The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Laura White was born in Rabbit Back in October, 1945, on the same day that women were given the right to vote in France. Her father, Aulis White, was a businessman discharged from the service for health reasons; her mother, Linnea White (née Nieminen), was an enthusiastic amateur painter. The White family lived from 1954 to 1960 in Switzerland, afterwards returning to Rabbit Back. Laura White published the first book in the Creatureville series in 1963, at the age of 18. It received little notice at the time, but the second Creatureville book, published just one year later, was a critical and commercial success. In 1965, Aulis and Linnea White moved to the French countryside but Laura remained living in the family home in Rabbit Back and continued serving as leader of the Rabbit Back Literature Society, which she had founded. A total of nine contemporary Finnish authors were protégés of the Society, including Martti Winter, Silja Saaristo, and Toivo Holm.

  Ella Milana knew that if she wanted to learn about Laura White and the Literature Society’s past, she had to divide the problem into sections and restrict and construct her questions in such a way that she drew out the essential and interesting information.

  The most critical thing at this point was the question of the tenth and clearly the most talented member of the Society, who died before his time.

  If she could find out whether the boy really had been murdered, nothing else would matter. Her literary historical research would end there and the police and the scandal sheets would lay claim to her research. It might mean the end of the Society.

  If Ella could show that the child had died a natural death, the whole thing would still be a tragedy, something to think about, a footnote to write into her literary history, and the real research could begin.

  Ella’s phone started to make a racket just as she was drifting off to sleep.

  She’d added the numbers of all the members of the Society to her contacts list. The display showed that the caller was Martti Winter.

  Ella yawned and pressed the answer button.

  Before she had time to say anything, Winter’s breathy voice was spilling into her ear. Suddenly she was wide awake.

  “It’s out there again. It’s standing in the garden staring at the house. I’m sorry to bother you again, but I really don’t know what to do with the thing. I thought before that I wouldn’t tell anyone about it, that it would make it easier to bear, but I was wrong. I have to share it with somebody.” Ella opened her mouth but didn’t know what to say.

  “Ingrid?” Winter’s voice said hesitantly. “Hello? Ingrid? Oh, hell, who did I call? Sorry, wrong number… I can’t work these tiny buttons with my fingers…”

  He hung up.

  PART THREE

  18

  WHEN MARTT I WINTER WAS TWENTY-ONE, his mother, Laila Barbara Winter, married a street lamp manufacturer named Eino Korkeala and moved from the hinterlands to Helsinki.

  Martti remained in his mother’s three-storey stone house in Rabbit Back. The house was in Hare Glen, five kilometres from the centre of town. Just north of Hare Glen was where Rabbit Wood began, but the glen itself was park-like then, bright with leafy trees and meadows, before it grew wild and tangled.

  Eleven years later Martti Winter’s mother was vacationing in the Swiss Alps with her street lamp magnate when she swished right into the path of a snowmobile that shot suddenly out from behind a hillock.

  At the funeral, Eino Korkeala talked about his wife’s last days and graciously praised Martti’s newest novel, which had received a great deal of attention in the media. Martti, who had just been weeping in the men’s room, thanked Korkeala for making his mother’s life a pleasant one.

  After the funeral they never contacted each other again.

  Martti had never had a father. The only daughter of a wealthy family, Laila Winter had got pregnant while on a trip down the Nile. She’d gone to bed with a man from Berlin while her parents were dancing on the deck of a riverboat. All Martti knew about his biological father was that he was named Hans, was “as beautiful as a fallen angel”, and was a violinist.

  By the time he was thirty-two, Martti Winter had already earned a tidy sum from his books and their translations and film rights. The inheritance his mother left him cemented his economic independence. He renovated the run-down house and had a three-metre-high stone wall built around the property.

  Then he wrote more books, in his office. It was on the third floor, where he could see the garden as well as a large strip of the valley from its large, many-paned window. When there were no leaves on the trees he could also see five neighbouring houses, the one farthest away belonging to Laura White.

  Martti Winter was now a decade older and twice the size he had been when he renovated the house.

  He was hunkered on the sofa in one of his living rooms, popping French pastilles into his mouth and fiddling with the telephone.

  He wanted to call Ingrid Katz. He had picked up the phone many times. If he did call her, she might get the wrong idea and go back to her old habits. But if he couldn’t talk to Ingrid, he couldn’t talk to anyone.

  They had once been lovers. They had played The Game together hundreds of times, plumbed each other’s deepest corners. Ingrid knew Martti almost completely, and Martti knew Ingrid—or at least he knew her as she was three years ago, the last time they played. Ingrid Katz’s personality back then was marked by an unquenchable desire to monitor Martti Winter’s life.

  She had been trying to spark his interest in her book-burnings for a long time. Martti suspected she was trying to tempt him to play; she probably wanted to find out what new things had materialized in his life and in his consciousness lately.

