A Blessed Child by Linn Ullmann Read Free Book Online

even hear what they were thinking. Words and thoughts could be picked up and registered as dots and lines on a screen to make a picture. It was better not to say anything or even think anything you didn’t want Isak to get wind of. But that was impossible. No talking. No thinking. Two deaf-mute girls in the grass with virgin knots between their legs and in their heads. It was Ragnar, the boy with matchstick legs, who came up with a plan.
    Ragnar had five ring binders full of
The Phantom
and
Superman
comics and knew everything about superpowers. Isak had a sort of superhearing and X-ray vision combined, said Ragnar, who also seemed to know things about Isak. But just like Superman, Isak had his limitations, a kind of weakness or vulnerability. “Like Achilles!” Ragnar exclaimed, not bothering to explain to the sisters who Achilles was. The point was to find
Isak’s heel
(which wouldn’t have to be a heel, exactly; it could be anything), cause pain, and make sure there was a total loss of all superpowers. Only then would the three of them be able to win the war against someone like Isak.
    “A superhero without his superpowers is much weaker than ordinary people without ordinary powers,” Ragnar said.
    Erika and Laura nodded and continued to say nothing. (Erika was not aware of exactly why Ragnar was declaring war on her father, but she and Laura went along and listened and didn’t protest.) Ragnar took the sisters to the hut in the woods and said that until they could discover what Isak’s weakness might be, they would have to speak and think in a language Isak didn’t understand, because then it wouldn’t matter that he could hear them. A language that he, Ragnar, had started to develop; it was based on criminals’ backslang but was much more complicated: you didn’t have the same consonant on each side of the vowel
o,
for example, like you do in the simplest form of backslang. In backslang the word
love
became
lolovove,
which anybody could work out. In Ragnar’s language,
love
was
lomovowe
and
I’m in love with you
was
Imon inop lomovowe woxitovhoj yozou;
and what was more, you had to pronounce it as if you were speaking Russian.
    In the hut he had a box full of things he had found on the rocky shoreline, flotsam and jetsam from the countries in the east, and that was how he had collected foreign words in foreign alphabets that could be added to his language. The wonderful word STOLICHNAYA from a vodka bottle, for example.
    But the first thing Erika and Laura learned to say was
I’m in love with you
or
Imon inop lomovowe woxitovhoj yozou.
Erika remembers repeating the word
lomovowe
to herself when she went to bed at night.
Lomovowe, lomovowe, lomovowe.
It was a lovely word once she had learned to pronounce it. Laura gave up trying to speak Ragnar’s language more or less straightaway. She found it too difficult, she told them. But not Erika. She didn’t give up. She liked speaking in a language only she and Ragnar could understand.
    Ragnar would speak to her, quietly. She lay there in the secret hut with his arm around her; he stroked her hair and said:
    Isak, pronounced Isotakol, was the wicked king from the land of Dofeatovhok who had bewitched the island and everyone who lived there—the people, the sheep, the cows, the trees, the fish. He had an ear as big as the tall windows of the community center. He heard everything. Every sound. The slap of the flounder against the stony seabed. Fir cones opening. Your breathing as you run away through the woods.

Chapter 17
    At a bus stop on the edge of Fagerås, a woman waited for the bus. Beside her was a boy of fourteen or so. The woman and the boy stood motionless in the slush; it was snowing and raining by turns. The bus stop consisted of a pole with timetables mounted on it and a rotting shelter with a disintegrating roof, the bench inside unusable. The woman, dressed in a red checked coat with a tie belt and high-heeled black boots, had her dark hair up and