Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (21 page)

I had certainly never seen such a beautiful room, and neither had Mrs Raa or Latona, the daughter of Pontanus. It was beautiful in a classical, thoroughly bourgeois way.

And it was no ordinary room, either: it was a salon or drawing-room. On the wall were painted, with exceptional skill, columns, bunches of grapes and medallions and another door, whose handle I went to turn before I realised that it was painted.

I also saw a solemn canopied bed which was like a room within a room. On a curved walnut bureau stood a heavy candelabrum. The sunlight, which flooded in from all directions, was softened by white curtains and glowed in the polished mirrors behind the candlestick and in the roses, white and red. There were three vases of them before each window.

A glass-doored bookcase was of the same reddish walnut as the bureau.

Between the doors – the real door and the illusory door – was a small square piano. The floor was covered by a blue carpet edged with narrow, meandering patterns. In the centre of the carpet a tree spread its branches, carrying both flowers and fruit.

It was a beautiful and exquisite carpet, perfect for the floor of so rare a room.

‘Who lives in this room? You?’ I asked.

‘Not me. This is the Kinswoman’s room,’ Pontanus answered. Across his face there flickered a somehow unpleasant expression, memory or thought which I did not have time to decipher.

‘Who is she?’

‘You will meet her soon enough,’ said Pontanus.

He looked out of the window and I went to stand beside him. I should have remembered what to expect, but all the same I started a little. The view to the west, over the rose-vases, was like a defamation when one looked at it from the constant peace of the Kinswoman’s room.

There rose apennines of waste, rotting refuse and abandoned piles of things, behind which the sun was just setting. It was strange and wrong that the substance of things lasted so much longer than human flesh, which withered and was forgotten like flowers.

‘What luck!’ said Pontanus, and leaned, looking dreamy, against the window-sill as if he were admiring the alpine glow.

‘What luck are you talking about?’ asked Mrs Raa.

‘That we were able to build the Tabernacle just here,’ he said.

‘What kind of luck is that,’ asked Latona, his daughter. ‘Those junk heaps aren’t beautiful, and what’s more, they smell.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Pontanus said. ‘This refuse site will soon be full. Next year, or perhaps even before Christmas, it will be closed, and then they will begin to build a big park in its place. It will be levelled, soil will be brought here, lawns will be sown and flowers and trees planted. It will be a real sight – I have heard it will be the biggest park in the whole of the City of the Golden Reed.’

‘Perhaps even a rose-garden,’ I said.

‘Oh, father, you’ll believe anything,’ said Latona, daughter of Pontanus, and Mrs Raa hummed:

For you have promised unto us

That even to the wilderness

Will come a lovely spring . . .

But as we looked at those terrible cordilleras, we wanted, nevertheless, to believe, as Pontanus believed.

Nocturnal Letters

Mrs Raa got a lot of mail; she received a letter almost every night.

The first, original letter, of which all the other nocturnal letters were the consequence, was written by her husband. On it was only her name, nothing else, for they lived, of course, at the same address then; there had been no need to drop the letter into a mail-box.

Mrs Raa saw the first letter on the kitchen table immediately after she had found her husband’s body, still warm, in the car in the garage. The envelope was carefully sealed, and Mrs Raa was afraid of it.

When all the formalities had been attended to, Mrs Raa took the letter in her hand. She turned it over in her hands and then dropped it on the table as if it had burnt her. It was a day and a night before she was able to open it.

The envelope was empty. There was nothing in it, not even an unwritten sheet. It was just an envelope.

For a long time Mrs Raa looked for the piece of paper that her husband had intended to put in the envelope. He had always been absent-minded. But when Mrs Raa had emptied and gone through her dead husband’s desk drawers, the piles of paper on his writing table, the book-case, the kitchen cupboards and all the waste-paper bins, she realised that there was no such piece of paper. The lightness of the letter was the same as the lightness of her own life, the clothes and the skin and the apartment that covered the desolation of her heart like dry shells.

After the funeral, Mrs Raa moved back to her home city.

