by Tove Jansson
Explosion is a beautiful word and a very big one. Later I learned others, the kind you can whisper only when you’re alone. Inexorable. Ornamentation. Profile. Catastrophic. Electrical. District Nurse.
They get bigger and bigger if you say them over and over again. You whisper and whisper and let the word grow until nothing exists except the word.
I wonder why fires always happen at night. Perhaps Daddy isn’t interested in fires during the daytime because then the sky isn’t red. He always woke us up and we heard the fire engine clanging, there was always a great rush and we ran through completely empty streets. It was always an awful long way to Daddy’s fires. All the houses were asleep and the pointed chimneys were lifted upwards towards the red sky which got nearer and nearer and at last we got there and Daddy lifted me up to see the fire. But sometimes it was a silly little fire that had already gone out long before we got there and then he was disappointed and had to be consoled.
Mummy only likes little fires like the ones she makes in ashtrays when no one is looking. And log-fires. She lights log-fires in the studio and in the passage every evening after Daddy has gone out looking for his friends.
When the log-fire is alight we draw up the big chair. We turn out the lights in the studio and sit in front of the fire and she says: once upon a time there was a little girl who was terribly pretty and her mummy liked her so awfully much … Every story has to begin in the same way, then it’s not so important what happens. A soft, gentle voice in the warm darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can’t get in. Not now or at any time.
My Mummy has lots of dark hair and it falls round you like a cloud, it smells nice and is like the hair of the sad queens in the book. The most beautiful picture covers a whole page. It shows a landscape at twilight, a plain covered with lilies. Pale queens are wandering over the whole plain with watering cans. The nearest one is indescribably beautiful. Her long dark hair is as soft as a cloud and the artist has covered it with sequins, probably some special finishing coat when the rest was done. Her profile is gentle and grave. And she walks there watering for the whole of her life and no one really knows how beautiful and how sad she is. The watering cans are painted with real silver and how the publisher could afford such a thing neither Mummy nor I can understand.
Mummy’s stories are often about Moses – in the bulrushes and later; about Isaac and about people who are homesick for their own country or get lost and then find their way again; about Eve and the Serpent in Paradise and great storms that die away in the end. Most of the people are homesick anyway, and a little lonely, and they hide themselves in their hair and are turned into flowers. Sometimes they are turned into frogs and God keeps an eye on them the whole time and forgives them when he isn’t angry and hurt and destroying whole cities because they believe in other gods.
Moses couldn’t always control himself either. But the women just waited and longed for their homes. Oh I will lead you to your own country or to whatever country in the world you want and paint sequins in your hair and build a castle for you where we shall live until we die and never never leave each other. Through endless forest dark and drear no comfort near a little girl alone did roam so far from home the way was long the night was cold the thunder rolled the girl did weep no more I’ll find my mother kind for in this lonely haunted spot my awful lot will be beneath this tree to lie and slowly die.
Very satisfying. That’s how it was when we shut the danger out.
Daddy’s statues moved slowly round us in the light from the fire, his sad white ladies stepping warily, all ready to escape. They knew about the danger that lies in wait everywhere but nothing could save them until they were carved in marble and placed in a museum. There one is safe. In a museum or in a lap or in a tree. Perhaps under the bedclothes. But the best thing of all is to sit high up in a tree, that is if one isn’t still inside one’s Mummy’s tummy.
The Stone
IT WAS LYING BETWEEN the coal dump and the goods wagons under some bits of wood and it was a miracle that no one had found it before me. The whole of one side shone with silver and if you rubbed away the coal dust you could see that the silver was there inside the stone too. It was a huge stone of nothing but silver and no one had found it.
I didn’t dare to hide it, somebody might see it and take it while I ran home. It had to be rolled away. If anyone came and tried to stop me I would sit down on the stone and yell my head off. I could bite them as they tried to lift it. I could do just anything.
And so I began to roll it. It was very slow work. The stone just lay on its back quite still and when I got it to turn over it just lay on its tummy and rocked to and fro. The silver came off in thin flakes that stuck to the ground and broke into small pieces when I tried to pick them up.
I got down on my knees to roll it, which was much better. But the stone only moved half a turn at a time and it was terribly slow work. No one took any notice of me as long as I was rolling down in the harbour. Then I managed to get the stone onto a pavement and things became more difficult. People stopped and tapped on the pavement with their umbrellas and said all sorts of things. I said nothing and just looked at their shoes. I pulled my woolly hat down over my eyes and just went on rolling and rolling and rolling and then the stone had to cross the road. By then I had been rolling it for hours and I hadn’t looked up once and hadn’t listened to anything anyone said to me. I just gazed at the silver underneath all the coal dust and other dirt and made a tiny little room for myself where nothing existed except the stone and me. But now it had to cross the road.
One car after another went past and sometimes a tram and the longer I waited the more difficult it was to roll the stone out into the road.
