The Looking-Glass Sisters (17 page)

A month passes, then a couple more weeks. The sun rolls across the sky around the clock, without ever touching the horizon – it’s already the middle of May.

The tree outside my window now has small, light-green buds, and fresh shoots are sticking their heads out of the thawed ground: grasses, heather and the first tentative beginnings of what will become rosebay willowherb in large mauve clusters.

One Monday morning, just after breakfast, Ragna decides to accompany Johan to the village. I sit at the kitchen table eating – a daily self-imposed chore so that I can better study the state of the master of the house. Unconcernedly, half turned away, I minutely examine him as usual for signs of the imminent fall: a worried look, a sudden movement of the hand, a marked loss of zest for life and desire. But he seems as untroubled as ever, feet planted wide apart, scratching his nose, and there seem to be no other horrors lying in store except for some bruises on his backside from all the potholes in the road.

I am not worried, consoling myself with the fact that everything in this world takes time. Just look at the spring outside the window. It slides slowly towards fulfilment, almost imperceptibly. The mere thought of my secret, treacherous deeds makes me feel as light as a feather – springlike, pale green.

Ragna has noticed the change, my good mood, and has been surprisingly gentle of late. Before they leave, she actually bares her teeth slightly, a small, encouraging smile that tells me to take things easy until they get back. As soon as she is out of the door, I slap my thighs, laugh and chuckle to myself: If only she knew what I have been thinking about for the past few weeks.

Finally, at last, I am alone again – it’s been too long since the last time. I snuggle down in bed among the soft pillows, the warm duvet. How nice to be undisturbed in the house, so marvellous not to be a source of trouble or irritation. I let out a cautious
I exist!
, try again, louder:
I exist!
The room
shakes with my power, with my presence, and I confirm that I own myself right from the tip of my tongue down to my withered toes.

I’m woken by Ragna and Johan standing staring at me. They’ve still got their outdoor clothes on, the return trip must have been cold – her nose is dripping. Their looks: I don’t like their looks. Something must have happened to me while I was asleep. Have I have come out in a rash, a tumour, something frightening? I quickly sit up, check the skin on my arm, touch my face, but all seems normal.

‘What is it?’ I say with a sudden dryness in my mouth.

‘What is it? You dare ask?’

Johan and Ragna glance briefly at each other. Johan is biting his lower lip and Ragna is breathing out quickly through her nose.

‘Yes?’ I attempt.

Johan stretches out an arm. Before I have time to see what he is holding, Ragna grabs it from him, brings it right in front of my eyes with a quivering hand. She doesn’t need to tell me. I know from the sinking feeling in my stomach, the dizzying sensation that knocks all the air out of me and presses me down into the bed.

‘What’s this? Can you tell me that?’

Her hand is so thin, the sinews and veins wind their way over the bones, and her nails are so sharp, they bore into the blank sheet of paper that is crumpled between her fingers.

‘Answer then, damn you. I’ve no more patience left. Answer!’

To underline that she means business, she grabs one shoulder of my nightdress, shoves me hard against the wall.

‘For a while things were quite all right,’ I answer weakly, rubbing the back of my neck with my hand.

‘All right? They’re bloody well not all right. It’s all pure obstinacy on your part.’

‘You don’t understand. For a while I wanted to leave, but then you refused to talk about it.’

‘What’s all this bullshit? I only want a straight answer: was this you?’ She holds the ball of paper up in front of me once more.

‘In a way, yes. I didn’t want to, but then I did, but now I don’t want to any longer. And it’s your fault.’

‘Don’t want to any longer? My fault? Explain yourself a bit better, will you?’

‘Yes, it’s your fault. You never listen to me.’

‘My fault! My fault! Are you out of your mind – am I the one responsible for the letter arriving like this?’

She opens her hand around the crumpled piece of paper, smooths it out with quivering hands, displays the evidence in front of me.

‘Yes, if you’d been a bit more open, we could have talked about it.’

‘Talked? All you’ve got to do is explain how this blank sheet of paper got into the envelope I sent to the nursing home.’

‘But first you have to listen to me.’

‘Your excuses aren’t worth wasting a second on.’

‘You’ve got to. I can’t stand all this quarrelling.’

Johan has caught sight of the glass behind the lamp. He wrinkles up his nose, examines the contents with obvious confusion.

‘What the hell is all this muck, Ragna?’

Ragna turns round quickly, stares angrily at the glass Johan is holding.

‘It looks like some coal-black filth,’ she states.

