The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  “Damn it,” she whispered, standing in front of the entryway mirror. She stood looking at her reflection. When had she started looking like that?

  “Are you looking for your gloves, honey?” her husband asked from the kitchen. “I put them on the bathroom radiator to warm for the morning. Are you going for a walk again? Did you remember to take your vitamins? You ought to take some or you’ll come down with something among all those books.”

  “I remembered,” Ingrid lied. “Yes, I’m going out. It’s too bad one of us has to stay and watch the kids. I’m going to the kiosk to buy some liquorice and brush off the book dust.”

  As she went out the door she asked, “Do you need anything from the kiosk?”

  Her husband thought about it. Finally, he said he didn’t need anything. Ingrid Katz left. Her husband never needed anything from the kiosk, she knew that without asking, but ritual required her to ask. Their marriage was a careful construction of interlocking rituals, and was rather precious for that. Sort of like Midsummer or Christmas.

  It was nine o’clock. The ritual of her evening walk required that she be back by ten. Then her husband could go to bed and she could sit up on the sofa reading for a couple of hours. She wanted to wish her husband goodnight. That was how they did it.

  Ingrid walked here and there through the familiar streets of the town. A few dogs came to meet her. A small, mixed-breed mutt stopped in front of her and growled, but a sarcastic snort sufficed to send it on its way.

  Ingrid liked her walks through Rabbit Back. They always skirted close to the centre but it was easy to imagine that she was walking in a great forest, far from civilization.

  There were seven statues altogether along her favourite route. They were part of the Rabbit Back art campaign. The idea was to make the whole district into one big gallery. You might see a statue at the foot of a tree, in the shrubbery, on the shore of the pond. Some of them were grotesque—frightening, in fact—others comical, graceful, even provocative, like the bare-breasted water nymph beside a certain small pond.

  The model for the buxom water nymph had been the artist’s own daughter, who taught the younger grades at Rabbit Back School. Ingrid saw a crowd of little boys gathered around the statue to admire the artist’s work.

  Beyond the water nymph and the crowd of boys Ingrid reached the lonely portion of her walk. The path narrowed, there were fewer ponds and the trees grew thicker.

  She glanced around. She didn’t want to be surprised, not when she was already feeling paranoid. She also didn’t want to see every statue too clearly. There were two malevolent-looking goblins along this stretch, not to mention the grotesque figures her imagination made from the snow and shadows. Ingrid’s silly children’s author’s head slipped easily into monster stories that she used to frighten herself.

  A little girl named Ingrid was walking down the road, and little did she know that there lurked a monster…

  She stopped twice under street lamps to listen and look to see if anyone was following her.

  Then she saw coloured lights in the dark. The little shop signs gave her a happy feeling. The signs in Rabbit Back were nostalgic, old-fashioned: HELI’S SALON, read one, and Ingrid remembered that she ought to make an appointment for a cut and dye.

  *

  Exactly an hour after she’d left the house, Ingrid halted at her front door. She dug out her house key and started to fit it in the lock.

  Suddenly there was a movement in the darkness.

  She spun around and stared hard at a nearby bush. It seemed to have moved about half a metre. Nonsense, she thought. Then the bush started rolling towards her.

  She dropped her keys, her heart lurched and started to pound in her chest. She looked at her watch. It was 10:01.

  It was happening again.

  Her hands and feet went bloodless and she felt dizzy, awful. She closed her eyes and turned her back on it, forcing herself to smile nonchalantly.

  Then she felt a breath on her neck whispering the dreaded words: I challenge you, Ingrid Katz.

  She turned around slowly, her eyes wet, a strained smile on her lips, and saw Ella Milana’s amused face before her.

  Ella watched as Ingrid gradually recovered.

  Katz was slumped sideways on the porch steps, pale and breathless. At the library and the party she had seemed stern and brisk. Now the irony was crumbling and dropping away. Ella wondered if she’d gone too far. But Arne C. Ahlqvist had clambered up a ladder and scratched at her bedroom window in the middle of the night to get to her.

  “Sorry to startle you,” Ella said, “but I had the impression that this was how you did it in the Society.”

  Ingrid waved a hand at her. “I won’t claim otherwise. It’s just that I’ve been out of practice for a while. It’s such a crazy thing to do. Dreadful, really. Utter foolishness. It’s no wonder you can’t talk about The Game to outsiders. They’d laugh at us, shut us up somewhere, the lot of us. But those are the rules. Laura wrote them, and it’s not our place to change them around.” She searched in the snow for her keys as she muttered this, her face lighting up when she found them. “But we can, in theory, be civilized about the whole thing,” she continued. “We could use the phone, for instance. ‘Hello, this is fellow Society member so-and-so. Could you possibly join me for The Game tonight after dinner?’ But we hardly play The Game at all anymore. It’s been more than three years since I last played.”

  Katz thought for a moment and then said, “We can play at the library, if you like.”

  Ingrid jangled her keys, opened the door and hung her coat on a hook. “You’re the challenger. You decide where we play. The children’s section? The reading lounge?”

