The American Girl (22 page)

. . .

“When the cat’s away the mice will play,” said Anneka Munveg, who was one of the women. “And WHAT is going on here?”

But the girls stood as though petrified. There were moments in life when even a chatterbox like Doris Flinkenberg was quiet. This was one of them. Remember that you are going to die as well. For the one who was standing at the very back, her with the quiet voice and the literal translation, was no one other than Tea Saucer Eyes: Inget Herrman in other words, and she was looking straight at them.

With something mysterious in her eyes. There was not, when she saw the objects around the girls, any more laughter in them either.

“Two defenseless girls in the lion’s den,” Anneka Munveg continued as if nothing had happened, she had not picked up on the strange mood. Instead she was now looking around with all of her senses on alert like a real journalist is supposed to do when she comes to new places, always with the idea of a new scoop in the back of her mind, new experiences—and preferably the first to report them. Naturally Bencku’s map on the wall opposite the bed caught her eye and she let out a delighted cry.

“But look at this,” she called enthusiastically. “My God, so interesting. It’s almost like a map over the Mumin valley!”

That is how Anneka Munveg continued her own bumbling show.
Bum bum bum bum
she carried on by the map though not for too long but certainly long enough that she would not be aware of what was going on next to her in the meantime. That the world stopped spinning for a second. Everything stopped. That is to say for the two-three other people. For Sandra it would remain a bit unclear if Doris Flinkenberg really had been as surprised as she claimed. “I should have understood,” she would say. “But I had forgotten.”

In other words it was this: the feeling of familiarity and
recognition. The one Sandra had felt for a brief moment when she had seen the photograph of Eddie de Wire for the first time. Now, in exactly this moment, the source of the feeling was discovered with a shudder.

Also Inget Herrman, who normally was not far behind Doris Flinkenberg when it came to how easily words flew out of her, became quiet.
Metaphysically quiet, so to speak
.

These seconds during which she in turn also understood, took hold.

The photograph of the American girl had fallen out of Sandra’s hand during the first surprise. Floated over the floor where it now lay between them where everyone could see it. A moment, before, thank goodness—because right then Anneka Munveg started suspecting a scoop in progress behind her back—Doris’s foot quickly covered it.

But they saw, all three of them. Eddie in the photo. The American girl. Inget Herrman. It was her.

Eddie risen again. A similarity so great that it just could not be a coincidence.

So quiet that you would have been able to hear a pin drop,
ping ping
like when the pins fell from Lorelei Lindberg’s mouth in Little Bombay once a long time ago when she started talking without remembering the pins in her mouth.

“Sandra! Help me! I can’t see!”

“What was it you were going to show me?” Anneka Munveg turned around and interrupted the whole thing, all of her senses on high alert now, when she noticed that her enthusiasm over the map on the wall had disappeared into thin air.

“We’re out of drinks,” Inget Herrman said to Doris and Sandra as if nothing had happened. “Where is Bencku? He said he had several cans left.”

“In the woods getting drunk,” said Doris Flinkenberg nonchalantly. “But I know.”

“Doris, Doris,” both of the women feigned again. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

Sister Night, Sister Day
. “That’s her sister,” Doris had said to Sandra while they were picking flowers a little later, flowers they were going to put under their pillows and sleep on so that later they would dream about who they were going to marry when they grew up. “I’m afraid I forgot to say that. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hadn’t really put two and two together. Memento mori,” Doris Flinkenberg repeated and laughed. “But it was actually rather exhilarating to remember it, for me too.

“So,” Doris continued. “And now I’m picking my last flower. Then I mustn’t say another word this evening. Otherwise there won’t be any interesting dreams tonight!”

And Doris picked her last flower, a lesser butterfly orchid though it was endangered. And Sandra picked her last one, a lily of the valley, and in silence they walked back to the house in the darker part of the woods, down to the basement, where they rolled out their sleeping bags on rubber mattresses, crawled down inside them, and laid the flowers under their own pillows.

