The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  “Shall we have another round right away, or would you like to go downstairs and have a beer?” Holm asks, rubbing his bristled head.

  Ella tosses him the blindfold and he ties it over his eyes.

  *

  Holm fumbles for the ashtray, stubs out his cigarette and asks for her question.

  Ella had planned a question for Toivo Holm—a strategic, pointed question about Oskar Södergran and the notebook. The game is, after all, supposed to be her tool, to be used for literary historical research, as she is constantly reminding herself.

  But she knows that sometimes The Game starts to use the players.

  She can’t help smiling and asks Holm to tell her about his most shameful sexual experience.

  Holm flinches. His posture slightly shifts. He’s no longer relaxed and confident, but tense.

  As he starts to speak, his voice is small and fearful.

  “For a long time I thought of myself as a nice person. Empathetic, sensitive—soft, even. I’d actually been rejected a few times for being too nice. But six years ago

  I was engaged to an actress. We were going to be married. I’m sure you remember my first series, The Darkest Turn, and the woman who played Inka Ilves. It was her. She was at the peak of her popularity at the time, and they still speculate in the press about what happened to her and why you don’t see her on television these days.

  I had been planning a television movie about Laura White for a long time and had drawn up various synopses and written a few experimental scenes—some of them realistic and based on fact, and others pure fantasy. But the story didn’t seem to open up for me.

  At some point I realized that my own beloved actress would, in the right light, look a lot like the young Laura White, especially if her hair were altered a bit.

  I had already tentatively sold the project, so I got an agreement that my fiancée would get the part of Laura White. She was very excited about it when I told her that the director had no objection to giving the lead to one of the country’s most sought-after actresses.

  Then we started working on the script together. We both had other jobs, but it was fun to work on a project together on the side. I had a chance to spend time at home with her for a change. I had been neglecting her—you know how it is when you’re writing. At my suggestion, she went to a hair stylist with a photo of Laura White in her youth and bought white dresses like Laura’s—I ordered one of them myself from a dressmaker.

  This all suited her perfectly. She had always been a method actor, throwing herself into her roles completely. I described the essence of Laura White to her and she practised her gestures and expressions until she knew them in every detail. She even read all of Laura White’s works so she could incorporate them into the role.

  The way we worked was that she would always perform whatever I had written so I could find the right words and plot for the story and adjust the whole thing. In the end she knew better than I did what would sound like Laura White and made her own suggestions. Some stories worked, some didn’t. The process was tough for both of us, but gradually the script was starting to come together.

  At some point the role became as much of an obsession for her as the film was for me. A worse one, perhaps. I knew at some level that she might be getting into the role too deeply, but I didn’t interfere because the project was coming along so nicely—we were already planning the shooting schedule.

  One evening I found her sitting at the desk. She had memorized pages and pages of one of the Creatureville books and was pretending to write the book herself. When I tried to get her to stop, she became very tense and yelled at me not to disturb her when she was writing; said she had to finish this book, she couldn’t keep her publisher and readers waiting.

  At that moment she was an exact copy of Laura White, right down to the smallest gesture and intonation, if the man who created the role can make such a claim. It was clear that something wasn’t right. I thought I should get her some help. And then I decided to fuck her.

  I took hold of her hands and said that they were too warm, that Laura White had cold hands. She didn’t resist as I dragged her into the kitchen and made her put her hands in the freezer with the bags of vegetables until they were ice cold. I tore off her white dress—I actually tore the dress in two—and then I fucked her. Fucked. There’s no other word for it. Fucked fucked fucked. My God.

  She stayed in character the whole time. She tried to push me away with her cold hands and scolded me and tried to explain calmly that it wasn’t appropriate to treat a respected children’s author that way and that she wasn’t even interested in sex because not only her hands but the rest of her was cold as well. Of course she stayed in character—she was experiencing psychosis, for God’s sake. And I kept saying “Laura, Laura, Laura” while I fucked her in the mouth and the cunt and in the ass like an animal, and I fucked her for who knows how long and then at some point in all the damned fucking both of us started to bleed. There was such a fucking lot of blood. But I just fucked and fucked and fucked until I finally came.

  I lay there puffing, hot and sweaty, and my fiancée got up off the floor and walked, naked, covered in blood and sperm, back into the office and started to try to write with her numb, frozen hands, although they were hanging at her sides like empty mittens.

  That’s when I finally started to worry. Like a loving, thoughtful mate, I wiped the worst of the mess from her skin and cried and got her dressed and begged her to forgive me, although she didn’t understand anything, and I admitted her to a psych ward.

  And if you want to know the worst part about it, maybe it’s this: even now, if I were completely honest, I would have to admit that it was the best piece of ass I’ve ever had.

  33

  AFTER SLEEPING for three days, Ella was awakened by the telephone.

  She immediately remembered how The Game had ended.

  When she told Toivo Holm that she was satisfied with his answer, he collapsed and rolled out of his chair onto the floor, weeping. Ella ran out of the bar and drove home.

