Stella Descending

by Linn Ullmann

  “An accident,” the guys on the squad say. “It was their own fault, sure. They were irresponsible, sure. But it wasn’t a crime. People who know them, and there aren’t many, say their marriage wasn’t that bad. Not that bad!”

  “Any marriage that’s not that bad is better than most marriages,” say my fellow detectives. And I would have said the same, if I had not been bothered by this twinge in my stomach every time I sat face-to-face—

  I broke my own train of thought. I said, “Let’s go over it one more time, Martin.”

  Martin lit a cigarette, considered me. “Is that really necessary?”

  “Is what necessary?”

  “To go over it again? I liked it better when we were swapping stories.”

  “Let me remind you that I am here as a representative of the law and it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything… . Once upon a time, six days ago, Stella was still alive. The date is August 27, 2000.”

  “We woke up around eight,” Martin said. “We were woken by the barking of the dog that never barks.”

  “Hoffa. Isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Odd name for a dog.”

  “It was named after Jimmy Hoffa.”

  Martin looked around, as if expecting the dog to come bounding into the room.

  “It’s not here right now,” he said. “I’ve packed it off somewhere.”

  I checked my notes. “So. The dog barked and you two woke up after sleeping for how long? Three hours?”

  “Right, but there was nothing unusual about that. Many’s the time we didn’t get any more sleep than that. I still dread sleep more than I dread sleeplessness.”

  Martin paused and lit a cigarette.

  “Stella and I woke with a start and ran down the hall. Hoffa had shit all over the floor. He’s a pathetic excuse for a dog. Have I mentioned that? The kind of dog you feel like hitting every time it lifts its head and looks at you. It’s got those eyes. That sort of look in them. It expects to be beaten, and it would never occur to it to bite back. And on this particular morning it had done its business in the hall, and there it was, standing at the door, barking. We woke up and everything was … turned upside down. Nothing was as it should be. We were both staggering around like sleepwalkers. I tried unsuccessfully to rub the sleep from my eyes. Stella was feeling nauseated and had to make a sudden dash for the bathroom to throw up. It was sultry, hot, sunny, and stifling. The dog that never barked was barking. There was shit all over the floor. The church bells were ringing. It was Sunday and the church bells were ringing. Amanda came running down the stairs, her hair all mussed up and her cheeks blotchy. She had pulled on a crumpled white T-shirt. Her legs were long and brown, her breasts were full. ‘What’s going on?’ she whispered to Stella. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘I’m feeling nauseous,’ Stella said. We all stood there in the hall, surrounded by piles of dog shit, Amanda, Stella, and me—and the dog. Bee was missing. That’s why the dog was barking. Bee had gone out without the dog. She always walked the dog in the morning. It was her dog. Her responsibility. But now she was missing.

  “It didn’t take us long to find her. She was standing outside our next-door neighbors’ house in her blue nightgown, gazing into their garden. She’s all eyes, that child! On the other side of the fence, two girls were jumping on a trampoline. Up and down, up and down, up and down. They’re Bee’s classmates, these two. Although mates is hardly the right word. A few months back these same girls had kicked Hoffa in the belly. The dog hadn’t quite been itself since. The girls’ kicking left its mark on Bee, too. Now and then she would just disappear, and when she did we usually found her exactly the way we found her this time, standing outside our neighbors’ garden gate, staring, Bee on one side of the fence and the girls on the other. Up and down, up and down, up and down on the trampoline. It’s a strange summertime sight, this: children bouncing up and down on a trampoline. None of us, not Stella, not Amanda, not I, could tear ourselves away from the sight of these two girls bouncing up and down.”

  Martin lit a cigarette.

  “We were quite a sight ourselves,” he says. “A family of four with a pathetic dog in tow, standing outside the neighbors’ garden gate. All of us in our night things, all four with messed-up hair, and all four”—Martin thought for a moment—“all four of us down for the count. That’s the only way I can put it. We were knocked out, licked. We’d lost the war. We were refugees in a strange land. When the mother of one of the girls on the trampoline caught sight of us through an open French window and came toward us with a steaming cup of tea in her hand, we didn’t stir. We stood outside her garden gate, huddled together like a bunch of ragamuffins. She came closer, her head tilted to the side. ‘What are you doing there? What do you want? Why aren’t you at home? What are doing out here in your night things?’

  “Suddenly Stella seemed to come to life. She cleared her throat. She pointed at the two girls on the trampoline.

  “ ‘Those two girls kicked my daughter’s dog,’ she said quietly, ‘and I think they ought to apologize.’

  “The trampoline girl’s mother looked flabbergasted.

  “ ‘But Stella,’ she said, lingering over the name, ‘we sorted all that out months ago. The dog was loose, the girls were afraid … none of us can say exactly what happened, can we?’

  “The trampoline girl’s mother cast a perplexed glance at Bee, as if to say, And we can’t believe anything she says, that’s for sure.

