Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (22 page)

Pontanus believes everything is alive: the air and the earth, fire and water, but also the rock on which the city is founded, minerals and metals, every substance we encounter, we covet or evade – dead people, too, and that which cannot be seen and of which we know nothing.

Oh Pontanus, poor Pontanus. His words are the afterimages of centuries that have been trodden to dust. What is the water of which he speaks, the dry water that does not wet the hand? Where is the gentle fire that does not smoke? A continuous, unchanging fire, like a stone? A fire like liquid, a fire that transfixes, a single entity?

Not to mention all the colours! He sprays me with his saliva as he tells me of a black that is the source of white, and of a white in which red is hidden.

‘It is forty-two days before the black phase begins,’ he says. ‘If I don’t make any mistakes. Then ninety days to the white phase, and to the red five months, at least.’

‘Is that when it is ready?’

‘It is,’ he says, and in his voice there is not the slightest quiver of doubt.

But I know that he has been engaged in the same work for at least a year, a year and a half, and there is no sign yet of the black phase. But Pontanus is not one to be downhearted. Not Pontanus. Night falls, and he does not tire, but becomes more alert, his finger rises and he raves about a quintessence that is the fifth element, and elixirs and antimonies, a king and queen, an eagle and a frog, and the Green Lion.

Pontanus is not satisfied with his role as a dependent variable, as an eyewitness. He wishes to be more than witness and a victim: he who does, changes and exchanges, rejects and chooses. He wishes himself to be God, and is that strange? That is what everyone wants! Everyone who is a real, living person . . .

But many acquaintances shake their heads. They ask: ‘Is he a lunatic, a madman?’

And I confess that I, too, can laugh at him, but not here, not as I see his rough face sweating behind the clouds of steam. Not as I see in his eyes the same golden glow that he tries to entice from his brews.

His gravity, his stone-quiet forehead cannot but draw me to him. Even when his mouth speaks with a spray of spittle, his forehead keeps silence, steep and white.

What, then, does he want? To transform the common into the rare, the rough into the sublime, the valueless into the immeasurably precious. He, a slight and short man, believes he can, like the womb of the earth itself, ripen and breed; like the ocean, enrich and crystallise.

And he claims that everything comes from one, which is two. That from two, one will come once more, through the Great Work.

It is no use arguing with Pontanus that he is a century, or even a thousand years, too late. Did not the world of which he speaks – the world of crystal spheres – long ago break into fragments, with its unicorns and chimeras? It was a beautiful but cruel world, yet not as merciless as this new one.

For now we find ourselves together in a world more desolate from year to year, of which both animals and gods are taking their leave.

‘Tell me, Pontanus, would you like to have it back? Would you like to exchange the red shift and neutrinos for perdition and the brilliance of crystal spheres, nucleotides and polymers for makaras and basilisks, waves, particles and radiation for God’s plan, absolute, mathematical, real time?’

Laugh at Pontanus, mock him. He will stand firm, he will tell you that although much has been found, much has also been lost, that although much has been learned, much has been forgotten.

I listen to him with pleasure, but at the same time in sorrow.

I look from the darkness of my own melancholy at how he boils and mixes, sublimates and refines his multi-coloured distillates in his little room, which he has dedicated as the chamber of the Great Work. I take a measuring glass in my hand and ask, ‘What’s in here?’

‘Salt,’ he answers.

‘And here?’

‘Mercury.’

‘And here, ugh?’

‘Sulphur.’

Often he answers readily, but often he breaks off and waves his hands: no point, in vain. But if I am too eager to say, ‘I understand,’ he becomes angry and makes it clear that it is not as simple as all that. Do I imagine that I can understand in the twinkling of an eye something that it has taken him years, or even decades, to comprehend?

There are matters about which he keeps a decided silence. He says they are things about which he cannot yet speak: his lips are sealed. When I ask what, in the end, is the final aim of his efforts, I do not receive a straight answer. All in all, he speaks confusingly and badly; however attentively I listen to him, I cannot understand the connections, and I begin to grow anxious, even fearful.

