Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (31 page)

I sank down before it, faltered and demanded that everyone around me should take part in what was happening on the wall’s surface – and, more and more triumphant, indescribably beautiful, swayed the shadow of spring, bearing in its branches the quality of qualities, as simple and immense as everything raised by the sun.

Did I not then dare, did I lack the courage, to turn and encounter the tree itself that threw the shadow? My eyes and its leaves, my body and its trunk, hands and branches, blood and sap, words, soughing and our common verticality – face to face, eye to eye . . .

No, I never turned.

But could it have added anything to its own shadow, in which its spirit lived?

Spring comes to the Gold-Washers

The End

Pontanus’s door, which he generally kept tightly closed, was now wide open. I happened to walk past it and, without immediately understanding what I saw, returned to look.

A storm had passed through Pontanus’s peaceful chamber.

Inside, a horror of destruction predominated. The little bottles that had stood in rows on the shelves, each with its own name-label, had been flung to the floor so that it glittered with broken glass. The scales were twisted. The warming tray was cold. Books lay open on the floor, and pages had been torn from them. A dark, smelly liquid had been poured on top of the broken glass and papers; a powder, perhaps iron filings, hung in the room so that, even standing on the threshold, one began to sneeze.

‘Where is Pontanus?’ asked one of the Gold-Washers. He had appeared unnoticed beside me. ‘Poor Pontanus. What will happen to him now?’

‘Vandalism,’ said a second Gold-Washer, peering over the shoulder of the first. ‘Don’t tell the Glass-Girl about this. She will go mad if she sees such a lot of broken glass.’

Too late. The Glass-Girl was coming toward us. We all turned to look. We could not shelter her from anything at all. Did we even want to? In our way of looking at her was an interest that was not entirely benevolent.

She approached us with her head raised and her legs moving evenly, like a sleep-walker’s. She appeared already to have received news of what had happened, for her eyes glittered like pieces of glass.

‘Close the door,’ said the second Gold-Washer, but the Glass-Girl pushed him out of her way with unexpected force.

She walked in and, first from under her heels, then from her throat, came a high, shattering, toneless word of glass.

She walked back and forth in the room, treading heavily, then jumped up and down on the spot and took a couple of the steps as if in a minuet. She picked up a prism that had not broken from where it had fallen on the floor, wiped it with her sleeve and set it back on the window-sill. Then she looked at us, standing in the doorway staring, constantly on our guard, and smiled, almost triumphantly, with a new, cruel face.

We looked at it in fright. She was not, after all, the person, the lamb-like creature, we had believed her to be.

‘Fetch a brush,’ she said, calmly and nobly.

But before anyone could obey, Pontanus arrived on the spot.

‘Pontanus, there’s been an accident,’ said the second Gold-Washer. ‘But it isn’t the end. Everything can still be restored.’

‘I’ll just tidy up a little here,’ said the Glass-Girl, suddenly herself again.

‘Yes, we shall tidy up a little first. You wait upstairs,’ I, too, said.

‘You can start again, and with better luck than before,’ said the second Gold-Washer. ‘It will all sort itself out.’

‘Let it be,’ said Pontanus.

When we looked at his forehead, we saw that this was no surprise to Pontanus. When we looked at his mouth, which no longer said anything, we began to understand. When we saw his desolate eyes, we already knew who had created the confusion of his lonely room.

Pontanus shut his door. We realised that this must mean the end. And now we, too, left, dispersed, each of us sorrowful at heart, although none of us had ever believed what he had believed.

The Winter Egg

The Winter Egg was of the Executioner’s making. It was not wooden, like most of the Executioner’s work, but of pale marble.

The Winter Egg was set in a small square that was the culmination of five streets. There was no pedestal to the Winter Egg, but the square was paved in such a way that the egg lay at the centre of stone radii. It looked as if one third of the egg was underground, and as if it had just pushed its way through the paving. It looked as if it were still growing. The veins of the marble, slender, pale green, reddish, bluish like streaks of watercolour wandered across the curved surface of the egg-universe.

