“Home,” says Doris. “Now I want to go home.”
And Doris says, “I’m going now and no one follows me.”
And Liz Maalamaa and the dog and Sandra and the presidents, they just stare.
“I’m going by myself. Now.”
And Doris leaves the Eagle’s Nest and walks away.
Home. The whole long way home.
And that is how it is, when the summer throws you away.
This was how it was when the summer had had enough of you and you went home.
Doris Flinkenberg was red like a lobster, beyond sunburned, when she returned to the cousin’s house.
Home.
At home.
What to do?
Lock yourself in?
Lock yourself into the cousin’s mama’s kitchen with the crosswords and all of the magazines. Ladies’ Home Journal and the others. True Crimes. That is what my life has become. The dictionaries. Learn to spell new beautiful words. Like for example “apotheose,” “anomaly,” and “monkey business.”
Should you actually do that? Was it possible?
“Doris, you should know that I came down too hard,” said the cousin’s mama when Doris came home. “I want to ask you for forgiveness. May I?”
“You can ask for whatever you want,” said Doris Flinkenberg.
And the cousin’s mama had, with a lump in her throat, nodded.
“Here, take this salve and rub it over your skin. Sweet child, how you’ve burned yourself.”
“Thanks.”
“Here. Take the sleeping pills as well. Lie down now and rest. Get enough sleep.”
“But we have to go to the house in the darker part . . . we have to clean.”
“Shh, Doris. We’ll have time. Sleep now.”
And the cousin’s mama pulled down the blackout curtain. And ritsch. When the cousin’s mama had left Doris pulled it up again. Sleep. Sleep did not help.
Look through the window. And who was there then, in the yard, as if on cue? Normalcy.
Bencku and Micke Friberg and Magnus von B.
With their bags of beer. Go out there, to the barn, to the boys, drink beer with them. It was something to do in any case. Something that was normal.
“. . . manufactured,” said Magnus von B. In the barn. And counted all the ingredients needed to manufacture dynamite. There really were not many and could, said Magnus von B. expertly, be gotten almost anywhere. And Bencku nodded. And opened a new bottle. And Magnus von B. talked.
That is how it was in Bencku’s barn. As usual.
But Doris did not look at them. She looked, yes she also looked at the map, but only quickly because then she looked down. Below the map. Where Micke Friberg was sitting, on Bencku’s bed. And plucking at his guitar.
Dazed and Confused. On the one hand, and the other. Forward and backward, just about. He was that skillful with the guitar. But he also looked up.
And then, suddenly, he discovered Doris-lull in the barn opening, against the light.
“Is anything going to happen here?” she asked with a drawling, inimitable Dorisvoice.
“And I was a sold man,” Micke Friberg said to himself in that moment and a thousand times later to Doris Flinkenberg during the fall, before Doris died.
“No one can love like us,” Micke Friberg whispered in Doris Flinkenberg’s ear already shortly thereafter.
And Doris paid attention. He was so beautiful. And it was a solution. For a time.
“Where have you been all my life?” Micke Friberg whispered in her ear just a few hours later, during one of their first hugs.
“What do you mean?” Doris whispered back, tenderly and devoutly.
And so, after that, it was the two of them together.
The day after Doris hooked up with Micke Friberg she and the cousin’s mama cleaned the house in the darker part of the woods. After the summer. Which had now gotten rid of you so it did not really matter what happened with everything, or most of it, later.
Sandra was on Åland. Wherever the hell she was. New York?
Couldn’t care less, Doris thought with a lump in her throat.
She was surprised about the lump. What was it now? The voice of the blood? Oh, damnation.
And traces could be seen and not be seen in the house. But everything she could sweep away, she swept away.
And the strange thing: the window in the door that had broken when Liz Maalamaa came in, it was whole. It had never broken either. The same dirty window as always.
She was going to search for a lot of things, when Sandra was not there. Evidence. But she did not. She did nothing.
