Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  ‘No. I’m just deputizing.’

  ‘Do deputies always wear suits like that?’

  ‘Not generally. And permanent staff don’t, either.’

  ‘Why have you got one, then?’

  ‘Because it’s a special day.’

  ‘Is it your birthday?’

  ‘Quite the opposite, really,’ Håkan said.

  ‘Oh.’ Elsa had to begin eating her ice-cream, for it was already melting through the holes in the waffle.

  ‘Do you know how hot it is now?’

  ‘I do. We have a thermometer here,’ Håkan said helpfully. ‘It’s now showing thirty-nine.’

  ‘Oh dear!’ Elsa said. ‘Can you die of that?’

  ‘Not at that temperature,’ Håkan said. ‘If you’re a healthy person.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Elsa said. ‘I am quite healthy.’

  ‘It lasts its time,’ Håkan said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Health. But perhaps it’s time to go now.’

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Back home,’ Håkan said. ‘I’ll be going soon too.’

  ‘Are they going to close the beach?’

  ‘It should be closed,’ Håkan said.

  Elsa went back to her mother, who had dampened a towel and covered her face with it.

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s thirty-nine degrees here. But he said that you don’t die of that.’

  Her mother snorted. ‘That’s comforting to hear. But why did you go and speak to that man?’

  ‘He said we should leave.’

  ‘Did he say that? Cheeky fellow! It’s not for an ice-cream seller to decide how long we can spend on the beach.’

  ‘But he said the whole beach should be closed.’

  ‘Why on earth? Don’t go to the kiosk again. You never know with guys like that. What they will make up next.’

  ‘Do you know how I feel?’ Elsa asked. ‘Just like in an airplane. When your ears feel funny.’

  ‘Swallow. Perhaps it’s got something to do with the barometric pressure. I’m sure it must have fallen.’

  Elsa thought for a moment, swallowing and licking her ice-cream.

  ‘What if that was behind the sun-cream business, too. Perhaps there’s going to be a thunderstorm, or something like that,’ Elsa said, a little anxiously.

  ‘Maybe,’ her mother said. ‘The weather’s changing, that’s for certain. It can’t go on like this for long. I think there’s a real storm brewing. Perhaps we really should go home. But not on account of the ice-cream seller.’

  ‘I want to have a swim first. That’s why we came here, after all.’

  ‘Of course you can go. Perhaps I should, too,’ her mother conceded. ‘Although I’m sure the water will be boiling. It won’t be very refreshing.’

  They walked lazily to the water’s edge, Elsa a little in front. But just before her toes touched the water, she stopped.

  ‘What now?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Let’s not go, after all,’ she said. ‘There’s something strange about the water. There’s something in it.’

  ‘Fish!’ her mother said.

  ‘Look, they’re all swimming the wrong way up,’ Elsa said.

  ‘They’re not swimming,’ her mother said.

  In the shallows there floated fish of many sizes and species. Their white bellies shone. They stank.

  ‘Are they dead?’ Elsa asked.

  ‘Looks like it. Strange that the birds haven’t noticed them yet,’ her mother said, and Elsa gazed at the empty, hot sky.

  ‘The birds have gone,’ someone said. The ice-cream seller was standing on the sandy beach in his elegant suit. His black shoes shone. It was so solemnly quiet.

  ‘They look as if they’ve been cooked,’ Elsa said, looking at the fish.

  ‘My dear, they are cooked,’ Håkan said gently. ‘Look.’

  The sea was dead calm. The rushes stood up straight like spears. But from amid the reed-bed and beyond, where the haze hid the view, a bubbling sound began to be heard. The water simmered and babbled.

  ‘Why did the water start to move like that?’ Elsa asked.

  They looked in turn at the simmering surface of the sea and at the haze, which had begun to thicken. It roiled and swirled, thicker and thicker. The hot, stinking fog wrapped itself around them and soaked their hair.

  ‘It’s steam,’ Håkan said. ‘The sea is boiling.’

