RAKEL’S FIRST MEMORY is of blue days with the voice of Joan Baez coming from the record player. Sitting on a stool by the window, looking out at the mountains, she listens to Mamma sing along:
To the queen of hearts is the ace of sorrow.
He’s here today, he’s gone tomorrow.
Young men are plenty, but sweethearts few.
If my love leaves me, what shall I do?
The song plays over and over, in a round, as if Mamma is trapped in a circle from which she can never break free. Because every time the song nears the end, it bites its own tail and starts from the beginning again. The melody is sad and beautiful, just like Mamma. Her black hair, her golden skin. Pappa can be drawn in lead pencil, but Mamma must be drawn in colored crayons.
Time holds its breath when Mamma sings. It stops and waits. What is it waiting for? For Rakel to find something to do, so that it can come to its senses and start moving again. So it can run and run, but never come to the door. Just like the riddle of the nursery rhyme.
She stares at the mountains until she recognizes all their faces. They stand there in a long, long line, holding each other’s hands. The mountains are her friends, and the two she likes best are Blåstolen and Trollstolen. They lean toward each other like twins, one white, the other blue.
She’s friends with the letters of the alphabet too. Not just from one side, but from all possible sides. She knows which of them are themselves through and through, like O, and who becomes someone else when turned slightly: Big M, who becomes W when turned on its head. Capital N, who becomes Z when it lies down on its side. Those who tend to stick together, and those who are all alone. There are grown-up letters and baby letters, but the babies don’t always look like the grown-ups. She’s fond of the tiny o. It looks exactly like its mother and is so round that it rolls along all by itself. But most of all she loves the little i. It often spends time alone, but it never looks sad. The little i is a letter after her own heart. It is itself, both forward and backward, but if you turn it on its head, it protests: !
Her favorite number is eight. Because she was born in August. But mostly because the number eight can be written in so many different ways. Two circles, one atop the other, like a snowman. A reverse number three first, and then a normal number three. Or in the difficult way Pappa is trying to teach her, where she starts by drawing an S, before continuing upward again in a reverse S from the bottom. And it all has to be done in a single continuous movement without lifting her pencil from the paper. She likes six and nine too, because they’re twins, only one of them is standing on its head. Five and two are reverse twins, whether standing on their heads or not—but only if you type them into a calculator.
The best thing about numbers is that you can put them together. When two numbers merge, they grow and become bigger than themselves. Three plus three is six. Six plus six is twelve. Twelve plus twelve is twenty-four. Twenty-four plus twenty-four is forty-eight. Forty-eight plus forty-eight is ninety-six. Ninety-six plus ninety-six is one hundred ninety-two. One hundred ninety-two plus one hundred ninety-two is three hundred eighty-four. Three hundred eighty-four plus three hundred eighty-four is seven hundred sixty-eight. Seven hundred sixty-eight plus seven hundred sixty-eight is one thousand five hundred thirty-six. They grow so fast that Rakel almost gets out of breath. And even if she stops there, it feels as if she’s hurtling toward infinity at top speed.
Mamma is also heading for infinity. The song that never ends. Rakel has to look after Mamma, make sure that she doesn’t get swallowed up by her song and disappear completely.
I love my father, I love my mother,
I love my sister, I love my brother.
I love my friends and my relatives too.
I forsake them all, and go with you.
One day Rakel will manage to draw a picture that makes Mamma happy. A sun in all the colors of the rainbow. Mamma dancing, with butterflies in her hair. Before Rakel was born, Mamma lived in a country where it was never cold. Where she was friends with the language, and the alphabet had more than twice as many letters. It isn’t so strange that Mamma longs to go back.
“Nobody will ever love you as much as I do, Rakel,” Mamma often says to her. “Who else would have sacrificed everything for you?” And there’s another thing that Mamma tends to say: “If you ever have to choose between a man who loves you and a man you love, choose the one who loves you. That’s the mistake people make in life.”
EVEN THOUGH RAKEL is an only child, it’s almost as if she has a big brother all the same. Because David stands a head taller than her. He has dark hair, just like Rakel. And he lives in the tall apartment building, just like Rakel. But she’s the only one who can see him. The best thing about David is that he’s always there when she wants to play with him. They are together every single day. When the other children tease her, she thinks that everything will be okay if only she can tell David about it. And when strange words bubble and spill over inside her head, tickling her until she laughs out loud, David is the one she looks forward to sharing them with. Because David understands exactly what she means and likes the same games that she does.
If she asks Mamma and Pappa about why she’s an only child, Pappa says, “We didn’t need to have any more children, because we got it perfect on the first try.”
Mamma says, “You cried so much and were so difficult that we didn’t dare have any more.”
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