The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  And transported them still asleep in bags to Jörgen Bäckström, one of his lackeys. In smaller communities, then like now, a large deal of the day rolls by on the power of a similar lackeying. In more elegant language it is called quid pro quo, but in reality it is a misleading name because in that system there is always one side that is stronger, the one who has the power to decide which favors should be exchanged, for what, and how. There is almost always one side at a disadvantage in relation to the other, and that part is for the most part people like Jörgen Bäckström who is not chairman of the city council, parish clergyman, bank director, or in this case a city veterinarian like Daniel Danielsson’s grandfather.

  Those sorts of people who have order and the power of interpretation on their side.

  Jörgen Bäckström lived in a house that veterinarian Danielsson rented out to him at a truly favorable price, and in that house there happened to be a hot and spacious furnace. And it was here, and expressly to Jörgen Bäckström, who did not have anything against cats for example, quite the opposite, that veterinarian Danielsson in his assiduousness transported the sleeping cats for cremation alive. And it was Jörgen Bäckström who would throw the cats in the fire. The city veterinarian personally was not really very hands-on in the handling of the actual animals but he happily remained and ENJOYED as the smell of fried cat filled the cottage.

  Jörgen Bäckström had no choice. He was a nobody—it is also a psychological mechanism, you see yourself like that from the beginning, you see your disadvantage and are chained to it—in comparison to veterinarian Danielsson. When Jörgen Bäckström finally got to the police it was too late for his part. He had already become crazy for good. Besides they did not believe him.

  It was not until the police commissioner was called by the parish clergyman that the whole thing came to an end.

  In other words the whole story unraveled when Danielsson the veterinarian went after the neighbor’s cat, the clergyman’s spoiled angora—a gift from the missionary station on Formosa. Danielsson the veterinarian was caught red-handed. A Saturday afternoon when the clergyman was sitting in his study writing the Sunday sermon and just happened to cast a glance out his window and was met with a scene that to begin with was quite amusing. Danielsson the veterinarian, the clergyman’s neighbor and brother in the lion’s club or whatever the corresponding organization was called at that time, was on all fours in the garden with a net creeping along after him, like a jungle luma (which was the name of a wild species of cat one had tried to tame for domestic use in certain missionary stations where Frasse in the clergyman’s garden originated) after his thirty-pound treasure, little Frasse. But when the clergyman realized what was going on in his own yard it was not amusing anymore and he grabbed the receiver of the telephone and called the police.

  “I said bad genes.” As if that was an explanation. As if it REALLY was. It started taking hold of Solveig as well, the way people thought in the District. Rita noted it, surprised and with disgust. This thinking did not agree with everything that existed outside in other places, with all possibilities. But Solveig seemed to have set her boundaries. Solveig from the District. Rita from the District. As if there was nothing else, for real. As if that were it.

  Descendant Daniel Danielsson had a mouth from which he exuded some kind of solitary rap millions of eternities before the multinational music companies or the remaining music companies noticed it. Gangsta rap, in other words, but this was Daniel Danielsson without a gang, totally alone, socrazysocrazy that he kept everyoneeveryone at a distance. But Rita, Rita Rat, in his fantasies, most beloved.

  Rita Rat locked in two windows with Daniel Danielsson, which, as said, seen from the inside in any case was a rather limited space. The world, here as well, though in another way, in a small rectangle.

  What was she going to do about it then? Complain to the boss?

  Jeanette Lindström, who had a license to practice stand business as a monopoly at the square in the town center during the summer months, was Daniel Danielsson’s mother, as said, it deserves to be repeated.

  “I have an obscure familial relationship with her,” as Daniel Danielsson himself expressed it.

