Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (44 page)

The birth rate, too, was falling. People’s sleepiness had its effect on sexual behaviour, too. The need for sleep was stronger than any other passion, money, love or food.

But nevertheless there were those who said that this is precisely how things should be. People were awake in order to sleep, in contrast to what had previously been thought. True life was lived at night, without bodies, on the astral level.

Often Håkan lay down in the middle of the day next to Sylvia, pressed his face into her hair and hoped to be able to fall asleep too, but after tossing and turning for an hour he got up again. He could not help it that he only needed seven or eight hours sleep.

Håkan tried to work, to write theatre reviews as he had always done. But how to write when only one or two of the city’s theatres were still functioning? And if there was sometimes a first night, there might be no one in the audience apart from Håkan. His applause fizzled out, and the curtain no longer rose.

The arts section shrunk still further, but so did even the economics and sports pages. The section editors were hardly ever seen, and the newspaper was no longer published at weekends. More and more often, even on weekdays, an edition was published which went by the name of a double issue. It was just as thin as all the other editions, but the next day no paper was published. News was no longer news; much of it was published again and again. One could just as well read a paper from last spring.

Eyelids tight closed,

Fords, rivers and streams

Håkan had read the lines before, when and where he no longer remembered. The poem had a knight and a maiden who slept and slept, trying from time to time to wake up, but then falling asleep again.

Although Sylvia was asleep, Håkan talked to her a lot. He told his wife things he had never intended to tell her. About his own youthful dreams, the deaths of his mother and father, how he longed for Sylvia’s presence. He also made a confession. He told her about Nadya, with whom he had once made love in the office when everyone else had gone on their summer holidays. After that he buried himself in his wife’s sleeping, sighing flesh. But afterwards he felt guilty, as though he had raped Sylvia.

Håkan understood that the end was unavoidably approaching. The sleepers were slipping farther and farther away from him. Their muscles, heart, lungs, were working at increasingly small capacities. Their bodies were beginning to dry and shrink. He had tried to keep his family awake, but it was painful to everyone and a sheer waste of time; he soon gave up.

Eyelids tight closed,

Fords, rivers and streams

Håkan envied those who slept. To see a stream of dreams welling up unfettered and free – that was what Håkan wanted. Sometimes he imagined that all of those who slept lived together somewhere. They did not dream solitary dreams, but he had been left awake by himself. It was like a punishment, but he did not know what for. The rejected world of wakefulness, the world of action, meant less and less compared to the reality of visions.

In the evening, at the usual time, he finally fell asleep. What a mercy to travel away from the city along the corridors of dreams. As he fell asleep, Håkan had reinvented a childhood game: he tried to determine when wakefulness changed into sleep. He never found that moment. Sometimes he dreamed of his wife and daughter or his father and mother, who were dead. But when Håkan woke, he always woke to grief. He had not really met them; they were merely sleep-phantoms, creations of his own memory.

But once, in the busy stream of images, some current took him to a somewhere completely new. Håkan noticed that his dream was not the same kind of sleeping as before. It was not sleep at all, but a kind of third state of consciousness. He noticed that he liked it. Then he saw Sylvia.

‘So you finally found your way here,’ Sylvia said.

Håkan looked around him in astonishment. He could not give a name to what he saw. His surroundings were quite unfamiliar. No buildings, no trees, but glowing colours and changing geometric shapes, ornaments and spirals, which recalled flowers, snowflakes, diamonds . . .

‘What kind of place is this?’

‘Place? This isn’t a place at all.’

‘But this area must have a name,’ Håkan said. ‘Are we in the country or the city? Are we at home or abroad?’

‘We are not in the country or the city. We are not at home or abroad. Why should we be? This is here. Everything is here.’

Håkan understood. He had arrived, and he meant to stay.

Fakelove’s Night

‘Darling, no more,’ Ella begged in her gentle voice, as so many times before. ‘You don’t need to, it’s fine like this.’