In the end I began to feel weak at the knees and then I knew that soon it would be too late, in a few seconds it would be too late, so I let it fall into the gutter and began rolling very quickly and without looking up. I kept my nose just above the top of the stone so that the room I had hidden us in would be as tiny as possible and I heard very clearly how all the cars stopped and were angry but I drew a line between them and me and just went on rolling and rolling. You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you’re safe.
When I got to the tram-lines I felt tired so I lay across the stone and held it tight. But the tram just rang and rang its bell so I had to start rolling again but now I wasn’t scared any longer, just angry and that felt much better. Anyway, the stone and I had such a tiny room for ourselves that it didn’t matter a bit who shouted at us or what they shouted. We felt terribly strong. We had no trouble in getting onto the pavement again and we continued up the slope to Wharf Road, leaving behind us a narrow trail of silver. From time to time we stopped to rest together and then we went on again.
We came to the entrance of our house and got the door open. But then there were the stairs. You could manage by resting on your knees and taking a firm grip with both hands and waiting till you got your balance. Then you tightened your stomach and held your breath and pressed your wrists against your knees. Then quickly up and over the edge and you let your stomach go again and listened and waited but the staircase was quite empty. And then the same thing all over again.
When the stairs narrowed and turned a corner we had to move over to the wall side. We went on climbing slowly but no one came. Then I lay on top of the stone again and got my breath and looked at the silver, silver worth millions and only four floors more and we would be there.
It happened when we got to the fourth floor. My hand slipped inside my mittens, I fell flat on my face and lay quite still and listened to the terrible noise of the stone falling. The noise got louder and louder, a noise like Crash, Crunch, Crack all rolled into one, until the stone hit the Nieminens’ door with a dull thud like doomsday.
It was the end of the world, and I cover
ed my eyes with my mittens. Nothing happened. The echoes resounded up and down the stairs but nothing happened. No angry people opened their doors. Perhaps they were lying in wait inside.
I crept down on my hands and knees. Every step had a little semicircle bitten out of it. Further down they became big semicircles and the pieces lay everywhere and stared back at me. I rolled the stone away from the Nieminens’ door and started all over again. We climbed up steadily and without looking at the chipped steps. We got past the place where things had gone wrong and took a rest in front of the balcony door. It’s a dark-brown door and has tiny square panes of glass.
Then I heard the outside door downstairs open and shut and somebody coming up the stairs. He climbed up and up with very slow steps. I crept forward to the banisters and looked down. I could see right to the bottom, a long narrow rectangle closed in by the banisters all the way down, and up the banisters came a great big hand, round and round and nearer and nearer. There was a mark in the middle of it so I knew it was the tattooed hand of the caretaker who was probably on his way up to the attic.
I opened the door to the balcony as quietly as I could and began to roll the stone over the threshold. The threshold was high. I rolled without thinking, I was very scared and couldn’t get a good grasp and the stone rolled into the chink of the door and got wedged there. There were double doors with coiled iron springs at the top which the caretaker had put there because women always forgot to shut the doors after them. I heard the springs contract and they sang softly to themselves as they squeezed me and the stone together between the doors and I put my legs together and took tight hold of the stone and tried to roll it but the space got narrower and narrower and I knew that the caretaker’s hand was sliding up the banisters all the time.
I saw the silver of the stone quite close to my face and I gripped it and pushed and kicked with my legs and all of a sudden it tipped over and rolled several times and under the iron railing and into the air and disappeared.
Then I could see nothing but bits of fluff, light and airy as down, with small threads of colour here and there. I lay flat on my tummy and the door pinched my neck and everything was quiet until the stone reached the yard below. And there it exploded like a meteor, it covered the dustbins and the washing and all the steps and windows with silver! It made the whole of 4 Wharf Road look as if it was silver-plated and all the women ran to their windows thinking that war had broken out or doomsday had come! Every door opened and everybody ran up and down the stairs with the caretaker leading and saw how a wild animal had bitten bits out of every step and how a meteor had fallen out of a clear blue sky.
But I lay squeezed in between the doors and said nothing. I didn’t say anything afterwards either. I never told anyone how close we had come to being rich.
Parties
SOMETIMES I WAS WOKEN UP in the middle of the night by the most beautiful music there is, balalaika and guitar. Daddy played the balalaika and Cavvy played the guitar. They played together very softly, almost in a whisper, both of them a long way away and then they sounded a little closer in turns so that sometimes it was the guitar that I heard and sometimes the balalaika.
They were gentle, sad songs about things that go on and on and that nobody can do anything about. Then they became wild and disorderly and Marcus broke his glass. But he never smashed more than one and Daddy made sure that he was always given one of the cheaper sort. Below the ceiling near my bed on the top bunk there was a cloud of grey tobacco smoke, and it made everything more unreal than it was. Perhaps we were out at sea or up in the mountains and I heard them shouting to each other through the cloud and things kept falling over and behind the violent noises came loud and soft waves of balalaika and guitar music.
I love Daddy’s parties. They could go on for many nights of waking up and going to sleep again and being rocked by smoke and the music and then suddenly a bellow would strike a chill right down to my toes.
