No. It was also quite simply so that in relation to the District, the school, and the municipality, everything: that when Doris Flinkenberg was no longer there, there were no reasons not to go to the French School anymore.
The Lover
ALMOST NO ONE AT THE FRENCH SCHOOL — EXCEPT FOR A FEW occasional people, more about that below—remembered her. The school had effectively obliterated the little harelipped girl from its collective memory. Most of her new classmates who had been in the same grade as her a long time ago had to think in order to form any kind of memory of Sandra from the lower grades.
The school nurse was also a different one now. She was one who spoke sex talk fluently, wife of a retired ambassador and like a fish in water at the French School. More like a fish in water than the so-called student body that still proved to be a hodgepodge in all respects. The superb children of diplomats expected to populate the school were, in the past as there were now, so few they could be counted on the fingers of both hands.
It was safe. Sandra had not changed in that respect either. She still did not belong to any group. She was still neither good nor bad in school.
There was a new arrogance about her. New, so far in that it could sometimes be seen. Definitely not all of the time. But sometimes it flared, often unexpectedly. She could say strange things in the middle of class. The kind of thing that got people to raise their eyebrows. Was she really sane? No clever, hilarious, or interesting things, but inappropriate and stupid comments. Like for example, suddenly during that discussion about Kitty G., more about that later. You really did not understand what she said and why.
She also had a lot of absences, which she could not justify. She forged the Islander’s signature on the absentee list where her absences had been recorded in order to be seen and explained in writing by a parent or guardian and be signed by the latter. But this did not happen all the time either. Just sometimes.
Not nearly often enough that it in some way would have affected the image you had of her at school. Sandra who? Sandra qui?
She continued to be a shapeless person, someone who blended in. One, as it said in the psychology book, blind follower. One of those who witnessed the murder of Kitty G. from the windows of their homes: saw and saw without doing anything. Did not even call the police while there was still time. Just thought: someone should call. Somebody surely already called. This is just so terrible.
Kitty G. was a young woman stabbed to death in a parking lot outside her home in an apartment building in an American suburb. There had been many witnesses to the murder. These witnesses were made up of several of the other inhabitants of the apartments in Kitty G.’s building who had windows facing the parking lot. They had stood and watched while the murder was happening before their eyes. Just stood there behind their curtains and stared, quite appalled. But no one moved a muscle to help her. Even to lift a telephone one single time.
And what made the crime exceptionally cruel was that it was very, very drawn out. The man with the knife chased Kitty G. around the parking lot for minutes. She even managed to get away a few times and managed to run a ways away before the man caught up with her again in order to continue stabbing her.
While all of the others watched. The blind followers. Behind their curtains. But was there nothing you could do about it, afterward?
Kitty G. Sandra picked her out for her scrapbook. The first material in a long time. She had already stopped collecting new material during Doris Flinkenberg’s time.
Partly because she had been occupied with other things, but also because she had come up with other ideas. New ideas.
The Mystery with the American Girl. That had been her task then, to be Eddie de Wire. Walk in her shoes. Dress like her, be her, talk like.
“I’m a strange bird. Are you one too?”
“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me.”
“I have a feeling,” Doris Flinkenberg had said then, ages ago in Bencku’s barn, and she would never forget it, they were words that had already become legendary, “that she is the mystery. That through her all of the unanswered questions will get their answers. We need to get to know her. We have to . . . find out everything we possibly can about her. We have to walk in her moccasins. We have to be her.”
She quickly stopped with her mediocre material collection again. The scrapbooks were nothing other than something obsolete, ritualistic, which she had lost touch with. Dead stories.
An interesting document. But about what?
“Long live passion,” her teacher at the French School suddenly whispered in her ear.
What would you have done if you were one of Kitty G.’s neighbors in the apartment block who, from the comfort of their own homes, watched as Kitty G. was murdered? That was a question asked aloud during psychology class. Most of Sandra Wärn’s helpful classmates were certain they would have called the police immediately, another that he would have gotten the pistol in the drawer of the nightstand (of course all Americans have a pistol in the nightstand drawers, les américaines, well, well!) and opened the window and fired into the air in order to frighten him, a third would have killed the murderer, and so on. Many of the reserved and uncertain diplomat children suddenly came alive. They were not any stupid middle-class Americans made passive by all kinds of hamburger culture and a-dime-a-dozen entertainment.
They could separate fact from fiction even when it was a matter of life or death.
But the anxiety could not be eased.
“I suspect that I wouldn’t have done anything at all.”
That was Sandra.
“Guilt must be borne,” the teacher said and naturally had no idea he was saying about the same thing as a certain Micke Friberg had said to Doris Flinkenberg a few weeks before Doris had preferred to blow her head off, but this talking about Raskolnikov and Sonya in Crime and Punishment, which he had read (and, yes, he had gladly seen that Doris had been more Sonya-like). “You couldn’t run away from it. Of course, it’s possible. For a while. But you won’t get away. But there is a pardon.”
