Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (20 page)

Only the jaws of Mr Babel and the first Gold-Washer continued to move until their plates were empty.

‘Just a little practice,’ the first Gold-Washer encouraged the dinner-guests. ‘If you just chew carefully, it’s not too bad, we mustn’t be discouraged. We’ll get used to it.’

But he pushed his plate away and raised his glass.

‘Relax,’ he shouted earsplittingly, and clapped his hands once more.

The door opened again. Through it came more Gold-Washers, carrying trays, their arms held out before them. They were laden with bottles of wine and Burgundy ham, roast pheasant and Caribbean heart stew and, to crown it all: a lemon syllabub.

The stringed instrument was put away, but a guitar and a bamboo flute began to play, a glass harmonica tinkled and a triangle, bright as silver. Chrysanthemums and thin-stemmed glasses appeared on the table, and candles were lit in every room and in the garden, where it was already night.

The plates of famine-bread were speeded away. At once the atmosphere lightened. We ate and laughed. The heavy weight of the famine-bread had disappeared from the table, and the reek of poverty from our nostrils.

This was, once more, the Tabernacle we knew.

The Wafer

Later, as we walked in the garden lit by lamps and candles, animated by the wine, we saw under a tree the tuatara, the strange pet of the Gold-Washers. It was eating. The remains of our first course had been set before it, the bitter famine food of our forefathers.

Would it be fit even for the tuatara? It looked as if it was, and more: the tuatara smacked its lips and sneezed as it ate, but it ate with devotion, entirely absorbed in its task. The tuatara was not fastidious.

Only as I watched it did I notice that autumn had come to the garden. How quickly it had come! While we had been fretfully chewing our famine-bread . . .

Everything, everything withered, and the colours of autumn spread over the earth in a golden cloak. Blazing with its autumn, a tree shed its leaves on the slipper back of the tuatara. They fell and covered its third eye, poured over the corrugated ridge on its back, blew in endless showers over its nocturnal meal, over the Tabernacle’s bitter bread of life, the wafer we had rejected.

Home-sickness

The City of the Golden Reed

This is the city, the rowdy village, that the angel measured with his golden reed. It is twelve thousand furlongs in length and breadth and height.

The smoke of the city spreads far. Its light-pollution hides the stars and the night from view. Stone everywhere, flesh everywhere. Jasper and sardonyx. Concrete and glass. And sometimes flesh is colder than stone, and sometimes stone is as warm and seductive as human skin.

Here is a drink that never ceases to ferment, a fortified extract. So dense with events that the gaze must be like a knife in order to clear its own path to this point.

Who can predict the movements and future of so complex an organism? In its incompleteness it is as alluring as a glimpse of a stranger. He steps out of nothing and points toward the window of a florist’s shop just as the tram turns down another street, so that his gesture is never completed.

But I turn my eyes in time, and behind the panes of glass, from the other side of the reflections and their reflections, blaze the cooling flames of gerberas, irises and narcissi.

Eyes cruise up and down the streets, always two by two. Refractors. Pupils. Tunnels of lenses. Through them pass the lights of the city and through them, out of a night protected by the vitreous humour, out of a seeing invisibility, the whole city has streamed forth.

When their former owners disappear, the eyes seek new ones for themselves. And many of them have indeed disappeared! One no longer sees even officers here, their greatcoats flapping in the constant wind, or weavers or swordsmiths or Mrs Bock, who used to ride in the magistrate’s carriage in her frock decorated with rosettes.

The Cossack general Krasnasyol has been murdered. No one remembers the shame of Lindstrom, the street tobacconist, any longer: that he was whipped for stealing a horse where Ore Street now ends. The potato-sellers no longer shout from their roughly made carts whose rattling wheels echoed to the end of the street. The eyes have changed, now they sit well in the heads of tax accountants and demonstrators of new products and qualified restaurant-keepers and countless old women who consider death their particular privilege.

How busy they are in their rush to get from one place to another. How they tack through the stream of shadows, the cross-swell of intersecting streets. How hurried I am, how I rush.

