Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (104 page)

Of course, the debate remains unresolved. But there is a certain reassurance to that fact; each vision is comforting in its own way.

II

Is continuity essential to selfhood? Can one separate the self from its surroundings? And must one be
someone
to be? These questions linger at the edges of the narrator’s many odd encounters in Tainaron. And Krohn develops them with such subtlety, it feels a bit heavy-handed to draw them out. I do so only with the caveat that there is far more on the page.

The question of identity is first directly addressed in the fourth letter. In this chapter, the narrator is taken to meet the queen: a vast, formless creature confined to a windowless cave and surrounded at all times by a crowd of busy servants. The narrator is astonished when the queen addresses her accusingly,

“You think, don’t you, that I am some kind of individual, a person, admit it?”

 . . . It was a most extraordinary voice, for it seemed to be made up of the murmur of hundreds of voices.

Baffled, the narrator agrees. But when the queen asks “So tell me, who am I?” the narrator struggles to respond.

Before I could even think of an answer to this question, I realized at last what was happening in the back part of the room, which was filled with the queen’s great rear body . . .

The queen was giving birth! She was giving birth incessantly.

“You are the mother of them all, your majesty,” I replied, humbly.

But the queen is not satisfied with this answer, because, as she says, “She from whom everything flows is not a someone.” Perhaps there is no satisfying answer; to serve as the source of life is a difficult burden. To be inseparable from everything can be unaccountably lonely.

In the eleventh letter, the narrator is allowed audience with Tainaron’s prince (already a foil for the powerful queen). She is surprised to find him abandoned to his tower, a decrepit and lonely figure. It seems he has not entertained a visitor in quite some time. Eager for anyone who will listen, the prince tells her about his departed princess. The princess has been gone for ages, and the prince no longer searches for her, but when she first disappeared, he spent many hours exploring the city, searching for her in the faces of strangers. He says,

“For I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess’s eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the interrupted flow of on comers there flowed only the loam of strange memories . . . ”

The prince, at least, believes that there is an essential essence to the soul, glimpsed through its windows. He clings to the idea that he’d know his lover, even if she were someone else. But perhaps this is only a fantasy.

Finally, in the sixteenth letter, the narrator is introduced to a person whose transformations are more instantaneous. The mimic: glimpsed first as a pile of stones, then a grassy knoll. Vexed, the narrator asks her friend Longhorn to explain.

“My dear,” Longhorn said, and looked at me, waving the extensions of his antennae, “do you believe that the Mimic could have a personality? Today he is one thing, tomorrow another. Wherever he is, that is what he is – stone a moment ago, now the summer’s grass. Who knows what form he will take tomorrow.”

But the narrator feels a certain unexplainable pique against the very idea of the Mimic, and declines Longhorn’s invitation to meet him. Gently, Longhorn rebukes her: “So you want everyone to be someone. You want what someone is at the beginning to be what he is at the end.”

Perhaps the narrator’s resentment of this fickle creature reveals unexamined feelings toward the silent recipient of her letters. Letter after letter she writes to her unknown lover, receiving no answer; as readers we find ourselves the uncomfortable target of her supplications, accused of indifference yet incapable of answering.
We
are the lover who’s changed, or died, or simply gone away. “That you are so implacable in your silence,” the narrator writes in her twenty-first letter, “makes you gradually become more like gods or the dead. Such is your metamorphosis; and it is not entirely repugnant to me.”

Little is revealed about this lover, nor the narrator herself. Like the Mimic, both are vague and ambiguous, serving primarily as filters for raw experience. Yet in a rare instance in the thirteenth letter, the narrator recalls a moment between herself and her lover, walking between two churches, discussing the soul. At the same time she offers a description of herself:

I seldom look in the mirror, but always there is someone there who gives me my eyes. And the root of my nose is bluish; a line has inscribed itself at the corner of my mouth like a drypoint groove. But this is no proof copy, and the acid of everyday life corrodes, prepares that which is the soul.

III

Though our narrator has been meticulous about documenting Tainaron, she is a bit like a tourist who visits a human city for just one season and concludes it is always summer there. But fall comes to Tainaron, and then winter, bringing yet more changes that the narrator cannot escape.

The first to be affected is Longhorn, her dear guide. As he’s accompanied her on her explorations of the city, she’s learned to know him intimately — and been astonished by his kindness. She feels dependent on him for her survival. But with winter comes sleep. Longhorn must retreat into his pupal cell (a kind of cocoon for beetles, constructed from mud and debris). When he emerges, he will be someone else.

Eventually, winter sleep will come to the narrator as well. Tainaron is not just a place one visits; it is a way of being. If one dares to take up residence there, one cannot be immune to the forces of change.

As I came to the end of this novella, a sort of narrative began to emerge in my head. I found that, unconsciously, I’d begun striving to assign meaning to symbols; I was looking for the key to an allegory. In my mind I was building a story about an aging woman whose lover has died, or gone on before her to somewhere else; without him her world has become unfamiliar. Tainaron is a place she creates in her mind, while she grapples with her own mortality and prepares for the inevitable. Or perhaps Tainaron is a place between worlds, a spot to pause in the afterlife. But then, I willed myself to resist this impulse. The story is too universal; it doesn’t deserve to be containe
d to any one narrative, any one interpretation. It doesn’t ask to be measured.

Regardless, the three final letters cast doubt on the story as it has been told so far. Perhaps there is no such place as Tainaron. Perhaps there are no insects with souls (or perhaps there are no humans). Perhaps there has never been a lover to receive these letters. Or perhaps he has been there all along. Like the debate on the nature of the soul, I prefer to leave this story an open question.

