The Looking-Glass Sisters (10 page)

‘Colour? I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about,’ she replies suspiciously, and carries on scrubbing.

‘I mean colour, Ragna, you know, if I’m a yellow person, or if I’m red or green.’

She laughs resignedly. Perhaps it’s too early in the morning for this type of question.

‘You’re a black maggot, pasty and filthy creature that you are.’

‘I don’t mean that sort of colour, Ragna, I mean the colour I have as a person. Am I mauve? For that’s what I feel I am myself.’

She wrings out the flannel with hurried movements.

‘Cut out all that colour talk.’

‘Ragna,’ I go on trying, ‘you’re yellow, for example. Well, for me you are because you’re always on the move,
and I don’t know if yellow’s a colour that’s on the move, but it’s the colour I feel you are.’

I straighten my back, try to catch that enclosed look of hers.

‘You’re yellow, Ragna,’ I repeat.

She rolls her eyes, takes hold of my hair and pulls it up so she can wash the back of my neck.

‘What colour am I, Ragna?’

‘Stop rabbiting on about that colour nonsense!’

‘Yes, but I need to know! I know so little about myself – you’ve got Johan. And you meet people when you’re in the village who can give you a feeling of who you are.’

‘Oh, do shut up!’

‘I can make it easy for you. I’ll give you three colours to choose from: red, mauve and blue. I’m one of those – I think I’m mauve, actually. Am I? Tell me, Ragna.’

She gives a start and tugs at my hair so I feel it smart in the roots, but I don’t quit, and turn towards her.

‘Well, I’m mauve, then? Mauve because I am bit of an afternoon sort of person and because I think so much, isn’t that right? Thoughts are mauve, Ragna, I’m sure of that.’

‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!’ she screeches, holding her ears.

The flannel dangles dripping between her fingers and produces large, angry stains on my shirt.

‘You’re chattering away like a crow!’

‘Yes, but listen to me, Ragna – you’re the only one I can ask!’

She stands there with rolling, half-closed eyes, shaking her head in frustration.

‘You’re not mauve, you’re shit black, and that’s because you plague the shit out of me! Do you hear me? Black! Black as muck! You shithead woman, you!’

Later, after my morning care, while I’m shuffling around my room, back and forth between the window and the mirror, Ragna is tidying the kitchen in a jittery mood. She stuffs glasses and plates ruthlessly into the cupboard. They must all be crammed to breaking point.

‘The animal, so self-obsessed! Here am I, slaving away day and night, and all she does is think of colours! I’ll give her colours, I will! Black and blue, that’s what she ought to have been!’

Black or blue or mauve. It really doesn’t matter. For I am in fact white. I can see that in the mirror. Almost colourless. My eyes are pale with a faint shimmer of blue, and my hair is almost completely grey – no, white. I look sort of transparent and will soon merge with the sky out there.

The colourlessness, uncertainty, everything I don’t know about myself, make my thoughts slide towards images I don’t like to think about. In particular, I have to think of distant, unknown coasts, places where people never cast anchor, inaccessible sounds and bays beneath ancient, gaping mountains, coasts so extensive that you see the sea curving on the horizon. They are the remotest, loneliest places in the world, they exist only on the very rim of nothingness. And I think so hard of these coasts that I get a sensation of disappearing in all the deserted wilderness – the coasts
become peripheral zones of my own body, every toe, every finger points out desolately towards the emptiness in the world. I am a remote landscape so completely abandoned that I have to scream in order to feel I am alive.

‘What are you whining about?’ Ragna shouts from the kitchen.

‘I’m disappearing, Ragna!’

‘Yes, bugger off completely while you’re at it, you pathetic creature!’

Perhaps it is the sound of the persistent tacking of the sewing-machine needle that manages to burst the bubble of the dreamy state that has kept me bedridden for a couple of days. Ragna is sewing. And it’s not a question of mending or patching old clothes. No, she’s sewing long tracks in large pieces of material. And when Ragna starts to hum an accompaniment to the sewing machine’s monotonous clatter, I can’t help feeling curious. Is she sewing new curtains in the middle of winter? Or can it be new bedlinen – the old sheets must be worn thin by all that rubbing together and physical excess?

