“I’m COMMMMIIIING!” How she shouts, what a voice. Unforeseen vocals, sounds like it is coming from the abyss—looks around, again. As if: did you hear? Yes. Yes, we certainly did.
But, one moment there, then gone and neither Maj-Gun nor Solveig remained on the square to express her admiration for the small spectacle of the unusually dramatically talented girl in more detail. Solveig drives off and Maj-Gun starts the Volvo’s engine, heads away, at full speed to the other side of the city by the sea, an hour’s drive to the address her brother had stated that he and his family would be living at for the coming years. “See my brother,” which she had said to Solveig, not that it was planned, but as soon as she is alone and sitting in the car she knows that is where she is heading. To her brother, to see him, no one else.
Her brother Tom: they had gotten back in touch with each other over the last few years, not very intensely but they had spoken on the phone now and then. Not about great important things but about work, the like. Things in general, so to speak. About how the doldrums can grab hold of you during the day. “You want to make a difference, Tom, do something for someone, not sit in a dusty law firm and for the clients tally and distribute their money in the most beneficial way between rich people.”
Still, there could be the same crap at the legal assistance bureau as well. Not in the same way, not as much money, for example, but in some way still the same. “These people without legal rights,” which she, like her brother Tom Maalamaa at some point, had spoken about grandly, not held lectures like him, but certainly spoken that way with him, privately. All of those who come to her, without money. But money no money, the same hunger. People are prepared to do almost anything for nothing.
For example: a crime that had attracted a lot of attention not only up there, in the north. A woman had shot her husband and her child and then run away and chased her departed lover who, when he refused her, got shot as well. And then sat there on various chairs and got in the papers too and stammered about “ménage à trois” just as if she knew French. Because that woman had really been in love then, had too much beer to drink too, had sex had sex and et cetera. “All of this climbing toward a story that gives life meaning—” Become someone who at least can stammer her way to some unusual drama and be the center point of it.
And when she had told her brother about it on the phone she added that sometimes she can hear papa Pastor, as it were, laughing rascallike at the Sunday dinner table in the rectory at certain ministers of the new school who wanted “the language of our time” and everyday trite similes in order to dramatize all of the big mysteries found in the church about life, death and make them understandable. Red light. Green light. “Tom, sometimes I’ve started thinking, imagine if people would first learn to stop at a red light, drive on green, and stop for all of the pedestrians in the crosswalk.”
“Ha ha ha.” Her brother Tom Maalamaa had laughed. He has been the only one with whom she has ever been able to carry on such conversations, despite the fact that he had then said what she really wanted to hear, which granted she understood first when she heard him say it. “Hey, Sis, what’s wrong? Got up on the wrong side of the bed?” Or… “Come on, the metaphysical doesn’t suit you. Me neither, for that matter. You must remember that from our childhood, which in certain respects was boring. We were rather alike. But I don’t remember anything about myself that was particularly funny, but certainly a lot that was funny about you. The Girl from Borneo. Get real, you were more fun as the Girl from Borneo, you know.
“Hey, Sis, what’s wrong? Isn’t it something else? Have you heard this one? ‘You become moral as soon as you become unhappy.’ I came across it on a blog once. Joking aside, Maj-Gun, you know that you can always come to me, I’m you’re brother, you can tell me anything—”
So yes, Tom. Now, that morning, she wanted to tell him… that, Tom, in the middle of everything, such a confusion about everything. Had in addition to the story such a burning low-voiced interest for—yes, what had it said in the obituary? Nature, roses? Music? She did not remember or, of course, she did, of course, but it was the formulation, “an interest, discreet, burning,” that has been eating away at her. So Tobias, so to a T, him. That text she had consequently found in her home, an old issue of the local paper, almost a year old, from the District, that she had at some point started subscribing to but never had time to read. Old issues strewn around her rooms. Happened to open a paper lying on a shelf even though she had actually been looking for something else.
That was of course what she had wanted and had thought about asking Solveig, that was why she had come—suddenly been in the District without letting anyone know ahead of time, which had been outside their agreement regarding the child, Johanna. That Tobias had died, why had no one told her?
But she, Maj-Gun, had not gotten it out, of course. Maybe because as soon as she was sitting in that café with Solveig, she understood that there possibly was no logical answer to that question. Solveig, Tobias. At the same time: there had never been any “pact” there—Solveig who had calmly said when she told Maj-Gun that Tobias had told her about Maj-Gun in Susette’s apartment, that Tobias had taken care of Maj-Gun then and made sure that she got to rest at the rectory. Flaming Carmen. Oh, no. Regardless of what Solveig had known she had not known that. No one had known.
But that confusion toward her brother. But her brother had not been home; at work, of course. Susette alone in the home, among the moving boxes, unmoving, at a window later, the children at school, the aupairgirl at the store.
And what were you supposed to do with Susette? In that frame of mind? Say to her: “Everything in my life has happened in the wrong order,” as you would have liked to have said to Tom, your brother, so that he would then say, after having comforted you, “Hey, Sis, it’s not that bad.” And that if you started thinking like that, “your life,” then you would lose your sense of reality, it became pretentious, metaphysical, too big. “And yes, Sister, I still think we’re doers, not talkers.”
But my life. Which despite the fact that it had not been said to Susette it still hung in the air between them, my life, like in the newsstand once. “Everything in my life…” Like something to write down in “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” yes, she still has it, like a memory only, a relic.
Still as if just that saying existed between them because that is when Susette walked up to the window and started speaking strangely about her life.
The Boy in the woods, Janos,… and Maj-Gun caught sight of the silver shoes.
And Maj-Gun, it stands to be repeated, understood, during the span of a split second, everything. In addition to the alienation, the shock, the surprise—understood that Susette was unreachable, she could no longer do anything for Susette.
Like a towel over her face, an anesthesia that had lasted a long time afterward.
Ringing in her ears, Susette’s: “You are so different now, Maj-Gun. After the Scarsdale Diet, anything is possible. I liked you much more in the newsstand. There was so much life inside you.”
And: “Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not unhappy. I’m doing okay. More than okay. I have a life I never thought I would have. I still want to thank you for making it possible.”
An anesthesia that has lifted only hours later, in the Winter Garden.
And only then has she started calling Tom; you just can’t push it away. The silver shoes. Aunt Liz. The medication. “At the nursing home they called her the Angel of Death.”