Stella Descending (15 page)

The thin boy with the black forelock trots at Harriet’s heels when she leaves the table, tugs at her braid and at the skirt of her
bunad,
the folk costume favored for such occasions. She flicks him off like a fly, but he comes right back. I’ve been helping to clear the table and am on my way out to the kitchen with a pile of dirty dishes. I pull up short in the doorway and stand watching. Harriet is at the kitchen counter decorating a jelly mold (when are we supposed to eat that? I wonder, stuffed as I am with ostrich and cake). The boy is standing behind her, whispering, “Hey, hey, hey.” He tugs at her skirt. “Harriet,” he says. “Harriet!”

For a long time she ignores him, goes on decorating the jelly; then all at once she whirls around and slaps the boy’s face so hard he falls to the floor. “For heaven’s sake!” I say, and run over to the boy. The woman with the one blind eye and the one seeing eye turns back to her jelly mold.

“You hit him,” I hiss. “You hit this child!”

The boy gets to his feet, puts a hand to his forelock, and brushes it back. “Uh-uh,” he says, looking at me. “Uh-uh,” he repeats, and hightails it, slender as a strip of film, out the kitchen door.

I want to say, You can’t go around hitting children like that, I don’t care if it is your birthday or if you are an old lady, even if you are Martin’s grandmother. But I don’t say any of this. I say nothing. I stand stock-still, just staring—at her, at the linoleum floor on which the boy had sprawled only a moment before—and suddenly I’m not sure what I saw and what I didn’t see.

“And who might you be?” she snaps.

I start. “I’m Stella,” I say.

She turns to face the counter. “Ah, yes, that’s right,” she says to herself, “Martin’s intended.” And then she sort of sings out my name letter by letter—“S-T-E-L-L-A”—and hands me the jelly mold. “Would you mind taking this to the table, please?”

She glares at me with her good eye. The blind eye gazes into thin air—as if really it were listening to something.

I know she’s said to have been the loveliest lass in all Høy-landet, but I never could see it.

Later that night, on the way home from the party, we spot a flock of screeching ostriches galloping across the frozen lake. They’ve escaped from the farm, and we have to call for help.

Martin puts his arms around me and says that if I were to get pregnant tonight, and if the baby is a girl, we should call her Bea, after his Swedish great-grandmother, Beatrice. I don’t say anything about the boy with the black forelock who was knocked to the floor. I don’t mention that until years later.

Then:
“Harriet?”
he says, thunderstruck. “Harriet hit a child? You’re crazy! You must’ve been imagining things, Stella!” WHEN I AM DEAD, Martin will cut out my heart and put it on a scale. In the other pan of the scale he will lay an ostrich feather. If my heart is lighter than the feather, I will live forever. If my heart is heavier, it will be devoured by Ammut the beast, part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus.

MY HOME IS WITH MARTIN. I believe you would like me to stay with you. You might even be a little bit in love with me. But we don’t talk about such things. It would upset you if I were to hint at any such thing. For Christ’s sake, Axel, you’re forever dying. You know, sometimes you disgust me. I’m young, Axel! I’m not going to die. It’s you who’s going to die, not me. I tell you I want to have more children. This hurts you. Dirty old man. Splendid old man. Don’t mind me. You know I love you.

There are a lot of things I don’t tell you. For example, I don’t tell you that Martin checks where I keep my contraceptive pills and makes sure I take them every night. He knows when I have my period and when it’s time to start a new sheet. He’s always the one who goes to the pharmacy to refill the prescription when I’ve run out.

He wouldn’t hold Bee when she was born. He got out of it by saying he wasn’t feeling well; it had nothing to do with Bee. He was also having nightmares and not sleeping well.

“Nightmares about what?” I asked.

To which he replied, “The hideous beast Ammut.”

But it might not be the same with a new baby. Martin is changing as the years pass. He has always been good to me, in his way, and he seems to have taken to the girls now, too.

I think I am going to stop taking the pill, when the time is right.

WE RENT a holiday cottage in Värmland, just over the border in Sweden: a wooden cabin painted red, surrounded by trees, and among the trees a lake where Martin and I swim naked at night.

Bee is four years old, Amanda is ten. They are good friends and don’t fight the way most sisters do. In the morning Amanda takes Bee into the forest, where they will build tree houses, play with pinecones and insects, and tell fairy tales. Amanda has breasts now, a little bump on either side of her T-shirt. Her dark hair falls past her waist. She’s starting to happen.

By the time my girls get back, Martin and I have set the table in the garden. Bee has brought presents from the forest— in my lap she lays a beetle, a tuft of moss, and a twig covered in green leaves.

Amanda wants to play Nintendo, but we don’t have a TV out here in the country. She misses her best friend, Marianne. She misses the city. In the evening we take turns telling stories about ghosts and other creepy things. First me, then Amanda, then Bee, but Bee just shakes her head. She doesn’t want to tell a story, she says, she only wants to know if I liked the beetle, the tuft of moss, and the twig covered in green leaves.

“Yes, yes, Bee,” I say brusquely. “Of course I liked them.”

Then comes the evening when it is Martin’s turn to tell a story.

“Once upon a time there was a beast by the name of Ammut,” he says. “It lived around these parts, deep in the forests of Värmland. This beast had an enormous appetite. It had to eat the heart of at least one child every week. And it had to be a heart that did not beat too hard (hearts that beat hard gave the beast stomachaches, hiccups, and other digestive problems), nor yet a heart that beat too slowly. It was his servant Poppel, a wicked sorcerer, who procured and prepared the children’s hearts. He did this by casting an invisibility spell on the children. You see, the sorcerer knew that for every day a child is invisible, its heart will beat a little more slowly, and after three weeks it will be beating at just the rate the beast likes best of all: a little but not too much.

