Stella Descending

by Linn Ullmann

  Martin did not answer. We sat on either side of the dining table, and neither of us said a thing. I knew if I waited long enough he wouldn’t be able to stand the silence.

  “I don’t know what it is with Bee,” he said, after a while.

  “She was born less than a year after you moved in with Stella?”

  “She was conceived at Høylandet,” he replied. “We were there just after we met, for Harriet’s—my grandmother’s— birthday party.”

  “Were you happy when Stella told you she was pregnant?”

  “I thought she grew more and more beautiful with each month that passed. Stella was exceptionally tall and now she was also exceptionally big. She was two and I was one. I looked at her and she was two. She was Bee and she was Stella, and with them I could find rest.”

  “You already knew she was going to be called Bee?”

  “Yes and no. We had decided to name her after my Swedish great-grandmother, Beatrice. We knew we were going to call her Bea—B-E-A—short for Beatrice. And we knew she had been conceived at Høylandet. At night I used to lie with my head on Stella’s stomach and tell the baby all the wonderful stories I could think of. I could picture her, almost walking out of her mother, a perfect little creature, a perfect little face. Sometimes we called her Bea. Sometimes we called her Herr Poppel.”

  “But you said, ‘Yes and no?’ ”

  “Yeah, well, you see, when it came to it she was never a Beatrice, or a Bea with a B-E-A, she was just Bee.”

  Martin paused for a moment, seemingly deep in thought. He lit a cigarette. “Those were good times.”

  “Good times for both of you? Stella was never unwell during her pregnancy?”

  “No, she was never unwell.”

  “And Stella’s other daughter, Amanda, how did she take all this? She must have been around five when Stella got pregnant.”

  “Something like that, yes. I don’t know. Amanda and I have never been close. I’ll be honest with you. Amanda was—how shall I put it?—Amanda was in the way, Amanda was—”

  “—never anyone’s favorite,” I murmured.

  “Sorry?” Martin looked puzzled.

  “I said, Amanda was never anyone’s favorite. I beg your pardon. It annoys the life out of the guys on the squad, too, my finishing other people’s sentences. Bad habit!”

  Martin looked at me. Then he said, “Amanda had nothing to do with Stella and me. Now and then I might have acted as though I was fond of her. It was important for Stella that I should be fond of her. I would take her on my lap, but she always wriggled free. I couldn’t do it, this father thing, with Amanda. She annoyed me. She was in the way.”

  “How exactly was she in the way?”

  “We had a lot of fun together back then. Playing.”

  “Playing? What do you mean? Who was playing?”

  “Stella and I,” he replied. “We played games. We’d meet at supermarkets and pretend we didn’t know each other. We’d each take a basket and wander around the store, flirting with strangers, stealing a pack of spaghetti, juggling with apples, doing a little dance with the brooms, and so on, until one of us, usually Stella, burst out laughing. Which meant that I had won.”

  “You had won.”

  “I had won. One day I got into an argument with the checkout lady because she insisted that a cauliflower is a cauliflower.”

  “I see… .”

  “Stella was standing in line behind me. We acted as if we didn’t know each other. We’d made a deal beforehand that neither of us was allowed to use a basket or a cart. We’d collected as much as we could manage to carry in our arms, and then some… . Okay, so there she was in line right behind me, very pregnant, her arms laden with milk, bread, fish fingers, meat-balls, soap powder, potatoes, apples, oatmeal, and lightbulbs, her face getting redder and redder. I remember thinking that she looked close to collapse—and then I got into this discussion with the woman at the register as to whether a cauliflower really was a cauliflower.”

  I asked Martin, “So in your eyes a cauliflower is not a cauliflower?”

  “I maintained, for the sake of argument, that cauliflower was broccoli and broccoli was cauliflower,” he answered. “Just to annoy the people behind me in line—other people’s contempt is so easily aroused, other people’s aggression—and to see how long Stella could last behind me.”

  “With her arms full.”