After a while, she gets up from the table and hums even louder. I hear rustling and swishing of fabric, I hear her bustling around in the room, she is clearly in high spirits, contented. When she crosses the corridor, on her way to her bedroom, I finally catch sight of what has woken me up: from Ragna’s head and down to the floor stream Mum’s old lace curtains, and topping her high-piled hair,
the material has been drawn together into a crown that dips over her face.

I give an almost silent whinny. That dried-up heap of bones looks no more like a bride than an old witch at a cauldron.

‘Oho, Ragna, so you’re getting ready for a wedding?’

‘Don’t stick your nose into my business,’ shouts Ragna from her room, while she rummages with jewellery and clothes.

‘Why haven’t you told me anything about it before?’

‘What do you need to know? You’re only interested in yourself.’

‘So, you’re getting married, are you?’

‘Yes. In that way we can defend ourselves against those in power!’

‘It didn’t exactly look like a helmet you were wearing on your head.’

‘Two heads are better than one, that’s what it’s all about. Standing together, against all of life’s threats and dangers. And that danger also includes you, don’t you forget it!’

Holy Moses. I sigh and gaze at the ceiling. Up there I can for a moment escape the hard grasp that constricts my existence. I float after the pale-white colour with the utmost ease, I glide and glide and am on the point of disappearing out the vent when I am hauled back to the miserable body in the bed and slide into my own dry mouth.

‘Ragna?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is Johan going to live here?’

‘Of course he is! Have you ever heard of a married couple who don’t share a bed?’

‘Why haven’t you said anything?’

‘The wedding’s at the weekend, here in this house. We want it over before Christmas. That’s all been decided. Your whining won’t make the slightest bit of difference.’

Despite Ragna and Johan’s relationship, all their excesses, the news hits me unexpectedly. They must have made up their minds in double-quick time, otherwise I’d have already had my suspicions. But when I think about it, I’m not surprised. Yes, it’s probably a wedding they’ve been whispering on about, imagined and planned during these last weeks at the kitchen table. I may have even provoked it by my frequent walks along the corridor, by my mere presence. They have clearly acquired a sudden need to ally themselves, yes, to have a marriage contract as a strong card to play if the situation in the house becomes critical: we decide things here!

I can’t help reproaching myself. From now on ‘We’re married!’ will ring out, scream from wall to wall and in every nook and cranny of the house. And from that day on we’re divided into two irreconcilable camps: the married couple and me, we two and you, them and me.

Sliced smoked salmon, served with some lettuce leaves and a dollop of cream. Elk roast with French fries. Ice cream with cloudberries and Ragna’s wafer cones. Red
wine with the meal. Johan’s home-made cowberry liqueur with the dessert.

Ragna stands by the bed rubbing her hands, looking expectantly at me. I’m invited. I’m to sit at the table. It is to be a memorable day for all of us.

Is she looking for signs of happiness? I sit there hunched up, heavy with the news, hardly able to look at her.

Later, towards evening the same day, she stands in my room once again, shakes me by the arm, wakes me from a deep, heavy sleep.

‘Dear sister. Look at what I’ve got here! I’ve altered it for you. It took hours and hours. Hasn’t it turned out fine?’

She holds up a dress of green burled material in front of herself. The acidic colour sticks to her face. My stomach gives a weak heave. Spittle gathers in my mouth. Has Ragna sewn on the collar and pockets? Sure to be the remains of some lace curtains. The dress must be old. I can’t recall ever having seen it before. I swallow and look away.

She squeezes a clothes hanger into the dress and hangs it up on the front of the wardrobe. Perhaps so that the spirals of the white lace collar will remind me of the difficult times that lie ahead.

‘Isn’t it lovely?’ she asks again, stroking the material with her hand. ‘You’ve always wanted a proper dress, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Ragna comes up closer, stands by the bed and stares at me suspiciously. ‘You’ve not made up your mind to be ill, have you?’

‘No, no.’

