The place, the Winter Garden on the Second Cape. Next to the wide-open sea through a grove of pine trees where the road stops, then you are there. Which is not true of course. You do not get there just like that. There is a security system. Fencing. Starts below the hill on the First Cape, which also belongs to the Winter Garden, but there is only a regular fence there, the real security measures are found farther inside. In any case: fences. Press your face against the square grooves, leaves a mark on your skin.
•
So. The Boundary Woods, others do not spend much time there.
An invisible boundary line, which applies not only to the inhabitants of Rosengården 2 but to almost everyone in the District as a whole.
Except one, of course. Ulla Bäckström who is exactly where she wants to be and everywhere in every place.
Private Property
. All of that means nothing to her.
Rosengården 2. Where she lives, with her family in an architectonic masterpiece of stone, tile, and glass in three and a half stories—she is the only child and has the entire attic at her disposal. “The Half Floor” or “the Glitter Scene” as Johanna hears her say as she sweeps past in the halls at school in the middle of a group of likeminded students, ones from the junior and senior classes. The Glitter Scene, the half story: slightly joking, of course, but still not without a grain of seriousness. Because Ulla
is
special and ingenious and very artistically gifted, really truly.
The theater, the dance, and the music:
how they sing about her there where she is walking, that is what she says she lives for … Ulla Bäckström, laughing in the hallways, filled with her own babble; everything she does and “creates.” And it comes about up there, she explains, on the Glitter Scene, her room. Ulla Bäckström, glittering eyes, capturing her friends with her talk, her laugh, with how she is—also capturing the ones standing off to the side watching her, like Johanna, for example.
There, on the Glitter Scene, EVERYTHING is there: all the thoughts, the ideas, and all the music. All the music books, all the manuscripts. And IF Ulla Bäckström is exaggerating then it is only just a little. Because already at the age of seventeen, her age when she dies
in November 2006, she has played the lead role in
Miss Julie, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and
Singin’ in the Rain
, a musical; she loves to sing, has a fantastic singing voice, deep and magnificent. And a few years earlier she was the American girl in a play she wrote herself, which was based on an old story about something that happened in the District.
“Places have their stories that define them, cover them like a scar, a curse …” Ulla Bäckström who talks like that on the stage in one of the school’s many auditoriums. “
The American girl who died, and all the death that gathered around her.”
And Ulla Bäckström has a band, or, she has had several bands, but one called
Screaming Toys
.
•
The Glitter Scene, Rosengården: and yes, it happens that when Johanna is in the Boundary Woods she finds her way to the northern edge, finds herself alone under the protection of the woods’ last tree and looks up. At Bäckström’s house, it is the last one. High above all the walls, enclosures, it rises up, the attic at the very top. No ordinary attic, there is a high ceiling in there, you can see that, large windows.
And yes, of course, maybe it is possible to see it as a stage. A theater stage, so shimmering and elusive, with promises. Dark fall nights, Johanna below, among the trees.
A faint light trickling out from beneath the heavy, dark red curtains pulled closed over the windows, like just before a performance is about to start.
The curtain that is pulled to the side. Ulla singing:
Don’t push your love too far, Eddie
.
Or: Ulla standing at the window. Just standing. There is a door on the stage, in the middle of the window, a door made of glass. She has opened the door. She is standing there, at the edge, in white clothes, shimmering. It is windy. Just standing there, singing.
In the wind: how it is blowing around her.
Don’t push your love too far, Eddie
. Ulla Bäckström sings, screams out over the Boundary Woods.
But it is like this, all the more often too. That: the bird has flown the coop. Darkness in Ulla’s window. Ulla is not where you think she will be.
Ulla everywhere, Ulla across all borders
.
And when you see her like that, a glimpse in the Boundary Woods, a glimpse on the field that starts outside Johanna’s window in Johanna’s room in the house below the hill on the First Cape where Johanna and Solveig live together, a glimpse below Tobias’s greenhouse while Tobias is still alive, a glimpse on the path in the copse on her way to the Second Cape … then she is not surrounded by all of her thousand friends but almost always alone.
