Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  The Day of the Plum Pudding

  “Did you know that a few years back two men with the same name disappeared on the same day in this city?” Mr. Chance asked me on one exceptionally windy day. He, too, was one of my acquaintances, one of the Heretics. Mr. Chance had already retired, and he had time to stop by our office a couple of times a week to blabber about his favorite topics.

  He was fixated on coincidence. It was his monomania. No matter what the topic of discussion originally was, whenever he was there, sooner or later the discussion would turn to coincidence. He couldn’t stop wondering at the secret order of nature, the principle of non-causal connection, which according to Mr. Chance was a background influence on all linear events. According to him, this universal principle manifested itself in coincidences, events that he liked to call serial and that in his opinion were connected through the experience of meaningfulness. He liked to emphasize that synchronism and seriality could not be explained by the known laws of nature, and therefore, our view of the world was not only incomplete, but flawed.

  Technically he was still a graduate student. He hadn’t finished his master’s thesis in political science before being completely swept away by the non-academic study of coincidences. He had earned his living for forty years as a janitor at a data center. During that time he had accumulated a collection of composition notebooks, in which he’d recorded all the coincidences he’d noticed each day, as well as where and when they took place. His inspiration for this beloved hobby was probably the biologist Paul Kammerer, a scientist he worshipped and often talked about.

  “Kammerer was the man,” Mr. Chace enlightened me, “who was destroyed by midwife toads. He was the researcher who thought that he could use the toads to prove that characteristics acquired during the lifetime of one specimen could be passed on to its offspring. His research results—or at least some of them—were exposed as fabrications. It killed him. But no one really knows who was actually responsible for the fabrication. I trust in Kammerer’s honesty.

  “I sometimes think,” Mr. Chance continued shyly, “that Paul Kammerer would value my humble notes to some degree. He himself recorded one of the most extensive and important collections of coincidences at the beginning of the twentieth century.”

  “I’m certain that he would have been interested in your observations,” I said. “How did he gather his material?”

  “He always had a notebook at hand and constantly wrote things down, whether he was sitting on a park bench or on a train or waiting for his meal in a restaurant. He classified the people he saw according to their age, clothing, and gender, and he even made notes about what they were carrying in their hands. He compiled statistics on the basis of his data and noticed to his surprise that many of the parameters cumulated in time.”

  On the day that I always remember as the Day of the Plum Pudding, Mr. Chance insisted that we leave the stuffy office and go for a small walk by the sea. A bracing northwestern wind, he claimed, would stimulate the mind and body.

  As soon as I opened the door, a chill winter wind grabbed at my scarf. I wrapped it around my neck twice over. The bay had not yet frozen, and the last boat of the year struggled to make headway, disappearing at times behind waves hemmed with white caps.

  “What was that story about the two men with the same name?” I asked him.

  “A true story,” Mr. Chance said emphatically. “They had the same first, middle, and last names. But they weren’t related and didn’t even know each other—nor are the reasons that led to their disappearances connected at all.”

  “Were they ever found?” I asked him.

  “How about we sit here?” Mr. Chance said, pointing to a damp bench under an oak that had already shed its leaves. What a marvelous tree! The ancient vitality of its black roots had spread its canopy over two paths in the park. A cloud swept over the tree’s crown as if one of the waving branches had chased it away.

  “One of them was found in ‘the Cholera basin,’ the harbor basin in front of the market square. I’ve heard nothing about the fate of the other man.”

  “That certainly is an curious case. But what does that prove?” I asked him. “Things like that happen, why wouldn’t they? There is so much happening in the world every minute that it would hardly be possible to avoid bizarre coincidences.”

  Mr. Chance continued on without paying my question any heed. He told me that very recently, in a small town on the western coast (I can’t remember where exactly), the young driver of a Mazda 323 lost control of the car in a left-hand curve, and went off the road. The car was wrecked. The driver and four passengers were all injured. Half an hour later at a different left-hand curve in the same town, another young driver of a Mazda 323 lost control of the car, running off road. The car was wrecked. The driver and four passengers were all injured.

