The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  The two brothers, the two brothers.

  The Islander might have stiffened for a microscopic moment at the dinner table. But not longer than that.

  And he recovered immediately. Cast a glance out the window.

  “I think we have company,” he said. “It’s my brother.”

  And then the doorbell rang. The Islander disappeared for a while, might have been gone longer than usual, while Sandra and the other dinner guests remained sitting at the table.

  There they came later, into the living room, both brothers. Not with their arms around each other now, but almost. And both of them were in a brilliant mood.

  There you see it Doris Flinkenberg. Everything passes.

  The Islander got another chair and set a place for the Black Sheep at the table.

  And so they sat there, the Islander and the Black Sheep, like very good friends, ate and drank and talked about nothing.

  They even talked about Åland.

  Maybe the Islander would even travel to Åland again sometime. Now when the old stuff did not seem to mean anything anymore.

  “Maybe I could steer the boat there sometime,” the Islander said.

  He did not say “with Kenny, my new wife.” Because it did not belong there either.

  And Sandra, little Sandra, she hid everything in her heart, and contemplated.

  Little Bombay. A small unsuccessful store, with fine silk fabrics. Which no one wanted to buy.

  While the days passed they were there, in the store, the little girl and her mother, and listened to music and just talked.

  Sometimes the phone rang.

  Sometimes they waited for the Islander.

  “What time do you think he’ll come today?”

  And they guessed right. And they guessed wrong. But he always came, the Islander, when the day was over and took them home.

  That was how it was, a long time. In the middle, as it’s called, of passion’s whirlwind.

  In the middle of the beautiful, soft, like silk, really fine habotai, or silk georgette. Silk georgette, which when you were older you understood it wasn’t such an expensive fabric—but the girl, the little silk dog, thought the name was so beautiful.

  Silk georgette.

  The love. The passion. Whatever it should be called. Silk georgette. The beautiful, soft ground.

  So one day, the Black Sheep came. It would be wrong to say it was a surprise. He showed up again, but had of course always been there somewhere in the background.

  “MMMMMMMMMMMM,” he said when he stepped into the store. “It smells like MOUSE here.”

  And at first it was an unpleasant trespassing. It was. And maybe for a long time afterward. But there were also other things that changed.

  Lorelei Lindberg who took hold of the lamp over the sink and shocks like lightning went through her, FSST. She turned around, completely unhurt.

  “Brr. I must have gotten a shock,” she said. Not happily, but rather anxious. It was unpleasant after all. Like an omen. “I could have died.”

  Because things had also started happening in the house in the darker part. Small shifts. Arguments that didn’t always end with reconciliation as they usually did. Arguments that were fought without any thought of reconciliation. And the Islander, he wasn’t a brooder, he was a doer.

  Maybe he went too far.

  It was like this: she couldn’t live with the house. She couldn’t be there, Lorelei Lindberg.

  You didn’t really know why. Maybe she didn’t either because it should have been so good. It should have been.

  And she loved the Islander, she did.

  But it was as though a dissonance had come in somewhere, a poison. Maybe it was the Black Sheep.

  “I was going to show you what your dreams look like. Not particularly good.”

  “A matchstick house for matchstick people. By the beach.”

  The last, “at the beach,” he sighed with all the ironic authority that only someone from the sea and Åland can mobilize at the mere thought of a similar marsh environment.

  He was an islander too. Lived in a nice lighthouse by the sea. On Åland. Where the relatives were.

  He was the Older Brother.

  And not a sympathetic person at all.

  He hadn’t completed a single project in his life, not least his architecture studies, which began chaotically.

  But he would succeed in this game, he had decided that.

  “We were two brothers,” the Black Sheep said to Lorelei Lindberg in Little Bombay. “We had two cats. One cat and the other cat. But there was only one mouse.”

  And it really was, in some way, so sick what he was thinking.

  And what the mouse was, at that stage in life—

  It doesn’t need to be said. It was so obvious.

  Lorelei Lindberg didn’t care about any of that, in the beginning. But gradually, when it started becoming so strangely lonely in the house in the darker part of the woods, with all of those dreams that now were realized that you were supposed to live up to, then everything changed. Slowly. Slowly.

  That terrible staircase. “A staircase up to heaven,” the Islander had said. But he did not see it himself, that which was so obvious, that it was a staircase up into nothing.

  “I’m going to show you what your dreams look like.”

  He had not only drawn the house, the Black Sheep. He had also found the lot; told his brother the Islander about it.

  The Islander, he was no thinker.

  He had forgotten about that game a long time ago, the one with his brother. Now, with Lorelei Lindberg and their little daughter, it was so obvious that you played other games.

  The Black Sheep had “contacts” in that part of the District. He had lived as a boarder with the baroness, a relative of Baron von B. who had once owned almost the entire District, while he was studying to become an architect in the city by the sea.

  It was the baroness who had told the Black Sheep that there might be a lot to buy. And the Black Sheep, he knew what the District was. He had driven around on the small roads there in his old cars.