But mail came to the City of the Golden Reed, too, from the place where her spouse now was. Mrs Raa found a letter on the kitchen table of her new apartment almost every night. Always her name was written on it in her husband’s small handwriting. But Mrs Raa could not reply: she had no address.

In the second letter she read the words that she had most feared: IT WAS YOU.

When she opened the third letter, all the lights in her house were burning. But from inside the letter flowed darkness, which spread quickly from room to room. The lights dimmed, she could no longer see anything. She wanted to close the envelope, but could no longer find it. The night around her was not mere darkness, but a blindness that filled every corner.

The fourth letter contained a plan of their house. It resembled some kind of orientation map, or the treasure charts children make, for in one of the rooms of the apartment, in a corner of the hall, a cross had been drawn. She saw herself wander through the hall with the map in her hand and stand in the corner marked by the cross. There was nothing there but a pile of old newspapers awaiting the next collection of waste paper. The pile was alarmingly high and crooked, and it looked to her as if it must contain a newspaper for every day of her life.

From the fifth letter her husband rose, looking just the same as before, but of course he was much smaller, hardly the length of a pencil. Joy and peace, the vision of a new possibility, made Mrs Raa’s heart dizzy.

Her husband began to grow, quickly, quickly, and soon he was the right size and Mrs Raa pressed him to her breast. But he continued to swell, at astonishing speed, and Mrs Raa’s arms could no longer encircle him. They could not restrain such unbridled growth. Her husband’s shoulders were already touching the walls, his head tore open the ceiling, but after that he began to vaporise. His solidity disappeared and he became summer mist, ether, the smoke of distant campfires.

When Mrs Raa opened the sixth letter, a light scent wafted from it. Mrs Raa did not know what scent it was, that of a flower or a fruit or the scent of their former love, which had been lost long before her husband’s death, or which she had imagined had been lost. Mrs Raa liked the scent; she did not want it to evaporate. But it evaporated even before she awoke.

Inside the seventh envelope was a piece of lined paper, as if torn from a school exercise book. On it was drawn various objects: a water-glass, an onion, a teaspoon, a chair. The drawings were rough and approximate, for her husband had never been able to draw, and the objects were simple, ordinary objects, of a kind that Mrs Raa had grown used to seeing and using every day.

She turned the piece of paper over in her hands and wondered whether it was a picture-riddle, a puzzle picture. But she could not think of a solution.

Mrs Raa kept the empty envelope in the drawer of her night-table. After dreaming, she sometimes opened the drawer and looked inside the envelope once more. Then she got up and went into the kitchen and let the water run. It was tomorrow and she drank a glass of water in the immeasurable light of the east window. But the chambers of her heart had turned into court chambers in which complex legal cases were heard.

When she sat down, the chair said a word, she stirred her coffee with a spoon and, in the dawn, her eyes were the eyes of an onion-peeler.

The Ravens of Edom

In the rooms of the Tabernacle, in the pavilion, in the courtyards, there were to be seen, increasingly often, two already aged figures who moved with difficulty. If one asked the Gold-Washers their names, one heard only: the ravens of Edom.

Perhaps they were man and wife, perhaps they had once had a home in a small town far to the north. But that was a long time ago: when I met them, they no longer had a home, a town of their own. Who knows what had happened to them? Who was even interested? For their hometown was so poor and insignificant, and so far away in the north.

No foreign power had conquered it, it had not been fought for from street to street, and no one had manned the barricades to defend it. What had happened had happened in silence.

The houses emptied and their doors and windows were barred. The school playground was deserted. Even in the heart of winter, not even the thinnest thread of smoke rose from a single chimney.

You grew silent, town, and your streets

remain empty: not a soul

will return, say why you were abandoned

They went away, to the south, in a forced emigration, their native town died: there is no eye to see it.

For not only people, animals and plants are mortal: places, too, can die. Places, too, can be mourned like dead people.

