Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (49 page)

Another figure appeared in the doorway. The Aztec nodded to him, then nodded his head towards Håkan and raised a finger. On his lips he formed, soundlessly, another word, which Håkan was unable to interpret. The new man slowly moved his gaze to Håkan, nodded and disappeared back into the inner rooms, closing the door tightly behind him. Håkan, however, was able to hear, more clearly than before, the murmur of a number of human voices.

‘You are right,’ the man said slowly. ‘This is not a restaurant. Rather, a – how should I say – laboratory. We have selected this peaceful area as our experimental station. Nothing here will remain the same, of that you may be certain. This area’s name will soon be on everyone’s lips.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ Håkan asked.

‘A certain society meets here. There are hundreds, thousands of cells like ours around the world.’

‘What are you driving at? What is this all about?’ Håkan argued. He felt the bitter sweat break out under his arms and on his forehead. He thought he should have laughed, although he did not feel like laughing.

‘What do you need us for?’

Håkan spoke of ‘us’ as if he had begun to feel a particular group or fateful cohesion with all the other inhabitants of this part of town. And precisely this had in fact happened.

‘The realisation of a worldwide plan,’ the man said, nodding for some reason to him, satisfied and self-assured. ‘You should be proud.’

‘Try to be a little more precise; there is no sense in what you say,’ Håkan complained. ‘What plan are you referring to?’

‘The media will call it an attentate. For us it is the last and decisive test.’

‘Test! What kind of test?’

New, panicky and hoarse questions tore their way out of Håkan, although an inner voice urged him to be quiet. ‘How do you intend to organise it? How do you imagine such a thing could be possible.’

‘We do not imagine. Everything is ready.’

‘But what for? Why?’

The man no longer replied, but his red lips twisted in an ugly way. At the same time Håkan felt as if within himself there had occurred an unwilled and violent shift, as if his consciousness had somehow changed. In the white paint of the window a small gap had been left or worn, the size of a coin, through which Håkan was able to see the maple that grew on the other side of the road. It was just beginning to change colour.

Only a few moments ago he had walked past the tree and into this room. But what the man had said and what was now happening in this room had divided time in two: the old time that had predominated before he entered the restaurant, and the new age that had begun after it, which that was in contradiction to what had gone before.

He felt that everything had changed. Although the maple looked the same as before, it was no longer the same, as if someone had furtively gone and changed it too.

What had happened to him, in a single room, had happened to the whole world.

‘’We’ll get even with you,’ Håkan shouted with the power of a deep-welling rage. ‘You’re mad. Criminal!’

Håkan thought about his home, which was barely half a kilometre from the restaurant. Both of them, his wife and he, had worked very hard for it. The building had been old and in bad condition when they had bought it, but the garden was large and luxuriant. And although they still had a large mortgage and a lot of work to do, they were happy there; it was a real home to them.

Håkan thought of the lines of a song which some character in a Chekhov play had sung: My new built house, of maple wood and lattice work all round . . .

That seemed to describe their home exactly: that spring, they had had to replace the rotten outdoor steps and rail. His collection of oriental maps, gathered over the years, was there; it contained some real rarities. Just the day before they had put up a new shelf. That was where Håkan kept his meteorological and mycological works.

The garden’s deep purple Martagon lilies were already beginning to wither under the jasmine bush. Their glossy, black, lazy cat washed itself energetically in the August sun on a wooden sofa Håkan had made himself. His wife’s face came close to his as if in a dream, full of caring questions, patience and tenderness.

Håkan now feared for all of this. He must get out and report what was happening in this place.

‘But I only wanted to eat,’ Håkan said humbly, almost as if to himself. He tried to understand, in vain, how and why he had wound up in this situation. ‘Be sensible and let me go now, and there will be no more serious consequences for you.’

‘You will stay here,’ the man said. ‘Soon you will be able to eat. Food is already being prepared for you.’

Håkan looked at him in amazement. What was behind the man’s sudden change of mind?

‘I no longer wish to eat,’ Håkan said stiffly. ‘I just want to go home.’

