And then they swam in the pool, she and Inget Herrman, together for the last time in the house in the darker part of the woods.
In the water that was also slowly, slowly trickling out in cracks, down in the earth beneath. Or was it a dream? Swimming among the cigarette butts. Rather disgusting, is it not?
“He shot her. By mistake. She died. In the pool. They buried her there. Under the tiles.”
Sandra. She had liked the marks on her body. These marks on her neck had actually evoked a feeling in her stomach. Up until now. Kenny’s eyes on them got her, more than Inget Herrman’s words ever could, to understand that they were silly, childish, and laughable.
Kissing disease. Kenny’s wide smile.
“A way of being with yourself.”
Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
In the pool now.
And Kenny, “Do you grow water lilies?”
“If you think I’m going to clean up after you then you’re wrong,” Inget Herrman had said the morning before she left. “I’m not planning on cleaning up after you.
“Then we’ll have to warm the sauna and wash off the old life,” she had suggested the night before when it was clear that the Islander and Kenny would be coming home as newlyweds, together. It had been the last time with Inget Herrman in the house in the darker part of the woods.
“And discharge me,” Inget Herrman had added, and then they had opened a bunch of champagne bottles and cheers, cheers.
The sauna had become warm and they had bathed. Washed themselves, dipped in the pool, drunk some more. Inget Herrman had sat on the edge of the pool and held expositions, which she had a very special predilection of devoting herself to when she was drunk.
About the weight of purposefulness and planning. Not just as a student, but otherwise. In life. “In life, perceived as a whole,” she was always saying.
“Life perceived as a whole,” Inget Herrman stated, “is rather short. It’s wise to live consciously, as Thoreau says, and with concrete goals in front of you. How did that poem by Nils Ferlin go? ‘Think now—before we push you away / You barefoot child in life.’ ” Inget Herrman lit a cigarette and continued. “The essence of that poem as I see it is that you’re given a certain amount of opportunities and chances, but not an infinite amount. If you don’t take care of your opportunities then there isn’t anyone who comes and gives out new ones. And furthermore. Finally all of us are alone. There isn’t anyone who gives us anything. We need to be prepared for that. To become an adult is to understand this. A cursed damned enormous loneliness.”
And, after a pause, with an entirely different voice, a tormented one, like a small animal’s:
“I don’t know if I’ve grown up. I don’t know anything.”
And Inget Herrman had burst into tears. She sobbed, with her mouth open, without covering her face with her hands, for a minute maybe and it had been unpleasant to see, but at the same time, a wave of tenderness had welled up inside Sandra and she cursed the Islander and his awkwardness, to exchange this for . . . yes, for a sister besides. “Kenny is a man’s woman,” Inget had said. “It’s not her fault, and she deserves all the happiness in the world, she hasn’t had it easy. Someone he could go around and introduce, virile in the prime of life himself, as ‘my young, beautiful wife.’ ”
And for a moment, exactly then—or had it just been the intoxication that had made Sandra think like that? She did not know, but one thing was certain: she would never be closer to complete surrender, to telling everything, as in just this moment, which was so tormented but yet suddenly so open, filled with possibility—the fantastic had traveled through her. What if . . . what if she were to tell Inget Herrman everything? From beginning to end? Without leaving anything out. Everything, honest, direct, and without detours.
Like a confession.
“Guilt is an action,” the lover had said. He had bitten her neck blue during the second—and last—intercourse a few days ago. “It cannot be evaded. But sometimes there is . . . mercy.”
It had been a colossal feeling, a relief, freedom, conviction. But a second that was gone just as quickly as it had come. Inget Herrman had stopped crying. Stopped just like that. Laughed, lit a new cigarette, filled her glass, and acted like nothing. Nothing nothing.
And later, very quickly, she drifted off into further thoughts, into her endless monologues. Farther into words into words into words.