  “With her arms full, right. So I was standing there, pointing at the receipt, which stated that I had purchased five heads of cauliflower, and insisting that I had purchased five heads of broccoli. The checkout lady sighed and said that, in any case, cauliflower—which was on special—cost the same as broccoli, so it really didn’t make any difference what you called it, at which I shook my head and said, ‘Makes no difference? Makes no difference? Fair’s fair! If I buy broccoli, then as far as I’m concerned, broccoli is what it should say right here, and if I buy cauliflower, then it should say cauliflower.’ The line was starting to get restless; I could hear muttering behind me and the odd groan. Stella butted me with her enormous belly, I could feel the tip of her navel against my back, as if to tell me enough is enough, and a man farther down the line yelled, ‘Come on, cut the crap!’ I pulled myself up to my full height and said again, ‘Fair’s fair. I refuse to accept a receipt that states I have purchased something I have not purchased.’ The checkout lady heaved another great sigh and pulled out a folder from under the register. It contained pictures of all the different vegetables in the world. Triumphantly she located the picture of cauliflower, with the word CAULIFLOWER written in block letters underneath it. I looked at the picture. I looked at the letters. A hush fell around me. I could feel Stella’s breath on the back of my neck. ‘Martin, give it up, please, the joke’s over.’

  “ ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘Fair’s fair!’

  “ ‘No?’ the checkout lady repeated, flabbergasted.

  “ ‘No!’ I said firmly. ‘It’s wrong. The book’s wrong, you’re wrong, everybody’s wrong. This is a crazy, crazy world.’ I pulled a cauliflower out of my bag, held it up in front of me like a skull, and announced, ‘This is broccoli!’ ”

  “And then what happened?”

  “Well, then a lot of things happened at once,” Martin said. “First there was this almighty groan, a collective groan, the unmistakable sound of tempers snapping. A young man from the back of the line charged up to the front and made a dive at me with both fists clenched. The checkout lady broke into hysterical laughter. And Stella dropped her armful of shopping on the floor. When she did, a lady came running over to her, crying, ‘Oh, my dear … oh, look at you … here, let me help you.’ Everyone went quiet. Stella was sitting on the floor, her legs stretched straight out, in a puddle of water, surrounded by groceries. Even the man who was about to lay into me had gone quiet, stopped in his tracks, his face turned to Stella, his fist still in midair. Stella’s eyes met mine. ‘It’s Bea,’ she whispered. ‘Bea’s on the way.’ She looked all around, meeting the eyes of the others in the line. ‘Look at the mess I’ve made … I’m sorry … water everywhere … Martin, can you get the car?’

  “Then: ‘Now will you stop it?’ she pleaded. ‘This game, I mean?’

  “ ‘Yes, of course.’ I dropped to the floor beside her, put my arms around her, and we both started to giggle. The other people in line didn’t know what to think. Some of them laughed, others shook their heads, and the nice woman who had come to Stella’s aid picked the groceries up off the floor and put them in a basket. I got to my feet and thanked her. A little man, over seventy if he was a day, with not a hair on his head or his face and with tiny gnarled hands, bent gingerly over Stella, who was still on the floor, and asked if she really did know me or whether she was just a bit confused, due to the circumstances. He pointed to the puddle of water. She said, yes, of course she knew me. ‘So you were standing right behind him in line while he was going on and on, insisting that cauliflower was broccoli, and you never said a single wo
rd?’ he asked. Yes, she said, she supposed she was. And then the man crouched down and whispered in her ear, ‘I hope, for your sake, that you know what you’re giving birth to today!’ The man pointed his right index finger at Stella’s stomach.‘Wretched little thing,’ he said. ‘Wretched little creature.’ Then he stood up and walked off.”

  Martin removed another cigarette from his pack but did not light it. Instead, he sat there fiddling with it.

  “That’s when Stella screamed,” he said at last.

  “Stella screamed?” I said.

  “Yes, she screamed. She was screaming at the old man, screaming that he was an evil old man, that he had no right to say things like that, that he should come back this minute and beg the unborn child’s forgiveness, that for all he knew she could be carrying an angel. But the man, who by this time was on his way out of the store, just shook his head and disappeared through the door with his shopping bag. I did my best to calm her down. The whole place was in an uproar. She was crying and screaming. Screaming at me to make that man come back here, screaming that he had to beg Bea’s forgiveness. But she had gone into labor. I couldn’t worry about him. We had to get to the hospital; there was no time to lose.”

