by Tove Jansson
But you might at least have sent them by registered mail. You never learn a thing about life’s practical details. And of course you haven’t given me an exact arrival date, but I go to the depot now and then, when it suits me.
Papa
The train stopped out on the moor, as inexplicably as before, and stood still for several minutes. It started moving again and Victor saw his father on the platform. They approached one another. Very slowly.
Premonitions
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, a remarkable woman lived in the village where I grew up. Her name was Frida Andersson. Frida lived alone in a cottage by herself but she had a daughter and a grandchild in the city. Sometimes in summer they would come to visit, but as Frida grew more and more peculiar, they began to stay away.
The trouble was, Frida was haunted by a bad conscience. It became an obsession that no one could help her with. No matter what went wrong in the village, she thought it was her fault. When the village misfortunes were insufficient, she began to concern herself with everything she read in the newspaper, and then, of course, her anxiety became endless. Everything was her fault. It got worse and worse. In the end she just sat on her steps and cried.
I realize that this may be hard to believe, but no matter how foolish Frida’s misapprehensions became, they were a bitter reality for her. It was impossible to explain and convince, and severity had no effect at all. Now, years later, it occurs to me that perhaps we should have gone along with her delusions, but we didn’t. When no one agreed with her, she found comfort and confirmation in superstitious signs. A mirror is broken, two knives are crossed – there are portents and omens everywhere, if only you’re sufficiently open to them and to the guidance that comes from above.
You might suppose that Frida would have been an easy target for the village children, but it wasn’t like that at all. They were fascinated. Every time something bad happened in the world, the children all ran to Frida to hear the ghastly details. She had a powerful imagination and she could tell a terrific story.
I really believe that the children helped her a great deal, perhaps more than her portents.
I was seventeen at that time and of course I knew how the world worked, and almost everything else, plus it goes without saying that I liked to contradict and argue. It’s amazing that Frida liked me anyway.
On pleasant summer evenings we’d sit on her front steps and she’d tell me about what was going to happen. She’d warn me earnestly about the inevitable, the threat that comes steadily closer and eventually finds its catastrophe, which must always have a reason, a cause.
“And the cause, of course, is you,” I said, being sarcastic.
“Naturally,” Frida said and took my hand. “You know, on Friday morning a big white bird came and tapped its bill on the kitchen window three times. And what happened? There was an earthquake in California!”
I read intellectual books in those days and launched into an explanation of egocentricity, misdirected self-identification and God knows what else, and Frida looked at me in a friendly way and shook her head and said, “You’ll learn. But it will take time.”
I tried to brighten her up with the prospect of a summer visit by her daughter and granddaughter, but no, the child could fall in the well or drown in the marsh or get a fishbone caught in her throat and suffocate. Then I got tired and left.
That same summer, they were blasting for the new highway. It was a company from the city that was doing the work. They had a whistle they blew; then came the explosion. You got used to it.
The accident caused a sensation in the village. No one could understand why Frida couldn’t stay home when the whistle sounded. If she didn’t believe in the town’s warnings she must nevertheless have had her own. There was no need for her to get hit in the head with a plain old piece of granite.
I went to the hospital and they said I could talk to her for only a couple of minutes. There wasn’t a lot of her to see under all the bandages.
I held her hand and waited.
Finally she whispered, “What did I tell you? Now you have to believe me.”
“Of course, Frida,” I said. “You’re going to be fine. Now you just rest and don’t worry about a thing.”
Then, her voice clear and distinct, Frida said, “Exactly. You know what? For the first time in my life, I’m not worried at all. It feels wonderful. And now I’m going to sleep for a while. See you later.”
A whole mass of children were there for Frida’s funeral. They seemed expectant. But nothing remarkable happened – except later that evening there was a thunderstorm.
Emmelina
WHEN OLD MISS SPINSTER on the third floor had uttered the last of her constant complaints and died peacefully in her sleep, many of her neighbours wondered what would become of the vast turn-of-the-century flat she had occupied for ninety years. Eventually they learned that it would go to Emmelina, nineteen, a kind of lady’s companion who, for all anyone knew, had been plucked from an employment bureau and was, consequently, a completely unknown quantity. How the maid found out, no one knew. She certainly didn’t get it from Emmelina, who never said a word about herself, or, for that matter, about much of anything.
In any case the will was hardly dictated by affection or gratitude. According to the maid, Old Miss Spinster might just as well have had a cat as her companion, and Emmelina’s ministrations, though irreproachable, seemed to have been rendered somewhat absent-mindedly. Mostly she sat by the bed and read aloud until Old Miss Spinster grew angry with the book and wanted a new one, or just insisted on knowing how the story came out. If you’re a maid, constantly taking things into or out of the room, you hear and see a great deal. Poor Old Miss Spinster had tried to knock some life into the exemplary Emmelina, make her good and mad, ring for her night and day to bring things she didn’t need, complain to high heaven about this or that, but no, it’s hard to upset a person like Emmelina, and there’s something wrong with people who are always calm and quiet. It’s not natural. “Almost a little creepy,” the maid said, lowering her voice. “Sometimes that Emmelina sends shivers down my spine.”
