Stella Descending (2 page)

Amanda

Listen! Sometimes at night, when I’m in bed, Mamma is here with me. Okay, not
right
here but close by. And sometimes she talks, not to me and not to Bee, but to someone else: Martin, maybe, or the old geezer. She doesn’t know I can hear her. Martin doesn’t want to hear, and the old geezer is deaf, so I suppose you could say she’s talking to nobody.

A few years ago, Mamma got sick and kept saying to herself, Better not fall now, better not fall. She used to say the same thing to me: Better not fall now. And to Bee: Better not fall now. I didn’t know what she meant. She was lying in bed flat on her back, and Bee and I were standing with our feet flat on the floor, and there she was saying we better not fall. You can’t fall when you’re already lying in bed, I told her. She said it was just a figure of speech. She didn’t mean it literally. But then some years went by and she fell anyway. Literally. And that was that. I don’t think people should go around using figures of speech all over the place if they don’t mean them literally. I must remember to tell Mamma that next time she’s close by.

That time when she was sick we thought she was going to die, but she didn’t. She got better and went back to work and said things I didn’t like: that she was living on borrowed time. When she was in the hospital, she asked me to read to her. Books and newspapers. She asked me to read
Moby-Dick,
because she felt you couldn’t die without having read
Moby-Dick
. We never managed to finish it. She couldn’t take it after a while. There came a point where all she wanted me to read were the real estate ads in
Aftenposten
. “Bright three-room apartment in quiet street, with balcony,” that sort of thing. That cheered her up. You’ll have to go and look at that one, she’d say, so I would, and afterward I would tell her all about the three rooms and the balcony, and about the light.

Bee is my little sister. She’s a quiet kid. Quiet, not stupid. She listens and she takes it all in. I tell her Mamma fell off a roof. Listen, Bee, I say. Mamma fell off a roof, Mamma’s falling still. She falls and falls and never hits the ground. That’s what we say. We say that Mamma is falling little by little, day by day, kind of in bits: first a finger, then an eye, and then a knee, and then a foot, then a toe, and then another toe. It takes longer that way. Not all of Mamma at once,
crash-bang-wallop
onto the ground. Mamma with her long fair hair, all mussed up. Mamma is beautiful. I mean was. I mean is, was; I don’t really know. She has one blue eye and one violet eye, burgundy toenails, yellow summer dress, and around her neck a silver locket that Granny left her. I was her daughter, the older one, and I am the one who painted her toenails burgundy. That was a long time ago. Mamma sat at one end of the white double bed, with two white pillows at her back, the window was open onto the garden, and the sun was shining. I sat at the other end, polishing her toes. That was when Mamma said, “I have the most beautiful feet in Scandinavia.” Just so you know. My mother, the dying, the dead, has the most beautiful feet in Scandinavia.

A while ago, Mamma said to Martin, “If the whole thing weren’t so goddamn depressing, I ’d be laughing at you now.” And then she laughed.

Sometime I’ll have to tell you about Mamma’s laugh. That, too, would come a little at a time. First a tiny chuckle, like one red marble rolling across the floor, then a slightly bigger marble, and then a whole bagful of marbles,
crash-bang-wallop,
all the marbles rolling across the floor at once.

Outside this door everything’s in an uproar. In here it’s quiet. This is Bee’s room. I take off my shoes. We’re already dressed for the funeral, red summer dresses and white shoes. I wanted a black dress, but that idiot Martin said no. I lie down on the bed next to Bee, sniff her hair, her skin; “It’s okay,” I say.

Bee doesn’t cry. She is very quiet. Plays with my hair a bit. I wish she would cry or something.

I’m going to lie here for a while, next to Bee. “Shut your eyes,” I say. “She’s close by.”

“Do you think so?” she whispers.

“Put out your hand to her,” I say, “and she’ll give it a squeeze.”

There are lots of things I don’t tell Bee. For example, (1) I have three boyfriends who are crazy about me; (2) Everything the minister says today will be a bunch of lies; and (3) In the depths of his dark heart, Martin, her father, our mother’s husband, furniture salesman and ostrich king, is actually a wicked sorcerer.

So this is my story. There’s no happy ending. My mother is dead. I am fifteen. My name is Amanda. It means,
She who is worthy of
love.

