The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

But delightful relief, maybe Doris Flinkenberg was thinking the same way. Because the seriousness in the kiss had barely started and it was over. During that hundredth of a second in which the seriousness remained Doris Flinkenberg lay on top of Sandra Wärn and looked her in the eyes and Sandra looked back. Unfathomably.

  A wee bit. And that was that.

  And during the remaining hundredths of that second everything became normal again. Doris opened her mouth and said, suddenly with a voice that unmistakably resembled the voice it was supposed to resemble:

  “I’m factor X. My name is Bengt.”

  And then Sandra was back to reality. She shook herself free and sat up on the moss like someone dazed with sleep.

  “Hi,” said Doris. “It wasn’t anything. What’s wrong with you? It was just a game.”

  And Doris, she remained lying on the ground. She looked up at the sky and now she was talking again.

  “Sandra, when you’re as lonely as I was. You know. Long ago. With marsh mama and marsh papa. Then you see. A lot. I saw, Sandra. All kinds of things. Both this and that.

  “And what I saw? A lot of stuff, which I don’t understand what it was, of course. I was so young. It was terrible for me. No place to be. No home, not a real one. I used to go to the cousin’s house, to the Second Cape, and to the house on the First Cape. Those trips almost cost me my life later when marsh mama was going to punish me for them though I’ve already told you about that. But, in other words. I was quite young, but I remember what I saw. Absolutely certain. I saw factor X and the American girl. In the boathouse. They were together then and were doing things with each other even though she was probably five years older.”

  “Like what?” Sandra asked nonchalantly in order to conceal the lump in her throat.

  “Well,” Doris said seriously, “pretty much what we were just doing in the moss. And even more.”

  “And what’s so important about that then?” Sandra blurted out hurriedly and mechanically.

  “Don’t you understand?” Doris got up from the grass filled with impatient energy. “That’s what almost nobody knows. That she wasn’t just with Björn. She was with him too. He was thirteen years old. As old as we are now. And she was nineteen. She lived two lives. Björn didn’t know anything about it. Not in the beginning in any case.”

  And Doris’s own thoughts lit a fire under her as well.

  “Come. Now we have a chance! I’m going to show you something!” Doris flew up out of the moss. “We’re going there now.” She started walking again, quickly and with determination, with Sandra behind her. Of course Sandra had no choice even though she already suspected what Doris was thinking, where Doris was going. She did not want to go there, not for anything in the world. But she did not want to be left here either, in the moss, in the woods, which was also filled with evil eyes that were watching her when she was not with Doris Flinkenberg.

  Still she was a bit surprised when she realized how close they were to the cousin’s property. They were not at all as lost as she had thought; in reality they were not lost at all, just a few hundred feet from the cousin’s property, where they were now walking up to the back corner of Bencku’s barn. Again Sandra was struck by how much Doris actually knew about how you could move around in the District unnoticed, that she really knew a lot of places no one else knew. Despite the fact that it was a result of Doris’s horrible past over in the marshlands Sandra could not escape feeling a pang of jealousy; suddenly she saw the difference between them so clearly. Personally she was the small, spoiled one, the one you barely needed to breathe on and she had fallen over and hurt herself and started crying. Fall down, death die. They had incidentally played a game like that on the bottom of the pool in the house in the darker part, she and Doris Flinkenberg. Sandra had fallen, fallen, over and over again, but then of course they had always had pillows under. And all the fabric, the suddenly almost so silly silk fabrics that had once been in Little Bombay.

  She, the little harelip, while Doris had been out in the world, been moving in it, making it hers.

  Here from the corner of the barn you could see the entire cousin’s property without being seen by anyone else. You could see up to the First Cape too, not right into the garden but certainly far enough so that you could distinguish life and movement, music and voices. The Midsummer Eve party that they had left a few hours before now seemed to have gotten going for real. It was the kind of party that everyone in the District would seek out little by little. Also Rita and Solveig and Torpe and Järpe and them; they would pass by the house on the First Cape anyway in their search for the ultimate fun, which would not exist anywhere else, but they would still keep going. And Magnus von B. and Bencku. It was unavoidable. They would show up and then they would not be in a hurry to go anywhere.

