Stella Descending (6 page)

Amanda

“Shut your eyes, Bee,” I say.

“They are shut,” says Bee.

“When you’re alone with the ostrich king, you have to imagine that Mamma is close by. Not right here, but close by.”

“Okay,” says Bee. “But she’s dead, really, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s right.”

Bee looks at the ceiling.

“But that doesn’t mean she’s not close by,” I say. “When you’re alone, you have to imagine that her arms are long, thousands of times longer than wings, thousands of times longer than my hair and your hair; her arms are so long that she can reach out any time, take you by the hand, and lead you away.”

Axel

When she came back from the trip to Høylandet she was different. I don’t know whether this change was due to the new surroundings—my apartment, instead of the sterile hospital room to which we had both grown accustomed—or whether it was something else, something that was, to me, intangible, unmanageable. More than once I came close to canceling our coffee klatch. The night before, I couldn’t sleep and my stomach ached. In the morning, after I had bathed and dressed, I walked down to the corner store, picked up freshly ground coffee and milk, and bought a layer cake from the patisserie. I decked the coffee table with candles, a cloth, and china. I tidied up and vacuumed, plumped the cushions, and folded the red plaid rug.

Ten minutes before she was supposed to arrive, I sank into a chair and burst into tears.

She rang the bell at one o’clock on the dot. It was a glorious, sunny, frozen Saturday in February. The first thing that struck me was that I had to raise my head to look her in the eye. She towered over me. Up to that point our relationship had been defined by the fact that I lay propped up in a hospital bed, tucked into a nest of white pillows and quilts, while she sat on the edge in her white uniform. Now she was wearing a yellow polo-neck sweater and a long black skirt. Her cheeks were apricot-pink and wet with tears from the winter wind, her eyes sparkling, her long fair hair caught up in a loose knot. She laid her hands on my shoulders and planted a kiss on my brow.

“I brought some fresh rolls.” She smiled. “Baked them myself!”

I pulled away from her and muttered something about making the coffee. Back in the kitchen, I stared numbly at the layer cake I had set out on a dish, ready to serve. I almost started to cry again. She was bound to think it ridiculous, over the top; she had brought fresh-baked rolls, clearly far more appropriate for a simple cup of coffee. Layer cake indeed! It was hardly as if anyone was celebrating a birthday! Hardly as if there was anything to celebrate at all. To serve a layer cake would be to give her the idea that I expected a great deal of this visit. It would put far too much pressure on an already strained situation. So I opened the cabinet under the sink, grabbed the serving dish, and tipped the cake into the garbage. I was licking the icing off my fingers when she appeared at my back.

“What a lovely apartment, Axel.”

She looked at me, looked at the empty cake dish, looked at the open door, the cabinet under the sink. “Don’t tell me you’ve been baking!” She laughed.

I shook my head.

“You’ve got some icing on your cheek.” Still smiling, she ran her right index finger across my cheek and popped her finger into her mouth.

“Mmmm,” she said, and winked. “Vanilla icing. . . . Have you got something up your sleeve?”

“No, not at all!” I said. “I had people over for dinner yesterday, and one of the ladies brought a cake. I was rude enough to eat the last slice before you got here. Well, I didn’t want to offer you the remains of last night’s cake. But Stella, why don’t you sit yourself down in the living room. I’ll put your rolls onto a dish, organize some bread and cheese, and make the coffee.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” she said.

“Stella, go sit down! Please! I’ll see to this.”

I was close to tears again. She smiled hesitantly and left me to myself in the kitchen, giving me a chance to dry my eyes and shove the ill-fated layer cake deeper in the garbage can. Then I put on the coffee.

The next hour passed uneventfully. We sat on the sofa, ate fresh-baked rolls, and drank coffee. She talked. She smelled sweet. She laughed. I didn’t say much; I didn’t need to. She was full of all the things she had seen and done on her short trip to central Norway with her new boyfriend.

“We left early Friday morning,” Stella said. “Flew from Fornebu to Værnes. We could have flown to Namsos, which is closer, but it would have cost a lot more. He paid for everything—”

“I should hope so,” I interrupted.

