The American Girl (5 page)

“I took them from the boathouse. This is why you’re here, isn’t it?

“Interesting,” the baroness continued. “Almost like works of art. You have an artistic talent, there’s no doubt about that. But a talent does not develop on its own. It demands work. Discipline. One cannot be . . . lazy.” It was as though she also had not opened her mouth for some time, and as if she was not very careful about what she let slip. Her thoughts were somewhere else entirely.

“May I get you a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you.” He shook his head, took the roll of maps, and left.

She came looking for him that same evening, at the cousin’s house. She came to his room where he was lying on his bed next to the desk in front of the window and determined what he had already determined many times before: this was the room he could no longer be in. Then the baroness had suddenly been standing in the middle of the room and she spoke to him. Looked straight at him, as if she found everything else around her completely meaningless.

“I was thinking that if you need someplace to be . . . I mean with your . . . painting . . . a studio. You always have.” She hurried to add, “Not the boathouse. But the house. There are so many bright rooms there, which are fantastic to draw in.”

Bencku went back the next day. He had been assigned one of the large, bright rooms on the third floor.

“You will certainly have a good perspective here.” The baroness
laid her hand on his shoulder in the same rough and plucky way she had when she spoke.

“You can certainly find inspiration here.”

He shook himself free. What did she really want from him? Was there not that tone in her voice again that made you think she was just about to say something else? That that was why he was here, because she had something to say?

“Come and I’ll show you where the key to the kitchen entrance is. You may come and go as you like. Don’t worry about me.”

And he followed her out of the room, down the inner stairs in light-colored beautiful wood that led almost directly to the Winter Garden. Yes, everything was so high and bright in here, so clean, just like he remembered it from the housing exhibition, and before. But Eddie had not had access here. She had been allowed to be here only when the baroness was home.

“You don’t have to feel forced to keep me company,” she said later. “I’m used to being by myself. Eddie . . . she was an episode. I mean, in the loneliness. I’ve lived alone almost all my life.”

But then it was as if she had pulled herself together again and came across other thoughts. “Oh. What I am standing here telling you? The story of my life?

“Life must go on,” the baroness said, low and serious. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

But he could not be in that room, he had understood that almost immediately. He stared at the white paper in front of him on the large worktable that she had carried in from somewhere else in the house. She had given him the paper also, he had never had nicer paper. He walked around the room. There were photographs there, lined up on a dresser, which was white, and in some way it gave him the idea that it was not a coincidence they were there, those pictures. That it was exactly
this room he had been given in order to “draw and become inspired in.” They were the type of family photographs of serious uncles and austere aunts in long dark dresses. Boys in sailor’s outfits, girls in light-colored dresses, with thick, long hair with rosettes. Bencku thought: is this what she wants to tell me? Is this what she wants me to be interested in? Her relatives and family with all their peculiarities, her relatives who had also been Eddie’s relatives?

But when it was not like that. Not a question of any of it. He was not interested. Not a bit. But still. He could not keep his eyes off of the pictures. He knew what he was looking for.

Her somewhere there. And of course he found what he was looking for.

A portrait. Showing a completely normal girl in a poorly taken photo. A school photo, or something similar.

She was looking straight into the camera, she was looking straight at him, with her scared, scared eyes. There was no obvious sadness in them, just, nothing.

He took the photo and left the Glass House for good. The baroness was in her Winter Garden when he left. He lifted his hand to wave. She gesticulated wildly with the scissors. There was nothing grand about it. Maybe she did not understand that he would not be coming back, but later when she eventually realized she let it go, she did not look for him all over again.

So, he went straight to Rita and Solveig in the cottage.

And after that, he filled things in on the map.

The girl in the marsh. Eddie’s death.

A few days later he moved into the barn on the cousin’s property where he insulated a room for himself. Sealed the walls with newspaper and rock wool, bought a Russian wood stove on a payment plan from the cousin’s papa out of his warehouse. A bed, an armchair, a piece of plywood for a table. A bookshelf
for books, maps, documents. Brought out Björn’s record player and some records.

