The Looking-Glass Sisters (14 page)

Is what is happening to me true? Can it be something I am fantasizing in my vivid imagination? That’s what Ragna is always saying, time and again, that my ideas have no basis in reality. But if this isn’t real, then what is? A dream, an explaining away of my life that is so endlessly hollow I have to fill it up with bizarre, strange stories in order to feel a grain of happiness, a little excitement, anger?

The sky, the darkness, the stars in infinite space: no, I’m not hollow. I’m full of possibilities and the strangest experiences.

It’s probably the laughter I hear first of all, but it could just as well be the noise of the engine, the sounds mixing and increasing in strength as they come nearer. As they leave the wood and reach the edge of the water, I distinguish Ragna’s jerky laughter from the roar of the engine, her hoarse, crackling laughter; she must have laughed the whole way.

I have my back to them and can’t see them. When the engine is turned off, only their footsteps tell me that they’ll soon be right next to me. They don’t exchange a word and
remain silent for a long moment when they finally come to a halt.

‘Sister,’ Ragna says, clearing her throat. Her voice is thin and piercing, it must be after all the screeching. ‘Sister?’

I don’t know what she sees, how can I, locked solid in the still point into which I have fallen, a point from which the water, the wood, Ragna and Johan are seen astonishingly clearly? I would have liked to say something, confirmed my existence to her, but not a sound comes out. And when I try to grip round the edges of myself and clamber up to the surface, I don’t move. I am completely lost in myself and cannot budge for sheer peace and serenity and an imperturbable laid-backness. But through the clarity that surrounds me I notice that I am physically shaking, I am shaking so strongly, so violently that Johan moves a step, he gives ground, and behind him is the wood, and under him is the ice, and above us all is the sky.

Johan bends down and places a hand under my armpit, the other under my knees, and then he lifts me up in a single movement. He holds me to his chest, moves with firm steps towards the trailer, and all the time Ragna trips after him, places a supporting hand under my bottom and calves. But she’s not much help. Johan bears my entire weight, and not only my weight, he has to hold tightly on to my clattering body with all his might so as not to lose hold – I am shaking that much in his arms.

They lay me down in the trailer with great exertions and groanings, try to lay me down flat, but my U is unbreakable, unsnappable. Finally they agree that Ragna will sit
beside me and hold on to me. She clambers up into the trailer and settles down, places her arms tightly round my stomach and calls out, ‘Ready,’ to Johan, who cautiously starts the scooter, and then we take the same route home.

The trip back under the blankets, being carried into the house and the warmth of my bed.

The pain of the slow thawing out is intolerable. I enter into a long parenthesis – white lines page after page in
Home University
.

Everything is a daze and void, until the moment when someone places something on my bedside table. A dull sound, fresh air.

I look up from my pillow. Ragna is there; she has just put down a dish of sliced fruit.

‘Eat, dear sister. You haven’t touched any food for days.’

I gradually wake up to the life that has been foisted on me. My heart beats in the cavity of my chest, my blood courses through my veins, my flesh is warm and tangible. No doubt about it, I am still on my journey through time.

I register my existence with a certain fatigue, have no expectations about what use I can put it to. It must be because death has stroked me with its cold fingers, the frost that has so painfully been driven out of my bones and joints. My eyes in the mirror. The only thing that will continue, that happens all the time, is the decline and slow disintegration of the body.

Not until I have almost recovered my powers do the memories of the experience out on the ice return. From my exhausted, half-withered position, the revelation out there seems fainter, not quite as feasible. Furthermore, there is something about the home’s same old boards, the knotholes in the ceiling beams – everything is as before, and radiates the feeling that my life ought to continue precisely like that: immobile, still.

My head sinks back on to the pillow. There is nothing more to think about.

I freeze and shake, sweat and drowse in turns. Hammering and thudding fill my head, my entire body. Yes, I am in the process of waking up, that’s what must be happening. And that’s good, particularly because words have announced their arrival. They run around in the room unrestrainedly, and under the bed sentences have begun to collect in large, dirty heaps. So it’s time to roll up my sleeves.