He raises the glass up to the light in the ceiling, turns it round and round; the light can’t filter through the thick black ooze, but some flakes of ash sticking up betray its contents.

‘What’s the old cow been burning? And what did she put it out with?’

Johan sticks his nose into the glass. He grimaces and pulls away quickly again.

‘What have you been burning?’ Ragna asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, swallowing.

‘There are the remains of some writing here!’

Johan pokes down into the glass with a finger. Ragna seizes the glass, glares at the contents, turns slowly towards me, disbelievingly, her mouth open.

‘Oh, my God. You burned the application. You’ve bloody well gone and burned the whole of my application to the nursing home!’

I’m about to protest, but immediately realize that it’s almost impossible to come up with a simple and plausible explanation that Ragna might believe. I twist the duvet around me, start to babble about trivialities to give myself time to concoct a story both of them will accept. But a glance in Ragna’s direction tells me that she sees my
babbling as a sign of lies and evasion. She yawns loudly and rolls her eyes, is pale and clearly in a state of shock, grabs the collar of my nightdress with both hands, twists it round hard, presses me down into the bed.

My incoherent babbling stops. I am shocked, me too; quite simply, I cannot think of anything that will explain the pitch-black contents of the glass. A wave of panic rises in my throat. I realize that I am hoist by my own petard, that my future hangs on an impossible choice between two explanations: burning the application or casting a spell on Johan.

I try to move so I can breathe, catch Ragna’s gaze, but her hands respond by twisting my collar even tighter. My mouth feels dry, useless; I can’t get any air past my lips, any word out of my mouth. I want to swallow, but can hardly move my throat. The only thing I do is think, while my breath bursts and bangs in my throat,
Poor, poor Ragna, I have never seen you so furious before in my life
.

Three hundred and sixty-five million years ago, at some point during the late Devonian and early Carboniferous periods, 70 per cent of all life was annihilated. A hundred and fifteen million years later, during the transition between the Permian and the Triassic, the same thing happened again, but this time 96 per cent of life in the sea and 70 per cent of life on land died.

After a seething, breathing, surging, pounding life of reptiles, amphibians, plants, insects, invertebrates, practically everything disappeared in an instant, or perhaps slowly, over time – but a time that we can’t count, a time that does not exist, a time that relentlessly closes around skin and shell, bone and cartilage. Leftovers that also gradually crumble, disintegrate, are gone, for even the decomposition ceases, after a time there is hardly anything left to decompose – not a morsel, a stub, a scrap, not even a sweeping of what was once a great diversity of existence, can be detected in the ocean or on the surface of the earth. Even the dust of what once lived is gone. Everything has collapsed into a slough of oblivion, layer upon layer beneath crusts and in hidden cavities. Disappeared into an infinity of stillness that, using
the human numerical system and human concepts, spans a period of
several hundred
million years.

That is how it continues, unceasingly.

Life comes into being. After one mass extermination then another, after life has emerged and disappeared, reemerged and disappeared once more, after death upon death upon death in an infinity of time, you arrive at the form of a human being – a species among many other species – developed in the course of a few hectic thousand years. Your limbs are long, wobbly and thin, flesh-pink, and you have no shell, bristles or feathers. You belong to a species that walks on two legs, is carnivorous and equipped with a cunning intelligence that, among other things, manifests itself in a desire for dominion over other animals and nature. And you are aware of your own finiteness, the definitive, the ineluctable.

That is the certainty into which you are created and by which you are created.

The activity of the earth is death. The smell of the earth is death.

You turn your face away. Close your eyes, hold your nose. The putrefaction, the disgusting, nauseous filth of the earth, is something you can’t stand.

You want to live.

I don’t want to be gone. I don’t want to!

Hasn’t that always been my mantra? My obsession throughout my life?

Perhaps I managed to live on only air and thoughts. I’m still here, although somewhat reduced and in an unknown part of the house. I can’t recall, so to speak, whether we have an attic, a whole floor above the kitchen and our bedrooms. I can’t remember either a staircase or a door that leads up here, or ever hearing Ragna on the stairs, rummaging around in the crates and boxes, or being aware of steps above the ceiling when I lay in bed in my old room. Something must have happened since our last clash, Ragna’s rage must have completely taken over. She pushed me down on the bed, that much I remember, but not how I was brought here, transported up the narrow staircase. I don’t understand how they managed; I was probably unconscious. She must have hit me, and she must have hit me hard – large portions of my memory have been blanked out.

