The American Girl (49 page)

She nodded. She smiled.

It was namely like this now, so clear and obvious. A new, entirely different story was starting now, here in the barn, after the unrestrained union. The first time of first times, that erased the memory of all first times which had ever been before. She would tell him.

What she would say was—she had already decided, and she would do it as soon as possible—about Little Bombay, everything, from beginning to end. Once and for all. Clean slate. If it was possible. But it was worth a try.

Love heals. Love saves lives.

She also thought she understood now, that was so fantastically simple too, that side by side with all of the other things that were happening and had happened, side by side with Doris’s death even, he had been there the whole time. Like in a pop song, really. She closed her eyes in Bencku’s bed one second, and for a moment no voices could be heard in her head, except for one of those normal and simple melodies: the sea was never so shimmering, or similar.

And what would happen then? Sandra, undressed and sticky in the bed, was lying and staring at the green clothes on the floor in the barn and looking at them like the clothes of a stranger. New things would happen now. News.

They would get married and have children together. Several children. Maybe not right away. They had schooling and studies and that sort of thing to finish first.

But like a picture. She and he. Who found their way to each other through loss—and found.

“Two castaways,” as the cousin’s mama once said in another situation that they both were, her and Doris Flinkenberg.

• • •

But Bencku? Have you become crazy? Doris-in-her in her head interrupted now. It was a voice that was not really welcome here. Besides she had completely forgotten it, for a while. But now it was back.

And Bencku came from the bathroom. Tripping over the floor in his socks. Had not gotten his socks off, they had been in a hurry. And the socks were also green like Sandra’s clothes in a pile on the floor, and he turned up the music.

And he came back to the bed and he looked straight at her while he was walking, into her eyes, and she was embarrassed and closed her eyes and in other words waited for him, that he would come to her again, with eyes closed.

The expected embrace failed to come. In the following, when she opened her eyes again, he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the music blaring.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back toward her. He had hidden his face in his hands. What was coming out of him sounded like a whimpering. His shoulders were shaking. And she was just about to stretch out her hand in order to clumsily touch and caress when she realized he was not crying, he was laughing.

And then Bengt started speaking, softly and quickly, as if he was angry. In fact it was not really laughter, it was a kind of bitter laugh that in some way, it did not need to be said, was directed at her. Not many words, but they came out of him like a waterfall, and at first she understood nothing.

“Anna Magnani,” Bencku started, “had incredibly huge breasts. She was curvy in the way working women are on film, you know, Anna Magnani, the real one. That the breasts swell like clumps of earth in their clothes. She was like that. And she was on her way all the time. Not away, but a little everywhere, she got her fits of rage when she was going here or there, things flew around her, she was in other words temperamental. And the cousin’s papa’s and the Dancer’s tongues hung to their knees when they saw her. And she
liked to be looked at, not for that. She willingly gave them a show. And others. She was like a walking cliché but they didn’t understand it, and she, she didn’t understand very much, she wasn’t all that clever either, and that showing, there wasn’t anything wrong with it. It was what it was. It was okay. Then there was still someone, he had a white Jaguar, an old one that is, 1930s model, and it was really stylish and for a while it was like he just had to drive it on the roads here. She had probably caught his eye. He flirted with her. But he had a way with her that you don’t forget. It was so descriptive for everything. It was one time, she was going to be off again. From here. From the District. She had something going on with the Dancer, some tiff again. The Dancer, that was Dad. And she’s already on the road running away. And then this guy happens to come in his car. He stops next to her as if he was thinking about picking her up. But not next to her, thirty feet in front. She thinks she’s going to get a lift and not because she’s thought something like that, but suddenly she thinks it’s a really good idea. So she turns around and gives the Dancer the finger and catches up with the car. But just as she’s about to get in the guy accelerates. She stumbles, doesn’t understand what has happened. And he stops maybe thirty feet in front of her, he thinks this is a hell of a lot of fun. And she runs again, and it’s as though she doesn’t really get that it’s a game. He even backs up, waves to her to come, and she gives it all she’s worth again; the dark hair whirling, sand and dust and sunshine like in a movie or in the rearview mirror and he watches with great interest. She’s at the car. She’s taken hold of the door. And then he floors it. She falls and hits herself pretty hard. Then maybe she understands something because she doesn’t do it again. But it’s enough. She’s fallen hard, and everyone has seen it too. That was Mom.” And Bengt paused and later added. “You don’t understand that. Ones like you.

