Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (86 page)

“The box was carried into the park that surrounded the building, up to a freshly-dug hole. It was lowered with the help of ropes to the bottom of the hole, and the man in black who had spoken inside the building stepped forward again. He took some sand in a small trowel, scattered it on top of the box and spoke the following words:

“ ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

“Following his example, the rest of the people did the same thing, but without saying anything. They sang again, and then people dispersed. I went on my way as well, amazed by these events.”

Emil explained to the pelican that the building in which this had occurred was a church, and the events which he had witnessed were called a funeral. The man who had stood in the barrel was a priest and his audience were the congregation.

“So the church is for dead people,” the pelican concluded.

“No, no, it’s for God, of course. And lots more things happen there than funerals. Every Sunday there’s a service, where the priest preaches, and then they marry young couples there and they give communion and they confess sins, if it’s a Catholic church. But the one that you went to must have been Protestant.”

“So there are two kinds of churches.”

“No, there are lots more kinds,” Emil explained. He struggled to remember. “There’s Orthodox and Anglican and Presbyterian, there are Mormon churches and Methodist churches and Baptist churches and Free churches. Muslims have their own churches, and they’re called mosques, and Jews have synagogues. I don’t know everything about it.”

“Are there then so many gods? How does one know which one to worship?”

Emil got confused. “I think there ought to only be one. And some people say that even that one doesn’t exist.”

The creature turned his head. “And the mournful man? Who was he?”

“That was the son of God,” Emil explained.

“Does he have any more children then?”

“No, just the one. But then there’s the Holy Ghost . . . ”

“Does he belong to the same family?”

“In a way. It’s very complicated. It’s theology.”

“But who is the mother?”

“Mary. The Virgin Mary.”

“How can she be a virgin if she is a mother? Isn’t she God’s wife?”

“I don’t think so, I don’t know. It’s theology, I already said that.” Emil was starting to be annoyed by the pelican’s endless questions.

“An unusual family . . . ” The bird stared ahead thoughtfully. “But that mournful man, you know . . . I liked that man. Hanging there above the table,” (“altar,” Emil interrupted) “nailed by his hands and feet, he looked at us sitting on the benches so patiently and beautifully. He looked just as though he pitied us, though he himself was in such a difficult situation.”

They didn’t talk any more about theology that night.

The Bird Studies Science

Emil went to return some overdue comics to the city library. The pelican was sitting in the library in a small nook between two shelves, engrossed in a thick volume. He sat with his wing on his cheek and his backwards-sloping forehead wrinkled. He had got hold of some spectacles—perhaps because he needed them, perhaps just so that he could look learned. He didn’t notice Emil until the boy tugged on the back of his coat.

“This is extremely interesting,” he said, indicating the book he was examining. “Extremely interesting.”

“What is it?”

“This discusses the theory of evolution and the first stages of life on earth. I have been studying biology all day, but tomorrow I intend to move on to organic chemistry. Yesterday I became familiar with physics and the day before with astronomy. Last week I devoted myself to algebra, geometry and musicology. Next week it will be the turn of linguistics and history, but at night I read literature.”

Emil felt quite dizzy from such a long catalogue of sciences.

“Do you remember everything you’ve read then?”

The pelican snorted. “ ‘Everything’ is perhaps not the correct word. But I certainly remember what is most important.”

“What is most important?”

“Well, that depends on many factors. But generally speaking one can say that the most important thing is that which remains when everything else has been forgotten.”

“I see. So you remember what’s most important, and what’s most important is what you remember.”

“Precisely, you are an ingenious individual, as I have always known. Now I shall say to you as a bird and as a human, that the most important thing, and the most valuable thing you can remember, is surprise.”

“Surprise?”

“Just that. The more you read, the more you are amazed. In the end one hardly need bother to read at all any more. One just sits and is astonished.”

“By the way the world works?”

“And by the course of time.”

“This reading’s not much use, then.”

