The Looking-Glass Sisters

by Gøhril Gabrielsen

  ‘Who is that lad?’ Dad called out again, entering the kitchen. ‘Who is he?’ he asked Mum exasperatedly.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Mum said time and time again. She had started to wash up some pots and pans.

  The silence outside was enormous. I craned my neck, turned my head, pressed my face to the glass. What had become of the sounds from Ragna and the young man? Something caused me to turn towards the corridor. Now both Mum and Dad were standing there looking at me, their faces were dark, their bodies tired and worn out, and I realized, we all did, that I was one of them, the old and the useless, and that I would go on being so, for ever.

  ‘He’s sure to be a right tearaway. They’re out of control, that lot,’ Mum said to Dad during supper.

  Her voice interrupted the silence, hard and rasping compared to the soft clinking of the cups. I was sitting over by the stove, Mum and Dad were at the kitchen table, Ragna’s chair stood empty close to the table. Our glances met from time to time, but occasionally Dad banged his fist down on the table, not hard, more as confirmation of something, and then we looked at each other, briefly.

  I asked to be put to bed, I had grown tired of waiting. And I also felt a sudden aversion to sitting there with Mum and Dad.

  Outside the window the summer night was still light, full of promise, but I was freezing in my bed, there was a draught that I hadn’t noticed before. I called for my mother and asked for an extra duvet. She shuffled in barefoot and in her nightdress. It must have already been night.

  So cold. In the middle of summer. And Ragna still not back! Mum tucked the duvet round me, gave a deep sigh. Get some sleep, she said, we can’t lie awake waiting, all of us.

  Ragna was eighteen, at least, no one had the right to insist she stay at home. But when she did come back, many hours later, Dad was waiting in the doorway. And when he asked her where she had been and was met by silence, he demonstrated his authority by hitting her. His hand struck her on the cheek, I could hear it right out where I was, a dull thump, almost metallic. But Ragna still didn’t answer, she went to bed without saying a word.

  And I recall smiling faintly, and then feeling the warmth return to my body.

  *

  The other story I remember took place earlier, the winter when I was seven and Ragna was twelve. We were sitting in the kitchen that evening, Ragna and I, on separate stools pulled away from the table in the middle of room. We stared at each other. Mum was standing behind me with a pair of scissors in her hand, my hair was damp and she had placed a towel over my shoulders. I sat bent forward, my eyes heavy with tears. I had resisted, struggled, but was now in a way prepared, had accepted what was going to happen. Ragna was beaming, tossing her luxuriant half-length hair. It had actually already grown past her thin shoulders, but she was to be spared the scissors, left in peace, while I, with my thin, wispy hair, was to have mine cut.

  ‘It grows unevenly,’ Mum said. ‘And it’s so thin and fine that it gets into small tangles all over your head.’

  So my hair had to be short, and now it was going to be cut off just above my ears.

  Ragna sat on her stool and shone, she shone and glittered and tossed her hair, so thick, so long was it that she could plait it, gather it in a ponytail, roll it up and let it cascade down again in long, soft curls. I stared straight ahead, pretended she wasn’t there, didn’t take any notice of her lapping up my humiliation – Mum cutting and my tears falling at every strand of hair that gave way before the scissors.

  Afterwards, I sneaked over to the mirror unseen, alone. My eyes had become so big and my head even bigger. My nature was confirmed: I was a stranger in this family and on this earth. While I suddenly realized as much, Ragna appeared out of nowhere and stood beside me. We stared at each other for a long time, from either side of the mirror, I closer, she further back. Nothing was said, but both of us saw what our reflections had to tell.

  Was it the day after? No, it was several days later, and it was planned in advance – that was the only way I could avoid suspicion.

  She screamed when she woke up, or rather when she picked up her brush that morning and passed it through her hair. Was it possible? During the night, the hours on her pillow, her hair had become snarled in an impenetrable ball, and it was impossible to do anything with this great clump, this thick, unruly haystack of hair all stuck together, entangled in an alarming fashion.

