The Looking-Glass Sisters (12 page)

‘We’re native population too!’ she says, thumping the table. ‘We’ve lived here for ages, yes, generations of our forefathers have!’

‘Yes, you bloody well have,’ the choir say in unison, gazing down into their glasses of Johan’s home-distilled hooch.

‘And they want to ride slipshod over us – want more rights, ownership of water and the outlying areas. They’ll want to own the sea next!’

‘It’s too bloody bad,’ say the choir, taking another swig.

‘We’ve got to stand together against the new master race. We’re just as much natives as they are!’

‘Sure, sure!’

‘You’ve got to find allies as best you can – before you know where you are, they’re outside the door, come to haul you out of your own home!’

‘Bloody liberty!’

‘They’ll simply have to conform, the whole damn lot of them!’

‘Yeah, are you crazy!’ say the choir, banging down their glasses.

‘Hey, Ragna, have you completely forgotten?’ I say, crawling out of the corner.

I’m multi-armed, many-legged, stop with my sting vibrating right in front of her. The choir and Johan start, trying to chase away a sudden foreboding.

I begin to hum quietly, possibly inspired by the choir, but I have my own quite specific reasons.

‘Forgotten this song?’ I look questioningly at her, open my mouth wide and emit a few notes in an unsteady voice. ‘You used to sing it a lot when you were young and still had a bit of flesh on you, didn’t you?’

The choir and Johan look uncertainly at each other.

‘Yes,’ I go on. ‘You knew it off by heart, and that’s not so strange, for you spent a lot of time with the natives here back then – wasn’t it their song, paying homage to their own history?’

Johan fidgets uneasily.

‘Damn it, what’s all this crap she’s talking about, Ragna? Can’t you get the hag off to bed so we can celebrate our wedding in peace?’

‘Give it a break!’ Ragna shrieks uncertainly.

‘Give? If we’re going to talk about giving, we ought rather to talk about you, dear Ragna. You’ve given one thing and another to the new master race. Do you think I didn’t see you through the window here when we were young? They ran after you through the undergrowth, their pricks in their hands, as horny as hell, every man jack of them.’

‘What’s the pike-fish trying to say?’ Johan’s got up and is standing menacingly beside the table.

‘All I’m saying is that Ragna has supported the new master race in her own very special way, under the warm skins, and ever since she was young. Not many of the natives have escaped her insatiable appetite for men!’

Home University
, Vol. IV, ‘History of the World’, at random, somewhere in the margin: ‘The sting location swelled up
quickly. Deadly poison pumped into each and every cell. The victim collapsed in vomiting fits and cramps, but the antidote was quickly injected by those at the scene.

‘Condition now stabilized. The poisonous vermin neutralized and carried back to its stinking cave.’

The bed embraces me, warm and soft, no one else in the world receives me in the same way – unconditionally loving and passing no judgement on my actions. I sink, fall down, but in the depths of its embrace I lie there tossing and turning between Ragna’s accusations and my own defence, restless, both when dreaming and awake.

As soon as I trickle into consciousness from a moment’s rest, I’m back at our trial just by registering the green dress against my skin. Was it the wine or pure malice? Or was it the actual mixing of wine and malice that produced the poison? That is how Ragna will argue and attack me. My anxiety and righteous indignation, yes, all my reasons for reacting do not exist in her repertoire of causes and explanations.

Johan’s wedding night hammers against my eardrums. Is he punishing both Ragna and me? The chest of drawers rattles noisily against the wall at regular intervals.

I pull out two wine-bottle corks from my dress pocket that with foresight I had taken from the kitchen worktop. I try to stick them into my ears. They’re too big and fall out; I’ve no other choice than to press them with both my hands against my head, hold them there, wait for the wedding night to be over.

Do hours pass? Days? I roll back and forth in the bed, green, poisonous, threatened with extinction.

Shame and desecration. The wedding meat is rotting on the dinner plates. In the glasses the wedding wine is coagulating. Did they cut the wedding cake and receive a small taste of their future happiness?

