The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  Inget Herrman who drew a picture of “the woman’s path and other paths” on the tablecloth with a pen. A figure that maybe slightly resembled the figures on Bencku’s maps but mostly in the intention, so to speak. Not in how they looked, in the aesthetic itself. They were not good-looking in any way, instead rather streaky and straggly.

  The woman’s path and other paths: it was a straight line that shot up out of the ground like the trunk of a tree, thick and determined; it was, Inget Herrman explained, “a woman’s path of tradition and custom.” But already almost from the beginning, from the root so to speak, other lines also extended from these, out, this way and that way, thinner, just as thick, in certain places thicker than that straight line that just went straight on and on.

  On the one hand the figure became something of a rather entangled bush, but on the other hand you could also see it, if you wanted to, like rays from a sun. Like lines of glitter, individual, separate, all sparkling in their own right.

  It was beautiful.

  And Inget Herrman exulted:

  “And what do we say about this? If it’s also like this?”

  And took a big gulp from her glass again, and added thoughtfully:

  “I think I’m also going to put this in the folder for my research material.”

  It was her thesis she was talking about.

  And it was Laura B-H, who was writing a novel up in the tower that summer, a novel about women that would later bring her honor and fame. Though she did not know it then, she was just sitting and writing.

  “About a real woman’s life for real. That’s important, I think.”

  Laura B-H who was lying down on her back on the ground in the garden one day, in order to read a poem that she had written once and had never finished. “It was in Ljubljana,” it started, and it had a thousand echo effects that she really could not manage keeping straight. “It was in Ljubljana,” and it described one of her own, personal experiences. How she had been out traveling, as “a lone woman in the world,” and suddenly just grown tired of how you were not allowed to be alone (in peace) anywhere, how there was always some guy there reminding you of who you were, smacking his lips in your ear and grabbing hold. In Ljubljana she had had enough. She had laid down right by the steps to the train station and yelled to everyone, “Come on then. Touch me. Walk over me.”

  But in her own mother tongue. No one had understood. And it had of course been, explained Laura B-H, her good luck.

  Because then the police arrived and she was arrested for disorderly conduct.

  She read that poem and it was hideous as a poem. Most of the women up there thought so too, but the ordeal itself, the experience was true. It existed.

  And you saw nothing of it then, it was something you would think about mostly later. That all of those people in the garden, everyone who had come here, who spent this time with the women in the garden, they all had something in their past that caused them to be right here at right this moment in the history of the world, and not anywhere else.

  In the garden in the middle, for the girls, for Magnus and Bencku, for the women themselves, but for others, still: on the side.

  In the garden in the middle, but still off to the side.

  The garden in the middle, but only for a while.

  The women would leave the house on the First Cape barely a year later, and that bus, Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn, would not start. While the women hung out in the garden, the light red bus Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn would stand parked below the hill and slowly rust away.

  “Now we have to get to the bottom of this,” Doris continued in the house in the darker part. “Take everything from the beginning. Leaving no suspects out.”

  Look, Mom, they’ve destroyed my song. When Doris and Sandra were not in the garden with the women they were occupied with their secret mystery. They listened to the record, the Eddie-record, when they were alone, over and over again. Sandra hummed and spoke like Eddie had spoken; she was quite good at it now.

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

  “The heart is a heartless hunter.”

  And the very best:

  “I’m a strange bird. Are you one too?”

  And she was wearing Eddie-clothes (it was a specially designed outfit that the girls had come up with, all on their own, and after coming up with this idea, Sandra Wärn had sewn it for herself using the sewing machine).

  And Doris rolled her eyes.

  “But Sandra. It’s so good. It’s just right.”

  And added:

  “Can I be factor X now?”

  Sandra nodded.

  And Doris was factor X and came forward and then they did everything they imagined Eddie and factor X had done. With feeling of course. But it had nothing to do with the embrace in the moss, the one that had taken place on Midsummer Eve, once quite a long time ago.

  It drifted away now. For the time being.

  . . .

  “Eddie,” said Doris. “She stole. Things. From the baroness. It drove the baroness mad with despair. ‘She is such a disappointment to me,’ she said to the cousin’s mama. It could very well have been a motive for murder.”

  “Mmm,” said Sandra, in the middle of the Eddie game.

  “Sandra, are you listening?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But still. I don’t really believe it. It was . . . family. And besides. Why would she invite the girl here from America just to kill her here?

  “It’s not really convincing,” Doris said and shoved Sandra who was humming her Eddie-song again.

  “And the cousin’s mama,” Sandra said.

  “What about her?” Doris asked viciously.

  “She couldn’t stand Eddie de Wire. I’m not saying she did it but we were going to look at everything, leaving nothing out. Maybe she was jealous. I mean, Bencku and Björn, they were the apples of her eye. Her children. And then the American girl came out of nowhere and took them away from her. Both of them, at once.”

  This had made Doris Flinkenberg deliberate for a moment.

