“I mean the house,” the Islander clarified in the sunshine. “Won’t it be phenomenal?”
“Yes,” Sandra answered slowly. And she knew then, in the same moment she heard her voice, that everything was so irreversible.
“This seals our union,” the Islander also said. “Now we’re sharing a secret. Remember. I’m counting on you. Not a word to anyone.”
And then she also understood something else. She could no longer get out. She was involved now, whether she wanted to be or not. And it was no hallucination. It was nothing less than reality, which, despite her current dazed state, was more than ever before completely clear.
Little Bombay
Pashmina was invented more than four hundred years ago when Nur Jahan, wife of the Emperor Jehangir, asked her weavers to present a woolen fabric that was “as light as a cloud but as warm as a tender embrace.”
And she got it.
Many are the finesses and secrets of pashmina.
Silk is, should we say it directly, second class.
We’re talking about silk in pashmina, in other words.
Real pashmina wool comes from the belly of sheep.
Or was it the hindquarters.
“This is what it looked like. A room with bolts of fabric, two tables, and shelves.
“A table and a chair and a record player in the back part of the room.
“A water boiler. We always drank tea. A certain type of tea.”
But she could also become angry. “Why didn’t anyone come?”
“And you ask as if business was going well.”
“Business is terrible.”
And all of the needles fell out of her mouth, she was so angry.
And clink clink the needles fell on the floor.
Little Bombay—
Little Bombay, Köpmansbranten 42, in a suburb in the western parts outside the city by the sea, open between eight and six in the evening.
A fabric store, “for silk. Can anything be more idiotic?”
The puzzle in the back room, on the little table.
Alpine Villa in Snow.
And all of the fabrics.
“. . . And the Islander. What is he doing again? He’s hardly ever at home . . .”
And one day the door opened and an acquaintance stepped into the boutique:
“When you speak of the devil.”
It wasn’t the Islander, but the Black Sheep.
“Long time no see. But remember this. That it isn’t always so wonderful to see what your dreams look like in reality.”
The Black Sheep, the eternal student of architecture. The Islander’s brother.
Always on the go, always busy.
Like the Islander. Yet so different.
And so it was, a time later. More like the time that it takes for a baby elephant to be ready baked in its mother’s stomach.
“Here comes happiness from a lucky roll of the dice!” the Islander yelled and shuffled a large, square package into the bedroom of the apartment in their native country. The package was almost as tall as Sandra, covered with silver-colored paper and a wide red silk ribbon tied in the shape of a playful tropical flower right on top. Sandra knew. She had already seen everything, but later when it happened in real time she lay and huddled on her mother’s bed, under her mother’s quilt. Squeezed her eyes shut, held her hands over her ears and la-laed to herself to shut out what could not be shut out.
And then glitter confetti rained over the bed, the package, the room, her.
A few days before Lorelei Lindberg’s birthday, it was just when you thought he had forgotten about all of it, in any case just when you yourself had forgotten so that you had eagerly started concentrating on other things in life, that the Islander had come into Sandra’s room with a plastic bag in hand. Lorelei Lindberg was at Little Bombay, the fabric store, and Sandra was lying at home in bed suffering the last sweat of the first childhood disease (was it chicken pox or German measles? she did not remember). He closed the door securely and then dug around in the plastic bag and pulled out a rather large object that he unwrapped in front of her from the brown paper.
“Look, Sandra! What do we have here? Ring any bells?”
Sandra did not understand anything. Or well. When she saw the object, it was a bell, a front doorbell of quite a unique type—then she suddenly understood far too much. The Islander meant: “Do you remember?” Of course she did, she had immediately recognized the bell so she knew exactly what it resembled. The doorbell by a front door to a certain house that they had seen in the Alps, a long time ago.
And an Islander, as has been mentioned, never forgets a good idea once he has come up with it. And he was a man of his word, damn it, too, an Islander, not to mention woven from a rare, stubborn cloth.
The doorbell looked like a cuckoo clock and apparently worked the same way. You wound it by pulling on two metal strings on which two heavy clumps, supposedly representing pinecones from the forest, were hanging, these were also made of metal . . . When you rang it (pushed a button) a terrace door in miniature opened on the alpine villa in miniature that the bell was carved into, and some red and tipsy alpine men and alpine women with foaming beer mugs in hand marched out at the same time as the alpine march started playing. The nausea welled up inside Sandra yet again, a sick feeling sort of imitating the nausea during her hangover in the Alps, and there it was again, the peculiar taste of complete hopelessness and rotten rum in her mouth.
Nach Erwald und die Sonne. Die Sonne. Die Sonne. Die Sonne. The bell sounded. How in the world would she have been able to forget that?
“You have no idea how difficult it was to get this bell,” the Islander said, pleased. “It was almost harder than building the whole house!”
Sandra listened to all of it, almost speechless with despair.
“But I managed!”
And she nodded. Once or twice, but otherwise she was mute, just mute, though as usual the Islander did not notice her playacting. He was, as said, not the kind of person who devoted his time to analyzing expressive silences, uncontrolled chatter, and all the possible hidden meanings in them, etc. and etc. Everything that somehow had a double meaning.