It’s not worth looking because if you do everything you’ve imagined disappears. It’s always the same. You can look down on them and there they are sitting on the sofa or on chairs or walking slowly up and down the room. Cavvy sits huddled up over his guitar as if he was hiding in it, his bald head floating around like a pale spot in the cloud and he sinks lower and lower. Daddy sits very upright and looks straight ahead. The others doze off from time to time because having a party is very exhausting. But they won’t go home because it’s very important to make an effort to be the last. Daddy generally wins and is last. When all the others are asleep he goes on staring and thinking till morning.
Mummy doesn’t join in the party. She sees that the oil lamp doesn’t start smoking in the bedroom. The bedroom is our only real room apart from the kitchen, I mean it has a door. But there is no stove in it. So the oil lamp must burn all night. If the door is opened the smoke gets into the bedroom and Per Olov gets asthma. Parties have been much more difficult since I got a brother but Mummy and Daddy try their best to arrange them all the same.
The table is the most beautiful thing. Sometimes I sit up and look over the railing and screw up my eyes and then the glasses and the candles and all the things on the table shimmer and make a whole as they do in a painting. Making a whole is very important. Some people just paint things and forget the whole, I know. I know a lot that I don’t talk about.
All men have parties and are pals who never let each other down. A pal can say terrible things which are forgotten the next day. A pal never forgives, he just forgets and a woman forgives but never forgets. That’s how it is. That’s why women aren’t allowed to have parties. Being forgiven is very unpleasant.
A pal never says anything clever that’s worth repeating the following day. He just feels that nothing is so important at the time.
Once Daddy and Cavvy played with a catapult that could shoot aeroplanes. I don’t think Cavvy understood how it worked because he did it wrong and the aeroplane flew straight at his hand and the hook went right through it. It was awful and the blood ran all over the table and he couldn’t even get his jacket on because the aeroplane wouldn’t go through his sleeve. Daddy consoled him and took him to the hospital where they snipped off the hook with pincers and put the aeroplane in the museum.
Anything can happen at a party if you aren’t careful.
We never had a party in the studio, only in the living room. There are two high windows there which have a solemn-looking arch at the top and the whole of Grandmother’s and Grandfather’s curly-grained suite with scrolls all over it is there. It reminds Mummy of the house in the country where everything is just as it should be.
At first she was worried about the suite and was cross because of the cigarette burns and the marks left by glasses but by now she knows that it’s all a question of patina.
Mummy is very good about parties. She never puts everything on the table and she never invites people. She knows that the only thing that really creates the right atmosphere is improvisation. Improvisation is a beautiful word. Daddy has to go out and look for his pals. They might be anywhere at any time. Sometimes he doesn’t find anybody. But often he does. And then they feel like going somewhere. One always lands up somewhere. That’s important.
Then someone says let’s look and see what we can find in the pantry. And one goes quietly to have a look and there’s lots there! One finds expensive sausages and bottles and loaves of bread and butter and cheese and even soda water and then one carries everything in and improvises something. Mummy has everything ready.
Actually, soda water is dangerous. It gives one bubbles in the tummy and it can make one feel very sad. One should never mix things.
Gradually all the candles on the balustrade go out and candlewax runs down onto the sofa. When the music is finished there are war stories. Then I wait under the bedclothes but I always come up again when they attack the wicker chair. Then Daddy goes and fetches his bayonet which hangs above the sacks of plaster in the studio and everybody jumps up and shouts and Daddy at
tacks the chair. During the day it is covered with a rug so that you can’t see what it looks like. After the wicker chair Daddy doesn’t want to play his balalaika any more. Then I just go to sleep.
The next day everybody is still there and they try to say nice things to me. Good-day pretty maiden, how lovely ’twould be if you’d come a-walking this morning with me. Mummy gets presents. Ruokokoski once gave her half a pound of butter and another time she got a dozen eggs from Sallinen.
In the morning it’s very important not to begin to tidy up too obviously. And if one lets in all that nasty fresh air anyone can catch cold or get depressed. It’s important to break the new day in very gradually and gently. Things look different in daylight and if the difference seems too sudden everything can be spoilt. One must be able to move about in peace and quiet and see how one feels and wonder what it is one really wants to do.
One always wants something the next day but one doesn’t really know what. Finally one thinks that perhaps it’s pickled herring. And so one goes into the pantry and has another look and there really is some pickled herring there.
And so the day goes on quietly and it’s evening again and perhaps there are some new candles. Everyone behaves terribly cautiously because they know how little it takes to upset everything.
I go to bed and hear Daddy tuning his balalaika. Mummy lights the oil lamp. There’s a completely round window in the bedroom. Nobody else has a round window. One can see out across all the roofs and over the harbour and gradually all the windows go dark except one. It is the one under Victor Ek’s asbestos wall. There’s a light on there all night. I think they’re having a party there too. Or perhaps they’re illustrating books.
