The scooter outfits have been hung up, we’ve given each other a cursory greeting – hands across the kitchen table, a nod from me to each of them. Old choir buddies of Johan’s, they relate, from the time when he lived out on the coast.
Ragna, the crooked catkin, stands there in the middle of the floor with her veil in folds. The men gather over by the oven, their hats are on, their chests swell, their mouths open up to the abyss within – a tide of sound streams up towards the ceiling.
It’s intensely powerful. The voices take up three different levels, merging into an amazing harmony, high and low notes coil around each other and intertwine, climbing to the heights, flinging themselves down surprising slopes.
I quiver and shake, it’s magic, pure seduction. I am borne aloft on the crests of waves that break, become soft and pliable. Tears fill my eyes. Where have they come from?
What an intoxicating conspiracy. I am abducted, already swept away from my rage. Stop! I cry out to myself, seize my crutches so as to stand up, go, protect myself against the lightness in the music.
The men look at me in surprise, their voices fall silent. I, too, stare at myself, down my dress, stockings, shoes. What have I done?
Ragna blushes, her nostrils flare and vibrate.
‘And now it’s time for some food!’ she urges, turning on her heel.
The candles are burning, Johan’s and Ragna’s rings take turns at catching the light. I’m sitting at the table eating like the others, while a lively conversation is taking place around me. The wine is beginning to have a noticeable effect. I feel a tickling in my chest, laughter and rage bubbling and heaving away, bursting and pressing. Soon the whole works will come trickling out. Best keep my trap shut, stay away from the wine and conversation.
The nature of the men becomes increasingly clear during their visit. All of them have been made from the same mould, fired according to the same recipe: hair in a thin wisp over the forehead, belly like a sack over the trousers. They carry themselves with the same assurance, have more self-confidence than Ragna, but I note that Ragna is more authoritative. Between their legs their penises dangle – their pride and joy, no doubt about that. Like Johan, the guests seem to think they are unseen and constantly clutch their crotch, grasp the bulge with their fists, heave it outwards.
Beneath my dress hang my unfondled breasts, in my crotch lies my jewel. Have they possibly considered laying siege to me, forcing a path into my virgin territory? I’m washed and clean, my hair’s been gathered into a knot, can I possibly arouse desire, do their eyes see a woman? I who have not shared saliva or juices with a living soul – what do I know about the playing of the sexes? But I have observed animals, how the ram lifts himself up, over and into the ewe, and have thought that it is impossible, impossible for me to behave with a man like that.
I can’t deny it: I have pushed my chair close to the table, a bit closer to the others, and am listening attentively to the hum of conversation about the old days, about life out on the coast and their time in the choir, about the trips to Sweden and Finland and their stay in the new Russia. Here one of them was apparently tricked by a beggar into parting with his shoes, while another got lost and was arrested by the police, and Johan, the seducer, dispatched women every single evening. The men toast again and nudge each other, wink at Ragna – that’s quite a guy she’s got herself.
Ragna nods and shakes her head. At one moment she’s by the stove, at the next by the table, knocking back wine in large gulps while piling meat and potatoes on to the guests’ plates. Her neck muscles strain like two taut strings, she is impassive and silent, hardly a word passes her lips, only the occasional cough or guffaw escapes her throat: small wisps of smoke from the fire that is always smouldering within.
I don’t like the food. The meat is tough with treachery, the gravy sour and thin with conspiracies. It is presumably the last meal we will share at this table, Judas wine, Judas meal with Judas tastes – Ragna’s high treason at the polished pots and pans.
After a while my back starts to hurt – I can’t sit still for any length of time. A restlessness crawls up my neck, to my throat, tongue and palate. I feel an urge to rave, yes, let my hair down, throw my head back in a howl. Obviously everyone else notices my restlessness. The men don’t try very hard to engage me in conversation – they’ve got the message. The questions go via Ragna and only have to do with the meal. Would your sister like some more potato? More to drink? Wouldn’t she like some more gravy? Ragna grunts and mutters in reply. Johan sends me his watchful, menacing look, but I sit there still, behaving properly. I eat and drink, sit straight.
