by Leena Krohn
From time to time, the offspring of one of her colleagues would visit the office needing to talk with their mother or father. If this youngster took the liberty of greeting Emmi D. with the profane expression “Hi!” and departing with an energetic “Bye!”, this seemingly minor event would lead to unexpected consequences. In such cases, Emmi D. would approach the youngster’s parent and ask, “Could I have a few words with you?”
Then she would proceed to instruct the parent that it is the elder person who greets first should they deem it appropriate, and only then may the younger person respond. Naturally, even then, the expression “Hi!” would be out of the question, as would be a “Bye!” called out upon departure. Before noon, the proper greeting is “good morning,” and after noon, “good day.” If one is unwilling to depart with the austere and traditional expression “goodbye,” an appropriate substitute would be “have a nice day.”
After imparting this advice, Emmi D. would inform the parent that, as the person responsible for the youth’s upbringing, he or she should shape up. If his or her offspring were to fail to learn decent manners in time, the child would most likely sooner or later take up a life of crime. “Vestigia terrent,” Emmi would say. (She often liked using Latin expressions, at times in the entirely wrong context.)
I said that Emmi D. was a friend “of sorts.” What sort of friend was she, then? Perhaps it would be better not to call our slowly evolved and in many ways superficial relationship a friendship. If someone were to ask me what we had in common and why I kept in touch with her over the decades, however infrequently, I wouldn’t be able to give them a credible answer. I had met Emmi back in university, and her obvious eccentricity caught my attention. She walked as if always on tiptoe. Her skull was an uncommon shape, a fact from which an early twentieth Century phrenologist would have drawn far-reaching conclusions. Her features would probably have been called “degenerate.”
I’m ashamed to admit that I observed her like a strange species of animal. I was puzzled by what made her act the way she did, persistently repeating the same pattern to her own detriment.
What our relationship meant to her, on the other hand, I never discovered. After our meetings, I was left feeling a mix of rage, amusement, and embarrassment, but the fact of the matter was that I was the one who kept in touch with her.
In my living room, over a low bookshelf, hung an oil painting depicting a jubilant crowd holding flowers and banners in a square. It was by a well-known artist friend of mine. I don’t know why Emmi D. hated it so much, but every time she visited, she made a snide remark about it. I assume it was more a question of her disliking the artist. Emmi D. had only once met the artist when the artist was out on the street walking a dog, an old Airedale Terrier. Emmi never could stand dogs. After that, she always referred to the artist as “that dog person.”
How she went on about that painting! She thought the colors were too flashy and primitive, the composition was wretched, the people looked like dolls, the painting didn’t fit the mood of the room, and the handwriting of the artist’s signature was that of a clearly inferior talent.
“O tempora, o mores,” she said, staring at the painting with disgust.
She only ever came to my place once of her own accord, and without calling me ahead of time to say she was coming. It was an unfortunate visit. It so happened that my second cousin was visiting with his wife, a surgeon from the Far East.
Emmi D. had a complete command of etiquette and the rules of proper behavior, but she didn’t feel it necessary to apply them to anyone not of Caucasian, Christian extraction. I saw how her eyes narrowed as she uttered a greeting and how she insultingly looked past Mei Fang as she withdrew her hand. She then turned to me and said she would come some other time, when I didn’t have other guests. Later that evening she called in a very worked up state and wanted to know why I socialize with “jungle people.” I lost my temper then, and hung up on her.
Nevertheless, one last time, on a lazy August afternoon, I got the rare impulse to call Emmi D. I asked whether she would like to come over for evening tea. She was silent, perhaps from surprise. Then she asked, “Well, do you still have that painting?”
I knew exactly what painting she meant, of course, but I asked with an air of innocence, “What painting do you mean?”
“The revolutionary painting,” she said. “The one over your low bookshelf.”
“Oh, that one. It’s still there,” I said. ”Why?”
“In that case,” she said, “I’ll wait until you replace it with some real art.”
After that, I didn’t meet her again until my second datura winter, when I saw her standing at the bus stop near the corner of Schaumanninkatu, looking pale, almost yellow, and even more miserable than usual. When I asked her how she was, she admitted to being ill, but wouldn’t say what with.
“I’m going in for more tests soon,” she said. “Alea jacta est. They only have four-person rooms, but I’ve told them that I won’t share a room with anyone of color.”
“I hope you get well soon,” I said and went on my way, blood boiling. I was sorry that she was unwell, but at that point I really felt that there was no sense in continuing our acquaintance.
And it didn’t continue. About a week after our exchange, I met a shared classmate of ours in the tram. She told me that Emmi D. had died.
I examined my feelings. Was I sad, did I have a guilty conscience, or was I perhaps relieved somehow? Everything in me was silent.
“I knew that she was going to the hospital to get tests done,” I said. “I saw her just the other week. Who could have thought that she would wither away so quickly?”
“Did you say you met her last week?” my acquaintance asked. “You must be mistaken. She died last month. It was some kind of liver condition. As far as I know she was unconscious for weeks before the end.”
“There must be some kind of mix up,” I said. “I spoke with her on Schaumanninkatu last Thursday and she was her old self, at least mentally. She’s impossible to confuse with anyone else.”
