Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  In Henbane City

  Fast-growing, ramicorn poplars against a stormy sky with swaying, cone-shaped crowns; the oval, silken-haired leaves of the goat willow and the calyces of privet blossoms, which so quickly wither and fall on to the summer lawn – these Håkan the gardener loved. No less did he adore the projecting scales of larch cones, the relaxed spirals of honeysuckle shoots or birch nutlets, equipped with flying wings, which so greatly resembled migratory birds in flight.

  Not to speak of flowers, wild flowers and garden flowers, the corymbs, ears and cymes of flowers, their heads, their lip-like corollas, which reached out to the sky like kisses, their deep, scented throats, whose deep throats, coated with nectar, guided insects toward shared delight for all.

  Håkan the gardener had experienced a great deal. But everything had had its beginning and end, like the seasons. Gardening was a constant struggle which was lost on many fronts. It had been hard enough to watch powdery mildew spread from tree to tree, leaf to leaf, cankers damage the pears and brown rot contort the apples. The bright red lily leaf beetle had devoured the buds of his orange lilies and his rarest lilies.

  But the city’s then party leader had been the garden’s worst scourge. Håkan would have preferred to welcome a hundred thousand Egyptian grasshoppers.

  O the lilac’s heavy drooping branches and the many-layered, tight buds of the peony, o the blue calyces of the forget-me-nots and the plump nectar stores of snapdragons!

  Their destiny was sealed on account of the obsession of the party leader.

  The leader said more cabbages and potatoes were needed. That Håkan understood, for last year’s harvest had been a bad one. He himself ate cabbage and potato; you had to eat something, after all. But did they have to be sown in perennial beds and flower meadows?

  That was that; it was the order of the party leader. At that time his word was law in the city. Flowers and decorative plants stole too much space from real utility plants. But still more essential was the fact that they represented a false, petit-bourgeois ideology. It was thus above all for pedagogical reasons that they had to be plucked. In their place cabbages and potatoes were to be planted, on pain of punishment. Swede and carrot were also permitted, however.

  At first garden-owners refused, but when fines were raised three times, many began to toe the line. But not Håkan. A week after the third ultimatum was given, a four-man gang patrol arrived in his yard, with motor saws, scythes, hoes and handspikes.

  ‘Will you be so kind as to leave my peonies alone,’ Håkan asked. ‘Can you see the buds, how large they are, almost ready. They will bloom next week. If you have to cut them down, come back when they have flowered, when they are beginning to shed their petals.’

  ‘Out of the way,’ the patrol leader said. ‘We’re only doing our job.’

  They carried out their day’s work quickly and efficiently. Soon the perennial bed was strewn with buds, like severed heads. From the flower stems, their golden sap seeped into the ground.

  That evening, Håkan sat behind his curtains and wept. He fell ill and stayed within his four walls for many weeks.

  But even inside his house he could not avoid hearing the artificially cheerful children’s songs of the patrols. The hysteria of the new revolution spread through the entire city. New flags rose on flagpoles. The patrols marched from yard to yard, from park to park every morning to check whether any flowers had dared bloom. They sang and yodelled incessantly as they marched.

  When the epidemic was at its worst, the inhabitants of the neighbouring block also clattered their saucepan-lids to drive the birds away. It had never occurred to Håkan that the birds of the air, too, could represent the leaven of a wrong ideology. The most enthusiastic even tore newly sprouted tufts of grass from the ground, so that as the summer progressed and inclined toward autumn, gardens and park were merely dry, dusty ground.

  Flowers disappeared, but people disappeared too, no one really know where to. Somewhere outside the city, education centres had been set up where people were taught how to think correctly, how to talk correctly and how to act correctly. Some came back before long; others were never heard of again.

  Where there is no beauty, there is no justice, wealth, work or hope, Håkan thought.

  But that period, too, came to its end. Those who returned came back as if to a different city. The correctness they had been taught came wrongness. Håkan’s garden was green once again, the banners of flowers fluttered there again, the peonies, the snapdragons and the lilacs flourished. Flowers are more durable than people, Håkan thought.