  ‘What will you think of next?’ Elsa’s mother said, dumbfounded. ‘And in front of a child!’

  ‘Run!’ Håkan said to Elsa. ‘Let’s see who gets to the car first.’

  He turned to her mother and said pointedly: ‘You too, madam.’

  Elsa’s mother grabbed Elsa by the hand and they ran as they had never run before. At one point Elsa nearly stumbled, and looked behind her. Amid the steam she could distinguish the ice-cream seller’s upright, black-dressed figure. He was not running.

  The ice-cream seller raised his hand in greeting and behind him, far out in the open sea, there rose a shimmering white bubble, round as a mother’s breast. It swelled and spread like a dream beneath the strange, white-hot sun.

  Totalpro

  That spring, once again, Håkan was looking for work. He had put in applications for three jobs, but in fact he had little hope. Håkan had prepared himself for the eventuality that he would draw a blank with all of them. His doubts did not stem only from the fact that the jobs for which he had applied were sought-after, demanding and well-paid. Håkan knew that his education was certainly sufficient, and more than sufficient. He had an excellent command of languages and his age, too, was ideal, but these characteristics did not guarantee work, or at least not a job that fulfilled his requirements.

  The right sort of character was a decisive factor. Håkan already had experience of countless psychological tests, which had revealed his character to employers. It was a character which did not please the interpreters of the responses. Test after test revealed that Håkan was not sufficiently extrovert or active, that he did not have leadership qualities and that he was easily disheartened.

  Håkan wanted to be a designer in an advertising company. The advertisement said that the designer should have a sense of humor and experience with object-oriented programming. He should also be able to deal with relational databases, transaction processing monitors and embedded environments. Håkan knew he could do all this. But it could be that not everyone would appreciate his sense of humor, for Håkan had more than once heard people call him serious, a fusspot and straight-laced.

  Another youthful team for which Håkan had also applied was seeking a key client manager. Applicants were expected to show energy, enthusiasm and a capacity for innovation.

  An international company which produced marketing promotional material had a vacancy for a long-term deputy for a totalpro client service manager. Håkan did not know what a totalpro was, but feared it was something he would never be.

  All these employers said they offered ‘challenges in line with capabilities’.

  Håkan waited almost two months for responses. He had digestive problems. Sour belches plagued him night and day. He spent a lot of time awake and his sleep was broken.

  At the end of April, Håkan received a telephone call from the company that was looking for a totalpro. He was asked to attend an interview. The key client manager and designer’s positions must already have been filled, for he had heard nothing more from them. Perhaps deals had been done long before, and the newspaper advertisements were mere delusion, Håkan suspected.

  Häkan had to travel to a new suburb for the interview. He spent a long time looking for the right bus-stop. It was an end stop located at the corner of a nearby park.

  A peculiar woman was standing at the bus-stop. She was wearing a checkered woollen scarf that was pulled up over her mouth, although the day was warm and sunny. The woman was very thin, and attracted attention for other reasons besides her scarf. She stood out fro
m a distance, even in the bustle of Eudora Street. She had an unfashionable tweed overcoat with a fitted waist, a bell skirt and a tightly fastened belt. Håkan remembered seeing such coats in 1960s movies.

  The woman was walking back and forth at the bus stop; even her gait was unusual, a kind of light skipping. For some reason Håkan became convinced that she was not waiting for a bus at all. When the woman turned and Håkan happened to see her profile, he started strongly. He believed he understood why she wore her scarf so high. The woman was very badly disfigured: she had no mouth or lower jaw.

  At the same moment the woman noticed Håkan, although Håkan had already turned his gaze away. A gaze that had lingered on the woman for no more than a moment, but long enough to see what had been intended to remain hidden. Håkan understood that the woman understood that he understood. He could not but thing what terrible accident had led to her losing half her face.

  The woman with half a face walked past Håkan and said in a toneless, thin voice which seemed to come from her belly rather than her lips: ‘I am sorry. So very sorry. Very, very sorry!’