“All the same, it must have been someone else,” my acquaintance said.
A couple of days later I got a letter from my acquaintance. In it was Emmi’s obituary, very austere. Below it were the lines:
Memories are like threads of gold,
They never tarnish or grow old.
Her mother and relatives were listed as the bereaved. She had died the previous month, just as my acquaintance had said.
This incident unnerved me. If the person I had met on Schaumanninkatu was not Emmi D, who was it? If it was Emmi D, or some kind of residual image of her, did other people see her as well, or did they just see me talking to myself on the street corner?
It was time to admit, at least to myself, that my intermittent, and lately chronic, physical and memory problems, had something to do with datura. I had been warned of the consequences, I admit it. I could no longer refuse to connect the increasingly frequent occurrences and unpleasant symptoms I was experiencing to my birthday flower.
I was becoming oversensitive to intense lights, sounds, and smells. I had constant problems with my eyesight. Reading and writing were difficult at times, because I could only see clearly at a very limited distance. My asthma was better, but I was plagued by a constant thirst and even had daily trouble urinating.
After Emmi’s death and temporary resurrection, I decided to stop using datura and go back to prescription medication and an inhaler. This resolution was not, however, an easy one to keep.
Faith is Sick
When I think of Faith and Faith’s paws, I remember Kachalov’s dog, the animal of which Esenin wrote:
Come, Jim, give me your paw for luck,
I swear I’ve never seen one like it.
Let’s go, the two of us, and bark
Up the moon when Nature’s silent.
“Faith is sick,” I told the Marquis over the phone. “Come quickly. I think we have to take her to the vet.”
/> Faith had once again been at the office for the day. She lay on the dragon mat and panted. Her nose was dry and hot, her gentle, heavy paws, which I liked to hold in my hands, twitched. She seemed to have fallen into some kind of stupor, but her eyes were open. They didn’t react to her immediate surroundings, though. Faith seemed to be looking much further away. She also didn’t seem to hear her own name. She was somewhere far away.
I put my hand on her graying warm chest, and my fingertips felt her old heart racing. Your pump is wearing out, I thought. The knowledge was intolerable.
The world was a much better place with old Faith in it than the world would be without her. The dog’s death would bring a big change in my life, as well.
Then I had a thought, cruel and frightening. When I left, I had put a handful of datura seeds on a saucer that was on the second lowest shelf of the bookcase. My innocent intention was to buy cactus soil and try to sprout them, just for their beauty. At least that’s what I had convinced myself of. I went to look. The stupid fish starting playing and singing, enough to drive a person crazy. I wanted it to be silent forever, so I hit it with the Marquis’s ashtray.
There were a few seeds on the saucer, far fewer than I had put there, and they looked damp. Faith could easily reach the second lowest shelf. For some reason she had gone and had a taste of the seeds, probably while I was at the post office. I hadn’t even thought that she might take an interest in them. I cursed my own stupidity and carelessness.
When the Marquis came, we lifted the animal, heavy with sickness and age, onto the back seat of the car and covered her with a blanket. She didn’t seem to understand or care about what was happening to her.
The Marquis was also miserable. I drove and the Marquis sat in the back. Faith’s heavy head rested on his knee and drool dripped onto his pants, but he didn’t care. On the way, I told him about the datura seeds in a rushed and confused manner. He didn’t have a single word of reproach, but that only made me feel all the worse.
The veterinarian’s waiting room was crowded, and we were forced to wait. I was afraid Faith would die in our arms. The pauses between her labored breaths grew longer. The dog’s breathing had become a measure of time.
As the young vet listened to Faith’s heart, I asked whether she had ever heard of datura and did she know what antidotes to use for its toxins. She shook her head—she’d never even heard the plant’s name.
“Of course, you can always call the Poison Information Center,” I said, “but this is urgent. Give her an antidote for scopolamine and hyoscyamine and nicotine. You must have something suitable.”
“Stomach pump first,” she said.
“Do you think she’ll make it?” I asked after the procedure. Faith looked nearly lifeless.
“It’s impossible to say,” she said. “Her heart is quite weak, as you know. We’ll just have to wait and see. She’ll have to stay here overnight for observation. This kind of thing is always touch and go with such an old animal.”
We left in low spirits, without saying much of anything to one another. I think the Marquis was also thinking that we had seen Faith alive for the last time.
The Psychology of a Plant
I called the Ethnobotanist and asked if I could meet him somewhere.
“Do you want me to write another article?” he asked.
“Actually I need some information on a plant. Or, rather, I need to talk to you about it. I already know quite a bit about it myself.”
“Is it urgent?”
“I’d say so.”
“What plant?”
“Devil’s trumpet—datura.”
“Alright, I’ll come over,” he promised.
At the office, with a fresh cup of coffee in front of him, he skipped the small talk and got straight down to business.
“A very interesting plant, in its own way. As you probably already know, it’s a member of the nightshade family, along with potato and tomato plants, tobacco and henbane. In tropical countries and temperate zones, it can spread like a weed. Beautiful, but to be avoided. I haven’t acquainted myself too closely with it, and I don’t intend to. Maybe you have?”
