The Glitter Scene

THE ROOM, THE HOUSE

THE CHILD, FLUORESCENT. Johanna. In the room of dreams, time, history. Pins The Child, fluorescent on the wall. The woman on the meadow with the child in her arms, a black-and-white photo, in a thunderstorm, lightning. The child of light/in the light.

An explosion, transcendence.

She is the Child, fluorescent.

Johanna in the room, looks out the window.

The meadow, which reveals itself on the other side of the windowpane in the light of the Winter Garden, dusk is now falling. A corner of the woods farther away, Tobias’s greenhouse on the side of the road, like a quivering yellow spot in the rain.

Lille. Breathes on the windowpane, an island of mist spreads over the glass, erasing the view. Breathes over and over again, so that the island becomes very large and then writes LILLE in the mist in large, clear letters with her index finger.

Several times over, faster and faster, until the name is obliterated and the window is clear and transparent again.

The road, on the side, the Piss Factory.

From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?

Patti and the factory, the Piss Factory. Somewhere, where there really was not anything, not the friendly middle-class family you grew up in. But poverty, the factory, ugly, fat ladies in the factory. During your lunch break you snuck out to the bookstore to buy your Rimbaud, and then you sat by the conveyor belt and tried to concentrate, your Rimbaud in your head: Rimbaud who was supposed to save your life but you could not know that yet. You thought you were stuck there, forever, in the factory.

The road is about thirty feet from the house where Johanna lives: one direction leading toward the Second Cape, the Winter Garden, and the main country road and the town center and the school in the other. The road: a shiny, dark line cutting through the deserted landscape.

See the road as a line—

She is Johanna, the child in the light/the child of light. She is the Child, fluorescent.

The house where they live, she and her aunt Solveig. At the foot of the hill on the First Cape, just the two of them. Earlier, quite often, there was also a small cousin, Robin, who had a mother, Allison, who worked on boats and was gone a lot. Robin liked being with Solveig and Johanna—especially Johanna, in Johanna’s room. They built the world’s largest race car track, yellow plastic rails joined together across the entire room, a thousand loops. Released small cars on the track, they traveled quickly, too quickly, flying out. But then Allison and Robin moved to another city and Robin stopped coming altogether. Stopped working on the boats, making beauty trips, as people said about her in Torpesonish. “And how are the storks in Portugal doing?” she would ask Johanna, happily ruffling her hair. Then Solveig would get so angry at her there would almost be a fight.

Allison was Torpe’s sister, the Torpe Solveig once was married to—back then they were living on the Torpesonish homestead at the Outer Marsh. Torpe is in Germany now, remarried, works on different construction sites there. Solveig had a cleaning business once, but now and for a long time already she has been working in real estate. Here, in the District. Has almost always been here. And in this place, not in this house, but in another one. It was called the cousin’s house, it burned down, the outbuildings and the barn were torn down and Solveig built this instead.

But otherwise, been there done that, you do not talk to Solveig about the past. She has closed that chapter, a lot of troubles. Almost the only thing Solveig wants to remember from her childhood and that she talks about sometimes is how when she was little and went to the swimming school at the Second Cape, she saved another little girl, a classmate in the swimming school named Susette Packlén, from drowning. She, Solveig, Sister Blue, the teacher’s assistant in Tobias’s swimming school; together with her twin sister Rita who was Sister Red. They were called that because of the color of their swimsuits, otherwise it was almost impossible to tell them apart, they looked so much alike. Solveig’s twin sister, Rita. Solveig has closed that chapter too. And the Winter Garden, Rita’s Winter Garden. Ritsch. Solveig has closed the curtains in the kitchen. To Solveig the Winter Garden does not exist.

But Tobias exists. As said, he once was the teacher at the swimming school. Yes, the same Tobias who has the greenhouse on the side of the road a little ways away from the house. Johanna likes Tobias, likes going to the greenhouse and spending time with him there.

There used to be another cousin in the house, Irene, Solveig’s girl. Much older, already grown up. The fall before the Winter Garden opened on the Second Cape, New Year’s Eve 1999, Irene moved away from home to start studying in another town to be a nurse. Later she went to Norway, works at an EMT station high up in the mountains. Beautiful cards, which Solveig hangs on the refrigerator, come from there, from Norway. Beautiful landscapes, restful. Reminiscent of how Irene is, or was, when she was still living in the house.

Someone who played the recorder and went to choir practice, a calm and low-voiced type. But—it was impossible not to like her. And to be allowed into Irene’s room across from the kitchen on the other side of the hall, in the evenings, in the rain, the black darkness on the other side of the window. Irene perched on her bed, on a light blue bedspread, knitting long scarves in subdued colors, or playing the recorder, the sheet music on a music stand next to the bed. Or, with a book: one of the four boy or girl books she had in her possession, the kind that when it is raining it just says, “The rain beat against the window.”

But to be allowed to come into this neatness, just ordinary things there: hairbrush, music stand, boy book, girl book, knitting, Johanna loved it regardless. Remembers how she used to stand in the doorway and stare at Irene, who was playing, stare and stare until Irene noticed her and put down her flute and looked up: “Hi, Lille, what, cat got your tongue?” And laughing, stretched out her arms toward Johanna. “Come here, you small silly changeling!” And at full speed Johanna had rushed right into her arms.

When Irene moved away from home, Johanna got her room. For a while, in the beginning, she tried to live like Irene, maintain the order and the neatness. But it did not go very well: little by little everything was, is, one big mess anyway. Things—paper, books, pictures, this and that—all over the place, everywhere.

But still, with Irene, as if there was a fundamental difference between the two of them. Despite everything having been so different in the District when Irene was growing up; there was no Winter Garden or high school or school for artistic expression and theatrical performance where she would have had the opportunity to develop her recorder music to a professional level, like there would be later—the school Johanna attends, and Ulla Bäckström from Rosengården 2. So like a fish in water you might think that the school had been designed just for her; the theater, the dance, and the music, the singing about Ulla Bäckström in the corridors at school.

But still, Irene on the one hand, Johanna on the other: in Irene there was nothing that ran wild, that could take its own wild paths, become too much of too much—

So for the time being, this is Johanna’s room. Everything that brings you to the music. The Story of the Marsh Queen, the Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1: a never-ending first chapter that washes over the room and buried the yellow plastic cars a long time ago.

The Marsh Queen who rose from the mire. The material that will be made into a story is constantly growing. Quotations, clippings, informations. All over the place, everywhere.

“Write her into the story. There aren’t many women in the history of music. At least make her a footnote. In The History of Punk Music.”

It is Råttis J. Järvinen, a music teacher, who said that to Johanna at school. In school there they are doing Project Earth; it is supposed to be a story, inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. This is what Råttis J. Järvinen says, and it is beautiful: “To be young is to lose an innocence but find a treasure—like Orpheus who loved his Eurydice so much he was prepared to follow her to the underworld.”

Project Earth. A project that is supposed to be about something that touches you, someone else’s story about you. The person you are, the one you could be and want to be, to the music. “Make the music yours, in your own language.”

Everything that brings you to the music. The Marsh Queen who says: “Being on stage is so terrible, they tear you to bits with their admiring looks, admiring hands, you could just die.”

The Marsh Queen who says: “The Glitter Scene is my life.”

Patti, Debbie, Ametiste, and the Marsh Queen, who once grew up here in the District in the house in the darker part of the woods: her name was Sandra Wärn.

So when it is at its best in the room, the room with broad views, big vision. The Marsh Queen. Johanna. “Take the world by storm.” Wembley Arena 2012. “The Glitter Scene is my life.”

But first it is a matter of: from here. The window. See the road like a line. The field. Tobias’s greenhouse stands like a dirty yellow spot on the side of the road, in the cool abstract glow of the Winter Garden. The Winter Garden that is shining, shining.

“See the road like a line.” Patti and the women, in the Piss Factory. Patti at the assembly line, away from here, reading her Rimbaud during her lunch break.

The Piss Factory.

Johanna and the Child, fluorescent on the wall.

Johanna turns off the lights, crawls under the covers in her bed across from the window, does not close the curtains. Wants to have the light, a dull glow from the Winter Garden. The room, the dreams, the Marsh Queen, time, history, vision: you can float in it, like a boat.

But calmly, all of the lights in the house in the background. Solveig’s and Tobias’s voices from the kitchen: Tobias has a habit of stopping by in the evenings after he has been at his greenhouse before he bikes back to the residential housing for seniors where he lives up in the town center. He is stubborn about that bike, despite the fact that it is more than six miles and he is old, his legs are getting worse and worse. But if the road conditions are bad Solveig convinces him to let her drive him—not so easy, Tobias is woven of a stubborn cloth. But still: voices in the yard, car doors slamming, she will be back soon.

Or, other evenings, Solveig who is watching television in the living room, the volume turned down very low, a quiet hum in the background. Sometimes Johanna gets up and goes to her, lies down on the sofa in the living room, her head resting in Solveig’s arms. Steep stairs, white houses on television: women, men who are running up and down stairs, meeting in hallways, talking, talking and having relationships with each other. Johanna does not follow along, Solveig’s fingers in her hair, she is not thinking about the Marsh Queen then either, not thinking about anything in particular, or about the houses. The houses that Solveig sells, supplies through her business. Blueprints, photographs, sometimes Johanna is allowed to be at a showing. To walk through the empty apartments, through the houses, imagine, all sorts of things. Brochures about Rosengården 5 and 6 and 8, residential areas, all of them alike. Old brochures about the Winter Garden before it was finished, a special language in them. Kapu kai. The forbidden seas. The hacienda must be built.

Not the Winter Garden that would exist later, for real. But the Winter Garden when it was still just an idea on paper, presented in brochures: the one planned by the Rita Strange Corporation—with all the history, stories from the District. The American girl. It happened at Bule Marsh.

In reality, the Winter Garden became something else. But still, what it was supposed to be does not disappear from your mind just because of that. The Winter Garden, an island that grows inside your head, that connects to you personally. To what is most personal. Because there is so much in the Winter Garden that affects you. You know it, you just cannot put your finger on exactly how. Or maybe you just do not want to.

So the Winter Garden that exists in your head cannot be shared with anyone, not with Solveig, for example. Ritsch, Solveig has closed the curtains in the kitchen. To Solveig the Winter Garden does not exist.

And yet, there are things Johanna would like to ask Solveig, which Johanna knows belong there, to the Winter Garden.

On TV Steep stairs, white houses. “I love you.” People in pastel-colored clothes who really do not say anything to each other. “Are you really my daughter?” “Yes, yes, I love you.” “My daughter! I love you, too.”

“Solveig,” one might want to ask, “who is my mother?”

But thoughts. Sometimes, quite often, Johanna grows tired of all the thoughts, is just sleepy. Solveig’s warm fingers, the smell of the woods and leaves in her nose, coming from her own skin.

“Aren’t you going to clean your room?” Solveig might whisper. Nah nah. Sleeping now. ZZZZZZZZZZ to Steep stairs, white houses.

Of course it happens that Johanna grows tired of the mess in her room, of everything. During the day, puts on her clothes, goes out. To the Boundary Woods, alone, where it is quiet; that is Johanna’s world.

THE BOUNDARY WOODS/SCREAMING TOYS, 2004–2006

2004, THE BOUNDARY WOODS. What is left of the large woods that were once large and uninterrupted, with the Outer Marsh farthest to the north. Now it is a small belt running between the Winter Garden and the mainland: stretching across all of the First Cape and then inland.

Great, desolate woodlands that over the years have been leveled by logging, construction work: new residential areas that have sprung up, called things like Rosengården 2, 3, and 5 and of these Rosengården 2 is the farthest to the south, toward the sea, the very nicest and oldest. It was built already during the 1980s, long before all of the other Rosengårdar and many years before a place like the Winter Garden on the Second Cape had even been imagined. But despite the new houses, Rosengården 2 remains as an unattainable ideal: the place that all other Rosengårdar try to imitate. These family homes, several thousand square feet in size, with gardens surrounded by wall-like fences that allow no one to see in but from where the sound of barking dogs can be heard; Spanish wolfhounds, no terriers exactly.

But still, it does not help. Rosengården 2 remains what it is: the most special and luxurious. And: the only gated residential area in the District. In order to get in you need a key card with a code, which is inserted into a machine at the entrance gate.

Private Property: the ones who live in Rosengården stay put. They do not come out—not to the Boundary Woods, anyway: in their eyes and in the eyes of many there is nothing there.

No lit walking path to work out on and cell phones with poor reception because the Boundary Woods are under radio silence compared to the Winter Garden.

And of course: here and there some fairly nasty places too. Bule Marsh, the abode of suicide, where unhappy people come to take their own lives. Maybe they are drawn to the marsh by a certain atmosphere of seclusion, timelessness: tree branches that hang over the dark, still water. Or egged on by an old story of something tragic that happened there once. The American girl who was pushed into the water from a cliff in the summer of 1969 by her jealous boyfriend, was sucked into the whirlpool and disappeared, and when her boyfriend understood what he had done he became so beside himself he went off and hanged himself. It is a story that can also be found in the Winter Garden.

The place, the Winter Garden on the Second Cape. Next to the wide-open sea through a grove of pine trees where the road stops, then you are there. Which is not true of course. You do not get there just like that. There is a security system. Fencing. Starts below the hill on the First Cape, which also belongs to the Winter Garden, but there is only a regular fence there, the real security measures are found farther inside. In any case: fences. Press your face against the square grooves, leaves a mark on your skin.

So. The Boundary Woods, others do not spend much time there.

An invisible boundary line, which applies not only to the inhabitants of Rosengården 2 but to almost everyone in the District as a whole.

Except one, of course. Ulla Bäckström who is exactly where she wants to be and everywhere in every place. Private Property. All of that means nothing to her.

