by Linn Ullmann
“I said I’m going to have that bath now,” I hiss. Then, grinning sheepishly, I look at her face. She reminds me of my mother—there’s the same tightness around the lips—even though she’s fifteen years younger than I am and at least twenty years older than my mother lived to be. “I have to take a bath before the funeral,” I say.
I grab my socks, which I had left lying on the sofa, debate for a moment whether to put them on, to save leaving the room in my bare feet, but then she would stand there in the light from the window, watching me while I sat down on the sofa and clumsily pulled them on. I couldn’t stand that. Pulling on socks is both an intimate and a strenuous task, impossible to accomplish with other people watching. I opt, therefore, for the lesser of two evils and leave the room with as much dignity as can be feigned in my condition.
WHEN I MET STELLA, she had just met Martin, the man to whom she was subject until her death. Her word, not mine: subject, she said. Nonsense, I said. If it hadn’t been Martin, it would’ve been someone else. No, she said firmly. Subject! I, for my part, am subject to my own aging body: the aching joints, the nervous twitching of the right eye, the constant ringing tone (a high C) in the left ear, the most unpleasant feeling of being forever at the beck and call of nature; though nothing ever comes, I still need to go, an affliction as intolerable as it is ridiculous. Then there is the heart that simply misses a beat every now and again, not that it bothers me, but it is a reminder, nonetheless, of the way things are going. And if that weren’t enough, I have a blister on my right foot that makes me limp when I wear my new dress shoes. So I am, in fact, subject to a pair of shoes. And I am subject to the Oslo Municipal Highways Department, which does not sand the sidewalks in the winter; subject to the weather, because in January the streets are like sheets of ice underfoot, and in July I grow faint with the heat, the relentlessly bright light. I am subject to all the hogwash that our newspapers and television channels spew at me, day in, day out, and subject to the appalling musical tastes of my neighbor, even older than I and almost stone-deaf besides. I am subject to my lack of faith in God and a life hereafter, and to my fear of falling and not dying (death doesn’t frighten me), but instead surviving as a helpless, drooling vegetable subject to the condescending care of healthcare professionals.
But to another person? No, I have never been subject to another person as Stella said she was.
“I don’t believe that.”
“What don’t you believe?”
“That you’ve never been subject to another person in that way.”
“Believe what you like, Stella, but I’m the one who knows.”
Martin was a handsome man, just as Stella was a good-looking woman. He is a handsome man. I mean, he didn’t exactly jump after her when she fell, so as far as that goes he is still among us. The question is whether he tried to save her, or whether he actually pushed her. I know he’s been questioned time and again by the police; they must have their suspicions, as I have mine, about so many things. But I do not believe he pushed her. Not deliberately. Husbands are forever being blamed for the misfortunes of their wives, and here I speak from experience. Stella was too good for him; it’s as simple as that. In my view he is a conceited ass (and I said as much to the extraordinary policewoman who interviewed me about the case); he is a brute, but he did not kill her. Such things do, after all, take courage of a sort.
Amanda
Everything the minister says in church today is a bunch of lies, because:
I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in death. I don’t believe in Mamma. I don’t believe in Pappa.
I don’t believe in the earth. I don’t believe in heaven. I don’t believe in the stars. I don’t believe in the trees. I don’t believe in the grass. I don’t believe in the birds.
I don’t believe in Norway. I don’t believe in the prime minister. I don’t believe what anybody says.
I don’t believe in my body, my breasts, my hair, my hands, my eyes, my teeth, or my mouth.
I tell Bee that Mamma falls and falls and never hits the ground. I tell her that Mamma meets a big blue bird, and the bird says loftily, “Falling is not the same as flying.”
“Huh!” says Mamma. “What would you know about that?”
“Ah, what indeed?” says the bird, and off he flies.
Soon Mamma meets a squirrel and a cod, and the squirrel and the cod say sadly, “Falling is not the same as flying.”
“Huh! What would you two know about that?” says Mamma.
“Ah, what indeed?” say the squirrel and the cod, and they go on falling.
Then Mamma meets an old woman whom God has chucked out of heaven because she was so grumpy and tight-lipped.
