Monika Fagerholm: The Glitter Scene

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.

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 .