Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  ‘Who was killed?’ I asked, playing with a maple leaf.

  ‘A girl,’ said Doña Quixote. ‘She was raped and strangled by a boy she had never met before. Perhaps I would have forgotten that news item quickly if a certain phrase had not gone on echoing through my mind.’

  I asked, since she remained silent.

  ‘Don’t hit me any more, I’m already dead,’ Doña Quixote said.

  ‘Look, a dragonfly!’ I pointed at the long, blue needle that had alighted on Doña Quixote’s sleeve.

  Doña Quixote looked at the insect as it rested. On the harbour road a tram screeched; the dragonfly rose vertically into the air, remained motionless for a moment on the breeze and was gone.

  Doña Quixote leaped up: ‘Come, let’s walk round the tower.’

  We walked round the tower. It had eight sides and three floors and only one, tightly bolted, door. Who had built it, and for what purpose? We did not know. But it was part of the landscape as if it had grown there, as if it had roots. Doña Quixote strode ahead of me, tall and severe, like a tower herself.

  ‘Shall we go?’ I suggested, but she did not seem to hear.

  ‘Do you know what she meant?’ Doña Quixote said, and stood still.

  ‘What?’

  ‘By what she said, that girl. Have you heard small children playing hide-and-seek? Have you heard how a child will call to its seeker from its hiding place, “I’m not here”?’

  And now the boy will always walk around this tower. It will always split his landscape in two.

  ‘But don’t you believe in something like reconciliation? Or if not reconciliation, then oblivion or – perhaps grace?’

  But Doña Quixote did not answer, but beckoned with her finger to the dragonfly, which was quivering on her shoulder once more, on its wings the cold glimmer of scales.

  The Mummy

  I have been travelling a long time to reach this town, where I have never been before and of whose language I speak only a few words. When the train arrives at the station, it is already evening, and my suitcase is heavy. I look on the platform for a porter, but instead a man in uniform steps up to me and gestures for me to follow him. When I hesitate, he shows me his card, from which it is clear he is a policeman or that, at any rate, he has a policeman’s authority.

  He takes me to the left luggage office and points to my bag. ‘Open it,’ he urges. I do so, and he examines and turns over everything I have, rummages through my socks, shakes the books and even opens a small box of chocolates.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, but he does not answer. Only when he unscrews my alarm clock do I realise he is looking for a bomb, and I also remember that just a short time ago, at a different station, an unsuccessful attempt at an assassination took place.

  Well then, I do not have a bomb, and he pushes my bag toward me abruptly, without apology. But his unnecessary suspicion has already meant I have missed the bus in which I was to have continued to a nearby village to a family I know. The first boarding house I find is full, and in the second I discover there is a big trade fair in the city.

  I walk up one street and down another, dragging my suitcase, which does not contain a bomb, and peering at hotel signs. The streets are flooded with people, but I cannot even hope to see any familiar faces. In a cramped and dark reception I am finally handed a small key, for a sum that is unreasonable.

  When I open the door, I see the room is already inhabited: in the other bed lies someone wrapped in blankets, turned to the wall and apparently fast asleep. This does not please me; I have paid for a single room and feel I have been cheated. But I am tired; I do not have the energy to go downstairs again and object in a foreign language.

  On the back wall is a tall mirrored wardrobe; I see myself on the threshold, as unremarkable as anyone else in the bustle of the street. I undress silently and quickly, so that my room-mate will not waken.

  I lie awake for a long time in the room which does not belong to anyone, and whose objects exude the anonymity of all rooms that are only passed through. It is difficult for me to sleep, as I think of the many paths that have passed through this hole. It is difficult for me to fall asleep, as my room-mate is so motionless and her breathing so light that I can hardly distinguish it in the small quiet spaces of my own breathing.

  I do not believe she is sleeping.

  When I awake, I know I have been sleeping. Someone is crying as if she has been crying for a long time, many hours hiccupping and panting. The bed below the window is shaken by violent convulsions of grief.

