Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (27 page)

The Cougher

I did not see with my own eyes the boy who shouted for the mother he had murdered. He remained only a voice, like the Cougher, who lived in the City of the Golden Reed, on its public transport system.

How often I, too, used it to travel round this stony promontory, which protrudes into the sea like a forlorn finger testing the coldness of the water.

Often, when I stepped inside, all the seats were already taken and on the journey as many as one and a half times the permitted number of passengers crammed themselves in.

The proximity of strange bodies and strange smells was agonising enough, but in addition hands often appeared to torment me.

The hands appeared from the midst of the crush and lived a life of their own, feeling, touching, even slipping inside your clothes if your position happened to be suitable. They did not belong personally to anyone; they just materialised from the rustling coats and the static electricity of man-made fabrics.

On my last journey, I thought I felt again such a fumbling, greedy touch: I looked behind me, but saw only unstirring profiles and eyes that stared inward. And then the hatred in the conductor’s voice, a real, living disgust, pushed me, too, forward, as she raged, in all the city’s official languages: ‘Move right down inside the car!’

Raincoats hissed, and there was an echoless cough. I pricked up my ears, was immediately on my guard: was the Cougher here?

Yes, he was here, but for a long time I was the only one who knew it. For all that had happened was something completely ordinary: someone had cleared his throat. He coughed once more, and then again, and again. But nothing opened, and the disturbance continued.

Such a thing can happen to anyone, of course. But this was only a foreword, a prelude.

For as everyone was sinking back into a daze of indifference, we were shaken by the first real outburst of coughing.

Where did it come from? From what blackened region, abandoned by angels? I heard the phlegm moving back and forth in the windpipe, wheezing and bubbling. I heard how it rose from soft, already decaying tissue, and everyone remembered, with a start, the secrets of their own guts.

Every fit of coughing hit its mark. There was nothing behind which to take shelter. The seminal fluid of a mortal illness was being sprayed on to us. And as series of explosions followed another, I heard behind them a tightening silence. Hands became fists, but their helplessness was unfathomable. I did not dare push my fingers into my ears, and how would it have helped: this cough was not heard with the ears, but with every muscle and nerve-fibre.

I know: the Cougher does not cough because he cannot help it, but because he wants to cough. He wants to blaspheme and dishonour his fellow-travellers. He wants to steal from us the air that we must breathe, this small, fusty, closed air-space. He wants to fill it with the tiny spores of his own ruin. And like a strange hand his cough gropes for a life that I believed to be my own.

Pity him? Who could demand that? Whoever has heard the Cougher even once cannot be so sanctimonious.

His cough has stormed his frothing slobber over my head: ‘Since I must, so must you, too . . . Where I am, there shall you be!’

I have heard that cough, I have heard how it insults everything that, to me, means love and life and immortality. No, I do not pity him, for whoever coughs like that is not a real person. For those explosions would have torn him to shreds if he were an ordinary citizen. For he would long ago have drowned and suffocated in the Niagara of his own poison.

But he goes on, he goes on, for he is not a human being, but an incarnate plague, he is the Cough itself.

My God! In the bus, an unpleasant thought crossed my mind: what if he knows something about me, something I cannot remember, something so shameful that the accusation of his cough is completely justified? Was he, then, my accuser and my judge, and was my punishment the hollowness of his cough?

I stood in the crush at the front of the bus and, past a fur coat smelling of mothballs, I saw the driver crouched over his steering wheel. He was suffering, I could see it from his neck, his whitened knuckles. We were still on the bridge, the journey was continuing and the final stop loomed like a promised land on the far side of towers, squares, crossroads. It was a miracle, it was a mercy, that our bus, which the Cougher’s fits of rage shook like a bottle, did not turn, shuddering, into the wrong lane and dash across the parapet of the bridge into the quiet of the canal, where even the cougher would finally have been silenced.

