Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (81 page)

And now a terrible doubt plagues me. I doubt that I could become a bird again at all. Am I still capable of being my children’s father and my wife’s husband? And will they be enough for me . . . ? Oh, it is a terrible doubt, but how can I eradicate it?

I feel that my outward appearance is also beginning to resemble that of a human more and more, that my wings are growing fingers and my beak is narrowing to a nose, my webbed feet into soft soles. I have begun to moult, just like the turkey in my song. Perhaps soon my feathers will fall out altogether and I will be naked under my clothes like a human.

Home Before Dark

“What, are you asleep?”

“No, not at all.” Startled, Emil lifted his head, which had sunk unnoticed onto his breast.

“I am a bad bird, keeping you awake in this way. What will your parents say, when you are away this late.”

“Dad—he won’t say anything . . . He’s not here. And mum’s often out herself in the evenings, she won’t be angry.”

“Does she know that I am a bird?”

“She doesn’t believe it. I did tell her once, but she didn’t believe it.”

“Perhaps it is better that way. I am grateful that you had the energy to listen to me for so long. But before we go to our rest—if you will allow it—I would like to sing you my
Little Night Song.
”

This certainly suited Emil. And the pelican sang:

Come home before the day is dead,

Come through the twilight, silken-head.

When your bed is woodland shade

The world grows strange,

The world grows strange.

The golden fish he splashed and sank

Through shadows to the sandy bank.

And if there’s time he’ll make his bed

In coral caves, when day is dead.

The russet fox he had to run

On Sunday from the huntsman’s gun

He raced for home to warm his bed

And cubs, before the day was dead.

The snail alone is never found

Away from home when night draws down.

He shuts his door and rests his head

Still long before the day is dead.

Come home before the day is dead

And evening finds you far from bed

And turns the path that leads you back

To shadows black,

To shadows black.

Not everybody makes it home;

Long fingers pluck them as they roam

And wrap them, sleeping, in the night

Till morning light,

Till morning light.

Glass and Diamonds

Glass and diamonds.

Dreams and life.

The Fair

Emil taught the pelican to read every day that week, but on Saturday they had a day off. The pelican had seen an advert about a big trade-fair on the other side of town.

“What is a trade-fair?” he asked Emil.

“It’s a kind of exhibition where they show you new things, machines and inventions.”

“Shall we go to look?”

“Yeah, let’s!” Emil was excited. He had never been to a trade-fair either. But then he became gloomy. “I think it costs something. I’m completely broke.”

The bird patted him on the back encouragingly. “Let me pay. I have just received my salary. We must go and see all the machines and inventions.”

So they went on the number seven bus to the other side of town on that bright, late-summer day, and through the bus windows the city watched them, more friendly than ever before.

They sat at the front of the bus and the pelican pointed with the tip of his wing at everything that went by: ice-cream sellers and girls skipping and a canary in a cage at a ground floor window. He exclaimed and said, “My, she is a nimble girl,” and “What does ice-cream actually taste like?” (since he had never eaten ice-cream) and “Canaries are not the sharpest tools in the box, you know.”

Whenever they went through a square or over a bridge or past some unusually large building, Emil had to say where they were and what the building was, but he almost never knew.

The pelican also spelled out the posters and shop signs, with Emil’s help:
Massive sale today! New nightclub opening here soon!
and
Bakery—Boulangerie.

“What is this Boulangerie?” the bird asked.

“It means bakery as well, but it’s in another language,” Emil explained.

“Oh yes, of course.” The bird was quiet for a moment.

“I used to think that all humans everywhere spoke the same language amongst themselves, just like all pelicans.”

“There’s at least a hundred different human languages,” Emil informed him.

“But doesn’t that make everything much more difficult?”

“It certainly does,” Emil said. He had already noticed this in school: French was not one of his stronger suits.

They were just driving past a huge brick building that was surrounded by a high wall. At the top of the wall there was a double strand of barbed wire. The pelican forgot the hundred human languages and began to ask about the purpose of the wall.

“It’s Pentonwood Scrubs,” Emil explained.

“What on earth is Pentonwood Scrubs?” the bird laughed.

“It’s a prison,” Emil explained. “Prisoners live there.”

“Whose prisoners are they?”

Emil considered. “Everybody’s,” he said, hesitating. “They’ve been condemned by the law.”

“What is the law?”

“It’s a book that says what you’re not allowed to do.”

“Then what are you not allowed to do?”

“Well, for example, you can’t steal. Or kill.”

“Or sleep on park benches,” remembered the bird. “But the prisoners have done something that one may not do. And now they have all been put into the same building to live, what for?”

The pelican asked difficult questions. But before Emil had time to think of an answer, the bus had arrived at the last stop and they had to get off. The trade-fair area was right next to it, filled with great dome-shaped tents and bustle. At the gate the pelican paid for both of them, but he had become quieter and looked distracted. Maybe he was still thinking about the hundred languages or laws and prisoners.

They found themselves in an immensely huge noisy hall, where girls dressed in little red skirts were displaying odd-looking machines and gadgets.

“This way, ladies and gentlemen!” cried one of the product-saleswomen, and Emil and the pelican pressed obediently closer. “This is an innovation that will be needed in every office and workplace! Secretaries and office managers! Once you’ve used it once, you won’t be able to give it up. Essential to every company!”

“Ladies and gentlemen! Esteemed CEOs! May I present: the automatic paper shredder
Destructor de Luxe
! This unique document shredder cuts all your important papers into half millimetre strips! Five metres a second! Take a look!” And the young woman pushed a stack of thick paper into the mouth of the gently humming
Destructor.
The pelican watched and listened with his beak open, but Emil didn’t really understand what it was all about.

