Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  When she sat down, the chair said a word, she stirred her coffee with a spoon and, in the dawn, her eyes were the eyes of an onion-peeler.

  The Ravens of Edom

  In the rooms of the Tabernacle, in the pavilion, in the courtyards, there were to be seen, increasingly often, two already aged figures who moved with difficulty. If one asked the Gold-Washers their names, one heard only: the ravens of Edom.

  Perhaps they were man and wife, perhaps they had once had a home in a small town far to the north. But that was a long time ago: when I met them, they no longer had a home, a town of their own. Who knows what had happened to them? Who was even interested? For their hometown was so poor and insignificant, and so far away in the north.

  No foreign power had conquered it, it had not been fought for from street to street, and no one had manned the barricades to defend it. What had happened had happened in silence.

  The houses emptied and their doors and windows were barred. The school playground was deserted. Even in the heart of winter, not even the thinnest thread of smoke rose from a single chimney.

  You grew silent, town, and your streets

  remain empty: not a soul

  will return, say why you were abandoned

  They went away, to the south, in a forced emigration, their native town died: there is no eye to see it.

  For not only people, animals and plants are mortal: places, too, can die. Places, too, can be mourned like dead people.

  Now those who lived there were scattered like the tribe of Judah, like straws in the winds of the wilderness. Some fell in the interior, some on the coast, like this old couple. Each one of them carried with them their little town, pocket-sized. Their old home was only an empty shell. The real town, built of people, had been wiped off the map and only wild animals lived there, thinned out by hunger and extinction.

  What were those two doing in the Tabernacle, with the Gold-Washers, among people of a quite different race?

  They were permitted to live in one of the rooms of the pleasure palace, and someone thought he knew: ‘They have been adopted.’

  They wandered through the Tabernacle like children lost in the forest, like Hansel and Gretel. One mumbled incessantly to herself, the other stared persistently at the floor as if looking for a trail of crumbs of bread that would guide him back home.

  The Customs Officer, he who dissected bodies for a living, brought them sparkling glasses and said: ‘You are from such-and-such a place, aren’t you?’

  And they looked at him, reviving: ‘Have you ever been there?’

  ‘Once,’ said the Customs Officer, and tried to think of something kind to say about that miserable, cold town.

  ‘It was a beautiful spot,’ he seemed to remember at last. ‘Yes . . . so peaceful.’

  ‘Isn’t that right?’ said one of them, grateful for his words.

  And the other: ‘The streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch, and her soil into brimstone; her land shall become burning pitch.’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked the Customs Officer.

  ‘Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the hawk and the porcupine shall possess it, the owl and the raven shall dwell in it. He shall stretch the line of confusion over it, and the plummet of chaos over its nobles.’

  The Customs Officer looked for a means of escape, but the homeless man’s voice was already becoming more uncertain; it began to fragment and grow dim. The ravens of Edom left the Customs Officer and continued their progress past groups of talking people and self-absorbed couples.

  ‘Is that where they come from?’ someone asked, and was answered: ‘Yes, there.’

  But no one saw the cloud the ravens of Edom had spun about them. It was their aura, the extension of their personality, and surrounded by it they wandered through the Tabernacle as they wandered anywhere else that was not Edom. It was the dense cloud of home-sickness, the only faithful companion in the trials of exile, on the road to Hooronaim.

  Just as the soil has its own irradiance and the sky its own, so their lives, too, were radiant; evenly and incessantly, their’ cloud radiated a grief which was hardly likely to reach its half-life.

  But the cloud shed light, it threw out a beam of light, and raised their past up as if on a platform. And in the limelight every detail, every task, every object under the lost sky of Edom took on a new significance, and its colours were cleansed like the patterns on stones in shore-water.

  And their ancient days had, indeed, been days of happiness. How exile broadened them, and what a rainbow it hurled across the hinterland town that jutted out on the shore of its unacidified lake with its modest apartment blocks, sawmills and cut-price supermarkets and constantly beflagged petrol stations.

