The Looking-Glass Sisters (3 page)

‘Can I have a glass of milk?’ I say after finally managing to swallow.

Ragna rushes out the room, rattles with a glass and the milk jug, is back in an instant and sticks the glass right under my nose.

‘Drink!’

I have already taken another bite and my mouth is full of bread. I look beseechingly at her, point with a finger at the bulge in my cheek. She sighs impatiently, presses the glass against my lips, forces my mouth open and pours in the milk. I swallow and swallow. It’s not easy, for I have to make sure that the bread doesn’t slide against my palate. I grasp her hand to remove the glass, but at the same moment some
crumbs tickle the back of my throat, the milk goes down the wrong way and I cough up the contents over her arm.

‘You monster!’

She slams the glass down on the bedside table and wipes her arm dry on the bedclothes.

‘I only want to help, but look what happens! Well, you’ll just have to manage on your own!’ She storms out of the room into the kitchen. I hear her rummaging around by the worktop and pouring coffee into a thermos flask with quick movements.

I pick up the lumps of bread from the bedspread and put them on the tray. I set about eating the rest of my breakfast. My chest is sodden, but I chew and chew and am about to drink the milk when she is back at my bedside again. She smiles and bares her teeth, then suddenly whisks the bread and milk glass out of my hands.

‘You’ve finished, that’s good,’ she says, and places the glass on the tray.

I sit there astonished, my hands as if frozen: the one hand without the glass, the other close to my mouth without the bread. I must look ridiculous, but I stay sitting like that while listening to the clinking of the glass and tray as she goes out into the kitchen, throws away the rest of the bread and washes up. Clink, clink, like faint bells.

And in an instant she is out of the door.

This is how any afternoon might develop:

Ragna is resting in her room, I am in mine. Maybe we sleep for half an hour before I need to pee. I lift aside the
duvet as carefully as I can, almost without a sound, so as not to wake her. But there is no way I am able to avoid breathing, perhaps panting when I sit up in bed, stop my crutches from making a rattling noise when I place them on the floor, and I am unable to prevent my nightdress from swishing when I slide down from the bed and plant my legs on the floor. When I straighten up, there can be no doubt. The creaking and cracking from my limbs and my back tell anyone that I am purposefully moving across the floor in the direction of the toilet, and now only one thing counts: to get my body moving faster, to reach a speed that can guarantee me a swift meeting with the lavatory seat well before Ragna picks up my movements. But despite all my exertions, I know from the faint rush of air across the back of my neck that the same thing as always is happening: Ragna will get there just before I do and, before I have time to protest, she will be inside the toilet and have shut the door behind her.

(This is all Ragna knows about waiting for something from a hole:

Lying on a frozen lake with a line and with one eye on the ice hole, nice and warm in a scooter outfit and on a reindeer fur. Soon the char will come, prime and plump and, within half an hour, it will take the hook. She waits, preening herself from sheer pleasure, jiggles the line a bit, maybe drinks a cup of coffee; she’s waiting for the fish that’s sure to come, large and red, inching its way towards the ice hole, her ice hole, smooth and deep. The water surges and falls, a cloud drifts past,
Ragna squints at the sharp winter sky and then there is a sudden jerk on the line, the fish is caught and now it is pulled up and out of its wet hiding place. Ragna smiles and seizes it by the gills, thinks of the frying pan back home as she breaks its neck – the fish, half-dead, floundering on the grainy ice; soon gutted and gleaming with fat.)

I stand outside the toilet door; heavy with a thousand lakes and ten thousand char, help me, jig, jig, there’s no time to lose, the ice hole is about to burst, run over, cascades of water and landed fish!

‘Ragna! Why have you locked the door?’

‘Because I want some peace, you simpleton!’

‘Yes, but I need to pee first!’

‘No, I’m in here right now!’

‘Ragna!’

‘That’s exactly why I lock the door, otherwise I can’t get any peace!’

The water surges and falls, surges and falls, a thousand rivers feeding the lake, which fills up, drips and gurgles and flows. I can’t walk, can hardly stand, can’t sit down, can’t lie down. I am locked, motionless, and if I move at all, the water will overflow and drown all life.

