The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  “Shit,” Ella said.

  “There you go,” Ingrid said happily. “When life gives you plums, spit out the stones.”

  There followed a moment of silence.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Ingrid continued, “there’s one thing you should remember. Even without Laura White teaching you, you’re still a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society. That’s something, isn’t it? Your name will be on all the official lists with the nine other members. I added it this morning. And whenever someone writes the next history of Finnish literature, it will say that the tenth and last member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society was Ella Milana.”

  Katz stopped the car and turned off the engine. They had arrived.

  “I think your mother’s expecting you. There are lights on in the kitchen. Try to explain what happened, somehow, although I don’t think that’ll be easy.”

  “Why not?” Ella said. “There was a party, then there was a snowstorm in the house and Laura White disappeared right in front of everyone’s eyes, and the tenth member isn’t going to be trained after all. That’s it in a nutshell.”

  “You got farther than your dad did, in any case,” Ingrid said.

  Ella was already getting out of the car. She stopped, lowered her bum back onto the seat, and looked at Ingrid.

  “What did you say about my dad?”

  Katz froze. Her right eye darted nervously as the light hit it.

  “I thought you knew,” she said.

  “Knew what?”

  “That Paavo Emil, your father, knew Laura White many years ago. And us—the members of the Society. He used to go around with us. A very strong runner. The Flying Rabbitbacker. He wrote some poems for Ms White and tried to get into the Society. But he didn’t get in. She liked him tremendously and his poems, but she thought his true nature was to run, not to write.”

  Katz took out a bag of liquorice and offered some to Ella, who declined. She filled her mouth with the sweets, obscuring her speech.

  “Your father had talent, but you’ve succeeded where he failed—you made an impression on Laura White. Tonight you lost a teacher who could have sped things up for you, but hey—you’re just as talented as you were before. The great author and creator of authors wouldn’t have chosen you out of all the people who’ve tried to get into the Society over the years for no reason.”

  Ella sat without moving.

  “Do you have all your things?” Ingrid asked, peeping into the back seat. “Didn’t you have a handbag with you? I brought one to the car anyway…”

  Ella nodded her head, which was now full of such heavy thoughts that she couldn’t speak. She showed Ingrid her handbag and suddenly remembered that inside it, along with her handkerchief and coin purse and keys, was a small leather-bound book.

  The rules of The Game.

  10

  ELLA MILANA and Marjatta Milana would have missed Christmas altogether if it hadn’t been marked on the calendar.

  Some local organization had made it their business to worry about the Christmas joy of widows and orphans and brought them a package in a cardboard box. It had gingerbread, tarts, fruitcake, traditional Christmas casserole, a ham roll, a couple of women’s magazines and a chocolate elf. They tried to eat the food, not wanting to be ungrateful, but being the recipients of charity lent it all an unpleasant aftertaste.

  They gave each other wrapped presents, no longer remembering what they contained.

  Later Marjatta Milana put a big pile of decorative pillows on the sofa because it had been looking so unused. Ella came into the dark room, lost in her own thoughts, and thought she saw her father lying on the sofa. “Don’t start bawling,” her mother barked from the kitchen table where she was going through the papers concerning her father’s death.

  A dream Ella had the night before Christmas Eve also gnawed at her holiday mood. In it, Santa Claus came to their house, and behind his beard she could see Paavo Emil Milana’s rotting face. He brought them a sack of mythological figurines and a card for a free mythological mapping. “Sorry Santa’s a little dead,” he said behind his beard, “but the damned garden gnomes gave him a good knocking around. They’re all communists, you know, every one of them. But now Santa would like to hear a poem or two. Can anyone think of a nice poem?”

  Then the dream changed, and Ella was lying in bed listening to Laura White’s dead body as it climbed the ladder to her bedroom window. In the dream she knew that Laura White was going to each house where she sensed there were Creatureville books. She also knew that the author didn’t mean her any harm; she just wanted to read the books she’d written when she was alive, over and over.

  On the floor there was a copy of Rabbit Tracks with a lead story urging locals to be understanding towards Laura White’s dead body if it should break into their homes. After all, it was “the body of the most beloved Finnish children’s author in the world”.

  Ella woke up. It was still night. She imagined for a moment that someone really was scratching and tapping on her window.

  It was just the crackling frost. She buried her head in her pillow and went back to her dreams, which no longer contained any restless undead.

  Over the long Christmas holidays Marjatta Milana shovelled the paths in the garden. It was a little more pleasant than crying in the kitchen. Ella sat in the house, where she still felt like a guest, even though she did partly own it. She sat perched at her desk, holding her temples and thinking. She wasn’t going to make a move until she had analysed the situation thoroughly.

  The night after Christmas, she woke up in her bed and opened her eyes. In her sleep, she had realized that a person is made up not just of her physical parts and her memories, but also her future.