Rosengården 2. Where she lives, with her family in an architectonic masterpiece of stone, tile, and glass in three and a half stories—she is the only child and has the entire attic at her disposal. “The Half Floor” or “the Glitter Scene” as Johanna hears her say as she sweeps past in the halls at school in the middle of a group of likeminded students, ones from the junior and senior classes. The Glitter Scene, the half story: slightly joking, of course, but still not without a grain of seriousness. Because Ulla is special and ingenious and very artistically gifted, really truly. The theater, the dance, and the music: how they sing about her there where she is walking, that is what she says she lives for… Ulla Bäckström, laughing in the hallways, filled with her own babble; everything she does and “creates.” And it comes about up there, she explains, on the Glitter Scene, her room. Ulla Bäckström, glittering eyes, capturing her friends with her talk, her laugh, with how she is—also capturing the ones standing off to the side watching her, like Johanna, for example.

There, on the Glitter Scene, EVERYTHING is there: all the thoughts, the ideas, and all the music. All the music books, all the manuscripts. And IF Ulla Bäckström is exaggerating then it is only just a little. Because already at the age of seventeen, her age when she dies in November 2006, she has played the lead role in Miss Julie, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Singin’ in the Rain, a musical; she loves to sing, has a fantastic singing voice, deep and magnificent. And a few years earlier she was the American girl in a play she wrote herself, which was based on an old story about something that happened in the District.

“Places have their stories that define them, cover them like a scar, a curse…” Ulla Bäckström who talks like that on the stage in one of the school’s many auditoriums. “The American girl who died, and all the death that gathered around her.”

And Ulla Bäckström has a band, or, she has had several bands, but one called Screaming Toys.

The Glitter Scene, Rosengården: and yes, it happens that when Johanna is in the Boundary Woods she finds her way to the northern edge, finds herself alone under the protection of the woods’ last tree and looks up. At Bäckström’s house, it is the last one. High above all the walls, enclosures, it rises up, the attic at the very top. No ordinary attic, there is a high ceiling in there, you can see that, large windows.

And yes, of course, maybe it is possible to see it as a stage. A theater stage, so shimmering and elusive, with promises. Dark fall nights, Johanna below, among the trees.

A faint light trickling out from beneath the heavy, dark red curtains pulled closed over the windows, like just before a performance is about to start.

The curtain that is pulled to the side. Ulla singing: Don’t push your love too far, Eddie.

Or: Ulla standing at the window. Just standing. There is a door on the stage, in the middle of the window, a door made of glass. She has opened the door. She is standing there, at the edge, in white clothes, shimmering. It is windy. Just standing there, singing.

In the wind: how it is blowing around her.

Don’t push your love too far, Eddie. Ulla Bäckström sings, screams out over the Boundary Woods.

But it is like this, all the more often too. That: the bird has flown the coop. Darkness in Ulla’s window. Ulla is not where you think she will be. Ulla everywhere, Ulla across all borders.

And when you see her like that, a glimpse in the Boundary Woods, a glimpse on the field that starts outside Johanna’s window in Johanna’s room in the house below the hill on the First Cape where Johanna and Solveig live together, a glimpse below Tobias’s greenhouse while Tobias is still alive, a glimpse on the path in the copse on her way to the Second Cape… then she is not surrounded by all of her thousand friends but almost always alone.

Ulla Bäckström, the Flower Girl, in a field, November 2004. Ulla Bäckström comes walking over the field, butterflies are falling out of her large, light, rough hair; velvet insects in different colors are shimmering softly in the light of the Winter Garden, where she is headed. Ulla Flower Girl, a basket with roses over her arm: she has begged them off of Tobias at his greenhouse, she is going to sell them at the Winter Garden.

Long white coat, long white dress, white ankle boots—dress-up clothes, because this is when she is writing her play about the American girl: Ulla, the Flower Girl, is going to gather material in the Winter Garden, the clothes are her camouflage.

The basket is filled with dark roses when she meets Johanna on the field.

“Hey, Lille.” Sets her basket down on the ground, trains her beautiful brown eyes on Johanna.

“Shall I tell you about the Winter Garden? Have you heard?

“You know.” Ulla Bäckström lowers her voice to a whisper, points at the frozen ground between them. “It’s like a hole in the earth. You can… fall. Down. And swish, you’re in the underworld.

“And Lille, it’s magical down there. There’s an inner kingdom. Kapu kai. Lots of rooms. The forbidden seas. Have you heard?

“Places almost nobody knows about. Secret rooms where only a few have been. And in the rooms, Lille, there are stories. The walls talk: It happened at Bule Marsh. Is it familiar? You find out the truth about everything there.

“Do you think it’s true, Lille?” she says, staring at Johanna again, but Johanna, suddenly struck dumb by her own shyness, does not get a word out.

But then Ulla Bäckström takes out the snow globe. Rummages around in her basket on the ground, under the roses.

“Look here.” It is round, made of plastic, fits in the palm of her hand.

“The American girl in a snow globe,” she whispers. “From the Winter Garden. You can buy it at the souvenir shop.” Holds up the snow globe in front of Johanna and Johanna sees: two plastic figures in a watery landscape. Boy, girl, on a cliff—the dark water of the marsh under them with white ripples that are supposed to represent the foam on the waves; the background of the snow globe a shimmering silver.

The boy in the foreground, with his back toward you, hand raised, turned toward the girl on the edge of the cliff in the moment right before she falls headfirst, is sucked up by the whirlpool and disappears. You see only her terrified face over the boy’s shoulder. Mouth wide open, sharp red lips surrounding a silent and eternal scream.

Ulla on the field shakes the snow globe, snow falls inside it: soft plastic flakes that swirl around in the water, mixed white and silver. Glitters in the light from the Winter Garden, which is falling over the field in the November twilight.

“They say she died from love,” Ulla Bäckström whispers. “The one who killed her loved her too much. The boy. With his back toward us. But, Lille, who is he? You can’t see the boy’s face.

“I mean,” Ulla Bäckström continues, as if she wants to reveal a secret, “which one? There were two, after all. Who loved her. One was named Björn, the other named Bengt. The Boy in the woods. That’s what they called him.

“But it was Björn who was her real boyfriend, they were closer in age. The Boy in the woods was only thirteen and she had just turned nineteen. And Björn, her boyfriend, he became so sad when she died that he went and hanged himself.

“But the other one. The Boy in the woods. You wonder, Lille, can you ever really know what it was actually like?

“Because he, Bengt, he loved her just as much. If not even more… I don’t know,” says Ulla Bäckström, after a brief pause, shrugging her shoulders, standing up straight. “Maybe it’s a riddle, Lille. But, in any case. Hard to know. Since all of them are dead now.

“But—oh! Have to go now. Sell my roses, in the Winter Garden.

“The snow globe, isn’t it pretty?”

Johanna nods attentively.

“Do you want it? You can have it.”

And Ulla Bäckström gives the snow globe to Johanna.

She laughs again, and now, suddenly, it has started snowing; large, heavy flakes descend over the field. “All of them dead now…” Ulla Bäckström hums in the first snow, almost elated, a new melody that suddenly has floated into her head. “Dead, Lille.” Opens her mouth and stretches out her tongue to catch a few snowflakes on it. “I’m obsessed with death. Ille dille death Lille,” Ulla sings and lowers her voice. “And I’m not Ulla but Ylla, Ylla of death. Listen Lille, in this silence on the field, doesn’t it sound good?”

Johanna mumbles, “Yeah, maybe,” a bit gruffly because she had to say something even if she would really like to say something else, something better, something more in line with the special mood.

“But, Lille,” Ulla continues, “maybe it’s like this. That there’s a lot of goodness… blue skies, flowers, beautiful music… and at the same time, as if another force, a wild pain, and mortality is working inside everything.”

And then suddenly, with those words, she is gone. Has lifted up her basket with red roses and continues across the field toward the Winter Garden.

Ylla of death. Skirts flapping, so white in the light of the Winter Garden rising up in front of her.

And Johanna, alone on the field, wants to call out, Wait Ulla, wait! Take me with you! But just stands there, dumb and silent. And futilely of course. Ulla Bäckström has probably forgotten everything already and Ulla Bäckström does not wait.

Johanna stands where she stands, a snow globe in her hand.

She takes the snow globe to her room and puts it away among all her things, looks at it sometimes and fantasizes. The field that starts outside the window. Blows mist on the glass. Lille, she writes in the mist, peers out through the letters. Empty. The light of the Winter Garden. Ulla does not come.

The play about the American girl begins and then ends, new plays come, new music. Ulla who sweeps by in the corridors at school, the theater the dance the music, how they sing about her there where she is walking. Johanna tries to make eye contact. It does not work. Or, if Ulla sees, then she looks through Johanna, caught up in her own things.

And at home: Robin moves away, Tobias becomes ill and does not come to his greenhouse anymore. The greenhouse deteriorates, Tobias dies, Solveig and Johanna are alone in the house.

The American girl in a snow globe. The Winter Garden. An inner kingdom. Kapu kai. But it happens that Johanna finds her way to the edge of the Boundary Woods anyway. Like always, she stands at the edge and looks up, into the darkness. Ulla’s room, high up above Rosengården’s fence.

“Maybe I went away because I wanted to be with people who were called Jack, Vanessa, Andy, and Catherine.” Sometimes Ulla still stands there in her room, on the Glitter Scene. The glass doors open, the white dress flapping in the window. Singing a song, “Death’s spell at a young age,” that one, another one? Or just stands, looking out at everything.

Then it is over, everything is normal. The door is closed, Ulla leaves the window. The curtains, like a theater curtain, are pulled closed again.

And still, often, just darkness, the bird has flown the coop.

But sometimes when Johanna stands alone at the edge of the woods and looks up at the Glitter Scene she imagines that she is there. With Ulla on the Glitter Scene, the theater, the dance, the music… no, not like that.

But so. “Maybe I went away because I wanted to be with people who were called…” Ulla and Johanna with the Marsh Queen, all of her songs. “And now you’re going to get to hear what it sounds like.” How Johanna is going to come to Ulla Bäckström in her room, and they are going to listen to it up there.

Death’s spell at a young age. They are going to be Orpheus who goes to the Underworld, the Winter Garden, bring back Eurydice. Their Project Earth. The Marsh Queen, the Winter Garden, the American girl in a snow globe, how everything is going to coincide.

They will have Project Earth. They will have everything. The two of them.

Patti, Debbie, Ametiste, Imagine, my Rimbaud and the Piss Factory. Screaming Toys and Wembley Arena 2012, everything will lead there.

“Being on stage is so terrible, they tear you to bits with their admiring looks, admiring hands, you could just die…” To talk like that in an interview, sign autographs.

Or like that. Just like that. Listen to the Marsh Queen and her songs. The Marsh Queen’s voice, mellow like Ulla’s, but even darker and more mysterious. “Lie down here,” Ulla Bäckström will say on the Glitter Scene while the song is playing, “and we’ll dissect the Marsh Queen’s inner life, all her dark corners… close your eyes…” And the insects, the butterflies, will glitter in her hair there on the Glitter Scene, among the music, the books, all the music and the dress up clothes, all the manuscripts.

But when that song has finished playing, new songs will come. And Ulla will sit up and shake the butterflies from her hair, klirr klirr as metal and velvet rain down on the floor around her.

The Glitter Scene is my life. New songs, other songs, their own songs.

Well. Just a story, a fantasy. It does not happen. Nothing happens, in reality. Aside from time passing, months, years. Robin who moves, Tobias who dies, the greenhouse that deteriorates on the side of the road. It becomes the fall of 2006, the months of October and November. A glimpse of a stranger in the Boundary Woods. She is called the Red One, a woman in her fifties, and she wears red clothes.

The Red One, from the Winter Garden.

The American girl in a snow globe. Sometimes Johanna thinks about it too. Lonely thoughts. Two characters in a watery landscape. Don’t push your love too far, Eddie. Ulla on the Glitter Scene, Johanna down below at the edge of the woods, alone like always, in the dark.

Ille dille death, Lille. “There is so much death.” The memory of Ulla from two years ago, 2004. “I am Ylla of death.” Ulla Bäckström catching snowflakes on her tongue on a field.

The house in the darker part, November 2006. If you follow the longest path into the Boundary Woods, which starts behind what was once Tobias’s greenhouse next to the road, and you continue across all of the First Cape to where the sea meets you on the other side, you will come to the house in the darker part. Though, it should be mentioned: in those outskirts you do not exactly think sea when you see the water, it is such an inland-located overgrown muddy bay—the poles of an old jetty sticking up out of the water.

But in any case there is a house next to that beach, the only house in all of the Boundary Woods, an old alpine villa in the mud. Has been standing empty for many years, a great staircase takes up almost the entirety of the front of the house leading up to the entrance on the second floor. Many wide steps in gray concrete, cracked in places; during the summer moss and weeds grow tall from within the cracks. One large staircase in the middle of nowhere: can look like that from a distance during the fall and winter when all the leaves have fallen from the trees and all the undergrowth has withered away. Isolation and such loneliness around the abandoned house where a special darkness rules, even during the day. Almost timeless, without a season—or as if it were the same season all year round. Late fall, just before the snow.

A feeling that endures after the Winter Garden comes to the Second Cape, which is located just a few miles away and illuminates all of its surroundings with its powerful lighting systems. But the light does not quite reach the house in the darker part: just streams down carefully among the tall conifers or grows stiff, into aurora borealis–like streaks across the sky during the cold, clear winter evenings.

But the house, someone lived there once. A small family, mother, father, child who came to the District straight from the international jet-setter’s lifestyle which, during the winter, took place at various Central European ski resorts. But the dad, he was called the Islander, loved his wife more than anything else on earth and in secret had the house in the darker part built based on the model of a lodge that the mother had fallen in love with during a sunny winter walk high up in the Alps and he gave it to her as a surprise.

It was supposed to be their new home, here, in the District, they would plant roots and live as a family here for real in the darker part of the woods. Of course it was not very successful. Wrong place, wrong foundation for a house, and the architecture and the construction were not really to anyone’s credit either so the mother could not put up with the marshiness; rather she left and remarried and the father and daughter were left alone in the strange house. Then they lived there just the two of them, father and daughter, until the daughter grew up and became the Marsh Queen and went out into the world, to the punk music, to become a footnote.

