The Looking-Glass Sisters (8 page)

‘Yes,’ she sighs huskily, gripping me by the arm, dragging me closer to the bed, heaving in an attempt to pull me up.

‘No, no, not like that, Ragna. Be more careful!’

She moans and supports herself, presses her fists in under my arms, strains, and with a sudden heave she throws my upper body towards the mattress. I grab hold of the foam rubber with all I’ve got in the way of hands and nails, while she, with a hard grasp round my feet, flings the rest of my body up.

I lie there in a twisted, impossible position, right on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to get hold of my bottom and push me over. I whimper, cling to the bedclothes, turn
my head towards her as a sign that I am waiting for her to continue, the final lift.

Ragna stands in the middle of the floor, grinning with her mouth open. I must look a bit surprised, for now she starts to sneer and laugh, throwing her upper body forward in small jerks, holding her stomach. Her laughter does not surprise me, nor the sound of it. To anyone uninitiated, it will sound like hearty trilling. I who know her hear traces of malicious pleasure.

‘Well, help me!’

The small jerks become faster; the laughter courses through her chest, builds up soundlessly before, in a final surge, it eventually bubbles over.

‘Come on. Help me, then!’ I cry out through the quacking din of her vocal cords.

She stops at once, puts a hand to her throat, then sneers some more. Her eyes blink and gleam, and she turns and crawls laughing out of the room, back to her hiding place.

I spend all my time in bed, counting neither the hours nor the days, but registering that darkness is in the process of taking over the day, the winds are increasing, the cold is seeping into the room. It must be getting on for mid-October, the time just before it starts to snow, white and pure. I feel a yearning for purity; my eyes want to rest in the white outside the window. I smell after weeks without being washed.

Ragna and I avoid each other. I call her for only the most necessary tasks. She’s hardly at home at present; as
soon as she has an excuse, she’s over at Johan’s. They’re probably working together on everything that has to be managed before the winter – from the smell and the spots of blood on her clothes I know that the autumn slaughtering is under way, with freezing, hanging up to dry, smoking and mincing.

Johan hasn’t shown himself since our last altercation, but Ragna is obviously back in favour – it’s not only her clothes that have spots of red on them when she comes back from his place.

I reign as queen in my room, in spite of the dust and the dirt. I have the silence, my pen and books, and, not least, I own the hours when Ragna is away. Sometimes I listen to a programme on the radio, but generally speaking I listen and talk to myself. And that is not poor entertainment.

In this steady, calm trickle I find it easy to forget, forgive, explain away, understand. But I’m not so stupid that I don’t sense the resentment beneath the everyday chores, for it’s not just chicken feed that’s worrying Ragna.

And I ask myself once more: Why do I want to stay? And I reply: What other choice do I have? I love the walls here, the view from the window, and will never feel at ease in the strange rooms of the nursing home, surrounded by corridors that lead to places I do not know. The insistence on adapting to all sorts of routines will be a daily struggle compared to the freedom I feel in this bed. I will be tormented by the continuous stream of people who come and then die,
suffer from the noise of the physical disintegration of the old people and their death rattles, especially when I know that in this house I can wake up and fall asleep to a gust of wind or the chirruping of birds.

Coexistence with Ragna is admittedly tough, but at least it is predictable. The wretchedness has a face, a body and a language. It strikes me regularly and in particular situations, but I am not surprised, I know my adversary. I am, in spite of everything, a sister branching from the same rotten trunk.

At the nursing home, on the other hand, total annihilation threatens me. In particular I fear the attrition of my right of ownership over my own body and mind, and worry that, like some object turned into kilos, litres and diagrams, I will simply become fodder for the nursing-home hierarchy.

I stretch an arm underneath the bed, find Vol. X of
Home University
, to be more precise ‘Religion, Philosophy, Psychology’. On page 84 I write, ‘Assistant: She pissed on me, a litre at least. I gave her a wash and new clothes. She was wet and sticky all over! (Thinks: The old bat had a little piss in her pants, or smelt of piss at any rate. It’s best to exaggerate to show how proficient I am.) Nurse: ‘Excellent! (Thinks: The new patient is too demanding. We’ll have to restrict her freedom to spare the other patients and carers.)’