  ‘God help me,’ Mum sighed as she tried carefully to tease the hairs away from each other.

  Ragna screamed and held her forehead with both hands, stared terror-stricken at Mum. Oh, the fear inside her – I could see it from the doorway, where Dad and I were standing.

  ‘Oh, Ragna,’ Mum said resignedly. ‘I can’t do anything with your hair. How could you be so stupid as to leave your chewing gum on your pillow?’

  Ragna protested. She had placed well-chewed lumps of chewing gum, of the sour-tasting type she used to buy when she was in the village, on a sheet of paper on the chest of drawers, she always did that, so they were ready for the following day, still with just a little bit of taste left, and slightly hard before they turned soft and pliable between her teeth. How could they have ended up in her hair?

  ‘You must have slept with your chewing gum in your mouth,’ Mum said. ‘You must stop doing that, it can be dangerous.’

  Ragna is bewildered, for she has admittedly lain there chewing away at a large, good piece for too long, until the house is silent and she has almost fallen asleep, but she has definitely always taken it out. Could she have forgotten?

  I stood for a while in the doorway, our eyes happened to meet for a moment, but then I tottered back to my bed as usual; pathetic and not responsible for what happened later that day: Ragna under the scissors, great lengths of her hair being chopped off, just beneath her ears, while she sobbed painfully and for a long time.

  *

  The self-torture continues. I am counting fears and torments. I arrive at number four: Ragna’s marriage to Johan. The shame I called down on Ragna on her wedding day. The plans for my removal. The empty letter to the nursing home. In addition, there are my pains and helpless dependence. That makes a total of six. Six torments and fears. I don’t know if that is a lot, but it is more than I manage to bear. My eyes feel as if they could burst, there’s hammering inside my skull, my skin cracks and splits, soon the poison will explode and cover the world with darkness.

  No, give me a bag, a sack, no, give me an ocean I can vomit in so I can tie all this misery up in some way or other.

  After thinking all this, I have to cry for a bit, cry for everything I am and all I cannot see because of my afflictions – the greatest wonders of the earth. And what have I failed to discover in the way of beauty inside myself?

  Why don’t I just do the simplest thing – cut off this connection to life, a quick stab to the heart with a knife? What more can I actually hope to achieve, apart from Ragna’s anger, endless days with a little food in my mouth and humiliating visits to the toilet?

  But the will to live clings to the hope that something will happen, something might improve. What’s more, I am a leisurely sort of person, I prefer to lie in bed dozing than to decompose completely in the earth, completely silent and devoid of thought.

  *

  ‘You spewed out lots of lava yesterday evening!’

  Feet planted well apart, Johan’s standing in front of my bed, thumbs thrust into the waistband of his trousers. Behind him stands Ragna, wringing her hands, her mouth is askew and twisted out of shape; it’s difficult to judge if she is holding back a smirk or rage.

  ‘Was it yesterday? I thought it was longer ago than that,’ I say, and heave myself up into a sitting position to try and gain some clarity regarding the sudden visit.

  ‘A ball of fire, that’s what you were – and do you know what I propose to do about it?’

  ‘No. Cool it down, perhaps?’ I say, and scratch my head.

  ‘This sister of yours is not at all stupid, Ragna
, which is a good thing. It means she’s capable of learning a lesson.’

  Ragna chuckles, then stares and simultaneously doesn’t stare at me. There’s distance about her, a restlessness I don’t like the look of.

  ‘Fetch the scooter outfit, Ragna!’ Johan shouts, glaring at me imperiously.

  Ragna dashes off into the corridor and returns with one of her old outfits, stiff with oil spills, fish blood and coffee stains. She stops by my bed and holds it up in front of me.

  ‘Now you just do exactly what we say!’

  ‘Good grief, Ragna, have you gone stark staring mad?’

  ‘You’re going to wear this!’

  ‘What are you two on about? What am I going to do in that outfit?’

  ‘You’re going to leave this place!’ Johan shouts.

  ‘Are you crazy?’

