The Rabbit Back Literature Society
Page 26
Ingrid Katz, who Ella called first, put a stop to her idea of renting a minibus.
“Just getting everybody to agree to come is an achievement. You ought to get a medal. But don’t overdo it. It takes a few hours to get there. Let’s do this: We’ll reserve seven taxis to pick us up in front of the library at ten o’clock. We can meet there. You, Martti and I can go in one cab. The others can each have their own.”
The following day dawned mild and partly cloudy. The members of the Society arrived in front of the library and exchanged polite, distant greetings. No one came closer than two metres to another except for Ella, Ingrid and Martti Winter, who stood together trying to look unconcerned.
“The snow will start to melt soon,” Ella said.
The three of them turned momentarily to marvel at the shrinking snowdrifts.
“Yes, it will,” Ingrid said.
“We’ll see,” Martti Winter said. “The ground’s frozen so hard in my garden that I doubt it will melt all summer.”
Ella and Winter looked at each other.
“Would you like some liquorice?” Ingrid said, bending over her bag.
They ate liquorice, and then the taxis came and the members of the Rabbit Back Literature Society got in.
Three hours later, Ingrid Katz was conferring with the nurses.
“I understand—the patient shouldn’t be needlessly disturbed and she’s scheduled for more surgery and only family is allowed to visit. Do you understand that we were once an extremely close-knit group? Good friends. Family, even, literarily speaking. Believe me, Aura Jokinen, alias Arne C. Ahlqvist, would definitely want the authors Winter, Saaristo, Seläntö, Kangasniemi, Oksala, Holm, Kariniemi, Katz and Ella Milana here at her bedside. It can only be good for her recovery that we’ve come to visit her. We came straight here. We got here even before her blood relatives showed up.”
Naturally all of the nurses knew who Laura White was and were to some degree aware of the nine members of the Society. In fact, two of them proved to be fans of Martti Winter’s work, and a third confessed that she enjoyed Silja Saaristo’s mysteries and had once bought one of Ingrid’s books as a Christmas gift for her children.
“You mean one of our patients is a writer, too?” one of the nurses said. “You don’t say. I’ve never met a writer, and suddenly the hospital’s full of them. Show me one of their books in the hospital library and I’ll be more interested. What did you say your name was?”
It was eventually agreed that each of them could visit Jokinen’s room separately and spend a maximum of one minute each.
Silja Saaristo insisted on going first, because she had an urgent need to use the ladies’ room.
“I’m going to wet myself soon, and I want to get this out of the way. There’s something so depressing about friends dying. And that hospital smell. Ugh.”
Within six minutes every one of the old members of the Society had gone in, and now it was Ella’s turn. She walked into the room, which at the moment contained only Aura Jokinen. Jokinen lay in bed with dark circles under her eyes, a bandage around her head and intravenous drips in her arm.
The nurse had prepared them by saying that even if the patient were conscious she might be confused.
“We’ll continue The Game where we left off,” Ella said. “As soon as you’re ready to start prowling again. I asked the others and they said that of course you can postpone The Game when something like this happens. But until then, try not to think about large, complicated things. I guess they’re getting a chance to look inside a sci-fi writer’s head after all. I just hope they fix your head well enough that you can start writing about this reality instead of writing about everything else.”
Jokinen smiled, raised one eyebrow and murmured something.
Ella bent closer and breathed in the sharp smell that wafted from the bed and the patient lying in it. “What did you say?”
“Jansson,” Jokinen whispered, pointing to the door. “Just here. Went to the cafeteria. Ask about Laura.”
Ella stepped into the cafeteria.
People came and went. The clatter of dishes was swallowed up by the sound of conversation that flowed over everything. Ella walked slowly along the wall. She was looking for a table with a man who fit Doctor Jansson’s description—a thin, elderly gentleman with white hair.
The Society authors had taken over seven tables in various parts of the room.
Ingrid Katz and Martti Winter were sharing a table. The long deli counter was behind them. Ingrid bent her thin neck to drink her coffee. In the harsh light of the cafeteria she looked old and stressed.
Martti Winter was eating a large chocolate doughnut. On his plate was more food: a ham sandwich, a chocolate bar and two large pastries. He was dressed in a white suit. A chocolate stain on his silk tie was visible from a distance.
Ingrid noticed Ella and beckoned her to their table. Ella parried the invitation with a gesture the intricacies of which made Ingrid smile in bafflement. She continued her circuit of the room. Nervous looks were thrown at her, as if she were a leopard searching for suitable prey.
She thought wistfully of the photograph on Martti Winter’s wall of himself and Ingrid as children. Then she came up with an idea for a camera that didn’t just record people in a momentary flash, but captured their entire chronological existence. Could you turn a little so that your childhood is in the picture? Right now your middle age is obscuring it…
A mural of a gleaming mountain landscape inhabited with people and sheep was painted on the cafeteria’s farthest wall. Ella looked for a long time at a white-bearded, stylishly dressed older man sitting among the sheep.
