The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  “I should pour that glass of water over you,” Ella said.

  She tried to make her voice cold, but the words rang like a gust of July wind. She sighed and stretched her hand out into the darkness. She wanted to touch his face and turn it towards the light, wanted to see the eyes that looked out from the Martti Winter jacket flaps. But he took hold of her wrist, held it for a moment, and shook his head.

  “You should go now. Come back tonight after ten.”

  Ella nodded and left.

  That evening they played a round of The Game that brought the history of the Society into a whole new light, or rather threw it into an even deeper shadow, Ella thought later, sitting at her desk in a state of intellectual vertigo and aftershock.

  Ella rang the doorbell. Martti Winter opened the door. He was wearing nothing but a wristwatch. The watch looked expensive and stylish. Ella guessed that it cost about as much as a midsized car.

  She seemed to have lost her words somewhere.

  Winter glanced at his watch, which Ella also tried to concentrate on. He said it was a couple of minutes past ten, and then he challenged her.

  Ella nodded and glanced nervously at the dogs, who were staring at them from every direction. Winter’s nakedness seemed to make them nervous, too. There were more dogs than there had been before. Ella and Winter went inside and the pack of dogs stayed safely outside. Ella breathed easier.

  Her discomfort returned, however, as Martti Winter went up the stairs. His flesh filled her whole field of vision. She followed him, her gaze fixed on his heels like a vice. They went into the blue room and sat in their usual places. “Ecce homo,” Winter said, and spread his arms.

  Ella obeyed and looked at him, although she would have liked to look away. There was too much light in the room. He’d brought in too many lamps. There was something pornographic in the situation. She felt like crying. Winter picked up a handkerchief from the table and surprised her by tying it over his own eyes.

  “I’m going to teach you a new manoeuvre. It’s called the mirror. It’s different from the other moves because the blindfold is tied on the challenger instead of the spiller.”

  “Why?” Ella asked, her voice squeezed into a tight bunch.

  A grim smile oozed over Winter’s face.

  “That will become clear to you as we play. I’m going to make you my mirror. I apologize in advance for this, but…”

  “The Game is The Game,” she said.

  He nodded. He was frightened now, too.

  “I want you,” he said, “to look at me as if you were my mirror, and convert my image into words and spill out everything that you think when you look at me.”

  28

  Ella Milana Spills

  ELLA SITS before his great nakedness, small and terrified.

  Martti Winter says, “If you have some yellow, now would be a good time to use it. If you don’t have any of your own, I have a bottle in the downstairs medicine cabinet. It clears the mirror very effectively. There’s a mini-fridge under the table. You’ll find some soft drinks there.”

  Ella’s gaze wanders over his flesh. She doesn’t feel well. She opens the little blue refrigerator, takes out a bottle of Jaffa, finds three crystals of yellow in her bag, and drops them into the bottle. Then she drinks half of it.

  “Spill,” Winter whispers. “Be my mirror. Service your fellow author, as the rules of The Game demand.”

  “I see a naked man,” Ella begins, then clears her throat.

  She concentrates. She closes everything out of her mind but the rules of The Game. Nothing else matters but honouring the rules of The Game. She has to build a precise picture of his nakedness in her mind and clothe it entirely in words, without concealing a single thought.

  She relaxes as the sodium pentothal starts to take effect. Words form in her mouth, syllables line up on her tongue like the carriages of a mountain railway. She drinks the rest of the soda and notices that she’s already begun to speak.

  “You’re big. So big. It’s bewildering how much skin you have, like the frame tent I slept in as a child with my parents, and yet you manage to fill it completely. Your flesh shakes like jelly when you breathe. Looking at you makes me think of a large, soft creature that’s been brought onto land from the depths of the ocean. You’re not meant for humans to see. You have

  less body hair than I expected. I thought you would be covered in hair, but my goodness, you’re as smooth as a child. I wonder if you shave your chest hair… but why in the world would you do that? You don’t seem to care what you look like. The skin on you is like a baby’s skin, pudgy, brimming over like a baby’s skin does, and I wonder if you’re even aware that you have a streak of chocolate under your double chin—there’s no telling how long it’s been there.

  Your breasts are larger than mine, but you have nipples like a little boy; it’s hard to even find them. There’s something touching about that.

  Your head is like a large boulder, heavy and lumpy, and you have a face like a gingerbread man. You have lovely hair, just like in your old photos—you probably take good care of it. But on such a fat head, there’s something grotesque about it. Like your hair and your fat don’t match.

  Your nose is boyish, in a good way. A little turned up, small and delicate.

  You have a certain sensitivity to your mouth, but mixed with weakness and decadence. When I look at your mouth for any length of time, it makes me want to hit you, hard, make you bleed.

  Your mouth is like a greedy child’s, like that of a child who’s been spoiled with chocolate and ice cream, a child everyone secretly hates, even his mother. The worst part is that in those old photos your mouth is beautiful and sensitive, but now, with so much fat on your face, your original features have sunk into the fat and almost disappeared.

  But at the same time, there’s something about your delicate, degenerate mouth that’s exciting. Do you remember how I blushed when we were drinking coffee? I was remembering a dream I’d had about you, or about your mouth, actually. God, what a dream!

