*
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.’
‘Yes,’ she sighs huskily, gripping me by the arm, dragging me closer to the bed, heaving in an attempt to pull me up.
‘No, no, not like that, Ragna. Be more careful!’
She moans and supports herself, presses her fists in under my arms, strains, and with a sudden heave she throws my upper body towards the mattress. I grab hold of the foam rubber with all I’ve got in the way of hands and nails, while she, with a hard grasp round my feet, flings the rest of my body up.
I lie there in a twisted, impossible position, right on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to get hold of my bottom and push me over. I whimper, cling to the bedclothes, turn my head towards her as a sign that I am waiting for her to continue, the final lift.
Ragna stands in the middle of the floor, grinning with her mouth open. I must look a bit surprised, for now she starts to sneer and laugh, throwing her upper body forward in small jerks, holding her stomach. Her laughter does not surprise me, nor the sound of it. To anyone uninitiated, it will sound like hearty trilling. I who know her hear traces of malicious pleasure.
‘Well, help me!’
The small jerks become faster; the laughter courses through her chest, builds up soundlessly before, in a final surge, it eventually bubbles over.
‘Come on. Help me, then!’ I cry out through the quacking din of her vocal cords.
She stops at once, puts a hand to her throat, then sneers some more. Her eyes blink and gleam, and she turns and crawls laughing out of the room, back to her hiding place.
*
I spend all my time in bed, counting neither the hours nor the days, but registering that darkness is in the process of taking over the day, the winds are increasing, the cold is seeping into the room. It must be getting on for mid-October, the time just before it starts to snow, white and pure. I feel a yearning for purity; my eyes want to rest in the white outside the window. I smell after weeks without being washed.
Ragna and I avoid each other. I call her for only the most necessary tasks. She’s hardly at home at present; as soon as she has an excuse, she’s over at Johan’s. They’re probably working together on everything that has to be managed before the winter – from the smell and the spots of blood on her clothes
I know that the autumn slaughtering is under way, with freezing, hanging up to dry, smoking and mincing.
Johan hasn’t shown himself since our last altercation, but Ragna is obviously back in favour – it’s not only her clothes that have spots of red on them when she comes back from his place.
*
I reign as queen in my room, in spite of the dust and the dirt. I have the silence, my pen and books, and, not least, I own the hours when Ragna is away. Sometimes I listen to a programme on the radio, but generally speaking I listen and talk to myself. And that is not poor entertainment.
In this steady, calm trickle I find it easy to forget, forgive, explain away, understand. But I’m not so stupid that I don’t sense the resentment beneath the everyday chores, for it’s not just chicken feed that’s worrying Ragna.
And I ask myself once more: Why do I want to stay? And I reply: What other choice do I have? I love the walls here, the view from the window, and will never feel at ease in the strange rooms of the nursing home, surrounded by corridors that lead to places I do not know. The insistence on adapting to all sorts of routines will be a daily struggle compared to the freedom I feel in this bed. I will be tormented by the continuous stream of people who come and then die, suffer from the noise of the physical disintegration of the old people and their death rattles, especially when I know that in this house I can wake up and fall asleep to a gust of wind or the chirruping of birds.
Coexistence with Ragna is admittedly tough, but at least it is predictable. The wretchedness has a face, a body and a language. It strikes me regularly and in particular situations, but I am not surprised, I know my adversary. I am, in spite of everything, a sister branching from the same rotten trunk.
At the nursing home, on the other hand, total annihilation threatens me. In particular I fear the attrition of my right of ownership over my own body and mind, and worry that, like some object turned into kilos, litres and diagrams, I will simply become fodder for the nursing-home hierarchy.
I stretch an arm underneath the bed, find Vol. X of Home University, to be more precise ‘Religion, Philosophy, Psychology’. On page 84 I write, ‘Assistant: She pissed on me, a litre at least. I gave her a wash and new clothes. She was wet and sticky all over! (Thinks: The old bat had a little piss in her pants, or smelt of piss at any rate. It’s best to exaggerate to show how proficient I am.) Nurse: ‘Excellent! (Thinks: The new patient is too demanding. We’ll have to restrict her freedom to spare the other patients and carers.)’
And my sister, Ragna, has she had any other choices than this miserable stretch of land between the house and the moors, the lakes and me? What stopped her leaving before our parents died? Why didn’t she send me away before I got older and more demanding?
The young Ragna, fresh-skinned and smooth-necked, maybe she walked through these rooms, full of eager dreams and wishes, with a glittering gaze fixed on the future.
She might have had her plans worked out. She would get away, go to the trading post and live in a bedsit. She probably sat in her room, thinking it all out – how she would talk and dress in order to get a job. She already had the names of people Father knew; she would surely be able to gain their trust. In a stream of images, she imagined how the first meeting would be: index finger on the doorbell, the neat pattern of her trousers and jacket against the front door, people’s expressions when she presented herself as Ragna, daughter of Cloudberry Nils. Yes, they were from her family, the juicy cloudberries that were delivered to the door every August. And then she would give a slight curtsy and say that she was available for work, she could wash and iron and scrub, take care of the slaughtering and prepare the meals.