  I listen to these eruptions of emotion tensely, thinking I should really get up and ask: ‘What is it?’

  I stir, shift, and begin to lift the coverlet, but she seems to understand my intention and attempts to stifle her moans. I cannot decide: I lie for a long time in the darkness without a cover, and I grow cold. The stifled groans swell once more, sighs take the space and the air from the room, and the stranger’s tears moisten my own life, too, with their bitter rain.

  Endless weeping! Limitless grief! It gushes like a hot geyser from the chasm in that unknown life, so deep that it does not seem possible to find enough to fill it anywhere, it erupts as lava that reaches and petrifies all movement. The ebb and flow of the sobbing rocks my bed, and her tears combine with the sombre waters of my memory so that, with horror, I too feel them begin to surge.

  No, I do not want to remember, I say to myself. But what good is it? My memory is that sheet-wrapped mummy.

  And as I struggle in the darkness to bar the door to the procession of humiliation and disappointment, regret and shame, bitterness and misunderstanding, fear and loss, it rises, the thing that was still a moment ago, the grief of my faceless room-mate, rises as high as Hokusai’s wave, and I hear the thundering I know has always, incessantly, sounded around my mean, closed, dry life.

  Mozart Cheated Us!

  In November a desperate man came to see Doña Quixote. He said his innards were scorched by a hatred so bitter it would be enough to burn the entire city to ruins. He said it smoked in his brain just as phosphorus can smoulder in still-living flesh.

  ‘Water does not quench phosphorus,’ was what he said, ‘and no comfort can ease my wrath.’

  On Doña Quixote’s table was a record sleeve, and as he spoke the man took it in his hand and turned it with restless fingers. It was Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

  ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!’ said the man, and his voice crackled like rifle-fire. ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!’ he cried a second time, in the manner in which a court usher calls the name of the accused who is to appear before the judge.

  ‘He is a liar,’ the man said. ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart cheated us.’

  ‘How did he cheat us?’ asked Doña Quixote, calmly.

  The man laughed bitterly. ‘Because he deceives us into believing things that don’t exist. Just remember the clarity of his string quintets, The Magic Flute’s noble ideal of brotherhood and Tamino’s unselfish love or the delight of the glockenspiel . . . There is nothing like that to be found in the world, and he must have known it himself.’

  ‘But,’ said Doña Quixote mildly, ‘he also has the Dies Irae and the Ave verum corpus.’

  ‘Yes,’ the man conceded. ‘They are his, and they are the world’s. Everything else is sweet deception, the empty chiming of a glockenspiel.’

  The table jolted, and the man drew back, startled. Doña Quixote, who had pounded her fragile fist down in front of him, looked at him with blazing eyes.

  ‘Do you think,’ said Doña Quixote, low and maestoso, ‘do you really think he was unable to see beyond the days of wrath, dizzyingly far, as far as here, and still further? You think you can’t survive. How long has Mozart survived?’

  The man sat in silence for a long while. He seemed to have calmed down, and after a time began to speak of something quite different.

  As he left, and was already bidding us good night, he lingered on the threshold. I felt he intended to say something important, but he merel
y commented, ‘The weather is easing,’ put his cap on his head and left.

  ‘Hell’s revenge burns within my heart,’ muttered Doña Quixote after he had gone. ‘Do you know who he was? He was the Moor, Monostatos.’

  And then she hummed: ‘Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön . . . ’

  The Room of Change

  All rooms move. Each of them swings in a pendulum motion between evening and morning, moving its inhabitants closer to the unknown land where they will be no more.

  But this room wanders through the streets, and the inhabitants within are constantly changing. Whenever it stands still, someone leaves and others take his place and they seek a space for themselves among the crowd of evasive eyes.

  When I was a child, I saw them differently. I saw them there, at the door, as they paused for a moment before they made their exit, holding a pole under a sign which read: ‘Do not stand in front of the mirror.’ I only had to narrow my eyes a little and I could see them as they had once been, to narrow them again, and on their faces was the satiety of age.

