The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Ingrid Katz stops speaking and points to her mouth. “Excuse me, but could I have something to drink? There’s some water in the back room, I think. All this talking is drying out my mouth. I haven’t talked so much at once in a long time. My job keeps me quiet most of the time. Since the signs specifically prohibit talking.”

  Ella fetches a paper cup of water from the back room. Ingrid sips it, apparently pondering what to say next.

  “The next thing I have any complete memory of is running away from the house with my heart pounding and two books in my hand. The other children are still in the corner room with Laura and I have

  those two books in my hand. Jesus.

  What happened in the house is a little dim and confused. I was walking around, opening doors and peeking into places. I remember peeping into some drawers and seeing a wonderful music box which I would have liked to have for myself. It had a ballet dancer. And I remember a big chair that I sat in for a while. It had a strange smell, sour and damp and sort of mossy. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in the woods, and I think I may have fallen asleep in the chair. Then I can almost remember that I went into another room that I thought led into the entryway, but I ended up right back in the same room I’d left. I felt sort of lost. But I’ve always had a lousy sense of direction.

  I have to say now that I can’t be sure of the rest of this. It’s in my head, but I don’t know if it’s a memory. I mean, it could just as well be some dream or fantasy. I put it in one of my children’s books and worked on it so much that I don’t really know how much of the original memory is left.

  But I do remember something like this—there was a colourful place on the wall where the light was really interesting and I had a delightful thought that, hey, it looks like there’s a door there, and then I touched the wall with my fingers and it gave way and suddenly there was a door opening in front of me.

  All these books appeared in this room. And I stepped inside. At some point I started to feel bad, I got dizzy and shivery and wanted to throw up.

  I don’t remember anything about the room itself, I just remember the dream I’ve had many times. In the dream, the room is full of water and I’m swimming from shelf to shelf looking at the books. And in the dream I see one book on a shelf that I’ve been looking for everywhere for a long time, and another one that I really must have, and then I swim towards the door with the two books in my hand and I’m about to drown because the books weigh so much.

  And then I always wake up.

  Ingrid grows quiet again and seems to be gathering her thoughts. “A lot of overlapping, hellishly unclear memories,” she laughs. “It’s annoying! It’s such a mess! Like at first there are a lot of films overlapping each other, and then I’m running out of the house with the books under my arm, feeling thrilled and guilty at the same time, horrified and confused, like you are when you have a fever. And then the memory breaks off.”

  Ella rubs her brow, trying to make something out of Ingrid’s story. “So what does this have to do with the library books?” she asks.

  “I’m not sure,” Ingrid says, “but at my deepest, I feel like it’s related. If you’ll wait a moment, I have another memory. In this one, I’m coming out of the rain into the library. I remember the cold and the wet, remember how

  water is dripping off me onto the library floor. I’m quite wet and shivering. The stolen books are under my dress, against my stomach, and I so want to get rid of them.

  And I don’t remember what books they actually were, although I know I looked at them. I had dreams about them, but it’s hard to remember dreams precisely later on; they disappear completely as soon as you start to focus on them. But I did still remember that, at least in my dream, there was something weird about the books, something that made it so that I couldn’t possibly keep them. One of them frightened me, something about a dead emperor—don’t ask, I really don’t know—and the other was a bit hazy, fluid and wavering, and when you read it you started to get dizzy and see double, or triple.

  I waited for the old librarian, Birgit Ström, to go somewhere, then I went into the back room and closed the door behind me. I thought she was going to have a poo. Sometimes she would take a long time in the toilet and the smell of her poo would spread out over the library. I ran, all wet and chilled, to a book trolley and shoved the books in with the others and my hands were shaking terribly, and I guess after that I just left. I don’t remember anything more.

  Ingrid grimaces and her voice becomes thin and old as she continues. “Those trolleys were for the books that had already been returned and were waiting to be shelved in different parts of the library. So the books I put there infected all the other books on the trolley, and they spread the infection through the shelves. That’s how it all started.”

  Ella leans forward and stares at the librarian’s dry lips. “You called it an ‘infection’,” she says. “What kind of infection do you mean? Some kind of mould?”

  Ingrid looks limp. “You’ve seen what an infected book looks like. I don’t have a name for it. In my head I sometimes call it ‘the book plague’—on those rare occasions when I dare to think about it. Or maybe you could call it a ‘book mutation’. If you wanted to talk about it at all. Maybe the world is what it is. But there are things you can’t talk about. You just keep quiet about them, and I would put this on that list.”

  Her face grows tense.

  “I don’t know what exactly it is. There are changes in some of the books. They somehow become… how shall I put it… fluid. And your Dostoevsky was a particularly bad case. It changed even more before I burned it.”

  She stretches her mouth into an ironic smile. Ella wonders if the air of the library is getting thinner or if she’s just imagining it. She feels like the blindfolded Ingrid is leading both of them to the edge of some kind of cliff.

