Doris off to the side, the girls with Sandra Wärn, Sandra Wärn as a girl among others, and all of them glanced furtively and rather interested in Doris’s direction. Sandra did not stand out in that group in any way, she was just there.
But so, it happened once that Sandra broke away from the group and came up to Doris Flinkenberg. They talked to each other for a while, a rather short moment because then it was time to separate, they were going to different classes, but also for other reasons.
And very concrete ones. Sandra was going away, she said, to Åland again, to visit her relatives again.
Doris did not say anything. Now she had a hard time carrying on. No one but she knew how hard. On the one hand she understood, as soon as she started talking with Sandra whom she had not properly spoken to since . . . the summer (and she was the one who had gone on her way, “home,” to Micke Friberg, all of that), that she would not be able to continue . . . with anything . . . before everything would be finished. Before all of the questions inside her got answers. And it was a pop song that for once was so true it did not tug at the corners of your mouth, whether you liked that kind of music or not.
And that she, if Sandra did not take the initiative, needed to start asking these questions. Herself. And how would that go?
Because it was obvious Sandra would not be taking any initiative.
On the other hand she understood, and it chilled her inside when she realized it, just like it did on that day in the schoolyard when she and Sandra carried out their last conversation with each other while Doris Flinkenberg was still alive, that it was impossible quite simply impossible not to continue with Sandra.
SandraPandraHarelipSisterNight&Day and all of it, highly beloved.
Such terrible things. Such an insight. What was happening? Whom do you ask? Whom should you turn to?
The boat. The same fall Doris died, a boat with five youths on board sank sixty miles to the west, in the middle of the sea. All on board drowned. The accident and the circumstances surrounding it bewitched Doris Flinkenberg the last weeks she was alive.
The accident happened on a Saturday night at the beginning of October. The youths had the intention of celebrating the weekend on board a rather large motor boat, a Nauticat. Witnesses who saw the boat at a gas station in a sound in the inner archipelago would later explain that the mood on board had been merry but in no way exaggerated.
The wind had already been hard during the day. Toward evening it reached storm force. The boat went aground at eleven o’clock and started taking in water. At two thirty, almost four hours later, it went to the bottom.
It had in other words been a rather slow course of events. The youths had plenty of time to fire off flares, all that were on board. When no help came and the boat slowly, slowly started filling with the water, they moved on deck and lit a fire.
When the fire had been put out by the water that started washing over the deck they understood that all hope was gone.
Why did no one come? Where was the coast guard?
The boat sank, and the youths died, one after the other. All of the people on board drowned or froze to death in the ice-cold water.
When all was said and done it was this event that Doris Flinkenberg had spoken to Sandra Wärn about in the schoolyard, that last time—which neither of them knew—they were in conversation with each other.
“I’m always going to remember what I was doing in that moment,” Doris said to Sandra there in the schoolyard, for some reason one of the first things they had spoken about, properly, in a long time.
“I slept with Micke it was the first time it’s over.”
She glanced at Sandra quickly and in secret, who registered and registered, but still, it was not as though she was really listening.
And yet she was.
“I was at Blumenthal’s,” Sandra said dully. “A pajama party. Me and all the girls.”
And then Sandra started talking in detail about the party and what had happened. There had been a party at Birgitta Blumenthal’s. Just for the girls. A pajama party, an idea someone had gotten from a foreign magazine, the kind of thing you did in other places, for example in America. But what you were supposed to do, actually, at a party like that was more unclear. So they put on their pajamas and “romped” in pajamas in different ways, among other things EVERYONE nipped at the bottles in the Blumenthals’ well-filled bar—the parents were teetotalers but they needed all of this liquor for appearances, Sandra explained as if she were reading from an instruction manual for the normal life for her friend—a sip or two.
And they voted Birgitta Blumenthal the most beautiful woman in the universe in a game that Birgitta Blumenthal herself had initiated, a beauty contest where the result was known ahead of time, “like it happens in reality too of course, you agree ahead of time who is going to win.” Birgitta Blumenthal had shed tears of joy where she was sitting on the edge of the bed with a red towel over her and a paper tiara, and then they danced in the dark, all of them, and told each other secrets.
“You know what their secrets are like,” Sandra stated, dully. “Tobias Forsström pinched my butt, but I didn’t tell anyone.
That kind of stuff.”
Sandra laughed and Doris laughed and Doris thought again about how much she appreciated Sandra’s stories, not what she was telling, but her manner.
And then they had played Truth or Dare. Sandra was dared to French-kiss Birgitta Blumenthal. A lasting memory: how it felt to have Birgitta Blumenthal the bookworm’s learned tongue in your mouth.
“Damn,” Sandra said in the schoolyard, and she was angry. “Damn. Like some freakin’ dyke.”
And Doris got a chill inside because—did Sandra mean her?
And then they had, Sandra said just as dully and lightheartedly, played cops and robbers.
And Doris got a chill inside, again.
And the school bell rang.
“I have to . . .” Doris had immediately started moving toward the entrance, almost half running.
