Stella Descending

by Linn Ullmann

  Martin is still crying. I stroke his hair.

  “It’s all turned to ashes,” he says.

  “Yes, but I don’t believe you’re going to leave me,” I say.

  He lifts his head and looks at me. I can’t make out whether it’s a nice look or a nasty look. But I know he won’t leave now. He’ll stay with me a little longer.

  The summer Bee turns seven I fall ill. It is the most glorious summer we’ve had in years. The sun shines every day, and it gets to the point where nobody feels uneasy about saying, I’m fed up with all this sunshine, it’s about time we had some rain. Usually when people say they’re fed up with sunshine, someone else says, Ssh, don’t complain, the weather could break any time.

  That’s Martin for you. Martin always has to take me to task.

  “Be careful what you say!” he warns. “Watch your tongue! Hubris!”

  Then one night I tell him I have a stomachache—it might even be something serious, I add.

  “Knock on wood,” says Martin.

  We are sitting in the garden of our new house, drinking vodka. It’s the middle of the night, about three o’clock, maybe half past, in the first pale light of dawn.

  “Last time I was sick was when I had German measles as a kid,” I say, laughing. “Just kidding. I’m never sick. Never!”

  “This summer will never end, and you’re never sick,” Martin mutters.

  “I’ve got a bit of a stomachache, that’s all. Forget it,”

  But the next morning the pain is worse. I have to stay in bed.

  When I throw up all over the eiderdown and the floor, I blame it on the vodka from the night before.

  But it’s got nothing to do with the vodka from the night before, it’s something else, something growing inside me that’s trying to do away with me, I think. Yes, that’s it, something that’s trying to do away with me. How come I didn’t see it before? Late the next day Martin drives me to the hospital.

  “I’m having contractions,” I tell the doctor. By this time I’m in tears. “I’m having contractions, but I’m not pregnant. I’m dying. I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

  Then I lose the sound. I can see the doctor’s lips moving, but I can’t hear what he is saying. All I can hear is my own breathing, in, out, in, out, and I have a fleeting vision of the way in which, night after night, I still bend over Bee’s bed when she’s asleep to check that she is breathing, in, out, in, out, because Bee is the sort of child who could suddenly die on me. Bee is too good for this world. I turn to Martin to tell him this, that Bee is too good for this world—that this is something he has never understood, nor have I—but I can’t get the words out. He wouldn’t hear me anyway. He’s too busy talking. Martin is talking and the doctor is talking, both looking at me, and Martin is fiddling with his car keys and I know that any second now he’s going to drop his car keys, and I try to tell him that he’s going to drop the car keys if he doesn’t stop fiddling with them, but he wouldn’t hear that either. And then he drops the car keys and there’s a booming in my ears. He doesn’t even notice. I bend down to pick them up, feel them in my hands, a familiar, coolish object between my fingers, such a prosaic thing, a bunch of car keys. I straighten up and try to say something to the doctor and Martin, because neither of them is moving his lips now. They are just staring at me. It’s all I can do not to giggle, they look so solemn, they ought to be wearing black top hats and have black mustaches. Are you going to a funeral, I try to ask, it being such a lovely day and all? I put out my hand to show them I’ve picked up the car keys, smile my sweetest smile—then comes another boom and everything goes black.

  ONCE, A LONG TIME AGO, you told me you were now so old that you sometimes talked to—or at any rate sensed the presence of—the dead, that the boundaries between them and you were gradually fading. Dear Axel, I don’t want to die yet. Pray for me. Ask them to stay away. I have two children. Give me a little more time.

  I DO RECOVER EVENTUALLY, although the blood flows more slowly around my body and nothing has any scent anymore, not even the lilac in the garden. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am living on borrowed time.

  I look at pictures of myself from just a few years back. Now I can see that I was almost beautiful. But today … I don’t know.

  I want him to fuck me until I wake up. I want him to fuck me back to the days when I used to bleed with joy.

  I place the pill on the back of my tongue and swallow the water. As he turns away to set the glass down on the bedside table, I spit it out again and crush the pill between my fingers. I slide into bed, under the eiderdown, and take his cock in my mouth. This time he doesn’t push me away. He’s grown hard, he turns me onto my stomach, he presses my face into the pillow. I’m not breathing, oh, no, I’m not breathing. From behind he finds his own way into me and comes with a gasp.

