The Rabbit Back Literature Society (20 page)

^“
I
GET THE IDEAS
for my books when I ponder life and listen to Mozart.”

It’s a pretty little answer, simple, and pure rubbish, but those are the kinds of answers the women’s magazines like to hear. As a professional gesture, Winter elaborates. He describes how the themes of classical music trigger a process in his mind that crystallizes literary, universal themes into thoughts, which in turn generate reflective stories. He doesn’t fail to add piquant little details, of course, because details are extremely important, in stories and in lies—he says that he tried Bach once, but it sent him into meditations on
theology
, and he started musing on the state of his soul instead of writing.

Ella Milana doesn’t believe him. The silence stretches out, agonizing at first, then terrifying. Martti Winter senses a change in mood. Ella is no longer in a hurry to get home.

Winter starts to sweat.

Ella finally says something.

“I’m sorry, what?” Winter asks.

“Rule number twenty-one,” Ella repeats. She’s standing right next to him now; he can feel her breath on his cheek and it causes him to shudder. She’s no slouch, he thinks fondly, and prepares himself for pain.

“I’m going to start with your cheek,” Ella whispers, “where I can get a good grip.”

No secrets between players
. That’s the motto Winter used to recite when The Game was new, back when it used to unite them, and hadn’t yet made them dread each other.

When Ella Milana has applied Rule 21 to Winter five times and got rubbish in response four times, Winter decides to end the farce he’s begun.

He asks for a glass of soda and adds, “Be so kind as to pour a good dose of yellow in.” His speech is indistinct because his lip and cheek are swollen.

Words start to fly out of Winter’s mouth into Ella’s listening ears.

No secrets between players
. He’s experiencing the joy of truly spilling. His words are like birds, or perhaps like bees on a hot summer day. He smiles as he talks himself into deeper
memories
, memories he thought he’d lost. With the blindfold over his eyes, past events start to flash in images around him. It’s like he’s leaning back against the axis of time she was talking about, bumping his head against the moment when an
eleven-year
-old Martti Winter read the last words of his piece, titled “My Mother”, out loud.

The other six Society members clap.

Elias Kangasniemi shakes a fist at him and laughs, “Damn it, Martti, you’re going to drive me to hang myself with those stories of yours!”

The others laugh to break the horror. Elias’s father did hang himself when Elias was four, and he constantly cultivates a kind of gallows humour, although the rest of them aren’t allowed so much as to mention a rope. Elias wipes his nose and looks out the window.

They’re sitting in a spacious bay window-seat in the reading room at the south end of the house. The room is painted white. They’re bathed in flooding, gushing, almost overwhelming brightness because they’re surrounded by windows on all sides, even the ceiling. Behind them glows the summer of 1972. The skylight delineates the sky in a blue circle with birds darting through it. The other windows look out on the garden.

Her garden is a stormy sea of colour.
Ingrid wrote that last week in a poem that Laura praised strongly. She said Ingrid had “learned the basics of metaphor beautifully”. Martti thinks now that if the garden is a sea of colour, then perhaps the house is a ship where he and the other children are sailing under the leadership of their captain, towards some distant destination.

Through the window glass Martti can see the insects sway in the garden’s eddies of hot air, their wings scorched, slightly mad. Laura White’s house is cooler. The authoress pours raspberry juice into glasses and drops in some ice. A fan turns on the ceiling. Toivo told him that the fan is a propeller from a Russian airplane that was shot down and given to Ms White by some soldier.

Laura White nods at Martti’s story. She’s sitting in a wicker chair with one leg thrown over the other, dressed in white, and
drops of sweat are running down her neck. She sips her coffee, places the cup in its saucer, rocks her head back and forth and says to Martti, “Your descriptions have improved tremendously. You’ve observed your mother very commendably. I especially like the way you described your own feelings, although there may have been a few redundant adjectives. Helinä, you can read yours next.”

