Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (17 page)

That was all. But as I set the sentences of the little interview one after another, from memory, which now worked with the accuracy of a photograph, I realised that it was no deception. What had happened had happened, all of it, to me, and I remembered the smell of my lover’s fingers and the fact that it had been the first cool, high day after a long summer.

And, dumbfounded by the superabundance of my life, I fell silent, and waited for the rap of the golden gavel.

‘Accepted,’ the bass of the Queen Bee rang out, and I saw a veiled smile spread over her face as if something inexpressibly sweet had just dripped on to her palate. In such a way my memory, too, although stolen, was added to her collection, to the great store of honey which was the basis of her economy, to the honeycombs from which she drew her happiness and her hospitality and which no thief would ever empty.

The Cloaked Moth

the twenty-fifth letter

Do you remember the entomologist who thought he saw a cloaked moth on the ground? He was delighted, and picked it up, only to realise 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.

Tonight the earth carries the city steadily on its shoulders. Even the heavens are motionless, and the buildings have long roots. I confess: I have countless times been forced to return and fetch home what I have abandoned and thrown away as worthless. Other colours glimmer from beneath the camouflage coat, and who knows which of them is right.

When I open the curtain, I see a half-darkened street, and nothing is happening there, but in the emptiness which is not now fractured by steps the restlessness of the first step and the exhaustion of the last combine.

Tonight I see in the half-light as if it were broad daylight; I see so far and so clearly that I can make you out too, cloaked moth.

The Gate of Evening

the twenty-sixth letter

Yesterday Longhorn and I visited the city museum. I wandered rather absent-mindedly through the echoing halls and corridors, which were full of the utensils of times gone by, tools, clothes and furniture. A flood of dates and names of kings flowed from Longhorn’s mouth – his memory is astonishing – but hardly a detail lodged itself in my memory, although it would have been an opportunity to learn a great deal about Tainaron’s past.

Weary, I happened to stop in front of a glass case where only one object was on display: a cap of some kind. It was deep black, but magnificently embroidered with stars, moons and suns. Gold and silver thread glittered as if the head-dress had just been sewn, but from the label fixed to the case I read that it was many hundreds of years old. In the centre of the cap – or perhaps it was a calotte – was a small hole.

‘What kind of cap is that and why is there a hole in it?’ I asked Longhorn, finally interested in what I saw.

‘It is called the Gate of Evening,’ Longhorn answered, delighted at the interest I showed, and immediately eager to give me all his information. ‘In the old days, when Tainaronians grew old and frail and it was time for them to depart, one of their heirs brought them a cap like that. The dying person put it on their head, and it eased their last moments.’

‘How on earth?’ I asked.

‘Because the hole is a gate, and it showed them the direction in which they were to go and so they did not stray from the right road.’

In the next room, too, there was something that aroused my interest: a row of masks. They were not demonic masks of the kind one often sees in folk museums; they were not grimacing or cruelly decorated or spattered with blood. I saw quite ordinary faces of the citizens of Tainaron staring peacefully out of point or compound eyes, antennae gently outstretched. One could see hundreds of such faces as one walked in the city; and that was what was most extraordinary about the masks.

‘What are these used for?’ I asked Longhorn.

‘Ah,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There was a time when a peculiar festival was held in Tainaron at the time of the autumn equinox, the day when day and night are equally long. These festivals gave employment to an entire profession: mask-makers. For the revellers had three kinds of mask: the first represented their faces as they were when they were quite young, the second showed their faces as they were at the midpoint of life, and the third mask as they would be when they were very old. They used the first mask in the morning, the second at midday and the third from evening to midnight.

‘So at some time of the day their mask was like their own face?’ I understood. The custom seemed very strange to me.

‘Yes, it was the day of the equinox,’ Longhorn said. ‘It spanned a whole life.’

‘And when were the masks taken off?’ I asked.

‘The masks were taken off at midnight,’ he replied. ‘They had fasted all day, but then they were allowed to eat and drink. There was everything in profusion, and beggars, too, were permitted to come to any table they wished.’

It was late at night by the time I returned from the city, and the vault of the sky was as black as the calotte which I had admired during the day. But behind the reflections of the city I could sense the promises of other lights, perhaps as deceptive as they. Here, too, their distance is as flabbergasting and strange as on the harbour pier where once, pierced by them, we lingered.

But I shall need no other gate of evening.

The Umbellifers

the twenty-seventh letter

We grow cold and look inward, for the frost has breathed on us and the city is making ready for a long hibernation. The season is over and the city people withdraw to their homes, doors are locked, conversation decreases. In the streets there are fewer and fewer people and vehicles, and all of them have particular destinations.

In many shop windows I have already seen a careless scribbled notice announcing that the shop will next open in the spring. Only one in three or four street lamps are lighted in the evenings, and later – so I have been told – only squares and crossroads will be lit.

Tourists are scarcely to be seen any longer. Who would be amused, after all, by touring a cold, dark city?

It is sad, sad. I think the lights of Tainaron should shine now that the sun is seen only seldom, more plentiful and colourful than before, but instead the city becomes dimmer and more impoverished.

Life stops in a thin crust of ice like frozen water and in the eyes of the few passers-by there is only the glimmer of the need for well-earned rest, but I am restless and wish to live. I wish to come and go, I wish to do something with these hands I see before me on the table so pale and helpless; I wish to debate important questions and eat and clink glasses.

Too late! Longhorn, if I mention my wishes to him, merely shakes his head and reassures me: ‘In the spring! When the winter has gone.’

And I see, of course I see exhaustion in his black jewel-eyes, I see that he himself would already prefer to withdraw to his home and stays on his feet only because I am here and in a way his guest. Always, before I meet him, I intend to say: ‘Go, do go, you do not have to stay awake for my sake; I shall manage very well here.’ But the words stick in my throat, for I know I shall be lost when he is gone.