I stretch out a hand, try to grasp some word or other, but they react by huddling together into unpleasant, hurtful sentences that stare at me from the corners of the room and the wardrobe. I don’t like it, throw a pillow at the nastiest ones. But I shouldn’t have done that, for suddenly they come at me and insist on a place in both my head and the bed. I flounder around in ‘abductions’, ‘marriage’ and ‘nursing home’, can hardly breathe, and it’s no good trying to catch them, for they immediately grow short-tempered and red and even bigger.

I say to myself that I must relax, breathe, pretend they’re not there. But the number of words just increases, they
come streaming in, and suddenly they start to propagate into ‘abhome’, ‘marductions’ and ‘nursinges’. To avoid chaos and panic I have no other choice but to make room for all of them – I realize that they simply ought to have their own, chosen shelves. I work feverishly, sorting and clearing away at great speed, place ‘abhome’, ‘marductions’ and ‘nursinges’ at the bottom, but realize immediately that that won’t work out. The old words start falling down when I place them on the shelves, their labels have gone and soon I don’t even recognize any of them. I examine them from all sides, every one of them, shake out their contents, but that too is a false move – everything gets mixed up together and splits up into new and even more incomprehensible meanings.

I gasp for breath.

Ragna is standing by the bed, staring at me. She places a cold cloth on my forehead – as if that was necessary; the whole pillow is soaking wet.

Her look: the fear within, it’s not hard to work out that it’s got to do with me.

Ragna moves round me with a new, strange attentiveness. I don’t know if I like it or not – it may well be that Johan affects me with his outbursts.

‘What the hell’s going on, Ragna?’

Ragna has left the stove and her simmering saucepans and entered my room without any warning, without a single call from me. I’m lying under the duvet in a dreamy
doze, listening absently to her approaching steps. When she is close, I look up from the pillow, but she doesn’t say anything, only opens a drawer, takes out a comb and, without a single word, starts with determined strokes to fix my hair. She is breathing close to my ear, short puffs. I try to wriggle free but she keeps a firm hold by gripping me round the forehead.

She goes through my hair several times, the unaccustomed strokes seeming to burn my scalp. Then she stops and removes the loose hairs from the comb.

‘There, now you look a bit better,’ she says with a distant smile, opens one hand, rolls the loose hairs into a small ball that she takes with her back to the kitchen. Once there, she opens the stove door, and immediately afterwards I can hear the hairs crackle as they are consumed by the fire.

‘What the hell are you up to now, then?’

Ragna has suddenly, without any warning, without a single call from me, got up from her game of cards and entered my room. Once inside, she starts to tug at my arms even though I’m asleep, and without any explanation hauls me into a sitting position. She presses my upper body forward until I hang dangling over my thighs, keeping me in that position with a supportive hand while starting to shake the pillows with the other. She shakes and bangs and pokes them into position, and when she’s finished shoves me back again. I seem to be a bit stiff, but that’s perhaps because I’m uncertain what she’s really up to. She doesn’t answer my quizzical, half-tired look, just
strokes the clean bedlinen with one hand, and is out of the room again.

‘Ragna! What the bloody hell!’

Even though I haven’t rattled my crutches, called out or moaned, Ragna leaves the dinner table and comes into my room. My cold and congealed food stands untouched on a stool placed next to the bed. The spoon is sticking up out of the porridge. This has been going on for many days.

‘What a lovely dinner!’ she says, clapping her hands together.

I don’t answer. How can I counter her words with my non-existent appetite? Possibly she interprets my lack of response as approval, for she sits down on the edge of the bed and leans towards me, the bowl of porridge in the crook of her arm.

Ragna is suddenly much too close: her smell, skin and the heat of her body. I turn my face away. She immediately interprets my gesture as a refusal to eat. And so I turn my head back and she quickly pushes two spoonfuls into my mouth.