  Amanda

  When Bee was born, at first I thought she was really strange, because she never cried and because she had big eyes, like a cat. But Bee’s not strange.

  The old geezer showed me a magic trick once; he made this little doll all dressed in red disappear before my eyes. It was one of those old-fashioned dolls with big blue eyes and long eyelashes and red lips that open and say Ma-ma. I asked him if he could do the same thing with people, get them to disappear like that. He thought I meant Bee. He thought I wanted Bee to disappear. He said it was normal for children to be jealous of their little brothers or sisters. He had felt like killing his own little sister when he was a boy, a long time ago. But that wasn’t what I meant. I was wondering whether he could make me disappear, because I wanted to be where the vanished people are, to see what it’s like there, to round that world.

  Corinne

  “I had a dream right after Bee was born,” Martin said. “A bloody clump on the operating table, a shapeless living thing, frail and exhausted, a thing that was dying but still breathing, and Stella was crying and saying, ‘But we can save her, Martin, we can save her!’ And when the clump pulls itself up, when the clump stops being a clump, Stella shouts at me to take her in my arms so she won’t fall and hurt herself.”

  Martin lit a cigarette.

  “I never used to dream before Bee was born. Stella said, ‘Of course you dream at night, Martin, you just don’t remember. Everybody dreams,’ said Stella. But I was sure I had never dreamt before. I had slept soundly every night, and if scenes were being played out in my mind’s eye, I certainly wasn’t aware of it. My nights were still and blue.”

  “But then Bee came into the world, and the very first night after she was born you had a dream about her, right?”

  “A horrible dream. A bloody clump, half alive, half dead, pulling itself up.”

  And it didn’t stop there. The next night he had another dream. This time he dreamt about Bee’s eyes. Bee was all eyes, eyes that were far too big. He had fathered a baby with eyes that were far too big, far too round, the eyes of a beast of prey. And so it went. Every night he dreamt about the child, and every dream was worse than the one before. Bee came to him in his sleep in a succession of different guises. She was disgusting things that he had spat out or with which he had fouled the street, she was battered, abused, covered in bruises and sores.

  Sometimes in his dreams he was abusing her, lying on top of her in her bassinet. She was all eyes.

  She was all eyes, and yet she was always Bee.

  “She was Bee, born of woman, not quite a month old, and yet,” says Martin, “and yet… .”

  He showed me photographs of Bee from those first weeks. Martin was not the type to whip out the family pictures every chance he got, so it was me who asked.

  “Did you take any photographs?” I asked.

  “I didn’t, but Stella did,” he said.

  I bowed my head over pictures of Bee. In her bassinet; on the floor at the moment she lifted her head for the first time; on the changing table enveloped in a red towel. Exceptionally big eyes, yes, there was no getting away from it, but otherwise, as far as I could see, just another pink-and-white baby girl.

  “I woke up every morning with these images, these pictures in my head,” Martin told me. “Not the photographs you’re looking at here, but night pictures I was powerless to ward off. She’d be lying in her bassinet in our room, and Stella would get up to hold her, though she didn’t cry much. People told us we were lucky to have a baby who never cried. Stella would get up and put Bee to her breast. ‘Look at her,’ Stella would say. ‘Look how she feeds.’ But the pictures were still there. I mean, she was lying right there, I could see that, I could accept that, a helpless little creature sucking at her mother’s breast, and it would be light outside, I’d hear that it was morning, hear someone slamming a car door or calling to a dog. You’d think I could have stroked the back of that soft, furrowed infant neck or taken one of those tiny hands in my big one. But no! Because night after night I was haunted by this child. This alien child. This alien child. She was so alien; do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Of course Stella noticed that I wouldn’t touch our baby. That I turned away every time she came toward me with Bee in her arms. To begin with she was furious. ‘What is your problem?’ she’d scream. ‘What kind of way is this to behave?’ ‘Give me time,’ I’d say. I told her I was jealous, that the baby took up all her attention and there was none left for me. She’d shake her head and stalk out of the room. But after a while she retreated into herself. The sound of her crying would reach me in every room. I’d go to her and put my arms around her. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she’d say. ‘Don’t you love her?’ ‘Of course I love her,’ I’d say. ‘Of course I do, Stella.’ I’d work myself up into a temper. ‘Of course I do! Do you think you’re the only one who knows how to love a child? Is yours the only love that’s good enough?’ I’d yell at her, even though I knew how hollow it sounded. She would yell back that it was hard to believe a man loved his own child when he couldn’t even touch her. And after a while she began to challenge me. She turned nasty—that’s the only way to put it. In the blink of an eye, Stella could turn downright nasty. I would see it in her face, the little smile twisting her lips, a hand brushed swiftly through her hair, her accusing—no, mocking—eyes.