She did not bother about anything and went to Micke Friberg afterward.
Though she found the pistol and she took it home with her.
“I don’t like it when you’re like that,” said Micke. “Swearing and like a teenage girl. When there’s so much else inside you. Style. “Besides you have a good voice.
“We’re going to sing together,” said Micke Friberg. “We’re going to have a band. Micke’s Folk Band.”
The pistol. Liz Maalamaa. The love that died. The red plastic raincoat on Lorelei Lindberg and on the American girl.
And the telephone numbers that did not exist in reality.
Sandra, what was it?
Sandra. Where is Lorelei Lindberg, really?
And the image on Bencku’s map. The woman in the pool. She forgot it now. On purpose.
Because it belonged to the hard things in the soul from which nothing could be woven.
“Do you think so, Micke?”
“What did you say, Doris?”
“That I can sing?” “Of course.”
“Well. Are we going to sing, then?”
They were the Rats. They went from house to house, from villa to villa, over the empty Second Cape. It was late in the fall in the middle of the week, for the most part, those times just before the snow was going to fall, everything was theirs. The rats, they went into the houses: sometimes it was easy, no effort (a window was open, a door was not properly locked), sometimes it was harder (you had to break a window, or so, but not worse than that), never impractical. They went from room to room in the houses, from floor to floor, through all of the floors from floor to ceiling: opening cabinets and drawers, reviewing the contents of them. In the kitchen, ate their crackers, crumbled them over the floor, stuck their fingers in their old marmalade jars and smeared on the sandwiches and on each other and sometimes on the furniture. Bombarded each other with old hard corn kernels, macaroni, rice.
Sat on the sofa groups in their living rooms, parlors, on all of their verandas. Sofa groups, what a word. Solveig, for example, she was quite good at imitating it. “Come and sit here in the sofa group, Järpe.” And Järpe came and opened his never-ending beer and frothed over the fabric the sofa and recliners were upholstered in. In their dens, lit long matches, pushed them still burning against the white tiles over the fireplaces. There were marks of course, but not worse than that, it could be washed away. It was not THAT bad.
They were the Rats. Järpe, Torpe, Solveig, and a few more, and Rita, Rita Rat above all. She was the one who was, so to speak, the essence of it all. And it was strange because all of it everything was for her completely totally immoderate plus minus zero, indifferent, did not mean a DAMN thing. A way to pass the time, just as meaningless as all other pastimes.
Skimmed through their left-behind magazines, tore out a page, made paper airplanes out of others, filled in the WRONG LETTERS in different places in their crosswords if such lay unsolved on the tables. Relics from summer delights gone by, they would be sabotaged now. But it was not THAT bad. Nothing more than that.
Looked out their windows.
Admired their views. So exquisite.
It was an unusually rainy and windy fall. Pouring rain, storms, and for the most part it was dark when the Rats were moving around the Second Cape. Pitch-black. Saw nothing in front of you. Not even as much as a finger.
&nb
sp; One could then so to speak in other words just as well have been anywhere. Damn nice here like this. And pfft. Blew on the windowpane and drew figures on the glass. No obscene words or shapes, that was just childish. Stupid words. Meaningless.
“Look at this,” Järpe Rat said and drew a smiley face in the damn steam.
“Whatever,” said Solveig Rat and blew on the windowpane and drew a smiley face in the damned steam next to his. “And the two of us are here.” The latter meant what Solveig loved to say in the language of the District: “Now we’re two. It’s the two of us.”
“Go to hell!” One time when Rita Rat was too drunk she crashed her hand through a windowpane. But it was later and she was wasted. And it was in the Glass House. The special thing with the Glass House and the Rats was that it was accessible to only a few of the Rats. Solveig and Rita, and so. So it was not the Rats exactly who made a lot of noise in the Glass House, who for example demolished what had once been the baroness’s Winter Garden.
It was only a few.