“You can talk,” she said, “but we’re both pretty strapped for cash. I thought it was really nice of him. Next time it’ll be on me. But that’s not the point. That’s not what I was going to tell you. The thing is, Axel, I’ve always been so afraid of flying. It’s not natural for human beings to fly; we belong on the ground. It’s not natural to put yourself so unconditionally and so helplessly into the hands of another human being—the captain, I mean. That he should have to carry so many bodies up into the air at one time, fly from one town to another, one country to another, goes against everything—the force of gravity, the survival instinct, the need for control, the amount of faith that I, for one, am able to put in others. How do I know that all the people who had a hand in building that particular plane were one hundred percent on the ball and knew what they were doing? Who’s to say there wasn’t some nutcase among them? And how do I know that the mechanics, the guys whose job it is to check that everything’s in working order, weren’t a bit hung over the day I happened to be flying out and cut a few corners? And how do I know that the captain didn’t find his darling in the arms of another man the night before? What if he decides the best revenge would be to send himself and everyone else on board plummeting to their deaths?”

“You just have to trust people,” I ventured.

“So says Axel Grutt, who’s never trusted a living soul.”

I mumbled something or other, but she carried on.

“Anyway, that’s the reason I don’t fly very often—that and lack of cash, of course. But Martin tried to help me. He knows I can’t resist a challenge. Just last week he said he would cook me the most wonderful seven-course dinner if I would dress as a man—his clothes, fake mustache, hat, coat, the lot—and go down to the supermarket with him. Well, on the way to the airport he said, ‘Stella, if you can manage to fly from Fornebu to Værnes without panicking, I’ll give you an ostrich egg.’ I laughed and asked what good an ostrich egg was going to be to me when the plane crashed and we were catapulted into nothingness.

“It went on like that. You know, of course—you do know, don’t you, Axel?—that I didn’t want him to see how afraid I was. He seems so sure of himself, and I feel so awkward and afraid when I’m with him. I’m never afraid with you, Axel, but with him . . . anyway, I got on the plane and squeezed my eyes tight shut. I didn’t sleep, but all the same I had a dream. It happens sometimes. I dreamt I was standing in line on the steps up to the high diving platform at Frogner Baths, the ten-meter one, you know? I was standing behind a whole bunch of naked women, all waiting to go off. And every time the signal sounded—this loud shrill trumpet blast—someone would dive. But there was no water in the pool, and everyone who went off was smashed to bits on the bottom. I knew this, knew it all along, we all knew, and yet we stood there on the steps, each waiting her turn . . . and I watched one woman after another stretch out, push off, and dive. It was a dream, right? But I wasn’t sleeping. I was sitting in my seat on the plane, next to Martin, with my eyes tight shut, almost overwhelmed by these images, and I couldn’t block them out. But I was not sleeping.”

Stella fell silent for a moment. Her frankness disconcerted me. But I listened. I did not interrupt.

“But that’s not really what I was going to tell you,” she went on. “What I was going to tell you was that when my turn came to dive from the platform, just as I drew my breath to push off, the plane actually took a dive for real. It felt as if we had heeled over and dropped straight down. All the passengers screamed— I screamed—but Martin grabbed hold of me and whispered, ‘It’s okay, Stella, it’s okay, I’ve got you,’ and of course it was okay. Well, I’m here, aren’t I? Safe and sound, and probably pregnant. It was only a little turbulence. We weren’t in any real danger. But I wonder whether that was the minute I stopped being afraid of flying. Forever. All my life I’ve been afraid, Axel. Afraid of all the terrible things that could happen.”

“And now you’re not afraid of anything?” I asked, with a hint of irony in my voice.

“No, no,” she replied, “of course I am.”

“Did my ears deceive me, or did you say you were pregnant?” I said.

She nodded.

“That was quick. How long have you known him, a month?”

“Five weeks and a couple of days,” she said. “I don’t know for sure that I’m pregnant. I just think I am. I knew the moment Amanda was conceived. Even though that man—Amanda’s father—meant nothing to me. I never want to talk about him! I don’t ever want to talk about Amanda’s father.”

