by Tove Jansson
This biographically explains Sculptor’s Daughter’s preoccupation with the dark and its preoccupation with authority, fear and salvage (‘in the end we saved everything that could be saved’). But only artistry explains the confluence of darkness, illumination, kindness and understanding which results in a book full of images as unsettling, surreal, vivid and full of unexpected light as the one in the story called The Iceberg, where the child, on her summer island and fascinated by a small floating ‘grotto’ of an iceberg offshore, goes out with a light in the middle of the night with a plan to throw herself inside it and float away. At the last minute she loses her nerve and throws her father’s torch instead. The ice lights up. But we’re left with both images, the one which doesn’t exist, conjured all the same, of a lost and frozen child, a child tucked inside an iceberg far out at sea, and this image which does, and which the child, annoyed at herself for not being brave enough to jump, consoles herself with:
My iceberg shone steadily out there like a green beacon and the batteries would last until sunrise because they were always new when one had just moved to the country. Perhaps … the torch would go on shining at the bottom of the sea after the iceberg had melted and turned into water.
From its foothold on the icy surface, Sculptor’s Daughter lights these surprising depths. It demands an understanding of the importance, and the fragility, geologically and metaphysically, of our smallness. It asks us to be alive to the imagination when it comes to the world, the ways we live and the different ways we can live. It mends its own breakages with art and story; this reparation always involves the telling of a good story, and then, when that story’s finished, another one. It is full of flung-open windows, thrown-open doors. At one point, at the end of the story called The Stone, a story about unexpected sources of wealth and about discovering a source of unexpected brightness in, of all things, stone, the child literally finds herself ‘squeezed in’, caught between ‘double doors with coiled iron springs at the top which the caretaker had put there because women always forgot to shut the doors.’ She’s the wedge that forces them open and keeps them open.
It’s a memoir of the child Tove Jansson. It’s a book of superb stories. It’s a connective masterpiece, a literal and literary threshold-maker in itself, sharp to and dismissive of all the closed doors; a book whose small, huge work is the healing of the divisions between the child state and the adult state, and whose huge ambition and painstaking micro-work is the salvaging and the giving back to adulthood, in the dangerous dark times there will always be, of a child-sized truth about how things connect, how they mend and how they continue, one good story after another.
Publisher’s note: The stories in this book follow Tove Jansson’s original edition of Sculptor’s Daughter, published in Swedish in 1968. The images, taken from the Jansson family archive, were added to the Swedish edition in 2003; see ‘A note on the photos’ at the end of the book for descriptions. Thirteen of the stories were included in the Sort Of Books collection, A Winter Book: Selected Stories.
Sculptor’s
Daughter
Tove Jansson
The Golden Calf
GRANDFATHER WAS A CLERGYMAN and used to preach to the King. Once, before his children and his children’s children and his children’s children’s children covered the face of the earth, Grandfather came to a long field which was surrounded by forests and hills so that it looked like Paradise. At one end it opened out into a bay for his descendants to bathe in.
Then Grandfather thought, here will I dwell and multiply, for verily this is the Land of Canaan.
Then Grandfather and Grandmother built a big two-storey house with a sloping roof and lots of rooms and steps and terraces and a huge veranda and placed plain wooden furniture everywhere inside and outside the house and when it was ready Grandfather began to plant things until the field became a Garden of Eden where he walked around in his big black beard. All he had to do was to point at a plant and it was blessed and grew until it groaned under its own weight.
The whole house was overgrown with honeysuckle and Virginia creeper and walls of small rambler roses grew round the veranda. Inside these walls Grandmother sat in a pale-grey silk dress and brought up her children. There were so many bees and bumble bees flying around her that it sounded like soft organ music, and in the daytime it was sunny and at night it rained and in the rock-garden there lived an angel who wasn’t to be disturbed.
She was still there when Mummy and I went out to live in the West Room, which also had white furniture and peaceful pictures but no sculpture.
I was a grandchild. Karin was another grandchild but her hair curled naturally and she had very big eyes. We played The Children of Israel together in the field.
God lived on the hill above the rock-garden and there was a forbidden cart up there. At sunset he spread out like a mist over the house and the field. He could make himself quite small and creep in everywhere in order to see what one was doing and sometimes he was only a great big eye. Moreover he looked just like Grandfather.
We raised our voices in the wilderness and were continually disobedient because God so likes to forgive sinners. God forbade us to gather manna under the laburnum tree but we did all the same. Then he sent worms up from the earth to eat up the manna. But we went on being disobedient and we still raised our voices.
All the time we expected him to get so angry that he would show himself. The very idea was tremendous. We could think of nothing but God. We sacrificed to him, we gave him blueberries and crab apples and flowers and milk and sometimes we made a small burnt-offering. We sang for him and we prayed to him to give us a sign that he was interested in what we were doing.
One morning Karin said that the sign had come to her. He had sent a yellow bunting into her room and it had perched on the picture of Jesus Walking on the Waters and nodded its head three times.
Verily, verily I say unto you, Karin said, many are called but few are chosen.
