Ella didn’t remember much about her childhood, but she remembered the smell of the inside of the Triumph. It gave her a headache, but she loved it. Sometimes she thought that if she could just sit in that car long enough she would get all her old memories back.
The car didn’t belong to her father anymore, although the name on the registration was still Paavo Emil Milana. He would have been shocked at the state of the car. Before he got sick he worked on the car every week—checked everything out, cleaned the motor, washed it and rubbed it with Turtle Wax. One time when he was waxing the car he declared, “Show me a man who doesn’t take care of his car, and I’ll show you a man who’s lost his soul.”
Since she’d returned to Rabbit Back, Ella had occasionally driven the Triumph to work, but she preferred to ride her bicycle if the weather permitted.
When she left the house to pedal to the school, the first two kilometres were slightly downhill. The breeze was sweetly cool against her skin in the warm air of August. It was wonderful just to sit on her bicycle seat and let her speed build up by itself.
There were old wooden houses along the dirt road and gardens with their scrubby old apple trees and stone guardians, and here and there newer brick buildings. Along the way she could also get a glimpse of two old playgrounds, a tiny beauty parlour, the beach, dogs, fields, horses and trees—oak, maple, lime and birch.
Halfway to the school the road plunged into a grove of spruce trees where it was always nearly dark. In the summer the air was thick with hungry gnats and she pedalled as fast as she could.
Then the road merged with a paved road and that’s when she had to start pedalling just to keep moving. The road passed more houses, a headstone carver’s, and two workshops—one of which made wooden statues of Laura White characters that were sold all over the world.
The road was as hilly as a child’s drawing; first down, then up, phew! then down, and up again to the highest point, from which she could see the roofs of central Rabbit Back and all the surrounding areas, and even farther on a clear day, all the way to the shimmering horizon. After a few of these hills and valleys she had to slow down, because there was a path between two spruces and a large stone that she always took as a shortcut. It took her straight to the school yard, provided the ground wasn’t too swampy.
Halfway down the path there was a pond that looked like a puddle but was said to be bottomlessly deep. Henrik, the Johansson’s boy, had once pushed a long pole into the pond without touching bottom, and then it felt like something tugged on the pole and the boys all ran away.
Ella had never taken that story seriously, but she passed the pond as fast as she could. She’d had foreboding dreams about the place. She heard strange noises and saw weird reflections on the surface of the pond.
She had walked this same route thousands of times, the first time when she was six years old, when she first started going to the library. When she returned to Rabbit Back to be a substitute teacher, she had ridden her bike to the school one Monday morning and before she knew it the breeze had wiped away thirteen years of her life.
She felt herself worrying whether she’d got her mathematics homework done and whether Johanna Rantakumpu would like her today and wondering if they would have P.E. inside and she would have to listen to Salli Mäkinen’s taunts about her too small breasts and too fat thighs, and wondered whether she and the other girls would go after school to walk up and down in front of Laura White’s house again, hoping that the miracle would happen and the authoress would see them and open her office window and invite them in for juice like she’d done with Aliisan Niemennokka two years ago, and maybe she would read to them like she had to her, from the Creatureville book she was writing, and who knows, maybe she would invite one of them to be the tenth member of the Society.
Then the uphill climb had eaten up her speed and the passing years had returned and she remembered that she was just a dreamy substitute teacher with defective ovaries and gracefully curved lips.
For a few seconds she was deeply sad. Then she felt relieved, and laughed so hard that she ran into the ditch.
Ella stopped the Triumph in front of the pharmacy. Her mother got out of the car and ran to fetch her father’s prescription. Ella glanced at his profile.
He was still quiet. The day was bleak and rainy, the bank and the shops were looming grey bulks in the drizzling wet. Umbrellas glided back and forth.
Ella looked at her father, who seemed to be waking from a dream. She noticed a figure opening a jammed umbrella in front of the car.
The woman in the rain looked small and slim, which slightly surprised Ella—she had imagined Laura White to be bigger, more imposing somehow.
The raindrops dampened and darkened White’s pale summer dress, but she finally got the umbrella open and walked away.
It crossed Ella’s mind that she could have offered the greatest children’s author she would ever know a ride. But the moment passed and White disappeared into the rain.
Her father breathed heavily.
Her mother appeared in the rearview mirror and dived into the car. “Well, how is everything?” she said.
Then Paavo Emil Milana opened his mouth and spoke the first of two poems that gave his wife a terrible shock.
How long have we been this way, lover, you and I?
The grass is growing through us, as hand in hand we lie, and drink the songs of butterflies.
I’ve forgotten your name. Am I made of earth now?
So many skies have circled over us. There’s nothing that I miss.
Ella’s mother poured some coffee into her cup. There was a plate of cinnamon rolls on the table that she’d baked to celebrate her husband’s homecoming. No one felt like eating them.
Ella’s father sat in his office looking out the window. Ella and her mother had led him there, and he sat in his chair like an obedient son. His cuts and bruises were healing quickly, but his skin still looked messy, like mischievous, heartless children had drawn on it, scribbled and smudged all over it.
