Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

“‘Majjunn,’ she says accordingly, taking that babble in her mouth. If Majjunn doesn’t tell anybody about this then when Auntie dies, Maj-Gun won’t get the prince because Auntie doesn’t have a say about that but she will get the whole kingdom.

“And then, Susette, we go down to the cabin and she writes her will. After my death all of my earthly possessions will go to… and so on.

“And it was for real. I get to inherit everything. Including the apartment in Portugal where she spends her winters these days because of the varicose veins that also run in the family.

“Djeessus, Susette. Tom Maalamaa. HE isn’t going to believe his eyes. That miser. That He. Will Be. Left With Nothing.

“But, Susette, she’ll never DIE of course, and then, well”—Maj-Gun grows quiet as if she has run out of air—“we were back in port again.”

And at the newsstand now, Maj-Gun who is drumming her fingers on the surface of the counter and suddenly it is really quiet and dark, after closing time, a good while, because neither of them has looked at the clock.

Dark over the square too: only one solitary streetlamp is lit. A cat who is leisurely moving across the empty square, not even black, an ordinary gray tabby, a fat barn cat.

“Everything can happen here,” Maj-Gun finishes. “Just that… that… do you think, Susette, that anything happens here at all?

“You can say anything here. That’s how it is, at the newsstand. In general.”

“It’s late.” Susette clears her throat, now she wants to get home right away.

Maj-Gun sighs, gets up as well, is going to start closing up.

Counts the register first, opens the cash drawer, PLING .

“Wait, Susette,” Maj-Gun calls when Susette is already at the door. “I think. About your mother. I understand, Susette. More than you know.”

“What do you mean?” Susette asks quickly, almost spitefully.

“What I’m saying,” Maj-Gun calmly replies, “your mother. She was for real. Not like my aunt or… like someone else. Your mother, Susette. Was as healthy as could be. In some way healthier than everyone else in the world who is healthy. Does that sound like a cliché? But still, what I want to say. It was just a logic. To go along with.”

“Maj-Gun. Don’t bother—” Susette says, but still, she cannot pull herself away, in some way wants to hear more.

“Life like a room, Susette. That’s what she said, maybe to you too, there at the rag-cutting bucket in the kitchen—a special mood that never leaves you once you’ve been there. Room after room after room that you enter and leave and then go on to the next one. That house, what it looks like on the inside, you don’t feel but you know… suddenly you’ve just ended up there… Not in a basement or in some dusty attic.

“But maybe just somewhere where it is… empty.

“Brown. Nasty. She spoke like that. Cut up her office clothes, they were like that shade you know, you remember. Worn woolen fabric. We cut. For the most part she cut and I listened. I really listened , Susette, because it was touching for real. Listened like I had never listened before and maybe will never listen again either because it hurt, and continues to hurt too.

“Is that death? It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God . Is that it? Maj-Gun? Susette? Questions like those. The most terrible or the most comforting, because that is where life and death cancel each other out, laughter grief same thing, there is no answer of course.

“But she remained sitting there cutting, didn’t give in.

“She remains sitting there, doesn’t give in.

“It demanded respect. But on the other hand I understand that you can’t live in it.”

“Maj-Gun. CAN we stop talking about this now?”

“Yes, Susette. But you don’t need to be jealous. It was, it IS, your mother. My occasional affinity with your mother, Susette. Originates from there and only there.

“She didn’t pretend. You could see it in her. A logic. I mean, also in the most absurd of contexts, at the rug rag bucket and among all of the rags.”

“Be quiet now!”

“Sorry, Susette,” Maj-Gun says again, one of the last things she says that night but then Susette is already outside. “I mean something else.

“When you don’t pretend. It isn’t like it is at the newsstand. That you can say anything. But it isn’t like that.

“You can’t say just anything and yet, even though you think so, it is so beautiful and right when someone says so—so you still keep going, the words pour out of you.

“I want…” But Susette is already halfway home on the pedestrian and bicycle path, when she really takes it in, the normal, fresh air, the autumn night. “I want something real.

“A love for example. Which is greater than death. Which overcomes death. It is… if nothing else… then my… readiness.

“The Boy in the woods. Someone who loves despite everything, Susette. That’s me.”

And Maj-Gun who calls out after her: “Sometimes I have the feeling that we are the Angels of Death. The two of us. In the same timelessness.

But otherwise, Susette in the everyday, ten thousand miles away from that. Cleaning with Solveig, traveling with Solveig in the company car to different places, joint cleaning projects and individuals ones, where they clean, each on her own. They have a good collaboration, get on well together, even if they are not friends in that way. Solveig is Susette’s employer, has her own life as well; has a five-year-old daughter, Irene, lives somewhere in the Outer Marsh. In a room on the top floor of an old house, not a single-family home exactly, Solveig laughs sometimes when she is in a good mood, but a shack with “room for many generations” that flow freely over all of the floors, small fry, cousins, sisters-in-law and in the midst of it all the mother of the clan, Viola Torpeson, with a can of beer and Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the apple of her eye Gossip Queen Allison, certainly full grown by now, who comes and goes, on “beauty trips,” as she says to the kids, they worship her and several kids crawl across the floor when she comes home.

At some point Solveig says she would like to move away with her girl: her husband, Torpe, who comes from that house, has traveled to Germany with his brother Järpe and some cousins, is doing construction work there. Move, not to Germany but to someplace that is just hers, and the girl’s, Irene’s, of course. Should not be impossible, business is booming, this year in particular has been great, with the assignment in Rosengården 2.

On the other hand, the Outer Marsh, it is okay: the girl gets on well there and does not need to be on her own very often, there are, as said, other kids to play with and always someone acting as babysitter: Gossip Queen, the sisters-in-law, Viola Torpeson.

Besides, Solveig can also say when she is in one of those moods: the Outer Marsh, an interesting environment. The marshiness, stinging sand in the air, fires on opposite beaches at night. Often someone is burning something there: at night when you cannot sleep, stand at the window on the second floor that faces the marsh, look at the fires, something a bit magical about it all, so to speak, comes close. And then sometimes, when Solveig talks like that, in passing, it whizzes through Susette’s head too: a rug weaver in a small cottage next to a body of water filled with reeds, she was there once. She, Susette, with her mother and the rug rags in sacks, loads of them, which they had cut up at home, brought them by taxi from the town center. Thousands of cats, the stink of urine, and a massive loom in one single room. Solveig shakes her head, no, did not know that woman, knows nothing about it. On the other hand, she is not originally from there. Has, as mentioned, grown up next to the First and Second capes, the cousin’s property, closer to the sea, which she also says as if it is in some way nicer. Still, without having gone into detail, you understand there is a lot of shit in that life: orphaned early on, a twin sister, Rita, who left the District several years ago and has broken all ties with her sister completely.