Her name was Lassie (Marsh-Lassie). A strange scene. There, at the pool’s edge, in a wet bathing suit. She, wrapped in a terry cloth towel, with the dog Lassie on it.
An entirely different dog from the silk dog, the one who had existed earlier.
Later, in the final part of Sandra’s life inside these borders, this doggishness would render her one last humiliating nickname.
Wrong kind of dog.
But still. Inget Herrman on her back in a wet bathing suit with a cigarette, the eternal cigarette, like a dead person, so drunk, so gone. Furthermore it was rather cold in the pool section and you could, for example, easily get cystitis if you did not take off your wet bathing suit after swimming, Inget Herrman did not seem to even be thinking about that.
The moment was over.
Inget Herrman had fallen asleep.
But she had been on her feet again the next morning.
And it was Sandra of course, not Inget Herrman, who caught a cold again and was forced to see the doctor and was prescribed a sulfur treatment against acute cystitis.
“Finally,” Inget Herrman had said, “we’re quite helpless.”
And they never swam in the pool again.
The pool filled with slime, until Kenny had it emptied and furnished her subtropical winter garden in it.
Sandra was sleeping in the marital bed. She was sleeping alone, under the sky, the white, tulle-covered one (a mosquito net, newly obtained), between the light red sheets. Kenny did not want the bed. Kenny had laughed when she saw it.
In front of Kenny’s eyes.
“Sandra!” Kenny called. “Time to wake up. Are you still sleeping?”
Not reproachful exactly, but still. Sandra pressed her nose deeper, deeper into the soft cushion. She was frozen, quiet, pretending to sleep even though she was awake.
“A dreamer in an alert state,” “the aunt” on Åland had said. “That’s what you are. Just like the other islanders.”
“Up and at ’em now,” said Kenny. “I need help.”
And it was with this that Kenny needed help: she had emptied the swimming pool, cleaned it on her own. With Sandra’s help she polished the tiles and admired the result. Later she bought many expensive plants, some tropical, unusual species. It was not for nothing that she had lived together with the baroness in the Glass House (which after the baroness’s death was rented out under the care of the baroness’s relatives, Kenny said that she had nothing more to do with it). She planted flowers in large, beautiful pots.
They were plants that needed a lot of light. She carried the pots down into the pool, rigged up lines with searchlights along the edges, a pearl necklace of strong lights that made the rectangular pool glow.
When the plants bloomed, which they did in due order—there was never a flower that did not bloom down there, bloomed audaciously and big and strong in different colors, obscene and white, very yellow and with large stamens—she carried down a small garden furniture set: a small table and three old-fashioned chairs with ornamental backs and slender legs.
“Here it is now,” she said. “Our subtropical underwater garden.”
It looked insane, but it was undeniably beautiful. “It’s not underwater at all,” Sandra objected. But Kenny was not listening. She had her eyes on her husband.
“Phenomenal,” he said. “Great.” With a new voice, one that came from somewhere in between passion and artificiality and nostalgia (the attempt at catching an old tone of voice and reproducing it with credibility). It was a voice that had come into being after Kenny. A voice expressly for Kenny. It relate
d to the voice that the Islander once used with Lorelei Lindberg like really nice polyester fabric compared to clean silk. Just the experts, the very clever, can tell the genuine from the fake.
To Sandra he said:
“It will be fine.” But he also had a new voice for her. A strange papa-voice.
Which made him like a stranger.
“Should we go out and shoot?” That time was over. The dad lay his hand on his daughter’s shoulder and they stood there at the edge of the pool while Kenny filled it with plants so it looked like some kind of specially designed grave.
Sandra thought: I want to go away.
“The miserable garden,” Kenny would say to Rita later in the big, bright apartment in the city by the sea that Sandra and Kenny lived in shortly before Sandra left the picture, went on her way.
“I think it was some kind of sublimation,” Kenny continued, and Sandra was on the other side of the wall listening, eavesdropping. “I so wanted to have children.”