  The illumination of their home-sickness was shadowless, all-embracing. Their former life was superabundantly rich in the light of that cloud.

  If the ravens of Edom could once return, if they could see their little Edom again as it was, what would happen to them? Would they return to their former tasks, accustoming themselves once more to the everyday life of Edom, and growing tired of it? How soon would they forget that which had been longer and broader and higher than anything else in their lives: their own home-sickness and its clear-sightedness?

  The Glow of the Gold-Washers

  The Tail of the Peacock

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘Just water,’ Pontanus said. ‘And this?’

  ‘Mercury.’

  ‘And this?’

  ‘Lead.’

  ‘And that?’

  ‘Tin.’

  Scales and weights. Living fire and the green eye of the monitor. Crucibles and measuring glasses of all sizes, on their sides the images of the flames. Coloured fluids, bubbling. Powders. Smells and evaporators.

  But through them I saw, day by day, Pontanus’s precise hands, the hands of an illusionist, weighing and sprinkling, shaking and mixing, measuring and arranging.

  I fingered Pontanus’s tools. I turned in this direction and that in his cramped room in the Tabernacle building and could not avoid breathing in sulphur fumes. I asked whatever came into my head and he answered, patiently, but lost in his own thoughts.

  Pontanus believes everything is alive: the air and the earth, fire and water, but also the rock on which the city is founded, minerals and metals, every substance we encounter, we covet or evade – dead people, too, and that which cannot be seen and of which we know nothing.

  Oh Pontanus, poor Pontanus. His words are the afterimages of centuries that have been trodden to dust. What is the water of which he speaks, the dry water that does not wet the hand? Where is the gentle fire that does not smoke? A continuous, unchanging fire, like a stone? A fire like liquid, a fire that transfixes, a single entity?

  Not to mention all the colours! He sprays me with his saliva as he tells me of a black that is the source of white, and of a white in which red is hidden.

  ‘It is forty-two days before the black phase begins,’ he says. ‘If I don’t make any mistakes. Then ninety days to the white phase, and to the red five months, at least.’

  ‘Is that when it is ready?’

  ‘It is,’ he says, and in his voice there is not the slightest quiver of doubt.

  But I know that he has been engaged in the same work for at least a year, a year and a half, and there is no sign yet of the black phase. But Pontanus is not one to be downhearted. Not Pontanus. Night falls, and he does not tire, but becomes more alert, his finger rises and he raves about a quintessence that is the fifth element, and elixirs and antimonies, a king and queen, an eagle and a frog, and the Green Lion.

  Pontanus is not satisfied with his role as a dependent variable, as an eyewitness. He wishes to be more than witness and a victim: he who does, changes and exchanges, rejects and chooses. He wishes himself to be God, and is that strange? That is what everyone wants! Everyone
who is a real, living person . . .

  But many acquaintances shake their heads. They ask: ‘Is he a lunatic, a madman?’

  And I confess that I, too, can laugh at him, but not here, not as I see his rough face sweating behind the clouds of steam. Not as I see in his eyes the same golden glow that he tries to entice from his brews.

  His gravity, his stone-quiet forehead cannot but draw me to him. Even when his mouth speaks with a spray of spittle, his forehead keeps silence, steep and white.

  What, then, does he want? To transform the common into the rare, the rough into the sublime, the valueless into the immeasurably precious. He, a slight and short man, believes he can, like the womb of the earth itself, ripen and breed; like the ocean, enrich and crystallise.

  And he claims that everything comes from one, which is two. That from two, one will come once more, through the Great Work.

  It is no use arguing with Pontanus that he is a century, or even a thousand years, too late. Did not the world of which he speaks – the world of crystal spheres – long ago break into fragments, with its unicorns and chimeras? It was a beautiful but cruel world, yet not as merciless as this new one.

  For now we find ourselves together in a world more desolate from year to year, of which both animals and gods are taking their leave.