  I no longer see in this way. Now I am one of them and, like them, I take my place by the windows to see all that is already familiar to me: lights and signs, arrows and numbers, the swarming of overcoats and the dusty herds of the roads – and all of it flows past my tepid gaze, bordered by kerbstones, in a dense torrent.

  I remember the experiments I used to conduct in this room. How I tried to tame Time and always failed. How I examined how long ‘now’ lasted, and how long its memory, how I stretched it like chewing-gum and, when it snapped, how I became tired.

  My patience was not sufficiently great. My attention not sufficiently concentrated. The knife of a new event always came to cut time in two. It was a divided reality, and I learned that there, in the room of change.

  This room has its route and its timetable. But the contents of the room change, and with them everything.

  I have seen, here, a man who arranged the cities of Germany on the thin thread of his memory, I have heard how he dropped their names like coins into a box: Aachen, Augsburg, Berlin, Bonn . . .

  Wherever he comes from, there is no hope. Wherever he goes, there is nothing to be done. But those tiny pieces of knowledge he presses upon one: like a torn entrance ticket to something, a party that has already been held or cancelled . . .

  And we sit or stand in our places and nevertheless we glide forward. This oblong, lighted trunk that moves, all these forgotten heads at the windows . . .

  Sometimes in the street, at rush-hour, when the city bus drives past me, crammed full, I feel like laughing. What a sight! Just as strange as if a swarm of witches were riding on a broom above the city lights . . .

  Onward it rushes, always on time, always on its route, and its windows are entirely covered in frost or condensation, people’s breathing.

  Onward it rushes, past withering parks and windows just lighting up, and its cargo is the weight of many displaced souls.

  The Room of Time

  Tick-tock.

  Some clocks really did make that noise. But most were silent: inside was a battery that made them keep time for a year, two years, or even eight.

  We had gone to the clock-shop, for the strap of Doña Quixote’s watch had broken. The clock-shop was very small, and strange in that it contained more ugly objects than I had ever before seen together.

  On the highest shelf were arranged, in order of size, a row of bronze-coloured goblets that recalled women constricted by corsets.

  If I were a competitor, I thought, and could see a trophy like that in advance, I would want to lose.

  On the walls hung pocket-watches on plastic chains decorated with turquoise and aniline-red spirals. There were ashtrays, too, in the form of riding-boots, mouths and lavatory bowls. But everything was covered in a thin, greasy dust, as if no customer had been here for weeks.

  ‘Good morning,’ says Doña Quixote.

  ‘Morning,’ says the clock-seller, and rises behind the counter, barrel-like and bloody-eyed, as strange as the things with which he has surrounded himself.

  He shows Doña Quixote watch-straps and photograph-frames sprinkled with gold-dust. They do not make an impression on Doña Quixote.

  She is looking at the digital watches under the glass. ‘They have no faces. They do not show time, they show the moment. There is no day or night for them. They have no history, do they have a future?’

  The clock-maker ponders, and I shift my weight from one foot to the other, looking at a plaque of juniper-wood. On it is branded: ‘One cannot keep house in cloud, in wind.’

  ‘I think people have already got bored with them,’ says the clock-seller. ‘They don’t buy as many digital watches as before.’

  ‘What is time, really?’ says Doña Quixote.

  ‘What?’ asks the clock-seller.

  ‘Time is matter,’ explains Doña Quixote. ‘Yes, it is matter and, furthermore, elastic. A kind of wax.’

  ‘Ah . . . ’

  ‘If you really want to,’ Doña Quixote says, ‘you can learn to model it. Stretch it like chewing gum. Roll it into a pretty little ball. Throw it away, except that it is a boomerang. It comes back.’

  And Doña Quixote leans on the counter and the countless clocks as if it is she, in fact, who has to try to sell them.

  ‘Last summer I happened to be there when the city stood still. Smoke sat motionless above the roofs. There in the street, a cyclist pedalled and pedalled, but got nowhere. The traffic lights stuck at red and the bells of St John’s church could only ring, “ding, ding, ding” . . . ’

  ‘Give me that,’ she says next, and points to a watch-strap.

