Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (85 page)

“This sort of thing doesn’t happen.”

“What sort of thing?”

“You know. Birds talking and acting and dressing and living like people.”

“I hadn’t heard of it before either. I suppose it’s pretty rare.”

“Not rare: impossible.”

“But it’s true anyway.” Emil nodded towards the sturdy white figure who was still busying himself by the fire. Elsa leaned closer to him again and whispered, almost into his mouth: “What if that’s a disguise too?”

“What do you mean?” Emil was startled.

“Just like his human clothes were a disguise, what if this is the same? Another disguise underneath? What if underneath the feathers and the beak there’s something else?”

They stared at each other, pupils widening. Then Emil laughed. “That’s crazy. Of course he’s a real pelican. What could be underneath, anyway?”

Elsa sucked her lip, thinking.

“Well maybe some kind of . . . monster.”

“You do talk some rubbish.”

“Or not a monster at all. What if there was a—person?”

“And another bird underneath the person?” Emil laughed again. Elsa looked offended once more.

“Say what you like, but I think there’s something—wrong—about this. Completely unnatural. That’s right, unnatural’s the right word. This sort of thing just doesn’t happen.”

“It’s ready,” said the pelican then, and turned towards them from the edge of the fire smiling brightly, a blackened fish hanging from the end of the stick. Noticing the grave and critical gazes directed at him, he became more serious.

‘An animal doesn’t smile,’ thought Emil. ‘But this one smiles. Can he be an animal, then?’ Doubt gnawed in his breast, but he himself didn’t really know where it was directed. He was angry with Elsa, she had kindled it.

He rose and went to the pelican and praised the appearance of the fish and the smell that arose from it. The pianist also woke up, and they all picked up a fish except Elsa, who claimed that she was already full of coffee and rolls. She stayed further away, and watched them. But the fish was delicious, and they made short work of it even without Elsa.

“Now a little music,” the pelican suggested, and the pianist dug a comb out of his pocket. Wildgoose accompanied the pelican as he sang:

From earth we are made, but the Earth’s not enough:

Too narrow to compass our dreams.

A mean death, to walk one path time after time;

How choking the everyday seems.

He who rows the high seas without oars,

Has no need of bowsprit or grapple;

He knows the house of Hades as well

As the priest knows the nave of the chapel.

After that, the only thing left to do was to collect the rubbish and burn it, to put out the fire and to leave.

“The left-over papers of the picnic club,” said the pelican and laughed, as they collected the paper bags and the greaseproof wrappers to burn them to embers. “Now they will no longer betray us. There will be no trace left of our presence.”

“Except the ashes.”

“You can pour water on top of them, and when they no longer glow we shall scatter them in the heather. Next year it will bloom the better for it.”

A Discussion of Time and Angels

“When I was a bird,” the pelican began one day.

He really said: “When I
was
a bird . . . ”

“When I was a bird,” he said, “I never thought about time. Of course I knew that when the sun went down the stars and moon would come out, and that when the stars grew pale and the moon drifted away, the sun would return. But I never measured time with the help of the heavenly bodies, I did not say ‘tomorrow’ or ‘last night’ or ‘next week.’ When my children were born, I sought food for them and I fed them, because that was what I had to do. But I did not think that with the help of that food they would one day grow big and strong. And when they had grown, I no longer remembered that once they had been no bigger than my foot . . . I did not know that History existed. I did not have perspective, that is it. Perspective is an important thing, and now I have it.”

“What’s perspective?” asked Emil. He was embarrassed to have to ask the bird, he had heard the word some time before of course, but just at that moment he couldn’t remember what it meant.

“It is the ability to see a little further. And from a little higher up as well, but not too high. If one looks from too high up, everything appears to be the same height, and to mean the same amount, or nothing. One must first look at what is nearby, and then at what is far away. Or vice versa. First at the matter itself, and then past the matter. First at that which is now, and then at that which was yesterday and which may be tomorrow. In this way, one achieves perspective.”

“I’d rather have wings,” said Emil.

“Do you mean that you would exchange your hands for wings?”

Emil hesitated.

“I’d like to have both.”

The bird sighed. “But that is not possible. The kind of animal that has both does not exist.”

“There are angels,” Emil contradicted him. “Although actually they don’t exist.”

“There are and there aren’t . . . What does that mean? And what kind of animal is an angel? I have not heard of such a species, although I have read the
Middle School Zoology Textbook
from cover to cover.”

“They’re not animals at all. They’re like people, except they have wings on their backs. And you can’t see them. People just talk about them sometimes, or sing about them: ‘The angel of the Lord came down . . . ’ ”

“Is that so? And what do they do?”

“They just fly around and protect little children, and when someone dies they take his soul to heaven. There’s also archangels, but I don’t really know if they do anything special. Angels are usually good, but then again there’s also black angels.”

The bird considered this. “I would achieve a great deal if I had both hands and wings . . . ”

The Bird Reads the Newspaper

The pelican had subscribed to a newspaper, the most important one in the country. He had enthusiastically told Emil about this subscription in advance. He had still never read a newspaper, although he had held one in his hands while he was still illiterate, as Emil remembered from their first meeting. But now that he had learned to read, he wanted to order one for himself, and he thought it was a great luxury to have it brought to his door.

The first morning that the paper was supposed to come, he was already sitting waiting on the doormat in the hall by four o’clock. When the paper-boy pushed it through the letter box, he felt how somebody on the other side of the door actually snatched it out of his hands.

“Must be a dog,” he thought and continued his round. But it wasn’t a dog, it was a bird.