  “Yeah,” she said carefully. “You’re right. But I don’t think so . . .” Doris thought for a while in order to come up with a real argument. “Once while Eddie was alive and was with Björn out there on the cousin’s property, she said, ‘That girl, Doris, is a theatrical performance.’ But later when everything had happened, she regretted it terribly. ‘I have such a hard time living, Doris,’ she said, ‘because of everything I’ve said. It’s too terrible. Certainly this is a tragedy, it breaks your heart. Young people, that they have to suffer so much.’ Sandra,” Doris asked, “do you think someone who had committed murder would talk like that?”

  Then Sandra became doubtful.

  “No. Definitely not.”

  “And besides,” Doris suggested, “just because you don’t like a person doesn’t mean that you want to kill her. Right? Not even the marsh mama wanted to kill me, directly. I was just so to speak—”

  “Sorry, Doris. I didn’t mean it. I don’t think that it was the cousin’s mama either.”

  “What do you think then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Things in motion,” Doris Flinkenberg continued. “That’s what Eddie, the American girl, said to him. It made an impression on him. He fell head over heels in love with her. For a while it was just the two of them. No one knows how serious it really was. It was one of the secrets about them. I saw.”

  “And we’re there again,” Sandra said and grew tense.

  “Yes,” Doris said in a sober tone of voice. “With factor X. With Bengt.”

  “So you’re sure it wasn’t him?” Sandra asked softly, as if she wanted to reassure herself again.

  “Bencku.” Doris laughed again. “No. Not Bengt. Then I would probably prefer the version everyone believes in. That it happened the way it looked like it had happened. Björn got mad at her at Bule Marsh and pushed her in the water and then he went off and hanged himself. It was the easiest so
to speak.”

  “Yeah,” said Sandra. “But Doris. Why all of that? I really don’t understand any of this. Why are we going to solve a mystery if there really isn’t a mystery?”

  And Sandra was calm and started pretending in the Eddie-clothes, glancing through the window as well, maybe one too many times because Doris was of the attentive kind.

  And Doris got up and climbed out of the pool.

  She went out into the rec room where the record player was.

  And came back, with the Eddie-record in her hand.

  . . .

  One last time. She stood at the edge of the pool with the record in her hand.

  “A little bird whispered in my ear,” she said happily, “that the American girl might be—”

  And then. She broke the record in half.

  “Alive.”

  Sandra saw the broken record. THE RECORD!! with Eddie’s voice, the highly unique—and she was beside herself.

  “What did you do?” And she became so angry that Doris was struck dumb.

  “You destroyed it!”

  “Yeah and so! We have other things to do than to lie here in the pool and pretend for strangers.”

  “Damn you, Doris!” Sandra screamed and ran away from the pool and up to her room and closed the door. Threw herself on her stomach in the marital bed and lay there and cried and screamed, cried and screamed, until little by little she did not understand why she was so upset.

  That record, Eddie. The American girl. All of it was so stupid. So damn stupid.

  Alive? Dead or alive. What did it matter? She was tired of this now, of the whole game.

  Doris. Where was Doris now?

  Had Doris left?

  But Doris had not left. She had not left the house. She had waited loyally outside the locked door to Sandra’s room. Standing there, occasionally knocking, furtively.

  “Sandra. Let me in now. I’m sorry.”

  And then, gradually, with Doris outside the door, and the crying that had stopped, the anger left her, Sandra calmed down. It was just a stupid record. In a game.

  And she crept over to the door and opened it.

  And there Doris was standing in her Playboy outfit, authentic according to the girls’ understanding about it all. A short skirt and rabbit ears on her head. It was too funny.

  “Now, Sister Night, we’re going to leave this for a while. Now we’re going to a party. There’s a masquerade in the garden on the First Cape. This is my outfit,” said Doris, as if it were news: Doris always wanted to have the same outfit if there was a masquerade. “And that’s your outfit. You can wear the Eddie-clothes. Is it even, then?”

  Women in a state of emergency (and the party culminates).

  And it was off to the garden, as always.

  “What is a thesis pro gradu?” Doris Flinkenberg asked Inget Herrman, now that she was bolder.

  “You’ll find out later,” said Inget Herrman. “When you’re older.” Because it was a bit later in the summer and Inget Herrman was not talking about her thesis so much anymore. “Believe me,” said Inget Herrman, “there will come a time when you’ll wish you didn’t know. That you hadn’t known at all.

  “When you realize that you felt better when you didn’t know,” Inget Herrman said and looked at the clock.

  It was a few minutes before noon.

  “It would be nice with a glass of wine,” Inget Herrman said, testing.

  “Not before noon,” Sandra said urbanely.

  “That’s something Sandra learned from the jet-setter’s life,” Doris explained to Inget Herrman. “During the time when she was there. With the Islander and Lorelei Lindberg. It was hot and passionate—”

  Then Sandra had elbowed Doris, quiet now, it’s enough now.

  But suddenly all words were unnecessary. The clock struck twelve and the sun was at its zenith, the middle of the day.

  “Erhm.” And suddenly he was standing there in the garden, no one other than the Islander himself. “There’s a party in the house in the darker part of the woods,” he said, almost shyly. “And all of you are welcome there.”

