The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Martti Winter raised his eyebrows. “Why, yes.”

  “Do you think it might be the tenth member of the Society?” Ella asked. “The first tenth member?”

  Winter looked at the photo up close, squinting, his mouth partly open. “It could be. It must be. As far as I know, no other children but the members ever visited Laura’s house. She didn’t especially like children, actually. She liked the ten of us, of course, but she thought of us as specimens. We weren’t ordinary children to her. She said something once about how children—all children except us, of course—were in her opinion tiresome, noisy, stupid, soulless creatures who gave her a headache.” Winter smiled. “That wasn’t the sort of thing one put on the cover of a Creatureville book, of course. She just didn’t want to have anything to do with children except at one remove, through her books. Once she actually said that she was surprised that it was children who read her books, since she had by no means written them with children in mind.”

  Ella asked whether the photo helped him remember anything more about the dead boy. Winter cut himself a fourth piece of cake and poured them both some more coffee. Then he looked at his guest with a sly smile and wiped his lips. A few crumbs fell onto the breast of his dark shirt.

  “Do you mean that we should take a break from coffee and continue The Game where you feel we left off?”

  Ella was taken aback by his gentle teasing. She was immediately conscious of the fact that her nakedness was his to control. His gaze at the moment was tracing her birthmarks and other distinguishing features with a sureness that was impossible to mistake. She felt herself at a disadvantage. She had a moment of panic, but then looked with cold, analytic eyes at the man who had won her nakedness from her.

  What a big lump of a creature he was, with his pudgy hands, pumpkin head and gingerbread smile! Let him have the map to her flesh if it made him happy. It was nothing but a stripped doll in the clumsy, sweaty hands of an oaf who didn’t even know what to do with it.

  Gradually she felt a return of the strength he had momentarily stolen. He sensed the change; Ella could see it in his eyes, the same eyes that were in the photo of the handsome young author on the jacket flaps.

  “Actually,” she said softly, “I was thinking we could just talk about it like two normal people.”

  “I see,” he said, surprised. “I can certainly tell you, at least, that I still don’t remember the boy’s name.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. We never actually wanted to get to know him. He may have been a member of the Society, but he was never one of us. We didn’t want to know his name. We didn’t want to know anything about him.”

  Ella looked surprised.

  “Think about it,” Winter said. “A child on his way to becoming a writer, like us, and yet so far above us that we couldn’t even imitate him. How could we possibly have liked him?”

  “I assume you weren’t overwhelmed with grief when he died, then?”

  “Grief is the wrong word,” Winter said with a vague look in his eyes. “We were shocked, of course. But we didn’t grieve. On my own behalf I can say that although I wasn’t glad he had died, I did feel liberated, in a way. Like I had escaped from his shadow.”

  Ella looked at the layers of chocolate cake. A disturbing thought came to her.

  “Shall I put on some music?” Winter asked.

  “No. Or go ahead, if you like.”

  “Don’t you like music?”

  Ella smiled. “Music is just sound at varying pitch to me. It crumbles in my ears like a rye crisp. And I didn’t come here to listen to music.”

  “Why did you come, then?”

  “To drink coffee and chat,” Ella said. “You invited me. Have you forgotten?”

  She looked at Winter. He had a surprised smile on his moon face that made her nervous.

  “Well, what is it?”

  “You’re blushing.”

  “Blushing? Don’t be silly. Why in the world would I be blushing over a cup of coffee?”

  Then she realized that her cheeks were, in fact, hot.

  “Like a little girl,” he said teasingly. “What were you just thinking about? Tell me. I’ll give you a cookie if you do.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about anything,” Ella said coolly, fearing that she was blushing even more. She was remembering with excruciating detail the dream she’d had the night before.

  They looked at each other for a long time—a young woman with lovely, curving lips and a defective part at her very centre, and a massive man with old photograph eyes in a moon face and a half-eaten Danish in his hand.