“In other words it’s done now,” he clarified as if there was still some uncertainty on the subject. And added, filled with his own enthusiasm:
“In other words that’s what has kept me occupied all these days. As we know Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it takes two years for a baby elephant to become ready baked in its mother’s belly.”
After a closing remark like that, which was not funny at the time, just stupid and silly, the Islander communicated that it was the day after tomorrow, on Lorelei Lindberg’s birthday, that it would “happen.”
“And now the two of us are going to conspire a bit more on the topic. This was of course both our idea from the beginning. And of course we want it to be a tremendous surprise for her, right? The surprise of all surprises. To her from both of us!”
And the Islander put on his sunglasses, which at that time he almost never took off because in secret he imagined that he looked like a certain popular French movie star when he had them on, and of course he actually did. Maybe he also had the idea that it would remind Lorelei Lindberg of the jet-setter’s life that they had lived more intensely in the past before this life and their child and the everyday and the, for the time being, bad business when there was currently considerably less of that commodity. And then of course it was not exactly cheap to buy land and build a house.
He put on the dark sunglasses so you could not see his expression. And sometimes—in moments just like these—Sandra became absolutely certain that what the Black Sheep in a certain white Jaguar had said would hold true: that there was nothing wrong with the Islander in and of himself, “aside from the fact that he isn’t in full possession of his senses. Just ask me, I’m his brother after all.”
Or, a few bricks short of a full load, which you said in the District where they would soon be m
oving. Behind the dark sunglasses it was filled with emptiness.
Little Bombay.
Don’t let it dupe you. The finest pashmina is not a silk blend.
Pashmina with silk is cheap.
Not completely worthless, but not the finest and most exclusive, which we are now looking for.
(Little Bombay, and all of the fabric.)
Lorelei Lindberg was speaking with a girlfriend on the phone:
“I have a child who cries so much.”
“When my daughter cries: Which my daughter does so often. Then I lose faith in life. Almost.
“Then I lose my hold, my courage, my . . . everything.”
Turned “Heroine” off and the radio on.
This streamed from the radio instead:
“Our love is a continental affair. He came in a white Jaguar.”
There was no one who escaped that hit during that time.
“How it is . . . I don’t know,” said Lorelei Lindberg on the telephone. “It’s just a bit . . . I don’t know . . . tricky. A strange mood.”
. . .
Polyester has been created as a refined copy of the real thing.
Advanced polyester is confusingly similar to real silk.
But tell me then, what is the point?
And the silk dog came out from under the table, turned off the radio and on with “Heroine,” again.
The door opened—the Black Sheep came in:
“Sniff. Sniff. Mmm. It smells like MOUSE.”
The birthday that took place a few days later started with Sandra coming into the bedroom where Lorelei Lindberg was lying alone in the big double bed (the marital bed, as it was also called) waiting to be told happy birthday while pretending to sleep. She was well aware of what day it was and carefully prepared for all of the antics that awaited her on this day. Lorelei Lindberg loved birthdays, most of all her own. Sandra had the birthday tray in her hands and was singing happy birthday alone in her thin, small voice: In a cabin in the woods little man by the window stood saw a rabbit hopping by knocking at his door, which was the only song she knew almost all the words to. Lorelei Lindberg opened her eyes pretending to be surprised, but bounced up spiritedly in a sitting position, stretched like a cat and laughed like the birthday child is supposed to. But at the same time, though she did everything to hide it, she was looking around furtively. But where was HE with all of her presents? All of the real packages, the real presents? Because on the tray Sandra was holding in her hands, next to the cup with scalding Lapsang souchong tea and some sandwich crackers with orange marmalade, there was just Sandra’s own present, which was small and such a strange shape that you instantly knew what it was. An elephant, a small one, made of ivory. The kind of elephant Lorelei Lindberg had said she could never have enough of, and she probably had ten already.
But no Islander anywhere, which—though of course Lorelei Lindberg did not know it—the Islander and Sandra had agreed on ahead of time. The plan was for Sandra to tell her mother that the Islander unfortunately had had to go out of town on an urgent business matter early that morning and therefore would not be home at all on her birthday so unfortunately mother and daughter would have to make do with just each other.
This was in other words what Sandra was supposed to explain to Lorelei Lindberg after she had finished singing the miserable birthday song while the Islander would be standing behind the door, waiting for a good moment to interrupt the whole thing—and it would be just that moment when Lorelei Lindberg really started believing what Sandra was saying and had sort of given up hope so you could hear it in her voice as well. This surrender would be the signal for the Islander to PADAM, throw open the door and stand there in person in the opening with his Veuve Clicquot champagne, his cigarillos, which he smoked only in honor of her birthday and, most important, the present, the magnificent present and his shout: “Here comes happiness from a lucky roll of the die! Here you go!”
But in the middle of the birthday song Sandra become so discouraged and on the verge of tears over what was about to happen that she abruptly stopped in the middle of the song and saw no other option than to jump straight into her mother’s bed, curl up tightly next to her mother’s body, squeeze her eyes shut, and utter only weak whimpers of powerlessness to herself.
