The Looking-Glass Sisters (7 page)

Ragna replies by tipping her head to one side and rubbing her eyes. Is it my previous episode with Johan that she is thinking of, when he flew out of the door in a rage?

‘Just get the hell out of here, Johan,’ I say before she has time to open her mouth. ‘And take these louts with you!’

I raise my crutch and point at the Finns, who glance irresolutely at each other. Johan lifts his backside uneasily, then settles it down into the seat of the chair once more.

‘Well I bloody never,’ he says, staring at Ragna. ‘Haven’t you thought of reacting in some way?’

But I’m the one who reacts, several seconds before Ragna manages to even think the thought. I bring the crutch down on the table with all the strength I possess, sweep it from side to side so that bottles and glasses and slices of bread fly off in all directions.

‘
Saatana
!
’ one of the Finns shouts.

The table stands in the direct line of fire and the force of the explosion causes all those sitting there to fling themselves backwards. I bash the table with all the strength I
possess, I strike and strike until I notice at one point in my fury that the crutch is bending. I’m injured, the crutch, my arm and foot are injured. I have to give up, step back. And at that moment I collapse on to the floor.

Ragna is standing close to the worktop, muttering, the Finns have squeezed into a corner by the door, but Johan stands at the table, self-assured, his feet well apart, his fists clenched.

I myself am lying in a jumble of crutches, arms and legs. I try to collect my body to orientate myself, to get up, but I’m rattling and clattering away worse than our old birch tree in a storm.

‘She’s frigging dangerous, Ragna. There’s more strength in the little monster than all of us put together,’ Johan says with contrived calm.

He goes over to Ragna, places himself in front of her.

‘I’m not staying here a minute longer than necessary,’ he says harshly. ‘Ragna, I am…’ He pauses, takes a breath to emphasize the force behind what he is about to say: ‘…sick, yes, that’s what I am, sick and tired of your sister, who exploits you and sucks the very life out of you.’

While he stands at the front door, waving to the Finns as a sign that it’s time to adjourn to his cabin, he concludes, ‘And the worst thing of all, Ragna, is that you let yourself be exploited, that you bloody well put up with everything.’

In
Home University
, Vol. II, ‘Earth, Plants, Animals’, in an empty space on page 76, I write down some sentences that occur to me early the next morning: ‘My sister’s a
scavenger that secretly eats straw in bed, the man gives her bones to gnaw on, keeps her on a lead.’

‘Ragna! You’ve got to help me!’

I’m out of breath immediately, even a few words take their toll. I’ll just have to face up to the reality of the situation: yesterday’s physical exertions have drained whatever strength I had. I lie huddled up in bed and my voice sounds disembodied, a braying that can only arouse Ragna’s revulsion.

I’m in pain; I’m aching from my lower back right up to my neck. I couldn’t find a comfortable position during the night and when I pinch my leg it’s as if I’m doing so through a thick layer of material, my flesh hardly registers a thing.

Ragna has already been awake for hours and is rushing about noisily doing the housework with hectic intensity. While she washes clothes in the tub that she has placed on the worktop (my panties, she usually threads them on one hand while she rubs soap into the crotch with the other – anyone can see the stains in the white material, which means me, and sometimes Johan, and we have on more than one occasion sat in silence watching) she answers my shout by repeating her own self-defence time and time again.

‘You think we were talking about you, you conceited worm, but we were talking about far more important things!’ she says, while heaving the clothes out of the tub, pouring out the water, fetching the clothes horse.

I don’t answer, haven’t asked what they were talking about either, but when she was inside my room and threw clean clothes on my bed I suggested she was pleased with the plans made during the visit the day before.

‘You little beast, you’ve frightened Johan off,’ she replied harshly. ‘If you’ve any sense, you’ll do well to keep your trap shut.’ She then gave my bed a kick before disappearing out of the door.

After a while she starts talking to herself about something completely different, and from time to time, without my having said a single word, she calls out to me to shut up. Suddenly, she bangs the mop hard against the floor and exclaims, ‘The deliberate misrepresentations in this country – I won’t put up with it!’