•
Ulla Bäckström, the Flower Girl, in a field, November 2004
. Ulla Bäckström comes walking over the field, butterflies are falling out of her large, light, rough hair; velvet insects in different colors are shimmering softly in the light of the Winter Garden, where she is headed. Ulla Flower Girl, a basket with roses over her arm: she has begged them off of Tobias at his greenhouse, she is going to sell them at the Winter Garden.
Long white coat, long white dress, white ankle boots—dress-up clothes, because this is when she is writing her
play about the American girl: Ulla, the Flower Girl, is going to gather material in the Winter Garden, the clothes are her camouflage.
The basket is filled with dark roses when she meets Johanna on the field.
“Hey, Lille.” Sets her basket down on the ground, trains her beautiful brown eyes on Johanna.
“Shall I tell you about the Winter Garden? Have you heard?
“You know.” Ulla Bäckström lowers her voice to a whisper, points at the frozen ground between them. “It’s like a hole in the earth. You can … fall. Down. And swish, you’re in the underworld.
“And Lille, it’s magical down there. There’s an inner kingdom.
Kapu kai
. Lots of rooms.
The forbidden seas
. Have you heard?
“Places almost nobody knows about. Secret rooms where only a few have been. And in the rooms, Lille, there are stories. The walls talk:
It happened at Bule Marsh
. Is it familiar? You find out the truth about everything there.
“Do you think it’s true, Lille?” she says, staring at Johanna again, but Johanna, suddenly struck dumb by her own shyness, does not get a word out.
But then Ulla Bäckström takes out the snow globe. Rummages around in her basket on the ground, under the roses.
“Look here.” It is round, made of plastic, fits in the palm of her hand.
“The American girl in a snow globe,”
she whispers. “From the Winter Garden. You can buy it at the souvenir shop.” Holds up the snow globe in front of Johanna and
Johanna sees: two plastic figures in a watery landscape. Boy, girl, on a cliff—the dark water of the marsh under them with white ripples that are supposed to represent the foam on the waves; the background of the snow globe a shimmering silver.
The boy in the foreground, with his back toward you, hand raised, turned toward the girl on the edge of the cliff in the moment right before she falls headfirst, is sucked up by the whirlpool and disappears. You see only her terrified face over the boy’s shoulder. Mouth wide open, sharp red lips surrounding a silent and eternal scream.
Ulla on the field shakes the snow globe, snow falls inside it: soft plastic flakes that swirl around in the water, mixed white and silver. Glitters in the light from the Winter Garden, which is falling over the field in the November twilight.
“They say she died from love,” Ulla Bäckström whispers. “The one who killed her loved her too much. The boy. With his back toward us. But, Lille, who is he? You can’t see the boy’s face.
“I mean,” Ulla Bäckström continues, as if she wants to reveal a secret, “which one? There were two, after all. Who loved her. One was named Björn, the other named Bengt.
The Boy in the woods
. That’s what they called him.
“But it was Björn who was her real boyfriend, they were closer in age. The Boy in the woods was only thirteen and she had just turned nineteen. And Björn, her boyfriend, he became so sad when she died that he went and hanged himself.
“But the other one. The Boy in the woods. You wonder, Lille, can you ever really know what it was actually like?
“Because he, Bengt, he loved her just as much. If not even more … I don’t know,” says Ulla Bäckström, after a brief pause, shrugging her shoulders, standing up straight. “Maybe it’s a riddle, Lille. But, in any case. Hard to know. Since all of them are dead now.
“But—oh! Have to go now. Sell my roses, in the Winter Garden.
“The snow globe, isn’t it pretty?”
Johanna nods attentively.
“Do you want it? You can have it.”
And Ulla Bäckström gives the snow globe to Johanna.
She laughs again, and now, suddenly, it has started snowing; large, heavy flakes descend over the field. “All of them dead now …” Ulla Bäckström hums in the first snow, almost elated, a new melody that suddenly has floated into her head. “Dead, Lille.” Opens her mouth and stretches out her tongue to catch a few snowflakes on it. “I’m obsessed with death.
Ille dille death Lille,”
Ulla sings and lowers her voice. “And I’m not Ulla but Ylla, Ylla of death. Listen Lille, in this silence on the field, doesn’t it sound good?”
