The Rabbit Back Literature Society (8 page)

A
S INGRID KATZ
drove her home from the party, Ella Milana replayed her glorious future as an Laura
White-trained
author.

It was a future of ecstatic reviews, interviews, glittering
publishing
events, grants and prizes. Above all, it was a future filled with metres of shelves of books with her name on the cover. All of it had just been proven a mirage, which only deepened its bittersweet glow.

Two hours earlier she had been waiting at the foot of the stairs, looking into Laura White’s eyes, preparing the greeting she’d written and practised for a week to make it sound as natural as possible.

Ms White, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity. I don’t know what it was that you saw in my story, but if you see the tenth member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society in me, I won’t question it
…

“Are you pissed off?” Ingrid Katz asked cheerily, putting on her turn signal and slowing down to make a sharp left turn.

Dark figures moved about in the road. Katz put on the brakes. The car skidded a little, then stopped.

The headlights shone on two large hounds and a spitz. The dogs looked at them, jumped over a snow bank, and disappeared into the darkness of the fields.

Ingrid Katz laughed, shifted into first gear, and stepped on the gas. Sharp gusts of wind shaved snow from the side of the road and tossed it up in white clouds of powder.

“It’s OK to be pissed off,” Katz said gently. “It means you’re still alive.”

The librarian’s Ford smelled like liquorice. Ella glanced at her and thought it best to put aside self-pity. “Well, Laura White is missing, and I’m still sitting here. I have no cause to complain.”

Katz laughed. “Well, yes. We’ll all pray for her and light candles for the next few weeks and probably go to dozens of memorials. It’s all part of the process. And so is being pissed off. I know you’re angry. Don’t try to be so mature and brave and keep things in proportion. It’s a bore. You were about to achieve something great, and it was taken away from you. You’ve experienced quite a personal loss this evening and you have to be pissed off. Say it out loud. It’ll make you feel better. Trust me.”

Ella shook her head. “I prefer not to use that kind of
language
,” she said, and hated herself for her affected tone. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s just not in a teacher’s vocabulary. If I use crude language when I’m not at work, it’s only a matter of time before I start swearing in class. I may not be working in the field I’m trained for, temporarily, but that doesn’t mean…”

She trailed off, tired of listening to herself. She stopped talking and started thinking about where she was in her life. She could apply for numerous positions and leave Rabbit Back. That’s what she had originally intended to do. But then her future had seemed to point to the Society and becoming an author, guided by Laura White. And she had made her decision, and Laura White had sent her a lovely letter promising her a stipend for as long as her training lasted.

“Shit,” Ella said.

“There you go,” Ingrid said happily. “When life gives you plums, spit out the stones.”

There followed a moment of silence.

“If it’s any consolation,” Ingrid continued, “there’s one thing you should remember. Even without Laura White teaching you, you’re still a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society. That’s something, isn’t it? Your name will be on all the official lists with the nine other members. I added it this morning. And whenever someone writes the next history of Finnish literature, it will say that the tenth and last member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society was Ella Milana.”

Katz stopped the car and turned off the engine. They had arrived.

“I think your mother’s expecting you. There are lights on in the kitchen. Try to explain what happened, somehow, although I don’t think that’ll be easy.”

“Why not?” Ella said. “There was a party, then there was a snowstorm in the house and Laura White disappeared right in front of everyone’s eyes, and the tenth member isn’t going to be trained after all. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“You got farther than your dad did, in any case,” Ingrid said.

Ella was already getting out of the car. She stopped, lowered her bum back onto the seat, and looked at Ingrid.

“What did you say about my dad?”

Katz froze. Her right eye darted nervously as the light hit it.

“I thought you knew,” she said.

“Knew what?”

“That Paavo Emil, your father, knew Laura White many years ago. And us—the members of the Society. He used to go around with us. A very strong runner. The Flying Rabbitbacker.
He wrote some poems for Ms White and tried to get into the Society. But he didn’t get in. She liked him tremendously and his poems, but she thought his true nature was to run, not to write.”

Katz took out a bag of liquorice and offered some to Ella, who declined. She filled her mouth with the sweets, obscuring her speech.

“Your father had talent, but you’ve succeeded where he failed—you made an impression on Laura White. Tonight you lost a teacher who could have sped things up for you, but hey—you’re just as talented as you were before. The great author and creator of authors wouldn’t have chosen you out of all the people who’ve tried to get into the Society over the years for no reason.”