She put on a white dress and went round all day with roses in her hair and sang hymns and carried on in a very affected way. She was more beautiful than ever and I hated her. My window had been open too. I had a picture of the Guardian Angel at the Abyss on my wall. I had burnt as many burnt-offerings and picked even more blueberries for him. And as for raising my voice in the wilderness I had been just as disobedient as she in order to get divine forgiveness.
At morning prayers on the veranda Karin looked as though Grandfather was preaching only to her. She nodded her head slowly with a thoughtful look on her face. She clasped her hands long before the Lord’s Prayer. She sang with great emphasis and kept her eyes on the ceiling. After that business of the yellow bunting God belonged to her.
We didn’t speak to each other and I stopped raising my voice in the wilderness and sacrificing and was so jealous that I felt sick.
One day Karin lined up all the cousins in the field, even the ones who couldn’t talk yet, and held a Bible class for them.
It was then that I made the golden calf.
When Grandfather was young and was planting like mad he put a circle of spruce trees at the bottom of the field because he wanted a little arbour to have his afternoon tea in. The spruce trees grew and grew until they were huge and black and their branches got all tangled up with each other. It was quite dark inside the arbour and all the needles fell off and lay on the ground because they never got enough sunshine. Nobody wanted to have tea there any longer but preferred to sit under the laburnum or on the veranda.
I made my golden calf in the arbour because it was a pagan place and a circle is always a good setting for sculpture. It was very difficult to get the legs to stay upright but in the end they did and I nailed them to the plinth just to make sure. Sometimes I stood still, listening for the first rumble of the wrath of God. But so far he had said nothing. His great eye just looked right down into the arbour through the hole between the tops of the spruce trees. At last I had got him to show some interest.
T
he head of the calf turned out very well. I used tin cans and rags and bits of a muff and tied the lot together with string. If you stood a little way away and screwed up your eyes the calf really did shine like gold in the darkness, particularly round its nose.
I became more and more interested in it and began to think more and more about the calf and less and less about God. It was a very good golden calf. Finally I put a circle of stones round it and collected dry twigs for a burnt-offering.
Only when the burnt-offering was ready to light did I begin to feel afraid again and I stood completely still and listened.
God kept completely quiet. Perhaps he was waiting for me to take out the matches. He wanted to see if I really would do something so awful as to sacrifice to the golden calf and, even worse, dance in front of it afterwards. Then he would come down from his hill in a cloud of lightning and wrath and show that he knew that I existed. Then Karin could keep her old yellow bunting and her prayers and her blueberries!
I stood there and listened and listened and the silence grew and grew until it was overpowering. Everything was listening. It was late in the afternoon and the light coming through the trees made the branches look red. The golden calf looked at me and waited and my legs began to feel weak. I started to walk backwards, towards the gap between the trees, looking at the calf all the time, and as it became lighter and warmer I thought that I should have signed my name on the socle.
Grandmother was standing outside the arbour and she was wearing her lovely grey silk dress and her parting was as straight as an angel’s.
What have you been playing at in there, she said, and walked straight past me. She stood in front of the golden calf and looked at it and smiled. She put her arm around me and absent-mindedly pressed me against the grey silk and said: look what you’ve made! A little lamb. God’s little lamb!
Then she let go of me and walked slowly down the field.
I stayed where I was and my eyes began to smart and the bottom fell out of everything and God went back to his hill again and calmed down. She hadn’t even noticed that it was a calf! A lamb! Good grief! It didn’t look one little bit like a lamb, nowhere near it! I stared and stared at my calf. And what Grandmother had said seemed to have taken all the gold away from it and the legs were wrong and the head was wrong, everything about it was wrong and if it looked like anything at all perhaps it was a lamb. It wasn’t any good. It wasn’t sculpture at all.
I went to the junk room and sat there for a long time and thought. I found a sack. I put it on and then went out into the field and shuffled around in front of Karin on bended knee with my hair hanging over my eyes.
Whatever are you doing? Karin asked.
Then I answered: verily, verily I say unto you, I am a great sinner.
Really? said Karin. I could see that she was impressed.
Then everything was as usual again, and we lay under the laburnum tree and whispered together about God. Grandfather walked up and down making everything grow and the angel was still there in the rock-garden as if nothing had happened at all.
The Dark
BEHIND THE RUSSIAN CHURCH there is an abyss. The moss and the rubbish are slippery and jagged old tins glitter at the bottom. For hundreds of years they have piled up higher and higher against a long dark red house without windows. The red house crawls round the rock and it is very significant that it has no windows. Behind the house is the harbour, a silent harbour with no boats in it. The little wooden door in the rock below the church is always locked.
Hold your breath when you run past it, I told Poyu. Otherwise Putrefaction will come out and catch you.
Poyu always has a cold. He can play the piano and holds his hands in front of him as if he were afraid of being attacked or was apologising to someone. I always scare him and he follows me because he wants to be scared.
As soon as twilight comes, a great big creature creeps over the harbour. It has no face but has got very distinct hands which cover one island after another as it creeps forward. When there are no more islands left it stretches its arm out over the water, a very long arm that trembles a little and begins to grope its way towards Skatudden. Its fingers reach the Russian Church and touch the rock – oh! Such a great big grey hand!