‘You can’t do without food,’ she says, following up with a third.

I protest, mumble with my cheeks stuffed that I’m not hungry, that I just want to be left in peace.

‘Is that all you have to say to your kind sister? You ought to be ashamed. Here I am preparing all this lovely food and even spoon-feeding you with it!’

‘Yes, I know, Ragna. The food’s fine, it’s just I’m not hungry.’

Ragna studies me for a moment in silence. She stares at me with a worried frown. I try to smile, would so much like to tell her that I’m quite content now, but just as I open my mouth to do so, she shovels in another spoonful. I chew and chew with tears in my eyes, cannot do anything else, my protests are all long since gone.

‘There, that’s a good girl,’ she says. ‘You’ll see, it’ll all turn out fine again.’

Kind, considerate Ragna.

Cool air streams towards me from a gap in the window. Low light falls into the room and spreads out over the floor. The sun is once more on its way towards the sky and life is returning. The blackest time of year is past, Christmas is over, yes, even my birthday in January has passed by unnoticed. I have lost several weeks from illness and a fever, it must almost be February, everything is airiness and light – and it has been streaming towards me for several days.

The world is new and open. I’ve got new bedclothes, the room smells fresh and the dust is gone from the corners. Fruit is placed on my bedside table every morning, cut into small pieces, to suit my stomach. A glass of water is served at the same time. I have to drink it while Ragna stands watching me.

One morning, the taste of the cool water makes me remember the experience out on the ice; the thoughts I had about myself under the sky, yes, the actual revelation about the limited, yes, straightforwardly horizontal nature of my life.

I drink the water, swallow it down, and nod, smiling cautiously at Ragna. She opens her mouth, revealing her teeth as an answer. In this state of awakening and purification the possibility of leaving her exists. I can let the single gaze remain in this room.

Ragna searches through the clothes in my cupboard. She pulls out one piece of clothing after the other, two, three old dresses, a pair of trousers, some jackets, takes them over to the window, squints and holds them up, examines the seams, sees if the material has any holes.

She divides the clothes into two small piles. Some items are obviously to be thrown out, I can sense this from the way she kicks them away. Others are to be mended, and a few of them washed. There’s no limit to the consideration she is displaying at present. It would seem to be a good opportunity now to talk to her about my decision:

‘Ragna,’ I say from my bed, well propped up with pillows. ‘There’s something we must talk about, something that happened out there on the ice.’

‘There’s nothing more to talk about, that’s all over and done with.’

‘But Ragna, I’ve got to talk to you about it.’

‘There’s nothing more to be said, we’ve finished that discussion.’

‘We haven’t talked about it one little bit.’

‘You behave properly and you’ll see that everything works out all right.’

‘Yes, but Ragna, I don’t want to have it like this any longer.’

‘Well, things will be different in future, I can tell you that.’

‘I mean, it could just be that I want something else.’

‘You’re always wanting something else. Making trouble, that’s the only thing you’re good at.’

Ragna’s attention is on the clothes; it’s difficult to tell if she has realized my genuine need to talk, the words come out mechanically, she simply churns them out, in the same way that she churns out meals when she’s busy.

I must talk with Ragna before the letter with the blank sheet of paper is returned, before she announces she’s heard nothing, before she phones the nursing home and asks what’s become of their answer – her application was sent ages ago.

What application? the woman in charge will ask. We haven’t received any letter. I’ll check to be on the safe side, but I’m absolutely sure we’ve never received an application for your sister to be admitted. What address did you send the letter to? Well, that’s the right one, the street number’s correct, strange, the postal service never mixes things up normally. When was it sent? Really? No, all I can suggest is that you send a new one, and as quickly as you can, and in the meantime we will try to find out where the mistake has taken place, yes, and what can have happened to your letter.

‘Ragna!’ I try again several days later when Johan is out of the house and she is close by, in the bathroom to be
more precise, where she is down on her knees scrubbing the floor.