Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (96 page)

Guardians of under-age persons were also in a special position. Permission was so seldom granted to them that it was generally useless to make an application. Attempts were made to screen drunks, drug-addicts and mental health patients. Psychotics were not admitted, or the seriously demented, and depression too, according to the rules, had to be treated before one could dreamdie. Why a person who was an idiot, a drunkard or a drug-taker was a less suitable candidate for dreamdeath than one who was sober and in his right mind was nowhere explained.

Strange to say, even after screening Dreamdeath still had clients, but the screen was rather approximate. And it was always possible to lie; the board could do nothing about that.

If the event was cancelled, the prepayment remained with the foundation. But the right to cancel remained with every client up to his last breath. In fact, it was used very often; there were many who regretted their decisions. Those who did had of course to make separate payment for resuscitation.

Some of them soon returned to conclude the project; others never did.

Some drained their dayma to the dregs; only when their consciousness began to fragment into visions did panic grip them and the knowledge dawned on them: I’m dying!

Did they succumb to cowardice or did rationality prevail, who could decide? The question of cowardice or courage is a complex one.

Some sought dreamdeath because they were afraid of life, some because they feared natural death. People believed they were acting and choosing freely, making their decisions on the basis of rational causes. But quite different forces propelled them.

They said, ‘I wish it.’ But people have many wills, and they are not unanimous.

Lucia saw how the fear of death, too, can lead to death. There were those who had such an unreasonable fear of old age and illness that they died young and healthy rather than growing old.

How on earth had it come about that Lucia, whose old and ill patients at the city hospital would have given their eyes for a moment or two of extra life, had ended up at Dreamdeath, measuring out deadly doses of dayma for completely healthy people?

Lucia, who really thought that suicide should never have been institutionalised, had drifted to Dreamdeath by chance and at first just briefly deputised for someone else. But after only a year she had applied for and got a permanent job.

Lucia could not help but compare the Dreamdeath clients to one of her favourite clients, Aunt Signe. Aunt Signe was as old as the sky and she had more illnesses than one could imagine a single living person could suffer: psoriasis, borreliosis, diabetes, constriction of the lungs, cancer of the large intestine and rheumatoid arthritis. In addition, she was almost blind and half-deaf.

‘Sugar still melts in my mouth,’ Aunt Signe used to say, although such a remark, from a diabetic, was not welcome.

The same was not true of Dreamdeath’s clients. But it was, of course, unreasonable to demand that everyone should be as tough and durable as Aunt Signe.

Working conditions at Dreamdeath were undoubtedly good and her salary dizzying compared to the city hospital. Of course Lucia, like everyone else, was interested in a financially secure life, a spacious and quiet apartment with a good address, a polymer robot which vacuumed and washed the parquet floors and looked after domestic security, a motor bed with physiovibrastic massage equipment, an espresso machine which also ground the Illy beans, all the blessings of civilisation which a well-paid professional person can enjoy. Moreover, Lucia wielded power at Dreamdeath, her decisions influenced people’s lives and deaths. One rapidly grew accustomed to the use of power and it was difficult to wean oneself from it. But Lucia nevertheless liked to think that she remained at Dreamdeath mainly for reasons completely different from money and power.

Lucia told herself that she wanted to know why people came to such an extreme decision, as if the reason could sometimes be anything other than deep unhappiness. Although many people said they had arrived at their decision for philosophical reasons.

The wickedness of the world and of humankind was not a very rare motive. Some applicants for the death licence belonged to societies such as the Association for Voluntary Extinction or the Euthanasia Church or the Earth Mother Liberation Front. They saw it as their duty to remove themselves from the disturbance of Mother Gaia’s harmony and believed they would thus help save the suffering planet. According to Lucia’s observations, however, behind these apparently rational and general reasons there always also lay personal matters, affairs of the heart, sorrows.