  I don’t particularly like Wednesdays. There is a dramaturgical rule that there is reason to regard with skepticism. The rule says that if a rifle is hanging on the wall in the first act then it should be fired at the latest in the last act. Nothing unnecessary is allowed in a play. It is a matter of upholding the dramaturgical tension. Yes, it sounds logical. But that is just what it is, logical. And then there is a risk that the play—if you do not happen to be Chekhov and have written it—just becomes tedious and stylistic. And does not provide room for the loose threads of life. When we weave we choose colors and patterns: they do not arise of themselves. And some threads ARE and remain loose. For example just such a thing.

  Everything is as it is, in other words, rather clumsy, really.

  Well, accordingly. In life on the other hand everything is, as said, another matter. And regarding Daniel Danielsson it is written so, not in any books on dramaturgy but rather in “the stars from which I read from life’s true book,” which it was also called in one of the songs on Doris’s insufferable Lasting Love Songs for Moonstruck Lovers cassette, that an idiot like Daniel Danielsson brings an air rifle to two windows (where his mother, whom he in other words, among other things, suspects for homosexual tendencies, which he has to point out over and over again, at the same time drawing his tedious evidence on the ice cream in the containers, has placed him to have him out of the way and get a little peace and quiet and summer in the summer house—“she wanted to be alone and make out with the dykes”—during the vacation) and already after the breakfast break on the morning of the third day it follows that then the same rifle will not only have been fired but also have caused a massacre before the church bells at the square had time to strike their three muffled chimes (as a sign that Daniel Danielsson’s workday was over and Jeanette Lindström, “the Dyke of Dykes,” according to her son, would drive up to two windows in order to give her son a ride back to the summer home, that is to say “the sea queen” on the Second Cape).

  When Daniel Danielsson showed up after the breakfast break that day in two windows he had his rifle with him. He came on foot. The idea had been to take the bus just that day since the Dyke of Dykes was busy and did not have the opportunity to drive him to work, but it had not worked out. Partly because of political reasons: to turn to public transportation was in agreement with how Daniel Danielsson saw the world as the apex of proletarian. But most of all because Daniel Danielsson, certainly with good reason, had suspected it would have been difficult to transport the rifle all the way to the town center. A few hours later he definitely had enough of the afternoon silence on the square, this stillness that in a book he would write a number of years later would take on metaphysical features. The silence in the world, in the universe. In that book, which Rita would not read, she would be the cute shop assistant, short and sweet, who screamed Help! Help! and had tried to talk some sense into him in a motherly way. She did none of this in reality. But fiction is wonderful and in it they would have gotten married as well and she would become mother to his many children for which he would tell just this story about his childhood in “small-town hell.”

  A silence that was broken only by the screams of the seagulls, the seagulls that flew around and around in the square as if bewitched, screamed and shed filth, screamed and screamed.

  Screams that accompanied and further reinforced the peculiar throbbing that was going on in Daniel Danielsson’s head, nonstop, twenty-four hours a day. And he was suddenly gripped by such an utterly irresistible desire to give expression to it.

  First by pounding the rifle against different surfaces in the stand, then by aiming the rifle a bit wherever it would fit. To one side, to the other, toward Rita Rat, his “stand buddy.”

  “Hands in the air or I’ll shoot you, my dear!”

  Rita,
she almost obeyed. She probably became completely terrified, there was no question about that. Furthermore, she did not doubt for a second that Daniel Danielsson could shoot her out of love. “He just wanted to make an impression on you,” Jeanette Lindström, the Dykes’ Dyke, would say later, and by this mean the entire episode from beginning to end, including the massacre, and get it to sound a bit like all of it was Rita’s fault.

  But still. There was something in Rita that in spite of the fear said: Stop. This is enough. And managed to ward off her own reflex to obey. Stare into the face of death. Maybe this was it, then. And instead she said as calmly as possible while staring at him hard:

  “Well, shoot, then. What are you waiting for?”

  Daniel Danielsson had paused for exactly a fraction of a second. Then he said, also as calmly as possible:

  “You mean it. Thank you, my dear!”

  And Daniel Danielsson’s face had twisted into an almost satanic smiling grimace, maybe something snapped in his head right then, as if to confirm that he had now come up with something unusually sick. And the madness triumphed.