When Solveig got started she was hard to stop. She imitated the summer guests from the Second Cape, their speech.
And of course, it was easy to laugh at them: the summer guests, who strained to have what they called a “free and equal” relationship to “the local people,” were almost the best thing to make fun of when they were not there and were going to get involved in everything. The ones who “understood the barren conditions out at sea” and so on, though in actuality there was almost no real archipelago outside the Second Cape, just a few occasional fisherman who still lived in the municipality and they lived farther inland and got to have their fishing boats moored at the rented jetty next to the county’s new public beach because the beach by the sea was private.
Spoke about these conditions loud and clear, as if they knew exactly what it was all about. Rita would get to hear it with her own ears a few years later when she came to the city by the sea and lived with the Backmansson family. Not the Backmanssons, they did not talk that way (and that further strengthened Rita’s solidarity with the Backmanssons, they were from the same planet as her).
When she would hear that talk in the city by the sea then she would think what did they really know anyway. And it could make her feel so downhearted that she actually for a moment—but only for a moment—thought about leaving everything and going home.
But immediately, on the other hand. Home. What was home? Not the cousin’s house, not Solveig’s (when she was living in the city by the sea with the Backmanssons, she would no longer think “Rita and Solveig’s cottage,” she would just think “Solveig’s”) cottage.
But still at the same time, Solveig who was going on like that with the Rats. It was so petty.
For her the Rats were almost a dead period during the fall. A pointless, and thus lacking in meaning, pastime.
Rita with Torpe in the boathouse. She was lying there with her bra up by her neck and Torpe Torpeson had just come inside her in his insistent way that was rather arousing anyway. But still, she could not let herself go, not even then. She was lying on her back with her legs spread on the same bunk where the American girl had once lain. Though she did not think about that, she stared at the guitar on the wall, it was still hanging there and was cracking in the cold, the strings that had broken were curling like locks, and while Torpe was busy she thought maybe, “Everything is so necrophilic.” It sounded terrible and it was but she was also cold inside at the thought of it. And then tenderness welled up inside her because Torpe Torpeson, he was here after all, and he warmed you.
It happened to be one of the unusual clear nights that fall, and when she was lying there with Torpe she suddenly saw just the sky and the stars—it was still so beautiful, so wonderful.
But suddenly, almost simultaneously, it became so strangely dark. A dark figure covered the window. It was the shadow of a person. And it WAS NOT Bengt because Bengt was holding house in other places for a change.
“Who the hell was that?”
Torpe jumped up and tore open the door and called out into the darkness. But the Shadow was gone.
“For Christ’s sake . . .” Torpe started.
“Oh. Don’t worry about it. Come here.”
The Shadow, Rita knew it, was Doris Flinkenberg.
•••
Doris was following Rita. No one noticed, not even Solveig.
“You’re the one who’s seeing things. Has a screw loose. What would Doris . . .” but Solveig stopped herself.
“She’s following me no matter what you say,” Rita said almost in a long and tired sigh as if she did not care about Solveig’s opinions one way or the other. That made Solveig uncertain. When Rita did not even have the energy to fight her.
“It’s the two of us,” a sentence that was so infinitely important to Solveig. And now Solveig suspected there was a part of Rita that was not in the District anymore, that might not stay regardless of whether or not the Backmanssons had taken her with them. Rita was going away.
And Solveig would not be going with her. That seemed like the whole point of it. Solveig was not going to go with her.
Solveig herself worked at Four Mops and a Dustpan.
And when Doris was dead in about a month, Solveig would take over everything herself. The cousin’s mama would not be able to work for a long time, Rita would have run away, and “the dustpan” would, true to habit, come and go, gradually more and more go. And Solveig would be equal to the task: only a few years later Four Mops and a Dustpan would have its own office in the town center with four employees. Solveig would sit in her own office and decide over everything.
And Rita, she would go away. She would really go away and not come back for many years.