  The patrols had disbanded long ago. The party leader was absent, his name was mocked; there was no one who would admit having once respected him.

  One madness was over; the era of another had dawned. Now another age was being lived in the city: now ordinary cabbage was no longer being grown, but henbane, Hyoscamus niger. A plant that had previously been despised and which had grown only in neglected areas of the city, in harbours, graveyards, industrial areas and roadsides, was now cultivated in gardens and even in public parks. It grew on balconies and windowsills; some people had dedicated an entire room to henbane and burned grow-lights through the long nights to get it to flower more quickly.

  Henbane is a strange plant. In the spring, after the first seed leaves, the serrated, rough and hairy leaves typical of the species appear. Then buds begin to be seen, and soon the first flowers blossom. Their corollas are pale or dirty yellow, and they are criss-crossed with violet and red stripes like veins. At that point henbane’s characteristic stench also begins to make itself felt in the garden.

  Henbane’s flower-head is funnel-like; the stamens’ anthers straggle separately. The fruit is multiseeded, and the species can appear in the most unexpected of places because the seeds can survive in the ground for long periods.

  Henbane is a poisonous plant, so poisonous that even a small overdose can lead to coma and death. It is for this very reason that the people of the city were so enchanted with henbane: they were able to hallucinate by eating its seeds or by chewing the flowers’ petals. Henbane’s leaves, seeds, flowers and roots are all poisonous. In the past it was used as a medicine for asthma, the tremors of old age, toothache and anxiety. Its scopolamine and atropine affect the central nervous system directly.

  Henbane allowed its users to peer into a strange world. It helped them have colourful new dreams, and the dreams were better than the city’s wretched reality. But many fell into a state of confusion, their pulse increased, their sight dimmed. They fainted, their body temperature rose to dangerous levels, their speech became slurred, and the convulsions began.

  But if they recovered, they got their hands on more henbane by one means or another.

  Patrols of a different kind from those of the former party leader now wandered around the city. They did not march; rather, they staggered. No one cleaned the streets any more, or cut the lawns, or grew proper cabbage. Henbane was enough for them. Previously, they had been the slaves of the party; now, they were the slaves of henbane.

  Only Håkan, the gardener, still toiled in his garden. Henbane also grew in Håkan’s garden, although he had not sown it and never used it. But the variety grown in the city was quick to spread, and proved to be very persistent. When dryness, damp or cold killed other grasses, its leaves remained unchangingly luxuriant over dry periods and the harshest winters. Its demands were minimal. It could survive anything. It spread everywhere. Its flexible shoots formed creepers and even climbed the trunks of the boulevard lime-trees.

  Its leaf was as sharp as a bread-knife. Touch one and it will slash a long wound in your finger.

  At night, when Håkan went to take a leak in his garden, he saw the henbane glowing in the back garden underneath the lilac bush. It was as if self-illuminating, something like glow-worms. He pointed his shower of pee straight on to its leaves, but it did not disturb them, acting only as additional manure, and the henbane only flourished more grandly.

  So-
called nature, what was it really? The more distantly and the more closely Håkan looked at it, the more he wondered, the less he understood. Even this scourge, which had now conquered the city, was part of its secret.

  But spring came back year after year, never staying the same. How every growing season was different, every opening corolla always new. How the leaves of their trees, with their networks of veins, always resembled the trees themselves, and how the trees resembled their own leaves.

  Håkan understood little, but loved all the more: fast-growing, ramicorn poplars against a stormy sky with swaying, cone-shaped crowns; the oval, silken-haired leaves of the goat willow and the calyces of privet blossoms, which so quickly wither and fall on to the summer lawn . . .

  Fakelove’s Burnout

  Almost furtively, in secret even from himself, Fakelove began to ponder the same subjects as Håkan, the Smoker and Universal Inflation. More and more often he was struck by little news items that skirted the subjects, the bulletins, calculations and predictions of various sects.