  ‘Tell me, Pontanus, would you like to have it back? Would you like to exchange the red shift and neutrinos for perdition and the brilliance of crystal spheres, nucleotides and polymers for makaras and basilisks, waves, particles and radiation for God’s plan, absolute, mathematical, real time?’

  Laugh at Pontanus, mock him. He will stand firm, he will tell you that although much has been found, much has also been lost, that although much has been learned, much has been forgotten.

  I listen to him with pleasure, but at the same time in sorrow.

  I look from the darkness of my own melancholy at how he boils and mixes, sublimates and refines his multi-coloured distillates in his little room, which he has dedicated as the chamber of the Great Work. I take a measuring glass in my hand and ask, ‘What’s in here?’

  ‘Salt,’ he answers.

  ‘And here?’

  ‘Mercury.’

  ‘And here, ugh?’

  ‘Sulphur.’

  Often he answers readily, but often he breaks off and waves his hands: no point, in vain. But if I am too eager to say, ‘I understand,’ he becomes angry and makes it clear that it is not as simple as all that. Do I imagine that I can understand in the twinkling of an eye something that it has taken him years, or even decades, to comprehend?

  There are matters about which he keeps a decided silence. He says they are things about which he cannot yet speak: his lips are sealed. When I ask what, in the end, is the final aim of his efforts, I do not receive a straight answer. All in all, he speaks confusingly and badly; however attentively I listen to him, I cannot understand the connections, and I begin to grow anxious, even fearful.

  He does indeed have the hands of an illusionist, but much less to show than a master of trickery. I bid him farewell, return to the streets of the Golden Reed; there is a damp wind, the vapours of his room soon disperse from my hair.

  But not a week has gone by before I am sitting in his laboratory once more, turning over in my hands a crucible that holds a foaming green liquid, or another, which he calls the Tail of the Peacock. It is supposed to contain all the colours.

  ‘There is a rainbow here,’ says Pontanus.

  To me, the contents of the bottle are cloudy and obscure, like wine sediment. It smells bad. But if one shakes the bottle hard, there is a flash of red, a flicker of green stripe. It does not look like anything at all, just like a patch of petrol glistening on the surface of a puddle.

  Why on earth have I come here again? Because, even if I do not understand what he says, although, like the others, I feel sorry for him and fear that he is wasting his time, I believe I secretly understand what he wants. I would not dare confess it even to him: a furrow of doubt appears again and again at the corner of my mouth and often I raise my eyebrows. But is not what most people do for a living in this city even more insignificant, more useless, than what Pontanus does?

  That is why I never tell him what the others say: that his work is hopeless and pointless. For if I were to say it to him, should I not also have to say it to myself?

  For in what essential sense do my own endeavours differ from Pontanus’s work? Do I, too, in my own room, life, body, not distil and vaporise, sublimate and decoct and mix the raw substances that I have been given, the days of my life, this time, this flesh, that it might be more than decomposing substance? That the best might be distilled and sublimated from it, that it might endure as gold endures? Do I, too, not wish to fashion it into something other than what it is, something other than what it appears to be? Is this not my real employment?

  Do I not hope that joy might burst forth from these worthless, snuffed-out days, as colourful as the floating tail of the peacock – that from them, through the chemistry of my own longing, the wonderful star of antimony, the regulus star, pure as crystal, might once again condense?

  The Pans

  What pans they had! A shake! and the nuggets of gold separated from the gravel of days. They were few, and the gravel and clay and sludge and mud were plentiful. But there were some! There were! No one can make me say there were not.

  I am not of the same feather as they, but something about the Gold-Washers attracted me. There was in them a burning focus, as in all monomaniacs, the blessed focus of madness, which warmed my melancholy, cold-blooded lizard-nature. Warmed it for a time, until it cooled, and I crawled on my way, seeking new sources of heat . . .

  Their names, like their individuality, were embedded in the great clan of Gold-Washers, its family similarity, its continuity, its endless hospitality, which fused together their individual dreams.