Ragna’s face, the men’s look, they appear before me at regular intervals in the darkened room. I flounder around in images from the dinner and the evening, feel lonelier and more abandoned than ever before. Even the words have gone; after jotting down my last note the books lie untouched under the bed. Possibly I can find something or other behind an old, dried-up thought, something I can scrape off and put in my mouth. But everything tastes dry and lifeless, nothing like the small sweets that make your saliva run.

It’s early morning, the mauve tinge across the sky tells me. The dearth of words, my sleepless trial, open up a couple of memories that gradually refuse to leave me. Or have they emerged as an outcome of conscience, a desire for restitution? How else can a memory of youthful innocence assume Ragna’s face and name?

I don’t write anything, I detect traces of the stories along the floor, walls and windowpanes, they stretch out of their own accord, on the headboard, the alarm clock, a small figurine, only to pale and vanish once more.

Ragna, the window states. Ragna had a lovely gleam to her hair, oh yes, it flamed and burned among the green of the bushes and trees, that was what he had said the first time they met. She told me that immediately afterwards, excitedly, about his look, his voice when he spoke. Yes, she would go on and on about it for weeks and months, but to herself, in front of the mirror, in her bed before falling asleep, but always close enough for me to be able to pick up the words.

Her breath smelt strange, and I didn’t like her clammy hand against my skin when she sat down on the side of the bed and told me how much in love she was; he was so kind, he had bought her a coffee at the café, and when they went outside to wait for Dad, who was doing the weekly shopping, he lent her his scarf. He was also funny; he had started to sing and laugh and nudge her as time passed and the biting north wind froze her hands and feet.

One afternoon he was, surprisingly enough, standing outside the house. He had arrived by moped along the bumpy, muddy road, and now he was standing there with mud spattered up his legs and back. I could see him from my bed; he calmly pushed down the side stand, shook the shield a bit, then took a few paces back, looked at the moped from a distance while taking his tobacco out of his pocket. He peered at the house and rolled a cigarette, but showed no signs of intending to knock or make contact. Instead, he lay down in the grass and blew out smoke in large clouds, quite relaxed, as if he had lived here for ages.

Ragna almost stopped breathing. He was right outside! And there she was, face unwashed, hair uncombed. What would he think of her when he saw her like that, a complete shambles?

She shot into her room, dashed around, hardly had time to fix her hair or change sweaters before she felt she had to go out and say hello to him. From the window I could see her face; she approached him nervously, uncertainly, and with a touch of something sweet about her mouth. He watched Ragna coming, but didn’t get up, sat quite still for a moment before throwing his cigarette away and stubbing it out in the grass with his thumb, gazing at her the whole time.

From the sounds in the kitchen I deduced that Mum and Dad were ill at ease; their movements stiffened as they were suddenly like strangers in their own house. Dad coughed and started walking backwards and forwards between the corridor and the kitchen, and Mum peeled the potatoes with a gentle, alert pensiveness.

‘Who is that lad? What sort of chap is he?’ Dad asked several times.

Mum didn’t answer at first, but while clattering with saucepans she called out that Ragna had never told her anything about it, so how could she know.

I sat down in a chair by the window ledge, well to the side, right next to the curtain, so that my interest in the proceedings wouldn’t be too obvious. Dad stood watching me from the corridor, I could sense this from the silence out there and the footsteps that had subsided. When he
stuck his head round my door, he didn’t speak, but I knew that he wanted to express something.

I see myself sitting at the window here, see myself slowly turn towards him, silent, but with a serene expression, and I see something inside him go to pieces, there, at the door. I see what I was and could not become, all that was lost and that would grow into raging accusations, be reshaped into lonely bitterness; I can read it in his eyes from here, and I saw it the time when he was standing in the doorway, aware that there was something he ought to say.

When I turned back to the window, Ragna and the young man had disappeared. I searched among the bushes, out across the heather, behind the tree right outside, but I knew that they were already long gone when I discovered the moped tracks through the grass. I unclasped my hands – they were so cold and empty in my lap – and my legs, so tired under the chair, so unnecessary, so alien. What use was this body, what was I going to do with all this flesh, this life I had received?