“That depends how one takes it. No one can ever comprehend for sure what is ultimately of use and what is not. But you humans have comprehended many things: the lumpfish’s diet and the length of the ice ages, the distance to Alpha Centauri and the trachea of the arthropod. You have short beaks compared to us pelicans, but you have managed to poke them into all places. There is no animal in the world more curious than you. Or stranger. How are we to comprehend you?”

The creature buried himself in the book once more.

The Conductor

The pelican had learned to use the radio and stereo. Almost always when he was on his way to visit him, Emil could already hear the sound of stringed instruments when he was on the stairs, for the pelican was particularly enamoured of violin concertos. He also began to go to concerts, he even got a season ticket for the city’s concert hall. He quickly learned to imitate the conductor’s gestures, and very frequently, his eyes half-closed, head thrown back and swaying like a tree, he would lead an imaginary orchestra before an audience that consisted of Emil alone.

His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, and his love of art seemed to be limitless. Along with science he was interested in all the fine arts—literature, music, films, theatre and opera. As well as all this, on Sundays he would go on tours of the city’s art galleries and museums. He accumulated expertise with surprising speed, greedily, as if he had only a very limited amount of time at his disposal. He seemed to be abandoning his old dreams of moving his family to the city, for he gave up his job as an attendant at the opera and stopped singing in the choir so that he could devote himself completely to the arts and sciences. Now he only sang in the bar a few nights a week to buy his daily fish.

“Generally speaking,” he said one day, “I don’t think well of humans. I no longer envy them or admire them as I used to. He who knows just a little of the world of humans cannot but deeply pity its state. But nonetheless there is something there, something extraordinary and wonderful, which sometimes glints through and dazzles the eyes . . .

“I have heard the learned claim that the world of humans is not the only one. That somewhere in the universe there are other worlds, of which many must be far superior and far more developed than the human world. It may be so, indeed it must be.

“There must be some world, even many worlds, where they know far more and they live far better than here, where they live obeying their own laws without crime and war and self-made suffering. Without regret,
schadenfreude,
shame or desire for revenge, without suspicion, greed and jealousy. There they live as human writers have always dreamed that we will live here in two or three hundred years, although the centuries turn and the future is no better than the past.

“I imagine nevertheless that there is something in the human world that would not be shamed by comparison. It is found in those things which are of the least use: singing and music, books, pictures and dreams. Sometimes when I listen and look at them, I think: ‘Even
they
could not have done this better, no one in any possible world.’ ”

The pelican broke off to fetch something from the music shelf. He waved the silver disk in his wing.

“Here! Listen to this!”

Emil read the cover of the CD:
Adagio.
The creature put the disk on and became the conductor once more. The violins vibrated with burning grief, the pelican gesticulated with his wing and huge bright tears rolled into his beak-bag. He had truly learned the art of weeping.

“That is all,” he said when the piece ended. “All! Less would not be enough, more would be too much. When I hear this, I am proud of the fact that I too am almost human.”

Mother

Emil went to see the pelican less often than before. Whenever he saw the bird these days he had a book in his hand, he was taciturn and seemed depressed. Emil had not seen Elsa once since the outing. Or, once he thought he had seen a familiar fringe among a crowd of people waiting at the bus stop, but when he threaded his way closer he couldn’t see it any more.

There were still a few days before the start of school. Emil had to get new clothes: shoes, towelling socks and uniform trousers. Many afternoons he went to pick up his mother from the laundry and they went through all the discount shops and shopping centres in the local area looking for the cheapest offers. There were always crowds, and the air was bad, but they didn’t have the money to buy clothes at the normal price.

Later in the evening his mother often went out again, although when she got home she was always “knackered,” as she said. But people have to enjoy themselves sometimes. Once a week his mother gave Emil money to go to the cinema, but in their part of town there was only one cinema. There was nothing on there that he was allowed to go to, except on Sundays when they had Tom & Jerry or Disney films, which Emil didn’t care for. Once he had tried to get into a film that was called
Naked Eves on Skis,
but he hadn’t even managed to get a ticket. He was too short and his cheeks were too round, and there was no sign of his voice breaking yet.