Beneath the giant spectacles of the optician and the barber’s golden platter, past the sun of the solarium and the booming bowling hall and the aquarium shop in whose window a tarantula is eating flies, through the park, where the monuments to those who have died of the plague are being cleaned.

Many wish to be far away from here; I do not. I listen to the sounds of the city as if the angel were blowing them into the air with his golden reed.

For this, too, and precisely this, is the City of the Golden Reed. It has been measured by an angel, and it is, in length and breadth and height, twelve thousand furlongs.

Ding and Dong

But can one place one’s trust in it, the City of the Golden Reed? For every place here wanders like a nomad; dust rises.

Scarcely have chains of mountains risen – variscan, appalachian, alpine – than they immediately begin to level. Continental plates shudder, seas dry into jungles of salt and swell once more. Like facial expressions and human ages, the landscapes of the earth’s surface change.

The city is a real but molten substance, like ectoplasm, which never solidifies. The thoughts of the crowd, people’s actions, hammer at the city, and its shape changes; its form is never completed.

Some people said Mrs Raa was away for two years, or three; others that she was not seen in the city for almost a decade; but most said nothing, for her name was unknown to them.

Bells! First of all, that little tinkling of bells . . . It danced mischievously into her ears from the fresh streets from which the snow had melted like the memory of a shared dream. It mixed with the slapping of the soft points of shoes against stone and recalled something long-forgotten to her mind. But Mrs Raa had never before seen such peculiar shoes.

First of all, they were very brightly coloured, garish really: crimson red, electric blue, green and violet, saffron- and sun-yellow. Sometimes one even saw shoes crowded with all the five hundred thousand colours of the spectrum, in spots, torrents of lines, whirls and spirals. If one looked at them for too long, one soon had to blink.

But the most extraordinary thing, for Mrs Raa, was not the colours, but the shape and size of the shoes. For during her absence they had grown so exaggeratedly long at their points that one would have thought they would make walking difficult. And indeed they did, for the longest points were often fastened with cords to the walker’s knees. Others had various objects fastened to them as amulets, or those little bells that tinkled on every square and pavement.

When Mrs Raa raised her eyes, she saw brightly coloured leggings or tight trousers that looked like leggings, but which were as gaudy as the shoes, but one leg was often of a different colour from the other.

And whatever detail her eyes fastened upon in the dress of passers-by, everywhere she found the same spirit of excess, the same pomp approaching effrontery, which expressed itself in immoderately large buttons, sleeves puffed up with starch, and collars that fell across the chest. Their folds were rustled by the gusts of wind that were always rushing through the city.

The clothes of new citizens mixed distant periods and foreign traditions with what they believed to be hitherto unprecedented.

Mrs Raa came to me in a passion and said:

‘But they wear old lace headdresses and saris, caftans and monks’ cowls. Are they Buryats? Fellahs? Franciscans? This is not the city I knew.’

‘What did you expect?’

I laughed and swung my legs so that the little bell at the tip of my shoe tinkled brightly. ‘Don’t they use shoe-bells down there in the south, then?’

But Mrs Raa was right: the city had changed. Was that a bad thing? Wasn’t it just as it should be? The tinkling was cheerful, it pleased my ear and it pleased Mrs Raa’s ear; but she was anxious.

‘It’s not just the clothes,’ she said. ‘It’s the air, people and people’s conversation. There’s too much of everything.’

Did I not understand what she was keeping faith with, what she was remembering in speaking in such a way? Her former city! Our city! When Mrs Raa called it up from her memory, it rose before her from the bath of decades as modest and austere as long ago. It was cool sure enough, but at the same time clean and modest. It was raining, and she was so short that she could see the street paving stones quite close; they gleamed wetly, they refracted the light like precious stones, like jasper, like sardonyx. And there were no hues of such fineness, of such richness, in the citizens’ new clothes.

Women and men (both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

All around her little fountains were born and died as drops shattered on the stones and the wind spread their freshness over the square.

