Stella Descending (19 page)

Amanda

The night is not far off. I’ve put Bee to bed and tucked her in. I got undressed, too, but I didn’t get into bed. It’s hot and I’ve pushed the window open as far as it can go. Before Bee fell asleep I said something I heard Mamma say to her once. I said, “It helps to cry.”

But Bee shook her head.

So I said, “Well, it would help me if you cried.”

She shook her head again.

You stupid kid! Our mother’s dead and you just lie there.
I felt like scratching her eyes out. Instead I patted her.

I said, “Have it your way, Bee, but there’s always a chance that you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and find me crying.”

She nodded.

“Or maybe you’ll wake up in the middle of the night and find I’ve gone for a walk. In which case, you just lie down and go back to sleep.”

Several times, Martin opens the bedroom door and stands in the doorway looking at us, Bee under the covers and me still up.

“Put on your nightgown, Amanda,” he whispers, “and shut that window. It’s blowing a gale.”

“Go away,” I say.

The next time he looks in, he says exactly the same thing. “Put on your nightgown, Amanda, and shut that window. It’s blowing a gale.”

There are lots of things I don’t tell Bee. For example: I might run away tonight. He might be waiting for me in town. We might climb some scaffolding, or a bell tower, or up onto a roof, just like Mamma and Martin, and we’ll see the whole town spread out at our feet, and then we’ll say
Snip, snap, snout
and he’ll take me from behind, and at that moment I might actually catch fire.

But before that, before any of this, I’ll sing five songs to Bee. I’ll sing one for the old, one for the young, one for the living, and one for the dead. And then I’ll sing one song just for you. D’you hear that, Bee? One song just for you. I want to be absolutely sure that you’re asleep before I go.

The last time Martin looked in, he said, “Do you want to talk?”

I looked at him. “We’re not friends, you and me. And don’t you forget it!”

“Yeah, right,” he said. “But put on your nightgown.”

Corinne

It is a freezing winter’s night, flurries of snow chased by rain in the deserted pitch-dark streets. The tram is almost empty. I am sitting right at the very back. A few seats in front of me sits a man, a stranger. There is something familiar about this stranger, my fellow passenger: his back maybe, or his hair, Bible-black. The tram stops and the man stands up to get off. I take the chance and call out to him. “Martin Vold, is that you?” The man turns, shakes his head, and smiles. It is not him. It is not Martin. This man has beady green eyes and a scar on his chin. I apologize for my mistake and we wish each other good night.

I have thought about Martin a lot lately. He dropped out of sight after Stella’s funeral. I had completed my investigation, and he was not suspected of anything—or at least not anything that could be proved. He was free to do as he pleased, and he chose to disappear. My fellow officers and I were finished with him. Although it turns out that I was not, in fact, finished with him after all. I roam the city’s streets like a woman in love, imagining that I see him on every corner. Not that I’ve ever been in love myself, heaven forbid! But in the course of my work I have come across enough women in love to know that this is pretty much how it affects them: Wherever they go they seem to see the face of their beloved—they see him getting into a car, leaning against a wall, at a café window, on the other side of the street.

Every now and then a face would present itself on the black shawl covering the window in Stella and Martin’s bedroom. Martin said it was a woman’s face. Stella said it was a man’s. But they agreed that it was a face, and that the face spoke to them. They gave the face a name: Herr Poppel.

“Even though I was positive it was a woman’s face, I went along with calling it Herr Poppel,” Martin told me.

The date was September 2, 2000. Stella’s funeral was only hours away. Martin and I were seated on either side of the big dining table. It would soon be morning.

“And what was Herr Poppel?” I asked. “What was his or her purpose?”

“She opened her big mouth and sang,” said Martin.

“Sang?”

“Yes, sang,” Martin repeated. “About us, Stella and me.”

“And what did she sing on the last day of Stella’s life?”

“Herr Poppel seldom sang during the day.”

“I see. Okay, so what did Herr Poppel sing on the last night of Stella’s life?”

“She sang a lullaby,” said Martin. “The same lullaby that Stella used to sing to Bee when she was a baby. It was Stella who did the singing that night, too, in her deep Herr Poppel voice. She would lie beside me in bed, singing, until it got to the point where I had to ask her to shut up. I’d ask her to shut up, and she’d tell me it didn’t pay to talk to Herr Poppel like that. I had to ask nicely, she’d say. So I’d ask nicely. ‘Please, Herr Poppel, don’t sing anymore tonight. And certainly not the song you’re singing now, because it reminds me of weird little babies who never cry but keep us up all night just the same.’ Stella would turn her back on me. ‘Fuck you,’ she would say. ‘Fuck you, Martin.’ Then we’d sleep back to back for a couple of hours.”

“What time would you say you fell asleep the night before she died?”