He does indeed have the hands of an illusionist, but much less to show than a master of trickery. I bid him farewell, return to the streets of the Golden Reed; there is a damp wind, the vapours of his room soon disperse from my hair.

But not a week has gone by before I am sitting in his laboratory once more, turning over in my hands a crucible that holds a foaming green liquid, or another, which he calls the Tail of the Peacock. It is supposed to contain all the colours.

‘There is a rainbow here,’ says Pontanus.

To me, the contents of the bottle are cloudy and obscure, like wine sediment. It smells bad. But if one shakes the bottle hard, there is a flash of red, a flicker of green stripe. It does not look like anything at all, just like a patch of petrol glistening on the surface of a puddle.

Why on earth have I come here again? Because, even if I do not understand what he says, although, like the others, I feel sorry for him and fear that he is wasting his time, I believe I secretly understand what he wants. I would not dare confess it even to him: a furrow of doubt appears again and again at the corner of my mouth and often I raise my eyebrows. But is not what most people do for a living in this city even more insignificant, more useless, than what Pontanus does?

That is why I never tell him what the others say: that his work is hopeless and pointless. For if I were to say it to him, should I not also have to say it to myself?

For in what essential sense do my own endeavours differ from Pontanus’s work? Do I, too, in my own room, life, body, not distil and vaporise, sublimate and decoct and mix the raw substances that I have been given, the days of my life, this time, this flesh, that it might be more than decomposing substance? That the best might be distilled and sublimated from it, that it might endure as gold endures? Do I, too, not wish to fashion it into something other than what it is, something other than what it appears to be? Is this not my real employment?

Do I not hope that joy might burst forth from these worthless, snuffed-out days, as colourful as the floating tail of the peacock – that from them, through the chemistry of my own longing, the wonderful star of antimony, the regulus star, pure as crystal, might once again condense?

The Pans

What pans they had! A shake! and the nuggets of gold separated from the gravel of days. They were few, and the gravel and clay and sludge and mud were plentiful. But there were some! There were! No one can make me say there were not.

I am not of the same feather as they, but something about the Gold-Washers attracted me. There was in them a burning focus, as in all monomaniacs, the blessed focus of madness, which warmed my melancholy, cold-blooded lizard-nature. Warmed it for a time, until it cooled, and I crawled on my way, seeking new sources of heat . . .

Their names, like their individuality, were embedded in the great clan of Gold-Washers, its family similarity, its continuity, its endless hospitality, which fused together their individual dreams.

If I wish, I can certainly remember him who sat in front of a microscope or stared at the terrarium all night long. What, really, was he examining so fixedly? In a box beside him were small insects, only two millimetres long. They were dead creatures, which he dissected and prepared. All of them belonged to one and the same family of lice, Copeognatha, to its sub-sect, Atropos pulsatorium.

Once I stopped to look as he did his work. When I had seen enough, I asked: ‘What do you want with those crawling things? What makes them so interesting that, from one day to the next, you enjoy their company so much that you will soon begin to look more like them than like people?’

The Gold-Washer said: ‘If only you knew how tired I am of faces and expressions and words. This little book-louse is marvellous. It does not bother us, or ever say a single word. Its world lies next to ours and we know nothing of it, but from the inside, from the book-louse’s point of view, it is as boundless as the world of human beings. Bigger, even, for it is smaller than ourselves. I shall show it to people; I am writing a report whose title will be
The Past, Meaning and Destiny of the Book-Louse.
’

This Gold-Washer also had a couple of bees’ nests at the end of the garden, beside the coppice behind which the piles of waste undulated.

‘To produce a pound of honey,’ the Gold-Washer once said, ‘a bee must visit seven million five hundred thousand flowers.’

That truly amazed me. I could not understand how the Gold-Washer’s bumblebees could find, in such a landscape, seven million five hundred thousand flowers.

But I remembered Pontanus’s dream.

Another Gold-Washer joined us. He wore a tall, flat-topped hat on his head, a kind of top-hat, except that it was not black. On the contrary, it was of innumerable colours, sparkling, brilliant, almost self-luminous colours. His hat was as garishly multi-coloured as the citizens’ new shoes. It was a provocative, vulgar hat that called many things into question.

