The Looking-Glass Sisters (6 page)

My heart hammers with shame and anxiety on my sister’s behalf. There’s a rustling of fabric, more huffing and puffing. Oh, God, now she’s putting on the bra and smearing her lips with red grease. After a short while she’s out of the room. I can’t see her from the bed I’m lying on, but a strong whiff of partying and the promise of an available woman seep all the way to my bedside.

One of the Finns catches sight of Ragna and gives a loud whistle.

‘Madonna!’

The laughter resounds, there is a chinking of glasses and more toasts.

‘My woman! My wifey!’ Johan yells.

Ragna giggles nervously, the scraggy bag of bones, with not an ounce of shame in her. She’s given a seat at the table and a glass is put in her hand, and now she’s knocking them back; I can hear from her swallowing how her throat is greedily working away. The cards are shuffled and dealt. Ragna expresses her delight at her hand, one of the men grunts, there’s more drinking, slurping, the card game’s started.

An hour passes. The first enthusiasm has died down, the roars of laughter are more infrequent, tension has built up. A chair is shoved hard against the wall, the legs tilt from the floor. One of the men gets up and trudges across the kitchen, opens the door to the corridor with a bang, then the front door, and outside, under a sky that’s turning grey, he relieves himself over the heather with contentment and low moans.

Johan is drinking, he’s the one pouring liquor down himself, and the conversation between him and the Finns suddenly grows quiet and intense. And Ragna? It must be Ragna who gets up so suddenly that a chair falls over. She heads to the worktop and turns on the radio, tries to find a channel with music.

The voices have dropped to a mumbling bass, the music stops me from making out the words; they’re talking about
something outside, but all I can hear is the sharp accent of the Finns, along with Johan’s and Ragna’s familiarly pitched voices.

Clothes in motion through the air, unsteady feet across the floor. Why aren’t they talking any longer? And this rustling – is it paper being spread out? The silence inside gives way to a sudden noise of repressed sounds that rise up from every nook and cranny: the wind sighs heavily against the window frame, there’s a trickling from the stream outside, the rippling must be coming from the bogs and the small suggestion of a whimper must be the door of my room, which is vibrating almost invisibly from the unaccustomed pressure that is building up from the breathing of many people.

Sounds and images merge – first the one, then the other – and it almost makes me shake my head, it’s hardly credible: from what I can hear, the thing that must be happening is that Ragna has lain down on the kitchen table and pulled up her skirt, and she’s now letting each of the men take her in turn, and during all this Johan is proudly observing the proceedings.

What moral decline. What depravity – and in our own home! Ragna is as if transformed, utterly bewitched. What can’t such behaviour lead to? Yes, I already fear the worst, the consequences, if she continues with her sexual excess in future: possessed by drink and lust, she will abandon herself to every newly discovered desire and go off with men, never to return. After a while, she’ll end up a drunken wreck on some sofa in Finland, servicing randy Finns all day long in
every conceivable set of undergarments – yellow and blue and red and with cups that are far too big. And then the tragic finale: Ragna in the arms of the Finns and Johan, through hot nights that become years, while I lie rotting in this bed, slowly, little by little, in this dreadful spot that will become overgrown and disappear from the rest of the world.

I know it, my fate’s already sealed, I’ll end up as food for mice, rats, birds and carrion. Soon I’ll be fertilizer for cloudberry moors – and what cloudberries! Pink heads, the German will think, the illicit picker, and pop the berry into his mouth. The mosquitoes will dance. The juice, the small pearls of moisture that make the German’s nose quiver, is nothing but molecules of my acidic corpse fluids that will soon mingle with his sweet blood.

In the midst of this whirl of thoughts, this picture of my future life, I get a sudden sinking feeling in my stomach: the rustling paper I’ve just heard – of course, it’s obvious, how could it be anything else? They’re planning to have me sent away, that’s what they’re doing, the cunning bastards. They must be writing the plan down, word by word, step by step, how it’s to be done. That’s why the Finns are here. Johan’s accomplices, his companions!

This eagerness, this low-pitched talking: they’re busy planning now, their proposals are clear and definite. Everyone’s contributing; even the Finns in their broken language are driven by reasons I do not yet understand.