  And if you could see from the barn to the garden you could see from the garden down to the barn—and help! Sandra did not even dare think that thought through to the end.

  “Come on.” And now Doris Flinkenberg was already standing in the door opening and hissed, “Quick!” But Sandra dug in her heels and stood as though frozen in place and just shook her head. Did not want to. No. Not in there. N-e-v-e-r.

  Doris almost genuinely surprised.

  “You’re not saying you’re afraid? Of Bengt?”

  Doris cleared her throat as if it were something extraordinary.

  Sandra did not answer, she just continued shaking her head.

  “Idiot!” Now Doris became impatient for real. “This is our only chance. Now Bencku might be a murderer, but he really isn’t that dangerous!” And with these words whose ambivalence Doris herself did not reflect further on because they were pressed for time, Doris Flinkenberg took a resolute hold of her friend and pulled her into the darkness of the barn.

  Into the darkness, the damp, solitude.

  It was the first time Sandra was in here and it was not really what she had imagined, that was immediately clear. But at the same time, she did not really know what she had imagined or expected. If someone had asked it would not have been certain that she would have been able to explain it.

  It was rather normal, in fact. High ceilings like in an ordinary barn, in certain places there were spaces between the roof boards, which were in pretty bad shape. Creaking and cracking and a soft and sweet smell hung everywhere, one that even a jet-setter’s kid could identify as a barn smell, highly normal. Sawdust, junk, and wood in piles. A chopping block with an ax in it in the corner. But not even in one’s wildest fantasy could this ax be turned into a murder weapon; it screamed wood chopping. Nothing stranger than that. An old bicycle, a few steel bed frames, and then all of those rusty gadgets you do not know the names of.

  His room was at the other end, in a corner. There was only a partition with leftover veneer panels making up the interior walls, there was a piece of cloth hanging in front of the entrance, which was not even closed. It was empty. No one there. And thank goodness for that.

  And of course it was the room they were on their way to, with Doris in the lead, and it was easy enough to see that this was not exactly the first time she had been here on her own and snooped around without permission. Sandra followed her, still hesitant, but the fact that it was so normal in there got her to perk up noticeably, and she actually even felt a tiny bit of curiosity welling up.

  Later inside the room there was only a bunk under a small window with endlessly dirty glass, you could barely see through it. A Russian wood-burning stove and a large drawing table that was a wooden panel on top of two wooden trestles, an old bookshelf with a few books. And everywhere elsewhere clothes, books, magazines, empty bottles, ashtrays, and so on.

  The map. It was then, in the middle of the most ordinary of ordinary, that Sandra caught sight of the map. It was tacked to the wall opposite the bed, in the small corner that started where the bookshelf ended. And Sandra, she saw right away what it represented.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Doris Flinkenberg had tumbled down onto the bed
with a crash, and no, it was certainly obvious, Doris was not afraid of anything in here. While Sandra withdrew again.

  “He has several. They’re the District. He makes up everything on them and still it’s true. Quite clever.

  “But,” Doris continued, “we don’t have time for this now. That’s not why we’re here. Look at this.”

  And Doris had stuck her hand behind the books on the shelf and fished out a key, an old, large one, and then, with movements just as practiced, she quickly pulled back the orange-colored rug on the floor, and there was a trapdoor in the floor with a lock, which Doris put the key in, unlocked it, and pulled the trapdoor open as if she had done it many times before.

  She lay on her stomach next to the opening and rummaged around in the hole and pulled out a rather large bundle that she, with a short but certainly triumphant glance at Sandra, lay on the floor and waved to her friend that she should come closer. Sandra came of course, though she really did not want to, though again she feared the worst.