Axel

There are certain places where I feel at home. Perhaps “feel at home” is not the right way to put it; better to say there are certain places where I feel at home with myself. By which I mean, external landscapes that accord with my own inner landscape. I come to a place, and it feels as if I have been there a hundred times before. Everything fits: the proportions, the colors, the distances, the clear sky above, the light. I come to a place where I find I am breathing, that I can breathe, that I am in harmony with my surroundings. I can’t explain it any other way. It’s not something I have experienced often in my life. I am not usually in harmony with my surroundings. In fact, I detest my surroundings, and my surroundings detest me.

Today I have to attend Stella’s funeral. After the funeral I will pick up my old blue Volkswagen Beetle, my third, from the repair shop. That Beetle is almost as rickety as I am, and like me it is constantly succumbing to a host of peculiar ailments. I’ll take it for a spin. It will do us both good, the Beetle and me. This evening, when I get back home, I shall have entrecôte of venison, washed down with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Sometimes I light a candle for my wife, Gerd. Today I shall light a candle for Stella too. Before going to bed, I will take two sleeping tablets and possibly listen to part of a piano sonata by Schubert.

It is my hope—a thought I have every morning, not least this one—that this will be the last day of my life.

MY HOME FOR the past thirty years has been a three-room apartment in Majorstuen. There is no sense of harmony between the apartment in Majorstuen and myself. I have always considered the place temporary. The rooms are furnished haphazardly, I have never purchased a stick of furniture myself, and when I moved here after Gerd died, I brought nothing with me from the old house—nothing except the gilt mirror that now hangs in the hall. I just sold everything else and handed over the key.

Every Thursday a woman about fifteen years my junior comes to clean the place. No, not a woman. That’s not the right word. An old hag, that’s what she is. An offense to the eye. I don’t know why I ever gave her the job, and I’m sure she has no idea why she took it. It was all so long ago there’s no sense brooding over it now. My only comfort is that she detests me as much as I detest her. Which does not mean we are not utterly civil to each other. I call her Miss Sørensen, even though no one calls anyone Miss these days, and she calls me Grutt. That is my name. I am Axel Åkermann Grutt. I happen to know that the old hag’s first name is Mona, and that as a young woman she held some minor position in the Oslo tax department. So—only to myself of course—I call her Miss Money Sørensen, or simply Money. Because she is a grasping old hag, and because she sometimes steals from me—ten kroner here and ten kroner there— although I never say anything. That would put us both in an untenably awkward situation. I have lots of other names for her as well, but some things I shall keep to myself till my dying day, which can’t be too soon. Besides, a bit of decorum is surely in order, even when it comes to Money. Not that she has ever shown any, coming to work in those short skirts of hers with her garish lipstick and woolen panty hose. If I had any trace of that highly fashionable quality
empathy,
I might well feel sorry for her, even to the point of not begrudging her the petty sums she steals from me each week. Money is old, weary, and pathetic, but like most women she imagines that short skirts and red lips will conceal her wretchedness rather than lay it bare.

Money is one person I see regularly. The other, apart from Stella, who is being buried today—she fell or was pushed off a roof on Frognerplass—is Stella’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Amanda. She often pays me a visit. It used to be she only came with her mother, but eventually she started coming on her own, too, and despite the fact that we don’t have much to say to each other and despite the fact that I don’t really like children—I think they’re overrated, to be honest—we spend a few hours in each other’s company now and then. Sometimes we play cards, I have taught her to play Høff, a game for two players using two packs of cards. She is also impressed by my feeble magic tricks, which is rather flattering. I used to be quite good. Amanda has pale fine-drawn features. She tells me she likes video games. I tell her I like Ferris wheels. It would never occur to either of us to speak of our loneliness.

Money and Amanda. There you have the circle of my acquaintance among the living. I could perhaps add to this list the blank-eyed young woman at the newsstand on the corner where I buy my papers. After all, I do see her every day. And speak to her, too. I say good morning and tell her which newspapers I would like (the same five, always), and then, after the same correct sum has passed from my hand to hers, I say goodbye. But by definition, an acquaintance ought at least to recognize one’s face, and the young woman at the newsstand has never recognized mine.

