For a while after, in school, in the entire District, the shock was intense. But later, almost more shocking, it passed. Rather quickly, faster than the American girl was ever forgotten. The Bäckströms moved away. New girls came, and new girls come, all the time,
the theater the dance the music
. But then I was no longer there. Came somewhere else. To the music, the stories. Yes, you could put it that way.
That was in any case when I got out all of the old stuff, my stories, the beginning of my Project Earth. The Winter Garden, what existed for real and in my head, all of my “material.” The Marsh Queen too, an eternal first chapter,
where did the music start?
What was left, in other words, still quite a bit, which I never tore up. And then I had so much of it in my head, of course.
And started writing a story about me and my cousin Robin whom I miss sometimes, he moved with Allison as said, I never heard from him. But a story about how we are children and left the house at the foot of the hill on the First Cape, and the Winter Garden reveals itself in front of us, an island in darkness, all the promises, beaming with light. A feeling that can exist only when you are young, a feeling you have never felt before:
to there
. Must go there.
The girl in the story grows up, but the same longing, the Winter Garden. And into the story comes a boy, his name is Glitter (!). He is the Marsh Queen’s son and returns in the story about a Project Earth, which you do together because you don’t want to do it alone. Because you already know that “lose an innocence, find a treasure,” it can truly be frightening, turn everything upside down.
In the middle of the Winter Garden there is
Kapu kai,
the forbidden seas
.
“Underworldly rooms, pictures on the walls, it happened at Bule Marsh, the truth about everything.” Ulla Bäckström who whispered all of that, on the field. White Ulla, red roses in a basket, the Flower Girl. Shimmering clips in her hair, in the light from the Winter Garden that became ever stronger in the dusk.
“Ille dille death,” she hummed, laughing, training her eyes on me, teasingly, I was so young.
“I am Ylla of death.”
A memory that comes so strongly right then, forces everything else away, makes it impossible to say anything about the Winter Garden, that loss, that kind of longing, and everything else that belonged there, in general.
But stories, music. There are other stories, other music, the world is filled with stories, music. And I make my story about the Marsh Queen instead, the Marsh Queen and the punk music, the first and the second chapters and so on, to the end. In my way, with my language, but it is a true story of course, because the Marsh Queen, Sandra Wärn, is not a made-up person, she exists, existed.
Death’s spell at a young age
. How she sings that song, it is dreamlike, it is hard, it is unforgettable.
And it becomes a good story, and after that story other stories follow, other songs. But about the Winter Garden, Ulla Bäckström, I can’t say anything, it is too painful.
Though gradually that story, the one about the Marsh Queen, when it has been told, it fades away. A story among many others. Though everything continued, continued anyway, changes.
Like in reality, with reality, in the District, everywhere.
The Boundary Woods disappeared. A new Rosengård was built, number 6 or 7 in that order, family homes. Around Bule Marsh, which has been drained down to something that looks like a properly bred pool in the middle.
And the house in the darker part of the woods no longer exists either—where the Marsh Queen once lived: a little girl, Sandra Wärn, wrapped in silk fabric from
which the Marsh Queen was born, like from a cocoon. The house sank deeper in the mud and was torn down. What remains, a stairway in the woods. A single stairway in the middle of nowhere. Cannot be seen from here because of all of the houses. But imagine it. A great staircase in a wood. Moss that is growing on it, weeds in the cracks, concrete decomposing.
Beautiful? Maybe. As I said I can’t see it, not from here. Where I am now, on the Glitter Scene, in what was once Ulla Bäckström’s room.
Alone here now, for a while, at the window where there no longer is a door. In this landscape, I don’t live here, I live somewhere else, I am in the music, my stories, I have everything, otherwise, another life.
•
But here in the house in Rosengården 2 with Solveig, one last time. I have been visiting Solveig, who still lives in the house at the foot of the hill on the First Cape and she has told me that she is going to sell what once, several years ago, was the Bäckströms’ house in Rosengården, for the new owners, and I have asked if I could come along.
The Glitter Scene. An empty room. Nothing up here. And what a space and all my dreams about what it was like here and would be like here. How I wanted to come, also here. Ulla Bäckström, Ulla with butterflies in her hair, Ulla in the corridors of school. And I who stood there and looked at her from off to the side, but she didn’t see me.