  “At this part of the movie the girl always gets up and leaves,” Winter said at last. “In case you’re not sure what to do.”

  Ella shoved the photo back into her bag and stood up. “Goodbye, Mr Winter. Thanks for the coffee and cake.”

  He walked her to the door.

  Ella went down the icy steps slowly, a slight smile on her lips, until she saw a German Shepherd and a spaniel skulking on the other side of the snowy meadow.

  “What draws them here?” she asked, pulling on her gloves.

  “That I don’t know,” Winter said. “But you should come again, for coffee and a chat. Before we play each other out completely and stop saying hello when we meet. That will happen eventually, but we’re not there yet.”

  Ella Milana returned to Martti Winter’s house for five days in a row.

  They drank coffee, ate baked treats and chatted. Ella enjoyed herself but didn’t forget her research—at every visit she managed to gather useful information.

  Winter talked more about how Laura White had taught him to look at everything with an outsider’s eyes.

  “We were supposed to look at ourselves that way, too,” he said. “She would take us in front of a mirror and make us stare at our own reflection until it started to feel alien and peculiar. Then we were supposed to write a description of ourselves and imagine that it was written by someone else, someone who had never seen a human face before. She tore up my first five attempts. It wasn’t until the sixth one that I accomplished what she was looking for.

  “When I read it aloud to the others, Silja Saaristo ran out of the room and threw up. Laura looked ecstatic, her eyes were glowing, and she clapped. ‘Look at Martti!’ she shouted to the others. ‘He has a writer’s eyes.’

  “I didn’t show that piece to my mother. It used to make her cry when I made faces and twisted my eyes up. ‘You’re such a good-looking boy,’ she would say. ‘Don’t deliberately make yourself ugly.’ If she had read the description I wrote it would have broken her heart.”

  The story of the butterfly made a particular impression on Ella.

  “Once Laura asked me to stay behind when the others were leaving. She gave me a caterpillar and said that my first task was to grow it into a butterfly. I put it in a pickle jar and gave it fresh leaves every day. I went to Laura’s house every day specially to take care of it. Then the caterpillar made a cocoon, of course, and one day a butterfly squirmed out of it. It was a tortoiseshell butterfly. I was incredibly proud of it, almost as if I had created it myself.

  “Then Laura picked up the jar from the table, held it between us, and asked me what my feelings were about the butterfly. I thought about it for a moment, and I answered that I liked it and cared a great deal about it, because I had raised it. She nodded. Then she gave me a little brown bottle and told me it was ether. She told me to pour some into the jar.

  “I obeyed, naturally. The butterfly began to behave strangely, rolled over and felt the glass wall of the jar with its proboscis. Laura said, ‘Look, it’s dying.’ And I looked.

  “I was crying, and I was ashamed, and eventually my butterfly was lying dead at the bottom of the jar, and I still didn’t know exactly what I was expected to do.

  “Then Laura gave me a homework assignment. She told me to write about something. I asked what I should write about. She said, ‘Anything.’ The main thing was that I should writ
e at least five hundred words, about anything at all.

  “I went home and sat with the blank paper in front of me for what seemed like ages. Then I started to write. I spent several days writing that piece. I hardly took time to eat or sleep. I got up secretly during the night and wrote. When the piece was finished, I went to my mother, who was reading a book in the garden, and handed it to her.”

  Winter closed his eyes and smiled.

  “It was about a cowboy named Billy James who had a horse that injured its leg. In the end he had to shoot the horse with his revolver. My mother read it with tears in her eyes, hugged me tightly, and said, ‘Good gracious, Martti, that is what I call a real story.’”

  Ella leaned forward, the half-eaten cookie in her hand forgotten.

  “What did Laura White say about your story?” She was more spellbound than was perhaps desirable in a researcher.

  “She said I should write it again. She told me to write the whole thing three more times. When I’d written the fourth version, she let me read it to the others.”