‘It’s got to be winter, when the going is firm. Then it’ll be easiest to get her out of here. During summer the path to the main road’s much too muddy and bumpy.’

‘We’ll have to lash her to the scooter.’

‘If she kicks up a fuss, we’ll have to sedate her.’

‘With what? How do we fix it?’

‘Ragna will have to go to the doctor in the village, complain about aches and pains.’

‘Right.’

‘All of us are needed. She’s not easy to handle, she knows how to lash out, the little troll!’

‘We’ll take a spade.’

‘And then it’s party time.’

‘
Helvetin
hyvää!
’

My heart’s pounding. My forehead’s throbbing.

‘Ragna,’ I say. ‘Ragna!’

My body feels numb, only my lips are moving – they open and shut independently of me. But she doesn’t hear me, my voice doesn’t reach them, doesn’t get through the music.

‘Ragna,’ I roar, shouting as loud as I can.

It goes completely silent. Not a breath, not a grunt from the men.

Someone shuffles across the floor and turns the radio off.

‘Yeeeaah!’

It’s Ragna, her voice distorted, coming from somewhere deep in her throat she’s never spoken from before.

‘Yeeeaah!’ she roars from the depths once more.

I’m completely at a loss. What am I to say?

‘Ragna,’ I shout, and then swallow. ‘Have you remembered to buy that notebook for me?’

Occasionally, in a state of deep despair, I have called on God, but the truth is that in everyday life I dismiss him as being not all that credible.

Even so, I can’t deny that I have often sensed a certain presence, and as a reflection of this a sense of being reconciled to the transitory nature of life. At such moments I have had a feeling of waking up, or of just suddenly knowing that everything passes. But God is. And my soul likewise.

Have I, with this realization, any reason to fear anything?

Why, then, am I so afraid of the catastrophe: of having to leave, be gone?

‘Notebook?’

Ragna gives a snort.

‘She’s asking about a notebook,’ she says, turning to the men with a voice that wobbles a bit.

‘Notebook!’ she shouts in an affected voice out into the room.

There is scattered laughter from the men, someone tops up glasses, they toast and laugh again, but not unrestrainedly. They are obviously engaged in more serious matters.

‘The door,’ one of the Finns says in his heavy accent. ‘Shut the door.’

Shuffling steps across the floor, heavy breathing just outside the room, I recognize Ragna behind the liquor and the drunkenness. She shuts the door.

‘Ragna?’

I don’t particularly like my voice – I’m whining. But she’s already back with the men, the door’s closed, the radio’s
on and I’m cut off from the impressions that can tell me what they are up to out there.

I often lie with my door shut. I often shut it myself. But to be shut in by Ragna, that’s something quite different. I’m in the process of accepting her authority to decide the position of the door. At the same time, though, I feel resistance, as always when she forces me to accept her will, short-tempered and unshiftable.

My hands folded, I note in silence that it is impossible to overlook me, precisely because I exist.
I exist
.

I sit up angrily in bed. Full of this clarity of vision, this strength, I feel a sudden urge to assert my right of self-determination. I pick up one of the crutches, hold it in the air and shout.

‘I’m here!’

‘I’m here!’ I shout again as loud as I can. ‘And I’m bloody hungry!’ I scream, bashing the crutch against the wall.

I can’t help being startled at this outburst, this sudden expression of hunger, because I haven’t felt like food the whole evening. But the insistence of my stomach is there now and I probably haven’t eaten for four or five hours.

Ragna’s face at the door.

‘You’ll have to wait!’ Her eyes are burning, there are red, flaming patches at her neck.

‘There’s nothing to wait for – I’m hungry!’

I get up from the bed and, supported by my crutches, totter over to the door and tug at the handle. Ragna holds back.

‘Sister!’ She’s at a loss, her voice slips. ‘I know you’re hungry,’ she says, ‘but you’ll get something a bit later, straight afterwards. I’ll rustle something up when the Finns have gone.’

Dregs of words, tangles of sentences. Her mild tone of voice jars – she could at least speak clearly and distinctly.