“Hey, Doris! What happened?” Sandra squeezed out, calling after Doris. Doris turned around quickly, or was it her imagination, in Sandra’s eyes there was suddenly all pain, like an injured animal.
Dearest, dearest. Everything is coming to nothing. We were going to be together. What’s happening, now?
She should have asked a lot of questions, then, in the schoolyard. She did not. Sandra went to Åland. Doris was left with everything she now had to find out for herself. And she would. She did.
At the end of the same month, October, the Rats vandalized the Glass House.
A few weeks later the baroness died. But then Doris was already dead.
And the second Saturday in November Doris took the pistol that she had never returned to Rita and Solveig’s cottage after the summer and went up to Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh and shot herself there.
Things were happening pell-mell in Doris that last period.
It was these questions which should be answered and that she, lacking anyone to ask, tried to find the answers to herself.
Why was there no water in the pool?
All normal people have water in their pools, right?
You could start like that. And so, further. Like the twin detective you had also once been:
“Sandra, that telephone number to Heintz-Gurt in Austria, it doesn’t go anywhere.
“I mean. It doesn’t exist. I know because I’ve tried.”
Then the one question, the one about the pool, automatically leads over to the other questions:
“Lorelei Lindberg. Where is she really?”
“That story about the helicopter, what was it actually? Was it true?”
And then you came to think about certain other stories that had actually been told. The one about the ring with the tablespoon-sized ruby that fell down into the pool and that Lorelei Lindberg called to Sandra to look for.
But she did not.
So Lorelei Lindberg went down into the pool herself. And
where was the Islander then, who was so angry at Lorelei Lindberg? The Islander with his rifle?
But: there was Bencku’s map. Doris Flinkenberg started suspecting something about the map on the whole. That it was not as innocent as it looked. That it hung there in Bencku’s barn like a shield: “I know this,” like a message.
Not images of how it actually was, as Inget Herrman had characterized Bencku’s maps. “But images as expression of.” That meant what was on the maps was not necessarily true, had not necessarily happened.
Well. Now Doris Flinkenberg had reason to doubt it worked that way. After the American girl’s death . . . there had not been any image. She had been there, on the bottom. Doris had found her.
Not to mention wearing the plastic coat. That terrible coat.
And now there was something else on Bencku’s map. Doris was there and checked it just before she shot herself. A woman in the pool. And she was dead. So dead.
Was it Lorelei Lindberg?
Where was she?
And then there was all of that which would later be in the farewell letter.
“. . . it was the game with Heintz-Gurt. What a name. The happy pilot. I found that too. In one of her scrapbooks. Almost word for word. I found, when I started reading other stories properly too. There is one, I have it in front of me now. Father and daughter hid the mother in a brick wall. This macabre crime united them for many years.
“I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t live with it anymore. And then there’s so much else. The red raincoat the American girl was found in. It’s in a photograph in the Islander’s bedside table. Of the girl and her mother. And she, the mother, has the coat on.”
And Doris wrote so much more in her last letter. But it was not a letter to Sandra.
She did not write a letter to Sandra.
But she went to the house in the darker part one last time.
It was empty, it looked like. She got in using the spare key as she had always done, already the first time, a long time ago when she came to the house in the darker part of the woods. It was only a matter of knowing where it was. And Doris knew. It was just that simple.
She had gone to the house in the darker part of the woods. She had gotten in there, in secret. She had her boots with her, she was going to leave them by the edge of the pool.
And suddenly a voice could be heard behind her:
“It’s always like there’s a stranger in this house.”
And she walked with Inget Herrman over the cliffs on the Second Cape, one last time.
“What do you do if you’re carrying a terrible secret?” she asked Inget Herrman. They stood by the sea, on the veranda of the boathouse, laughing.
“Throw yourself in the sea with it. Then you sink. A terrible secret tends to be heavy to carry.”
“Seriously,” Doris said impatiently.
“Sorry,” said Inget Herrman, suddenly serious because she also saw Doris’s need. “But I can’t give any abstract advice. I need to know more essentially. Otherwise I’ll just say like somebody said: Poor people who must suffer so terribly.”
Feel akin to Inget Herrman. But they had walked out on one of the longest jetties on the Second Cape, in the wild wind of fall.
“Here everyone thinks that it’s just sea and horizon,” Inget Herrman said. “That there isn’t any land on the other side. That nothing happens on the other side. But there are: places, locations, other countries. And when the weather is clear then you can almost see it from here.”
“Walk on the water, then,” Doris said abrasively.
“Now the young lady was clever clever.” Inget Herrman laughed.
But Doris had not laughed.
She turned around and started walking back.
“Oh! I’m sorry, Doris,” Inget Herrman said. “Sometimes—well, it’s so hopeless.” And her thoughts had gotten stuck on the Islander who left the house in the darker part of the woods in anger during a fight they had a few hours earlier. “I’m going to tell you, Doris Flinkenberg, never grow up. Be as you are NOW, and always. When you grow up . . . then you have to have relationships and scenes from a marriage and things like that.”