But in the house, large wild parties were held there once. They could last for days because the Islander loved glitz and glamour. Even after his daughter had grown up and left home and he was living somewhere else, he would come back during the hunting season and then there were parties, for days and nights. Until it gradually ebbed out on its own: one party was the last party and the Islander stopped coming altogether. It was like this: you could stand in the forest, in the darkness, and watch the parties from the sidelines. Like a ship, an island of light—which was traveling by. Then suddenly the house was evacuated and it was empty and dark all over again.

Johanna goes to the house sometimes—there is a panorama window on the ground floor at the back through which you can see the basement. She cups her hands around her face, looks in: an old earth-filled swimming pool, filled with disgusting water that seeps up from the ground through the cracks in the tiling. Trash floats on the calm surface. Paper, scraps of fabric, bottles, the like.

But it was here, exactly right here in the pool, that she, the Marsh Queen, had grown up. The Marsh Queen whom she later became, when she went out into the world, to the punk music. The Marsh Queen who rose from the mire. Lived alone in the house with her father the Islander, her name was Sandra Wärn: a little girl who collected matchboxes and silk fabric—her mother had owned a silk fabric store that had gone bankrupt and all of the unsold fabric was brought to the house in the darker part and when her mother left, everything was left behind. Bundles, packages from a closet on the upper floor were unwound in shimmering, colorful lengths and spread out over the entire house. Down in the swimming pool too, when the Marsh Queen was a child, was just a square, sloppily tiled hole in the ground, never filled with water—there was so much about that house that in some way was unfinished. The girl hung out down there in the swimming pool, it became her world. And a moment in her life, childhood, the only world, for a time she came to share with a friend who became everything to her, they were always there. But that friendship ended abruptly and tragically, they had a falling out, the friend went and shot herself. And then in some way, Sandra Wärn had lost everything, there was nothing left.

Imagine: Sandra Wärn after her friend’s death. Among all the fabric, in the waterless swimming pool. Colorful, shimmering lengths she wrapped herself in, and fell asleep. Slept and slept, in sorrow, inconsolable, wrapped in fabric. But from them, like from a cocoon, the Marsh Queen was born, the one who went out into the world, to the music. Never returned, but—forgot nothing. All of it, the house, the swimming pool, her and her friend’s world, all of the fabric, she took them with her to the music. Wrote songs about them, such as one called “Death’s Spell at a Young Age.”

She has talked about it in interviews. But smack, back to reality. At that point in the story the Marsh Queen stops herself, almost throws everything away, tears the silk fabric into pieces… “Oh, maybe it’s just a way of saying something else. Maybe I left because I wanted to be with people called Jack, Vanessa, Andy, and Cathe—”

“She cuts rags for rugs, Lille.”

And that is just about how it is, at the basement window in the house in the darker part, that day, one afternoon in November 2006, when Johanna suddenly hears a voice behind her, turns around fast as lightning, and stands face-to-face with Ulla Bäckström.

The same Ulla yet another one, different. Certainly older than two years ago in the field, wearing completely ordinary clothes now. Jeans, dark blue quilted jacket, a red hat pulled down over her ears, out of breath, as if she had been running. And she has something in her hand. A toy mask.

“Crehp, crehp, Lille. Through fabric, long strips. Curls down into a bucket. While she’s talking, talking, Djiissuss—you never get away.

“Maybe she’s crazy, Lille. You must know who I’m talking about. The Red One. What’s her name? Maalamaa.

“But Lille,” Ulla adds, looking around, confused and at a loss, “it’s as if you’ve put a ball in motion.” She grows quiet for a moment and then Johanna understands what it is about her that is different. Ulla Bäckström is afraid. An ordinary empty rotten day in the woods, cold, the first snow is about to start falling again.

But terrorstruck, the fear stinks, screams in her for a few seconds even though she immediately does everything in her power to fend it off.

“My God, Lille,” she calls. “I am so DAMNED tired of it. I’m not interested anymore, I never think about it.”

“About what?”

“The American girl. It was just one project among many. I’m doing new roles now, new manuscripts. The world is filled with manuscripts, Lille…”

“What are you talking about?”

Ulla Bäckström comes closer, the fear is suddenly blown away, her voice is steadier. “You know, Lille, it was like this, when I played the American girl, played her on stage. Or it becomes like that. If you do the same thing over and over again, play the same story in the same way, beginning middle and end, the same scenes, same same, over and over again…

“Are on the cliff and die of love, fall fall, every time the same way… that, well, it becomes a bit monotonous. And then it can happen that you start thinking about other things. Or just this repetition that makes you uncertain, you start asking yourself: was it really like this?

“You know, with that story. The American girl. You start thinking about other possibilities.

“Björn who killed himself. Her boyfriend, after she had died. But Bengt, the other boy, the one in the woods, who loved her too. Who was he?

“If it was him… And then, when you start thinking like that you sort of became unsure about everything.

“I gathered material. Sold flowers in the Winter Garden. But I didn’t get anywhere. Then you start asking around elsewhere, here and there. Putting balls in motion, Lille. Google, write some messages… and then, gradually, you come across someone”—Ulla pauses—“whose name is… Maalamaa.

“Well, there’s not so much to say about that. But now, Lille. The Red One, now she’s here. In the Winter Garden. And I’ve been there.

“And she talks about completely different things—

“Strange things. Like, well, that change everything.

“And suddenly, even though you don’t want to hear any more, you get hooked.

“She cuts rags for rugs, Lille. Heavy scissors, crehp crehp through the fabric, curling down into a bucket on the floor—”

“What does she talk about?” Johanna suddenly asks, loudly and eagerly.

Ulla Bäckström stops herself, stares so intensely into Johanna’s eyes that Johanna almost regrets asking.

“Well.” Ulla shrugs. “Just different stuff. She knew that boy, Bengt. Well, he wasn’t a boy then any longer, a grown man… the one who died here, burned in the house.

“But that—maybe there was another secret. About what happened. Also with the American girl. Where everything started. Three siblings, Lille, who were united by a secret that should have kept them together but instead it drove them apart and everyone turned against each other. Is it fam—”

“What three siblings?” Johanna interrupts her.

But then Ulla suddenly laughs and puts on the mask she has in her hand.

“You know, Lille,” she yells, with the mask on. “And her name is the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa—and your moooootheeer HA HA HA!

“And SO, Lille, it becomes an entirely different story. About two people and a newsstand. Maybe you know it too? HA HA, Lille! Buhuu!”

And with these words Ulla turns around and walks away, November 2006, for the last time.

“Dark boring groupie,” she yells. “EVERYTHING can be stuffed into your head!”

But that same evening, though much later, almost night by that time, Ulla Bäckström is standing on the Glitter Scene, the glass door wide open. And she falls, flies out.

A shadow behind her, that mask. The Angel of Death. Liz Maalamaa.

To add to the Winter Garden. Ulla falling, the mask, Screaming Toys.

It howls through this experience, screams, Screaming Toys.

But Johanna, still during the day, has run home from the woods, the house in the darker part, to her room.

The American girl in a snow globe.

Bengt in the woods.

Three siblings united by a secret.

Solveig closing the curtains in the kitchen. Ritsch. To her the Winter Garden does not exist.

Rita’s Winter Garden. The Rita Strange Corporation.

From The Return of the Marsh Queen, Chapter 1. Where did the music start?

The Marsh Queen: I don’t know about music, if what I mean with music, is music.

“Wembley Arena, 2012.” Everything that brings you to the music. “Maybe I left because I wanted to be with people called Jack, Vanessa, Andy, and Catherine.” A new hour of creation, we are the Woodst…

But of course, fantasies only. Leftovers of a Project Earth, the Marsh Queen, in the wastepaper basket, torn to bits.

“You have to know your history, to know who you are.”

It was Tobias who said that once. But Tobias is dead, the greenhouse is dark, at the side of the road. It obscures the field.

And Johanna is alone with a story, a very different one, one she does not know what to do with.

A gust of wind, November 2006, Child, fluorescent on the wall.

And it is blowing through this experience.

THE STORY, TOBIAS’S GREENHOUSE, 2004

TOBIAS HAS A greenhouse, he grows roses there, lots of different kinds, you can remember names, such as one called Flaming Carmen.

Tough, sharp stems are forced up from plants and he is not very good at it. A rather hopeless task too if you think about the climate, he explains to Solveig sometimes, a bit vaguely as always when he is talking to her about his greenhouse that he built on property Solveig has rented to him. He certainly has all sorts of fertilizer in there, strong chemicals and strange lamps to “stimulate” the vegetation, he says with authority, even though it does not help. Tobias does not really have the knack; all the knowledge he has acquired about plants, and mainly about roses, he has gotten from books. According to Solveig, it may all be beautiful but in reality it just is not enough.

Maybe Solveig is right, Johanna does not know. On the other hand: Johanna does not care about greenhouse gardening, the art of getting roses to grow or die; she likes Tobias, likes going to the greenhouse, being there with him. Just the two of them, Solveig has asthma and cannot handle the air, but sometimes she shows up anyway. Suddenly standing in the doorway, reminding Tobias to wear his gloves. This period, the last period, Tobias in the greenhouse before he gets sick and dies, he often had to come to Solveig in the kitchen and get Band-Aids, his hands covered in small cuts.

But for the most part it is just Johanna and Tobias in the greenhouse, on their own. Tobias moving up and down the rows, cutting and pruning. Johanna in her place, a stool made of an upside-down bucket next to the water hose and the books by the entrance. Yes, there is a bookshelf with books in Tobias’s greenhouse, next to all the greenhouse equipment and a record player playing opera music: a part of Tobias’s large library that he could not take with him when he moved from the apartment on the hills north of the town center to the senior housing facility by the square. For example A Lesson in History—A Sense of Belonging to the Village, Architecture and Crime, and History and Progress, which was once Tobias’s favorite work of reference: a heavy, worn bundle, several pounds of it, on the top shelf, mold on the edges.

“You need to know your history in order to know who you are.” Tobias was once someone who said things like that, with a pedagogic fervor that had pretty much left him even before he left the teaching profession; he had taught history at the coed school and the high school. He had also been Solveig and Rita’s teacher, that is how long Solveig and Tobias have known each other. Even longer too: they became friends at the swimming school where Tobias had taken notice of the twins’ swimming talent, the twins’ talent in general, the twins always did well in school too.

You have to know your history, Tobias said to Johanna once and started telling her about some local history but her concentration started fading while listening to the Old Men’s Choir over five generations, the like. That’s not mine, Tobias, she had wanted to say, but on the other hand: her own history, in that way, what would she have to add? The Marsh Queen, the corridors at school, to the music, but Råttis J. Järvinen who also says that then, Johanna, one might also learn how to play an instrument, practice a little. Nah. My story. Not exactly elated at the thought.

So they have not done a lot of talking there in the greenhouse, it just turned out that way. Just been there together, the damp everywhere, Tobias’s music playing on the record player. Tobias slowly moving up and down the rows between the plants, Johanna on her bucket, and the titles of the books her gaze rests on, the scissors, the knives. The dusk falling outside can be seen through a hole in the plastic wall, see the road like a line, the light, the Winter Garden.

“Tell me about the American girl, Tobias.”

In any case Johanna is thinking about what Tobias said about needing to know your history when she goes down to Tobias in the greenhouse after meeting Ulla on the field the first time, after being given the snow globe, from the Winter Garden.

“Project Earth, Tobias. It’s something we’re doing at school.”

Tobias stops what he is doing, surprised, but at the same time, what else is there to say about that?

“I know, Tobias,” says Johanna, “that Bengt is my father and he loved the American girl and that Björn, the one who killed her, was also from here, the cousin’s house—

“And now, Tobias, I want to know everything. You know just as well as I do that Solveig doesn’t say anything. I want to know. Tobias. Everything.”

THAT RHYTHM AND THE QUIET CHILDREN, 1969

TOBIAS TALKS ABOUT THE DISTRICT like another world, even though it is not more than thirty–forty years ago. About the capes: the Second Cape, next to the sea, where he, at the beginning of the 1960s, runs a swimming school for the District’s children before the summer settlers take over the beautiful cliffs of the archipelago. A housing exhibition of the vacation homes of the future is being built on the Second Cape, the first of its kind in the country, it is finished in 1965. Modern houses in a bold, new architecture are sold as summer camps for people who can afford to buy them because they are expensive houses—mostly outsiders, from the nearby city by the sea for example. Located just forty miles away and there is a road the whole way so it makes the area especially attractive. Thus the Second Cape is transformed into a secluded place, rather inaccessible for the District’s own residents. The public beach is moved to the woods behind the First Cape, Bule Marsh.

The First Cape is located right behind the Second Cape, a bit off to the side, farther inland. It has more reeds, no sandy beaches or jetties there. The tall hill on which at that time there was only an old three-story house on it with turrets can be seen from a distance, far out at sea as well, like a landmark. In the very beginning, when Tobias comes to the District as an elementary school teacher in 1959, the house is empty and there is no sign of any owner making claims to the house. In and of itself it is not striking at that time: after the war, the entire District was a military base for the occupying power and was closed to all outsiders and when it is returned and opened again, not everyone who had been evacuated returns. The devastation was immense, homes, properties destroyed, burned down—not something you particularly want to see.

And below the hill then “the cousin’s property,” a red cottage with outbuildings and a tumbledown baker’s cottage where the twins, Rita and Solveig, will come to live and grow up together. The cousin’s property: named after the old man who owns the place; he is called “the cousin’s papa” and nothing else. A jovial name for a grouchy and obstinate man who, shortly after the District becomes an open area, comes out of nowhere together with his brother and his brother’s wife and their three small children and has, it turns out, papers saying that he is the new owner of certain land on the First and the Second capes. He won them in a poker game from one Baron von B. who, naturally after the game had taken place in some military barrack at the end of the war, tried to do everything in his power to invalidate the transaction. But it was futile, Baron von B. had signed over portions of his property in the presence of witnesses, nothing to be done about the matter.