Rita attended the high school up in the town center; some days when she went home from school on the school bus she got off a few stops early in order to have some peace and quiet, think, be alone.
Then, if Doris Flinkenberg was on the bus, it happened that Doris noticed and got off as well, at the same stop, and followed at an adequate distance, dawdling after Rita. And if someone could walk with slow, idling steps it was Doris Flinkenberg. That is to say when she was alone; in the company of other people, Doris got stuck in them. Imitated. If anyone was an impersonator it was Doris Flinkenberg.
The new Doris. Ha-ha. Micke’s Folk Band. Doris and her miserable boyfriend . . . or was it ex-boyfriend? There were rumors that Doris Flinkenberg had given Micke Friberg himself the boot. In favor of . . . whom, you had to wonder, then? For what? To, maybe, ramble around alone in the leafy woods and pursue other people. I walked out one evening, out into a grove so green.
Though. Doris, anguished, walked around at school as well, alone. The other girl, Sandra, could not be seen. “Ha-ha,” thought Rita in the woods, “maybe the dykes are having a lovers’ quarrel.”
And something there behind her in the woods. Yes, there she was. Doris. At the same time: another seed of, not panic, but certainly anxiety, was growing inside Rita.
What did Doris Flinkenberg want with her anyway?
And Rita continued walking. She walked and walked. Until she came to Bule Marsh. That was not where she had been headed. Though it would be wrong to say that it was Doris behind her who had driven her there. It was something between part compulsion and own will.
One day in the middle of October: Bule Marsh lay there so deep and solitary, so special, also on an otherwise sunny fall day like this one, where in other places it could still be warm and with a lot of color. But the warmth, the colors, it was as if they did not extend all the way to Bule Marsh.
And it was as if they had never really done so.
Now Rita walked up onto the highest cliff. Looked around. Could not help but be gripped by the strange beyond-time feeling and the great loneliness that ruled there at the marsh.
Otherwise Rita was not like Doris and Sandra or her brother Bengt who roamed around in the woods just because, roamed and roamed so to speak and still always ended u
p at Bule Marsh in the end.
For Rita there was for the most part a purpose and a goal.
With Torpe and Järpe and Solveig, a place where you could drink your beer in peace and quiet.
Or, with Solveig a long time ago, in order to swim. When they were little and the public beach had been there at Bule Marsh for a short time. Of course the opening in the reeds was still as public as you could get, but nowadays there were real public beaches in several places in the municipality. It had just been those years following the housing exhibition when the public beach had to be moved quickly from the Second Cape when that area became private. And it was as if no one in the midst of all the bustle had thought about somewhere other than Bule Marsh.
But what happened here, the American girl, all of that, had brought an end to everyone’s desire to swim in the marsh water, as if swimming with a corpse. Already that following year a new public beach with piers and diving platforms and all sorts of things had been opened by one of the larger lakes in the west. Rita and Solveig had also gone there in the beginning, continued with the swimming training they had devoted themselves to earlier, together, a while anyway. Because they had a plan, that they would become swimmers or world-famous divers like Ulrika Knape for example. Private plans, highly private. Something like that. With quite a bit left open in the details of the plans themselves. Something in that area anyway. Amaze the world in some way so to speak, both twins.
Stupid dreams. When the new beach by the lake in the west had been inaugurated the following year Solveig had made quite a nice leap from the thirty-foot landing, and it had been rather unforgettable. Rita herself had a cold and could not participate. She sat in the audience on the newly built stands on wheels that could be pulled out when needed and caught her sister’s whirling jump in the palm of her hand; in a certain perspective she had, her sister Solveig looked so small. And been quite proud. But then the swim camp, which for the time being was being arranged in the neighboring municipality with participants from swim clubs from around the whole country, had its show. And really, you could see the difference. Rita anyway, and Solveig. So they had, little by little, actually that season already stopped with training and all of that. Not based on any verbal agreement, it just happened that way.
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