“Yes, I have.”
“I actually find datura a bit distasteful. Its blossoms are too grand and ostentatious if you ask me. For a herbaceous plant, it’s huge. You probably already know that it’s also poisonous, which is to say it has an extraordinarily well developed defense mechanism. A plant like that is full of energy and aggression. Did you know that it’s considered an evil goddess by some?”
“Why?”
“It’s said that the plant has a criminal past, though datura itself can hardly be blamed for that. In the Middle Ages, particularly in Italy, poisoners used it for assassinations. Datura contains a number of poisons. It also contains Vitamin C, but it’s probably wiser to get that from oranges or vitamin pills. The main alkaloid in datura seeds is hyoscyamine, the same substance found in henbane. The seeds also contain scopolamine and atropine, which have been used as arrow poison and eye medicine. The leaves of the plant contain methanol and hyoscine. The stem contains nicotine and pyridine, umbelliferone and tannin and a couple of dozen other toxins. It does have its medicinal uses, though, as do all poisons. It has been grown in secret gardens and used for religious and therapeutic purposes, such as to treat wounds and internal damage. It dries the mucous membranes. Did you know that . . . ”
“ . . . it has even been used to try to cure asthma,” I said.
“Exactly. Its effects are unpredictable, however. It numbs the senses. Don’t keep it in your bedroom at night.”
“Are you serious?” I asked with mock lightness. “Will it come after me and throttle me in my sleep? It’s only a pretty flower.”
“Only! As I recall, we’ve talked before about how plants and their mentalities are underestimated. As a thinking woman, you shouldn’t fall into that trap. I mean it. Datura smells the strongest at night. Its scent alone can give you hallucinations. Datura breaks down the wall between fantasy and reality, making it impossible to tell them apart. I repeat: impossible! The boundary becomes invisible. You could slip onto the wrong side, so to say, completely unawares. If that happens, there’ll be the devil to pay.”
Then I confessed to him that, from time to time, once or twice a week, I drank tea made from datura leaves for my asthma, or crushed a couple of seeds into powder and then sprinkled them on a sandwich.
“Kind of like a condiment,” I said with a forced laugh. “But I’ve stopped using it, really.”
(“Really” meaning that I still, on some nights, out of habit, put a datura leaf in my tea strainer, just one, and mixed the drink with ordinary tea.)
The Ethnobotanist didn’t laugh.
“Unwise,” he said sharply. “Very, very unwise. I wouldn’t have thought you’d stray into something like that. You’re a grown woman for heaven’s sake! I’m warning you! The datura’s toxins accumulate in the body. Your vital organs will begin start to shut down. You’ll begin forgetting things. You might even forget to take your next breath. The seeds and root in particular are pure poison. Eating more than just a few seeds is certain death, and the concentration of poison in them can vary wildly. Eating them could lead to undocumented, long-term consequences. But it’s the root that is the most dangerous. Keep away from it!”
I began to sweat, but he went on with his merciless lecture. “Do you want to lose your awareness of time and place? Do you want to lose your memory? Suffer from mental breakdowns, perhaps chronically?”
“Of course not.”
“Tell me, have you already had . . . experiences?”
I hesitated.
“I suppose you could say so,” I confessed.
He waited for me to give him more details, but I remained silent.
“Can you be more specific? Have you suffered from nausea? Dizziness? A dry mouth and thirst?”
“You’d think you’re a doctor, not a botanist.”
“Have you?”
He waited, unsmiling, for my answer.
“Well, from time to time.”
“I knew it,” he said. “Dilated pupils? Lost time? Confusion of time and place? Oversensitivity to light and sound? Palpitations? Overly vivid dreams? Communication with people who aren’t physically there?”
I remembered my run-in with Emmi D, who was dead, getting lost, my states of agitation and anxiety, my eyesight problems, some conversations that weren’t conversations at all, and I swallowed.
“I knew it,” he said again, unhappy. “No one can use datura without consequences. You’ve gotten off easy, seeing as you can still carry on a conversation with me. Some people get lost completely in other realities and never return to our shared world. You could have died. Promise me—don’t even look at that flower again. Give it away, or better yet, destroy it. It has too much power over you already.
He was right. But I still didn’t want to destroy my beautiful flower.
The Woman Who Was Four
When someone dies in a movie or on stage, the face of the actor—even smeared with fake blood—doesn’t really differ from the faces of the living. Real death, however, shrinks the face and alters the features. In half an hour, they have become nearly unrecognizable. Their owner seems to have abandoned them, and those left behind by the deathbed cannot help but ask, “Where has she gone?”
All cadavers resemble one another. All that was personal and characteristic in the face is stripped away. It is only then that one understands that it is not so much a person’s features that shape their face, but rather it is the person’s experiences and memories that give the face its unique, familiar, and beloved appearance. And those elements the departed take with them when they go.
It was Sylvia, the woman who was four, who led me to these thoughts. No doubt in part because I talked with the woman, if I remember correctly, in the same week I heard about Emmi’s death. I never discovered whether Sylvia was faking it, sick, crazy, eccentric, or “the real thing.”