I want to go down again, to my room and bed and all my books. I want to go down and live to the rhythm of morning, afternoon and evening. Is it day or night? The day cycle has ended, summer is at its most intense, I can’t sleep and I’m not completely awake either. The sun, this burning light, everything has become so white – it must be due to the height, I have probably never been closer to the sky. I am constantly blinded, can hardly see, everything in this room has a reflection so penetratingly white that I have to screw up my eyes or keep them completely shut.

It tires me out so much. If only I had a pair of sunglasses.

‘Rgna!’

‘Rgna!’ I try again. ‘Iv gt t hve sm snglasss!’

The dryness in my mouth glues the words together until they’re almost unrecognizable. I haven’t drunk anything for several days. Or is it weeks? Under this burning sky, completely outside time, it could just as well be a question of months, if not years, orbiting in an insane thirst around the sun. Ragna must come immediately with thirst-quenching water – if not, it will be impossible to bring me back to life. For I am already a dried-out country lying here. I am earth so dry that I have cracks several metres down into the abyss. At the bottom, in the depths down there, I continue to trickle – a thin, seeping stream that slowly twists along its bed, waiting for rain, for floods, for the balm of Ragna’s care.

But time is short. Sand blows in across the plains, fills cavities, drifts into the cracks. Only the tongue and palate are still working in this godforsaken body, and they are both in the process of swelling up into the sky.

‘Cm, Rgna! Hlp. M so thrsty!’

How can she suddenly avoid all contact, bound as she is by her obligation as a sister to take care of me? The sudden idleness after her lifelong, daily activity must, if nothing else, have given rise to a feeling of unrest, or gnawing thoughts about how I am getting on now. What does she do with her time? Does she feel a twinge in the morning around the time for my morning care? Does she wake up at night around the time I used to call out for help?

Johan has sabotaged our sisterly pact, he’s the one who’s lured her into thinking new thoughts, making choices that distance her from her true work. What does he really want,
that greedy man-child? For her to wash and dry his bottom, the same as she did previously for me?

This room, it seems impossible to think that anyone can have lived here. The house was built before Ragna was born, but everything seems to be worn out and dilapidated. The paint on the floorboards has been worn away in a straight line from the bed to the door, probably by someone over a period of years. The curtains, faded and threadbare, flutter by the draughty window, while on the walls the sharp outlines of frames suggest that pictures once hung there. The chair, the bedside table and the chest of drawers wobble on unstable legs, the water has been turned off at the mains and the washstand is cracked. I can’t understand it; someone must have lived and worked in this room, but not Ragna or me, and it can’t have been Mum and Dad either.

There is no reason to doubt my location, where I actually find myself, for right beneath the window the old birch tree stands swaying. I could grasp the branches if I wanted to, and see, when I stretch towards the glass, how the rosebay willowherb grows in great clusters as before, and how the open plains stretch out in their familiar way for miles and miles around. Everything is as usual – both the view and the room, just dilapidated, and seen from high up. And that makes me feel really giddy.

Time is spent in bed, as before, except that the mattress here is hard and resists when my body presses against it. I
miss sinking into soft pillows, and I miss my daydreaming; I pass nearly all my time lying with my eyes half-closed, peering, turning a bit every now and again, and without all that many thoughts in my head. I know that I ought to be up training, get hold of my crutches, take the few steps over to the door, perhaps as far as out into the attic room and over to the stairs. I was eager to begin with, but then I was still full of hope of an imminent reunion with my former life on the ground floor.

I have also raged and created havoc around me; occasionally I scream horribly and bang my crutches against the furniture and the wall. Ragna and Johan then react with stillness, whispers, and the pent-up laughter stops completely. But the stillness never lasts for all that long, they’re too happy in their newly won freedom. I can see them in my mind’s eye, sitting at the kitchen table when it happens; looking at each other and praying silently that they can last out: sooner or later these terrible attacks of rage of mine must come to an end. If not, surely they would have come up here, seen how I was doing, blessed me with some water and some care?

No, nothing’s as it should be. This violent shifting between surges of strength and exhaustion, I don’t understand it; sometimes I am consumed by a fuming rage, and this despite my insane thirst and my physical state. The surges of strength come suddenly, I’ve no idea from where, but it’s probably natural they start to grow in intensity every time I think of what’s happened – that I’ve been dumped
and forgotten by both of them. It starts as a slight tingling sensation, a touch of resentment; perhaps I feel the longing for Ragna’s hands. But the surges increase under the heavy weight of everything that has created my screwed-up life. And they grow even stronger and more violent when I think of what Johan has set in motion.