‘Ragna, open up!’

I lean cautiously against the door without moving my feet and lower body, place an ear against the wood. What is she up to?

From the sound of the cistern I can make out Ragna’s intermittent low breaths, small light grunts that tell me
she is straining. It must be all the meat she’s eaten recently, mince from the innards she cooked the other day.

I give her a little time, try to think of other things, hoping the water will recede. It has to be a mild summer’s day, yes, I’ll think of a mild summer’s day, one with the washing hanging out, white and clean, billowing in the light breeze to the humming of the mosquitoes, the rustling of the birch trees, the babbling and trickling of the stream…

‘Ragna! Get a move on!’

I hammer on the door with my crutch.

That sound inside, is she laughing? I place my ear against the door again. It’s seething and bubbling in her throat, now she’s letting go, and her laughter lets rip in the tiny room.

‘Ragna! Ragna!’ she mimics with a distorted voice. ‘Ragna! Get a move on!’

All I can do is stay calm, I say to myself. Don’t think of anything. Don’t get upset. With these words I slide into a state of patience, and I manage to wait, for some seconds, yes, even a couple of minutes perhaps. Until I hear the sound of running water. Ragna has flushed and is now turning the taps on. She whistles loudly while letting the water run. There’s no tune to it, just an echo of her hollow interior at an assumed cheerful register.

The dam gives way under the pressure and the water gushes out. It happens in a moment, but I have time to notice this dual feeling pass through my body: the pain of holding it back, the relief at finally letting go. At the same instant, I am stricken with intense sadness, the tears well up, but maybe it’s the relief and not the pain, or both, but I cry
and leave off, cry and leave off – it’s lovely and it’s sad, it’s good and it’s bad – I cry at myself and Ragna’s gurgling laughter, at her hidden rage in every single gasp, and I cry at what is about to come – her vocal cords that will whip and lash when she discovers what misery I have caused out here in the corridor.

And this is how many of our mornings turn out:

I’m sitting on the toilet, the seat has warmed up and I have found the right position so as to be able to stay here until my mission has been successfully accomplished. At such times a rare calmness may come over me, and I don’t count the minutes or the half-hours, the time is spent studying my cuticles and palms, the strange patterns in the plaster on the walls and, not least, whispering words and sentences that come to me, rhythmically, small verses to the sighing of the vent, the drip from the tap, the creaking of the surrounding house: hush, hush, swish swash widge wudge nudge no, swim swam blip blop baah bee…

Knock, knock.

‘Get a move on!’

I stiffen. Alarm bells ring, ongoing processes are retracted. Alert, red alert!

‘You’ve bloody well been sitting there for ages. Now you really must make way for other people!’

I sigh. All functions were on their way perfectly. If Ragna doesn’t calm down soon, it will take ages to get back into the same state.

‘Ragna, I’m the one who’s here now!’

‘Yes, damn it, you’re always the one in there – or trying to get in!’

She kicks the door twice, but moves away. Judging from her steps, I work out that she has gone into her room and is lying down on her bed.

I give a sigh of relief, try to recapture that flowing calmness. It is easier than I had feared and I am in the process of drifting off on the patterns and just audible words when there’s another kick on the door.

‘Get a move on, I said!’

Ragna is standing with her mouth close to the door. I hear her breathing. From experience I know to keep quiet so as not to fuel her rising anger – in that way I’m able to postpone the disaster.

Ragna stays standing outside, but is not at a loss. She now starts switching the light off and on.

‘Out! Out! Out!’ she intones in time with the light switch.

The change between dark and light is quite intriguing, but after a while I start to get dizzy.

‘Stop that, Ragna. It makes me feel sick!’

‘You can puke for all I care if you don’t come out quickly.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes, I bloody well do. You don’t seem to understand that I need to use the loo too!’

Boundless conscience. There’s nothing else for me to do but block my urge, forget my own needs, which have died down anyway with all this rowing.

‘All right, then.’

