The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  “Cut and sew together!” That was the worst part. Not on your life! And the suggestion, expressed so bluntly, had just resulted in Sandra becoming even more stubborn. She had gradually, with her notorious crying spells as a weapon, simply refused to go to the doctors’ offices. Just refused. And God help the one who did not respect her decision. Then . . . UAAAH! In other words, it was at the time the nurse at the French School was having her eyes opened to Sandra’s harelipped state.

  And this refusal, where did it come from?

  Was it because as a child she was already dead set on cultivating this split as an attitude toward life, as a powerful OTHER perspective in favorable situations in any case? Unfortunately not.

  She was scared to death, that was the truth. Afraid of the operating knives, afraid of the anesthesia, of the mere thought. A normal, petty fear. She was almost ashamed of this fact when she contemplated it herself.

  But with the school nurse at the French School it had been about something else from the very beginning. In the beginning, Sandra had gone to her mostly in order to have something to do during the breaks and the study periods. In order to kill time. She was bored, had almost no friends. In itself, not having any friends at the French School was not very agonizing because there were so many students who were like her—reserved, self-centered, and scared to death of everything. Some of these children knew no French or any, as it sometimes seemed, other languages. They had traveled around the world so much they had not properly learned a single language at all.

  But Sandra went to the school nurse because she noticed that she liked to have someone to talk to about her afflictions, imagined and real, and be taken seriously.

  The school nurse could do nothing else. It was her job and her employers were not just anybody. The French School was a private school with an exclusive student body, which was not necessarily the same thing as talented but rather students with parents who were diplomats, employed in the international business world, and the like. So the everyday school nurse was a spirited, robust, and sufficiently primitive element in that environment. As long as she lived up to that role: one of those small, genuine people among the bigger, smarter ones.

  But even simple people have secrets, even though they can be quite small. And that was what Sandra had done: she had picked up on the school nurse’s secret. It was quite simply that the school nurse despised the teachers and above all the parents of the students at the French School, those who always, also in their absence, used their money and their influence to decide everything. But she liked children. Normal children: despite the fact that there was a certain lack of this kind of child at the French School, children who suffered from normal childhood afflictions such as flat feet, or bleeding gums as the result of a plain diet or quite simply malnutrition. And in the French School she attached herself above all to the ones who had some hint of a disability, and preferably because she was so practically inclined, a visible one.

  This is what Sandra had seen and been moved by.

  “Here comes happiness!”

  PADAM! Back to the apartment, Lorelei Lindberg’s birthday, reality. The door to the bedroom had been thrown wide open and finally there was the Islander with the champagne, cigarillos, and the enormous box that almost had to be pushed in. And with his happy yell. “Here comes happiness!” Lorelei Lindberg brightened up and was like a child again, the way she was when she got presents. She quickly jumped out of bed in her baby doll nightie and threw herself at the box. Tearing off the silver paper, throwing aside the ribbon and the bow without giving them a second glance, and in no time she got out . . . a die. Exactly that. Light yellow and enormous, a very enormous one, made of plastic.

  A few days earlier the Islander had asked an acquaintance from his hunting league if he could have it, a league he had, before Lorelei Lindberg, been an active member in. An acquaintance who coincidentally happened to be the director of an entire ice cream factory. Sandra, the unlucky accomplice, knew everything about this as well; furthermore she had been present at the transfer in the office of the ice cream factory. The enormous die with lid was an advertising model from the previous season and had originally been used during a failed launch of vanilla ice cream portions packed in small, small plastic dice in different colors. The advertising die had been in the director’s office for a long time already, as an almost unlucky reminder of the unpleasant faux pas in the marketing. A true businessman does not like to fail; not a lot of convincing was needed from the Islander’s side in order for him to be given it for free. Sandra, on the other hand, she got ice cream, and as much as she could eat too. She had eaten from this blood ice cream, eaten, eaten, eaten. And now, when she was lying under the quilt on her mother’s side of the marital bed, she promised herself that she would never never eat ice cream again.