  It was a surprise. So she could speak, then! Her voice reached Håkan from a distant, dark place. Why did she say that? On whose behalf was she sorry? Her own or Håkan’s?

  Håkan did not react to the woman’s words in any way. The woman perhaps believed that he had not heard anything – and perhaps that was better. Håkan did not wish to enter into any kind of relationship with that person. He did not wish to see or hear the woman. He did not even wish to know she existed. In fact, Håkan realised that he was afraid of the woman. That he was afraid of her, but that he did not pity her in the least.

  Perhaps it was ridiculous, perhaps it was senseless, but he could not dispel his fear by any act of will. It was fear itself that was his only link with that person. But it was an extraordinarily intimate link.

  Håkan stared fixedly at the eastern end of the street, in the direction the bus should have come from and whence, thank God, it soon arrived. He did not look behind him as he got into the bus. Nevertheless, he thought he heard the woman’s light footsteps, which left rapidly, almost running. He felt a great sense of relief.

  As he sat down in a window seat, Håkan knew the woman had been waiting for him, and no one else, at the bus stop, simply to say that little phrase. Perhaps, after all, she had understood that Håkan had heard it. Otherwise she would surely have followed him on to the bus and repeated her phrase, repeated it time after time until, in the end, Håkan had been forced to react.

  The woman had gone, but for the whole journey to the international company’s offices fear dogged Håkan. It was only in the bus that he began to understand the basic cause behind his reaction. It was not that the woman was so badly deformed or her unusual attempt at making contact.

  The stranger at the bus-stop was no ordinary person. In fact, Håkan thought, the woman was already dead. She must be dead. For no one could have survived the accident the woman had so clearly experienced. Her clothes, too, were in Håkan’s opinion proof of this. Such garments were not worn by any living person, at least not in that country or that city.

  But something else began to add to Håkan’s fear. It was not true that fear was his only link to the woman. It now began to mix with something melting and warm, something that resembled suddenly falling in love. For now, when Håkan heard the woman’s words again in his ears, he seemed to hear in them – despite the thinness of the voice – unusual energy, vital, genuine empathy, the like of which Håkan had not encountered for years, not really since his mother died.

  The woman did not resemble his mother in any way. But she had returned from the dead just for him, just to express her regret. The woman had returned from the kingdom of Hades to bring him a message.

  Håkan could not stop thinking what the woman had really meant. Was she referring to herself, or to Håkan? Or was she thinking more of them all, the fate of humankind as a whole?

  For Håkan, the peculiar stranger’s phrase felt like a bad omen. He was now convinced that the woman who spoke from her belly was a seer and a prophet. Like the Sibyl, she saw accidents, both past and future.

  As soon as he stepped inside the new building that housed the company whose interview he was attending, as he walked through its clean, high glass doors and into the spacious lobby decorated with weeping figs and ivy made of silk, Håkan knew he would not step through the same door again. His capabilities, his diligence and his patience, his long years of study, his deep knowledge of information technology, his ideas and his innovations would remain forever unused.

  The woman had known it before he had. That was why she had waited for Håkan at the bus-stop and that was also why she had been so extraordinarily sorry.

  But if only even that were enough. If only she had not meant something else as well, something even more final, the destruction that awaited Håkan perhaps only one bus-stop away or even closer, behind the metal door of the lift, on the next floor. Which awaited not only Håkan but other inhabitants of the city, ripe, over-ripe, near its time, as completely ready to let go as fruit at harvest-time.

  And when Håkan walked, guided by the secretary, along the well-lit corridors toward the managing director’s office where the interview was to take place, he could still hear the hollow voice repeating over and over again, ‘I am sorry. So very sorry. Very, very sorry!’

  End-of-the-world Party

  Lisa was fitting a gas mask to her face.

  Fakelove had spent Friday at the Neuro exhibition, where new therapeutic methods, psychotropic medicines and herbal preparations were on show. On his return from the exhibition, Fakelove found his daughter in front of the large trymeau mirror in the hall. Lisa had come to see her father for the first time in many weeks. Her long, fair ponytail glowed gold in the light of the candle lamp-bulbs. In the mirror, Fakelove could see a grotesque frog face. The gas mask was a model from the time of the Second World War.

