Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “Generally speaking,” he said one day, “I don’t think well of humans. I no longer envy them or admire them as I used to. He who knows just a little of the world of humans cannot but deeply pity its state. But nonetheless there is something there, something extraordinary and wonderful, which sometimes glints through and dazzles the eyes . . .

  “I have heard the learned claim that the world of humans is not the only one. That somewhere in the universe there are other worlds, of which many must be far superior and far more developed than the human world. It may be so, indeed it must be.

  “There must be some world, even many worlds, where they know far more and they live far better than here, where they live obeying their own laws without crime and war and self-made suffering. Without regret, schadenfreude, shame or desire for revenge, without suspicion, greed and jealousy. There they live as human writers have always dreamed that we will live here in two or three hundred years, although the centuries turn and the future is no better than the past.

  “I imagine nevertheless that there is something in the human world that would not be shamed by comparison. It is found in those things which are of the least use: singing and music, books, pictures and dreams. Sometimes when I listen and look at them, I think: ‘Even they could not have done this better, no one in any possible world.’ ”

  The pelican broke off to fetch something from the music shelf. He waved the silver disk in his wing.

  “Here! Listen to this!”

  Emil read the cover of the CD: Adagio. The creature put the disk on and became the conductor once more. The violins vibrated with burning grief, the pelican gesticulated with his wing and huge bright tears rolled into his beak-bag. He had truly learned the art of weeping.

  “That is all,” he said when the piece ended. “All! Less would not be enough, more would be too much. When I hear this, I am proud of the fact that I too am almost human.”

  Mother

  Emil went to see the pelican less often than before. Whenever he saw the bird these days he had a book in his hand, he was taciturn and seemed depressed. Emil had not seen Elsa once since the outing. Or, once he thought he had seen a familiar fringe among a crowd of people waiting at the bus stop, but when he threaded his way closer he couldn’t see it any more.

  There were still a few days before the start of school. Emil had to get new clothes: shoes, towelling socks and uniform trousers. Many afternoons he went to pick up his mother from the laundry and they went through all the discount shops and shopping centres in the local area looking for the cheapest offers. There were always crowds, and the air was bad, but they didn’t have the money to buy clothes at the normal price.

  Later in the evening his mother often went out again, although when she got home she was always “knackered,” as she said. But people have to enjoy themselves sometimes. Once a week his mother gave Emil money to go to the cinema, but in their part of town there was only one cinema. There was nothing on there that he was allowed to go to, except on Sundays when they had Tom & Jerry or Disney films, which Emil didn’t care for. Once he had tried to get into a film that was called Naked Eves on Skis, but he hadn’t even managed to get a ticket. He was too short and his cheeks were too round, and there was no sign of his voice breaking yet.

  So it was that Emil often just stayed at home and stared at the TV that his grandmother had bought them second-hand, or read. Now he had got up to H in the encyclopaedia.

  Under H he was particularly captivated by the entry for “hot air balloon,” which talked about the engineer André’s aerostation and its wrecking on the Spitzbergen, and about Coxwell and Glaisher, who as early as 1862 reached to the height of 30,000 feet, at which point one of them lost consciousness and the other got frostbite in his hands.

  Emil liked hot air balloons more than space rockets: their construction was easier to understand and they could be controlled by a single occupant; sometimes he dreamt of building a hot air balloon and flying in it, maybe to Mogham, and maybe taking Elsa with him, maybe the pelican as well. It was a beautiful mode of transport, silent and unusual.

  One night he awoke at two in the morning, and as he was going to the bathroom, for some reason he glanced into the living room, where his mother slept.

  It was empty.

  His mother had gone out again that evening, but she had never been away so late before. Fear squeezed Emil’s lungs so that he had to breathe rapidly and shallowly. Terrible technicolour pictures rose to his eyes: his mother lying on the pavement crushed by the wheels of a car, surrounded by gaping onlookers who did nothing, his mother in the hands of a drug gang with a knife to her throat or being harassed by some drunken lunatic. He had read the paper, he knew what people were capable of doing to each other in the big city. The pelican was right, one shouldn’t ever read the papers, although the papers weren’t to blame for what happened. It wasn’t good to know about all sorts of things.

  He opened the front door and peered into the stairwell. It was dark and cold, only the streetlight’s glare made the stone landing gleam under the window. He hadn’t known that the city could be so quiet. There was no sound of running water anywhere, he couldn’t hear a single human voice, just now and then some late reveller speeding homewards along the motorway.

  If something’s happened to mum, Emil thought, at least then dad will have to take me back to Mogham.

  But he was so ashamed of his thought that sweat broke out on his forehead and deep inside him someone screamed in a child’s voice: “Mum!” He himself did not make a sound.

  At that very moment the downstairs door opened and the light in the stairwell came on. Hope and disbelief alternated in Emil, for the steps sounded at times like his mother’s and at times like someone else’s: they were unsure, stumbling, but floor by floor they neared their door. Using the lift was not permitted this late at night. When he was finally sure that it was his mother, he pulled the front door silently closed, turned off the hall light and went to bed.