So it was that Emil often just stayed at home and stared at the TV that his grandmother had bought them second-hand, or read. Now he had got up to H in the encyclopaedia.

Under H he was particularly captivated by the entry for “hot air balloon,” which talked about the engineer André’s aerostation and its wrecking on the Spitzbergen, and about Coxwell and Glaisher, who as early as 1862 reached to the height of 30,000 feet, at which point one of them lost consciousness and the other got frostbite in his hands.

Emil liked hot air balloons more than space rockets: their construction was easier to understand and they could be controlled by a single occupant; sometimes he dreamt of building a hot air balloon and flying in it, maybe to Mogham, and maybe taking Elsa with him, maybe the pelican as well. It was a beautiful mode of transport, silent and unusual.

One night he awoke at two in the morning, and as he was going to the bathroom, for some reason he glanced into the living room, where his mother slept.

It was empty.

His mother had gone out again that evening, but she had never been away so late before. Fear squeezed Emil’s lungs so that he had to breathe rapidly and shallowly. Terrible technicolour pictures rose to his eyes: his mother lying on the pavement crushed by the wheels of a car, surrounded by gaping onlookers who did nothing, his mother in the hands of a drug gang with a knife to her throat or being harassed by some drunken lunatic. He had read the paper, he knew what people were capable of doing to each other in the big city. The pelican was right, one shouldn’t ever read the papers, although the papers weren’t to blame for what happened. It wasn’t good to know about all sorts of things.

He opened the front door and peered into the stairwell. It was dark and cold, only the streetlight’s glare made the stone landing gleam under the window. He hadn’t known that the city could be so quiet. There was no sound of running water anywhere, he couldn’t hear a single human voice, just now and then some late reveller speeding homewards along the motorway.

If something’s happened to mum,
Emil thought,
at least then dad will have to take me back to Mogham.

But he was so ashamed of his thought that sweat broke out on his forehead and deep inside him someone screamed in a child’s voice: “Mum!” He himself did not make a sound.

At that very moment the downstairs door opened and the light in the stairwell came on. Hope and disbelief alternated in Emil, for the steps sounded at times like his mother’s and at times like someone else’s: they were unsure, stumbling, but floor by floor they neared their door. Using the lift was not permitted this late at night. When he was finally sure that it was his mother, he pulled the front door silently closed, turned off the hall light and went to bed.

His mother slammed the door loudly, although usually she was so quiet. She muttered something and Emil heard her shoes clatter to the floor. Then he could no longer restrain himself, and he got up and went to the hall.

His mother was sitting on a stool leaning her elbows on her knees, her hands hanging down between her legs, staring at the opposite wall. It was empty and pale grey, there was nothing there to stare at.

When she saw Emil, she said in a thick voice: “Go away. Your mother is the most miserable person in the world.” Her cheeks were wet and red and her breath stank. Her head jerked down and her eyelids closed.

Emil took a step towards her, but her hand rose in a gesture of rejection: “Go away. Go to sleep. There’s nothing to worry about here.”

He went, but he listened in the dark with wide-open eyes. He couldn’t hear anything from the hall, not for a long time. Had he been dozing? Had his mother already gone to her own room? He cried a little, and the tears flowed into his ears.

It must have been close to morning by the time his mother rose from the stool in the hall and went to the bathroom. Even then Emil couldn’t sleep. With drying eyes, but with his ears full of tears, he stayed awake through a long night.

After that Emil looked at his mother with new eyes. He no longer saw in her a mother who was always present and always the same, as if everlasting, but a person who had much that was strange and confusing about her. A person that faltered. It made him uneasy. She had always been there, in front of him, but it was as if he had never looked directly at her but rather at the world, first through her and later past her. Now Emil saw a tired woman who was still young, but who had gained weight recently. She had given her hair a coppery brown rinse a month ago, but the roots were already showing that that was not her natural colour. Her fingernails were bitten down. There was sorrow in her, many sorrows.