  “Is it a diamond?” Lorelei Lindberg asked, filled with happy expectation while she eagerly pried at the plastic lid. When she had gotten it open she let out such a loud and high-spirited shriek that Sandra just had to look out from her hiding place and then glitter confetti rained over her as well.

  Silver confetti over the entire room, everywhere. That was what the Islander had filled the entire die with. And for a moment Lorelei Lindberg was occupied with just the confetti. The Islander too, of course. They threw it around and yelled and became monkeys again, they were orangutan Gertrud in a yellow lace nightgown and chimpanzee Göran in a captain’s suit and dark sunglasses. The Islander opened the champagne bottle, ploff! the cork flew across the room. Veuve Clicquot, and little Sandra crept out of the bed over the floor after the cork like a well-trained dog because she collected the small metal plates on the top of these corks on which the same grouchy lady was always pictured. Sandra had quite a few already, but that was of course exactly how it was supposed to be in the real life of a jet-setter.

  The small, soft silk dog was hunting again. The confetti was mixed with sticky champagne that flowed and flowed and so, yet again, another of Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander’s passionate chaoses was a reality.

  But Lorelei Lindberg gradually calmed down and discovered her present anew. Lifted the die up in the air with both hands, turned it upside down, and shook out the rest of the confetti over the floor. Now she knew what she was looking for: plop it fell out among the last of the glitter dust, the small, small box. Sure enough, a box of matches that originated from the nightclub the Running Kangaroo, which they had visited many times at the Austrian ski resort where Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander and Sandra (the little silk dog) had spent their honeymoon, their seventh, eighth, ninth . . . and it just happened to be one of the very finest examples in Sandra’s matchbox collection (yes, she collected matchboxes too). Not long ago when the Islander, during the planning of the birthday surprise, had asked his daughter to get out her collection and pick out a really nice box, he was the one who had laid eyes on it.

  “Ha-ha!” Lorelei Lindberg yelled and pushed out the box. “A diamond,” she repeated, certain of victory. She liked guessing what presents she was going to get, and for the most part she was usually right.

  But now it was no gemstone she had unwrapped from the soft, white cotton that Sandra had laid in the box as a bed, but a key. A completely ordinary key, a Medeco.

  “What’s this? Where does this go?” she asked a bit hesitantly, a bit nonplussed, but yet not exaggerated. There were, after all, so many fun boxes and drawers and cabinets that had locks in them where such a small, phenomenal, as-ordinary-as-could-be key could fit.

  “Get dressed now!” The Islander tore the quilt off of the bed where Sandra was still lying. “Both of you! We’re going!”

  “I burned my arm!” Sandra whined slowly, but of course there was no one who had time to notice her wailing now.

  Out to the car with all of them, the Islander behind the wheel, they drive off.

  That was how they came to the District. That was how they came to the house in the darker part of the woods.

  Because th
e house. It became an anomaly. It was built in the darker part of the woods, in the District behind the woods on a piece of property that lay by a shallow, muddy marsh, and only in his wildest dreams, which the Islander sometimes could be good at when things were getting out of hand at work, could he call it a beachfront property—though it had been sold as one.

  On the outside, the house was square, a rectangle in grayish-white brick and cement. It had a flat roof that was bordered by a wide copper-colored edging, there were some porthole-shaped holes in the façade that were supposed to represent windows splat splat splat splat four in a row right under the border. But it was the staircase that was the most striking. About forty steps, twenty to twenty-five feet wide, in clean, gray cement. Crumbly, unbearable.

  The Islander had stopped the car on the hill above the house, which was located in the glen next to the swampy marsh, just before he let it roll down the road that led up to the stairs. And from that perspective, up on the hill, it looked like the entire house was a staircase. A stairway hanging in the air, leading to nothing.