  ‘You’re on your way to the nursing home!’

  Ragna and Johan glance quickly at each other, clearly happy with the way things are going.

  ‘Oh, God! Ragna!’ I try to catch her eye, wake her up from this madness, but she looks away and sticks close to Johan.

  Johan pulls aside my duvet and throws it into the corner. The green dress has slid up and lies twined round my stomach, while my tights have slid down, revealing a cluster of hairs peeping out round the edge of my pants.

  I place my hand over my crotch, keep a hold on myself in the hope of preventing the attempt to dress me that is already in progress.

  ‘Cooperate, damn it,’ Johan says, pulling me closer to the edge of the bed.

  ‘I refuse. Do you hear? I refuse!’

  ‘Refuse? What the hell can you refuse, you old bag?’

  Ragna is standing at the end of the bed, pulling the legs of the outfit up over my calves while Johan holds me down. I try to reason with them, tense my body against the bed, but my legs and torso and arms are pushed, shoved and screwed into the outfit, to my cries and shrieks of desperation.

  ‘I won’t! I won’t!’

  ‘Refuse as much as you like, it won’t do you any good,’ Johan says between clenched teeth.

  ‘Just shut up, Johan. This is something between Ragna and me!’

  Johan straightens up. I’m packaged, my body lies inside the scooter outfit.

  ‘Just in case you haven’t understood, I’m the one who decides things here now.’

  For a moment they stand perfectly still, exhausted and out of breath after the packaging process, but then they nod to each other, bend down over me, get hold of one end each – Johan under my arms, Ragna with my feet. I try to twist and turn to free myself, but have precious little strength in my body, except for the rage that is now growing in my chest, a violent anger that I howl out into the room, right in Johan’s ear as it turns out, for he gives a start and swears, yells at me to shut up, otherwise he’ll hurl me to the floor. I’ve no wish to collide with hard floorboards, no matter how upholstered I am, my back and legs will end up looser than ever. So I reduce my howling to a low whimper, topped by a few subdued yowls and groans.

  Once in the kitchen, they lay me down on the floor. Ragna sits astride my stomach, her legs firmly round my waist, after which she grabs my wrists and presses them down to the floor, while Johan puts on his sweater and his scooter outfit.

  ‘Now you’re going to be cooled down,’ she drily repeats after Johan, as if having to remind herself why she is doing this, depraved human being that she is.

  When Johan’s fully dressed, Ragna loosens her hold. She scrambles to her feet and walks out into the corridor for her own clothes, while Johan comes back into the kitchen.

  I don’t move. My moaning has died down, there’s only a faint humming vibrating between my ears. Johan stares at me. I stare back. Is he going to sit on me? Pin me to the floor? But he turns his head away with a grin and at that moment I get the idea that he thinks that’s what I want, that I want him to sit on my body, to pin me down.

  Fancies himself, doesn’t he, our Johan of the mighty voice? So melodiously conceited and fine. He’s got another thing coming, then. I don’t want to feel the weight of him against my body, his breath against my ear. And I start to howl again, though quite faintly.

  They lift me up from the floor and carry me out of the house at a steady pace and with great care. It’s amazing to make the journey out of the house with my face towards the ceiling. I spot cracks and beams and corners I have never noticed before. It strikes me that the house is still unexplored. And then I think that I ought to have spent more time studying my own home, and this immediately makes me feel more desperate, for I realize that it might be too late, from now on everything is simply uncertain. But once my head is out in the open air under the clear sky, I nevertheless feel happy that in this position I am still alive – only someone who’s dead is normally carried out this way.

  I register and ponder all this from a still point within myself, for all at once I realize that I have been screaming the whole time. I howl and scream and yell with all my might, and I’m unable to stop. I am two individuals, split and divided into an outer and an inner person, one in bewildered panic, the other calmly observing the sky above the house: I howl and marvel at the white haze up there, the unfathomable depth of the universe. I wail and wonder if everything in the world revolves around its own unsolved enigma. I scream and think: here I lie, mirroring the stars in the snot from my own nose.

