The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  But I don’t have any facts about him. I can dimly remember his face, or at least the impression it made on me. Once, for instance, I was looking at Ingrid when she was sitting on the steps at Laura White’s house—I had a bit of a crush on her. Later I found out that she was utterly in love with me, but she couldn’t show it because I was a year older than her, and at that age a year is a wide chasm. I was looking at her and thinking to myself that she certainly had a pretty face, when all of a sudden that boy was standing beside her and looking at me in a peculiar way.

  And suddenly I thought that, compared to him, Ingrid was positively ugly. If Ingrid was pretty, then that boy had the face of an angel, that’s how divine his features were.

  Except that I didn’t like his eyes. There was something disturbing about them.

  I don’t remember his name. I’ve tried to remember it over the years. I assume that all of us children knew his name, but when he died we agreed that we would never talk about him again, and things you don’t talk about have a way of escaping your mind.

  I’ve sometimes had dreams where he comes to my house and grabs me by the shoulder and kisses my cheek and whispers something in my ear, but I can never quite hear what he’s saying. And I wake up from the dream covered in sweat every time, as if I’d had the worst kind of nightmare.

  He died in the early spring of 1972. I was eleven years old at the time. Ingrid came over to my house in the morning and told me. Laura White had come to her house and told her that the boy was no more and that the meetings of the Society would be cancelled for a while.

  I don’t know whether Ingrid said how he had died. Maybe I didn’t even ask. I have an idea that he drowned in the pond in Laura’s garden. I don’t know where I got that idea. I just remember that when I went by the pond a little while later there was a hole in the ice and I thought, That’s the hole he fell through and drowned, him and his ever-present notebook.

  Winter’s speech grows ever more indistinct, as if he were speaking in his sleep. Now he rouses himself a little, slurps some cocoa, which has grown cold, thinks for a moment, and continues.

  “Did I already tell you that Laura White taught all of us to carry a notebook? Right from the start. We were told to write down our observations about people and life and the world. She always stressed that a writer should know how to make observations about two things—meaningless details and the universe. She also said this: ‘If you really want to say something, you have to give up words and forget yourselves.’”

  Winter’s mouth hung open. His tongue flicked against his dry lower lip.

  “At the end of one meeting Laura said, ‘Dear budding writers, beloved friends, in the end, you must learn to look at everything as if you weren’t even part of the human race.’ And she gave us an assignment, a different one for each of us. I was told to pretend for a week that I was a Martian observing a creature called a ‘mother’. I actually ended up abandoning the assignment on the third day, when my mother grew worried and started to make an appointment at the doctor’s for me.

  “We wrote all kinds of things in those notebooks, as well as we were able. Most of what we wrote was quite trivial. Things like ‘sometimes my mother cries secretly’ or ‘my mother left a strange-coloured stick in the toilet’ or ‘today in class a terrible-smelling fart came out of the teacher’s bum and everybody pretended that they didn’t hear or smell anything’.

  “We spent those first years pretty lazily. Learning to observe took some time—but not for the tenth member, naturally. No, he was constantly writing in his notebook, everywhere he went, furiously writing, writing with abandon, the little Mozart, the gifted little shit.”

  Winter smiled self-mockingly under the blindfold, and Ella smiled, too.

  There was a cry from outside.

  From the garden. From inside the wall.

  Ella turned to look. What an inhuman sound. The winter night flowed thick into her veins.

  25

  MARTTI WINTER heard the mug fall out of Ella Milana’s hand onto the floor and roll under a chair.

  The contents of his own mug spilled into his lap. “The neighbour’s cat,” he said, ignoring for the moment the cold cocoa seeping into his underwear.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Did it frighten you? Such a horrible sound for a small creature to make.” Winter laughed. “Let’s continue the game, shall we?”

  Silence.

  He waited another moment and then tore the blindfold off.

  She was gone. He heard her clumping down the staircase. There was no creak of the front door. Her steps continued deeper into the house.

