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.