The Listener

by Tove Jansson

  Now Mr Shimomura was standing beside her. He moved as quietly as he spoke. With a regretful gesture, he handed her his sketch pad. He had drawn the wolf with only a few lines – deliberate, brutal, tremendously sensitive lines. It was a very good drawing. Suddenly she wanted to show him a living wolf.

  They waited for the ferry. She had been very anxious about the silence, but Mr Shimomura didn’t seem to care about her any longer. He walked around on the little strip of beach below the dock, picking up small stones and bits of charcoal and studying them closely. He must be freezing in that thin little coat, she thought. And no hat. His drawing of the wolf had given her a timid respect for him, more than what one feels for everything foreign. Her insecurity was also somewhat dampened by her concern that he wasn’t warm enough.

  A small motor launch with a cabin drew up to the dock. It was called the Högholmen.

  “Doesn’t the ferry run any more?” she said.

  “Only the staff boat,” the driver said. “And we only go three times a day.”

  She turned to Mr Shimomura and said, “Please.” They climbed down into the motor launch.

  “This man is a foreigner,” the driver said. “We only take staff. It’s closed in the winter.”

  She was suddenly upset at the thought that Mr Shimomura wouldn’t get to see his wolf. “But he’s leaving tomorrow. You see, he’s going to Japan tomorrow and then it will be too late. This is very important to him!”

  “Fine, fine,” the driver said. “But I don’t have any tickets.” He went into the cabin.

  They were the only passengers. The launch drove them out to the island, which stood tall in the water, black and white with rock and snow. She tried to remember where the cages were, but it had been a long time. She remembered a llama that had spat on her, and that she liked the monkeys because they didn’t appear to be caged.

  Mr Shimomura said nothing until they had gone ashore. Then he ignited his smile again, stepped aside to make space for her, and said, “Please, please.” He waited for her to show him the savage animals.

  She went first, up onto the island. The snow was deep and wet and there weren’t many paths. They passed locked buildings and empty cages. Almost all the signs had been removed.

  In the middle of the island she got her bearings. Here was the old-fashioned pavilion with fretwork gables and an intricate pattern of very small windowpanes. It was here one drank lemonade and listened to the orchestra. Through the window she could see a sea of chairs turned upside down. The snow lay untouched on the steps. Naturally there was no place to have a cup of coffee at this time of year, and no bench to rest your legs on and nowhere to get warm. She was suddenly annoyed and turned abruptly and walked towards the birdcages where the birds sat at the tops of their trees like dark fruit. And the bears are no doubt hibernating, she thought. And it will be several hours before we can go home.

  Mr Shimomura followed her footsteps in the snow. His feet were much smaller than hers. Immobile flocks of goats observed them as they walked across the island. The animals didn’t turn their heads to watch them; they moved their whole bodies, all of them at the same time, with great precision, and then the forest of thick, twisted horns was absolutely motionless again. The whole area lay in silence; not a soul moved among the cages. Melting snow dropped and streamed around them. She stopped and read a sign that said, “The wild ass that came from Rostock on 5 April 1970 shares its pen with Kaisa (grey), an elderly domesticated ass”. It struck her as peculiar, especially since there were no asses at all in the enclosure. She wondered where the polar bears lived.

  They came down towards the shore in an area called Feline Valley. The snow leopard looked past her, uninterested. It was greyish yellow and had a very long tail. She turned around to check on Mr Shimomura, and saw that he had gone straight down to the water’s edge. He was not interested in cats. She caught a glimpse of his black coat among the birch trees, moving quickly. Now he was into the yellow reeds. Maybe he’s on a private errand, she thought, and looked at the snow leopard again. After a bit, she moved slowly on, stopping occasionally to wait, but Mr Shimomura did not come back. So she made her way laboriously down the bank to the shore. She didn’t dare shout. The island was quiet, and maybe all the animals would started howling at once, and anyway she had no right to be there.

