And he bent his back like a spring, his chest thrust forward naked and exposed like on Saint Sebastian with the arrows, he breathed heavily and the wave of warmth welled over her too.
Back to the room.
Seemed foreign. Words. Most things were foreign to her after Doris’s death. Most of the words that described different kinds of feelings. How were these words applicable to the feelings and the mental state that they bore reference to? Was there any connection at all? It was not clear.
“I accept everything, Doris. I’m an anomaly.” She had lain there in the bed in her room and spoken to Doris, that had been her lifeline. But a Doris who was not the Doris who had been there alive not such a long time ago, but another, halfimagined and constructed by her. A Doris-construction that did not exist any more than Doris’s flesh and blood existed in life, but that was needed so she would not fall apart completely. A Doris to talk to. So that was what she did in bed when she did not masturbate or sleep. Spoke with a Doris whom she knew did not exist, whom she knew she had made up.
The masturbation was less sexual than a means of creating a room for herself away from what was outside. Away from the world and the unpleasant facts in it. Among others the fact that Doris Flinkenberg was dead.
It was like sleep. It carried her away.
But gave a kind of awareness of her body.
“I’m probably a bad dyke,” she had said with regret in the bed where she was lying alone in the room behind closed curtains without knowing whether it was day or night. “You’ll have to forgive me.”
But does it matter, Doris Flinkenberg replied very clearly, and she could not answer that, so her fingers found their way down over her body to between her legs and so on.
“Sexuality is communication and creativity,” it said in red letters in a brochure that had been handed out in school once. She remembered that right when she got her threehundredmillion-fourth self-inflicted orgasm there in the marital bed in the dark little room in the darker part of the woods, and could not resist smiling.
Communication and creativity.
“My God,” she said to Doris Flinkenberg inside her and Doris laughed. Pulled her spit-filled mouth into a smile, showed her gleaming teeth. “You’re supposed to learn all kinds of shit and then find out later that it isn’t even true.”
It was during the breakdown, or just after it. But the breakdown itself, this was how it started. It was six weeks after Doris’s death, the last week before Christmas, a Saturday evening at the Blumenthals’ where Sandra had been visiting. A completely ordinary Saturday evening when the parents were home. Mom and Dad Blumenthal were at that moment in the sauna on the floor below the cozy living room where Sandra and the daughter Birgitta were sitting and watching television while they discreetly and unbeknownst to the parents were nipping at the bottles in the well-filled bar that the Blumenthal parents used only for show. He was a pediatrician, she a nurse—but was sitting on the city council—they were complete teetotalers. The breakdown started in the just aforementioned living room, while the Blumenthal parents were getting changed in the dressing room after bathing. A bonk could be heard, a great thud, when Sandra tumbled to the ground in a half-conscious state. Mrs. Blumenthal who, having time to think “the war is coming,” had traumatic childhood memories from the bombings of the city by the sea where she had lived, she screamed, an open, childish scream. But the second thereafter she knew enough to get herself together and run upstairs to the girls. And when she saw the girl on the floor, not their own daughter, thank goodness, she rolled up her sleeves to provide first aid—but of course it was not needed, said her husband, the pediatrician, who had already made it to the patient’s side. It was not that life threatening. Sandra Wärn had quite simply passed out, it was probably a result of overexertion and certainly understandable after everything that had happened. He did not bother about what her guilty friend, their own daughter, tipsy and excusing herself, had to say right then. He was a doctor after all and understood immediately that this had nothing to do with alcohol regardless of how Birgitta Blumenthal, in a half-hysterical and drunken state, was standing and clinging to him with her childish confession. “We were just tasting.”
So that is how the breakdown started, and it did not come unexpectedly though it looked that way. Sandra had actually gone and waited, though it sounds a bit bizarre to say that. But it was also just as bizarre to carry on like nothing had happened. Which she had done to begin with. She understood the whole time that it was not the way it was supposed to be, that it was not normal either. But normal, what was that now anyway? When Doris was gone the words paled as well, the worlds they hid, all the nuances and associations, their own meanings. Normal was normal again, in a normal sense. Of course it facilitated communication with the outside world and the possibility of establishing an understanding, but it also took something away, something essential, a taste.
And the big question that should have been answered was quite simply the one that had been pushed forward the whole time before the breakdown: was it possible to exist at all without this taste? If you said yes right away then you were lying just as much as if you said no and took action accordingly—found new friends, for example, just as if it had been a question about having a friend. This is the dilemma Sandra found herself in after Doris’s death. She did not want to die, but she did not understand how she would go on living.
It was real as real could be. And if she started thinking about it, no that was it, it could not be thought, for entirely logical reasons. There was only one solution, death die, but in other words she did not want to so it was a matter of pushing the thoughts aside as best she could and, what, NOW Doris spoke in her, “trot along?”