  Doris Flinkenberg paid no attention to Sandra’s hesitation, she was already in the process of unwrapping the bundle, a light blue blanket with holes, and revealed a bag, a shoulder bag in leather, light blue like the blanket, and it had Pan Am on it. The name of an airline, below the familiar logo.

  Sandra just stared. She was scared again, of course, almost scared to death, but at the same time still fascinated. Extremely fascinated somewhere, so that it was almost burning in her body. But the fascination also made her afraid; all of it was so sick because she knew what it was. Doris did not need to say anything more. Doris did not need to say anything. But of course she could not stop herself:

  “Her name was Eddie,” Doris Flinkenberg started, like at the marsh a while ago. “She came from nowhere. She had everything she owned in a bag.”

  And without looking up Doris had started emptying the bag of its contents. She took out item after item and lay them out on the floor between them.

  A few books, a booklet with guitar music. A 45 RPM record in a brown envelope without any text anywhere. A white woolen shirt, rather thick. A scarf, white-red-blue, a small purse, two wide, white plastic bracelets (which was almost the worst, it was so concrete), an alarm clock. A small case from which Doris fished out a photograph: “This is her. Look.” And she handed the photograph to Sandra who accepted it mechanically so to speak, like a sleepwalker, the discomfort was still causing her to be too upset and too petrified really to be able to look at it, but she also accepted it with a tickling curiosity and fascination. And an alarm clock. A big one that you needed to wind at the back with a huge butterfly key, and Doris did. And for a moment the clock’s resounding ticking filled the entire barn and at last Sandra had the desire to yell: “But quiet now, he can come at any time.”

  She checked herself in any case, Doris held the clock up to her ear.

  “Listen to how it sounds. Like a bomb. A time bomb. Memento mori.”

  “A what?”

  “Sometimes I set the alarm for Bencku. So that he’ll remember that he’s also just an ordinary mortal. In fact it’s Latin and means remember that you’re also going to die. Listen, listen to how the clock is ticking under the ground. Memento mori.”

  “Stooppp,” Sandra hissed. “What is this? What are they doing here?”

  “He’s taken care of them. I guess he thought they were his.”

  Sandra fingered the girl’s things. The book with the chords to simple songs to sing and play on the guitar, and those books, whose contents Inget Herrman would later explain to them in detail. Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a book about shopping mall theory, and Teach Yourself Classical Greek, a volume that did not exactly look very worn. That small record in its thick brown paper, you wondered what was on it? No label in any case, but later they saw on the cover. “This is your own music. This song was recorded by . . .” and on the dotted lines you were supposed to fill in the name of the person who was singing and the date. And which song.

  But of course Sandra did not have the peace and quiet to investigate anything in detail, not now, there would be time to meditate over that later. Now she just sat there and stared, and the songbook opened to a really fateful page as if on request.

  “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Poor boy, you’re bound to die.”

  “Factor X”—Doris lowered her voice to a whisper—“fell in love with her. So in love that he didn’t know up from down.” And then she repeated the same thing she had already said at the marsh, but now, here in the barn, with all the things, it sounded even more fateful. “We know what it can be like. Young love, a violent end.” And Sandra nodded again, dreamlike, while chills ran down her spine, chills that yet again had a tiny bit of that terrible sensual pleasure in them. The unconscious midwife’s assistant Ingegerd, Margarethe who loved only one . . . poisoned her sister with snake venom . . . and all of the others who sliced open their arteries in bathtubs and pools because of unhappy love and desperation, stuck their heads in gas ovens in musty kitchens with poor ventilation, started cars in garages . . . and left or did not leave behind more or less dramatic messages. “Good-bye, cruel life.” Adieu à la vie emmerdante.

  Kiss my ass I’ll be damned now you cheated on me again and it was the last time I said.

  “Said and said.” Doris had, in another situation, once objected to such farewell letters when it was a question of suicide. “Just as if it makes things better by saying this or that at that stage, when everything is already irrevocable. I certainly wouldn’t write a stupid farewell letter if it were me.”