Now six months had passed and Emmelina was still living in the great flat. She changed nothing. Everything stayed the way it had been in Old Miss Spinster’s days. She seemed to like the darkened rooms with their capricious and barely discernible collections of furniture and bric-a-brac. She could walk, or rather wander, from one room to the next, apparently quite content and without a thought for the future.
The maid, who continued to come once a week, could report that Emmelina slept in the dining room, the largest room in the flat by far, the chairs all lined up against the wall, and that she had a lot of crystal balls on the sideboard shelves, but if you’re odd, you’re odd, and that’s all there is to it. Time passed and the neighbours forgot about Emmelina, who was seldom seen, and everything in the building returned to normal.
Later, it occurred to David, who lived on the floor below and worked in advertising, that he might have passed Emmelina on the stairs several times without noticing her, small and pale as she was. And then came that important evening.
The lamps had gone out in his flat. He couldn’t find a torch and went out into the stairwell. And then he saw Emmelina coming down the stairs step by step with a candle in one hand. David studied her face, which was so calm, so absolutely tranquil, caressed by the evasive shadows of the candle flame. She struck him as ethereally and mysteriously beautiful.
That night, David called up an image of the girl with her candle to chase away the thing he feared, which was an insight that came back to him mercilessly every evening when it grew dark. The insight was that he hated his job but that he didn’t have the courage to break out and begin again from the beginning. That may sound easy. Don’t a lot of people turn their lives around at age thirty-five? No, they don’t. They go on and on. They don’t dare, they don’t have the strength. They just can’t bring themselves to make the break … Or maybe they think it won’t mak
e any difference.
The nights continued, and gradually the image of the girl with the candle faded. And after all, what did she have to do with his problem?
David had nightmares in which, jovial and unctuous, he tried to sign a client using the same amusing anecdotes over and over, repeating the same simplistic, popular slogans again and again to close the deal … Or he was on his way to an important business lunch and he’d forgotten the address, the client’s name, the purpose of the meeting, and he was late, always late, running madly through the streets knowing he was betraying an important trust.
And then in the morning he’d go back to his office.
David wrote a letter to Emmelina and then tore it up.
And there was Knut. They got together now and then to have a beer and read the evening papers before going their separate ways. Knut had a job renting and selling cars a couple of blocks down the street. One time David was dangerously close to telling him about his despair but decided against it. He didn’t need to watch Knut look down at his large hands in helpless concern, exactly the way he had always done at school whenever he was embarrassed.
At his job, Knut might sometimes say to a customer in passing, “As my good friend in advertising said about this model …” or “You might ask a friend of mine in the advertising business. He hangs out with a lot of corporate bigwigs who drive this car.”
Now Knut finished his beer and folded his newspaper.
“I don’t see so much of you these days,” he said. “Lots of work?”
“You bet.”
“Going well?”
“Sure,” David said. “See you.”
“So long,” said Knut.
Of course he could approach someone else, the bartender at the Black Bear or the man at the newsstand, and pour out all his troubles recklessly and tell them that he really only wanted to die, and then of course it would be impossible ever to have another drink at the Black Bear or buy a paper at the corner.
In the end, David walked one flight up and rang Emmelina’s bell, without knowing what he would say to her.
“Good evening,” Emmelina said. “You live downstairs, don’t you?” Coolly polite, completely at ease, she talked to him for a few minutes about nothing in particular. She did not ask why he’d come. The young woman struck him as intelligent, and David was grateful for that. He slept that night without dreaming.
They started going out in the evenings, always to the same restaurant on the next block. For David, these evenings became very important because of Emmelina’s restful silence and her calm. She didn’t seem to expect anything of him and appeared to be completely at peace with herself. She never said anything of significance, nothing personal, but what she did say was preceded by a little pause that left David in suspense – until the moment of expectation passed. He noticed that Emmelina took what he said almost literally, with a child’s earnestness, and he decided never to burden her. It was enough just to be close to her, free from the others but still not alone.
David loved Emmelina’s hair – straight, blonde, bobbed in front and shoulder-length on the sides, a sparkling head from which her face looked out as if from a window, a narrow face, not in any way remarkable except for her eyes, which were unusually light, almost colourless. And he liked the way she let her hair fall forward when she listened to him with her eyes cast down.
David tried to preserve her mysteriousness. He was protective of this fragile new friendship. But with all chivalric courtesy, he could still ascribe qualities to Emmelina, give her traits of character that she showed no trace of. He constructed a tender picture of her childhood and early youth, gave her little eccentricities, charming faults. It became a game that reality was not allowed to approach too closely.