I know what it is that’s the worst thing of all. It’s the skating-rink. I have a six-sided skating badge sewn to my jumper. The key I use to tighten my skates is on a shoelace round my neck. When you go down onto the ice, the skating-rink looks like a little bracelet of light far out in the darkness. The harbour is an ocean of blue snow and loneliness and nasty fresh air.
Poyu doesn’t skate because his ankles wobble, but I have to. Behind the rink lies the creeping creature and round the rink there is a ring of black water. The water breathes at the edge of the ice and moves gently, and sometimes it rises with a sigh and spreads out over the ice. When you are safely on the rink it isn’t dangerous any more but you feel gloomy.
Hundreds of shadowy figures skate round and round, all in the same direction, resolutely and pointlessly, and two freezing old men sit playing in the middle under a tarpaulin. They are playing ‘Ramona’ and ‘I go out of an evening but my old girl stays at home’. It is cold. Your nose runs and when you wipe it you get icicles on your mittens. Your skates have to be fixed to your heels. There’s a little hole of iron and it’s always full of small stones. I pick them out with the key of my skates. And then there are the stiff straps to thread through their holes. And then I go round with the others in order to get some fresh air and because the skating badge is very expensive. But there’s no one here to scare, everybody just skates faster, strange shadows making scrunching and squeaking noises as they pass.
The lamps sway to and fro in the wind. If they went out we should keep going round and round in the dark, and the music would play on and on and gradually the channel in the ice would get wider and wider, yawning and breathing more heavily, and the whole harbour would be black water with only an island of ice on which we would go round and round for ever and ever amen.
Ramona is as pretty as a picture and as pale as The Thunder Bride. Ramona is for adults only. I have seen The Thunder Bride at the waxworks. Daddy and I love the waxworks. She was struck by lightning just when she was going to get married. The lightning struck her myrtle wreath and came out through her feet. That’s why she is barefoot, and you can see quite clearly lots of crooked blue lines on the soles of her feet where the lightning came out again.
At the waxworks you can see how easy it is to smash people to pieces. They can be crushed, torn in half or sawn into little bits. Nobody is safe and therefore it is terribly important to find a hiding-place in time.
I used to sing sad songs to Poyu. He put his hands over his ears but he listened all the same. Life is an isle of sorrow, you live today and die tomorrow! The skating-rink was the isle of sorrow. We drew it underneath the dining-room table. With a ruler Poyu drew every plank in the fence and the lamps all at the same distance from one another and his pencil was always too hard. I only drew black and with a 4B – the darkness on the ice, or the channel in the ice or a thousand murky figures on squeaking skates flying round in a circle. He didn’t understand what I was drawing, so I took a red pencil and whispered: Marks of blood! Blood all over the ice! And Poyu screamed while I captured this cruel thing on paper so that it couldn’t get at me.
One Sunday I taught Poyu how to escape from the snakes in their big carpet. All you have to do is walk along the light-coloured edges, on all the colours that are light. If you step on the dark colours next to them you are lost. There are such swarms of snakes there you just can’t describe them, you have to imagine them. Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else’s snakes can ever be as awful.
He balanced himself with tiny, tiny steps on the carpet, his hands in front of him and his great big wet handkerchief flapping in one hand.
Now it’s getting narrow, I said. Look out for yourself and try to jump to that pale flower in the centre!<
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The flower was almost right behind him and the pattern disappeared in a twirl. He tried desperately to keep his balance, flapped his handkerchief and began to scream, and then fell into the dark part. He screamed and screamed and rolled over on the carpet, rolled off onto the floor and under a cupboard. I screamed too, crawled after him and put my arms round him and held him tight until he calmed down.
People shouldn’t have pile carpets, they’re dangerous. It’s much better to live in a studio with a concrete floor. That’s why Poyu is always longing to come to our place.
We are busy digging a secret tunnel through the wall. I’ve got quite a long way and I only work when I’m alone. The wooden panelling went all right but then I had to use the marble hammer. Poyu’s hole is much smaller but his Daddy’s tools are so bad that it’s a disgrace.
Every time I’m alone I take down the hanging on the wall and dig away and no one has noticed what I am doing. The hanging is Mummy’s. She painted it on sack-cloth when she was young. It shows an evening. There are straight tree-trunks rising out of the moss and behind the tree-trunks the sky is red because the sun is setting. Everything except the sky has gone dark in a vague greyish brown but there are narrow red streaks that burn like fire. I love her picture. It goes deep into the wall, deeper than my hole, deeper than Poyu’s drawing-room, it goes on endlessly and one never gets to the place where the sun is setting but the red gets more and more intense. I’m sure it’s burning! There is a terrible fire, the kind of fire Daddy is always going out and waiting for.
The first time Daddy showed me his fire it was winter. He went across the ice first and Mummy came behind him, pulling me on a sledge. It was the same red sky and the same shadowy figures running and something terrible had happened. There were jagged black things lying on the ice. Daddy collected them together and placed them in my lap, they were very heavy and pressed against my tummy.
