by Tove Jansson
That evening, Erik had not prepared any supper. He said he had a headache. They could make something themselves or eat something cold from the pantry.
“Did you take an aspirin?” Alexander asked.
“Yes, of course,” Erik said. He was lying on the sofa in the parlour, staring at the ceiling with his feet on the armrest. And he hadn’t taken off his shoes. Alexander went for a blanket. “Lift your feet,” he said, and he put a newspaper over the arm of the sofa.
The next day, Alexander suggested that Erik sew curtains for The House, even though he knew that Erik had never sewn and couldn’t even hem a tablecloth.
The winter wore on and The House rose higher and higher. Alexander and Boy had moved beyond the cupola and were working on the highest tower, where they were planning a rotating beacon. Their Black & Deckers ran every evening, an infernal shrieking of electric saws and drills in the bedroom, interrupted by periodic silence. Erik sat and watched television. Sometimes he went to the local cinema. Alexander asked if he couldn’t go and visit Jani and Pekka or some of their other friends, but Erik didn’t want to. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s our turn to invite them.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Alexander, “but not until The House is finished. Then they can come and look. I’ve told you, we can’t be disturbed while we’re building.”
Boy didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. He was cheerful and chatty at mealtimes and completely occupied with getting the beacon to rotate.
One evening when Alexander had gone to the station to buy cigarettes, Boy threw open the door to the parlour and shouted, “It’s going around! It’s rotating! We’ve done it!”
Erik turned off the television. In the darkened room he walked slowly towards Boy and then past him into the bedroom, where the only lights were in The House, lamps burning on every floor. From the final, topmost tower, red and green lights swept across the walls of the bedroom in a steady rhythm.
“We did it!” Boy shouted, laughing out loud. “Alexander and me! We made it work. We’ve topped off the house and the beacon’s working just the way it should. Well? What do you think of our house?”
“It’s not yours,” said Erik very softly.
“Oh yes it is,” Boy said. “It sure is! You’d better believe it is! Come and look from the other side. Come look at the way the lights reflect in the bedroom mirrors!” When Erik didn’t move, he took him by the arm.
“Don’t touch me!” Erik shouted.
“Don’t be silly,” Boy said, and gave him a slap on the back. Erik screamed – a little, squeaky scream. Fumbling on the workbench he grabbed a tool, something that felt hard and cold in his hand, and he flew at Boy and struck at him blindly. The drill bit hit him near the ear and angled down towards his shoulder, and Boy threw himself back against the doll’s house, which tottered for a moment and seesawed on its podium. The beacon continued to rotate. Boy jumped behind the doll’s house and yelled, “Stop that, for Christ’s sake! Have you lost your mind?”
Erik pursued him step by step. It was hard for him to see, and the moving beacon distorted the room and made it seem strange. He stumbled. Boy was silent.
“I know where you are,” Erik said. “You’re hiding behind the doll’s house.” He gripped the drill shaft harder and went after him. “I’m coming,” he said. “And this time I won’t miss.”
“Jesus Christ! Leave me alone,” Boy said. He was trapped in a corner of the room and couldn’t get away. “What do you want?”
Erik began to tremble. All he knew was that he had to strike out, just once, one time, but hard. There was something wrong with his glasses, all he could see was the beacon fluttering round and round. “Turn off that damned light,” he screamed.
Boy didn’t move.
“Turn it off so I can see you, or I’ll smash the whole tower to pieces!” He took one step towards Boy and said, “Shall I smash you or the tower?” By now he was shaking so hard he could barely stand. “Shall I smash you to pieces? Is it you I should smash?”
“No,” Boy said. “Not me.”
Erik took off his glasses. They were in the way – they’d fogged up and made it hard to see. The everyday act of taking off his glasses and stuffing them in his pocket altered everything, inexplicably. A great weariness swept over him, and he said, “Could you go turn on the overhead light? There’s something wrong with my glasses.”
