Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (100 page)

But during my whole eloquence I was bothered by something that I still couldn’t express to myself clearly. Only when the man, this new Filemon, had been guided out, did I start to understand what had bothered me. This case was extremely unbelievable. The man had worn a clean white long-sleeved dress shirt and straight dark trousers whose trouser legs were fashionably narrow. How on earth could he have maneuvered into that sort of trousers? How had he donned the shirt? When I reminisced I was certain that the garments hadn’t shown extra zippers; they hadn’t been particularly large. There was no way to dress a root-footed man whose arms were like bushes into such garments.

I started to suspect that the young man had assumed such a horrendous look just to trick me. That he and his friends had just fooled around with me and now mocked my compassion and sincere pathos. That wooden man! My face heated as it occurred to me that they might have a hidden camera with which to film our meeting. The wooden man and his friends surely squirmed in laughter as they peeled extra bumps from the man’s sinewy, healthy feet.

The emotion that I had experienced while meeting him turned into anger, and I was ashamed by my words, which I now recalled as pompous and hollow. But then I saw again the man’s eyes, that had looked at me from amidst the dark bark-skin, and I remembered their suffering, which I couldn’t imagine as false, and I started to doubt my own disbelief. Maybe the garments had hidden zippers or slits after all?

In this confusion and ignorance, I fell asleep.

The Queen of the Night and Other Strangers

A woman came to me to talk about, as she put it, the problems in her marriage.

– That is not my field, I told her. – Maybe you should meet a lawyer or a private investigator. Or a priest or a therapist, depending on the severity of your problem.

– But I came to you, she said, so beautifully that I gave up. – Besides I expressed the matter poorly. Actually, this is about something else than marriage.

– All right, tell me of that something. Don’t be offended if I look like I’m asleep. I often close my eyes while listening to a client. That makes me concentrate better, I said, pronouncing those words already from my own pleasant darkness.

– My husband, who otherwise was a lucid and calm man, often saw nightmares, she began. – In which he fought against who knows what—a beast, an unknown enemy, a robot. Often, for some reason, I woke up just before he started to toss and scream reverberantly, out of horror or anger. Perhaps some change in his breathing prepared me for his nightmare. I told him that it was just a dream, patted him as if he were a child, which we don’t have, and soon he fell asleep again. But one night I saw a nightmare myself. I saw that I punched and kicked my husband in a rampant rage. Why I did so, the dream gave me no explanation. There was only that short attack amidst the rush of the small hour’s dreams, and I woke up to that.

– The dream astounded me, and I didn’t understand why I had such a hostile dream, because the relationship between me and my husband was warm and heartfelt. I studied myself and couldn’t find a reason for the hostility of the dream; I had no scores to settle with my husband. I had never felt even the temptation to slap him, let alone punch or kick radiating such blind rage. The dream made me feel guilt, and I didn’t mention it to my husband, though sometimes at the breakfast table I might have told him my dreams. Actually, I was afraid. I feared for my own sanity, because to me such rage surpassed the limit of normality even in dreams. But I calmed myself thinking: “Dreams are dreams”, and then forgot the incident and lived a day of wakefulness.

She fell silent, and when I cracked my eyelids because of the silence, I saw she had sunk into joyless thoughts.

– Did something else unpleasant happen? I asked kindly and closed my eyes again.

– Exactly so. Two weeks later, in the waking world, I was sent an email. It contained messages between my husband and another woman, dozens of letters. They were love letters. My husband had a lover.

– And that’s when you recalled your dream, I said.

– Yes, that’s when I remembered. I understood that the dream had prepared me beforehand for what would happen and that something in me had already known about it. There were many letters, for a duration of almost two years. The moment when I understood what I’d read was one of the turning points of my life. But I had already beforehand, in my dream, spent all my rage, and only disappointment remained.

