The American Girl (2 page)

Doris was already dead as a rock when Rita made it to Lore Cliff. She was lying on her stomach, with her head and hair hanging down over the dark water. In blood. And Rita lost it. She tore and pulled at the dead and still warm body. She tried to lift Doris up, and how absurd was that, to carry her.

Carry Doris over troubled water
.

Solveig had to do everything in her power to try and calm Rita down. And suddenly the woods were filled with people. Doctors, police officers, ambulances.

But. Doris Night
and
Sandra Day.

In one of their games.

They had been two, actually. Sandra and Doris, two.

Doris Day&Sandra Night
. That was the other girl, she had also had many names, which they made up during their games. Games that had been played with the best friend, the only friend, the only only only, Doris Flinkenberg, at the bottom of the swimming pool without water, so far. It was Sandra, she was bedridden for weeks after Doris’s death, in a four-poster bed in the house in the darker part of the woods that was her home. She lay with her face turned toward the wall, knees bent and pulled up toward her stomach. She had a fever.

A stained, worn nylon T-shirt under the big pillow. Loneliness&Fear: the other copy of the only two in the history of the world. She squeezed the shirt so hard her knuckles turned white.

If she closed her eyes she saw blood everywhere. She was in the Blood Woods, wandering there in the darkness, confused, like a blind person.

Sandra and Doris: it had been the two of them, they had been best friends.

And, only Sandra Wärn out of everyone knew this: Sister Night&Sister Day. It was a game they had played. And in just this game she had been the girl who had drowned in Bule Marsh many years ago. She who was called Eddie de Wire. Her, the American girl.

The game had another name as well. It had been called the Mystery with the American Girl.

And it had its own song. The Eddie-song.

Look, Mom, they’ve destroyed my song
.

And all the words and peculiar sayings had also belonged to the game.

“I’m a strange bird, are you too?”

“The heart is a heartless hunter.”

“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.”

But,
shadow meets shadow
. There, in the darkness, those weeks when Sandra did not leave her room, it happened sometimes that she crawled out of bed and stood by the window and looked out. Looked out over the muddy landscape out there, over the familiar, low-lying marsh, over the clump of reeds . . . but more than anything toward the grove off to the side. That was the direction in which her gaze was drawn. That is where
he
was usually standing.

And he was standing there now, looking at her. Her behind the curtains in the room with the lights out. Him out there. They stood there across from each other and stared at each other.

One of them was the boy, and he was Bengt. Quite a bit
older now. The other was the girl, Sandra Wärn. Who was the same age as Doris had been when she died, sixteen years old.

2008, the Winter Garden
. Johanna is walking in the Winter Garden. And everything is still there, these many years later.

In Rita’s Winter Garden, a park, a world all by itself. A defined space for entertaining, recreation, enchantment.

A world in and of itself, for games, also adult games.

But at the same time it is an intricate combination of public and private, conventional and normal, but also the secret, forbidden.

Because there are things in the Winter Garden you do not talk about, things you only imagine. Underground and above. Secret rooms, a labyrinth.

You can walk down there and experience almost anything.

All of the old things, in their own way. The District and its history are also in the Winter Garden. Like pictures on the walls, names and words, music.

Carry Doris over troubled water
.

Death’s spell at a young age
.

Nobody knew my rose of the world but me
.

I walked out one evening, out into a grove so green
.

Shots, I think I hear shots
.

Look, Mom, they’ve destroyed my song
.

In the middle of the Winter Garden there is
kapu kai,
the forbidden seas
.

Loneliness&Fear

Doris Night. And Sandra Day
.

2008, the Winter Garden
. Johanna is walking in the Winter Garden. She works here after school and on the weekends.

You have access here after the other areas are closed. Johanna can be alone here, she likes being here.

Johanna loves the hours when she rambles around on her own in the Winter Garden, with music flowing in her ears. The Marsh Queen’s music.

She is seventeen years old, it fascinates her.

But she is also looking for something special. That room, that red room. It happened at Bule Marsh room. That which belongs to
kapu kai
, the forbidden seas.

What happened at Bule Marsh once, everything is in that room.

She ended up there once by mistake. She has looked for it but never found it again. And now she knows for sure that she has to find her way there again.

Because it was like this a long time ago, New Year’s 2000 when the Winter Garden was inaugurated. It was that night eight years ago.

It was her and her brother. They were not supposed to be there, their mother Solveig had forbidden them.

But they went through the woods anyway, just the two of them, in the middle of the night, and they came to the Winter Garden.

The children came to the Winter Garden, which revealed itself in the woods, there where the Second Cape began. The ornate old-fashioned letters over the gate drew your thoughts to an old-fashioned garden in another country, with sphinxes on both sides of the entrance, and the light, most of all the light. A silver and metallic shine so strong that the children who had come out of the darkness of the woods were blinded
.

It was so beautiful, so tremendous
.

Stirring emotions the children had never felt before
.

They walked in toward the clear, sharp light, toward the people and the party, to everything within it
.

B
ARON VON B. LIKED TO PLAY POKER. HE WAS NOT ALWAYS
lucky, but he took the defeat like a man is supposed to. That is to say, he paid out without making a face.

In the beginning there was the District. The Second Cape and the First Cape and the great woods and something else too. In the beginning was the war, and the war, it was lost.

Certain areas caught the eye of the victorious nation, the great land in the east, areas that were highly desirable for future military exploits and just in general, and the country could keep its independence regardless.

