The American Girl (10 page)

Though this was nevertheless important information (and it was true). That now, this morning in the beginning of the history of the world, a fate was sealed,
the harelip not harelipped anymore
. Sandra had been in her second year at the French School when the diagnosis was made, and an operation was carried out soon thereafter. “We’ll quickly send a referral in this matter,” the school nurse had said proudly, as if this initiative was only her own and Sandra’s. Little Sandra really had not done much to correct the delusion. In reality, Sandra had done nothing at all since the delusion itself had sort of been the whole point.

“One might think that your parents should have intervened a little sooner,” said the school nurse who contacted the mouth specialist who immediately set a date and time for the operation on his calendar. “Have your mother and father really not said anything at all?”

“No,” Sandra lied calmly and gently.

The school nurse just shook her head, the kinds of parents there were these days. Like so many others, she also had a lot of prejudices against the superficial party lifestyle, which in her eyes these jet-setters lived, and the fact that Sandra’s parents, the Islander and Lorelei Lindberg, in Sandra’s own portrayal also belonged to this group, had not changed it.

“Mom and Dad think it’s fine the way it is.” Sandra stoked the fire. “They think I look funny. They like laughing at me. Though they mean well. They just have such a phenomenal sense of humor. They don’t mean it in a bad way.”

And that had made the school nurse even more beside herself with anger.

“That wasn’t nicely done,” she said, and her voice almost shook with indignation. But then she had continued more determined than angry, downright triumphant, “It’s good that I’ve
taken matters into my own hands. And not because I have an opinion on the matter,
I wash my hands of it
, but I must say that personally I don’t think you should laugh at a child.”

It was of course lies, all of it from beginning to end, but if you had come this far in your lies you could not reasonably pull yourself out later down the line, of course the little harelip understood this instinctively, even if it was to the detriment of herself. In other words, the subsequent operation in question that was an inevitable result. “No pain, no gain,” she tried to comfort herself with on the operating table where she shortly thereafter lay bound among knives and other instruments that existed solely to carve into her. But she had not been able to control herself and at the last second screamed, “I don’t want to,” but it had already been too late; the terrible ether mask was pressed over her face and she fell asleep and in a horrible ether nightmare she saw angry, chubby yellow guys dancing cabaret and woke up vomiting violently eight hours later.

In fact, the Islander and Lorelei Lindberg had taken Sandra to a whole slew of doctors and mouth specialists. Even in Little Bombay Sandra had sometimes been forced to give someone a closer look at her mouth, a customer or some other child-friendly soul who had good advice to give, someone who knew a plastic surgeon or had a relative who had suffered the same affliction.

“It’s just a matter of cutting away and sewing together,” the man in the white Jaguar said laconically, and it took a while for Sandra to identify him as the Black Sheep, the Islander’s brother, because when he came to Little Bombay all of it, the clothes, the car, were so new.

“Cut and sew together!” That was the worst part. Not on your life! And the suggestion, expressed so bluntly, had just resulted in Sandra becoming even more stubborn. She had gradually, with her notorious crying spells as a weapon, simply refused
to go to the doctors’ offices. Just refused. And God help the one who did not respect her decision. Then . . . UAAAH! In other words, it was at the time the nurse at the French School was having her eyes opened to Sandra’s harelipped state.

And this refusal, where did it come from?

Was it because as a child she was already dead set on cultivating this split as an attitude toward life, as a powerful OTHER perspective in favorable situations in any case? Unfortunately not.

She was scared to death, that was the truth. Afraid of the operating knives, afraid of the anesthesia, of the mere thought. A normal, petty fear. She was almost ashamed of this fact when she contemplated it herself.

But with the school nurse at the French School it had been about something else from the very beginning. In the beginning, Sandra had gone to her mostly in order to have something to do during the breaks and the study periods. In order to kill time. She was bored, had almost no friends. In itself, not having any friends at the French School was not very agonizing because there were so many students who were like her—reserved, self-centered, and scared to death of everything. Some of these children knew no French or any, as it sometimes seemed, other languages. They had traveled around the world so much they had not properly learned a single language at all.