‘You will eat,’ the man said. ‘I will make sure of it.’

What on earth did he mean? Håkan wondered, slowly and foggily. He felt as if there must be something wrong with his brain.

The door had now once again been silently opened into the inner room, where Håkan surmised the kitchen was – if this restaurant actually had a kitchen. A small, tight group of people had appeared in the doorway, staring at him with attentive gazes, as if they expected something extraordinary from him. Among them Håkan recognised his neighbour, the man who had denied that he had ever visited the place. Håkan looked him straight in the eye and realised that he hated him. The same emotion flashed in the man’s gaze as in a mirror.

‘The meal is now ready, my little sir,’ said a maliciously sweet voice. Its owner, a particularly tall and thin man, pushed through the group of curious people who stood in the doorway and approached across the floor carrying a tray from which there came an absolutely horrible stench.

‘I will not eat,’ Håkan cried in a loud voice, almost screaming.

‘Indeed?’ said a new voice, whose owner Håkan could not see. ‘You demand food, anything at all. Here it is: anything at all.’

The people, still motionless and attentive in the doorway of the inner room, looked at Håkan. In some of the strangers’ eyes Håkan felt he could see a trace of sympathy. It was to the owners of these eyes that he directed his last, but almost inaudibly uttered word: ‘Help!’

The weakness of his voice demonstrated that even he could hardly believe that anyone could help him. And indeed his plea did not cause any visible reaction among the onlookers.

He was grabbed by both arms, he was led to the table and forced to sit on a chair. On the table he was awaited by the plate, a bowl really, whose contents looked somehow indeterminate, even frightening. In no sense did the portion even distantly resemble a real meal, or even anything edible, even though it had been set on a plate.

Håkan saw the dark, almost black plants or plant remains that were heaped on the plate, some of them dried, some rotten. They recalled last summer’s bladderwrack, washed up on the shore. Perhaps the association was also caused by the iodine-like smell that spread from the plate.

Half covered by the plants was a pale and soft looking veined piece of meat which had finger-like protuberances or which possibly actually were real fingers. The meat looked as if it was moving intentionally, rhythmically.

But perhaps it was his fault; there must be something wrong with his eyes. It was as if the contents of the plate were changing constantly, as if he were looking at a hologram.

Now, as he eyed the portion more closely, perhaps it was just cooled, cold porridge.

He still did not want to eat it, not in any form. Someone grabbed his nose and, pressing painfully with a spoon, forced his mouth open. Just at that point he thought he heard a groan, as if the portion had let out a scream, and the echo of that cry broke hoarsely from his own throat.

In Henbane City

Fast-growing, ramicorn poplars against a stormy sky with swaying, cone-shaped crowns; the oval, silken-haired leaves of the goat willow and the calyces of privet blossoms, which so quickly wither and fall on to the summer lawn – these Håkan the gardener loved. No less did he adore the projecting scales of larch cones, the relaxed spirals of honeysuckle shoots or birch nutlets, equipped with flying wings, which so greatly resembled migratory birds in flight.

Not to speak of flowers, wild flowers and garden flowers, the corymbs, ears and cymes of flowers, their heads, their lip-like corollas, which reached out to the sky like kisses, their deep, scented throats, whose deep throats, coated with nectar, guided insects toward shared delight for all.

Håkan the gardener had experienced a great deal. But everything had had its beginning and end, like the seasons. Gardening was a constant struggle which was lost on many fronts. It had been hard enough to watch powdery mildew spread from tree to tree, leaf to leaf, cankers damage the pears and brown rot contort the apples. The bright red lily leaf beetle had devoured the buds of his orange lilies and his rarest lilies.

But the city’s then party leader had been the garden’s worst scourge. Håkan would have preferred to welcome a hundred thousand Egyptian grasshoppers.

O the lilac’s heavy drooping branches and the many-layered, tight buds of the peony, o the blue calyces of the forget-me-nots and the plump nectar stores of snapdragons!

Their destiny was sealed on account of the obsession of the party leader.

