“You could say so.”
“Are you saying he’s been a kind of God for us?”
“To be perfectly candid, yes. He should be ashamed of himself!”
“What about Hilde herself?”
“She is an angel, Sophie.”
“An angel?”
“Hilde is the one this ‘spirit’ turns to.”
“Are you saying that Albert Knag tells Hilde about us?”
“Or writes about us. For we cannot perceive the matter itself that our reality is
made of, that much we have learned. We cannot know whether our external reality is
made of sound waves or of paper and writing. According to Berkeley, all we can
know is that we are spirit.”
“And Hilde is an angel...”
“Hilde is an angel, yes. Let that be the last word. Happy birthday, Hilde!”
Suddenly the room was filled with a bluish light. A few seconds later they heard
the crash of thunder and the whole house shook.
“I have to go,” said Sophie. She got up and ran to the front door. As she let
herself out, Hermes woke up from his nap in the hallway. She thought she heard him
say, “See you later, Hilde.”
Sophie rushed down the stairs and ran out into the street. It was deserted. And
now the rain came down in torrents.
One or two cars were plowing through the downpour, but there were no buses in
sight. Sophie ran across Main Square and on through the town. As she ran, one
thought kept going round and round in her mind: “Tomorrow is my birthday* Isn’t it
extra bitter to realize that life is only a dream on the day before your fifteenth
birthday? It’s like dreaming you won a million and then just as you’re getting the
money you wake up.”
Sophie ran across the squelching playing field. Minutes later she saw someone
come running toward her. It was her mother. The sky was pierced again and again by
angry darts of lightning.
When they reached each other Sophie’s mother put her arm around her.
“What’s happening to us, little one?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie sobbed. “It’s like a bad dream.”
Bjerkely
…an old magic mirror Great-grandmother had bought from a Gypsy woman ...
Hilde Moller Knag awoke in the attic room in the old captain’s house outside
Lillesand. She glanced at the clock. It was only six o’clock, but it was already light.
Broad rays of morning sun lit up the room.
She got out of bed and went to the window. On the way she stopped by the desk
and tore a page off her calendar. Thursday, June 14, 1990. She crumpled the page up
and threw it in her wastebasket.
Friday, June 15, 1990, said the calendar now, shining at her. Way back in
January she had written “15th birthday” on this page. She felt it was extra-special to
be fifteen on the fifteenth. It would never happen again.
Fifteen! Wasn’t this the first day of her adult life? She couldn’t just go back to
bed. Furthermore, it was the last day of school before the summer vacation. The
students just had to appear in church at one o’clock. And what was more, in a week
Dad would be home from Lebanon. He had promised to be home for Midsummer