‘Who is that lad?’ Dad called out again, entering the kitchen. ‘Who is he?’ he asked Mum exasperatedly.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Mum said time and time again. She had started to wash up some pots and pans.

The silence outside was enormous. I craned my neck, turned my head, pressed my face to the glass. What had become of the sounds from Ragna and the young man? Something caused me to turn towards the corridor. Now both Mum and Dad were standing there looking at me, their faces were dark, their bodies tired and worn out, and I realized, we all did, that I was one of them, the
old and the useless, and that I would go on being so, for ever.

‘He’s sure to be a right tearaway. They’re out of control, that lot,’ Mum said to Dad during supper.

Her voice interrupted the silence, hard and rasping compared to the soft clinking of the cups. I was sitting over by the stove, Mum and Dad were at the kitchen table, Ragna’s chair stood empty close to the table. Our glances met from time to time, but occasionally Dad banged his fist down on the table, not hard, more as confirmation of something, and then we looked at each other, briefly.

I asked to be put to bed, I had grown tired of waiting. And I also felt a sudden aversion to sitting there with Mum and Dad.

Outside the window the summer night was still light, full of promise, but I was freezing in my bed, there was a draught that I hadn’t noticed before. I called for my mother and asked for an extra duvet. She shuffled in barefoot and in her nightdress. It must have already been night.

So cold. In the middle of summer. And Ragna still not back! Mum tucked the duvet round me, gave a deep sigh. Get some sleep, she said, we can’t lie awake waiting, all of us.

Ragna was eighteen, at least, no one had the right to insist she stay at home. But when she did come back, many hours later, Dad was waiting in the doorway. And when he asked her where she had been and was met by silence, he demonstrated his authority by hitting her. His hand
struck her on the cheek, I could hear it right out where I was, a dull thump, almost metallic. But Ragna still didn’t answer, she went to bed without saying a word.

And I recall smiling faintly, and then feeling the warmth return to my body.

The other story I remember took place earlier, the winter when I was seven and Ragna was twelve. We were sitting in the kitchen that evening, Ragna and I, on separate stools pulled away from the table in the middle of room. We stared at each other. Mum was standing behind me with a pair of scissors in her hand, my hair was damp and she had placed a towel over my shoulders. I sat bent forward, my eyes heavy with tears. I had resisted, struggled, but was now in a way prepared, had accepted what was going to happen. Ragna was beaming, tossing her luxuriant half-length hair. It had actually already grown past her thin shoulders, but she was to be spared the scissors, left in peace, while I, with my thin, wispy hair, was to have mine cut.

‘It grows unevenly,’ Mum said. ‘And it’s so thin and fine that it gets into small tangles all over your head.’

So my hair had to be short, and now it was going to be cut off just above my ears.

Ragna sat on her stool and shone, she shone and glittered and tossed her hair, so thick, so long was it that she could plait it, gather it in a ponytail, roll it up and let it cascade down again in long, soft curls. I stared straight ahead, pretended she wasn’t there, didn’t take any notice of her lapping up my humiliation – Mum cutting and my
tears falling at every strand of hair that gave way before the scissors.

Afterwards, I sneaked over to the mirror unseen, alone. My eyes had become so big and my head even bigger. My nature was confirmed: I was a stranger in this family and on this earth. While I suddenly realized as much, Ragna appeared out of nowhere and stood beside me. We stared at each other for a long time, from either side of the mirror, I closer, she further back. Nothing was said, but both of us saw what our reflections had to tell.

Was it the day after? No, it was several days later, and it was planned in advance – that was the only way I could avoid suspicion.

She screamed when she woke up, or rather when she picked up her brush that morning and passed it through her hair. Was it possible? During the night, the hours on her pillow, her hair had become snarled in an impenetrable ball, and it was impossible to do anything with this great clump, this thick, unruly haystack of hair all stuck together, entangled in an alarming fashion.