  •••

  “Boys will be boys,” Jeanette Lindström would say afterward. “They have such a hard time showing their feelings.

  “You’re undeniably a cute girl, Rita.”

  The gulls, in other words, who were making a terrible racket. Skwaak. They were the only ones who had managed to drown out Daniel Danielsson and his loud thoughts and his desire to make an infringement on the world, an action that would definitely be seen and felt in some way, which became especially obvious in just those long seconds when Rita with the muzzle of the rifle pressed against her chest—it really was cramped in two windows, as said—sat absolutely frozen and did not obey. It was just the seagulls, the damned seagulls, that did not care about anything.

  NOW Daniel Danielsson knew, exactly the second Rita said, “Well, shoot, then,” what he was going to do about it. Slowly, slowly he turned the rifle away from the “stand buddy” toward the birds, raised it and aimed and fired. And fired and fired and fired and fired. Daniel Danielsson was an excellent marksman, a real hunter when he was in the mood.

  So he managed to hit quite a few seagulls, which fell to the ground, damp damp, and injured many and evoked a blasted chaos of seagull intestines, blood and feathers. Birds that lost their ability to orientate and flew into the window of the stand, damp damp, against the glass and blood and feathers and guts in the ice cream, especially in the vanilla ice cream because the lid of just that one happened to be standing open when the seagull massacre started.

  Seagull feathers, guts in ice cream. Blood in chocolate. Pistachio and nuts, feathers, and sinews and small bird bones, terribly stringy. In the streusel.

  I don’t particularly like Wednesdays was how Daniel Danielsson officially explained himself afterward. Of course the event aroused attention and Daniel Danielsson was given fines to pay, but above all he was interviewed and so on. My notorious fame originates from . . . would be the first words in the book The Seagull Massacre that would be written a few years later and translated into a thousand languages and become a real classic, an excellent, pulsating, and anarchic portrayal of a childhood in a small-town hell. The rats from the boomtown orchestra might read it and be impressed because later they would want a “punk hit” or whatever it was called that would climb the charts with the song “I Don’t Particularly like Mondays,” which would be about a girl in a small town in England who starts shooting wildly around her on the playground on a completely ordinary Monday morning just because she is so bored, and of course it becomes an awful massacre.

  But this is where Rita got off. She did not care about any continuation, either this one or Daniel Danielsson’s own.

  In the middle of the massacre she got up, not to mention appropriately calm, opened the door to the stand, and left the two windows that way.

  Freedom. It was that simple. Just open the back door and walk out.

  A moment of freedom, in other words. Because for Rita’s part the whole thing meant a return to the mops and that dustpan who was always absent anyway when it suited him.

  “Back to your roots,” as Solveig would have said, and maybe she said it too. But Rita did not listen to her anymore. She had stopped listening.

  She started, sometimes in certain moments, it actually felt, becoming desperate.

  That year she and Solveig cleaned the Glass House on the Second Cape alone.

  “We are such a good team,” Rita and Solveig said to the cousin’s mama.

  The memory of Jan Backmansson. It faded.

  •••

  And the baroness in the Glass House, later, when she came out and you could see her from a distance from the First Cape. During rain and hard winds you could see her inside the house, in the same way wearing sunglasses in a wheelchair turned toward the sea, in the bay window, the veranda, “my fantastic Winter Garden” or “my lovely garden,” which she also said, but that was such a long time ago. Like a pilot in an airplane who was going to take off. Like the captain of a spaceship. Miss Andrews. The windowpanes so clear clear. Rita knew. She and Solveig had been the ones who had washed, washed these windows, rubbed them.

  “One should get a pistol.”

  It came from somewhere.

  The memory of Jan Backmansson. It faded.

  One time, a bit earlier, in the middle of a workday in the Glass House Rita had suddenly become nauseous and just dropped everything and gone home to the cottage to rest.

