Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  The others fell silent; only Babel was mumbling softly to himself, the language of Babel in his distress, the tongue of tongues, which each of us could understand, but no one could translate.

  What could I have done? I was not needed there. I returned to the solitude of my three-cornered room, where the Gold-Washer’s cry echoed once more: ‘One must also leave room for the soul!’

  Then peace returned. Not a sound was heard in the Tabernacle that night, in the house that was so big that there was even a room without walls, and another without a roof.

  But not even that was enough. Nothing was enough for the soul, it was too big even for the pleasure palace of the Tabernacle.

  The Breath in our Nostrils

  He had heard that same sound countless times. It was the undercurrent of all the days, all the years, but only when the night deadened all the other sounds did this one – which was hardly a sound to begin with – rise so that the ear could hear it.

  It was the first and it was the last, it belonged to everyone individually and it was everyone’s in common, just as one and the same fire burns in cigarette lighters and pyres, grave-candles, flamethrowers and the coloured paper lanterns of August.

  But this was not hot, but gentle as the touch of a beloved hand. To waken at night and feel on one’s cheek, on one’s bare shoulder its warm wind, passing through the nostrils of a child or someone one loves . . .

  It took away all words – both trivial and weighty, disappointed and eager, cruel, tender, yearning, and the few words that were so simple and true that they could have been hewn into the bedrock, that same rock which one could not avoid treading wherever one went in the City of the Golden Reed.

  The tide of life rose and fell with that wind, life’s real, omnipresent spirit of truth.

  In it were their inheritance and their possessions, received from the air, and it would disappear into the air once more.

  And when the cloud of words had left the crowns of the nocturnal pine-trees, only one sound, and a story in common, was left: it was the trees’ ambrosian hymn.

  Now, as he lay awake and alone in the Tabernacle, in the house of faces and snouts, now, as he wandered from one room to the next, and saw them, their joints loosened, their jaws ajar, the pallor of sleep on their faces, did he not understand them better than he ever did in daylight?

  For then their faces were full of seals and signs and memories, but at night they all fell away – gazes, expressions, too, all that had been learnt. Now their naked faces were blind and clean. How pitifully simple they were in the maelstrom of sleep, how open they were, how similar to each other, how devout.

  Without eyes and without light, they saw things he did not see.

  Now he followed, enviously, their even breathing, in which the inward breath began exactly where the outward breath ended, at the place where death resided.

  But in hospital rooms he had heard the pauses between breaths, pauses that steadily lengthened as if the walls of the room had, with sweat and tears, been pushed farther and farther away, the roof raised higher and higher.

  Between them came a space into which listeners’ past dissolved and which opened up more and more room to the death’s future, to his future, he whose breast still rose and fell – and again – and again, for the last time, until the pause opened up beyond them and beyond him who seemed to lie among them, so boundless, so distant, that they had to call it death.

  He remembered Latona who, fingering her hair, had once looked at him mischievously and said: ‘I am afraid of you, you know everything about death.’

  Wrong! Quite wrong. Every day new, cold corpses were brought before him, the Customs Man, and every day he dissected those who had once been people and in whose breast a restless heart had beaten.

  He did not know anything more of death than anyone else who walked the streets. Was there anything to know? For it was not to be found in the bodies touched by his knife, not in cooled matter or in the operating theatres, but where blood flowed quickly and invisibly, where people lived and feared.

  That night everyone slept in the Tabernacle, everyone but the tuatara and the Customs Man. And, wandering through the rooms of the Tabernacle as if through a harbour, the Customs Man, too, was seeking the peace of likeness: a ship that would take him to common waters.

  Was it not already approaching him from where day was breaking, as the trees spread like misty sails outside the house, in the fields of the dawn, and as the first gust of wind set the shreds of paper on the waste heaps dancing?

