Stella Descending Read Free

Jesper’s story! Oh, yes, one other thing: Back in the fifties, Jesper married Nora, and with her he had a son: Martin.
    Winter 1990. Our story proper begins about now, on a day in late January, let us say. Here’s picture number one: We are standing outside an apartment building in the Frogner district of Oslo, scene of the young actor’s tragic death in 1934. In the picture you can see a hydraulic lift extending upward to a closed window on the ninth floor. Atop the lift is a platform, on the platform sits a spanking-new avocado-green sofa, and on the sofa sits Martin, with a big smile on his face. I don’t know whether you have noticed, but behind the closed window on the ninth floor, half hidden behind a pale blue curtain, a young woman is waiting.
    The name of the woman behind the blue curtain on the ninth floor is Stella. On a sunlit evening just over ten years after Martin climbs through her window, she will fall from that selfsame building in Frogner. The descent, from the moment she loses her footing until she hits the ground, will take two seconds. Two seconds: no more, no less. It is these two seconds on which I shall endeavor here to shed some light.
    I am a special investigator with the Violent Crimes division of the Oslo police department. The sign on my office door says C. DANIELSEN. The C is for Corinne. I have no friends; my coworkers call me Corrie the Chorus because of my theatrical background. In my former life I was a ventriloquist and puppet maker. At one time I even had my own puppet theater. My pièce de résistance was a number featuring fifty puppets, a very fair representation of the entire cast of
La Bohème.
    My real gift, however, is that I get an ever so slight twinge in my stomach whenever I come face-to-face with a killer. Call it intuition. I can also tell when I’m on the brink of a confession and when I am not. This is one of those cases in which I never did get a confession. The case was dropped due to lack of evidence. Martin took his red-clad daughter, Bee, by the hand and walked away, vanishing from my sight until that winter’s night in Oslo, when he turned up again on that streetcar—or so I thought. He got off scot-free.
    Hence these words.

Amanda
    Listen! Sometimes at night, when I’m in bed, Mamma is here with me. Okay, not
right
here but close by. And sometimes she talks, not to me and not to Bee, but to someone else: Martin, maybe, or the old geezer. She doesn’t know I can hear her. Martin doesn’t want to hear, and the old geezer is deaf, so I suppose you could say she’s talking to nobody.
    A few years ago, Mamma got sick and kept saying to herself, Better not fall now, better not fall. She used to say the same thing to me: Better not fall now. And to Bee: Better not fall now. I didn’t know what she meant. She was lying in bed flat on her back, and Bee and I were standing with our feet flat on the floor, and there she was saying we better not fall. You can’t fall when you’re already lying in bed, I told her. She said it was just a figure of speech. She didn’t mean it literally. But then some years went by and she fell anyway. Literally. And that was that. I don’t think people should go around using figures of speech all over the place if they don’t mean them literally. I must remember to tell Mamma that next time she’s close by.
    That time when she was sick we thought she was going to die, but she didn’t. She got better and went back to work and said things I didn’t like: that she was living on borrowed time. When she was in the hospital, she asked me to read to her. Books and newspapers. She asked me to read
Moby-Dick,
because she felt you couldn’t die without having read
Moby-Dick
. We never managed to finish it. She couldn’t take it after a while. There came a point where all she wanted me to read were the real estate ads in
Aftenposten
. “Bright three-room apartment in quiet street, with balcony,” that sort of thing. That cheered her