Beaming, smart Doris, who is still so fragile under the surface. It does not disappear even though it cannot be seen.
A betrayal, a love that died: the most important in Doris’s life, the only one that existed. Yes, of course, there would certainly have come more events, and experiences, a new time. But a blow, and it is decisive and fateful, there is nothing for Doris, no real time.
To be sucked into a black hole: then there is all of the old stuff, other betrayals, tattooed into the skin and an
unbearable fear then, of everything, which flares up inside her. A betrayal, a love that died, the most important in Doris’s life.
And so then. Doris, conquered by a time that has run away with her—to another time.
And suddenly trapped in that time.
“The folk song. A repetition in time and space. Such a different way of understanding time.”
Maybe it is like that. Because that is what she does during the final months of life, Old Doris who is New Doris: sings folk songs in a band. Her boyfriend at the time Micke Friberg,
Micke’s Folk Band
—they are together a few weeks that last fall—Doris sings and talks about the folk song in between the songs.
“I’m Doris, this is Micke, and we have a band, it’s Micke’s band,
Micke’s Folk Band
. We sing old folk songs in modern arrangements, they’re Micke’s arrangements—”
But regardless of how hard Doris tries to devote herself to the music that Micke Friberg talks about, regardless of how she tries to be Micke Friberg’s girlfriend, everyone already knows it is a lie. There was someone else, Sandra, whom she loved.
•
But that is later, not yet. And Rita and Solveig, this is what happens to them. Turn twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and continue living together in the twins’ cottage on the other side of the field across from the cousin’s house. For a long time anyway, up until Rita, just after Doris’s death, leaves the District for good in the fall of 1976.
But she spends a lot of time in the house on the First Cape as well; where new inhabitants come. First a group
of women who rent the house for a few years, have a collective of some sort or another and Bengt and a boy from the Second Cape, Magnus von B., whom Bengt starts spending a lot of time with, running around among them, trying to curry favor, make themselves useful in every way. Yes, yes, Bengt has “a way with women,” but it is still girls from the District who fall for him most of the time—not those women who make fun of him there where he is standing with his “flower power cap” on, talking about big things, about revolution and things like that.
But then the house is bought by a real family from the city by the sea: they are called Backmansson and they have a boy, Jan, the twins’ age, and Rita starts going with him just about as soon as the family moves in. And intensely; gradually Rita is at Backmanssons’ on the First Cape almost all the time when the family is there, more or less moves into Jan Backmansson’s spacious room in the tower. They cultivate mutual interests there, for Rita, new interests—nature photography, for example.
What is it? Real teenage love. Maybe. On the other hand, Rita has other boyfriends too when the Backmanssons are not home and they are not always around because the parents are field biologists and travel quite a bit: boys from the District, ones like Järpe and Torpe Torpeson, for example.
And it is hard to know with Rita, becomes harder all the time, she is not exactly someone who explains herself, in that respect she definitely does not become a speech maker with age. Says nothing about her business, gradually not even to her sister Solveig, not to mention Tobias who continues supporting her and Solveig as best
he can. Opens his wallet, “gives scholarships,” just as fair with both of them.
But Rita, she slips away more and more … and there is something wild and unmanageable about her. More and more too, with time, as if Rita in some way is two people. One who spends time at the Backmanssons’ house when they are home and otherwise another who exists in the District, in school, outside class and makes several of her classmates afraid. Rita Rat, she who provokes, allows herself to be provoked, and does not hold back, the one who hits.
But at the same time, despite everything and all of the time: Rita does well in school, has good grades in just about every subject. “The astronaut,” “the nuclear physicist,” it still matters, at least to her. In reality Solveig is the one who starts fading away and it does not turn around either: later when Rita leaves the District in the middle of high school, Solveig becomes pregnant shortly thereafter by one of the Torpeson boys from the Outer Marsh. Drops out of school and it is left unfinished despite the fact that she miscarries after a few months. Starts cleaning full-time for the cleaning company Four Mops and a Dustpan, which the cousin’s mama leaves behind.
