Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Babel was sitting on the terrace of the Tabernacle, looking at the moon through binoculars. The Kinswoman had come out of her chamber and sat hunched in a wicker chair, humming to herself, and peeping into her apron pocket from time to time. What was in it? Latona said there was nothing, but how did she know with such certainty?

  The Gold-Washer who was seldom silent was sitting on a bench. On his knee slept the tuatara, wrapped in blankets.

  ‘Not to speak of her gloominess,’ said the Gold-Washer, ‘which could not resist seizing the house, too, so that it decayed and became dirty and ingrained, but nevertheless his sight was sharp, so sharp that he could see through the years, if only he opened his eye, although later he no longer – at least, that was what they said – ’

  And they stopped listening to his speech, which turned underground and pierced its own corridors there. ‘Siehenveten,’ said Babel, and offered the binoculars to Latona.

  They were wearing many clothes, and yet they were cold.

  They sat there on the terrace as if in the auditorium of an outdoor theatre. The first snow had fallen that day, and its torn lace remained here and there on the ground. The branches of a dead apple-tree crackled in the terrace fireplace. Their curls of smoke reached for the strange, old, scarred ball that hung above the flames.

  With one finger, the Gold-Washer was stroking the scaly, triangular head of the tuatara. Why had it been dragged out into this red moonlight? Should it not long ago have been hibernating in the cold room where the Gold-Washers had built it a nest?

  A train went by behind the forest, the lash of its whistle floated for a moment over the Tabernacle and Latona said: ‘The Glass-Girl is coming home from work.’

  Babel fetched a chair for her from indoors. When I turned my eyes away from the moon, the Glass-Girl was already sitting there, smiling her perpetual shy smile.

  ‘Luna ekso! Luna rota! Aurum! Halma!’

  Babel fussed around the Glass-Girl, settling a rug around her shoulders. Indeed, it seemed necessary; the Glass-Girl always looked cold.

  Babel’s finger waved at the glowing object, and the Glass-Girl turned her slow, gentle eyes toward it. It was clear that she had not expected to see anything like it up there in the heights. For the first time that night she looked up. Her small face became smaller and even more bloodless than before. It shrank together like a white fist. Could she, too, not believe her eyes?

  We others, too, turned to look once more, except for the Kinswoman, who perhaps slept.

  I knew now: we had moved over into the moon’s world. It was a mistake to imagine that we were standing on the same terrace as during the day, and that behind us was the same building. This place was different. Just as a new person changes a room as he steps across its threshold, so the rising of the moon had changed the world. Its presence – even half-hidden – set a silver-hallmark on every object.

  We did not know the body that floated above us. Now it looked like an empty iron ball which the charcoal that burned inside it had heated to a red glow. It looked so heavy that it seemed astonishing that it had not already fallen. A single cloud fled before it, quickly as if in fear for its life.

  The tuatara – what had got into it? It awoke with a start and slipped from the Gold-Washer’s knees into the darkness gathered by the trees.

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ said Latona. ‘It’s just an eclipse of the moon. At the moment it is at its fullest. By midnight it will be the same as it’s always been.’

  But the Glass-Girl had risen to her feet, wringing her hands. The rug slipped from her shoulders on to the terrace floor. Her transparent face was turned toward the bronze glow, unbelieving, feebleminded and full of distress. One could imagine that the soul, if anyone were ever to see it, might resemble such a face. Something was undulating in her, perhaps liquid glass. It was set in motion by forces of different directions: the moon and gravity and a great star that had disappeared on the other side of the earth, and some field even stronger than these.

  ‘It’s only the moon,’ Latona affirmed once more, ‘in the end it’s only the moon. People have walked on it, you know. Their footsteps remain in the moon’s dust.’

  But her voice did not sound as certain as a moment ago.

  ‘Lunar eclipses occur quite often,’ I said. ‘As often as three times a year. It’s quite natural.’

  Quite natural! And I was ashamed. What on earth had I thought I meant?