The war had ended; in the noonday park a dove was pecking at the sand and making do with what it found. A window opened, sparkling, and their mother’s voice tumbled over them like home, where the running footstep rested, where satisfaction and poverty resided.

Not even the patience of an archaeologist can return her former city to Mrs Raa. And what if it could? How sad, how strange would be the Mrs Raa who lived there . . .

The Dark Shadow of the Pleasure Palace . . .

The Gold-Washers had an idea. It was a simple, megalomanic idea. They thought it was possible to build a house in which life would be different and better than elsewhere. That on the crumbling surface of the earth it would be possible to found a stronghold, to set aside an area of quiet waters that norns and demons would avoid.

Perhaps many other homes, too, have been built in such a belief, but I learned to know only the Tabernacle.

It was not really a temple, and neither were the Gold-Washers, its inhabitants, any more pious than the other citizens. They merely had a pinch of faith and a lot of money – whose, never became clear to me.

When we saw it for the first time, Mrs Raa and I and Latona, the daughter of Pontanus, it made us laugh a little. It was a misty day and as we approached the Tabernacle it materialised rapidly, as if it had not been built of wood and concrete and glass, but of some much more fluid substance.

It was not in a place where any of us would have wished to build a house. The refuse dump of the City of the Golden Reed was too close. We sensed its stench, we saw its disintegrating heaps and the screaming flocks of gulls above it.

The Tabernacle, the pleasure palace of the Gold-Washers, was unlike any house we had ever seen before, although it contained parts and materials from many buildings that we knew only from pictures.

‘What architect designed this?’ asked Mrs Raa. ‘Is he still at large?’

Although the Tabernacle was in the City of the Golden Reed, on its outer edge, it did not seem to have a home town. It was a lonely house, it was a house of great confusion. ‘Porta Maggiore!’ cried Latona.

‘Not in the least, from this side it’s St Peter’s,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ said Mrs Raa. ‘Don’t you remember? It’s the spitting image of Hagia Sofia.’

‘But that tower,’ I said. ‘That’s the tower of the Admiralty.’

But I also noted the pointed arches of curved wood. They had been made by a Gothic spirit that had found itself in the wrong age. Where, then, did the crooked walls, the Tabernacle’s asymmetry and its peculiar sense of imbalance come from? Its geometry provoked anxiety, the building moved and never really became fixed to the spot.

Before us was confusion, nobility and the power of hope, which was only increased by the scaffolding which had been left there.

There were also some columns, a loggia which proceeded like a solemn, expansive thought. But the curves of the roof dizzied the gaze; they were the Tabernacle’s earthly wings. ‘This sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed,’ said Mrs Raa. ‘It really shouldn’t.’

We went on standing there, in the gravel of the road, gazing around us, until Pontanus came and took us inside. ‘This is the Pantheon,’ he said.

We found ourselves among statues in a round, draughty vestibule. They had been placed in semicircular niches in the walls of the hall, but some of the spaces were still awaiting their inhabitants. They were monstrous or divine forms: a melancholy sphinx, a kalamakara, an archaeoptrix. I touched them, I stroked their surface with my finger and realised that they were all made of wood: aspen, spruce, pine.

‘Who made those?’ I asked.

‘The Executioner,’ said Pontanus. ‘He lives here.’

There seemed to be a countless number of rooms in the Tabernacle, and not one of them resembled another. One of them was of bamboo and paper; its floor was covered in sisal matting. One was triangular, another semicircular, a third had walls but no roof, a fourth a roof but only two walls.

There were empty rooms which had no furniture, or only a mattress on the floor, and others that were furnished extravagantly, some ostentatiously, some elegantly. It seemed to me that these rooms were public spaces; I did not believe anyone lived in them. We also passed closed doors, but we did not meet any of the building’s inhabitants.

‘Would you like to see the most beautiful room in the Tabernacle?’ Pontanus asked.

He took us to the upper floor, to the western gable of the building. There was a spacious, light-filled room which one could see in three directions, every way but north.