But it was not by any means the Gold-Washer’s only headdress. Sometimes he dressed in a tricorn hat, sometimes a turban or a red fez, a skullcap or a ridiculous drainpipe cap.

When, after we first became acquainted, I tried to recall this Gold-Washer’s face, I saw before me only a furiously rotating cylinder, glittering with colours.

And I never really remembered his face, even later, but I did recall his voice, and he had many voices – for he both sang and played. He played the bullroarer and the comb and the split drum and a home-made glass harmonica – anything from which he could coax a sound.

The third Gold-Washer was the Executioner. It was he who had made, with chisel and axe and plane, the strange wooden statues of the Tabernacle, and had also made many kinds of furniture for the building. He did not speak at all, and did not like his work to be interrupted. Sombre and bearded, he hewed, whittled, planed and polished.

If anyone asked him, as he busied himself at his block of wood as if it were an executioner’s block, ‘What are you making?’ he growled, ‘A statue,’ and continued working without pause.

But there was also a Gold-Washer who did nothing. It seemed to me, in fact, that he had never done anything at all. He did not dissect book-lice or sing or play, he did not make statues like the Executioner or busy himself with a Great Work like Pontanus. Once he had moved into the Tabernacle, he no longer went outside it, neither did he appear to take part in any of its ordinary tasks. He certainly talked, and talked almost incessantly. I was amazed that he could live in the same house as the Gold-Washer who loved the silence of the book-lice. Although he spoke only one sentence a day, if he began it in the morning he had still, late at night, not reached the end, so that he had to continue as soon as he woke in the morning.

Often he was interrupted. For his advice was asked on all sorts of problems, from the practical to the most personal. He, who was older than the other Gold-Washers, gave advice willingly, and his counsel was short, pithy and often also to the point, but after he had given his counsel he returned to his own sentence.

I never saw him take a step. Perhaps he was paralysed? In summer he sat in the French garden – for such a garden, too, was built in the Tabernacle – beside the fountain, in winter in a high-backed chair in a room with views in three directions. And from that chair flooded a stream of words and memories that ran under the earth in silence when there were no listeners present, but welled up audibly as soon as any ear was brought in by anyone’s feet.

I never happened to see how he moved from one place to the other, but I suppose the others carried him.

What did he really speak about? Of course, I heard only fragments, no one heard anything but fragments. But it seemed to me as if he wanted to gather together into one and the same sentence everything he had experienced, to build from it a strong and compact whole, a Tabernacle of his own.

This sentence he sculpted and polished as the Executioner did his images, he examined it as the second Gold-Washer did his terrarium, watched over and guarded it as Pontanus did his bottle. The sentence was
his
pan, and the gold he washed in it was the meaning of his life.

‘Why do you talk so much?’ the Child of the Tabernacle once asked the Gold-Washer.

‘Why?’ the Gold-Washer asked, and interrupted his long sentence for a moment.

‘But surely someone has to speak, since so many keep silence. Since animals cannot and gods do not wish to. I can and I wish to. And I have nothing else of my own but words, nothing else of my own.’

How to Listen to Babel

He, too, was one of the Gold-Washers. Everyone knew him, for he went everywhere, was healthy, cheerful and attentive to everyone.

But nothing much was known about him. Not even which country he came from, for if one asked him about it, he pointed toward the south or nodded toward the east, or sometimes to the south-west. And at the same time he smiled a smile that was open and cheerful, the smile of a man who does not and cannot have any secrets.

Not even his official name was known. At first he was called the Man from Babel and later Mr Babel or just Babel. And Mrs Raa – after meeting him for the first time – said with a half-smile, in all sympathy: ‘Well, look at that, there’s Mr Good-as-Gold himself.’

Whatever language was spoken to him, the one which was generally spoken in the country or something more distant, he always seemed to understand what was being said, but his own response was a bewildering muddle. Babel’s own Volapiik. Any recognisable language it was not, but mixed with it were expressions from countless languages, Germanic and Romance, Finno-Ugrian and Indo-European and perhaps even languages that have long since died.