  “What are the odds of something like that happening?” Mr. Chance asked and pointed his index finger at me.

  “Probably not very good,” I said. “But sometimes extremely unlikely things do happen. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “That’s not good enough,” he said, shaking his head. “Not good enough at all.”

  Right then a Mazda 323 passed us on the boulevard at walking speed. Mr. Chance didn’t seem to notice the car, and I didn’t say a word.

  “On a different note, you have heard the story of the plum pudding, haven’t you?” Mr. Chance asked.

  For a moment I thought that he really was going to change the subject, but then he went on, “It’s also a true story, well known by aficionados.”

  I hadn’t heard the story, but I was sure that I soon would. I was getting cold, but Mr. Chance didn’t even seem to notice the vicious wind. Coincidences kept him in a state of constant agitation to the point that he hardly ever noticed extraneous circumstances.

  “Well, when a certain Monsieur Deschamps was a child, he got some plum pudding from a Monsieur de Fortgibu. Where was this again? I can’t remember whether it was in the city of Joan of Arc’s victory, Orléans, or in Rouen, where she was burned. In any case, years later in a Parisian restaurant, Monsieur Deschamps noticed plum pudding on the menu and got a craving to have some. But when he ordered plum pudding for dessert, the waiter told him that the last of it had just been ordered. As it happens, it had been ordered by the very same Monsieur de Fortgibu.”

  “That certainly is a coincidence,” I said wearily. My eyes searched for the boat, but I couldn’t find it anymore. It had perhaps already sailed behind a small islet.

  “That’s what people tend to say. But listen to this,” he insisted. “Years passed, many years, and again Monsieur Deschamps had an incident with plum pudding. He was invited to a party where the kind of pudding in question was being served. While he was eating it, Monsieur Deschamps made a remark to the party that all that was missing was Monsieur de Fortgibu. Right at that moment, the door opened and who walked in but Monsieur Fortgibu himself, already a man of very advanced years, who had meant to go somewhere else entirely. He’d gotten the wrong address, and accidentally gatecrashed the party that Monsieur Deschamps was attending. What do you say to that?”

  “Nothing, to be on the safe side,” I replied kindly.

  The boat was closer than I thought. It was already turning toward the harbor. Now I could see that, although it was a small boat, it had been given a name. “Joan of Arc” was painted on its hull. An unusual name for a boat.

  “That might be for the best,” Mr. Chance said. “The case of the plum pudding would put anyone at a loss for words. Force them to face a universal enigma. Shall we have a walk in the botanical garden?”

  We walked. We sat down again on a bench as damp as the previous one, but more shielded from the lash of the arctic wind. Young and delicate trees, maybe fruit-bearing trees, grew behind the bench. Each one had a nameplate in front of it.

  “Do you know what I think? In a way, the universe is like a pudding or maybe Jell-O. Some philosopher has said that before me, though.”

>   “Really?”

  “The connection between everything, you see? Things aren’t all unrelated, the world isn’t a pile of unconnected things. Jell-O trembles, no matter where you poke it with your spoon, the whole thing. Interaction, sameness, oneness, homogeneity . . . You know what the most important thing in a pudding is?”

  “The most important thing? I, for one, judge pudding by its flavor.”

  I was beginning to lose interest, and by now wanted to go back to the musty warmth of the basement. I heard a bat hit a ball in the sports field, but it was out of sight.

  “Precisely! You said it! The most important thing in a pudding is its flavor. And pudding has just one and the same flavor no matter where you stick your spoon in.”

  I must have looked confused. He lifted his finger and continued, “Here’s an analogy for you: pudding—taste! World—meaning! You do understand, don’t you?”

  “I suppose,” I said, with hesitation. “But I have to get back to the office.”