I GAVE UP SMOKING five years ago. I took a course, the strategy of which was to get the participants to dislike cigarettes, something that had previously given them pleasure. Every time I had the urge to light a cigarette, they told me that, old geezer that I am, I should chew on a stick of licorice instead. A licorice stick! Inevitably, all we ever talked about at every session was what a struggle it had been to get through another week without cigarettes and whether we had given in or “cracked,” in the parlance of the course.

Let us get one thing clear: I did not attend this course of my own free will. I was ordered to do so by my family physician, my only friend of some thirty years’ standing in fact (and, at one time, Stella’s boss), Dr. Isak Skald. He told me if I continued smoking I would die. It was, as I told him, hardly a sound argument since (1) I greatly enjoyed smoking and (2) I had nothing against dying. The sooner the better, said I. But Skald, some years my junior, was so determined to preserve my old carcass, this thing he was prepared to count as a life, that I was robbed, as it were, of my own will, leading me to wonder whether I had ever had a will of my own at all. At any rate, his was the stronger, which was vexing enough in itself. It would prove to be of little comfort when Skald himself up and died of a heart attack not a year later, at the tender—to me—age of seventyfive. By then the joy was gone. Skald had taken it with him to the grave. (He had told me once, a long time ago, that he found joy in his wife Else’s hands. It was almost unbelievable, he said, that a woman’s two hands could change everything, all ideas of a well-ordered bachelor existence, all self-elected solitude, all disdain for matrimonial ties; thanks to Else’s hands and the constant longing for Else’s caresses, he no longer had any desire to go on living alone in his apartment with two aging mistresses lodged at a safe distance, according to his original intent. Instead, he wanted to spend the rest of his days with Else.)

Don’t get me wrong: I did try to take up smoking again. Indeed, I smoked plenty of cigarettes during the reception following Skald’s funeral; I stood in a corner of Skald’s lovely bright living room, virtually devouring cigarettes and canapés and drinking beer. Then out of nowhere Else, a tall woman, six feet if she was an inch, sidled up to me, her lips at my ear. (That day, Else had turned in an exceptionally good performance as the grieving widow: dignified, composed, and warm, with becomingly red-rimmed eyes. She looked younger than her sixty-four years. Her fifteen-year marriage to Skald had been her third. His predecessors had also died, so she knew the role of widow, though not having played it for some time.)

“You know Isak made it a point of honor to get you to give that up,” she whispered, pointing to the cigarette between my fingers. “He’d be quite beside himself if he knew.”

I looked at her face, her glistening eyes, her gray suit, her hands—two broad gold bands on the ring finger of the left one, Skald’s ring and her own.

“Your husband, my friend, would not be
beside
himself, as you put it, wherever he is now,” I muttered.

“That may be,” she whispered, “but
I’m
still here, and
I’m
beside myself. I’m beside myself.” She dropped her gaze, wiped away a tear, and said, “And I think it’s silly of you to start smoking again after being off it for so long and having done so well.” (A marvelous woman, I remember thinking to myself; it did not surprise me when she married again some months later.) Then she raised one of those hands that had once given my friend Dr. Isak Skald such joy and plucked the cigarette from my lips.

“For my sake,” she whispered, kissed me on the forehead, and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. Then she moved on to the next guest who had come to pay his last respects.

I MET STELLA ten years ago at Ullevål Hospital. She was a nurse, I was a patient. For some reason—this is one of the most remarkable things that has ever happened to me—every day this young woman would come to my room and perch on the edge of my bed, chattering on about everything and nothing (not least about Martin, whom she had just met and fallen in love with) as if it were her honest wish to be my friend. I say again that I have no idea why she might have desired my company or what she may have seen in me, an old man with one foot in the grave; sometimes I wonder whether she saw me at all, sitting there at my bedside: young, dressed in white, nattering on.

My stay in the hospital was a fairly lengthy one. Skald had persuaded me to have an operation. I won’t go into details. The old carcass was falling apart. The pain was exquisite. I say exquisite because God, if he exists, is brutally inventive. The litany of agonies and afflictions that beset the human spirit and body is, I think, exquisite in its candor. God glamorizes nothing—everything hurts, everything breaks down, there is no mistaking the way things are going. Dying is one thing, a relief, I think. But growing old is hard work.

At that time, ten years ago, Stella was working in the geriatric unit, but later she switched to treating the dying, primarily cancer patients, at the Radium Hospital.