And he thought, How does she see me? A tall man with glasses and a thin neck, conventionally well dressed … Does she sense that I’m unhappy, does she realize how tightly I control myself? She asks no questions, ever … Why not?!
One day Emmelina said, “I collect crystal balls. I’d like to show them to you.”
On the way to Old Miss Spinster’s flat, he said, “She was a pretty angry woman, the old lady. It must have been difficult for you at times.”
“It wasn’t a hardship. She needed to get angry. It calmed her.”
“You read aloud to her, didn’t you? People say she only wanted to know how the stories ended – but what if they ended badly?”
“I chose books that ended happily,” said Emmelina. “So eventually she knew it would go well for her too.”
“How do you mean?”
“But you already know that. She died in her sleep.”
“You’re a funny one,” David said. “What would you read to me when the time came?”
“I’d read you the riot act,” she said.
David laughed appreciatively. It was so rare these days that anyone could make him laugh and still keep an utterly straight face.
When David came into the gloomy, overcrowded flat, it frightened him. “But Emmelina,” he said, “you can’t live here!”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “And I may not stay very long.”
The crystal balls were very beautiful, some of them transparent, others filled with mist.
“Good hobby,” David said and smiled at her. “What do you see in them? Something you wish for? Do you get a glimpse of the future?”
“No,” said Emmelina. “They’re empty, which is why I can stare into them practically forever.”
David was concerned. It seemed to him that Emmelina needed to see people more. He would introduce her to his friends, first of all to Inger and Ines.
They received Emmelina with an easy friendliness but came gradually to see her as a lovable curiosity, worthy of acceptance and protection but not really of being taken seriously. They did not shorten her name but continued to call her Emmelina, the name itself an archaic pleasantry worthy of preservation. But mostly they called her “My Dear”.
Sometimes they talked right past Emmelina, as if she weren’t even there, but they meant no offence. Yet sometimes when she spoke everyone went silent and listened attentively, almost expectantly. When whatever Emmelina had to say struck them as banal, however, the conversation would continue without her, almost with a sense of relief.
“She’s sweet and pleasant, of course,” Inger said, “but isn’t she a little naïve? And what about her sense of humour?”
Inger was a large, pretty woman who kept close track of everyone she’d slept with over the years and couldn’t help bossing them around and seeing to it that they behaved themselves as well as could be expected. One day she asked David how he was, if he was feeling better. And he recalled with sharp self-loathing the time he’d gone to Inger and told her of all his misery with his job and even wept in her arms.
Now her question made him belligerent. “How do you mean?” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be feeling all right?”
“Darling,” she said, “I know you’re terribly proud. But promise me not to brood about all those things any more? All right? Good. That makes me feel much better.”
He had allowed her to get really close, and she’d become painfully tactful, conspiratorial even, now that she was in possession of his weakness. And he couldn’t even dislike her because she was so clearly and completely kind.
At his job, things did not improve. David was late for appointments, barely polite to clients, and an ironic tone crept into his popular slogans that discredited what he was trying to sell.
“What’s troubling you?” his boss asked in a friendly way, because he liked David.
And all at once David understood that he was, as Knut would have put it, doing everything he could think of to get himself fired. But cowardice took a new grip on him and he promised to pull himself together and try harder.
One day as David and Emmelina were sitting at their usual table at the restaurant, he gave her a present, a glass ball. If you shook the ball, a snowstorm whirled up and g
radually fell on a little Swiss chalet with tinfoil windows.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
Emmelina smiled and touched his hand, a friendly gesture, but not unlike the appreciation one shows for the clumsy gift of a child.
David was silent for the rest of the meal and she didn’t ask him why he didn’t eat.
Finally he burst out, “You don’t care about anything!”
Emmelina stared at him. She waited.
He went on. “Emmelina, what do you mean to do with your life, your only life? You can’t just let time go by!”
“But my life is good,” Emmelina said.
“No, it’s not! A flower trying to grow in a cellar! Is there nothing you really care about, nothing you long to do? To achieve something, create something, maybe with your own hands? Discover new ideas that are bigger and more important than yourself? Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Emmelina said.
“Listen to me. If, right now, you could get your wish, like in the fairy tale, you know, you can wish for anything at all but only one wish, what would you wish for? You can sing more beautifully than anyone else in the world, or know everything about the stars, or know how to make a clock or build a boat. Anything at all!”
“I don’t know,” said Emmelina. “What about you?”
“Come on, let’s go,” said David curtly. “I can’t breathe in here.”
They walked up the street, past Knut’s garage, which was closed for the day, and on to the park. A light rain was falling, very light. As they walked under the trees, David talked about his agony at work, he poured out the whole miserable story – but in the third person. When he was done, Emmelina said, “I feel sorry for him. But if he’s too weak to live, wouldn’t it be better if he didn’t?”
That frightened David.
One evening when David and Emmelina were at Ines’s place, there was an awkward incident. After dinner, Ines was telling them about her new party dress. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ll put it on. And you have to tell me what you really think!”
