Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  ‘No one ever dies!’ he said, and looked at me with condescension.

  In the spring we flew a kite from the boulders on the shore. Oh dear, it escaped from his hands and the wind took it out over the open sea. It was a hawk, black and blue, and the cold waves fought over its wings.

  He did not cry.

  Now the first snows have fallen and the city glows with the distant light of winter.

  The tall stone building is empty. Everyone has gone; I don’t know whether to work or to the shops, on journeys or to death.

  Only the Looking-Glass Boy plays in the chasm of the yard, in the shadows of the snow. I see from my window how the flakes fall on his brightly coloured cap and on the cellar steps and on the frost of the sandpit. With what infinite humility they fall on to brick and metal, wood and glass, concrete and human hands.

  I shout his name and he looks up, bends over and scoops up some snow. His fingers are bare.

  ‘Catch!’

  He throws it toward the light of the window. The severe substance of eternity and the warmth of his fingers, transparent. Sometimes he has rested beside me and I have believed he was sleeping. But his eyes are open, after all, and he looks through me as through a window.

  ‘When I fall asleep,’ he said later, ‘or when I wake, all the colours come here.’

  ‘Where from?’ I ask, and he points to the white wall on which the door, slightly open, has drawn a glowing pillar.

  What could ease, what could ever dilute the ineluctability of chance, that he has been born on earth.

  The Aquarium Light

  I have seen a small house in a forgotten quarter of the city. I call it the Gothic House because its roof slopes so steeply and the narrowness of its sides make it look so high that it recalls a dwarf cathedral.

  I have never seen the people who live there, but I have been inside the house once. I had to go there on account of an aquarium, because a friend of mine, who knows the owners, had promised to look after the fish while they were away. One Sunday in May he rang and asked whether I wanted to go there with him. I did, for I would have gone anywhere at all with him.

  ‘Here it is,’ said my friend, opening a dilapidated door. It was already evening, and the slanting light cut across the long grass of the garden.

  We entered a room that was cool and large.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said my friend, and disappeared somewhere.

  I found myself looking at a picture on the wall, and it was foreign to me. Someone was lying, eyes closed, in the middle of an open field. He was inside a low, transparent tent; perhaps it was some kind of mosquito net, made of gauze. The sleeper in the picture was surrounded by the dimness of a summer night; he lay on his back, his hands by his sides, like a dead person. But he was not dead, for the gauze, the room, all the summer night swayed with the breath of his sleeping.

  In the darkest corner of the room stood the aquarium. I saw it only when my friend returned and switched on the lamp that was attached to the inside of its lid. I gazed into the small, water-filled room that glowed.

  ‘What are you going to give them?’ I asked.

  ‘Mmm.’ He studied the label of the jar of fish-food. ‘These are freeze-dried termites.’

  I opened the jar and inhaled; inside were small, dark crumbs that smelled of nothing. I was alert and carefree. I saw everything close up and in accurate detail.

  The fish swam up close to the surface as soon as the light was switched on. I sprinkled the crumbs on the water, and their ring-mouths snapped. One of the fish was particularly large, greedy and beautiful.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t you recognise an ordinary goldfish?’

  ‘Ordinary?’

  Nothing that evening was ordinary. With what grace the creature moved; it had a shimmering, floating tail, a gold-glimmering veil, which fluttered slowly and artfully, as if the fish were a dancer.

  ‘Do you think it can see us?’

  ‘The odd movement, perhaps.’

  The aerating device in the corner of the aquarium hummed unevenly; there was something in it of the wind and the sound of bells. The glow of the aquarium light struck the water and, from there, reflected into our faces as we leaned over the tank.

  ‘Listen, about that trip,’ my friend said. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea, after all.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked. He was talking about a plan which we had been discussing for a long time: a visit to Assisi.

  ‘I’ll have to think about it some more.’

  ‘Don’t you want to go, after all?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ he said, absent-mindedly trailing his fingers in the water. The fish swam up to look at them, waving its tail, and the reflections of the water, stirred by its fins, marbled the skin of his cheeks like the glimmer of sunlight, as if we had been standing in the water of a river under a summer sky.

  I wanted to ask: ‘What do you mean?’, to sort the matter out straight away and in every detail. But speech had become an overwhelming exertion.

  He lifted his fingertips and drops fell back into the underwater landscape, where reddish shells had been carefully placed and where thin reeds bent elegantly as if a wind were blowing.

  ‘I’ll just go and water the plants upstairs,’ he said, and closed the lid of the aquarium.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ I said.

  I watched his back as he went upstairs. From the small, black-and-white picture twilight poured into the room, spreading like a ring on water.

  The beginning of spring spread itself before me, dazzlingly empty. It was a table spread with a spotless cloth, set with the empty dishes of weeks of lonely days.

  The fish whisked its tail, and I wanted to say to him: ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘You don’t know me.’ How quickly I grasped, as my crutch, the secret comfort of all those who have been rejected: ‘You don’t know me. If you knew me, if you knew who I really am, you would love me forever.’

  He returned, the empty watering-can in his hand, and eyed me carefully.

