The American Girl (18 page)

“HERE THEY CELEBRATE THE WILD LIFE,” DORIS FLINKENBERG
said to Sandra Wärn where they were hanging out on their own in the shade in the garden outside the Women’s House on the First Cape. “They don’t let on that there was a yesterday here in the District. A yesterday filled with blood and murder.

“Dancing over corpses.” Doris Flinkenberg smacked her lips at Sandra Wärn up in the dark branches of the sea apple tree or in the neglected rose bower that had at one time certainly been elegant and resplendent. Off to the side of the parties and the other events in the garden, not too far away but at just the right distance, thereby having the right overview of everything that was happening.

And there was always something going on in the garden next to the house on the First Cape during this time. Because it was those years when the women were there and the parties billowed around them, spread out over the entire District, almost everywhere. That was
the happy time
.

The summer women and the winter women—the whores in the house in the darker part. A few summers, falls. Then it was over. The women were expelled from the house on the First Cape and a completely ordinary family, they were called Backmansson,
moved in. They were the real owners of the house, rightly said the direct descendants.

“Mmm,” Sandra answered a bit impatiently because Doris had been carrying on like that for quite a while, walking like a cat around hot porridge. But still certainly smiling at her friend in that special way they had practiced together in the house in the darker part of the woods, a smile that signaled understanding and devilry and many ambiguities.
Our crafty fiendishness
, Doris Flinkenberg had said; that was what these expressions were supposed to demonstrate.

But also, not insignificant on Sandra’s part, a smile that was intact. Two straight rows of teeth on top of each other could be glimpsed from between two normal lips. It had been a few years since the cleft palate surgery had taken place, the one that had released Sandra from a visible harelip and now, since a few months back, with a successful adjustment to her bite—one that had lasted since early childhood involving her teeth being pulled and two different kinds of braces, one for nighttime use the other for daytime. A lot of money had been spent in order to achieve the final result of a healthy and normal child’s mouth.

“But tell me now, then,” Sandra gradually whined more and more persistently at Doris Flinkenberg up in the sea apple tree or in the shadowy bower. But Doris only held a finger up to her lips. “Shhh, not yet,” though there really was no one who heard her in the middle of the noise from the party. Also her face broke into that same smile, but when Doris smiled it revealed what you might call an overbite. There was no one who had bothered straightening her teeth and now it was too late; Sandra and Doris had both turned thirteen now.

But still, though you did not hear what the girls were saying to each other there where they were in their private shade off to the side in the garden, did you not discover, just by looking at them and their facial expressions, something muffled and alarming so
to speak, something nevertheless a bit terrifying in the middle of all the light, summer, and fun? Something at least a bit ominous, which cast somewhat longer shadows in the bright day than what was normal.

Maybe so. Just tell the girls. In fact, it would have made them proud and interested to hear it.

Sandra Night&Doris Day, Doris Night&Sandra Day. Two girls in identical black shirts on which
LONELINESS&FEAR
stood in green paint on the stomachs. Long-sleeved nylon T-shirts in the middle of summer, but, and that was the most important thing, articles of clothing of which there were two identical ones in the entire world. Sandra had sewn them for their games, mostly just for fun in the beginning, but gradually a deeper message and content started taking shape inside them. For the time being mostly unarticulated, like a tone.

Now it was Doris’s turn to lead the game, her turn to start. That meant that you had to follow her lead and have patience. A lot of patience, that was starting to become clear.

“Tell it now!”

Doris Night&Sandra Day, Sandra Night&Doris Day: those were their alter egos’ identities for the game, to which the smiles they had practiced in front of the mirror at the bottom of the swimming pool in the house in the dark part also belonged.

“We’re two sixth-sense siblings,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “That’s what we’ve become as a result of tragic circumstances. The phenomenon poltergeist. Do you know what that is?”

Sandra shook her head but looked expectantly at Doris, rain or shine the crossword solver with dictionary at the ready, who continued, “That’s when the innocent child has had more than enough horrible things done to it and it has developed supernatural abilities in order to survive. The ability to see beyond what is,” Doris Flinkenberg clarified. “See what no one else sees.”