In other words, such a strange, small clan: maybe you think what kind of loose rabble—who, without asking anyone’s permission, settles down in the house on the hill on the First Cape and do not leave voluntarily; a countryman is needed to get them to leave. A bit amusing; here today, somewhere else tomorrow, people like that, as it were. But they do not disappear, they just move down to the foot of the hill and when you realize the cousin’s papa actually owns that place (and large sections on the Second Cape as well, which he later sells to the company with the housing exhibition) you adjust your attitude a little. All this ownership still musters an ounce of respect together with the fact that shortly thereafter a terrible thing happens, the mother and father to the three small children die in a car accident. Crash into a hill at a high speed on the way to a dance competition (that was what they were, circus performers, professional dancers). And three small orphaned children left to fend for themselves with the man in the cottage, in that mess… and children are children despite everything, you can see from a long way off how it is going with those children. You try and do what you can for them, get them clothes, food, even if it needs to happen in secret so that the old man, who mainly spends his time sitting in his room boozing, will not become angry.

The children stay out of the way—like shadows, timids, during the day. But they can be seen at a distance: on the hill on the First Cape, sitting in a row, backs leaning against the stone foundation of the house where they had lived for a while. Tall, big for their ages, look older than they actually are. And when you see them like that, it can happen that you feel a certain… maybe it is not the right word, but worry, discomfort.

As if it were still hanging in the air, the music from the house from the time the children’s parents were still alive and practicing dance moves on the salsafloor on the ground floor. Rumba tones, sneaking out through the crack in the open window, behind closed curtains. On still, hot summer days: energetic rhythms, certainly “southern,” certainly “happy,” but in the silence where only the music and the pounding of feet could be heard it became something else entirely. Something pulsating, threatening, hypnotically absorbing.

That rhythm and the quiet children. And so, the children at the foot of the house on the hill, the three cursed ones. A memory, like a sensation, that springs up again a few years later when tragedy befalls the house again in connection with the American girl’s disappearance and death at Bule Marsh.

Not for Tobias, of course, but for many others. Something about those children…

Tobias, on the other hand, after having met the twins at the swimming school and having known them for a few years, asked them what they do up there on the hill. “Play,” the girls replied. “The Winter Garden.” “What kind of a game is that?” Tobias asked with friendly interest. “A sibling game,” Solveig explained and Rita elbowed her and added cryptically, giggling, “A world. An own world. We’re building. In our heads.”

But then when Tobias was about to ask more, both girls were evasive and giggled even more and started teasing him instead in a way that would gradually become an amusing pastime and a special jargon among the three of them. “Will you ask Rita?” one of them said, or “Are you talking to Solveig?” And whether Tobias nodded or shook his head it was always wrong. “I’m Solveig,” one of them said. “No, me, I’m Rita.” And they carried on like that to confuse him because of their likeness—and at the time the twins still looked so much alike that it was impossible even for Tobias to always tell them apart.

And little by little, about a year before everything with the American girl happens, things become pretty good for the kids in the cousin’s house. A new woman comes to live there about a year after the car accident. A simple one, fond of children, who gets the house in order and has a boy of her own with her, his name is Björn and he is a few years older than the other children who become his “cousins” in the cousin’s house. The cousin’s mama: her real name is Astrid Loman, she is countryman Loman’s daughter from the next county over and she is the kind that opens her arms to all children.

And God knows in those years, during the aftereffects of the war, there are enough homeless, abandoned children to go around. A little girl like that starts hanging around the cousin’s house too: Doris Flinkenberg, an abused, mistreated child from the Outer Marsh. A special child, filled with light—and who, after Björn’s death, is taken in as a new cousin in the cousin’s house.

But first, now, the three siblings: the twins Solveig and Rita and their older brother Bengt. The twins catch Tobias’s eye at the swimming school in other words: their exceptional talent, not only when it comes to swimming but in general, their strength, courage. Makes them assistant teachers in the school and that is where one of them, Solveig, distinguishes herself early on and saves a girl named Susette Packlén from drowning and gets the Lifeguard’s Medal, which she keeps under her pillow a long time afterward, many years—there is so much of the child in her too.

There at the swimming school one of them, Solveig, is called Sister Blue, and the other, Rita, is Sister Red, so that the young students will be able to tell who is who.

Tobias takes the twins under his wing, not just at the swimming school but otherwise too. He visits them in the baker’s cottage where they live on their own on the other side of the field across from the cousin’s house. He encourages them in school, gives good advice.

And he is the one who finds them a new place to swim at Bule Marsh when the Second Cape becomes private property. Rita and Solveig are going to become swimmers, have decided that little by little. And if you are going to become a swimmer, you have to train hard and be goal oriented, with discipline. Bule Marsh becomes their training location where they go early every summer morning—and it is there, at the quiet beaches of Bule Marsh, in the middle of the woods’ isolation, where they eventually meet the baroness from the Second Cape. They teach the baroness to swim, something she maintains she does not know how to do. In return, in exchange for the swimming lessons, the baroness teaches the girls English, which is one of the many world languages she has mastered.

For a time, a few summers at the end of the 1960s, the twins and the baroness are at Bule Marsh almost every morning. And Tobias himself as well, if he happens to come by on one of his morning walks. Like a small family there on the beach; Tobias, the baroness, the twins. Though it ends forever after that morning, late summer 1969, when the American girl dies there at the marsh.

Falls from Lore Cliff and disappears, is sucked into the water’s currents. And the current is strong, especially under the cliff, and it is very, very deep.

Bengt, Rita and Solveig’s brother, walks in the woods on his own, or on the Second Cape—even after the summer residents settle there. Tall and gangly, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, but looks older. And a sketchpad under his arm more often than not: but if you ask him what he is drawing, which Tobias does once, tries to start a conversation that way, for the most part you receive no answer or perhaps just a few evasive mumbles in response.

But, “maps,” “special buildings,” “architecture”—on a rare occasion he finds his tongue, even becomes excited. Then for the most part, his cousin Björn is with him and Björn is the one who explains it as a way of introduction, with admiration in his voice too. But then when Bengt relaxes and starts talking on his own it does not become much more intelligible; Björn rolls his eyes and starts laughing in the middle of everything. “You aren’t right in the head, Einstein,” he says but with respect, so to speak, as if being crazy is a sign of honor, and Bengt thaws even more and suddenly words start gushing out of him. Then you see the age difference too, of course—despite his gruffness and seriousness, how much of a little brother Bengt is in relation to his cousin Björn with whom he shares a room on the upper floor of the cousin’s house; his best friend, his only friend, before the American girl comes in any case.

Björn and Bengt, together the two of them make a rather odd couple, as it were. Bengt who is five years younger and still a head taller than Björn. And no, they do no talk very much, not always and especially not in large groups. The collective silence you sometimes say when you see the cousins together. But for the most part it is that ordinary teenage shyness too; in any case with Björn, none of that restless, quiet anxiety about him.

Björn is kind, someone everyone likes, nothing strange about him. A perfectly ordinary boy who tinkers with his moped on the cousin’s property; he bought it with his own money, he works at the gas station up in the town center and is going to be a car mechanic when he grows up. And of course, something that becomes very clear later on when he gets together with the American girl, eventually get married and start a family and have many children with her.

It is in the middle of June 1969 when she comes walking from the Second Cape where she is living that summer, the American girl Eddie de Wire. Cuts across the cousin’s property with her eyes trained on Björn who is working on his moped outside the barn, the transistor radio hanging on a hook on the wall of the barn. Teenager drawn to teenager, like a fly to flypaper—Eddie to Björn and, of course, despite the great shyness, vice versa. Eddie who sits down in the opening of the barn, lights a cigarette and smokes. Björn toying with his moped, screwing and screwing because he has no idea what to say but for everything in the world he does not want her to go away. And then he finally builds up some courage and lifts the radio down from the hook on the wall, takes it in one hand and Eddie in the other, and then they go for a walk. So Björn becomes Eddie’s official boyfriend that summer. The one she “is going steady with” as it is called in the pop songs that should be playing on that radio as they walk up and down Saabvägen, backward and forward; but for the most part there are just talk shows, or the news and the weather report.

Eddie and Björn, by the barn on the cousin’s property, many evenings that summer. And gradually, after a while, Bengt joins the group. As shy as a weasel at first, a quiet presence—but does not go anywhere, remains there.

“The architecture,” “the buildings” that Bengt talks about, they are his world. Architecture, houses, dreams about houses—both in fantasy and reality. For example the houses on the Second Cape that were once part of the housing exhibition: he loves them, has them on his mind, as if they in some way are his. He was on site already when they were being planned and built, asking the builders and architects questions and trying in different ways to make himself useful to the construction workers. But without progress: Bengt is not, so to speak, despite his wild and strange mind, the slightest bit practically oriented.

Also after the summer guests have taken possession of the Second Cape he continues going there, moves around just as he pleases and at whatever time of day suits him. He does not pay attention to the property lines, ignores the sign PRIVATE PROPERTY that is eventually put up in the little copse of trees that naturally demarcates the summer world on the Second Cape from the remaining parts of the District. The strange boy, you notice him. There is nothing obviously charming or childishly attractive about him either; almost something a bit frightening where he is wandering among the houses and on the cliffs, sketch book under his arm, tall and gangly. Stirs, yes, a certain discomfort, thoughts that cannot really be uttered out loud, in any case not if you are an adult and a parent on the Second Cape because he is, after all, you can see that too, just a child. A child like your own children, who have their own eyes and ears to see and hear with as well of course, who can monitor what they hear in the voices of the adults, the kind of underlying things that cannot be said in public.

So maybe that is why no one on the Second Cape really intervenes when the children finally take matters with Bengt into their own hands. Attack him, chase him into the woods behind the houses, surround him, and punish him. Many times, over and over again.

Before the American girl arrives and becomes his friend and gets involved, saves him. And the time that follows, a few intense weeks in July and the beginning of August 1969, you can see them on the terrace of her boathouse. Mouths moving, especially Bengt who is talking the hind legs off a donkey—all that dark gruffness and shyness in him blown away.

But punishment or not, and also before the American girl: nothing can beat Bengt. Sooner or later he is back again.

On the bare cliffs by the sea, for example, looking up at the Glass House where the baroness lives. One of the most elegant houses on the Second Cape, with the entire front made of glass. Windows from floor to ceiling and a veranda in the middle which, from a certain perspective, off to the side, looks a bit like it is floating above the water.

“That boy is different.” It is the baroness who says that about Bengt to Tobias when Tobias visits her in the Glass House. They sit down there on the veranda on long, light summer evenings and talk to each other. The American girl is not there yet, it is the summer before the catastrophe that changes everything. Changes the baroness too—and in those times, the baroness is not the baroness but rather just “Karin,” to him.

Many times later in life Tobias will remember how she said it, “Karin,” the baroness; without anything condemning, no customary District suspiciousness in her voice. But softly, with admiration. The calm, the softness… like an extenuating circumstance because he liked her very much once, keeping in mind everything that happens later.

Up there on the veranda in the Glass House, Tobias and “Karin,” at the beginning of time. Him talking, her listening with interest when he tells her about Bengt and his two sisters—about their tragic family history, of course, but also about their talent, fantasy. And about the game they have, the Winter Garden, they are building their own world, with their own language that only they understand. People float freely away from themselves. In the middle of the Winter Garden there is Kapu kai, the forbidden seas. The hacienda must be built…

How he has taken it upon himself to support and help the twins, in school, in all ways, sneak them a little money now and then, “granting small scholarships.” With swimming as well; they are talented, good swimmers, both of them: one of them saved a little girl named Susette Packlén from drowning at the swimming school that Tobias held for the District’s children a few years ago, right here, on the Second Cape.

“The hacienda must be built.” The baroness laughs on the veranda of the Glass House, and it is as if she is enlivened for real, likes what she is hearing. “You are kind, Tobias,” she says as well. “It must mean a lot to them that you are here.” And Tobias shrugs and says nothing but it touches him of course that she, the baroness, “Karin,” which she is for him during this time, says that.

And he will also like thinking that the baroness getting to know the twins at Bule Marsh has something to do with what he is telling her about them, that it makes her interested, so to speak, so that she wants to be involved, take part in something.

She starts coming to the twins at Bule Marsh, precisely in the mornings.

They teach her to swim and she, who is widely traveled and knows a great deal about most things, talks to the girls about life and the world that is large, the many interesting places to visit, a lot of interesting things to see along the way. But the world in a metaphorical sense as well, like the world inside you: that you can be and become yourself. It being your duty as a human being to take advantage of all these possibilities. I have placed you in the center of the world… The baroness quotes Pico della Mirandola there at Bule Marsh. The world as a garden. Welcome girls to my lovely garden—

Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance there at Bule Marsh, of course, you can smile a little. I have placed you in the center of the world. On the other hand, completely realistic.

And Tobias comes there often. Like a small family on the beach—or what should you call it; but a somewhat special kinship, a unit, a possibility. But in some way, at that time, he is already thinking—so fragile.

“I can’t swim, Tobias.” The baroness laughs as it were there on the veranda many times. “So it’s about time I learn. But funny girls—”

But, of course, on the veranda, they also talk about other things. Their own things, interests they share. About gardens, plants, the woods, and nature. “I’m going to have my winter garden here on the veranda.” The baroness laughs. “My hacienda. My own world.”

Below the Glass House, at the edge of the beach, there is a boathouse, a small hut on poles stuck between the rocks on the beach, a terrace facing the sea. That is where she spends her time, the American girl Eddie de Wire, a short time, a few months during the summer of 1969 when she is in the District.

She has come from America, the baroness has taken her under her wing, they are distant relations. She lived with her since the winter and comes with her to the summer residence on the Second Cape. Meets Björn who becomes her boyfriend and Bengt who is six years younger but the two of them become good friends as well, gradually spending a lot of time together, just the two of them.

But otherwise, Eddie de Wire, who is she? You do not really know. It is one summer—yet, like a question mark, a mystery. It is also a bit like this with the American girl: one day she is in the District, and few months later she is gone. Just nineteen years old when she falls from Lore Cliff at the beginning of the month of August and tumbles to her death in Bule Marsh.