When the light came on, he put the drill handle back on the workbench. Boy put his fingers carefully to his ear and looked at his hand. “Blood,” he said. “It’s running down on my collar.”
Erik sat down on the floor. He felt ill.
They heard the front door open. A few moments later, Alexander came in, stopped in the doorway and said, “What the hell’s going on in here?”
“He hit me,” Boy said. “Look! Blood!”
“Erik?” said Alexander. “Why are sitting on the floor? Where are your glasses?”
“In my pocket. I feel sick.”
“What have you done?”
“I don’t know,” Erik said. “But I saved our tower. It’s all in one piece.”
Slowly, Alexander opened a pack of cigarettes, took one out and lit it. “It actually rotates,” he said. “You know your stuff, Boy. Now the whole thing’s perfect. No one’s ever built such a house as Erik’s and mine.”
A Sense of Time
FIRST AND FOREMOST, you need to understand that I really love my grandmother. I love her honestly and respectfully, and for the most part I understand the things about her that are hard to understand. We’ve lived together all my conscious life. But I have no idea what it is that has so completely upset her sense of time, and I’m sure she hasn’t, either. We never talk about it.
How should I begin so you won’t misunderstand …? First of all, you mustn’t think any of this is funny! Before I say too much, there’s one thing I want you to remember. Grandmother is the calmest and happiest person you can imagine. Sometimes I think it is precisely this – that she’s lost her grip on time, I mean – that keeps her happy.
Since my parents died, Grandmother has taken care of me in the sweetest way. We’ve lived together for seventeen years, and she is now very old. In the beginning, I took it all in my stride. If she woke me in the middle of the night and wanted to take a mid-morning stroll, I followed along without a question. I got used to it – in fact, I loved our nocturnal rambles. I was proud of being the only child out at night. Mostly we went to the park or down to the harbour; Grandmother knew I was interested in boats. I remember her high-topped shoes on the pavement. As we walked down the street, they made the only sound. The streets were always empty except for an occasional passing car. I also grew accustomed to her serving me my evening tea in the middle of the day and then putting me to bed and drawing the curtains. I would read under the covers with a flashlight. Then it got worse. I realized that Grandmother had completely lost her sense of time, and I began to object. That distressed and upset her. Indeed it confused her, and I couldn’t stand to see her anxious, so after that I let her divide up the day whatever way she liked.
When I entered the university – that was a year ago – she interfered with my work a great deal. I would get up at six o’clock, sit down to study, and she would come in and worry that I was staying up too late. “You need to go to bed,” she’d say. “You need to rest your eyes and your poor nerves. There’s no hurry, you’ve plenty of time to study, believe me. Can’t you please go to bed if Grandmother asks you very nicely?”
This doesn’t happen every day, but still several times a week. Grandmother’s private, interior world must be very strong if she can so serenely deny the sun and the moon. I wonder what it is that shines for her and makes her so terribly certain and calm. I don’t want to upset her, far from it, but lately it’s become a real nuisance. I try to organize my work day according to a schedule, a kind of supporting framework of sometimes rather fragile decisions built on good intentions and exertion. It all falls apart when
Grandmother wakes me at night and gives me a cup of coffee to make it easier for me to get up. It destroys my concentration. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Today I am really upset. Grandmother and I have a long flight ahead of us, all the way to Anchorage, Alaska. She wants to see an old friend who is very dear to her. He’s a doctor, although he’s now an old man and gave up his practice long ago. Grandmother is generally frightened of doctors, but she believes in this man. He saved her life once, when she had diphtheria. She says they could always talk to each other in a clear and secret way that no one else could understand. Now I’m hoping that he’ll be able to help us. He has taken care of people who are not exactly out of their minds, but not exactly in their minds, either, if you know what I mean. People with misconceptions or, let us say, dislocations in the ability to perceive and make judgements – in other words, the sort of thing that can affect otherwise completely social, well-meaning individuals. Of course, Grandmother is not going to see him as a patient. She just wants to visit him before she’s too old to travel.
