Gøhril Gabrielsen - The Looking-Glass Sisters

To begin with I thought my stay up here would be short. Once Ragna had become calm again she would bring me downstairs, and after making her point by not speaking to me and ignoring me for several days, everything would be as it was before: some daily confrontations, rounds of arguing and shouting at each other, the occasional fit of rage. For I want nothing more than to return to my old room and my daily rhythm, to diverting my thoughts with my dear books, to the serenity of the body when it wakes up at night or in the morning in the same old bed, with the toilet in the corridor just outside.

But I have to realize that we’ve come to a watershed in our relationship as sisters. After our last agonizing quarrel, it looks as if she’s forgotten me. I’ve been stowed away like an object among all the other objects up here — discarded and outside time.

*

I sleep without dreaming, and when I’m awake I flow between different states like a quiet river. In this condition, the sounds from below are the only things I really listen to and take into consideration. But for a long time everything has been surprisingly peaceful and quiet, especially after the digging outside, and that must already be many days ago now.

How can she leave me lying here like this, and why this palpable stillness, this whispering and tiptoeing from room to room, when normally they make a racket as they talk to each other? If they think I no longer notice them, they’re both wrong. For I can hear quiet, quivering conversations, chores being performed. I can pick up the sound of them squirming under the duvet and the laughter rolling back and forth between them.

But I hear more than that, for I believe I can distinguish the sound of day from evening during this time of year with no darkness, and I can distinguish the silence of sleep from the silence of my loneliness.

The tiny details, the signs of what was brewing, her final rejection and my banishment: my mirror image that is not fixed in her shiny pupils, I who am reflected back, do not exist in the darkness in there. I must have seen it coming.

‘You’ve got to go.’

She’s standing over me, it’s morning and she says it before I’m completely awake.

‘You’ve got to go,’ she repeats, and slams the door behind her.

I’ve got to go. It’s final, she’s said it, and it means that she’s decided she can’t put up with having me around any longer. How far have things actually gone, I ask myself? Does she gag when she turns aside the duvet and sees my limp, thin legs? Does she burn inside when she serves me food, washes my clothes? Is she a walking vacuum, a soundless roar; is she absent from her own life because I make demands on her the whole time? And has the situation got worse since she met Johan?

She wants to put me in a nursing home in the village, that’s where she wants to park me; she’s threatened to do it before. I’m not very old, just partially paralysed. I’ve always lived here and I will never leave this house. Admittedly, this is a place where I’m invisible and away from the world, but I’m also part of everything: every splinter in the floor, every knot in the wooden boards — I know each one. Here, where the sun moves unceasingly across the sky all summer, I am more than I can dream of. And I smoulder like old firewood when the sun is below the horizon all winter. I have a special ability to cling on, to live in what is there.

The threat of being sent away comes after one of our lesser confrontations, after a mild summer evening when I go to bed early and settle comfortably among the pillows. I leaf through an old book, note a couple of thoughts in the margin, as I always do before going to sleep. The window’s ajar; it’s impossible to prevent a mosquito or two from getting in, despite the netting in the window frame. On my bedside table I’ve lit a mosquito coil and the smoke is spiralling round in gentle circles, right across to Ragna, who is standing in the doorway, wrinkling her nose. She shoves the door open with her foot, goes over to the bedside table, fumbles under the lampshade with a shaking hand and turns off the light.

‘No,’ I say. ‘No,’ I say again. ‘Can’t you see I’m reading?’

She doesn’t answer, but takes the mosquito coil, which comes away from its foot, presses the glowing end into the saucer and crushes it into small, smoking pieces that are quickly extinguished. She waves her hand in front of her mouth, which is compressed into a thin streak.

‘I’ve told you before,’ she says, emphasizing each word. ‘The smell makes me feel ill!’

I don’t answer and switch the light back on. I like to have the lamp lit, even when the sun shines all night; it’s got something to do with how the shadows fall in the room. Ragna breathes heavily and stretches out her arm to turn it off again, but I stop her in mid-air by grabbing her wrist. She turns away, pulls her arm out of my grasp, straightens up.

My sister, Ragna: for a moment I consider her from a place many years previously, stare at her from there towards this now, where she stands quivering with resentment, from the time when her hair was long and deep copper, and her slender neck bore the broad face with ease and a certain elegance. The point in our history where I can feel a reluctant touch of tenderness for what she was and what she became: her hair now thin wisps, her head craning out into the world on a neck of stringy sinews, the taut muscles, always ready to slash and hack.

Maybe she senses this light breeze of tenderness that moves through me, for she chews her lip and stares at me with narrowed eyes before turning and leaving the room.

I’m asleep, dreaming uneasily. When I wake I call out immediately for Ragna.

‘Ragna,’ I shout from the bed. ‘You must come. I’ve got cramp!’

It’s silent for a long while. She never comes at once; I always have to call out a few times. That’s why I shout at the slightest suspicion of a problem with my legs: if I wait too long the pain might become unbearable before she finally gets to the door. I twist and turn under the duvet, puff and pant and moan. ‘Hurry up. Come quickly. What are you waiting for?’ I grab hold of her nightdress when it sweeps across my arm as she shuffles forward and pulls out the drawer of the bedside table to fetch the cream. Her face contracted, eyes closed, she fumbles blindly, mechanically, sits down on the side of the bed. I call out, ‘Hurry up!’ and tug at her nightdress while she spreads the cream over her hands, then finally lifts the duvet and starts to massage my thighs and lower legs, up and down, rhythmically, lazily. Her face is still blank; she grunts in time with the movements, faint snorts rising from the slumped body.

What does Ragna know about pain? She who never says anything if she hits her finger with a hammer, or traps her toe in the door, or gets stung on the cheek by a wasp. At worst, she lets out a little gasp. Ragna is armour-plated, protected against attack, impressions and impulses, despite her thin, almost transparent skin. Ragna is a person you instinctively talk loudly to, long and hard, so as to be heard through the thick layer of resistance.

‘A bit harder!’ I shout out into the room. ‘Can’t you do it a bit harder?’ I yell as loudly as I can. I fling myself forward and grab her arm. She gives a start, a sleepy gasp for air escaping from her mouth. She doesn’t look at me, but squeezes her fingers round my thighs, starts to rub with the firmness that may ease the cramp. When her hands have reached my lower legs, round my ankles, I think I can hear her muttering. I sense that she is completely awake, though she still doesn’t look at me; there is something vigilant about her. I know that she will now toss and turn in her bed, unable to sleep, for the rest of the night.