One area was handed over to the victorious nation, for a time. The District was located in just that area. Consequently, the people were evacuated and everyone was forced to move, and later during the years that followed it was as though the area was closed off from the outside world.

It was during these tumultuous years that Baron von B., who happened to own almost all of the Second Cape and a significant portion of the woods and so on, sat down at the poker table. And played. And lost. And played. And lost.

Against the cousin’s papa and the Dancer. They won everything.

The whole of the Second Cape, a significant portion of the woods, and so on.

And some years later when the occupied area was returned it was not the baron but the cousin’s papa and the Dancer and his wife with their three children who came to the District. And settled there. Like a real clan.

And that is what they were in the beginning. But shortly thereafter the Dancer and his wife were killed in a car accident and the three children became orphans.

The three children: that was Bengt and the twins, Rita and Solveig.

B
ENGT AND THE BUILDINGS, 1969
.
AS A CHILD BENGT WAS
fascinated by the buildings on the Second Cape. They were built on land the cousin’s papa had sold for large sums of money. The Second Cape was a peninsula jutting out into the sea, one of the most beautiful places in the District. The area was divided into individual parcels of land on which houses were built, modern vacation homes for an exhibition of country living, one of the first public displays of its kind organized in the country. When the exhibition was launched one summer at the end of the sixties, the houses were sold one after the other, for the most part as vacation homes for people with money, the houses were not exactly cheap, and often to people without any ties to the District.

They were unique houses, utopian houses. Houses built in a bold, new architectural style. And Bencku, he knew about architecture, he knew those houses. He had studied their blueprints and discussed them with the architects, he had hung around the buildings while they were being built. So he was obsessed with them long before they were finished.

He also saw himself as being the expert on them; he knew more about them than their future owners, more than the architects who had drawn them. Because he was the one who was from the District, the only one who knew the houses in that environment.

And the surroundings, the District, it was his world: the Second Cape, the First Cape, the four marshes, and the long, deep
woods that ended by the marshes in the east—there where the house in the darker part gradually came to be built.

And the entire District existed in Bencku’s head in a truly unique way. That is what he drew on his maps. He would devote himself to these maps during the remainder of his youth.

Bencku and the maps
. They were not exactly a secret. He spoke about them, in any case, with the people he knew well. But there were not many who got to see them, almost no one, so many thought it was just talk. That it was just Bencku who wanted to seem self-important, as usual.

But they existed. They existed in reality. Little by little Bencku drew in almost all of the houses, all of the places, everywhere in the District. But in his own way. He used pictures, codes, and his own names. Names that were a mixture of the traditional names in the District and all of the words he had made up or looked up in books.
Kapu kai
, for example, it means
secret ocean
in acronesian.

The names also served another purpose for Bengt. It is like this: he thought that regardless of who was going to come live and own the houses on the Second Cape, the houses were, by virtue of him being the one who had named them, his.
Just like everything was his
.

Bencku himself
. He was thirteen years old then, tall, and looked considerably older. A surly and taciturn fellow, who kept to himself for the most part; except sometimes, when he was among people he knew, it could happen that impassioned, he opened up and held lengthy expositions about this and that and it seemed as though he was the only one who was interested. Architecture and crime, monochronics within landscape architecture, that sort of thing.

“Bencku is bananas,” his sister Solveig would often say to her twin Rita when it was just the two of them in the red cottage.

“He has a screw loose,” Rita would second. It was a time, at the beginning of time,
once long ago
, when the sisters had always been in agreement.

Rita, Solveig, Bengt: the three siblings did not have very much in common, though they were all tall. And that there was not much of anything else was something Rita and Solveig were really very careful about pointing out.

And all three of them were “cousins” in the cousin’s house. They had been taken in by the cousin’s papa and the cousin’s mama, whom the cousin’s papa had married when his brother and his brother’s wife had been killed in a tragic car accident when the three siblings were little. The cousin’s mama had a son of her own when she came to the house, he was Björn. And the cousin’s mama, she was Superintendent Loman’s daughter, and basically someone who stood with both feet firmly on the ground in all kinds of weather.

Cousin Björn
shared a room with Bengt on the second floor of the cousin’s house. Björn was eighteen years old, worked in the woods and might go to school to become an agronomist. For the most part he hung out in the barn on the cousin’s property, tinkered with his moped or with junk which there was a great deal of in the cousin’s papa’s extensive collection. Bengt was often there with him; Bengt and Björn, they stuck together.

They were best friends despite the fact that Björn was five years older. And in some way they were a lot alike, for example both of them were rather quiet. Björn’s silence was less noticeable than Bengt’s, it was like Bengt was a bit more prickly. Björn was well liked and friendly, and easy to get along with.

Björn and Bengt: together they made an amusing, odd couple. People would sometimes say
the collected silence
. Bengt, thirteen years old, and half a head taller than Björn, the older, thoughtful one. The cousin’s mama used to say “the apples of my eyes” about both boys.

. . .

So that is the way it was before Eddie came, before Bencku met Eddie and everything changed. And once everything started changing, everything happened very quickly. In less than one year everything that had been would be destroyed.

Eddie from the boathouse on the Second Cape, Eddie with the guitar and the thin, flat voice, but it did not matter. Eddie who spoke with a strange accent and with phrases that were sometimes very bizarre, but that still, and maybe just because they were so strange, made an impact on you.

“I’m a strange bird, Bengt,” she said. “Are you too?”

Eddie, the American girl.

Eddie most beloved, but in the mire.