Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  I looked at her more closely. Her face was like that of a mountain-dweller: lean, clear and fearless. Her eyes gazed out from among shadows, darkly brilliant and precise. She was dressed ascetically, in the Chinese mode: in a dark, military jacket and trousers.

  ‘Is that what you do?’ I asked, already a little interested. ‘Ask yourself all kinds of questions?’

  ‘Yes,’ she conceded, looking at me distantly.

  ‘And life answers?’ I continued, a drop of derision spilling into my voice.

  She eyed me now so penetratingly that I would have thought her gaze impudent had it not been unflinchingly tranquil.

  She looked straight into my non-existence, at the spot where there is something like a needle-prick, but so deep that one could throw all one’s belongings into it, one’s memory and one’s doubts, one’s demands and one’s subterfuges – yes, all one’s life – and there would still be nothing at all there.

  ‘I had a question in which I lived for a long time,’ she said. ‘Many years. And one day I remembered I had forgotten it. It had gone, and from that I knew that I had received an Answer.’

  Her words and her way of speaking baffled me. I turned to look at The Shipwrecked.

  ‘I think they drown.’

  ‘Perhaps you are right. They drown if no one hears them.’

  Then she went on, looking at the sea, ‘Once I wanted to be, for people, something like – like a piece of straw.’

  It almost amused me. That was, after all, what she quite clearly was.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ I asked.

  ‘Every Tuesday and Thursday.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Always,’ she repeated, and tapped her binoculars. ‘I have to be able to see the horizon.’

  Then she turned. Without saying goodbye, and without paying any more attention to me, she began to descend the hill among the great lime-trees. Some of the trees were so old that they had great rents and hollow wounds, filled with asphalt and strengthened with iron bolts. Before I realised it, I was walking with her past The Wader, around whose thighs the water rippled, cold and indifferent.

  At the steps that lead down to the street she stopped, took off a shoe and shook a couple of grains of sand from it. Shoe in hand, standing on one leg, she paused to think about something, like a large, old crane.

  I was standing smiling a couple of steps above her when she raised her eyes. ‘Oh, you’re still there.’

  She put her shoe back on.

  ‘And I am here.’

  She tapped on the step with her shoe. ‘And where someone is standing, no one else can stand.’

  That sentence – a self-evident truth, obviously enough, but above all the conviction with which she spoke it – touched my heart, which had long been silent and cold. She had begun to go down the steps again, but I did not follow her.

  ‘Go wherever you like,’ I said to her back. ‘As far and for as long as you like. But there will come a Tuesday or a Thursday, fine or chilly . . . ’

  I had remained standing, my hand on the rail, and I saw, far away in the street, her hurrying, thin form. I looked at my own shoes and saw beneath them the granite step, the rose-pinkish stone and the glittering crystals, more living, more real, than many long years.

  The Place where You Stand

  And was it not stone, the very first thing I saw in this city?

  It was everywhere, carved and uncarved, rough and polished until it shone. It was used to cover the surfaces of the squares and edge the narrow pavements. It formed the foundations of buildings; it was used to build steps and pedestals of statues and grandiose memorials to great men.

  It pushed itself through subsoil and thin humus, like a forehead thinking a sombre thought, in parks, back yards and unbuilt sites. Even the roads that led to the city were cut and blasted through the same basic material. It was this place’s plinth and raw material, it was the city’s seal and destiny, like the sand of Rotterdam, the mud of Venice or the oil-shale of Pittsburgh . . .

  I have seen a quiet street here, and a main road that is as busy as the river of Tuonela1. In a dream, I grew cabbages by its side, and the unbroken caravans of cars destroyed every single round head.

  On the corner, under a large clock, is a coffee bar where one can buy grass and bootleg alcohol. One night there was an important meeting there, and I sat in the corner eating soup.

  One of the participants in the meeting, a young man whom I half-knew, came up to me.

  ‘May I?’ he asked, and took the spoon from my hand. He fished something out of my plate of broth and, carrying the spoon held out in front of him, took it to show his own table.

  ‘Look!’ said the young man.

  A murmur of disbelief and disdain filled the entire room. I tried to stretch my neck to see what was in the spoon, but the young man held it up so high that I could not see anything.

  From there I have walked here, to the quiet street. Here is the yard I have seen in a picture: a small back yard and a street musician, a small man with his violin. The walls were full of windows, but not one of them opened. Along the bottom of the picture was written, in a feeble hand, ‘Alone with God.’

  ‘To live under the eyes of others.’ Open and closed, free and flowing spaces. Streets, rooms and yards. Staircases, squares and towers. Temples. Market-places. Bridges and steps, white ships. Faces that drift along the street like detached petals.

  When the street-lights go on, the stone is no longer heavy. A deep glow lights up the patina of brick and plaster. The trees in the park are the evening’s silhouette.

  ‘Take note of the grace and softness that one can see, as one walks the streets, in the faces of men and women as evening approaches, and bad weather . . . ’

  A pile of matter, a mechanical chaos, a little Babel: that is the city in daylight.

  No, now it is something else: the place where you stand . . . It is consciousness, an independent and spacious form, it is a vehicle that transports the inheritance of night and day through endless zones.

