by Leena Krohn
My island is a flower-pot whose earth has been gathered into a mound, round as a breast, and the tree is a bonsai tree, a small sun-cypress.
This tree is very old. Its trunk is twisted and warped as if it had grown in the grip of storms on a skerry far out at sea. But this is not so; the free winds of the sky have never tossed its needles, although it has already lived a human life-span or two. It has been grown through torture, in a handful of poor earth, through pruning, binding and pinching.
Its bent shape contains the spirit of all the points of the compass.
In the shadow beneath the tree grow some low shoots. When I return from the city, I wish I could throw myself there, into the shade of the tree, on my back among the brown shoots.
I would like to stay there until evening to see, just to see how silver-green the needles are, and how rough the bark of the trunk.
And when the August evening, as summer breaks into autumn, lights up the city sky, this sun-cypress is, against the glimmer, black as a calligraphic sign drawn by a master.
If I could – if I had to interpret its message, I would content myself with repeating the words of Sonya Alexandrovna:
‘You have not been able in your life to feel joy, but wait – – – wait . . . Then we shall have rest . . . Then we shall have rest.’
The Peacock
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘I thought peacocks existed only in the zoo.’
‘How could anyone be mistaken about a peacock?’ she asked in turn. ‘Especially if you see it spread its tail.’
We were sitting in a cafe and she was looking at her inverted mirror image in the concave surface of a teaspoon.
‘I think I waited for my husband until three in the morning. I couldn’t wait any longer; I had to go out.’
I had no idea where to look for him, but I stopped a passing taxi and asked it to drive to the city centre. Just as I had paid and was stepping out on to the pavement, the street-lamps went out. I walked down to the bar and saw it was shut. I walked to the street corner and crossed at the crossing where the traffic lights were blinking orange. I met no one, and I saw that everywhere was closed.
I turned to walk back; I had no more money.
I took a short cut across the old allotment gardens. I followed a lane bordered by palings and hedges of hawthorn and white-painted wooden gates. Many of the gates were decorated by the figure of a sun, whether rising or setting I could not say.
Behind the fences were clapboard cabins in yellow, red and green, fantastically small and neat with their white cornices. The sky lightened, and the edge of the real sun rose far beyond the tower blocks of the suburbs.
The apple-trees were shedding their last blossoms, and my anguish was greater than my fatigue. I saw my husband dead, I saw him with another.
Then I heard from my left side, behind the fence, a high-pitched screech. I turned and saw a peacock strutting along under the gnarled apple tree. It was green and silken blue and it was dragging its tail through the morning dew on the grass.
I saw it, and perhaps it had been watching me for a long time. We stood there, facing one another, between us the white fence, and at the same moment it puffed itself up, it stretched its neck, shook itself along the whole of its length, jumped a short step backward and spread its tail to its full breadth, and it rocked and shimmered its fan of glossy colour before me, its living rainbow, its eye-fringed flower of paradise, and all the time, above it, flakes of apple blossom were scattering.
Night and the Other
There came nights when one of them fell out of his bed as if it had bounced upright and thrown him to the ground in a calculated full-nelson. And just before the thud a toneless ‘Help!’ was torn from his throat, the kind of wheeze one could imagine coming from a paralysed person whose bedclothes had caught fire.
In her own bed, the other started upright and mumbled, ‘It was only a dream’, while he crept back on to his mattress, turning his back like a barrier.
But it was not a dream. It was the life they shared, which was dying and was crying out with the mouth of one of them. Which could not escape their mercilessness, their rancid love, their regret or their vengeance.
Now one slept while the other lay awake. She who lay awake had waited throughout a long evening. And the other one had come back, certainly, but what she had been waiting for did not return, and would not return any more, if it had ever even existed. But the waiting continued, as a thirst that parched like the sirocco.
Now, in this darkness, the expression had been wiped away, the expression that was so strange to her face but was attempting to conquer it: winsome, knowing its defeat in advance and therefore suffering, and therefore so deeply repugnant. Night had peeled it from her face like the dough from which the bread of separation and contempt is baked.
Bathed by the night, her face, which no one could see, lay on the stains of the pillowcase like a bitter flower, turned toward the darkness of the ceiling. Her body, which was already beginning to abandon the memories and demands of love, was hers alone; it was a light and redundant thing, unstirring and clearly delineated, drawn on the bed as the shapes of the figures lying in coffins were once drawn on their lids.
But from this reed, she knew, there could now, at last, burst a voice, a voice she had long yearned to hear, a voice that spoke with heartfelt compassion like an ample nanny, a question that was tender and dark, an answer that was convincing, firm and joyful: ‘Why thus? For you do not need to live like this . . . Whatever is crooked, make straight. Whatever is spoiled, throw away. Whatever is dead, bury.’
She could hear the other’s breathing and she breathed like his dream; the same wind passed in and out of their nostrils. The same wind – and she was astonished: how had it come into the room?
She was no longer thirsty, and she knew the waiting was over. A wave had submersed their room and had arrived, in the night, at the point where the waiting ended.
