Stella Descending (8 page)

Corinne

I have three witnesses: Alma Blom, Frederikke Moll, and Ella Dalby. Three women in black coming into my office, each one uglier than the one before, and each of them with some bit of knitting in her hands. There were other people around, obviously; it was a warm sunny evening, the apartment house faces Frogner Park, and there were people everywhere—waiting for the streetcar or entering the park, people with picnic baskets, dogs, bottles of wine, footballs—but Oslo is not a city where people are in the habit of craning their necks and looking up. Oslo is a city where people look either straight ahead or at the ground, which is why no one ever notices the things that are forever happening high up above.

So a crowd of people came running after the fall, when Stella was lying on the ground, covered by the fleecy blue traveling rug that Alma Blom, one of the witnesses, had thrown over her in horror. A crowd came running after it happened, but only three saw her before the fall, up there on the roof with Martin.

Stella and Martin on the roof, nine stories above the ground, back and forth along the edge, first him, then her, tiny steps, arms out to the sides like circus performers, tightrope walkers, equilibrists. Alma Blom, or maybe it was Frederikke Moll, calls to them to get down from there, but they do not hear. Instead they teeter toward each other, fling their arms around each other, and stay like that for a while, in a sort of embrace.

Although Alma Blom maintains that this embrace was more like a tussle.

Martin and I were sitting at the table. I said, “Your wife was pregnant, Martin. Three or four weeks gone.”

Martin spread his arms wide. “That can’t be true,” he said. “She was on the pill.”

“It’s true.” I sighed. “My friend Karina down at pathology found a yellowish mass less than a centimeter long in her womb, an embryo.” I show Martin the nail of my index finger. “Smaller than this nail, just a little bit of a thing. A bulge in the mucous membrane, my friend Karina said, a spongy little blob, an excrescence. Did you know?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know she was pregnant?”

“No, I said.”

“Did you want to have more children?”

“No.”

“Did Stella want to have more children?”

“No, I told you, she was on the pill.”

Amanda

When Mamma was sick we thought she was going to die. Mamma thought it was pathetic, all those books she hadn’t read, so I sat in her hospital room and read her this book about a captain who sails the ocean hunting a sea monster. We didn’t get very far before Mamma couldn’t take any more, which was fine by me. After a while, all she wanted me to read was the real estate pages in
Aftenposten
.

“You know,” she said, “I think if we were to move from the house we’re living in now to another house, we’d be able to start all over again,” and then she hugged me.

I asked her why we would want to start all over again when we had already come so far. I for one didn’t want to start all over again, round all those worlds again, I said.

She said it was just a figure of speech, not meant to be taken literally.

I said I knew that.

One day I read about an apartment on Frognerveien. I don’t remember whether it was for sale or for rent. We read both the FOR SALE and the FOR RENT ads, in the morning and evening editions.

“Oh,” said Mamma. “That’s where we lived before we moved into our house. The same building. I wonder whether it’s our old apartment.”

I remember when we lived there.

Once, a long time ago, long before Mamma was born even, a man climbed up onto the roof of that building and jumped off. Mamma told me this when she was explaining why I shouldn’t lean out the windows. It’s no wonder; we
were
living on the ninth floor. I can see why she was worried. I was only four or five then, a runny-nosed little kid.

“No one, Amanda, no one. No one knows why he jumped,” Mamma said.

Corinne

“There’s another sentence I’d like us to dwell on a little,” I told Martin.

He looked away. He got up from the dining table and asked if I would like some coffee. I prefer tea.

“A cup of tea, please,” I said. “I never say no to a cup of tea.” My fellow officers prefer whisky. Time was, when we were often away on police business, we used to sit up late into the night in hotel rooms, tossing ideas back and forth. ‘Yep, a lot of cases have been solved over a glass of Dawson’s,’ the guys in the team are fond of saying, sounding vaguely wistful. I’d say instead that a lot of cases would have remained unsolved had it not been for a strong cup of Lipton’s. But then again, that’s just me.