“Blood is thicker than water.” It is the baroness who says that to Tobias on the veranda at the Glass House, where they are sitting, talking to each other that summer before all of the horrible things happen. She says it many times on various occasions, in various tones of voice. Sometimes ironically, sometimes excusing herself, sometimes as if “despite everything,” officiously and decidedly.

The blood, the water, the kinship. It is about the American girl, who is such a disappointment to her. She makes no secret of it either: after Eddie de Wire’s death several others in the District will be able to hear those words ringing in their ears, “such a disappointment.”

So Eddie de Wire living in the boathouse and not up in the Glass House with the baroness can be seen as an expulsion. Which the baroness, “Karin,” herself does not say outright, not even to Tobias but it can be gathered by the mood. Something that is suddenly so different this year: the baroness’s exhaustion, hesitation, anxiety—or, pure fear? Can also be seen in the mornings with the twins at Bule Marsh. Yes, the baroness is there this summer as well, but not as often. Clearly irritated sometimes, snaps at the girls, “Don’t stand there and dawdle like the cat’s got your tongue.” Says things like that, which make the girls confused, careful and clumsy, nervous. And then when she still tries to be like before, starts talking about all of her trips, about Italy, the world, Pico della Mirandola, the Renaissance… it often happens that she just stops. Does not get in the water, wraps her bathrobe more tightly around herself, remains sitting on the beach.

“Such a disappointment…” Not even with Tobias, when it is just the two of them on the veranda, does she explain it any further. On the other hand: Tobias does not ask, as if there were a distance between them that neither really understands. But at the same time, when they got together it was as if they were both so preoccupied with bridging the gap they were unable to focus on anything else.

Put your finger on what has changed, try and stumble your way forward to an old fellowship. “Karin,” “Tobias,” “Karin,” “Tobias”… and then they sit there saying staccato lines to each other that begin with the same terms of address, “Karin,” “Tobias,” meaningless, like an old parlor game. Find a manner… it slips away.

For example, a certain afternoon in the Glass House at the end of July 1969: “Karin,” “Tobias,” in the Winter Garden—Tobias who suddenly says to her that he is going away.

“To Italy?” “Karin” asks then. It comes out in a hurry, sharp and almost ill-tempered. Tobias laughs. “Well. Not now anyway.”

No, no, Karin: Tobias is going to an in-service training seminar in another city, will be gone almost a week, which he says with a sober severity in his voice too, as if he is reprimanding her, like the teacher he is in real life. With the purpose of underlining the difference between the two of them: he is never anywhere, much less abroad, does not have the possibility. It hits home, of course, “Karin” understands perfectly, laughs acidly, shrugs her shoulders, picks up a book. Once she came to him—now, all of this alienation, and he regrets it of course—at the same time, the reality in everything, when you understand that it is the last time. And at the same time: a dreadful parlor game, “Karin,” “Tobias.”

Like this too: in the next moment Tobias stands and walks to the window. Stands on the glassed-in veranda—of course, for real; glass against the world here—and looks out. The boathouse off to the side, where Eddie de Wire and Bengt can be found even on this late afternoon. On the terrace, just the two of them, babbling away.

Eddie and Bengt: feet dangling over the water, the sea opening up in front of them. Eddie with the guitar she is plucking at amusedly, Bengt drawing, talking. He who was always so quiet, as if transformed, suddenly something a bit happy about it.

And on the Second Cape otherwise, the summer life that is carrying on on its own, separate path. The children from the fancy houses, in the middle of their “sea life” with sailboats, skiffs that they devote themselves to as silly hobbies, fishing gear, motorboats.

But again, the unusual figures on the terrace of the boathouse. Brace yourself against them. In this moment, as if they ruled, were queen/king over everything. The boy’s babbling, the girl’s laughter, the only closeness.

They have a game, the Winter Garden.

The baroness, “Karin,” has at this point in time, July 1969, stopped saying “odd” about Bengt. Says, when speaking of Bengt and Eddie on the terrace of the boathouse, nothing. Pretends not to see them.

Northern wind. The sea dark, foam on the waves.

Still, a beautiful image. Eddie and Bengt. Ideas flying around them. Such invincibility.

What is Bengt saying?

The hacienda must be built?

Something else?

Cannot be heard of course. On the other hand: does it matter if you know it in hindsight? Because that comes to an end as well. Just a few days later the American girl is dead, and Björn, her real boyfriend, has hanged himself in the most distant outbuilding on the cousin’s property.

And Tobias then, who never goes anywhere but has now been to a training seminar in another city, comes back as if to another world.

And this is how the American girl’s death is going to be taken down in history: like a teenage love&jealousy drama with a violent end. Björn who argues with his girlfriend Eddie de Wire when he realizes that she has deceived him and he becomes furious and chases her through the woods and they end up at Bule Marsh where he pushes her from Lore Cliff into the deep water with the strong current. It happens quickly, in just a few seconds, how she falls, is sucked into the whirlpool. And Björn, when he understands what he has done, cannot live with it: love is pure, he loved her after all.

Eddie’s body disappears. Becomes stuck on the bottom, the dredging that year results in nothing—not strange in and of itself since the water at Bule Marsh is deep.

Floats up a few years later, after a long period of drought, at the end of another summer, 1975.

But you know that she fell, there are witnesses who have seen it—

But, as said, above all. This will become a story. He who killed for the sake of love. A story about young love and violent death that lives on in time, lives on in the District.

And will also, many years later, be at a place called the Winter Garden.

Where you can, for example, buy the American girl in a snow globe at the souvenir shop. Two figures in a watery landscape.

“It was a great love, Lille.” Ulla Bäckström with the snow globe, on the field in 2004… in the first snow, which is falling around her. Looks at Johanna, absorbs her with her beautiful eyes. “Ylla of death… I am obsessed with death.” Ulla-Ylla who is catching real snowflakes on her tongue.

And Ulla Bäckström as the American girl. How she stands on the Glitter Scene, her room in the woods, at the highest point in the wonderful house where she lives in Rosengården 2 and Johanna below, alone among the last trees of the Boundary Woods, in the darkness. Streaming lights, like searchlights. She IS the American girl, so real you can almost see the following: how she falls, crashes down to the ground—

“Don’t push your love too far, E—”

But Tobias, in the greenhouse, shrugs impatiently. As if he wanted to say something else now, with authority: once upon a time all of that was real.

And he—just like Solveig—is not interested in the Winter Garden. As if he also wanted to say: don’t bother with all of these stories, tales, productions, which come later.

Because once upon a time, as said, all of this was FRESH and real. And the loss that followed, life changing.

“I didn’t want it to happen that way.”

The baroness on her veranda, tired, stammering, waiting for the two sisters of the dead Eddie de Wire.

“Maybe I didn’t understand her.” Says the same thing over and over again in different ways when Tobias comes to her at the Glass House when he is back from his trip; on her veranda, and it is the last time.

“I should have understood, Tobias,” she says, “but—” She carries on like that, ruffled and confused and beside herself. “I was going to send her away, I thought I had sent her away—

“And that poor boy who was wandering around with her little bag… I took him under my wing. I meant well, but—”

Then, almost a week after that fateful morning, the following has also taken place. Bengt has been at the baroness’s. He was the one who found Björn in the outbuilding and has gone into shock, become mute, weeks will pass before anyone can get a sensible word out of him.

So the baroness went to the cousin’s house and offered to take Bengt to the Glass House for a while, after everything. So he will get some peace and quiet and be able to get away from everything but also to make things easier for the cousin’s mama who has been beside herself during this time—about Björn, inconsolable. But as luck would have it, things get better for her later, when Doris Flinkenberg is allowed to move into the cousin’s house.

And of course, the baroness has had such a bad conscience too. She does not hide it at all.

“I should have understood, Tobias. I didn’t mean everything I said. About Eddie, I mean.”

And she has gotten nice drawing materials for him. Been into the city and bought real painting supplies: an easel and paint, watercolors, oil paints, chalk, expensive felt pens. And is not the least bit quiet about the potential absurdity in that that is what she does, goes to the city and buys all of those things in the middle of all of the chaos. “I was so beside myself, Tobias. Didn’t know what to do.”

There in the Glass House, in one of the largest rooms with a view of just the sea—in other words in the opposite direction, so he would not have to look at the boathouse all the time—she decided Bengt will have peace and quiet, to paint, in all placidity, if he wants to.

Bengt has been there. One day, maybe half, before he disappeared without the baroness even noticing it, and, still, without saying anything at all. Is just gone. And later back at the cousin’s house where he furnishes a room for himself in the barn and lives there. Eventually bringing in a bed and a Russian stove, and insulating the walls.

But after that, for Bengt, when he gradually starts speaking again (but then it is later in the fall and the baroness has left), there is no talk about the Second Cape; his solitary wandering has also ended. The boy with the sketchpad. Does not exist.

“I didn’t WANT it to turn out like this… But, Tobias,” says the baroness, “it was when that boy left that I understood you can’t push things aside. You have to… face. Your responsibility, your shortcomings… I didn’t understand that girl.”

The baroness hysterical, babbling, telling Tobias an incoherent story about the last evening, night. A disturbance, a fight, and how she had phoned an acquaintance who came with a car to take the American girl away. And how they had driven away from the property, the last she had seen of the American girl. And Bengt who had come to her, upset, asking to see the American girl and not believing her when she said that she had sent her away.

Bengt, stood there bewildered, with the American girl’s bag—

“They were going to go away, Tobias. Had decided to run away. The two of them, Tobias. Or whatever she had hammered into him, Eddie. My God, that poor boy.”

And how she had seen him leave—so alone, so crestfallen, all of him. As if all the air had left him… that her having gone looking for him again later, afterward, was maybe her way of trying to make things right, asking for forgiveness.

Later, early in the morning, how Rita in her swimsuit had come running to the baroness in the Glass House from Bule Marsh. In need of help, wanting to tell her about something terrible at Bule Marsh—

And then she told the baroness, “Karin,” but in the middle of everything just stopped, as if she was pushing all of it away.

“Blood is thicker than water, Tobias. Maybe I’ve learned that now. But it was an expensive lesson, Tobias. And not worth it.

“I was afraid of Eddie, Tobias. She wasn’t honest. In the end I didn’t know who she was. And maybe I don’t know now either. But this: it is just terrible. I’m sorry, Tobias, I didn’t want it to turn out like this—”

And the baroness on the veranda of the Glass House, so alone, pitiful.

And how she appealed to him about an old friendship, fellowship, solidarity.

“Blood is thicker than water, Tobias. But it isn’t everything.”

But still, Tobias left. She is no longer “Karin” to him. Just… nothing.

Because she said other things as well. About the twins, not directly, but paraphrasing, which in some way was even worse.

“I don’t know if it’s right, Tobias. And please don’t ask me to explain. But I want to stay out of this, Tobias. Completely. Everything. God knows I have enough problems of my own now. Of course I don’t mean you, Tobias. But—I’m asking you to respect my decision.”

So that is how it went when the baroness abandoned the twins, when she refused to have anything to do with them anymore.

And for Tobias, who cannot believe his ears yet in some way it is not exactly a surprise either. “Karin.” What “Karin”? A silly dream.

And Tobias leaves the baroness and he never comes back again either.

And that is how it is. The baroness disappears, ceases to exist—for Tobias, and for the twins. And shortly thereafter, as said, she has other people around her, new youths. Blood is thicker than water: her own relatives, a pair of sisters to Eddie de Wire, they come from America—and Kenny, the younger sister, comes to live with the baroness permanently.

In some way she might look a little bit like her sister Eddie, but still, so completely different. Essentially different, so light, Kenny de Wire in white clothes. But a delightful person and above all nothing mystical or mysterious about her.

But in some way it is, will be, in another time, in another world.

Because already during the winter after the American girl’s disappearance the baroness is diagnosed with cancer and that is what she dies of six years later after a course of illness that had been lengthy and painful. The baroness loses the ability to move, has reduced vision and hearing, treatment and medicine make her bloated.

Sometimes you can see her at a distance, from the high hill on the First Cape. The baroness next to her house on the veranda where a winter garden was going to be constructed but it never materializes because of her illness. See her, an ungainly bundle in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets in the middle of a warm summer day, but turned facing the sea, in large, dark sunglasses.

With her then, the new girl, Kenny de Wire. A calm voice that echoes for a long time in the warm, still summer evenings. A pleasing, soft laugh—that charm, that affability.

None of the alienation that once hovered over her sister Eddie de Wire, with Bengt, on the terrace of the boathouse.

“But Tobias!” Johanna interrupts him impatiently in the greenhouse. “What happened? At the marsh? The baroness never said anything?”

“But she wasn’t there, Johanna,” Tobias says and adds, after a short pause. “No, no, Johanna. I spoke with her as I said. I have a feeling that everything she told me was true. I know, Johanna. I knew her—”

“But Rita then? Who went to the baroness? What did she say?”

Tobias shrugs—“What she saw—”

“But Tobias,” Johanna starts again. “Rita and Solveig then? Did they have anything to do with that… at Bule Marsh? Was that what the baroness meant?”

And, for a second, Tobias looks at Johanna blankly, completely perplexed. As if: my God, no.

“It was just that she abandoned them. Because she had so much else going on. Her own relatives. And it was already so terrible, everything, for her, she thought. But the twins became very lonely, of course.”

Yes, of course. Life goes on, everything passes gradually. But it takes time. The one who killed for the sake of love: Björn who caused his girlfriend’s death at Bule Marsh. Also before that story—which is also a bit beautiful, the young love, so shimmering but unconditional—can come out.

The gloom rests heavily over the District, over the cousin’s house. The poor cousin’s mama who lost Björn, and is beside herself, inconsolable.