  She was going through the downstairs rooms towards the terrace, towards the garden.

  There were far too many stairs in the house for a heavy-set, middle-aged man to catch up with a light-footed young woman.

  When Winter finally made it to the first floor, his lungs were straining like sails in a storm, his chest convulsing. He resisted the urge to stop and rest and headed towards the piano room. He held on to the walls and tables for support, knocked a vase, a lamp and several boxes of chocolates onto the floor, panted, gasped, shouted, wheezed, falling more than running as he went.

  He came to a stop in the piano room.

  The double doors at the back of the room were open and freezing air rushed into the house. The furniture crackled around him—the piano, chairs, sofas and small tables flinching in the sudden cold like frightened animals.

  Winter, too, recoiled from the open doors and the darkness beyond. He would have liked to bolt like a horse and run until everything went dark. He cleared his throat, willing himself to calm down, and stepped through the doors onto the terrace.

  At first there was nothing to see but a blank square of frozen black. The world ended at the edge of the terrace. The darkness was too thick even for the creator. The work of creation had been abandoned right here.

  But the girl was out there somewhere, where during the daytime there was a garden, statues and a high wall around all of it. As he stood staring into the dark, he could finally make out different shades of black—the night sky, the trees under snow, the carved figures between them.

  The terrace pavement was covered in ice. It was a roofed terrace, so there was only a thin layer of snow on it. He could see footprints where she had run back and forth over the pavement. Winter walked to the right and then to the left, taking short, careful steps in his slippers.

  He noticed a gap in the snow between two statues. The stone nymphs were smiling:

  She’s not coming back. She’s stepped into the darkness and you’re never going to see her again.

  The tracks led to a wall of darkness beyond the lime trees. The terrace was surrounded by silence.

  Winter felt very heavy and tired. He peered in the direction of the tracks and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  “Hey,” he shouted.

  An echo bounced back from the stone walls. His skin rose up in goosebumps. He was sure it had sensed him.

  “Hey! Miss?”

  A twig snapped somewhere. A sighing, sniffling sound rippled over the snow. Someone, or some thing, was wading through the drifts towards the terrace.

  Winter went to the edge of the frozen pavement. His movements were like those of a child who can’t swim and fears falling into the water. He leaned one hand on the iron railing, reached the other out into the darkness and closed his eyes. He stood waiting for the warm, human creature named Ella Milana to take hold of it. He closed his mind to all other possibilities.

  “It’s some kind of small animal,” the girl said.

  Her voice came from a few metres away, low to the ground. Winter sighed with relief and opened his eyes, but he still couldn’t see her in the blackness.

  “A squirrel or a bird, I’m not sure. I can’t see anything. Poor little thing. It’s injured. A cat must have caught it.”

  He was able to make out Ella Milana’s pale face, then her dark clothes. She stood ou
t against the dim garden like she’d risen from black water, carrying a bundle in her outstretched arms. For a second she looked like an icon of the Holy Virgin holding the baby Jesus.

  Winter leaned out, took her under the arm and tugged her and her burden onto the terrace. As if by agreement, they quickly moved several steps away from the edge of the terrace and stood facing each other, the light from the house comfortingly close by. Their breath melted into one large cloud of steam. It prevented him from seeing at first what she was holding.

  It had feathers. It was a magpie, or had once been one. You could hardly call it alive, although it was still breathing. It had no eyes. Its empty eye sockets were steaming. White bones jutted out where the wings should have been, and the bird flapped them up and down, as if it imagined it could somehow reach the outer perimeter of the darkness it had fallen into.

  “Oh. Little friend,” Winter whispered, laying a hand on Ella Milana’s shoulder.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the remains of the bird, still managing to cling to shreds of life. A wave of indignation rose up in Winter. Pathetic thing. Still alive, all torn up like this! Horrifying—absolutely obscene!