“Hello, Mother,” says Mamma.
“Hello, Daughter,” says the old woman.
“What are you doing here, halfway between heaven and earth?” asks Mamma.
“God chucked me out of heaven because I was so grumpy and tight-lipped,” says the old woman. “What are you doing here?”
“I fell off a roof, and now I’m just falling and falling without ever hitting the ground,” says Mamma.
“Well, you can take it from me, falling is not the same as flying,” says the old woman.
“Huh! What would you know about that?” says Mamma.
“Ah, what indeed?” says the old woman, and she goes on falling.
Axel
It was a green sofa that brought them together. Stella was living alone with her daughter, Amanda. An aunt had left her some money, and with this money she decided to buy a sofa. Martin worked for an exclusive furniture store in Oslo; it was his job to deliver goods to customers’ homes. That was how they met. If I had been in Stella’s shoes I would have spent the money on other things—music or wine, or, had I been younger, a trip to London to try out the new Ferris wheel there, the London Eye. But Stella spent her money on a green sofa. It so happens that I have sat on that sofa. It was not to my taste at all, a long hard modern piece of furniture that resembled nothing so much as a tight green female mouth.
Stella told me that, having delivered the sofa, Martin did not want to leave. He had had himself and the sofa hoisted up the outside of the building to the apartment in which she lived, and they materialized right outside her window on the ninth floor.
“All at once he was just there, sitting on the sofa, handsome, smiling, outside my window.”
I remember how she sat on the edge of my bed and laughed when she told me.
“I asked him to leave, but he wouldn’t. He refused. And then … well, then he moved in.”
I can imagine how Stella, on catching sight of Martin outside her window, must have seen her own face reflected in his. The same narrow blue eyes, the same full lower lip, the same large hooked nose. They were both skinny and thin-skinned, every single muscle, every bone on display. Sometimes those two faces reminded me of another face, the face of a man I had once known slightly. Rolf Larsen was his name. He ended up in Dachau during the war. He survived, after a fashion, and when I met him again, quite by chance, on Karl Johans Gate in Oslo, it was that thin-skinned face that shocked me most. His words as to where he had been and what they had done went in one ear and out the other. The skin around his eyes, mouth, and cheekbones was too tight, pulled taut. It could have ripped open at any moment to reveal—what?—a gaping mouth? A scream?
Eventually, such faces were to be seen everywhere. You could hardly open a newspaper without coming across pictures of them, the faces of war, and these days I hardly even notice them. But on those few occasions that I saw Stella and Martin together, I remembered Rolf Larsen. I never thought of it when Stella was alone. Her face was always changing, or evolving, as if it could not decide what sort of face it ought to be and so reflected the facial features of whomever she was with—which is not to say that she grew old and wrinkled when she was with me. The transformation was more subtle than that.
She herself used to say, “Martin is a more beautiful version of me.�
�� Naturally, she was deaf to my vehement protests. Stella hated her own reflection. One time at my apartment, on her way back from the bathroom to the living room, she stopped in front of the gilt mirror in the hall. She did not know that I could see her from the living room. (In fact she never knew how I hung on her every word, followed her every move, when she visited me.) She stopped in front of the mirror and leaned forward, peering at her own reflection—and then she made a face so horrible I almost dropped my coffee cup. She dug her nails into her cheeks and clawed and clawed at herself, the way a child, unhappy with a drawing, will scribble over the whole thing in a temper. Then she straightened up, ran a hand through her hair, moistened her lips with her tongue, and returned to the living room—to me— as if nothing had happened: gleeful, almost, with two red spots on her cheeks.
Not long after Martin moved in with her, as he promptly did, he asked Stella to come with him to Høylandet to meet his family. His grandmother—his father’s mother, that is—was soon to turn seventyfive, an event that was to be celebrated in grand style. I was still in the hospital. Stella was glowing when she came into my room and sat down on my bed.
“He wants to take me way out into the middle of nowhere, by plane and train and bus and God knows what else. Me, who’s so scared of flying!”
