Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Is there any interaction? I am asking a straightforward question: In what sense do they exist? In what sense do they live? The gorgonoid, the tubanide, the pacmantis and the lissajoune. These statistical animals that can only be seen. That are only two-dimensional, even though they appear three-dimensional.

  Did I say ‘only’? It is unclear in what sense they fail to be three-dimensional. For even if we cannot measure the mass of the gorgonoid, we are able to calculate its volume. And I was unable to rid myself of the following question, however irrelevant it seemed in regard to the institute’s project: Can behaviour exist without consciousness? Does the gorgonoid believe that it can influence its individual life in the same way as we do? And is there any way of proving that it does, or does not?

  If someone asks, is it alive, what does he really mean? And I do ask. I ask, does it exist for itself? Because I believe that only that is true life. If it has no consciousness, but only an abstract and superficial reality, I do not consider it to be alive. It may be true, but it does not live. In that case, it is merely an object and – objectively! – it exists. And exists much more clearly and unequivocally than myself, who can never prove the existence of my internal reality and whose exterior form can easily be destroyed, but never transferred. But it is not alive. No, that I deny it.

  ‘You can’t,’ Rolf said. ‘How can you dictate that artificial reality is less real than physical reality?’

  ‘Life is not a spectacle,’ I said.

  Gorgonoids always stay in their own world. People always stay in the human world. They cannot function without creatures of the same species. But even a solitary gorgonoid is still a gorgonoid, while a person stripped of all relationships is no longer a person. His life resides in them.

  Gorgonoids! Tubanides! Lissajounes! Nipponites mirabiles! In some ways we were like them, and in others – I thought – even more mechanical than they, like inorganic objects.

  But did they have even the slightest possibility even of dreaming of choice as we do, day after day, again and again, and as we would continue to do even if it were conclusively proved that any chance of choice was over, and that it had never really existed. That was where humanity lay – not in freedom itself, but in the dream of freedom.

  I still say that I wish to raise my hand and step out – in that direction! And I raise my hand and take a step. Not knowing whether I have done so because I wish it, or because my will happens to be in harmony with what I must do.

  I still ask: In what sense do we exist? We, who are both visible and invisible? What level of reality do we represent? Is it always the same, or does it sometimes shift, without our realising it?

  How independent, and how dependent, are we?

  And how can we ever cease to exist?

  Translated by Hildi Hawkins

  The Lord of my Death

  What are the people doing, who always stand around outside the glass doors of the railway station, between the booths selling daily papers and fruit and chocolate? Aren’t such random groups of people standing at all railway stations of all towns, with nothing in common except that they happen to be in the same place at the same time?

  Who has a rendezvous under the clock? Some are waiting for the trains to arrive or depart. Many have come to see off, say goodbye to, or welcome travelers. They have been invited to a visit, or a to negotiation, or to see an ailing friend or relative, or they hurry home to cook dinner. All sorts of rabble, too, loiter where the crowd is at its thickest, idlers and winos, spending their time, their only and inexhaustible asset.

  I was going to walk through the station, buy a couple of papers, and then go on to the marketplace to get some smoked flounder. As I passed, my eyes fell on a person – I am rather short-sighted, so I may have squinted a little to see better.

  My gaze fell on him – and caught. It was unusual, for I rarely look at people as I walk in the street. I tend to be deep in thought while walking, and, to be honest, nowadays I am less and less interested in people. Neither do I suppose to attract other people’s attention in the least. I don’t expect a lot of people, neither good things nor bad, and at the same time I hope that they wouldn’t ask too much of me. I feel I have had my share. I don’t want to trouble anyone, and willingly presume to be left to my own devices.

  Perhaps this is a lot to ask. Perhaps it is a selfish wish. But the fact is that my mind is otherwise occupied.

  But now my eyes were caught on a stranger like the tongue of a chameleon. He was the prey of my gaze.