  They sat for some time without speaking. It felt natural that they should both think their own thoughts for a moment. Ella looked around. The room was high, the ceiling covered in chocolate-coloured panels decorated with skilfully carved reliefs of gambolling wood nymphs. Martti Winter said that he’d ordered them from a local woodworker with the proceeds from his first successful novel. The carvings were based on a dream he’d had numerous times.

  “They would always lure me into their dance and then get me lost in a deep forest. It’s in their nature. They want to seduce you, to cause your destruction, but most of all they want to be seen. I sensed beforehand that if I commissioned the work, I would stop having the dream, and that’s what happened. But when I saw the woodworker later he said that he had started dreaming about the carving. I’ll bet his dreams were just as damp and horrible.”

  Ella glanced at the clock and got up from the table.

  Martti Winter said, “Ella Milana, my dear, will you come again tomorrow? I enjoy having someone to talk to for the first time in a long while. I had forgotten how pleasant a chat and a cup of coffee can be. For some reason you don’t get on my nerves nearly as much as most people do.”

  “I may not be able to come,” Ella said. “I promised my mother I would go with her to Tampere to see my aunt.”

  Ella broke that promise.

  “I have a lot of work to do,” she told her mother the next morning. “I’ll drop you off at the station, of course. And if you plan to be in Tampere for the whole week I could drive there in the Triumph in a couple of days, once I’ve got my work where it ought to be.”

  “Well, let’s do that, then,” her mother sighed. “Though I don’t see how your project’s going to fall apart if you leave it for a few days. What you need is to meet some nice young man and do a little courting before you forget how. I didn’t raise you to be an old maid. Even a wallflower has to bloom sometime.”

  Ella looked over her notes. She was delighted at how much information she had gathered just from chatting with Martti Winter over coffee and cake. If Professor Korpimäki started asking her for her Laura White material, she would at least have something. A lousy researcher she would have been, if she let such information go uncollected.

  As she drove up to Winter’s house for the seventh day in a row and walked to the door humming to herself, she noticed that there was a key left in the front lock.

  A bicycle leaned against the porch, glittering with frost. Ella thought she recognized it.

  She let herself in and listened to the silence for a moment. A plastic bag from Rabbit Market lay on the floor by the door, full of chocolates and other sweets. There was a pair of woman’s boots in the middle of the entryway with snow still on them.

  She heard muffled talk from upstairs.

  Ella went up to the second floor. She could hear a woman’s voice from a room she knew Martti Winter used for his daily nap—he had shown it to her a couple of days before.

  She pushed the door open.

  The venetian blinds cut the daylight into thin slices that painted stripes across everything in the room. The air was heavy and there was an odd smell that Ella didn’t recognize right away. In the middle of the room was a heavy-framed bed. Martti Winter lay on it. His breathing was laboured. Ingrid Katz was bent over him like a hungry phantom groping for blood to drink.

  “Is he sick?” Ella asked, stepping over the threshold.

  “Ah, the baby writer,” Ingrid Katz gasped. “Hello there. It’s getting crowded around here.”

  Ingrid Katz and Martti Winter were nearly invisible, shadows cast over them like a pile of quilts. Ella squinted, trying to make out the scene. It occurred to her that Ingrid might be torturing or perhaps even murdering Martti Winter.

  “Hello, Madame Librarian,” Ella said.

  Ingrid snorted. “There aren’t any librarians here. Just I. Katz, author and member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society. I came to check on the condition of my comrade, to make sure he was all right.”

  Martti Winter let out a groan like someone suffering an agonizing death.

  Ingrid Katz smiled and shot a quick glance at Ella.

  “Our dear fellow author has eaten till he’s a bit bloated and isn’t up to his usual duties. I know him like the back of my hand, so I have a certain responsibility for him. I know him almost better than I know myself. And the same is true for him. He knows me. Don’t you, Martti?” She smiled at him with tears in her eyes and whispered, “I know what makes him tick as if I’d built him myself. When you’ve learned a person’s thoughts and needs through and through, you can never leave him for good.”