“No, heaven forbid,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have to talk about any of your lovers. In fact, I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Oh, I’m babbling on again—I know.”

“Yes, you are.”

“It’s just that I wanted you to know about the baby. I can’t be sure . . . but I don’t think I’m mistaken. I know it happened that night.”

“I see.”

“It was a cold, white, starlit night, and we were on our way home from the birthday party. It was pretty late, three o’clock, maybe three-thirty, and we had a half-hour walk in the cold night air ahead of us. It had been snowing; the countryside around us was white and still; we were goofing around like a couple of kids, making tracks and snow angels; he stole my hat and threw it up into a fir tree and it got stuck on a branch—and then we came to a lake that had frozen over. We had seen children skating on it earlier in the day, but now all was quiet . . . all was quiet until we heard a faint rumbling far off, coming closer, until suddenly we caught sight of some huge shadows among the trees: massive, weird-looking creatures, heading toward the frozen lake. Martin and I stood perfectly still. Out on the ice the dark shadows began to gather speed; in fact, before we knew it they had broken into a gallop, one after the other. There were a whole lot of them and they didn’t lose their balance, they didn’t slip, they just went on galloping. For a moment I thought they were some sort of strange prehistoric horse, but as my eyes adjusted to the distance and the darkness I saw that they had feathers, and then I thought of a fairy tale my father used to tell me when I was a little girl, about a golden bird and about the wind rushing and sighing through the trees, and all at once it dawned on me that those weren’t horses I saw out there on the ice but ostriches. Ostriches galloping across the ice in the dark of night. ‘They’ve run away from the farm,’ Martin whispered. ‘They think they’re back on the savannah. We have to do something. I’d better call someone.’ So he called someone, and after a while a big truck drove up, and Martin’s mother and father and three other men jumped out without a sound, and they all started running down to the frozen lake, brandishing torches. By this time the ostriches were standing quite still, all huddled together; they had abruptly come to a halt, as if frozen solid in the winter night. We left then, went home.”

Stella looked at me and gave me the ghost of a smile.

“His family breeds ostriches,” she explained. “Kind of goes against all the laws of nature, don’t you think, keeping giant African birds in the middle of Norway? It made me think. They’re tied to the ground—grounded—too big to fly home, to fly at all. Their feathers and wings are absolutely useless.”

She fell silent for a moment, looked away.

“That night Martin took my hand in his and said, ‘If we have a child now, and if it’s a girl, we’ll call her Bea after my Swedish great-grandmother, Beatrice. She was the first woman in Scandinavia to have a hat trimmed with ostrich feathers in her wardrobe.’ ”

Yes, I could tell right away. When she came back from that trip with Martin, she was different. Something had happened. He had touched her, held her, kissed her, opened her up . . . I don’t know, I never really knew, had no way of knowing. She didn’t say anything; she didn’t need to. I could tell by her cheeks, her eyes, her provocative smile.

When she left, on that Saturday afternoon, I made up my mind that I would never see her again.

Well, what did I, an old man—because even back then I was an old man—have to offer a young woman in love? And what did she have to offer me?

Well, there you are, Axel Grutt. What did I have to offer you? What
did I have to offer you except visions of your daughter as a young
woman—or of your wife, Gerd, as a young woman? Oh, yes, because it
was Gerd you were thinking about, wasn’t it, ten years ago when I sat
there on your sofa that time, flushed and happy and pregnant? And it’s
Gerd you’re thinking about today, isn’t it, now that I too am about to
return to dust?

Maybe it was that yellow sweater. Gerd had a yellow sweater she wore when she went skiing. Gerd was the athletic type. I, on the other hand, loathe all forms of sporting activity. Or was it that provocative smile or her way of sitting, long legs stretched out, head up, a hand run through her hair. Stella’s visit reminded me of the night Gerd came home long after dinnertime, flopped down into a chair, and said, “Now listen to me, Axel, because this is going to hurt!” This was just after the war, and life at work was hellish. I was worn out and, to cap it off, I had had to make my own dinner, since my wife obviously had other things to do that day.