Stella Descending by Linn Ullmann Read Free Book Online Page B

mind.
    “Can’t you manage it?” she asked.
    “Now, now, be patient, Stella,” I whispered.
    I eventually got the catch open. Then all I had to do was to hook it through a little loop in the chain and—
click
—that would be that. But even my good eye let me down—well, it would, wouldn’t it, watering, misting over—and my hands trembled even more.
    In the end I completely botched it, and the locket slid down into her lap. She turned and smiled at me. I looked down.
    “Just a minute,” she chirped, getting to her feet. “I’ll see if Lena’s down the hall, I can ask her to do it. Trust Mamma to leave me a necklace with such a tricky clasp. She probably thought I’d never be able to take it off and would have to keep it round my neck forever.”
    She winked at me.
    I nodded as she went out the door.
    I curled my fingers in like claws.
    “Butterfingers!” I hissed at my hands.
    I bit off a chunk of bread. Chewed and chewed, but couldn’t seem to swallow.

Amanda
    After the funeral, Martin the ostrich king will take Bee by the hand and bring her home. Martin isn’t my father. My father’s in Australia. Martin is Bee’s father; that’s why it’s up to him to take Bee by the hand and bring her back here. Bee will sleep in this room and wake up in this room, but Mamma won’t be here, and I won’t be here, and the plumber won’t be here.
    Once, when Bee was just a baby, the ostrich king and I went to Copenhagen for my birthday. He had promised me a ride on the Ferris wheel. The old geezer told me that if it hadn’t been for his great-uncle in America, there wouldn’t be any Ferris wheels, and without Ferris wheels, the old geezer said, the world would have been a poorer place. Who knows? The old geezer says a lot of weird things. But it didn’t come to anything, that Ferris wheel ride. Instead, the ostrich king and I went on the roller coaster, up and down and up and down. Now I’m not afraid of anything; back then, though, I was afraid. The ostrich king just laughed at me and we did it again. Afterward we went back to the hotel room, and I lay on my bed and watched TV, and the ostrich king lay on his bed and slept. The curtains were drawn.
    On my birthday I ordered hot dogs, French fries, and a soda from room service.
    The ostrich king slept for three days. He said he’d never slept so well. Dreamless.
    Then we headed home again.

Axel
    A bath before the funeral. Attending to one’s toilet becomes an increasingly arduous task as one ages. But as long as I have plenty of time, and as long as neither impatience nor fear gets the better of me, I can, nonetheless, make myself presentable.
    Some years ago I took one of my last trips abroad, to Arezzo in Italy. There was an archaeologist there, Paolo, or Massimo; I don’t recall his name. But I do remember being invited into his workshop, where I saw all the fragments of stone jars on which he was working. To me this collection looked like a bunch of old rocks, but he was proud of them because they were old, thousands of years old. And if you put them together in the right way, said Paolo or Massimo, if you understood how this stone fit with that, then you would also understand something very important about something-or-other—I’ve forgotten what. It wasn’t the thought of some grand design that impressed me, however, it was the way the archaeologist worked. He handled each fragment with precision, gentleness, care, and deliberation, always in the knowledge that it could crack, crumble away, turn to dust. It was a beautiful sight: the archaeologist’s fingers, the remarkable rapport between hand and eye.
    Sometimes I feel about my body much as the archaeologist seemed to feel about his stones. It’s as though my body is a heap of rocks that has to be made presentable, put on display, possibly commented on (Well, how about that? Don’t tell me he’s still alive!). I should not have to feel ashamed of my appearance were it not for the fear that