  Now she was awake and her mother was on the phone explaining that she was having a lovely time at her sister’s house and asking how Ella was, and why she sounded so sleepy. She wasn’t sleeping in the middle of the day again, was she? Her mother was planning to extend her visit by months and might even end up living there.

  “Emmi has such a big, empty house here now that the children have their own lives and families and Tauno’s gone, too. And this way you can work on your research in peace.”

  Ella listened to her mother’s explanation and said that as far as she was concerned her mother could stay at Aunt Emmi’s house as long as she liked. Ella would be fine. She was a big girl.

  A thought occurred to her. “Hey, Mum, does the name Oskar Södergran mean anything to you? A boy about twelve years old or maybe a little older, who used to spend time in Rabbit Back in the 1970s?”

  “Hmm… let me think. The name is familiar for some reason… why don’t I ask Emmi? She lived in Hare Glen for a while with Tauno. Hold on.”

  A moment later Emmi came to the phone. “Hello, Ella? Yeah, there was an old woman named Naakkala who lived for a while next door to us, or a little farther away. I think Stiina was her first name. Old as could be, but in the summers she went around on a bicycle and in the winters on a kicksled. And I think I remember that there was a little boy with long hair at her house sometimes. We didn’t really know them. Tauno didn’t like to get too involved with the neighbours. But he might have been old lady Naakkala’s grandson, her oldest son’s boy, from Helsinki—or somewhere in the south, anyway. He had the face of an angel, and I think his name might have been Oskar or Osku or something like that.”

  Ella asked her Aunt Emmi if she remembered anything bad happening to the boy.

  Emmi dithered for a moment and then remembered that maybe something nasty had happened to him. “Once when I was on my way to the post office, old lady Naakkala passed me on the way, crying
. She babbled something about how Oskar wouldn’t be coming to Grandma’s house after all, that he was never coming again. He and his mother had been in a car accident. That’s all I remember. No, wait. There was one other thing. Your mother says she wants you to put an envelope in the mailbox. She says she left it on the spice rack or someplace. It’s an entry to win a year’s subscription to Rabbit Tracks.”

  When Ella put down the phone she immediately forgot about the envelope, she was so relieved. Winter and the other Society members may have been thieving magpies and a disgrace to their profession, but at least they weren’t guilty of child murder.

  Her mood improved. On Monday she called the rectory to ask about Stiina Naakkala’s church records. Pastor Karhunen, who answered the phone, thought he remembered the woman. They agreed to meet at the rectory the following day at two.

  Ella went into town early. She went to the flea market and then to Mother Snow’s Café, where she often went to eavesdrop on conversations and sometimes participate in them.

  Although Mother Snow’s was almost in the centre of town, it was surrounded by a thick stand of trees criss-crossed with winding footpaths, which made it easy to lose your sense of direction.

  The atmosphere in the café was unchanged. There were eleven tables in all. One of them was a table for one with a glass top, roped off between two posts. It was reserved for the exclusive use of Laura White. On the table was an old Creatureville book—a valuable first edition—watched over by both the proprietress and several stone Creatureville characters.

  The other ten tables were larger and intended for customers. They were dedicated to the Rabbit Back Literature Society. Each table had the works of a member of the society on it—except for the tenth, which was empty. There was a sign on the wall that read: READING IS NOT REQUIRED BUT IT IS RECOMMENDED.

  Martti Winter’s table was the one closest to the pastry case. Aura Jokinen’s was usually occupied by a crowd of young people, sometimes by older sci-fi fans. Families with children made their way to Ingrid Katz’s table, which had a pile of children’s books on it and a high chair provided.

  The tenth table was set aside for the Society’s tenth member, whom Rabbit Back had awaited for so long, with no inkling that the tenth member of the Society had died, his ideas stolen and published secretly.

  When Ella, the new tenth member, appeared in the café, old Eleanoora shook her hand, led her to the tenth table, and lamented the fact that there was as yet nothing on it to read.

  “But who knows, perhaps soon?” she said with a smile. “You know, I remember how you used to come here for ice cream on Sundays when you were a little girl. Every time you came you would look through those books and even then I thought to myself, I wonder if that girl’s going to be a writer. Birgit Ström always said, ‘Little Ella might just have what it takes if she ever gets the writing bug.’”

  When Ella had come to the café after Laura White’s disappearance, Eleanoora had been quiet and serious, bringing her some coffee and a roll and whispering, “Ella Milana, the tenth table is still yours, and it still looks awfully empty.”

  Ella sat at the bookless table as usual. She drank coffee and read the paper. Now and then she glanced around at the books on the other tables and pondered darkly about how many of them actually belonged to the tenth table, which actually belonged to Oskar Södergran.

  The Helsinki paper had once again found some news about Laura White’s disappearance, “the tragic riddle of the century”. The full-page article discussed police speculation that when spring came and the snow melted, some random wanderer would find the authoress’s body, probably in some dell or hollow. The article also reported, however, that “local experts” said that in the past many others had disappeared into Rabbit Wood, never to be found. What Rabbit Wood takes, Rabbit Wood keeps. They also interviewed a man who had been part of the search on the night of the disappearance and nearly driven his snowmobile into a ravine.