  Mr Shimomura was walking along the water’s edge, through the harbour’s deposits of plastic and paper and fruit peelings. He was collecting bits of wood that the waves had washed ashore. Of course, she thought, with the relief that comes with recognition, he’s collecting oddly shaped twigs. I’ve read that they do that.

  They hadn’t spoken for a long time. They were taking a break. He didn’t show her his twigs, and she didn’t comment. Their solitary wanderings through a closed landscape had simplified something. By and by, they walked back to the empty cages.

  And now the bears came. She glanced quickly at Mr Shimomura. Yes, now he was interested. Not in the brown bears but in the polar bear. It lay on its back with its paws in the air, large and shapeless and dirty yellow against the snow. Its muzzle and eyes were coal black. It looked at Mr Shimomura over its shoulder, raised itself heavily, with the same motions as a sleepy person getting out of bed, and sat down, staring down at the snow between its paws. Mr Shimomura did not take out his sketch pad. He just looked at the bear.

  The damp chill was beginning to creep up her legs. This island was really dreadful, unspeakably sad. It cut her off from everything real and alive. It scared her. Why wasn’t he drawing. Was he waiting for the bear to get up? She said nothing, just tied her scarf around her head and hat and waited.

  Finally Mr Shimomura turned to her, and, with a bow and a smile, let her know that now he had finished seeing the bear. They passed a bison and a mink. Behind one of the buildings there were buckets, shovels, and a pair of skis in the trampled snow. There were people who lived and worked out here. But they never saw a soul.

  When she finally found the wolves, the island had darkened in the early dusk.

  “Mr Shimomura,” she said slowly. She smiled, almost shyly. And showed him the wolves. There were three big cages, with a wolf in each cage. All three walked back and forth along the bars, back and forth in a kind of gliding trot, without lifting their heads. Mr Shimomura went closer and gazed at them.

  The wolves’ ceaseless pacing struck her as appalling. It was timeless. They loped back and forth behind their bars week after week and year after year, and if they hate us, she thought, it must be a gigantic hate! She felt cold, suddenly terribly cold, and she started to cry. Her legs hurt, and she wanted to go home. The wolves and Mr Shimomura had simply nothing whatever to do with her.

  It was not certain how long Mr Shimomura studied the wolves, but when he walked away the dusk had grown much deeper. She wiped her face with a glove and followed. As they passed the empty monkey house, he turned around and explained everything by laying his hand on his sketchbook, smiling, and nodding his head. He pointed to his forehead to indicate that he had captured the wolf. He had it. She needn’t be the least uneasy.

  They walked on up the hill. She followed after him in the resigned, irresponsible calm that follows tears, just walked through the snow and felt that now nothing more could be expected of her.

  The outlook tower was locked, but there was a round, open verandah at the bottom, its walls covered with names in pencil and ink. Mr Shimomura brushed snow from the bench and sat down. He put the oddly shaped twigs beside him and sank into immobility. It was now clearly evening. The island below them was dark, but more and more lights were coming on along the half circle of the horizon, and she could hear the city’s continuous dull roar and an ambulance siren that grew steadily fainter and then vanished. Maybe lions don’t roar in the winter, she thought. They’re sitting there somewhere in one of those windowless buildings that maintain the proper temperature. Maybe all the animals are quiet in winter if they live in cages. Her thoughts grew vague. They lingered for a moment o
n the Japanese giant spider crab that lives so far down on the bottom of the sea that its ten legs aren’t bothered by the waves, and then she drifted into sleep.

  She was awakened by Mr Shimomura touching her hand. It was time to go. She was very cold. They walked down the hill and past the pavilion. She didn’t look at the cages and didn’t try to say anything in English. After all, he had his wolf. One day, God knew in what remarkable place, Mr Shimomura would sit down and, with a few obvious, long-considered lines, he would draw a wolf, brutally, sensitively, the most living, breathing wolf that had ever been drawn.

  The little motor launch was there to receive them. The driver said nothing.

