The American Girl (11 page)

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 feeling 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.

Most of the furnishings on the ground floor were rather half finished, only the sauna area and the dressing room and the den, which was called the “rec room” in the house in the darker part, were ready to be used. But all of that, that was secondary and
that was not what the girl was drawn to, but to the hole in the ground that in the future would be tiled in order to become a swimming pool. Still just a raw, black hole in the ground, foul smelling and rather damp. The girl stood at the edge of this hole and looked down into the darkness of the earth. And it suddenly bewitched her, the hole, the silence, the house itself, everything.

The voices from the upper floor, Mom, Dad, disappeared again. And Sandra immediately understood, completely calm and without drama, that she was going to stay here. That the house in the darker part of the woods was hers,
but not like a possession
.

Like a destiny.

So whether or not she got on well was a trifling matter, just like anything she thought. Because this was about necessity, the inevitable.

Here comes the night. So cold, so roaring, so wonderful
.

And like a lightning bolt in her head she saw the following with her inner eye: she saw two girls in a swimming pool without water, playing on the green-tiled bottom among silk chiffon, silk satin, and silk georgette. And among all other things, which they would have so many of in their bags. Two backpackgirls among all of their things, the contents spread all over the bottom of the pool, mixed together and with the fabrics. Sandra’s scrapbooks, Jayne Mansfield’s dead dog, Lupe Velez’s head in a toilet bowl, and so on, and Doris with all of her old loose issues of
True Crimes. The midwife’s assistant Ingegerd, lacking moral scruples, and the nine incubator babies in her hands. He killed his lover with fifteen hammer strikes to the head
. Young love and sudden, violent death. And the Eddie-things, the story about the American girl, Eddie de Wire.

Death’s spell at a young age. And pang. Sandra also saw how Doris shot the doorbell at the entrance to the house in the darker part to pieces that last summer when everything ended. The last
year the last summer the last month the last last last before that moment when the summer has had enough of you and wants to get rid of you for good.

“Yet every wave burns like blood and gold, but the night soon will claim what is owed,” which were the words of a song that played in Doris Flinkenberg’s cassette player.

And also, a ways away from the house, in the bushes, an ill-humored one. The boy, always the boy. The same boy as before, at a proper distance, staring at the house as though he was convinced that it would decompose or sink down into the ground like Venice as a result of the power in his eyes when he looked at it.

“Disappear. Down into the ground. Sink.”

But alone, she would be and continue to be a while longer, all the way until that day when Doris Flinkenberg got into the house and into Sandra Stigmata Princess of the Thousand Rooms (furnished with aperture windows, almost without oxygen).

She, the princess, who would nevertheless cease to exist in just that moment when Doris Flinkenberg started asking her stupid questions that she would answer before you had a chance to open your mouth.

“What are your hobbies? Mine are crossword puzzles, listening to music, and
True Crimes.”

“I don’t know,” Sandra would answer, but carefully, also because she was afraid of saying the wrong thing. “Though I don’t have anything against firing rifles.”

The house on the inside.

Sandra’s room. The kitchen. The parlor. The small corridor.

The Closet.

The pool without water.

. . .

Above all the fact that the house was a work of hatred.

The Black Sheep in Little Bombay.

When they came in he was lying on the sofa in the back room snoring.

He sat up.

A shiny white Jaguar.

A red raincoat.

Little Bombay
.

At first he was a threat
.

On the other hand Lorelei Lindberg was happy when he showed up
.

After the first surprise
.

On the other hand she was also happy when he left
.

So it was ambivalent
.

He was lying, sleeping in the boutique when they came there one morning
.

He had opened the door with his own key, why not, he was the landlord
.

“What do you think of the house?”

“I thought I would show you what your dreams look like.”

“Filled with nothing on the inside.”

“I know WHERE they speak like that.”

“A matchstick house for matchstick people. Have you thought about that? That it’s about fitting into that shape?”

Asked the Black Sheep in Little Bombay, he spoke only to her—it was as if the silk dog didn’t exist
.

Huddled over her water bowl, under the table, and heard
.

In Little Bombay, with all of the fabrics
.

Lorelei Lindberg. Pins fell out of her mouth
. Ping. Ping.

Pins with glass heads in different colors
.

And the dog, she picked them up
.

But Lorelei didn’t ask her to help because her eyes were so bad
.

Not that time
.

“It’s never easy to fall into the hands of the living God
. . .
”

“GOD?”

“You know,” the Black Sheep explained to Lorelei Lindberg many times, “the game where the cat plays with the mouse until it gets bored. And becomes a light morsel to chew up.”

“It’s not a game. It’s serious. It just looks that way.”

“Exactly. That was what I was going to get to. We were two brothers. We had two cats. One’s cat and the other’s cat
. . .
but only one mouse came up out of the hole. And the mouse, that was you.”

Doris Flinkenberg
. In the beginning she ran away from her. The strange, slightly plump girl who sometimes used to follow her from the bus stop where she got off by the main country road when she came from the school in the city by the sea. Sandra knew who it was of course, one Doris Flinkenberg, who lived a bit closer to the capes.