  “One of these days,” Mr. Chance said, “I’ll come by your office again. We need to discuss this subject again and dig a bit deeper.”

  “Without a doubt,” I said.

  As we got up—I was already chilled to the bone—I happened to take a look at the young fruit tree under which we’d sat. It wasn’t an apple tree as I’d assumed, nor a cherry tree. I bent down and read the nameplate.

  You got it! Prunus domestica, the plate read, a plum tree.

  Another Man with the Same Name

  Although the circulation of The New Anomalist continued to increase, I was unpleasantly aware that the magazine itself wasn’t improving. If anything, it was degenerating. The Marquis searched more and more eagerly for sensational material in an effort to increase the magazine’s circulation.

  He didn’t even come to the office every week. But when he did, he’d hum golden oldies or hymns. On good days he’d address me using the names of his favorite songs, “Lalaika” or “Lazzarella.” On bad ones, just by my last name. I didn’t care for either practice.

  He’d stop humming, knock on the door even if it was open, and say, “I have an idea.”

  And he always did. Unfortunately, his ideas weren’t always good. Sometimes they were just awful, and it wasn’t unusual for us to end up having a fight. And there were days when I had to put the worst of his ideas into practice as best I could.

  The Marquis complained about how The New Anomalist took up all his time, but that wasn’t really true. I didn’t know exactly what he did all day long. Maybe it was true that he sat in the library all day gathering material, as he so readily insisted. Usually, however, he sat in a shady little dive called The Foxhole, which was generally considered a meeting place for the neighborhood’s petty criminals. What attracted a man like him to that kind of place will forever be a mystery to me, and maybe it’s better that way.

  The New Anomalist did take up all of my time, though. The Marquis didn’t hesitate to call me during my free time, and he often got his brilliant ideas at night.

  If the phone rang at quarter past midnight, I knew who was on the other end of the line.

  “Listen up, Lalaika, we need to offer psychic guidance, understand?” I heard after a rude awakening.

  “We! Go ahead and say what you really mean. You’re planning to force me to become some sort of dial-up psychic . . . ”

  “No, no, you’re right, you might not suitable for the job. You probably don’t have the empathy for it.”

  “That’s rich coming from you!”

  “I have a couple of candidates. You can interview them and pick one. ‘Ask a Clairvoyant,’ now there’s an idea! Or maybe, ‘Sibyl Says.’ Or what about this: ‘Write to the Dead!’ We can help you communicate with your loved ones beyond the veil. ‘Hello from Heaven,’ that sort of thing . . . ”

  “Now you’ve gone too far,” I said. “Goodnight.”

  I could never anticipate when the Marquis would show up. Whenever he did come to the office, he’d stay for an hour or at most two, sitting at his computer, and then he’d disappear again. Most of the time he sat surfing through webzines looking for news that would fit our needs.

  “Listen to this,” the Marquis said, staring at the monitor. I thought how he’d lately become pale and aged. He was probably thinking the same about me.

  “Good lord. Here’s our ‘Rumor of the Month.’ ”

  “What is it?”

  “Jesus didn’t die at Golgotha. The man who was crucified was his cousin. Jesus himself escaped to Siberia. From there he went on to Japan, where he started a family in his old age.”

  “No! I refuse to put that in the magazine. Under no circumstances will I agree to that.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Do you want to get sued again? That’s not the rumor of the month—more like the rumor of the millennium. It might offend someone’s religious beliefs, or more likely many people’s. I’m tired of replying to angry letters from the readers.”

  “Fine. How about this, then: the works of Shakespeare weren’t written by Shakespeare, but by another man with the same name.”

  “I suppose that’s the better of the two,” I said reluctantly.

  The things one has to do!