After the meal, the choir move over to the stove again, snap their fingers as an accompaniment to rhythmic, guttural sounds. Johan seizes Ragna, heaves her out on to the floor. Her lace crown has come away at the edges, her veil has gathered itself into a knot and bounces back and forth against her back. At last I can get up and find a place in a corner. From the periphery I watch the married couple’s unstable mating dance, their ritual celebration of the conspiracy in the home. I grin inwardly – there’s precious little in the way of control left. Ragna keeps on barging into Johan, who answers with jerks and shaky legs.
From the corner I also secretly watch the choir. Their bodies, the rhythm of their hands and feet, how they pull themselves up and flaunt themselves, with glazed looks and a smile around their lips. You would almost think there were more of them in our tiny kitchen, and in response to that thought my gaze wanders round the room.
Can it really be me all of them are secretly addressing? My hands search for my crutches, I tremble, keep swallowing. I’m completely unused to attention, so what am I to do? It must be all the wine, for now I start banging the crutches against the floor, keeping time, rhythmically, I don’t have any choice in the matter, this is the only way I can respond to their concealed attention. I let my lips part cautiously in an attempt to smile, and immediately everything in me is flung wide open: windows, doors, shutter and vents let in roaring winds in great gusts. I am lifted, float in the air, forget my lamentable trembling body. What release. I am opened and open to everything that might take place this evening – for don’t I like all of them? Every single one? Just look at them, the men, snapping, smiling – I’m the one they’re singing to! I swing my body as best I can, supported by my crutches and the wall. I’m transported by their looks and my own thoughts; my hips, is it possible, I’m cautiously wriggling them – oh, God, how free I suddenly feel, here am I for real, flaunting myself! I suddenly see myself from the outside, cannot hold back the laughter building up in my chest, it’s bursting out, all the resentment and restlessness I have been storing the whole evening, now it’s welling up and pouring out of me.
Ragna and Johan stop suddenly. Their looks are hard and dark.
‘What the hell are you playing at? Can’t you behave like a civilized human being!’
Ragna is red-faced and het up, she stands in the middle of the floor with clenched fists, ready to defend morality as a newly married woman in her own home. I first think of pretending not to notice her, I’m still floating on a wave of happiness, but then I notice that the singing has died down; the men have formed a small cluster and are whispering, their backs are shaking, they are clearly trying to conceal the fact they are grinning and laughing.
The doors slam shut once more, the windows close. Something falls, heavily – well, it’s my own sudden freedom lying mangled at the top of my stomach. My eyes whirl, but I straighten up. What was I thinking of, no, I’ll never let myself be carried away like that again.
The men sit down at the table once more. Johan fetches a new bottle and fills the glasses. The conversation about this and that lags a bit. The mood is clearly somewhat strained. The choir give Ragna insecure looks and pretend not to see me.
I’m still standing in the corner, fiddling with my crutches, my back straight, head raised, but can’t help longing for my duvet and bed. The letter, Ragna’s treachery, and now th
e outrage in front of the choir – how much am I actually expected to be able to put up with?
Ragna shows signs of wanting to take control of the situation. The muscles in her neck tense and she tries to catch everyone’s eye. But when she finally opens her mouth she doesn’t start to talk about me, doesn’t say a thing about her resignation, all the hard work, how difficult I am. No, she explains away again. Once more we get our story, disguised as a struggle between her and the new master race.
‘We’re native population too!’ she says, thumping the table. ‘We’ve lived here for ages, yes, generations of our forefathers have!’
‘Yes, you bloody well have,’ the choir say in unison, gazing down into their glasses of Johan’s home-distilled hooch.
‘And they want to ride slipshod over us – want more rights, ownership of water and the outlying areas. They’ll want to own the sea next!’