Martin came back with tea.

“This sentence on which you wanted to dwell,” he asked. “Which one would that be?”

“Something one of the witnesses said,” I replied. “She said that your embrace up there on the roof might just as easily have been a tussle.”

Martin glanced away. “No, there was no tussle. It was an embrace. She balanced against me, giddy with the sun, the view, and a sudden . . . joy. And it rubbed off on me. We’d been having a rough time of it.”

“Rough in what way?”

“Stella’s illness, her mother’s death . . . lots of things.”

“But things between you two were fine?”

“She drove me crazy,” he blurted out. “Stella was so afraid. Afraid of this, afraid of that, and most of all afraid I would leave her. Fearful and tight-lipped. She was a child. Like Bee.”

“Bee is your daughter?”

“You have to take your children on trust.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she’s probably mine.”

“And now there was another child on the way.”

“No!”

“Okay, let me repeat the question: Could that embrace up there on the roof have been a tussle?”

“Everything was just fine between Stella and me. I didn’t push her, if that’s what you’re asking. We were standing there on the edge, close, really close together. I remember running my fingers down her long slim back, the fine fabric of her dress, her backbone under my fingertips. When I was a little boy, Thorleif, my grandma’s gentleman friend, told me that my grandmother’s back reminded him of a Stradivarius. Before he became an accountant in Høylandet, Thorleif had actually been a musician, a violinist, with only one great dream in life: to get the chance, just once, to play a Stradivarius. He never got to do it; I don’t think he was a particularly good musician. As I was stroking Stella’s back, this childhood memory swept through me like a puff of blue smoke,” Martin said.

He considered me for a moment.

“I didn’t push her,” he repeated.

I said, “Tell me about the video.”

“The video,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “The video.”

“Our neighbor had a break-in during the winter, and he wasn’t insured. We felt that we ought to be insured, or at least Stella, who was always so afraid of everything, was adamant that we ought to be insured. The insurance broker came over, went from room to room making notes, and then told us he usually advised anyone taking out an insurance policy to get all the items of value in the house down on video, with a running commentary, in case it all went up in flames or got stolen. He said that when disaster strikes, people tend to forget what they had and what it was worth.” Martin laughed. “But nothing much came of that insurance video,” he said.

“Oh. Well . . . it makes interesting viewing,” I remarked.

We sat in silence for a while. The silence was getting on his nerves. The silence gave me the upper hand. He drummed on the table with his fingers.

“What are you thinking?” he asked eventually.

“I was thinking about the sofa,” I said. “That’s it there, isn’t it?” A sliding door divided the room in two. We were sitting in the dining area, and the green sofa was in the living area.

“It’s not often that people in my line of work have anything to do with magic sofas. I once had a case involving a flying carpet, but a magic sofa . . . never! I don’t suppose you would let me sit on it, so I could make a wish?”

“What would you wish for?” Martin asked.

“Ah, that I can’t tell you.”

Martin produced a pack of cigarettes and offered me one, but I turned it down. He lit up and sat there gazing at the smoke rings he was blowing.

“I don’t think anyone as fat as you has ever sat on it,” he said.

“D’you want to see it break in two?”

“Just like my grandfather,” he says.

“The man who lay down on the railroad tracks?”

“Yeah, him.”

Again we fell silent. I had plenty of time. My fellow officers never take their time. I tell them: You have to take your time. But taking things slow scares them, as does silence. I pulled a nail file from my purse and proceeded to file my nails. I have exceptionally beautiful hands. If you saw me, your first thought would be that there isn’t anything beautiful about me, not one single thing. But that would be because you hadn’t noticed my hands.