“My goodness, child, what’s wrong now?” Then Lorelei Lindberg had in turn moved suddenly and the cup of tea on the tray, which Sandra had only just had time to set down on the nightstand before the sudden dive, tipped over and boiling hot tea had sprayed over both of them. Though most of all over Sandra’s left arm and it had really stung. If it had not been Lorelei Lindberg’s birthday, Sandra probably would have had a crying spell, though she managed to ward it off for the time being in honor of the day.
But so, sucking the spot on her skin that had been burned, Sandra had been held in the bed and thus made sure she got as far under the covers as possible, not to mention with her head first (like an ostrich who thinks it can escape from danger by sticking its head in the sand). Without seeing, without hearing, without doing anything. Only her tongue, her own small and hesitant tongue played over the tender, newly burned skin on her arm. Disgusting blisters would surely gradually pop up there, blisters that she would amuse herself with hollowing out holes in them or picking at them in general so that maybe they would become infected and she would be forced to go to the nurse’s office at the French School. She could, if she really tried, already hear the school nurse’s voice:
“If you touch it one more time you’ll get scarring you’ll have to carry around for the rest of your life. Do you really want that? Do you really want scars like that, you who’ve just had surgery on your lip? You who’ve just been given a normal mouth. Normal like all other children?”
Normal. The nurse at the French School had normal on her mind. But on the other hand, she had carried on so about Sandra’s newly won normalcy that the effect had almost been the opposite. So you might think the school nurse, when all was said and done, still was not as convinced about Sandra’s normalcy as she let on. Maybe she wanted to convince herself by carrying on like that? Sandra liked that, like a game.
And later in life, during the best times, those which were spent in the swimming pool without water together with Doris Flinkenberg, Doris would become a completely splendid school nurse in one game. Just like that she would understand the character and secrecy of the nurse at the French School; the game would be called the School Nurse’s Secret.
“I was the first one who saw through her,” Doris Flinkenberg would say with a voice muffled and oh so similar, in the swimming pool without water that would become their haunt in the house in the darker part. “SandraIdiotHarelip. An infernal liar. Putting on airs for all she was worth. I saw through her, I did.”
Though this was nevertheless important information (and it was true). That now, this morning in the beginning of the history of the world, a fate was sealed, the harelip not harelipped anymore. Sandra had been in her second year at the French School when the diagnosis was made, and an operation was carried out soon thereafter. “We’ll quickly send a referral in this matter,” the school nurse had said proudly, as if this initiative was only her own and Sandra’s. Little Sandra really had not done much to correct the delusion. In reality, Sandra had done nothing at all since the delusion itself had sort of been the whole point.
“One might think that your parents should have intervened a little sooner,” said the school nurse who contacted the mouth specialist who immediately set a date and time for the operation on his calendar. “Have your mother and father really not said anything at all?”
“No,” Sandra lied calmly and gently.
The school nurse just shook her head, the kinds of parents there were these days. Like so many others, she also had a lot of prejudices against the superficial party lifestyle, which in her eyes these jet-setters lived, and the fact that Sandra’s parents, the Islander and Lorelei Lindberg, in Sandra’s own portrayal also belonged to this
group, had not changed it.
“Mom and Dad think it’s fine the way it is.” Sandra stoked the fire. “They think I look funny. They like laughing at me. Though they mean well. They just have such a phenomenal sense of humor. They don’t mean it in a bad way.”
And that had made the school nurse even more beside herself with anger.
“That wasn’t nicely done,” she said, and her voice almost shook with indignation. But then she had continued more determined than angry, downright triumphant, “It’s good that I’ve taken matters into my own hands. And not because I have an opinion on the matter, I wash my hands of it, but I must say that personally I don’t think you should laugh at a child.”
It was of course lies, all of it from beginning to end, but if you had come this far in your lies you could not reasonably pull yourself out later down the line, of course the little harelip understood this instinctively, even if it was to the detriment of herself. In other words, the subsequent operation in question that was an inevitable result. “No pain, no gain,” she tried to comfort herself with on the operating table where she shortly thereafter lay bound among knives and other instruments that existed solely to carve into her. But she had not been able to control herself and at the last second screamed, “I don’t want to,” but it had already been too late; the terrible ether mask was pressed over her face and she fell asleep and in a horrible ether nightmare she saw angry, chubby yellow guys dancing cabaret and woke up vomiting violently eight hours later.
In fact, the Islander and Lorelei Lindberg had taken Sandra to a whole slew of doctors and mouth specialists. Even in Little Bombay Sandra had sometimes been forced to give someone a closer look at her mouth, a customer or some other child-friendly soul who had good advice to give, someone who knew a plastic surgeon or had a relative who had suffered the same affliction.
“It’s just a matter of cutting away and sewing together,” the man in the white Jaguar said laconically, and it took a while for Sandra to identify him as the Black Sheep, the Islander’s brother, because when he came to Little Bombay all of it, the clothes, the car, were so new.
The American Girl Page 7
