Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  ‘Come away,’ said Longhorn, with unexpected softness, and we left Hades without looking at each other again.

  The Charioteer

  the tenth letter

  I have received a card from my home country. Yes, it was not from you; we know that. The bronze statue on the card is two thousand four hundred years old, but he whom the card shows is a mere youth. His forehead is encircled by an ornamental ribbon, and his hair curls, lightly gilded, over his ears. He holds a pair of reins in his hands, and his eyes are dark stones, glittering, mysterious and surprised.

  But what life and riches shine from them! It is hard for me to believe that what I see is merely coloured light reflected from stone. What a coincidence that it arrived just as I had sent you my last letter! For, don’t you see, he has the same gaze, the one I was talking about, which hurts me, which I recognise everywhere.

  But this young man is astonished at something; even his mouth is astonished, already ajar and about to open. I am sure I am not mistaken in remembering that I once saw a similar expression on the face of someone who was dying; all the tubes had been disengaged, and his eyes were wide open. The same concentration marks both their faces and forces both of them forward in an invisible race.

  Why is it that it is in the form of this young man’s face that I should most like to remember the face of humankind . . .

  Tracks in the Dust

  the eleventh letter

  Have I told you that Tainaron has a prince? As a foreigner, I was unexpectedly offered the opportunity to attend his reception. I asked Longhorn for advice as to how I should dress for the occasion and what behaviour was expected. I felt his answer was vacuous, and did not help me one bit.

  ‘You can go in whatever you like,’ he said. ‘You can ask whatever you want.’

  And then he added: ‘It’s not important, after all.’

  ‘Not important?’ I was astonished. ‘Do you just go there as you are, straight off the street, and say whatever comes to mind to the prince?’

  But he did not give me any more clues, and I went there by myself, in my best dress of course, but distinctly nervous.

  The prince lives in the middle of the city, in his palace, which is surrounded by a moat. The drawbridge was down, and there were no guards to be seen. People were going in and out, and no one paid any attention to me. I had been given a piece of paper, a promissory note which I tried to proffer to some of the passersby whom I guessed to be members of the palace staff, but no one wanted to accept it; everyone just waved their hands vaguely: ‘It’s not necessary.’

  ‘Where does the prince hold his reception?’ I asked three different times, and it was only on the third occasion that I was directed to the right place; but no one bothered to come with me as a guide, and the corridors along which I walked were empty. Through doors that had been left open I saw various different rooms: tambours, halls and stairwells, new colonnaded corridors and courtyards where landscape gardens had been built with pavilions, artificial lakes and bridges.

  The prince received visitors in the tower at the heart of the palace, in the donjon. I saw him from a distance from the dim passageway on whose stone floor my shoes tapped alarmingly noisily.

  The door to his reception room was wide open, and I could not see anyone else in the vicinity.

  The salon was oval in shape and small. At its centre was a single chair, on which the prince sat.

  The room was very high, in fact as high as the tower, so that the prince looked as if he were sitting at the bottom of a well.

  I stopped before stepping across the threshold, for I did not know how I should approach him. He sat motionless, but seemed to be looking me straight in the eye. He was very old and frail. The way in which the light fell around him and on to his domed head from the upper windows made the vision desolate and melancholy.

  I think I stood there for a long time, anxiously, but just as it began to seem to me that the prince was sleeping with his eyes open, his forelimb rose in an encouraging gesture, slowly and ceremoniously. I stepped into the room.

  ‘Your highness,’ I began, ‘I have come . . . ’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted me before I had time to begin. ‘It’s perfectly clear. You can ask whatever you want.’

  I had prepared many kinds of questions concerning both domestic and foreign policies, trade links and tax reform, but at the moment they all fell out of my head.

  ‘May I ask, may I ask,’ I mumbled, ‘how you are?’

  This was, of course, completely inappropriate, I understood that myself. But I could not get anything else out of my mouth, and I looked at him, dumbly, waiting for him to rise and announce that the audience was over.

  Strangely enough, he seemed on the contrary to be engrossed by my question, as if it were completely apt for that time and place.

  ‘As to my health, I have nothing to complain about,’ he said, in such a low voice that I had to lean forward to hear. ‘But I am worried about my ears. There is a murmuring in them all the time. Or else a ringing, of a little silver bell.’

  And he suddenly shook his head, so that the fluffy blue collar that surrounded his neck hissed and rustled.

  ‘And then there are the nights, they are definitely too big. They have grown larger and larger since the princess left, and the princess left thirty years ago, in her prime. You will not believe how small they were when she was still here. This small!’

  He stretched out two of the downy pincers of his forelimb for me to see: they were almost touching. I looked at them with polite interest and nodded.

  The prince leaned backward in his chair and spoke now more audibly, as if with greater warmth: ‘When the princess had died, I often went into the city incognito, in strange armour. I stood by the bridge and did not let anyone by without inspecting him or her thoroughly from head to feet. But I never saw the princess again, for I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess’s eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the uninterrupted flow of oncomers there flowed only the loam of strange memories . . . ’

  And the prince’s voice fell. I suspected that the audience should have ended long ago, and it tired me to stand before him as the only hearer of his ancient yearning. No one came to fetch me away, and in the palace there was a soundlessness as if there were no one else there.

  ‘Do you know why we have been forgotten?’ the prince whispered unexpectedly, and his choice of words surprised me: why that ‘we’, it was not really right in this situation, and why did he lower his voice in such a familiar way?