  BEE HAS HER EIGHTH BIRTHDAY. She says she would like a dog. Martin doesn’t want a dog. I don’t really want a dog either. But Bee wants a dog, and Amanda wants a dog.

  “A dog wouldn’t be that much trouble, surely,” I say. “Not now that we’ve got a house.”

  Martin shrugs.

  “Bee doesn’t play with other children,” I say. “Nobody ever comes home with her after school; she never gets invited anywhere. She’s lonely.”

  “Aren’t we all,” says Martin. “Dog or no dog.”

  We find a dog through an ad in the newspaper. A family on Nesodden wants to find a home for their eight-month-old mongrel. We’re away a lot, they say, we don’t have the time, he’s well-behaved, house-trained, affectionate. The dog is gray with white paws and a white tip on his tail, little and scrawny with a big dry nose. His name is Hoffa—after Jimmy Hoffa, the union leader. Not the most fitting name, Martin and I feel, for such a little scrap of a thing, an awful lot to live up to, but a name’s a name. And Hoffa does everything Bee says. Bee says Sit, and Hoffa sits. Bee says Down, boy, and Hoffa lies down. Bee says Come, and Hoffa comes. Bee says Give me a paw, and Hoffa lays his paw in Bee’s hand. At night Hoffa sleeps under Bee’s eiderdown, curled in against her stomach. During the day he sits on the windowsill or in the garden, waiting for her to come home.

  One day, Hoffa wriggles through a hole in the fence out into the street. He sits himself down on the sidewalk and takes a sniff at two girls walking past. The girls are not strangers, they are neighbors’ kids, in the same class as Bee. At one point the plan had been for these girls and Bee to walk to and from school together, but nothing ever came of it. The girls didn’t want to; it was as simple as that. Their parents apologized for the fact that the arrangement had not worked out as expected. That was a long time ago.

  But now Hoffa is sitting on the sidewalk in front of our house. He sniffs at the girls walking past, and maybe he rubs up against them the way he usually does when he wants to be scratched behind the ears. But the girls have no intention of scratching behind his ears. They lift their sneaker-clad feet and kick Hoffa in the side, so hard he falls over.

  I see none of this. Bee is the sole witness. She is a little farther up the road when it happens.

  “No!” she shouts, and races toward the girls. “Don’t kick him!” she shouts. “Don’t kick him! Please!”

  The girls turn to look at her. They snigger.

  “Stupid old dog!” they yell. “Stupid old dog!”

  Hoffa whimpers, still lying on the sidewalk. Flat out, as if trying to hide his skinny doggy body in the pavement, as if hoping the ground will open up and swallow him. Nose between his paws.

  The girls kick Hoffa again, hard, in the stomach this time; then they both run off.

  Bee stops short, turns her face to the sky, and screams. If you didn’t hear her, only saw her, as I suddenly catch sight of her through the living room window, you would have thought she was standing there on the sidewalk with her face turned to the sky, singing. But then I hear her. I hear that she is screaming— and then, only then, do I run out to ask my little girl what has happened.

 
Sometimes I have the thought—no, I never voice it, but I do think it—that Bee is not mine, even though, at great discomfort to both herself and to me, she fought her way out of my body, in no uncertain terms, over eight years ago. Sometimes I have thoughts I don’t want to have, pictures that come unbidden. A cuckoo in the nest! Bee is not one of us! Bee is an interloper! I look at her, this strange, awkward, quiet little girl whose hand always shakes slightly, and feel nothing but exasperation, even anger, that she should be there at all, in my sight. Is it okay for me to think like that? No! No! It’s not that simple. Because at the very moment that this thought strikes me, all I want to do is to draw her close and assure her of how much I love her.

  Could it be that wanting to love someone so much is also love of a sort?

  Our neighbors, the girls’ parents, do eventually apologize for the incident with Hoffa, but not without observing that the dog was running loose in the street and that the girls were afraid and acted in self-defense.

  Me, I sit night after night by Bee’s bed. She has pulled the eiderdown right over her head, like a little animal gone into hibernation. I try to push the quilt aside so I can stroke her cheek, but she screams no! or something like that, and pulls the eiderdown back over her head.

  IS IT RIGHT that the dog’s nose is warm and dry?

  Is it right that Bee never cries?

  Is it right that the lilac in the garden has no scent?

  Is it right that Amanda has to fall from world to world?

  Is it right that this house is so quiet?

  Is it right to have a plumber living in the attic, sending us plumbing bills we cannot pay?