  On Air, on Sunlight

  Oh, the wisdom of orchids, letting their flowers bloom at the exact moment when there are insects ready to pollinate them! So it is in nature, but down in our basement office, there wasn’t a single insect, not one winter fly woken from its hibernation. And yet, my Phalaenopsis orchid was in bloom when I met the Ethnobotanist, the man who had written an article on plant sentience for The New Anomalist.

  Purple and blue veins intertwined in the white corollas of the Phalaenopsis like a map of the rivers and roads of an unknown country. It was made up of the most ethereal of substances, finer than the finest silk. I felt pride when the Ethnobotanist admired the orchid’s inflorescence, as if I myself had caused it.

  As I listened to the Ethnobotanist, I recalled some lines from Spoon River.

  “My thanks, friends of the

  County Scientific Association,

  Twice I tried to join your honored body,

  And was rejected

  And when my little brochure

  On the intelligence of plants

  Began to attract attention

  You almost voted me in . . . ”

  I call him the Ethnobotanist, though he had made an academic career studying lichens. He had then moved on to unorthodox research topics, ethnobotanics, and the psychology of plants. I enjoyed listening to him—he was so enthusiastic, spoke so passionately about things that were so different from what the chief editor of The New Anomalist was interested in. I wrote down just some of his thoughts.

  “For one thing,” he said, “I hope you understand that plants, too, are conscious. The consciousness of plants resembles human dreaming. That, too, is consciousness. Everywhere in the universe, there is consciousness. It is senseless reason that seeks to set humans apart.

  “We are convinced that having a brain is an indispensable precondition for intelligence. Not true at all! Intelligence, memory, mind, and spirit run through all flora and fauna, all the way down to single-celled organisms. Where there’s life, there’s consciousness. It is different for every species and differs at each stage of a plant’s life. Woody and herbaceous plants, naturally, have very different ways of thinking and viewing the world. There are many plants, such as tomatoes, that are unusually aware of their environment and are more easily disturbed by human touch.

  “Isn’t it odd,” the Ethnobotanist continued, “that when humans perceive their environment and react appropriately to its changes, we call it intelligence. But when other animals, let alone plants, act the same way, we no longer call it intelligence, but instinct, which we consider inferior. We think that reason, ratio, guides our actions. But it does very little of that, which is perhaps a lucky thing. No, it is what we do not feel, what we know nothing about, that a
lso guides us.

  “Plants don’t change their location nor do they speak the same way as we do. Is that what makes us think of them as them idiots? They move upward, towards the light. That’s what we, too, should be doing. The dialogue that plants have with the air and the sun is the foundation of our lives. When will we remember, when will we acknowledge, that our lives are completely and entirely dependent on and at the mercy of plants?

  “Plants have conversations with other individuals and even other species, but in their own ways, such as through chemical signals. Did you know that trees have a tremendously keen sense of smell?” the Ethnobotanist asked. “They know when the larva of a pest insect are crawling on their leaves. They start taking specific counter-measures, each according to its species. They even communicate and scheme with other species in order to banish the saboteurs. Security specialists could learn a lot from the alarm systems of plants.

  “Perhaps you remember a Dr. Singh? He studied the effect of music on the growth of plants.”

  “His name sounds familiar,” I said. “Wasn’t it his research team that made the observation that jazz and classical music accelerated growth, whereas heavy metal slowed it down?”

  “He’s the one. Many researchers since then have continued his line of study and verified his results. And how about Mr. Backster? By measuring electric impulses, he proved that plants even reacted to his thoughts, and that they also had memories.”

  He stroked the petal of my Phalaenopsis with the nail of his index finger.

  “The geometry of plants, their mathematical perfection, never ceases to amaze me. Each flower is a wheel of life, its own microcosm. The development of every plant vindicates the philosophy of eternal return.

  “We don’t actually know,” he continued, “what plants really are. We think they are passive, weak, harmless. What a delusion! The earth holds no greater power than the energy of the plant kingdom. Mankind’s clumsy dabbling on the earth cannot compare to such creativity.”