Stella Descending

by Linn Ullmann

  “What makes you say that?” I asked him.

  “Because nights with Stella were anything but good,” he said.

  “In what way, anything but good?” I said.

  “We never slept.”

  “You never slept. Ever?”

  “Never. I didn’t want to sleep anymore. Bee was haunting me … this little baby … she did it on purpose, I’m sure of it, invaded my dreams, and it was getting so I hated her. My dreams were becoming more and more violent, more and more— how can I put it?—disgusting. In them I took off my clothes and jumped on her like an animal, entering her, fucking her, a baby, a deformed, abused, skinny, scabby baby—we were both deformed … one-legged, thirteen-fingered, dying things … in the end there was no knowing which was her and which was me … it was sick … and I’m not like that, you know? I’m not like that. It was just in these dreams. God, how I hated her! Not only at night but during the day too. This silent helpless little creature who never took her eyes off me and never behaved like other babies. And I couldn’t tell any of this to Stella. She was the child’s mother. I told her I had terrible nightmares, but not what they were about, just that I could no longer bear to sleep at night. I preferred to sleep during the day, when it was light, because then the pictures weren’t as vivid. I switched jobs, gave up selling furniture for a while, took to working nights, stacking crates in a warehouse. I’d come home at four in the morning and wake Stella.”

  “What did you do for the rest of the night once you’d woken Stella?” I ask.

  “We made up games to pass the time. We’d always played games anyway, daring each other to do things, telling each other stories, messing around… .

  “During the day, Stella went to work, took care of the children, cooked dinner, went to PTA meetings, visited women friends and Axel Grutt—all while I was asleep. I no longer participated in the day-to-day side of our life together. Not that I lay in bed and slept all day, that’s not what I mean; we ate our meals together, we dealt with the house, behaved like parents of a sort. Occasionally I might even take the girls into town or to the movies or help them with their homework. The years passed, and Bee got bigger. But to me she was still repulsive. When I went anywhere with children, I would make a point of holding Amanda’s hand, not Bee’s, and when Amanda got so big she wouldn’t hold my hand anymore, I told her she should at least hold her sister’s hand, so she wouldn’t get lost, although the truth is I had this fantasy that she would get lost and never come back, find a gingerbread house in the woods. But I became expert at hiding all this, and Stella was happy to see me getting involved with the kids—thinking up fun things to do with them, taking an interest in their welfare, kissing Bee in the presence of witnesses. Kissing Amanda cost me nothing, but then Amanda had always pulled away from me.

  “Like I said, I didn’t sleep all day, even though I worked nights, but I went through the motions, in my sleep as it were; taking in the day’s events much, I guess, as other people would take in some crazy dream: like a succession of abstract, often disjointed pictures that had both something and nothing to do with me. When evening came I would liven up. I went to work, and Stella went to bed early.

  “Eventually it reached the point where we lived—talked, fucked, and played—at night, in the hours between three and six—”

  Martin broke off, got up from his chair, and left the room.

  “I just have to get something,” he called back, and I heard his footsteps going up the stairs to the second floor and the three bedrooms: Stella and Martin’s room, Amanda’s room, Bee’s room. Moments later he returned. In his hands he had a large black blanket or shawl.

  “This shawl hung over the window in the bedroom to block out the morning light,” he said. “It began with this shawl, our nighttime games. How many years ago I couldn’t say, it must have been spring or summertime, Bee would have been about three, or maybe four. At any rate it was a nuisance, its being so warm and light outside both day and night, so Stella found this shawl in the attic and hung it over the window. I came home as usual around three or four in the morning and climbed into bed beside her. Then we lay there hand in hand, perfectly still, and watched the morning light gradually filtering in through the dark fabric, which was more worn in some places than others. Stella said, ‘Look at the woman on the shawl.’ ‘What woman?’ I said. ‘The woman bending down to pick a child up off the grass,’ she said. And then I saw it, the outline of a flickering magic-lantern slide: a woman bending down to pick a child up off the grass. But then the woman turned into a car driving flat out along a deserted freeway in the middle of the night. I told Stella that the woman had turned into a car driving flat out along a deserted freeway in the middle of the night, and she said that the freeway was actually a skyscraper, or a tower, and on the top of the skyscraper or tower was a tightrope walker, standing on one leg, singing. Yeah—and so it went on. We started up our own all-night picture show … and one night Stella said—or maybe it was me who said it—that the pictures might be trying to tell us something.”