I looked at her, puzzled. “He? He who?” I asked, trying to be patient.
“Martin!” she cried, rolling her eyes. “He wants to take me home … to the farm … to meet his family: mother, father, ostriches, the lot.”
“Ostriches?”
“His parents have an ostrich farm,” she explained. “It’s an experiment. His dad has been given a government permit. He thinks ostriches are going to be the farming sensation of the nineties or something. But listen! His grandmother Harriet is turning seventyfive. We’re going to a birthday party!”
I turned away, muttering a few choice sarcastic remarks about Middle Norway, birthdays, and grandmothers. But hadn’t they, I wondered, only known each other a few weeks? Well, yes, she said, that was true, but he had already moved in with her, so surely there was nothing to keep them from going away together. She gave me a look, imploring or anxious—as if it mattered whether I gave her my blessing.
“So when do you leave?”
“Tomorrow.”
“How long will you be away?”
“Four days, maybe five.”
“But aren’t you on duty?”
“I can swap shifts with one of the others.”
All I could think was that if she left the next day I would never see her again. I was due to be discharged in three days, due in three days to return to my miserable old-man’s existence. The thought of never seeing her again made me do an odd thing; ten years later I still cringe with embarrassment. I don’t know what came over me—I don’t like outbursts of any kind and prefer not to be the butt of other people’s sentimentality. Being touched by other people upsets me; I actually find it physically unpleasant, and I instinctively pull away when I sense an imminent embrace or a caress. Because the last thing I want to do is to hurt anyone, I usually feign a sneeze or a violent fit of coughing so the person closing in on me will not think I am spurning the advance. (Of course my wife, Gerd, was not fooled. How many times did I cough in her face as we lay side by side in our narrow marriage bed; how many times did she turn away with cold, wounded eyes, reproaching me with her naked, slightly coarse back, which I could never bring myself to stroke or put an arm around?) But when I realized I was never going to see Stella again, I touched her. I was sitting up in my bed, she was perched on its edge, and suddenly I grabbed her right hand and pressed it against my cheek. (She had such a slender supple wrist, no sharp rings or jangling bracelets, just warm skin.) And she did not take her hand away—even after I let go of it. She stayed where she was, very still, very close.
Then something burst out of me: words … gibberish … sobs … I don’t know what all. I vomited, too, as if all the nastiness inside me was being forced up my gullet and out. And then I let out something like a howl.
“Hush now, Axel, hush,” she whispered. “It’s going to be okay, it’ll be okay.” She spoke to me the way a mother speaks to her child, comforting it. “Hush now, Axel, hush.”
It had been ages since anyone had called me Axel. I bowed my head. In gratitude. With Stella’s hand on my cheek.
Then she said, “We’re going to be friends, you and I. This isn’t the last time; you know that, don’t you? I can come to see you at your apartment, and we’ll have our chats, and we’ll have coffee. I want you to meet my daughter—you know, Amanda?— she’ll be five next week. And I want you to meet Martin.”
I felt a twinge of uneasiness. It might have been better to say goodbye there and then. There’s no denying that I looked forward to seeing Stella at the hospital, but that she should show up at my apartment, that she and I should sit on my gray sofa drinking coffee and chatting, seemed at that moment completely unlikely. In my mind the difficulties multiplied. Would I have to serve something with the coffee? What would we talk about? She was only twenty-five at the time. What did one say to a twenty-five-year-old? What would Money say? Maybe I was just a pathetic old man. I had never had many close friends; there had only been Isak Skald, really, and over the years he and I had developed a set of unwritten rules to govern our friendship. He called me Grutt, for example, and I called him Skald. It’s not that we were especially formal or polite with each other, this was simply what we did. We were careful when we discussed personal matters. Since he was my doctor, it was only natural for me to tell him about my physical ailments; and just as naturally, he responded by offering medical advice. But to save our friendship from being confused with a straightforward doctor-patient relationship, he informed me of his physical ailments, too. Since we both suffered from an enlarged prostate, this was an obvious topic of conversation. Occasionally we would talk about his wife, Else, that marvelous woman with the hands that could change a man’s life, but all in all I would say that we talked more about our prostates. And I don’t think we ever mentioned my Gerd.