Three on the jetty
. It was fall again, the time of the rats, all the summer guests had left. Rita, Solveig, and Bengt were sitting with their backs toward land at the very end of the longest jetty on the Second Cape, dangling their legs in the water and talking about something but you could not hear what it was.

And there came Doris Flinkenberg, over the cliffs on the Second Cape. Doris, with the tape player, the one she had gotten from the cousin’s mama when she came to live in the cousin’s house as a new cousin, a wedding present, she said herself, and when others other than the cousin’s mama caught wind of that, it sounded quite ridiculous. Doris could be heard from a distance now, the music playing as she was on the move. When she caught sight of Rita, Solveig, and Bencku she immediately directed her steps toward them and called out, at the beginning of the jetty, a big and resounding “HI!”

No reaction. Not even so much as a movement. Doris was like air to them. But do not think that Doris let this stop her. She set down the radio cassette player (she was extremely careful with it, one of the few presents she had ever gotten from anyone, and furthermore, even more important, it was the visible confirmation of her new status: she was a cousin’s child now too) and walked farther out on the jetty until she was fifteen-eighteen feet behind the others who were still pretending not to notice her. She held out her hand and her index finger and yelled:

“Pang! Pang!
Now I shot you!” Then something amusing happened. Everyone turned around at lightning speed, almost instantly. And their expressions, they were priceless. There was fear in them, and surprise.

Doris Flinkenberg thought it was hilarious.

“The looks on your faces!” she called delightedly. “Scared out of your wits! It was just a finger, the Doris Finger here!”

Rita was the first to recover. She got up slowly and started walking toward Doris with that stiff face she had when she was really angry. Doris flinched.

But at the same time the cousin’s mama was there: she had popped up on the cliffs by the sea behind them.

“Doris!” she called. “Are you coming? We’re going to bake bread now!”

In the beginning that was how the cousin’s mama was after Björn’s death. She could not leave Doris Flinkenberg, the new cousin’s child, out of her sight.

And Doris, who for a brief moment had been afraid of Rita and the others, relaxed.

“I’m coming!!!” she called to the cousin’s mama. And then she turned back to the other three, just as brazen as before.

“Only guilty people turn around!” she said.

And:

“I know something you would just die to know. I know something that you would rather die than wish that I knew. I saw something.”

Room for me in the lodge
. When Björn had died and Bencku moved out to the barn, there was room for one more child in the cousin’s house. And that was Doris Flinkenberg, the knocked-about trash kid, who moved into Bencku and Björn’s old room on the second floor.

“My girl now,” the cousin’s mama said tenderly to Doris. “Of course on loan.”

“Not on loan,” Doris Flinkenberg protested, her mouth filled with bread. “For your own.”

Even though it could be trying to listen when Doris Flinkenberg and the cousin’s mama spoke their strange jargon with each other, it could not be denied that it was thanks to Doris Flinkenberg that the cousin’s mama got her lust for life back after Björn’s death. If Bengt had not been so crazy at first, she probably would
have gone crazy herself. That was not an option, she was also a mother of course, despite everything, the cousin’s mama, she said to herself, and everything could not fall apart. And for a while her purpose in life became organizing a safe home for the trash kid Doris Flinkenberg. And she was successful.

“One man’s death is another man’s breath,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “Then there was room for me in the lodge.” She was the only one who could say it and not have it sound cynical.

Stories in the kitchen of the cousin’s house
. The story about Eddie, Björn, and Bengt faded away in the District. You stopped talking about it, life went on.

That is the way it was. Björn had gotten angry with Eddie, he had a violent temperament under that kind-natured surface, and everyone knew it. And there had been a scuffle at the marsh and she ended up in the water and it all happened so quickly,
the current in the marsh is so strong
, he had not been able to save her.

For a long time there was only one place where the story lived on and it was, strangely enough, the kitchen in the cousin’s house. It was the cousin’s mama and, more than anything, Doris Flinkenberg who kept it alive. There, surrounded by the smell of baking bread, among crosswords and dictionaries and newspapers,
True Crimes
, it was told over and over again from certain fixed points of view. Analyzed and commentated on by both Doris Flinkenberg and the cousin’s mama in their own, particular ways.