  One day the news carried an item saying that the tallest tower of the city’s oldest cathedral had caught fire. A cloud of smoke surrounded it and the fire service was alerted. But the ladders only reached halfway up the tower. They were set up anyway, and the firemen climbed as high as they could. Then it was realised that the ‘smoke’ was an enormous cloud of insects. The cloud was made up of millions of dancing individuals, dark, each about half a centimetre long.

  The firemen were unable to determine the species. And now a new prophet appeared, who claimed on television that the case was a clear omen of the end.

  I don’t suppose that’s Håkan, Fakelove thought as he followed the show on which the prophet appeared. He admitted it was a slightly paranoid thought.

  It happened more and more often that Fakelove woke in the middle of the night and began to worry about the previous day’s correspondence or ponder the most difficult cases, particularly that of the Man with Twenty-One Faces. He had only written one message, but it did not leave Fakelove in peace. The man’s silence felt ominous.

  He certainly had reason to be anxious. His practice began to go more badly, financially, than before. He began to become more suspicious. Whenever a new client appeared, Fakelove became vigilant: could this be Håkan?

  Often, after a small diversion (‘Do you have obsessions about the end of the world?’ ‘What do you think of millennialism?’ ‘Are you possibly acquainted with eschatological movements?’ etc.), he might ask directly: ‘Have you been in my care before? Isn’t it the case that you used to use the pseudonym Håkan?’

  It was, of course, embarrassing. Some clients took offence, others were so shocked by such messages that they immediately withdrew from the correspondence. The new situation was visible on Fakelove’s bank statement.

  But Håkan’s stubborn, ridiculous arguments returned to Fakelove’s mind and remained circling in his head. They began to seem increasingly convincing. Coincidentally, he picked up a book on the theories of Velikovsky and soon afterward some scientists’ case for a rapidly approaching ice age.

  Oh Håkan, Håkan, Fakelove thought. Has the black cook already arrived? Soon we will be boiled and fried, frozen and ground into grain like Struwwelpeter. We will be drowned in floods and mudslides, radiated to death, robots will walk over us in polymer boots. We will disappear in a single flash and wander slowly the bitter road to extinction. We will faint with hunger and parch with thirst, we will perish through mesothelioma, Q fever, tularemia and the Black Death. We will be blown up, gassed and poisoned. A supernova will explode and swallow our solar system. Is that not enough? What else can you invent as our end?

  Eschatophobia gradually began to take hold of Fakelove too, although he would not have mentioned his dark thoughts to anyone for any price.

  Having remained awake at night, Fakelove was irritable and tired during the day. He began to respond to his patients in a tone which could not always be called professional or in any sense empathetic.

  But was it so strange, when a person had to read rubbish like this: ‘Be so kind as to answer the following questions: 1. What is the definition of life? 2. What is life? 3. What is the future of humanity? Respond within two days. I need your opinion for my sociology dissertation.’

  Fakelove responded the same morning: ‘I, on the other hand, do not need your questions, and I do not have time to waste on such “sociology”. I am not a prophet, but a professional therapist. How can you even imagine that a professional person would waste their time with such quasi-problems.’

  But next he read: ‘hi everyone I just wanted to know if there was anyone out there who could explain what life after death is like i really believe we come back and that’s why we sometimes know things before they happen and sometimes we feel we’ve been somewhere before but not in this life i’m not sure i’m in the right group i don’t want to bother anyone but thanks a lot for all your answers in advance HAVE A GREAT DAY OR NIGHT!’

  Fakelove deleted the message, accompanying his keyboard-stroke with just a single sigh. By bad luck, the next message was from a man who had been married for thirty years but had never told his wife of his desire to be Nelly. Now he wanted breasts and hormones and a sex-change operation. He demanded that Fakelove should organise them for him within two weeks.

  Life in Order remarked: ‘You live in a reality that you have created yourself. You can have everything you really want. I have a method that will provably give you everything you want, and advise you of the means with whose help you can preserve your world as you want it. Do you want to live in your own reality, or someone else’s? Control your life completely! Change it totally! TRY MY METHOD! Now only 50 marks per week!’