The leader said more cabbages and potatoes were needed. That Håkan understood, for last year’s harvest had been a bad one. He himself ate cabbage and potato; you had to eat something, after all. But did they have to be sown in perennial beds and flower meadows?

That was that; it was the order of the party leader. At that time his word was law in the city. Flowers and decorative plants stole too much space from real utility plants. But still more essential was the fact that they represented a false, petit-bourgeois ideology. It was thus above all for pedagogical reasons that they had to be plucked. In their place cabbages and potatoes were to be planted, on pain of punishment. Swede and carrot were also permitted, however.

At first garden-owners refused, but when fines were raised three times, many began to toe the line. But not Håkan. A week after the third ultimatum was given, a four-man gang patrol arrived in his yard, with motor saws, scythes, hoes and handspikes.

‘Will you be so kind as to leave my peonies alone,’ Håkan asked. ‘Can you see the buds, how large they are, almost ready. They will bloom next week. If you have to cut them down, come back when they have flowered, when they are beginning to shed their petals.’

‘Out of the way,’ the patrol leader said. ‘We’re only doing our job.’

They carried out their day’s work quickly and efficiently. Soon the perennial bed was strewn with buds, like severed heads. From the flower stems, their golden sap seeped into the ground.

That evening, Håkan sat behind his curtains and wept. He fell ill and stayed within his four walls for many weeks.

But even inside his house he could not avoid hearing the artificially cheerful children’s songs of the patrols. The hysteria of the new revolution spread through the entire city. New flags rose on flagpoles. The patrols marched from yard to yard, from park to park every morning to check whether any flowers had dared bloom. They sang and yodelled incessantly as they marched.

When the epidemic was at its worst, the inhabitants of the neighbouring block also clattered their saucepan-lids to drive the birds away. It had never occurred to Håkan that the birds of the air, too, could represent the leaven of a wrong ideology. The most enthusiastic even tore newly sprouted tufts of grass from the ground, so that as the summer progressed and inclined toward autumn, gardens and park were merely dry, dusty ground.

Flowers disappeared, but people disappeared too, no one really know where to. Somewhere outside the city, education centres had been set up where people were taught how to think correctly, how to talk correctly and how to act correctly. Some came back before long; others were never heard of again.

Where there is no beauty, there is no justice, wealth, work or hope, Håkan thought.

But that period, too, came to its end. Those who returned came back as if to a different city. The correctness they had been taught came wrongness. Håkan’s garden was green once again, the banners of flowers fluttered there again, the peonies, the snapdragons and the lilacs flourished. Flowers are more durable than people, Håkan thought.

The patrols had disbanded long ago. The party leader was absent, his name was mocked; there was no one who would admit having once respected him.

One madness was over; the era of another had dawned. Now another age was being lived in the city: now ordinary cabbage was no longer being grown, but henbane, Hyoscamus niger. A plant that had previously been despised and which had grown only in neglected areas of the city, in harbours, graveyards, industrial areas and roadsides, was now cultivated in gardens and even in public parks. It grew on balconies and windowsills; some people had dedicated an entire room to henbane and burned grow-lights through the long nights to get it to flower more quickly.

Henbane is a strange plant. In the spring, after the first seed leaves, the serrated, rough and hairy leaves typical of the species appear. Then buds begin to be seen, and soon the first flowers blossom. Their corollas are pale or dirty yellow, and they are criss-crossed with violet and red stripes like veins. At that point henbane’s characteristic stench also begins to make itself felt in the garden.

Henbane’s flower-head is funnel-like; the stamens’ anthers straggle separately. The fruit is multiseeded, and the species can appear in the most unexpected of places because the seeds can survive in the ground for long periods.

Henbane is a poisonous plant, so poisonous that even a small overdose can lead to coma and death. It is for this very reason that the people of the city were so enchanted with henbane: they were able to hallucinate by eating its seeds or by chewing the flowers’ petals. Henbane’s leaves, seeds, flowers and roots are all poisonous. In the past it was used as a medicine for asthma, the tremors of old age, toothache and anxiety. Its scopolamine and atropine affect the central nervous system directly.