Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (29 page)

The back of a hand relaxed on to a pillow, violet streams flowed across a wrist, hearts beat in their fingertips.

The doubt that had long been eating at their insides was now absent. Certain that they existed, they looked from mirror to mirror. They were alive! It was a rare feeling. It was an amazing experience.

The Gold-Washer’s hand strayed deeper and deeper between Latona’s thighs and released from her lips – from both their lips – a silvery moan. But his other arm was wound round Latona’s shoulders, and his fingers reached her face. In the silence of dreams, they traced her image again and again.

‘I’m melting,’ she heard the other cry out as his transfixed body relaxed, fulfilled, away from her, toward her. On Latona’s face pleasure and suffering flared into a single expression that left behind it a landscape of purity like death. It was eternally the same: peace, renewable innocence.

Then someone was looking at them from the darkness and Latona rose up over her own still raging breast.

‘Look!’

The Gold-Washer jumped up. ‘Who’s there? Who dares?’ And he could not find a switch, a lamp. Was a third person present?

Some hint of light, the dawn of the dawn or the light of the zodiac, the nightglow!, made things visible and picked out Latona’s shoulder. It was a false dawn, not real light but like something originating from the heart of the night, from their own pupils. But the gold had disappeared, and true morning was farther off than ever. They, too, were only dimness in the dimness, the darkest substance of night.

They loomed dimly at each other, but they saw no one else. Until Latona pointed to her feet, to the floor, where something gleamed like a glass bead, and a second, and a third.

She bent over and tried to pick them up, but her hand encountered cold and clammy skin, a guttural sound was heard, and they understood: the tuatara.

It remained motionless, and they two, they returned to their places, breast to breast. Was it sleeping? Was it looking at them? No, it was looking through them, with all its three eyes. It was a mesozoic gaze, a gaze that bored its way through epochs, the triple, impersonal gaze of extinction.

Their joy and their happiness did not interest the tuatara, not enough to make it glance at them even when they groaned.

When Latona looked at the glowing eye on its forehead, she remembered something. It was like a little, round roof-window, like a scale model of the Pantheon, although it was covered with the finest of fine membranes.

A deep fatigue overcame Latona. She rolled over on to her stomach and, in the face of that unseeing gaze, the significance of what had just happened vanished; she tried to understand it but could no longer do so.

A deep fatigue overcame the Gold-Washer. Their eyes were closed once more, and there was no reason to open them. Under their eyelids, were their eyes not veiled by a membrane like that of the tuatara’s third eye?

The night went on. The tuatara was awake, but they slept.

A Ring Around the Moon

The moon darkened. The cone of the earth’s shadow fell over the scarred face of the moon so that it darkened. But not completely. A dark, wine-red glow spread over its surface hammered by meteorites, the moon’s craters deepened, its mountains became steeper. The Sea of Serenity, which could also be discerned with the human eye, spread out as a dark dust-pool.

Now one could see clearly what had only been known before: that the moon was not, after all, a disc, but a lump of stone with its own mass, which wandered, separate from everything else, through the darkness, along a route that never seemed to change.

Babel was sitting on the terrace of the Tabernacle, looking at the moon through binoculars. The Kinswoman had come out of her chamber and sat hunched in a wicker chair, humming to herself, and peeping into her apron pocket from time to time. What was in it? Latona said there was nothing, but how did she know with such certainty?

The Gold-Washer who was seldom silent was sitting on a bench. On his knee slept the tuatara, wrapped in blankets.

‘Not to speak of her gloominess,’ said the Gold-Washer, ‘which could not resist seizing the house, too, so that it decayed and became dirty and ingrained, but nevertheless his sight was sharp, so sharp that he could see through the years, if only he opened his eye, although later he no longer – at least, that was what they said – ’

And they stopped listening to his speech, which turned underground and pierced its own corridors there. ‘Siehenveten,’ said Babel, and offered the binoculars to Latona.

They were wearing many clothes, and yet they were cold.

They sat there on the terrace as if in the auditorium of an outdoor theatre. The first snow had fallen that day, and its torn lace remained here and there on the ground. The branches of a dead apple-tree crackled in the terrace fireplace. Their curls of smoke reached for the strange, old, scarred ball that hung above the flames.

