The Woman Who Borrowed Memories

by Tove Jansson

  When finished, the miniature woodshop was very small, with a sloping roof. Alexander had built it with bleached wood and taken great pains to give it a window with dirty panes that were broken in just the right way. It had a tree stump for chopping wood and a workbench with tiny tools, each of them exact to the tiniest detail. He had never before felt such peace of mind. He liked the quiet. Sometimes the telephone would ring out in the apartment, as if in another world.

  “That was Jani and Pekka on the phone. We should have them to dinner sometime soon.”

  “Yes, of course,” Alexander answered. “As soon as I’ve finished the woodshop.” He sat up half of every night, having fun, never turning on the television. He ate too fast and went back to his cubby as quickly as he could. Erik bought new cassettes and turned up the volume louder and louder. When Alexander came into the bedroom at night, he was preoccupied and happy and fell asleep at once. Early in the morning, he was back at work. He took his coffee through the window.

  “But where are you?” Erik said. He pushed a cup of coffee and some sandwiches across the windowsill. Alexander caught a glimpse of his troubled face and long nose, but his glasses turned his eyes to empty mirrors.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Where are you? Where are you these days?”

  “On the second floor,” Alexander said. “I’m up in the kitchen. The trapdoor in the floor is really a challenge. It has to meet the cellar stairs.”

  “Of course,” said Erik.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’? In that tone of voice.”

  Erik was silent. Then he said, “It was nothing. What does it look like, the trapdoor?”

  Alexander showed him. The trapdoor was laid in the kitchen floor with miniature hinges, while a thin chain prevented it from falling open. The stairway down to the cellar, meticulously mounted, disappeared in darkness.

  “It’s lovely,” Erik said. “Where did you get this doll’s house idea?”

  “It’s not a doll’s house,” Alexander said immediately. “It’s a house.”

  “Who for?”

  “Just a house. Maybe for us. I’m building everything exactly the way I want it. I decide. The first and second stories are by the sea. Then comes the parlor.”

  “Where?”

  Alexander laughed a little. “Somewhere in Germany. The attic will be in Paris. We’ll see.”

  Erik looked into the kitchen. “It has a wood stove.”

  “Of course. It’s prettier.”

  “Good lord,” Erik said. “I can’t imagine cooking on a wood stove. It’s impossible. Not when you’re used to a modern kitchen.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Alexander said.

  He never swept his workshop. Wood curls and sawdust and stone dust lay like a thick fur rug on the floor, and he liked standing in this soft soil his work had created and letting it grow thicker and deeper around him. He trailed it over the rest of the apartment and Erik had to vacuum several times a day.

  When the kitchen ceiling was finished, Alexander began thinking about electric lights. The house should definitely have electricity. He bought materials, thin copper wire, fixtures, and flashlight batteries, and spent a lot of time wiring the first and second stories. It was not a success. He had to remove the wiring in the kitchen ceiling, and he damaged the stairs in the process. Erik thought the house could be lit just as well from the outside.

  “Out of the question,” Alexander said. “This house has to glow, it has to live from the inside, don’t you see? We’re there inside, and other people walk by outside. But these batteries aren’t worth a damn. Or else there’s something wrong with the wiring.”

  In the end he called Jani. Jani had an electrician friend called Boy. Boy came and had a look. “You’ve got to get rid of all this junk,” he said. “It’s never going to work. You’re going to need a transformer on the bottom floor.” He explained in detail. They were absorbed in their electrical discussions all evening and went on planning during supper.

  “This will be a piece of cake,” Boy said. “You haven’t got a clue, but I’ll teach you. I’ll get it working. But you’re going to have to take up that middle floor again because of the wiring. You’re a wonderful carpenter, but you don’t know a damn thing about electricity.”

  Boy came back almost every evening. He often brought little table lamps, sconces, or a chandelier that he’d found in some hobby shop or toy store. He came straight from work in his jeans and trailed street dirt over the rugs, but Alexander didn’t seem to notice—he just admired whatever Boy had brought with him and listened gravely to his suggestions about improvements to the house.

  “You should realize,” Boy said, “that this house is going to be famous. But whatever you build, it’s the lighting that’s going to make it sing. Believe me.”

  Boy was a little, skinny fellow. He looked and moved a bit like a squirrel. He laughed often, showing his gums all the way to the roof of his mouth, and he clapped them both chummily on the back. Erik detested being clapped on the back, especially by such a small man wearing boots with high heels. When Boy came, the three of them would sit in the parlor and talk for a while, about whatever, about nothing, the way people do when they’re ready to leave but want to round things off to be polite. And then Alexander would stand up and say maybe they should get started and he’d go into his little cubbyhole with Boy. The tone of their voices changed, grew quieter and calmer, and the pauses grew longer. They stood and thought, considering some problematic detail in their construction project. From electrical, they had moved on to concern themselves with the uprights in a bay window and the construction of a spiral staircase. Out in the kitchen, Erik was preparing supper. The window to the cubby was closed on account of the sawdust, so he could only hear their voices, not what they were saying. But in their exchange of practical questions and suggestions, he could hear a quiet and complete harmony of purpose. Often these unheard, intermittent conversations were like breezes passing through foliage—strengthening, fading, stopping, then quickening again. From time to time, Boy would laugh, the way a person laughs when something finally fits.