“You and I, Sandra,” Doris hammered down. “We’ve certainly been treated badly enough. Me with my scars and you with your tragic family background. Heintz-Gurt, Lorelei Lindberg, all of that. You and I, Sandra, we know what it means to suffer.

“And the suffering has developed a hidden power in us that makes it so that we can see what no one else sees. See what others maybe should see but don’t dare. The forgotten or what has been pushed away. Often”—Doris Flinkenberg made a solemn pause before she continued—“terrible things. Horrible crimes. Violence and passion. This is our starting point in any case.

“And,” she added, “what we’re investigating is real. It happened for real.”

“I don’t understand anything,” Sandra said impatiently. “Get to the point.”

“Shh.” Doris put her finger to her lips. “Soon. But right now we don’t have time because now we’re going to a party.”

A living room in the grass
. And they headed up to the house on the First Cape where there was almost always something going on inside the house or outside in the overgrown garden. There with the kind help of Bencku and Magnus von B. the women had carried out the entire parlor furniture set, what was left of it anyway. A long table, curved white chairs, even the worn sofa with the plush cover. “Our living room in the grass,” the women said and fastened white tent cloths over everything as protection against bad weather.

Bencku and Magnus von B. were also helpful in the garden in other ways. They cut the grass, they grilled bittyfish and green sea apples on the stone grill and when the women went to the city center in their light red bus
Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn
in order to do some shopping, the boys were there and helped carry the shopping bags. “Bencku fell in love will all of them at once,” Doris Flinkenberg established in the cousin’s kitchen. “Maybe Bencku will get married later too,” she went on to say, but to the
cousin’s mama and when Sandra was not there—she and Sandra had more important things to talk about when they were together and besides, Sandra always acted so strangely when Bengt was brought up.

Thus up in the garden, right up into the middle of the party where the girls took their places in the sea apple tree, which had its name from the fact that the cousin’s papa, while he was still in his prime, had had Bencku and Rita and Solveig pick apples from it, certainly completely ordinary half-hard, wind-beaten junk that they had then sold to the summer guests as
sea apples
. The apples had been rapidly consumed since there were quite a few summer guests who were crazy about everything related to the
sea
.

And the women thought it was fun having two moody girls in the tree or in the middle of the rose bower. “Our mascots,” said Anneka Munveg who was a news reporter and the one who was always the first to make the “scoop” wherever she went, in her crass and humorless way. “Our house pets,” someone else filled in, one of the less colorful women, someone you would not remember afterward. “What was it they were called again, those chipmunks in Donald Duck? Wasn’t it Chip and Dale?” That lit a fire under Laura Bjällbo-Hallberg. “The small imperialistic nibblers,” she hissed. “Never in your life! Now that there’s definitely an absolutely genuine Soviet counterpart.” Life for Laura B-H during these years was a matter of finding the absolutely genuine Soviet counterpart to everything.

But when no one had come up with what the Soviet counterpart to the two chipmunks could be the girls quite simply became the “Soviet counterpart to Chip and Dale.” And when that chant became too long to get out, it was gradually shortened to just the
“Soviet counterpart,”
short and sweet.

And the women, as said, also allowed themselves to be entertained by Doris and Sandra’s muffled serious behavior toward everything, that which belonged—of course they did not
know—to the game Sister Night&Sister Day. The expressionless faces, the distorted smiles, and the enormous long-sleeved nylon T-shirts in the middle of the summer heat. “Sourpusses,” the women burst out delightedly. “But maybe you’re also needed in some way,” she determined, the one who was the most delicious of the delicious, her with eyes the size of tea saucers, whom Doris and Sandra were in love with in their secret, innocent way. “Maybe you’re needed in some way,” Inget Herrman said accordingly.
“If nothing else than like the darkness that gives depth to happiness.”