  And then they had wandered through the woods to the house in the darker part, the women, the girls, Magnus von B., and Bengt.

  And they had come to the house, where the Islander was standing at the top of the stairs like a captain.

  And it was then that Bengt, who was behind Sandra, had said, “Sinking, sinking,” though very, very softly, so that just about only Sandra could hear. And she turned around and looked at him. And he, he looked at Sandra too.

  And the high point of the party was reached.

  At one point the Islander and Anneka Munveg were sitting on the stairs and they talked and talked. Anneka Munveg talked about her interesting job as a reporter, and everything in the world you could report on to everyone. The Islander nodded and caught on because Anneka Munveg was also so sexy, with her big light-colored Afro and her sober, black clothes. And Anneka Munveg told the Islander about “the working woman’s day” and all of that. And the Islander nodded, again, at the same time as his fingers hesitantly fingered the hair at the back of Anneka Munveg’s neck, these fingers were demonstrably there. Sandra saw, and she did not push them away, she acted like she did not care at all.

  But then Inget Herrman was suddenly there asking the Islander to dance.

  And the very last memory of that evening was how Inget Herrman and the Islander had danced something they called the “cowboy dance” at the bottom of the pool without water.

  “Didn’t I say that she would seduce him?” Doris Flinkenberg whispered from somewhere in the background.

  . . .

  AND THEN EVERYTHING WAS OVER.

  SMACK.

  SUMMER BECAME FALL AND IT WAS HUNTING SEASON AGAIN.

  2. . . . and the whores

  “THE FLESH IS WEAK” HAD BEEN ONE OF THE ISLANDER AND Lorelei Lindberg’s mutual hits during the time when Lorelei Lindberg was still there. One of these many mutual hits, when it had been some time since the passion was over, admittedly remained in your head. But so to speak disconnected, like a ballad whose specific significance you no longer could grasp.

  So when the Islander started humming it when it started becoming fall you understood accordingly, if you were Sandra, that it meant something, but not exactly what. You recognized it but at the same time you did not. It was old and at the same time new.

  Variety is the spice of life. Maybe it was that simple. Now Pelle has finished his dinner and is ready for dessert—an ice cream would taste pretty good. That way of seeing things, that philosophy of life.

  This was in other words a brief paraphrasing of the fact that when the fall came and the hunting season started the Islander became restless and started humming these old songs—and polishing his rifle.

  And then one day Pinky was there.

  “Hey, princess, are you sleeping?” She was suddenly standing at the end of the pool in the basement in a red Lurex jacket and with a pink heart-shaped bag, glittering so in silver shoes with four-inch heels.

  And the Islander, in a phenomenal mood, was right behind her. “And where do you have the cocktail shaker?”

  It was the sign that it was now fall and the hunting season had started. Another time. The memory of the summer and the women in the house on the First Cape: it faded.

  . . .

  That early Saturday evening when the Bombshell showed up in the house in the darker part of the woods again Sandra was lying sure enough at the bottom of the pool without water. But she was not asleep, though it might have looked that way. She was lying with her eyes closed, on her back, she was thinking. A lot of images flew through her head, new impressions. There was a man whose head was a glass ball filled with water in which a golden yellow aquarium fish was swimming, with long, multilobed fins. It was a slum in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, built in miniature like a toy village on a gray hillside. Small, small shacks in rows, people in poverty, people in real shit. It was more re
al than real.

  Then the fishermen’s pub. Where she and Inget Herrman and Doris Flinkenberg had spent the rest of the day after the art exhibit. “An examination of what is going on in art around the world right now,” as Inget Herrman had stood and said on the steps of the art museum.

  “Rather dreary, actually,” Inget Herrman said in the bitter wind. “Come on. Now I’m both hungry and thirsty. I’m going to show you a real fishermen’s pub.”

  “Is this what it was like living as a jet-setter?” Doris had whispered to her best friend Sandra Wärn.

  “Sleeping Beauty, are you sleeping?” Pinky continued. “In that case it’s time to wake up now!”

  That was before the real hunting parties. But like a preparation for them.

  The women in the house on the First Cape were certainly still there. A few of them stayed over the winter, but they were the more sinister and less striking ones. The ones who had planted sprouts that had, of course, already withered away at the beginning of October just a few weeks after they had been planted, dyed paper and fabric with paint made from plants that they had boiled themselves and then called it “my art” this and “my art” that and talked about it and analyzed it in various expert ways.

  They also talked about getting hens and goats but were so hopelessly impractical and slow with everything that they did not even have the energy . . . just talking about it tired them out. Sometimes even Bencku pretended he was not home when one of them came down the hill and knocked on the door to the barn or on his small dirty windowpane.

  “Bencku might have too much bite,” Doris had determined laconically in the cousin’s kitchen and the cousin’s mama was just about to reproach her “now, now, now” when Doris had already opened the kitchen window of her own accord, stuck her head out the opening, and helpfully yelled:

  “He’s probably there. Just knock hard. Sometimes he doesn’t hear well.”