‘I really hope not. It’s to be my special day and you’re not to ruin it!’

‘Relax.’

Ragna gives a forced smile. I smile back weakly. She stands over me gleaming with a power that only the certainty of imminent happiness generates. I smile a bit more, as best I can. She breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to her wedding preparations.

Home University
, Vol. VIII, ‘Language and Communication’, at random, in the margin, somewhere in the middle of the book: ‘Marriage, damage, mad rage, bloody carnage.’

I am profoundly asleep once more when she bursts through the door with a cup in her hands.

‘And how are you, dear sister – it’s morning!’

She turns on the light, and in the flood of brightness I am rapidly scrutinized for all visible and future afflictions that might threaten the weekend’s wedding. She puts down the cup, leans over me and straightens my pillow, pulls me by the arm in an attempt to get me up.

‘I don’t want anything! Just let me sleep!’

‘Is that the thanks I get for coming with tea on this lovely morning?’

She presses her hand in under my arm. I have no option but to move as she wants and take up a kind of sitting position in the bed.

The teacup is placed in front of me in a hollow she makes in the duvet. She straightens up and stands there
close to me. I sense that she is gazing at me with a look I do not know and turn my head in surprise to see what it is. At the same moment, my forehead bangs into her hand. There’s a sting, her nails have scratched the skin, her hand is trembling. Was she about to smooth out my hair? The gaze disappears, she pulls her hand away.

‘Dear sister,’ she says in a husky voice, ‘I only want you to have a nice day.’

‘Right.’

‘And you can be sure the food will be good.’

‘Sure.’

‘And just think, wine! For you too! It’ll be a real celebration!’

‘Yes.’

‘The dress will suit you.’

I don’t answer. She rubs her hands when I deliberately sink back into the bed. The tea slops over. A stain spreads out, I feel the heat through the duvet.

‘Just be a bit pleasant, all right?’

‘Yes,’ I say, and turn my back to her. She bends cautiously over me, breathing heavily.

‘Are you afraid?’

She’s right. I’ve every reason to be afraid. I lie in the dark and think about curses, search for sentences that can be twisted from newlywed happiness to slow destruction, sentences that convert a good marriage into an agonizing, painful divorce. I make a pathetic attempt to write something despite my exhaustion, but console myself with the fact that if they don’t work, I will make predictions, evocations, stick pins into what is about to happen:

I take a breath. Try to prevent a landslide of images that press against my forehead, the gaze behind the closed eyes. I don’t want to watch these images: the cruelty in them, the humiliation, yet I am drawn towards them, yes, I observe every single shot, coolly, with distance and without dignity. Me with an axe and hammer. Ragna flung to the crows outside. The freezer full of Johan turned into steaks and ribs, mince and chops.

Everything starts swirling. I’m falling.

‘Ragna! Help me!’

On her wedding day Ragna is up at five o’clock, stoking the stove. She hums as she puts on the coffee. Everything’s ready. The pans are sparkling, the windows and walls are gleaming. I have been washed, cleaned, scrubbed the previous evening, and the meal stands prepared in the pantry, it will only need to be heated when they return from the wedding in the village.

‘We’ll be coming back with guests – it will be a celebration the likes of which you’ve never seen before!’

I wonder if she’s saying this as a piece of information or a threat, but first and foremost I am thinking that I will be sitting eating and conversing with the rest of them – I’ve
no experience of doing that, since I very rarely sit at the table and talk to Ragna.

People. The house is going to be full of people. But not more than three guests – I know that from the number of places laid out. It will be a strange experience. I’ve hardly seen Johan of late. He’s wisely kept himself out of sight so as not to provoke a quarrel with his in-laws. The war has been de-escalated. We’re to meet together on the great day in peace and harmony.

They set off into the darkness – through the window I see that Johan has fixed a flag to either side of the handlebars on the snow scooter. Beneath her capacious scooter outfit Ragna is dressed in her newly sewn dress, and her veil has been laboriously crammed in under her hood. A corner of it has escaped and is fluttering in the wind, waving to the heavens, which bless the bridal journey with a clear sky and stars.