  Eyelids that Spatter Blood

  The Brute

  Poor tuatara, what a brute it is. Some friend of a friend of one of the Gold-Washers imported it years ago from the Pacific islands. When the Tabernacle was finished, it moved in with its new masters.

  The tuatara was born before the Fall, like all reptiles. It is a living fossil, it has remained alone on the face of the Earth. It belongs to a great family, the family of the dinosaurs, but all its relatives died as early as the Mesozoic era. The tuatara ought to be gliding through the dimness of ferns and calamites, in eternal heat, as droplets sparkle on its faintly patterned skin.

  Was its native land the immense continent of Gondwanaland, from which America, Africa and Australia subsequently tore themselves free? Or was it born in Laurasia, still lusher and milder? Poor tuatara! It will never reach its home.

  It has been flung here with finality, amid a strange species. It must live in the strange house of the Tabernacle in a land of snow and granite.

  The tuatara is not large, only half a metre long, stocky and green all over, a real fright. It is slow and covered in scales, it is slightly horrifying to lay one’s hand on its cold skin, on the prickly, upright cornified ridge it carries on its back. It no longer starts when it is touched, but it does not seem to enjoy the experience, either. It is altogether different to stroke a warm-blooded creature, a cat or a dog, which looks its owner in the eye and knows him and its own name.

  But this creature – does it know the hands that feed it? Similar hands once trapped it in a gentler place, where it lived in the company of fulmars, and brought it under other skies, as a pastime, an oddity, a curiosity . . .

  I have never heard the Gold-Washers call it by a pet-name. It is just the tuatara, not so much an individual as a representative of its species. If they were to give it a proper name, it would not learn to recognise it or come to them when it is called, but only out of hunger.

  Whoever loves the tuatara loves purely, without demands, for no one who sees its round eyes can expect to be loved in return.

  Whenever the sky darkens, one of the Gold-Washers takes a book. Whenever the sky darkens, the second puts a headset over his ears and the B minor calms his face, makes it peaceful and broad. Whenever the sky darkens, the third rests his head on his hands and sees through the window the outdoor room where they sit under lanterns as the prey of the night. Whenever the sky darkens, Pontanus’s scales quiver, but the book-lice crawl into the crevices between the stones in their terrarium and sleep.

  Only then does the tuatara wake, far away in its dark room, and returns to their company through many halls and corridors and two hundred million years.

  It comes to where they are, and it is spoken to, it is stroked and it is given a meal. What does it eat? I have heard that here in the Tabernacle it eats everything the Gold-Washers themselves chew upon: fruit and meat, porridge and potatoes, but it likes flies best, so in summer the swish of the fly-swatter is often heard.

  It never looks straight at the Gold-Washers, although it has three eyes, two on either side of its broad head and one on top, where it can be seen under the gleaming skin. Although its gaze slips past people, it seems to observe a great deal out of the corners of its three eyes.

  What might the image the tuatara has formed of us be like? If one could project it on to a wall like a transparency, would we recognise ourselves from it?

  When the tuatara has eaten, it slips past the Gold-Washe
rs toward the outside door; someone opens it and the primitive reptile disappears, rustling, into the night. But when morning breaks it appears early on the terrace brilliant with dew, colder than before.

  Tuatara, You Saw Us

  Aah! One day the Gold-Washers had visitors, and one of them, Doctor K.C., went to look at the sleeping tuatara. A den had been built for it of cardboard boxes in one of the many empty rooms of the Tabernacle.

  Of what did the tuatara dream at the Gold-Washers’ house, in the garden of the Tabernacle? Did it ever see us in its dreams, our clean hands, our long, lanky legs and the constantly changing garments with which we clad ourselves?

  The Doctor went into the room where the tuatara was sleeping, bent over the lizard, gave a laugh, perhaps tickled its side, and then – was thrown backward, fell, clambered upright again and, groaning, angry, wiped blood from his face.

  ‘My God!’ his wife cried, and dashed to his side. ‘It tried to kill you. It bit him! It bit him! Destroy that reptile!’