  Martin ran a hand over the shawl before giving it to me.

  “To lie in bed at night and look at the black shawl over the window was a little like lying in the grass and looking at the clouds. Pictures would start to form. Faces. Nice or nasty, depending.”

  (III)

  FALL

  Stella

  Sometimes when I’m with you, Axel, when I come to visit you, I look at myself in the gilt mirror in the hall. Then I imagine that you come to stand behind me and that it is your face I see. You are old and ugly and I love you. But I don’t like it when you touch me. I find it repulsive. Your hands are cold. You won’t let go of me when I’m ready to leave.

  IT IS NIGHT. Martin is curled up in a ball in the middle of our big double bed, naked, skinny. Fists clenched, eyes squeezed tight shut, one arm covering his face as if he were warding off a blow. Or else he is sitting on the sofa in the living room, with the camera trained on the door, waiting for me to come back down and pick up where we left off.

  I look at my face in the mirror.

  During the day it’s not so easy to detect all the tension, or fear, or anger that is written so large on Martin’s face when he is asleep. I can see it, of course. After all the years we have lived together—of course I can see it. If I go right up close to him, feel his breath on my face, I can see it. If, instead of kissing him, I run my fingers over his lips, which are tight and hard and closed, I can feel it. If I start to count the tiny, almost invisible lines around his mouth, which he can no longer explain away… .

  I have a photographic memory. I remember in pictures. Martin’s face figures in so many of them, and in each picture there is another tight line around his mouth. He told me once that the reason we found living together so painful was that we always saw one another in close-up.

  And even now, after all that’s been said and done, there’s no rest to be had. I’m sure that if he were to open his eyes now, he would see me standing here watching him. He would see that I am still very close by.

  EVEN AS A CHILD I had trouble sleeping. Every time I felt myself falling asleep, I would think, Ah, at last I’m going to sleep—and then, of course, I didn’t. One day I told Mamma the reason I couldn’t sleep at night was that every time I thought I was finally drifting off, I seemed to be jolted out of it and found myself wide awake instead. “Well, then, you’ll just have to stop thinking that,” said Mamma. “You’ll have to stop thinking, Ah, at last I’m going to sleep.”

  But lying in bed at night thinking about how you’re not going to think about something is just the same as thinking about it—and I remained sleepless.

  “Think of something else, then,” said Mamma, who also couldn’t sleep at night. I inherited my sleeplessness from her. I’m happy to have inherited something of hers, although I wish I had inherited something other than insomnia—her beautiful hair, for example, or her hands. But I’m glad there is some proof that I am her daughter, a bond
between us.

  I never dared to get up when I couldn’t sleep. Which is how it came about that, when I was still just a child, I began to picture myself walking from room to room to look at the people I lived with. Pappa was not much to look at, not even in the imagination. He lay flat in bed, a lean gray man, snoring, with his head on the pillow. Mamma was another matter. I didn’t dare call out to her, even though I knew she was awake. Mamma got so angry—a tight-lipped sort of anger, it was—if I bothered her as she sat, night after night, on the sofa with her legs tucked under her, staring out the big window in the living room.

  “What are you thinking, Mamma?”

  No reply.

  “What are you thinking?”

  Mamma is like Bee. I look at her face, alien, impenetrable, hostile, like a landscape that is far too cold or far too hot, and I cannot imagine that we once shared the same body. I lay inside Mamma, and Bee lay inside me, but if I were to think of the three of us as an object of some sort, it would have to be a hatstand, with hooks sticking out in all directions.