But something good happens to her during this time too, which at least makes the sadness a bit more manageable, she gets something new to live for. That girl, Doris Flinkenberg, the knocked-about trash kid, whom the cousin’s mama who loves children, wants all the children to come to her, has also been attached to earlier, gets to come and live with the cousin’s mama in the cousin’s house. It is arranged so that Doris gets a new home in the cousin’s house and Doris, who is beside herself with joy in the middle of all the grief, moves into Björn and Bengt’s old room on the top floor of the cousin’s house.

Small, remarkable Doris, the mistreated one from the Outer Marsh who, after all of the terrible things she has experienced in her early childhood, finally gets some peace around her. And someone like the cousin’s mama loves her one hundred percent and wants what is best for her.

And how they have such a good time together, the cousin’s mama and Doris Flinkenberg. In the kitchen, in the cousin’s house, with crosswords, the music streaming from the radio, the family magazines, True Crimes…

Doris, despite her terrible past, is still in some way so bright. And it soon infects everyone who comes in contact with her, Doris-light.

But, as said: it takes time. Some weeks, months later everything is still open, raw. Maybe also because Eddie de Wire’s body was not found right away makes it difficult to move on. The body floats up out of the marsh where it has been lying, wedged into the mud on the bottom, six years later, at the end of an unusually dry and hot summer in 1975. And then: what is left of the body is just a skeleton, in a red plastic raincoat—plastic is an eternal material. It is Doris Flinkenberg who makes the macabre discovery.

And the other shock: that something like that can happen here.

A period of tittle-tattle, creepiness, feeling ill at ease and a lot of thoughts, other thoughts, about what happened at Bule Marsh when the American girl drowned. Thoughts that do not really belong anywhere, but they still do not leave you alone during this strange time.

You think for example about the baroness—though these thoughts really start coming when the baroness and Eddie de Wire’s sisters, who came from America, have traveled back to the baroness’s winter home in the city by the sea.

You knew of course, everyone in the District had known, that the baroness and Eddie de Wire had not gotten along. “That girl is such a disappointment to me”: how the baroness herself had gone around saying it, increasingly irritated toward the end of the summer as well. And how even then rumors were spreading that the fact the baroness and Eddie de Wire were at each other’s throats was more than just the usual grudges that can arise between an adult and a teenager. But more serious things: for example that Eddie de Wire was said to have stolen things and money from the baroness, forged her signature on proxies, the like. And it had already been going on during the winter in the apartment in the city and the baroness had tried to send Eddie de Wire away during the winter in the city by the sea. But Eddie de Wire had quite simply refused, as if she was dead set on staying. “Where am I supposed to go then?” Played innocent and stupid when the baroness had driven her into a corner, tried to force her to leave.

And followed her to the summer residence as well. Where the baroness put her up, not in the house but in the boathouse. An existence that Eddie de Wire was dissatisfied with in the beginning but later found tolerable after all. And she found herself a boyfriend, of course, one boyfriend, maybe two. But you can also remind yourself about something else you heard the baroness say one time while Eddie de Wire was still alive. That after the summer the American girl would not be there anymore: the baroness had no plans whatsoever of taking Eddie de Wire with her to the winter residence.

And in that light, think about the fact that the baroness herself had also spent quite a lot of time at Bule Marsh where Eddie de Wire had died. That she had a habit of going there almost every day for her morning swim. But that is to say—you have stopped yourself at the thought—morningswim? At Bule Marsh, in the middle of the woods? The baroness from the Glass House on the First Cape that is located by the sea: my goodness, why didn’t she swim there?

But you knew the answer to that too. A fact that is cast in a new light.

The twins. Rita, Solveig, from the cousin’s property. They were the ones she would meet at Bule Marsh, they were the reason she was there: the twins who were always at Bule Marsh—already early in the morning when ordinary, honest people were still in bed, asleep. In order to “train”? Were going to become swimmers, whatever that was? There was so much talk about a “talent for swimming,” which they were seen as having. How they had gone around bragging about it left and right as if they were saying it just to each other but loud and clear enough so everyone else would be sure to hear it too. About everything “that was required,” “all the sacrifices,” “training, training, training…”

Sure. This was added on silently in the District back then too, before everything. Who did they think they were? Ha-ha. Really, seriously, nothing to write home about exactly. That “cousin’s property,” for example, which they came from, what kind of a place was it anyway?

Now, in this context, you remind yourself of what you know about them, not much, but strange things. The terrible man, the “cousin’s papa” who won the property in a card game, the parents who died, dancers, circus artists? And so, a memory that strikes down like lightning. Dance music coming from the open window, closed curtains. Rumba tones. A persistent, absorbing rhythm in the still, hot summer days around the house on the First Cape. The dancer, his wife, who were training for dance competitions on the salsafloor.

The rhythm, and the quiet children. The three cursed ones. And later, after the accident, sitting outside the house, the three children in a row. Tall kids who seemed so much older than they were, backs against the stone foundation.

Rumba tones, absorbing, as if they could still be heard around them.

That kind of inheritance, that kind of evil blood in the genes.

A shiver ran through you. Those children. The boy, who was friends and maybe more than friends with the American girl, and Rita, Solveig, the twins.

Back to Bule Marsh. Those girls with the baroness who did not get along with her young relative Eddie de Wire who died right there, at Bule Marsh.

Nothing you walk around saying out loud, you dismiss the thought as soon as you can. But still, difficult to get it out of your head once it has gotten in. And because all of it cannot be said out loud, after all they are only children, strengthens the feeling.

And so it becomes that much of that vagueness, the fear, the discomfort, the suspicions that were hanging in the air after the American girl’s death without a goal or a direction gather around the twins, unspoken. Rita, Solveig, exposed for a short while; the eyes of the District upon them, stolen looks.

And a circle of emptiness around them, which only Tobias does not care about at all and pushes his way through. Continues visiting the twins in their cottage, just like before. Encourages Rita and Solveig to focus on school: the world is large, is open to them, and so on. Everything that had also been said in the woods at Bule Marsh with the baroness—but that sounds different now. Pedagogically severe and square so to speak, yes, he certainly hears it. But someone has to say something, he cannot remain quiet. Do not throw away your talent: high school, college, university! Reminds them of their old nicknames, which existed before “the swimmers,” before everything. “The astronaut,” “the nuclear physicist.” Which were of course also what they were going to become… and the twins nod and start bickering a bit loose-limbed about who was going to be what, as they had a habit of doing during the time when they enjoyed teasing Tobias because even he did not want to admit that he also had a hard time telling them apart because they looked so much alike. “I AM the nuclear physicist, not Rita.” “No, me Rita.” An old jargon but without any energy in it: grown out of it, not very much fun anymore.

They do not talk about swimming, at all. Never again. Naturally unthinkable to continue training at Bule Marsh as if nothing had happened. But there are swimming pools, in the city by the sea for example where you can easily get to by bus, not to mention one in the next county over. And when it becomes summer again, other public beaches in the District.

“Shall we go and swim? Rita? We can bike.” Solveig will be heard nagging at Rita a few times. But Rita is determined. Does not listen at all, all of that is over and done with.

So, what do you mean “swimmer”? Two ill-fitting swimsuits that are hanging, forgotten, on a clothing hook in the hall of the twins’ cottage under shirts, coats.

An old Lifeguard’s Medal that is hidden away in a desk drawer is forgotten. A reminiscence from another life.

So in the very beginning, it is like this, you cannot escape: Rita and Solveig on shining late summer days and in the fall that follows August of 1969. September that becomes October and the beginning of November. High blue skies, wild white clouds, and the play of colors when the leaves fall from the trees, the ground grows hard, the first snow.

Sitting on the steps of the twins’ cottage on the other side of the field, across from the cousin’s house.

Rita, Solveig, just the two of them while everything continues around them.

On the cousin’s property, for example, about three hundred feet in front of them on the other side of the field: the new girl in the cousin’s house, Doris Flinkenberg, she is jumping rope. Concentrated, persistent, does not look around, in the middle of her own personal game, as if she had personally discovered the art of jumping rope. And not just any old, rotten jump rope she is handling either, but a brand-spanking-new one, which the cousin’s mama has bought for her in a real store with her own money from cleaning houses that she has saved in a tin can in the cabinet in the kitchen. In addition to the glossy photos and the stationery of a kind that not only a small child like Doris Flinkenberg could be made happy with, printed with Keep-on-going-and-smile suns at the top edge. Not to mention the radio cassette player, a real radio cassette player, which also suddenly appears at the house instead of the old transistor that belonged to Björn and had been broken into a thousand pieces.

Welcome-Doris-presents is what they are called. Gifts that are given to Doris Flinkenberg to make Doris happy, Doris who has had such a difficult time and has now finally gotten a real home. With the cousin’s mama, in the cousin’s house. “Today I’ve gotten, and tomorrow I will get and get…” That is how Doris’s little song goes, the one she walks around humming during this time too.

Doris who is jumping rope a few hundred feet away. “Stipplo.” One of the twins says it, so that only the other one hears. “Stipplo.” But in the next moment how it actually happens: Doris on the cousin’s property, a desert away from them, trips over the rope, tangles her legs in it, falls flat on her stomach. Dump on the ground, she is not particularly graceful. And Doris, there where she is lying, looking around, a brief moment of astonished hesitation—as if she really did not know how she was going to deal with this unexpected mishap, with what kind of reaction. On the one hand: naturally just a trifle, what is tangling yourself in your jump rope compared to all of the horrible things you experienced in your early childhood in the Outer Marsh that fortunately for that matter is now over? On the other hand: objectively speaking it is also damn painful falling flat on your face, not to mention skinning your knees. But such a normal evil for a normal child can be blown away by a normal mother. And as if she was thinking just that, she casts a quick glance in the direction of the cousin’s house and the kitchen window where the cousin’s mama can be found on the other side… and first then, how her face wrinkles and she starts crying at the top of her lungs.

“Maamaa!”

The cousin’s mama is out of the house in no time, running to Doris Flinkenberg, taking her in her arms. And then the scrapes on Doris’s knees are inspected by the cousin’s mama and Doris Flinkenberg together. Whereupon, cheeks ballooning, puust on the owie and soon Doris stops sobbing because it is so much fun and she starts puffing as well. And the cousin’s mama helps Doris to her feet and they disappear inside the house. To the kitchen, where a snack is being served and pop songs and crosswords are filled in family magazines and there is reading from True Crimes.

A funny little scene, of course, not even the twins on the steps on the other side of the field can resist smiling just a little.

“You said it. Stipplo,” Solveig establishes later. “And then it happened.”

“Nah, it was you,” says Rita.

“I heard you, Rita. Don’t even try.”

Rita suddenly gets angry. “Yes, but just imagine if you would shut up! IMAGINE if you would stop getting involved in things. It just gets screwed up!”

Tobias, within hearing distance, closes in with quick steps. Rita sees but does not stay and wait, gets up and leaves. Solveig gets up as well, shilly-shallies a brief moment as if standing between two fires but then follows after Rita. Waves to Tobias, “Be back soon.” Tobias waves, calls out something friendly, “See you,” then remains standing at a loss before he slowly walks off in a different direction to return when the twins are back.

Tobias stands and watches: the twins heading up the steep path to the hill on the First Cape. To the house, the overgrown garden that will be tended by a family by the name of Backmansson who will eventually move in there. But still, a short while, a few years, a place for dreams, utopias… “They have a game, the Winter Garden,” the silver ball in the middle of the tall grass, overgrown rosebushes, reflecting light in the middle.

Rita first on the path, Solveig a little way behind. Rita who is in a hurry, Solveig trying to keep up with her.

Because also: those children… A shadow falls over them. Which Rita tries to escape, by breaking free of her sister, separating herself. Rita, suddenly, how she turns around and bellows, “I want to be alone. Do you have to follow me around all the time?”

Solveig flinches, stops. Rita who continues, upward, upward.

Still Solveig, she does not want to stay in the shadows either. Or shadow and shadow, maybe the grandiose just was not for her—because one difference among many, which starts presenting itself between the twins during this time as well, is that Solveig broods less, is maybe a bit slower but more here and now. But quite simply: does not want to be left behind, alone.

“Rita, wait!” And Rita still hears, regrets it. Waits for her sister and when Solveig has caught up with her the siblings walk the last bit like two friends, arms around each other.

“They have a game, the Winter Garden.” A game with its own language, like a separate world, a dreamworld, a utopia. With its own rules, its own language. The hacienda must be built.

Beautiful. But: it fades. Lacking the energy to maintain it, or force&resistance. The cursed ones. The eyes of others that become their eyes. Rita, Solveig frozen in time. Rumba tones, stone foundation, an unexplainable threat hanging in the air around them. Another story that is taking over all the time.

And yes, there comes Bengt. Who does not spend very much time with his siblings anymore, or at all, with anyone. Has started speaking again, but does not say very much—on the other hand, it was always like that. And soon, rather soon too, he will pretty much leave the sketch book altogether to become oneofthose teenagers for real. One with bags of beer, flower power cap on his head, to attract “women”—girls from the District and so on… who in some way will actually flock around him, for a while. But Bengt becomes stuck there, so to speak, the beer, et cetera… drifts here and there, one who comes and goes, things with him go to hell in a handbasket, he becomes nothing. And many years later, 1989, then he is around thirty-five, he is completely dried up, kaput. Comes “home,” to the cousin’s property and ends things. Also there, in that cursed cousin’s house. Maybe a logical fate—

A sad story, a story about the unnecessary.

Tobias who stands by and watches. Remembers “Karin” too, not often but sometimes. Her desertion, and his. The baroness who soon after the catastrophe said confused, stammering: “That is what you do. First. Instead of doing what you should be doing. Go to the city with ‘Astrid’ ”—that is the cousin’s mama’s real name, which only the baroness has ever used—“and buy things.” As if it would make things easier. Art supplies for Bengt, a radio cassette player. Yes, it is “Astrid” who suddenly wants it but it is the baroness who pays for it. She tells Tobias about Astrid who had a tin can filled with coins in her authentic checkered milkman shopping bag, which she had insisted on taking with her on their visit to the city; she had suddenly taken the can out in the appliance store and opened the lid and poured the contents out on the counter. “Is this enough?” With tears in her eyes, and the baroness explains that it was first in that moment that she understood how, behind the cousin’s mama’s calm, sorrowful façade, such a daze had been hidden, that she herself had fallen silent. And in some way also understood that she should do something. Not just for Bengt, but for everyone, for everything. Those children, so defenseless. But at the same time she realized the opposite. She could not, cannot—has enough problems of her own: Eddie de Wire and the guilty conscience about her own shortcomings, everything that went wrong.