With one finger, the Gold-Washer was stroking the scaly, triangular head of the tuatara. Why had it been dragged out into this red moonlight? Should it not long ago have been hibernating in the cold room where the Gold-Washers had built it a nest?

A train went by behind the forest, the lash of its whistle floated for a moment over the Tabernacle and Latona said: ‘The Glass-Girl is coming home from work.’

Babel fetched a chair for her from indoors. When I turned my eyes away from the moon, the Glass-Girl was already sitting there, smiling her perpetual shy smile.

‘Luna ekso! Luna rota! Aurum! Halma!’

Babel fussed around the Glass-Girl, settling a rug around her shoulders. Indeed, it seemed necessary; the Glass-Girl always looked cold.

Babel’s finger waved at the glowing object, and the Glass-Girl turned her slow, gentle eyes toward it. It was clear that she had not expected to see anything like it up there in the heights. For the first time that night she looked up. Her small face became smaller and even more bloodless than before. It shrank together like a white fist. Could she, too, not believe her eyes?

We others, too, turned to look once more, except for the Kinswoman, who perhaps slept.

I knew now: we had moved over into the moon’s world. It was a mistake to imagine that we were standing on the same terrace as during the day, and that behind us was the same building. This place was different. Just as a new person changes a room as he steps across its threshold, so the rising of the moon had changed the world. Its presence – even half-hidden – set a silver-hallmark on every object.

We did not know the body that floated above us. Now it looked like an empty iron ball which the charcoal that burned inside it had heated to a red glow. It looked so heavy that it seemed astonishing that it had not already fallen. A single cloud fled before it, quickly as if in fear for its life.

The tuatara – what had got into it? It awoke with a start and slipped from the Gold-Washer’s knees into the darkness gathered by the trees.

‘Didn’t you know?’ said Latona. ‘It’s just an eclipse of the moon. At the moment it is at its fullest. By midnight it will be the same as it’s always been.’

But the Glass-Girl had risen to her feet, wringing her hands. The rug slipped from her shoulders on to the terrace floor. Her transparent face was turned toward the bronze glow, unbelieving, feebleminded and full of distress. One could imagine that the soul, if anyone were ever to see it, might resemble such a face. Something was undulating in her, perhaps liquid glass. It was set in motion by forces of different directions: the moon and gravity and a great star that had disappeared on the other side of the earth, and some field even stronger than these.

‘It’s only the moon,’ Latona affirmed once more, ‘in the end it’s only the moon. People have walked on it, you know. Their footsteps remain in the moon’s dust.’

But her voice did not sound as certain as a moment ago.

‘Lunar eclipses occur quite often,’ I said. ‘As often as three times a year. It’s quite natural.’

Quite natural! And I was ashamed. What on earth had I thought I meant?

But we were all standing in the circle of the soul and the moon, and I understood why the Glass-Girl looked at the moon in the way she did.

What was natural in the way I claimed? That rough object that hung over the Tabernacle? The cold substance that glittered in places on the ground? We ourselves, in our scarves and winter coats, just taken from the wardrobe, so heavy and self-conscious . . .

One of the Gold-Washers stretched out his hand and touched the Glass-Girl’s thin shoulder.

‘It’s getting cold,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘Let’s go.’

The Kinswoman was singing again, the chairs clattered.

Indoors, lights were lit in every room. Who was sobbing over there? Probably the Glass-Girl.

The last shower of sparks flew, crackling, from the fireplace on to the emptying terrace. In its glow, heavy as a heart, the moon rose still higher into the air’s desolation.

Godspeed Tuatara

In the morning the bush of golden rain was bare. The headless body of the tuatara lay, damp with dew, in the shadow of the mock ruin. The triangular, three-eyed head had been thrown, or rolled with the force of the blow, under a bush. Much blood had flowed; it was, to their astonishment, as red as human blood. But the tuatara’s green colour had faded to milky, and all of its eyes were glued shut by a membrane. On the sand of the path the Executioner’s axe was seen.