  But we were all standing in the circle of the soul and the moon, and I understood why the Glass-Girl looked at the moon in the way she did.

  What was natural in the way I claimed? That rough object that hung over the Tabernacle? The cold substance that glittered in places on the ground? We ourselves, in our scarves and winter coats, just taken from the wardrobe, so heavy and self-conscious . . .

  One of the Gold-Washers stretched out his hand and touched the Glass-Girl’s thin shoulder.

  ‘It’s getting cold,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘Let’s go.’

  The Kinswoman was singing again, the chairs clattered.

  Indoors, lights were lit in every room. Who was sobbing over there? Probably the Glass-Girl.

  The last shower of sparks flew, crackling, from the fireplace on to the emptying terrace. In its glow, heavy as a heart, the moon rose still higher into the air’s desolation.

  Godspeed Tuatara

  In the morning the bush of golden rain was bare. The headless body of the tuatara lay, damp with dew, in the shadow of the mock ruin. The triangular, three-eyed head had been thrown, or rolled with the force of the blow, under a bush. Much blood had flowed; it was, to their astonishment, as red as human blood. But the tuatara’s green colour had faded to milky, and all of its eyes were glued shut by a membrane. On the sand of the path the Executioner’s axe was seen.

  Many Gold-Washers had gathered at the spot. The Torso and Pontanus and the Glass-Girl and Latona stood silently around the lizard’s body; only the Glass-Girl was crying.

  ‘This is the dragon, but where, where is St George?’ said one of the Gold-Washers.

  Then the Executioner strode in.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ he asked. ‘What’s that over there?’

  The others made space for him in silence.

  ‘That’s your axe. Was it you who did it?’ asked the first Gold-Washer.

  The Executioner lifted his axe from the path as if in a trance, touched its blade and looked at his finger.

  ‘I?’ he roared, suddenly coming round. ‘I, execute an innocent creature?’

  ‘Who, then?’ asked the first Gold-Washer, and we evaded one anothers’ eyes.

  ‘I!’ said the Torso, and laughed bitterly. ‘Who else could it be? No one else here would be capable of such an act.’

  He was right. No one but the Torso could have killed the tuatara, for even his tongue was like an axe. The Torso had the heart of a murderer.

  The Child of the Tabernacle came and looked at the Torso, looked at the tuatara. Suddenly there were two children, three.

  ‘Let us bury the tuatara,’ the Child said. ‘We have already buried a bird, and many book-lice.’

  ‘You may,’ said the Gold-Washer, ‘of course you may. Find a beautiful place for it and arrange a big funeral. It is so far from home.’

  ‘I shall make a coffin,’ said the Executioner.

  But Babel was already carrying a large cardboard box into the courtyard. It was just right for the tuatara’s last resting place. He set it on the ground, sighing, and looked at the tuatara.

  ‘Gevange todo, friie nizani,’ he said.

  We scattered to feed our own doubts. The second Gold-Washer took a spade and went with the children to seek a suitable burial place for the tuatara.

  When they had come past the beehives to the edge of the forest behind which rose the waste-heaps of the City of the Golden Reed, the Child of the Tabernacle stopped and looked around him. There was a strip of waste ground, a small field, dry and sunny. It was as if summer had returned
for that day.

  ‘Let’s bury him here,’ said the Child of the Tabernacle.

  And the Gold-Washer’s spade ground, grating, through the grass-roots and into the sandy soil.

  Farewell, tuatara,

  godspeed into earth’s care

  Home to Gondwanaland

  Let your soul repair.

  Hereby we consign you

  into extinction’s peace.

  May you melt away

  into the soil, at ease.

  May you rise like hay

  like grass which, night by night,

  you rustled as you came and went

  unknown, and out of sight.

  Let the wind make music over

  our graves too, and go.

  So offer your forgiveness

  Whether we knew, or no.