  The bird stopped flapping its wings. It tilted its blind head, opened its beak and let out a little sound, like a child’s babbled question. Ella Milana’s arms swung apart in a broad arch and let the bundle fall with a thud onto the terrace. Winter lifted a slipper, placed it on the bird, and shifted his whole weight onto it. He heard a crack, then took two steps backwards.

  They stood facing each other for a moment longer, looking first at the crushed bird lying wet on the ice of the terrace, then at each other. Ella Milana turned to look into the darkness from which she’d carried the bird. “What could do something like that?” she asked. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but her ashen face revealed her mental state.

  Martti Winter rubbed his arms. The frosty air seemed to wrap itself tighter around them.

  “A cat,” he said. “They get over the wall somehow. Or maybe it was an owl. There are a lot of owls around here. They sometimes attack the cats. And vice versa.”

  Ella Milana turned to give him a doubtful look, but then nodded. “A cat or an owl,” she said. “What else could it be?”

  Martti Winter picked up the carcass and flung it back into the darkness, as far from the house and the terrace as he could.

  They turned to leave. A black form flew between them from out of the garden. They recoiled. The dead magpie stared at them from empty eye sockets.

  “Oh!” Ella Milana said.

  Martti Winter felt like screaming. Ella Milana lifted her left foot as if to dance, pivoted and took a few curious, bewildered steps towards the garden.

  The garden sighed and rasped in a sudden gust of wind. Somewhere outside the wall the dogs began to bark in unison.

  Martti Winter filled his lungs with the cold, caught the girl under the arm and quickly slipped into the house. He dropped her on the floor, flung the doors closed, locked them and pulled the thick drapes over them. Then he turned his back to the doors and straightened his trousers.

  “Ouch,” she said, lying on the floor massaging her hip.

  “Would you like some more coffee?” Winter asked solicitously. “Or cocoa? We seem to have interrupted The Game, so…”

  Ella Milana scrambled to her feet, wiped her lovely, arching lips with her fingers and turned her head to look at the closed terrace doors. “Don’t you think we should discuss what just happened?”

  Martti Winter snorted and padded over to the piano. He sat on the too-small stool, rose a couple of times to adjust it, looked up at the ceiling and started to play the first bars of the Moonlight Sonata.

  Then he switched to ragtime.

  “What did just happen?” he asked as he played, grinning like a lounge pianist. “An evil owl murdered an innocent magpie. Or maybe a cat did it. That’s that. Nature can be cruel.”

  “An owl or a cat! That was something else,” she said. “Owls don’t hurl dead birds around.”

  Winter continued playing.

  “Another variation on the ‘slow barge’,” Ella Milana said sourly, laying a hand on the piano.

  Winter grew distracted for a moment looking at her, particularly at her delicate fingers tapping the top of the piano. He lost track of the notes, so charmed was he, suddenly, by the young woman’s presence. A peculiar passage came into his mind, something he had read somewhere, or was it something he’d written himself? She isn’t beautiful, not like the girls on magazine covers who stir heat in the viewer, jealousy, a desire to possess. Her charm is akin to that of a meadow of flowers veiled with morning mist, with all its sounds and scents. Impossible to grasp, yet it awakens a great and unrequitable longing.

  “Fine,” she said, with a click of her tongue. “We won’t talk about it. We won’t discuss it. But maybe we really ought to stop The Game for now.”

  Winter batted his eyes, lifted his sausage-like fingers from the keys and rested them in his lap. “My spill ended when you ran into the garden,” he said, staring at his fingers. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “I suppose so,” she said.

  They went back up to the third floor and into the blue room. The handkerchief was tied over Ella Milana’s eyes, and the second round of The Game began.

  “I would guess,” Winter began. Then he was silent for several seconds. He made a decision to continue the manoeuvre he’d already begun, something they had developed when The Game was in its early stages. They called it “the x-ray manoeuvre”, for obvious reasons.