•
But Rita, still during that final period when she remains: drags certain youths with her from the District over to the Second Cape in the fall when the summer residents have gone home. Rita and the Rats: break into the abandoned vacation homes, make them theirs for the night, have parties, but mostly are just there,
creepy crawling
, invading. Do not destroy, vandalize to leave a mark behind:
we were here
.
Solveig is there too of course. Still, something in Rita Rat those final weeks that also makes Solveig keep her distance. Rita is always the one who keeps on to the bitter end, if someone goes too far it is always Rita. One of the last nights Rita is in the District: how she breaks into the Glass House, starts breaking the windows on the veranda, with a cane, furious. Solveig remains standing on the hill, smooth as glass, hard, shiny, as if frozen in the moonlight—and watches.
It is Rita’s last fall in the District, the Backmansson family has been gone quite a while, it is more than a year now actually. The house on the First Cape has burned, not completely but it was damaged in a forest fire that spread at a violent speed. The Backmanssons were not home then but the house has become inhabitable and it needs to be repaired, and in the meantime the Backmansson family is living in their apartment in the city by the sea again. The intention is that they will return as said, but time is passing—the renovation never gets started and for a long time, it will be many years, the house just stands there on the hill with a dark, open gaping hole on the side, deteriorating even more until it is torn down at the end of the 1980s.
But when the Backmanssons left they promised Rita that she might be able to come and live with them in the apartment in the city, finish high school there, in one of the city’s schools. But time is passing, as said, and nothing happens: the house on the First Cape stands where it stands, as if the Backmanssons have forgotten what they said to Rita before they left. It is not mentioned when Rita visits her boyfriend Jan Backmansson in the city by the sea and the visits have also become
fewer and farther between the final months Rita is in the District. As said, the Backmanssons travel a great deal and then Jan Backmansson has his own hobbies that Rita does not share but that his parents suddenly think he should make time for in addition to his demanding schoolwork.
Scouting
and something called “convent activities.” Rita does not even know what it is, but things like that, similar things.
And she waits, waits—until she does not have the strength to wait anymore.
•
No one says out loud that Rita is the one who goes after the windows on the veranda of the Glass House, no one tells; a crime no one gets any clarity in. It is Solveig who explains to Tobias much later how it was.
And the baroness passes away that fall, never hears about it.
Besides, so many other things happen that fall—everything. Doris dies, Rita leaves.
As if everything culminated, but in an entirely separate story. That cursed October night when Doris Flinkenberg due to
her
unhappiness, her rejected, defrauded love, gets it into her head to go and shoot herself.
Doris, the amazing, who despite the darkness within her was so light on the outside: goes down to Bule Marsh, out onto Lore Cliff, has a pistol, presses the muzzle to her temple and fires.
•
And the night after Doris Flinkenberg’s funeral, that is when Rita heads off. To the Backmanssons in the city by the sea, without asking permission or telling anyone about her plans ahead of time.
One Saturday night in November 1976 Rita is suddenly standing below the Backmanssons’ third-floor balcony on a calm and civilized street in the chic southern areas of the city center. Dirty, slightly intoxicated, everything she owns in a shabby plastic bag.
Calls out to the people standing on the balcony, guests of Mr. and Mrs. Backmansson who are having a large party that night.
But Rita waits on the street, and is let in.
•
That is how it is told to Solveig later by a few youths from the District whom Rita bummed a ride from into the city after she wrecked Solveig’s tiny rickety old car that she had driven off in from the twins’ cottage while Solveig was in the shower. Certainly deliberately: out into the field, toward a tree at a low speed, then walked to the main country road with her things in a plastic bag.
Not even Solveig’s own car but her boyfriend’s at the time, Järpe Torpeson, who had fixed it up for Solveig so that she and her sister would be able to sputter around on the small roads and to the Outer Marsh, Torpesonia, where he lived.