  By December, Alexander had reached the parlor. He made French windows and put different colors of cellophane in the complex pattern of panes. Erik went into the cubicle and said, “About the cellar. I was cleaning the medicine cabinet and found some little bottles that are empty. We could put jam in them. You know, something we could color red. And then cover them with paper and put on labels.”

  “Excellent!” Alexander exclaimed. “Great idea! You can use plaster. I’ll show you how to mix it.”

  Erik set to work on his jam jars on the kitchen counter. He did a fine job, and each time he finished a jar and had written a label, he would take it to the window and get it approved. Finally Alexander said that now they had enough jam jars, and when they went on coming he was irritated. “We’re in the middle of a really difficult bit right now,” he said. “We don’t have time for jam jars. Can’t you find something else to do?”

  Erik walked straight out of the kitchen and turned on the television in the parlor. It was a lecture about the metal industry. After a while, Alexander came after him and said that the cellar needed some apples. But not too many. They could probably be made from clay, but don’t make the clay too wet and hard to handle. Erik’s apples weren’t great, and neither were his cucumbers, bananas, and melons. But when they’d been painted and piled out of the way behind the cellar stairs, it didn’t much matter.

  The house rose higher and higher. It had reached the attic, now, and had grown more and more fantastic. Alexander was in love, almost obsessed, with the thing he was trying to create. When he woke up in the morning, his first thought was The House, and he was instantly occupied with the solution to some problem of framing or a difficult staircase or the spire on a tower. Never before had he felt so light and free. Even his night thoughts, in the past often burdened with anxiety or self-reproach, had changed. He had only to c
lose his eyes and walk into his house and see that everything was as it should be. In his imagination, critical faculties sharpened to their limit, he would walk attentively from room to room, up stairways, out onto balconies; he would examine every detail and see that each was completed and that the whole was astonishingly beautiful. He saw the tower that would ultimately rise above his work and crown it triumphantly. Sometimes at night he would get up, very quietly so as not to wake Erik, and sneak into the kitchen, into his cubby. He would turn on a flashlight, sit on a kitchen chair, and look. He’d shine the flashlight through one window after another as if it were moonshine or the beam of a lighthouse. Alexander was in the grip of a passion for perfection. He was not aware of how closely, how perilously, perfectionism and fanaticism are related.

  Erik was allowed to sand window frames and paint them white. Once he tried to hang wallpaper on a landing, but it wrinkled and had to be pulled off.

  When the elaborate attic story began taking shape, The House was nearly two meters tall and would no longer fit in Alexander’s cubby. Alexander and Boy had a long talk and decided the only alternative was to empty the bedroom.

  “It’ll fit exactly,” Alexander said. “We can put the workbench under the window. And it won’t fit in the parlor.”

  “Which parlor?” Erik said. “Yours or mine?”

  “What’s your problem?” Alexander said. “What are you angry about? This is important. We’re about to start on the tower.” He borrowed two collapsible camp beds and put them in the hall. They lifted the big double bed in the bedroom and leaned it against the wall. The House was moved with infinite care and placed on a modeling stand with a revolving top. Now, in full daylight, The House changed character. The dreamlike quality was replaced by a bewildering impression of lifelikeness. The flat winter light filled every room. The pillars and the long balustrade on the open gallery threw pale gray shadows that were real, and the green, red, and blue panes in the windows cast soft rainbows on the floor. Every detail, every article of furniture, became convincing, as if they had all stood in place for generations. Alexander rotated The House slowly on its platform.

  “And now,” he said, “now we’ve come to the attic. Now we build our tower.”

  Boy said, “The cupola won’t be easy. It’ll have to be asymmetrical. Otherwise we won’t have room for the tower and the new gallery.”

  “True,” said Alexander. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. Which room do you think we should make smaller?”

  “The bedroom. We’ll have to make it a lot smaller.”

  “That’s wrong!” Erik said. “Completely wrong. I don’t agree at all. The bedroom’s already too small, and the window’s too high!”

  “About the cupola,” Alexander went on. “You may be right that we could make it asymmetrical.”

  “Yes,” Boy said. “I mean, so we’ll have room for our gallery.” And they bent over the workbench and started sketching the tricky section of the roof.

  That evening, Erik had not prepared any supper. He said he had a headache. They could make something themselves or eat something cold from the pantry.

  “Did you take an aspirin?” Alexander asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Erik said. He was lying on the sofa in the parlor, staring at the ceiling with his feet on the armrest. And he hadn’t taken off his shoes. Alexander went for a blanket. “Lift your feet,” he said, and he put a newspaper over the arm of the sofa.