‘Are you sure?’ Fakelove asked. He was unpleasantly aware that he had neglected Ella in recent months. And of the fact that, despite his skills and manly exertions, Ella did not enjoy their sex.

‘It’s fine like this,’ Ella said again. She was about to say something else. Fakelove waited. He turned on to his back. And, after a long silence, Ella finally whispered what Fakelove had been afraid to hear. ‘It won’t work.’

‘Do you mean: not with me?’

Once again, Ella fell silent for a long time. Fakelove heard her holding her breath, they both held their breath, until Ella finally dared whisper: ‘Perhaps.’

Fakelove got up, fetched his cigarettes and put on a dressing gown. He lit the outside lamp and went out to the steps to smoke. He still smoked a couple of cigarettes a week, although he offered nicotine addicts tips on how to give up.

The night spread and echoed around the expensive area where Fakelove lived. The eternal, primeval, untamed darkness whose denseness the garden’s Japanese lanterns only deepened. He sat in its heart and its immenseness, its strangeness, penetrated his consciousness. It was no wonder that children feared the dark. He feared it too.

The colours had become shadows. The garden rustled differently from in the daytime. In Fakelove’s oval swimming pool the water rippled, cold and strange. The water looked fake, it moved slowly, impenetrably, dull black like oil.

On the garden swing there sat, alone, the crumpled shadow of the maple. Like someone suffering from a stomachache, Fakelove thought.

From kilometres away came a faint rustling, a buzzing from a nest whose inhabitants were always awake.

Fakelove sat on the bottom step and felt the roughness of the gravel beneath his feet. He grieved. Not so much for Ella; but he suddenly wanted to go back home, back to his mother. The earth continued endlessly under his feet, spreading out in all directions. But there was no direction in which his mother lived. He also thought about his only daughter, Lisa, and helplessness, worry and longing made him feel the weight of years.

The strongest bond, Fakelove thought now, was vertical, not horizontal: it ran in the direction of the arrow of time, from generation to generation. What happened between the sexes was something much more momentary.

How many people, how much sorrow, how many human actions, the earth was able to bear. Beyond the fence the sand of the yard mixed with the forest earth and the darkness of the tangled roots.

At that moment Fakelove felt only tiredness and absence, coldness and weariness. This was the end of love, but it had not ended, nevertheless.

In his mind the old question beat like a drum: ‘Who? Who with, then?’

He did not dare ask. In the hallway he heard the cautious steps of Ella’s bare feet.

‘I am so sorry,’ Ella said. ‘That’s just the way it is.’

‘Go back to sleep,’ Fakelove said irritably. ‘You’ll get cold. I’ll come back soon.’

Yes, that was just the way it was: he would lose Ella, her serious, almost sombre face, which could light up unexpectedly in a delighted smile, her white thighs and arms with their blue veins. Ella herself had not yet decided anything, or rather: she had decided to stay with Fakelove. But the thing that was stronger than her will would soon lead her away from Fakelove.

And Fakelove began already to think about the practical matters that he would soon have to address. Above all he wanted to do what he could to ensure that the end of this relationship would not affect his practice, his trustworthiness and his professional success. Such information would spread fast. How believable could he be as a sexual adviser if his partner left him?

But what and who was that person whom he would soon be losing. He tried to get all of Ella into his sight at once, to deal with her once and for all, so that he could then let her go. But it was impossible; he could only get a partial view.

Fakelove wanted the night to end. He wanted the day back, with all its cares, with all its colours.

With Colourful Lamps

Before, there was something that was called yellow and blue and red. And green. The world was brightly coloured, and that meant: full of colours. But that was long before Håkan was born.

Their compound name had been colours and they had something to do with light. Colours were something that could be seen in objects, in everything there was. Every object had a colour, but colours were not characteristics of objects. It was really quite complicated. But water and air did not have colours; it was said that they were colourless. On the other hand, Håkan had heard that the sky and the sea were called blue, so that he did not really know what to believe. Colours were characteristics in something of the sense of size or shape. They were – a quality.