Many people passed by the Winter Egg on foggy, cold days which portended still gloomier times, and many regarded it almost with yearning. How easy it would be to live through the long, cold, dry season if one were like the Winter Egg or a hard-husked seed or a pale root which has penetrated so deep into the subsoil that not even the frost can choke it . . .

In spring and summer idle folk spent their time in the square, young people hung around, drunks, lovers, the unemployed. There were no benches there, and so many leaned their backs against the egg. Once someone put an enormous plastic bag over the egg, like a condom. It was removed the same day, but later in the summer the egg was decorated with a broad-brimmed straw hat. Although it was far too small for the Winter Egg, it gave it humanity, a face and a personality.

Once in spring, as I was crossing the square at midnight, I stopped to look at a girl who was dancing in the square before the Winter Egg. She danced quite alone, and on her feet were high boots that snapped as they resounded against the stones of the square.

What kind of dance was it? What music was the girl dancing to? I could not hear anything, no drums or tambourines, castanets or guitar, and even the handful of people who had gathered around her were astonishingly quiet.

An old couple walked past me, and the woman said: ‘She’s still dancing.’

Now I understood what dance it was. I understood that the girl had wanted to stop long ago, but that she could not. For the dance that she must dance was the tarantella, a terrible dance. Some who had begun dancing it had had to dance until their deaths.

Then a group of men approached the tireless dancer. They grabbed the girl’s arms roughly, without a word. The tossing of her limbs was restrained with a purposeful grasp, malevolent even. Three or four men half led, half carried her to a small lane off the square; two more followed them without looking around them.

But the stamping of her boots did not calm down; again and again her hands broke free. They waved and gesticulated above the men’s heads as if making signs to the spectators who had stayed in the square.

Next time I passed through the square, I saw that the statue was broken. It must have happened the same day, for pieces of the shell lay all around on the stones. I had imagined the Winter Egg was made of solid marble, but now I could see that it was hollow inside, like all eggs.

It did not look as if the sculpture had been broken from the outside, but as if an internal force, like an explosion, had shattered it. What had the Executioner hidden inside it, or what had he forgotten? What embryo had grown so big that the thick marble had cracked like the chalk shell of a real egg?

Whatever it was, it had now got out. There will come a day when it walks toward me at a crossroads in new clothes and I will not recognise it or know where it has come from.

The pieces of marble were cleared up and the remains of the Winter Egg, too, were removed from the paving stones, Soon a new statue was erected in its place, showing a statesman with one hand on his breast, the other on the statute book.

The Sun

Nevertheless, the spring also came to the Gold-Washers. It was not the spring that Pontanus awaited so eagerly, when the crowns and haloes of flowers begin to glitter among the rot of the refuse dump. The waste-heaps rose more steeply than before, and when the snow had melted they began to smell. But it was the real spring, all the same, and the grass grew for the first time on the tuatara’s grave. The earth turned toward the south as a great expanse of melting snow, it was Sunday and the thaw-water muttered its own babble.

The Gold-Washers had lifted a blue sofa from one of the inside rooms on to the terrace. On it the Kinswoman slept the light sleep of spring.

The Torso and the old Gold-Washer were playing chess in the pavilion. The Glass-Girl, who recalled a crocus in her after-winter tinge of blue, moved the pieces according to the Torso’s instructions.

‘A three, I said, for God’s sake, three! Do you want the pawn to be taken at once, eh?’

Crocus’s timid fingers grasped the piece once more, and a long silence took the Gold-Washer’s hand to his forehead. The game went on, but in the sun the board shrank and shrank.

And, move by move, the spring advanced on all fronts: above the Gold-Washer’s glittering top hat and in the grass, where the tuatara had once slashed his paths, and under the roots of the grass, in the ground, which melted its great home-sickness and all its three eyes.

Whatever the Gold-Washers did, it was not enough. They could not go completely inside the spring day, something was always left outside. Restlessness stirred, it drove them here and there, inside and out, into the city and back. But nothing they could think of to do was enough. In one way or another, they always remained deprived, without rights. They were spring’s gatecrashers.

A fist struck Pontanus’s door.