  The only thing I’d like to know, she thought, is which wolf he’ll draw. The one he saw or the one he imagines.

  The Rain

  THREE MOTORBOATS RUSHED across the water, their bows abreast. The sun shone and the boats they met waved and assumed they were having a race.

  In the middle boat, the broadest of the three, an old woman lay on a litter. The litter was made of an old red deckchair stretched out full length and supported with oars. It was narrow enough to carry through a door.

  She lay with her head turned away. Her hair was very white and she seemed suddenly and surprisingly small.

  The boats maintained the same speed all the way to the bus pier, where they slowed and beached at the well-trampled landing where the cars and boats of the summer people came and went and where everything was proceeding normally until the ambulance arrived. Then everyone put down their bags and baggage and thought, Dear Lord, right in the midst of vacation, and they took a grip on their children to keep them from running over to look. An old woman in a sunhat bent over and tried to look into the unfamiliar, averted face. She wasn’t being nosy, she just recognised the situation and said to herself, Poor soul.

  In the general store they tried to figure out what might be needed in the ambulance and bought Vichy water, candy, and tissues.

  It was hot in the ambulance. The driver knew his stuff. “Do you have any nitro?” he asked. Apparently the people who drive ambulances have to know a lot; maybe they get special training. The attendant who sat beside her just sat there, quiet and serious. He was very young and looked as if really, by natural right, he should have been somewhere else entirely. The road twisted and turned its way through the parched landscape. Once, perhaps, it had been a path, threading its way among houses and boulders and small fields. Then it grew broader, and no one stopped to think that it widened and hardened into a motor road precisely because it had always avoided obstacles.

  It was a hot day and there was a thunderstorm that night. The hospital was long and low and a corridor ran through it from one end to the other. It was the darkest time of the night, but no lights were needed now in summer. All the doors stood open, and the people who lived inside them were quiet. Maybe they slept and maybe they listened to the thunder.

  It was a beautiful thunderstorm. The architect who built the hospital had included a large balcony at one end of the corridor. From it, one could see the solemn garden with its asphalt paths, black with rain. A few nighttime cars drove past at long intervals. The whole landscape was filled with the storm’s cold, greenish light, the trees unmoving, like painted scenery in a long and lonely stage perspective. The thunderstorm sailed over the garden, its lightning bolts white and chilly blue, losing themselves in the summer night.

  The hospital was near the coast and now, just before dawn, the gulls were screaming above the shoreline. There must have been hundreds of them, all crying, the sound rising and falling, louder than the thunder. For anyone listening, their cries were like panting, like a pulse, a fervour, filling the night.

  The gulls went silent when the sun rose, and the rain was brief.

  The corridor was so long that it seemed to end in a point of darkness. But the whole length of the corridor glowed with the greenish light that permeated the night outside and flowed in through the open doors.

  She loved thunder, but this lovely storm was probably too quiet, it never really reached her.

  What is it that cuts across the breathless, brief, and occasional periods of sleep as a very tired human being dies? It cannot be merely the tormented need for more air, for water, or because everything slows and chokes as it rushes towards dissolution, towards the implacable and utterly alien transformation of the body. The old woman was visited by images, events from the life she had lived or dreamed. Everyone was with her, maybe not only those who had loved her and lived with her but also those who had slipped away, the opportunities she’d lost. There is no way to know. We know nothing but try to find explanations in a smile and a few words that come from far away, from another world, more real than reality.

  Death can be a stopping, simply a going quiet. To listen to the sound of breathing for a long, long time, to laborious life fighting to continue, to life forced to continue and to run through tubes and catheters until suddenly none of them are needed and they can all be removed and hung up on their hooks and rolled away on rubber wheels. The one who dies is utterly clean, utterly silent, and then, from the grey mouth, from the altered face, comes a long cry. It is commonly called a rattle, but it is a cry, the exhausted body that has had enough of everything, enough of life and of waiting and enough of all these attempts to continue what is finished, enough of all the encouragement and the anxious fussing, all the loving awkwardness, all the determination not to show pain or frighten those you love. Death in all its variety has a million forms, but it can also be the death of a long and very weary life, a single cry, an articulation of finality, the way an illustrator completes his work with a vignette on the final page.

