So it wasn’t that bad, Susette. You didn’t kill him. And pretty soon after that he had gotten out of the woods and come to some farm where there had been kind people who took care of him. And then, in other words, after that, Susette, Janos decided there wouldn’t be any more French, les petits animaux sauvages. To the School for Land Surveying, to learn to always have a map and a compass with him.
And how did I know that girl was you, Susette? Because something in that story sounded familiar and so afterward I quite simply went up to him and asked what the name of the girl in the woods was, did he remember? And ho-ho, Susette, poke and blink and pinch in the corridors of city hall, of course he remembered. A beautiful name, like a chocolate waffle, he said, she had also been a bit like that… and a little more poking and pinching, “see Black Rudolf he is dancing, all of us have been young once…” But Susette, he liked telling stories too, just like me. So he didn’t ask me why I had decided to ask him something like that, but carried on with his youthful reminiscence, the strawberry-picking fields, all of that. And the song “Black Rudolf,” which had been the first song he learned in “the free world”: at a social gathering in the fire station for the area’s residents, it was a religious area, so Susette, no dancing. Just this community sing-along that had resounded, drawling like a hymn from the mouths of the area’s gathered residents and from other parishes, berry pickers including “the international brigade,” which had been transported there in their own bus for what looked like was going to be the only evening entertainment for the month. “Iltamat,” a dance with songs to which the text had been handed out to everyone so you only needed to sing along as a warm-up before the evening highlight, which was going to be some minister on summer work who was going to give a “speech to the countryside” while his wife was buying local weavings to hang on the wall in the cottage.
“In the middle of the song I thought,” Janos said, “that I’m never getting to Paris, I will die in exactly this spot. But then, Maj-Gun, in the next moment I thought that if I die I will die with the words to ‘Black Rudolf’ as black as a tropic night on my lips and then it suddenly became funny, I started laughing, at everything. And in the middle of the laughter I looked around and my eyes met her eyes… the chocolate waffle’s.” And poke again, Susette, and blink blink blink. “And the chocolate waffle was squirming just as impatiently as I was and she smiled at me, and Jesus Christ, those eyes… Maybe, Miss Leading Legal Aid Assistant, a little bit of romance anyway, hein?”
Hein? Susette. But sure enough, a story too long to tell in just a few seconds, seconds during which you understand everything. A silver shoe in your hand, but you don’t want to understand anything.
One final story for you, Susette, but in silence only.
Because for real, there in that house, Susette in front of her, she has not said anything at all.
Susette a stranger. The abandonment, the brokenness.
And maybe the same sorrow in Susette too, one moment. Because she has suddenly recovered, said: “Sorry, Maj-Gun. It spills over sometimes. It’s so messy, rags everywhere. You get irritated. Yes, the shoes. Liz Maalamaa gave them to me before she died. She liked me, she said. And wanted me to have them.
“And Tom likes them. We go out dancing sometimes, just the two of us together. And tonight we’re going out. If the shoe fits. Liz and I, we had the same size.”
And Maj-Gun has of course understood that she is powerless. With Susette. Nothing she can do here.
“And don’t misunderstand me, Maj-Gun. I’m not unhappy. I’m doing all right. A life I never thought I would have… Maybe it’s strange but I have missed… you. Sometimes. My mother. I have a bad conscience. I was, to put it simply, depressed.”
There are no collected conversations. Is left unfinished, Susette at the window. Maj-Gun left the room, the alienation.
In reality it is not even Susette she has come to see, but her brother. For a different reason, suddenly just wanted to see Tom, such a confusion about everything.
“How did you know Susette anyway?” Maj-Gun had asked Solveig earlier in the day.
“She worked for me at the cleaning business and came from here, of course. She worked for Jeanette Lindström too, and for a while when she was terribly young she was employed at the private nursing home for the elderly and demented. At the nursing home they called her the Angel of Death. Jeanette Lindström told me that.
“How adults can be so brutal. It was probably that paleness, the big eyes. Her mother wasn’t really right those final years. Dragged Susette with her to all sorts of strangers’ funerals—”
“She had a pistol in the bathroom,” Maj-Gun put in. “I saw it with my own eyes.”
Solveig and Maj-Gun: they met at the café up in the town center earlier in the morning. And they had spoken about the past, despite the fact that it was Maj-Gun who had called Solveig and wanted to meet her even though she had come on entirely different business, which she still had not managed to get out later.
“Solveig,” she started instead, “sometimes I think about everything with—Bengt. What really happened?
“I saw him lying in the house, dead,” she added.
“You’ve said that.”
“Have I?”
Solveig did not answer, did not comment on the bit about Susette and the pistol in the backpack in the bathroom at Susette’s apartment: passed over, as if she had not even heard it.
But suddenly said instead, “Is that why you’re here? Is that why you’ve come now, Maj-Gun?” And focuses her eyes on Maj-Gun there at the cozy local café, Frasse’s Pastries and Coffee, authentic through and through, “provincial,” of course, really looks the way it is supposed to. But still in some way sterile, fabricated like an exhibition, “the coziness.” Solveig who had asked, in the middle of all that familiarity in her eyes even if it was a long time ago, “a wild pain.”
No fear, no avoidance, just that pain.
Well, no. Maj-Gun was not able to answer that properly either. It had not been because of that, shrug of the shoulders… “I don’t know.”
And then suddenly Solveig said she was the one who burned down the cousin’s house. Set fire to it, she did not care about the consequences, had gotten the insurance money. But speaking of Susette, she was the one who called Solveig and told her about Bengt in the cousin’s house: “I think something terrible has happened at the cousin’s house.” She had said, almost whined, early the next morning, when she had, in other words, phoned from where she was, with her fiancé, in the city by the sea.
And it was she, in other words, who had alerted Solveig to the fact that she had found Bengt dead in the house, he had probably shot himself. She had not said that, of course, but sounded truly shaken and worn out and Solveig had seen it later with her own eyes.
And besides, Solveig continued after a brief pause in the café, spoken softly but calmly as always—that yes, if there was something strange about it all, something else, in other words… then it might as well have been in another way. Maj-Gun herself, for example. Whom Solveig had spoken to on the phone before she got the chance to speak with Susette, already the evening before. Solveig had come home late to Torpesonia where she was living at that time and some Allison told her that Susette had called. And Solveig had, despite the late hour, dialed Susette’s number because she had been a bit angry but certainly worried too about what happened with Susette who had just up and left an independent project in the middle of the day. Just left without saying a word, which was, despite the fact that Susette could undeniably be a bit scatterbrained, rather unlike her. And then it has, in other words, been Maj-Gun in Susette’s apartment who lied on the phone about Susette being there but that she could not come to the phone because she had a bad case of angina.