  ‘Show me,’ said one of the Gold-Washers, and calmly went up to the Doctor. ‘Did it really bite you, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘He is covered in blood, you can see for yourself!’ shouted the wife.

  Good lord, how furious she was.

  ‘But where is the wound?’ asked the Gold-Washer, and wiped the visitor’s face with a damp towel. It emerged from under it as smooth and shiny as a piece of fruit.

  The Doctor felt his face in astonishment. No, nothing hurt. Where indeed was the wound from which the blood had flowed? It was not to be found on the visitor, or on the tuatara, which had curled up again to sleep in the security of its own coldness.

  It was a wonder, an incomprehensible riddle. For the cloth which hung from the Gold-Washer’s hand was clearly bloody.

  ‘Let me explain,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘You disturbed this lizard’s afternoon nap, it was frightened of you, and it has its own defence mechanisms. For you see, although we call it a tuatara, in fact this individual has – strangely enough – a characteristic of certain saurians: it spatters blood from its eyelids if it is disturbed. You were not injured, were you, and we can all calm down: the matter is clear, I hope.’

  They sat down at the dining-table soon after this incident, but the atmosphere had changed. The couple were offended. They were no longer at home in the house where the tuatara lived. The blood of a reptile had been spattered on them, and they could not make themselves comfortable in the large rooms of the Tabernacle.

  For these were forms and ways of life of which they had known nothing. The spirit of another epoch had blown over them, and its strange stench filled them with dread.

  The blood-spattering eyelids spoiled their evening. Whatever they talked about – concretism, new dairy products, the moons of Jupiter – pauses opened up between their sentences, into which the tuatara breathed, two walls away.

  And when they were just about to get up and say goodbye and had almost forgotten the tuatara, it awoke in its den. Evening had come, and it rose up on its short, five-fingered legs pallidly, its back-fin sticking up, and slipped past them to the door. It did not appear to notice anyone or to remember that they had already made each others’ acquaintance.

  For a moment, all three paused, abreast, under the great dome of the Pantheon, ready to leave. Doctor K.C. and his wife waited, tall and straight, and the tuatara, the green lizard, much lower. The makaras carved from blocks of wood, the other wall-decorations of the Pantheon, looked at the couple, who were like them, face to face.

  Then a car door slammed and a Gold-Washer came in. On his head was a drainpipe cap. He came in an unstable state of mind, drunk, intending to go on drinking.

  The Gold-Washer leaned heavily on the shoulders of both the Master and his wife, swayed between them, and wagged his finger at the tuatara:

  With your third eye, tuatara dear,

  you transilluminated us,

  looked into our marrow, bones,

  and into our hearts and spleens,

  pierced the timber of our skulls

  sensed the purpose of our brains.

  ‘Shouldn’t you let it out?’ said Doctor K.C. But the Gold-Washer continued, without listening to him:

  Tuatara, you saw us,

  weighed us up, yet stayed.

  You know who we are now.

  Weep blood for all our sakes.

  Nightglow

  The Tabernacle dimmed, eye by eye and window by window. The glass harmonica no longer tinkled, the dark rooms expanded and contracted like the lungs of the sleepers.

  Behind their walls, the night wind left the crowns of the trees in peace; only the murmuring was ceaseless. Locks of hair twisted in motionless whorls over Latona’s ears, her lips were as naked as her hard forehead, and on the down on her upper lip gleamed the same moisture as in the pistils of herbs.

  They went inside, Latona and the Gold-Washer, the tophatted one. What a quantity of fabric they were wearing, garments, shoes and belts. They had before them an exacting task. As if everything that they had ever worn or would ever wear had now to be cast aside – everything, from swaddling clothes to shrouds, but first the hat, which glittered like a peacock’s tail.