For a long time not a word was spoken. Martin stared at the ceiling. I filed my nails. The dining table stretched out between us. To lighten things up a little I suggested that we tell each other stories. A police detective and a furniture salesman must have plenty to say, and there’s no reason why circumstances, in this case an unexplained death, should prevent two people from getting better acquainted. The other detectives on the squad feel I waste too much time on stories that are not really relevant. But I tell them it is there, in the small talk, in the idle chitchat, in the little asides, that the solution lies.

“Yeah, right, Corrie,” they say. “You and Miss Marple!”

And I say, “Trust me. There is an order to this. Faint, I grant you, but no less human for all that.”

So I told Martin about a case I had a long time ago.

“How long ago?” he asked.

“Almost a hundred years,” I said.

He nodded.

“Once upon a time there was a man not unlike you in manner and looks. This man was such a good liar that it was impossible to catch him out,” I said. “I had no proof, just a suspicion, a twinge in my stomach. And besides, I could smell it. I can, you know,” I told him. “I can smell whether a man is guilty or innocent.”

“You don’t say,” Martin replied, making no move to pull farther away from me.

“On that occasion I didn’t even have a body,” I continued. “I did, however, have three hundred and fifty-eight witnesses, quite literally an audience. On the night when a conjurer of some repute magicked his wife away for good.

“This conjurer, who went by the name of El Jabali, was considered to be one of the best in Scandinavia. As a boy he had dreamed of becoming the new Houdini. Spurred on by the idea of being able to wriggle out of even the trickiest situations— chains, blocks of ice, a sea of flame, you name it—he eventually managed to worm his way into the good graces of the top magicians in Norway, from whom he tried to pick up a few pointers. He was a quick study and was soon performing at functions and parties all over the country, doing tricks with cards, dice, silk scarves, a top hat, two doves, and a rabbit. But he was no Houdini. He practiced and practiced, but he could never get out of his self-imposed restraints quickly enough, never succeeded in presenting himself to the audience as a free man, a living declaration: I exist! I am! When, at the age of twenty-three, he finally recognized that his dream of becoming the new Houdini was never going to come true, he was miserable. For four years he remained miserable. He lay under the eiderdown in his lodgings in Majorstua, feeling miserable and wishing only that he could disappear. His landlady threatened to throw him out. His parents threatened to cut him off without a penny. His friends threatened to deny him solace and financial support. Then two things happened. Toward the end of the fourth year he started to think; he hitched his demons to his cart and made
them
work for
him
instead of the other way round. He summoned all the beasts of his depression and asked them, How can I become the world’s greatest conjurer? And the beasts replied as they always had: You do not exist! You are not!

“For four years El Jabali had lain under his eiderdown wishing he could disappear. And to some extent he had succeeded. No one spoke to him anymore. No one cared about him. No one gave him a second thought. And then it came to him in a flash: His destiny was not to become the new Houdini; it was not to present himself to the whole world, proclaiming I exist! I am! Quite the opposite. His destiny as a conjurer, as a magician, as El Jabali, was to make things disappear: cards, dice, silk scarves, top hats, doves, rabbits, maybe even a beautiful woman, and finally, of course, himself.

“A little flourish, he thought, and everything is plunged into darkness. Everything disappears.

“Toward the end of his four years under the eiderdown, two things happened to El Jabali. One was that he started thinking. The other was that once he took up with his friends again, he met a half-Russian, half-Congolese circus artiste named Darling and fell in love with her. Darling returned his love, and not long after their first tempestuous encounter, they were married. Darling’s father was a ringmaster, and El Jabali promptly became a natural part of his father-in-law’s small but well-established Circus Bravado. Every night he performed a number of conventional conjuring tricks—entertaining enough, but nothing really sensational. Not yet.

“Then the Circus Bravado set out on its tour of Norway. For the young newlyweds life was, on the whole, pretty good. Everyone knew that El Jabali was cooking something up. Before every show he would lie on his bed in the trailer he shared with Darling, listening to Schubert’s
Die Winterreise
and contemplating his grand disappearing act. Eventually he got around to telling his wife about his plans: how he could make absolutely anything vanish without trace right before the very eyes of the audience, just like that—no cabinet, no trapdoor, no fluttering draperies, nothing—simply the most stupendous optical illusion, a gradual fade-out, right there in the middle of the ring, in front of hundreds of astonished witnesses. Darling took to the idea immediately and offered to be his assistant.