It was hard getting Grandmother to the plane. She insisted it was a night flight, that she’d always wanted to see the North Pole at night, that we were leaving way too early and would have to wait at the airport for hours. I tried to explain. I showed her the timetable and a world map. Nothing helped. Finally I pleaded with her to come for my sake, and then she came. Our plane was delayed, or maybe it was being repaired. Grandmother fell asleep wrapped in a blanket, but every time they’d call out an arrival or departure over their ghastly loudspeakers, she would jump to her feet anxiously and look at me until I calmed her down and explained that we still had plenty of time.
Now she’s sitting in the window seat on the aeroplane and I’ve bundled her up well. Every time she wakes up, she can see the North Pole. A little while ago, the stewardess handed out pretty cards guaranteeing that the passenger has really flown right over the pole – two polar bears in relief stare up at a vanishing aeroplane, white on white in a compass-like frame. I’m saving the card for her. When I was little, we collected pretty postcards and pinned them to a bulletin board. Many of them came from Grandmother’s friend in Alaska. He travelled a lot when he was young. I remember in particular a beach in Hawaii and the Place de la Concorde after dark.
It is now deep night. There is a full moon sharply outlined against a black sky, and, 36,000 feet below us, the snow. Hour after hour, the same empty bluish white expanse. They’ve turned off the overhead lights, and now one can see that the snow down there is not a completely smooth surface. Sometimes the moonlight throws long shadows.
Before we left, Grandmother talked a lot about the arctic night we would fly through. “Isn’t it a mystical word, ‘arctic’? Pure and quite hard. And meridians. Isn’t that pretty? We’re going to fly along them, faster than the light can follow us. Isn’t that right? Time won’t be able to catch us.” She is enjoying the trip immensely. This is, in fact, the first time she’s ever flown. The most interesting part to her was the meal, which was served on a tray with depressions like soap dishes for each item. She put the minimal salt and pepper shakers in her purse, also the little plastic spoons. “They’re spoiling us,” she said. “They’re always giving us something – a candy, a newspaper, a glass of juice …”
Of course, I’ve noticed that the stewardess gives us much more attention than she gives the other passengers, probably because Grandmother is so old – in an open, almost charming way – and because she’s so delighted with everything they give her.
Grandmother’s friend is going to meet us in Anchorage, then we change planes and the three of us fly on to Nome, where he lives. I’m very tense. Is she going to talk to him about time, perilous time? Does she realize how dangerous she’s made it? Is she hoping he’ll straighten the whole thing out or, to the contrary, tell her she’s right? Dear heaven, I hope he doesn’t upset her.
I think I’ll sleep a little. I’m so terribly tired. Almost everyone is sleeping; the whole plane is quiet.
My watch has stopped.
♦ ♦ ♦
Grandmother woke up. Beneath her stretched an endless landscape of snow. The sky just above the horizon was brown with a dark red kernel that cut through the night right under the wing in the direction the plane was flying. The stewardess walked by, stopped, and smiled at Grandmother. Grandmother smiled back and with a finger to her lips indicated that her grandson needed his sleep; he was very tired. The stewardess nodded and walked on. The long blue field of snow was intensely cold against its glowing horizon. It was like a landscape in a dream, one of those endless dreams where everything stands and waits. Grandmother let her thoughts move on to John, wondering in what way he’d grown old. But she was sure she’d know him again at once.
By and by, the ice field below was interrupted by belts of dark water, and the sea opened up more and more. Grandmother sat whispering to herself. “Lonely schooners of ice and snow …” she whispered. “To see the coast of Alaska … Night in Nome.”
The plane lurched and seemed to fall, then rose again and flew on with its wings bouncing up and down as if in the grip of some powerful, capricious storm. Lennart woke up. “Don’t be afraid, it’s nothing to worry about!” he said. “It has something to do with warm and cold air as we come in over the coast.”
“Temperature changes,” said Grandmother. “I understand.”