Sandra also did not know Micke Friberg had said that to Doris. But those words touched her anyway in a way that made it so that she just had to stay behind after class when all of the other students had gone home, with him, whom she had asked to stay, and he was a friendly teacher so he did.
“I suspect I wouldn’t have done anything.”
And made a pause. So that, so to speak, what should have come after remained hanging in the air between them like a great abnormal emptiness.
He looked at her with great sympathy. “I can’t live with that thought. I can’t live with that guilt. It’s a guilt in and of itself, isn’t it?” It was something like that, words in that style, which they both had expected she would add.
But consequently she did not. Instead she said, “Not out of cold-bloodedness. But because I’m so slow. So extremely stiff in my joints.”
He was staring. On the one hand, she shocked him, repelled, with her coldness and her arrogance. On the other hand. The invitation could not be misinterpreted. And he recognized her, from years back. La passion, c’est un emmerdent. Passion is only devilry. But she got to it first.
She went and bought herself a really warm winter coat, a muff to stick her hands in, and a briefcase of an expensive brand to keep her schoolbooks in, and then, finally, she went to the bookstore and bought a French classic for him in the original, one of those small hardbound volumes that were both elegant and expensive.
In front of the class he had a habit of complaining he was poor, that he earned so little with his teacher’s salary he did not even have enough money to buy the French classics in the original, which he loved so much. For example André Gide and François Mauriac. Great writers, who wrote about real things, like guilt, reconciliation, and mercy.
She bought him a novel by François Mauriac, Vipers’ Triangle.
That silenced him.
And then he took her somewhere and then they walked in the city a
nd suddenly they were at a third place and they slept together there.
I’m NOT in love. It’s just a crazy phase I’m going through right now.
It became like that. Though neither of them wanted it, not really. Desire, that was another thing.
But they were like Doctor Pavlov’s dogs, both of them.
But what was the clock that triggered the drool in the dog’s doglike jaws?
Memento mori.
“You fall in love with someone who brings something inside you to life.”
Prr. Remember that you are going to die as well.
It was the same teacher she had written a certain essay for a thousand years ago, shortly before the adventure of her life, Doris Flinkenberg, started and she was fearless and audacious enough to leave the French school altogether. Lupe Velez’s head in a toilet or Passion’s death was the sunny name on the essay and he had eagerly used his red pen in the margins and in between the lines because Sandra was quite horrible when it came to writing proper French.
He had not known if he should laugh or cry, but on the other hand, if there was something he was used to from the French School in particular then it was young, stigmatized, spoiled girls with an exaggerated inner self and a lot of strange fantasies in their small and empty heads.
He was the first one Sandra recognized from before when she returned to the French School. But not immediately because he had recognized her first.
“Long live passion,” he had half whispered to her as a first greeting in the middle of the auditorium, in the middle of the school day. And asked politely, with a certain adult and kindly amused glint in his eye:
“To what do I owe this pleasure?” In French of course, above all because it was the only language in which such an indiscreet and ambiguous politeness could be expressed without becoming coarse, so that the humor and innocence were retained.
He, of course, did not know anything about Doris Flinkenberg and later, in some of Sandra’s most advanced fantasies, she told him about Doris after one of the two to three sexual encounters they carried out with each other at odd times of the day. Fantasies as said: in the situation itself she always stopped, she never even got started, it was never possible to tell him anything at all. It was shyness and a strange role-playing game the whole time, and neither of them enjoyed the game, which was a part of the game, which naturally stopped being a game before it had even really gotten started.
She remembered Lupe Velez who drowned in the toilet bowl, and in light of everything that had happened, life at the marsh, Doris Flinkenberg, she could not keep from laughing. It had been so different. She had been such a different person then. The laughter just poured out of her and it surprised her teacher who was expecting another reaction. In some way he had the idea that it was his light irony that would be mild and kindly shocking. He had thought she would become shy. Not this fool. He stood there and became embarrassed. And even though they were just the two of them, it felt as if the entire school’s teachers and students and remaining personnel were standing there watching them.
He was one of the teachers at the French School who also commanded respect because they showed their light disdain for the well-mannered and wealthy students—above all the female portion of the student body. Name something that stirs more latent aggression in an ordinary, friendly boy or a highly normal poor man on a single income who is trying to muddle along on only an hourly wage from his teaching job than a spoiled female student with all the outer signs of conventionality: pleated skirt, blouse with lace, briefcase, the right last name, and so on. One who lives on Daddy’s money, as it is called.
He had been used to being received as expected by such a conventional and predictable young lady. That she would blush out of indignation when he came with his well-balanced truths and bits torn from real life, which he knew something about but she did not.
