The Looking-Glass Sisters (4 page)

‘And you’re a fat barrel that has to be filled,’ she retorts.

Ragna commands. Johan works. Morning and evening he walks through our house with nails and hammer, screwdriver and saw. Four weeks after his first visit, the roof has been checked, the gutters cleared, half-rotten planks outside replaced, the window frames patched up and painted.

The sun shines through newly cleaned windows; our home smells fresh and of baking.

One day Johan comes in with a plastic bag of old clothes. He takes out a pair of trousers and holds them up against the lamp. The light can be seen through threadbare material, revealing two large holes at the back. He affectedly shrugs his shoulders, his look expressing how sad it is to own such poor clothes. Ragna grabs the trousers with a wry smile, nods to Johan to sit down and then fetches the
sewing machine from the cupboard in the hallway. With nimble fingers she threads the cotton silently – displaying deep concentration as she places a piece of material over each hole and manoeuvres the trousers in under the pressure foot.

Ragna finds a comfortable sitting position and draws in her breath, presses the pedal as far down as it will go. Everything proceeds at breakneck speed, the trousers fly this way and that, in one direction and then the other, under the insistent hammering of the needle. Johan stares at the efficiency, the assuredness, the violent energy. The trousers are ready in no time. Ragna holds them up, swings them back and forth to judge the result, then throws them into his lap without a word and with a smirk on her face.

Already after five weeks I note that the nature of the visits has almost imperceptibly begun to change. The energetic working partnership has become more physical and direct; now it is clearly a question of looking each other over.

As, for example, the Friday Johan comes to dinner. I am also sitting at the table, my sister in the middle and Johan on her right. Ragna has covered the table with a tablecloth and decorated it with a sprig of rosebay, so I eat as tidily as I can in order not to spoil the occasion.

I don’t say anything, pretend not to notice what I see and gradually understand: Johan, chuckling with a potato in his mouth, has his gaze fixed on my sister’s scraggy neckline. The table rocks, the rosebay sways, Ragna’s chest is bright scarlet. The kitchen thuds and thumps, divides into
two worlds: what is happening above the table and what is happening below.

Or the Monday Johan comes back from town in the late afternoon with his bag full of provisions. (The previous day he had volunteered to do the weekly shopping in the village for Ragna. All that exertion and so much to carry, no, he’s got a motorbike and has to do his own errands anyway.) Sweat pours off him, his rucksack is lifted down on to the kitchen floor with a groan. Ragna opens the larder, starts to unpack and stack the items on the shelves. Cold air and the smell of dried meat seeps out into the kitchen. Johan squeezes into the tiny room with her; I can see both of them from where I’m sitting in my room. From here I also watch him pulling at her sweater, lifting it over her shoulders, taking hold of her breasts, which stand stiffly apart, above her plunging neckline. Johan kneads away, my sister clucks with pleasure, then casts a swift glance in my direction before slamming the door.

And like the morning Johan comes before Ragna is up, and long before I normally surface. His steps must have woken me, and when he taps on her window, lightly and cautiously, I am wide awake. She is out of bed in a trice and lets him in, her quick movements betraying that she has been lying there waiting for him. They whisper together, imagining they are undiscovered. The front door is open, allowing a breeze to come in, and there is a slight creak from a beam overhead.

I’m asleep, I’m not asleep. I try to get back to a point in my sleep where I don’t have to witness what I fear is
happening. I clench my eyes tight. Johan has closed the door of Ragna’s bedroom; now he’s taking off her nightgown, it falls to the floor. The walls are paper-thin. I concentrate on breathing: my breath is deep and heavy, sleep breathing, regular and rhythmical. Come rest, allow me some repose, free me from my sister, who is breathing more heavily, who is sucking in breath in irregular gasps, rhythmically to Johan’s suppressed moans. Now he is grasping her breasts, the old tatters of them, his great fists tearing at her flesh, which gurgles and bubbles and boils. He’s already stirring away inside her, I can smell it all the way from here, the juices, the mixing slobber, my sister who’s being kneaded and is fermenting. I breathe in and out, open my eyes and swallow, start to whistle the national anthem – ‘Yes, we love with fond devotion this our land that looms!’ – then continue, louder, more piercingly, ‘Rugged, storm-scarred o’er the ocean, with her thousand homes!’