“The children’s parents knew nothing about the beast in the forest, nothing about Poppel the wicked sorcerer. And one by one the children went missing. Their parents called and called for them, but in vain. Eventually the parents decided that their children must be dead, and they wept without stopping for seven days, maybe more.

“The children, who were not dead at all, just invisible, climbed up onto their parents’ knees, clutched their parents’ hands, patted their parents’ cheeks, slipped into their parents’ dreams at night. ‘We’re not dead,’ they cried, ‘we’re alive!’

“But even though their parents heard their cries, they persisted in believing that the children were dead. They put the cries down to grief playing tricks on them, and after a while both the children’s cries and the parents’ grief subsided.”

“Did their parents’ grief really subside?” Amanda asks.

“Yes, after a while,” Martin replies. “The invisible children put their heads together and came to the conclusion that the only way to win back their parents’ love was to become visible again, and the only way they could become visible again was by venturing into the forest and finding the wicked sorcerer. No sooner said than done: One by one the children tramped off into the tall trees of the forest; one by one they were caught in a sack by the wicked sorcerer, who had known all along in the depths of his dark heart that the children would come in the end, because no one wants to be invisible for too long a time; and one by one they were boiled alive in a cauldron—”

“And then what?” Bee asks, breaking in.

“Then all Poppel the wicked sorcerer had to do was to cut out the children’s hearts, which by now were beating neither too hard nor too slowly but at just the right rate, and serve them to the beast,” says Martin. “Snip, snap, snout.”

Amanda looks at Martin. It is not a pleasant look. “The children’s hearts wouldn’t be beating at all, would they, if the children had been boiled alive in a cauldron?”

“ ’S’right,” whispers Bee, edging onto Amanda’s lap.

“Poppel’s a sorcerer,” retorts Martin defiantly. “And sorcerers can do whatever they damn well please.”

The next day, and this is what I wanted to tell you, Martin takes Bee into the forest. His story has scared her. I say, “Come on, take her for a walk in the forest and show her that there is no sorcerer and no beast.”

I stand at the window, watching them walk along the path leading into the forest. She looks so frail under all that long black hair, and he looks so big. They walk along side by side. I think, Surely he could at least take her hand.
Come on, Martin,
take her hand! Why don’t you take her hand?

I say nothing.

Amanda comes to stand beside me. She looks out the window. “He’s going to walk off and leave her out there, isn’t he?”

“No, Amanda,” I say. “He’s not going to walk off and leave her.”

We stand at the window a little while longer.

“Look,” I say, and I point, too eagerly, too brightly. “He’s taking her hand! He’s taking her hand, Amanda.”

And they disappear among the trees.

AMANDA MINE-ALONE. That’s what I call her sometimes. She has no father to speak of. I know you two spend a lot of time together, Axel, and that’s fine, even though I wish she got on better with young people. The old geezer, that’s what she calls you. Her best friend, Marianne, doesn’t call very often these days, and as far as I know she has no other friends her own age. When she’s at home she lies in front of the TV, playing Nintendo; she has this game she plays, with a princess who has to round world after world, falling from one level to the next and fighting the most terrible battles in her quest to find the key to the palace of the king.

Sometimes I can spend a whole night sitting on the edge of her bed. She sleeps on her tummy, the way she did as a baby. She’s all grown up now, tall and—I was about to say beautiful, but beautiful isn’t the right word, although men do follow her with their eyes when she walks down the street. She’s curvy, with the sort of figure I never had. I can’t see it on her, can’t see it in her face, her sleep is deep and seems so peaceful, but I know she has horrific dreams, of mutilation and ghosts and murder. I wish I could take her in my arms and hug the nightmares out of her.

Can you hear me, Amanda? I wish I could be with you when it gets you this way.

When Bee was younger she loved her pacifier. She hung on to that pacifier as if it were her only link with the world. Without it, nothing: no night, no day, no mother, no father—no Bee, in fact. Amanda never used a pacifier, never sucked her thumb, never had a single cuddly toy or doll or tattered old blanket. But ever since she was a baby she has had the habit of rubbing her right index finger gently up and down the bridge of her nose, as if, in her sleep, she were inscribing these horrific dreams of hers on her face, scene by scene.

In the morning, at the breakfast table, she tells us what she has dreamed about, but at that time of day even the worst dreams seem to have their funny side. Bee thinks Amanda is telling stories and begs her to tell some more.

Amanda has a father. I don’t even know for sure whether he’s still alive. Probably is, and doing fine, but no help to anyone since he emigrated to Australia. He sent us a postcard once:
Dear
Stella. Dear Amanda. I’m fine. Miss you. Stella—tell Amanda I love
her! Hugs and kisses and all that.

WE DON’T MAKE LOVE as often as we used to. We don’t sleep, either. After Bee was born we used to lie awake night after night, on sheets drenched in sweat, following the sound of Bee’s breathing in her bassinet. She never cried, but she kept us up all the same.

Sometimes, when we’re not lying there looking at the black shawl that covers the window, I take Martin’s hand and give it a squeeze. This used to be a sign. He knows what it means. But I’m not even wet when he climbs on top of me and butts his way inside. His orgasm is sudden and silent. Afterward, he goes downstairs to the kitchen, makes coffee, sits on the sofa, and gazes out at the blackness of the night, waiting for it to let up. I am full of his body fluids; they’re running out of me. I’m alone in the room—apart from Bee, breathing in her bassinet. I stroke my breast, remember when I used to bleed with sheer pleasure. I soak my hands in his semen, rub my fingers up inside myself, back and forth, slowly, thinking of Martin not down there in the living room but here with me.