Free Stella Descending by Linn Ullmann Page B

take my wife and my child—I take it she
is
my child, I yelled at Gerd—to Tromsø, there to continue the victory celebrations. Nothing came of it, of course.
    Today, fifty years later, I can’t think why I didn’t just let her leave. I didn’t love her enough to beg her to stay. As she herself said, “You don’t understand, Axel—how could you understand, you of all people?—but there are parts of my body you have never touched, you don’t know the sounds I make and would not recognize them if I were with him and you were in the next room, and you have never ever come close to . . .”
    She did not finish the sentence, but I knew exactly what she was talking about. It disgusted me, this . . . what she expected of me, what she had every right to expect of me, what she had found with someone else.
    I dreaded the nights. Came up with degrading excuses, degrading both for her and for me, to get out of it. Of course sometimes I had to, and sometimes I forced myself to, but always with her on top, astride me, since that way I did not have to touch her, and I knew full well that
that
way it would all be over much quicker, that her tense little shudders would not be long in coming. And when that happened, the shuddering, it was all over. Even though she would have liked it to last longer, it was over. That was all I waited for, shut my eyes, waited, barely aware of her going through her solitary dance, far away, above me, waited for what I could, with good conscience, call the end.
    “You got what you wanted,” I told her on one occasion when she tried to lull me into carrying on. “Don’t you think I can feel you shuddering?”
    She repeated the word, seeming almost surprised. “Did you say shuddering?”
    She looked me straight in the eye.
    “Shuddering!”
    Then she laughed softly and turned her back on me.
    “That’s only my body betraying me,” she whispered. “Don’t fool yourself, Axel, it certainly isn’t pleasure.”
    I MEET NO ONE I know on the way to the crematorium, although the young news vendor with the blank eyes is at her post. I’ve lived in this city all my life, and still it seems foreign to me. I walk past the station building at Majorstuen. There were plans, at one time, for this building to be an imposing landmark, a taller and grander edifice than the one that stands on this spot today; a good-sized skyscraper was more what town planner Harald Hals had had in mind. But then came the war, and all the plans for a fine city bit the dust. Oslo seems to have this in common with my own life: Nothing turns out as planned.
    For instance, it had never occurred to me that Gerd might die before me. In good moments, I used to envisage a peaceful old age with her, thinking that in time we could become good friends, she and I, once her appetite had abated. Or that God, if he exists, would grant me an early release, and in her old age she could have a nice life with her women friends and her visits to the theater.
    And Stella! I cannot explain this thing with Stella! To fall like that, to stumble over the edge, with her own husband, that conceited ass, as witness? I cannot understand it. So careless. So pointless. What were they doing up there on the roof? Such a damned clumsy thing for a damned clumsy woman to do, fooling around high up in the air. Clumsy people have certain obligations, to themselves and to their bodies and to other people. Clumsy people are always apt to bring accidents in their wake if they’re not careful. I should know. I myself am a clumsy man.

Amanda
    Let’s imagine, Bee, that we’re climbing up some scaffolding, a steeple, or up onto a roof just like Mamma and Martin. We can see the whole city spread out before us; then we count one, two, three, and we jump. (But first I’ve got to make love with Snip, Snap, and Snout; I’ve got to hear them whisper sweet things in my ear about my breasts and my belly and my face while they take me from the front and from behind, because