Stella Descending (16 page)

Here with me, until I can no longer hold back the tears.

BEE STARTS NURSERY SCHOOL when she is five. She doesn’t say much, but she stares at all of us—the nursery-school staff, the children, Martin, me—with a look in her eyes that I cannot fathom. She has great big eyes, with room for plenty of grievance.

“We’ve hardly had time to make any mistakes,” Martin whispers, “and yet the way she looks at me, anybody would think I’d robbed her of all joy or something.”

Bee’s hair is long and dark and beautiful, just like Amanda’s. All the other girls at nursery school want to comb it, brush it, braid it. Bee lets them. Bee sits on a blue box and lets the other girls tie red ribbons in her hair. She has the patience of a saint. But when I ask her who has tied ribbons in her hair, she can’t say for sure.

One morning I hear a cry from Bee’s room. It comes from Martin. I’m in the kitchen making breakfast. It’s Martin’s turn to wake the kids. I hear a cry from the bedroom and race up the stairs. Bee is still asleep—his cry has not woken her—her dark hair spread across the white pillow.

“Lift her head,” Martin hisses.

“What is it?”

“Aw,
Jesus!”
says Martin.

I sit down on the edge of her bed, lay my cheek against Bee’s, listen to her breathing. So faint, feeble almost. This is my child, I think; dear God, help us. I run my hand through her hair and whisper to her that it’s time to wake up. A black bug crawls over my fingers. I run my hand through her hair again.

“Bee’s got lice,” I murmur. “It’s quite common,” I add, seeing the look of revulsion on Martin’s face.

Bee wakes without a word, wraps her arms round my neck, lays her head against my chest. There are lice on the pillow and on the sheets, and when I brush her hair lice fall on the floor.

“There’s no end to it,” Martin says. “There’s just no end to it.”

I keep Bee home from nursery school and Amanda home from school. Amanda tells us a tale about a princess who is so beautiful that gold coins fall from her hair every time she combs it. In the evening she plaits her own hair together with Bee’s. They sleep in the same bed. I find them like that, intertwined, two girls and one braid. My daughters.

I INHERIT SOME MONEY from Pappa, enough for Martin and me to take out a loan and buy a semidetached house with a garden on Hamborgveien, near the Lady Falls. I have the idea that everything will be different when we move. We’ll be more like a normal family. I can just picture it: Martin, Amanda, and Bee, in the kitchen, in the garden, maybe even a dog. More life, I think. Yes, that’s it. More life.

And at long last I have a good excuse to kick out the plumber. There is no way he is coming with us. I refuse to take the plumber with us to the new house.

“D’you hear me, Martin? I’m not taking the plumber!”

Martin looks at me. “But I’ve already told him he can rent the room in the attic. I thought that would be okay. We could do with the money. And you should never underestimate the value of having a plumber in the house.”

“And what value would that be, exactly?” I ask.

“A plumber in the house, Stella! A plumber in the house! Does everything have to be spelled out?”

A few weeks after Bee’s sixth birthday we move to our new home in Hamborgveien. Martin, Amanda, Bee, me—and the plumber in the attic.

I didn’t think Pappa had any money. I thought he had a lot of debts, so the inheritance came as a surprise. The gift shop in Majorstua had to close when Miss Andersen, the sales clerk, died and the customers stopped coming. That was a long time ago. Pappa spent the last years of his life in a dark little cubbyhole of an office, strictly a one-man affair, in downtown Oslo. I never really took any interest in what he did there. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I imagined that he did nothing. It has always been tempting to resort to the word
nothing
when trying to describe Pappa. I can’t help thinking of this song about a dead man, sitting in the corner of a diner, and nobody realizing he’s actually dead as a doornail. The first time I heard it I thought of Pappa. I thought it was Pappa who was sitting in the corner of that diner, dead as a doornail, with nobody noticing.

I finally get around to going into his cubbyhole office to clear it out. Mamma can’t be bothered, she says; it was a big enough job packing his clothes into cardboard boxes (two boxes) and delivering them to the Salvation Army. The rest is up to me.