  “ ‘I know exactly what happened,’ Stella said drowsily. She had almost fallen asleep again, asleep on her feet there, outside the neighbors’ garden gate, giving up with a sigh. She had been like this ever since that time she was sick: a fleeting spark, soon snuffed.

  “ ‘Oh, who cares,’ she muttered.

  “She turned her back on the woman.

  “ ‘Come on,’ she said to us. She took Bee by the hand and started to walk away.

  “Amanda, the dog, and I turned away, too, and followed her home.

  “The rest of that day passed in a dreamlike haze,” Martin told me. “Stella and I slept a lot, couldn’t seem to wake up properly. The black shawl fluttered gently over the bedroom window. Before, Stella always used to insist on taking the shawl down during the day, to let the light in. But we never took it down now. It hung over the window, pinned there by four thumbtacks, one blue, two red, and one yellow. We could hear the Nintendo in Amanda’s room. Bee had curled up in the basket with the dog. They often lay like that, those two, the dog with his leg over Bee or Bee with her arm around the dog. All was quiet, not a sound except for the relentless piip-piip-tjoom-piip-piip-tjoom from Amanda’s room. Stella and I lay hand in hand on the bed, on top of the eiderdown, staring at the ceiling.

  “ ‘Listen to how quiet it is,’ she said.

  “ ‘Hmmm.’ I grunted and drowsed on.

  “ ‘You’d never believe there was a family living in this house,’ she said. ‘With children and all.’

  “I yawned.

  “ ‘It’s not natural.’

  “A gentle breeze was blowing outside. The black shawl over the window rose and fell.

  “ ‘Look, there’s Herr Poppel,’ Stella said, propping herself up on her elbows.

  “ ‘Yep,’ I said, ‘there she is.’

  “Then the rain started.

  “We fell asleep eventually,” Martin said. “We fell asleep when the rain came. It’s so nice to be lulled to sleep by the sound of rain. The kids were used to our sleeping during the day when we weren’t at work, so they didn’t disturb us. After a while, though, Bee did wander through to our room.

  “ ‘Mamma,’ she said.

  “ ‘Let me sleep,’ Stella murmured.

  “ ‘But I’ve got something to tell you,’ Bee said.

  “ ‘Later, honey,’ said Stella.

  “Then Stella reached out her arms and pulled Bee onto the bed.

  “ �
�Why don’t you snuggle up here with me for a little while,’ she whispered. ‘And we’ll have a nice nap here, all three of us.’

  “When we woke up again, maybe a half hour later, it was still raining. Bee had gone in to Amanda. We were alone in the room. We chatted about this and that. Stella reminded me of the time I delivered the sofa and almost jumped out her ninth-floor window. Then she started to cry.

  “ ‘I wish we could start all over again,’ she sobbed. ‘I wish you were standing outside my window again. I wish we could celebrate your grandmother’s seventy-fifth birthday again. I wish we could have Bee again. More than anything else, I wish that we could have … I don’t like all this silence.’

  “I stroked her hair. I wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted from me, so I said, ‘Would you like me to sing to you?’

  “So I sang to Stella,” Martin said. “Songs she liked. Songs I had sung to her when she was sick. Songs that made her happy.”

  “I didn’t know you could sing,” I said.

  “When I was a little boy my grandmother Harriet used to sing to me. Stella didn’t like Harriet. But she softened slightly toward her when I told the story of how my grandfather ran off and left her in the lurch when she was a young girl with a baby on the way. She had heard that story a thousand times before, but all at once she seemed to be listening to it in a different way. My grandfather fell in love with an actress, I told her. Loved her from afar, that is. Fell in love, not just with her but with his own dreams of stardom. Farming wasn’t for him, and he couldn’t have cared less about Grandma or the child she was carrying.

  “Suddenly Stella sat up in bed and said, ‘Hey, the sun’s come out. Let’s go get everyone something nice to eat.’

  “That was fine by me, so we jumped out of bed. We told the kids we were going out to pick up something for dinner and wouldn’t be gone long. We drove past the apartment block on Frognerplass where we had lived in the early days, and I said, ‘Wasn’t it you who said you’d like to start all over again?’

  “ ‘Uh-huh,” Stella said hesitantly.

  “ ‘Well, that’s easily arranged,’ I said.

  “ ‘No games now, Martin,’ Stella pleaded. ‘I’m hungry. The kids are waiting for us.’

  “But I wasn’t listening to her. I parked the car. Dragged her out of the passenger seat and up to the front door. I asked her if she remembered the view from the roof. She nodded. We used to go out on the roof in the old days; there was a skylight we could climb through.

  “ ‘Know what?’ I said. ‘We’re going back up on that roof.’

  “She nodded again.

  “We didn’t have to wait too long before someone let himself out of the building and we seized the chance to slip through the door. We took the stairs, not the elevator.”

  All this time, Martin had been running something through his fingers. It was a little silver locket.