  A person’s future was part of her, just as much as her hands and feet and reproductive organs. But an individual future was such a large part of a person’s time that you couldn’t see it all in one moment, and without any information about it people ended up trying to guess the true nature of their future.

  If this theory was correct, a person’s future could be thought of as a kind of soul that defined one’s ultimate being on the axis of time.

  When she’d returned to Rabbit Back, Ella had consisted of lovely, curving lips, faulty ovaries, and a future as a language and literature teacher. Then her future had been operated on and she’d received a new diagnosis: she was going to be a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an author trained by Laura White.

  At first she shrank from her new future, because it was a considerable shock to her identity, but gradually it had started to appeal to her more and more. She had even looked through the History of Finnish Literature for the section about Laura White and the Society she had formed around her, and got excited imagining how in the next printing they would include her name, Ella Milana, as the Society’s tenth member.

  What was more, her being, spreading itself across the axis of time, was actually different now. She had experienced a similar shock as a child the first time she’d stood between two mirrors and seen her own profile. Before she saw it, she had imagined it very differently.

  Our individual futures are never what we imagine them to be.

  For instance, she had once imagined that her soul, her individual future, her most fundamental being, would include giving birth to several children in her thirties. She would have put it on her passport if she could. But then the gynaecologist had shown her, with the help of mirrors, that she was not the person she had imagined.

  Once, at a lecture on aesthetics, she had admired a stranger, a man sitting to her right. She had watched him for half an hour, fantasized about him, and even decided to try to get to know him. Then he had turned, and from this new angle, he was unattractive to her.

  It wasn’t possible to see an image of the whole person at once, because your point of observation was at one point on the axis of time, and the thing observed was shot through with innumerable points of observation. Every day would present a new
side to view, and a being that you thought beautiful might suddenly prove unbearably ugly to you.

  Falling in love with a person’s momentary being was as irrational as falling in love with the left side of his face, or the back of his head, or some other individual part of him. That was why Ella couldn’t really blame her former boyfriend for not knowing how to love her once her childless future was made visible.

  In the midst of developing this complicated theory, Ella heard a noise. This time she was awake enough to see that there really was someone peeking in at her window.

  There was a dark figure standing on the fire ladder knocking on the glass.

  Ella didn’t move. She carefully tugged the covers up over her face until only her eyes showed. Then the moon flashed momentarily over the face of the knocker.

  Unlike in her dream, it wasn’t Laura White’s body. It was the round, easily recognized hamster face of Arne C. Ahlqvist, alias Aura Jokinen, whom Ella had met at Laura White’s party.

  The woman pressed her face against the window and left a blind spot with her breath. Ella had read the rules of The Game. She knew what this was about.

  The sci-fi writer had come to challenge her.

  The rules of The Game stated how the challenge should be made:

  Every member of the Society has an unlimited right to challenge any other member to a Game. The challenge must be performed between the hours of 10 PM and 6 AM, and The Game itself, with both players taking their turn, must be played immediately upon making the challenge. The challenger has a right to make every attempt to challenge, using any means available, provided that delivering the challenge doesn’t cause unreasonable harm. The challenge shall be considered delivered when the one challenged perceives the presence of the challenger and the challenger perceives that he or she has been perceived. Once a challenge has been delivered, the one challenged cannot refuse The Game without forfeiting membership in the Society.

  Ella closed her eyes tightly and pretended to be in a deep sleep, trusting that a middle-aged woman with a family wouldn’t stay hanging from a ladder in the freezing cold for very long. She hoped with all her might that her mother, asleep across the hall, wouldn’t be awakened by the knocking and come rushing in to confuse the situation.

  The figure finally disappeared, and Ella was calm again.

  11

  THE CHANGE to her personal future was a deep disappointment to Ella, and she was also upset by many everyday worries. The bills had to be paid and the groceries bought. There wouldn’t be any open substitute positions until next fall, and her stipend had disappeared with the snowstorm. She made a long and thorough examination of her personal future and realized that she had to earn some money somehow.

  One thing she didn’t want her future to include was unemployment, which for her had always meant a descent into dispirited listlessness.

  Eventually it sank in that she couldn’t change the cards she’d been dealt. She just had to play them.

  When Professor Eljas Korpimäki heard a few days before Laura White’s party that his favourite former student was going to be a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society, he was thrilled.

  “That’s incredible news. You should show Ms White your dissertation. It’s quite a competent bit of research. Maybe sometime in the future you might agree to let me interview you about your experience. I just happen to be about to embark on a new project on Laura White. Thank you for calling and telling me. It’s always so heart-warming to hear news like this. By the way, would you tell Laura White hello from a humble professor who is still the world’s leading Laura White expert? You might also mention that the same professor was just in Tokyo delivering a lecture on her works. If she would just relent and grant me an interview…”

  When the media announced that Laura White had disappeared without a trace, the professor called Ella in quiet bewilderment, lamenting the fate of everyone involved and wishing his favourite student the best in the future. “Perhaps we can discuss what happened later, when you’re back on your feet. I don’t want to trouble you any more for now.”