But Sandra went to the school nurse because she noticed that she liked to have someone to talk to about her afflictions, imagined and real, and be taken seriously.

The school nurse could do nothing else. It was her job and her employers were not just anybody. The French School was a private school with an exclusive student body, which was not necessarily the same thing as talented but rather students with parents who were diplomats, employed in the international business world, and the like. So the everyday school nurse was a
spirited, robust, and sufficiently primitive element in that environment. As long as she lived up to that role: one of those small, genuine people among the bigger, smarter ones.

But even simple people have secrets, even though they can be quite small. And that was what Sandra had done: she had picked up on the school nurse’s secret. It was quite simply that the school nurse despised the teachers and above all the parents of the students at the French School, those who always, also in their absence, used their money and their influence to decide everything. But she liked children. Normal children: despite the fact that there was a certain lack of this kind of child at the French School, children who suffered from normal childhood afflictions such as flat feet, or bleeding gums as the result of a plain diet or quite simply malnutrition. And in the French School she attached herself above all to the ones who had some hint of a disability, and preferably because she was so practically inclined, a visible one.

This is what Sandra had seen and been moved by.

“Here comes happiness!”

PADAM!
Back to the apartment, Lorelei Lindberg’s birthday, reality. The door to the bedroom had been thrown wide open and finally there was the Islander with the champagne, cigarillos, and the enormous box that almost had to be pushed in. And with his happy yell. “Here comes happiness!” Lorelei Lindberg brightened up and was like a child again, the way she was when she got presents. She quickly jumped out of bed in her baby doll nightie and threw herself at the box. Tearing off the silver paper, throwing aside the ribbon and the bow without giving them a second glance, and in no time she got out . . . a die. Exactly that. Light yellow and enormous, a very enormous one, made of plastic.

A few days earlier the Islander had asked an acquaintance from his hunting league if he could have it, a league he had, before
Lorelei Lindberg, been an active member in. An acquaintance who coincidentally happened to be the director of an entire ice cream factory. Sandra, the unlucky accomplice, knew everything about this as well; furthermore she had been present at the transfer in the office of the ice cream factory. The enormous die with lid was an advertising model from the previous season and had originally been used during a failed launch of vanilla ice cream portions packed in small, small plastic dice in different colors. The advertising die had been in the director’s office for a long time already, as an almost unlucky reminder of the unpleasant faux pas in the marketing. A true businessman does not like to fail; not a lot of convincing was needed from the Islander’s side in order for him to be given it for free. Sandra, on the other hand, she got ice cream, and as much as she could eat too. She had eaten from this
blood ice cream
, eaten, eaten, eaten. And now, when she was lying under the quilt on her mother’s side of the marital bed, she promised herself that she would never never eat ice cream again.

“Is it a diamond?” Lorelei Lindberg asked, filled with happy expectation while she eagerly pried at the plastic lid. When she had gotten it open she let out such a loud and high-spirited shriek that Sandra just had to look out from her hiding place and then glitter confetti rained over her as well.

Silver confetti over the entire room, everywhere. That was what the Islander had filled the entire die with. And for a moment Lorelei Lindberg was occupied with just the confetti. The Islander too, of course. They threw it around and yelled and became monkeys again, they were orangutan Gertrud in a yellow lace nightgown and chimpanzee Göran in a captain’s suit and dark sunglasses. The Islander opened the champagne bottle,
ploff!
the cork flew across the room. Veuve Clicquot, and little Sandra crept out of the bed over the floor after the cork like a well-trained dog because she collected the small metal plates on the top of these corks on which the same grouchy
lady was always pictured. Sandra had quite a few already, but that was of course exactly how it was supposed to be in the real life of a jet-setter.