Do you know what I wanted to do then? I wanted to push my way through the fur coats and the winter raincoats, bend over the driver and grab the dashboard. It was full of levers and switches and signal lights, and I would have tried all of them, one after another. For I felt, for a moment I was sure, that there must be a button which I could press to end this disturbance, which would have silenced the cougher’s drumfire.

There must be such a button there, there must be one somewhere, since there are levers at whose touch cities dissolve into emptiness and crowds puff into dust and whirlwinds of ash, spin and disperse like smoke into the silence of the night . . .

The Gong

It’s true, isn’t it, that there are sounds that can empty, repel and neutralise other sounds? Such was the sound of the gong, it was as pure as the gold of Ophir. I turn the gong against people’s talk, quarrels and rattling, against the cough and the howling of the murderer.

There was a time when I heard it again and again during the afternoon rush-hour, in the tumult of buying and selling, when people had heavy loads to carry and the sunset made the eyes of those who were hurrying home seem bloodshot. Boi-oing!

The whole street was streaming with faces, collars and hats, hair, scarves and overcoats, and they slipped forward like sails, carried by their own emptiness. Everyone else was anxious, everyone else was far from home, but he who came toward me was at home with every step, his destination was the moment of striking when brass flowered.

There he was, as anonymous as all the shadows of the street, slipping past me with his shaven head, around him the gold-brown wind of his cloak, lingering in his smile. His stick, too, I remember; there was a round knob at the top and it struck precisely, struck unhesitatingly like the hammer of fate and stopped at once, struck and drew away into the still quivering air, and in the iridescent colours of the windows flashed the brass of the gong.

What do
you
think, did he go round the entire city sounding out in the same way, so that not a single note arrived too early or too late, and so that he never sprained his bare ankles, which were encircled by the cords of a pair of sandals, even on the streets that were cobbled?

His blows were a thread which bound the whole city together, as if someone were to bend over and pick up from the paving-stones everything that had been forgotten, so that nothing should remain unconnected and alone any longer.

And if you, too, heard it, do you not regret that you did not do as you wished: that you did not dance after him, clapping your hands, clip and clap, whenever his stick boomed on the gleaming convex surface?

But although you only turned to look after him, bag in hand, did you not, in reality, go after him none the less, and did not someone else, and someone else again, and did we not together celebrate the fact that the city was, for once, single and united, whole, our own, and that it lived with all of us, without ever tiring throughout the moments of the day?

The Silence of the Meadow

The sun shone into the room, distant and low. It was the oblique unglowing gaze of a winter’s day.

A grey squirrel was leaping about in the pine-tree beyond the window, amusing the Child of the Tabernacle. The others stayed inside and felt the cold, because the inhabitants of the Tabernacle felt the cold every winter. Its designers had forgotten the fourth season.

The tuatara had not been seen for some time. The ancient lizard was sleeping soundly in its den of a cardboard box in an empty room. All three eyes were closed, and one of the Gold-Washers had wrapped it in some red wool so that it would not feel the cold as they themselves did.

Pontanus came from his room to the stove, rubbing his hands.

’Things are going well,’ said Pontanus. ‘They’re going very well. In a day or two I shall have reached the black stage.’

‘Right,’ said the Gold-Washer who was always present and always speaking, both aloud and silently.

‘That’s what he said in the spring,’ said the Gold-Washer who loved book-lice. ‘That’s what he’ll say next year.’

‘Maybe he will,’ said the first Gold-Washer. ‘But the main thing is that he is making progress.’

We all fell silent, for the rumbling had begun again.

We heard it many times a day, for the Tabernacle lay under a busy flight-path. Above our heads people rushed eastward and westward, reading currency exchange rates and eating soft-boiled eggs, if it was morning. Sometimes the booming bellies of the aeroplanes seemed to touch the wings of the Tabernacle itself, as if to entice it, too, into flight. But the Tabernacle did not rise into the air, no, it just rattled and shook. As long as the building quaked, we could not speak, only wait.