The cousin’s mama who had stood in the shop like a child, chasms that had opened for the baroness. But the only thing she had been capable of doing was collecting the coins and getting out her checkbook and paying for that gadget—at the same time as she hated herself, her checks, her money, her possibilities.

Everything you should have done but did not while there was still time. “Time is the time we do something else, Tobias,” the baroness had said to Tobias on the veranda and said that there was a poem that went like that which had suddenly popped into her head and Tobias never hated her like he loved her in that moment.

“WHERE IS EVERYONE? I WANT TO PLAAY!” Doris out in the yard again, had become a bit bored with just the cousin’s mama and the crosswords in the kitchen. And the music: I go up to the mountains with my lonely heart—a pop song of the day as good as any other, which she hums where she is standing there on the steps, looking around with a hardtack sandwich in hand.

“WHERE?” Doris yells. Deadly silence. No one answers Doris. But then Doris catches sight of Rita and Solveig and Bengt on the hill on the First Cape.

“I’m comiiing!” And Doris heads off in the direction of the path that leads up to the hill. But no one stays there and waits for her. Bengt disappears and Rita and Solveig make their way down on the other side, leaving the garden and the house that will soon be occupied by others: let’s get out of here as they say in the District.

Enough of that. But also, enough of the twin-unity. What happens happens there even though no one notices until it is impossible to hide it any longer. A crack that becomes a sore that is widened until it can be seen by day, red and gaping. Doris starts running up the hill.

Rita and Solveig walk down, as said. You can see them strolling down the hill, out of Doris’s sight, leaving the garden and the house that will soon be inhabited by other people, let’s get out of here.

Lose yourself. Because what you are, have been together, is not good enough.

And you have started hating what you are.

The game. The Winter Garden, on the hill. Can be determined. Silly. Realized. The utopia. More fantasy was needed than what they possessed in order to make the game, which was really never a game but an own world, real—a possibility. Well, been there done that and no one there is interested in witnessing the development of the fall, from A to B in that way.

And: what remains. The astronaut. The nuclear physicist. A damned many years until college, university.

But at the same time—these are just movements that can be sensed under the surface.

And are never spoken about, almost no fights, reconciliations.

An old Lifeguard’s Medal that Solveig still sleeps with under her pillow. A sign of luck. Talisman. Pathetic. But it disappears, as Rita starts saying: “You are, Solveig, a pathetic.”

But Doris comes to the twins’ cottage that same night. “Today I got, tomorrow I will get and get.” Doris warbling her own little song, a few hours after she raced up the hill on the First Cape only to discover that the siblings had escaped.

Doris in the twins’ cottage, jumping around there too: clumsy dance steps on the floor, tippytoe, today… tomorrow… GET! Doris everywhere, at the table where Solveig and Tobias are trying to focus on her math homework… but mathematics, sigh, Doris does not want that one, yawns theatrically, you become bored after all. So Doris continues on, to the bookshelf, takes out the Swedish Academy’s word list that was Tobias’s Christmas present to the twins and that Solveig used to take with her to the cousin’s kitchen as an aid for the cousin’s mama with all of the crosswords she was solving before all of the terrible things happened and Doris Flinkenberg came to the cousin’s house. Some strange, funny word that Doris can find and take away from there; and Doris flips, flips until she realizes, which she says too, with delight, “I am so little, I can’t read!” And moves on to picking up different things at random, whereupon she stretches out on her stomach on Solveig’s bed, “get and get,” but drowsy now, and then of course after a moment of motionlessness as if she were sleeping, so to speak, she sticks her hand under the pillow.

“Damn it, Doris!” Solveig’s voice suddenly surprises all of them, resounds loud and wild in the cottage. “You put my medal back!” And everything stops, is frozen. Doris above all. Doris sits up, so small pitiful afraid—as if all of the terrible things she has been through bubble up inside her, gather in her eyes in an unbearable way. Opens her hand, it is empty, but says, stammering, “Sorry, sorry…” bottom lip quivering, like a preparation for crying.

“Now, now, girls,” Tobias says but Solveig gets up and walks out, slamming the door behind her.

And later, that night, Solveig goes to the outbuilding farthest away on the cousin’s property alone and she has newspaper and matches with her.

The place where Björn was found when he was dead. It is definitely burning, but just a little, nothing dangerous. The outbuilding itself will fall down under its own weight during a storm, but not until the following year, in the spring.

But suddenly Bengt is there, with the water bucket, and puts it out.

And everyone sees: Solveig standing and crying by the outbuilding. Rita coming, taking her hand, leading her home. They walk, Solveig crying, Rita putting her arm around her. Past the cousin’s mama who is standing on the steps of the cousin’s house, and Doris, heavy with sleep in her pajamas and big boots, just below. Rubbing her eyes, but then, shoots into the cousin’s house and as fast as lightning she is back with a blanket and runs after Rita and Solveig on the field and “if you are freezing, here,” and wants to put the blanket over Solveig’s shoulders. And Solveig stops, turns around, says a soft but very emotional “thank you” to Doris Flinkenberg.

And it is—all of the small things that happen that evening, that night, the only release.

But later, gradually, everything evens out. In the District too: life goes on, everything acute and inflammatory comes to rest, the whispering as well. Is pushed aside by new happenings, bad, good, everything imaginable from day to day, big and small, which draws attention to itself. And Rita, Solveig—they are of course on the other hand completely ordinary youths in the District, students at the school, the coed school and the high school up in the town center. And that is finally what wins over everything that does not exist, that is not left: like the American girl and the baroness and the other summer residents. And the winter comes, the spring, the summer, several summers falls winters seasons.

And at the cousin’s property, in the cousin’s house, there is something about Doris Flinkenberg for real. Her mood, her joy, her light. Which infects everything and brings about a change. Something about Doris, so smart, wonderful—she gradually wins everyone’s heart. With the exception of the cousin’s papa’s of course, but he does not count. He has withdrawn to his room next to the kitchen, closed the door. Sits there and boozes by himself, sometimes does not even come out at mealtimes.

The effect Doris has, Doris-light. Doris who, despite everything, comes and makes everything normal again. And when after that scene with Solveig in the twins’ cottage Doris’s own present-getter zeal becomes weaker, it becomes more fun for the twins and for Bengt to be around her. So that you notice that you WANT to give Doris a lot of things—especially when she is not there in person begging for them.

Doris came like the first orange after the war. The cousin’s mama says many times when she becomes herself again. And Doris laughs, nods and agrees. WANTS to be an orange, but also banana and pear and large green apples of the kind that can be bought at the real store—the whole fruit basket.

“Look, it’s me!” The fruit basket standing on the prize table at the Christmas bazaar at the fellowship hall in the middle of December: all of those wonderful fruits under the crackly cellophane and the red silk bow around the handle. First prize, of course, and Doris points at it, laughs. And Rita and Solveig and Bengt and Tobias and the cousin’s mama laugh too, it is funny of course and Bengt, who has inexplicable good luck with games, buys a few lottery tickets and wins that basket too, which he then, in full view of everyone, hands over to little Doris Flinkenberg.

So heavy, so large, she barely has the strength to carry it, has to drag it behind her on the floor of the fellowship hall but she gladly does it of course, a fine show besides. But then CRUNCH someone is suddenly there sticking her hand in through the cellophane, swiping the largest most delicious green apple: it is the Pastor’s daughter Maj-Gun Maalamaa, almost as little as Doris, who has been running around among the guests at the church bazaar with a terror-inducing old lady mask, “Here comes Liz Maalamaa, buhuu buhuu!” as if she wanted to frighten people and maybe it is a little creepy because the mask looks dreadful but no one wants to play along with those kinds of games NOW in the whirl of the general Christmas bazaar with the elves and the Christmas peace and the candles, so no one pays any attention. Just her brother who is slightly older, wearing a suit and white shirt with a tie even though he is probably only eight–nine years old, he is trying to keep an eye on his little sister, who the less attention you pay her the more high-spirited and unbearable she becomes.

But she is standing there now, the Pastor’s daughter Maj-Gun Maalamaa, with the apple from Doris’s basket in her hand. Takes off the mask and takes a big bite of the apple right in front of Doris, smack, and “ha-ha-ha” to Doris. “Give it back!” Doris yells. Give it back. But suddenly Doris, when Maj-Gun does not pay her any attention, so pitiful and suddenly almost afraid. “Stop!” she almost whispers, but Maj-Gun does not stop, only when her father the pastor shows up and pulls her ear, does she yell bloody murder, “NO!”

“Don’t pay her any attention,” says Solveig, who has been standing next to Doris the entire time; and it turns out all right later, because the Pastor comes and apologizes and takes Doris and Rita and Solveig to the kitchen of the fellowship hall where he has sweets that he lets his disobedient daughter Maj-Gun offer them. Especially Doris, who will get the nicest piece, a shiny red chocolate heart with a truffle inside wrapped in paper. “Maj-Gun should apologize,” says the Pastor. And Maj-Gun finally says it, sorrysorry.

The fear, how it had flamed up in Doris’s eyes. The Pastor had also seen it. And probably thinks it is a matter of the old lady mask so he explains to Doris Flinkenberg who has her mouth so full with delicious chocolate that she cannot speak but just makes her eyes wide—that the mask is not dangerous at all but represents the face of a famous actress, Ava Gardner, does Doris want to try it on?

But just as Doris is going to nod yes please there is a furious howl from Maj-Gun Maalamaa who snatches the mask out of papa Pastor’s hand and yells that it is not a movie star but her horrible godmother Liz Maalamaa! And Doris recoils, almost frightened—but Maj-Gun has run away, with the mask, the apple, before the pastor has time to become even angrier with her.

But the fear in Doris’s eyes, you think about it later. That it is still there beneath everything. Under the surface of this that and the other—jump rope jumping, cassette player, song of the day I go up the mountain with my lonely heart in the cousin’s kitchen, crosswords, True Crimes with the cousin’s mama… and the cousin’s mama!—it remains. Like the scars in her skin, the burns from the grill, the cigarettes, under her clothes.

Can pass, but never leave.

A fear that exists there and can be called forth.

Like an omen as well. Because that fear, it disappears for a long time but returns when she gets older and contributes so that she, many years later, in her teens, will take her own life: goes and shoots herself at Bule Marsh.

Just sixteen years old—and incomprehensible. At the same time not. Because by that time there is also another story. Doris’s own, private one. Because what also happens and very soon, already the following spring, after Doris arrives at the cousin’s house, is that she starts going out on her own. On the prowl for a companion of the same age, a friend of her own. Because despite everything, things become a bit humdrum with the cousin’s mama and the older cousins at the cousin’s property.

And she finds her way to the house in the darker part, completely new then. And a girl the same age lives there. Her name is Sandra Wärn and she becomes like fat on bacon with Doris for many years. A friendship that becomes love for Doris and that Doris enters into hook, line, and sinker. But it ceases, a fight, some misunderstanding, as can happen between two who are close, maybe too close—and when it suddenly ends Doris is skinless.

Beaming, smart Doris, who is still so fragile under the surface. It does not disappear even though it cannot be seen.

A betrayal, a love that died: the most important in Doris’s life, the only one that existed. Yes, of course, there would certainly have come more events, and experiences, a new time. But a blow, and it is decisive and fateful, there is nothing for Doris, no real time.

To be sucked into a black hole: then there is all of the old stuff, other betrayals, tattooed into the skin and an unbearable fear then, of everything, which flares up inside her. A betrayal, a love that died, the most important in Doris’s life.

And so then. Doris, conquered by a time that has run away with her—to another time.

And suddenly trapped in that time.

“The folk song. A repetition in time and space. Such a different way of understanding time.”

Maybe it is like that. Because that is what she does during the final months of life, Old Doris who is New Doris: sings folk songs in a band. Her boyfriend at the time Micke Friberg, Micke’s Folk Band—they are together a few weeks that last fall—Doris sings and talks about the folk song in between the songs.

“I’m Doris, this is Micke, and we have a band, it’s Micke’s band, Micke’s Folk Band. We sing old folk songs in modern arrangements, they’re Micke’s arrangements—”

But regardless of how hard Doris tries to devote herself to the music that Micke Friberg talks about, regardless of how she tries to be Micke Friberg’s girlfriend, everyone already knows it is a lie. There was someone else, Sandra, whom she loved.

But that is later, not yet. And Rita and Solveig, this is what happens to them. Turn twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and continue living together in the twins’ cottage on the other side of the field across from the cousin’s house. For a long time anyway, up until Rita, just after Doris’s death, leaves the District for good in the fall of 1976.

But she spends a lot of time in the house on the First Cape as well; where new inhabitants come. First a group of women who rent the house for a few years, have a collective of some sort or another and Bengt and a boy from the Second Cape, Magnus von B., whom Bengt starts spending a lot of time with, running around among them, trying to curry favor, make themselves useful in every way. Yes, yes, Bengt has “a way with women,” but it is still girls from the District who fall for him most of the time—not those women who make fun of him there where he is standing with his “flower power cap” on, talking about big things, about revolution and things like that.

But then the house is bought by a real family from the city by the sea: they are called Backmansson and they have a boy, Jan, the twins’ age, and Rita starts going with him just about as soon as the family moves in. And intensely; gradually Rita is at Backmanssons’ on the First Cape almost all the time when the family is there, more or less moves into Jan Backmansson’s spacious room in the tower. They cultivate mutual interests there, for Rita, new interests—nature photography, for example.

What is it? Real teenage love. Maybe. On the other hand, Rita has other boyfriends too when the Backmanssons are not home and they are not always around because the parents are field biologists and travel quite a bit: boys from the District, ones like Järpe and Torpe Torpeson, for example.