  Martti Winter whispered, “Ingrid, my call last night was a moment of weakness. I was terrified and alone. If you had answered, I’m sure I would have said right away that it was a mistake. You can’t come here with your own key anymore. That’s what we agreed on. You think you know me, but you don’t, not anymore.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “No,” he whispered triumphantly. “There are new things inside me.”

  He groaned again. Ella noticed now that Ingrid’s hand was under the blanket, and she realized what it was she was doing to him.

  She ought to have left. Everyone present, including herself, knew that it was the only sensible thing to do. Her feet wanted to leave; the door was waiting to be slammed. She didn’t leave.

  She stood in the dark room to watch the strange scene that her presence didn’t seem to alter.

  “Oh, you have new things inside you, do you?” Ingrid said, half teasingly and half sadly. “So you don’t need Ingrid anymore?”

  “No,” Winter gasped. “I don’t. Don’t come here anymore.”

  “That’s what he says now,” Ingrid said to Ella. “Now that poor Ingrid has done her job.”

  “Naturally it was necessary to conclude what you started, without my permission and in the middle of my nap, but don’t provide this service for me again, Ingrid.”

  Katz pulled her hand out from under the covers and wiped it with utmost calm on a tissue.

  “If you can get the job done without me then naturally I’ll leave you in peace. I apologize. I simply thought…”

  “Thank you and goodbye,” Winter said.

  Ingrid nodded. “I do have a life of my own, after all, a family, children—and I’m a rather good mother. I try to live that life as much as I can. Except when I’m sometimes pulled into The Game, as I was the other day by our baby writer. And I worry about you sometimes. You know, I’ve been having bad dreams about you. We haven’t seen each other in ages, you and I, and when you called, I started to think…”

  “There’s no need to worry about me,” Winter said gently. “Go back to your family and your library. But first give me a few tissues.”

  Ingrid looked at Ella thoughtfully. Suspiciously, in fact. “But Martti, does this girl really like you?”

  “You would have to ask her that,” Winter said we
arily. “But please don’t.”

  Ingrid Katz walked twice around the bed and stopped at the foot, her hands on her hips. “Well, Martti, I’ll leave you in peace. But you must promise that you’ll be all right. And that if you’re not all right, you’ll let me know immediately. I don’t need you, but I do need to know at all times that things are all right with you.

  “Well, goodbye then,” Ingrid said to Ella with everyday good cheer, as if she’d been there watering the flowers.

  Then she calmly left, with a smile on her face.

  Ella was left alone with Winter.

  He was still lying motionless on the bed. The conversation he and Ingrid had just had seemed inauthentic to Ella, made of paper. As if she’d walked into the middle of a play. Maybe that’s what happened when people became writers and knew each other so well that there was no need to speak anymore. Authentic communication was quickly replaced by written drama.

  Ella adjusted the blinds to let more light into the room. She would have opened the window as well but she couldn’t make the latch work.

  There was a black and white photo on the wall of Martti Winter and Ingrid Katz at about ten years old. They were holding hands. In the background was Laura White’s house and the swing in her garden. White herself sat on the swing holding a pen and a notepad.

  Ella paced back and forth around the bed and looked at Winter from different angles, trying to teach her eyes to see his essence in new ways.

  While she did this, she came up with the beginnings of a theory of the varying sources of human attractiveness. Attractive people come in two forms. Some people are attractive like beautiful objects that awaken aesthetic pleasure—they make you want to own them, and to be seen in their company. People like Martti Winter, on the other hand, are attractive like museums, or palaces, or other architectural structures that a person seems to return to again and again to walk around and enjoy the atmosphere.

  “So you came today, after all,” Winter said, turning his large head on the pillow to look at her.