  And then I devote myself to gasping and sobbing. I shake and am shaken while coolly observing that I am lying on the scooter trailer in a pile of reindeer furs and old blankets. My crutches are there too, they have been stuck under my armpits; I have even managed to grab hold of one and now I am banging it rhythmically against the steel edge of the trailer. I bang away while the darkness rushes towards me, through me, while the beam of light from the scooter sweeps wildly across the wood, slicing a route along paths that only Johan knows. Branches cling and give way, lash against the trailer, I am flung back and forth in sudden jerks, but I notice that something is holding me in place. It is the rope and it is Ragna’s look. She is keeping tabs, that is her job where she sits behind Johan: the leader, the seducer. Now I’m being taken away, it’s final, now I am to be gone.

  In the wood, Johan and Ragna are like gleaming glass – I have never seen anything of the sort before. There is a clarity that embraces them, perhaps produced by my unexpected encounter with the cold and the fresh air. I take special notice of Johan. The faint crackling across the back, the small break across the nape of the neck tell me that his substance is in the process of crumbling away in a state of constant deficiency: I haven’t got enough, don’t possess enough, everything streams wearily from his back as he hangs over the scooter. So much that just disappears, all the time!

  And I see the repressed suggestion of goodness in him, that which he has never dared make use of for fear of losing it – it lies inside him like a half-rotten fruit, unusable except for his own nauseating interests.

  That is how it is with most things. Even the wood stands there pouring out its troubles: the winters are far too long, the summers far too short, the sun and the heat never stay long enough. And so the branches become knotted and stunted.

  Time disappears – I don’t know how long we have been going, but we’re now through the wood and approaching a flat, wide-open area. Some way out, Johan stops. They get off the scooter, waddle towards me in the dark, thick outfits, undo the rope and pull me off the trailer. They drag me across the coarse surface: it is hard and cold, I am laid down and take a look around me. The white surface stretches endlessly out into the darkness. I am probably on water that has frozen solid.

  Johan and Ragna are standing over me nudging each other, grinning. Ragna is bent over double, holding her stomach; the laughter is welling up in her. It’s on the point of gushing out.

  ‘Now all you’ve got to do is cool down!’ they shout out, and walk unsteadily away from me, bending over with suppressed salvos of laughter. The scooter is started with a jerk and they set off t
owards the wood. They shout and yell into the angry roar of the vehicle; there is an echo of power over the entire expanse of water, but gradually the sounds die away, not unlike the humming of mosquitoes up under the ceiling, and then, all at once, I’m lying there alone, sucked into the silence.

  I’ve never lain out in the open before, my face to the sky, except in my first year as a baby, and then secure in a pram or a box. And if I ignore my stay in hospital, I have never been so far away from home before.

  It marks a turning point to lie outdoors like this, yes, it’s a ground-breaking act in my otherwise uniform life. That’s probably why I keep lying there in silence, without a word on my lips, why I lie stiff and motionless on the ice. The sky above me is overwhelming. The vast reaches of space up there, which I never think about and have never really sensed, now appear to be filled with countless possibilities and dizzying explanations, as I suddenly realize what life is. My life is.

  What darkness. And what reality: I can choose to see myself in a completely different way. And do so just by changing angle, altering the perspective for my, up to now, so limited, yes, horizontal observations and reflections.

  And then I think of all that’s been wasted, that I could have been so many other things than the ‘crone on crutches’ and ‘catkin in the wilderness’.

  But a new life is still conceivable, feasible, merely by virtue of being alive. I can transform myself via a multitude of images and explanations, it is perfectly possible – just by shifting my body a certain distance away, to the nursing home, for example. How might I not view myself from there? Won’t I, the self-obsessed and troublesome one, be seen as a likeable fellow human being among all those pig-headed senile old people? Won’t I, the pathetic and helpless one, appear strong and independent among those who are even weaker? And won’t I, the sickly sister, stand out as being healthy and almost young among ancient women with death in their bodies and their look?