Right after Doris’s death, when Sandra, recently recovered from the last disease of childhood, which was the mumps, had returned from Åland and was stubborn about immediately returning to school, she had the feeling that everyone was watching her. First because of what had happened. A bunch of students she barely knew had been polite, even held open doors for her, at the same time as they had been careful about maintaining a proper distance. Later, especially, when the days passed and you still could not see anything noteworthy about her, not a trace of unusual emotion for example, there were those she thought looked at her crookedly, and whispered things about her and whispered behind her back.
Then there were of course those, both teachers and students, who came up and gave their condolences. The grief. “The grief,” said the adults. It sounded strange and big and heavy and Sandra became even more depressed by hearing it.
“She didn’t have an easy time of it, that girl,” said Tobias Forsström, who taught English and history and came from the District, in the same way Doris’s biological relatives had. “All odds against her,” Tobias Forsström stated with a tone of voice as if he was holding a lesson even though it was during a break and it was centuries since Tobias Forsström had been her teacher in any subject at all. “There are many here who come from such poor circumstances, almost destitution, that others, outsiders, have a hard time imagining. Therefore you think it’s truly unnecessary when things turn out like this for a girl who had been given every opportunity to get out. Break the cycle so to speak.” And then he smiled resolutely and patted Sandra on the shoulder. Sandra had certainly taken the resoluteness and the somewhat forced pat on the shoulder to interpret to her own disadvantage. She certainly understood. There were those in the District who looked down on residents like the Islander and herself.
Who built impossible houses for a fortune, and settled there, otherwise lacking all ties to the District. It was easier to relate to the summer guests: they did not claim to belong in the same way, and furthermore they were, in any case when seen from a certain perspective, a bit moving in their goal of separating, in their eyes the “genuine” (sea-) and the “false” (upstarts like the Islander who thought they could buy everything with money); so careful about always being on the right side.
&nbs
p; “Now we’ve gotten a proper young lady in our class,” Tobias Forsström said with a crooked smile a long time ago already when Sandra had started in the school in the town center. “A proper young lady from the French School in a completely ordinary English class, then we’ll have to see how this is going to go.” The class on the other hand had not laughed, at her or at Tobias Forsström’s attempt at light humor. Tobias Forrström was not a well-liked teacher. The aggression that oozed around him under the oily smile and the so-called ambiguous jokes with which he tried to entertain a highly uninterested world around him were repulsive in and of themselves, you pulled away out of instinct. And furthermore, on the other hand, who wants to be reminded that you belong here and nowhere else, once and for all and no matter what happens, whatever you undertake in the world? When you were still young, a child and looking ahead at the big picture? On the surface the world was also filled with lots of messages from here and from there saying it was open to everyone to become and to do anything.
Sandra had not bothered about Tobias Forsström, either then or later.
“But was a fantastic young person.” He was actually the one who had said that too.
Him. Tobias Forsström, of all people.
And yes. You could agree with that. Her way of talking, being. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW UNTHINKABLE IT IS TO LIVE WITHOUT HER? Sandra had the desire to shout in Tobias Forsström’s face, but of course she had not, she had just walked off, politely and kindly, just like a “young lady from the French School,” where she would incidentally return and quite soon, would be expected to do.
Pain was a mild expression for what it was like even to brush against the memory of the first time in the house in the darker part of the woods, the first period, then before everything became complicated.
Doris who had come to you like a gift. So wonderful, so unexpected—had changed everything.
No one like Doris. No one who talked like her.
I didn’t abandon her. Sandra Wärn said solemnly, as if she were in a church and was going to confess her sins out loud. This happened at school again, suddenly and without reason, and the one who happened to be standing in front of her turned around. It was yet another schoolteacher: Ann Notlund, the music teacher, who took a step closer because she certainly also wanted to hug Sandra.
“Sometimes you wish you could get the young to understand that there is a life after this one,” said Ann Notlund. “I mean,” she corrected herself when she heard how it sounded, “in life. There is something other than a large and fateful NOW.”
Then, sure enough, she opened her arms and came closer so that Sandra ended up right in between them.
Sandra stood there stiff as a stick and thought, still a bit unaware of everything around her, out loud:
“It wasn’t me. Wasn’t wasn’t me.”
“But dear child, what are you saying?” Ann Notlund said devoutly but absentmindedly as if she still was not really listening.
Maybe, thought Sandra while she slowly returned to reality, Ann Notlund was quite simply no woman of words. Had a hard time hearing, speaking, and understanding.
Maybe, thought Sandra, the only weapon she had in that case was just this hug.
The only weapon she had was her hug.
“What a funny saying, Sandra,” Doris said to Sandra a bit later and in the middle of the school day. Loud and clear, but so that no one other than Sandra heard it.
Hugs. How Sandra hated hugs, especially in school right after Doris’s death when she appeared to be the only one who seemed to be careful about carrying on as if nothing had happened. Well aware that it was an impossibility and that out of necessity the breakdown must be lurking just around the corner if she continued (which she did, there were no alternatives) living in something so unreal.
“But how are you, really?”
“How are you doing?”
The talkative ones who carried on like that.