“And it’s not the event itself. It’s a damn image too. Of how it is. And there’s always going to be a difference between—nah, I don’t need to say it.”

No. She did not want to be a part of this, now she was freezing for real. Freezing. But she understood this was not the right moment to get a quilt, blanket, to get, even ask for, something. What would you say? She was speechless.

And maybe it was good she did not say anything because then he came to where he was going, to the extraordinary part. She could not believe her ears. Everything cracked again. But despite that, she had to hear this, there was no other option.

“And,” Bencku continued, when a moment as long as an eternity had passed, she lay there and understood and understood nothing, the water bed quietly lapping beneath her, like an irony, “I KNOW about you. Everything about YOU. I know what you were doing.”

“But Doris . . .” Sandra started because at first she thought he was thinking about her and Doris, all of their games, also the one that was about the American girl.

“I’m not talking about Doris now,” Bengt hissed. “I’m talking about your . . . father. The Islander. And—” Suddenly he did not seem to know how he would continue, he just said, “You’ve seen there on the map. All of it is there. I know what’s there under that wretched house, under the pool.

“I just haven’t understood how far you could go.”

“Me and the Islander then?” Sandra asked in as sober and innocent a tone as possible.

Bencku did not answer.

But Sandra understood.

And now she was small again. Sandra vulnerable Wärn. She wanted to get up and get dressed, she wanted to leave, but at the same time, she was as though frozen. In order to counteract the petrification she got up and started gathering her clothes. But then she stopped herself, it was too overwhelming.

“But Bengt,” she then heard herself peep. “My God. Where have you gotten that from?”

And suddenly she understood so many things. First that on the map, on Bencku’s map, the woman who was lying on her
back in the pool and was dead, it was not an expression of something as Inget Herrman had once said about Bencku’s maps.

It was too unbelievable. But then also another insight, and it shot through her head like lightning and it made everything stop for a second. Because why now? Why did he say it first now?

“You didn’t say this to Doris did you?” She heard herself ask, clear and loud and obvious.

“You didn’t need to say anything to her either,” said Bencku. “She already knew everything.”

The boy in the woods, the one who saw, the girl in the house, the woman in the pool, the Islander with the rifle. Once a long time ago. And he aimed it at the woman in the pool—

That was what Bencku had drawn, what Bencku had seen.

“No,” whined Sandra. “Don’t you understand anything? You saw wrong. It wasn’t true.”

The following days and nights she avoided looking out the window toward the place where he had a habit of being. Later, it was maybe a week later, when she did, he was gone.

“Bencku is at it again. That is the only thing that is normal.”

It was Solveig who was talking. Solveig who came and cleaned in the house in the darker part of the woods, without a uniform, but otherwise like always. She brought news from the outside world. That was how she said it.

“Here I come with news from the outside world.” Just as if nothing had happened. But typical Solveig. You would not think she had been the one to see the dead Doris, Doris with her skull blown into a thousand pieces just a few weeks earlier.

Life goes on.

That was also what she said. She talked about the cousin’s mama that “she’ll probably never be really well again. She was very attached to Doris.”

And about Rita: Rita was in the city by the sea. Solveig knew that much. Not much more.

“So now I’m a twin without a twin. A half. Though that’s not possible in the long run.

“But life goes on.” Solveig repeated that many times, patting her stomach.

“And I’m pregnant. That’s my secret. YOU are not allowed to tell anyone. Not Järpe Torpeson . . . since he isn’t the father. Rather Torpe Torpeson, his brother. But we’re going to get married soon, so it’s not a secret.”