Broom. How Solveig, in the bathroom, had heard the engine start. Gone out, seen the little car disappear into the darkness—the last of her twin sister Rita. Forever.
All of Solveig’s attempts at getting in touch were in vain. Rita cuts all cords, does not get in touch.
•
And what is left? At the cousin’s property, the cousin’s house?
Doris’s song, maybe. A voice on an old cassette tape.
“The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again. Such a different way of looking at time.”
Doris’s voice, soft, a bit hoarse, just a few weeks before she takes her own life. Becomes the first in a long line of those who will go down to Bule Marsh and die at their own hand. Because it is, in real time and history, what Bule Marsh is gradually transformed into. A cursed place,
a sanctuary for suicidals
.
But no, it has nothing to do with any old stories anymore. Like, once upon a time,
Rumba tones, the three cursed ones
.
Just a darkness that falls over the cousin’s property, over and over again. Woe followed by woe, like pearls in a necklace. With some places, some people it is like that. They are cursed, so to speak. Things happen, and continue to happen.
Affected by time, another time. The time of the folk song.
“The folk song. A repetition in time and space. Such a different way of understanding time.”
But—with the folk song comes realism; it is a shame about Solveig, who is left behind, all alone.
•
Because: the one who is left behind is left behind. Being in the world, in the cousin’s house, without
Doris-light
.
The cousin’s mama who has no strength left for anything. She collapses completely in the spring and is taken to the District Hospital by ambulance and when she gets better she moves back to the neighboring county where she originally came from. Never returns to the cousin’s
property, to the cousin’s papa: because
he
does not die of course, has eternal life in him.
And Solveig then, with all of this. Rita in the world, and Bengt who stopped being responsible for his actions a long time ago—a restless one, sometimes here, sometimes there. In the city by the sea, in other places, in other cities and comes and goes in the District. Wanders off, but unlike Rita nothing becomes of him, he deteriorates more and more.
•
Solveig. Nah, she did not become an astronaut or a nuclear physicist. Eventually she moves in with her boyfriend Torpe Torpeson, whom she has taken over after her sister Rita, to his home at the Outer Marsh, Torpesonia. Is expecting a child with him; that child and another end up as miscarriages before she finally has Irene in 1984.
By that time she has been living in Torpesonia for a long time; has taken over the cleaning business as said, Four Mops and a Dustpan, business is decent, makes a living off it and eventually has an employee, Susette Packlén from the District.
The cousin’s papa dies of natural causes but not until the end of the 1980s; he becomes deathly old. And Bengt—it is an accident of course—falls asleep with a cigarette that sets fire to the cousin’s house and when the fire department arrives, there is nothing that can be done to save him.
And Solveig, it is a turning point for her.
She sets herself free from it, turns her back to it, the old stuff no longer exists for her.
Tears down, builds new, moves in with Irene and eventually Johanna as well.
Closes the cleaning business, starts a real estate business instead.
But from the ashes of the old ruins: finds a Lifeguard’s Medal, an old sign of luck, a talisman.
•
“But Tobias,” Johanna has started in the greenhouse in the fall of 2004, when Tobias has finished telling the story. A sad story, in a remarkable way a beautiful story, of course, but still, inside Johanna, it has been pounding there, not grown quiet. All of the questions, suddenly millions, wanting to go back to the really old stuff that Tobias has not spoken about. The morning at the marsh, the American girl, Björn who hanged himself.
Rita and Solveig, the twins at the marsh. Were they there? What did they see?
And Doris Flinkenberg, the knocked-about marsh kid, was she not running around in the District then too? And then
—the Boy in the woods
, Bengt. What did he do?
Don’t push your love too far, Eddie
.
Ulla on the field. “There was not one who loved her, but two. They say she died from love. The one who killed her loved her too much.”
Bengt and the American girl Eddie de Wire, on the terrace of the boathouse. Her own father, Bengt.