Ella sat without moving.

“Do you have all your things?” Ingrid asked, peeping into the back seat. “Didn’t you have a handbag with you? I brought one to the car anyway…”

Ella nodded her head, which was now full of such heavy thoughts that she couldn’t speak. She showed Ingrid her handbag and suddenly remembered that inside it, along with her
handkerchief
and coin purse and keys, was a small leather-bound book.

The rules of The Game.

E
LLA MILANA
and Marjatta Milana would have missed Christmas altogether if it hadn’t been marked on the calendar.

Some local organization had made it their business to worry about the Christmas joy of widows and orphans and brought them a package in a cardboard box. It had gingerbread, tarts, fruitcake, traditional Christmas casserole, a ham roll, a couple of women’s magazines and a chocolate elf. They tried to eat the food, not wanting to be ungrateful, but being the recipients of charity lent it all an unpleasant aftertaste.

They gave each other wrapped presents, no longer
remembering
what they contained.

Later Marjatta Milana put a big pile of decorative pillows on the sofa because it had been looking so unused. Ella came into the dark room, lost in her own thoughts, and thought she saw her father lying on the sofa. “Don’t start bawling,” her mother barked from the kitchen table where she was going through the papers concerning her father’s death.

A dream Ella had the night before Christmas Eve also gnawed at her holiday mood. In it, Santa Claus came to their house, and behind his beard she could see Paavo Emil Milana’s rotting face. He brought them a sack of mythological figurines and a card for a free mythological mapping. “
Sorry Santa’s a little dead
,” he said behind his beard, “
but the damned garden gnomes gave him a good knocking around. They’re all communists, you know, every one
of them. But now Santa would like to hear a poem or two. Can anyone think of a nice poem?”

Then the dream changed, and Ella was lying in bed
listening
to Laura White’s dead body as it climbed the ladder to her bedroom window. In the dream she knew that Laura White was going to each house where she sensed there were Creatureville books. She also knew that the author didn’t mean her any harm; she just wanted to read the books she’d written when she was alive, over and over.

On the floor there was a copy of
Rabbit Tracks
with a lead story urging locals to be understanding towards Laura White’s dead body if it should break into their homes. After all, it was “the body of the most beloved Finnish children’s author in the world”.

Ella woke up. It was still night. She imagined for a moment that someone really was scratching and tapping on her window.

It was just the crackling frost. She buried her head in her pillow and went back to her dreams, which no longer contained any restless undead.

Over the long Christmas holidays Marjatta Milana shovelled the paths in the garden. It was a little more pleasant than crying in the kitchen. Ella sat in the house, where she still felt like a guest, even though she did partly own it. She sat perched at her desk, holding her temples and thinking. She wasn’t going to make a move until she had analysed the situation thoroughly.

The night after Christmas, she woke up in her bed and opened her eyes. In her sleep, she had realized that a person is made up not just of her physical parts and her memories, but also her future.

A person’s future was part of her, just as much as her hands and feet and reproductive organs. But an individual
future was such a large part of a person’s time that you couldn’t see it all in one moment, and without any
information
about it people ended up trying to guess the true nature of their future.

If this theory was correct, a person’s future could be thought of as a kind of soul that defined one’s ultimate being on the axis of time.

When she’d returned to Rabbit Back, Ella had consisted of lovely, curving lips, faulty ovaries, and a future as a language and literature teacher. Then her future had been operated on and she’d received a new diagnosis: she was going to be a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society, an author trained by Laura White.

At first she shrank from her new future, because it was a considerable shock to her identity, but gradually it had started to appeal to her more and more. She had even looked through the
History of Finnish Literature
for the section about Laura White and the Society she had formed around her, and got excited imagining how in the next printing they would include her name, Ella Milana, as the Society’s tenth member.

What was more, her being, spreading itself across the axis of time, was actually different now. She had experienced a similar shock as a child the first time she’d stood between two mirrors and seen her own profile. Before she saw it, she had imagined it very differently.

Our individual futures are never what we imagine them to be.

For instance, she had once imagined that her soul, her individual future, her most fundamental being, would include giving birth to several children in her thirties. She would have put it on her passport if she could. But then the gynaecologist
had shown her, with the help of mirrors, that she was not the person she had imagined.