Her lack of sleep was apparently starting to affect her vision; the mural seemed to swim and buckle before her eyes.
The old man moved, took a drink of his coffee. It was only then that she realized he wasn’t part of the painting.
She got herself some coffee and a biscuit. As she approached Doctor Jansson’s table with her tray, she did remember seeing him at Laura White’s party. He had been standing at the foot of the stairs right next to her when Ms White had started down the stairs.
“Doctor Jansson?”
“Oh, hello,” the old man said with a smile. “The lovely Miss Milana, of the Rabbit Back Literature Society. I remember you well. We unfortunately didn’t have a chance to introduce ourselves at that ill-fated gathering, but you were pointed out to me. Please sit down, if such humble company suits you.”
Ella put her coffee on the table and sat down next to him.
“I hope you won’t take offence if I say this at the very beginning of our acquaintance,” Doctor Jansson said, leaning towards her, “but you have unusually gracefully formed lips, if you ask this retired physician and art lover. Nature has its own whims and missteps, which in my profession one sees all too often. But your lips are evidence of nature’s gifts.”
Ella thanked him for the compliment, wiping her mouth and smiling awkwardly.
The doctor let his attention wander over the bright hospital cafeteria and Ella followed his gaze. The server behind the counter was refilling the pastry case, which Martti Winter had emptied significantly. A little farther off, Winter could be seen watching the activity at the counter, no doubt pondering whether to purchase anything else to nibble on. Ingrid Katz sat with her chin resting on her knuckles, explaining something to him.
“It seems the whole Literature Society is here,” the doctor said. “One is lying upstairs with an IV in her arm and the rest are here in the cafeteria. Do they still not speak to each other?”
“Not really,” Ella said.
Doctor Jansson shrugged sadly. “Well, it’s been that way for years. It’s not something an old man like me can understand, people remaining strangers to each other when they used to be so close. They did everything together for years—vacations and parties and studying their writing. Some of them even dated. Perhaps all they need is to get up from behind their keyboards. You never know.”
The doctor nodded. “Yes, I heard.”
“We talked about an incident that happened to Laura White when she was a child.”
As she tossed this bait to the doctor, she lifted her coffee to her lips to hide her face.
Doctor Jansson looked at Ella with watery eyes and raised his bushy eyebrows. “It’s good that Aura remembers that incident,” he said. “Very good. I’m glad. It was an extraordinary thing, and a heartening example of what rehabilitation can do. It’s not surprising that people don’t talk about it here…”
Doctor Jansson’s demeanour changed as the memories revolved in his mind—he stroked his beard, tapped the table with a long index finger and started to speak:
“What a case that was! A ten-year-old girl who was angry
at her parents over some small thing and ran off into the woods, naked for all practical purposes, wearing nothing but a thin nightgown. She had a bad habit of running away in a temper, out of the house, wherever her feet took her. She had a blind trust that her mother and father would always catch her before she got too far away.
It’s night, there’s a quiet snow falling, the ground’s been frozen for some time. It doesn’t occur to her parents to call anyone for help at this point. They run after her and think they’ll catch up to her in a moment, like they always have before.
They’re right behind her for a long time, and many times they almost catch up with her, but this time she’s faster than usual, or perhaps her parents are getting slower—in any case things go wrong and they finally realize to their horror that they’ve lost her completely. A nearly naked child, lost in the woods at night in freezing weather that’s growing colder.
A couple of hours go by as they search desperately. The mother is hysterical, gives up the search and goes to alert the police, the family doctor and the ambulance. They both cherish a hope that she’s gone home on her own and is sitting by the fire warming herself.
That’s when her father finds her footprints and follows them to a small pond. He looks into the clear ice and sees his daughter underneath it. Farther off there’s a hole in the ice where she’s fallen in. He understands the situation immediately—she’s fallen through the hole in the ice and can’t find her way out again.
He yells at the top of his lungs—the neighbours hear him from a kilometre away—and starts hacking at the ice with his flashlight. When he’s got her out of the pond he runs with the lifeless girl in his arms for fifteen minutes to get her home. The ambulance is already there and they rush her to the hospital. But her heart has already stopped, she’s not breathing, her body seems cold and dead—too much time has passed.
Somehow, as if through a miracle, they manage to revive her—she starts to breathe and her heart starts up again.
It’s clear that the best they can hope for is that she’ll spend the rest of her life in an institution. That’s what their own doctor tells them. I’m ashamed to say that this short-sighted, foolish pronouncement can be attributed to me. God have mercy on me.
Of course, the facts supported my prognosis. The girl’s brain was badly damaged. She could no longer speak, eat, walk or do anything else. She’d regressed to the state of a newborn baby. For a long time she didn’t respond to anything, and then, when she did begin to respond, she didn’t even recognize her own parents. Her mind was truly a blank slate.
Well, against the warnings from the hospital and the pessimism of their doctor, her parents bring her straight home, travel to Switzerland and hire an army of specialists to rehabilitate her.
