The Looking-Glass Sisters (15 page)

‘Do you think I’m a good human being?’ I call out from the bed into the corridor.

‘You should be glad you’re as healthy as you are,’ she calls back.

‘I mean, do you like the person I am?’

‘You’re much too preoccupied with yourself. There are more important things to think about. Many people are far worse off than you are.’

‘So you really think that I’m just a lot of trouble? You don’t like all the caring and nursing?’

‘What I don’t like is all your fussing. You have a tendency to yap away about things that don’t exist.’

‘Perhaps it would be best if we just went our separate ways?’

‘I didn’t say that. All I’m saying is that far too much of your talk consists of lies and imaginings.’

‘But Ragna, it’s the way I see the world, it’s how the world is to me.’

‘All well and good, but a lot of what you see isn’t right.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘Because so much of what you think is such utter nonsense!’

‘So there’s never any nonsense in your life?’

‘No, I really haven’t time for that sort of thing. Stuff and nonsense, that’s you, you lazy little beast!’

Ragna has got up from the floor, her last words drowned by the sound of water being emptied into the washbasin. The discussion is clearly over for the time being, I can feel
this from the way the bucket is slammed into the cupboard. Even so, I’m surprised. When did Ragna and I last have such a long conversation?

Ragna’s care of me becomes increasingly cursory as soon as I feel a little better. She spends nearly all her time with Johan; they sit in the kitchen playing cards and drinking coffee, unless they happen to be discussing politics and the apportioning of water and outlying areas. The daily routines are interrupted only by Johan’s sudden lust and some scooter trips to the village.

Towards the end of March the sun causes large patches of wet grass and mud to appear. The main roads are already dry, I hear them say, and after a short while the snow scooter is replaced by Johan’s motorbike.

The change of transport is an occasion for great rejoicing; they yell and shout when the bike picks up speed in the wet earth and skids on slush.

From time to time, she mends my clothes. The sewing machine hammers away over loose seams and open holes, and she mends stockings, pants and socks by hand with needle and thread. When the clothes are washed and clean, she hangs them up on the outside of the wardrobe, and smaller items destined for the drawers she places on the chest of drawers. Nothing is put back, everything is left out, eloquently expressing how much Ragna does for me.

The battle for the toilet has died down – as far as I’m concerned, at any rate. My long stay in bed and the draining exhaustion of my convalescence have meant that I have to relieve myself in the chamber pot that Ragna places under me in the bed. And perhaps that’s just as well. There wouldn’t have been enough time for us all in the morning, with Johan sitting there for an hour at least.

Several months after the wedding, it turns out that Ragna has the same impatience with Johan that she used to have with me. She turns the light off and on when she feels he’s been in there too long, kicks the door, or just leaves him inside in utter darkness.

‘Johan, you prick!’ she shouts. ‘Hurry up, will you?’

But, unlike the sharp tone of voice she uses with me, she talks to Johan with playfulness and laughter in her voice.

Johan swears and curses in there, rummages around with clothes and paper, and when he finally comes out, sweaty and all worked up, it quite often happens that he flies straight at her.

‘Bloody woman,’ he sometimes says, and drags her off to the bedroom for punishment and an encounter with his dipstick. Accompanied all the time by Ragna’s laughter – ecstatic, gleeful.

And then the sounds of them die away, plugged and shut out by the wine-bottle corks I press against my ears. Sealed off in my hermetic universe, I still sense the bitter sweetness of the wedding wine, and hear the hatred inside me that rushes back and forth incessantly, redder and bloodier than the thin liquid that squeezes through my veins.

Johan is seldom – practically never – inside my room. And now that I spend all my time in bed, he is virtually invisible to me. Although we do sometimes catch sight of each other when he passes down the corridor, on his way to the bedroom or the toilet. From time to time, when I’m in form, I sometimes bend forward a little and turn my head precisely when I hear him coming. For a brief instant, we let our eyes rest on each other, but I always take care to pull myself quickly back with a short, derisive clatter, well before he can pretend anything, and before he can bore through me with that murderous look of his:

The sentences just work. I’ve achieved the meaning I wanted. At last I can once more carry on my most precious occupation: lie on the pillows and twist the world exactly as I like.