“Observe!” the young woman cried triumphantly, and opened the box on the front of the appliance. She grabbed a handful of strips from it and thrust them right and left, almost pushing her hand into the pelican’s beak-bag.

“Fantastic!” smiled a man who looked like an office manager, and he nudged the pelican’s crop so that it quivered.

“Fantastic is the right word!” The saleswoman seized on the gentleman’s remark. “It is impossible for anyone to reconstruct the original from these strips. The
Destructor de Luxe
now at a special introductory price! Only fifteen hundred! A one-time opportunity! Don’t let it pass you by.”

But the pelican and Emil had already done so. The pelican had seized Emil by the hand and was dragging him at furious speed towards the bus stop.

“I need something to strengthen my nerves,” he said. “My figure is not suited to fairs.”

So they went by bus to the pelican’s for tea. The bird himself had a raw flounder, but Emil devoured a coconut cake that the bird had bought especially for him.

“You know almost everything about me, but I know hardly anything about you,” the pelican said between bites. “Were you born in the city?”

“No, I’m from elsewhere. I only moved here last summer.”

“So you are a stranger here too . . . Then it’s no surprise that I thought immediately that we had something in common. Perhaps you have the same illness as I do . . . ”

“I’m perfectly healthy,” Emil muttered.

“But don’t you ever have a pain here?” and the bird pressed his wing against his chest. “Don’t you ever feel as if there was some kind of fishhook there that was pulling you back to where you came from?”

Emil hung his head without answering. A lump had risen to his throat and his eyelids were beginning to burn.

“It is a difficult illness.” The bird looked discreetly away. “Some never recover. Then only one thing helps: one has to go back.”

“But what if you can’t?”

“Then one has to become accustomed to life as a chronic invalid.”

He did use difficult words, Emil thought. Where could he have learned them? Mr. Wildgoose must read the dictionary out loud to him between songs in the restaurant.

“What’s a chronic invalid?”

“It is someone who suffers from an incurable disease.”

“I don’t want to become a chronic invalid.”

“Perhaps you do not need to. Perhaps you will forget, or return. And sometimes one can only forget when one has returned, and then left again. For it can happen that, when you get back what you wanted, it is not what you wanted at all.”

“Do you mean that it isn’t home?”

“It may be that it is the time, not the place, for which you long so much.”

“I see.”

Emil said “I see,” because he didn’t really understand what the bird meant. But he enjoyed listening to his cawing voice and his careful mode of speech, to which he was already accustomed. He no longer found the creature’s round, yellow eyes strange, nor did his lumbering gait strike him as ridiculous any more.

He already looked at him as one looks at a true friend, seeing past the lead-grey pipe-cleaner legs and the shapeless beak and, strangest of all, the beak-pouch. He forgot them, just as love forgets that which is not important, but without knowing it he also loved the pipe-cleaner legs and the beak, and he would have been sorry if they had changed shape.

Home in the Pupil of an Eye

I have climbed these steps so many times. I have opened this door so many times. I have looked out of the windows into the yard. I have warmed myself by the hearth-fire. I have eaten at the table. I have lain in the bed.

Z. Topelius

The next day Emil got a letter from his father. In it he said that he could come to Mogham for a week right away.

“It would be best if you left tomorrow, then,” said Emil’s mother.

“I don’t know if tomorrow . . . ”

Did Emil really say that? Even he was surprised. After all, hadn’t he been waiting for this letter every single day since school ended? And it came only now, when July was already almost over . . .

The fact was, he was scared. Because his father’s new wife Margaret would be there. There was the baby too, Mary, who he had never seen before. And then he thought about the pelican and his obligations as a teacher. For some reason he was a little afraid of that too: to leave the pelican alone in the city. But he couldn’t explain even to himself what could be frightening about that.

Nevertheless, Emil could not hide the quiver of joy in his voice when he had a chance to tell the pelican: “Tomorrow I’m going home.”

But the bird’s beak became paler than before.

“For good?”

“Just for a week,” Emil said hastily.

“After that you probably will not have time to come here any more.”

“We’ll sort something out,” Emil assured him. “Of course I’ll come.”

The creature pressed his hand formally.

“I am glad for you. Have a good journey, Emil. A very good journey!”

Emil left first thing in the morning, and his mother took him to the train before she left for work. She came as far as the compartment in the carriage and lifted his bag up to the rack herself.

“Wait a moment,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

From the window Emil saw her running along the platform to the kiosk. When she came back she had a chocolate and nut bar in her hand, which she pushed into the breast pocket of Emil’s denim shirt.

“Couldn’t you come with me, mum?”

“No, I can’t.” And her expression grew tense. “I’ve got to go now, they’re already announcing it.”

She hugged Emil and he was embarrassed; that sort of thing didn’t happen very often. Slowly, at first almost silently, the train slid into motion, and his mother, waving from down on the platform with a sorrowful expression, slid in the opposite direction just as silently.

The railway yards were left behind, and the train sped through huge industrial estates, and districts where tall buildings, like the one that Emil and his mother lived in, stood side by side. But the green spaces between them became wider and the vegetation denser, joining together and becoming countryside. There were real cornfields, where combine harvesters made the rounds, or stakes stood in straight lines like yellow soldiers. There were woods, real woods, which the slanting rays of the morning sun lit up so that they were full of sharp strips of shade and glowing green leaves. There were houses, not twelve storeys any more, not even four, but low, whitewashed houses with pine fences, with garden swings, with laundry hung up to flutter between two birch trees. There were grey barns and lakes and the train sped ever deeper inland, towards the North.