Now those who lived there were scattered like the tribe of Judah, like straws in the winds of the wilderness. Some fell in the interior, some on the coast, like this old couple. Each one of them carried with them their little town, pocket-sized. Their old home was only an empty shell. The real town, built of people, had been wiped off the map and only wild animals lived there, thinned out by hunger and extinction.

What were those two doing in the Tabernacle, with the Gold-Washers, among people of a quite different race?

They were permitted to live in one of the rooms of the pleasure palace, and someone thought he knew: ‘They have been adopted.’

They wandered through the Tabernacle like children lost in the forest, like Hansel and Gretel. One mumbled incessantly to herself, the other stared persistently at the floor as if looking for a trail of crumbs of bread that would guide him back home.

The Customs Officer, he who dissected bodies for a living, brought them sparkling glasses and said: ‘You are from such-and-such a place, aren’t you?’

And they looked at him, reviving: ‘Have you ever been there?’

‘Once,’ said the Customs Officer, and tried to think of something kind to say about that miserable, cold town.

‘It was a beautiful spot,’ he seemed to remember at last. ‘Yes . . . so peaceful.’

‘Isn’t that right?’ said one of them, grateful for his words.

And the other: ‘The streams of Edom shall be turned into pitch, and her soil into brimstone; her land shall become burning pitch.’

‘What did you say?’ asked the Customs Officer.

‘Night and day it shall not be quenched; its smoke shall go up for ever. From generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever. But the hawk and the porcupine shall possess it, the owl and the raven shall dwell in it. He shall stretch the line of confusion over it, and the plummet of chaos over its nobles.’

The Customs Officer looked for a means of escape, but the homeless man’s voice was already becoming more uncertain; it began to fragment and grow dim. The ravens of Edom left the Customs Officer and continued their progress past groups of talking people and self-absorbed couples.

‘Is that where they come from?’ someone asked, and was answered: ‘Yes, there.’

But no one saw the cloud the ravens of Edom had spun about them. It was their aura, the extension of their personality, and surrounded by it they wandered through the Tabernacle as they wandered anywhere else that was not Edom. It was the dense cloud of home-sickness, the only faithful companion in the trials of exile, on the road to Hooronaim.

Just as the soil has its own irradiance and the sky its own, so their lives, too, were radiant; evenly and incessantly, their’ cloud radiated a grief which was hardly likely to reach its half-life.

But the cloud shed light, it threw out a beam of light, and raised their past up as if on a platform. And in the limelight every detail, every task, every object under the lost sky of Edom took on a new significance, and its colours were cleansed like the patterns on stones in shore-water.

And their ancient days had, indeed, been days of happiness. How exile broadened them, and what a rainbow it hurled across the hinterland town that jutted out on the shore of its unacidified lake with its modest apartment blocks, sawmills and cut-price supermarkets and constantly beflagged petrol stations.

The illumination of their home-sickness was shadowless, all-embracing. Their former life was superabundantly rich in the light of that cloud.

If the ravens of Edom could once return, if they could see their little Edom again as it was, what would happen to them? Would they return to their former tasks, accustoming themselves once more to the everyday life of Edom, and growing tired of it? How soon would they forget that which had been longer and broader and higher than anything else in their lives: their own home-sickness and its clear-sightedness?

The Glow of the Gold-Washers

The Tail of the Peacock

‘What is this?’

‘Just water,’ Pontanus said. ‘And this?’

‘Mercury.’

‘And this?’

‘Lead.’

‘And that?’

‘Tin.’

Scales and weights. Living fire and the green eye of the monitor. Crucibles and measuring glasses of all sizes, on their sides the images of the flames. Coloured fluids, bubbling. Powders. Smells and evaporators.

But through them I saw, day by day, Pontanus’s precise hands, the hands of an illusionist, weighing and sprinkling, shaking and mixing, measuring and arranging.

I fingered Pontanus’s tools. I turned in this direction and that in his cramped room in the Tabernacle building and could not avoid breathing in sulphur fumes. I asked whatever came into my head and he answered, patiently, but lost in his own thoughts.