  1. Tuonela is the underworld in Finno-Ugrian mythology.

  The Brightness of Glass

  All around the city, in market-places, squares and on street-corners, small towers have been erected. I look at them for my delight; they please my restless eye.

  If I were asked to describe them, I would say they were green. Yes, they are the same green as the trams and the rubbish-bins in the park. But their walls are, for the most part, of window-glass. They can be seen far away, for lights always burn within them, and there is no lock on their door, but only a handle, so anyone can step inside at any time.

  I have even seen queues in front of these towers in the evenings, after the office day is over. I have seen people step inside alone, money in their hand, and the heavy door closing automatically behind them. For two, such a tower is cramped, and yet it is built as a meeting-place, made for dialogue.

  But an anonymous rage is directed at these narrow glass rooms. Cracks like stars have been made in the glass walls, and often I have had to return home without success: it is not possible to make contact.

  But, for me, these towers are as beautiful as Chinese pagodas. The greatest publicity combines, in them, with the greatest privacy.

  He who has entered can be watched by anyone who remains outside in the darkness of evening. I can see him through the glass as clearly as in underwater light. I see a finger picking one number after another from a disc, and thereby choosing its own route.

  The profile of his face does not move; it lingers in its own peace like a statue. Inside the tower is a quiet pool in the current.

  But he who has stepped inside the tower has been able to go still further. I can see him there, it is true, but he himself is already elsewhere, in the place where he sends his voice. I see his lips opening, and, impatient in my waiting, I feel envious that he has already arrived.

  At night, these small green towers are the lighthouses of the city. In their glass-bright isola
tion, their transparent solitude, they bear witness to the reality of contact.

  When I was ill, I dreamed of a small glass house like that, just that and nothing else. All through the dream, nothing moved; the dream itself was an empty, green cell that made a sound. It called incessantly, reverberating as if it were ringing out in a very open space, in a night-time station hall or the depths of the past.

  But there was no one to answer it, for although it was I who dreamed the dream, I was not there either.

  Doña Quixote

  Whenever someone whines that miserable expression, ‘That’s life’, and nods his head with kindly condescension, I remember Doña Quixote. I see her narrow white fist pounding the table so that the ashtray dances and hear her passionate contradiction, made with all her strength: ‘No! That’s not life! That’s not life at all, unless you make it like that yourself . . . ’

  How tall and thin she is. Sometimes it seems to me that she is constantly growing, not in the same way as children, but as if a reaction to gravity were constantly trying to pluck her free of the ground.

  I am always shocked when I look at her ankles and her wrists. I am amazed when I see her feet. How can she stay upright and go forward on such thin ankles and such narrow feet?

  One night I see her from behind as she stands in front of a window, and I start. For it seems as if there were a tree in the room.

  Doña Quixote says herself that she is not a person. I am inclined to believe her. But it could also be that it is the other way round: she is so much more a person than people generally that it is for that reason she seems peculiar.

  But Doña Quixote is not the knight of the sorrowful countenance. When I think of her like this, from a distance, her shape is that of a flame, and I would like to stretch out my finger to warm it at her blaze.

  I am not the only one who has the same desire. In the evenings, her little room is often full of chilly people. They arrive one by one and look askance at one another; each of them believes each of the others to be an interloper.

  Indeed, I have never met so many unhappy people as at Doña Quixote’s house. Their unhappinesses are different, but all of them are alone and all of them believe they have fallen from the tree of life. Their lamentation echoes and multiplies as they bump into obstacles, and the obstacles are other people.

  Doña Quixote is the only person it does not affect. She allows it to pass through her, and it sinks into the shade of the valley of silence, so that they may forget.

  But Doña Quixote’s visitors often change. This year one no longer sees the same faces as last year. Where do they all go?

  Sometimes it so happens that they meet Doña Quixote in the street and no longer recognise her. I have seen Doña Quixote greet them, even take hold of their coat-sleeves, but they look at her with such puzzlement that she becomes embarrassed and lets them go.

  ‘Why do they forget you so quickly?’ I ask, unhappily.

  She thinks. Her violet gaze comes from an unimaginable distance.

  ‘If they remembered me, they would remember their unhappiness,’ she says.

  The Procession

  As a child, Doña Quixote once went into her parents’ bedroom when there was no one there and the rest of the family was listening to the radio in the living room.

  Doña Quixote went up to her mother’s dressing-table; she wanted to see herself. But when she looked in the mirror, her reflection was not there. There were other people, quite unfamiliar, and many of them were wearing clothes she had not seen on anyone else: long cloaks, broad white collars, strangely shaped headdresses.

  She looked and looked, and the people in the mirror, men, women and children, came and went in an unceasing procession.

  ‘Won’t it ever end?’ wondered the small Doña Quixote before the mirror. She was tired, and she would have liked to see her own reflection, but the stream of strangers did not stop.

  She saw them as though through a window, but did not know whether they could see her when she asked: ‘When will it be my turn?’

  ‘Did your turn ever come?’ I ask Doña Quixote, who looks, in the light of the evening lamp, like an ancient Indian.