Solveig went around in the house in the darker part, where she had never been before with her mops and her dustpan—From the Closet could be heard:

“She certainly left a lot of fine clothes behind. Just THINK that she didn’t want to have any of this. To Austria. Or wherever it was she went?”

“To New York,” Sandra said weakly, though it was actually completely pointless to carry on with that story any longer. She could just as well have said it like it was, but she did not in any case. She was silent.

“And it’s not clothes, it’s fabric.
Material.”

Bencku’s barn. She went back later anyway, as if to check, not what Solveig had said, if he had left or not. But what had been. A yesterday. The warm light. The music. The map. It was like a dream. Did it exist?

“It’s probably best you stay away from me. I’m not . . . I can’t . . .” That is what he had said later, finally.

“I’m sorry.” He had also said that. “Sorry.”

And she also understood something else: the Eddie game, all of it. He had never understood a bit of it. It was not the American girl he had been enticed by, it was by . . . her.

“Sorry. How everything is still such a load of crap.”

And she left him then and thought that she would not anymore. But now—

Had it existed? She turned on the ceiling lamp. A naked bulb shone sharply and implacably over the emptiness.

Cleaned, clean. Everything put away. The records that had lain spread over the floor with and without covers. Books that had been torn out of bookshelves, clothing, the empty bottles and cigarette butts in the ashtrays, bottles, over the floor. The smell, sweet and musty.

Gone.

The whole smell of yesterday gone. The map. He had taken it down from the wall. And while she was there a noise could be heard behind her, a voice.

It was the cousin’s mama, who appeared from the darkness. “Murderer! If you take him from me as well I’ll kill you!”

It should not have been like that. Somewhere in a corner of her mind she had still seen something completely normal in front of her. How it should have been between her and the cousin’s mama. How they should have sat in the cousin’s kitchen and talked about Doris, remembered Doris. How the memory of Doris would have built a bridge of understanding between them. Not an intense closeness, but still.

“No,” Sandra whined, “no.”

But then Solveig was there again and pulled the cousin’s mama away.

“It’s just Sandra . . .”

And led her back out into the yard.

The cousin’s property. Swampy, dead. The cousin’s papa in his eternal room, a yellow light burned in there. Dead. Nothing.

What I love is gone, hidden in the distant darkness and my true road is high and wonderful.

What? On Doris’s cassette player, such a winding tune. The shoes in the Closet.

Sandra had been left standing on the cousin’s property, for a moment at a loss. Then she had gone home and strapped her backpack on her back and started walking toward the main country road. She emptied the Islander’s wallet in secret before she left the house in the darker part. Had over a thousand marks in her pocket, a decent capital to start with. And where?

She was the lifter, she was the nameless, she was the one to whom the woods whispered its secrets, secrets of words, secrets of blood, swishing secrets from the District . . . she was Patricia in the Blood Woods, the unusually lively shop assistant who had finally gotten her messy life in order when she went out for a walk and a strange wild man came and strangled her.

NO, that was not her! Sandra turned around and went home again.

This restlessness when Doris Flinkenberg was gone.

And later when she did not come up with anything she took the bus into the city and enrolled herself as a student at the French School again.

So it was not as a result of Birgitta Blumenthal who went around and spread strange rumors about Sandra that she changed schools. Said that Sandra was not completely
normal
, that there was something odd about her and the whole house in the darker part of the woods. Who knew what secrets the house hid, really.

No. It was also quite simply so that in relation to the District, the school, and the municipality, everything: that when Doris Flinkenberg was no longer there, there were no reasons not to go to the French School anymore.

ALMOST NO ONE AT THE FRENCH SCHOOL — EXCEPT FOR A FEW
occasional people, more about that below—remembered her. The school had effectively obliterated the little harelipped girl from its collective memory. Most of her new classmates who had been in the same grade as her a long time ago had to think in order to form any kind of memory of Sandra from the lower grades.