The American Girl (16 page)

You wanna implode your mind with the Exploding plastic inevitable?

Little Bombay, all the fabrics
.

No. All of that was over now
.

Imaginary swimming
.

The girl ran in the pool. Back and forth between the short ends
.

The Islander had gotten up and walked out to the pool area on unsteady legs, with the rifle
.

The girl who ran and ran as if she hadn’t even seen him, eyes closed, back and forth, back and forth
.

Imaginary swimming. He had raised the rifle and aimed it at her
.

Then she had stopped suddenly. Looked up at him with big, defenseless eyes
.

He had fallen, crumpled together, the rifle had fallen out of his hand, he had started crying
.

Belonged to the kind of hard things in the soul from which stories cannot be woven
.

DORIS WAS THE ONE WHO TOOK SANDRA OUT IN THE DISTRICT
. Sandra got to know the District in a new way. Until she had met Doris Flinkenberg, Sandra had mainly roamed around the house in the darker part of the woods without aim or purpose. Maybe followed in the boy’s footsteps, in daylight of course, and when he definitely was not in the vicinity. Come to different places, Bule Marsh for example. She had also seen the cousin’s property before, and a few other places, but they had not meant anything. Her head had been filled with strange thoughts that had nothing to do with the concrete reality surrounding her in the darker part of the woods, so full that she had not really had the energy to see anything outside of herself, or had room for anything else in her consciousness.

She had, in her aimless wanderings, mostly been occupied with thinking about whether or not someone was following her, if she was being watched. Was the evil eye there, all of that—the boy in the woods, and so on.

“Ah Bencku,” Doris said when Sandra brought him up, “He’s bananas. As bananas as a . . . BANANA,” she continued. “What do you mean?” Sandra whined, but Doris just shrugged her shoulders. “You’ll probably see later. Yourself.” Which had not exactly calmed Sandra’s anxiety. See what? Though it had not been possible to continue asking questions then because Doris Flinkenberg had, true to habit, bubbled on about a bunch of other conversation topics which, according to Doris in her own opinion, were much more interesting.

“Behind the marsh.” Doris pointed at an especially brushy direction in the woods. “That’s where I came from. In the
beginning. Oh, boy Sandra. You should just know what lunatics I descend from on both my mother’s and my father’s side.”

And again Doris pulled down her pants a bit and revealed a terrible dark brown but very visible checkered scar on her left thigh. “Do you know what this is?” she asked and Sandra just shook her head. “The work of idiots. They’re over there. Beyond the marsh. Or, were.”

“We’re not going there, are we?” Sandra asked anxiously.

“Are you crazy?” Doris fastened her eyes on her. “I’m never setting foot there again. Never ever! Now we’re going to turn off the path here and go in the other direction. To where civilization is.”

And with these words they came to the cousin’s house, which Doris Flinkenberg exhibited for Sandra like a museum of a happy home. Here was the kitchen, so shiny and clean, with the household assistant who was kneading the dough so conveniently, and there was the transistor radio from which the weather report came, and the Poppy radio cassette player—which could not be used as a radio because the antennas had come off a long time ago—with Doris’s own music:
Lasting Love Songs for Moonstruck Lovers
, “Our Love Is a Continental Affair,” and all of Doris’s other songs on cassettes, just as unbearable.

And there was the cousin’s mama with her crossword and her dishes and her cooking and all of her
True Crimes
. And next to the kitchen on the first floor of the cousin’s house was the cousin’s papa’s room, though you were not allowed to go in there. He kept to himself in there and the best thing to do was to walk as quietly as possible past the closed door. Doris snuck by on tiptoe, with her finger to her lips.

“He keeps company there with his demons and phantoms,” Doris hissed to Sandra on the stairs going up to the second floor when they could speak freely again. “And you’re not allowed to disturb him. Though he’s not dangerous. Not in that way. Not anymore now when he’s past his prime. Meek like a kitten.”

“What’s a phantom?” Sandra asked when they came up to Doris’s room, the nice and bright and spacious attic room where the daylight streamed in between the clean white apple-patterned curtains and you had such a pretty view over the entire cousin’s garden below.

“A fantasy ghost,” Doris Flinkenberg answered and sat down on her bed, on the bright yellow bedspread. “Ghosts that come from ancient times. There was a woman he loved but she’s dead now. Anna Magnani, or the breasts from the working class. That wasn’t her name really, but that’s what Bengt says.”

And when Sandra gave her a questioning look, Doris shrugged her shoulders impatiently.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s not important. We might get to that later.”

It was rather cozy, really, in Doris’s room on the second floor of the cousin’s house. Such a pretty picturesque little attic room, perfect for two little girls to play their games in. But still it would never be like that, never a place where Sandra Wärn and Doris Flinkenberg hung out. There was already something else that they were disciples of. The house in the darker part of the woods, and most of all the basement and the pool without water was already theirs.

This room, Doris’s room in the cousin’s house—it was, yes, too normal. No room for Loneliness&Fear or for Sister Night and Sister Day.

“Come . . .”

And then they went out again, and over the cliffs to the Second Cape. They saw the elegant houses that had once been part of the housing exhibition for country living in the future, where the summer guests and the sea urchins now lived and there were Private Property signs almost everywhere. But of course you did not care about that, now in the fall when everything was deserted and
there was no season
, as the summer guests had a habit of expressing themselves. They saw the Glass House,
the most beautiful of all the houses on the Second Cape, and it was one of those fantastic sparkling fall afternoons when the different colors of the trees shone in the sunlight and were reflected in the water that reflected in the glass windowpanes so that a game of colors arose and it actually looked a little like the house was moving, as if it were on fire.

