Stella Descending Read Online Free PDF Page A

want a divorce. I won’t be able to stand that guy for more than five years.”
    We continued down the aisle as Alice whispered these words in my ear. I leaned toward her and muttered that this was not the right time to be discussing her possible divorce. Then she came to a complete halt. A faint murmur ran through the congregation, a ripple of uneasy curiosity. Alice came to a complete halt and whispered in my ear.
    “The problem, Pappa, is not that
you
don’t like him. The problem is that
I
don’t like him! I think he’s an arrogant jerk. Look at him! Look at him standing there with that pompous look on his face, waiting to marry me. I can just feel it in my bones, Pappa, this is going to be no fun at all!”
    We stood there in the aisle, eyes fixed on her fiancé, who was himself starting to look puzzled. We spent a long time staring at him. Eventually I leaned toward my daughter.
    “Well then, Alice, there’s only one thing to do,” I whispered.
    She looked at me and gave me her most dazzling smile, and we turned right around. We turned and paced back just as solemnly as we had made our way down the aisle, just as slowly in the opposite direction, away from the altar, away from the estimable fiancé, toward the church door. In sheer consternation, the verger opened the door, letting us out into the light. And before the congregation had collected itself, we were back inside my blue Beetle.
    “Okay, where to now?” I asked my daughter.
    Alice just laughed.
    “Oh, Pappa, I do love you,” she said, laying her head on my shoulder as I started the car and drove off. “I love you so very, very much.”
    Today I’m off to church again—or, rather, to the crematorium— this time on account of Stella. It’s a relief to know that the next funeral I attend will be my own. Stella was afraid of death, which is possibly why she worked with it day in, day out. I don’t know. She was young. She had children: two girls. Amanda and then Bee, a quiet little thing she had with the conceited ass to whom she was married.

    “But you don’t like anyone, Axel; everybody’s either an old hag, or
detestable, or disreputable, or an offense to the eyes—and what was it
you called Martin?”
    “A conceited ass.”
    “How come? Give me one good reason.”
    “He’s reckless.”
    “So are you, Axel, in your own way.”
    “He’s dishonest.”
    “And what does that make you, the soul of truth?”
    “He’s not good to you.”
    “There are plenty of people worse off than me.”
    I do not fear death. I learned early on from my father that the right to die by one’s own hand is the most fundamental of human freedoms. There is always a way out. I have known this since I was a boy: There is always a way out! And my father actually did put an end to it all, taking my mother with him. Whether he did so deliberately, I cannot say, although he probably did. Long after we children had grown up and left home, before the war, they went missing in the Trollheimen Mountains and weren’t found until spring. They had been caught in an avalanche, or so it was said. They left no money. My sisters inherited our mother’s few dresses and cheap jewelery. I inherited a chandelier. When Gerd and I got married, she hung the chandelier in the living room. She thought it was beautiful. She said it lit up both the room and itself, unlike me, she said; I didn’t light up the room, myself, or anything else for that matter. I remember her sitting on the floor in her blue-checked dress with a yellow cardigan around her shoulders and her hair in a braid, sitting under the chandelier and gazing up at it for hours on end. One night after she had fallen asleep, I crept out of bed and downstairs to the living room, where I climbed onto a chair and pulled off one crystal after another until the chandelier was stripped bare. The next morning, Gerd demanded an explanation. I did not feel I owed her one and said as much. I still have the crystals, sealed up in