Gøhril Gabrielsen - The Looking-Glass Sisters

I’m falling and falling in the dream, but wake up at the moment my body smacks against the floor. The pain of the collision overwhelms me. Yet the surprise is worse: to find my old nightdress way up my stomach, my pubic region dismally bared and naked, the helplessness, the gaze towards the books and the dust under the bed, the whole situation confirming the fact that I have gone down, down and under.

I’m unable to get up from the floor. I haven’t had the strength for several years to get up from the floor unaided.

‘Ragna! Ragna!’

She comes padding from a hiding place in the house, is suddenly standing in the room staring at me with black eyes, open-mouthed. Her jaws are working, her arms shaking; she radiates a deep urge to tie me up, to lash her prey tightly.

Clack, clack.

She is standing directly over me. Her mouth is dribbling, her black eyes glitter hungrily towards the flesh that I scarcely can move.

‘Yes,’ she whistles.

‘Can you help me up? I was dreaming and fell on the floor.’

‘Yes,’ she sighs huskily, gripping me by the arm, dragging me closer to the bed, heaving in an attempt to pull me up.

‘No, no, not like that, Ragna. Be more careful!’

She moans and supports herself, presses her fists in under my arms, strains, and with a sudden heave she throws my upper body towards the mattress. I grab hold of the foam rubber with all I’ve got in the way of hands and nails, while she, with a hard grasp round my feet, flings the rest of my body up.

I lie there in a twisted, impossible position, right on the edge of the bed, waiting for her to get hold of my bottom and push me over. I whimper, cling to the bedclothes, turn my head towards her as a sign that I am waiting for her to continue, the final lift.

Ragna stands in the middle of the floor, grinning with her mouth open. I must look a bit surprised, for now she starts to sneer and laugh, throwing her upper body forward in small jerks, holding her stomach. Her laughter does not surprise me, nor the sound of it. To anyone uninitiated, it will sound like hearty trilling. I who know her hear traces of malicious pleasure.

‘Well, help me!’

The small jerks become faster; the laughter courses through her chest, builds up soundlessly before, in a final surge, it eventually bubbles over.

‘Come on. Help me, then!’ I cry out through the quacking din of her vocal cords.

She stops at once, puts a hand to her throat, then sneers some more. Her eyes blink and gleam, and she turns and crawls laughing out of the room, back to her hiding place.

*

I spend all my time in bed, counting neither the hours nor the days, but registering that darkness is in the process of taking over the day, the winds are increasing, the cold is seeping into the room. It must be getting on for mid-October, the time just before it starts to snow, white and pure. I feel a yearning for purity; my eyes want to rest in the white outside the window. I smell after weeks without being washed.

Ragna and I avoid each other. I call her for only the most necessary tasks. She’s hardly at home at present; as soon as she has an excuse, she’s over at Johan’s. They’re probably working together on everything that has to be managed before the winter — from the smell and the spots of blood on her clothes I know that the autumn slaughtering is under way, with freezing, hanging up to dry, smoking and mincing.

Johan hasn’t shown himself since our last altercation, but Ragna is obviously back in favour — it’s not only her clothes that have spots of red on them when she comes back from his place.

*

I reign as queen in my room, in spite of the dust and the dirt. I have the silence, my pen and books, and, not least, I own the hours when Ragna is away. Sometimes I listen to a programme on the radio, but generally speaking I listen and talk to myself. And that is not poor entertainment.

In this steady, calm trickle I find it easy to forget, forgive, explain away, understand. But I’m not so stupid that I don’t sense the resentment beneath the everyday chores, for it’s not just chicken feed that’s worrying Ragna.

And I ask myself once more: Why do I want to stay? And I reply: What other choice do I have? I love the walls here, the view from the window, and will never feel at ease in the strange rooms of the nursing home, surrounded by corridors that lead to places I do not know. The insistence on adapting to all sorts of routines will be a daily struggle compared to the freedom I feel in this bed. I will be tormented by the continuous stream of people who come and then die, suffer from the noise of the physical disintegration of the old people and their death rattles, especially when I know that in this house I can wake up and fall asleep to a gust of wind or the chirruping of birds.

Coexistence with Ragna is admittedly tough, but at least it is predictable. The wretchedness has a face, a body and a language. It strikes me regularly and in particular situations, but I am not surprised, I know my adversary. I am, in spite of everything, a sister branching from the same rotten trunk.

At the nursing home, on the other hand, total annihilation threatens me. In particular I fear the attrition of my right of ownership over my own body and mind, and worry that, like some object turned into kilos, litres and diagrams, I will simply become fodder for the nursing-home hierarchy.

I stretch an arm underneath the bed, find Vol. X of Home University , to be more precise ‘Religion, Philosophy, Psychology’. On page 84 I write, ‘Assistant: She pissed on me, a litre at least. I gave her a wash and new clothes. She was wet and sticky all over! (Thinks: The old bat had a little piss in her pants, or smelt of piss at any rate. It’s best to exaggerate to show how proficient I am.) Nurse: ‘Excellent! (Thinks: The new patient is too demanding. We’ll have to restrict her freedom to spare the other patients and carers.)’

And my sister, Ragna, has she had any other choices than this miserable stretch of land between the house and the moors, the lakes and me? What stopped her leaving before our parents died? Why didn’t she send me away before I got older and more demanding?

The young Ragna, fresh-skinned and smooth-necked, maybe she walked through these rooms, full of eager dreams and wishes, with a glittering gaze fixed on the future.

She might have had her plans worked out. She would get away, go to the trading post and live in a bedsit. She probably sat in her room, thinking it all out — how she would talk and dress in order to get a job. She already had the names of people Father knew; she would surely be able to gain their trust. In a stream of images, she imagined how the first meeting would be: index finger on the doorbell, the neat pattern of her trousers and jacket against the front door, people’s expressions when she presented herself as Ragna, daughter of Cloudberry Nils. Yes, they were from her family, the juicy cloudberries that were delivered to the door every August. And then she would give a slight curtsy and say that she was available for work, she could wash and iron and scrub, take care of the slaughtering and prepare the meals.

But at this point Ragna would stop her daydreaming. For wasn’t it the case that she would really like to have the very finest of jobs, preferably from the start? Why be a domestic help when you could be a cashier in the food shop or a waitress in the café? Here she would meet people, become well known in the village, her face would be seen every day, either at the cash register in her orange jacket with white collar or at the tables in her white blouse and black apron, holding a burger on a plate. Occasionally, Ragna talked about this when we were children, particularly when she came home from the village and enacted all her impressions in front of the mirror in the bedroom. If I know her, she would have played around for ages with the images of herself in different roles, would have amused herself thinking about the curious looks people would give her, the long conversations that would take place among people in the village when she was finally in her position: Who is she, this new girl, this Ragna, who grabs everyone’s attention with her efficiency and her clear-eyed look?