‘Now you’re going to be cooled down,’ she drily repeats after Johan, as if having to remind herself why she is doing this, depraved human being that she is.
When Johan’s fully dressed, Ragna loosens her hold. She scrambles to her feet and walks out into the corridor for her own clothes, while Johan comes back into the kitchen.
I don’t move. My moaning has died down, there’s only a faint humming vibrating between my ears. Johan stares at me. I stare back. Is he going to sit on me? Pin me to the floor? But he turns his head away with a grin and at that moment I get the idea that he thinks that’s what I want, that I want him to sit on my body, to pin me down.
Fancies himself, doesn’t he, our Johan of the mighty voice? So melodiously conceited and fine. He’s got another thing coming, then. I don’t want to feel the weight of him against my body, his breath against my ear. And I start to howl again, though quite faintly.
They lift me up from the floor and carry me out of the house at a steady pace and with great care. It’s amazing to make the journey out of the house with my face towards the ceiling. I spot cracks and beams and corners I have never noticed before. It strikes me that the house is still unexplored. And then I think that I ought to have spent more time studying my own home, and this immediately makes me feel more desperate, for I realize that it might be too late, from now on everything is simply uncertain. But once my head is out in the open air under the clear sky, I nevertheless feel happy that in this position I am still alive — only someone who’s dead is normally carried out this way.
I register and ponder all this from a still point within myself, for all at once I realize that I have been screaming the whole time. I howl and scream and yell with all my might, and I’m unable to stop. I am two individuals, split and divided into an outer and an inner person, one in bewildered panic, the other calmly observing the sky above the house: I howl and marvel at the white haze up there, the unfathomable depth of the universe. I wail and wonder if everything in the world revolves around its own unsolved enigma. I scream and think: here I lie, mirroring the stars in the snot from my own nose.
And then I devote myself to gasping and sobbing. I shake and am shaken while coolly observing that I am lying on the scooter trailer in a pile of reindeer furs and old blankets. My crutches are there too, they have been stuck under my armpits; I have even managed to grab hold of one and now I am banging it rhythmically against the steel edge of the trailer. I bang away while the darkness rushes towards me, through me, while the beam of light from the scooter sweeps wildly across the wood, slicing a route along paths that only Johan knows. Branches cling and give way, lash against the trailer, I am flung back and forth in sudden jerks, but I notice that something is holding me in place. It is the rope and it is Ragna’s look. She is keeping tabs, that is her job where she sits behind Johan: the leader, the seducer. Now I’m being taken away, it’s final, now I am to be gone.
In the wood, Johan and Ragna are like gleaming glass — I have never seen anything of the sort before. There is a clarity that embraces them, perhaps produced by my unexpected encounter with the cold and the fresh air. I take special notice of Johan. The faint crackling across the back, the small break across the nape of the neck tell me that his substance is in the process of crumbling away in a state of constant deficiency: I haven’t got enough, don’t possess enough, everything streams wearily from his back as he hangs over the scooter. So much that just disappears, all the time!
And I see the repressed suggestion of goodness in him, that which he has never dared make use of for fear of losing it — it lies inside him like a half-rotten fruit, unusable except for his own nauseating interests.
That is how it is with most things. Even the wood stands there pouring out its troubles: the winters are far too long, the summers far too short, the sun and the heat never stay long enough. And so the branches become knotted and stunted.
Time disappears — I don’t know how long we have been going, but we’re now through the wood and approaching a flat, wide-open area. Some way out, Johan stops. They get off the scooter, waddle towards me in the dark, thick outfits, undo the rope and pull me off the trailer. They drag me across the coarse surface: it is hard and cold, I am laid down and take a look around me. The white surface stretches endlessly out into the darkness. I am probably on water that has frozen solid.
Johan and Ragna are standing over me nudging each other, grinning. Ragna is bent over double, holding her stomach; the laughter is welling up in her. It’s on the point of gushing out.
‘Now all you’ve got to do is cool down!’ they shout out, and walk unsteadily away from me, bending over with suppressed salvos of laughter. The scooter is started with a jerk and they set off towards the wood. They shout and yell into the angry roar of the vehicle; there is an echo of power over the entire expanse of water, but gradually the sounds die away, not unlike the humming of mosquitoes up under the ceiling, and then, all at once, I’m lying there alone, sucked into the silence.
I’ve never lain out in the open before, my face to the sky, except in my first year as a baby, and then secure in a pram or a box. And if I ignore my stay in hospital, I have never been so far away from home before.
It marks a turning point to lie outdoors like this, yes, it’s a ground-breaking act in my otherwise uniform life. That’s probably why I keep lying there in silence, without a word on my lips, why I lie stiff and motionless on the ice. The sky above me is overwhelming. The vast reaches of space up there, which I never think about and have never really sensed, now appear to be filled with countless possibilities and dizzying explanations, as I suddenly realize what life is. My life is.
What darkness. And what reality: I can choose to see myself in a completely different way. And do so just by changing angle, altering the perspective for my, up to now, so limited, yes, horizontal observations and reflections.
And then I think of all that’s been wasted, that I could have been so many other things than the ‘crone on crutches’ and ‘catkin in the wilderness’.
But a new life is still conceivable, feasible, merely by virtue of being alive. I can transform myself via a multitude of images and explanations, it is perfectly possible — just by shifting my body a certain distance away, to the nursing home, for example. How might I not view myself from there? Won’t I, the self-obsessed and troublesome one, be seen as a likeable fellow human being among all those pig-headed senile old people? Won’t I, the pathetic and helpless one, appear strong and independent among those who are even weaker? And won’t I, the sickly sister, stand out as being healthy and almost young among ancient women with death in their bodies and their look?
The cold fills the outfit. It’s tight around the shoulders, back and hips, makes my legs feel more withered than ever. I start to shake. But it is not only the cold. I am shaken just as much by the sudden revelation, this confirmation of something important has been recognized, by the prospects of change, a different existence. And when I realize that the revelation coincides with this sudden limitation of being left abandoned on the ice, I see the possibilities and the finale, so to speak, at the same time, and the shaking increases and becomes more violent. My teeth chatter uncontrollably, my muscles quiver in intolerable tension, my stomach contracts in a way that makes my back arch into a U.
Is what is happening to me true? Can it be something I am fantasizing in my vivid imagination? That’s what Ragna is always saying, time and again, that my ideas have no basis in reality. But if this isn’t real, then what is? A dream, an explaining away of my life that is so endlessly hollow I have to fill it up with bizarre, strange stories in order to feel a grain of happiness, a little excitement, anger?