But my God, what are you supposed to say? Isn’t it obvious? Not so great. And what are you going to do about it? How are you going to make it go away? Should we hug?
Then it was definitely better with people like Tobias Forsström who just pressed out a sympathy because he so to speak had to (with her that is), or those who said nothing at all, who just looked at her a bit sadly but were visibly relieved when they noticed that she did not look sadly back. Relieved over being allowed to be like before. Like always.
In Doris’s own classroom they put a photograph with flowers and a candle on Doris’s desk at the very front of the center row. In the beginning the candle was lit all the time and the roses stood in warm water in a glass jar; the water was changed regularly, the jar was refilled with new roses. The photograph showed Doris with big red, shimmering hair, the Doris who had actually existed for only a short period of time, the very last months. Doris in a photograph her boyfriend Micke Friberg had taken. The new Doris. Her from Micke’s Folk Band. “Hi. I’m Doris, this is Micke, and we’re Micke’s Folk Band. Now I’m going to sing a happy folk song in our own arrangement—‘I walked out one evening.’ ” Micke Friberg left school shortly after Doris’s death. He had to think. He could not stand it.
From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?
Micke Friberg: I don’t have a clear memory of her. She used to stand in the schoolyard sometimes, pale in the face. They had identical blouses on. Her and her friend. They said Loneliness&Fear on them.
I mean, a hundred years BEFORE the punk music began.
But her that is, maybe it’s stupid to put it this way, but I don’t have any memory of her. She was my first love. And you know how that can be. She committed suicide later. And if it hadn’t been for the music I probably never would have gotten over it.
From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?
Ametiste: the rise and rise and rise Ametiste, that was me, before anything at all had started happening. Before I met her who became the Marsh Queen on Coney Island, in one of the record recording stands, there are still some of them left over there.
Debbie had a ’67 Camaro, she inherited it from her mother. To have a car in New York was both luxury and insanity, but it was probably, and Debbie had also said that, what kept us in our right minds, making short, fun trips to Coney Island and the beaches around it.
But the parking in New York was a full-time job. Three mornings a week you had to get up in time to move the car before seven o’clock because if the parking police got there first you would have the car nicely chained until it was transported to the burial site for abandoned cars far outside the city, wherever it was.
That was my job. To park Debbie’s car. To get up early in the morning and then sit in the car on one side of the street and wait for the parking on the other side of the street to go into effect. I used to sleep in the car sometimes. And later when Sandra, the Marsh Queen, came, we were two. We wrote some songs there.
Debbie was busy then. She had broken through and was busy being famous over the entire world. Almost. But then they took her to France and got her to lip-sync dirty words in French and it was “punk” according to the ones selling the records.
Though also for her, earlier: Debbie also said she wrote most of her earlier songs while she was sitting in the car waiting—with the engine on when it was winter—to be able to park the car on the other side of the street.
In other words it was there, among other things, that the music was born. In Debbie’s ’67 Camaro a few blocks from the Bowery where we all lived back then.
A lot of other legendary types were also living there then. For example William Burroughs. I remember him like a ghost. A white ghost.
We lived at the Bowery and William Burroughs haunted the place: it’s fun to remember it like that. It was a fun time.
We hung around Debbie: she was big, the biggest in the world, almost. She became famous in a short period of time, a few years, there were those who were surprised that it was pr
ecisely her.
That there was a time, a few months, maybe half a year, when she was the biggest in the world.
Biggest in the world. There’s something in music called a “peak.” That’s when everything culminates.
But I didn’t see much of Debbie later. Almost nothing. She was always on tour.
And when she was at the Bowery she was surrounded. By everyone who suddenly wanted to come into contact with her.
And we left later, me and the Marsh Queen.
Incidentally, I picked her up on Coney Island, in a record recording stand. And she was a crazy girl, you better believe it.
But she could write songs.
The punk music started there in other words.
At the very beginning. In New York. When we waited to park Debbie’s Camaro, in the mornings.
And it snowed.
Heavy flakes fell.
Write like this, I said to the Marsh Queen. That heavy flakes were falling.
Write like this, I said. And the Marsh Queen, she wrote.
Gradually the candles stopped being lit as the first thing you did when you came to school. The flowers withered and no new flowers appeared. The flowers had dried and they were beautiful that way too, so they were allowed to remain. Then someone knocked over the glass jar by mistake and it fell to the floor and went to pieces. Not large, normal shards, but grainy damp splinters that were a pain to sweep up.
In that moment the roses went into the trash can.
“Maybe we should have thought about you,” said Ann Notlund, the music teacher who was also the homeroom teacher for Doris’s class. “Would you have wanted them?”
Before Sandra had time to answer this or that (but these flowers, what would she do with them?), Ann Notlund continued: “Then there is another thing. Her desk. Her things. I’ve understood that her mo . . . her foster mother is not well and can’t be bothered right now.”
“I can,” Sandra said, calm and businesslike. “Of course.”
The American Girl Page 36