“Darling was a trapeze artist. She had grown up in the circus. It was not in her nature to be anyone’s assistant. This half-Russian, half-Congolese girl was a diva by the age of nine, when she was the top of a human pyramid consisting of her grandfather and grandmother, father and mother, five brothers, two sisters, three boy cousins, and one girl cousin. Darling had faith in her husband’s talents as a magician. He had the hands for it, good hands. There was no doubt in Darling’s mind that he had a magician’s hands. But she was also prepared to be his assistant for another reason: She dreaded his black moods, which sometimes threatened to send them both plummeting into the abyss, so she was more than willing to vanish from the ring a little at a time, once a night, to the entrancing sound of the audience’s applause—if that was what it took to make him happy.

“His disappearing act was a sensation from the very first show, and the press was soon hailing El Jabali as the greatest magician in Scandinavia. The Circus Bravado’s tour of Norway proved to be its most successful ever, and El Jabali’s father-in-law, the ringmaster, finally seemed pleased with his son-in-law, slapped him on the back, and kissed him on the lips. Not another word was said about the fact that in the past the ringmaster had been known to refer to his son-in-law in somewhat derogatory terms—calling him a conceited ass, for example. But then El Jabali really was presenting the Bravado’s audiences with a most amazing conjuring trick.”

“Can you describe it?” Martin asked. The room was dark; his face, across the dining table, indistinct.

“Close your eyes and picture it,” I said.

Martin didn’t close his eyes, but he listened quietly nevertheless.

“The show is almost over. The lights are low, only a single pool of white light in the center of the ring. The pianist plays the first stanzas of what a few people will recognize as the last song in Schubert’s cycle
Die Winterreise
. El Jabali wanders into the ring, dressed like a tramp, a clownish musician in a squashed top hat, a moth-eaten dinner suit, a tattered bow tie, and a pair of enormous black shoes. He shuffles in, heading for the pool of light, stopping now and then to cock his head and point to the circus orchestra, as if to tell the audience that he too can hear the piano music.

“Then he is standing perfectly still in the pool of light. He casts a wary glance at the pianist before proceeding to turn his right arm in a circle. The pianist plays and the tramp’s arm turns. And so it goes. The pianist plays; the tramp’s arm turns. Eventually two clowns dressed in red run into the ring, carrying a barrel organ. They set it down gently in front of the tramp and indicate with their huge whitened hands that he can play it if he wants; the barrel organ is a gift from them to him. Then they run out.

“So the tramp plays the barrel organ, one little tune after another, but he doesn’t seem too happy. He looks around. He’s all alone. Even the clowns have gone. No one wants to listen to the organ grinder. But maybe if he plays something else—yes, that’s it, maybe if he plays something else—and so he does, something a bit livelier, as if he were summoning someone, calling out to someone, and to the audience’s amazement a woman begins to materialize in the pool of light. First one arm, then another arm, then a finger, then an eye, a knee, a foot, a toe, then one breast, followed by another. From out of nowhere there she is, a dazzlingly beautiful young woman, half Russian, half Congolese, every bit as solid, every bit as alive as the organ grinder himself. Who would have believed it? A woman conjured up out of nothing.

“And then they dance. The organ grinder dances with the woman.

“I can dance, he says. Although, of course, you don’t hear him say that because this is a circus act and words are rarely spoken at the circus. But that is what you imagine he is saying: that he can dance. And pride gets the better of him, the tramp is all puffed up with pride. He says he doesn’t need to stand here playing his barrel organ because he can dance. He can even dance alone. I can dance just as well without you, he says. I can dance alone in this pool of light.