  The study of Martti’s well-being had been an important project for her for three decades. Up until the past few years she had ambushed him again and again and made him spill. She kept herself up to date on things like his sexual experiences, his moods, his disappointments, joys, lifestyle, diet, illnesses and plans. She hadn’t suffered from jealousy for a long time now, and didn’t try to revive their old love affair. She also wasn’t planning a novel. She just wanted to check in at regular intervals to be sure he was all right.

  Martti Winter, for his part, decided to make sure that he would never have to play The Game with Ingrid again. He started avoiding her in public places after ten o’clock, and never went out anymore. He installed the best locks available on the doors so that she couldn’t break in, although the rules of The Game allowed it.

  One night she got into the garden, squirmed through the ventilation system into the house, came up the stairs, walked up to his bed and challenged him to a Game in the middle of a most delicious dream.

  Once he had recovered from The Game, Winter blocked every possible route into the house and bricked over a crack he found in the garden wall. It wasn’t a large crack, but a small-boned author could squeeze her way through it, if she wanted it badly enough. To make absolutely sure, he also had barbed wire and broken glass installed on top of the wall.

  He wanted to keep his new thoughts and experiences, even though they weren’t terribly important ones. He couldn’t stand the incessant probing of his mind anymore.

  When he caught a serious respiratory infection, however, he had to give Ingrid a key, because she came to tend to him and take care of his ongoing business. Once he had recovered, he thanked her and asked her to return the key, but she refused. When she saw his panic, she promised she would never use it to challenge him.

  Ingrid kept her word.

  She had a habit of dropping by and letting herself in—purportedly to rest her legs—but she never came creeping around at night.

  She’d been up to something secret for a long time. Winter didn’t want to know what it was. If she wanted to burn library books, let her burn them. He had his own life to live, and preferred to live in blissful ignorance.

  Winter had given up human curiosity not long after giving up sex and alcohol and taking up eating. When his stomach was full enough it was easy to concentrate on
the basics. Lately he had managed to keep things simple, with the exception of the custom-made pastries, which he preferred baroquely complex, extravagant and abundant.

  At the moment, however, his composure was shattered. He felt a need to talk with someone. He was even prepared to play The Game with Ingrid if it would help him to bare his problem to someone who might possibly understand.

  Winter heard a noise outside. He sighed, got up from the sofa, and walked to the window.

  The front garden was full of dogs. Two of them were having a row, until one submitted and calm returned. In the area in front of the porch alone he counted seven of them. When one dog got up and disappeared from view, two more appeared. There were more behind a snowdrift, near the rubbish can, in the shadow of the wall. In the daytime they dispersed, but at night they returned.

  Winter had ordered The Big Book of Dogs on the internet and learned over the past few weeks to identify them, first by breed, then as individuals. He wanted to know which dog to blame if he were attacked, to know which kinds of dogs were particularly dangerous.

  After studying the matter he knew that among the dogs were Jack Russell terriers, cocker and springer spaniels, golden retrievers, Labrador retrievers, Finnish spitzes, Russian wolfhounds, German Shepherds, Norwegian elkhounds, schnauzers, dachshunds both long- and short-aired, Great Danes and an extensive selection of mixed breeds. He had made a list of the dogs and reported it to the police. The constable who answered the phone sounded weary.

  “Rabbit Back has stray dogs everywhere,” the policeman said. “We have real work to do here, like a certain famous author’s disappearance. Listen, if one of them bites you, call us again. And don’t worry, they’ll leave eventually if you don’t feed them. Besides, doesn’t your house have a separate back garden with a high wall around it? Go in the back garden if the dogs frighten you.”

  Winter watched the furry backs moving about below him. The dogs hadn’t noticed him standing in the window. Or maybe they didn’t care. None of the dogs had behaved aggressively towards him so far, although he had encountered some of them during the daytime, when he took out the rubbish. But there was something threatening about them. They were planning something, waiting for something.

  They could smell his fear and he sensed their desire to sink their teeth into his soft tissue. When he was younger, Winter had been a tough fighter and had always been able to hold his own, if his opponents were human. But the smallest dog could strip him of every shred of confidence.

  He’d once had a revealing dream. A German Shepherd in a necktie had demanded to see all of his personal papers and started to accuse him of tax evasion, although he had taken care to keep his taxes in order. He had been humiliated and cried and even kissed the dog’s paw to make him relent. When he woke up, he found a wool sock in his mouth.

  Winter drew the blinds over the window and walked to the opposite side of the house. The back garden, blockaded against the army of dogs, didn’t cheer him at all. Unfortunately, the dogs weren’t his worst problem.

  His office window looked out on the garden, which was separated from the rest of the world by the wall. He rested his hands on the window sill and peeped out warily.

  He had spent a large sum of money to light the garden over the past couple of years. In September, for instance, he had installed six new garden lights, the brightest available, making a dozen lamps in all. He had also scattered small lights here and there among the statues and shrubbery. In theory, the area inside his walls should have been the most brightly lit garden in the neighbourhood, a veritable sea of light.

  As he looked out the window now, only one weak light shone below. You could just barely make it out in the snow and dark undergrowth. For some reason, his lamps didn’t work for very long. They dimmed and sputtered, they lost power. In spite of his best efforts, the snowy apple trees, oaks, and maples stood dark in the midst of blackness and the garden, surrounded by its wall, looked like a tub filled to the brim with the heart’s blood of a winter night.