The flowers would gradually wither in the pool. The light would not be enough, despite everything. No light in the world could brighten up the pool section, and yet it was the brightest place in the entire house in the darker part.
“I’m like a cow,” she would say to Rita Rat in the city by the sea. “A barren cow.”
Kenny so bright, so lovable.
Rita over the rooftops. She had come walking over the rooftops, knocked on the window in the apartment. Personally she lived in the Backmanssons’ apartment on the same block, so the roofs between the two buildings were connected, she had worked that out. And she had looked at Kenny as though it was the most natural thing in the world that she showed up just like this, via the roof, and then she explained that walking over the rooftops was something that she just had to try.
Sure enough. Kenny was enchanted by it. Like all pretty, lovable women Kenny had a streak inside where she saw herself as if in a movie in several immortal scenes. How Rita came to her and they became best friends: this was one of them.
How one day Rita could suddenly be heard like a voice through the open window in the apartment, Sandra and Kenny. Rita from the District. They had looked out and there she was, swinging on the roof of the building next door, and she called out, “Come!” Kenny had of course immediately responded to the call. Just as naturally, Sandra made a face and stayed indoors.
And then Kenny and Rita continued to be enchanted by each other up on the roof. Two of them under a chimney, and the city below. What a scene, what a story. A story that received wings, and it flew. And Rita and Kenny shone, which they did otherwise as well. In each other’s company, glittering.
Rita had succeeded. She made no secret of the fact that it should be seen just that way. She lived with the Backmanssons in the wonderful room, Jan Backmansson’s sister’s (the one who was studying dance in New York) former room, and Jan Backmansson was her boyfriend.
You did not connect her with the District, the nickname Rat had disappeared. There was, so to speak, nothing in her creature that alluded to it. She was tall and handsome and in all ways, yes, you had to admit it, one of those young women whom you rarely saw even on the streets of the city by the sea.
Sandra, on the other hand, she did not forget.
For example Solveig, Solveig who had stood there in the darkness with the crazy cousin’s mama at Bencku’s barn then not such a long time ago, taken long drags on the cigarette and been very upset.
“The last thing she did was steal my jacket and wreck my car. Drove it into junk metal on Torpeson’s field. She left it there and hitchhiked to the city. Forced herself on the Backmanssons. In the middle of the night.”
Rita, however, did not make her former life in the District a secret, all of that. It was so to speak not pertinent anymore. And when she saw Sandra the first time, she certainly looked at her with something that could be likened to triumph, however furtive. Now I’m here. But that was also mixed with a kind of calm indifference in the presence of everything that had been. Because it did not matter, everything with her and in her seemed to say. It is so different now.
And Sandra remembered Solveig who had puffed with such a nosiness and smoldering indignation that it surrounded her like a veil that you could almost cut through.
“She’s half,” Solveig had said. “We’re twins. And then you’re whole only when you are two.”
But Sandra, when she came to the city by the sea later, she became defenseless. Without skin. But there was no one who was interested in her skinlessness. She lived with Dad and his new wife in a house in the older part of the city by the sea. Dad’s new wife was, as said, Kenny.
She was the one who had picked out the apartment. An exquisite one with many rooms. Rooms rooms rooms and high ceilings, windows facing every direction. Toward the sea, up in the sky, toward the back gardens. But little Sandra. She could not find herself there.
She stamped her way forward on the sidewalk, in heavy hiking boots, stubbornly and without a goal.
She detested the city by the sea. It was not big and it was not small, there was exactly one boulevard in it and a few avenues and a whole lot of people who walked around in shabby clothes, leering at each other.
Sandra went home. She did not want to go home. But there was nowhere else to go.
She came into the apartment, went to her room and closed the door. LOCKED it after her. Still the voices from the next room could be heard.
“Mascot.” They giggled. “The wrong kind of dog.”
And they whispered about her.
Was there one or more? Or was it just her?
Rita Rat, here again. Over the roof. And the worst thing about that story was it was true.