  Is it right to have a mother who would rather be a tree?

  Is it right that I come to see you and stand in front of the gilt mirror in your hallway and see your face instead of my own?

  Is it right that Martin and I never sleep?

  Is it right that in the forest there lives a beast who eats children’s hearts?

  Over the window in our bedroom we have hung a black shawl to block out the light. In some places the shawl is worn thin, in others it is still thick. Because of these irregularities in the fabric, not all the light is kept out, and it forms patterns and pictures on the black screen that we can look at when we lie in bed.

  Now and then a face seems to present itself on the shawl. Martin sees a woman’s face. I see a man.

  We call the face Herr Poppel.

  Long ago, when I was pregnant with Bee, we called her Herr Poppel. Before that we called the plumber Herr Poppel. In my mind I have called you, Axel, Herr Poppel. I think almost anyone can be Herr Poppel, good or evil, big or small, dead or alive.

  JUST BEFORE SHE DIES Mamma comes to me. She is a patient in my ward, though she does not want me to nurse her. She is ashamed of her illness, of her body. Nonetheless, I insist on nursing her. I don’t quite know why, what my motives are. We don’t say much to each other. I tend to her, wash her, feed her, and fluff her pillows, all with the hands of a professional. Mamma says, I have a daughter and my daughter has hands; and I say, You have a daughter and she is a nurse and she tends to you just as she tends to all the others—there’s no more to it than that. But one morning I stand by her bedside and watch her while she is sleeping. The disease has disfigured her, but at this particular moment her face is as beautiful as it used to be. Maybe it’s the morphine. Or maybe it is death, putting a period at the end of the sentence, death saying, This is your mother’s face as it was when it was loveliest. Forgive her or strike her. But leave it at that.

  I sit down on the edge of the bed, still gazing at her, and she senses that I am close by, that I want something of her. Even with her body pumped full of morphine she senses it. Just as she opens her eyes, I lean over her and hiss, “Tell me about Ella!”

  “No,” she says.

  “Yes,” I say.

  I rummage in my pockets and produce a tattered photograph of a plump woman with full red lips.

  “I found this picture in Pappa’s desk drawer,” I say. “How many years had he been holding on to this picture, do you think? Fifteen? Twenty? How many times a day did he take it out of that drawer and look at it?”

  Mamma raises her hands, wasted old hands that betray her face, hands that say the beautiful face on the pillow is nothing but a mirage. She snatches the picture and grips it tightly between her index and middle fingers. I could easily snatch it back, but I don’t. I let her keep it. She doesn’t look at it: doesn’t need to or doesn’t want to.

  “We were painfully attached to one another. That’s all there is to it, Stella. I would have followed her to the ends of the earth if she had asked me to.”

  Mamma breathes out, breathes in, breathes out, breathes in.

  “Does it hurt?” I ask.

  “No,” she says.

  “Yes it does,” I say.

  “No,” she says.

  Her stomach rumbles. We both start. I am sitting on the edge of the bed, holding her hand. She tries to pull away, but I keep a firm grip. I’ve never heard Mamma’s stomach rumble. She cringes, looking as if she would like to hide under the covers. Her eyes plead with me: Leave me alone, go away. But I stay where I am.

  “You’re not going to die alone,” I say.

  “But that’s what I want,” she whispers.

  “Maybe so,” I say, giving her hand a squeeze. “But you’re not going to die alone.”

  And then she farts. Mamma lets off a rotten, rasping, spluttering fart that must have been stewing away inside her ever since the time when she decided, as a little girl, to become as quiet as a tree. Mamma farts, opens her eyes wide, and says, “Go away, go away,” and then she shuts her eyes, breathes in, breathes out, and dies.

  I lean over her, put my lips to her ear. “Now you’re a tree,” I whisper.

  Afterward I take off my shoes. I lie down beside her on the bed. I am going to lie here for a while. Later on I’ll iron the white blouse, wash the old body, and comb the lovely long hair that I longed to play with when I was a little girl, even though she never liked it when I touched her.

