Read Online The Looking-Glass Sisters by Gøhril Gabrielsen - Free Book Online

for a poor woman who from now on will have to steal around the moors like a common thief. I who was born here just as much as they were, Mum and Dad too for that matter, they wore themselves out in this spot for half their lives,and then the damned natives claim that I don’t belong here! No, our rubbish is clearly not as fine as their rubbish! Our forefathers have clearly not decomposed in the ground for as long as theirs! No, for we are bloody bandits from elsewhere, unwelcome, aliens!’
    Ragna’s rage floods out into our small house, rises high and higher, it presses and roars in my ears so I can hardly breathe.
    ‘The moors that I have walked over since I was a little girl,’ she intones while she moves things, pushes things around, puts things away with great violence inside the kitchen. ‘My livelihood each and every autumn! From now on I’ll have to stand and watch them fill their pails – and they’ve the whole area to take from. The government will give them everything, yes they will, Johan says. As if it wasn’t just as much our refuse as theirs that nourishes the cloudberries! Let me tell you – they’ll just have to spit on me when I come, fetch their rifles too, I don’t care, at least I’ll die on my own moor!’
    She interrupts herself with a fit of coughing, but goes on in a hoarse voice, ‘I’ve got to say it, but you keep quiet about it being said. Johan had with him a secret map of which families will take over the various areas here. And it’s not us, I can tell you that! You whine like a dog for food, but soon there won’t be any food around, for your further information! You ought to be ashamed of yourself and find out more about what’s happening instead – for we’re being ambushed!’
    Suddenly she’s a lot less het up.
    ‘The right of disposition of the outlying areas, something like that, that’s the fine name they give to it. Whenour lease from the state expires, when the new master race decide things, then, then it’s all over and out with you too, you miserable worm.’
    You miserable worm. She’s hardly even able to say the words. They come as a final kick from a woman already on the floor, completely exhausted and overpowered.
     
    For one weak moment I’m capable of believing her. But I quickly realize that this is due to exhaustion and repressed fear. This sudden threat of a superior force and being shut out of the moors is nothing but a distortion of the truth: I’m the one who is going to be ousted, by a master race consisting of Johan and Ragna, and I’m the one who’s going to be subjected to a new regime – at the nursing home, to be precise.
    The lie’s good. She almost believes it herself, and maybe there’s a hint of truth too. But the rage, all the force of the emotional outburst, is directed at me, and I’m quite certain that I was one of the victims of yesterday’s many conspiracies.
    *
    Just think if I was unfortunate enough to go on living down through the centuries in the form of a series of existences – first a sparrow, then a wasp, after that a tree, a birch, and then to become a dog, a beetle and a human being again. Instead of letting my soul remain here, which is my greatest wish, I would be diluted, spread out into all kinds of states in all kinds of places, and when I eventually return, this place and I would be strangers to each other. Nothing would be recognizable, no small stone or tree.
    I bend down and fish out one of the books that is lying in the dust under the bed, to be specific one of the reference works in Home University , Vol. III, ‘Geography’. On the back cover I write, ‘Let me be spared from living several lives.’ And beneath, at the very edge of the margin, ‘Just let me fertilize the moors.’
     
    In real life I’m a person made for permanent, eternal states. Marriage would perhaps have been the right thing for me. A connection and obligation for ever. For isn’t it the case that on the few occasions when I