Skald had heard that Stella and I were having these daily bedside chats, that she sometimes brought her lunch to my room instead of eating with her colleagues. Was it possible, he wondered, that I was infatuated with this young woman? I made it clear that I found such insinuations offensive. If Stella were to have coffee with me at my apartment, this was exactly the sort of comment I was worried about. When you got right down to it, there was no good reason for Stella and me to see each other. I had nothing to offer. I felt vaguely shy when she was around, and it bothered me. Shy and ashamed, even. As if I were seeing myself, my face and my body, with her eyes. These clumsy hands of mine with their stiff fingers, not nimble enough.
Once Stella and I were having a snack in my room. She kept fingering the silver locket that hung on a chain around her neck. It had been her mother’s. Finally the clasp came undone and the locket slid to the floor. Stella dropped onto all fours.
“Dammit,” she muttered, “dammit, I can’t see it.” But, after groping around for a while: “Here it is! Found it! Under the bed!” She stood up, hair a mess, a big smile on her face. “Got it!”
She brushed off her uniform and handed me the silver locket. It was so tiny in my hand. I looked at it lying there, glinting on my palm, and thought what an insult it was for something so small and silvery and feminine to be put into an ancient paw like mine. She sat on the edge of the bed with her back to me, gathered up her long hair, and bent her head, baring her long white neck. I looked away.
“The clasp is so tricky. Could you fasten it for me?”
I looked at the necklace between my fingers. I looked at the nape of her neck. I looked at my hands.
“I’m not very good with itty-bitty things like this.” I tried a little laugh.
“Sure you are, it’s easy,” she said. “It’s only hard to fasten if you’re the one wearing it.”
Face turned away, hair gathere
d up, she told me how this particular clasp worked. I looked at the nape of her neck and caught a faint whiff of perspiration and of something else I couldn’t put my finger on, a not unpleasant but rather spicy odor that always seemed to cling to Stella. Gently I laid the chain around her neck, my hands trembling, all the cuff links I was no longer capable of clipping to my shirtsleeves flashing through my mind.
“Can’t you manage it?” she asked.
“Now, now, be patient, Stella,” I whispered.
I eventually got the catch open. Then all I had to do was to hook it through a little loop in the chain and—click—that would be that. But even my good eye let me down—well, it would, wouldn’t it, watering, misting over—and my hands trembled even more.
In the end I completely botched it, and the locket slid down into her lap. She turned and smiled at me. I looked down.
“Just a minute,” she chirped, getting to her feet. “I’ll see if Lena’s down the hall, I can ask her to do it. Trust Mamma to leave me a necklace with such a tricky clasp. She probably thought I’d never be able to take it off and would have to keep it round my neck forever.”
She winked at me.
I nodded as she went out the door.
I curled my fingers in like claws.
“Butterfingers!” I hissed at my hands.
I bit off a chunk of bread. Chewed and chewed, but couldn’t seem to swallow.
Amanda
After the funeral, Martin the ostrich king will take Bee by the hand and bring her home. Martin isn’t my father. My father’s in Australia. Martin is Bee’s father; that’s why it’s up to him to take Bee by the hand and bring her back here. Bee will sleep in this room and wake up in this room, but Mamma won’t be here, and I won’t be here, and the plumber won’t be here.
Once, when Bee was just a baby, the ostrich king and I went to Copenhagen for my birthday. He had promised me a ride on the Ferris wheel. The old geezer told me that if it hadn’t been for his great-uncle in America, there wouldn’t be any Ferris wheels, and without Ferris wheels, the old geezer said, the world would have been a poorer place. Who knows? The old geezer says a lot of weird things. But it didn’t come to anything, that Ferris wheel ride. Instead, the ostrich king and I went on the roller coaster, up and down and up and down. Now I’m not afraid of anything; back then, though, I was afraid. The ostrich king just laughed at me and we did it again. Afterward we went back to the hotel room, and I lay on my bed and watched TV, and the ostrich king lay on his bed and slept. The curtains were drawn.