I hold my breath. I hear agitated whispering. Low yelping, my sister complaining, hands fumbling, Johan continuing; his fingers in her flesh, he pummels away at her while I whistle piercingly, shrilly, ‘Love her, in our love recalling those who gave us birth!’

Something happens. Feet stumbling over each other, Johan makes a final assault, my sister in reverse, I see what I hear; her body succumbs while, with clenched teeth, she stares at the door in a rage.

I howl. Johan comes with a groan, my sister lets dry air escape from the slit of her mouth.

Silence. I lie there, my eyes shut, try to become calm, breathe gently. The door is thrown open. Ragna half-naked, quivering. Her smell above my face, the sweat of the hand that slaps my skin. I hold my cheek, look at her as she disappears, the vertebrae sticking out from her back.

I’ve always liked to think of Ragna as one of those people who find every experience disappointing, everything she sees and smells and senses; she is the sort of person who constantly longs for more, every single second. I think of her body and soul as painfully separated; there is a constant discrepancy between her dissatisfied ego, which wants more, and the body’s monotony of work and rest and biological rhythms. I think that Ragna’s spirit will never be satisfied within the restricting boundaries of the body, that she will always stare yearningly towards the infinity outside and inside herself. And then I think: This lack is really a longing to be gone, to cease entirely.

But something has happened. There is now expectation in her eyes, a questioning upward gaze when Johan is around. Maybe when she put her hands on his shoulders, when she leaned towards him for the first time, maybe she opted for life in that movement. Is there a sting in her breast? The certainty that her earthly sensual happiness is so brief, nothing more than an ecstatic sigh in eternity? Does, then, the thought of what will be gone – that something is over and done, even in the kiss itself – hurt more than a thousand times as much?

Johan. One morning when I decide to have breakfast in the kitchen, he’s already sitting in my chair, eating. I place myself next to him, supporting myself heavily on my crutches, rap a bit on the chair as a sign that he is to move. Ragna’s gaze wanders slightly, but Johan keeps on talking, unperturbed, doesn’t turn round, reaches out for the butter and spreads large lumps over his bread.

‘Damn it,’ he says, ‘they should have gone in for tourism. There are loads of Germans here every summer!’

Johan is sitting in my chair. The chair I most like sitting in when I’m eating. That I have to sit in if my back isn’t going to hurt. But he pretends not to notice and continues.

‘A bloke told me this weird story recently,’ he says, slurping his coffee. ‘His wife was asleep in the sun outside the house and when she woke up she was surrounded by this gang of Germans, who were pointing and speaking all at once. They didn’t take any notice of her at all. And this was on her own bloody plot of land!’

I hurl one of my crutches to the floor with a crash. Johan still doesn’t turn round, but he lowers his voice, says indifferently to Ragna, ‘What does she want?’

‘You’re sitting in her chair.’

‘Can’t she find somewhere else to sit? Can’t she bloody well see I’m eating at the moment?’

‘Can’t you wait a bit?’ says Ragna, in my direction.

‘Wait?’ I say to her resignedly. ‘Am I meant to wait for where I always sit?’

Johan laughs, either to me or at me, he laughs to Ragna, as if my request was some private joke.

‘She’s hot-tempered, that one. It can’t always be easy for you, Ragna.’

‘Are you blind as well as deaf?’ I bang the crutch I am still holding against the floor. ‘I’m standing right next to you – if you’ve got something to say, you can say it to me!’

Johan chuckles, takes another slice of bread, then slowly and deliberately spreads a thick layer of butter over it.

I have raised my crutch, lifted it up, and now I place the end of it, with its worn-out rubber, on Johan’s wrist. He sits there, completely frozen, looking fixedly at the crutch.

‘Tell your sister to get that bloody thing out of the way,’ he says quietly.