“It’s never good to get attached to SOMEONE like he was attached to her,” the cousin’s mama said to Doris Flinkenberg.

“Pretty girl,” Doris Flinkenberg added, carelessly, with a voice unlike her own. Doris was good at imitating, both real people and familiar voices. Now she continued, as if she were an uncle or an aunt, far too sensible: “But probably spoiled by the men’s attention already at such a young age. But,” with a final rhetorical fling, “what would I know about that?”

No one answered that question. But the cousin’s mama clapped her hands.

“After all she wasn’t from here. I don’t know from where, but not from here.”

“Not from the District,” Doris decided firmly, mouth full of a bread roll. “Didn’t value what we value here. Thought she was remarkable. Something special. You made your bed, now lie in it. Isn’t that true?”

But the cousin’s mama did not answer. Sometimes Doris Flinkenberg had the ability to carry her strange, playful ideas way too far.

“It was almost painful to see,” said the cousin’s mama, but flatter and more serious now. She had stopped herself in the middle of happily solving her crossword, dropped the pencil on a photograph in the middle of the crossword, a photo of the teenage pop singer Agnetha Fältskog, who wore a jersey dress with a heart-shaped hole through which her navel could be seen, and was completely still, looking out through the window.

“Why painful?” Doris Flinkenberg hurried to ask.

The cousin’s mama did not answer. A muffled silence spread through the kitchen. Sometimes the cousin’s mama’s grief still caught her unawares and all of the old stuff floated up, she floated away—

Doris reached out for an issue of
True Crimes
and randomly flipped to an article she started reading out loud in order to get the cousin’s mama thinking about something else. Away from that,
you always travel on your own in the land of sorrow
, which she had said once, so solemnly it sounded like she was in church. It was terrifying not least because of all of the terrible things that had happened—Doris Flinkenberg had already, for better or for worse, experienced terrible things in her own life (she had for example grill marks on her body to prove it)—but also because it took the cousin’s mama away from her, to a place where neither she nor anyone else could go.

“He killed his lover with fifteen hammer blows to the head,” Doris Flinkenberg read aloud with her best Sunday school voice and later she said, innocently and surprised like the child she actually was, “Jealousy can cause all sorts of things, can’t it?” and laughed, carefully glancing playfully at the cousin’s mama, a small
rascal
who wanted to say: come with me.

And the cousin’s mama came along. But not right away. She still had to sit quietly and be in her own world for a while.

Because sometimes it did not help. Sometimes nothing helped against the sorrow and the unavoidable. Sometimes you just had to wait, wait until the cousin’s mama would become herself again.

“Dé-co-lle-ta-ge,” she later said suddenly and pointed at the singer’s navel. “But you’re supposed to have that sort of thing on your neck.”

Doris Flinkenberg brightened.

“Oh. That’s not a décolletage. It’s just a pop singer’s belly button.”

By the house in the darker part of the woods, he found himself there more and more
. He had started going there instead. Found himself there more often. Forty steps of cold concrete in the front, the flat roof, the small holes for windows. Large windows only in the basement facing the surrounding jungle. And it was a jungle: ferns and secondary growth grew tall, cramped during the warmest months of the year. Ferns whose stems could grow three feet high.

Yes indeed. An alpine villa. It was true.

But he was there more and more often, in the bushes, at the edge of the woods.

And saw.

There was a girl there, at the top of the stairs. She was maybe Doris’s age, in any case crazy enough that no one had to tell you she was the one who lived there. She would stand there
and ring her own doorbell. Ring and ring. For which there was, you understood if you stood and stared for long periods of time (which he did), no intelligible reason. The doorbell played some kind of melody, and that was what she set off, over and over again. She probably had a key, you understood that—but it was not the most important thing. Sometimes she opened the door herself in the middle of the song (and then the music grew quiet), only to close it and ring the doorbell again immediately after. When she had been doing this for a good while her parents turned up, a relatively pretty woman who had a strange piercing voice when she yelled (and she yelled at the girl, it always ended with that) and a man who always wore sunglasses. They were angry with the girl, they scolded her, as you would scold a spoiled child.