“Past five, I guess,” Martin said. “It took us all night to make the video for—”

“Ah, yes, the video,” I said, interrupting him. “There was something I wanted to ask you. Several times on the video Stella says that there’s something she wants to tell you.”

“Does she? I don’t remember.”

“Did she tell you something that night?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know whether she told you anything?”

“No, I don’t know. I can’t think of anything in particular, if that’s what you mean. But, no, I don’t think so. Stella always had a hundred and one things buzzing around in her head, all of which she wanted to tell you. But there was nothing in particular. I would remember if there was.”

“Might it have been that she was pregnant?”

“No.”

“No, she didn’t tell you she was pregnant, or no, she didn’t tell you anything at all, or no, she wasn’t pregnant?”

“No, no, no!”

I look at Martin. I say, “A yellowish mass, a bulge in the mucous membrane, a spongy little blob, an embryo less than a centimeter long.”

This brings us to the last day.

Martin and Stella sleep back to back, and when they wake up a few hours later, the last day has already begun. Martin has given an account of this day many times already. He has spoken to my fellow officers, and he has spoken to me. So what do we have?

We have a man and a woman on the roof of an apartment building in Frogner, walking back and forth along the edge, like tightrope walkers, circus artistes, equilibrists. We have an embrace and a fall. The woman pulls herself out of the man’s arms and falls. Or he pushes her and she falls. They are both tired, dead tired.

“An accident,” the guys on the squad say. “It was their own fault, sure. They were irresponsible, sure. But it wasn’t a crime. People who know them, and there aren’t many, say their marriage wasn’t that bad. Not that bad!”

“Any marriage that’s not that bad is better than most marriages,” say my fellow detectives. And I would have said the same, if I had not been bothered by this twinge in my stomach every time I sat face-to-face—

I broke my own train of thought. I said, “Let’s go over it one more time, Martin.”

Martin lit a cigarette, considered me. “Is that really necessary?”

“Is what necessary?”

“To go over it again? I liked it better when we were swapping stories.”

“Let me remind you that I am here as a representative of the law and it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. . . . Once upon a time, six days ago, Stella was still alive. The date is August 27, 2000.”

“We woke up around eight,” Martin said. “We were woken by the barking of the dog that never barks.”

“Hoffa. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Odd name for a dog.”

“It was named after Jimmy Hoffa.”

Martin looked around, as if expecting the dog to come bounding into the room.

“It’s not here right now,” he said. “I’ve packed it off somewhere.”

I checked my notes. “So. The dog barked and you two woke up after sleeping for how long? Three hours?”

“Right, but there was nothing unusual about that. Many’s the time we didn’t get any more sleep than that. I still dread sleep more than I dread sleeplessness.”

Martin paused and lit a cigarette.

“Stella and I woke with a start and ran down the hall. Hoffa had shit all over the floor. He’s a pathetic excuse for a dog. Have I mentioned that? The kind of dog you feel like hitting every time it lifts its head and looks at you. It’s got those eyes. That sort of look in them. It expects to be beaten, and it would never occur to it to bite back. And on this particular morning it had done its business in the hall, and there it was, standing at the door, barking. We woke up and everything was . . . turned upside down. Nothing was as it should be. We were both staggering around like sleepwalkers. I tried unsuccessfully to rub the sleep from my eyes. Stella was feeling nauseated and had to make a sudden dash for the bathroom to throw up. It was sultry, hot, sunny, and stifling. The dog that never barked was barking. There was shit all over the floor. The church bells were ringing. It was Sunday and the church bells were ringing. Amanda came running down the stairs, her hair all mussed up and her cheeks blotchy. She had pulled on a crumpled white T-shirt. Her legs were long and brown, her breasts were full. ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered to Stella. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I’m feeling nauseous,’ Stella said. We all stood there in the hall, surrounded by piles of dog shit, Amanda, Stella, and me—and the dog. Bee was missing. That’s why the dog was barking. Bee had gone out without the dog. She always walked the dog in the morning. It was her dog. Her responsibility. But now she was missing.

“It didn’t take us long to find her. She was standing outside our next-door neighbors’ house in her blue nightgown, gazing into their garden. She’s all eyes, that child! On the other side of the fence, two girls were jumping on a trampoline. Up and down, up and down, up and down. They’re Bee’s classmates, these two. Although
mates
is hardly the right word. A few months back these same girls had kicked Hoffa in the belly. The dog hadn’t quite been itself since. The girls’ kicking left its mark on Bee, too. Now and then she would just disappear, and when she did we usually found her exactly the way we found her this time, standing outside our neighbors’ garden gate, staring, Bee on one side of the fence and the girls on the other. Up and down, up and down, up and down on the trampoline. It’s a strange summertime sight, this: children bouncing up and down on a trampoline. None of us, not Stella, not Amanda, not I, could tear ourselves away from the sight of these two girls bouncing up and down.”

Martin lit a cigarette.