Johanna mumbles, “Yeah, maybe,” a bit gruffly because she had to say something even if she would really like to say something else, something better, something more in line with the special mood.
“But, Lille,” Ulla continues, “maybe it’s like this. That there’s a lot of goodness … blue skies, flowers, beautiful music … and at the same time, as if another force,
a wild pain
, and mortality is working inside everything.”
And then suddenly, with those words, she is gone. Has lifted up her basket with red roses and continues across the field toward the Winter Garden.
Ylla of death
. Skirts flapping, so white in the light of the Winter Garden rising up in front of her.
And Johanna, alone on the field, wants to call out, Wait Ulla, wait! Take me with you! But just stands there, dumb and silent. And futilely of course. Ulla Bäckström has probably forgotten everything already and Ulla Bäckström
does not
wait.
Johanna stands where she stands, a snow globe in her hand.
She takes the snow globe to her room and puts it away among all her things, looks at it sometimes and fantasizes. The field that starts outside the window. Blows mist on the glass.
Lille
, she writes in the mist, peers out through the letters. Empty. The light of the Winter Garden. Ulla does not come.
The play about the American girl begins and then ends, new plays come, new music. Ulla who sweeps by in the corridors at school, the theater the dance the music, how they sing about her there where she is walking. Johanna tries to make eye contact. It does not work. Or, if Ulla sees, then she looks through Johanna, caught up in her own things.
And at home: Robin moves away, Tobias becomes ill and does not come to his greenhouse anymore. The greenhouse deteriorates, Tobias dies, Solveig and Johanna are alone in the house.
•
The American girl in a snow globe. The Winter Garden. An inner kingdom
. Kapu kai. But it happens that Johanna finds her way to the edge of the Boundary Woods anyway. Like always, she stands at the edge and looks
up, into the darkness. Ulla’s room, high up above Rosengården’s fence.
“Maybe I went away because I wanted to be with people who were called Jack, Vanessa, Andy, and Catherine.” Sometimes Ulla still stands there in her room, on the Glitter Scene. The glass doors open, the white dress flapping in the window. Singing a song, “Death’s spell at a young age,” that one, another one? Or just stands, looking out at everything.
Then it is over, everything is normal. The door is closed, Ulla leaves the window. The curtains, like a theater curtain, are pulled closed again.
And still, often, just darkness,
the bird has flown the coop
.
But sometimes when Johanna stands alone at the edge of the woods and looks up at the Glitter Scene she imagines that she is there. With Ulla on the Glitter Scene, the theater, the dance, the music … no, not like that.
But so. “Maybe I went away because I wanted to be with people who were called …” Ulla and Johanna with the Marsh Queen, all of her songs. “And now you’re going to get to hear what it sounds like.” How Johanna is going to come to Ulla Bäckström in her room, and they are going to listen to it up there.
Death’s spell at a young age
. They are going to be Orpheus who goes to the Underworld, the Winter Garden, bring back Eurydice. Their Project Earth. The Marsh Queen, the Winter Garden, the American girl in a snow globe, how everything is going to coincide.
They will have Project Earth. They will have everything. The two of them.
Patti, Debbie, Ametiste,
Imagine, my
Rimbaud and the Piss Factory. Screaming Toys and Wembley Arena 2012, everything will lead there.
“Being on stage is so terrible, they tear you to bits with their admiring looks, admiring hands, you could just die …” To talk like that in an interview, sign autographs.
Or like that. Just like that. Listen to the Marsh Queen and her songs. The Marsh Queen’s voice, mellow like Ulla’s, but even darker and more mysterious. “Lie down here,” Ulla Bäckström will say on the Glitter Scene while the song is playing, “and we’ll dissect the Marsh Queen’s inner life, all her dark corners … close your eyes …” And the insects, the butterflies, will glitter in her hair there on the Glitter Scene, among the music, the books, all the music and the dress up clothes, all the manuscripts.
But when that song has finished playing, new songs will come. And Ulla will sit up and shake the butterflies from her hair,
klirr klirr
as metal and velvet rain down on the floor around her.