  “I assume that you sometimes take all of your clothes off and stand in front of the mirror naked, looking at yourself. I want to know everything you see, and what you think about what you see.”

  26

  ELLA MILANA was at the front door, ready to leave. Martti Winter looked worriedly at her and began to hold forth on the nature of the x-ray manoeuvre.

  “On the one hand, it’s a somewhat crude game, but on the other, a sort of extreme verbal strip game, exciting and humiliating and every possible thing in between. Silja Saaristo used it for the first time in 1978, with Ingrid Katz as her subject. Ingrid used it on Elias Kangasniemi, and Elias used it on me. That’s how it started. The wisest thing is to think of it as a rite of initiation. It’s something we made up, so we use it. Would you like me to offer an apology? I can do that. I’m sorry I used the x-ray manoeuvre on you.”

  Ella didn’t answer. She was looking for her gloves on the wooden hat shelf, but found them in her coat pocket.

  “At this point you ought to be aware that there are a lot of other tricks you can use in The Game. If all this is too much for you, then stop playing.”

  He looked her in the eye with a twinkle that suddenly melted into genuine regret.

  “Oh, little Ella. All this must be devilishly difficult for you. You’ve thrown yourself into The Game cold. The rest of us at least had a chance to grow into it gradually. When it began it was quite innocent. Laura didn’t create it so it would become like this. When it began, we were children. But we changed, and The Game changed with us. Have you been offered the yellow yet, by the way?”

  Ella nodded. She had, in fact, just taken sodium pentothal, and she could still feel its effects. She pressed her lips together and held her tongue captive between her teeth to keep from continuing to babble. Escaped thoughts flocked into her mouth like seagulls.

  As she opened the door, Winter seemed to remember something. He asked her to wait, disappeared deeper in the house for a moment, and when he came back, breathless, pressed a photo album into her hands.

  “Take this. I dug it out a couple of weeks ago just for you, to give you some idea of what the Rabbit Back Literature Society is. Take it with you. You can borrow it as long as you don’t lose any photos. And under no circumstances are you to give any of them to the newspapers. None of us want to see these in the evening tabloids. I’ve put labels on some of them to give you a sort of tour of Society history.”r />
  Ella took the album under her arm, nodded and walked out. The dogs stirred in the darkness.

  “If you have any questions about any of the pictures,” Winter added, “just call. Or come to visit, during the day. We can drink coffee and chat. You don’t need The Game to have a conversation.”

  Ella went down the steps and stomped her feet to disperse the dogs.

  “A Dalmatian, a corgi, a Labrador retriever, and a mixed-breed spitz,” Winter said from behind her, proud of his expertise. “Perhaps a cross between a Finnish spitz and a Norwegian elkhound.”

  The dogs remained at the edge of darkness.

  Ella wasn’t afraid of dogs, but she did feel uncomfortable under their reproachful gaze, as if she were the intruder.

  Martti Winter shouted, “I’ll certainly understand if you don’t want to come! The Game has that effect. Once you’ve played The Game with someone enough, you can hardly speak to them anymore. I was just thinking that if we’re not yet that far gone, it would be nice to chat.”

  Ella stopped and considered the emotional state that shone through his voice. “Yes, I’ll come,” she said, without turning around.

  Ella Milana lay in her room for five days. Her mother tried three times to take her temperature. She said she was tired, needed to recharge her batteries for a while.

  Mostly she didn’t think about anything. She just lay there looking at the ceiling and lamented the hollowness of her being. She was a clay pot, and she’d been broken in pieces. There used to be something inside her, and now that it had spilled for the use of someone else, all that was left was a cracked, dried-out shell.

  Sometimes her mind would slip into going over The Game again—first the round she’d played with Ingrid Katz, then the one with Martti Winter, in some moments the time she spilled to Silja Saaristo about her barrenness, and she thought about how ugly and defective she had felt listening to her own words.