“I so like it when you take care of me, Susette. I take my medicine so gladly. It’s almost as if I want to be sick all the time when you’re here. Now I’m finally getting some peace and rest, it’s been quite lonely, especially after the death of my dog. But now, Susette, here with you.”
And Liz Maalamaa had swallowed her medicine: all obligatory portions according to the doctor’s prescription and more, gradually, which Susette portioned out for her in transparent, colored medicine cups. She, Susette, was used to it, how medicine should be portioned out, had of course worked so much with the old and the sick during her lifetime.
And she had found more tablets too, consequently, other medicine, hidden away in the medicine cabinet in a special container: bottles, bottles with sleeping pills, calming pills, with a few years under their belt, but medicine as medicine, Liz Maalamaa needed her medicine. “I need my medicine, Susette,” she said as well. And Susette had started placing more pills in the medicine cups, and increasing the dosage and even mashing, discreetly, pills into Liz Maalamaa’s food too.
“Reconciliation.” Though that, about the medication, she had not been able to say anything to the therapist, therapists, or to Tom Maalamaa or anyone else.
But the following, as a backdrop to what it had been like to come home to Liz Maalamaa in Portugal, she had certainly mentioned at one therapist office or another:
“I needed protection. Up until then. I went around carrying a pistol without really knowing why.”
The therapist had listened, not moved a muscle. “Yes, it can be like that. We need protection. All of us have a buffer zone that is invisible but cannot withstand being trespassed. And if it has been trespassed upon, it can be the case that you have not been aware of it—especially if it happened during childhood. But it provokes a disturbance, and often such a disturbance, if it originates in the childhood infantile, can take on an absurd expression in adulthood.”
That therapist used some of her other patients as examples, granted without naming any names. Some director of a large business corporation who walked around with a teddy bear: a large, large teddy bear who had to have his own seat in business class. A day-care manager with a toy gun in her apron. A movie where someone had lost a sled, Rosebud, which was the key to the mystery his entire life had developed into.
Completely illogical but all of us are irrational beings, especially when we struggle to be the most rational, the therapist had said—but added: “There is understanding. We must try and understand each other. What things say, what language everything we surround ourselves with is speaking… We must listen, be observant, speak, speak.”
The therapist at the office had spoken, one of those therapists who, in addition to listening, liked talking. Because there were therapists like that too, had been, all kinds of therapists, all manner of schools, Susette had, during all the years in therapy, learned. But the therapist who liked hearing her own voice about the movie and the literature and all the patients who visited her who flew business class had been good, in any case. Aside from the fact that Susette of course understood that the therapist took for granted that it had not been a real pistol, which had been loaded to boot and had ended up in her Fjällräven backpack that she had sometimes carried with her in the middle of the day, rather one of those daycaremanagerpistols, toy, certainly plastic, like the yogurt containers at the cemetery.
On the other hand, the pistol. If she had started thinking about it too much at the office, the offices, then it would have become too absurd and completely impossible. “We’re here to help you build a story for yourself that has some sort of coherence, context. A story with not necessarily a happy ending, but a story that you can live with. There is understanding. It is always easier to look things right in the eye. Give them words. Then you can go on living. And you deserve to live, Susette. Your life, Susette,” the therapist had said. “You haven’t had it easy, Susette. But now you have so much that is valuable. It’s your turn now. It’s about time you start thinking about the fact that you have a right to be thinking this way.”
So she had forgotten about the pistol. With this therapist and all therapists later. And otherwise. There was a forgetfulness in her, that was also true. She had forgotten so much so much and when she remembered what she had forgotten then it did not come in the form of any coherent stories, it came like breezes, drafts of wind through her head, images pulled loose, sentences.
But she had cried a lot. There, in Portugal, the crying had started there, already while Liz Maalamaa was still alive. She cried at night, during the afternoon when Liz Maalamaa was sleeping and Tom Maalamaa was sunbathing on the patio. Stood at the window and watched him where he was lying, wearing sunglasses and reading Gandhi’s memoirs in a deck chair in front of a marvelous sea and cried. Out of love, and out of sorrow. Something comfortless in that crying, everything she was—at the same time, when she saw Tom, who calmly accepted and would, during their entire lives together, accept the crying as a part of who she was, a crying filled with leniency, even hope.
Letting the crying out.
“The sorrow doesn’t disappear just because of it,” the therapist also said, given the crying, the weight, that word: the Sorrow. It was beautiful, fitting. More beautiful than “a life-long depression,” which became the diagnosis.
“You can live with depression, as long as you get help… And then there is medication—”
So yes, after Portugal, she no longer needed any protection. But the crying had continued. And there had been the thing she had said to the therapists that had not really come out the right way, not exactly how it had been, not due to the information provided, but otherwise just, because it was unexplainable.
Maj-Gun Maalamaa. It was that day in November, the last in the District, when everything culminated: Susette had been on her way to the sea, which she hated, but there, for some reason, going out there, a logic, because she could not live. Suddenly Maj-Gun Maalamaa in the boathouse there at the Second Cape where Susette as a child had been saved in the swimming school—so now when she was going to swim it was logical that it was going to happen, without being saved, exactly right here. Maj-Gun, who had been furious and started hitting. And beating and beating and beating Susette black and blue so that she blacked out awhile in the boathouse and when she woke up again it was dark and Maj-Gun was gone. Maj-Gun who had such power in her blows, and she who had not defended herself, just accepted them. But how strange, that she had also wanted to say to Maj-Gun, afterward, if there had not been so many other things, “Thanks to you I found my way back to life.” Maj-Gun saved her life, that had been true. When she had woken up in the boathouse she knew one thing. Away from the sea, not staying here, away from here.