  I was at a party, lying naked on the buffet table among the cakes and pastries and goose liver, and you came up and started tasting me all over with your mouth, and then I think you took a bite out of me.

  Ella continues looking and talking.

  She goes over his arms and legs, gives a precise description of his ears and the small details of his skin, notices a pale scar on his leg, occasionally returns to fatty forms whose shapeless excess is simultaneously troubling and fascinating. Somewhere deep inside she realizes that her words are cruel, but her surrender to the yellow and the rules of The Game has done its work.

  Martti Winter sits the whole time in his chair motionless, listening.

  But the outlines get mixed up with the other outlines. You only get glimpses of your flesh; it’s changing all the time as the point of view changes. Right now you’ve got the part turned towards me that’s like a big tent full of bucketfuls of fat. But your entirety is spread out broader on the axis of time. Chronologically you’re forty-three years old, and if I knew how to shift a little, if I stepped just a hair to the side of this present observation point, I could see you as a beautiful man, the same man who looks out at me from the jackets on your novels and the old pictures in the photo album.

  A solid, muscular chest, a hard stomach, all that is just as much a part of you as the part of you in these few years where I’ve ended up, looking at you from this chronological angle.

  As she spills, Ella gets up from her chair and comes over to Winter. Doing something can be spilling, too, she thinks hazily. She puts her hand on his chest, leans over, and kisses him.

  He seems to answer her kiss from very far away.

  Then Ella asks whether he’s satisfied with her answer. He nods, brushes her cheek and asks her to present her question.

  She backs up, her legs rubbery from the yellow.

  She stumbles and falls towards Martti Winter. Her hands sink into the folds of his stomach up to the w
rists. She’s horrified, tries to get back on her feet, loses her balance again and falls face-first into his arms.

  “Oops,” she mumbles. “I don’t seem to be all that graceful today.”

  A moment later, back in her own chair, having collected herself, Ella asks, “Do we have to play The Game to the end today? The yellow makes me tired. Maybe I could ask my question the next time.”

  “No,” Winter says. He takes off the blindfold and looks at her. “If we don’t play both turns today, as the rules require, we won’t be members of the Society anymore.”

  To Ella’s relief, he goes to get dressed. She’s beginning to get used to his beanbag-chair shape, but she likes him better with his clothes on.

  He comes back in gold slippers and black socks. The straight legs of his trousers fall over them. Ella remembers him talking earlier about his tailor. Under his luxurious smoking jacket she can see a white collar and an expensive silk tie.

  “So,” he says. “Make me spill. Shall I wear the blindfold again, or would you like to try ‘the mirror’?”

  Ella shakes her head and starts to tie the blindfold over his eyes. “I just want to ask you about one small thing so we can go to sleep. That’s my right, isn’t it? I have to make sure that you spill the entire truth, but the question can be easy and simple, can’t it?”

  Winter concedes that she is correct.

  Ella continues.

  “You actually answered this same question a year ago in a magazine interview. So, Mr Winter—where do you get the ideas for your books?”

  Ella smiles.

  She assumes he will be amused by the carefree superficiality of her question.

  Wrapped in his blindfold, Winter turns pale.

  29

  Martti Winter Spills

  “I GET THE IDEAS for my books when I ponder life and listen to Mozart.”

  It’s a pretty little answer, simple, and pure rubbish, but those are the kinds of answers the women’s magazines like to hear. As a professional gesture, Winter elaborates. He describes how the themes of classical music trigger a process in his mind that crystallizes literary, universal themes into thoughts, which in turn generate reflective stories. He doesn’t fail to add piquant little details, of course, because details are extremely important, in stories and in lies—he says that he tried Bach once, but it sent him into meditations on theology, and he started musing on the state of his soul instead of writing.

  Ella Milana doesn’t believe him. The silence stretches out, agonizing at first, then terrifying. Martti Winter senses a change in mood. Ella is no longer in a hurry to get home.

  Winter starts to sweat.

  Ella finally says something.

  “I’m sorry, what?” Winter asks.

  “Rule number twenty-one,” Ella repeats. She’s standing right next to him now; he can feel her breath on his cheek and it causes him to shudder. She’s no slouch, he thinks fondly, and prepares himself for pain.

  “I’m going to start with your cheek,” Ella whispers, “where I can get a good grip.”

  No secrets between players. That’s the motto Winter used to recite when The Game was new, back when it used to unite them, and hadn’t yet made them dread each other.

  When Ella Milana has applied Rule 21 to Winter five times and got rubbish in response four times, Winter decides to end the farce he’s begun.

  He asks for a glass of soda and adds, “Be so kind as to pour a good dose of yellow in.” His speech is indistinct because his lip and cheek are swollen.

  Words start to fly out of Winter’s mouth into Ella’s listening ears.

  No secrets between players. He’s experiencing the joy of truly spilling. His words are like birds, or perhaps like bees on a hot summer day. He smiles as he talks himself into deeper memories, memories he thought he’d lost. With the blindfold over his eyes, past events start to flash in images around him. It’s like he’s leaning back against the axis of time she was talking about, bumping his head against the moment when an eleven-year-old Martti Winter read the last words of his piece, titled “My Mother”, out loud.