But Sandra did not dream about any man she was going to marry when she grew up. She lay awake a long time and went over the events of that strange evening when so much had happened. And now something else floated up.

The map. On Bencku’s wall. She had seen what had been on it. The house in the darker part of the woods. The enormous stairs, millions of steps, and where? Up to heaven? Out into nothing?

And in the middle of everything a swimming pool. A figure there on the bottom. A girl? A woman? Who was it? Lorelei Lindberg? Or herself?

It also confirmed what she had known about the boy the whole time, even if it had never been said. He had been in the area in any case. He had seen.

And she had chills. Of course, she was certainly scared. But at the same time a strong will was born inside her, a normal
will, to get to know the boy and speak with him. In the barn she had also understood that maybe there was nothing THAT strange about him, really. He was, after all, a completely ordinary person too.

Not just factor X. That was reassuring.

And not long thereafter the girls were walking with Inget Herrman over the cliffs on the Second Cape, and Inget Herrman told them about herself, about Eddie and Kenny, the three sisters who grew up on a property called Ponderosa once a long time ago and one time long ago also scattered across the world, “some are like reeds in the wind,” Inget Herrman stated, “others less so.”

Chantal de Wire, she explained, that was her, in another life. Chantal who set out for San Francisco and became Nothing there, Nothing Wired, more exactly. Inget means nothing, she explained, and that was how the name Inget came about. Plus the last name: the result of a quick unsuccessful marriage with some Sven. Sven Herrman, Inget Herrman’s ex-husband. But no one Inget Herrman wanted to waste more words on at all.

“Girls, I’m not,” Inget Herrman explained to Sandra and Doris, “exactly known for my good taste in men.”

And they continued and came to the boathouse, the girls and Inget Herrman, sat down on the deck in front of the sea, only the sea there in front of them, and nothing else. It glittered of course and surged, of sea, it was so beautiful,
such a beautiful, beautiful day
. Inget Herrman with a girl on either side of her, feet dangling over the water’s surface, all three. Inget Herrman told them how all three of the sisters had ended up here, in just this part of the world. Eddie who had gone away to visit the baroness, their mother’s sister, or how it was; and how not so long after Inget and Kenny in different parts of the world as well, had received the terrible news about what had happened. “The District?” “The baroness?” They had not understood anything.

Inget Herrman told them about Eddie too. About Eddie’s things in the bag; she explained them to the girls as best she could. The books
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, a so-so novel;
Teach Yourself Classical Greek
, which Inget Herrman smiled at, one of those a-big-smile-extends-your-life smiles; and the book about shopping mall theory and practice. That got Inget Herrman to gasp for breath, “Eddie, she tried so hard.

“Eddie, little Eddie, who was so young and confused,” Inget Herrman said. “But still she wanted to do big things. Build worlds, build houses. A shopping mall. ‘The
future of consumption is consumption,’ ”
Inget Herrman quoted from that book. “Yes, I’ve read it myself. It was my birthday present to her. One time, when we were much younger and I thought there was still a chance that something might become of her.”

Inget Herrman talked about Eddie, said all sorts of things like that, and all of it was interesting, it gave a certain scope to their own project at hand. “We need to walk in the American girl’s moccasins,” as Doris had said in the barn, but it provided nothing more. Meat on their bones maybe, but still, Sandra felt and Doris felt, so so strongly that they did not even need to talk about it afterward, that the mystery would not be solved with this information. That is to say with the knowledge about which books someone read and that sort of thing.

But still, it was so beautiful sitting with Inget Herrman on the terrace of the boathouse, where the American girl had once been herself, sat at exactly the same place, with the same fantastic sea in front of her,
exactly right here
. And that was something to hold on to, that, strangely enough, meant more.

And when Inget Herrman later spoke about greater things in connection to Eddie, more overarching, that was when you really felt you were on the right track.