And finally they went up to the house on the First Cape, which sat on a hill next to it, but a little on its own, surrounded by a pointed beach in three different directions. It was an old green villa with three stories, or almost four because the fourth one was a tower with a tower room.

And surrounded by a garden, now rather overgrown, which subtly crossed over into the real woods that continued a good way to the west until you came to the end of the woods, to the dark marshlands where a certain alpine villa had been raised.

The house on the First Cape had been empty for many years now already, and they got inside—it was as easy as pie, it was just a matter of walking in—and they went up in the tower and looked around at everything, everything that was around them.

And then down to the floor below where there was a large living room still with certain old pieces of furniture in it, not very well preserved but not entirely destroyed. And there, in the parlor, Doris stood in the middle of the room, closed her eyes and opened them again, and then looked straight at her friend meaningfully, as only Doris could, and said:

“A lucky house, what good luck that I was here.” And made an expressive pause before she continued. “This is namely where the bastard was found. And the bastard, that was me.”

And Doris curled up on the plush-covered sofa and waved to Sandra that she should sit down next to her.

“Come and sit here and I’ll tell you about my happiest story. There are many good things about this story . . . but the absolutely best thing of all is that it’s true. All of this happened for real!”

THE HOUSE ON THE FIRST CAPE WAS ONE OF THE FEW HOUSES
in the whole of the District that had escaped destruction during the occupation after the war. When the area was returned the house was completely and, to top it all off, almost newly painted; the original furniture was still inside the house and even some of the other things. Some important person must have lived there, people thought, someone who had the power to prevent the vandalization that had otherwise been carried out more or less systematically in order to hide the traces of military and other activity in the area. And someone who had liked the house, someone who had been content there: even the garden seemed to have been cared for.

This stirred bad blood in the District, especially among those who had their former homes burned down, disrupted, soiled. And that the rightful owners of the house on the First Cape had not been in touch made everything that much worse.

To leave the house adrift. After everything. That was almost worse than doing what the cousin’s papa had done, just showing up with his clan one day during the first period after the area had become free with that eternal but certainly completely legal document of Baron von Buxhoevden’s confounded bad luck in poker games.

The house was empty. It would continue to stand empty. During many years it was a place where people came and went and hung out for shorter and longer periods of time. Very nearly every person in the District had either lived in the house on the First Cape or had known someone who had lived there—that is the way it was in the end. But still, the house would prove impossible
to take possession of. There were always the original owners who dug their heels in somewhere in the background even though they never showed up themselves in the house on the First Cape. The women who would live in the house a while in the future were the first ones who would have a legal rental agreement to show. And for a time after that when the Backmansson family, descendants of the original owners, would finally move in.

The cousin’s clan had also hung out in the house on the First Cape when they first came to the District. Very first in other words, when the cousin’s papa’s brother and his wife were still alive, them plus the twins Rita and Solveig and the oldest, the son Bengt. They had lived on the First Cape while what would later become the cousin’s house was built below.

It was rumored that the cousin’s papa actually had never given a thought to leaving the house on the First Cape. That he walked around miffed over the fact that the First Cape was located just outside the area he had won in the game. Sometimes he even tried to claim that the First Cape really was his too, but according to a verbal agreement. He tried to dismiss the fact that he had no papers to prove it as a meaningless technical detail. It did not work of course. But the clan stayed in the house anyway, contract or not. They probably would have continued staying there too since you really did not want to mess with the cousin’s papa when he was in his prime. He had that brother too, in other words, the one who died, who looked like a testy bull, never said a word. But that nickname, the Dancer, in combination with his appearance and everything else you had heard about him sent chills down your spine.

But still, one beautiful day their fellow citizen Loman stood on the property of the house on the First Cape with an eviction notice in hand, this more or less on commission of the house’s actual owners who, like always, remained invisible.

But paradoxically enough it was probably just this eviction attempt—plus of course the car accident shortly thereafter, in
which the Dancer and his wife Anna Magnani or the breasts from the working class, which their only son Bengt would gradually call her, died—that caused the cousin’s family to finally be accepted in the District. It was the last straw, you thought, about the owners who stayed away, to send out a compatriot as a lackey. Not to mention up there. Where you would rather not set foot—and it did not matter if you were a cop or not.

But so, at the same time, sort of another fate was also being determined in passing.

“One man’s death, the other man’s breath,” as Doris Flinkenberg had a habit of saying at this point in the story in the cousin’s kitchen in the cousin’s house where she had the cousin’s mama tell it over and over again.

It was namely so that Loman, who had received the commission to convey the warning about the imminent eviction to the cousin’s papa, had a daughter. “Let us call her Astrid.” That was how Doris Flinkenberg always described it to Sandra. Let us call her Astrid. This Astrid had a boy, his name was Björn. And Astrid, she loved children. And here, exactly at this point, Doris usually had to pause because she became so excited; her eyes twinkled and her voice became utterly soft.

This daughter happened to be present when countryman Loman set out for the house on the First Cape in order to have a serious talk with the cousin’s papa. Maybe as some kind of protection: as said, the cousin’s papa was known as a hothead with a violent temper, and this was as said while he was still in his prime before all of the tragedies befell him and he became docile and distant and locked himself in his room. Astrid together with her boy Björn had stood a bit off to the side as countryman Loman conveyed his errand. And she, Astrid, there was probably nothing special about her. She probably made no impression at all. That is to say as a woman, so to speak. She, Astrid, was a like a gray mouse. No one you paid any
attention to. In comparison to Anna Magnani . . . the Dancer’s wife . . . as if on cue rumba tones and thuds from dancing could be heard from inside the house, and they had in and of themselves been rather exhilarating and rhythmical tones, but at the same time there was something truly threatening about them.