  The Undead

  What They Did Not See

  Where, in moist shadows, the mushrooms stood on their single leg, there the Gold-Washers came late in autumn, a little before evening, when the rain had ceased for a moment.

  Had the tuatara’s homeland once looked like this? Above them bare larch-trees recalled the calamites of the Devonian period. An archaeopterix could have risen from their shade into a heavy glide, its neck extended like a swan’s.

  ‘Here! Here!’ came shouts, and they bent to see the headless ones which had only a hat and a foot, the cool ones, often slimy and always motionless, which even the wind could not induce to dance as it did the dark towers above their caps.

  Caterpillars’ palaces! Worms’ portals! Some of them the Gold-Washers simply shoved with their boots, and if they fell, soft, left them there; others they grasped gently and lifted them into their baskets and took them with them to the Tabernacle.

  Many of them were pale, black or slime-bluish like the people of the underworld, like the inhabitants of the place of the dead; or, if they bore colour, red and yellow, they spread a waxen light around them. They did not sparkle as summer flowers do; instead, they secreted the more distant, moist glow of decomposition.

  But the Gold-Washers knew that those they gathered and later ate were momentary and transient, and that what endured and what gave birth to them remained hidden beneath the earth. Their filaments ramified everywhere beneath the forest litter and the yellowed ostrich ferns. Rain fell and snow fell, the earth froze and then thawed, mushrooms pushed themselves through the soil on the first day, swelled on the second and on the third were already blackening and rotting. And he who did not know could not have guessed that the round egg of the first day was the same creature as the broad-capped, solid form of the second day, the same as the blackened stump, melting to liquid, of the third day . . .

  Were they the same? How uncannily quick they were, although they looked unbudging. How hurriedly an autumn day could call them from their forgotten hiding places, shape them and melt them back into invisibility. And how purposeful was their own alchemy when they broke up dead forms and released a substance which would otherwise have remained a prisoner of what had been.

  Examining them, the Gold-Washers began to realise that the forces they served – chaos and decay – were of the same origin as growth and order, form and procreation . . .

  Only the mycelium survived from year to year. It could not be seen unless it was dug up, and then it dried, as a secret always dies when it is revealed.

  Life and continuity were here, in its invisibility, not in the mushrooms themselves, which were seen and picked and which were born on the surface of the earth randomly as the universally ramifying mycelium of dreams and images pushes its own offspring into the light of day.

  They wandered and sought in the deceptive landscape and their voices echoed far and then disappeared. Their words and thoughts – they were only dust, only smoke, only mist, they puffed forth from their mouths into the wind like a cloud of spores from the blade of a gill and dispersed without a trace, so it seemed.

  But he who believes this is so will be surprised. There will come a time when he will ask: ‘What is rising over there? And there? And there?’

  They are deeds that swell and then shrink, but beneath them spreads, wider and wider, the imperishable mycelium of words, images, dreams.

  The Confessional

  When I touched the skin of her hand, it felt like the flesh of a mushroom. It was spongy, soft, watery-white. It felt as though the blood no longer flowed beneath it. As if, if a knife had been sunk into it – I ask forgiveness for this image – it would have encountered no resistance, pain, blood. But she was alive, although she was dead.

  When I happened, against my will, to hear a conversation between the Customs Man and the Gold-Washer, I knew at once what they were talking about. Many people spoke of it, both in the city and in the Tabernacle. But until that day I had not heard any details, not a single reliable explanation, and nothing like it had happened to any of my friends or my friends’ friends. In fact, I had thought the entire rumour ridiculous, hardly worth a sneer.

  The Gold-Washer said: ‘Go to her. It will not last long, you know that.’

  What were they talking about? Not about any epidemic disease, merely that some dead people did not wish to remain dead. Charon’s ferry brought them back to the shore of departure, but only to await the next sailing.

  It had happened – or so I had heard tell – that some of them, whose death certificates had already been issued and who had been moved into the hospital cellars, walked out on their own two feet. They staggered back to their wards in their white shirts and their appearance caused hysteria, questions and accusations, outbreaks of terror and joy.

