Don’t step on my shadow, turn around. How I hated her—and loved her. Still, she was mine. Is mine.
An image I carry with me: Ulla on the field, Ulla in the Boundary Woods, my world, catching snowflakes on her tongue. Says wonderful things. That was who she was. Even if I didn’t know her, knew nothing about her.
And she didn’t know me, knew nothing about who I was. No connection. Understood nothing about her stories, what she was doing, how important it could be for someone like me. Like the story about the American girl. Just a play to her, new idea, new songs to sing, to hum. Weave herself inside something for a while, then weave herself out. And go on, the theater the dance the music, as if nothing would leave a trace.
But still, a connection, and here, now, I am the one who would see it.
Suddenly, here on the Glitter Scene, everything coincides, or can be fixed, in some way. In another image, my image, and it was Ulla Bäckström who brought me to it. Before everyone else, before my own mother too. And I see it more clearly than ever now, on the Glitter Scene, Ulla’s room, a cloudy day in January 2012.
It is Bengt, my father, and the American girl Eddie de Wire, on the terrace of the boathouse, one day in August 1969, a few days before Eddie disappears forever.
Eddie de Wire and Bengt on the terrace, just the two of them, and their mouths moving.
Feet dangling over the water, the sea opening up in front of them. Eddie with the guitar that she is plucking at, amused, Bengt who is drawing, talking. He who was always so quiet, as if transformed—suddenly something happy about all of it.
On the Second Cape otherwise, the summer life that is continuing on its own path around them and all of the other people in the world somewhere else.
But the unusual characters on the terrace of the boathouse. Brace yourself in them. In this moment, they are the ones ruling over everything.
Northerly wind. The sea dark, foam on the waves.
Eddie and Bengt. Ideas flying around, long, happy, excited.
What is Bengt saying?
The hacienda must be built?
Something else?
You don’t know. You won’t know. It can’t be heard. Travels away with the wind.
But, where did the music start? Here. Exactly right here, in any case.
And: it is not an image. It is how it is. Bengt, my father, and the American girl Eddie de Wire who in one eternal moment rule over everything.
And at the same time, on the Glitter Scene, this room now. In the sun that suddenly, for a few seconds, peers out and lights up everything, the first rays of sun in January. The great deserted wooden floor is glittering.
With tinytiny butterflies. I turn around. Now I see.
That what remains up here in the empty room is tinytiny butterflies wedged in between floorboards everywhere. Velvet insects, different colors, in silver clips. The ones that fell out of Ulla Bäckström’s large, wonderful hair.
“JOHANNAA! Come now!” Solveig calls from the floor below. I leave the room, have to go.
Author’s Note
“It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” which occurs in several places in Susette’s and Maj-Gun’s stories, is from Hebrews 10:13. “The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at” is from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets. “Ready to be gone,” about the Glitter Scene, is from Jean Cocteau, The Holy Terrors, translated by Rosamond Lehmann. The idea about becoming moral as soon as you are unhappy is Marcel Proust’s (thanks to Malin Kivelä).
I took the characterization of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and several statements about Mahler and his music from a fantastic article about Mahler and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum: “Närhet och utanförskap” (Proximity and Exclusion) by Lena von Bonsdorff, published in HBL, June 2008. This article, which breaks down intellectual defenses, was an important source of inspiration for me.
The people and places in the novel are fictional through and through, but I have taken the liberty of borrowing the names of the captains’ homes, Java and Sumatra, from reality; these are the names of two of the most beautiful houses in Hangö. The islands of Java and Sumatra are of course located where they are in the Indian Ocean, next to each other with Borneo just above; it was not really possible to find other nonfictive examples.
Thanks to Silja and Tapani for their indefatigable support and encouragement, and thanks to Hilding, more than words can say.
Also by Monika Fagerholm
The American Girl
Wonderful Women by the Sea
About the Authors
Monika Fagerholm’s much-praised first novel, Wonderful Women by the Sea, became one of the most widely translated Scandinavian literary novels of the mid-nineties and was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 1998 it was followed by the cult novel Diva, which won the Swedish Literature Society Award. Her third novel, The American Girl, became a number-one best seller and won the premier literary award in Sweden, the August Prize, as well as the Aniara Prize and the Gothenburg Post Award.
Katarina E. Tucker was born in the United States and raised bilingually with English and Swedish. She holds a doctorate in Scandinavian literature from the University of Wisconsin. In 2003 she won the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Translation Prize for her translation of Sven Deblanc’ Jerusalem’s Night. After dividing her time between Europe and North America, she now resides in the Netherlands.
Review
“A dreamy, creepy, swirling of prose that eventually uncovers a story of love and violence in a coastal Finnish community.”
“The conclusion of The American Girl narrative will delight fans of the series.”
“Complex and interesting.”
“Out of The American Girl’s elusive mysteries of time and creepy teenagers-in-trouble, Fagerholm triumphs with its sequel, The Glitter Scene, mining the not-quite-real or the too real evidence of sorrow that we forget we live by.”
“The Glitter Scene balances on the ice-cold tones of David Lynch and the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice … a remarkable story of guilt, revenge, and betrayal. A beautiful novel where the distance between blissful fantasy and grim reality is never very far.”
“With the same inimitable style as in the previous novel, Monika Fagerholm opens up a dizzying world full of secrets … It is intense and compelling.”
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.