‘Well, sister, and how do you like your life as a newlywed?’

For several days, Ragna has been attacking the house with cloth and water along the walls and skirting boards and ceiling. Now she’s standing on a stool in my room
with her arms in the air, rubbing the cloth quickly back and forth over some black stains just above the bed where I am lying dozing under the duvet.

‘None of your business,’ she groans.

‘Well, you’re enjoying it, aren’t you? I can’t remember when the house has ever been so clean.’

‘You’re being cheeky and sarcastic, I refuse to answer.’

‘There’s life in the old bitch yet, it would seem. Perhaps there’ll be children, you know, from a second biblical Sarah? Small Johans and small Ragnas crawling around and peeing all over your newly washed floors?’

Ragna turns round suddenly and flings the cloth into the bucket so the water splashes everywhere. But I can’t stop myself.

‘Johan’s clearly working away at it, though, isn’t he? I mean, that’s what he’s devoting practically all his energy to at the moment, wouldn’t you say?’ I send her a questioning look.

Ragna jumps down from the stool with a crash, leans over me and shakes her fist.

‘Shut up, you whiny old cow! You’re just jealous – you’ve hardly any juices worth stirring in your carcass!’

She dries her forehead, breathes heavily. Black sweat stains have spread out under her armpits. Ragna has never liked spring-cleaning, but she always keeps going till she’s finished, room by room, with an untiring zeal. Now she takes the bucket with her and leaves the room with a taut neck and a clenched fist that she bashes into the door frame.

‘She’s on the mend, the old hag,’ she calls out from the kitchen.

Johan makes approving noises in his throat, though absent-mindedly, as he’s playing patience.

Home University
, Vol. IX, ‘Health, Welfare, Economy’, on a white area near the end of the book: ‘No juices, eh? I see, I see. I’ve turned sour on old bile, vomit and repressed body fluids. What can one do about that? Well, a man’s pure medicine of course. No, thanks all the same. I’ve seen the side effects: loss of wits and control. I’d sooner turn sour and end up a foul-smelling troll.’

Johan and Ragna’s married life has made me wonder about the relationship between man and woman. Or rather, what such a life can do to a woman, and even more precisely, how the relationship has changed Ragna. The trance-like clashes that end with the infiltration of Johan’s sexual organ into hers, all the beast-like sounds she utters during the act, that’s one thing – she who has always hated my instinctive nature, who wants to discipline all my sudden whims. But what really surprises me is that Ragna, this obstinate, unaffected woman, more and more frequently is transforming herself into a two-headed non-independent We.

‘Ragna,’ I might call out in the afternoon, ‘what are we having for dinner?’

‘There’s blood sausage with sugar.’

‘But Ragna, that’s not the sort of food either of us likes to eat!’

‘We’ve already decided what’s for dinner. You’re going to have to eat the same as us!’

‘All that blood makes me constipated!’

‘Stuff and nonsense! We don’t notice anything!’

Or: ‘Ragna, what on earth? All that noise in the middle of the day?’

‘We’re listening to a music programme on the radio!’

‘That’s not at all like you!’

‘None of your business, you jealous bitch. We like it a lot!’

Or: ‘Ragna, will you remember to return my books to the library? And perhaps borrow some new ones?’

‘Well, no. I mean, we’ve got lots and lots of other things to think about.’

‘But can’t you split up for a bit? So you can do your own errands?’

‘No, we don’t feel like doing that at all!’