  When I think about Mamma, the first thing that comes to mind is her silence. As a little girl I often sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon. Mamma makes dinner, maybe, and I draw or do my homework. We live with Pappa in a new house with big square windows. It’s winter; all the pictures from my early childhood are winter pictures. Sometimes I will stop whatever I am doing, put down my crayons or my books, hold my breath, not make a single sound, and look at Mamma standing by the kitchen window with a faraway look in her eyes, a cigarette between her fingers. All I can hear is the sound of her breathing. She makes no other sound—no sighing, no yawning, no swallowing or lip-smacking or humming or stomach rumblings, no rustling of clothes or jingling of bracelets. And this silence, Mamma’s silence, not only reigns when she is standing by the kitchen window with a faraway look in her eyes, it reigns at all times. And it is not just she who is silent, but everything she does and everything she touches. I sit at the kitchen table, holding my breath and thinking that I, Stella, age nine, have an utterly silent mother. When she lights a cigarette, I don’t hear the crackle of plastic being removed from the cigarette pack, no swoosh as she strikes a light on the side of the matchbox, no intake of breath from her lips as she takes the first puff. When she cooks dinner, I don’t hear the usual chinking of pans, glass, and cutlery. And when we go to the store to buy food, I hear only my own feet trudging through the wet snow. I never really realized how silent Mamma was until I became aware of the sounds other women made. I remember one woman—a lady, really—who visited our school when I was in first grade. She had come to talk to us about how to use a toothbrush properly. She didn’t look like a dentist. She didn’t smell of fluoride. She didn’t even wear a white coat, like the gruff old man in the basement—the school dentist—who was known as the Demon.

  No, this strange lady wore a tight red dress. She had big breasts that made me think of balloons, and she smelled of some heady perfume. But above all, she made a lot of noises. Every time she lifted the big red toothbrush up to the huge fleshcolored plastic jaw with the twenty-eight chattering teeth—in order to demonstrate how we ought to brush—the four bracelets on her right wrist jingled and jangled. Her high stiletto heels beat out their own distinctive clickety-clack rhythm as she walked across the linoleum floor, and the tight red dress, which was made of some sort of shiny synthetic material, rustled if she so much as drew breath. She jingled and jangled and rattled and rustled—and each time the heavy gold ring on the second finger of her left hand struck the teacher’s desk, it went clunk, clunk, clunk.

  Eventually, silence becomes a blanket term for everything about Mamma: thin, flat-chested, clean, and reserved. Her cleanliness knows no bounds. Over and over again she turns on the faucet and washes her lovely long hands, scrupulously, with unscented soap. And over and over again she whispers to me that I must remember to bathe in the evening and shower in the morning. She never lets me see her naked, and—until the day she becomes terminally ill and is admitted to my ward—I am never able to think of Mamma as a seeping, odorous, rumbling, reallive body. She is an angel. Not a luminous angel with wings and long golden hair, but an angel nonetheless, with an angel’s body and angel feet that always hover just above the ground.

  At the age of thirteen I try to adopt Mamma’s angelic appearance, without success. My body refuses to keep silent as hers does. My body bulges in all directions; it sweats and bleeds and shits. I can’t control it. It will not obey me. I’m ashamed of it. Everywhere it goes my body draws attention to itself. It’s so big, so conspicuous, always leaving some trace of itself behind. There go Stella and her body, thumpity-thump. There’s no way of hiding it: the stink, the shit, the belly rumblings, the rash on my hands.

  In my room I have a closet in which I hide stained sheets, panty hose, and panties. I know Mamma thinks I’m disgusting, but I don’t want her to know how disgusting. Eventually the closet is so full I can’t close the door properly, and at night, when I’m in bed, I can see the dark pile behind the door I cannot close threatening to spill out into the room.

  As I say: I remember in pictures, photographs. A picture of Mamma at night, sitting on the sofa, legs tucked under her. A picture of Mamma standing by the kitchen window, faraway look in her eyes, cigarette between her fingers. In both pictures her face is turned away. I have other pictures too, but in all of them she has her face turned away. As a result, I don’t recall her features all that well, her eyes, her mouth. I remember her hair, long and dark and shining. And I remember her hands, because they are beautiful and because sometimes she rubs my tummy when it aches. No other form of caress ever passes between us. Once, standing in the middle of the living room, I fling my arms around her waist, quite unprompted, and say, “Mamma!”

