“But Bengt is dead, Susette!” Maj-Gun suddenly stands up and yells.
“Janos is dead too,” Susette says then, laconically, calmly.
“Janos? Dead? No! I’ve met him—” Maj-Gun started automatically, as it were, but at the same time completely bewildered, not come any farther. Because suddenly, she was standing in the middle of the room with a silver shoe in her hand.
Liz Maalamaa’s silver shoe, one of them: both neatly placed in a paper box with glass. Those wonderful shoes, which Liz Maalamaa loved. “Come and see my gallery.” The aunt who had sent pictures of this “gallery” in her winter home in Portugal, photographs on the wall, of Maj-Gun also, and other things, “everything I hold dear.” And the silver shoes, on a shelf. These shoes that the aunt would become so angry about if you snuck into the guest room and borrowed them from her in secret when you were a child and she came to visit at the rectory—she rarely wore them but always had them in her luggage. Elegant and shimmering. And otherwise she almost never got angry at her goddaughter Maj-Gun Maalamaa.
“Damn it, Susette, do you have to have the silver shoes too?”
Maj-Gun wanted to say, roar loudly, because suddenly with the silver shoe in her hand, Susette turned around and stood there, staring at her, and Maj-Gun understood how everything was. Solveig’s little girl Irene who in Portugal, a long time ago when the child had been born in Portugal, had run around like a passerine in the aunt’s house, curious, pulling out drawers, opening all the cabinets, which children do. “Look!” Had come running in the midst of everything with her arms full of medicine bottles. Empty, half full, a desert, and there had been more in a certain place in the refrigerator. “SO sick, SUCH a shame about her.” Irene’s voice full of sympathy. And her mother Solveig who had laughed: “That girl will probably become a nurse when she grows up.”
Sedatives, sleeping pills, the like. And Maj-Gun had known at least one thing for sure: that her aunt, after her marriage where she had been drugged with sedatives by the family doctor, instead of being someone in the family, everyone was aware of the abuse that had occurred in the home, who decided to do something about it… that after that, she had sworn she would never take a pill like that in her mouth again. “I would rather walk on hot coals, be awake twenty-six hours a day. Clear mornings, Majjunn, are so wonderful.”
The aunt who passed away so peacefully in her sleep. “They called her the Angel of Death at the nursing home.” That medication, not forgotten directly, just put away. Which suddenly reminded Maj-Gun of something else. Rag-cutting scissors, white hairs, dried darkness, blood? In a kitchen cabinet in that apartment where she had once been and was, and had waited for sirens, justice—certainly put away, but not thrown out, still there.
And stood so exposed in front of Susette, now, without all the words. Susette who paid attention to the bit about Janos, turned around and hissed so strangely about some kind of private detective, and… “Shouldn’t you say kiss kiss kiss?”
Kiss kiss kiss. Yes. She understood.
A strange moment. When there had been nothing to say. Nothing at all.
And rug rags. All of the strange connections between them. Gone. No bonds.
Susette a stranger. The Angel of Death. Maj-Gun did not know, has never known, anything about her.
And at the same time, such a sorrow in that moment. Such an abandonment, and such abandoning.
And Maj-Gun did not want it to be like that. She suddenly wanted to tell another story, about that Janos, for example, “Black Rudolf,” in the corridors of the city hall in the northern region of the country. Been salivating at the mouth, so real and it is as if it has come out of her anyway, one last amusing story, a real newsstandanecdote besides, but Susette is listening now, it was not that bad, listen!
And Janos, the Lithuanian, from the same city in the north where she lives, lives there with his family in peace and quiet. “An engineer now… works at the Office for Land Surveying, which is housed in the same building as the Municipal Legal Assistance Bureau, my workplace these days. And one of those conversations over lunch once, you know, in the presence of many colleagues, and there is talk of this and that.” And once when a conversation which, as it were in general, was about one’s choice of profession, or “life choice” as it is called in those magazines, just as if it is something you can steer rationally. How you become who you become, end up where you end up. How much it’s still a matter of chance, really.
And Janos then, a tall jovial man of the sort who normally would not leave anything to “chance” or dreams, who had suddenly started explaining that he knew exactly why he had become a land surveyor and why he devotes himself to orienteering in his spare time. And not only him, but his entire family, all of them are orienteerers, Susette: mom dad all the kids, they run around like wolves, tongues hanging out, with a map and a compass and they try to navigate correctly in the woods. They’re smart, one son has even competed in the national championships.
But once when Janos was young, he had really gotten lost in the woods. In the middle of the country, after having run away from a strawberry-picking field where he had not been making any money, while at the same time being expected to be grateful over having been allowed to get out “and breathe the fresh air of the free world” as a link in the international friendship exchange under the sign of solidarity. Because at that time, Susette, there was the Iron Curtain in Europe and Janos was, in other words, from the other side even if he wasn’t from Poland not “the Pole,” which everyone at the strawberry fields was determined to call him no matter how much he protested. And despite the fact that he would rather have been in any other place on earth at that point in time, for example Paris—he was a first-year student of French—he, without grumbling, had to take the only opportunity that was offered to him to spend a few days “in the free world” somewhere. “The free world, the strawberry field, the same berries berries as at home on the collective farms, ha, ha, ha, ha.” So in other words, that summer: plants plants is what he had in front of him and he quickly understood that in addition to plants, it also wasn’t the idea that he was going to see much more before, pjutt, a few coins in his pocket, and back to the homeland behind the Iron Curtain again.
But as luck would have it there had been girls there then. There were always girls, “cute girls.” And one of them—with such amazing hair and these blue eyes—he had especially spent time with, so that shortly thereafter he and this girl had just run away, in the middle of the night.
And ended up in a wood. Walked and walked for days, just hills bushes moss around them. There had been water to drink, brooks, small forest lakes, pools, the like—and raw mushrooms and berries to eat, but the hunger was not quieted by them, and the more time went on, and the less they got anywhere, both young lovers were transformed into two small animals. Became “les petits animaux sauvages” with each other. All of the sweetness in the girl washed away, just silly and idiotic weakly unfocused staring big-eyedness left over. And of course they couldn’t say a word to each either; her English had been just as bad as his, and it was her only foreign language. And like a frustrated speedball he had made trouble with her. The strength that was running out, the exhaustion; a great fight had broken out. He had pushed her, splat, she landed face-first on the moss and he had done that to her over and over again. But suddenly, she caught on fire, and one time when she crawled up on her knees, she had gone after him like a vixen. With unforeseen powers, besides: hit him with a rock. And he had passed out for a few minutes, but when he came to again he had been alone in the woods and the girl had been gone forever.