  “I noticed when I was in school that there was something strange about the books in the Rabbit Back library. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I felt from the very beginning that it was my particular problem.” Ingrid thought for a moment, then changed the subject. “When I was younger I once had a little trouble, the kind of thing that can happen to a girl who messes around with the wrong kind of boy. I knew it was there but I didn’t want to think about it. I just shut off my mind until I’d gone to the doctor and bought the pills, and when I took them, I thought about something else altogether.”

  A stony silence fills the library. Ella looks up at the ceiling. The skylight looks blacker than before. The night huddles tighter around the building.

  If she really listens closely, she imagines she can hear the books quietly rustling on the shelves.

  “After high school I went to university and studied library science,” Ingrid recites, through rigid lips. “I came here first as an assistant, and then, when Birgit Ström died, I became the librarian.”

  Ella opens her mouth to speak, but the words evaporate from her lips into the dry library air. She shifts in her seat. Her ass is numb.

  “All right,” she says wearily. “I don’t really understand what you’ve told me, but I accept your story.”

  Ingrid Katz shakes her head. “I haven’t told you a story. The Game isn’t for stories. If only we could tell each other stories! Telling stories is nice. It’s nice to embellish them with all kinds of things, and leave out the embarrassing parts. You can make stories logical and understandable. But if we play The Game right, all that comes out is what’s inside you, nothing more and nothing less. I spill, you spill, we spill.”

  She takes a deep breath and stands up.

  “You’ll come to realize how The Game works,” she says, her voice lively again. She takes the scarf off and hands it to Ella. “In your head, you have a clear, rational version of things. You know—your own story, the one you tell in public. We all dress ourselves in stories. Then you start to spill, and for a little while afterwards you don’t understand what you’re really saying anymore. And finally, always, the thing that is mos
t shocking about spilling is you yourself. That’s the true nature of The Game. Here. Put this over your eyes. It’s your turn. I want your father’s death.”

  14

  AFTER THE GAME, Ella Milana slept for a week.

  Her mother came to stand outside her door now and then, to bring her a sandwich and let her know what was happening in the outside world.

  There was going to be a fireworks show to celebrate the new year. Marjatta Milana bought a raffle ticket when she went into town. The principal called five times to ask about the essays, which Ella still had not returned. Marjatta shovelled new paths in the snow and kept the old ones clear as more snow fell. She drove away two aggressive dogs that were hunting some small animal among the currant bushes. There was a good programme on television, which Marjatta ended up watching alone. There was a proper meal waiting in the kitchen.

  A postcard arrived from Ingrid Katz. Marjatta Milana read it aloud, wondered that her daughter seemed to have taken up sports, and pushed the card under the door. It read: You may feel achy after The Game. It’s normal, and will pass.

  On the seventh day Ella got up, dressed, took her bag and went out. The first flakes of a new snowfall were drifting to the ground. The drifts were full of shovelled paths. Ella walked along one of them to the shed, searched for a canister she knew was there for the lawn mower, came out with it and doused her bag with petrol.

  She struck a match under the apple trees. Her mother appeared on the steps and rocked back and forth as she watched her through the branches.

  The match flew in a graceful arc and landed in the bag. The flames swirled higher than Ella had anticipated and she fell backwards onto her bum in the snow.

  “What exactly do you think you’re doing?” her mother shrieked. “Destroying a good bag! Aren’t your students’ essays in that bag, the ones the principal was asking about?”

  “They’re infested with mould,” Ella coughed, waving the smoke away.

  Her mother bustled over, grabbed her under the arm, pulled her to her feet, farther from the pyre, and tossed snow on the hem of her coat, which was smoking. Ella watched with satisfaction as the papers burned in the bag.

  “I noticed it a couple of days ago. I don’t know where it came from, but I certainly can’t take them back to the school or give them to anyone. You know how these things can spread like wildfire.”

  A week earlier, when The Game had ended and Ella had left the library with Ingrid Katz, Ingrid hadn’t offered her a ride, explaining, “I need oxygen. Need to clear my mind. Recovering from a spill takes time, and I have to come back and open the library in a few hours.”

  When she got home, Ella wandered into her room and tried once more to get to work grading the essays still in her bag. She couldn’t understand anything she read. The pupils’ texts were more confused and shapeless than usual, positively incomprehensible in places. She was beginning to suspect that she’d suffered some sort of attack of the brain, but then she noticed that she was able to read other texts without difficulty.

  The problem wasn’t her; it was the essays.

  She watched the burning bag now, no longer baffled by the book plague Ingrid had told her about. At first it certainly had bothered her, but then she’d come up with a clever theory about the state of everyday reality:

  Reality was a game board for all of humanity to play on, formed from all human interaction. You could in principle make it up out of anything you wished, provided you all agreed upon it. But it was easiest if everyone used square pieces, because they would all fit perfectly together and form a seamless whole.

  So square pieces had become the standard. Ella guessed this had happened sometime in the Middle Ages, or perhaps it came with the knowledge gained during the Enlightenment.

  Occasionally, however, an unusual piece might fall into someone’s hands. The board had to be made according to strict standards, though, if you wanted to avoid problems with the rest of the world. So you had to disregard the non-standard pieces, had to maintain the right attitude about them.

  And that’s how Ella handled the troubling question of the book plague.