I don’t know whether she mourns for him. It’s hard to tell. It was a perfectly ordinary Wednesday. They were sitting in the kitchen, Mamma and Pappa on either side of the kitchen table, under the blue ceiling light, eating dinner. Then Pappa died. He didn’t topple over, he just sat there on his chair, almost as if it would have been bad manners not to, with the same straight back, the same pale blue eyes. There was nothing to indicate that a change, if one can call it that, had taken place. He simply stopped eating. His face might have turned a bit grayer when it happened, I don’t know. In any case, Mamma didn’t notice a thing until she began to clear the table and he still hadn’t moved.

His office looks exactly as I expected: a brown desk, a brown chair, a brown bookcase. A computer. A grimy window overlooking a grimy backyard. White fluorescent tubes on the ceiling. I find invoices and catalogs, from which I gather that after the closure of the Majorstua store, Pappa had gone on selling bric-a-brac by mail order. Mail-order knickknacks: crystal swans, brass candlesticks, sherry glasses, china dogs, angels in every shape and form at prices to suit every pocket. I discover that he rents a small storeroom somewhere in Asker, to the west of the city. And as far as I can see, everything is in perfect order: no unpaid debts, no dissatisfied customers, no secret love affairs, no unknown son or daughter. Nothing.

It takes me some time to find the key to the desk’s top drawer, which is locked. The key is tucked high up on a shelf out of sight, inside a ceramic pot that must once have held a plant. There’s still some potting soil at the bottom. I dust off the key and unlock the drawer. Inside I find a photograph and an unfinished letter dated many, many years earlier. The photograph is of a fair and rather plump lady pushing fifty. She has full red lips. Although it’s hard to say for sure, I would say she is a tall woman. I turn the photograph over. The name
Ella
is written on the back in green, my mother Edith’s handwriting. And a year:
1979.

I pick up the letter, immediately recognizing Pappa’s neat, elegant hand:

Dear Ella,

I am writing to you yet again. Edith has told me you
have decided to leave for good this time and she
intends to go with you. My wife says she’s going to
leave me for you. I beg you, I beg both of you: Do not
do this. Stella may be a big girl now, but she is still
not grown up. Not quite fourteen. She needs her
mother. You promised me you would wait until she
was grown.

THEY ARE ALL DEAD NOW.

I sing to Bee. She lies in bed listening, silent and solemn-faced. She won’t play with my hands the way Amanda did at that age.

“Night-night, Bee,” I say, but I receive no reply. “Aren’t you going to say night-night back, Bee?”

Bee turns to face the wall.

I sit there on the edge of the bed, staring at the back of that thin, clammy little neck. Then I get up and look in on Amanda.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” she says.

“That’s just about enough Nintendo for tonight,” I say.

“Oh, but Mamma, there’s this beast in the forest that I have to kill,” she says, “and then the princess’ll fall down into the next world.”

I stretch out on the sofa and read. It is far too quiet in this new house of ours. Not a sound except the mechanical little melody churned out by Amanda’s Nintendo game.

The silence has followed me all the way here.

I AM LYING on the sofa, reading, when Martin walks into the living room and says, “That’s it, Stella, I’m leaving you. I’ve packed a bag. I’ve found myself a studio to rent. I can’t take this any longer: the house, the kids, Bee . . . all of it. I can’t take it.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say. I don’t look up but keep my eyes fixed on the page of my book. He’s done this before.

He sinks down onto the sofa, lays his head on my shoulder, and bursts into tears.

“I can’t stand it,” he whispers. “I’m going to disappear if I stay here.”

“I don’t believe you’re going to leave me,” I say. “I don’t believe you’ve packed your bag, and I don’t believe you’ve found a place to rent.”

Martin is still crying. I stroke his hair.

“It’s all turned to ashes,” he says.

“Yes, but I don’t believe you’re going to leave me,” I say.

He lifts his head and looks at me. I can’t make out whether it’s a nice look or a nasty look. But I know he won’t leave now. He’ll stay with me a little longer.

