“I didn’t let him go! You’re wrong, Mama!” In the beginning then, Susette had roared like a stuck pig when her mother suddenly accused her of having let her father go. And later, calmer, tried to explain the dignity and the importance of the dying one needing to find peace.
Her mother had started crying. Her wailing. But they had hugged, hugged and never fought again. Her mother had said, “There is a lot to cut up. Rags, fabric. Can you sharpen the scissors for me, Susette? My eyes are getting so bad.” And Susette sharpened her mother’s scissors and took her own scissors (she had her own pair, which she threw away later when she moved out, but her mother’s she took with her to the apartment on the hills above the town center) and they had sat down at the rag bucket, each on her own stool. Behind closed blinds, in a once cozy kitchen. And crehp crehp, let the scissors travel through the fabric, rags, scraps, long strips, loom lengths, which whirled down into the bucket between them.
“But the loom, Mama. Where is it?” Susette had asked at one point, weeks later, maybe months, when they just continued cutting fabric, rags, and been and collected more, more: transported rags in plastic bags in the wheelbarrow from the nearby houses, and all of the other houses in the lush neighborhood below the town center, gone from door to door and rung the bell and knocked. Susette had not said to her mother what they both knew: that the rug weaver herself, her in the Outer Marsh, had been dead for a long time already. It was impossible to say. The word “death.” Susette had not dared take that word in her mouth even in the house with her mother because it would have been like giving her mother a signal to let everything inside her well forth. Also that terrible thing she had screamed at Susette after the funeral. “The Angel of Death.” No, she had not said that exactly, but that was what it had felt like.
Her mother had not answered Susette’s question about the loom, she never answered it. It was probably so, that she did not know. She lost the loom, it had become mislaid in some way, but continued, still, maybe just because, due to her forgetfulness, cutting cutting anyway.
“It is never easy coming to a house of sorrow, Susette.” She had said, for example, admonishingly, at the rag-cutting bucket.
And then the funerals, the cemetery again. The flowers to the graves. To her father’s grave in the new cemetery where the meadow had once been where they, she and her mother, back when everything had still been normal, picked flowers and brought them to the cemetery. And now her mother was sad about that too: that the meadow was no longer there and her father “was resting” on the new side that she thought was so bare and deserted and she became even more sorrowful because of it, that poor him had to “rest” there, could you even “rest” there, come to peace, which you should be allowed to do after you die?
Flowers on the graves of others as well. Still, like always. But the jars they had with them to place the flowers in were rarely washed and boiled, transparent and clean like before, rather nasty, sometimes just yogurt jars, helpfully washed, made of plastic—
And the funerals, her mother and the funerals. Sitting in the church, listening to the blessings, sorting addresses into neat fans on the tables in the fellowship hall afterward.
“The grieving have other things to think about.”
All death, Susette had sometimes thought in secret, in my hands.
But cutting rags with her mother, it had become like a language. Her and her mother’s only way of being together, of communicating. “So ugly,” the brothers said when they, together with their young families, had at some point in the beginning still come to visit their former childhood home. And father’s house of balsa wood that needed to be collected because one of the kids in the family was so “interested in construction” but of course it could not be found anywhere—when it later surfaced it was broken. Balsa is fragile, thin wood: as if someone stepped right on the veneer sheet on which it was constructed. Not Susette, maybe her mother, or otherwise it had ended up under the piles of fabric or other junk, trash, and been crushed under the weight.
“Susette, maybe you should…” the brothers insinuated, meant clean, keep things in order. “We can see mother isn’t well, that she can’t do things on her own right now.” And snap it had been so that the brothers with their proper wives and proper small children, self-fulfilled in their own lives and business like everyone in the whole world, would have such an understanding for “the difficult daily life of a young family,” stopped coming to the parental home altogether. Mother had gone and visited them sometimes instead. In office clothes, which she still had. Susette had her job of course and could not get away. On the other hand, she had not actually wanted to go along. Nice to be alone, at least for a few days, now and then. Catch her breath, not cut rags. And when her mother came home again she was usually quite energetic and normal, but after a day or two everything was just like before.
So yes, it had been clear. She, Susette, had not been able to do anything about it. Powerless. And of course in the long run she had not been able to live there either.
So she had left, gone to the strawberry fields in the central part of the country and ended up in a wood and it was not until three years later that she came back, but then, as mentioned, her mother was already dead.
But with the lady, old Elizabeth Maalamaa in Portugal, she had been able to get it back. Well, a kind of reconciliation. The word “reconciliation” was not Susette’s own, she had gotten it from the therapist, therapists, she had regularly seen during her seventeen-year marriage to Tom Maalamaa. “Reconciliation”: but a good word, when she, sitting there at the office, had spoken a bit about her mother and Liz Maalamaa.
For example, the following: about what it had been like, in Portugal, December 1989, like coming home. Or another possible image, also fitting: from a road in whirling snow in the District to Tom to Portugal—so self-evident. To Liz Maalamaa, who had become bedridden rather soon after Susette and her fiancé Tom arrived then, in December 1989, and Susette sat at her bedside for hours when Liz Maalamaa was not sleeping, and sometimes then as well, watching over her, as it were. How she liked Liz Maalamaa. And how Liz Maalamaa liked her. “I want to protect you from everything evil,” Liz Maalamaa had even said. “I like you so much, my Susette.”
As if Susette had been her girl and Liz Maalamaa her mother. It had also almost been said: not like a game exactly, but like a silent, mutual agreement. Liz Maalamaa never had a child of her own, and how she longed for a child of her own, she talked about that too. “Susette, my own girl.” And Susette had her mother again, but then what had gone wrong with her mother, for real, everything, everything, in the house, that she personally had left and not been there at the end, not even at the funeral… could in some way be repaired, now. Liz Maalamaa had also told Susette about her careful preparations for her own funeral, neatly written down in pencil in a notebook that she kept in the drawer of her nightstand next to her bed: “Yes. I haven’t thought about dying yet, especially not now when you’re here, Susette, my girl, but you never know of course.” And then when she shortly thereafter had been dead, Susette made sure to follow all of Liz Maalamaa’s funeral instructions to a T, to the point that it was exactly that very expensive porcelain, a fine china that her husband’s family had so cared for, which should be set out and used at the family’s table during the reception in the fellowship hall after the burial.