Ragna gets up, grins resignedly, pulls the crutch towards her. But I don’t move it just yet, the cold metal against his skin – a request to surrender. It is impossible to ignore me.

‘Fucking hell,’ Johan says as he quickly stands up, shoving aside the crutch with enough force to cause me to lose balance and fall backwards against the wall. I push with my hands, use all my strength, but gradually slide down the wall and hit the floor. That’s more than I can take, and almost immediately my legs start to quake from the sudden exertion.

Johan wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What a bloody palaver,’ he says, fetching his jacket, which he’d hung over the chair.

Ragna stands there in confusion, moans in despair, is about to say something, but all she manages to do is to snatch at Johan, who twists out of her grasp and rushes past.

‘Johan,’ she cries out desperately. ‘Johan!’

He turns round at the door, throws his arms out dramatically and rolls his eyes exaggeratedly towards heaven. His whole body says that he cannot do anything, that the problem is not him but with the human scrapheap on the kitchen floor.

As soon as he has shut the door behind him, firmly but with restraint, Ragna is by my side. She tugs at my arm, shakes it, pulls and tears at it in a furious attempt to get me to stand up. Sobbing the whole time.

Days and weeks go by. I glide into a soothing rhythm of calm everydayness. It is an illusion, I know that, for beneath the dependable surface conspiracies smoulder, along with my sister’s hot-tempered desire for her own life.

If I am to retain the right to live in this place, I must hone such skills as vigilance and suspicion, and so as to mark this decision, I write these skills on the palm of my hand in capital letters.

That’s a habit I have – to jot down what I am thinking. I immediately write it down on a random piece of paper. I battle for everything combustible in this house – government circulars, sales brochures and the newspapers that are bought every Monday. But Ragna insists on using everything for lighting fires.

‘Can you remember to buy me a notebook?’ I shout out to her whenever she goes shopping in the village.

‘Yes, yes, all right,’ she shouts back impatiently, and slams the door. At other times, I ask for books. ‘Ragna,’ I
say, ‘can you drop in at the library on your way home?’ She doesn’t answer, never promises anything, but occasionally, perhaps when several months have passed, she may bring home a bag or two of books. The selection is always a surprise. I suspect her of having randomly snatched them up in passing, for they deal with topics ranging from anatomy and embroidery to the history of art and the hunting licence test. She thinks I don’t particularly mind, that I don’t have any special favourites. And she’s quite right, I read everything; that’s the way I’ve got to know about the world.

Meanwhile, as I’m waiting for paper to write on and new books, I secretly scribble in our ten volumes of the reference work
Home University
, and I even occasionally read through the old schoolbooks and novels that our parents ordered from a catalogue when Ragna and I were teenagers and they wanted to give us some sort of ‘education’. The books are in my possession – I keep them under the bed; Ragna has never shown any interest in them. So that’s how I’ve been able to fill page after page of
Home University
, the margins, all the spaces between the lines, the white in-between pages, with everything I’ve thought and felt over the years. I learned to read and write from my parents, but especially from Ragna, who used to be fetched by taxi on certain days of the week and driven to school at the trading centre. It was very tiring – from the crack of dawn to late evening – and after a few years a kind of home-teaching system was devised: Ragna sitting at the kitchen table, grappling with maths problems that made
my parents shake their heads in despair. No, you’d better help your sister to read and write instead.

Words. They can still make me feel dizzy, even so many years after I first made their acquaintance. But when I cautiously started to change their order in a sentence the dizziness became an obsession. I experienced falling into the deepest well or abyss just by moving a subject, an object, a verb around and changing one or two small words here and there:

I steered clear of this game for many years. Then I began to play it again. I dismantle and rebuild for hours. I don’t know why. I feel intoxicated, shake and tremble – and I can’t stop doing it.

And my sister? What does she write on her own private sheets of paper that she will never share with me? What complaints does she jot down about her exertions? I realize at once that I don’t care about her complaints. But I would care if they became a letter, a letter that was completed and sent, or if a blank sheet of paper was left
lying there, quivering in expectation at the words that were to be formed.