  “I can’t explain it any other way,” Martin said, “except to say that something happened to us up there on the roof. We woke up. We became our old selves again. Maybe it was the view, maybe it was that giddy feeling, maybe it was the thought that we could actually start over. We teetered back and forth, back and forth, along the edge of the roof. Daring each other, just like we had done that time in the store when Stella’s water broke and Bee was on the way and everything changed. It was a game. It wasn’t in earnest. It was a game. Then we turned to face each other. I opened my arms and she wavered toward me, taking little bitty steps like a tightrope walker. I once saw a tightrope walker dancing along her rope on tiptoe, a pink parasol in one hand and the hem of her dress in the other. That’s how Stella looked, like a doll, sort of like a doll, and we stood there, wrapped in each other’s arms, and Stella whispered to me that from now on everything was going to be fine.

  “ ‘I’m not a tree,’ she said, ‘and it really is possible; it really is possible to start all over again.’ We both gazed up at the sky, and it was exactly like lying on the grass on a summer’s evening, staring at the drifting clouds, and Stella laughed, let go of me, and pointed to a blue cloud shaped like a face, with a nose, forehead, two or three eyes, and a big mouth, and she said, ‘Look, Martin, there’s Herr Poppel.’ ”

  Video Recording: Stella & Martin

  The House by the Lady Falls

  8/27/00, 5:55 A.M.

  MARTIN: I can hear someone tramping on the stairs. Who’s that tramping on my stairs? Could it be Amanda? No, Amanda is asleep. Could it be Bee? No, Bee is asleep. Could it be the plumber? No, the plumber is asleep. Could it be Stella?

  STELLA: Martin, put that camera down.

  MARTIN: This is Stella. My wife. More beautiful than beautiful. She got mad at me a little while ago and stormed upstairs. Now she’s back. Nice to see you, Stella. Greetings from Mr. Insurance Agent Gunnar R. Owesen and myself.

  STELLA: Martin! Put that camera down!

  MARTIN: But we’re not finished.

  STELLA: We’re not?

  MARTIN: No, Stella, we’re not.

  STELLA: Put that camera down and come to bed. It’s almost morning.

  MARTIN: Take the camera for a moment.

  STELLA: Okay. Now what?

  MARTIN: What do you see, Stella?

  STELLA: I see your face.

  MARTIN: And what do you say?

  STELLA: I say, This is Martin. My husband. He has blue eyes, although sometimes when he thinks no one is watching him, his eyes are almost green. On his chin he has a little sore spot that never heals. Right now he is sitting on the avocado-green sofa, staring at the ceiling. I wonder what he’s thinking. Maybe he’s not thinking about anything. Maybe he’s thinking about me. Maybe he’s thinking that everything has turned to ashes. That we all went up in flames anyway.

  MARTIN: Stella, put the camera down and let’s go to bed.

  STELLA: Say good night to Mr. Insurance Agent Gunnar R. Owesen!

  MARTIN: Good night, Gunnar R. Owesen.

  STELLA: Good night, Gunnar R. Owesen.

  MARTIN: Sleep tight. And sweet dreams.

  (V)

  FALL

  Stella

  When I lost my footing and fell toward the ground, I flung my long arms around my tummy and said, Now we’re flying, you and I. You’re no bigger than a fingernail. You’re a bulge in the mucous membrane, a spongy little blob, an excrescence. You have unlimited depths. You could be anyone you wanted to be. Even a tree, if you set your mind to it. Although I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve known a few trees in my time, and they don’t have much to say for themselves. Me, I get nervous around trees. My body rumbles and roars and leaves its mark wherever it goes. It’s embarrassing. There were times when I too wished I were a tree, a body that left no trace of itself behind. But things didn’t work out that way. I bled. I laughed. When I was expecting Amanda I used to wonder what sort of face she would have. That, to me, was the greatest mystery of all. Not only was I going to have a baby, but that baby would have a face. And when I was expecting Bee, I wondered what sort of face she would have. And now it’s your turn.

  Now it’s your turn.

  You are the mystery.

  And someday, very soon, I will give you a name.

  LINN ULLMANN

  Stella Descending

  Born in 1966, Linn Ullmann is a graduate of New York University, where she studied English literature and began her graduate studies before returning to Oslo in 1990 to pursue a career in journalism. She had established herself as a prominent literary critic when her first novel, Before You Sleep , was published in 1998 and became a critically acclaimed bestseller throughout Europe. Ullmann writes a column for Norway’s leading newspaper and lives in Oslo with her husband, son, two stepchildren, and a dog.

  ALSO BY LINN ULLMANN

  Before You Sleep

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2004

  Translation copyright © 2003 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Ullmann Linn, 1966–

  [Når jeg er hos deg. English]

  Stella descending / Linn Ullmann; translated from the

  Norwegian by Barbara Haveland.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Oslo: Tiden Norsk, 2001.

  I. Title.

  PT8951.31.L56N3713 2003

  839.8’2374—dc21

  200243431

  www.anchorbooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42795-3

  v3.0