But the sorrows were interesting, and there were as many of them as there were unhappy people. Only loneliness, grief, exhaustion, regret, shame and guilt were always the same.

Lucia called Schopenhauerian those who said, ‘Ever since I was a child, I have known that non-existence is better than existence.’

To them, Lucia said, ‘It may be so. But are you certain that existence ends with death?’

Almost all of them said: ‘Of course, I am completely certain.’ But the same uncertainty dwelt in the eyes of almost all of them.

Lucia said she sometimes believed in natural immortality, but Lucia’s ideas about what perhaps remained after the last breath were as dim and open to interpretation as anyone’s. If the mind, the soul, the consciousness did not die at death, did it remain the same human mind with all its characteristics, its virtues and its weaknesses? Or was it a stripped, purified, improved version? And what happened to it next?

More and more often Lucia attempted to use her influence in order that the project was cancelled or moved to the indefinite future. Secretly she had begun to carry out underground work that the foundation’s board would not have approved of. If it were revealed, she would probably be dismissed, without a fuss and politely. The board followed the statistics closely, and they already showed that her clients cancelled the event more often than average.

But it was in this way the Lucia best succeeded in justifying to herself that she, who had no belief in the concept of ‘rational suicide’, and in whose opinion the change in legislation was frankly a mistake, continued her work at Dreamdeath.

If someone had decided to give up a life that had become a burden, why should he be forced to continue merely because of other people’s social or emotional needs? Did Lucia have any reason to intervene in such a process and question the right to suicide?

The word ‘merely’ troubled her. But if she spoke about her thoughts to those who had been given the permission to die, she encountered irritation, occasionally even rage. She was told: ‘You’re trying to brainwash me!’ or ‘I have the right!’ or: ‘I have already paid!’

It was Lucia’s job to guide people to the threshold and over it long before they naturally would have reached it.

REALLY EXISTING?

Extracts from the novel
Mehiläispaviljonki. Kertomus parvista

(
The Bee Pavilion. A story about swarms
, Teos,
2006
)

Translated by Anselm Hollo

The Bee Pavilion
(
Mehiläispaviljonki
, 2006) was Leena Krohn’s twenty-sixth book and provides for the reader an array of fragments of reported realities, which crisscross the boundaries of imagination and challenge the whole traditional conception of the world.

Really Existing?

There are few old buildings in this town. Most are demolished to make way for new ones long before they reach the end of their first century.

Nevertheless, one brick building in our part of town, built at the beginning of the last century, was spared demolition for a long time. The two-storey building functioned as a Support Centre for the Psychically Ill and later on, for a couple of winters, as a shelter for alcoholics. The board fence that had surrounded the building for decades was taken down long before the building itself, but the maples on the sidewalk cast their shadows on its windows to the very end. When the lilacs and dogwoods in the back garden were in bloom, their heavy racemes shed purple and white on the sand.

Few townspeople remember that building and its past. All the psychically ill persons who were treated there are now dead, even those exceptional cases who managed to get well again before their demise. Gone, too, are their nurses, gone the alcoholics who spent the worst freezing nights there. None of them ever sobered up.

These days there are no psychically ill persons or alcoholics. Instead, we only have mental health and addiction clients, and some with a double diagnosis. The building fell into a long period of decay but was nevertheless more attractive than the new ones, especially in the evening, when the setting sun lit up the patina of its brick walls. You would not see two identical bricks; each one was its own landscape, and their hues, rough spots and holes looked their best in the slanted evening light. Then, too, the maple leaves cast shadow hands onto walls and ground, wandering across the yard’s cooling sand as if looking for a lost key.

After the alcoholics’ shelter was closed down, the building was renamed: now it was the House of Associations. Its owner, the city, collected modest rents from clubs and associations which held their meetings there. In addition, the amateur theatre company Heart & Liver rented the basement, and the street level was occupied by Hecuba’s Porno Shop.

