Maybe Solveig is right, Johanna does not know. On the other hand: Johanna does not care about greenhouse gardening, the art of getting roses to grow or die; she likes Tobias, likes going to the greenhouse, being there with him. Just the two of them, Solveig has asthma and cannot handle the air, but sometimes she shows up anyway. Suddenly standing in the doorway, reminding Tobias to wear his gloves. This period, the last period, Tobias in the greenhouse before he gets sick and dies, he often had to come to Solveig in the kitchen and get Band-Aids, his hands covered in small cuts.
But for the most part it is just Johanna and Tobias in the greenhouse, on their own. Tobias moving up and down the rows, cutting and pruning. Johanna in her place, a stool made of an upside-down bucket next to the water hose and the books by the entrance. Yes, there is a bookshelf with books in Tobias’s greenhouse, next to all the greenhouse equipment and a record player playing opera music: a part of Tobias’s large library that he could not take with him when he moved from the apartment on the hills north of the town center to the senior housing facility by the square. For example
A Lesson in History—A Sense of Belonging to the Village, Architecture and Crime
, and
History and Progress
, which was once Tobias’s favorite work of reference: a heavy, worn bundle, several pounds of it, on the top shelf, mold on the edges.
“You need to know your history in order to know who you are.” Tobias was once someone who said things like that, with a pedagogic fervor that had pretty much left him even before he left the teaching profession; he had taught history at the coed school and the high school. He had also been Solveig and Rita’s teacher, that is how long Solveig and Tobias have known each other. Even longer too: they became friends at the swimming school where Tobias had taken notice of the twins’ swimming talent, the twins’ talent in general, the twins always did well in school too.
You have to know your history, Tobias said to Johanna once and started telling her about some local history but her concentration started fading while listening to the Old Men’s Choir over five generations, the like. That’s not mine, Tobias, she had wanted to say, but on the other
hand: her own history, in that way, what would she have to add? The Marsh Queen, the corridors at school, to the music, but Råttis J. Järvinen who also says that
then, Johanna, one might also learn how to play an instrument, practice a little
. Nah. My story. Not exactly elated at the thought.
So they have not done a lot of talking there in the greenhouse, it just turned out that way. Just been there together, the damp everywhere, Tobias’s music playing on the record player. Tobias slowly moving up and down the rows between the plants, Johanna on her bucket, and the titles of the books her gaze rests on, the scissors, the knives. The dusk falling outside can be seen through a hole in the plastic wall,
see the road like a line
, the light, the Winter Garden.
“Tell me about the American girl, Tobias.”
In any case Johanna is thinking about what Tobias said about needing to know your history when she goes down to Tobias in the greenhouse after meeting Ulla on the field the first time, after being given the snow globe, from the Winter Garden.
“Project Earth, Tobias. It’s something we’re doing at school.”
Tobias stops what he is doing, surprised, but at the same time, what else is there to say about that?
“I know, Tobias,” says Johanna, “that Bengt is my father and he loved the American girl and that Björn, the one who killed her, was also from here, the cousin’s house—
“And now, Tobias, I want to know everything. You know just as well as I do that Solveig doesn’t say anything. I want to know. Tobias. Everything.”
TOBIAS TALKS ABOUT THE DISTRICT like another world, even though it is not more than thirty–forty years ago. About the capes: the Second Cape, next to the sea, where he, at the beginning of the 1960s, runs a swimming school for the District’s children before the summer settlers take over the beautiful cliffs of the archipelago. A housing exhibition of the vacation homes of the future is being built on the Second Cape, the first of its kind in the country, it is finished in 1965. Modern houses in a bold, new architecture are sold as summer camps for people who can afford to buy them because they are expensive houses—mostly outsiders, from the nearby city by the sea for example. Located just forty miles away and there is a road the whole way so it makes the area especially attractive. Thus the Second Cape is transformed into a secluded place, rather inaccessible for the District’s own residents. The public beach is moved to the woods behind the First Cape, Bule Marsh.