‘It’s too bloody bad,’ say the choir, taking another swig.
‘We’ve got to stand together against the new master race. We’re just as much natives as they are!’
‘Sure, sure!’
‘You’ve got to find allies as best you can – before you know where you are, they’re outside the door, come to haul you out of your own home!’
‘Bloody liberty!’
‘They’ll simply have to conform, the whole damn lot of them!’
‘Yeah, are you crazy!’ say the choir, banging down their glasses.
‘Hey, Ragna, have you completely forgotten?’ I say, crawling out of the corner.
I’m multi-armed, many-legged, stop with my sting vibrating right in front of her. The choir and Johan start, trying to chase away a sudden foreboding.
I begin to hum quietly, possibly inspired by the choir, but I have my own quite specific reasons.
‘Forgotten this song?’ I look questioningly at her, open my mouth wide and emit a few notes in an unsteady voice. ‘You used to sing it a lot when you were young and still had a bit of flesh on you, didn’t you?’
The choir and Johan look uncertainly at each other.
‘Yes,’ I go on. ‘You knew it off by heart, and that’s not so strange, for you spent a lot of time with the natives here back then – wasn’t it their song, paying homage to their own history?’
Johan fidgets uneasily.
‘Damn it, what’s all this crap she’s talking about, Ragna? Can’t you get the hag off to bed so we can celebrate our wedding in peace?’
‘Give it a break!’ Ragna shrieks uncertainly.
‘Give? If we’re going to talk about giving, we ought rather to talk about you, dear Ragna. You’ve given one thing and another to the new master race. Do you think I didn’t see you through the window here when we were young? They ran after you through the undergrowth, their pricks in their hands, as horny as hell, every man jack of them.’
‘What’s the pike-fish trying to say?’ Johan’s got up and is standing menacingly beside the table.
‘All I’m saying is that Ragna has supported the new master race in her own very special way, under the warm skins, and ever since she was young. Not many of the natives have escaped her insatiable appetite for men!’
*
Home University, Vol. IV, ‘History of the World’, at random, somewhere in the margin: ‘The sting location swelled up quickly. Deadly poison pumped into each and every cell. The victim collapsed in vomiting fits and cramps, but the antidote was quickly injected by those at the scene.
‘Condition now stabilized. The poisonous vermin neutralized and carried back to its stinking cave.’
The bed embraces me, warm and soft, no one else in the world receives me in the same way – unconditionally loving and passing no judgement on my actions. I sink, fall down, but in the depths of its embrace I lie there tossing and turning between Ragna’s accusations and my own defence, restless, both when dreaming and awake.
As soon as I trickle into consciousness from a moment’s rest, I’m back at our trial just by registering the green dress against my skin. Was it the wine or pure malice? Or was it the actual mixing of wine and malice that produced the poison? That is how Ragna will argue and attack me. My anxiety and righteous indignation, yes, all my reasons for reacting do not exist in her repertoire of causes and explanations.
*
Johan’s wedding night hammers against my eardrums. Is he punishing both Ragna and me? The chest of drawers rattles noisily against the wall at regular intervals.
I pull out two wine-bottle corks from my dress pocket that with foresight I had taken from the kitchen worktop. I try to stick them into my ears. They’re too big and fall out; I’ve no other choice than to press them with both my hands against my head, hold them there, wait for the wedding night to be over.
Do hours pass? Days? I roll back and forth in the bed, green, poisonous, threatened with extinction.
Shame and desecration. The wedding meat is rotting on the dinner plates. In the glasses the wedding wine is coagulating. Did they cut the wedding cake and receive a small taste of their future happiness?
Ragna’s face, the men’s look, they appear before me at regular intervals in the darkened room. I flounder around in images from the dinner and the evening, feel lonelier and more abandoned than ever before. Even the words have gone; after jotting down my last note the books lie untouched under the bed. Possibly I can find something or other behind an old, dried-up thought, something I can scrape off and put in my mouth. But everything tastes dry and lifeless, nothing like the small sweets that make your saliva run.