Martti doesn’t listen to Helinä’s story. He wants to savour the praise he’s received.

But where could Ingrid have got to? She hasn’t come yet. He’s not angry at her anymore, although his arm hurts and he’s sure he’ll have a bruise.

He regrets now that he went and left her at the rat’s grave. Now they’ll have another several days of being angry with each other. It’s stupid, since they both know that in the end they’ll make it up again.

She was sick, too. In the morning Martti had felt her
forehead
. It was hot, and she was pale and sweaty. He told her to go home because she was coming down with something, but she wouldn’t do what he said, wouldn’t admit being sick at all. Five years ago, Ingrid’s mother got sick, and died two weeks later.

Martti whispers in Laura White’s ear that he has to go to the toilet. Helinä is still reading as he tiptoes out of the reading room and closes the glass door carefully behind him. He has to pass through several dark rooms. It feels tiresome because it’s so easy to get lost in Laura’s house.

Someone walking ahead of him opens a door and goes into one of the rooms they’re not allowed in.

They were not specifically forbidden from walking around the house. In some houses you might be allowed to run around, but
in Laura White’s dark house one walked sedately, and behaved in a civilized manner.

After Martti met Laura White for the first time, he asked his mother to teach him good manners. “Ms White is a fine lady and if I’m going to start visiting her house every week I want to know how to behave, so I don’t screw up.”

His mother bought him
The Golden Book of Etiquette
. Laura White had the same book herself. Sometimes, when the children were at her house writing, she would sit nearby and study
The Golden Book of Etiquette
. Martti thought she must be an expert on etiquette. Sometimes she read other kinds of non-fiction, the kind that describe how the human brain works.

Humans are very complex and difficult-to-understand creatures,
Laura once said.
The job of writers like us is to study a person until we learn to understand him and understand his life. We simply have to remember to maintain enough distance when we do it; otherwise we won’t see him very clearly
.

Martti can see the person walking ahead of him clearly now. It’s a girl, tall and thin, wearing a pretty red dress she got as a birthday present, and dirtied when she was playing this morning.

Oh Ingrid…

Martti runs after her, but stays out of sight. He wants to see what she’s up to.

Ingrid is walking uncertainly. She staggers. Her thin legs peep out from under the hem of her dress. Martti thinks that her fever must have risen. Soon she’ll probably faint and crack her head open.

But Ingrid doesn’t faint. She just wanders, returns to a room she was just in, turns around, changes direction and runs back so that Martti has to dash behind a bent-legged sofa to hide.

Then she disappears without a trace.

Martti goes into the room after her, but the room is empty. He runs into the next room, and the next, and the next.

He’s already on his way back to the reading room when a door on his right bursts open and Ingrid comes rushing out. Her hair is tousled and sweat is running down her pale face. In the dim light of the hallway he can see that her red dress is wet through with sweat. It drips on the floor.

She’s holding something tight against her chest.

Martti calls to her. Something wriggles in his stomach. She stumbles in the other direction—first into the hallway, then into the foyer and out of the house, with Martti right behind her.

He bolts out of the dark house into the brightness of the veranda, and as he stops to regain his vision Ingrid runs down the road that leads across Hare Glen. She falls, scrambles onto her feet again, and continues her unsteady escape.

The sound of birds and insects surrounds Martti as he stands in front of Laura White’s house wondering what to do. Shadows slip through the brightness of the garden; the weather is changing. Clouds are piling up in dark heaps that meld at the edges to form a stormy alliance.

Ingrid just stole something from Ms White’s house—he saw it with his own eyes.

Of all the people in the world, his Ingrid has gone and stolen something from Laura White.

Laura White is particularly strict about her books. They’re allowed to read her books, but they have to ask permission first, and under no circumstances can they take the books home with them.

She has books in her collection that are so rare that no one else anywhere has them, not even the largest libraries in America. Once she got so excited talking about her books and talked so quickly that none of the children could understand her. It frightened them to see an adult dash about and babble like that.