“We were quite a sight ourselves,” he says. “A family of four with a pathetic dog in tow, standing outside the neighbors’ garden gate. All of us in our night things, all four with messed-up hair, and all four”—Martin thought for a moment—“all four of us down for the count. That’s the only way I can put it. We were knocked out, licked. We’d lost the war. We were refugees in a strange land. When the mother of one of the girls on the trampoline caught sight of us through an open French window and came toward us with a steaming cup of tea in her hand, we didn’t stir. We stood outside her garden gate, huddled together like a bunch of ragamuffins. She came closer, her head tilted to the side. ‘What are you doing there? What do you want? Why aren’t you at home? What are doing out here in your night things?’

“Suddenly Stella seemed to come to life. She cleared her throat. She pointed at the two girls on the trampoline.

“ ‘Those two girls kicked my daughter’s dog,’ she said quietly, ‘and I think they ought to apologize.’

“The trampoline girl’s mother looked flabbergasted.

“ ‘But Stella,’ she said, lingering over the name, ‘we sorted all that out months ago. The dog was loose, the girls were afraid . . . none of us can say exactly what happened, can we?’

“The trampoline girl’s mother cast a perplexed glance at Bee, as if to say, And we can’t believe anything she says, that’s for sure.

“ ‘I know exactly what happened,’ Stella said drowsily. She had almost fallen asleep again, asleep on her feet there, outside the neighbors’ garden gate, giving up with a sigh. She had been like this ever since that time she was sick: a fleeting spark, soon snuffed.

“ ‘Oh, who cares,’ she muttered.

“She turned her back on the woman.

“ ‘Come on,’ she said to us. She took Bee by the hand and started to walk away.

“Amanda, the dog, and I turned away, too, and followed her home.

“The rest of that day passed in a dreamlike haze,” Martin told me. “Stella and I slept a lot, couldn’t seem to wake up properly. The black shawl fluttered gently over the bedroom window. Before, Stella always used to insist on taking the shawl down during the day, to let the light in. But we never took it down now. It hung over the window, pinned there by four thumbtacks, one blue, two red, and one yellow. We could hear the Nintendo in Amanda’s room. Bee had curled up in the basket with the dog. They often lay like that, those two, the dog with his leg over Bee or Bee with her arm around the dog. All was quiet, not a sound except for the relentless
piip-piip-tjoom-piip-piip-tjoom
from Amanda’s room. Stella and I lay hand in hand on the bed, on top of the eiderdown, staring at the ceiling.

“ ‘Listen to how quiet it is,’ she said.

“ ‘Hmmm.’ I grunted and drowsed on.

“ ‘You’d never believe there was a family living in this house,’ she said. ‘With children and all.’

“I yawned.

“ ‘It’s not natural.’

“A gentle breeze was blowing outside. The black shawl over the window rose and fell.

“ ‘Look, there’s Herr Poppel,’ Stella said, propping herself up on her elbows.

“ ‘Yep,’ I said, ‘there she is.’

“Then the rain started.

“We fell asleep eventually,” Martin said. “We fell asleep when the rain came. It’s so nice to be lulled to sleep by the sound of rain. The kids were used to our sleeping during the day when we weren’t at work, so they didn’t disturb us. After a while, though, Bee did wander through to our room.

“ ‘Mamma,’ she said.

“ ‘Let me sleep,’ Stella murmured.

“ ‘But I’ve got something to tell you,’ Bee said.

“ ‘Later, honey,’ said Stella.

“Then Stella reached out her arms and pulled Bee onto the bed.

“ ‘Why don’t you snuggle up here with me for a little while,’ she whispered. ‘And we’ll have a nice nap here, all three of us.’

“When we woke up again, maybe a half hour later, it was still raining. Bee had gone in to Amanda. We were alone in the room. We chatted about this and that. Stella reminded me of the time I delivered the sofa and almost jumped out her ninth-floor window. Then she started to cry.

“ ‘I wish we could start all over again,’ she sobbed. ‘I wish you were standing outside my window again. I wish we could celebrate your grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday again. I wish we could have Bee again. More than anything else, I wish that we could have . . . I don’t like all this silence.’

“I stroked her hair. I wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted from me, so I said, ‘Would you like me to sing to you?’

“So I sang to Stella,” Martin said. “Songs she liked. Songs I had sung to her when she was sick. Songs that made her happy.”

“I didn’t know you could sing,” I said.

“When I was a little boy my grandmother Harriet used to sing to me. Stella didn’t like Harriet. But she softened slightly toward her when I told the story of how my grandfather ran off and left her in the lurch when she was a young girl with a baby on the way. She had heard that story a thousand times before, but all at once she seemed to be listening to it in a different way. My grandfather fell in love with an actress, I told her. Loved her from afar, that is. Fell in love, not just with her but with his own dreams of stardom. Farming wasn’t for him, and he couldn’t have cared less about Grandma or the child she was carrying.