  The section at the bottom of the page was about the tourists arriving in Rabbit Back from all over the world. Dozens of White’s admirers had arrived over the winter, particularly from Japan and Germany. There was a picture of two Japanese young people standing at the edge of Rabbit Wood with snowshoes on their feet and packs on their backs. The caption read: TWO BOYS FROM OSAKA INTEND TO FIND LAURA WHITE’S BODY.

  Ella had started to tire of the missing author. After all, she was collecting material about her life and works, and the disappearance had nothing to do with it.

  She leafed ahead to the culture section. Aura Jokinen smiled at her from the page. The article said that Jokinen’s new novel had won a prestigious international sci-fi prize. The caption read: MOTHER AND SCI-FI WRITER ARNE AHLQVIST SEES THINGS DIFFERENTLY.

  Ella leafed through the paper and accidentally overheard the conversation of a small group at the Silja Saaristo table. A middle-aged man was turning Saaristo’s newest novel over in his hands, saying something about how confused the mystery was in the book, and that he had suddenly stopped sleeping well, how he’d been sleeping poorly for a long time.

  A young woman asked if he was having bad dreams. He said, “I’m still only dreaming about that writer. I’m a grown man—I can handle a few nightmares—but my kids are having them, too, waking up the whole house screaming.”

  An older woman took up the lament and said that she had thrown all of the Creatureville books out of her house in front of the children, to calm them down. “But then the little things had a dream that Laura White’s body crawled in the window and put the books back on the shelf and started reading them again. I don’t know what to do.”

  The man spoke in a voice flat with exhaustion. “And then there’s the constant Creatureville reruns and documentaries about Laura White you have to put up with. I don’t believe they’ll ever find her body, even if all of Japan comes to look for it. It’s going to lie in the woods and rot.”

  The young woman said in an unnecessarily loud voice, “Laura White’s body isn’t anywhere in the woods. It’s sneaking around in our dreams.”

  The group fell silent. Old Eleanoora had a coughing fit.

  The silence continued.

  The man coughed, got up and went to get more coffee for the women. The women started talking excitedly about the things they’d bought at the flea market.

  Ella left the café. It was 1:40 in the afternoon. She stopped on the steps for a moment to button up her black coat and wrap the white scarf she’d bought at the flea market around her neck. She looked at the snowy trees that hid the school and the library. Magpies sat here and there in the shadowy limbs, watching the café.

  The rectory was in the old parsonage. Ella was greeted by a small, frail man with a beard that protruded long and thin like a winter-killed creeping vine. He made small talk about the quantity of snow that had blown over the path, asked Ella to wipe her shoes on the mat and wondered how much more snow Our Heavenly Father would grant to Rabbit Back, with it already heaped so high that the rectory’s old building superintendent couldn’t fight it much longer.

  Ella shook the pastor’s hand and they went into his office. “Please sit down, Miss.”

  Pastor Karhunen said he hadn’t known old Stiina very well—no one had—but he had met her adult children at her funeral: Iiro, Eino, and Olavi.

  “I have a lot of faults,” he said, “and the Lord in his mercy forgets them every evening, provided I bear them in mind. Remembering names, however, is one thing I’ve never had any problem with.”

  He remembered Olavi Södergran being there with his wife Mirja. A stylish woman in a wheelchair. Her spine had been damaged in a car accident.

  “They said that they’d lost their child in the same accident. They were a very impressive and attractive couple. Did I mention that Olavi Södergran was blind? He made a joke over coffee about the blind leading the crippled and she smiled at it—apparently his quip didn’t sting in the least.”

  The pastor offered Ella a chocolate and smiled, th
inking of Olavi Södergran’s humour.

  “The author Laura White was at Stiina’s funeral, too, by the way. She came up and kindly shook hands with Olavi and the old woman’s other sons and said she had known Stiina a little through Oskar. I talked for a long time with Olavi and his wife about literature and the Lord’s mysterious ways. Beneath the humour I could see a certain kind of grief, the kind that can be a particularly hard blow to non-believers. I told them I could send them some passages from the Bible that would provide both beautiful literature and the comfort of God’s word, if they wanted me to.

  “You’re a literary person. If you ask me, there are passages in the Bible that a lover of literature has to appreciate, even if they have no interest in religious matters. The Book of Job, for example. A great mystery, and full of wonderful metaphors. None of this purple prose.”

  He paused, gazing at her expectantly, and when she promised to make it her business to get to know the Bible on a literary level, he nodded with satisfaction and continued.

  Although the Södergrans had said they were agnostic, they had given him their address so that he could send them some biblical selections.

  He picked up a slip of paper from the table and handed it to her.

  “You said you had some information for the Södergrans about their departed son? I don’t have their phone number, unfortunately, but here is their address. This is where they were living six years ago. They might very well still be there.”

  That evening Ella wrote a letter to Olavi Södergran and his wife Mirja.

  She started with polite greetings. She followed with an apology for the manner in which she was reminding them of a tragic incident in their past, but said she believed that what she had to tell them was the kind of information they would want to know, particularly if they were, as she had heard, great lovers of literature.