  The baroness was his friend. But they were not close in any way. She was a relatively lonely person, and she helped him and he helped her, also when he no longer lived with her. Also with Eddie de Wire, the niece. When the baroness was at her most desperate. With that girl who sucked life and soul out of her.

  Who stole, who swindled, who could not be trusted. Who was everything else other than what you expected of her.

  The American girl.

  “Come and take her away away away away,” the baroness had screamed on the telephone to the Black Sheep that last night. “I have her in a room here! I’ve locked her up! And taken her clothes to get her to stay here for the time being! Now she’s going!”

  The Black Sheep had come. He happened to have a raincoat, which had been left behind in the car at some point. Lorelei Lindberg’s red raincoat.

  It was once, a rainy day, during the very last time in Little Bombay. The girl and her mother waiting for the Islander who was late. The Black Sheep showed up instead. He insisted on driving them to the house in the darker part. When they had come to the house the rain had stopped and the sun was shining again.

  “I was going to show you what your dreams look like,” the Black Sheep repeated in the car at the top of the hill just before they rolled down into the glen where the unlikely house was.

  Their home. Lorelei Lindberg was so upset she forgot her coat in the car.

  Lorelei Lindberg and the Black Sheep. He got her later. He “won” the game.

  And no. There was no real plausibility in it. She was not “in love.” You do not fall for the kinds of stupid things the Black Sheep was doing. Those games.

  You do not. Actually.

  But assume that something happens, something unexpected, something that makes you not be so sure of yourself anymore. Of anything. For example passion, love.

  What was it? Lorelei Lindberg was standing on the
landing and the Islander had come up behind her. Suddenly, there was a scuffle, so he had pushed her. Down the stairs, down into the mud.

  “She fell like an angel, down from heaven.” As it had once played in Doris Flinkenberg’s cassette player.

  But it was no longer beautiful. Nothing was beautiful. The warm, soft earth had become malicious.

  She had to get stitches at the hospital with a stitch called a butterfly. When she came home again the Islander was remorseful. He had bought her that wretched ring, the one with the big red stone in it, “a tablespoon-sized ruby.” But it went wrong again.

  She was standing at the edge of the pool and fumbled with it. And before you knew it she had dropped it. Down into the hole in the ground that should have become a swimming pool a long time ago. And the Islander became angry and shoved her down into the pool to look for it.

  He took the ladder away and walked off.

  The mother in the pool, the girl also there, in a corner under the spiral staircase. The mother saw her and was quiet about the stone. “Quick,” sure enough, Doris, you were right, the little girl did nothing. She was as though frozen. A sleepwalker again. Sleepwalker.

  And furthermore. It happened so quickly. The Islander. With the rifle.

  “It is so empty. I’m shooting flies with an air gun.”

  And fired.

  But idiots. There was no ammunition in that rifle. An idiot who would shoot around in his own house.

  It was an empty round and not straight at her in the pool, but to the side.

  But it was enough.

  After that shot, it was true, Bencku, nothing was the same.

  •••

  IMAGINARY SWIMMING. If you were wondering what it was that you saw a little later, when you came back.

  The girl who was running back and forth in the pool.

  It was certainly Sandra. It was me.

  Back and forth back and forth. Those were terrible times, you should know. Dry swimming in the pool without water. Then there was nothing.

  No reconciliation.

  There was no silk dog any longer, rather some kind of bizarre animal of an entirely different species, some kind of damp rat with nasty fur that shone and shone from one end to the other.

  And when it was at its most difficult. Then he came, the Black Sheep. Then he was so nice.

  She just cried then, that was in Little Bombay also. Afterward.

  “Stoopp!! I want to go away!!!” She screamed to him and he did not need to listen for very long in order to understand.

  “Away!” she sobbed. He took her at her word.

  They came to Åland, to the nice house, to the sea.

  Quite some time went by before I agreed to meet with her at all.

  Because it was a betrayal. That’s what I thought then. Now of course, I think so differently.

  The last time, that was in Little Bombay.

  “Are you coming, Sandra?”

  They were standing in the door now, both of them, and he was quite impatient.

  But Lorelei Lindberg did not want to, she was shilly-shallying. Starting to become unhappy again.

  “Sandra?”

  She did not answer. She disappeared. Became nothing. Plupp. A spot on the floor.

  The silk dog, the invisible.

  “Are you coming, Sandra?”

  “Sandra.”

  But he did not have as much patience as her, who never had patience otherwise. Only just then—all the patience in the world.

  But it was time.

  Time time time time, thought the little silk dog who lay and pressed under the table.

  And it was in Little Bombay, that too.

  Among the fabric.

  Silk georgette organza habotai taffeta and rasgulla hung down in whirling cascades, like a rain over the edges of the table. Flowed, flowed—

  And that, all of that, belonged and would, under a long period of time, belong to that hard stuff in the soul from which stories could not be woven.

  For both of them.

  The Islander and Sandra Wärn.

  For a while it was so, that everything that had been Lorelei Lindberg, and that is, was obliterated.