The small, soft silk dog was hunting again
. The confetti was mixed with sticky champagne that flowed and flowed and so, yet again, another of Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander’s passionate chaoses was a reality.

But Lorelei Lindberg gradually calmed down and discovered her present anew. Lifted the die up in the air with both hands, turned it upside down, and shook out the rest of the confetti over the floor. Now she knew what she was looking for:
plop
it fell out among the last of the glitter dust, the small, small box. Sure enough, a box of matches that originated from the nightclub the Running Kangaroo, which they had visited many times at the Austrian ski resort where Lorelei Lindberg and the Islander and Sandra (the little silk dog) had spent their honeymoon, their seventh, eighth, ninth . . . and it just happened to be one of the very finest examples in Sandra’s matchbox collection (yes, she collected matchboxes too). Not long ago when the Islander, during the planning of the birthday surprise, had asked his daughter to get out her collection and pick out a really nice box, he was the one who had laid eyes on it.

“Ha-ha!” Lorelei Lindberg yelled and pushed out the box. “A diamond,” she repeated, certain of victory. She liked guessing what presents she was going to get, and for the most part she was usually right.

But now it was no gemstone she had unwrapped from the soft, white cotton that Sandra had laid in the box as a bed, but a key. A completely ordinary key, a Medeco.

“What’s this? Where does this go?” she asked a bit hesitantly, a bit nonplussed, but yet not exaggerated. There were, after all, so many fun boxes and drawers and cabinets that had locks in
them where such a small, phenomenal, as-ordinary-as-could-be key could fit.

“Get dressed now!” The Islander tore the quilt off of the bed where Sandra was still lying. “Both of you! We’re going!”

“I burned my arm!” Sandra whined slowly, but of course there was no one who had time to notice her wailing now.

Out to the car with all of them, the Islander behind the wheel, they drive off.

That was how they came to the District. That was how they came to the house in the darker part of the woods.

Because the house. It became an anomaly. It was built in the darker part of the woods, in the District behind the woods on a piece of property that lay by a shallow, muddy marsh, and only in his wildest dreams, which the Islander sometimes could be good at when things were getting out of hand at work, could he call it a beachfront property—though it had been sold as one.

On the outside, the house was square, a rectangle in grayish-white brick and cement. It had a flat roof that was bordered by a wide copper-colored edging, there were some porthole-shaped holes in the façade that were supposed to represent windows splat splat splat splat four in a row right under the border. But it was the staircase that was the most striking. About forty steps, twenty to twenty-five feet wide, in clean, gray cement. Crumbly, unbearable.

The Islander had stopped the car on the hill above the house, which was located in the glen next to the swampy marsh, just before he let it roll down the road that led up to the stairs. And from that perspective, up on the hill, it looked like the entire house was a staircase. A stairway hanging in the air, leading to nothing.

“A staircase up to heaven,” the Islander said to Lorelei Lindberg in the car while they were still on the hill. “This is where we’re going to live.” He added, just as if it was not enough already:
“Everything is yours, Lorelei Lindberg. Just yours.” Only then did he ease on the brakes and let the car roll down the hill.

Lorelei Lindberg was silent, completely silent. She stepped out of the car, she stood next to the lowest part of the house, she looked up. She looked at the long, tall gray stairs. Then she looked around. She looked at the Islander, at Sandra. There was no one else there in the woods, but still it was as if Lorelei Lindberg had looked around like someone who was surrounded by an audience of thousands. Like someone, to borrow an expression from Doris Flinkenberg who comes into the story quite soon,
on the big glitter scene
. But for once it was not about finding an outlet for an extreme need to make a spectacle, but to, well what? To save face? In that case, for whom?

For herself. To hide her own confusion in the presence of herself. How she was taken unawares.
My dream, did it look like this?
Then it was easier if you were playing a role like someone who is performing on stage, in the beam of the floodlights, in the presence of a million faceless faces in the dark.