  “We’d be sitting at the dinner table, Amanda, Stella, and me, this table here,” and Martin thumped the table. “Stella would be sitting where you’re sitting. I’d be sitting here. Amanda would be over there. Bee would be in her bassinet in the bedroom, but sometimes we’d hear her grunt. Even though she never really cried, she did make some sounds. Stella would keep on eating. Bee would grunt louder. Grunt is the wrong word, though. She whimpered. Yes, that’s it. She whimpered. And Stella would go on eating.

  “Amanda would say, ‘Mamma, Bee’s crying.’

  “Stella would say, ‘Yes, so she is.’

  “Then Amanda would ask, ‘Should I go get her?’

  “And Stella would say, ‘Martin should get Bee.’ Then she would add softly, ‘Thanks, Amanda, you’re a good big sister, but it’s Martin’s turn to get Bee.’

  “So I would get up and go to the bedroom to get Bee. Lift her out of her bassinet, walk back to the dining room, and hand her to Stella.

  “And the dreams continued. Sometimes I would get it into my head that the baby was evil. That this baby was, in fact, willfully haunting me. I grew convinced that Stella had given birth to some evil thing.

  “It became more and more difficult to deny Stella’s accusations, silent though they were, now. We’d been looking forward to this, she and I, to Bee, little Bee, named after my great-grandmother with the ostrich-feather hat.

>   “To make amends I tried to devote myself to my stepdaughter instead. I tried to get closer to Amanda. I took her to the movies, picked her up from school, attended PTA meetings. For her seventh birthday I took her to Copenhagen. We went to Tivoli Gardens and ate popcorn and cotton candy. I had managed to persuade Stella not to come with us, to stay at home and take it easy with Bee.

  “ ‘We all need a bit of time,’ I said, tugging Amanda’s hair. ‘Time together and time apart. Amanda and I will manage just fine without you two for a couple of days.’ This said in a gently teasing, tender manner. Stella, happy that I was at last taking an interest in Amanda but disappointed, nonetheless, that things still weren’t working out with Bee, merely nodded and smiled. Amanda hissed at me not to tug her hair.

  “Afterward, when Stella was out of earshot, Amanda turned her face up at me and said, ‘We’re not friends, you and I, and don’t you forget it!’

  “ ‘No, no, of course not,’ I said, somewhat taken aback, although in my heart of hearts I felt the same way. And then I said, ‘So why do you want to go to Copenhagen with me for your birthday?’

  “ ‘Because I want to go to Tivoli,’ Amanda said. ‘I want to ride the Ferris wheel.’

  “And that was that. We went to Copenhagen. We celebrated her birthday in true time-honored fashion. We went to Tivoli. We rode the Ferris wheel. And best of all, in the hotel room that first night, in the narrow bed next to Amanda’s narrow bed, I slept. And I slept. A sleep without dreams. A sleep with no pictures. And the night after that, too, and the night after that. Three nights in a hotel in Copenhagen with no dreams of any sort, the pictures in my mind’s eye faded away, and I thought, Now I can go home to Stella and Bee and put my arms around them both and tell them that I love them.”

  When Martin and Amanda got back from Copenhagen, Martin walked straight into the bedroom, where Stella was lying asleep with Bee. He hugged them both. Later that evening, he gave Bee her bath, lowering her into the lukewarm water, filling his cupped hand with water, and trickling it gently over her head. He did this several times, filled his cupped hand with water and trickled it over her head, until she actually smiled. She’s smiling at me, he said to himself. You’re smiling at me. He lifted her out of the tub, laid her on the changing table, and wrapped her in a big red towel. Two huge eyes gazed at him with wonder, and he gazed back with wonder every bit as great.