At some point or other it’s as if I lose all control, and it’s difficult to say if the surges come from inside or outside me. Everything is seen from the outside, I am reduced to an observing eye, I stare at myself and my actions, matter-of-factly, neutrally, from a place in the corner here. I see myself arch my back, I see my arms, the muscles quiveringly taut, and then I see myself thrust forward with my feet, lift my body with my lower legs, my thighs, hold myself upright on powerful legs. And in this way I stand in bed, like a mountain, and roar.

Yet what surprises me most is not the surges of strength or the lower body that in an instant starts to function. No, it’s what happens the following morning or night, or perhaps just a few hours later (what do I know about the cycle of day and night in this eternally burning light?). Twice it’s happened, and on both occasions after an attack: I wake up and discover that the furniture is not in the same condition as before, or rather, the furniture that I smashed, destroyed during the attack, all the discarded things that I pulled out of boxes and suitcases in the attic room outside – they’re gone, every single thing has been removed and tidied away. There’s not a strip of paper to be seen, not a trace of splintered wood, not a scrap of
razor-sharp glass shattered into a thousand fragments visible anywhere.

The last time I lay down on the floor, I even sniffed, smelt, examined things; bored my eye down into every single crack along the length of the floorboards. A grain of dust, a strand of hair, a little dirt here and there, oh yes, but not the trace of the mirror or the washbasin that I had just smashed to pieces. The mirror dust, the millions of small mirror particles, ought to have been winking up at me in the light, glittering in brief flashes and all the colours of the rainbow. But the floor was swept clean of all traces of my outburst. Only the wall where the washbasin and mirror had once hung confirmed what had happened. Yes, that’s right, it’s absolutely true – I stood up and went over to that corner of the room, on my own legs, surely and steadily. And I bashed my crutches against the porcelain and the glass until everything was in ruins around me. The turned-off water taps that now jut out into the room, the marks on the walls from the crutches, there can be no other explanation: it’s true that the washstand and the mirror have been here, and it’s equally true that every little piece of them has gone.

True?

If I sucked the marrow from my bones and spat it out, the very core of my innermost being, then perhaps completely different truths would be revealed, come gleamingly to light. It is all fantasy, a product of my endless life in bed, lost in aimless daydreaming as I always am. Daydreams
with night in them and with nameless moons and planets as homes for a mind that’s gone astray.

But I fear the worst, that which is worse: that I am dying and approaching final annihilation, yes, that I’m in the middle of an apocalypse, in its shining, swelling nucleus.

I ought to be prepared. I’ve always been aware of the fact that sooner or later it will happen. I am, in spite of everything, someone who has lived at the furthest extremities of life, and I experience these extremities daily, inside the walls of this house. The lopsidedness of the chair, the dull sheen of the glass, the fatigue in everything and everyone, I have constantly observed the frailty, visible proof of the fact that nothing ultimately endures in the struggle against the forces of destruction. Disintegration, cessation – I’ve lived with the threat every single day: death quivering in a cup, in a step, in a single action, in the slightest movement. The things around me and I have realized that death can come at any moment, just a wrong step, a small slip, and the cup is broken and I am gone. It’s got nothing to do with my helplessness, my dependence on crutches, but is simply due to the unpredictability of death.

So perhaps things have come to this: I am perhaps close to annihilation, while they sit downstairs enjoying their coffee. It’s unbearable, for Johan is sure to be squirming in pleasure on the chair where I ought to have been sitting, and munching away at cakes I ought to have been eating. And Ragna, who ought to have been busy nursing and caring,
is probably sitting there right at this moment, flaunting herself with her blouse open and her breasts bared. It is shameful how they are enjoying good food and each other while I’m left lying abandoned and unsure whether I am alive or dead. And just to make it quite clear once more, I still do not want to be among the dead.

So what else is left to me other than to rage: bang on the floor with my crutches, shout out their names, yell the filthiest words I know, and finally smash the chair and bedside table. But no matter how much racket I make, no matter how much I hammer and wreck the place, it will only ever be a faint clinking compared to the noise of the rage that thunders deep down within me. And once again I end up just as uncomprehending, confused at what later happens: the scraps of wood that made up the bedside table are gone, as are the remains of the chair – there’s not a splinter left. So now the room is empty and completely clean, and all that’s left is me and the bed. But of course we are also inseparable, forever bound to each other.