The basement also contained a small apartment, really just a room with a cooker, formerly inhabited by the caretaker of the Support Centre for the Psychically Ill. Later on it was the dwelling of Siegbert, the former deacon, and his hybrot.

I may well be the only one who referred to the building as The Bee Pavilion. Why? One summer I took a walk on another town’s promenade. I stopped at a white wooden gate to look across it at a garden I had never seen before. I was intrigued by a tall, narrow log structure, shingle-roofed and faded to a silvery grey, the likes of which I had never seen. On two of its floors there were small, close-set windows with no windowpanes.

I admired the building. I enquired after its purpose and was told that it was a bee pavilion. The swarms were able to enter through those little windows, and the beekeeper could collect the honey from the inside. Now, however, there was no sign of any kind of motion around it, and it had been uninhabited for years. The beekeeper had died, and those clean, industrious, devout winged creatures no longer deposited their nectar there.

The old brick building looked nothing like the bee pavilion on the small town promenade. Nevertheless, the clubs and associations that held their gatherings in it could be understood as swarms, not as industrious and devout but swarms nevertheless.

Some of these were officially registered, others not. Even though most of them had list-serves and chat rooms on the web, their members also wanted to meet each other in physical space. This was the case with the Herpetological Society and the Dahlgren’s Syndrome Association, and also with the Throat Singers, the Promoters of Municipal Science, and the Storm Chasers. In the rooms where electric shock treatment had been administered, without anaesthesia, the Society for Water Jet Ski Competition and the Steinwurzel Family Foundation held their meetings. In the upstairs rooms, where the restless ones had been put in restraints, the Lipographs, Friends of Vanished Languages, Palladists, and Nasal Twang Speakers met on working days, with Saturdays reserved for the Benevolent Association for Victims of the Scientific Worldview. The Kill Your Television Club, The Voluntary Poor, and Those Living in Their Automobiles met once a month in the small assembly hall on the second floor. The latest newcomers in the building were The Prophets, The Mothers of Resinated Children, The Luddite Club, The Breathers, and the Fluctuating Reality Club.

The members of most of these were natural and human persons, but on Friday nights the former staffroom for nurses tending the insane, now converted into a small cafe, hosted The Club of Non-Human Persons. It catered to persons who considered themselves druids, vampires, changelings, demons, werewolves or other kinds of different species, such as Amazons descended from Venus.

I joined the Fluctuating Reality Club and so did Selma, my old classmate. I have been asked why I wanted to join an association with such a strange name. I used to reply that it was just a momentary whim, but it really was not that simple.

Nowadays, the Bee Pavilion’s plot is vacant and dreary, but in a year or two it will be occupied by a brand-new building. It will be an intelligent house development, offering expensive apartments to senior citizens (we no longer have any Old People in our town), or, according to an alternative plan, a collaborative community for methodological development.

As I was reading the annual report of The House of Associations, I came across the following message:

‘Have you ever experienced some sudden and inexplicable aberrance in your life? Have you sometimes searched in vain for objects that have then appeared in places they could not have reached in a natural manner? Have you experienced unusual and significant coincidences? Has time stopped or slowed down for you, or, on the contrary, speeded up in an unaccustomed manner? Have you travelled from one spot to another without any physical mode of transport? Have you seen animals outside of their natural habitat, or ones that do not belong to any surviving species? Report on such aberrances and unusual experiences and join The Fluctuating Reality Club.’

Those questions amused and intrigued me. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t experienced one or two things. I also thought that I could add to a short story collection I was planning a tale about The Fluctuating Reality Club and its members, assuming them to be quite gullible people.

I started reading the club’s home page and responses given to those questions. Most of them were brief and dealt with vanished objects: rings, watches, mobile phones, scissors, keys, handbags, letters. Some such object disappeared, let us say, in a tram, but was found a month later up in the loft, in the pocket of an anorak, or in a cousin’s bathroom under the bathtub. But there were some tales that were long, meandering, and replete with strange detail and coincidence.