– My spouse was a businessman, who tried to sell dated technology: personal weather stations and self-illuminating cellphone covers. He did many business trips, or I thought them to be business trips until I read the mail I’d received. The messages revealed that his lover, named Josephine, lived in a city on the other side of the globe. The quality of the relationship didn’t leave much to doubt, for the very first letter that I read had this sentence: “I remember the night when I saw all your graces, you the Queen of the Night, but your smile was the most beautiful of them.” Many of the messages ended in the words: “With countless kisses, fond hugs, and always loving more.” Those sickly sweet words almost amused me, but only almost. For after them, in every message, I read an invisible post scriptum addressed to me. It was written in big letters, thickened, and underlined. The post scriptum said: “I don’t love you.”

– Attached in the letters was a picture that my husband had taken of his lover. Josephine was bony, swollen-lipped, and not young anymore, though younger than me. In the picture she smiled the smile of a girl in love.

– From that moment on, our marriage was as useless and pointless as those poor cellphone covers that my husband sold. After a quick glance you could mistake the cover for the phone itself, imagine that one could still stay connected, send, and receive. But pick up the cover and you’ll notice it’s empty, light, and useless.

– The sender of the messages was unknown to me. Her name was Arunja. Suddenly I’d gotten involved with three strangers: besides Josephine and Arunja, there was also my husband, with whom I’d lived for fifteen years. The cover letter, attached to which I received the love letters, was as full of hate as my own dream. It was in coarse language and spoke both to the writer’s vulgarity and her ill will.

“I send this letter so that you know your man’s woman. These are just few of many, and why he loves my country. I got your husband’s password when he visited my country with Josephine and I read his letters because he sleeps with the woman and wants to betray mine. Josephine is an evil woman. She uses witchcraft and traps for men and is hungry for sex and money. Your man know her not but give her many money and gifts.”

– The messages that Arunja sent me were apparently authentic, and my husband could do nothing but admit the relationship.

– And there was yet another? I asked. – Or third, however you want to count. This woman, Arunja, who sent the letters?

– That, my husband denied. He didn’t know anything about the sender of the messages, knew no Arunja and thought the names were faked. He’d had no romance with Arunja nor any other woman than Josephine. Anyone can use a false name while sending email, that’s what my husband said.

– But if she didn’t know you at all, why would she then send you the messages? I asked. – How had she accessed your correspondence?

– My spouse, whom I thought already as my former spouse, couldn’t answer the questions. He said that in that regard he was completely in the dark. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I looked at him with new eyes. We were silent for a long time, and I thought of our future, that had darkened too. In this silence there started another dream that was my husband’s.

– He lay on the sofa as he often did during afternoons, but suddenly he started to moan and swish with his arms. I saw that he’d fallen asleep, which I found curious after the conversation we’d just endured in that room and that had changed both our lives.

– I understood that he saw a nightmare again and told him loudly to wake up. He didn’t hear me but tossed and twitched so frenziedly that he fell from the sofa to the floor. It was only then my husband woke up.

– Then you saw the nightmare, I said. – What kind?

– I saw that we had a little child, and that the hallway’s letterbox clanked. The child went to examine the letterbox and I tried to stop the child because I understood that behind the door lay danger. The letterbox clanked and flapped as if in a storm, and the child got still closer. At the same time the front door started to slowly push open as if behind it moved a vast and irresistible force. Locks were nothing to it. I tried to push the door shut, straining my hardest, just before I woke up.

– The child was my ignorance and blue-eyedness, I told my husband. It was as if he hadn’t understood. But I understood and was ashamed.

– When I started to pack, I heard someone say: – Don’t leave.

– I didn’t know if it was his voice. I didn’t recognize it.

– I moved into my niece’s apartment, which was temporarily empty, and after thinking for a couple of days I wrote to one of those unknowns, the woman who’d sent the letters, Arunja.

“Do you want to say that both you and my husband have had an affair and that he’s cheated on you? When and where? And how did you get his password?”

– Arunja didn’t reply. A week passed, and I wrote again: “I’m waiting for your reply.”

– Still nothing from Arunja. I wrote the third time: “I still wait for your reply. If you don’t reply to me, I’ll think you a liar.”