  He had once been proud of his garden. He used to walk among the plants and statues and sit in the shade of the trees. Sometimes he had developed his novels there, at other times simply enjoyed the warmth, the flowers, the world of sound the insects created, with its multi-layered, architectural dimensions.

  He had thought of the garden as a carefree playground. He’d brought women there, sometimes in the heat of the day, sometimes even at night, when the air was warm enough. He remembered many of them lying naked in the multicoloured light. He particularly remembered a certain worker from the pensioners’ department. After the act, she had pushed him off her, spread her legs and rocked back and forth, letting his seed trickle down into the earth, whispering, with her eyes closed, “Let this be our shared sacrifice to the powers that live beneath our feet.”

  He also remembered how disturbing it was, how he’d been compelled to flee into the house, saying he wanted to get them something to drink, and when the woman finally came after him, she seemed embarrassed.

  “I don’t quite know what came over me,” she said. “Just an inexplicable whim, I guess.”

  That same summer the gardener had come twice a week to care for the plantings. Winter had ordered all kinds of beautiful stones to place among the plants and decorated the garden with statues. They were large, imposing works made by local sculptors.

  He had once served Ingrid Katz some cider in the garden. She had looked around and said, “You’ve got your own little paradise here, Martti. Is it all right if I build a little fort there behind the geraniums and move in?”

  Now he didn’t dare go in the garden anymore.

  There were no dogs in it, of course. The wall kept them out. He’d wanted to create his own little paradise where no dog could come sniffing out his emotions or brooding over who knows what.

  But there was something even worse in that garden.

  A couple of years earlier, things had been different. He had invited a person he’d met by chance, a woman who said she was a mythological mapper. He thought it would be amusing.

  He brought her into his garden, and she took a nap. This, apparently, was the key to mythological mapping. She would sleep in people’s houses and gardens and have mythological dreams.

  Afterwards she said something about his “personal problems” and phantoms that are apparently attracted to repressed guilt. “For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend hanging your certificate in a place of honour or anything,” she said.

  She had been awakened among the tulips by her own shouts, and wrote out the mythological certificate with a trembling hand. “Most people think garden elves and such are nice, but a phantom, well, that’s not a terribly pleasant thing.”

  They were drinking iced tea at the garden table. Winter thought the tulips looked a little dried out. The mapper chattered away. She kept emphasizing that mythological mapping was, when you came right down to it, just a silly little game.

  “You see, I’ve had dreams about gnomes and elves and things ever since I was little, but only when I was sleeping in a strange place. And that’s how I got the idea for this business, a couple of years ago. But even I don’t take it all very seriously, Mr Winter, I can assure you. I just happen to have dreamed, while sleeping in your garden, of a phantom that has chased away all of the other creatures. So that’s what I’m writing here.”

  Martti Winter picked up the telephone. He reached a finger towards the buttons, then thought for a moment about the nature of The Game, and what he was about to do.

  Nothing in the Rabbit Back Literature Society was given away for free. You had to play for everything. Even the smallest experience had exchange value.

  Had it really been ten years since Winter had met Aura Jokinen in front of the dentist’s office? He’d said hello and was going to continue on his way, but she mentioned in passing that she’d had a root canal and Winter asked, purely out of politeness, how the root canal had gone.

  Aura had smiled and said, “The
experience was excruciatingly interesting, particularly when the dentist bungled it a bit. What do you have to swap for it?”

  Winter laughed. They looked at each other, and he realized that she was waiting for his answer. He shook his head. Then it occurred to him that a root canal would be a fitting symbolic element in the novel he was writing, and that he himself had never had the experience of getting a root canal.

  He offered a sexually transmitted infection that he’d suffered from six months earlier. Aura was delighted, and promised to keep her windows open. Later, Winter ran into his intimate problem in Arne C. Ahlqvist’s They Shoot Centaurs, Don’t They? The tragic hero in the novel, Martian warlord C. Horace Patton, a half-human, half-horse product of genetic engineering, suffered from the same disease.

  *

  Winter just wanted to talk to Ingrid. If he had to agree to play The Game, to agree to spill, he would. Let her write his experiences into a gothic novel, or a tragicomedy. He didn’t care, as long as he could talk to her. He searched for her number in his phone memory and pressed the call button.

  Someone answered. He started to talk, his explanation confused. Then he realized he had called the wrong number, and he stopped talking and hung up after a short search for the button.

  He was about to try calling again, but then he felt hungry.

  Four years ago, in a period of severe distress, Winter had had a moment of enlightenment.

  He had been thinking about suicide. First he considered hanging himself, then gassing himself with the car in the garage, but then, as he was sitting in his office near the open window, listlessly pounding out a novel, a liberating thought flashed through his mind.

  An individual’s life was based on, and geared towards, eating. Everything else was of secondary value. Even sex was only important from the standpoint of continuation of the species, and continuing the species was one thing that the individual known as Martti Winter had no intention of taking on.