“We didn’t know each other all that well,” said Inget Herrman. “Life can be like that. Even with your own sister. All three of us were separated pretty early. We were separated like reeds in the wind . . .

“It was actually first after Eddie’s death that we were reunited. Me and Kenny anyway. We heard what had happened. On the other side of the world. We were both in America at the time, Kenny and I. But in different places, for a long time back. But we traveled here together. And then we just stayed here. Kenny with the baroness and I . . . I just didn’t get away from here. I didn’t have any plans. Then. I just stayed here—

“But,” Inget Herrman continued, “Eddie. It’s a pity about Eddie. She was so alone. So very, very alone. We’re all alone,” Inget Herrman stated. “But Eddie, she was so alone you could smell it. And it was attractive but also pitiful. All the loneliness,” Inget Herrman stated again, “rests on a secret.”

And she had barely said it when Doris Flinkenberg filled in.

“I know what it’s like to be alone.” And, with a glance at Sandra, “We. We know.”

It was such a spiritual moment, it would be remembered years after they had stopped solving the mystery of the American girl, that mystery and all other mysteries, when you did not want to know about any mysteries at all. Remembered later, later, when you were alone for real, what it had been like to talk with Inget Herrman about loneliness, abandonment, on such a fantastic, beautiful summer morning on the terrace of the boathouse.

“The sea was never so shimmering as when you walked by my side,” as it played on Doris Flinkenberg’s cassette tape player.

And Inget Herrman, who spoke about love, she was the only one who did not raise her eyebrows at the fact that it might have been Bengt and Eddie who loved each other most, despite the age difference, despite all the strangeness in it.

“A young boy. A half-grown girl. Who had nothing in common. What did they have in common?” Inget Herrman reasoned.

“In common,” she later snorted. “As if love. Would be about that. Having something in common.

“I’m going to tell you about love,” said Inget Herrman. “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.”

And the very last thing she had said, which was almost the best:

“In the fall, girls, I’m going to invite you to the city by the sea. Then we’re going to make some study visits to art exhibitions and see good movies and good movie theaters and really talk more about this.”

“Now we have quite a few suspects,” Doris Flinkenberg said when they had left Inget Herrman that morning and wandered, though quite energetically, toward the house in the darker part of the woods and the bottom of the pool in the basement where they had their headquarters as always.

“Not her? Inget Herrman?”

And Doris Flinkenberg turned toward Sandra and looked at her as if she were an alien.

“Of course not her, gooberhead. Are you crazy?”

Of course they had put the American girl’s things back in the bag under the floor in Bencku’s barn on Midsummer Eve, the bag back in the hole under the floor, wrapped in the blanket so that it would not look like someone had been there and snooped.

But one of the things did not really get put back, which so to speak mesmerized them: that record. They had not mentioned it to Inget Herrman either, maybe because “to walk in the American girl’s moccasins” was still something they were going to do on their own. They had taken it with them, in other words, and the next time they were alone in the house in the darker part they listened to it; Eddie’s thin, raspy voice rattled through the house in all the rooms where there were speakers.

A magical effect. Because it was her voice. This was a record that Eddie herself had recorded once a long time ago, at an
amusement park in America. She had put a coin in the machine and walked into a stall and sung her own song into the microphone, and a while later the record had popped out of a hole, like photos from a photo booth.

A voice says more than a thousand bits of information. Because it was here now.

The American girl’s song, a weak, out-of-tune, and distant whine.

Look, Mom, what they’ve done to my song
, she sang.
It looks like they’ve destroyed it now
.

In English of course, it did not sound good, but it was her.

“Look, Mom, they’ve destroyed my song,” Sandra hummed afterward.

“But Sandra,” Doris Flinkenberg exclaimed, “it’s fantastic. So similar.”

And Sandra sang and when she sang she felt it so clearly and strongly, she was not pretending to be the American girl, she was her.

And in Doris’s company she continued singing to her heart’s delight.

But she would also, later, continue humming when she was alone and in entirely different situations.