‘Come out, spook, the sun’s shining!’ shouted the top-hatted Gold-Washer. ‘Come and see the book-lice.’

It was a moment before Pontanus opened the door. ‘Oh, father, how pale you are,’ Latona said.

Over the winter Pontanus’s nose had become marbled; it looked like the Winter Egg.

‘Really,’ Pontanus said. ‘The spring seems to have come. But I am old and tired.’

‘Forget it,’ the Gold-Washer said. ‘What has it got to do with you. But look at them!’

The other Gold-Washer had carried his terrarium into the courtyard. He had opened its lid and bent down into it, between the stones, a couple of branches of golden rain. Along these arched bridges the book-lice were walking to freedom, one after the other, their snouts and antennae twitching.

Babel, too, was standing with his hands behind his back, watching the book-lice’s first spring day.

‘Is your study ready?’ Pontanus asked the Gold-Washer.

‘The material is complete,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘I no longer need the book-lice.’

The ravens of Edom were walking slowly round the courtyard, clockwise, hand in hand. They, too, stopped beside the terrarium, examining it silently, from a distance, as if from Edom.

‘Go,’ the Gold-Washer hurried his little creatures. ‘And live blamelessly, as you have until now. Eat, copulate, give birth, sleep. That is enough. That is all.’

‘No it isn’t.’ Pontanus muttered, lost in his own thoughts.

But one of the lice seemed to wish to remain in its glass prison. It went a certain way along the branch, but soon turned back and returned to the bottom of the terrarium. Then the Gold-Washer picked it up, set it on the palm of his hand and put it down on a blade of grass.

Babel bent over and said to it, waving his finger: ‘Monda perfida.’

‘Do you think they notice any difference between prison and freedom?’ Pontanus asked.

‘Hardly,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘Is there a difference? They can live in a prison, too, and in freedom, too, they have to die.’

But Babel said weightily to him: ‘Use bharat. Piranikku jevvalavu nalla!’

Then the Kinswoman awoke from her short sleep and her trembling, high terror echoed across the courtyard: ‘Mother! Father!’

Pontanus sat on the grass, his heavy head in his hands, and looked, his forehead furrowed, at the activities of the book-lice. He screwed up his eyes in the sun’s shimmer.

How small the book-lice were!

His thinning hair quivered and glistened on his temples, his scalp, like thousands of antennae. The sun’s gold, lighter than the cap of happiness, fell on to them. Under the sweet warmth of that headgear the labour of hope, which Pontanus had thought he had abandoned, continued uninterrupted, undisturbed by anything. Here, in his own Tabernacle, he measured and weighed, enriched, distilled and matured once more. His flame now burned without spitting, and meaning, in which he had ceased to believe, lit up Pontanus’s secret chamber as the spring sun did his old head.

‘Look!’ said the Child of the Tabernacle. ‘That one’s going to town and that one’s climbing a mountain, and that one’s digging down into the earth.’

The book-lice were dispersing, and there were not two who chose the same road.

Then they were all gone, hidden by the spring.

The Child looked for the last one, which the Gold-Washer had just set on a blade of grass. But the insect was nowhere to be seen; only the grass moved unceasingly, and he could not tell one blade from countless others.

PEREAT MUNDUS:
A NOVEL OF SORTS

1998

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men.

Carl Sandburg

Cold Porridge

Håkan, too, had a brain. His brain did not contain a program, but nerve-cells connected to one another by the million, a giant, dynamic network. A layman who happened to see inside Håkan’s skull might make the mistake of imagining that all the bowl contained was cold porridge. Not a pretty sight, that’s for sure. But that porridge – when it was still warm – was a universe in itself.

And with what exemplary tightness was it folded inside its hard gift package, its little bone vessel.

Even the most successful specialist company in packaging technology would have something to learn. It was the astonishing product of an evolution that had lasted four billion years, and mankind knew of nothing comparable in the universe.

If anyone asked, Håkan, too, was a materialist. That was what he liked to call himself, anyway. Håkan believed that the human mind was born of brain activity, and that human consciousness could not exist without a brain. There was no distinct mind, soul or spirit, only the material brain, nerve cells and their electronic activity.