Finally, our narrator begins her twenty-fifth letter with the following story:

Do you remember the entomologist who thought he saw a cloaked moth on the ground? He was delighted, and picked it up, only to realize that it was no more than a piece of rotten wood. Then, of course, he threw it away in disappointment.

I wonder why — already preparing to leave — he nevertheless crouched to seek once more the piece of branch he had thrown away. But how diligently and closely he had to examine it before he saw: it was a cloaked moth after all.

Look closely. Look again. This, I think, is Tainaron.

The Robot and the Ant: The Tales of Leena Krohn
The First Thirty Years 1970–2001
by Minna Jerrman

“I am the measure of all things,” says the City Surveyor. He is an important official who inherited his profession from his father. He measures the lengths of narrow streets and wide boulevards, the heights of lofty skyscrapers and, conscientiously, of diminutive buildings. His measuring instrument is his own body, what else. It is a perfect fit for the job: long, green, and flexible as a licorice whip. The City Surveyor’s days are busy, as there is always new work to be done. We are in Tainaron, after all, an imaginary city created by Leena Krohn.

My grandmother would have told Leena Krohn to stop talking nonsense, but luckily, Leena is an adult. She can tell all the tall tales she wants.

Imagination is not forbidden in Krohn’s stories, just the opposite in fact. Without imagination, the reader misses out on the richness of the experience, as Krohn’s books combine the inexplicable with tangible descriptions of reality. Even her novels are woven from overlapping, fragmentary snapshots, which each reader assembles into their own window to the world.

To pick up a book by Krohn is to leave your old, familiar life behind. Why is it so easy to get hooked on these stories? Because they merge wild mental edifices, philosophical knots, and touching human destinies. They take a stand on issues while also tickling your funny bone. They say what they have to say with measured turns of phrase, sparing, but charming.

In Krohn’s own words, “I combine fantasy and fact with lyrical expression while aspiring to clarity and accuracy.”

The Bold and the Not Beautiful

I wish I had an aunt who lives on the Moon. I would spend my holidays with her, making long expeditions across the lunar plains. I would hop on one foot on the
Mare Imbrium.
I would kick up dust driving a moon buggy. I would wave at the Earth.

Stories about people who would often be called village idiots, people who see or hear more than others do. Stories about unprejudiced children whose minds are open to the strangeness of their surroundings. Stories about time, telling us about future cities or about intimate moments from beyond history. Stories digging into the fundamental questions of life: mortality, morality, and the nature of reality.

All of this and much more can be found in Krohn’s books and the hundreds of stories contained therein. Most of Krohn’s works are on the short side, but are all the more heavy in content. When turning the last page of one of them, one is at best inspired to immediately turn back to the beginning and start again.

Krohn does not shy away from the ugly or the strange. Her characters are usually just ordinary people, or even people on the margins of society. Crotchety grannies rather than resplendent princesses, first-graders rather than professionals on fast-track career trajectories, substance abusers rather than health-food enthusiasts, shy bystanders rather than quick-tongued intellectuals.

My favorite must be the girl who vacations with her aunt on the Moon. Or perhaps it’s Inka, who floats three inches off the ground when she’s happy.

Krohn’s stories also often rely on the firm belief that children are not feeble minded, that they can be as sharp as any adult. Or really, that they are more observant, more willing to question received wisdom rather than take it as absolute truth. Their secret, you see, is that they haven’t lost touch with their imagination

On the other hand, Krohn’s stories also honor age and the wisdom it brings with it. Practical smarts that many forget amidst the daily rush.

A Yard’s Worth of Story in Everyone

“To write is to open your eyes to the inexplicability of people.”

(Krohn in Gustavelund, August 7th, 1995)

Krohn’s body of work is like a meadow full of ants. At first you think it’s impossible to tell them apart. All you see are legs, thoraces, and antennae. Yellowish and black ants, large and small ants.

To make sense of Krohn’s s ant farm, one has to divide it into four colonies: books for children, books for adults, stories for the young at heart, and the rest.

Black garden ants.
Krohn started her writing career in the early 1970s with picture books and later with longer children’s books. They feature knee-high protagonists and generous use of illustration, often by her sister, Inari Krohn.

Termites.
No pictures, but lots of text that makes you think. These are the distinguishing characteristics of Krohn’s adult books. The protagonists in these texts are usually grown-ups and the texts themselves are usually novels.

Leafcutter ants.
Stories for the young at heart falling somewhere between adult and children’s books. Some of Krohn’s most original creations. The characters in these short story collections are often children, if not in age at least in imagination. The stories cover every subject between heaven and earth, but always with a (sometimes sticky) philosophical view. The stories are seasoned with illustrations, either by Leena Krohn herself or by her sister, Inari.

Carpenter ants and red ants.
Finally come the rest. Poems, essays, and songs produced in great abundance over the years. Krohn wrote poems and songs during the 1960s and 1970s and then moved on to essays.

6–12–28

I tried to catch up on some sleep during the day, but it was no use. I kept thinking about how many numbers there are in Krohn’s books and about their regularity. 6, 12, 28. Something like that. Is there some secret meaning behind them? A pattern?12 . . .  Not quite . . . The alarm clock interrupts my thoughts.

Reading Krohn’s texts can make you paranoid. No period is just a period any longer. The number of paragraphs in any given book is no longer a coincidence. No character’s name is just a name. You start finding meaning in everything.

Take the titles of the books, for instance. They often have a subtitle, like
Umbra: A Glimpse of the Archive of Paradoxes
or
Pereat Mundus: A Novel of Sorts
or
Datura: A Delusion We All See.

Why such rambling names? The subtitles describe the blurring of borders, indefiniteness, that the work is not trying to give an exhausting account of the subject, but only glimpses here and there, the best parts. It is as if Krohn is taking her thumb and fudging the border between the book and the rest of the world.