“What’s got into him?” Ella’s mother said. “He’s never been much interested in reciting poetry. And now he decides to start.”
She pressed a slip of paper into Ella’s hand. “I wrote it down. You’re a language and literature teacher. Tell me who the author is.”
Ella shook her head. “It doesn’t sound familiar. But I can call someone and ask.”
And she did call, but Professor Korpimäki didn’t recognize the poem, either. “Where did you say you found it?” he asked in a friendly tone.
“My father recited it,” Ella said. “And since neither of us knew who the author was, I thought I would call you. Thanks anyway.”
The next night her father sat up in bed and recited another one. Ella’s mother handed her the paper at the breakfast table. It read:
At last I have a happy tune
a song that I can tell
of mayflies dashing and sparkling
and madness most beautiful,
sparrows plunging into clouds,
the sun on its rattling rails,
creatures of a land of frost
that stir a longing in my breast.
But I tell no tales
of how there lurks beneath the fields of hay
that thing into whose arms
we each will one day sink away.
5
IT WASN’T UNTIL many weeks later, when Paavo Emil Milana was dead and buried, that Ella Milana started to think about what Ingrid Katz had told her.
It was the author Ingrid Katz. You could tell because the author Ingrid Katz was more relaxed than the librarian Ingrid Katz, although she still had that something predatory about her.
“Laura White liked your story,” Ingrid had said.
They had been chatting politely for five minutes, talking about anything but the tainted books, or the theft, or why Ingrid had asked Ella to come back to the library. Ella nodded and tried to look interested, as she had been doing. She’
d actually been thinking about Paavo Emil Milana’s current state.
She was also thinking that she had never been in the library after closing hours. It felt like she was up to something a bit perverse.
Ella’s right eye started to twitch.
They were sitting in the children’s section drinking coffee and eating yellow cake. The table was much too low and there were plush toy versions of Bobo Clickclack, the Odd Critter and the other Creatureville characters between them. Ella felt strange eating and drinking in the library. After all, there was a sign that said ABSOLUTELY NO EATING OR DRINKING IN THE LIBRARY!
Ingrid Katz had a peculiar smile on her face. Ella looked past her. A short distance away, an exhibit of mythological sculptures was gathered as if for a night-time council.
“As you can guess, this caused a bit of a stir in the Rabbit Back Literature Society. Something like this, after such a long silence. Ms White first told Martti Winter and Martti told me. Martti should have been the one to tell you, but these days Martti is what he is. He doesn’t appear in public very often. It couldn’t have been more than ten years ago that you couldn’t go anywhere without running into him. But nowadays, poof, you never see or hear from him.” She shook her head sadly. “Except maybe at the Rabbit Market bakery. They have the best pastries in town, and do you know why? Because Martti Winter is a regular customer there! They make custom pastries for him, if you can believe that.”
Ella felt awkward. She wondered if Ingrid might be drunk, tried to smell it on her breath. All she could smell was liquorice and coffee.
Ingrid Katz wasn’t the most brilliant author in the Society, but Martti Winter was its undisputed star. His works had been translated into dozens of languages. He was one of those rare Finnish writers who had become rich from his writing. His works were popular with both critics and a large reading audience.
Unlike Martti Winter, Ingrid Katz wrote small books. Critics liked them well enough, but they never got much publicity. As far as Ella could remember, all of her books were young adult novels filled with people committing suicide and having abortions and losing their virginity and suffering alcohol poisoning while living with parents who fought constantly and were in all ways unbearable.
“So, since Martti wasn’t able to get in touch with you, the task fell to me,” Ingrid said with a sigh. “But that’s all right. You and I know each other, after all, because of that incident the other day.”
She smiled jovially. “Well, what do you say?” she asked.
“About what?” Ella said. She was finding it hard to concentrate.
“About what we’ve been talking about!” Katz said. “About being the next to receive an honour that hasn’t been bestowed on anyone in a very long time. And not because Ms White wasn’t looking for new talent. I haven’t seen her terribly recently, but I know that she reads the Rabbit Tracks literary supplement regularly. And she has her own portfolio there at your school.”
“The Laura White file,” Ella said.
Ingrid Katz nodded. “To be honest, I found your story… what was it called?”
“‘The Skeleton Sat in the Cave Silently Smoking Cigarettes’,” Ella said.
“Yes. Well, I didn’t see anything remarkable in it when I read it in the paper. It seemed to me like a typical bit of slick lang-and-lit-teacher’s prose. Very good, no doubt, for someone at your level of training, but not at all extraordinary. I just thought: Uh-huh. Next. But then I’m not the one who took nine tentatively promising children and trained them to be nine more or less successful authors, so what’s my opinion worth? If Laura White sees something in your story, then there’s something in it. And something in you. I can’t see it, but I believe in it.”
Ella was flustered. “This is all a little… I’m sorry, but could you spell out exactly what it is that you mean?” she said, smiling apologetically.
Ingrid Katz looked more serious and put her coffee cup back on the table.