  They passed the elves, gnomes and nymphs standing in the dark and Katz led them between the shelves to a reading corner with a table and two bar stools. In the middle of the table stood a small stone figure of a woman with plump breasts, wide hips, and butterfly wings.

  Ella liked this spot. She lost herself in looking at the floors opening up above them and the skylight, the winter night falling through it into the room in a grid of light.

  “Do you have a handkerchief?” Ingrid enquired, taking off her glasses and placing them carefully in their case.

  Ella took out a red scarf and tied it around the librarian’s eyes, as the rules of The Game instructed.

  “I hope it’s not too tight,” she said.

  “No,” Ingrid answered. “You managed to get a rule book from somewhere, then?”

  Ella could smell liquorice on her breath. “Yes,” she answered. “Martti Winter loaned it to me. I’ll return it when I get my own copy, of course. That’s promised in the rule book: Every member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society shall receive one copy of the rules of The Game for their own study.

  “You can blame me for that,” Ingrid said. “I’m the one who put you up to asking him. I suppose you’ve read the part about how to present the questions as well?”

  “The rules say that I can ask you anything at all and you have to answer with absolute honesty,” Ella said. She had the rule book in her bag, just in case. “If I’m not satisfied with your answer, I ask again until the answer sounds sufficiently believable. You’re expected to try with all your might to be completely open and honest. If I get a sense that you’re not making an effort to answer honestly, it’s my right and responsibility as the challenger to help you by any possible means to find the truth within yourself.”

  Ingrid thought for a moment. “You haven’t been trained in The Game,” she said at last. “Are you quite sure you can follow through all the way to the end?”

  “When I’ve got my answers from you, I am indeed ready to answer any questions you may have, if that’s what you mean.”

  Ingrid shook her head. “That’s my responsibility. What I’m worried about is whether you’re ready to get the truth out of me if I don’t answer truthfully enough. I have to know if you can honour the spirit of The Game to the last. You should und
erstand that once a question has been asked, you have a duty, to both of us, to make sure that I give a complete and honest answer. You simply cannot content yourself with anything less than the whole truth.”

  Ella felt her palms sweating. “I’ve read the rules,” she said, “and I understand them.”

  Ingrid’s mouth grinned. Ella wished she could see her eyes.

  “But I find it hard to believe that you have it in you,” Ingrid said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe you can play The Game properly. Laura White hasn’t trained you.”

  Ella bit her lip. “Are you trying to make me say that I understand the meaning and the demands of Rule 21?” she said.

  Ingrid Katz nodded.

  Rule 21 wasn’t an easy one. Ella had read it through many times until she was sure she understood it.

  Once she’d read Rule 21 it was easy to understand the rituals associated with challenging someone to The Game. People could more easily free themselves from their inhibitions at night, and once you had the other person in your clutches, like a predator, it was easier to temporarily abandon common courtesy.

  Ella took hold of Ingrid’s lower lip. Then she twisted it until the woman let out a high-pitched cry of pain.

  A drop of blood rolled down her chin. She pushed Ella’s hand away and gave a squeak as she felt her lip with her fingers.

  “All right,” Ingrid said, mollified and a little frightened. “You understand Rule 21. So let’s play.”

  Ella asked her question.

  She had formed it carefully beforehand so that it wouldn’t be too broad or vague, precisely according to the rules.

  “I want information about those books you took off the shelves and destroyed. You weren’t honest with me about them. Tell me the truth now.”

  Ingrid Katz turned pale under the scarf. She made a nervous movement, touched her swollen lip again, and said, “I’ve tried not to think too closely about it. This is the one thing that Martti Winter doesn’t know about me, as far as I know what he knows and am not just thinking I know. But all right. The Game has started, so I’ll spill.”

  13

  Ingrid Katz Spills

  ELLA STOPPED HER and asked her what she meant by “spill”.

  Ingrid’s mouth smiled. “It’s one of The Game’s more recent terms. You draw it out, and I spill it. I spill, I spilled, I am spilling. At some point we wanted to distinguish between playing The Game and telling stories, because storytelling is an art, but The Game is something else entirely.

  “You see, The Game doesn’t produce stories, it produces material for stories. That happens when you break open the stories and let their unformed essence spill out. That’s what The Game is for. Everybody has valuable material inside them that The Game can help to draw out.”

  Even with her eyes covered Ingrid Katz seemed to sense Ella’s confusion.

  “I suppose it sounds a little tasteless,” Ingrid said apologetically. “I may have been the one who suggested the term. You won’t find it in the rule book. I was thinking about collecting sap from trees. It seemed like a beautiful idea in a way. To go to the woods and make a little hole in a tree and come away with something valuable without doing any damage. Arne C. was very enthusiastic about the term, but she has her own ideas about it now. She suggested we call The Game Nosferatu, but I let it be known that I would quit the Society the second such a name was adopted.”

  Katz began spilling by telling Ella that she wasn’t the only book thief. “You wouldn’t have got it into your head to sneak in after those books if I hadn’t committed my own book theft a good thirty years ago.”

  She hesitated.