  The girl, Sandra, left the dinner table after dessert. She was sleepy. It was nothing more than that. She was tired, she went to bed.

  Also the hunting had lost its appeal. The changes in the party. The game. All of that.

  A few hours later she woke up to a sound out in the corridor. She thought she could make out a familiar voice also, already then, but she fell asleep again anyway.

  “It’s just the boys who want beer,” someone yelled.

  And not a lot of imagination was required in order to understand who the two boys were who had shown up at the house in the darker part of the woods, in the middle of the hunting party, in the middle of the night, uninvited. Magnus von B. and Bencku, the two unmanageable ones who would never grow up.

  Both of them lost sons, in their own ways.

  But the fathers took them in now, and offered. And offered.

  In the early morning the girl woke again, in the darkness. The electric alarm clock on the nightstand next to the enormous marital bed where she had rolled in a sweaty, deep, dreamless sleep, showed six thirty in clear, sharp orange-colored numbers.

  Sandra was suddenly wide awake. She sat up in bed. The first thing she noticed was the silence. The deafening house-in-the-darker-part silence, which covered everything so to speak. The party was over now, an early, early Sunday morning.

  Everything was over.

  Sandra got out of bed, put her feet in the movie star slippers, and pulled on the silk kimono—though that had stopped meaning anything now, no scents left on the fabric. No reminiscence anyway, nothing.

  She unlocked the door and went out into the hall. The door to the basement was open. Sounds could be heard from below, a sound she immediately recognized again—and it was a reminiscence.

  Snores. Someone was sleeping down there.

  Maybe for a moment she thought the fantastic. That Doris . . . that nothing had happened, that everything had just been a dream.

  But it was just a brief moment.

  Then she got herself together and went down the stairs.

  The sound of the snores grew.

  The whole house shook from it.

  But she did not shilly-shally on the stairs but went down quickly, but still as quietly as possible.

  And this was what she saw.

  They were lying in the pool. Both sleeping, both snoring, as if competing with each other. It was actually comical too, though she did not laugh just then. One of the ones on the bottom of the pool was Bengt, the boy. Sure enough he had been one of the “boys” who had arrived intoxicated and uninvited to the hunters’ party in the middle of the night.

  The other, that was the Black Sheep. He was lying on his back and it was from him the true foghorns were coming.

  He lay there with his shirt open. Someone may have torn it open while he was sleeping. So defenseless. The Black Sheep. The loose shirtsleeves without arms spread to the sides over the green tile like angel wings, loose. And just below, like under one wing, the other boy, in other words, Bengt was lying.

  In just as deep a sleep, snoring almost as loudly.

  Sandra stood for a while and looked at it all, also the entire desolation after the party, the knocked-over bottles, the entire disgust.

  Maybe she also stood there and imagined, or expected a continuation. That someone would wake up. Bengt.

  “Now I’m going to tell you about love,” Inget Herrman said once. “You don’t fall in love with someone because that person is nice or mean or even because of that person’s thousand good qualities. You fall in love with someone who brings something inside you to life.”

  But she turned around. She went up again. Left them there, all of it. Showered and got dressed. Got the boots from the Closet, they had been there the entire time. They were the boots Doris left for her before she die
d (but Inget Herrman had put them away, by mistake, before Sandra had seen them).

  They had been there the whole time next to Pinky’s glitter shoes, next to above all those ice skates that she had with great effort one time a long time ago painted green and tried to skate on Bule Marsh.

  And then there was not so much more with anything at all. Sandra put on these enormous boots and walked out into the world.

  Rather she took the ferry over to the continent already the same day. Rather that is how she came out into the world.

  “THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED. AND I STARTED LIVING.”

  (the return of the Marsh Queen, a few years later)

  ____________

  THE MUSIC DIES HERE. IT IS SO SIMPLE. ON CONEY ISLAND, America, sometime at the beginning of the 1980s.

  Sandra likes to be there, leave the city for a while. Here there are beaches, parks, restaurants, an amusement park with old carousels.

  She has a few dollars in her hand, she has asked for them.

  She is hungry, she is thinking about buying some food.

  That is when she catches sight of a recording booth, it is located at the edge of the amusement park, like a relic from another time.

  Sing your own song and give it to your loved one.

  She steps into the booth, mostly for fun, puts in a coin.

  The red light comes on: record.

  She starts singing. An old song. The Eddie-song, which it was once called.

  Look, Mom, what they’ve done to my song. They’ve destroyed it.

  But it is so stupid. Suddenly she has forgotten the words. The words to THAT song, it is almost unbelievable!

  She stops singing, stops completely. Suddenly sees herself from outside.

  What in the world is she doing standing there in the booth howling, all alone?

  It is absurd.

  She looks around.

  There are some people walking by.

  A young woman is strolling last in the group; suddenly she turns around and catches sight of Sandra in the booth.

  She raises her hand in a greeting. Sandra waves back. The woman hesitates a few seconds but then she leaves the group and runs over to Sandra.