Monika Fagerholm - The Glitter Scene

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.