  ‘I suppose I should turn off the aquarium light,’ he said.

  The Remoteness of All Glory

  Doña Quixote is ill. I have never seen her so gloomy and ill.

  I am in a hurry and I should have gone somewhere quite different. But I came here, nevertheless, knowing nothing of her state in advance.

  Doña Quixote is lying between the sheets, wearing all her clothes. She has even left her shoes on her feet.

  ‘I thought I would die last night,’ she says.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask.

  ‘I had such a bad nightmare,’ she says, like a little child.

  ‘Would you like some sage tea?’ I ask.

  She does not answer, and looks as if she is still gazing into her nightmare.

  I make Doña Quixote some sage tea and she swallows a couple of gulps obediently. Then she pushes the cup away and says she wants to go away. Away completely. She says her strength has withered and crumbled. She says her eyes have grown dim. She says she has reached a place where all that is true is the remoteness of all glory.

  Her words make me cold and my gaze avoids her eyes. I, too, am disappointed, as though my trust, my hope had been in vain.

  I hear her sigh.

  ‘I am growing tired,’ she said, ‘and so are you. And if it is for the last time, then let it be so. But whatever does not stir, remains.’

  She sits on the edge of her bed and her long, white fingers hang like quills.

  ‘Do you want to hear the dream that woke me up?’

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘It was very short,’ Doña Quixote says. ‘I was in a strange country, in a strange city. It was night. Around me were nothing but ruins. I saw hands, feet and heads that thrust their way out of the cracks between stones or lay, mutilated, on the pavement. They continued as far as the eye could see so I could no longer find a clear space to step on.’

  She falls silent and
stares with sightless eyes at a flower on her carpet. I take Doña Quixote’s guitar from the corner and ask her to play something.

  ‘Play “All the bright lanterns”, for example,’ I say.

  But she does not touch the guitar.

  ‘Whose dream did I dream?’ she asks. ‘Whose dream am I dreaming? Oh, how cold I am.’

  I fetch a large blue shawl from the cupboard, I ask her to drink another cup of tea. I ask whether she would like to watch the television news, and when she continues to be silent. I turn the set on.

  The television shows a strange city that has been bombed. The television shows a shanty-town that has been destroyed. The set shows men and women, girls and boys, all dead, all lying in the filth of the road, with snuffed-out faces.

  A Room of One’s Own

  The piece of things. The comb that lies on the table before me between the pen and the book. The bottle of Aquila ink and a lump of blue glass I found on the beach at Murano. My gaze often moves over these things like a fly, understanding nothing of their purpose or origin.

  Sometimes, on the other hand, when I look around me and see things that have been made and produced, sold and bought for money, I am astonished. Whence comes this persistent feeling that they are concealing a secret? That my room, although I know there is no one here but me, is inhabited by unknown people? That even the most insignificant object, such as a spent match or a crumpled bus-ticket, has its own, ineluctable personality, an individual life which must not be undervalued, a consciousness that has perhaps a more direct link with reality than the short feelers of the senses and language?

  No, they do not conceal anything. Everything is here: visible and before me. Everything is precisely what it is, openly, every day. If reality has a secret, then it is this nakedness that is transparent.

  The comb lies on the table before me between the pen and the book. How different they are from me, in that they have a purpose that I do not. But there are moments when our mutual understanding is unbroken. The great expectation we hold in common.

  I understand the psychometrist who, taking an object in his hand, can say where it has come from and who has used it. For cannot crumbs from a loaf of bread prove who ate the bread? The handle of a cup I once grasped will carry forever the wavy lines of the epidermis of my forefinger and thumb . . .

  The Empty Room

  ‘Nothing exists,’ said the Looking-Glass Boy.

  He has come into my room and his finger turns toward my table.

  ‘Hey,’ I shout, ‘I still have a lot of work to do.’

  He does not seem to hear. He has already managed to say it: ‘The table does not exist.’

  Then he looks at the painting I have hung on the wall. It is a beautiful picture. I have grown used to it, and I like to look at it.

  ‘Listen,’ I begin, but his finger is already pointing straight at it. ‘The picture does not exist.’

  This depresses me a little. I would like to sit down, but when I look round I see the Looking-Glass Boy has already pointed at my chair.

  And it was a good chair. I had been sitting in it for many years.

  ‘I don’t want to sleep on the floor,’ I tell him severely, but it is no use. If nothing exists, why should he spare the bed . . .

  I see he has moved his gaze to my lamp.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I want to see.’

  But the lamp has already gone out.

  So that now we are crouching in the darkness and there is nothing any more, anywhere, only we two.

  But through the darkness I think I can make out something like a small stick . . . It is his pale, thin, beautiful finger.

  Oh. I already know, I know!

  It will turn slowly toward my heart, and there is nothing for me to use as my shield.

  Lost

  There are days when Doña Quixote ceases to speak.

  When I step into the room, she sees my arrival, nods lightly and motions for me to sit. But when I ask something, she shakes her head, presses a finger to her lips, and her eyelids veil her gaze.

