The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again.
And Susette cannot hear that, she walks straight toward the girl in the opening now against the wind QUIET now, and pushes the girl—
The girl falls. A quiet fall, it is quiet. Maybe it is the surprise. And in the distance: flames jump up from the Winter Garden.
“Look! The Winter Garden is on fire!” Both of them saw that. The girl who turned around at the last moment—but then she just fell, quietly.
And yes. The Winter Garden is burning. What a scene. Susette in the opening. Something she has forgotten.
That impossibility. All impossibility.
Flames in front of her eyes. Rug rags.
“Mama, where is the loom? The rug weaver?”
Susette on the rocks. Lambada, among rags, like once, at a disco.
She has closed the door and turned around. Walked back across the floor, left the room. Puts on her silver shoes again, they are standing where she left them just inside the door where she, just a minute or so ago, walked over the wooden floor to where the girl was at the other end, in white skirts. But the girl, where is the girl now?
Torn a small hole in the heel of her bone-colored panty hose. A small splinter in her skin, it is bleeding just a little. But she is used to blood, it is not dangerous, she has Band-Aids in her purse, Band-Aids, bandages, you have to be well prepared when you have children.
Leaves the room, goes downstairs again, to the laughter, the socializing. On the stairs she realizes that she has the mask on, takes it off.
“Where were you?” Tom Maalamaa asks when she sits down next to him on the sofa in the bright living room.
“Up there.”
But now she is neither here, there, swinging a bit. Flames in front of her eyes.
“Did you see Ulla? She loves oysters. They will be served shortly.”
The father who is asking and making an attempt at starting to call for the girl again, with that terrible voice.
“I think she’s sleeping,” Susette says quickly in order to avoid hearing the scream.
“Sleeping?”
“Looked that way.”
“She was just awake. Ulla usually never sleeps. She’s hyperactive.”
Peter Bäckström laughs, as if calmed by his own explanation because for just a moment he became a bit strange because of Susette Maalamaa. Oysters, Ulla comes to the oysters: he goes to get more wine from the kitchen.
Tom Maalamaa touches her hand.
“You’re so cold. Have you been outside? What do you have in your hand?”
Everyone looks at what she has in her hand.
“One of Ulla’s thousand toys. It’s like the attic of a theater up there. You were there? Ulla loves the theater. A mask. Let’s have a look.” Nellevi takes the mask Susette hands to her, laughs.
Tom Maalamaa does not laugh.
Nellevi puts the mask on. Buhuu.
Peter Bäckström calls from the kitchen that the Winter Garden is on fire.
Everyone rushes up, around. The Winter Garden is burning, can be seen from the kitchen. But Nellevi does not run there but up the stairs to her daughter’s room. “Ulla!” Maybe it is an instinct during times of danger. Susette knows that instinct well, she is a mother too after all.
She has three children, and in the empty living room where she has been left alone because Tom Maalamaa also ran out to the kitchen, she should start thinking about these children—their ages, abilities, characteristics. If someone were left, but no one is left, nor she.
The mother’s screeeaaamm from the Glitter Scene, throughout the entire house.
Then Susette is no longer in the house anymore. She has taken her coat in the hall and is walking down the avenues where she once walked and where she is walking now, twenty-nine years old, never became any older. It is dark, the silver shoes, the gates are closed. But you can get out from the inside, but not in from the outside, as if she did not know this. This is the future. Solveig on the avenues. You don’t need to see with the Eyes of the Old.
No. But the impossibility. Susette hurries on.
Because she has forgotten something. And how long, almost an entire life.
“Mama, where is the loom?”
LOOM, AGAINST A BACKGROUND OF FLAMES
(Susette at the house in the darker part, the Boundary Woods, 2006)
HERE IT IS. Susette in the Boundary Woods, she has run there and onto some path and ended up at a strange, empty, dark, decomposing house; it is the house in the darker part. A basement window, flames in front of her eyes, lighting up the guts, she peers in. Flames and there it is rising up, taking up the entire basement. Loom, against a background of flames.
And fabric hanging over it and around it like scraps. All sorts of fabric, silk fabric, ordinary fabric, rag scrap, velvet, linen—entire large layers and strips, loom lengths.
Sees the loom. She does not get there.
Sirens, ambulances, fire trucks, Spanish wolfhounds.
But at father’s deathbed it was like this. He was on his way away and needed to go and find peace, you could see that. “Sleep now, dear father. You will get to rest soon.” But her mother who was crying and shouting, “Don’t go! Come back!” “But, Mama—”If you’re going to leave then you’re going to leave, it’s unavoidable. Then you have to be allowed to do it peacefully and with love, surrounded by your loved ones, not filled with anxiety about having to leave. And there at the hospital, the final minutes, they had already taken all the tubes out of him so that it had not been Susette or he who had personally decided he was going to pass away right then.
It had been at home in the house after the funeral that Susette tried to explain that to her mother. Because suddenly, when they were alone again, the brothers with their families gone home, her mother in the kitchen furious at her, Susette. Because she had not stood next to her father’s deathbed where it had just been the two of them and called her father back. Not called together with her mother that he should not leave—
“You let him go. You let him go away.” Her mother had said that, of course not: “it was your fault Susette,” it would have been too much. Her mother understood that too, of course, because somewhere, at that time, she still had a certain mind for the possible and impossible. She was still also active in her position at the bank, even if she had been forced to go down to part-time due to her husband’s illness and also not had time for her position as secretary of the Bankers’ Employee Club. But in any case: if you deal with money, particularly other people’s money, you have to stay levelheaded, rational in your mind, she said that to herself many times, also earlier in life when she had still been normal.
But half a year later she was put on one hundred percent sick leave. Not a particularly large pension, but that, plus the widow’s pension and what Susette earned at the nursing home when she started working there after high school, had been enough so they could afford to stay in the large house.
And then everything had gotten out of control. As if there suddenly were two realities for Susette: one at home, one on the outside. But gradually it was the first reality that gained ground even though she did not want it to. The normal teenage life in the District, which she in and of herself never really was a part of, but it had existed like a background, but that background paled, disintegrated just like the fact that she had once had a real boyfriend too. Despite the fact that it had mostly been a youthful infatuation, Gustav Mahler’s music, Sunday dinners at the rectory. Was made unreal. Instead, the nursing home, the empty corridors, the old, the dying in their beds, and two very disobliging hospital cats who saw red at the sight of her.