Gøhril Gabrielsen - The Looking-Glass Sisters

I’m sitting on the toilet, the seat has warmed up and I have found the right position so as to be able to stay here until my mission has been successfully accomplished. At such times a rare calmness may come over me, and I don’t count the minutes or the half-hours, the time is spent studying my cuticles and palms, the strange patterns in the plaster on the walls and, not least, whispering words and sentences that come to me, rhythmically, small verses to the sighing of the vent, the drip from the tap, the creaking of the surrounding house: hush, hush, swish swash widge wudge nudge no, swim swam blip blop baah bee…

Knock, knock.

‘Get a move on!’

I stiffen. Alarm bells ring, ongoing processes are retracted. Alert, red alert!

‘You’ve bloody well been sitting there for ages. Now you really must make way for other people!’

I sigh. All functions were on their way perfectly. If Ragna doesn’t calm down soon, it will take ages to get back into the same state.

‘Ragna, I’m the one who’s here now!’

‘Yes, damn it, you’re always the one in there — or trying to get in!’

She kicks the door twice, but moves away. Judging from her steps, I work out that she has gone into her room and is lying down on her bed.

I give a sigh of relief, try to recapture that flowing calmness. It is easier than I had feared and I am in the process of drifting off on the patterns and just audible words when there’s another kick on the door.

‘Get a move on, I said!’

Ragna is standing with her mouth close to the door. I hear her breathing. From experience I know to keep quiet so as not to fuel her rising anger — in that way I’m able to postpone the disaster.

Ragna stays standing outside, but is not at a loss. She now starts switching the light off and on.

‘Out! Out! Out!’ she intones in time with the light switch.

The change between dark and light is quite intriguing, but after a while I start to get dizzy.

‘Stop that, Ragna. It makes me feel sick!’

‘You can puke for all I care if you don’t come out quickly.’

‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes, I bloody well do. You don’t seem to understand that I need to use the loo too!’

Boundless conscience. There’s nothing else for me to do but block my urge, forget my own needs, which have died down anyway with all this rowing.

‘All right, then.’

I sigh loudly and grip my crutches, prepare myself for the laborious process of getting up and adjusting my clothes. It takes time, to be honest, even though I hurry as much as I can. And Ragna has to help me to pull up my pants, because I can’t do it on my own.

‘All clear!’ I say, and bang my fist against the door to open it.

‘You’ll have to help me,’ I continue, and aim for the corridor since there’s more room out here for Ragna to kneel down and pull up my pants. But as I pass the door with my pants round my ankles, Ragna slips past me into the toilet. I turn round and am about to say something, but she has managed to close the door hard before I get a word out.

‘You’ve got another thing coming,’ she shouts, and laughs loudly and affectedly.

I sigh and stay standing there, feeling at that moment in my tortuous existence a slight breeze pass my bottom as the door slams shut and the shaking in my knees after all that hurrying. And when I hear Ragna giggle to herself as she finds a comfortable position on the already warmed-up seat and hear her loud grunts of pleasure, I can’t help laughing a bit at it all either.

*

I must admit that Ragna and I have had a lot of good moments during our years alone in this house. But they tend to be seasonal and come with the weather — or winter, to be more precise. When the storms tug at the planks of the house, when the windows shudder and the stove wails in the fearful draughts, we get on best. In such weather the house turns ice cold and all we can do is stick to our beds. But our battle against the violent forces is a shared cause, that of keeping body and soul — and the house — together.

‘I’ll throw on another log,’ Ragna might shout, and pad out of bed.

‘Fine. We must never let the stove go out,’ I call back.

‘We’ve got to try and keep the water from freezing! You can use the toilet first,’ she might say later.

‘Will do!’ I reply.

‘Do you need an extra duvet?’ I might ask.

‘No, you just keep yourself warm,’ she replies.

Sometimes Ragna and I even move into the kitchen. She places our mattresses right next to the stove and close to each other. ‘We’ll just have to make the best of a bad job,’ she says, and plumps up the duvets and pillows.

At times like that, we don’t look at each other but instead often exclaim things, as if to ourselves: ‘One hell of a gust, that was!’

Or: ‘Really wicked, that one!’

Or: ‘Bloody hell! Now it’s going to take the whole house!’

And then we snuggle into our duvets, turn our backs to each other, and wallow in warmth and contentment.

At times like these, in the dark, maybe with a candle lit, a sudden, intense feeling overcomes me that Ragna and I are one body, completely inseparable. We have gradually let go of parts of ourselves in favour of the other. Over the years, through conflicts and confrontations, we have shaped, kneaded and formed ourselves into a lopsided, distorted yet complete organism. Ragna has the body and I have the soul. She puts on the firewood, I do the thinking. She makes the tea, I read and write. And we both agree: God, it’s cold!

*

One Thursday a couple of months ago, we were wrenched out of our day-to-day existence by someone hammering on the front door. Johan, broad and tall and with a stomach well outside the band of his trousers, does not wait for us to open and perhaps welcome him in. No, he walks straight into the kitchen where Ragna and I are sitting. Here he stands, legs apart, in front of the stove, tells us that he has moved into the house next door, which has stood empty for over thirty years, and that he has a state lease and intends to live off hunting and fishing. I listen to the conversation that develops between him and Ragna, do not ask any questions, do not ask where he comes from. It doesn’t feel natural to me, and since we haven’t spoken all that much since, I still don’t know what he did in the years before he arrived.

Johan is a man who has come to stay. Already on his second visit he goes over to the fridge and takes some milk without asking, puts his feet up on the table and looks possessively at Ragna. Ragna lights up, brushes his feet away, immediately puts him to work.

‘Can you repair tools?’ she asks, she who repairs everything herself, slapping him on the back with feigned hardness.

‘Course I can,’ he replies, and sits down to look at the tool Ragna passes him, with half an eye on her.

He takes no notice of me as I sit silently at the kitchen table, my arms round my crutches.

The visits soon become more frequent.

Ragna bakes bread, loaves larger and more luscious than I have ever tasted, and cakes, extra sweet with a soft base.

‘You’re bloody good at baking,’ Johan sighs, with his fingers in the latest batch.

‘And you’re a fat barrel that has to be filled,’ she retorts.

Ragna commands. Johan works. Morning and evening he walks through our house with nails and hammer, screwdriver and saw. Four weeks after his first visit, the roof has been checked, the gutters cleared, half-rotten planks outside replaced, the window frames patched up and painted.

The sun shines through newly cleaned windows; our home smells fresh and of baking.

One day Johan comes in with a plastic bag of old clothes. He takes out a pair of trousers and holds them up against the lamp. The light can be seen through threadbare material, revealing two large holes at the back. He affectedly shrugs his shoulders, his look expressing how sad it is to own such poor clothes. Ragna grabs the trousers with a wry smile, nods to Johan to sit down and then fetches the sewing machine from the cupboard in the hallway. With nimble fingers she threads the cotton silently — displaying deep concentration as she places a piece of material over each hole and manoeuvres the trousers in under the pressure foot.