  This person attracted my attention because he was exceptionally ugly, like a version of Mr Hyde or of Dorian Gray. His features were brutally disproportionate, even grotesque, his appearance was unkempt and his whole figure decadent. Not the way people deteriorate as they age, or even in the way drunkards are, although undoubtedly he was one. A short man, a motley bush of beard on his face, his hair stiff with filth. Really bad looking, but the features and the expression were more idiosyncratic than the outfit. How would I describe his expression? It was at the same time macabre, malicious, and deranged. In short, an appalling face.

  This was a man who was both backwards and deeply corrupt.

  I swear I didn’t as much as slow my steps as I passed him, it would have been an absurd thing to do. In fact I walked by quite briskly. As far as I know my expression didn’t change – no grimaces, like the German teacher at the all-girls school would have said. The moment really was fleeting. I didn’t frown, I didn’t raise my eyebrows, I didn’t lift my chin. But I did look at him, without turning my head, out of the corner of my eye.

  And at that very moment the man looked at me, and our eyes met.

  What happened often happens downtown: you look closely at some person who cannot be aware of your presence, who is otherwise occupied and may even be facing away from you, yet this person senses your stare at once, as though touched or even shoved. The person turns to look at you.

  Did my eyes betray my astonished, almost incredulous contempt, after all? My disgust? Everything comes through, that’s how it is. Nothing remains hidden. And this man, who looked like an analphabet, was able to read my gaze in the blink of an eye. This amazed me. My gaze had become an act. I had meant no such thing. It couldn’t be helped anymore. My gaze had reached out from me like a prehensile organ, and he had felt its grasp that was perhaps insolent and offensive. In all likelihood he really felt like a catch pierced by this gaze, and struck back.

  On that day I wore a long, light-colored trench coat, a blue scarf, only a shade of lipstick. I had white woolen socks and low laced shoes. I mention this only to make clear that there was nothing provocative or conspicuous about me, unless it is taken into account that I am not a small person. But this is a fact I cannot hide.

  Sometimes I feel I can move in a crowd as if invisible. Thus attracting his attention was at least as unusual as my own gaze had been.

  As I was passing the man at a distance of a few steps – and of course I had immediately looked away from him – he let out a strange sound, an inhuman roar, a grunt of unbridled rage. It was a war cry!

  And the man followed me, his pupils dark and wide, his feet oddly spread. His hand was raised to strike, his face contorted in a demonic grimace –.

  It would have been no mere slap – it seemed to me that he focused all his available energy on the blow that was aimed at my – head? chest? And how is it possible that this rather frail and liquor-ridden body could muster such an amount of hostile strength as seemed to be loaded in that instantaneous blow? In which boundless storehouses of hatred did it originate?

  I smelled his rancid stench and held my breath. Dried urine, booze, shit, rotten teeth, who knows what noxious fumes.

  I made a sideways leap, it must have looked ridiculous. But the unexpected and dreadful aggression required a reaction. The unfairness of the man’s hatred hurt me deeply.

  I ran a few hasty steps and managed to push open the door to the station hall. I saw passers-by turn to look and was a
shamed. I was certain the man would pursue me, and as I glanced back I thought I saw his horrific shape push, or fall, in through the swinging doors.

  I ran, heavily, clumsily, flailing my arms. I swept through the station hall, past the people sitting on their trunks. It had been months, even years since I last ran, and for the very fact this person had forced me to, I hated him.

  I even ran down the escalator, I was sure he was panting right behind me. As I rushed through the subway station, up the stairs, through the arcade, I imagined all the while that I heard this nightmare stomp at my heels. My shoulder bag swung and hit an old lady in the side, but I didn’t wait for her reaction.

  I pushed through the revolving doors into the department store. I passed a sales representative lifting a novel, automatic dish brush with a refillable container for dish soap. It looked handy and I had time to think I’d buy one later.