  “A staircase up to heaven,” the Islander said to Lorelei Lindberg in the car while they were still on the hill. “This is where we’re going to live.” He added, just as if it was not enough already: “Everything is yours, Lorelei Lindberg. Just yours.” Only then did he ease on the brakes and let the car roll down the hill.

  Lorelei Lindberg was silent, completely silent. She stepped out of the car, she stood next to the lowest part of the house, she looked up. She looked at the long, tall gray stairs. Then she looked around. She looked at the Islander, at Sandra. There was no one else there in the woods, but still it was as if Lorelei Lindberg had looked around like someone who was surrounded by an audience of thousands. Like someone, to borrow an expression from Doris Flinkenberg who comes into the story quite soon, on the big glitter scene. But for once it was not about finding an outlet for an extreme need to make a spectacle, but to, well what? To save face? In that case, for whom?

  For herself. To hide her own confusion in the presence of herself. How she was taken unawares. My dream, did it look like this? Then it was easier if you were playing a role like someone who is performing on stage, in the beam of the floodlights, in the presence of a million faceless faces in the dark.

  Lorelei Lindberg said, “Fascinating.” Her voice was flat and toneless the first time she said it. Then she said “fascinating” a second time, a few seconds later. The second time she had already gotten a tiny bit of color in her voice, even if which color, which mood, was something you could not determine for sure and maybe she could not either.

  And Sandra looked around. She looked at the house, the copse, and the marsh. The Nameless Marsh, so small and petty that, as it would turn out, it did not have a name on Bencku’s maps. Though it was winter she could still vividly imagine the many different kinds of insects that would come to live around the house. Spiders, different kinds of creepy-crawlies—just the word caused shivers to run down her back. Mosquitoes, ordinary ones as well as the special kind of bullymosquitoes that seemed to exist only at the Nameless Marsh and nowhere else in the world. Small, so small, that they could barely be seen but still capable of leaving four-inch-wide pimples on your skin if they were able to bite you. Thankfully Sandra’s skin type was the bloodless kind, the kind of skin mosquitoes do not like. Super-sized rainbow flies. Beetles. Lots of beetles. Beetles with hard shells, clicking beetles, flying beetles . . .

  The Islander had taken off his dark sunglasses. Now he held his hand out to Sandra, who was so engrossed in her own thoughts that she was not able to get away in time. Gooberhead, didn’t he understand anything? Obviously not. The Islander’s hand landed on her shoulder and started clapping it. Pat pat pat. This was the way he wanted it: demonstratively conspiratorial. Now he would show Lorelei Lindberg that there had definitely been two of them involved in this. The entire rest of the family. He and their daughter, Sandra Wärn.

  But Lorelei Lindberg did not see them, not then. She was looking up, still. And she started walking up the stairs, step by step. After five or six steps she turned around for the first time and said, looking behind at her husband and at her daughter, with a voice that really was not hers, hesitating, veiled:

  “And you’ve kept this a secret from me?” Took a few more steps and when she turned around for the second time she turned not only toward them, the family members present, but to the entirety of her imaginary audience on the big glitter scene.

  “So this was the surprise,” she said. “Fascinating.” One’s dream: Had it looked like this? Was this really what she had meant?

  A stairway to nothing.

  But so again, aware of the thousands of pairs of eyes that were watching in her imagination, but aimed at only one in the entire world, she said, with a voice that they had never heard her use before. It was thin and childish, but so honest and so fragile. She said:

  “Thank you.”

  And those tiny, tiny words, which were not meant ironically at all, marked at the same time, in a creepy way, the end of her marriage to the Islander.

  Later did she turn toward all of the others:

  “I’ve never gotten a house from anyone. What do you say? You have to say: Thank you.”

  And she took the remaining steps sideways, tottered and almost lost her balance so that she had to steady herself on the outside wall and then she happened to touch the doorbell, which started ringing—or playing—its light-hearted alpine tune in march time. Nach Erwald und die Sonne. Schnapps, Karappff. Bier. Bier. For a moment the melody divided the compact silence in the woods.