Once, at a lecture on aesthetics, she had admired a stranger, a man sitting to her right. She had watched him for half an hour, fantasized about him, and even decided to try to get to know him. Then he had turned, and from this new angle, he was unattractive to her.

It wasn’t possible to see an image of the whole person at once, because your point of observation was at one point on the axis of time, and the thing observed was shot through with innumerable points of observation. Every day would present a new side to view, and a being that you thought beautiful might suddenly prove unbearably ugly to you.

Falling in love with a person’s momentary being was as
irrational
as falling in love with the left side of his face, or the back of his head, or some other individual part of him. That was why Ella couldn’t really blame her former boyfriend for not
knowing
how to love her once her childless future was made visible.

In the midst of developing this complicated theory, Ella heard a noise. This time she was awake enough to see that there really was someone peeking in at her window.

There was a dark figure standing on the fire ladder
knocking
on the glass.

Ella didn’t move. She carefully tugged the covers up over her face until only her eyes showed. Then the moon flashed momentarily over the face of the knocker.

Unlike in her dream, it wasn’t Laura White’s body. It was the round, easily recognized hamster face of Arne C. Ahlqvist, alias Aura Jokinen, whom Ella had met at Laura White’s party.

The woman pressed her face against the window and left a blind spot with her breath. Ella had read the rules of The Game. She knew what this was about.

The sci-fi writer had come to challenge her.

The rules of The Game stated how the challenge should be made:

Ella closed her eyes tightly and pretended to be in a deep sleep, trusting that a middle-aged woman with a family wouldn’t stay hanging from a ladder in the freezing cold for very long. She hoped with all her might that her mother, asleep across the hall, wouldn’t be awakened by the knocking and come rushing in to confuse the situation.

The figure finally disappeared, and Ella was calm again.

T
HE CHANGE
to her personal future was a deep
disappointment
to Ella, and she was also upset by many everyday worries. The bills had to be paid and the groceries bought. There wouldn’t be any open substitute positions until next fall, and her stipend had disappeared with the snowstorm. She made a long and thorough examination of her personal future and realized that she had to earn some money somehow.

One thing she didn’t want her future to include was
unemployment
, which for her had always meant a descent into dispirited listlessness.

Eventually it sank in that she couldn’t change the cards she’d been dealt. She just had to play them.

When Professor Eljas Korpimäki heard a few days before Laura White’s party that his favourite former student was going to be a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society, he was thrilled.

“That’s incredible news. You should show Ms White your dissertation. It’s quite a competent bit of research. Maybe sometime in the future you might agree to let me interview you about your experience. I just happen to be about to embark on a new project on Laura White. Thank you for calling and telling me. It’s always so heart-warming to hear news like this. By the way, would you tell Laura White hello from a humble professor who is still the world’s leading Laura White expert? You might also mention that the same professor was just in
Tokyo delivering a lecture on her works. If she would just relent and grant me an interview…”

When the media announced that Laura White had
disappeared
without a trace, the professor called Ella in quiet
bewilderment
, lamenting the fate of everyone involved and wishing his favourite student the best in the future. “Perhaps we can discuss what happened later, when you’re back on your feet. I don’t want to trouble you any more for now.”

Ella called him a couple of days later. She enquired whether he would be interested in paying her for a research project on Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society.

He could hardly contain his joy. Two days later he called to tell her that everything had been arranged handily.

“I put some weight behind your grant application, and did what I could to get assurance from my contacts that your
funding
was basically guaranteed. We’ll have to wait for the allotted time, of course, but there shouldn’t be any problem. You’ll get a stipend from the university for your first few months of work. It’s a time-sensitive topic, after all, the fact-finding, in light of recent events. But are you quite sure that the members of the Society will agree to be interviewed? At this point the whole affair is still at the level of the women’s magazines.”

“Yes, they’ll talk to me,” Ella promised.

She would receive funding for a year of work. She was guessing that a year of The Game would get her all the
information
she needed from the writers in the Society. After that she would find a teaching position at some school far from Rabbit Back.

Ella was afraid of The Game. It certainly wasn’t an easy way to gather information. But the idea of it was also exhilarating.

If The Game worked the way she imagined, based on the rule book, she would learn things that would otherwise have been left to speculation for all eternity.

She could dig up anything she wanted from the Society’s past.