Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  The Cossack general Krasnasyol has been murdered. No one remembers the shame of Lindstrom, the street tobacconist, any longer: that he was whipped for stealing a horse where Ore Street now ends. The potato-sellers no longer shout from their roughly made carts whose rattling wheels echoed to the end of the street. The eyes have changed, now they sit well in the heads of tax accountants and demonstrators of new products and qualified restaurant-keepers and countless old women who consider death their particular privilege.

  How busy they are in their rush to get from one place to another. How they tack through the stream of shadows, the cross-swell of intersecting streets. How hurried I am, how I rush.

  Beneath the giant spectacles of the optician and the barber’s golden platter, past the sun of the solarium and the booming bowling hall and the aquarium shop in whose window a tarantula is eating flies, through the park, where the monuments to those who have died of the plague are being cleaned.

  Many wish to be far away from here; I do not. I listen to the sounds of the city as if the angel were blowing them into the air with his golden reed.

  For this, too, and precisely this, is the City of the Golden Reed. It has been measured by an angel, and it is, in length and breadth and height, twelve thousand furlongs.

  Ding and Dong

  But can one place one’s trust in it, the City of the Golden Reed? For every place here wanders like a nomad; dust rises.

  Scarcely have chains of mountains risen – variscan, appalachian, alpine – than they immediately begin to level. Continental plates shudder, seas dry into jungles of salt and swell once more. Like facial expressions and human ages, the landscapes of the earth’s surface change.

  The city is a real but molten substance, like ectoplasm, which never solidifies. The thoughts of the crowd, people’s actions, hammer at the city, and its shape changes; its form is never completed.

  Some people said Mrs Raa was away for two years, or three; others that she was not seen in the city for almost a decade; but most said nothing, for her name was unknown to them.

  Bells! First of all, that little tinkling of bells . . . It danced mischievously into her ears from the fresh streets from which the snow had melted like the memory of a shared dream. It mixed with the slapping of the soft points of shoes against stone and recalled something long-forgotten to her mind. But Mrs Raa had never before seen such peculiar shoes.

  First of all, they were very brightly coloured, garish really: crimson red, electric blue, green and violet, saffron- and sun-yellow. Sometimes one even saw shoes crowded with all the five hundred thousand colours of the spectrum, in spots, torrents of lines, whirls and spirals. If one looked at them for too long, one soon had to blink.

  But the most extraordinary thing, for Mrs Raa, was not the colours, but the shape and size of the shoes. For during her absence they had grown so exaggeratedly long at their points that one would have thought they would make walking difficult. And indeed they did, for the longest points were often fastened with cords to the walker’s knees. Others had various objects fastened to them as amulets, or those little bells that tinkled on every square and pavement.

  When Mrs Raa raised her eyes, she saw brightly coloured leggings or tight trousers that looked like leggings, but which were as gaudy as the shoes, but one leg was often of a different colour from the other.

  And whatever detail her eyes fastened upon in the dress of passers-by, everywhere she found the same spirit of excess, the same pomp approaching effrontery, which expressed itself in immoderately large buttons, sleeves puffed up with starch, and collars that fell across the chest. Their folds were rustled by the gusts of wind that were always rushing through the city.

  The clothes of new citizens mixed distant periods and foreign traditions with what they believed to be hitherto unprecedented.

  Mrs Raa came to me in a passion and said:

  ‘But they wear old lace headdresses and saris, caftans and monks’ cowls. Are they Buryats? Fellahs? Franciscans? This is not the city I knew.’

  ‘What did you expect?’

  I laughed and swung my legs so that the little bell at the tip of my shoe tinkled brightly. ‘Don’t they use shoe-bells down there in the south, then?’

  But Mrs Raa was right: the city had changed. Was that a bad thing? Wasn’t it just as it should be? The tinkling was cheerful, it pleased my ear and it pleased Mrs Raa’s ear; but she was anxious.