Many Gold-Washers had gathered at the spot. The Torso and Pontanus and the Glass-Girl and Latona stood silently around the lizard’s body; only the Glass-Girl was crying.

‘This is the dragon, but where, where is St George?’ said one of the Gold-Washers.

Then the Executioner strode in.

‘What’s happening here?’ he asked. ‘What’s that over there?’

The others made space for him in silence.

‘That’s your axe. Was it you who did it?’ asked the first Gold-Washer.

The Executioner lifted his axe from the path as if in a trance, touched its blade and looked at his finger.

‘I?’ he roared, suddenly coming round. ‘I, execute an innocent creature?’

‘Who, then?’ asked the first Gold-Washer, and we evaded one anothers’ eyes.

‘I!’ said the Torso, and laughed bitterly. ‘Who else could it be? No one else here would be capable of such an act.’

He was right. No one but the Torso could have killed the tuatara, for even his tongue was like an axe. The Torso had the heart of a murderer.

The Child of the Tabernacle came and looked at the Torso, looked at the tuatara. Suddenly there were two children, three.

‘Let us bury the tuatara,’ the Child said. ‘We have already buried a bird, and many book-lice.’

‘You may,’ said the Gold-Washer, ‘of course you may. Find a beautiful place for it and arrange a big funeral. It is so far from home.’

‘I shall make a coffin,’ said the Executioner.

But Babel was already carrying a large cardboard box into the courtyard. It was just right for the tuatara’s last resting place. He set it on the ground, sighing, and looked at the tuatara.

‘Gevange todo, friie nizani,’ he said.

We scattered to feed our own doubts. The second Gold-Washer took a spade and went with the children to seek a suitable burial place for the tuatara.

When they had come past the beehives to the edge of the forest behind which rose the waste-heaps of the City of the Golden Reed, the Child of the Tabernacle stopped and looked around him. There was a strip of waste ground, a small field, dry and sunny. It was as if summer had returned for that day.

‘Let’s bury him here,’ said the Child of the Tabernacle.

And the Gold-Washer’s spade ground, grating, through the grass-roots and into the sandy soil.

Farewell, tuatara,

godspeed into earth’s care

Home to Gondwanaland

Let your soul repair.

Hereby we consign you

into extinction’s peace.

May you melt away

into the soil, at ease.

May you rise like hay

like grass which, night by night,

you rustled as you came and went

unknown, and out of sight.

Let the wind make music over

our graves too, and go.

So offer your forgiveness

Whether we knew, or no.

The Undead

What They Did Not See

Where, in moist shadows, the mushrooms stood on their single leg, there the Gold-Washers came late in autumn, a little before evening, when the rain had ceased for a moment.

Had the tuatara’s homeland once looked like this? Above them bare larch-trees recalled the calamites of the Devonian period. An archaeopterix could have risen from their shade into a heavy glide, its neck extended like a swan’s.

‘Here! Here!’ came shouts, and they bent to see the headless ones which had only a hat and a foot, the cool ones, often slimy and always motionless, which even the wind could not induce to dance as it did the dark towers above their caps.

Caterpillars’ palaces! Worms’ portals! Some of them the Gold-Washers simply shoved with their boots, and if they fell, soft, left them there; others they grasped gently and lifted them into their baskets and took them with them to the Tabernacle.

Many of them were pale, black or slime-bluish like the people of the underworld, like the inhabitants of the place of the dead; or, if they bore colour, red and yellow, they spread a waxen light around them. They did not sparkle as summer flowers do; instead, they secreted the more distant, moist glow of decomposition.

But the Gold-Washers knew that those they gathered and later ate were momentary and transient, and that what endured and what gave birth to them remained hidden beneath the earth. Their filaments ramified everywhere beneath the forest litter and the yellowed ostrich ferns. Rain fell and snow fell, the earth froze and then thawed, mushrooms pushed themselves through the soil on the first day, swelled on the second and on the third were already blackening and rotting. And he who did not know could not have guessed that the round egg of the first day was the same creature as the broad-capped, solid form of the second day, the same as the blackened stump, melting to liquid, of the third day . . .