I sigh loudly and grip my crutches, prepare myself for the laborious process of getting up and adjusting my clothes. It takes time, to be honest, even though I hurry as much as I can. And Ragna has to help me to pull up my pants, because I can’t do it on my own.

‘All clear!’ I say, and bang my fist against the door to open it.

‘You’ll have to help me,’ I continue, and aim for the corridor since there’s more room out here for Ragna to kneel down and pull up my pants. But as I pass the door with my pants round my ankles, Ragna slips past me into the toilet. I turn round and am about to say something, but she has managed to close the door hard before I get a word out.

‘You’ve got another thing coming,’ she shouts, and laughs loudly and affectedly.

I sigh and stay standing there, feeling at that moment in my tortuous existence a slight breeze pass my bottom as the door slams shut and the shaking in my knees after all that hurrying. And when I hear Ragna giggle to herself as she finds a comfortable position on the already warmed-up seat and hear her loud grunts of pleasure, I can’t help laughing a bit at it all either.

I must admit that Ragna and I have had a lot of good moments during our years alone in this house. But they tend to be seasonal and come with the weather – or winter, to be more precise. When the storms tug at the planks of
the house, when the windows shudder and the stove wails in the fearful draughts, we get on best. In such weather the house turns ice cold and all we can do is stick to our beds. But our battle against the violent forces is a shared cause, that of keeping body and soul – and the house – together.

‘I’ll throw on another log,’ Ragna might shout, and pad out of bed.

‘Fine. We must never let the stove go out,’ I call back.

‘We’ve got to try and keep the water from freezing! You can use the toilet first,’ she might say later.

‘Will do!’ I reply.

‘Do you need an extra duvet?’ I might ask.

‘No, you just keep yourself warm,’ she replies.

Sometimes Ragna and I even move into the kitchen. She places our mattresses right next to the stove and close to each other. ‘We’ll just have to make the best of a bad job,’ she says, and plumps up the duvets and pillows.

At times like that, we don’t look at each other but instead often exclaim things, as if to ourselves: ‘One hell of a gust, that was!’

Or: ‘Really wicked, that one!’

Or: ‘Bloody hell! Now it’s going to take the whole house!’

And then we snuggle into our duvets, turn our backs to each other, and wallow in warmth and contentment.

At times like these, in the dark, maybe with a candle lit, a sudden, intense feeling overcomes me that Ragna and I are one body, completely inseparable. We have gradually
let go of parts of ourselves in favour of the other. Over the years, through conflicts and confrontations, we have shaped, kneaded and formed ourselves into a lopsided, distorted yet complete organism. Ragna has the body and I have the soul. She puts on the firewood, I do the thinking. She makes the tea, I read and write. And we both agree: God, it’s cold!

One Thursday a couple of months ago, we were wrenched out of our day-to-day existence by someone hammering on the front door. Johan, broad and tall and with a stomach well outside the band of his trousers, does not wait for us to open and perhaps welcome him in. No, he walks straight into the kitchen where Ragna and I are sitting. Here he stands, legs apart, in front of the stove, tells us that he has moved into the house next door, which has stood empty for over thirty years, and that he has a state lease and intends to live off hunting and fishing. I listen to the conversation that develops between him and Ragna, do not ask any questions, do not ask where he comes from. It doesn’t feel natural to me, and since we haven’t spoken all that much since, I still don’t know what he did in the years before he arrived.

Johan is a man who has come to stay. Already on his second visit he goes over to the fridge and takes some milk without asking, puts his feet up on the table and looks possessively at Ragna. Ragna lights up, brushes his feet away, immediately puts him to work.

‘Can you repair tools?’ she asks, she who repairs everything herself, slapping him on the back with feigned hardness.

‘Course I can,’ he replies, and sits down to look at the tool Ragna passes him, with half an eye on her.

He takes no notice of me as I sit silently at the kitchen table, my arms round my crutches.

The visits soon become more frequent.

Ragna bakes bread, loaves larger and more luscious than I have ever tasted, and cakes, extra sweet with a soft base.

‘You’re bloody good at baking,’ Johan sighs, with his fingers in the latest batch.