*
It’s early morning, the mauve tinge across the sky tells me. The dearth of words, my sleepless trial, open up a couple of memories that gradually refuse to leave me. Or have they emerged as an outcome of conscience, a desire for restitution? How else can a memory of youthful innocence assume Ragna’s face and name?
I don’t write anything, I detect traces of the stories along the floor, walls and windowpanes, they stretch out of their own accord, on the headboard, the alarm clock, a small figurine, only to pale and vanish once more.
Ragna, the window states. Ragna had a lovely gleam to her hair, oh yes, it flamed and burned among the green of the bushes and trees, that was what he had said the first time they met. She told me that immediately afterwards, excitedly, about his look, his voice when he spoke. Yes, she would go on and on about it for weeks and months, but to herself, in front of the mirror, in her bed before falling asleep, but always close enough for me to be able to pick up the words.
Her breath smelt strange, and I didn’t like her clammy hand against my skin when she sat down on the side of the bed and told me how much in love she was; he was so kind, he had bought her a coffee at the café, and when they went outside to wait for Dad, who was doing the weekly shopping, he lent her his scarf. He was also funny; he had started to sing and laugh and nudge her as time passed and the biting north wind froze her hands and feet.
One afternoon he was, surprisingly enough, standing outside the house. He had arrived by moped along the bumpy, muddy road, and now he was standing there with mud spattered up his legs and back. I could see him from my bed; he calmly pushed down the side stand, shook the shield a bit, then took a few paces back, looked at the moped from a distance while taking his tobacco out of his pocket. He peered at the house and rolled a cigarette, but showed no signs of intending to knock or make contact. Instead, he lay down in the grass and blew out smoke in large clouds, quite relaxed, as if he had lived here for ages.
Ragna almost stopped breathing. He was right outside! And there she was, face unwashed, hair uncombed. What would he think of her when he saw her like that, a complete shambles?
She shot into her room, dashed around, hardly had time to fix her hair or change sweaters before she felt she had to go out and say hello to him. From the window I could see her face; she approached him nervously, uncertainly, and with a touch of something sweet about her mouth. He watched Ragna coming, but didn’t get up, sat quite still for a mo
ment before throwing his cigarette away and stubbing it out in the grass with his thumb, gazing at her the whole time.
From the sounds in the kitchen I deduced that Mum and Dad were ill at ease; their movements stiffened as they were suddenly like strangers in their own house. Dad coughed and started walking backwards and forwards between the corridor and the kitchen, and Mum peeled the potatoes with a gentle, alert pensiveness.
‘Who is that lad? What sort of chap is he?’ Dad asked several times.
Mum didn’t answer at first, but while clattering with saucepans she called out that Ragna had never told her anything about it, so how could she know.
I sat down in a chair by the window ledge, well to the side, right next to the curtain, so that my interest in the proceedings wouldn’t be too obvious. Dad stood watching me from the corridor, I could sense this from the silence out there and the footsteps that had subsided. When he stuck his head round my door, he didn’t speak, but I knew that he wanted to express something.
I see myself sitting at the window here, see myself slowly turn towards him, silent, but with a serene expression, and I see something inside him go to pieces, there, at the door. I see what I was and could not become, all that was lost and that would grow into raging accusations, be reshaped into lonely bitterness; I can read it in his eyes from here, and I saw it the time when he was standing in the doorway, aware that there was something he ought to say.
When I turned back to the window, Ragna and the young man had disappeared. I searched among the bushes, out across the heather, behind the tree right outside, but I knew that they were already long gone when I discovered the moped tracks through the grass. I unclasped my hands – they were so cold and empty in my lap – and my legs, so tired under the chair, so unnecessary, so alien. What use was this body, what was I going to do with all this flesh, this life I had received?
The Looking-Glass Sisters Page 9