  IT IS NIGHTTIME. The bathroom is lined with mirrors so I can see that my face is pale and blotchy. I unpack the pregnancy test kit, hold the stick between my legs, and pee over both the stick and my hand. I remain seated on the toilet, waiting for the result. Slowly the blue line starts to show. A blue sky, I think to myself. A blue dress. A blue sheet. I get up from the toilet seat, stand in front of the mirror, and breathe out, making my stomach swell. It will be some months before it really starts to show. A blue vein over my hip bone. When I breathe in I can see my ribs. Mamma once told me I was so skinny that I looked like something out of Belsen. I didn’t know what Belsen was, but I thought it was great to have Mamma make any comment at all about my body. There is a fetus growing inside me. I can picture those photographs by Lennart Nilsson. A blue fetus. Blue water. Blue hands. Slowly I am going to be brought back to life. Slowly I am going to be brought back to life, and Martin will be able to sleep again, with no dreams.

  In a minute I’ll go down to Martin and say, Listen to me! Put down that video camera. I haven’t been swallowing the birth control pills you’ve been giving me, not for ages. I want to hear a baby crying in this house. I don’t want all this silence.

  I THINK OF YOU, Axel. You are so old. It is not your face I see now. It is not your face I see in the mirror. It is mine. I am Stella. I am thirty-five years old. I live here, in this house. It is August 27, 2000. Soon it will be morning. Next spring I am going to have a baby, and by that time you are sure to be dead. Which is as it should be.

  (IV)

  FALL

  Ella Dalby Witness

  I was standing there, scissors in hand, snipping away, when I saw it.

  Some girls had come running over to me with a long piece of rope they had found behind a tree in the park. They wanted to know if I had a pair of scissors and would cut the rope in half, to shorten it. They wanted to use it for a jump rope, they
said.

  Why, of course I have scissors, I said, opening my purse. I always carry a pair of scissors.

  The girls weren’t really paying any attention to me. They stood in a huddle, sharing a bag of candy, talking among themselves and waiting for me to do as they asked. They cannot possibly have seen what I saw.

  What did I see?

  I saw a man and a woman, way over there, way up there on the roof, and both of them dangerously close to the edge. They teetered back and forth, back and forth, and I wanted to shout at them to stop it, to get down from there; they were putting their lives at risk. But I was far too far away. I was in the park; they were up on the roof. We were separated not only by a street but by cars and people and trees. And then she tripped toward him. The woman tripped into the man and he caught her in his arms, and they stood there embracing for ages. I breathed out, relieved, turned to the girls, cut the rope—and saw her fall.

  I saw her fall. A flutter, a movement in the corner of my eye. The rest of my gaze was on the girls, the park, the trees—all that greenery. I saw her fall, a dark speck on the edge of a green picture.

  But if you ask me whether she tripped, was pushed, or jumped, I could not say. Nor is it any of my concern.

  Axel

  As to Stella’s funeral, there’s not much to say. She’s ashes now.

  The walk in the sunshine from Majorstuen to the crematorium was not pleasant, partly because I got sunburned, on the back of my neck and my earlobes—it still hurts, and putting cream on the afflicted areas does no good—and partly because the blister on my right foot made it virtually impossible for me to walk the whole way in my new shoes, with the result that I arrived at the chapel of the crematorium limping and close to tears. Usually when I go for a walk, I wear a pair of gleaming-white sneakers, but that would never have done for today. A black suit and gleaming white sneakers is not a happy combination, not unless you’re a pop star or something of the sort. Naturally, I did consider walking to the chapel in my sneakers and changing into my dress shoes for the funeral, but I have never approved of carrying one’s good shoes to one’s destination in a plastic bag, as my fellow countrymen are given to doing—when it snows, for example. And I could just imagine what insurmountable difficulties this alternative would present in terms of the actual changing of the shoes. First I would have to find a bench close to the chapel—a little out of the way so as not to attract any attention—then untie the laces, remove the sneakers, and put on my dress shoes. Then I would have to put the sneakers in the bag and, in short, show myself to be, or have become, the very sort of man I despise: a man who carries his shoes in a plastic bag. So there you have it, the reason I did not opt for this alternative and the explanation for my hobbling into the chapel, tortured and tearful. You know, it is remarkable how a measly blister can completely overshadow such entities as God and death. As the service got under way, I could not have cared less what the minister had to say about anything whatsoever. I had only one thing on my mind: whether it would be possible to unlace my right shoe and kick it off—during the first hymn, perhaps—without the other mourners noticing, and by doing so ease my right foot. This I succeeded in doing, and the minute the shoe was no longer pressing on the blister, the pain stopped. What bliss! Such was the relief that although I did not mean to, I simply could not help but utter a loud ahhhh!