– I had already stopped waiting when Arunja’s message arrived. She wrote: “Slept with that woman, not me. He want me, but the woman won’t give time. I sat near him and many times see him write password. The woman is a threat to me and call me criminal. She knows spells. If not write you in 2 months, I am dead and she kill me.”

I woke to utter silence. I opened my eyes and saw that the client was looking at me accusingly. I had perhaps lost a sentence, hopefully nothing relevant.

– Yes, I said, that was a peculiar story. And at the same time very ordinary.

– But I didn’t understand almost anything at all of it, she said. – It was a foreign story of a foreign country, and a person familiar to me was one of its characters. But even he wasn’t familiar, and that perhaps was the lesson of the letters. My marriage was a mirage, and still it was one of the foundations things of my life. I said to myself: “If my marriage was a mirage, surely plenty of other essentials in my life are as imaginary and fragile. My home? My past? Myself?”

– True, I had always known that my life was based on illusions but I had decided to believe in them, because I loved them as all people do. I had lived amidst a dream, but now I was awake. I saw all the rooms where I’d lived, as if for the first time, and they were barren, though the furniture was at the same places as before, though the walls had paintings, and though the windowsills were blooming with plants that I had so carefully tended.

– As a child I wondered, how a room could turn into another, when a person came in or went away. Now I looked at the rooms where I’d lived and saw that their most important content had disappeared somewhere. They, too, were as empty as a cellphone’s cover. Love had gone away.

– You learned, I said. – And that’s why you should in fact be happy. The letter delivery was a message far away from reality, it was a small demonstration of the basis of existence, which is instability. You learned and thus avoided continuing your marriage in betrayal and ignorance. The malice of an unknown person, her lowly motives, revealed to you that which is the truth. You should thank her.

– I could of course insist that I would have rather lived in a lie and in ignorance. But actually I didn’t. I wrote to Arunja one last time. Two months had passed since she’d sent me the correspondence between my husband and his lover. Her identity and motives were still veiled in darkness. Actually, I couldn’t be certain of anything, not even her gender, nationality, or age. Perhaps she was Josephine’s husband?

– I asked in my message if she was bewitched and presented a polite wish that she would still be alive and well. I got an instant reply. It read: “This is an automatically generated remark from the delivery’s status. Unfortunately your message couldn’t be delivered. This address has been discontinued or canceled.”

– Do you think that she’s dead?

– She’s alive or dead, and I can think whatever I want. I got from a stranger a vital message, information that changed my life but at the same time added to my ignorance.

– That is the way of all knowledge, I said. – And what are you going to do now?

– What indeed? I will go on with my life from where it got stuck for so long. I will leave behind some old fallacies but I will seek new ones, for no one can live without fallacies, great or small. I will submit to the fact that I’ll never know who Arunja was and why she’d actually sent me the letters and whether she is alive or dead. The fact – as many of the more important ones – will stay forever a mystery to me. The story is unfinished, she said, and I could finally see her tears.

– Don’t cry, all true stories remain so, I said, and fell asleep again.

ME AND MY SHADOW

2012

Translated by Hildi Hawkins.

‘Kuin astuisitte aurinkoon’ (‘As if stepping into the sun’) is a chapter from the novel
Hotel Sapiens ja muita irrationaalisia kertomuksia
(
Hotel Sapiens and Other Irrational Tales
, Teos, 2012), where several narrators tell their stories.

Me and My Shadow

The fog banks have dissipated; the sky is empty. I cannot see the sails or swells in its heights, nor the golden cathedrals or teetering towers. I would not have believed I could miss a fog bank, but that’s exactly what it’s like: its disappearance is making me uneasy. For all its flimsiness and perforations it was our protection, our shield against the sun’s fire and the stars’ stings. Now the relentlessly blazing sun has awakened colours and extracted shadows from their hiding places. The moist warmth has dried into heat and the Flower Seller’s herb spirals have dried up into skeletons. The leaves on the trees are full of bronze, sickly red and black spots. Though there is no wind and autumn is not yet here, they come loose as if of their own volition, as if they wanted to die.