  The highest flames swirled up from the confiscated comic book. Its pages showed vaguely duck-like figures behaving bizarrely. She hadn’t looked closely at them since she’d come home from The Game, spent.

  It was just a dream, the duck dressed like a sailor splitting an older duck’s skull with an axe and doing it again to another duck that happened along.

  The page crinkled in the fire for a moment and was devoured.

  Ella Milana sat at her desk planning her research project.

  Her first stipend payment had arrived in her account that day, so she had to make a start. She stared at her own reflection in the window, forming her first question about Laura White.

  She also had to decide whom she would challenge next. She couldn’t challenge Ingrid Katz again until Ella herself or someone else was challenged. The rule book said: You cannot challenge the same member of the Society a second time until you have challenged someone else or until you yourself are challenged by another member of the Society.

  Ella examined the printed list of Society members Ingrid had given her. It had a picture of each member, including Ella. Her picture had been taken at a local photo shop a couple of days before Laura White’s party. She looked like a hopeless, overeager idiot.

  The list included contact information for each member. Except for the screenwriter Toivo Holm and the author Anna-Maija Seläntö, who lived in Sweden, all of the members were living in Rabbit Back, including Ella.

  This was the list of all the members of the Rabbit Back Literature Society:

  MARTTI WINTER

  INGRID KATZ

  HELINÄ OKSALA

  AURA JOKINEN

  SILJA SAARISTO

  ELIAS KANGASNIEMI

  TOIVO HOLM

  OONA KARINIEMI

  ANNA-MAIJA SELÄNTÖ

  ELLA MILANA

  Ella looked at the photographs. She stopped at Martti Winter and thought at first that they had mixed up the pictures. Like the other members’ photos, it had been taken years ago. Instead of a fat, worn-out man, the photo showed a fine-featured, almost beautiful youth.

  It was the same photo that was on the inside covers of his books. Ella suddenly remembered how in high school she had read his entire oeuvre, occasionally falling into a reverie over the photo of the lovely young man who’d written them.

  She had always known that Martti Winter and several more of her favourite writers lived in Rabbit Back. It hadn’t meant anything to her. They might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Rabbit Back wasn’t a particularly large town, but like all towns it was made up of numerous compartmented social strata. The writers in the Society and ordinary people sometimes encountered each other on the street or in a shop, but that was an optical illusion. Even if the two people saw each other, even if they said hello, no real encounter had occurred. The writers simply lived on a different plane of existence than other people.

  Ella took Martti Winter’s novel Hidden Agendas down from the shelf and opened it. There was the photo on the inside cover—a soft-focused studio portrait, sensitively lit and no doubt retouched. The picture let you know that the author wasn’t an ordinary person, he was some kind of literary god made flesh, an enlightened, more evolved being. Ella remembered how Silja Saaristo had greeted her at the party: Ella! Welcome to the demigod gang!

  Ella’s finger ran down the list of names. All of them had spoken to her at the party. She must have made a clumsy, childish impression. She wasn’t used to that kind of attention.

  She thought about how Arne C. Ahlqvist had greeted her. Something about it had bothered her at the time. Because of her schooling, something had caught her attention, something that other people wouldn’t have taken any notice of. She had almost started a discussion with her about comma placement, because Ahlqvist had said to her: It’s so nice to meet the new tenth member of the Socie
ty.

  As a language and literature expert, Ella, of course, would have put a comma between new and tenth. Without a pause there, or some kind of emphasis, indicated in writing by a comma, the sentence seemed to mean that it was nice to meet a new tenth member who had replaced the old tenth member.

  And there had never been any more than nine members in the Society until Ella Milana joined.

  Ella knew she was splitting hairs. Was she ever. It was like a sickness only lang and lit teachers contracted, and she knew exceedingly well that people just said things sometimes, that speech was imprecise, as well it should be. And she would have forgotten the whole thing if she hadn’t suddenly remembered another peculiar conversation, one that included a strange adverb.

  Oona Kariniemi was known for her profound love stories. At the party, Kariniemi had been talking with four older men when she noticed Ella, waved and darted between the men to come and talk to her. Are you the Ella Milana? she had screamed, a wine glass in her hand. I knew it! That story of yours in Rabbit Tracks was excellent. You use the language beautifully. We’ve never had any real language professionals in the crowd, just us writers, but we’ve got along somehow. Of course our editors have had a lot of cleanup to do, ha ha. But hey, it’s really great to get some new blood in the Society. Thanks to you we have a tenth member again.

  She had definitely used the word again.

  Ella picked her phone up from the bed, searched for Ingrid Katz’s number, hesitated a moment, then pushed the green button. She made a face at her reflection in the black window.

  Ingrid answered on the fifth ring. “Evening, Ella,” she said, a little breathless, apparently on her evening walk. “How can I help you?”

  “Good evening. Sorry to bother you, but could you please tell me: have there ever been any other members of the Society besides the nine of you?”

  The librarian’s breathing rasped over the phone. “You’re a lang and lit teacher. You must have a copy of A History of Finnish Literature on your shelf.” Ingrid laughed. “Look in there, if you don’t remember.”