  Accusations were levelled at the doctors who had confirmed the deaths, health officials fell silent.

  People began to doubt the reality of death. They took their dead home and kept the bodies in their bedrooms until they began to rot.

  The resurrected ones were not healthy, they were merely living, and many were attached once more to tubes. Their mortal injuries, knife-wounds, extreme frailty of old age, the last symptoms still remained. They were not really alive, but not quite dead either.

  It was a travesty of resurrection.

  And none of them lived very long in their post-mortem state. Their new life lasted only a day or two, a week, at most two. Of what had happened to them they remembered nothing.

  I listened on the terrace of the Tabernacle to the words of the Customs Man to the Gold-Washer. I did not know whom they were speaking of.

  ‘He opened her shirt and bared her side to me. “Look,” he said. Under her shoulder there began a deep, blackish zone, a slightly shiny area, which disappeared beneath the belt of her skirt. What had caused it? “It’s not serious,” I said. “It’s only a bruise.” But I was lying. It was not a bruise. It was blotch.’

  An aeroplane rumbled over the Tabernacle, and I missed something the Customs Man said. But he raised his voice once more: ‘Then I said to him – where did I get such strong words, perhaps they were too strong: “She rose from the dead for your sake, and you have abandoned her”.’

  ‘He looked at me in distress and replied: “But I – can – not! Don’t you understand: she smells already. I wanted her to come back, but not dead, not dead! Her flesh is already coming away from his bones. It has changed, it is decomposing. You take her into your bed, if you like.” ’

  I should not have heard what the Customs Man said. His words were not intended for my ears. They were words for the confessional. But my chair had a high back, and it was turned toward them; they had not noticed me.

  The Customs Man said: ‘How can we live our lives if the dead will not stay in their graves? If all the undead rise up? What will we do if death no longer exists?’

  Then the Gold-Washer spoke. The Gold-Washer who was always present and from whom words streamed. He spoke in a very low voice, perhaps bending close to the Customs Man’s ear, so that I could make out a word here, a word there.

  ‘ . . . to fear . . . even the angels . . . if they were to see it .
. . the resurrection of the body . . . so that the flesh may not . . . the trumpet of the last days . . . ’

  The tone of his voice was gentle and persuasive; it calmed me, too, the eavesdropper. The anxiety that had gripped me as I listened to them disappeared and I felt as if I had fallen asleep in my chair. When at last I got up, I could no longer see the Customs Man anywhere, or the Gold-Washer.

  I never heard them, or anyone else, speak of the matter again. It was forgotten in the city and it was forgotten in the Tabernacle as if no such thing had ever happened.

  For only a very few falsely dead ever appeared in the entire city – and all of them between October and December. No confirmed case was ever reported from elsewhere in the country. By the beginning of the year everything had gone back to normal: those who died stayed dead.

  Some had received a second chance, a new life. But how short and shadowy it was, hardly worthy of resurrection. And they had to pay for it with another death, both the resurrected ones and those who loved them.

  At last the hymn of the migratory bird was sung, but those who remained at the edge of the pit cried soundlessly: ‘Do not come back. Stay where you are – or are not. Do not turn back unless you can return through the womb of woman, naked, without memories, newly born.’

  In Arabia There Is One Tree

  The Marseillaise

  The Gold-Washer who loved book-lice told me: my eyes were dazzled. It was a spring sky and I was sitting under a large tree at the edge of the forest and waiting. I was probably supposed to meet someone there, but I no longer remember whom I was waiting for or why. All I remember is that he never appeared before me in the field embellished by the foliage. How dry and reddish-brown it was, like a laterite landscape.

  The sun shone and I sat and sat in the swaying shadows under a tree that was unknown to me, not impatient but as calm as the noonday through which I was living. I leaned my head against the trunk of the tree so that my eyes, when I did not close them completely, wandered lazily among the branches, in their spacious house that stretched in all directions.