The First Cape is located right behind the Second Cape, a bit off to the side, farther inland. It has more reeds, no sandy beaches or jetties there. The tall hill on which at that time there was only an old three-story house on it with turrets can be seen from a distance, far out at sea as well, like a landmark. In the very beginning, when Tobias comes to the District as an elementary school teacher in 1959, the house is empty and there
is no sign of any owner making claims to the house. In and of itself it is not striking at that time: after the war, the entire District was a military base for the occupying power and was closed to all outsiders and when it is returned and opened again, not everyone who had been evacuated returns. The devastation was immense, homes, properties destroyed, burned down—not something you particularly want to see.
And below the hill then “the cousin’s property,” a red cottage with outbuildings and a tumbledown baker’s cottage where the twins, Rita and Solveig, will come to live and grow up together. The cousin’s property: named after the old man who owns the place; he is called “the cousin’s papa” and nothing else. A jovial name for a grouchy and obstinate man who, shortly after the District becomes an open area, comes out of nowhere together with his brother and his brother’s wife and their three small children and has, it turns out, papers saying that he is the new owner of certain land on the First and the Second capes. He won them in a poker game from one Baron von B. who, naturally after the game had taken place in some military barrack at the end of the war, tried to do everything in his power to invalidate the transaction. But it was futile, Baron von B. had signed over portions of his property in the presence of witnesses, nothing to be done about the matter.
In other words, such a strange, small clan: maybe you think what kind of loose rabble—who, without asking anyone’s permission, settles down in the house on the hill on the First Cape and do not leave voluntarily; a countryman is needed to get them to leave. A bit amusing; here today, somewhere else tomorrow, people like that, as it
were. But they do not disappear, they just move down to the foot of the hill and when you realize the cousin’s papa actually owns
that
place (and large sections on the Second Cape as well, which he later sells to the company with the housing exhibition) you adjust your attitude a little. All this ownership still musters an ounce of respect together with the fact that shortly thereafter a terrible thing happens, the mother and father to the three small children die in a car accident. Crash into a hill at a high speed on the way to a dance competition (that was what they were, circus performers, professional dancers). And three small orphaned children left to fend for themselves with the man in the cottage, in that mess … and children are children despite everything, you can see from a long way off how it is going with those children. You try and do what you can for them, get them clothes, food, even if it needs to happen in secret so that the old man, who mainly spends his time sitting in his room boozing, will not become angry.
The children stay out of the way—like shadows, timids, during the day. But they can be seen at a distance: on the hill on the First Cape, sitting in a row, backs leaning against the stone foundation of the house where they had lived for a while. Tall, big for their ages, look older than they actually are. And when you see them like that, it can happen that you feel a certain … maybe it is not the right word, but worry, discomfort.
As if it were still hanging in the air, the music from the house from the time the children’s parents were still alive and practicing dance moves on the salsafloor on the ground floor. Rumba tones, sneaking out through the crack in the open window, behind closed curtains.
On still, hot summer days: energetic rhythms, certainly “southern,” certainly “happy,” but in the silence where only the music and the pounding of feet could be heard it became something else entirely. Something pulsating, threatening, hypnotically absorbing.
That rhythm and the quiet children
. And so, the children at the foot of the house on the hill,
the three cursed ones
. A memory, like a sensation, that springs up again a few years later when tragedy befalls the house again in connection with the American girl’s disappearance and death at Bule Marsh.
Not for Tobias, of course, but for many others. Something about those children …
Tobias, on the other hand, after having met the twins at the swimming school and having known them for a few years, asked them what they do up there on the hill. “Play,” the girls replied. “The Winter Garden.” “What kind of a game is that?” Tobias asked with friendly interest. “A sibling game,” Solveig explained and Rita elbowed her and added cryptically, giggling, “A world. An own world. We’re building. In our heads.”