  ‘Hi! Long time no see!’ Fakelove said, trying to hug his daughter. The gas mask made it a little difficult.

  ‘Where’s that from?’ Fakelove asked.

  ‘From a joke shop,’ Lisa said hollowly through her snout.

  ‘Did you buy it? Why on earth?’ Fakelove asked.

  ‘I suppose you mean what with. I did have my own money,’ the girl said.

  ‘How much did it cost?’

  ‘I’m not saying. A bit of a lot.’

  ‘I can’t say it suits you,’ Fakelove said.

  ‘That’s not the intention,’ Lisa said.

  ‘I really hope you won’t have to use it.’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ Lisa said. ‘I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. I’m going to a party tonight.’

  ‘What kind of party?’

  ‘An end-of-the-world party,’ Lisa said. ‘Don’t you know about them? I thought you were coming too.’

  ‘Me? How should I know about your parties?’

  ‘I only thought,’ Lisa said, indefinitely.

  ‘Mercy me,’ Fakelove said. ‘An end-of-the-world party! The newest of the new. O tempora, o mores.’

  To himself he thought: Dear God, can’t the end of the world leave you in peace, even at home?

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was Latin,’ Fakelove said.

  ‘Everyone there will have one of these.’

  ‘Well well,’ Fakelove said, with a snort. ‘Really cool.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Lisa pressed her grotesque snout almost up to the mirror and fluffed up her fringe so that it fell over the shallow forehead of the gas mask.

  ‘Actually, you look awful. Like a frog.’

  ‘I like frogs,’ Lisa said.

  ‘They have their own parties,’ her father said. ‘How do you think you can eat snacks and drink cider and snog wearing one of those?’

  ‘Snog! Who would snog there? And I expect there’ll be more than cider there,’ Lisa said.

  ‘I’m sure. But you certainly won’t be taking anything el
se.’

  ‘Of course not, don’t be an idiot. And by the way, no one says “cool” any more.’

  ‘I do. Where’s the party, by the way?’

  ‘At the old slaughterhouse.’

  ‘Really, sounds nice,’ Fakelove said. ‘Whose idea is it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The end-of-the-world party.’

  ‘What do you mean whose idea, haven’t they always been held.’

  ‘Is that what you think? That there have been end-of-the-world parties throughout the ages? I haven’t happened to hear of them,’ Fakelove said. ‘Or go to them. You’d think there’d be better reasons to organise parties.’

  ‘And worse,’ Lisa said.

  Meeting up with his daughter did not really fulfil Fakelove’s expectations. Once the door had shut, Fakelove sat down, a little depressed, at his machine. Ella was not at home, and that, too, made him feel oddly uncomfortable. Whenever Ella was away, Fakelove thought that perhaps she would not come back again.

  To pass the time, Fakelove read his mail.

  There was a message from Håkan, after all these weeks. It came on a mailing list which all Fakelove’s patients could read.

  Håkan wrote: ‘Attention all patients of Doctor Fakelove! Tonight, at the Old Slaughterhouse, a great End-of-the World Party will be held! Everyone welcome. Recommended costume: gas mask.’

  What on earth was this, Fakelove thought. What had he thought of now? This was the place Lisa was going to, too. This was what Lisa had meant when she asked whether Fakelove had heard about the party. But how did Lisa know about it? Why was she going there? Was the old slaughterhouse a suitable place for a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl?

  Fakelove began to be so anxious that he began to prepare himself to go to the party. But really, he would not consent to wear a gas mask.

  He drove to the industrial area and parked his car next to an empty container. There it was, the old slaughterhouse, which had later been dedicated to free art. Its neglected, gloomy form rose as a landmark to this remote area. How could a party be held in such a place? How could art be made, which Fakelove understood as the creation of beauty and joy?