  Lorelei Lindberg just stared at the clock, frightened, as if she had seen a ghost. The Islander started laughing. Lorelei Lindberg cast a quick glance at him again and one moment it was as though it was possible to discern something so unthinkable as fear in her otherwise mischievous eyes.

  Fear for her life.

  Regardless, the moment was quickly over because later Lorelei Lindberg broke out into a rippling laughter that welled out into the quiet world that surrounded her. And then, in that moment, Sandra was one hundred percent convinced that her mother was playing a role for all she was worth. That she was on the glitter scene again. But now the performance did nothing. The main thing was that everything was fairly normal again.

  The Islander and Lorelei Lindberg laughed. That was also normal. But it was not fun. It was just sad. All of this was so desperately depressingly saddeningly inscrutably sad.

  The music stopped playing. It became quiet again.

  Lorelei Lindberg, at the top of the landing, put the key in the lock, opened the door, and walked into the house.

  . . .

  “Everything is yours,” the Islander whispered again at the foot of the stairs. His voice was thick, he was moved by Lorelei Lindberg, moved by himself, moved by their love. Now he let go of his daughter and started following his wife up the long, long staircase, like someone hypnotized.

  “A staircase to heaven,” he whispered. “Everything is yours.”

  This long, long midmorning and the girl was still on the stairs, still below the house, still on her way up. Now Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander could be heard from inside the house, they sounded like they always did again. “Interesting,” Lorelei Lindberg said, that was what you heard, “interesting.” The front door was ajar, the horrible bell had stopped playing, the metal chains with the pinecones in the forest on the ends were still swinging back and forth, hitting the brick wall, dong, dong, dong. In other words, it was quiet otherwise. Desolate. Not a gust of wind through the trees. The type of silence that does not exist anywhere else but by the house in the darker part of the woods, by the Nameless Marsh: Sandra would get used to it, she would even learn to love it, but now it was the first time she experienced it and it was mostly strange, as if there lay a quiet threat in it. Was it the calm before the storm? Or the calm in the eye of the storm?

  Eye. Then she felt it on her back again. Maybe she had been fe
eling it for a while already, but she became aware of it now when she was alone outside the house. She turned around, had to force herself to do so because actually she really did not want to turn around at all, actually she wanted everything to just be normal.

  That was when she saw him.

  He was standing at the edge of the wood, in a glade on the right side, between the first higher branches of the wood, next to a rock. A boy maybe fifteen years old, maybe a little older—tall, skinny, wearing a brown jacket and blue farmer’s pants. But the eyes. They were small and penetrating and they were looking, maybe they had done so a good while already, straight at her.

  And she looked back, she forced herself to see. But he did not turn away either, not an inch. And when she had stared at him for a while she suddenly became scared for real, turned around and rushed head over heels up the stairs into the house.

  But once inside she did not stay with the adults on the upper floor; instead, with her heart pounding, still in a state, she continued straight down to the basement. As though led by an impulse that was, strangely enough, calming. Straight down the stairs at the other end of the narrow corridor that started by the entrance, and yes, it was dark in there, the small aperture windows in the rooms, which lined the corridor with the beige wall-to-wall carpet, were even smaller than they seemed when you looked at them from the outside. The stairs were a spiral staircase, modern, one with slits between the steps and large spaces between the posts in the railing.

  It was brighter on the lower level. That was due to the large panorama window, there was glass almost from floor to ceiling and for the most part it made up the entire wall on the back of the house that faced the marsh. Right now the window was so stained with dirt from the construction that you could see nothing through it. Later toward the spring and summer tall ferns and other overgrowth would burst forth from the ground and form a high and impenetrable jungle on the outside. But at certain times during the year, falls, winters, springs, it would be relatively light and very open down there.