  I was beginning to calm down. My near vicinity was so crowded with people in a flurry of movement in all directions that I didn’t think my tormentor could track me anymore. I went out through another door and crossed the street to a café that has a doorman at all times.

  I took a paper from the rack, folded the blue scarf onto the adjacent chair and ordered a cappuccino, as is my habit in this café. I still breathed unevenly. The light of a calm winter’s day fell onto my paper through the skylight.

  A sideboard was decorated with a seven-branched candelabrum for Christmas.

  But the figure of the man still loomed before me, big and terrible, like a genie released from its bottle, towering to the ceiling. I shuddered. The memory of his odorous aura must have caused it.

  I thought: my life and his have no point of contact. Nothing, except the merciless blow I managed to dodge. I come from an entirely different world. I don’t think I bother anyone. I don’t live at anyone’s expense. I lead a quiet and simple life that has, if not luxury, then at least a certain quality to it. I mind my own business without burdening others with them. I have studied almost all my life and still do. I have my office and my research, which give me profound satisfaction. An apartment of my own, albeit mortgaged. My daughter and my son. Relatives, and a male friend, and many female friends. I eat well but with moderation. I change my underwear every day. Does this put me in debt to those who are not as satisfied with their lives? Should I apologize for all this to those who live more poorly and are less happy than I am?

  I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I have worries that wake me up every night. And I feel they should be payment enough for all I have. But I may be wrong. Maybe I have had so much and so undeservingly that I can pay back my debts only when I die, if then. Yet I find it inconceivable that my debt would be to that outcast at the station rather than to my parents and ancestors, my own children, my teachers and friends. I see no dependency between us, no reason to believe that I live well because he lives badly, or vice versa.

  He! What was he? Why should I waste a second to consider my attitude towards such a creature? I can form a closer contact with a cat, a sparrow, even a bumblebee than with a person like him. Towards them I feel compassion, and, to an extent, I can understand them, even try to put myself in their place. What is it like to be a bumblebee on a northern sundrop? A sparrow in a snowstorm? Without a doubt I respect them – unlike him.

  They are what they are completely: cats, sparrows, bumblebees. Each of them wholly represents the idea of its species. They are exactly what they are meant to be. They fulfill their purpose to the last detail. They never stray. But whatever a man is meant to be, it’s definitely nothing like him.

  I see he is human-shaped like me. He has hands and feet and presumably all his internal organs in the same places as anyone else, but this makes the strangeness even more total. It makes this creature more inconceivable than a cat, or a dog, or an insect. It makes my revulsion even deeper, turns it into something resembling horror. For how is it possible that such a creature is human?

  His metabolism and his vital functions are similar to mine, although he, of course, is a man and I am a woman. His nails grow at the same speed with mine, as does his hair. I know that our DNAs are next to identical, because we are members of the same species. But I feel he is entirely different from me, or any of my acquaintances or relatives. Something in him doesn’t seem human to me, to me he doesn’t represent the idea of a human like a sparrow represents the idea of a sparrow.

  You laugh at me! You say: As if you know what this idea is like! But in fact you, too, think you know, you are just ashamed to say it. I have the courage to say: A human being should be beautiful, good, wise, and just. I am not, and neither are you, but wouldn’t we very much want to be all this?

  He doesn’t, not in the least.

  Towards him and his likes I do not feel and cannot feel any sympathy, not even abstractly and from afar. And why should I? I won’t be the hypocrite to say I ought to. I have no obligation to, and what would he gain from it anyway. And I’m not going to apologize for my lack of compassion.

  I picked up a tabloid someone had left on the table, but I was barely able to scan the headlines. I had to admit that my agitation had still not settled. Still the diabolical travesty of a man held sway over my thoughts.

  And now I’m trying to be fair. I want to appreciate the various reasons, both genetic and environmental, that have put him into his current, undoubtedly miserable state. How could I know if he should be blamed for any of it? Or I given the credit for not being where he is? I don’t know if he ever chose anything.