And it is hard to know with Rita, becomes harder all the time, she is not exactly someone who explains herself, in that respect she definitely does not become a speech maker with age. Says nothing about her business, gradually not even to her sister Solveig, not to mention Tobias who continues supporting her and Solveig as best he can. Opens his wallet, “gives scholarships,” just as fair with both of them.

But Rita, she slips away more and more… and there is something wild and unmanageable about her. More and more too, with time, as if Rita in some way is two people. One who spends time at the Backmanssons’ house when they are home and otherwise another who exists in the District, in school, outside class and makes several of her classmates afraid. Rita Rat, she who provokes, allows herself to be provoked, and does not hold back, the one who hits.

But at the same time, despite everything and all of the time: Rita does well in school, has good grades in just about every subject. “The astronaut,” “the nuclear physicist,” it still matters, at least to her. In reality Solveig is the one who starts fading away and it does not turn around either: later when Rita leaves the District in the middle of high school, Solveig becomes pregnant shortly thereafter by one of the Torpeson boys from the Outer Marsh. Drops out of school and it is left unfinished despite the fact that she miscarries after a few months. Starts cleaning full-time for the cleaning company Four Mops and a Dustpan, which the cousin’s mama leaves behind.

But Rita, still during that final period when she remains: drags certain youths with her from the District over to the Second Cape in the fall when the summer residents have gone home. Rita and the Rats: break into the abandoned vacation homes, make them theirs for the night, have parties, but mostly are just there, creepy crawling, invading. Do not destroy, vandalize to leave a mark behind: we were here.

Solveig is there too of course. Still, something in Rita Rat those final weeks that also makes Solveig keep her distance. Rita is always the one who keeps on to the bitter end, if someone goes too far it is always Rita. One of the last nights Rita is in the District: how she breaks into the Glass House, starts breaking the windows on the veranda, with a cane, furious. Solveig remains standing on the hill, smooth as glass, hard, shiny, as if frozen in the moonlight—and watches.

It is Rita’s last fall in the District, the Backmansson family has been gone quite a while, it is more than a year now actually. The house on the First Cape has burned, not completely but it was damaged in a forest fire that spread at a violent speed. The Backmanssons were not home then but the house has become inhabitable and it needs to be repaired, and in the meantime the Backmansson family is living in their apartment in the city by the sea again. The intention is that they will return as said, but time is passing—the renovation never gets started and for a long time, it will be many years, the house just stands there on the hill with a dark, open gaping hole on the side, deteriorating even more until it is torn down at the end of the 1980s.

But when the Backmanssons left they promised Rita that she might be able to come and live with them in the apartment in the city, finish high school there, in one of the city’s schools. But time is passing, as said, and nothing happens: the house on the First Cape stands where it stands, as if the Backmanssons have forgotten what they said to Rita before they left. It is not mentioned when Rita visits her boyfriend Jan Backmansson in the city by the sea and the visits have also become fewer and farther between the final months Rita is in the District. As said, the Backmanssons travel a great deal and then Jan Backmansson has his own hobbies that Rita does not share but that his parents suddenly think he should make time for in addition to his demanding schoolwork. Scouting and something called “convent activities.” Rita does not even know what it is, but things like that, similar things.

And she waits, waits—until she does not have the strength to wait anymore.

No one says out loud that Rita is the one who goes after the windows on the veranda of the Glass House, no one tells; a crime no one gets any clarity in. It is Solveig who explains to Tobias much later how it was.

And the baroness passes away that fall, never hears about it.

Besides, so many other things happen that fall—everything. Doris dies, Rita leaves.

As if everything culminated, but in an entirely separate story. That cursed October night when Doris Flinkenberg due to her unhappiness, her rejected, defrauded love, gets it into her head to go and shoot herself.

Doris, the amazing, who despite the darkness within her was so light on the outside: goes down to Bule Marsh, out onto Lore Cliff, has a pistol, presses the muzzle to her temple and fires.

And the night after Doris Flinkenberg’s funeral, that is when Rita heads off. To the Backmanssons in the city by the sea, without asking permission or telling anyone about her plans ahead of time.

One Saturday night in November 1976 Rita is suddenly standing below the Backmanssons’ third-floor balcony on a calm and civilized street in the chic southern areas of the city center. Dirty, slightly intoxicated, everything she owns in a shabby plastic bag.

Calls out to the people standing on the balcony, guests of Mr. and Mrs. Backmansson who are having a large party that night.

But Rita waits on the street, and is let in.

That is how it is told to Solveig later by a few youths from the District whom Rita bummed a ride from into the city after she wrecked Solveig’s tiny rickety old car that she had driven off in from the twins’ cottage while Solveig was in the shower. Certainly deliberately: out into the field, toward a tree at a low speed, then walked to the main country road with her things in a plastic bag.

Not even Solveig’s own car but her boyfriend’s at the time, Järpe Torpeson, who had fixed it up for Solveig so that she and her sister would be able to sputter around on the small roads and to the Outer Marsh, Torpesonia, where he lived.

Broom. How Solveig, in the bathroom, had heard the engine start. Gone out, seen the little car disappear into the darkness—the last of her twin sister Rita. Forever.

All of Solveig’s attempts at getting in touch were in vain. Rita cuts all cords, does not get in touch.

And what is left? At the cousin’s property, the cousin’s house?

Doris’s song, maybe. A voice on an old cassette tape.

“The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again. Such a different way of looking at time.”

Doris’s voice, soft, a bit hoarse, just a few weeks before she takes her own life. Becomes the first in a long line of those who will go down to Bule Marsh and die at their own hand. Because it is, in real time and history, what Bule Marsh is gradually transformed into. A cursed place, a sanctuary for suicidals.

But no, it has nothing to do with any old stories anymore. Like, once upon a time, Rumba tones, the three cursed ones.

Just a darkness that falls over the cousin’s property, over and over again. Woe followed by woe, like pearls in a necklace. With some places, some people it is like that. They are cursed, so to speak. Things happen, and continue to happen.

Affected by time, another time. The time of the folk song.

“The folk song. A repetition in time and space. Such a different way of understanding time.”

But—with the folk song comes realism; it is a shame about Solveig, who is left behind, all alone.

Because: the one who is left behind is left behind. Being in the world, in the cousin’s house, without Doris-light.

The cousin’s mama who has no strength left for anything. She collapses completely in the spring and is taken to the District Hospital by ambulance and when she gets better she moves back to the neighboring county where she originally came from. Never returns to the cousin’s property, to the cousin’s papa: because he does not die of course, has eternal life in him.

And Solveig then, with all of this. Rita in the world, and Bengt who stopped being responsible for his actions a long time ago—a restless one, sometimes here, sometimes there. In the city by the sea, in other places, in other cities and comes and goes in the District. Wanders off, but unlike Rita nothing becomes of him, he deteriorates more and more.

Solveig. Nah, she did not become an astronaut or a nuclear physicist. Eventually she moves in with her boyfriend Torpe Torpeson, whom she has taken over after her sister Rita, to his home at the Outer Marsh, Torpesonia. Is expecting a child with him; that child and another end up as miscarriages before she finally has Irene in 1984.

By that time she has been living in Torpesonia for a long time; has taken over the cleaning business as said, Four Mops and a Dustpan, business is decent, makes a living off it and eventually has an employee, Susette Packlén from the District.

The cousin’s papa dies of natural causes but not until the end of the 1980s; he becomes deathly old. And Bengt—it is an accident of course—falls asleep with a cigarette that sets fire to the cousin’s house and when the fire department arrives, there is nothing that can be done to save him.

And Solveig, it is a turning point for her.

She sets herself free from it, turns her back to it, the old stuff no longer exists for her.

Tears down, builds new, moves in with Irene and eventually Johanna as well.

Closes the cleaning business, starts a real estate business instead.

But from the ashes of the old ruins: finds a Lifeguard’s Medal, an old sign of luck, a talisman.

“But Tobias,” Johanna has started in the greenhouse in the fall of 2004, when Tobias has finished telling the story. A sad story, in a remarkable way a beautiful story, of course, but still, inside Johanna, it has been pounding there, not grown quiet. All of the questions, suddenly millions, wanting to go back to the really old stuff that Tobias has not spoken about. The morning at the marsh, the American girl, Björn who hanged himself.

Rita and Solveig, the twins at the marsh. Were they there? What did they see?

And Doris Flinkenberg, the knocked-about marsh kid, was she not running around in the District then too? And then—the Boy in the woods, Bengt. What did he do?

Don’t push your love too far, Eddie.

Ulla on the field. “There was not one who loved her, but two. They say she died from love. The one who killed her loved her too much.”

Bengt and the American girl Eddie de Wire, on the terrace of the boathouse. Her own father, Bengt.

“But Tobias—” Johanna, with an urgency that could no longer be concealed.

Then Tobias himself suddenly looks up at her and says, “Johanna. To you this isn’t about Project Earth, is it?”

And Johanna nodded, carefully, but could not get a word out anyway, suddenly mute in some way. And Tobias was just about to say something, had taken a few steps forward and then staggered. As if still, tired of his own words, tired of everything, of the age in his body too, all the energy leaves him. The plants he does not have the energy to look after, as if he saw it in that moment too: how they are becoming overgrown, have grown above his head, roses, thick full stems and thorns that tear at the skin on his hands because he has of course forgotten his gloves somewhere again.

A record on the record player, Carmen, it has finished playing. And the uncertainty about what to do next, fumbling, what was he going to say now? Has taken the spray bottle to fill it with water but stumbled and hit the bookshelf next to him, it rocks and damp books from the top shelves come tumbling down. History and Progress and several others, Tobias has to duck in order to avoid getting the books on his head and almost loses his balance so that Johanna has to grab him and help him down on the stool where she had just been sitting and then she gathers up the books on the floor.

Among them too Architecture and Crime, poorly bound, old glue on the sides is falling off—not just the covers, a quick stolen look, loose pages as well.

Drawings, characters in dark lead, blue watercolor. “In the woods a body of water reveals itself. It happened at Bule Marsh.” And a name on the first page of the book, “This book belongs to” with straggling letters and then his name, Bengt.

The Boy in the woods, with the sketchpad. Bengt.

A blue girl on a cliff.

“Sister Blue.” How it sweeps through her head.

Rita. Solveig. Bengt. A crack that became a wound that was opened. A secret that drove them apart.

Solveig. Sister Blue.

Solveig who pretends the Winter Garden does not exist.

Ritsch! The kitchen curtains.

The book in Johanna’s hand. At first she thinks about asking, “Can I borrow it?” but changes her mind and says straight out, “This book was my father’s. Can I take it?”

“What is it Tobias? Put on your gloves, Tobias?”

And right then, before Tobias has a chance to answer, Solveig is suddenly standing in the entrance to the greenhouse.

Sometime later, spring 2005, Tobias becomes ill and does not come to the greenhouse anymore. Falls off his bike, it is slippery, an early morning on his way to the greenhouse, he is lying in bed with a cast on his leg. An accident, he has fallen off his bike before.

But never really recovers again. Develops other problems. His stomach, his heart, and he dies in the month of April 2006.

The greenhouse deteriorates, no one goes there anymore.

JOHANNA IN THE ROOM, IN THE EVENING, NOVEMBER 2006

THE AMERICAN GIRL in a snow globe.

She has taken it out again.

Solveig is not home, she has gone out.

Looks at the snow globe, she is alone in the house, in the darkness in her room, shimmering quiet, the light, the property.

Oh! Turns on the light.

Digs in a drawer and finds the book. Architecture and Crime.

The drawings in the book.

A blue girl on a cliff, above the water, she is screaming.

Ulla Bäckström earlier that day, at the house in the darker part of the woods.

About the Red One in the Winter Garden. She talks about strange things.

A completely different story.

Three siblings who were united by a secret that was supposed to keep them together but it drove them apart and turned them against each other.

Three siblings. Remembers Tobias’s story. The three cursed ones. At a house, the stone foundation.

Rita, Solveig, Bengt.

Rita who left, never to be heard from again.

Bengt who died, burned up in a house—this house.

And Solveig who remained.

“I was Sister Blue.”

The lifeguard, who saved a little girl named Susette Packlén from drowning.

A blue girl on a cliff, in the picture.

Three children at the foot of the hill. Rhythm. Rumba tones.

The three cursed ones.

They had a game called the Winter Garden.

The house that burned, Bengt who died in the fire, Solveig who built a new one, Solveig and the Winter Garden, Rita’s Winter Garden.

“Rooms under the earth, Lille. The truth about everything.”

There is a blue child screaming on a cliff.

Sister Blue.

Burned?

The outbuilding that burned. Fire on a stick. Solveig who tried to set fire to it.

Ulla with the mask, the Angel of Death Liz Maalamaa.

The Child, fluorescent, on the wall, the Red One, in the Winter Garden.

It’s your MOOOM.

Ulla, who out of sheer devilry had imitated the district dialect that she does not speak unless it is needed on stage.

“She knew him. The Red One. They were adults then.”

“And so, Lille, there was a completely different story, about two at a newspaper stand. Ha ha ha—”

“Who is my mother, Solveig?”

Solveig, never, does not answer.

The storks in Portugal.

Transcendence. Explosion. And suddenly Johanna sees like a picture a scene for the Winter Garden.

A man who is lying in a room, in a house.

It is winter, snow outside. Walk in snow.

But he is lying dead, shot. Blood everywhere, on him.

The Boy in the woods. And she knows. It is her father, Bengt. In the house, before it starts burning.

Mooom.

“You put balls into action, Lille. Come to someone… Maalamaa.”

But Ulla who was afraid. At first. Before she put the mask on.

“I said I don’t want to. Doing something else now. Screaming Toys.”

Project Earth. You think you are going to get one story and then you get another.

And now Johanna is afraid.

More afraid than she has ever been.

She is standing on the field outside the window.

The Red One. Maj-Gun Maalamaa.

The Child, fluorescent. Flames up on the wall.

But Johanna gets dressed, to the Winter Garden, and to the Red One, out to her.