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.