It was Kenny and it was Rita, now Kenny’s best friend, in a big, bright apartment in the city by the sea. And it was Sandra, the wrong kind of dog. The Islander, her father, had set out to sea. Again. Only about a year after the new marriage had begun. “Maybe he couldn’t stand coming face-to-face with mortality.” That was Inget Herrman’s analysis, Inget, whom Sandra visited quite often in her small studio apartment on the outskirts of the city. There were long afternoons when they drank wine, red earth-colored such that glowed warmly and filled with promise when the sunlight reflected in the glasses. It was beautiful, the only thing beautiful in the city by the sea during this time. “That tends to be one of the negative effects of an intimate relationship between an older man and a younger woman,” Inget Herrman continued. “You rarely talk about those kinds of negative effects, especially not when it’s a question of an older man and a younger woman.”
And Inget Herrman took a deep breath and laughed her distinctive, rattling laugh that Sandra and Doris had once fallen in love with so much that they had spent days trying to imitate it, but without success. Though it was like that with people you liked, you do not remember what they looked like, and the same goes for voices, Sandra and Doris had been able to determine a long time ago. “And a woman like Kenny, that’s even worse. There are only four years between us but she has an ability to make me feel dejected and slightly demented. Like an older person who can get into a bad mood because of her own slowness and sudden difficulties in managing to do even the very simplest of everyday functions. We’re all going to die. But it really isn’t fun to be made aware of it. Remember I’m saying this with good intentions. The young woman we’re talking about is my sister.”
“Or breed it’s called,” someone on the other side of the wall in the big, bright apartment continued. And raised her voice, so Sandra would hear. Yes, it was Rita, Rita Rat. She had an exceptional ability to carry on like that.
“And, can we ask ourselves, which breed?”
Kenny laughed, but happily. Rita was coarser. Kenny was not coarse. She could not be, she was so bright, so excellent, so lovable.
Little Sandra. Poor Sandra. Poor poor Sandra. Her mouth so dry besides. Wetting her lips with her own wet tongue. Let the tip of her tongue get stuck in the top lip’s imagined furrow. And it
was deep.
The process by means of which Sandra was transformed into a mute and a harelip had started again.
It must immediately be said that this and what followed, a description of Sandra’s last time in the city by the sea before she left, originated in an extreme subjectivity. Sandra’s own perspective.
Because there were no others. The world diminished.
It is in other words possible that Kenny and Rita were talking about entirely different things. That Sandra just imagined all of that on the other side of the door. In reality it was highly likely. They probably had more interesting things to spend their time on in conversation than on Sandra, who only in her own grandiose fantasies was the interesting center of everything (negative or positive, the harelip’s contemplation of her navel, so it had started again). For example, when Kenny said something friendly to Sandra, asked Sandra if she wanted to come along somewhere (and she actually asked sometimes, in the apartment in the city by the sea, in the beginning anyway), Sandra had the ability to discern undertones and dissonance in what was said.
Says one thing but means another.
“It’s important to her to be everyone’s friend,” said Inget Herrman. “Maybe she is. I don’t know. If you only knew how little I know about my sisters. Should I tell you about Eddie?”
“You HAVE told me about Eddie,” said Sandra who had left all of that behind.
“Yes. But not everything. Not anything at all about how little I understood her. I think she was capable of almost anything. Even murder.”
And you’re saying that now, thought Sandra. But she did not say anything. She finished her wine and reached for the bottle on the desk between them in order to refill it. She drank. Inget Herrman drank.
Both of them were quiet for a while and changed conversation topics. The sun sank behind the rooftops, it became dark, and when the wine was gone it was evening, early evening, unpleasantly early. Inget Herrman was going somewhere, meeting someone, and she started getting ready. Sandra, on the other hand, what would she do on such a night like this when it was too early to go to bed and impossible due to the wine in her body to do anything else? The mere thought of going home—yes, it was unthinkable.
The American Girl Page 41