  “At least that’s one way to look at it,” she added uncertainly, “now that I’m putting my feelings into words. It’s weird. I’ve never let myself think it through to the end until now.”

  She said she’d been twelve years old. It was the first week of July. “We—Martti and I—were spending the morning on the hill by the school. We started acting childish, making rivers and dams, the way children do. We were going to Laura White’s house but first we wanted to play in the mud. It was like that on the hill, a good place to dig rivers in the dirt. It was nice. It was exciting

  to see how the water would go where we wanted it to, and we decided to go to the dead rat’s grave before we went to Laura’s house; we thought we still had time. Martti had on a new pair of leather shoes and they got all dirty, of course. He tried to make light of the whole thing, said, “It’s just a pair of shoes,” but I knew that his mother was going to tear into him. I promised to take his shoes to my house and ask my father to do something with them. My dad was a cobbler. He had a shop where the Brumerus kiosk is now…

  Well, Martti was very grateful, just sighing with relief, even though he tried to hide it from me. And…

  Ingrid is quiet for some time, then says, “I’m sorry. Maybe all this doesn’t have anything to do with the books. I don’t know. But I’m trying to go back in my mind to that day, and one detail leads to another, and so on.

  “It’s extremely difficult to remember things correctly. I remember that day in one sense, but of course it’s not clear, not a whole film in my head that I can just reel out for you. There are breaks in the film in several places, part of it’s dim, some of the story is jumbled, a lot of it is faded almost completely away. There are alternate versions of some of it. The days get mixed up. I remember the feelings, but are they the original feelings or are they the feelings I have when I remember it?

  “You must have noticed sometimes how when you tell a story you make up all kinds of additions to it, partly because it improves the story and partly because there are always gaps in your memory. You can’t do that in The Game. The Game isn’t for telling stories. In The Game you leak out whatever is deepest within you, nothing more and nothing less. But I’m sure you read about it in the rule book, so I’ll stop explaining. Please be patient, though, and don’t pinch my lip quite yet. I’m rummaging through my head as I talk and gradually I’ll muddle into a deeper memory and some superfluous things might come out in the meantime. Anyway, I do remember the rat… I got it

  for my birthday. A dead rat. Or that’s what I thought at first, when I found a package on the kitchen table with a dead rat in it. I thought it was one of my father’s deep lessons. He was always playing those kinds of tricks on me. I found out later that he had found the carcass in the cellar and swept it up into the first piece of paper he found to take it outside, and then forgotten it on the table when he went out to his workshop.

  I didn’t know what to do with it. I imagined my father would ask me in the evening what I’d done with my gift, and I ought to have a thoughtful answer. That’s the way my father was. He was always inventing different challenges and tests for me. So anyway, I decided to give the rat a proper funeral. I went and asked Martti to come with me.

  Martti was excited. He came over and put together a little coffin for it and it was the finest little coffin I had ever seen.

  He made a fabric lining for it out of his handkerchief. I said wouldn’t his mother be angry with him for putting an expensive handkerchief in a rat’s coffin, but he didn’t say anything. He was so serious.

  That happened in the morning. When Martti and I were on our way to Laura White’s house we decided to go by the rat’s grave again. We had put a sort of little cross on it. We made it out of popsicle sticks, I think. When we were at the grave, Martti started crying. I was shocked, wondering what was the matter. He explained that he was imagining his mother lying dead under the ground.

  I told him that his mother was alive, unlike my mama, but his tears just kept coming. I socked him in the arm as hard as I could. I said he ought to save his crying for when there was a reason to cry. That was one of my father’s sayings. I made it my business to instruct Martti.

  He got angry and ran away towards Laura White’s house. I remember I stood there for a long time before I realized that he had left me standing alone at a rat’s gr
ave. So I walked after him.

  The way to Laura’s house seemed terribly long. When I got there, I walked around in the garden for a while trying to decide whether to go inside at all. I went to the edge of the pond and was about to rinse my face with the cool water, but then I was startled by a branch or a reflection and I ran to the porch. The pond in Laura’s garden made all of us nervous—it was fun to skate on in the winter, but during the summer we didn’t go near it. I don’t know why.

  When I think about it now, we could have swum in it. Don’t children usually enjoy swimming? For some reason we just never did. Maybe it was because of Laura. She hated and feared the water. She never went swimming and probably never went boating either, and she preferred not to go near deep water, and we probably got that attitude from her.

  Anyway, I went inside after all and I heard voices from farther inside, from the corner room. The others were there, already reading their stories out loud. I think I heard Martti’s voice above the others, and oh how I hated him at that moment. And to top it off, it hit me just then that we were supposed to write something about our mothers for that meeting, and I hadn’t written a single line. I wanted to cry.

  I was all mixed up. I didn’t know if I should go in where the others were or just go home. I may have had a fever, too. I was shivering. It felt like something had shut me off from everything. And then I went and looked around the house, although I was a little bit afraid to walk around by myself. I’d never really looked around Laura White’s house before, and now I had decided to do it for the hell of it, just because I got the idea in my head.