  ‘It’s not just the clothes,’ she said. ‘It’s the air, people and people’s conversation. There’s too much of everything.’

  Did I not understand what she was keeping faith with, what she was remembering in speaking in such a way? Her former city! Our city! When Mrs Raa called it up from her memory, it rose before her from the bath of decades as modest and austere as long ago. It was cool sure enough, but at the same time clean and modest. It was raining, and she was so short that she could see the street paving stones quite close; they gleamed wetly, they refracted the light like precious stones, like jasper, like sardonyx. And there were no hues of such fineness, of such richness, in the citizens’ new clothes.

  Women and men (both dong and ding)

  summer autumn winter spring

  reaped their sowing and went their came

  sun moon stars rain

  All around her little fountains were born and died as drops shattered on the stones and the wind spread their freshness over the square.

  The war had ended; in the noonday park a dove was pecking at the sand and making do with what it found. A window opened, sparkling, and their mother’s voice tumbled over them like home, where the running footstep rested, where satisfaction and poverty resided.

  Not even the patience of an archaeologist can return her former city to Mrs Raa. And what if it could? How sad, how strange would be the Mrs Raa who lived there . . .

  The Dark Shadow of the Pleasure Palace . . .

  The Gold-Washers had an idea. It was a simple, megalomanic idea. They thought it was possible to build a house in which life would be different and better than elsewhere. That on the crumbling surface of the earth it would be possible to found a stronghold, to set aside an area of quiet waters that norns and demons would avoid.

  Perhaps many other homes, too, have been built in such a belief, but I learned to know only the Tabernacle.

  It was not really a temple, and neither were the Gold-Washers, its inhabitants, any more pious than the other citizens. They merely had a pinch of faith and a lot of money – whose, never became clear to me.

  When we saw it for the first time, Mrs Raa and I and Latona, the daughter of Pontanus, it made us laugh a little. It was a misty day and as we approached the Tabernacle it materialised rapidly, as if it had not been built of wood and concrete and glass, but of some much more fluid substance.

  It was not in a place where any of us would have wished to build a house. The refuse dump of the City of the Golden Reed was too close. We sensed its stench, we saw its disintegrating heaps and the screaming flocks of gulls above it.

  The Tabernacle, the pleasure palace of the Gold-Washers, was unlike any house we had ever seen before, although it contained parts and materials from many buildings that we knew only from pictures.

  ‘What architect designed this?’ asked Mrs Raa. ‘Is he still at large?’

  Although the Tabernacle was in the City of the Golden Reed, on its outer edge, it did not seem to have a home town. It was a lonely house, it was a house of great confusion. ‘Porta Maggiore!’ cried Latona.

  ‘Not in the least, from this side it’s St Peter’s,’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Raa. ‘Don’t you remember? It’s the spitting image of Hagia Sofia.’

  ‘But that tower,’ I said. ‘That’s the tower of the Admiralty.’

  But I also noted the pointed arches of curved wood. They had been made by a Gothic spirit that had found itself in the wrong age. Where, then, did the crooked walls, the Tabernacle’s asymmetry and its peculiar sense of imbalance come from?
Its geometry provoked anxiety, the building moved and never really became fixed to the spot.

  Before us was confusion, nobility and the power of hope, which was only increased by the scaffolding which had been left there.

  There were also some columns, a loggia which proceeded like a solemn, expansive thought. But the curves of the roof dizzied the gaze; they were the Tabernacle’s earthly wings. ‘This sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed,’ said Mrs Raa. ‘It really shouldn’t.’

  We went on standing there, in the gravel of the road, gazing around us, until Pontanus came and took us inside. ‘This is the Pantheon,’ he said.

  We found ourselves among statues in a round, draughty vestibule. They had been placed in semicircular niches in the walls of the hall, but some of the spaces were still awaiting their inhabitants. They were monstrous or divine forms: a melancholy sphinx, a kalamakara, an archaeoptrix. I touched them, I stroked their surface with my finger and realised that they were all made of wood: aspen, spruce, pine.