“I’m talking about an offer,” she said. Her expression was inscrutable. “Laura White promises to make a writer out of you, if you wish to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society.”
6
SITTING IN THE BATHROOM after the funeral, Ella Milana remembered how her father had once read aloud to her from a Creatureville book when she was a child. It was a book Santa Claus had brought a couple of days before.
She remembered her father’s weight on the edge of her bed, his soft voice painting pictures in her mind. She remembered how she had kept her eyes closed. She had a vivid memory of the going-to-sleep passage in the book:
Mother Snow tucked Bobo Clickclack, the Odd Critter, Dampish, Crusty Bark and all the others into bed. She kissed them gently and called them her “own little creatures”, which always made them smile under the blanket with pure contentment, and for a moment they all forgot that Emperor Rat stalked the night, whispering dark secrets that no living creature could hear without being badly broken.
Then Mother Snow went into the kitchen and made herself a cup of hot cocoa.
CREATUREVILLE FOLK,
BY LAURA WHITE, END OF CHAPTER TWO
She remembered interrupting her father and asking him what the part about Emperor Rat meant and how they would keep him away, since everyone in Creatureville was so afraid of him.
Her question was followed by such a long silence that she thought he must have tiptoed out of the room. But he hadn’t—when she opened her eyes, he was still sitting there. He was pondering her question seriously—with such fierce concentration, in fact, that she started to feel afraid and regretted that she’d asked it.
“It seems to me,” her father finally said with a sigh, “that Emperor Rat is one of those things that we’re supposed to forget about. He’ll come if he’s going to come, but we shouldn’t start dwelling on it, and we certainly can’t start actively expecting it to happen.”
Autumn seeped into the grass, plants and trees and gushed from the treetops up into the sky to cover the landscape.
Ella and her mother hunkered indoors out of the rain. The house felt grey and huddled tight. It was colder than usual for this time of year. Neither of them felt like lighting the old tile stove that they used to supplement the electric heat.
Ella told her mother about the memory that had come to her so suddenly. Her mother was watching a television show called The Last Sixty Years of Our Lives. Without turning her head, she told Ella she had remembered it wrong: “As far as I know your father never read aloud to you. It must have been me.”
When the show was over, her mother started writing a shopping list for the next day, which was a Monday. Monday had always been the family shopping day. Her mother always said that writing shopping and to-do lists made it possible to keep things under control that would otherwise have weighed on her mind.
Ella sat next to her. There were crumbs and coffee stains on the kitchen table. Ella was tired. She had been up late trying to grade papers, but nothing had come of it. She was tired. Two hours earlier she had started to listen to her own breathing, and then her mother’s breathing, and now she couldn’t stop no matter how she tried.
The air rasped in through her mother’s nostrils and flowed through her windpipes into her lungs, then came back out again with a weary puff and a drawn-out wheeze that had a faint rattle in it. Now and then she sort of wolfed all the air in at once and snorted it out so quickly that there was no way her lungs had any time to absorb the oxygen into her bloodstream.
Breathing was somewhat complicated when you really thought about it. Ella wondered whether people die sometimes from starting to think too much about things that you’re not supposed to pay any attention to, like breathing.
She looked at her mother’s shopping list and forgot her ponderings for a moment.
POTATOES
CARROTS
TISSUES
SOME KIND OF MEAT (CHICKEN STRIPS?)
WHEAT FLOUR
POTATO FLOUR
TOMATOES
FUN
ERAL (COFFIN FOR PAAVO, ETC.)
LAUNDRY SOAP (FOR COLOURS)
HEADSTONE
COFFEE
Her mother looked at her intently, her eyes dry.
“Might as well get everything taken care of,” she said, and rapped her knuckles on the table. She was sitting up very straight in her chair, but her neck was bent backward somewhat, her head tilted feebly to one side. “Let’s go to the florist, too. I’m sure Kuutti knows how to handle these cemetery sorts of things. You’ll never hear a word of complaint about Kuutti’s Flowers. Satisfied customers, living or dead. By the way, do you want to be next to your father and me at the cemetery? I need to know so I can order the right size headstone.”
Ella didn’t answer.
“I’m not trying to force you into the same grave,” her mother said soothingly. “I was just thinking that if we’re going to be taking care of these sorts of things I might as well ask you about it so that you wouldn’t complain about it later—tell people you hadn’t even been invited to share a plot with your family. I’m trying to take everything into account, including you, now that you’ve moved back home and everything.”
“Thanks, Mum,” Ella said. “That’s very thoughtful.”
“And there are money matters to think about,” her mother said in a hurt voice. “You’ll save a pretty penny if we put you under the same stone as the rest of your family. It may not feel like a pressing issue to you now, but you ought to plan ahead.”
“What would you think if I wasn’t buried in the same plot as you and Dad?”
Her mother looked at her sharply, then nodded, hers eyes wet now. “That’s that, then,” she said, and scribbled something on her shopping list. “We’ll just buy a headstone for two. You can look for your own plot and choose all the features you want to buy.”
The Rabbit Back Literature Society Page 4