And my sister, Ragna, has she had any other choices than this miserable stretch of land between the house and the moors, the lakes and me? What stopped her leaving before
our parents died? Why didn’t she send me away before I got older and more demanding?

The young Ragna, fresh-skinned and smooth-necked, maybe she walked through these rooms, full of eager dreams and wishes, with a glittering gaze fixed on the future.

She might have had her plans worked out. She would get away, go to the trading post and live in a bedsit. She probably sat in her room, thinking it all out – how she would talk and dress in order to get a job. She already had the names of people Father knew; she would surely be able to gain their trust. In a stream of images, she imagined how the first meeting would be: index finger on the doorbell, the neat pattern of her trousers and jacket against the front door, people’s expressions when she presented herself as Ragna, daughter of Cloudberry Nils. Yes, they were from her family, the juicy cloudberries that were delivered to the door every August. And then she would give a slight curtsy and say that she was available for work, she could wash and iron and scrub, take care of the slaughtering and prepare the meals.

But at this point Ragna would stop her daydreaming. For wasn’t it the case that she would really like to have the very finest of jobs, preferably from the start? Why be a domestic help when you could be a cashier in the food shop or a waitress in the café? Here she would meet people, become well known in the village, her face would be seen every day, either at the cash register in her orange jacket with white collar or at the tables in her white blouse and black apron, holding a burger on a plate. Occasionally, Ragna talked about this when we were children, particularly when she
came home from the village and enacted all her impressions in front of the mirror in the bedroom. If I know her, she would have played around for ages with the images of herself in different roles, would have amused herself thinking about the curious looks people would give her, the long conversations that would take place among people in the village when she was finally in her position: Who is she, this new girl, this Ragna, who grabs everyone’s attention with her efficiency and her clear-eyed look?

But then, in the midst of a flight of fancy, she must have realized that it would be virtually impossible for her to achieve the dream of a respectable job in the village. When I think about it, Ragna has gone on quite a few times about impenetrable family ties, saying that without exception the more well-to-do women in the village have authority over the cash registers, their daughters have been chosen for the job of café waitress as far back as their confirmation. Seen from this point of view, what other possibilities did Ragna have? She could of course have used her strength at the nursing home, for looking after people, washing and feeding them. Were there alternatives to this type of work? No, not except the home here and with me. And most likely the authorities contribute a krone or two for Ragna’s care of her younger sister.

The question of Ragna’s choices, or rather lack of choices, involves answers I am not too happy about. Her life is suddenly visible, like a stage when the curtain is pulled back. Ragna’s story makes for a really uncomfortable drama,
and I’m put in an impossible position when the revelation comes. There are of course all the lies she clings to so as to keep a balance between us. That she makes me weak so as to be able to feel strong herself. That she exaggerates her own importance so as to avoid feeling the pathetic, helpless female she actually is. But that I, with my need of care, have become her excuse for not creating a proper life for herself, that I and my sickly body have become her self-imposed fate and mission in life, that’s something quite different. I wring my hands in despair. Yes, that’s the way it is. Ragna and I are probably quite similar, have precisely the same cast of mind. We do not have any other choice but to remain. We are equally frightened and helpless, and cling to each other as a defence against the outside world: she out of anxiety about her inability to interact with other people, all the social niceties, the things she hasn’t learned to master and understand; and I out of fear of losing the remainder of myself at the hands of cynical strangers in an institution.

Oh, poor helpless little Ragna, poor helpless us.

But that’s not all. The truth about Ragna also contains a paradox. Profoundly and fervently she wants to be rid of me, despite the fact that I act as her shield against the world. But she feels no shame about this treachery; no, rather this innermost dark wish has helped to give her a positive image of herself. As she sees it, she is a woman who has heroically sacrificed herself for her sister’s wellbeing for many arduous years.