“Hmm,” said Doris Flinkenberg. She melted because of those words, she liked Inget Herrman so much, of course, also when Inget Herrman talked like that. Inget Herrman who said the kinds of things no other grown-up said.
And of course all of it was not Inget Herrman’s fault. And she had thought that maybe, maybe she would be able to tell Inget Herrman now, how it was, ask her if she knew.
But she did not. And they went their separate ways. Everything was strange. She decided then already.
Never be a grown-up, Doris Flinkenberg.
• • •
Dearest dearest, what is happening? We were supposed to be together!
“Where are you going, Doris Flinkenberg?”
“Out,” Doris Flinkenberg replied. “I’m going out.”
And the fall had advanced to the month of November when Doris Flinkenberg took Rita’s pistol and set out in the darkness on an early Saturday evening. Went to Bule Marsh and shot herself there.
“The devil take you Sandra Wärn,” Doris Flinkenberg stood and screamed in the pool without water, when Sandra had pulled up the ladder once so that Doris could not get out. That had been during the summer, during a game.
And when she came back she had the pistol with her.
Sandra, in the middle of the summer, stood and pointed at her with the pistol.
“Are you scared?”
“Of course not.”
Going away
SOMEONE ELSE WHO LEFT EVERYTHING AND THE ENTIRE DISTRICT was Rita. The evening after Doris’s funeral Rita left under sensational circumstances—even if the attention itself came later. First Rita crashed Solveig’s car, the red Mini Cooper that Järpe had fixed up. She rammed it against a tree in Bäckström’s field north of the town center. Possibly on purpose. Highly likely, but there would be no opportunity to talk about these possible opinions, not for Solveig’s part anyway, not for a long time. Thereafter Rita had, muddy and furious, wandered up to the main country road where she positioned herself to catch a lift in the direction of the city by the sea. Anders Bäckström and Sabrita-Lill Lindholm from the neighboring county (Sabrita-Lill, that is, Anders was the son in the house on Bäckström’s farm, the soon to be only farmers who farmed the earth in the District out of tradition and custom) who happened to come driving in Anders Bäckström’s father’s rather new BMW had stopped and driven Rita into the city by the sea. It was their statements you had to turn to if you were Solveig and you wanted to know where your sister had gone. And at that point, just after Doris’s death, there was chaos in the cousin’s house, the cousin’s mama was out of her mind with grief and powerlessness, there was no one other than Solveig who even had the energy to worry about where Rita had gone. “Don’t you care about any of this?” Solveig asked Torpe Torpeson, her own boyfriend Järpe’s brother, whom Rita had been together with, but Torpe had truly shaken his head and shrugged his shoulders; he was mostly relieved after everything. Rita had a screw loose and it was best when Rita was so far away that farther away did not exist.
“Oh hell,” Torpe swore in the District language, “she’s not really really right in the head,” and had in other words spoken about Rita but shrewdly smiled at her sister Solveig who looked pretty much the same of course, was just a little plumper, a bit softer in the face, which was actually also an advantage, and little by little nature would take its course and it would “become” Torpe and Solveig, and Järpe would have to look around for a new “chick” and he would find one of those and many more. But that Mini Cooper, Järpe would grieve it deeply. He would be furious for a while, kick rocks in every direction so that they scattered in every direction at just the thought.
What a pity it would also be for Solveig. So much life to maintain, all on her own. Everything that fell to bits. The cousin’s mama who after she was released from t
he mental hospital in any case would never return to the cousin’s house.
Solveig who would try and take care of all of that. But she had a child in her stomach. For a long time it was her own knowledge. A secret. And her only hope.
But the evening when Rita left. She had been drunk but not at all impaired when she got into Anders’s father’s car, Sabrita-Lill in other words explained to Solveig on the telephone. Dirty, as if she had waded through a few hundred feet of swamp at least, in other words no on-the-side-of-the-road spray on her clothes. You could certainly see something had happened in the fields there. You had not been able to ask about it then because she had not exactly been in the mood to answer any questions. This, in other words, according to Sabrita-Lill Lindholm on the telephone. And she had been absolutely determined. She was going to go to the city by the sea. And there had not, for either Sabrita-Lill or Anders Bäckström, been any reason to doubt the seriousness of it.
They had not seen any other option than to do as she wanted and drive her all the way. That is to say they could not just leave her like that, to fend for herself. Certainly not in the shape she was in, not very drunk, in other words, but certainly out of it. And both Anders and Sabrita-Lill were known as youths with a sense of responsibility, no hooligans like Rita and the Rats and those, a little bit better than the marsh pack at some point in time, but not in any considerable way—
You could trust them, in other words. They drove Rita into the city by the sea where they left her on the street by the beach in the exclusive part of the city where the Backmansson family’s residence was. The houses on that stretch of beach were beautiful and calmly inspired respect, substantial stone houses that radiated constancy and an obvious peace that can be purchased only with money. That kind of self-evident money, quiet money. So self-evident it was not something you spread the word about. You lived at the sea in other words because you “couldn’t” live anywhere else; you had high ceilings in your apartments because you got headaches in other ones. You were now once and for all normal in that way.
The American Girl Page 33