  The next day, Alexander suggested that Erik sew curtains for The House, even though he knew that Erik had never sewn and couldn’t even hem a tablecloth.

  The winter wore on and The House rose higher and higher. Alexander and Boy had moved beyond the cupola and were working on the highest tower, where they were planning a rotating beacon. Their Black & Deckers ran every evening, an infernal shrieking of electric saws and drills in the bedroom, interrupted by periodic silence. Erik sat and watched television. Sometimes he went to the local cinema. Alexander asked if he couldn’t go and visit Jani and Pekka or some of their other friends, but Erik didn’t want to. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s our turn to invite them.”

  “Yes, yes, I know,” said Alexander, “but not until The House is finished. Then they can come and look. I’ve told you, we can’t be disturbed while we’re building.”

  Boy didn’t seem to notice that anything was wrong. He was cheerful and chatty at mealtimes and completely occupied with getting the beacon to rotate.

  One evening when Alexander had gone to the station to buy cigarettes, Boy threw open the door to the parlor and shouted, “It’s going around! It’s rotating! We’ve done it!”

  Erik turned off the television. In the darkened room he walked slowly towards Boy and then past him into the bedroom, where the only lights were in The House, lamps burning on every floor. From the final, topmost tower, red and green lights swept across the walls of the bedroom in a steady rhythm.

  “We did it!” Boy shouted, laughing out loud. “Alexander and me! We made it work. We’ve topped off the house and the beacon’s working just the way it should. Well? What do you think of our house?”

  “It’s not yours,” said Erik very softly.

  “Oh yes it is,” Boy said. “It sure is! You’d better believe it is! Come and look from the other side. Come look at the way the lights reflect in the bedroom mirrors!” When Erik didn’t move, he took him by the arm.

  “Don’t touch me!” Erik shouted.

  “Don’t be silly,” Boy said, and gave him a slap on the back. Erik screamed—a little, squeaky scream. Fumbling on the workbench he grabbed a tool, something that felt hard and cold in his hand, and he flew at Boy and struck at him blindly. The drill bit hit him near the ear and angled down towards his shoulder, and Boy threw himself back against the doll’s house, which tottered for a moment and seesawed on its podium. The beacon continued to rotate. Boy jumped behind the doll’s house and yelled, “Stop that, for Christ’s sake! Have you lost your mind?”

  Erik pursued him step by step. It was hard for him to see, and the moving beacon distorted the room and made it seem strange. He stumbled. Boy was silent.

  “I know where you are,” Erik said. “You’re hiding behind the doll’s house.” He gripped the drill shaft harder and went after him. “I’m coming,” he said. “And this time I won’t miss.”

  “Jesus Christ! Leave me alone,” Boy said. He was trapped in a corner of the room and couldn’t get away. “What do you want?”

  Erik began to tremble. All he knew was that he had to strike out, just once, one time, but hard. There was something wrong with his glasses, all he could see was the beacon fluttering round and round. “Turn off that damned light,” he screamed.

  Boy didn’t move.

  “Turn it off so I can see you, or I’ll smash the whole tower to pieces!” He took one step towards Boy and said, “Shall I smash you or the tower?” By now he was shaking so hard he could barely stand. “Shall I smash you to pieces? Is it you I should smash?”

  “No,” Boy said. “Not me.”

  Erik took off his glasses. They were in the way—they’d fogged up and made it hard to see. The everyday act of taking off his glasses and stuffing them in his pocket altered everything, inexplicably. A great weariness swept over him, and he said, “Could you go turn on the overhead light? There’s something wrong with my glasses.”

  When the light came on, he put the drill handle back on the workbench. Boy put his fingers carefully to his ear and looked at his hand. “Blood,” he said. “It’s running down on my collar.”

  Erik sat down on the floor. He felt ill.

  They heard the front door open. A few moments later, Alexander came in, stopped in the doorway, and said, “What the hell’s going on in here?”

  “He hit me,” Boy said. “Look! Blood!”

  “Erik?” said Alexander. “Why are you sitting on the floor? Where are your glasses?”

  “In my pocket. I feel sick.”

  “What have you done?”
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  “I don’t know,” Erik said. “But I saved our tower. It’s all in one piece.”

  Slowly, Alexander opened a pack of cigarettes, took one out, and lit it. “It actually rotates,” he said. “You know your stuff, Boy. Now the whole thing’s perfect. No one’s ever built such a house as Erik’s and mine.”

  Translated by Thomas Teal

  A LEADING ROLE

  IT WAS the biggest part she’d ever been given, but it didn’t suit her, it didn’t speak to her. An insignificant, anxious, middle-aged woman, an obliterated creature without any personality whatsoever! She had one good scene in the third act, but the rest of it! A shadow—to play a shadow in her first leading role. She called Sanderson and said, “It’s Maria. I’ve read through the part and I think it’s lifeless. Maybe it’s literature, but it’s not theater.”