And a miracle happens. It takes time, but in the end she learns everything all over again and recovers. It’s truly an old-fashioned survival story. The White family leave Rabbit Back with a helpless, brain-damaged ten-year-old, and return six years later with an intelligent, civilized young lady.
You could perceive only a few small signs of her previous condition. One of them was that she could never remember anything about the accident or her life before it happened, except for one small memory.
Some time much later the girl, who at that point was already a woman, mentioned to me that she remembered seeing something on the night she drowned, the night that she died for a while. She wouldn’t say anything more. But she asked me a lot of questions about how exactly the human brain works and what kinds of hallucinations a person might have when the brain is deprived of oxygen.
Another trace of the accident was that she didn’t want to touch the piano anymore, although before she had been a gifted student. It was no doubt due in part to the coldness and numbness of her fingers—she never fully regained her circulation.
Aside from the way it began, this story isn’t such a bleak one. In place of music, she took up other interests, and her talents found different ways to blossom. Can you imagine? Three years later this young woman who should have been a mere phantom of her former self published her first children’s book, which was, of course, Creatureville.
Her proud family invited their pessimistic old doctor to dinner and presented him with a copy of the book, inscribed by her. It read: “For Doctor Jansson from his friend Laura. We both strive to understand what makes a person tick.”
Doctor Jansson’s hands were trembling as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.
“That book is in a place of honour on my shelf, and in my capacity as a doctor I’ve ordered myself to look at it every day—once in the morning and once in the evening. This prescription has helped me to keep my ego from overreaching, which it has a tendency to do. That book has helped me remind myself daily that though we humans have learning and wisdom and imagine we know everything—imagine ourselves gods—events will take their own course, in spite of divinities such as ourselves and our little ideas and assumptions. We thought we’d lost Laura forever, and we got her back again. Why? Because anything can happen—even the kinds of things that we can’t predict or understand. For that same reason, we have to accept that Laura finally did leave us the way she did, tragically and unexpectedly.”
The old man stared into the distance. Then his furrowed face quivered and a smile spread over it.
“Tragically and unexpectedly, I say, but in actuality it was a beautiful thing. Poof, she’s gone, and in her place is white, wildly dancing snow! You know, Ella, it’s just like Mother Snow says in Laura’s last book:
Dear creatures, sometimes we are allowed to experience wondrous things and go places we couldn’t reach even in dreams. Only someone who hasn’t learned anything from it all can think that they’ll be able to hold on to what they’ve found forever.
EPILOGUE
37
ELLA MILANA stands with her back to the bed. Her clothes fall to the floor.
The dim room smells like dark chocolate. Ella ties the blindfold over her eyes, turns, gropes her way to the bed and reaches both hands out in front of her.
He takes hold of them, and a small yelp escapes her.
Afterwards she draws another X on her calendar and smiles.
The whole thing was hard at first.
The first time, she got caught under him and nearly smothered, her side crushed. The second time, she sprained an ankle and almost broke her nose. Their third time it ended with him making an ill-advised movement and getting an attack of lumbago and starting to yell out loud, unable to stop. Ella called a doctor who came and pumped him full of three syringes of painkillers.
The fourth time ended with both of them laughing uncontrollably.
The fifth time went better. Neither was noticeably injured and they both had an orgasm—they were finally starting to find a way to fit their bodies together.
Ella and Martti Winter never talked about their relationship, and they didn’t comment on each other’s actions—words can be razor sharp when it comes to tender ma
tters of the flesh.
The only exception was an ode that he wrote to her—to her nipples, to be precise. At first she thought it a ridiculous idea, but when she heard the poem she ran out of the room with tears in her eyes.
Things you don’t talk about aren’t completely real. After the fifth time, as Ella is rinsing herself in the bathroom, she tries to recount the experience in her mind. She wants to find something in it to shape into a memory.
It isn’t easy. She doesn’t remember the act at all, except for a surreal general impression and an idea that formed in her mind at the final moment: she was a little crawfish swirling in the eddies of the sea, slamming herself again and again against something large and powerful.
Ella Milana returns to the bedroom. The bathrobe she’s wearing is much too big for her. She lets it slide off onto the floor, steps out of the pile of fabric, and starts putting her own clothes on.
He looks at the outline of her body in the dimness.
“What?” Ella asks.
“Ella Milana,” he says, “May is half over, and the weather report promises a warm, sunny day tomorrow. It’s time we went for a picnic. Let’s have one out in the garden. I’ll make the food.”
“Oh,” Ella says happily. “Can I bring anything?”
Winter is breathing heavily. Ella turns to look at him.
When he finally answers, his voice is scooped hollow.
“Bring a shovel.”
38
THE DOGS haven’t gone anywhere.
Ella Milana and Martti Winter counted all the dogs gathered around the house on April Fool’s Day. They got as far as thirty-eight.
Every now and then someone appears at the house to pick up their pet and take it home. Within a few days, the creature runs away and comes back to Winter’s house again. The Rabbit Tracks dog psychologist A. Louniala has been flooded with questions from weary dog owners. The dog column has tripled in length.