There was, however, no certainty or information about an object’s real colour. You could not, apparently, even speak of a ‘real’ colour. The colour, so Håkan had read, depended on the viewer, the time, the space, and the colours, contrasts, shadows, reflections of other nearby objects . . .

They were words whose meaning no one really knew any more.

Colours, shadows, reflections could not be felt, heard or smelled. They were seen. Seeing was what it was called then, and everyone knew how to see. But no one really knew any longer what seeing meant, except that human beings had once had such a capacity. People had had some kind of organs in their heads for seeing, on either side of the nose. They were called eyes.

Now smooth skin covered the places where eyes had once been. But it was very fine skin.

Seeing was a sense that operated at a distance, like hearing. But it was nevertheless something quite different. If you could see, you did not need to smell, taste or feel an object. The seeing person knew from a distance, without grasping objects, their characteristics, even whether something was small or large.

Now they could only know by feeling. The teacher said that this was better, but Håkan was not so sure. He would so much have liked to be able to see.

Sometimes Håkan felt his face. He imagined that beneath his skin there were still soft eyeballs that wanted to see. He fancied he could feel them move when he felt the right places on either side of his nose. He thought that if he dared puncture the skin, they would come out again. He believed that his eyes were always open there, and were just waiting and waiting. If he allowed them to see, he would finally know what seeing really was.

The guide said that colours were not really exist outside people, that they did not really exist. People put them into objects just by looking at them.

Now no one knew anything about seeing, and it was not appropriate even to talk about it, except in a purely symbolic sense. Now only machines knew it, if even they did. Machines could see, but perhaps differently from how people had seen.

Some historians claimed that it had begun even before the third millennium. Not all newborn children any longer had eyes. At first it had been a great misfortune; later it had begun to be considered normal. In their time, no newborns had eyes any more.

The guide said that seeing was a characteristic that had been discarded as useless as the human race developed. It was a primitive relic. That in fact all it brought was trouble and strife.

Eyes were unnecessary, even dangerous, because they prevented deeper seeing and thus put a brake on the intellectual and spiritual development of humanity.

But Håkan had a friend, Liisa, who thought differently.

‘They’re lying,’ Liisa said. ‘The truth is that we are losing our senses, one after another. And what do we get instead? Talk about deeper seeing is just deliberately confusing. Every sense gives information, as you know. We cannot live without getting information about our surroundings, and I do not even want to live in such a way. The end of the human race is just one or two generations away.

‘But something completely different has always been said,’ Håkan said.

‘True! We’re being cheated. Try to understand what history predicts for us. First to disappear were colours, then distances and forms, then we no longer saw anything. Our senses of taste and smell are also beginning to deteriorate. Soon we will no longer recognise the smell of smoke, the scent of seaweed on the beaches, the aroma of our morning cup of coffee. Soon we will not care what we eat, for everything will taste the same – in other words, of nothing. Hearing will be the last to disappear. After that we will still, for a time, feel touch, weight, wetness, cold and hot.

‘And then?’ Håkan asked.

‘Then only thinking will be left,’ Liisa answered. ‘And that, too, will disappear. Do you think that, without senses, there can be any thought, soul, consciousness? The sense of beauty, of justice, of goodwill will go. Everything will go away, so far, so far. You can hear bird-wings beating, far away, far away.’

‘Is it a poem?’ Håkan asked.

‘It is a poem that someone wrote long ago.’

One night, Håkan had a vision. Before that he had not really had visions; he had only heard, tasted, smelled and felt his dreams. But now he could see. Strangely enough, he felt as if he had always been able to see. It was quite natural.

In his dream, he was standing at a crossroads. One road was the night road and the other was the day road. Along the night road there were many houses, but none had their lights on. Along the morning road the street-lamps were still burning, although the sun was already rising, lamps glowed in the windows and in the gardens shone yellow, red and green lanterns. He know that they were red and yellow and green, although he had never seen red or yellow or green.