The boring thing about those youths who, as it were, take for granted that they are the only ones capable of seeing conventions and thereby break against them, the only ones with surprises at the ready, or just new, other thoughts, is that when you get down to it, when someone makes them speechless, they pull away, back up, as if indignant instead of advancing curiously, nosing about, and taking the invitation.
But the short relationship or whatever it should be called that began shortly after the conversation about Kitty G. and the guilt was like a means of coercion. He did not know what to do with her. She did not leave him alone, neither literally nor above all figuratively speaking, with her strange reactions—that laugh which echoed in the auditorium—and the strange things she said. Sometimes he also had a feeling she was pursuing him.
Yet, she did not “take” him anywhere mentally in other words, barely even physically.
She was the one who took the initiative with everything: the short relationship that consisted of only two brief sexual encounters on the sofa in sole breadwinner’s apartment while the kids were with their mother.
Neither of them particularly enjoyed it.
She did not like the apartment imbued with children, the realism in it, which made no room for her fantasies. Obviously he did not think she was impressionable in the right female way since she displayed an almost total disinterest in his children and his role as sole breadwinner and family father as well as all of the everyday hardships, a subject that he had otherwise noticed hit home with women, old and young women alike, and further increased his charm and attraction.
Blah blah blah blah. She put on music, noisy music. He had a good record collection with, for example the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and the like, and that, my God, had to drown him out.
When they were finished on the sofa and the music had played for a while she got up and got dressed and asked if he wanted to go out with her to the shops and provide advice since she was going to buy winter clothes.
“I’m pretty crazy about clothes,” she said again with the same arrogance—and it made him crazy!—as when she had spoken about her slowness, the stiffness in her limbs in connection with the murder of Kitty G. She was standing on the glitter scene, acting.
“My mother had a fabric store that was called Little Bombay. Little Bombay in an ordinary suburb! Of course it was a disaster. The business went bankrupt. She never recovered. She took it very hard. I mean my real mother that is. Not the woman my dad is thinking about marrying NOW.”
He understood she was playing a part and my God my God how he regretted seducing her. This girl was deeply unhappy, she was desperate, she needed help.
“You miss her?” he asked, more as a teacher, a fatherly protector than as a half-naked lover who had slept with Lolita on the sofa in his own sole breadwinner’s home (among all the toys).
“She grafted a love of clothes and fabric of high quality into me.”
Grafted. It was a word worthy of a crossword solver and in the moment she had spoken it she understood from exactly which direction in her head it had flown. From the Doris direction, and now it was dangerous.
She stepped on a child’s ball on the floor and it released a shriek that in no way crushed the mood but did stir additional stupidities in her head. She had to get away.
“Come on. Do you want that book or not? But first you have to come along and give advice.”
That was it: he asked the right questions. And that was what was wrong. That he was some kind of human. Not even some kind. But she could not stand it. And he could not either; he was too aware of the situation, which was fundamentally wrong. Oh, if only they had started talking about the children and the ball and the loss and how it is not the easiest thing to replace a biological parent, that would have been a normal conversation. And from there they could have moved on to her parents’ divorce (because that was what they had done, gotten divorced? Had she not said that? He could not say, he was ashamed to say he had a poor memory of what she had told him) and so on and so forth. But it was not like that, now they were going to the bookstore to buy a book as a present f
or him, which was called Thérèse.
He followed her to the store like a dog. Not because of the book, but because the whole thing needed to be rounded off in some dignified way. As luck would have it they skipped the clothing store. She seemed to forget all of that when they came out into the fresh air and he got started with his story.
They went straight to the bookstore. He hated her. His head was filling with half-formulated discomfort in the presence of her upper-class manners, her arrogance, her depraved childhood in contrast to . . . him. All of that which had been the subject of a thousand million classics but which still had its attractive force.
Ein Mann who wants.
Ein poor Mann in the big world.
On the glitter scene: she was an unscrupulous Lolita who pulled the clean young man into the dirt despite the fact that on the outside it looked like just the opposite.
And it would be the “secret” with the story. Yawn. Very exciting.
But in order to have something to talk about while they were walking to the bookstore he told her about the plot in the novel she was going to buy him. It was called Thérèse in other words and it was a French classic of the best sort. It was about a woman who tried to poison her nasty husband—and he was nasty, that was also clear beyond a shadow of a doubt. He caught her red-handed and carried out a punishment for her. He left her alone in the estate where they had lived together, in the woods—she hated living in the woods—starving, alone, no one was allowed to speak with her or touch her. When she had made amends, just before she faded away, died, he came back to the estate, held out his hand to her, and took her back to the big city where she always wanted to go, gave her her freedom, which she always wanted, and a reliable income. They went their separate ways at a café in the big city, in a peculiar mood that was characterized by if not direct friendship, then by a new, mutual respect for one another.
The American Girl Page 39