Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Have you heard of the black mouse and the white mouse? One is night and the other is day, but they both have the same job.

  During the spring nights, I wake up in my bedroom to the mouse’s rustling, whether it’s the same mouse or a different one, I don’t know. It’s past midnight, but spring is already so far along that night isn’t properly dark anymore, just a hazy twilight that dissolves color and blurs outlines. Daybreak is a while off; it’s still the hour of the wolf, the hardest time of day for the children of man.

  During the hour of the wolf, people are at their most defenseless. Their body temperature and energy levels are at their lowest, and their exhaustion is at its deepest. But the mouse nibbles and labors away. One couldn’t be blamed for thinking that a thief had broken in to do his sly work. And it is a thief, stealing my life. The black mouse always works the nightshift. Its associate, the white mouse, does its work during the day. I just can’t make out its rustling in the incessant clamor of the day. Now it’s the black mouse’s turn to gnaw through my life’s thread, no, the umbilical cord through which life nourishes me. That is the job of the black mouse, and also the white.

  But at the same time, from the thicket of bird cherry and black alder in the park, I hear the melody of a nightingale—the last of the evening or the first of the morning? Such energy, such joy tinkling in the twilight, the boundary between night and day. An invisible fountain of volition and hope leaping into the air, glistening in the spring landscape. The nightingale is a different time. It doesn’t live in the hour of the wolf.

  “Earth and sky, forest, and fallow-plot,

  Caught that discontinuous strain,

  Those portionings out by lot

  Of trials, glee, fatuities, and pain.”

  I’m awake now, at least almost, and listening to two sounds at the same time, the mouse and the nightingale. Hearing connects me to both the indoors and the out. I can hear the nearness, and I can hear the distance. I can hear the infiniteness of space. My senses give me both myself and that which is not me. They are both a bridge and a chasm. When they disappear, I suppose I will disappear as well.

  It’s night for all of us now, the mouse, the nightingale, and me, their audience. But it’s not the same moment; each of us has our own. I alone, at least so I believe, am the only thing connecting our moments. Or could the mouse, between nibbles, be listening to the nightingale’s song? That is all I am now, a listener of the sound made by these two. One is nibbling away inside, the other singing outside. Both completely unaware of their audience.

  Suddenly, still half asleep, I understand: the mouse truly is inside, inside me. It lives in me, they live in me and always have, the day mouse and the night mouse both. They are a part of me, a temporal being who is shortened by each passing day and night.

  But the nightingale trills in mists of dawn, outside of me, in the real spring. There is another reality out there, in which I, too, have gone about my business, but only part of me. Was it only my ears that flew there? Is everything else left here, with the mouse, in the hour of the wolf?

  And I say to the mouse, “Gnaw away, do the work that was given to you, that you were born to do. It won’t be long before the thread is severed. What then? The nightingale’s song is something you cannot chew through, mouse. The song is also an umbilical cord, still feeding me with wordless melodies. There will come a time when I can no longer hear your nibbling or the nightingale’s song. But as long as I remember the nightingale, I will believe in eternity, I will believe that there is no end to spring, or to me.

  It’s always spring somewhere. There is always someone to hear the nightingale’s song.

  And I fall asleep again to song and nibbling and to the smell of datura. My dream, reality! Now the building in which the mouse is nibbling is within me, but so is the city, the nightingale’s park, and further away, the harbor, the open sea, the sky. They are all in me, part of me, and I am gone.

  The Third Seed Pod

  Madame Maya

  I began to hear a thumping. The potted orchid on the window sill trembled. The floor shook and my pen rolled off my desk. I was startled, and when I saw her, I was startled again.

  What a lady! She must have weighed three hundred thirty or even three hundred fifty pounds. She puffed and panted as she lumbered into our cramped office in her red rubber boots. The weather wasn’t rainy, so maybe boots were the only kind of footwear she could squeeze on to her swollen feet. The legs of her boots were slit open, and the fat on her legs forced her to walk with her legs apart. Her features, which perhaps could have once been called beautiful, were obscured by her sagging jowls and multiple chins.

  She, too, was one of the magazine’s loyal subscribers. She said she wanted to discuss a certain interesting phenomenon.

  “Have you noticed,” she asked after waddling around the room for a moment examining all of the available seats and finally settling in the armchair I had bought at the flea market, which cried out in distress under her weight. “That sometimes, in a certain light, usually at nightfall, matter can become partially transparent?”

  “No I haven’t,” I said, surprised. It was an unconventional start to a conversation, to say the least.

  “But it does,” she insisted.

  I glanced at her fingers and looked quickly away. She wasn’t wearing any rings, and even bracelets would have pressed into her fat fingers, which probably always stuck out in slightly different directions. The folds of flesh around her wrists spilled over the armrests of the chair.

  I had never met this lady before. I had actually already closed the office for the day, but had come back for my transcription of the Voynich manuscript, which I planned to continue parsing at home. I had left the door ajar, and she had crammed herself into the hallway before I noticed.