But at this point Ragna would stop her daydreaming. For wasn’t it the case that she would really like to have the very finest of jobs, preferably from the start? Why be a domestic help when you could be a cashier in the food shop or a waitress in the café? Here she would meet people, become well known in the village, her face would be seen every day, either at the cash register in her orange jacket with white collar or at the tables in her white blouse and black apron, holding a burger on a plate. Occasionally, Ragna talked about this when we were children, particularly when she came home from the village and enacted all her impressions in front of the mirror in the bedroom. If I know her, she would have played around for ages with the images of herself in different roles, would have amused herself thinking about the curious looks people would give her, the long conversations that would take place among people in the village when she was finally in her position: Who is she, this new girl, this Ragna, who grabs everyone’s attention with her efficiency and her clear-eyed look?
But then, in the midst of a flight of fancy, she must have realized that it would be virtually impossible for her to achieve the dream of a respectable job in the village. When I think about it, Ragna has gone on quite a few times about impenetrable family ties, saying that without exception the more well-to-do women in the village have authority over the cash registers, their daughters have been chosen for the job of café waitress as far back as their confirmation. Seen from this point of view, what other possibilities did Ragna have? She could of course have used her strength at the nursing home, for looking after people, washing and feeding them. Were there alternatives to this type of work? No, not except the home here and with me. And most likely the authorities contribute a krone or two for Ragna’s care of her younger sister.
*
The question of Ragna’s choices, or rather lack of choices, involves answers I am not too happy about. Her life is suddenly visible, like a stage when the curtain is pulled back. Ragna’s story makes for a really uncomfortable drama, and I’m put in an impossible position when the revelation comes. There are of course all the lies she clings to so as to keep a balance between us. That she makes me weak so as to be able to feel strong herself. That she exaggerates her own importance so as to avoid feeling the pathetic, helpless female she actually is. But that I, with my need of care, have become her excuse for not creating a proper life for herself, that I and my sickly body have become her self-imposed fate and mission in life, that’s something quite different. I wring my hands in despair. Yes, that’s the way it is. Ragna and I are probably quite similar, have precisely the same cast of mind. We do not have any other choice but to remain. We are equally frightened and helpless, and cling to each other as a defence against the outside world: she out of anxiety about her inability to interact with other people, all the social niceties, the things she hasn’t learned to master and understand; and I out of fear of losing the remainder of myself at the hands of cynical strangers in an institution.
Oh, poor helpless little Ragna, poor helpless us.
But that’s not all. The truth about Ragna also contains a paradox. Profoundly and fervently she wants to be rid of me, despite the fact that I act as her shield against the world. But she feels no shame about this treachery; no, rather this innermost dark wish has helped to give her a positive image of herself. As she sees it, she is a woman who has heroically sacrificed herself for her sister’s wellbeing for many arduous years.
I can easily imagine Ragna’s refrains – can almost hear her rattling them off: ‘If it weren’t for your illness, I’d have had a man and children and a large house to look after!’ ‘If it weren’t for you, you lazy layabout, I’d have been a successful working woman!’ ‘If it weren’t for your pitifulness, I’d have been popular with other women!’
Oh yes, Ragna has always wanted to be rid of me, perhaps long before I fell ill at the age of four. For don’t I have a clear picture that she reacted to my fever and crying with a strange, satisfied look? Of course, I could be exaggerating, I could be stretching the credible much too far. Even so I am open to – no, I am prepared to state that the wish became stronger when Ragna saw in advance the outcome, what would happen later, when she kept watch and took care of me for our parents: a life devoted to looking after a shabby, sickly sister out in the wilds.
So I can h
ardly blame her, as a child, for having tried in her own way to prevent what she suspected the future might bring. Yes indeed, that may be how it was. Why, otherwise, didn’t she inform Mum and Dad when my condition suddenly worsened?
For the same reason, perhaps I ought not to judge her, little Ragna, for her cunning and her many outbursts during our childhood. And perhaps I ought not to blame her, child that she was, for all the instances of pure malice. After all, I had ruined her life with my illness.
This is one of the many incidents I ought perhaps to have forgiven:
‘Ragna! Shall we pretend to be fine ladies?’
It’s afternoon and we are alone in the house – I’m seven and Ragna’s twelve.
I go into her room. Ragna peers at me from the bed, where she is sorting things into small boxes. Suddenly she fixes her gaze on the glass beads I’m wearing round my neck.
She gets up and comes over to me. At first I interpret this approach as friendly, but then her hand is at my throat, the necklace, and she rips it off.
‘You’re so horrid. And those are my beads. I’ll never, ever play with anyone as horrid as you!’
And this:
‘Little sister! Come here and I’ll show you something.’
It’s summer, perhaps a year later, and I’m sitting in the kitchen eating, but immediately I totter over to the large stone where Ragna is sitting, full of expectation.
The sun is low, so it’s hard to see what she’s pointing at. I bend forward as best I can, stare down into the heather.
‘Do you see it? That’s what you’re like, precisely like that,’ Ragna says.
The Looking-Glass Sisters Page 6