  And when my mother tucks me in at night and strokes my head, I remember that one day she’s going to die and be buried in Rabbit Back cemetery, and I’ll have to give her to the worms.

  The other six Society members clap.

  Elias Kangasniemi shakes a fist at him and laughs, “Damn it, Martti, you’re going to drive me to hang myself with those stories of yours!”

  The others laugh to break the horror. Elias’s father did hang himself when Elias was four, and he constantly cultivates a kind of gallows humour, although the rest of them aren’t allowed so much as to mention a rope. Elias wipes his nose and looks out the window.

  They’re sitting in a spacious bay window-seat in the reading room at the south end of the house. The room is painted white. They’re bathed in flooding, gushing, almost overwhelming brightness because they’re surrounded by windows on all sides, even the ceiling. Behind them glows the summer of 1972. The skylight delineates the sky in a blue circle with birds darting through it. The other windows look out on the garden.

  Her garden is a stormy sea of colour. Ingrid wrote that last week in a poem that Laura praised strongly. She said Ingrid had “learned the basics of metaphor beautifully”. Martti thinks now that if the garden is a sea of colour, then perhaps the house is a ship where he and the other children are sailing under the leadership of their captain, towards some distant destination.

  Through the window glass Martti can see the insects sway in the garden’s eddies of hot air, their wings scorched, slightly mad. Laura White’s house is cooler. The authoress pours raspberry juice into glasses and drops in some ice. A fan turns on the ceiling. Toivo told him that the fan is a propeller from a Russian airplane that was shot down and given to Ms White by some soldier.

  Laura White nods at Martti’s story. She’s sitting in a wicker chair with one leg thrown over the other, dressed in white, and drops of sweat are running down her neck. She sips her coffee, places the cup in its saucer, rocks her head back and forth and says to Martti, “Your descriptions have improved tremendously. You’ve observed your mother very commendably. I especially like the way you described your own feelings, although there may have been a few redundant adjectives. Helinä, you can read yours next.”

  Martti doesn’t listen to Helinä’s story. He wants to savour the praise he’s received.

  But where could Ingrid have got to? She hasn’t come yet. He’s not angry at her anymore, although his arm hurts and he’s sure he’ll have a bruise.

  He regrets now that he went and left her at the rat’s grave. Now they’ll have another several days of being angry with each other. It’s stupid, since they both know that in the end they’ll make it up again.

  She was sick, too. In the morning Martti had felt her forehead. It was hot, and she was pale and sweaty. He told her to go home because she was coming down with something, but she wouldn’t do what he said, wouldn’t admit being sick at all. Five years ago, Ingrid’s mother got sick, and died two weeks later.

  Martti whispers in Laura White’s ear that he has to go to the toilet. Helinä is still reading as he tiptoes out of the reading room and closes the glass door carefully behind him. He has to pass through several dark rooms. It feels tiresome because it’s so easy to get lost in Laura’s house.

  Someone walking ahead of him opens a door and goes into one of the rooms they’re not allowed in.

  They were not specifically forbidden from walking around the house. In some houses you might be allowed to run around, but in Laura White’s dark house one walked sedately, and behaved in a civilized manner.

  After Martti met Laura White for the first time, he asked his mother to teach him good manners. “Ms White is a fine lady and if I’m going to start visiting her house every week I want to know how to behave, so I don’t screw up.”

  His mother bought him The Golden Book of Etiquette. Laura White had the same book herself. So
metimes, when the children were at her house writing, she would sit nearby and study The Golden Book of Etiquette. Martti thought she must be an expert on etiquette. Sometimes she read other kinds of non-fiction, the kind that describe how the human brain works.

  Humans are very complex and difficult-to-understand creatures, Laura once said. The job of writers like us is to study a person until we learn to understand him and understand his life. We simply have to remember to maintain enough distance when we do it; otherwise we won’t see him very clearly.

  Martti can see the person walking ahead of him clearly now. It’s a girl, tall and thin, wearing a pretty red dress she got as a birthday present, and dirtied when she was playing this morning.

  Oh Ingrid…

  Martti runs after her, but stays out of sight. He wants to see what she’s up to.

  Ingrid is walking uncertainly. She staggers. Her thin legs peep out from under the hem of her dress. Martti thinks that her fever must have risen. Soon she’ll probably faint and crack her head open.

  But Ingrid doesn’t faint. She just wanders, returns to a room she was just in, turns around, changes direction and runs back so that Martti has to dash behind a bent-legged sofa to hide.

  Then she disappears without a trace.

  Martti goes into the room after her, but the room is empty. He runs into the next room, and the next, and the next.

  He’s already on his way back to the reading room when a door on his right bursts open and Ingrid comes rushing out. Her hair is tousled and sweat is running down her pale face. In the dim light of the hallway he can see that her red dress is wet through with sweat. It drips on the floor.

  She’s holding something tight against her chest.

  Martti calls to her. Something wriggles in his stomach. She stumbles in the other direction—first into the hallway, then into the foyer and out of the house, with Martti right behind her.