Dark sad groupie
. And when I occasionally happened to walk behind her in the hall she turned around and said and laughed so that everyone heard, “Don’t step on my shadow, Lille, turn around.”
Don’t step on my shadow, turn around
. How I hated her—and loved her. Still, she was mine. Is mine.
An image I carry with me: Ulla on the field, Ulla in the Boundary Woods,
my world
, catching snowflakes on her tongue. Says wonderful things. That was
who
she was. Even if I didn’t know her, knew nothing about her.
And she didn’t know me, knew nothing about who I was. No connection. Understood nothing about her stories, what she was doing, how important it could be for someone like me. Like the story about the American girl. Just a play to her, new idea, new songs to sing, to hum. Weave herself inside something for a while, then weave herself out. And go on,
the theater the dance the music
, as if nothing would leave a trace.
But still, a connection, and here, now, I am the one who would see it.
Suddenly, here on the Glitter Scene, everything coincides, or can be fixed, in some way. In another image,
my
image, and it was Ulla Bäckström who brought me to it. Before everyone else, before my own mother too. And I see it more clearly than ever now, on the Glitter Scene, Ulla’s room, a cloudy day in January 2012.
It is Bengt, my father, and the American girl Eddie de Wire, on the terrace of the boathouse, one day in August 1969, a few days before Eddie disappears forever.
Eddie de Wire and Bengt on the terrace, just the two of them, and their mouths moving.
Feet dangling over the water, the sea opening up in front of them. Eddie with the guitar that she is plucking at, amused, Bengt who is drawing, talking. He who was always so quiet, as if transformed—suddenly something happy about all of it.
On the Second Cape otherwise, the summer life that is continuing on its own path around them and all of the other people in the world somewhere else.
But the unusual characters on the terrace of the boathouse. Brace yourself in them. In this moment, they are the ones ruling over everything.
Northerly wind. The sea dark, foam on the waves.
Eddie and Bengt. Ideas flying around, long, happy, excited.
What is Bengt saying?
The hacienda must be built?
Something else?
You don’t know. You won’t know. It can’t be heard. Travels away with the wind.
•
But, where did the music start? Here. Exactly right here, in any case
.
And: it is
not
an image. It is how it is. Bengt, my father, and the American girl Eddie de Wire who in one eternal moment rule over everything.
And at the same time, on the Glitter Scene, this room now. In the sun that suddenly, for a few seconds, peers out and lights up everything, the first rays of sun in January. The great deserted wooden floor is glittering.
With tinytiny butterflies. I turn around. Now I see.
That what remains up here in the empty room is tinytiny butterflies wedged in between floorboards everywhere. Velvet insects, different colors, in silver clips. The ones that fell out of Ulla Bäckström’s large, wonderful hair.
•
“JOHANNAA! Come now!” Solveig calls from the floor below. I leave the room, have to go.
“It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” which occurs in several places in Susette’s and Maj-Gun’s stories, is from Hebrews 10:13. “The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at” (
this page
) is from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton” in
Four Quartets
. “Ready to be gone,” about the Glitter Scene (
this page
), is from Jean Cocteau,
The Holy Terrors
, translated by Rosamond Lehmann. The idea about becoming moral as soon as you are unhappy (
this page
) is Marcel Proust’s (thanks to Malin Kivelä).
I took the characterization of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and several statements about Mahler and his music from a fantastic article about Mahler and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum: “Närhet och utanförskap” (Proximity and Exclusion) by Lena von Bonsdorff, published in
HBL
, June 2008. This article, which breaks down intellectual defenses, was an important source of inspiration for me.
The people and places in the novel are fictional through and through, but I have taken the liberty of borrowing the names of the captains’ homes, Java and Sumatra, from reality; these are the names of two of the most beautiful houses in Hangö. The islands of Java and Sumatra are of course located where they are in the Indian Ocean, next to each other with Borneo just
above; it was not really possible to find other nonfictive examples.
Thanks to Silja and Tapani for their indefatigable support and encouragement, and thanks to Hilding, more than words can say.