There is another, more significant series of large objects with the titles PHALLUS I, PHALLUS II, PHALLUS III, “presumably ad infinitum.” These represent Jasmin’s despising of “ sovereignty and the patriarchy.” When Maud visits to try to understand Jasmin’s motive for befriending her, she discovers collages of “pressed photographs, scraps of fabric, sheet music, tampons (Maud couldn’t quite see whether or not they were used), fragments of bone and all kinds of unidentifiable trash.” Jasmin’s apartment on the ground floor has a glassed-in terrace which also serves as her art studio.
She decides that she has a problem that needs a solution. A few days later, Jasmin brings pastries and coffee, bounds into the kitchen, and makes herself at home. Maud instantly realizes that she has made three mistakes: answering the bell, letting Jasmin in, and allowing her to float through the flat as though she owned it. When Maud returns from one of her many trips abroad, Jasmin, an artist, rings Maud’s doorbell and arrives bearing gifts, a “really expensive Champagne de Pompadour” and “Russian caviar was also the real deal.” In the first jaw-dropping, head-spinning story, “An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems,” Maud suspects another tenant in the building, Jasmin Schimmerhof, of having ulterior motives for her sudden kindness. After her mother and sister died, Maud was intent on holding onto the apartment for dear life. Maud’s living arrangements are “rather unusual.” After her father died when she was 18, the apartment was sold, but an agreement was made through an attorney that she, her mentally ill sister, Charlotte, and their mother could continue to live in it rent-free “for as long as any member of the family wishe to reside” there. Maud is an 88-year-old retired teacher of French and English who lives alone in an apartment in Gothenburg, Sweden.
That’s what happens to several of the unsuspecting characters in the quirky quintet of tales in Helene Tursten’s linked collection of short stories, An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good.
If you rankle her, you’re likely to end up dead.
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