‘Wait a moment!’ I hear her shuffle back into the room and talk to the men, who answer with grunts and groans.

I don’t wait, wrench open the door.

What predictable play-acting. They’re all sitting there, the men and my sister, fully dressed at the kitchen table, with their liquor glasses in their hands and a vague expression of disgruntlement. I don’t believe them, what hypocrisy: they’ve obviously got dressed quickly and cleared away the papers. I, for my part, haven’t considered revealing my suspicions, everything I’ve understood, and root around in the bread bin, unconcerned and with complete naturalness.

But although the mind is strong, the body is far weaker. Soon I’m shuddering, my arms and legs are shaking, and it’s all I can do to stay upright on one crutch, for I need the other hand to search for food. I usually don’t stand here at the worktop; for the last few years Ragna has prepared the meals. I rummage around and can’t find the butter. Or the cheese slicer.

After fumbling back and forth for a while, I begin to see myself as they must see me. And if I turn my head slightly I can see myself too – the face in the mirror above the sink is mine. Oh, let my pride bear me up, keep me
standing, my will straighten me up, for I am truly a pitiful sight. Is that what the Finns see? An emaciated creature of feminine origin, degenerated, mutated at the edge of the wilderness? A furry animal with bared canine teeth, snarling at the smell of strangers?

I exist
. So pitiable and pathetic. I have swaggered out armed with two perverted words that suddenly fall to pieces, ashamed of their own alleged strength. I regret this, change the statement to a stuttering
I exist?
, for that’s the state of affairs now, with me clutching my crutches and whimpering, ‘Ragna, help me.’

‘What the hell’s she making a song and dance about?’ Johan asks.

Ragna tosses her head, empties the last dregs and puts the glass down hard on the table. She reels over to the worktop, starts to slice bread and immediately afterwards sticks a dish right up under my nose.

‘Eat!’

The bread’s got no butter and the salami has evidently been lying around sweating on the cutting board for several hours. I don’t like salami, it’s pure bloody-mindedness to put it on the bread, what is she thinking of? The greasy piece of meat suddenly symbolizes all her inconsiderateness. She expects me, then, to go the entire evening without food, to sit quietly in my room with a raging hunger, to be thankful for anything at all. There’s no doubt that Johan is her main priority now, that she doesn’t think about anyone else but him.

‘That’s my chair.’

I stand at the worktop and with my crutch hit the chair Johan’s been sitting on all evening. I’ve shoved the plate right in front of him, between the bottles and the glasses. The Finns follow the situation with raised eyebrows and expressionless eyes, look first at me, then at Ragna and Johan. I hit the chair again. I’m so close I’m almost breathing down his neck, which folds into two thick sausages, so close that I notice the hairs sticking out from his shirt, the worn material over the meaty back. He sits motionless, his arms crossed on the table, doesn’t move a muscle.

‘I want to eat.’

To underline that I mean business, I raise one of the crutches, lower it slowly over the table and shift a liquor bottle that’s close to the plate, slowly remove the crutch and return the tip to the floor. I do it as slowly as I can and with strength I scarcely possess. My legs are shaking, I’m breathing heavily, but now I am showing I demand my right to the chair and a seat at the table. One of the older Finns, a dark bloke with green, close-set eyes, smiles slightly. This sets a chain reaction in motion: soon the upper lips of all three of them start twitching, a twisted grin they try to restrain so as not to provoke Johan.

And Ragna? Ragna has shrunk to a small girl, wringing her dry hands while glancing across at Johan, who now lifts his backside slightly in order to find a more comfortable position on the chair.

‘Ragna,’ he says calmly, almost gently, turning slowly towards her, ‘can’t you get that bloody nuisance out of here?’

Ragna looks around helplessly, unable to deal with the unexpected situation.

‘Johan,’ she begs, trying to appeal to something in him, perhaps to the words he has whispered into the pit of her throat in the heat of their embrace, words that have given her the sense of a bond between them, something so strong that it can cope with a certain amount of testing. She is about to say more, but Johan interrupts her.

‘Can’t you just ask her to stay away while there are people visiting? She embarrasses all of us.’ He pauses, looks questioningly at her. ‘Don’t you agree, Ragna?’