And remember the summer’s day when a bomb concealed in the hold had torn a hole in the side of such an aeroplane. We heard the explosion and all of us ran outside, everyone but the Kinswoman and the Gold-Washer who just sat and talked.

We saw the aeroplane tilt and lose altitude, but it carried on, it disappeared from view. Later we heard that it had landed at the airport of the Golden Reed exactly on schedule, even though there was a yawning rent in its body. But through the glare against which we shielded our eyes hurtled three or four packages. They were passengers who had been sucked out of the opening in the body and into the sunshine. It was the sun of a summer’s day, but up there it was still terribly cold.

The noise of those masses of air! We saw them being thrown into the void, bound to their chairs. Quite certainly they had in their laps today’s newspaper and a film-wrapped breakfast. Spinning, soundless as autumn leaves but much faster, they were torn away from their connection with humanity, from the unreal life they had prepared for themselves to the inhuman reality of death.

The top-hatted Gold-Washer spoke or pretended to speak to Latona, who was crouching by the fireplace in the stunning rumble. His mouth was moving, even his ears were moving, but there was no sound.

A summer pasture was dimly visible in the winter of the Tabernacle, the flowering side of a valley behind the refuse-hillocks. One of the aeroplane-seats had landed there, in the silence of the meadow, in the silence that returns after the worst has happened, the rumbling and the explosions and the tearing steel.

The passenger was still sitting, bound by his belt, but he was broken like a flower and the gaze of his eyes was detached, absent. In their emptiness, those unblinking eyes were like the sky; but they had no other perspective but its pure, glimmering blindness.

And the aeroplane had gone. They recovered their stolen voices, even the buzzing of a fly. It bounced against the windows of the Tabernacle, a little winter fly. For it could not know that the light toward which it struggled and strained was the brightness of snow and death.

Room for the Soul

Sometimes I spent the night in the Tabernacle. Every night there was different, like every day in the Tabernacle. Sometimes I drank the mother’s milk of dreams, rushing headlong from one image to another, farther and farther away from the house of the Gold-Washers and the book-lice.

But if I could not sleep, I could hear from below the squeaking of the bowed harp or the tinkling of the glass harmonica and, from time to time, strange cracks, as if the lash of a whip were striking thin skin.

On such nights, the solitude of the Gold-Washers filled the air of the Tabernacle with heavy secrets. I lay waiting for something, the splitting of the heart of night, the tearing of the curtain of the temple, the angel’s trumpet. But nothing happened. The Tabernacle swam steadily, ploughing deep through the timeless night.

But around the time of the winter solstice, in the deep of the Tabernacle’s night, I awoke to a hoarse bellowing. It was the kind of shout that cannot be suppressed, when torturing-irons break the leg-bone.

I put on my clothes, the door flew open as if of its own volition, and I fell down the stairs into the great common room. All the Gold-Washers were already there, but no one noticed my arrival. In their midst, the object of their undivided attention, swayed a narrow, dark tower. It was the old Gold-Washer, whom I had never before seen taking a single step. I had not guessed he would be so tall.

He was just standing, his shoes rooted to the ground, but swaying above like a tree on a hill. He stood and shouted: ‘One must also leave room for the soul! Room for the soul!’ It was an entirely new and detached sentence. I wondered whether it was connected in any way with his long, lifelong sentence, which he had still been building the day before. Perhaps he had now reached the end of it. Perhaps a third sentence would follow soon.

Around the Gold-Washers I could see, at least, the Executioner and Babel and the Customs Man and the Gold-Washer who always wore a hat. But now he had no hat at all, so that he looked naked and even a little pitiable.

The others fell silent; only Babel was mumbling softly to himself, the language of Babel in his distress, the tongue of tongues, which each of us could understand, but no one could translate.

What could I have done? I was not needed there. I returned to the solitude of my three-cornered room, where the Gold-Washer’s cry echoed once more: ‘One must also leave room for the soul!’

Then peace returned. Not a sound was heard in the Tabernacle that night, in the house that was so big that there was even a room without walls, and another without a roof.