  I say it is windy outside, and she smiles. I say I have brought us buns and cream for our coffee, and she looks at me tenderly but remains silent.

  The blue and red mobile that she has hung on the curtain-rail spins slowly in the draught from the crack of the open window. On the table is an avocado whose furrowed skin is deep green, like late summer. I want to sit as silently as she, but I have travelled here from a great distance across the bustle of the city, and I have caught the restlessness of the streets.

  There was something I absolutely had to tell her. What was it? What was it? I forget so much every time I step into this room.

  When I look at Doña Quixote, she seems suddenly to have shrunk, as if the dimensions of the room had changed and there were dozens of yards between our chairs, as if she were already moving to the far side of where my voice can reach her.

  I feel longing. I can no longer sit in one place, I get up and go to the kitchen to make coffee.

  When I return, there is no sign of her. From the threshold, where I am standing, if I turn my head a little I can see the whole of the small room and the hall. I am sure I would have heard if she had gone out.

  The bathroom door is ajar and it is dark inside: no one there. I tear open the alcove curtain, but she is not in her bed. A deep panic overwhelms me and I pull open the doors of all the cupboards and wardrobes. I rummage among her clothes as if she could have hidden herself among them.

  I go into the alcove again and bend down to look under her bed. Do I really think I will see her irises there, in the dust and the darkness?

  Then she speaks my name from the room behind me, low and gently. She is sitting beside the radiator in her own chair, in exactly the same position as when I got up and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

  ‘Where were you?’ I ask, angry now.

  ‘I was here,’ she says. ‘But I’ve been sitting here all the time.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ I say. ‘And don’t do it again. It makes me ill.’

  She smiles a little, and that makes me even angrier. I would like to say something hurtful to her as she sits there, so immovable and distant. I would like to say I shall never come here again, because she is – because she is – so thoroughly strange and different from everyone else. But when I even think of seeing her elongated form for the last time, hot grief flows like a liquid right out into my toes and my fingertips, and I sit down in my old place.

  ‘Talk to me,’ I say, ‘and put an end to my trembling.’

  I see her lips moving, I see she is speaking, but what she is saying I cannot hear. She talks and talks, but between us is something heavy and difficult. I struggle to understand, but I merely notice I am still afraid and that I do not recognise her whom I call Doña Quixote and who murmurs like a tree in a strange place.

  Then she comes to me and strokes my hair.

  Now I hear her say: ‘It goes before me, and I can see the hem of its coat. And even were it to go through the gates of death, I must follow.’

  ‘Doña Quixote,’ I say, ‘what are you talking about?’

  ‘People lose everything,’ she said. ‘Knowledge and skill and all human abilities. Strength crumbles and beauty is snuffed out like a flame. Faith goes, and hope, and only one thing remains, the thing whose name I do not wish to repeat in vain.’

  A tree stands before the window, the last ray of daylight encircles its trunk, which sways imperceptibly.

  ‘One doesn’t get used to living,’ it says, as quietly and inwardly as if the wind had merely rustled its crown.

  And I repeat, as swiftly as if its breathing had been transferred to me: ‘That’s how it is, one never gets used to living.’

  A Gate Built in Water

  It is perfectly true that, south from here, off the shore of a certain island, stands a Gate Built in Water.

  I believe it has stood in the same place for many centuries. It is made of wood and, when some part of it rots, it is r
ebuilt exactly the same as it has always been.

  I imagine the gate is so narrow that an oarsman must ship his oars to pass through it without difficulty.

  I imagine it, because I have never seen the Gate Built in Water, and I do not wish to see it. The journey is too long, and even if I were to make it, I would prefer to stay in the hotel and draw the curtains.

  But I have seen a picture of the Gate Built in Water, and I know the most important thing: it is beautiful. I remember it often and I am happy that it is there and remains there. I think if the island were overwhelmed by a natural disaster or by war, the surviving inhabitants would rebuild the Gate Built in Water before schools, shops and temples.

  I hope it has no meaning. That whichever direction one chooses to pass through it, one goes nowhere. The water ripples around its pillars and they rise straight from the cold deeps and a dull sound is heard if they are touched by the blade of an oar.

  Why would anyone sail through the Gate Built in Water? Why indeed, when one can sail past it just as well – and with far less trouble – on either side . . .

  Nevertheless, wherever the Gate Built in Water is seen, everyone, at every time and in every place, will unquestionably go through it, and not only once, but again and again.

  The Measuring Line of Zerubbabel

  Doña Quixote, who was hanging half out of her window, reappeared completely in the room. I saw she had a pair of binoculars in her hand, and that she was for some reason agitated.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ she muttered. ‘Without a doubt.’

  She passed me the binoculars and said: ‘Look for yourself. There, there on the roof, do you see?’

  Even with the naked eye it was easy to see that, far away, two men were climbing on a red tile roof. To me it did not look at all unusual; after all, there are chimney-sweeps, roof-menders, snow-shifters.

  When I examined the two men through the binoculars, I saw they were connected by a long, pale rope, perhaps a measuring tape, which they were moving along the ridge of the roof.