But then when Tobias was about to ask more, both girls were evasive and giggled even more and started teasing him instead in a way that would gradually become an amusing pastime and a special jargon among the three of them. “Will you ask Rita?” one of them said, or “Are you talking to Solveig?” And whether Tobias nodded or shook his head it was always wrong. “I’m Solveig,” one of them said. “No, me, I’m Rita.” And they carried on like that to confuse him because of their likeness—and at the time the twins still looked so much alike that it was impossible even for Tobias to always tell them apart.
And little by little, about a year before everything with the American girl happens, things become pretty good for the kids in the cousin’s house. A new woman comes to live there about a year after the car accident. A simple one, fond of children, who gets the house in order and has a boy of her own with her, his name is Björn and he is a few years older than the other children who become his “cousins” in the cousin’s house.
The cousin’s mama:
her real name is Astrid Loman, she is countryman Loman’s daughter from the next county over and she is the kind that opens her arms to all children.
And God knows in those years, during the aftereffects of the war, there are enough homeless, abandoned children to go around. A little girl like that starts hanging around the cousin’s house too: Doris Flinkenberg, an abused, mistreated child from the Outer Marsh. A special child, filled with light—and who, after Björn’s death, is taken in as a new cousin in the cousin’s house.
But first, now, the three siblings: the twins Solveig and Rita and their older brother Bengt. The twins catch Tobias’s eye at the swimming school in other words: their exceptional talent, not only when it comes to swimming but in general, their strength, courage. Makes them assistant teachers in the school and that is where one of them, Solveig, distinguishes herself early on and saves a girl named Susette Packlén from drowning and gets the Lifeguard’s Medal, which she keeps under her pillow a long time afterward, many years—there is so much of the child in her too.
There at the swimming school one of them, Solveig, is called Sister Blue, and the other, Rita, is Sister Red, so that the young students will be able to tell who is who.
Tobias takes the twins under his wing, not just at the swimming school but otherwise too. He visits them in the baker’s cottage where they live on their own on the other side of the field across from the cousin’s house. He encourages them in school, gives good advice.
And he is the one who finds them a new place to swim at Bule Marsh when the Second Cape becomes private property. Rita and Solveig are going to become swimmers, have decided that little by little. And if you are going to become a swimmer, you have to train hard and be goal oriented, with discipline. Bule Marsh becomes their training location where they go early every summer morning—and it is there, at the quiet beaches of Bule Marsh, in the middle of the woods’ isolation, where they eventually meet the baroness from the Second Cape. They teach the baroness to swim, something she maintains she does not know how to do. In return, in exchange for the swimming lessons, the baroness teaches the girls English, which is one of the many world languages she has mastered.
For a time, a few summers at the end of the 1960s, the twins and the baroness are at Bule Marsh almost every morning. And Tobias himself as well, if he happens to come by on one of his morning walks. Like a small family there on the beach; Tobias, the baroness, the twins. Though it ends forever after that morning, late summer 1969, when the American girl dies there at the marsh.
Falls from Lore Cliff and disappears, is sucked into the water’s currents. And the current
is
strong, especially under the cliff, and it is very, very deep.
•
Bengt, Rita and Solveig’s brother, walks in the woods on his own, or on the Second Cape—even after the
summer residents settle there. Tall and gangly, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, but looks older. And a sketchpad under his arm more often than not: but if you ask him what he is drawing, which Tobias does once, tries to start a conversation that way, for the most part you receive no answer or perhaps just a few evasive mumbles in response.
But, “maps,” “special buildings,” “architecture”—on a rare occasion he finds his tongue, even becomes excited. Then for the most part, his cousin Björn is with him and Björn is the one who explains it as a way of introduction, with admiration in his voice too. But then when Bengt relaxes and starts talking on his own it does not become much more intelligible; Björn rolls his eyes and starts laughing in the middle of everything. “You aren’t right in the head, Einstein,” he says but with respect, so to speak, as if being crazy is a sign of honor, and Bengt thaws even more and suddenly words start gushing out of him. Then you see the age difference too, of course—despite his gruffness and seriousness, how much of a little brother Bengt is in relation to his cousin Björn with whom he shares a room on the upper floor of the cousin’s house; his best friend, his only friend, before the American girl comes in any case.