  His mother slammed the door loudly, although usually she was so quiet. She muttered something and Emil heard her shoes clatter to the floor. Then he could no longer restrain himself, and he got up and went to the hall.

  His mother was sitting on a stool leaning her elbows on her knees, her hands hanging down between her legs, staring at the opposite wall. It was empty and pale grey, there was nothing there to stare at.

  When she saw Emil, she said in a thick voice: “Go away. Your mother is the most miserable person in the world.” Her cheeks were wet and red and her breath stank. Her head jerked down and her eyelids closed.

  Emil took a step towards her, but her hand rose in a gesture of rejection: “Go away. Go to sleep. There’s nothing to worry about here.”

  He went, but he listened in the dark with wide-open eyes. He couldn’t hear anything from the hall, not for a long time. Had he been dozing? Had his mother already gone to her own room? He cried a little, and the tears flowed into his ears.

  It must have been close to morning by the time his mother rose from the stool in the hall and went to the bathroom. Even then Emil couldn’t sleep. With drying eyes, but with his ears full of tears, he stayed awake through a long night.

  After that Emil looked at his mother with new eyes. He no longer saw in her a mother who was always present and always the same, as if everlasting, but a person who had much that was strange and confusing about her. A person that faltered. It made him uneasy. She had always been there, in front of him, but it was as if he had never looked directly at her but rather at the world, first through her and later past her. Now Emil saw a tired woman who was still young, but who had gained weight recently. She had given her hair a coppery brown rinse a month ago, but the roots were already showing that that was not her natural colour. Her fingernails were bitten down. There was sorrow in her, many sorrows.

  That was how Emil looked at his mother, as if he had walked a little distance ahead and then stopped and turned his head. He saw weakness and disintegration
where he had believed there to be strength and life’s eternal home. And into his days there trickled damply the knowledge that humans never, even in their prime, stop being vulnerable to the crushing hands of reality.

  Exposure

  The next evening Emil rang the pelican’s doorbell. He rang repeatedly and for a long time, but the pelican was obviously not home, which was unusual at that time of day. Or maybe he didn’t want to open the door, or maybe he was in the bath and didn’t hear the doorbell.

  Emil opened the letter box and peeked in, but he couldn’t see anything except a section of the dim hall. He heard the sound of running water, but it came from the next flat; the pelican’s flat was perfectly quiet.

  He visited the next morning and evening as well, just as fruitlessly. He was beginning to worry. More than that: he was beginning to be afraid.

  At the door to number six he ran into the pelican’s neighbour lugging an empty rubbish bin. She was an unbelievably fat woman, whose ankles spilled out over the top of her tightly laced leather shoes.

  “Excuse me, I don’t suppose you know if Mr. Henderson has moved?”

  “Don’t talk to me about ‘Mr.’,” the woman said in a spiteful tone.

  “But doesn’t he live here any more?” Emil insisted.

  “There’s living and living. Can you call it living when he doesn’t do anything else except sit in the bath? Water gurgling all the time, day and night. No one could bear that.”

  “So he’s gone then. Do you know where at all?”

  “Why’re you bothering me? You’re always hanging on his coattails, don’t think I haven’t seen you. I wonder if your mother knows who you’ve been keeping company with.”

  Emil swallowed. The feeling of danger inside him became more urgent. The woman was already on her way up the steps, but she turned her head once more so that her left cheek folded on top of her shoulder:

  “You should spend more of your time with decent people.”

  Emil froze. The woman had not emphasised the word “decent,” which would have been natural if she had meant some person she considered a bad example. She had emphasised the word ‘people.’ Could there be more than one explanation for that?

  He returned to his own staircase and rang Elsa’s doorbell for the first time. The girl herself opened the door. She stepped half a step back when she saw Emil, and her eyes widened. She didn’t say anything, as if she was so frightened that she couldn’t make her voice work. Emil had not expected such a reception.

  “The pelican’s disappeared,” he said. “Did you know?”

  For some reason he was certain that Elsa had known before him.

  “Well, yes, actually . . . ” Elsa looked away. “I’d heard about it.”

  “Who told you? Where did you hear?”

  “They were talking about it out there in the yard, that’s all. Of course people knew.”

  “They knew that he’d left? But he didn’t tell me that he was going to go somewhere. He should have done, I was his friend.” Emil’s voice trembled. He felt now that the way the pelican had acted towards him had been deeply wrong.

  Elsa leaned against the hall wall and shifted on her feet. She didn’t ask Emil in. The kitchen door was half open, and he could hear from the sounds that someone was washing up in there.

  “Did he go back there then, to his family?”

  Elsa suddenly turned towards the wall and her shoulders shook. “You don’t understand anything at all.” She was openly crying. “He didn’t go anywhere, he was taken.”

  “What do you mean taken? Back there?”

  “Not there,” the girl shouted. “To the zoo.”

