Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

Maj-Gun hastily cleans everything up. The papers, the magazines, the cassettes, the compass, pens, and so on. In a black garbage bag that she drags down the stairs and leaves it next to the garbage can by the door. She puts the room key on the table in the hallway, the house is empty, glances all the way into the kitchen, cannot help herself.

The distinguishing feature about this house, Sumatra, is, as said, that on the inside it is exactly like the other house, Java, the same blueprint. The same view in other words, out into the kitchen. In Sumatra like in Java, when you come down the stairs from your rented room on the upper floor. The woman at the rug rag bucket. She had thought it was a dream at first; it was not.

“Can you help me with this?” The woman had looked up from her work, among the rags, the bags in the kitchen, piles of them. In half darkness in the middle of the day, the window shades pulled down.

“An office rat on the lower floor.” Maj-Gun had started a letter to her brother Tom about life there in Java. “In gray clothes, all of her gray.”

A letter, among others, that was never finished.

Because she had liked that woman, they had become friends, for real. “Susette, she didn’t give way.” Whatever she had meant by that, Maj-Gun, then it was one hundred percent true and real.

But now. Gone forever. Giving away.

So: here in the house, Sumatra, everything is normal. The table wiped clean, coffee cups and saucers in the sink, lemons against the dark blue bottoms of the curtains, really nice, fresh. A dull January afternoon light.

And left, left the big, black garbage bag by the garbage can. Everything from the newsstand in it too, except for “The Book of Quick-Witted Sayings,” which she still did not dare throw away, keep it, like a memory. But the cigarettes, the blouse, and so on. She puts the remainder of what had been hers from the furnished room that she had rented into the seaman’s chest that she had brought with her when she moved in many years ago.

There is room for a lot in the chest, everything she has. A few weeks later, after her aunt’s funeral, right before she travels to Portugal, she transports the chest to a storage space in the industrial area on the outskirts of the city by the sea where it will remain until she returns one year later, buys a little house in another part of the city, a lush suburb, where she will live during her university studies.

She puts some other things in the chest as well. Red bow, a piece of wrinkled silk paper carefully folded, everything from the getawaybag that was hanging around forgotten in a closet in the Manager’s hall for many weeks. It was close to being left behind altogether. The Manager, from the stairs, came running after her with it when she was already seated in the passenger’s seat of the rented delivery van next to the delivery man. Tobias in the slush, temperatures above freezing again. Maj-Gun had taken the bag, good-bye, they never see each other again.

The drawings were also placed in the chest. Bengt’s drawings from the walls in the other apartment, which she put in the bag while she was there. Blueblueblueblue pictures, watercolors, which she has not inspected more closely, will not end up doing so either actually. That “exhibition.” That Winter Garden. Which may come to exist in the Winter Garden later, the one on the Second Cape.

She gives these drawings to Rita, some years later. Rita, Solveig’s and Bengt’s sister, from the Rita Strange Corporation. They do not know each other, cross each other’s paths during a legal dispute. Maj-Gun is the lawyer, recently graduated from the university where already in the final stages of her studies, which she completes quickly and “brilliantly,” she is offered a good position at a law firm with a good reputation, which has its reliable offices in the nice southern quarter of the city. A law firm where the lawyers occupy themselves with inheritance law and the like. Rita is the client. In her capacity as party in that corporation, Rita Strange . An elegant context for wild elegant ideas. Advertising people, artists, architects, gladly calling themselves “avant-gardist.” Those kinds of dreams, which can be taken seriously thanks to their financial solvency, “the backing.” Feasible, you can dream big.

And it is back then, in the wake of a recession, when dogs are eating dogs and some have become full even if it is not spoken about publicly.

Build. The Winter Garden. Architecture. The Second Cape. An idea on paper that has been born out of all of this? Maybe. But it is not interesting, in any case in the perspective that Maj-Gun cannot muster any interest in it, not even enough to pay more attention to it than she needs to for the purposes of her job, not in the least. Market transactions, inheritance and gifts, and so on, the kinds of things that can be bought with money, and the kinds of things the law is there for, plus the money, to secure them. The Glass House on the Second Cape is owned by a friend, Kenny, who is also a member of the corporation, she inherited it from a relative she once lived with. And Jan Backmansson, who is Rita’s husband, has the hill on the First Cape, but some sister Susanna is being obstinate, and so on. Several transactions, legal obstacles, but those kinds of obstacles are there to be overcome. An idea. Which may be realized. But what is just as true is that the Winter Garden, a few years after it has come to be, is transformed.

Has already aged then. An idea that was an idea, a thought, but when it was realized: well, not what you had thought. Not a lot of added value either, a bit clumsy too.

Is sold, is bought by someone else. As a physical place, the Winter Garden can be seen as a process, that light is transformed and transformed.

But the brochures will remain. Kapu kai. The hacienda must be built . That, for example, and other things.

Lengthy? Diffuse? Maybe. Maj-Gun thinks so in any case while she carefully, and down to the last letter, becomes acquainted with all of the details in the matter, she is being paid for it. But My God when it comes to the business matters that person cannot stop babbling she thinks, which could be an interesting observation since Rita, cool as a cucumber, is someone who de facto does not babble. At all. Puts forth facts. Papers on the table. One of those, could have been fascinating.

She gives the drawings to Rita during the final stages of the proceedings. Says, “I knew your brother.” And adds, after a brief pause, “We had a relationship.”

Rita looks at Maj-Gun Maalamaa, one moment, takes it in, so to speak, what does one say: the revelation. She is wearing red clothes. Expensive skirt, expensive small jacket with discreet and solid buttons, and slim, that stomach fat like all of the other fat she dieted away of course. Attractive. Shrugs her shoulders. “Bengt,” Rita says later, as if it were nothing, shrugs again, “had many relationships.” Tragic? Neither of them says so, nor “he was washed up” as Solveig said once a long time ago on a winter day on the square in the town center, “a wild pain,” which for Maj-Gun settled everything, in one moment, but—in and of itself, the pain, the words, for Rita’s part does not mean that it does not, could not, exist there.

In some way, perhaps it is audacious, it makes an impression on Maj-Gun. Reluctantly. No nonsense. Rita’s attitude.

Rita just takes the drawings and puts them in her bag. Nothing more about that. And maybe, if you had been in another mood, or in some way, in relation to everything, could have sat on your high horse, you could have hissed, You could actually call Tobias now and then, someone who did so much for you too .