She puts the washtub down so hard on the floor that the water splashes out.

‘Soon we won’t even be allowed to use the roads either, we’ll be hunted like stray dogs, the whole lot of us. That was what we were talking about yesterday by the way, for your information. And then you come along, with your noise and commotion, and make trouble!’

Now she’s pushing the long-handled broom around the floor, bashing it into corners and along walls.

‘No, you really must stop all your yelping,’ she says, out of breath, ‘for there are other things to think about for a poor woman who from now on will have to steal around the moors like a common thief. I who was born here just as much as they were, Mum and Dad too for that matter, they wore themselves out in this spot for half their lives,
and then the damned natives claim that I don’t belong here! No, our rubbish is clearly not as fine as their rubbish! Our forefathers have clearly not decomposed in the ground for as long as theirs! No, for we are bloody bandits from elsewhere, unwelcome, aliens!’

Ragna’s rage floods out into our small house, rises high and higher, it presses and roars in my ears so I can hardly breathe.

‘The moors that I have walked over since I was a little girl,’ she intones while she moves things, pushes things around, puts things away with great violence inside the kitchen. ‘My livelihood each and every autumn! From now on I’ll have to stand and watch them fill their pails – and they’ve the whole area to take from. The government will give them everything, yes they will, Johan says. As if it wasn’t just as much our refuse as theirs that nourishes the cloudberries! Let me tell you – they’ll just have to spit on me when I come, fetch their rifles too, I don’t care, at least I’ll die on my own moor!’

She interrupts herself with a fit of coughing, but goes on in a hoarse voice, ‘I’ve got to say it, but you keep quiet about it being said. Johan had with him a secret map of which families will take over the various areas here. And it’s not us, I can tell you that! You whine like a dog for food, but soon there won’t be any food around, for your further information! You ought to be ashamed of yourself and find out more about what’s happening instead – for we’re being ambushed!’

Suddenly she’s a lot less het up.

‘The right of disposition of the outlying areas, something like that, that’s the fine name they give to it. When
our lease from the state expires, when the new master race decide things, then, then it’s all over and out with you too, you miserable worm.’

You miserable worm. She’s hardly even able to say the words. They come as a final kick from a woman already on the floor, completely exhausted and overpowered.

For one weak moment I’m capable of believing her. But I quickly realize that this is due to exhaustion and repressed fear. This sudden threat of a superior force and being shut out of the moors is nothing but a distortion of the truth: I’m the one who is going to be ousted, by a master race consisting of Johan and Ragna, and I’m the one who’s going to be subjected to a new regime – at the nursing home, to be precise.

The lie’s good. She almost believes it herself, and maybe there’s a hint of truth too. But the rage, all the force of the emotional outburst, is directed at me, and I’m quite certain that I was one of the victims of yesterday’s many conspiracies.

Just think if I was unfortunate enough to go on living down through the centuries in the form of a series of existences – first a sparrow, then a wasp, after that a tree, a birch, and then to become a dog, a beetle and a human being again. Instead of letting my soul remain here, which is my greatest wish, I would be diluted, spread out into all kinds of states in all kinds of places, and when I eventually return, this place and I would be strangers to each other. Nothing would be recognizable, no small stone or tree.

I bend down and fish out one of the books that is lying in the dust under the bed, to be specific one of the reference works in
Home University
, Vol. III, ‘Geography’. On the back cover I write, ‘Let me be spared from living several lives.’ And beneath, at the very edge of the margin, ‘Just let me fertilize the moors.’

In real life I’m a person made for permanent, eternal states. Marriage would perhaps have been the right thing for me. A connection and obligation for ever. For isn’t it the case that on the few occasions when I have left the house I immediately long to be back home? Every step, every metre I put behind me, I am distancing myself not only from home but from myself. I become roomless, hollow, without roof and walls. And as I turn round, the relief, the sight of the house, everything that step by step returns and becomes alive again. And when at some point on the way back I am reunited with myself and embrace my domestic happiness, I start to laugh. How long have I been away – five minutes?