It’s a play that Aleksis Kivi apparently wrote in 1873, if not earlier, and I found it on a shelf where I used to keep a catechism. The process is very exciting, although I don’t really know what causes it.

She eventually got a severe headache and withdrew upstairs to rest.

When Ingrid wanted to borrow one of her books that wasn’t even in the Rabbit Back library, Laura said no. The reasons she gave for this were left to occupy their minds for a long time. They were almost certain she wasn’t joking.

I’m sorry, Ingrid dear, but it’s an unconditional rule of mine. Books attract bacteria when you handle them. Every book has its own quite unique strain of bacteria, which changes slightly whenever a new person reads it. I’m sure you understand.

She looked at her hands and grew more serious.

I’m sure you all know the sign in the library encouraging you to inform the librarian if there are any infectious diseases at home. They understand what bacteria can do to a book. Books owned by different people should under no circumstances be kept on the same shelf, otherwise entire bacteria strains could be mixed. And books can’t stand up to just anything.

Libraries are rather dangerous places, by the way, although they do serve a noble purpose. Always wash your hands when you read a library book, and keep library books separate from your own books.

The bacteria question has troubled them for a long time. They want to ask her if she’s serious, but they’re afraid to. Once when they asked her about her childhood, she answered a few
questions gladly, then suddenly raised her hands to her temples and slumped half-unconscious onto the sofa.

Oh, children,
she whispered, covered in a cold sweat,
my head is splitting. You’ll have to be quite silent for a little while. But don’t leave. Come closer. Take hold of my hand. I’m sure this will pass in a moment. Martti, my love, can you put your cool hand on my forehead? It helps. Don’t be afraid. I’m in a little pain right now, but everything will be all right again soon
.

They’ve witnessed these attacks of hers four or five times. They’ve never spoken about them, not even among themselves.

There’s a bicycle leaning against a tree. It’s Toivo’s bike, the kind with a long seat. Martti gets on the bike and follows Ingrid down the road, which meanders across Hare Glen like a gravel snake. Ingrid isn’t at home or in her father’s workshop.

Martti rides to the shore and pushes his way through the thick willows to their secret fishing spot. He can see their footprints in the sand, their shared fishing rod leaning against a birch tree. On the bark of the tree are initials, inside a heart. Martti carved his own into the tree and then Ingrid added hers, and the heart.

This is where Martti touched her bare breast after she had read an adult book called
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and wanted to write something like it.
I have to know what it feels like, otherwise I won’t be able to write about it,
she said—it was five days ago now. She took off her shirt right in front of him, the midday sun casting steep shadows on her skin.

Ingrid’s breast was small and the skin felt like warm rubber as he first prodded it and then squeezed it warily.

She’s not here now.

Martti climbs up the hill to the water tower, too—Ingrid’s magic place. The hill is a grass-covered cone with a fenced,
level place on top. On the platform is a booth with a steel door that’s always locked.

Ingrid likes to make up crazy stories about the booth: inside are trolls in chains, mad witches, ghosts and demons, imprisoned children, Russian prisoners of war. They come here to eat lunch when the weather is fine, share some liquorice from the kiosk on the shore. In windy weather they come up to the platform to send model planes flying in every direction.

They also tried kissing here last winter when they were
supposed
to write something about love for Laura White. After the kiss, Martti pressed his lips against the iron railing, and bled profusely when he tore them away again.

He doesn’t see her here now.

He finally finds her in the east playground. A drizzle of rain is falling. Ingrid is sitting on a swing, half turned away from him, thrashing her legs. As Martti comes down the grassy hillside he sees what she’s stolen from the house.

She’s looking through a book and another one is lying on the grass, a cloth-covered notebook, the kind Laura White has given to all of them, telling them to take better care of them than they would their own soul. Martti has one, too, in a blue cover with gold letters that say:
RABBIT BACK LITERATURE SOCIETY
.