  The clock-merchant hurries to try it on her stick-thin wrist, and after that he has to go into the back room, where he makes a new hole in the strap. He is extremely polite, hurries to open the outer door and, on the threshold, thrusts his card into Doña Quixote’s hand.

  On the journey home, Doña Quixote is quiet and anxious-looking.

  ‘Do I look old?’ she suddenly asks. I deny it quickly.

  ‘You’re lying,’ she says cruelly. ‘I looked in the window and saw for myself. I do look old.’

  ‘What window do you mean?’

  ‘The clock-shop,’ she said. ‘I saw my head there among all those dreadful things, and it was very old.’

  I say no more, and she would not listen if I did. She stops in the middle of the pavement, and her face is naked, and tired.

  ‘Time is a tiger,’ she says. ‘It has no morals. None!’

  Then she strides forth again, so it is hard for me to keep up with her. At the crossroads where we have to part, she grasps my arm and smiles mysteriously.

  ‘Do you know what it is that is unaffected by time? Do you?’

  Her eyes have the glimmer of valleys at evening.

  I shake my head, and she whispers, ‘It’s the twinkling of an eye, do you believe me?’

  Patroclus, too, is Dead

  On a bright, ringing frosty day I meet, at Doña Quixote’s house, the Incurable One. It is as if the city has been dusted with icing-sugar; a glittering layer of snow-dust has frozen to the walls and the branches of the trees.

  The Incurable One is sitting in Doña Quixote’s uncomfortable armchair, as pale as if he, too, were made of snow.

  Once he used to come here often, but now he spends long periods in hospital, and movement has become increasingly difficult for him. Seven years ago his daughter died in a car crash, and soon afterwards his wife departed.

  But now he sits by Doña Quixote’s window, and the February light casts blue lines of shadow across his forehead and neck. He sits almost touching the radiator, but he seems to exude a coldness its warmth cannot reach.

  Doña Quixote and the Incurable One are talking about birds. Birds are the Incurable One’s great love, but he says it is years since he has seen the spring or autumn migrations.

  Doña Quixote says that one night, when she was walking along her own str
eet, a barn owl flew out of the garden porch.

  ‘It flew low and soundlessly,’ said Doña Quixote. ‘And as it passed us, it looked straight into my eyes.’

  ‘Owls can hypnotise you,’ said the Incurable One, and nodded.

  He glanced at the high sky and sighed. ‘Spring is coming. I should like to see the birds return once more.’

  ‘They will fly again,’ said Doña Quixote.

  The Incurable One rose with difficulty, fetched his briefcase from the hall, and pulled out a large book.

  ‘ “Dear friend”,’ he read, ‘ “you too must die, why do you complain so? Patroclus is dead, and he was a far better man than you. Death and a cheerless fate threaten me, too. There will come some morning, or evening or noon, when someone will destroy my life in battle . . . ”.’

  He read with a weak but vital voice, and the words that he left in the room rang as crystal-cold as the February day.

  In April I rang on Doña Quixote’s door. When she opened it, still on the threshold, she said: ‘Patroclus is dead.’

  We went to walk on the shore. It was a day when everything was breaking and melting, vanishing and lifting, the kind of day when all that is old seems to be disappearing and there is not yet anything new to take its place.

  ‘It said in the paper,’ said Doña Quixote, ‘that the lark has already arrived.’

  I looked up, but the sky was low and without gaps. It was like a broad and downy wing.

  ‘Do you hear?’ Doña Quixote said, but I could hear nothing. ‘Everything here is beneath it. So that when someone dies, someone else can go on singing . . . ’

  The Sun-cypress

  In this city there is a landscape that I often watch and that is not changed by the seasons. I do not have to climb a panoramic tower, walk to the shore or even look out of the window.

  This landscape is here, in my own room. No one who steps inside can fail to see the island or the evergreen tree on a hillock on the island.