She considered getting up and going over to the other, waking him and saying: ‘It is here now.’
But she did not get up before it was morning.
The Chamber
In late autumn, when the when the weather changes, Doña Quixote becomes restless. It is as if she begins to flicker, and from time to time her mood turns round like a leaf twirled by the wind.
Today she says she must move out of her chamber. Her ‘chamber’ – that is what she calls her apartment, and the word echoes in her mouth like a vault.
‘Where would you go?’ I ask.
‘It’s impossible to live here,’ she says, not answering. ‘People have left their unhappiness here. This is not an apartment, but a rubbish tip. This chamber stinks.’
Then she digs out Sunday’s newspaper from somewhere and begins to examine the section headed Property: Apartments.
Later, we are standing in an unfamiliar hall and an estate agent is thrusting leaflets into our hands. We look at the plan of the flat: a room, a kitchen alcove, a bathroom and three built-in wardrobes.
The room is empty and naked. It is the abstraction of a room, it is any space at all, a cube full of emptiness.
There is the door, through which one can go in and out. There is the window, from which one can see. It gathers light from the winter sky and scatters it into this empty vessel.
The estate agent speaks of the floor-covering, the tiles, and of the respectability of the residents.
‘If you lived here,’ I say to Doña Quixote, ‘what would be different?’
She does not answer, but opens a cupboard door. I do not see anything but a clothes-rail, but she remains gazing at it for a long moment.
‘If you moved here,’ I ask again, ‘do you suppose your memories would not move with you?’
She gazes on at the cupboard, and I cannot even guess what she is thinking.
‘ “And if sadness were to strike you here . . . ” ’
‘Be quiet!’ she says, and slams the cupboard door shut. Then, cheerfully: ‘Come!’
‘Do you know this?’
She whistles something like a question into the fog of the street light.
‘What is it?’
‘Pong pontuli, pong pongtuli,’ she hums, and extracts a key from her pocket.
I look at the tuft of grass that swayed all summer in the cleft in the stone step outside Doña Quixote’s front door. Now it is only yellowed straw, but to me it still looks as if it split the stone.
After we have returned to the Chamber, Doña Quixote pulls on a robe made out of some kind of hempen fabric whose elbows are worn through, and prepares a herbal drink for herself. She claims it improves her sight.
No, there is no smell of unhappiness here, only tobacco and the dust of books. On the window-sill are stones from the shore and a Samos goblet. If you fill it to the brim, the drink flows away to the very last drop. Lost in thought, I often turn it over in my hands.
‘For mankind, nothing is ever enough,’ said Doña Quixote once, when I asked the meaning of the clay goblet.
‘He asks for more, more and more. And then – oops! – he loses what he already had.’
That is the lesson of the goblet of moderation.
The Poplars
In the breaks between lessons, the girls walked under the poplars, arms linked. They wore pleated terylene skirts, and petticoats stiffened with foam rubber. When they moved, it sounded as though they were wading through dry leaves.
Which of them ever looked at the poplars? Constantly present but nevertheless strangers, they took part in the girls’ lives by dropping shadows into the gulf of the yard, and pale green catkins, and their shrivelled leaves as messages about the great autumn that, from one spring to the next, came closer to them: in the branches that no longer made new shoots.
Among the babbling of the yard, the air was often pierced by a vulgar, high-pitched laugh. It was Deska, who had twice had to repeat a year, and was already a woman.
Sometimes she went up to Anttila, under the bare branches. The sky glittered like new aluminium, and Deska was wearing around her neck a silk scarf with blue waves.
‘Do you know why I have this scarf?’ she asked Anttila.
‘Because it is beautiful,’ said Anttila. ‘Because you were given it as a present. Or else you have a sore throat.’
‘No no no,’ said Deska. ‘Look!’
She pulled the scarf and the neck-opening of her pullover down over one of her shoulders so that Anttila had a long glimpse of her pale, almost luminescent, skin, and then a little bruise, about the size of a small coin.
Anttila examined it, screwing up his eyes, but his gaze soon rose to meet Deska’s. They came to his expectant, shining, demanding.
‘Where did you get that?’ Anttila asked. ‘Did you fall?’
‘Pooh!’
The impatient finality with which Deska pulled the scarf back into its place.
‘Don’t you understand,’ she said. ‘It’s called a love-bite.’
‘What?’
‘A love-bite,’ she said. ‘Do you want me to spell it for you?’
The scarf with the blue waves bobbed far off in the forbidden gateway. There was a rustling as the girls walked, arm in arm, back and forth, back and forth, but the leaves had been swept off the asphalt long ago.
A Spring Evening
A friend whom I had not seen for two years had returned to the city.
I had laid the table and prepared a meal. When we had sat down, we looked at each other over the freesias he had brought.
It was early spring.
We wanted to tell each other everything, absolutely everything that had happened during the time we had been apart. And we did. The spring evening darkened outside and we drank another glass of wine. I lit a candle, and we spoke more softly, and with lengthening pauses.
