Free Stella Descending by Linn Ullmann Page A

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.
    “Well, and what exactly is going to hurt, Gerd?” I asked.
    I knew, of course, what it would be. Yet again, it would be something to do with Victor, everybody’s golden-haired hero of the Resistance and
my
fellow teacher. She would not give him up. Everyone knew about it. Everyone in the staff room. Every one of those people with whom I normally took my coffee. I don’t know whom they pitied more, Axel Grutt the coward, who was being openly cuckolded, or his lovely wife, who was unfortunate enough to be married to him.
    Gerd wanted to take Alice, who was nine at the time, away with her and move up north with this other man. There seemed to be no end to Victor’s heroic exploits, and now he wanted to