  But if it could be proved that he either chose or didn’t, what then? I see it and react to it. The visible is not just surface and reality is not only behind all that is visible. He is also what he seems. This is one reason why he is where he is. As for the reasons why he appears the way he appears, they are irrelevant to me. How could I follow their chain of causality to its beginning? What else should I, what else could I react to, than what he appears to be?

  Besides, at times I think – as cruel as it may sound – that without a doubt every man alone is to blame not only for what he does but also for what others do to him, what happens to him, how he ends up. And now is such a time. Right now I am convinced that we all choose our own misfortunes.

  But even as I think this way, I have to confess I am at a dead-end: Are there no victims, no scapegoats? In that case I would have to admit that the blow he aimed at me was in a sense justified and that I caused it myself. Very well, I do remember my gaze, which was an act. I take full responsibility for it, whatever that means. But as a matter of fact I think I had not meant to aim such a gaze at the man. And if I hadn’t meant to, how can I take responsibility? It just happened.

  And as I say this, I remember that many people who have killed say the very same words: “It just happened.” Does “just happening” in any way free them from acts they nevertheless committed? Or do all acts, even the most deliberate ones, ultimately just happen?

  But why do I still feel deeply offended?

  And what if his blow had struck me? What if he had kicked me down and battered me to death? Should I say: I gave him such and such a look. Thus I got what I deserved.

  That would be too much, really.

  But perhaps it was not just about that gaze but instead about all my acts and failures previous to that unpleasant incident. And in that case the man would have acted as an instrument of fate.

  Even in that case I would loathe him, and his blow would be, in a sense, as unfair!

  But I still aspire to be a good and broad-minded person. And if I was asked to contribute to a charity for his benefit, I would. Why wouldn’t I, even though I’m convinced no charity will improve his state. But it would be ridiculous and unreasonable to ask me to sympathize as well.

  I listened to the hum of the espresso machine. The porcelain and the spoons chinked as clearly as glass bells. At the next table someone said: “He always does that; he never considers the feelings of others.”

  The fact is
I hate him without restraint. If I am sincere I have to admit that it’s a great misfortune his kind even exists. Undoubtedly he is both a criminal and a psychopath. He is vile socially, psychologically, and biologically, a total failure of a being. My mental hygiene suffers when I as much as remember him. If I have to smell him again, I shall throw up.

  But he, too, hates me. Even more so: he wants to destroy me, and all my kind, this is clear as day.

  But I don’t strive to destroy him. I don’t spit at him. I merely step aside. As far as I’m concerned, he can be wherever he will, as long as he doesn’t attack me. I didn’t put him in his current state. I’m neither his oppressor nor his exploiter.

  Wherever he is, I don’t wish to be. Why doesn’t he, then, allow me even a brief, narrow opening, when all I want is to pass him quickly?

  The waiter came to bring my coffee, a glass of water, and a brioche. I drank the water promptly. I was still shaken.

  Now I knew. In that familiar, pleasant, and peaceful room I couldn’t help but know that the fury and the unfairness, which had preyed me on the station through the unknown bum and which I had only barely avoided, would once strike me with all its destructive power. The bedrock I had rested on at the start of this day was no longer under me. My life had started to flutter like a flame that someone had tried to blow out but had not succeeded to just yet.

  I knew: in the end he would succeed. He would find me – no matter how inconspicuous and aloof I tried to be. I might avoid him for a time, make abrupt evasive movements, I might run – but how long, how far?

  For the aggression that was aimed at me was life’s own rampant, destructive energy, which will – as soon as I forget myself, look at it at the right moment, and reveal my unprotected, soft face – hit the mark. And even not forgetting and staying on guard at all times wouldn’t save me. It would be no longer about my vigilance and reactions.

  That vile creature stood for the reality that existed behind my everyday life, a life that was peaceful only in appearance. For any unexpected reason it might be torn apart to reveal what I didn’t want to see: the inevitable advent of my doom.