I can easily imagine Ragna’s refrains – can almost hear her rattling them off: ‘If it weren’t for your illness, I’d have
had a man and children and a large house to look after!’ ‘If it weren’t for you, you lazy layabout, I’d have been a successful working woman!’ ‘If it weren’t for your pitifulness, I’d have been popular with other women!’

Oh yes, Ragna has always wanted to be rid of me, perhaps long before I fell ill at the age of four. For don’t I have a clear picture that she reacted to my fever and crying with a strange, satisfied look? Of course, I could be exaggerating, I could be stretching the credible much too far. Even so I am open to – no, I am prepared to state that the wish became stronger when Ragna saw in advance the outcome, what would happen later, when she kept watch and took care of me for our parents: a life devoted to looking after a shabby, sickly sister out in the wilds.

So I can hardly blame her, as a child, for having tried in her own way to prevent what she suspected the future might bring. Yes indeed, that may be how it was. Why, otherwise, didn’t she inform Mum and Dad when my condition suddenly worsened?

For the same reason, perhaps I ought not to judge her, little Ragna, for her cunning and her many outbursts during our childhood. And perhaps I ought not to blame her, child that she was, for all the instances of pure malice. After all, I had ruined her life with my illness.

This is one of the many incidents I ought perhaps to have forgiven:

‘Ragna! Shall we pretend to be fine ladies?’

It’s afternoon and we are alone in the house – I’m seven and Ragna’s twelve.

I go into her room. Ragna peers at me from the bed, where she is sorting things into small boxes. Suddenly she fixes her gaze on the glass beads I’m wearing round my neck.

She gets up and comes over to me. At first I interpret this approach as friendly, but then her hand is at my throat, the necklace, and she rips it off.

‘You’re so horrid. And those are my beads. I’ll never, ever play with anyone as horrid as you!’

And this:

‘Little sister! Come here and I’ll show you something.’

It’s summer, perhaps a year later, and I’m sitting in the kitchen eating, but immediately I totter over to the large stone where Ragna is sitting, full of expectation.

The sun is low, so it’s hard to see what she’s pointing at. I bend forward as best I can, stare down into the heather.

‘Do you see it? That’s what you’re like, precisely like that,’ Ragna says.

And then I see it too. In among thin stalks and small green leaves a small mouse is dragging itself forward by its front paws; it’s straining and straining, both its rear legs are broken and hang helplessly behind its little body.

And this:

It’s spring and I must be nine, perhaps ten. I’m sitting on a chair just outside the front door, while Ragna is drawing patterns on the steps with a piece of chalk.

‘Come and see, girls,’ Dad suddenly shouts from behind the house. ‘I’ve found a nest with two crow’s eggs that are about to hatch! Hurry, before the mother returns!’

We look at each other, equally eager. I get up as quickly as I can, pull the duvet away from my thighs, grab hold of my crutches and put one leg forward. But something happens – I crash after only one step, stumble and fall flat on my face, tripped by Ragna’s left foot. There’s pain in my face, my arms. I look up. Ragna, running, turns round towards me, laughs and sticks out her tongue.

Our chequered relationship, all these different episodes – no, dear Ragna, I can’t forgive everything. But here is a good memory, for there we are, out in the grass on a summer’s day. I’m eight and you’re thirteen, you’re big and I’m small, you’re all-knowing and I’m stupid; it’s dry in the grass and dry in the air – and everything is completely still. We’re sitting on the ground, on a rug, me right at the edge and you next to me. I’m fiddling with a matchbox, you’re pulling up blades of grass and placing them in a small heap. We don’t say much, or think much either, but from our movements and looks we reach an agreement that I am to strike a match and place it in the heap of grass.

The grass quickly catches fire, flames shoot straight up, and we move a little on the rug. But look, the fire starts to spread and crackles in the air. I become afraid and call out for you to do something. You get up and calmly ask me to roll over to the other side. I lie down, do as you say, and soon I’m on the grass, while you pull the rug up and throw it over the flames, which go out with a puff.