The American Girl
Authors: Monika Fagerholm
P
UBLISHER’S
N
OTE
:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Nobody knew my rose of the world but me
.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
____________
It happened at Bule Marsh 1969–2008. . .
Bengt and the American girl
(Bengt’s story) . . .
The house in the darker part of the woods
(Sandra’s story 1) . . .
The most beautiful story ever told
•
The story about the house on the First Cape/Doris’s happiest story
The women and the whores
(Sandra and Doris’s story 1) . . .
1. The women
•
Women in a state of emergency
•
2. . . . and the whores
•
The end of the Mystery with the American girl
When the summer throws you away (Sandra and Doris’s story 2) . . .
The Music (Sandra’s story 2) . . .
The planet without Doris
•
The road out into the Blood Woods
•
The lover
•
The most secret story
Scenes from a marriage (Sandra eavesdropping among the shoes, somewhat later) . . .
Sandra Night/Doris Day, Doris Night/Sandra Day
•
The girl turned toward the window
•
The last hunt
____________
T
HIS IS WHERE THE MUSIC BEGINS. IT IS SO SIMPLE. IT IS AT
the end of the 1960s, on Coney Island in New York. There is a beach and boardwalk, a small amusement park, some restaurants, fun slot machines, and so on.
There are a lot of people here. She does not stick out from the crowd. She is young, fifteen-sixteen, dressed in a thin, light-colored dress. Her hair is blond and a bit limp, and she has not washed it in a few days. She comes from San Francisco and, before that, from somewhere else. She has all of her belongings in a bag she wears over her arm. A shoulder bag, it is blue and has “Pan Am” on it.
She walks around a bit listlessly, talks to someone here and there, answers when she is spoken to, looks a little bit like a hippie girl, but that is not what she is. She is not anything, actually. She travels around. Lives from hand to mouth. Meets people.
Do you need a place to crash?
There is always someone who asks.
And you can still live like that, even during those times.
She has a few dollars in her hand, ones she has just gotten from someone. She asked for them, she is hungry, she wants food. Really she is just hungry, nothing more. But she is happy otherwise, it is such a beautiful day here, outside the city. The sky is endless, and the world is large.
She sees a few kids who are pretending to sing in front of a machine where you can record your own song. They can still be found here and there even during those times, and exactly
at places like these: “Record your own song and give it away to someone. Your wife, your husband, a friend. Or just keep it for yourself.”
Like a small silly memento.
She steps into the machine just for fun and randomly starts feeding coins into it.
You can select background music, but she does not. She pushes Record and then she sings.
Look, Mom, they’ve destroyed my song
.
It does not sound very good. It really does not. But it does not mean anything.
Look, Mom, what they’ve done to my song
.
The words do not fit very well with reality. It is such a beautiful day out there.
And when she has finished singing she waits for the record and gets it.
And then she suddenly remembers that she is supposed to meet someone here.
She is in a hurry to get to the designated place, it is a park.
She is going to meet a relative. A distant one. Not the relative, but the distance to the place where the relative lives. It is a place on the other side of the earth.
That was the girl, Eddie de Wire. The American girl who was found drowned in Bule Marsh, the District, a few years later. A place on the other side of the earth.
____________
I
T HAPPENED IN THE DISTRICT, AT BULE MARSH. EDDIE’S DEATH
. She was lying at the bottom of the marsh. Her hair was standing out around her head in thick, long strands like octopus tentacles. Her eyes and mouth were wide open. He saw her from where he was standing on Lore Cliff, staring straight down into the water. He saw the scream coming out of her open mouth, the scream that could not be heard. He looked into her eyes, they were empty. Fish were swimming in and out of them and into her body’s other cavities. But later, when some time had passed.
He never stopped imagining it.
That she had been sucked down into the marsh like into the Bermuda Triangle.
Now she was lying there and was unreachable, a distance of about thirty feet, visible only to him, in the dark and murky water.
She, Edwina de Wire, Eddie. The American girl. As she was called in the District.
And he was Bengt. Thirteen years old in August of 1969 when everything happened. Eddie, she was nineteen. Edwina de Wire. It was strange. Later when he saw her name in the papers it was as if it was not her at all.
“I’m a strange bird, Bengt. Are you too?”
“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.”
She had talked that way, using peculiar words. She had been a stranger there, in the District.
The American girl
. And he, he had loved her.
. . .
There was a morning after night, a night when he had not been able to sleep. At daybreak he ran through the forest over the field over the meadow past the cousin’s house, the two decayed ramshackle barns and the red cottage where his sisters, Rita and Solveig, lived. He jumped over three deep ditches and got to the outbuilding by the border of Lindström’s land.