  She had caught Doris Flinkenberg red-handed: rummaging in the pistol cabinet where the pistol she and Solveig had inherited was kept, like a priceless object.

  “What the hell? Aren’t you supposed to be in the Alps?”

  “No,” said Doris Flinkenberg, who had an ability to appear in a lot of places when you least expected it. “As you can see. No.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for the pistol. Can’t you see? I need it.”

  “Well, you can’t have it. It’s not yours. You have no right to be here.”

  Then Doris said slowly, almost drawling:

  “Erhm. Weren’t you the one who said that about the American girl. That a certain person saw wrong. That was me. That she was alive anyway.”

  Rita stiffened.

  Then she stated as calmly as she possibly could:

  “Well. Maybe it wasn’t really true. But, on the other hand, Doris . . . there are things you don’t know. There are things that . . . it is in any case . . . well, we’ll talk about it later.”

  “We’ll have to do that, then,” said Doris Flinkenberg on the glitter scene. “We’ll do that. Can I have the pistol, then? Just for a little while, to borrow?”

  “Take it, then,” Rita hissed. “But you’re coming back with it later.”

  “Oh. Not a word to anyone.”

  “I said go away.”

  “Shhh . . .”

  “Go away.”

  The world in a small rectangle, 7. When the summer throws you away. And they are driving a hundred miles an hour with Liz Maalamaa on the highway in a sports car that Liz Maalamaa has rented for the day. It is open, the girls in the backseat, Liz Maalamaa turns around sometimes and looks at them and laughs, an encouraging laugh, now we’re going to have fun. And the dog next to Liz Maalamaa, it is whining too, it has curled up next to Liz Maalamaa on the driver’s seat, it seems to like riding in a car, it seems like it is used to speed.

  Liz Maalamaa, in sport gloves, scratches behind her ear sometimes, on the go.

  And the girls, they say nothing, but they are so joyfully expectant. This trip with Liz Maalamaa, it surpasses everything already, even before anything has happened.

  They are on their way to the Eagle’s Nest, a restaurant on the outskirts of the city.

  “I’m so hungry, girls,” Liz Maalamaa said there where she was standing among the shards of glass in the basement of the house in the darker part, “and my dog is so thirsty. Yes,
his name is Jack. And you may pet him.”

  And the girls, still so at a loss, had pet the dog. But now, when Liz Maalamaa had gotten started, then they had instantly caught on.

  “You like to dance?” Liz Maalamaa asked because she had of course seen them and heard the music, down in the pool. “Should we kill two birds with one stone, then?” and Liz Maalamaa clapped her hands, “I’m hungry, my dog is thirsty, and you—you actually look like you need to get out a bit, you’re so pale. Get out and look around in the world. And take a dance with the presidents. You need, quite simply,” said Liz Maalamaa, “to get out and dance a little.”

  And they arrive at the Eagle’s Nest, it is located up in a tower and what a view: a round restaurant with a round dance floor in the middle. And they take a table by the window, the dog Jack on the table, he drinks water out of a mug on a tray. And Liz Maalamaa eats beefsteak and the girls also want some.

  Though later the music starts playing and at the same time the presidents come. And the regents. The peace treaty is signed, now there will be BEEF and DANCING. And so they dance. Sandra in the glitter clothes, and Doris as she is, but she is so beautiful—like a day, so she gets asked anyway, most of the time. And they dance with America’s president, they dance with the fat Leonid Brezhnev from the Soviet Union, they dance with Kekkonen and quite a few from the Bernadotte family . . . but suddenly in the middle of the dancing, Doris falls to the ground unconscious.

  Liz Maalamaa calls from somewhere, “But I’m going to tell you girls that grace is so large so large. Little Doris, did you trip, is there something wrong with you?” But no, there is nothing wrong with Doris. She has just heard another song:

  “Yet every wave burns like blood and gold, but the night soon will claim what is owed.”

  And it comes from considerably closer and farther away. From a certain tape player, from a certain cassette collection. And suddenly she longs to be there.