It was so peaceful. My apartment was a home once more. The plates emptied, and I carried them into the kitchen. When I returned, he looked at me curiously and for a long time. I sat down again opposite him, sipped my drink and nodded to him, but it was difficult for me to follow his speech and my thoughts had begun to wander.
When I tried to concentrate once more on him and the moment at hand, I suddenly had the impression something decisive had changed. Perhaps it was something in his face, or tone of voice: its timbre was now different.
I stroked my hair. I touched my eyebrows. I shook the crumbs from the front of my blouse. From time to time he eyed me as if something in my appearance disturbed him.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ I asked but he refused, abruptly and without explanation. The harshness of his refusal embarrassed me, so that after a pause, which seemed very long, I was unable to begin the conversation again.
When, at last, I began hurriedly to speak, he spoke a sentence at the same time, which I did not catch.
‘Sorry,’ I said, and he: ‘No, after you.’
But I had already forgotten what it was I had intended to say.
I wanted to turn on the standard lamp, but it was behind him, and I could not get up and cross the floor while he watched. I heard him start to speak again, but his sentences were fragmented, and indeed I could now understand hardly a word he spoke. I do not know whether the fault was in him or in my own capacity to understand, or in the space of air between us, which had rapidly thickened and darkened.
He stammered a little, and it seemed to me that he was avoiding looking directly at me. This was so, there was no doubt about it: his gaze only grazed my shoulder, and he turned more and more often toward the darkness of the window so that I could see only his cheek as it grew dim in the candlelight.
Then I gathered my strength and sat down so he could not – so I imagined – avoid looking me in the eyes. But I was wrong: he merely glanced in my direction and, without hesitation – it was unexpected, after all! – moved his chair so that he was sitting with his back completely turned to me.
The strength flowed from my limbs and I began to swallow. Neither of us was speaking any longer. There was no use pretending. I could hear him breathing quickly and unevenly, but his back was very straight. Expectation made me tremble so that a faint creaking could be heard from the joints of my chair.
I could not help it: a little hiccup rose from my throat, and then he leaped up, pushing his chair to one side. I raised my arm in front of my eyes and the chair fell.
Footsteps resounded – he had gone.
The Memory of our Deeds
One night in winter I was sitting in Doña Quixote’s apartment reading a magazine. I felt her eyes on me and raised my head.
‘Tell me who you are,’ she said slowly. It was an aggravating question. I wished she had not asked it.
‘I have thought about it,’ I said, ‘but it is something that does not become clear. I only know that if I look at something for a long time, anything at all, I begin to resemble it like a sister. And I know what I would have liked to have been.’
‘What?’ asked Doña Quixote.
‘A pair of blue eyes, that and nothing else,’ I said. ‘I would have liked always to stay on the auditorium side, because it is dark there, it is quiet there, there nothing ever happens. Only eyes move . . . But I came to understand that no one is allowed to stay there, no one at all.’
‘Because there is no such thing as the auditorium side,’ Doña Quixote said. ‘Because the world bathes in the limelight of the sun and moon. And everyone has to be Hamlet, is that what you mean?’
‘The memory of our deeds . . . “When we awake, only the memory of our deeds remains”.’ That line now came back to me.
‘It is not a good line,’ Doña Quixote said.
‘I don’t know,’ I
said. ‘But it is my life’s line.’
‘Because you live inside your head,’ said Doña Quixote. ‘It is the sentence of those who live inside their head.’
She knocked on my hairline with her cool and slender finger.
‘Hey, come out of there,’ she ordered.
‘Where?’ I asked.
‘There you are,’ said Doña Quixote, and leaned back, satisfied. ‘You do understand, after all.’
‘Do I?’ I asked, astonished.
‘That you’re already outside. In the wide world. Sometimes people just forget. And then there is nothing but themselves and the memory of their deeds.’
The Looking-Glass Boy
I do not know why Doña Quixote calls him the Looking-Glass Boy. I asked her once, but she did not answer.
Everything changes quickly in the mirror of his face. It is small and glowing like a focus. He is as full of eyes as an archangel.
Unceasingly, even in his sleep, he is growing. ‘Aren’t you finished yet?’ I say to him often. ‘I think that is exactly the right size. The best size of all.’
But he does not stop.
Sometimes I catch him in my arms and press my ear against his chest. Will I hear more than the light paces of his heart? The sound of growth, the song that once murmured in every body? It is like the ceaseless rushing of a waterfall or an invisible radiation and it surrounds everything that grows.
‘Trilzadam qwalamba. Weedoo! Sorozzo!’
‘What’s that? But what is it, really?’ I keep asking, and he comes right up to me and repeats: Tril-za-dam qwa-lam-ba. Wee-doo! So-roz-zo!’
And I still understand nothing, and he laughs.
Once I had an idea that I would teach him. I said: ‘People are born and grow, grow old and die.’
How angry he became! He stamped his feet and shouted: ‘It’s not like that! It’s not like that!’
‘How is it, then?’ I asked, astonished.