  If I wish, I can certainly remember him who sat in front of a microscope or stared at the terrarium all night long. What, really, was he examining so fixedly? In a box beside him were small insects, only two millimetres long. They were dead creatures, which he dissected and prepared. All of them belonged to one and the same family of lice, Copeognatha, to its sub-sect, Atropos pulsatorium.

  Once I stopped to look as he did his work. When I had seen enough, I asked: ‘What do you want with those crawling things? What makes them so interesting that, from one day to the next, you enjoy their company so much that you will soon begin to look more like them than like people?’

  The Gold-Washer said: ‘If only you knew how tired I am of faces and expressions and words. This little book-louse is marvellous. It does not bother us, or ever say a single word. Its world lies next to ours and we know nothing of it, but from the inside, from the book-louse’s point of view, it is as boundless as the world of human beings. Bigger, even, for it is smaller than ourselves. I shall show it to people; I am writing a report whose title will be The Past, Meaning and Destiny of the Book-Louse.’

  This Gold-Washer also had a couple of bees’ nests at the end of the garden, beside the coppice behind which the piles of waste undulated.

  ‘To produce a pound of honey,’ the Gold-Washer once said, ‘a bee must visit seven million five hundred thousand flowers.’

  That truly amazed me. I could not understand how the Gold-Washer’s bumblebees could find, in such a landscape, seven million five hundred thousand flowers.

  But I remembered Pontanus’s dream.

  Another Gold-Washer joined us. He wore a tall, flat-topped hat on his head, a kind of top-hat, except that it was not black. On the contrary, it was of innumerable colours, sparkling, brilliant, almost self-luminous colours. His hat was as garishly multi-coloured as the citizens’ new shoes. It was a provocative, vulgar hat that called many things into question.

  But it was not by any means the Gold-Washer’s only headdress. Sometimes he dressed in a tricorn hat, sometimes a turban or a red fez, a skullcap or a ridiculous drainpipe cap.


  When, after we first became acquainted, I tried to recall this Gold-Washer’s face, I saw before me only a furiously rotating cylinder, glittering with colours.

  And I never really remembered his face, even later, but I did recall his voice, and he had many voices – for he both sang and played. He played the bullroarer and the comb and the split drum and a home-made glass harmonica – anything from which he could coax a sound.

  The third Gold-Washer was the Executioner. It was he who had made, with chisel and axe and plane, the strange wooden statues of the Tabernacle, and had also made many kinds of furniture for the building. He did not speak at all, and did not like his work to be interrupted. Sombre and bearded, he hewed, whittled, planed and polished.

  If anyone asked him, as he busied himself at his block of wood as if it were an executioner’s block, ‘What are you making?’ he growled, ‘A statue,’ and continued working without pause.

  But there was also a Gold-Washer who did nothing. It seemed to me, in fact, that he had never done anything at all. He did not dissect book-lice or sing or play, he did not make statues like the Executioner or busy himself with a Great Work like Pontanus. Once he had moved into the Tabernacle, he no longer went outside it, neither did he appear to take part in any of its ordinary tasks. He certainly talked, and talked almost incessantly. I was amazed that he could live in the same house as the Gold-Washer who loved the silence of the book-lice. Although he spoke only one sentence a day, if he began it in the morning he had still, late at night, not reached the end, so that he had to continue as soon as he woke in the morning.

  Often he was interrupted. For his advice was asked on all sorts of problems, from the practical to the most personal. He, who was older than the other Gold-Washers, gave advice willingly, and his counsel was short, pithy and often also to the point, but after he had given his counsel he returned to his own sentence.

  I never saw him take a step. Perhaps he was paralysed? In summer he sat in the French garden – for such a garden, too, was built in the Tabernacle – beside the fountain, in winter in a high-backed chair in a room with views in three directions. And from that chair flooded a stream of words and memories that ran under the earth in silence when there were no listeners present, but welled up audibly as soon as any ear was brought in by anyone’s feet.