Lennart leaned across and looked down at the alien landscape. Mountains now, white and conical, beautifully drawn, one behind the other, as simple as a child’s drawing, the red horizon glowing behind them.
“The sun’s coming up,” he said.
“No, darling,” Grandmother said, “it’s going down. That’s what’s so interesting. We’re coming out of a long arctic night, and when we catch up with the day it’s already evening.”
Lennart looked at his grandmother and, unable to control his frustration, he burst out, “Why aren’t you wearing your seatbelt? Why don’t you ever do what I say? You don’t listen!” He fastened her belt and started gathering up their magazines, stood up and rummaged through the luggage bin for gloves and hats. Finally he tried to put on his overcoat, but lost his balance and sat down abruptly as the plane banked. It was unbearably warm and he felt a little ill.
“This turbulence won’t last long,” the stewardess said. “But you must keep your safety belts fastened.”
“Lennart,” said Grandmother, “the next time we fly, do you think they’d let us into the cockpit just for a little while? And when we land, do you think you could find some nice postcards of the sunset?”
“Yes, yes,” Lennart said. “Whatever you want. I’ll take care of it. I’ll fix it.” He was wet with sweat halfway down his back.
They landed in Anchorage.
Grandmother was unsteady on her legs because she’d been sitting still too long. He was trying to hold her arm, and at the same time carry all their bags and belongings. The stream of people was steered into a narrow corridor, a kind of tunnel that led into the arrivals hall. He couldn’t find their tickets at the check point – there was a long delay, and when he finally found them and they moved on he couldn’t see the departure time for the next flight because he couldn’t find his glasses. He should have checked earlier. He ought to find someone who could get Grandmother a chair. There didn’t seem to be a single chair in the whole hall, only glass walls and doors everywhere, and people pushing forward in the queue and kicking their bags along over the slippery floor and into the backs of a person’s knees, suddenly impatient as if seconds mattered. It was unforgivable that he hadn’t checked and remembered when the connecting flight was to leave for Nome. The loudspeakers bellowed constantly. People were divided up into queues marked “Transit” or “Exit” or were crowded together into a waiting room. He held onto Grandmother and they were channeled into a large echoing space decorated with skins and icicles. And there stood John, waiting for them, a little old man with a white goatee. John saw them at once and walked up to G
randmother and kissed her hand. They sat down at a table and looked at each other.
“Grandmother,” said Lennart, “I’ll be right back. I’m just going to buy our postcards.” In the corridor he found no one selling cards, mostly just hides and little stuffed polar bears and seals. He hurried on through the transit hall, where people sat eating, and up a flight of stairs. He should have found his glasses and checked departure times. The stairs went down again and he walked through swinging doors and found himself in a new hall with nothing but panelling and posters on the walls. The high panels looked like doors, but they didn’t give when he pushed on them and they had no handles. He ran around the room a couple of times before he saw the blue lamp over the exit, which led him straight out into the snow. There were several trucks beside a snow bank. It could have been a loading area. In any case no lights, just black night. An aeroplane rose towards the sky behind the terminal. The red horizon had faded and there was nothing but deep arctic night. He turned and ran back – up the stairs and down a corridor and into a new hall that he didn’t recognize. Now it was just a question of finding Grandmother and getting her onto the flight to Nome and finding out when it left. They needed to hurry, and Grandmother moved slowly and got ill if you tried to rush her. He tried not to listen to the arrival and departure announcements. He kept repeating Grandmother’s lovely, magically effective words – arctic, mystical meridians, Nome at night. He kept running and finally found his way back and saw them sitting side by side, Grandmother and John. They were deep in conversation. He walked up to them and stood behind Grandmother’s chair and heard her say, “They’re equally lovely. Day and night are equally beautiful to me. But Lennart needs to learn where they belong. You understand, he’s only just begun to live his life in earnest, and it will be so awkward for him if he doesn’t get help …”
“Grandmother,” Lennart said, “there weren’t any cards.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “John has cards for us.”