And one cannot even see the fireflies here any longer; they have completely disappeared from the streets, and that, more than anything else, shows what hard times await us. Even the house of the Queen Bee looks bolted, and I cannot imagine where all the Oddfellows have scattered.

But today when I went past the house’s battened-down shutters, I saw a little light coming out of one of the cracks. I got up on tiptoe and peered inside, but I did not see the Queen Bee. But the empty room was filled with a warm, rosy glow whose source is in the honeycombs of memory.

Perhaps its warmth will suffice for the Queen Bee, however long and hard the winter. The Dangler’s balcony, too, is empty, and the street below it, one of Tainaron’s busiest thoroughfares, cuts through the city, empty and clean. Just occasionally a hawkmoth or two rushes past me in its late refitting. Elsewhere it is quiet, but in my head clatter the melancholy words: chippings and clay! Chippings and clay!

The spring tide is over, and Oceanos is murmuring its winter story. It is unlikely that I shall ever again come to gaze longingly over its swelling waters.

If now it were to happen that a letter were to drop on to my doormat, I know what it would say. You would write: ‘Why do you not go away?’

I can hear you say it, rather coldly and a little didactically, as if you were offering me something on a plate, but looking away at the same time. And I admit that I have heard those words before; I have asked myself the same question. And perhaps, if someone were to say the word, I would go. I taste the word in my mouth; how fresh and pure it tastes.

I had my reasons for coming to Tainaron; I am sure they were important reasons, but I have nevertheless forgotten what they were.

‘Come!’ What if I were to say that to you? It would be in vain, quite in vain, for all I could show you would be the wintry stalks of the umbellifers in the meadow at the Botanical Gardens.

Upright like them, I remain in this land of sleepers.

Date as Postmark

the twenty-eighth letter

Today I opened the door, and before me rose the Rhinoceros Beetle, as gloomy and simple as a mountain. He is a friend of Longhorn, but I have only met him in passing before.

‘Come inside,’ I asked, but he went on standing on the spot, swaying, and I could not fathom what he wanted.

‘Have you seen Longhorn recently?’ I asked at length, for I had not seen Longhorn for many days.

‘It was Longhorn who sent me here,’ he responded, and fell silent once more.

‘And how is he?’ I asked, becoming a little impatient.

‘He told me to come here and ask if there is anything I can do for you,’ the Rhinoceros Beetle managed to say, swaying in ever greater circles. I think he must weigh more than one hundred kilograms.

‘Thank you, but I do not need anything,’ I said in astonishment. ‘But where is Longhorn himself?’

‘I thought you already knew,’ said the Rhinoceros Beetle, suddenly standing still.

‘I do not know anything,’ I said, fearing the worst. ‘Has something happened to Longhorn?’

I felt like shaking the Rhinoceros Beetle, who remained motionless, but he was too wide. I thought I understood.

‘Ah, he is already asleep,’ I said, and was very offended. It was not polite to retire for the winter without even saying goodnight.

‘He is in his pupal cell,’ said the Rhinoceros Beetle, becoming even more massive than before.

This information came as a shock to me. For the sake of the Rhinoceros Beetle, I managed, with difficulty, to restrain myself, for I would have liked to have cursed him: ‘Damned longhorn beetle! How dare you!’

The Rhinoceros Beetle left, but I went on standing in the doorway. I should never meet Longhorn again; not the Longhorn who had for so long been my patient guide in this strange city. If he were to return and step before me, I did not know who or what he would then be, or even when it would happen, for everything here has its own time and particular moment, unknown to others.

I should never again be able to turn to him, but he nevertheless stepped before me, into the place where the Rhinoceros Beetle had just been standing, stood there and began to grow as the dead grow.

Then I saw that I had never known him and that I had never even wanted to know him. And as he grew, he became thinner and more indistinct; his form slipped into the darkness of the stairwell and he no longer had shape or mass.

But his eyes, his eyes remained, and his gaze, which is as black and piercing as it ever was, and as impenetrable. And when I look into the darkness of his eyes they gradually begin to sparkle like double stars, like the planets on which the sun shines and on which there are seas and continents, roads, valleys and waterfalls and great forests where many can live and sing.

Then I went inside and closed the door, a little less sad. For it was, after all, now clear that although I had lived beside him from the beginning to the end, not just one life but two or three, I would never have learned to know him. His outline, which I had once drawn around him, in order to be able to show him and name him, had now disappeared. It liberated the great stranger who was a much realer Longhorn than the person I once knew, small and separate.

Such is my farewell to Longhorn today, date as postmark, in the city of Tainaron.

Passing Bells

the twenty-ninth letter

What a rumbling! Over all of Tainaron it spread, echoing from wall to wall, shaking the windowpanes and resonating in my own chest. When I pressed my fingers against the table, I could even feel the sound of the ore bells in my fingertips. And my toes, the soles of my feet, my elbows heard it, for the floor, all the soil of Tainaron quivered and resounded.

The prince had died, and now in all the churches, cathedrals and temples of the city, the many of them that there were, passing bells were being rung. They roared from morning to night as if to restore to the deceased the respect which no one had accorded to him before his death.

‘What happened to the prince?’ I asked the Rhinoceros Beetle. For the cause of his death had not been divulged on the news.

‘Him? He just died,’ the Rhinoceros Beetle answered, turning his slow gaze upon me. ‘It was high time. He was an old man.’

‘But was it not almost too fitting a time?’

I had seen, in the heart tower, what I had seen: the thin, expectant form of the prince, huddled on a simple chair which had been set in the middle of the floor without the company of adjutants or even the most lowly guardsman. His cloak was surrounded, like another cloak, by the aura of his fast approaching end. And it was not a natural end.