  Ella called him a couple of days later. She enquired whether he would be interested in paying her for a research project on Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society.

  He could hardly contain his joy. Two days later he called to tell her that everything had been arranged handily.

  “I put some weight behind your grant application, and did what I could to get assurance from my contacts that your funding was basically guaranteed. We’ll have to wait for the allotted time, of course, but there shouldn’t be any problem. You’ll get a stipend from the university for your first few months of work. It’s a time-sensitive topic, after all, the fact-finding, in light of recent events. But are you quite sure that the members of the Society will agree to be interviewed? At this point the whole affair is still at the level of the women’s magazines.”

  “Yes, they’ll talk to me,” Ella promised.

  She would receive funding for a year of work. She was guessing that a year of The Game would get her all the information she needed from the writers in the Society. After that she would find a teaching position at some school far from Rabbit Back.

  Ella was afraid of The Game. It certainly wasn’t an easy way to gather information. But the idea of it was also exhilarating.

  If The Game worked the way she imagined, based on the rule book, she would learn things that would otherwise have been left to speculation for all eternity.

  She could dig up anything she wanted from the Society’s past.

  12

  INGRID KATZ closed up the library at eight and sent the intern home.

  She climbed the stairs to the third floor and walked around the upper level to see everything below from a bird’s-eye view. This walking inspection was more a ritual than a necessary act. As always, she reminded herself that all this was her responsibility. Then she went back downstairs.

  It had been a satisfying day: she’d had to remove only one book from the collections, and for merely ordinary reasons—a patron had dropped it into a bowl of berry porridge.

  Ingrid Katz closed the main door, checked to make sure it was locked, and stopped for a moment between the marble columns to breathe the outside air. The columns had once made her feel like the keeper of a sacred temple. That feeling had faded now. They were just pillars of stone. When she was feeling glum she even thought that the books were just bundles of paper with text printed on them.

  She walked around to the back of the library where her Ford had its own parking space, and opened the car door. It hadn’t frozen shut this time.

  She sat in the car but didn’t yet start the engine. As was her habit, she paused to acknowledge her negative thoughts and go through them one by one.

  Today one of them was the recurring thought of changing jobs, leaving the library for someone else to worry about. She let the idea take over, let it feed her desire to do something else, anything else. Well maybe not anything. What she wanted was to write, to write freely, to write something meaningful. She wanted to write. She did, after all, work among great books, in a virtual garden of creativity, when you thought about it, but she herself hadn’t been able to write anything for a long time. She had been scraping together a modest children’s book, but she had stalled even in that pathetic attempt.

  She nevertheless knew that she could write something wonderful, something unprecedented, if she could just get started. A great novel that would win at least the Finlandia Prize, and maybe even be an international success, a hit with readers and critics, and sell so well that she could build her family a large house in Rabbit Back’s best neighbourhood.

  But all her energies were taken up with preventing the library from careening into chaos. Books were being ruined all the time. And they were stolen. Faulty works appeared on the shelves constantly. The budget was cut every year. Another part-time library assistant had been laid off and replaced by an unpaid intern who let loose flaccid farts b
etween the stacks, thinking no one would notice.

  Ingrid seized her unpleasant thoughts, shoved them in an imaginary garbage bag, and flung them from her mind.

  Then she cast off her skin. She was no longer Ingrid Katz the librarian. She was now Ingrid Katz, wife and mother, who was just getting off work, about to be greeted with smiles.

  As she started the car she looked around the library grounds. It was dark in the shadows of the trees; there could be anyone lurking there. For several days she’d had bouts of paranoia like she hadn’t felt in years. She glanced in the rear-view mirror once more to make sure she didn’t have any extra passengers in the back seat. She was conscious of the fact that this was disconcerting behaviour, but on the other hand she did have past precedents for it.

  She drove straight home and greeted her family. She came home every evening in time to put her children to bed. She’d promised her husband she would.

  Ingrid Katz had birthed four children in all. The first two had been made by a more or less mutual understanding. The last two were a gift to her husband, who had always wanted a super family.

  She liked the children, too, of course.

  “This is the life,” her husband would say as they sat surrounded by their children.

  One time Ingrid had answered, “You don’t read books.” She’d meant it as an accusation, as the worst sort of insult. She said it maliciously.

  Her husband laughed. “Books,” he said. “There are a lot more important things in life than books. The children, for instance.”

  This evening the children wanted their mother to read old fairy tales to them. She shook her head and read to them from her unfinished children’s book. They fell asleep so quickly that she wondered if she ought to add some more exciting scenes. She tucked them in. After she’d gone to the bathroom, she put on her winter coat and looked for her gloves. She’d put them in her coat pocket, but now they were gone.