  ‘Who made those?’ I asked.

  ‘The Executioner,’ said Pontanus. ‘He lives here.’

  There seemed to be a countless number of rooms in the Tabernacle, and not one of them resembled another. One of them was of bamboo and paper; its floor was covered in sisal matting. One was triangular, another semicircular, a third had walls but no roof, a fourth a roof but only two walls.

  There were empty rooms which had no furniture, or only a mattress on the floor, and others that were furnished extravagantly, some ostentatiously, some elegantly. It seemed to me that these rooms were public spaces; I did not believe anyone lived in them. We also passed closed doors, but we did not meet any of the building’s inhabitants.

  ‘Would you like to see the most beautiful room in the Tabernacle?’ Pontanus asked.

  He took us to the upper floor, to the western gable of the building. There was a spacious, light-filled room which one could see in three directions, every way but north.

  I had certainly never seen such a beautiful room, and neither had Mrs Raa or Latona, the daughter of Pontanus. It was beautiful in a classical, thoroughly bourgeois way.

  And it was no ordinary room, either: it was a salon or drawing-room. On the wall were painted, with exceptional skill, columns, bunches of grapes and medallions and another door, whose handle I went to turn before I realised that it was painted.

  I also saw a solemn canopied bed which was like a room within a room. On a curved walnut bureau stood a heavy candelabrum. The sunlight, which flooded in from all directions, was softened by white curtains and glowed in the polished mirrors behind the candlestick and in the roses, white and red. There were three vases of them before each window.

  A glass-doored bookcase was of the same reddish walnut as the bureau.

  Between the doors – the real door and the illusory door – was a small square piano. The floor was covered by a blue carpet edged with narrow, meandering patterns. In the centre of the carpet a tree spread its branches, carrying both flowers and fruit.

  It was a beautiful and exquisite carpet, perfect for the floor of so rare a room.

  ‘Who lives in this room? You?’ I asked.

  ‘Not me. This is the Kinswoman’s room,’ Pontanus answered. Across his face there flickered a somehow unpleasant expression, memory or thought which I did not have time to decipher.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘You will meet her soon enough,’ said Pontanus.

  He looked out of the window and I went to stand beside him. I should have remembered what to expect, but all the same I started a little. The view to the west, over the rose-vases, was like a defamation when one looked at it from the constant peace of the Kinswoman’s room.

  There rose apennines of waste, rotting refuse and abandoned piles of things, behind which the sun was just setting. It was strange and wrong that the substance of things lasted so much longer than human flesh, which withered and was forgotten like flowers.

  ‘What luck!’ said Pontanus, and leaned, looking dreamy, against the window-sill as if he were admiring the alpine glow.

  ‘What luck are you talking about?’ asked Mrs Raa.

  ‘That we were able to build the Tabernacle just here,’ he said.

  ‘What kind of luck is that,’ asked Latona, his daughter. ‘Those junk heaps aren’t beautiful, and what’s more, they smell.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Pontanus said. ‘This refuse site will soon be full. Next year, or perhaps even before Christmas, it will be closed, and then they will begin to build a big park in its place. It will be levelled, soil will be brought here, lawns will be sown and flowers and trees planted. It will be a real sight – I have heard it will be the biggest park in the whole of the City of the Golden Reed.’

  ‘Perhaps even a rose-garden,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, father, you’ll believe anything,’ said Latona, daughter of Pontanus, and Mrs Raa hummed:

  For you have promised unto us

  That even to the wilderness

  Will come a lovely spring . . .

  But as we looked at those terrible cordilleras, we wanted, nevertheless, to believe, as Pontanus believed.

  Nocturnal Letters

  Mrs Raa got a lot of mail; she received a letter almost every night.