Over the years, I’ve had a great deal to find fault with regarding Ragna’s particular nature: her stubbornness, her fiery temper. But these characteristics have also represented her strength: the raw force that has enabled us to cope on our own in this home. Ragna still asserts her ideas with vehemence; she is not afraid of picking a fight with Johan and defending herself and her opinions. But in spite of that, We is the strongest party in the relationship – when anything is asserted from that perspective, they turn gentle and tractable as kittens, both of them. A crackdown is launched on the one who lets this third party down, the
one who tries to break and take a different tack. For that reason, it isn’t hard to imagine what they talk about in the kitchen, all the comments and arguments aimed to stabilize the holy We alliance.

‘Why aren’t you concentrating, Ragna?’

‘I was just thinking I ought to take the chamber pot away from under my sister.’

‘We’re in the middle of a game of cards. You’re not her bloody slave, can’t it wait?’

‘That’s true, Johan, we’ll play until one of us wins.’

Or: ‘What am I to do, Johan? She’s wearing me out. And you never help me either.’

‘It would be bloody marvellous if the two of us lived here alone.’

‘Yes, Johan, and we will someday, you’ll see.’

Or: ‘How about a ride on the motorbike?’

‘My sister’s still not quite well yet. I ought to be here and take care of her.’

‘I’m so bloody fed up. You can’t go on behaving like this. Soon you’re going to have to choose. It’s us or her.’

‘Relax. Obviously I’ll choose us!’

One afternoon I have a dream that’s so strange I wake up with a start. The images are unusually clear, the experience so vivid and strong that I go on lying there with a wide-open, fixed gaze until it gets dark.

I dreamt I lay trapped under the ruins of a collapsed house, I was half-suffocated and close to death, under a huge pile of stones but with an air pocket close to my nose. And I wasn’t alone, there was someone else in the ruins, just as half-dead as I was. When the house collapsed, we had managed to get hold of each other’s hands, we lay separate and hidden by the rubble, but our fingers were intertwined. I didn’t know who the other person was, but I had a feeling that it was a woman, and that there was something familiar and close in the contact between hands and skin.

We held on to each other for a long time and signalled via squeezing and tweaking that we were still alive – a reassurance and encouragement for both of us.

But after a while the other person’s squeezes grew slacker, colder, the hand responded more weakly and less frequently to my squeezes, and finally stopped altogether. I tried to stretch the other person’s fingers, make large movements with my hand to get a reaction, but stones and the position of my arm made it impossible. Finally I had to accept that the other person was dead and that I was completely alone in the ruins of the collapsed house.

I cried, and in a way that was a good thing because the tears sealed me off, I could abandon myself to grieving for what I had lost, and the fact that I was lost to life. I cried until everything went pale, almost white, and it was then that the strangest thing in the dream happened. The rubble was lifted off my body and daylight streamed towards me. Blinded, happy, I held my hands in front of my eyes; right above me I could make out the contours of
a figure, a man, and when he bent down and examined my injuries, I felt even happier, for I was sure that we knew each other – I just didn’t know where from or how. I made a sign that I wanted to be lifted up, but he didn’t touch me, only shrugged his shoulders resignedly, and he then left me in the ruins with quick, light steps. Just before he disappeared over the horizon, he turned round and waved, and it was then that I woke up.

If only I understood what the dream meant, if only I knew who he was, why he didn’t want to take me with him. These are the questions I am struggling with when evening comes and Ragna is standing at the foot of my bed.

She stares at me sceptically.

‘What’s up with you? Have you seen a ghost?’

I don’t answer, but blink several times to try and escape from the hypnotizing images. I shake my head uncomprehendingly, look a bit worried, lift the duvet. And then I understand, I can feel it in my whole body – the pain in my back and thighs after having lain lopsidedly and in an arch over the chamber pot. It’s a relief when Ragna removes the po, but at the same time it causes me violent pain as my back sinks down into the mattress. I’ve been lying there for several hours, at least.

The pot sloshes and splashes, Ragna makes a face and holds her nose.

‘What a stench,’ she says, and quickly spreads the duvet out over me.

The days come and go. From my inert life on the pillows I have plenty of time to study the married couple’s rhythm of daily activities.