  The thunderstorm gave the parched landscape only a quick shower.

  The big rain came several days later. It started raining just before dawn, across the mainland and across the islands. Wells and water barrels filled, there was a rustling and roaring on every roof, and the rain went on and on. The soil was so dry that it was crisscrossed by cracks, and the moss came away from the granite faces in hard plates. Now all the earth, all the moss, all the roots filled with water. The rain dashed down over the whole countryside in a blessed overabundance, and inside the houses people lay listening and thought, This is good, and then turned over and fell asleep.

  Blasting

  NORDMAN’S BOY HAD SLOPING shoulders and large, nervous hands. His wrists were unnaturally slim. He rarely said anything – but then neither did Nordman. The trouble with the boy was that he couldn’t stop working his mouth – a small, uncontrollable mouth that he tried to hide behind his hand. His eyes were much too large – astonishing, huge, Byzantine eyes in an anxious face. He tried to hide them, too, but it wasn’t possible. Every time Nordman went off to do some blasting, the boy stood behind the alders and watched them load the boat. “Aren’t you going to take him along sometime?” Weckström asked, but Nordman thought the boy was too little.

  Now, this autumn, they had a blasting job a long way out in the islands. It was windy, and the trips home could eat up a lot of time. What with one thing and another, Nordman decided to do the whole job at once and spend the nights in the coastguard hut on Sandskär. The job could take at least two days, so he decided to take the boy with him so he wouldn’t have to leave him at home alone.

  They loaded their gear and got off about eight o’clock, and they ran into heavy seas once they rounded the point. The boy sat at the bow, wearing so much clothing that only his nose showed. He had never been in the motor launch before. Above him, the tarpaulin, fastened to the side rail and the cabin with big clumsy nails, had shaken out of its gussets and hung crookedly the way it always did when the wind blew from the side. A crowbar was rolling back and forth across the deck, and in the middle of the boat, black and clamouring, stood the engine, cobbled together from the parts of several other engines. It laboured there in heat and streaming oil and reeling belts, and from its innards rose a crooked metal pipe that spewed soot over the entire lau
nch.

  This machine had a dubious look to it but was actually very dependable, the product of true patience, hard mental effort, and devotion. Nordman had worked at it in the evenings almost all spring.

  The seas had grown heavier, and the cardboard box at the stern had disintegrated, leaving small red apples to swim about in the bilge. The shotguns had been firmly stowed in plastic. The boy looked at everything, but all he thought about was the dynamite box, which was even better protected than the shotguns and carefully stowed away near the stern.

  Nordman sat amidships, steering, and Weckström sat beside him. They passed long empty beaches, more than usually desolate because of the vacant summer cottages. Behind Herrskär they turned straight south. Then Nordman climbed across the thwarts to his son and shouted above the engine’s racket, “It’s fifteen tons!” He pointed south. The rock stood out no more distinctly than everything else smudged together on the horizon, but the boy nodded and understood.

  “What’s his name?” Weckström shouted when Nordman came back.

  “Holger,” Nordman bellowed.

  Blasting is a terrible thing to imagine, worse than anything. Someone screams, no words, just a roar, a whoop, and then boots come running, crunching across the gravel, and then a silence that is sick with dread and that grows and bulges and bursts in a great explosion. Thunder booms up out of the earth and the granite rises. Torn free by blaster Nordman, the granite rises towards the sky in dreamlike and terrible slow motion. And then it comes down. Doomsday hulks and razor-sharp splinters, shards like sharks’ teeth or the jaws of saw-toothed, deep-sea monsters – they all rain down for an eternity, and you never know if, quite unnoticed, a blaster’s hand is among them. In this dark image, borne by the wave of detonation, Nordman had flown into the air countless times, though he never knew.