  It wasn’t only her size that drew attention, but also her outfit. Her windbreaker, adorned with long-faded violet and orange stripes, hung open. Her huge bust made it impossible to close the zipper. Beneath the coat, she wore some kind of sweatshirt that was the color of grass.

  Her voice boomed from the depths of a mountain of flesh, low like a man’s.

  “I would like to talk to you about this phenomenon and ask whether you are perhaps already aware of it or have yourself had similar experiences.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” I said cautiously. “When you say matter becomes transparent, what kind of matter do you mean?”

  “Human flesh, for example,” she said. “If the conditions are right, I can see objects through my arm.”

  I didn’t really know what to say to that. Her arms filled in the sleeves of her windbreaker to the point that they had started coming apart at the seams. Arms like that did nothing to help the credibility of her claim.

  “Your bare arm?” I asked just for the sake of it. “If you’re dressed, do you also see through your sleeve?”

  “Through the sleeve as well, of course,” she said.

  “And what kind of objects do you see through your arm and sleeve?” I asked, getting more and more confused.

  “Whatever happens to be around,” she said with a snort, or a sound more like a motor turning over. She looked amused. I realized how stupid my question had been and felt embarrassed.

  “I don’t generally go looking at things through my arm,” she explained patiently. “At the right moment, any material—wood, metal, stone—can become transparent. Locked doors, the walls we live within, anything can turn into gauze, and you can see the world through it like through a dusty window, like the one you have here,” she said and pointed at the window at the top of our wall.

  “Well, that sounds . . . sounds quite remarkable,” I said without much enthusiasm.

  “But matter is a remarkable phenomenon,” she said. “We think we understand it, but it always surprises us.”

  “Don’t you think that it’s more a question of you having a special ability than a quality of matter itself?”

  “If I have this gif
t of sight, then everyone else does as well,” she said forcefully. “It’s just that not everyone is able to use it. It’s latent in them. But if and because everyone has this ability, doesn’t that mean that matter is something completely different than what we imagine? And light, too, because this obviously also has to do with the characteristics of light. A certain wavelength, field effects, who knows.”

  “That bears thinking about,” I said.

  “It’s important. Think about it and look around,” she said.

  “Would now be an opportune time by any chance?” I asked.

  “No, now is not the right time,” she said and looked past her cheeks to the window pane, beyond which the day was already fading.

  “The light is still too glaring. One has to wait until the evening cools and the light falls at an angle. It doesn’t happen every evening, though. Humidity is also a factor, cloud altitude and density, special atmospheric conditions. I haven’t yet figured out all the necessary parameters. I’ll be sure to let you know once I’ve gotten a little further in my research.”

  She said this with a dignified nod that shook all her chins, as if this were actually an academic branch of science.

  “But start keeping an eye out today. Be observant. You may not succeed in the first weeks or even months. But the right day will come, and then you’ll see . . .

  “Just think,” she said, swaying in her seat, “What we call matter is just a dance of elementary particles. And it’s a long way from one particle to the next. And all these particles are invisible. Isn’t the strange thing actually that we don’t automatically see through everything all the time?”

  “You’re right about that,” I said, and a new thought occurred to me. “But isn’t it even stranger that we see anything at all, if there isn’t actually anything to see?”

  “It’s all the veil of maya,” she said and heaved her majestic tonnage from the chair.

  Did she actually say that, or was it me? How heavy a veil can be, I thought while watching her heaving and panting flesh traverse the room, disturbing things along the way.

  Oh madame, wherever you are, do you still drag the weight of your own veil?

  Cake

  Do you remember how we only met once that year, in September? I was in a bookshop downtown looking for a book called Towards Robot Consciousness when I noticed your profile in the newspaper section. You were leafing through some foreign daily. There had been a serious plane crash the day before, which was suspected to be part of a coup, and I thought maybe you were looking for news about it. You didn’t seem particularly happy to see me. In fact, I would have just walked quietly by had you not happened to look up from your paper at that exact moment. We agreed to have coffee upstairs, in the book café, where they have particularly good cappuccino and end-of-the-world cake: chocolate confections decorated with a marzipan skull.

  We traded news. You told me you had gotten divorced, taken out a large mortgage, and recently moved into a new apartment. You were able to, because you’d just gotten a senior researcher’s position at the Academy of Finland. I congratulated you. I told you a bit about The New Anomalist, but our conversation soon sputtered out. We were both a bit uncomfortable. It had been a long time since we had sat together, just the two of us.

  Someone had left a magazine on our table.

  You began leafing through it and said, “Aha! Here’s the article I’ve been looking for. The one by Huntington on the clash of civilizations.”

  “Don’t let me stop you, go ahead and read it,” I said.

  You buried your head in the magazine, and I reluctantly spooned end-of-the-world cake into my mouth. My appetite had almost completely disappeared that year. Instead, I asked the waitress for another glass of water. I had a burning thirst, as I always did back then. What had been my favorite dessert no longer pleased me, I was downhearted, unhappy with myself. Why couldn’t I carry on a conversation with my old friend?