The summer Bee turns seven I fall ill. It is the most glorious summer we’ve had in years. The sun shines every day, and it gets to the point where nobody feels uneasy about saying, I’m fed up with all this sunshine, it’s about time we had some rain. Usually when people say they’re fed up with sunshine, someone else says, Ssh, don’t complain, the weather could break any time.

That’s Martin for you. Martin always has to take me to task.

“Be careful what you say!” he warns. “Watch your tongue! Hubris!”

Then one night I tell him I have a stomachache—it might even be something serious, I add.

“Knock on wood,” says Martin.

We are sitting in the garden of our new house, drinking vodka. It’s the middle of the night, about three o’clock, maybe half past, in the first pale light of dawn.

“Last time I was sick was when I had German measles as a kid,” I say, laughing. “Just kidding. I’m never sick. Never!”

“This summer will never end, and you’re never sick,” Martin mutters.

“I’ve got a bit of a stomachache, that’s all. Forget it,”

But the next morning the pain is worse. I have to stay in bed.

When I throw up all over the eiderdown and the floor, I blame it on the vodka from the night before.

But it’s got nothing to do with the vodka from the night before, it’s something else, something growing inside me that’s trying to do away with me, I think. Yes, that’s it, something that’s trying to do away with me. How come I didn’t see it before? Late the next day Martin drives me to the hospital.

“I’m having contractions,” I tell the doctor. By this time I’m in tears. “I’m having contractions, but I’m not pregnant. I’m dying. I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

Then I lose the sound. I can see the doctor’s lips moving, but I can’t hear what he is saying. All I can hear is my own breathing, in, out, in, out, and I have a fleeting vision of the way in which, night after night, I still bend over Bee’s bed when she’s asleep to check that she is breathing, in, out, in, out, because Bee is the sort of child who could suddenly die on me. Bee is too good for this world. I turn to Martin to tell him this, that Bee is too good for this world—that this is something he has never understood, nor have I—but I can’t get the words out. He wouldn’t hear me anyway. He’s too busy talking. Martin is talking and the doctor is talking, both looking at me, and Martin is fiddling with his car keys and I know that any second now he’s going to drop his car keys, and I try to tell him that he’s going to drop the car keys if he doesn’t stop fiddling with them, but he wouldn’t hear that either. And then he drops the car keys and there’s a booming in my ears. He doesn’t even notice. I bend down to pick them up, feel them in my hands, a familiar, coolish object between my fingers, such a prosaic thing, a bunch of car keys. I straighten up and try to say something to the doctor and Martin, because neither of them is moving his lips now. They are just staring at me. It’s all I can do not to giggle, they look so solemn, they ought to be wearing black top hats and have black mustaches. Are you going to a funeral, I try to ask, it being such a lovely day and all? I put out my hand to show them I’ve picked up the car keys, smile my sweetest smile—then comes another boom and everything goes black.

ONCE, A LONG TIME AGO, you told me you were now so old that you sometimes talked to—or at any rate sensed the presence of—the dead, that the boundaries between them and you were gradually fading. Dear Axel, I don’t want to die yet. Pray for me. Ask them to stay away. I have two children. Give me a little more time.

I DO RECOVER EVENTUALLY, although the blood flows more slowly around my body and nothing has any scent anymore, not even the lilac in the garden. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am living on borrowed time.

I look at pictures of myself from just a few years back. Now I can see that I was almost beautiful. But today . . . I don’t know.

I want him to fuck me until I wake up. I want him to fuck me back to the days when I used to bleed with joy.

I place the pill on the back of my tongue and swallow the water. As he turns away to set the glass down on the bedside table, I spit it out again and crush the pill between my fingers. I slide into bed, under the eiderdown, and take his cock in my mouth. This time he doesn’t push me away. He’s grown hard, he turns me onto my stomach, he presses my face into the pillow. I’m not breathing, oh, no, I’m not breathing. From behind he finds his own way into me and comes with a gasp.