The women on the First Cape
had arrived in the District one Saturday morning in April. They came in a light red bus on which it said
Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn
in fuzzy yellow letters along the sides. The bus drove over the cousin’s property, not to mention almost straight across, but it was no one’s fault because it just so happened that was where the road easement that led up to the path that led up to the First Cape was located. The bus stopped, the doors were thrown open, and the women burst forth from it, far from all of the women who would come to live in the house on the First Cape during the time that followed, but quite a few. A large enough number in any case so that inside the cousin’s house you became speechless with surprise. Doris and the cousin’s mama who were busy in the kitchen with a musical crossword and the first baking session of the weekend, the cousin’s papa inside his room behind the wall, who otherwise during this time of year had the habit of lying in bed and drinking schnapps six weeks in a row—he was maybe into the fourth week that Saturday morning when the women showed up in the District—but now you could actually hear the noise from a chair being pulled over to the window on the other side of the room.

And all of these women were themselves a surprise, but also the following: who was it who just seemed to pop out of nowhere there next to the bus? And who started to put on airs and
act like it was the most natural thing in the world that a bunch of women had suddenly arrived in a light red bus that was parked next to the end of the easement road on the cousin’s property where the path up to the First Cape started? If not—those inside the cousin’s house could not believe their eyes, but it was true—Bengt.

The bus hardly had time to stop before Bengt was out of his barn, dragging his feet as usual, but it had little to do with the fact that he was not in a hurry rather that at this point in his life he had decided that this way of walking, dragging his feet, that is, made him interesting. Dressed to the hilt in his own apathetic way, in clean farmer’s pants, a clean blue shirt, and a horrible red scarf tied around his head. Though it should be conceded that, aside from the thin stubble on his chin, he looked relatively decent.

In other words, Bengt with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, figuratively speaking of course, and this picture were in agreement with Doris Flinkenberg who, not exactly at this moment but certainly later, would become good at interpreting in different ways with words. She was talented with the richness of words after all. But now, right now, Doris was not analyzing at all, she was too astonished.

“Bencku picked up a scent,” she said, rather weakly.

“Now, now, now, now,” said the cousin’s mama, just as distantly.

And Bengt, he was not looking at them of course, he did not look at the cousin’s house at all. The women unloaded their bags out of the bus: bags, bags, their this and that, hundreds of things, while Bengt stood there and put on airs, filled his hands, let them load him up with stuff. And later they slowly started moving up toward the house on the First Cape, the house that had stood empty for so many years that you almost had time to get used to the idea that it would always be like that. They moved forward like a curious train rocking quietly, like a safari expedition in
the swampy interior of the jungle. And of course, the peculiar scene had sound. Voices, laughter, and the like. But regardless, inside the cousin’s house it was as if everything had played out in silence, which maybe quite simply was due to the fact that Doris Flinkenberg had kept quiet for once.

The women on the First Cape: there were eight–nine of them in the beginning, between the ages of about twenty and fifty-five. Also a few children were along, but for the most part they ran around and made noise and drifted together into a shapeless mass even while the women were there. The number of women was often higher, especially in the middle of the summer when the parties really got started. But of everyone there were still some who stood out more than others, like chosen ones, and most of them were already there on that first Saturday in April when the women took possession of the house on the First Cape—besides, they had a rental agreement to show, the first of its kind anyone had ever seen for the house on the First Cape. You would remember who these women were long afterward, even if the memory would blur amazingly quickly.

Consequently it was Laura Bjällbo-Hallberg, the one with the Soviet counterpart to everything; it was Anneka Munveg, a rather well-known news reporter who wrote a series of reports called “The Everyday Life of the Working Woman;” it was Saskia Stiernhielm who was a painter and who lived in something called the Blue Being—the blue room—in Copenhagen during the winter. If you wanted to reach her you had to address the letter to the Blue Being, Copenhagen and then one way or another it would get there. And then there were those names you remembered best because they were so funny, like Dolly Dreamer and Gaffsi and Annukka Metsämäki, but otherwise there was nothing special about them. Nothing conspicuous in any case, sort of lasting and worth remembering that a child demands in order to really be able to commit them to memory—like
her, the most delicious of the delicious, the one with eyes like teacup saucers, the one who was called Inget Herrman.