  Suddenly, without lifting your eyes from the magazine, you said, “Apropos, the old woman who walks so extraordinarily quickly . . . ”

  I was too surprised to say anything. You still weren’t looking at me, your eyes firmly on your magazine. Your mouth didn’t even seem to move when you said, “Don’t hurry too much. Don’t try to catch up with her. You don’t have to. She will catch up with you, of that you can be sure. Sooner than you think.”

  How could he know about her?

  Stubbornly reading your magazine, you went on, “You must know who the old woman really is. The future is terrifyingly fast, always overtaking us. It only looks like it’s ahead of us. In reality, it’s pursuing us. It’s a predator.”

  I was beginning to get irritated and said, “You know, I think I had better leave. You’re having some strange thoughts today. Where on earth did you get them?”

  You seemed to wake up then and finally lifted your gaze.

  “Sorry, what was that? This Huntington can really write, though I don’t necessarily agree with everything he has to say. You should give it a read, too.”

  When we were standing on the escalator, I asked, “Why did you say what you did just then?”

  “Why did I say what?”

  “About the old woman.”

  I was becoming more and more insecure.

  “When?”

  “In the café.”

  “In the café? I’m sorry, I’m not quite sure what you mean. We didn’t talk about any old women. I lost myself in the magazine, and before that we talked about my new apartment and your new job.”

  That’s what you said, and I was left alone with my disbelief. The end-of-the-world cake’s sugary flavor lingered on my tongue. Either my friends were lying to me, or I was being betrayed by my own senses.

  The Sound Swallower

  The office doorbell rang just as I was trying to finally finish my article about the Voynich manuscript. Or did I mishear? I often found my ears ringing these days. I tried to focus only on the real, like Ursula had advised me to. Perhaps someone had rung the bell on their bicycle on the street outside. I couldn’t be bothered to get up, and turned my attention back to the manuscript:

  AK.GSG.TO.DTO.THZO8.OHAR.

  But then I heard another ring—the doorbell after all—and I had to get up to answer it.

  There he was again, quiet and dressed in a gray suit, the Master of Sound, the one with an interest in alternative audio technology. He had with him a backpack that didn’t suit the rest of his attire, and he proceeded to carefully place it on the floor.

  “I happened to remember while I was passing by,” he said, “that you had mumblemumble about the Detector of Silent Sounds. Remember?”

  I admitted that I did remember.

  “Is your article ready?” I asked.

  “Not yet, unfortunately. You see, I’ve been spending my time developing a mumblemumble. I have it with me. I’ve been working on it for a while, and I’ve got it working in a mumblemumble way. Maybe you’d like a demonstration.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s a mumblemumble swallower.”

  “A sound swallower?”

  “Precisely. Its operational mumblemumble is almost the mumblemumble of the Detector of Silent Sounds, the device I told you about last time. When you hold the Sound Swallower to your ear, distracting sounds mumblemumble.”

  I held the gadget in my hands, looking at it from various angles. It didn’t look like much. It couldn’t really be called a machine at all. It was a quite tall, lidless cardboard cylinder, probably used to hold tea. It had been packed tight with plastic straws, blue and red and yellow, the kind normally used at children’s birthday parties.

  I lifted it up to my ear. There was a murmur. The effect was similar to holding a large conch shell to one’s ear.

  “Wouldn’t earplugs be more practical,” I asked. “And shouldn’t these come in pairs? But then you’d have to tape them to your head.”

  “Well, this is a protomumble,” he said. “There’s
room for development.”

  I remembered that, as a young student, I had spent a couple of months in an unfamiliar town living in a dorm that was next to the town’s busiest intersection. There was an emergency services station across the street from the dorm, and ambulances and fire trucks would howl off at all hours. I wasn’t able to sleep. I was comforted by the thought of how thin the Earth’s atmosphere is, only seven-and-a-half miles. Nothing more than a skin. How quickly all noises fade when rising just a bit higher.

  And how soon they stop being heard altogether if one descends just a few inches beneath the surface, among the roots and the worms. It was then that I began to understand that sounds were an exceptional phenomenon, that silence and darkness were the normal state of the universe and that an infinite noiseless night surrounded all sounds and images. I thought that I should actually learn to celebrate every sound, even cacophonies. Even the howling of ambulances and fire trucks, which are heralds of catastrophe and mortal danger, but also of the fact that we are still alive.

  Time and change have a voice; eternity is silent. The human ear is always searching for one or the other.

  So I found myself saying, “I could use a Sound Swallower. How much do you want for it?”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought of mumblemumble. But if you want it . . . Maybe mumblemumble.”

  “How much did you say?”

  “Ten marks.”

  “Ten marks isn’t much for silence.”

  “When I’ve finished the mumblemumble version, I’ll bring it for you to try,” the Master of Sound said.