  ‘It was my turn,’ she said. ‘That, precisely, is what my turn is; only time had to pass before I understood it.’

  Uta and Ekkehart

  Uta lived in another city a long time ago. By now she has been standing in the nave of the cathedral for seven centuries.

  When I was a child, I got a postcard of Uta from Naumberg. I fixed the card to the wall in the hall with a drawing pin so that whenever I went out or came in, I saw Uta’s delicate stone features.

  Since then, I have seen other pictures of Uta. In one Uta is alone; in another her husband, Ekkehart, stands by her side. Between them, it seems to me, a deep and abiding silence intervenes.

  Uta’s cloak-wrapped form is proud and reserved. She holds the loose robe closed under her chin so that its collar rises almost in front of her mouth. For that reason I look at Uta’s mouth almost furtively. It is like a pain that shames her, or a too intimate part of the body. It is tender and arrogant, a lovely wound, stubbornly forbidding.

  Her right hand, which holds the robe, is invisible beneath it. But all the narrow fingers of the left hand are visible, slightly separated from one another. On her forefinger is a large, round ring, no doubt given her by Ekkehart. She has another jewel, too, in her otherwise simple attire: a buckle attached to the left shoulder of her robe, almost the same as on Ekkehart’s broad chest.

  Her hair cannot be seen: it is hidden by a helmet-shaped headdress surmounted by a lowish crown.

  Her eyes look past you. Her lower lids are slightly narrowed, as if what she sees does not really please her. Quite right: a faint contempt sharpens Uta’s gaze, so cloaked in tenderness and refinement that it is hardly recognisable.

  Uta and Ekkehart. They are among the founders of the cathedral of Naumberg, aristocrats of their city. The unknown master who sculpted Uta and Ekkehart had never seen them. When their portraits were completed, they had already been lying for decades in the crypt beneath this skyscraper, which was not built according to earthly dimensions.

  Everything here is vertical as in a forest. But the glittering roses of the windows rise higher than the crowns of trees. There are no walls; only glass, pillars, ribs – only the fretwork of lath and staff, a thin line rising from octave to octave.

  No, this is not a building, but a road raised up, a delirium knitted of stone, the megalomanic dream of a spider.

  Little matter, more hope. And the higher the spears of the towers reach, the farther they banish what cannot be seen.

  At their roots, in the midst of the strained pillars, a stone among stones, stands Uta. The evasion of her eyes, the collar raised to protect her face, the mouth that has been on the point of trembling for seven hundred years . . . Perhaps she would like to leave this place, withdraw into the shadows, decay and disintegrate into nothing.

  Uta of Naumberg cathedral. Is there another statue which, in its unmoving stone, bears witness so incontrovertibly to the isolation of human flesh and the trembling of the spirit?

  Cro Magnon Boy

  I cannot take my eyes off him, although I struggle to look past him at the bustle of the streets, the markets and the parks. He does not notice me, but I reflect him like a shiny surface.

  He always gets on the bus at the same stop, by the school for deaf children. He has a striped, knitted cap on his head, like the ones all the other boys have, but the forehead beneath it is as if forged by some village idiot of a smith: where, in other people, it becomes concave as it approaches the root of the nose, in him it dashes crookedly forward and creases abruptly above his eyebrows. It is like a rain-shelter, a little visor, which he himself must also constantly be able to see.

  He is followed by another, smaller boy, and they, too, are able to sit, because in the mornings the bus is half empty.

  The language of his hands hypnotises me: elongated, lumpy f
ingers, as if contorted by rheumatism. The hands of an old goblin, but beautiful, passionately sensitive.

  What are they saying? I do not understand anything, not a word, but I should like to know: it must be important. The little boy, who is sitting diagonally opposite me, hears and understands everything. They gesture, nod and laugh, and the smaller boy even drums on his knees. They do not notice the other passengers.

  When I follow the signs he makes with his hands, I remember an Indian dancer who visited the city years ago. I was unhappy when I went to see her performance, and I was unhappy when the performance was over.

  But in between, while I watched her body live as though it were not a human body but a flower’s corolla, a flame, a beam of light, a lovely creature or something matter is perhaps intended to be, but that it always betrays and forgets – in between, as her brilliant sari fluttered and her wrists, her ankles, stretched, rose – I saw clearly that life, that joy . . .

  And now, as the pantomime dwarf opposite me speaks in his strange tongue, silently and volubly, I seem to see again . . .

  See, and forget once more. See, and forget.

  The Tower

  Out walking one Sunday, Doña Quixote and I found ourselves in a park, at whose centre stood an old, red-brick tower. The tower was crenellated and its bricks glowed with a dry, rich warmth like that of earth in late summer.

  Behind the tower, the park was split in two by a broad concrete road under which ran a traffic tunnel, but farther off on the slope grew some large maples. They were just changing colour; their green had already begun its long retreat.

  ‘Come, let us sit in the shade,’ Doña Quixote said. ‘From here, we can see the pond.’

  The pond was just a cataracted eye, muddy and overgrown. From it rose a mild breath of air, as from stale wine.

  ‘In this park there was once a murder,’ Doña Quixote said. ‘I read about it in the paper a long time ago.’