  Fakelove replied rapidly and crushingly to these messages. But he had hardly had time to congratulate himself on his pithy expressions when his first ex-wife telephoned, wondering why Lisa’s maintenance had not yet appeared. When Fakelove checked his bank statement, he noticed that he had carelessly credited it to his second ex-wife’s bank account. He was becoming increasingly absent-minded.

  Fakelove telephoned his second ex-wife, who said that this little payment was only right and proper after the division of the kind of fortune they had had. She had not the slightest intention of sending the sum back. And she slammed the phone down on Fakelove.

  When the seventeen-year-old Big Mistake? wrote again, Fakelove was not in the best frame of mind. The girl was now actually eloping with her neighbour, the untrustworthy, chauvinist old drunk.

  Fakelove forgot his fatherly tone and wrote: ‘Well, it’s your own choice. Isn’t it better that you should just get up and go off with your idiot? At least you’ll learn something about life that your dad and mum never taught you.’

  The worst case, however, was Fakelove’s reaction to Animal Lover’s question. This client wrote: ‘I should like to know why I prefer sex with animals to sex with humans. Always after human sex I feel dirty, but never after I have had sex with animals.’

  Fakelove replied: ‘My dear Animal Lover, I am amazed you have to ask, you should have realised the truth ages ago. It is because you’re a beast yourself. You should not be living in rooms with furniture. Throw away your clothes, tear up your passport and get rid of your other encumbrances too. Move to a stable, barn or pigsty. Hee-haw!’

  He sent the message, and immediately regretted it. Fakelove knew that such behaviour could not go on. Before long one of his patients would complain to the medical council and he would receive at least a warning. As a professional, Fakelove understood that he was suffering obvious symptoms of burnout. Håkan, Chain-Smoker, Universal Inflation and the Man with Twenty-One Faces had exhausted his capacity perhaps forever. Some formerly taken-for-granted tautness that had for years faithfully supported his routines, his work and his motivation, had now snapped. He could hear in his ears a taut howling, the cry of a broken string. In his mouth was the taste of metal, and he felt he could smell burning.

  A
t the very least he should take a holiday, but would even that be enough? Fakelove began to calculate whether he would be able to afford to take early retirement. But his mortgage payments were still so large that he could not survive without selling the house. And it was still Ella’s home.

  Just as Fakelove was becoming increasingly cruel toward his patients, more irrational, impatient and changeable, his tenderness and desires, which were directed toward Ella, only became more profound. Ella was patient, tolerated his whims, tried to please, did not wish to hurt him. But she had become increasingly quiet. In the mornings she went out to teach French before Fakelove woke. Fakelove felt her absence increasing day by day. She was no longer where Fakelove encountered her, and he did not dare ask whom she was spending time with in her thoughts.

  At night he lay awake as Ella slept. The shadows of the sycamore walked along the walls like severed hands. When he had lived in the house alone, after his second divorce, Fakelove had often thought someone was waving at him from the kitchen window. But it was only the sycamore that grew close to the wall, the same one whose shadow sat at night in the garden swing.

  Fakelove leafed through books on the end of the world, which had names like Countdown to Eternity, 666, How to Recognise the Antichrist, Is the Antichrist Alive and Well?, The Last Days of Civilization, Blood Moon, The Fourth Kingdom, The Last Battle, The Truth about the Ruin of Europe, Everything about the Second Coming, Are We Living in the Last Times? and Harvest of Souls.

  If Ella began to stir, he pushed the book under his pillow; he did not wish Ella to know anything about them.

  When Fakelove finally fell asleep, he found himself riding a tram on a dark winter’s day. The entire city knew that the due date, the end, was at hand. But people lived as they had always lived. The tram route ran under the great cathedral and its crushing weight descended on to his shoulders like judgement day.

  When Fakelove was already half awake, he thought the dream was true: the world had ended, but no one had noticed. They were already living in the hereafter, but imagined they were still living their earthly lives.