  The fabric folded like water, more and more of it seemed to flow from the darkness; they moved it aside with impatient gestures, and it fell on the floor, rustling heavily. They threw garments around them, and tarlatans and linen shirts, necklaces and fur collars, headdresses and waistcoats, greatcoats, leggings and mosquito nets flew through the room. They became entangled with sleeves, legs and socks, buckle-pins pricked their fingers, their way was barred by buttons and spun thread.

  Finally: what a mountain of rags, what a hill of tatters, what a cliff-face of cloth, rose on the floor before them, and they sank into its side, knocked over by the feather of their desire. But although they had already taken everything off, absolutely everything, it was not enough, no: between them was still skin and sweat and desire, the loneliness of two cities.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ she said, but she could not do so herself; she had to shelter her gaze. For in the darkness their invisible bodies shone, they were golden. The substance of which they were made had been renewed. It was now the flesh of gods.

  The back of a hand relaxed on to a pillow, violet streams flowed across a wrist, hearts beat in their fingertips.

  The doubt that had long been eating at their insides was now absent. Certain that they existed, they looked from mirror to mirror. They were alive! It was a rare feeling. It was an amazing experience.

  The Gold-Washer’s hand strayed deeper and deeper between Latona’s thighs and released from her lips – from both their lips – a silvery moan. But his other arm was wound round Latona’s shoulders, and his fingers reached her face. In the silence of dreams, they traced her image again and again.

  ‘I’m melting,’ she heard the other cry out as his transfixed body relaxed, fulfilled, away from her, toward her. On Latona’s face pleasure and suffering flared into a single expression that left behind it a landscape of purity like death. It was eternally the same: peace, renewable innocence.

  Then someone was looking at them from the darkness and Latona rose up over her own still raging breast.

  ‘Look!’

  The Gold-Washer jumped up. ‘Who’s there? Who dares?’ And he could not find a switch, a lamp. Was a third person present?

  Some hint of light, the dawn of the dawn or the light of the zodiac, the nightglow!, made things visible and picked out Latona’s shoulder. It was a false dawn, not real light but like something originating from the heart of the night, from their own pupils. But the gold had disappeared, and true morning was farther off than ever. They, too, were only dimness in the dimness, the darkest substance of night.

  They loomed dimly at each other, but they saw no one else. Until Latona pointed to her feet, to the floor, where something gleamed like a glass bead, and a second, and a third.

  She bent over and tried to pick them up,
but her hand encountered cold and clammy skin, a guttural sound was heard, and they understood: the tuatara.

  It remained motionless, and they two, they returned to their places, breast to breast. Was it sleeping? Was it looking at them? No, it was looking through them, with all its three eyes. It was a mesozoic gaze, a gaze that bored its way through epochs, the triple, impersonal gaze of extinction.

  Their joy and their happiness did not interest the tuatara, not enough to make it glance at them even when they groaned.

  When Latona looked at the glowing eye on its forehead, she remembered something. It was like a little, round roof-window, like a scale model of the Pantheon, although it was covered with the finest of fine membranes.

  A deep fatigue overcame Latona. She rolled over on to her stomach and, in the face of that unseeing gaze, the significance of what had just happened vanished; she tried to understand it but could no longer do so.

  A deep fatigue overcame the Gold-Washer. Their eyes were closed once more, and there was no reason to open them. Under their eyelids, were their eyes not veiled by a membrane like that of the tuatara’s third eye?

  The night went on. The tuatara was awake, but they slept.

  A Ring Around the Moon

  The moon darkened. The cone of the earth’s shadow fell over the scarred face of the moon so that it darkened. But not completely. A dark, wine-red glow spread over its surface hammered by meteorites, the moon’s craters deepened, its mountains became steeper. The Sea of Serenity, which could also be discerned with the human eye, spread out as a dark dust-pool.

  Now one could see clearly what had only been known before: that the moon was not, after all, a disc, but a lump of stone with its own mass, which wandered, separate from everything else, through the darkness, along a route that never seemed to change.