  The first, original letter, of which all the other nocturnal letters were the consequence, was written by her husband. On it was only her name, nothing else, for they lived, of course, at the same address then; there had been no need to drop the letter into a mail-box.

  Mrs Raa saw the first letter on the kitchen table immediately after she had found her husband’s body, still warm, in the car in the garage. The envelope was carefully sealed, and Mrs Raa was afraid of it.

  When all the formalities had been attended to, Mrs Raa took the letter in her hand. She turned it over in her hands and then dropped it on the table as if it had burnt her. It was a day and a night before she was able to open it.

  The envelope was empty. There was nothing in it, not even an unwritten sheet. It was just an envelope.

  For a long time Mrs Raa looked for the piece of paper that her husband had intended to put in the envelope. He had always been absent-minded. But when Mrs Raa had emptied and gone through her dead husband’s desk drawers, the piles of paper on his writing table, the book-case, the kitchen cupboards and all the waste-paper bins, she realised that there was no such piece of paper. The lightness of the letter was the same as the lightness of her own life, the clothes and the skin and the apartment that covered the desolation of her heart like dry shells.

  After the funeral, Mrs Raa moved back to her home city.

  But mail came to the City of the Golden Reed, too, from the place where her spouse now was. Mrs Raa found a letter on the kitchen table of her new apartment almost every night. Always her name was written on it in her husband’s small handwriting. But Mrs Raa could not reply: she had no address.

  In the second letter she read the words that she had most feared: IT WAS YOU.

  When she opened the third letter, all the lights in her house were burning. But from inside the letter flowed darkness, which spread quickly from room to room. The lights dimmed, she could no longer see anything. She wanted to close the envelope, but could no longer find it. The night around her was not mere darkness, but a blindness that filled every corner.

  The fourth letter contained a plan of their house. It resembled some kind of orientation map, or the treasure charts children make, for in one of the rooms of the apartment, in a corner of the hall, a cross had been drawn. She saw herself wander through the hall with the map in her hand and stand in the corner marked by the cross. There was nothing there but a pile of old newspapers awaiting the next collection of waste paper. The pile was alarmingly high and crooked, and it looked to her as if it must contain a newspaper for every day of her life.

  From the fifth letter her husband rose, looking just the same as before, but of course he was much smaller, hardly the length of a pencil. Joy
and peace, the vision of a new possibility, made Mrs Raa’s heart dizzy.

  Her husband began to grow, quickly, quickly, and soon he was the right size and Mrs Raa pressed him to her breast. But he continued to swell, at astonishing speed, and Mrs Raa’s arms could no longer encircle him. They could not restrain such unbridled growth. Her husband’s shoulders were already touching the walls, his head tore open the ceiling, but after that he began to vaporise. His solidity disappeared and he became summer mist, ether, the smoke of distant campfires.

  When Mrs Raa opened the sixth letter, a light scent wafted from it. Mrs Raa did not know what scent it was, that of a flower or a fruit or the scent of their former love, which had been lost long before her husband’s death, or which she had imagined had been lost. Mrs Raa liked the scent; she did not want it to evaporate. But it evaporated even before she awoke.

  Inside the seventh envelope was a piece of lined paper, as if torn from a school exercise book. On it was drawn various objects: a water-glass, an onion, a teaspoon, a chair. The drawings were rough and approximate, for her husband had never been able to draw, and the objects were simple, ordinary objects, of a kind that Mrs Raa had grown used to seeing and using every day.

  She turned the piece of paper over in her hands and wondered whether it was a picture-riddle, a puzzle picture. But she could not think of a solution.

  Mrs Raa kept the empty envelope in the drawer of her night-table. After dreaming, she sometimes opened the drawer and looked inside the envelope once more. Then she got up and went into the kitchen and let the water run. It was tomorrow and she drank a glass of water in the immeasurable light of the east window. But the chambers of her heart had turned into court chambers in which complex legal cases were heard.