  Recognizable, yes, but still so different. Because this was no story, this was real and you could feel the reality of it all right here in Bencku’s barn, among the American girl’s things.

  It was a living person who had owned them, a living person who had used the scarf, read the books, tried to interpret the music, and so on. The American girl. Eddie de Wire.

  And it was a completely different thing. Suddenly you became so excited by it that you could almost hear your own heart beating in the silence, in a race with the wretched alarm clock that was ticking so deafeningly tickticktocktock. Memento mori. You really would not be able to believe that there was a cheerful party going on somewhere else, basically in every other place, since it was Midsummer Eve after all, and right at this exact moment.

  Loneliness&Fear. Sister Night and Sister Day.

  “I’m a strange bird,” Sandra heard herself say. “Maybe you are too.”

  It came out almost automatically, she would have been able to swear to it after the fact. Doris jumped and looked at her friend, amazed.

  “But Sandra. Say it again. It’s similar.”

  And Sandra repeated the strange string of words, Doris’s eyes shone; she took the American girl’s scarf and tied it around Sandra’s neck and for a brief moment Sandra felt so strongly that she was the American girl Eddie de Wire.

  She took the photograph in her hand and looked at it. The girl, the blurred girl. But still, in some way, acquaintances.

  It was her, now it was her.

  And the boy . . . her blood chilled.

  “But what’s with you? You look like you’ve made a fortune and lost it all . . .”

  “But . . .” Sandra started. “Him.”

  “Aha.” A glow of understanding broke out across Doris’s face. “Of course you think it’s him. That he was the one who committed the murder. Bengt in other words.”

  And it looked like Doris was going to burst out laughing over the absurdity of the thought. But she saw Sandra’s frank need, where she helplessly fingered the photograph, regretted it and became serious again.

  “Yes, there are people who believe that. That’s what you’d think if you haven’t believed how it happened for real, that Björn became angry at her and pushed her into the water. That that boy . . . so strange. And he was always together with them. What did he do that night? But Sandra. It’s not him. I KNOW it.”

  “Come here and look.” And Doris
went over to the map on Bencku’s wall.

  “Here. Come and see.”

  And Sandra saw.

  “She’s lying here. You see. At the bottom of the marsh. It’s certainly her.”

  Sandra gasped for breath. Yes, she saw. And saw.

  “If he had drowned her, would he then have her on the wall? On his own map?

  “I mean,” Doris continued, “so that everybody sees.

  “Bencku is certainly crazy,” she established then. “But there are also limits to his craziness.

  “Then I think it’s probably Björn,” said Doris, the twin detective. “When Björn became angry he became angry. One time he twisted the handlebars of the cousin’s papa’s bike out of position and hung the bicycle in a tree on the cousin’s property. The cousin’s papa’s! Not even the cousin’s papa dared go after him when he was angry. It didn’t happen often, but when it happened, so.”

  “But,” Sandra peeped when she finally got her voice back, “shouldn’t these be given to the police? All of these things? Isn’t it important evidence?”

  “But Sandra, you don’t understand,” Doris said calmly. “The police have had all of this. That’s where it comes from. Bencku got it from the cousin’s mama. I know because I was there then. When she gave it to him. Because you know that the cousin’s mama is the daughter of superintendent Loman, from the neighboring county, he was also the police chief in the District before the police districts were divided.”

  “Now I have to say it, Sister Night,” Doris said grandly with such a hushed tone in her voice that for a short second Sandra got the idea that Doris was thinking about confessing to something terrible, such as “call the police now, it was me.” Sandra stared at her and Doris stared back.

  “The one who did it then?” Sandra stammered, rather helpless.

  Then Doris relaxed because she had expected just that question.

  And for a moment Sandra stood there rather bewildered and waited, like an idiot, with the photograph of the American girl in her hand.