To be quite honest, why all this talk about being composted in earth and moor? I who am never outside? Even Ragna is hardly outside the door for long periods. In the summer, the mosquitoes chase us indoors; in the winter, there is the cold and the wind.

When Ragna was young, she met a man from the south at a mountain cabin out on the plateau. Apparently he remarked that she was lucky to live in the midst of this magnificent scenery, that she certainly must have many fine outdoor experiences every single day. Ragna always grins
when she tells the story, and I can well understand that: for us who are indoors most of the time, nature is simply something that takes place outside the front door – mosquitoes that come and go, and stunted birch trees that come into leaf in spring and shed their leaves in autumn. No, it’s nothing to get all spiritual about. It’s actually the house, my room, that I don’t want to leave, and I would rather rot under the floorboards than on the boggy moorland.

To be quite honest once again, why do I insist on this urgent need to stay put? On the radio I hear about people who have to leave their homes at great speed, their own country, people who disappear, vanish, fleeing across mountains, seas and dangerous borders. To escape threats and persecution. Chased away from their work, family, bed, the cup in the cupboard.

What have I got to lose? Nothing more than my own screwed-up existence. But even that is too dear, too good, to be abandoned.

Now that Ragna has become one of those who fear having to move, will she understand my wish to stay? Will we work things out, now that the threat of banishment has become part of her life? Will we become two sisters who fix each other’s hair and do each other’s nails? Will I hold out a skein of wool while she winds it into a ball?

Out with the ointment and antiseptic, bandages and plasters – we’re a little family with pus and pain in our cuts and scratches.

I dream that Ragna is standing by the seashore, on a beach with fine silver grains of sand, not unlike the shore of one of the lakes near here. She is standing on a large stone, warm in the sun, fishing with calm, slow movements, unaware that I am standing in deep water further out, waving to her.

‘Catch me!’ I implore her. ‘Haul me in!’

I signal as best I can, with my arms and hands. But Ragna goes on casting without getting any nearer to me, while her catch grows bigger and bigger: great heaps of cod and coley. I begin to tire of signalling to her, my feet are sinking deeper and deeper into the soft seabed, and large fish steal round my body, ready to attack at the slightest sign of weakness. Finally, though, there is a tug at my flesh, the hook has caught a firm hold of my neck, and at a furious speed I am pulled through the cold water. As I break the surface I feel a great happiness, a rush of joy. I am in familiar surroundings again, in the light, fresh air, where I can breathe and move freely. While I lie flopping on the ground, dizzy and happy, I suddenly notice Ragna’s scrutinizing eye. She picks me up in her fists, holds me tight towards the sun, evaluates, twists and turns me, bends my arms and legs and neck, stretches me out, and finally pokes a finger into my stomach. From the displeasure on her face, I am afraid that my body is too pale, too thin, too small, too odd, but before I have time to protest, she breaks my neck, twists it round and throws me down to the other fish.

I’m falling and falling in the dream, but wake up at the moment my body smacks against the floor. The pain of the collision overwhelms me. Yet the surprise is worse:
to find my old nightdress way up my stomach, my pubic region dismally bared and naked, the helplessness, the gaze towards the books and the dust under the bed, the whole situation confirming the fact that I have gone down, down and under.

I’m unable to get up from the floor. I haven’t had the strength for several years to get up from the floor unaided.

‘Ragna! Ragna!’

She comes padding from a hiding place in the house, is suddenly standing in the room staring at me with black eyes, open-mouthed. Her jaws are working, her arms shaking; she radiates a deep urge to tie me up, to lash her prey tightly.

Clack, clack.

She is standing directly over me. Her mouth is dribbling, her black eyes glitter hungrily towards the flesh that I scarcely can move.

‘Yes,’ she whistles.

‘Can you help me up? I was dreaming and fell on the floor.’