Her face. In my mind’s eye I see it all the time but as if in a dream, very close, right up against my own—still I can’t describe her features because the face keeps changing.

She reminded me of my only daughter, Alice, whom I haven’t seen since my wife died in ’69 (Alice felt I was to blame for her mother’s death, that somehow my “selfish, harsh, tyrannical nature” had caused the cancerous growth in Gerd’s stomach). Stella had the same tremendous lust for life as Alice, the same proud bearing. I’m not talking here of the sort of beauty that comes from perfect facial features or a shapely figure— neither Alice nor Stella could be described as beautiful in the traditional sense—but a beauty that springs from physical grace. Even as a little girl Alice could take my breath away just by running down the street toward me, arms outstretched. So too with Stella. I can see her now, way down at the other end of a hospital corridor or sitting on the edge of my bed: an angular young woman with broad shoulders, narrow hips, small round breasts, and lively, expressive hands. She was very tall, slim, and slightly round-shouldered—a princess on stilts. Sometimes she would sweep through a room with all her usual style and grace, other times with a less-expected, faltering sort of charm.

I’ve always been fascinated by Ferris wheels. I like to stand and watch them from a distance. Or look at pictures of old ones, in Coney Island, Vienna, London, Chicago, Tokyo. Even the garish little wheels of traveling fairs have their allure. Of course these days it would never occur to me to get onto one and spin slowly through the air, round and round. Not anymore. I am too old. My father took me up in a Ferris wheel once, and on that day he told me we were distantly related to the American engineer George Washington Ferris, who invented it.

When Alice was a little girl I took her on the beautiful Ferris wheel in Vienna. I remember the snow falling, the lights, her gleeful laughter, and the way she stood up in the gondola, stretching her arms into the air. The last time I dared to go up in one was with Stella, at the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. We happened to bump into each other on the street. She was in town for a conference on care of the terminally ill, and I was there to . . . well . . . to go to Tivoli. She was most surprised to see me outside her hotel.

“I can’t believe it!” she said. “You’re in Copenhagen, Axel?”

I replied that I was indeed and often had business in Denmark (I believe that I did in fact use the word
business
as if it were the most natural thing in the world).

She said it was nice to see me, that she actually had quite a busy day ahead of her, but surely we could find time for a cup of coffee. I said, “Couldn’t we go to Tivoli instead and try the Ferris wheel?” She looked as if she had been struck by a bolt out of the blue. Or, rather, she looked at me as if I had just fallen out of the blue, to land outside her hotel in Copenhagen at two-thirty in the afternoon. Evidently it had never occurred to her that I might be the sort of man who frequented amusement parks.

“You sat so still, Axel, with your big hand over mine, and when we
reached the highest point you said, ‘Look, Stella! Look!’”

“And you hardly dared to open your eyes, couldn’t understand what
I saw in this form of entertainment.”

WHEN I SAW STELLA for the first time, way down at the other end of the hospital corridor, dressed all in white, so purposeful, and with that—how shall I say?—singing inside her, I was put in mind of the time Alice was to be married. When I met her, Stella was in her mid-twenties and she and Martin had just started living together. Alice was also in her mid-twenties when, for some unfathomable reason, she decided to get married. I was to lead her to the altar and hand her over to an estimable fiancé, whose name I’m glad to say I have forgotten. He was a tall, dark, bespectacled man whose only good trait was that he always agreed with the last person to speak, seldom forcing his own ideas and opinions—whatever these might have been—on others. If there was one man about whose thoughts I had no wish to be enlightened, it was Alice’s fiancé. There are torments even I have been spared! Anyway, I collected my white-clad daughter at her studio apartment . . . how many years ago was that? It would have been in ’63, six years before Gerd died—I picked her up at her tiny apartment and made room for her in my blue Volkswagen Beetle, the one that was to give up the ghost in the seven-ties but at that time still shone like the sun. We drove to the church. Alice was quiet. Her veil kept falling over her face and she blew it away in exasperation, as if it were the long hair she had never had. I chatted dutifully about the weather and mentioned that her mother was looking forward to the party afterward; she had left for the church a half hour earlier to check that the flowers had been arranged just so, and the whole house was filled with the glorious smell of roast reindeer—that sort of thing.