Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

OWWW in her stomach.

An intense pain, like a reminder, she almost folds over double inside on the church pew because she can control herself after all: but that is the memory, this year I have something kicking in my stomach . Unpleasant consequences… how could she forget that? And at the same time, exactly at the same moment she becomes aware of it: something that she, of course, in some way had been aware of the entire time, has been said to her besides, should not come as a surprise. But still, like a bombing. The gaze that traveled over the pews in the church, over the people in them, naturally also to the family in the first rows. Her brother’s erect neck that is sticking out of the stiff shirt collar, his neck sunburned—and another neck, the one next to his. Hair in a ponytail, gray shoulders, skin shining, despite the great amount of sunshine in the south where it has also been—white.

Maj-Gun remains staring.

It is Susette Packlén. Who turns her head slowly, looks back in the middle of the hymn, eyes meet Maj-Gun’s eyes, big eyes.

Suddenly, during a few seconds, which will later slip away, for a long long time, Maj-Gun has understood exactly everything.

On the other hand, of course, the obvious though nonetheless fantastic for that. Susette and love . Polo shirt, blazer, sideburns. Susette from the underworld, under the disco ball, gray, glittering. Susette on the dance floor, through the cigarette smoke. At the other end of the dance floor: polo shirt, blazer, sideburns. Tom Maalamaa. Her own brother.

Rag doll. “Loose limbed.” Dance my doll… Susette and love: like a story to dance to.

“Sometimes I have the feeling that I planted things inside her, Manager.” The Manager, who has not really understood, but on the other hand, she had not really been able to to go into detail or explain what she meant. But: all stories. The Boy in the woods. Duel in the sun. Dead. For love. The boy in the house. Susette in the hangout. When she was falling and falling—

Rug rags.

On the other hand, this is the landslide, something she will keep hidden for a long time in life because it is so amazing. That Susette, a stranger . She knows nothing about Susette. Has never known anything.

Her head spins, her stomach turns. Her stomach. OW! OW! OW!

Her stomach. This year I have something kicking in my stomach . Solveig on the square: “a wild pain.”

“What are you babbling about?”

The Boy in the woods. A violation.

She cannot keep the child. It was never hers.

So after the memorial service, the burial. At this cemetery, another place, another city, the little town where Liz Maalamaa’s husband had come from. This is where she will now be lowered after all: in this earth, for her not the earth of home but foreign earth, though no more heartfelt singing about this either. The swans, Dick and Duck, her aunt on the ship, maybe there was some truth in all of this too. “I didn’t understand what connected people, Manager. Though now I guess I’ve grown up. Been slapped in the face.”

A lush cemetery, picturesque, you can see it despite the fact that it is a dull and snowless January day, no leaves on the trees, gobs of old, dirty snow on the ground. The temperature is above freezing again but there is a biting wind that goes down to your bones and it makes it feel like fourteen degrees at least. Maj-Gun has been freezing in her new red winter coat with a silky soft lining during the roughly thousand feet she and all of the other funeral guests wandered from the church behind the creaking black cart with the white casket on top—three male descendants on either side, Tom Maalamaa at the very front on the right, the most important spot, like oxen pulling the hay wagon along behind them.

The cemetery grove itself where the family grave is located is particularly nice: so if one had the desire to say something nice, something that could be said in the presence of all relatives from both sides of the family, then it would, for example, be exactly what Maj-Gun herself is going to say afterward at the reception, mainly in order to put an end to a certain burial ecstasy that has caused some of the closest relatives on the dead husband’s side to start getting out of hand.

“God knows everything,” Maj-Gun is going to say, “but the grove is beautiful and that Aunt Liz Maalamaa would have appreciated resting in that place is something we all can agree on.

“A childless marriage but God gives and God takes away and that sorrow which lasted so many years only brought the two of them closer together.” Afterward, consequently, some relative from the husband’s side suddenly felt the need to determine this despite the fact that there had not been a single person at the table for the closest mourners who would not have known exactly what the married life between the two, now dead, people in question had been like. If not the “family doctor” himself—a cousin who is enthroned at one end of the relatives’ table instead of at the cousin’s table where he actually should be sitting but has apparently received a better seat due to his respectable age in addition to his task as “physician in ordinary,” which they say in that family, to that family. He is ninety-four years old but clear as a bell, possibly a bit loose tongued in his old age; that is to say less restrained with what he in company as company might happen to allow to come out.

That “doctor” whom even Liz Maalamaa was forced to see many times while her husband was still alive for a neck brace and bandage and grogginess-inducing calming tablets as a result of what, of course, did not exist, something everyone was well aware of—her own cowlike clumsiness that caused her to fall down the stairs all the time. Which is, in other words, what her husband had pointed out in public where still no one had spoken out against him: that his wife so to speak had to stumble, fall, or come tumbling from the second floor to the first floor in that beautiful house, which was in everyday language called a “shatoe,” on comfortable sandals where they lived. But “ssshh,” even “the doctor,” just like the entire family, put his finger to her lips. “Ssshhhhhh,” had not even needed any form of extra request to “the doctor,” he was bound to confidentiality in any case and then of course it was decorum too. But then in any case, with great sympathy—because he was no wild animal of course—generously prescribed all of those calming medications that sometimes made the aunt float forward so to speak, under the influence. Not over the ground, but in her head, where a lot of strange things—China, memories from a life as a missionary that had never been lived in reality—started welling forth.

But that is, consequently, when “the doctor” here at the reception after the funeral suddenly starts speaking like that, in small print over the sorrow of childlessness and about some sort of despite-everything-union between the two partners, that Maj-Gun is going to look at her own father, the dead one’s brother. And notice for once that he has a hard time keeping his own council; his hand that is gripping the coffee cup—fine Chinese porcelain, a fine china , they had to drag the most exquisite family china to this exhibition as well—starts shaking unreasonably and you suddenly understand for once that he is not planning on being the country boy from the boardinghouse in the company of these people, which he is in all other places except for in the church where he is so keen to stay on good terms with everyone; too good terms, he has just realized now and now in other words, readiness, he has decided for the first and the last time to say things as they are, speak, shout out.