  Emil’s heart thumped. A terrible misfortune had occurred, something irreversible and with far-reaching consequences. The pelican was behind bars, he had been disgraced and thrown in jail, his chances for a respectable life either as a person or an animal stripped away from him.

  “How is that possible?” he spluttered. “How did it happen? Who did it?”

  “I did.” Elsa looked at him, her eyes black with despair.

  “You. That’s not true. It couldn’t have been you.”

  “It was me. I didn’t take him there, but I made it happen. First I told my mum and dad that Mr. Henderson wasn’t human, but they didn’t believe me.”

  “My mum didn’t believe me either.”

  “Then I told the janitor. He didn’t believe me at first either, but I told him to look at Mr. Henderson’s hands and feet. I asked him if he thought that any human could have hands and feet like that. Then he started to think. He started to watch Mrs. Greatorex’s tenant. Yesterday morning, when I was on my way out, he was just coming out of the basement and he said: ‘You have sharp eyes, young lady, and the rest of us have been as blind as bats. If he’s not a bird, I’ll eat the crown jewels. I’ve called the zoo and they’re coming today to get him.’

  “I asked what they were going to do with him, and he laughed. ‘What d’you think zoos are for? He’ll get his own little box that he won’t even have to pay rent for, free board and plenty of admirers. Mrs. Greatorex herself can go there to gawp at her tenant, for a small fee.’

  “I went home, and I haven’t been out since. But mum told me that Mr. Henderson went off somewhere yesterday with two strange men in a delivery van. There are odd rumours going round the building. From what I hear, someone other than me’d been saying that Mr. Henderson wasn’t human at all, but they’re also gossiping that he belonged to some kind of criminal gang, along with the men in the van. They’re saying he had links with the underworld. That’s all a load of rubbish of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Except that he wasn’t human. And that he’s been taken away. And it’s my fault.”

  “Blaming yourself isn’t going to help,” Emil said, as more experienced people sometimes said. His face, too, looked for a moment like an adult’s, stern and brave. It was prepared to cope with that which was irreversible, but with the strength of his clenched fists he would change that which he still could.

  The pelican himself, perhaps in a fit of insane courage and defiance, had shown himself to Elsa as a bird, and he certainly hadn’t forbidden her from passing the information on to others. Maybe it wasn’t even a question of overconfidence, maybe he had even been hoping in some way that the truth would get out? Maybe he had wanted to test humans, to see how they would react to a creature in their midst who was no longer an animal, but not a human either? Maybe Emil and Elsa—because remembering his suspicions and the cooling of his feelings towards the pelican, Emil felt himself just as responsible for this ‘occurrence’ as Elsa—had merely functioned to further and carry out some kind of plan.

  “Blaming yourself isn’t going to help,” Emil repeated. “Now we need action.”

  Prisoners

  A more accurate name for the zoo would be “animal prison.” But even the worst criminals these days don’t end up in such dismal boxes as a bear caught in the wilderness, who is used during the summertime to wandering for leagues every day across swamps and boundless woodland, can find himself in. Even nine square metres of concrete floor and walls made of bars are not enough punishment for him, although he has committed no crime. A theatre is made of his misery, money is earned from his despair, his shattered life provides entertainment for thousands. Day after day the bear goes around the same circle, ten steps east and ten west, but he will never again see the sun rise or set from the wild woods. People pay to be able to gape at his misfortune, they chew roast beef sandwiches noisily in front of his prison and they throw one or two pieces on the floor in front of him so that they can laugh at his clumsy movements and imagine themselves to be animal lovers. His fur turns grey in captivity, and the smell of humans, which in former days he made long circuits to avoid, clings to him.

  And the tiger? The tiger in the northern zoo, the tiger from the Indian jungle, where orchids bloom wild and a tree grows from a seed in a single summer, although that is, to be fair, a
long time there? We dare not even contemplate the tiger, the night walker, who can leap three times as far and high as his cell. For he does not even have the consolation of hibernation, which for the bear still opens a single door back to the blueberry woods.

  There is no joy for birds there either, except for mallards and peacocks, which strut at the day-trippers’ feet, and actually enjoy being able to unfurl their magnificent tails to be gawped and pointed at.

  But the sea eagle’s cage is narrow and tall. A dead tree has been put there for him, and he crouches on its highest branch like a statue, a dark monument. He is one of the last of his species as well, outside the cage there no longer live many who carry his honourable name. Nor can this life be called life, for what is the sea eagle without the sea? What will he do with his metre-long wings when the wind will never again have the chance to lift them?

  The pelican was the only one of his kind in the zoo, and Emil found him easily. His cage was lower than the sea eagle’s, and there was a wading pool in it. On the chain-link fence a sign said: Dalmatian Pelican, Pelecanus crispus.

  At first Emil just watched him for a long time; he didn’t want to go up to the cage straight away. And besides, there was a family there who were trying to tempt the bird closer with pieces of biscuit. Emil was sure that the pelican would have felt humiliated if someone he knew had seen him in that position. So he waited until the family, tired of their fruitless attempts at persuasion, announced that they were going to the monkey house.