He walked into the outbuilding. The first thing he saw were the feet. They were hanging in the air. Bare feet, the soles gray and dirty. And lifeless. They were Björn’s feet, Björn’s body. Cousin Björn’s. And he was also only nineteen years old that same year, when he died by his own hand.
They had been a threesome: Eddie, Bencku, Björn. Now it was only him, Bencku. He was left alone.
And so, he stood and screamed out into the wild dazzling nature of late summer, so quiet, so green. He screamed at the sun, which had just disappeared behind a blue cover of clouds. At a dull, calm summer rain cautiously starting.
Drip-drip-drip
in an otherwise total and ghostly calm. But Bencku screamed. Screamed and screamed, even though he suddenly did not have a voice.
He became mute for long periods of time. Thoroughly mute: he had not spoken that much before, but now he was not going to say anything at all. According to the diagnosis, a clinical muteness brought on by a state of shock. As a result of everything that had happened during the night.
Another child was also moving around in the District then. She was there at all possible and impossible times of day, in every place, everywhere. It was Doris, the marsh kid. Doris Flinkenberg who did not have a real home then despite the fact that she was maybe only eight or nine years old.
It was Doris who said she had heard the scream at the outbuilding by the border of Lindström’s land.
“It sounded like a stuck lamb or the way only someone like Bencku sounds like,” she said to the cousin’s mama in the cousin’s kitchen in the cousin’s house where she gradually, after Björn’s death, would become a daughter herself, in her own right.
“It’s called a pig,” the cousin’s mama corrected her. “To squeal like a stuck pig.”
“But I mean lamb,” Doris would protest. “Because that’s what Bencku sounds like when he screams. Like one of those lambs you feel sorry for.
A sacrificial lamb.”
Doris Flinkenberg with her very own way of expressing herself. You did not always know if she was serious or if she was playing a game. And if it was a game, in that case, what kind?
“One man’s death is another man’s breath,” Doris Flinkenberg sighed in the cousin’s kitchen, so delighted over finally having her own home, a real one. Only someone like Doris Flinkenberg could say “One man’s death is another man’s breath” in such a way that it did not sound cynical but, actually, almost normal.
“Now, now, now.” The cousin’s mama said to Doris nevertheless, “What are you actually saying?” But there was still something soft in her voice, in a calm and settled way. Because it was Doris who had come to the cousin’s house and given the cousin’s mama her life and all her hopes back after the death of Björn, her darling boy.
But who could have imagined then that only a few years later Doris would be dead as well.
It happened in the District, at Bule Marsh, death’s spell at a young age
. It was a Saturday in the month of November. Dusk slowly transformed into darkness and Doris Flinkenberg, sixteen years old, wandered through the woods on the familiar path down to Bule Marsh. With quick and determined steps. The growing
darkness did not bother her, her eyes had time to get used to it and the path was familiar to her, almost too familiar.
And it was Doris Night, or was it Doris Day, or was it the Marsh Queen, or one of the many other identities in the many games she had already had time to play in her life? You did not know. But maybe it was not important anymore.
Because Doris Flinkenberg, she had the pistol in her pocket. It was a real Colt, certainly antique, but in working condition nonetheless. The only thing of value that Rita and Solveig had ever inherited from anyone: a distant ancestor who, according to rumors, had bought it in 1902 at the big department store in the city by the sea.
Afterward, when Doris was dead, Rita would swear she did not know how the pistol, which was stored hidden away in a specific spot in her and Solveig’s cottage, had gotten into the hands of Doris Flinkenberg.
It would not be a complete lie, but also not entirely true.
Doris came to Bule Marsh and she walked up Lore Cliff. She stood there and counted to ten. She counted to eleven, twelve, and fourteen too, and to sixteen, before she had gathered enough courage to raise the pistol’s barrel to her temple and pull the trigger.
She had already stopped thinking, but her emotions, they swelled in her head and her entire body, everywhere.
Doris Flinkenberg wearing the Loneliness&Fear shirt. Old and worn now. A real cleaning rag, that was what it had become by this time.
But anyway, in the space between two numbers the resolution had taken hold of Doris Flinkenberg anew. And she just raised the barrel of the pistol to her temple, and,
click
, she pulled the trigger. But first she shut her eyes and screamed. Screamed in order to drown herself out, to drown out her fear, and the shot itself, which she would not hear anymore, so that was even more absurd.
Shots, I think I hear shots
.
It echoed in the woods, everywhere.
It was Rita who heard the shot first. She was in the red cottage about a third of a mile from Bule Marsh with her sister Solveig. And it was strange, as soon as she heard the shot she knew exactly what had happened. She tore her jacket from the wall and ran out, through the woods to the marsh with Solveig after her. But it was too late.