  But I don’t think she’s too happy about this, even if she does give my hair a quick brush with her fingertips and whisper, “Stella … oh, Stella.”

  I don’t have as many photographs of Pappa. Not in a waking state, at any rate. He sleeps a lot. At night, in the afternoon, and most certainly, as I am fond of imagining, during the day when he is at work. Pappa owns a gift shop in Oslo, where he sells all sorts of bric-a-brac. Behind the counter works an elderly lady called Miss Andersen; Pappa stays in the back room, keeping the books. I’m fond of imagining Pappa lying on the floor, surrounded by books, buried under a mound of books, sleeping the day away until it’s time to catch the train home and carry on sleeping.

  I have another picture of Pappa, almost the only one of him awake and in an upright position. We are alone in the house. Mamma is off somewhere. Sometimes she is just that: off somewhere. I never know where she is. She can be gone for a whole day and half the night too. Sometimes I can somehow hear she is back, or not exactly hear it but sense it. That she is in the house. That she is sitting on the sofa with her legs tucked under her. That the night is as it always is. But at this particular minute, on this particular day, Mamma is off somewhere, and both Pappa and I know for sure that she won’t be back for hours, days maybe.

  Pappa comes into my room with a laundry basket under his arm. He makes straight for the closet bulging with dirty sheets and stained underwear. I’m sitting on the bed. He pulls it all out, folds it, and lays it in the basket. Then he leaves the room. A little later, he pops his head round the door again and looks at me. His eyes are pale blue.

  “Come on,” he says. “We’ll get all this washed before she comes home. She doesn’t need to know anything about it. That’s what I do: wait with things until she’s not here. I mean, it’s easier that way.”

  AXEL, AGAIN. There you are, waiting for me outside my hotel in the middle of Copenhagen. It scared me, seeing you there. I don’t believe this is a coincidence. I believe you have actually followed me to Copenhagen. And there you are, on the street outside my hotel: courteous, false, ancient, and infatuated, telling me you have business in Denmark. D’you want me to laugh out loud? D’you want me to scream? What do you want? Wha
t do you want with me?

  For two days I’ve had to sit through lecture after lecture on nursing the dying: pain relief, comfort, counseling, care. And now here’s the forever dying Axel Grutt, waiting for me outside my hotel. And he won’t be content with just going for coffee. He wants to take me for a ride on a Ferris wheel.

  A famous actress spoke to us about her son’s death, a moving story of white-clad nurses, cool hands, thin bandages, pain-killing morphine, fluttering curtains. She kept repeating the words death with dignity, death with dignity, a truly beautiful death, while becoming tears rolled down her cheeks. When she finished, I asked if I might say a few words. I stepped up onto the stage, stuck two fingers down my throat, and threw up. The actress gasped, Oh, my God! I wiped my lips and asked for a glass of water.

  “I’m afraid of heights,” I tell Axel. “And besides, I’m a bit pushed for time.”

  “Afraid you might fall, or afraid you might jump?”

  “Afraid I won’t be able to get down again.”

  “I’ll hold your hand.”

  Later, you tell me that you are related to the inventor of the Ferris wheel, an American engineer greater than Gustave Eiffel. Are you trying to impress me, Axel?

  The worst thing about the Ferris wheel is not that it goes fast, because it doesn’t; it moves with terrible slowness. The worst thing is that it stops when you get to the top, and there’s no way of knowing when it will start to turn again.

  THIS IS MY FIRST PICTURE of Martin. Imagine, if you will, a large bright room bare of furniture. The ceiling is high, and the wooden floor is worn. It could probably do with being sanded, but I like it as it is. I have one big window with fine, almost transparent pale-blue curtains, and in the center of the room is a new sofa. It’s green. On the sofa sits Martin. He has had himself hoisted up the side of the building, has climbed in through the window, and now he’s refusing to leave. He has set the sofa on the floor and himself on the sofa. He’s laughing. He reaches his hand out to me. He says something or other, but the sound seems to get lost. I don’t catch it, even though his lips are moving. The doorway in which I’m standing, between the bedroom and the living room, has a high sill that I always trip over on my way to bed at night.