The next morning, when the paper-boy arrived at the same door, it opened before he had a chance to carry out his job. A very strange-looking gentlemen, dressed in an extremely gaudy dressing-gown, stood in the doorway. He eyed the paper-boy so sternly that the boy was rather frightened.

“Do not ever bring me a newspaper again,” the gentleman said.

“But it’s ordered for this address. On the address list it says Henderson.”

To confirm this, the boy showed the list in question to the severe-looking man in the dressing-gown, pointing with a trembling finger.

“Nevertheless,” the gentleman said. “Do not bring it here. As far as I am concerned you may do with it what you will.”

And that was the end of the pelican’s brief acquaintance with the newspaper, from which so much had been expected beforehand.

The pelican assured Emil that he never intended to read another newspaper again in his life. As he told him this he seemed depressed and tired, almost ill.

“Either it is lying,” the pelican said, “or then, even worse, it is telling the truth.”

“It’s not lying,” Emil assured him. “It’s the biggest paper in the country. But why would it be worse if it was telling the truth?”

“Because,” the pelican said, and seemed to be trembling in disgust, “it says such terrible things about people. I don’t want to believe them.”

“Like what?”

“There was an article about a boy who kicked another boy to death because he would not give him a cigarette, and another about a man who cut off a locksmith’s ear.”

“That sort of thing happens these days, from what I hear. In cities.”

“I also read an article about a squadron of bombers and multi-target missiles. A missile is a contraption that can be hurled across thousands of miles to a pre-arranged point. Perhaps it sounds unbelievable, and it frightens me to tell it, but it is designed to rip human dwellings and human flesh to pieces, to bleed all the blood from human bodies, to scatter them and their surroundings as dust into the air. And there are so many of these bombs and missiles, so it said in the paper, that each person on the globe could be killed dozens of times. It did not say a word about animals, but they would certainly suffer the same fate, they would suffer it even before the humans.

“This is not an interpretation, it was said so clearly that it could not have been misunderstood. It is not just terrible, it is also irrational, but nevertheless I have heard people say that humans are the most rational of all animals.

“I am now greatly bewildered, I have never been so astonished in my life. I am bewildered by humans, who can both play the magic flute and create missiles. What are they really? What kind of creature are they? And if my beak is growing shorter, as I sometimes feel it is, if my feet are becoming narrower and my feathers are falling out, if one day I find I have a real human face, will I become the same as them?”

The Mournful Man

The pelican had been to a completely new place, and he told Emil about his impressions.

“I noticed some time ago that here and there in the city there are handsome buildings with towers, and at the top of the tower there is some kind of decoration. On Sundays you can hear bells ringing in them, and then large numbers of people wander in that direction, but on other days they look quite deserted. Out of curiosity I decided yesterday to go and take a look at what they really do in those buildings.

“The inside reminded me of the opera or the cinema. There were lots of benches there too, but in front of the benches there was no white screen, but rather some kind of table and a barrel-shaped box. Attached to the wall above the table there was a man carved from wood, who—it is terrible to relate—was nailed up by his hands and feet. On a stage in front of the table was an oblong box, which was covered with white frills. There was a man speaking in the barrel who was dressed in black, and around his neck there was something that looked just like a little white food label.

“I sat down on a bench the back row, because I wanted to hear what he had to say. And his speech was rather odd, too. It became clear that there was a dead man in the box, who he referred to in his speech from time to time. The man had been hard-working and respectable, he had led a blameless life, which had, when judged humanely, been cut off all too soon, and behind him he had left a large crowd of mourners along with his widow and children.

“But the box would only be a temporary resting place for the man. And now the man in black used a word which I had never heard before: ‘ascension.’ There would come a time, so the man in the barrel claimed, when all the dead would rise from their graves and gather for the last judgement. They would have two alternatives before them: eternal joy or eternal torment. And they would receive one or the other according to how they had behaved here on Earth, but above all according to what they had believed. If they had believed in the mournful man who hung on the wall from his hands and feet, they would be assured of their place in joy. This mournful man, as the man in the barrel explained, had died for the sins of humankind and made ascension possible for them. He himself had ascended shortly after his death, and on judgement day he would divide the dead into those who were going to joy and those who were going to pain.

“All this was new and shocking to me, but I wasn’t completely sure of whether I was supposed to take it seriously or whether it was the same thing as in the Opera or the cinema, which the décor resembled. Was everything here just pictures and imagination, designed as consolation and diversion for those who are too accustomed to reality or those who are afraid of it?

“The word
death
itself, which the man in black repeated constantly, had previously been unfamiliar to me as a concept. Among those of my kind, you see, death in the way he spoke of it does not really exist. He spoke of it as the inevitable end of all earthly life, but we, there on the coast, in a way we live forever. We too have, of course, seen dead companions, who have been killed by humans or by some other animal, but that is chance, accidental, not the rule. I myself have never thought about my own death, but if it should happen to me—the idea of which entered my head for the first time as a human—I would not believe that I should ever rise to my wings again. The waves or the sand would swallow my body, and that would be all.

“A old woman wearing a headscarf who was sitting next to me joined her voice in song with the rest of those sitting in the room:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope for years to come,

Be thou our guard while troubles last,

And our eternal home.

“Brightly-coloured wreaths of flowers, lilies, roses and aquilegias, were placed on top of the box, until it was completely covered in glowing colours. Then four men came and took hold of the box, each by his own corner, and set off carrying it down the central aisle towards the outer door. I followed them behind all the other people.