  ‘Because it is all the same to them,’ the prince whispered, ‘what I do now, where I go or what I say, everything is permitted now. Do you understand?’

  ‘No, I do not believe it, your highness,’ I said hesitantly, but his forelimb crooked and beckoned me closer.

  I bent obediently toward him and came so close that I thought I heard the little silver bell he had mentioned, as well as the scent of some bitter herb. Then he whispered into my ear: ‘In reality, I am no longer the prince.’

  He drew away to see the effect of his words on me. I can say that they did not really have any effect. I was convinced he was speaking the truth. Only thus did the emptiness and indifference which I had encountered in the palace – and earlier – make sense.

  ‘I see you believe that I . . . ’ the prince said heavily. ‘But do not worry, that is not the case, not in the least. Know this: times change, but each is only one time of many. So what; it can be changed, like a change of clothes. Today I still sit in my palace. But often I ring my bell for a long while and no one comes. My shirt still bears the arms of Tainaron, but the wine which is brought to me is no longer of the same quality as before. So what. For tomorrow I shall be in exile, or my body will lie in that landscape garden on the little wooden bridge and the national guard will have pierce
d it with newly sharpened bayonets.’

  Now he finally rose to his feet – I had been expecting it for a long time – and I realised, with relief, that the audience was over. I bowed respectfully, and when I turned, I saw only my own footprints in the heavy dust that completely covered the stone floor of the donjon.

  Their solitude proved to me with complete clarity that no one had visited the room for ages, and that the prince himself had not left it.

  He was a lost cause.

  The Day of the Great Mogul

  the twelfth letter

  I do not know why I pick up my pen again. No longer because I might expect return mail. But I would like to tell someone that something strange has happened, some curious, unpleasant changes, and I have no idea what has caused them. Perhaps it is temporary, and my life will return to how it was before. Perhaps, too, the days that were like prizes, long ago, will return.

  I have not travelled anywhere, but this city is now different. The change does not please me. When I look out, I see that it is as if it has been unclothed. The most important thing is absent; the thing that once, just a moment ago, made me strong and happy. I look at the ground, I look at the sky, and everywhere is the same absence, in the eyes that crowd the streets and the department stores as if they were seeking their lost pupils in the windows and sales counters. If I were to send you photographs of Tainaron before and Tainaron now, you would say no difference is visible, and perhaps it is so; but nevertheless I know that everything is decisively different.

  If the sounds of the city were to be muted for a moment, I could hear a secretly crumbling sound as if a trickle of sand were falling from the side of a sandpit. And the vital force, which I believed to be inexhaustible, runs and runs somewhere where no one can use it.

  Is this what is known as growing old? Do I see it everywhere, although it exists only inside myself? And what once was happiness around me, was it too a mere reflection? But in that case how can I know anything of what Tainaron is, what it is like?

  Today the book I open describes the great mogul Aurangzeb, who was a cruel tyrant. Fifteen of his elephants fell into a cleft on a mountain road, and on the back of one of them was his favourite wife.

  ‘Remarkable,’ writes the great mogul, ‘empty-handed I came into this world, and now, as I leave it, I drag with me an enormous caravan of sins . . . My sorrow mortifies me. Farewell, farewell, farewell.’

  I force myself to get up and open the door and step out into the street. I have decided to eat, but from the window table of the café the passers-by look as if they are dragging burdens which are invisible but nevertheless heavy. The liquid glimmers in my cup, and soon I shall have to swallow it. I look at it as if it were the goblet of today.

  Under the marble table my legs wait, motionless, symmetrical, side by side. I do not know whether I have ever sensed their existence as such. They are alive, and all at once I am scorched by hot pity. My legs, my poor legs! Modest, sturdy and resilient, my own pillars, you too will wither!

  Small days, small days. The woman who, in the tramcar, takes a comb from her handbag and, pulling it through her stiff hair, complains: ‘The comb doesn’t work, no. The concrete eats the hair so.’

  A friend who sways toward me, his coat open, shaking his fingers. There was a time when he ran from table to table, his face flushed, to proclaim that his dogma was the youth of the world. What he says now is something quite different, quite different,

  but I do not listen; I mourn. The youth of the world!

  How we secrete words around us, so that the eye of reality may not see us! In vain! So hopelessly thin and tattered a veil does not hide anything, and we writhe in the brightness of destiny. No shield, no armour, and neither will flesh ever return to the word.

  And when I pass by the statue of the Great Sleeper, around it billows a tired song:

  Sweet is my sleep, but more to be mere stone,

  so long as ruin and dishonour reign;

  to bear nought, to feel nought, is my great gain;

  then wake me not, speak in an undertone!

  My poor friend! I saw his finger fall and he wavered across the frosty wasteland and shut himself up in the fortress of the telephone kiosk in the square.

  It happened there, not here in Tainaron, for these are different statues, but the days are as small everywhere and their shape is that of a funnel.

  I wonder if you too have noticed: there are moments when you do not wish to wish and then you look inward and what is it that you see? An endless sequence of wishes, infinitely many yous, and all of the yous are threaded on to the tough thread of memory, and in the end you yourself are no more than that thinnest of thin threads, and it quivers, tensed . . .

  But today I walked past a chirping flock of sparrows and it fell silent as a wave of nausea swept across me and suddenly the earth gave way beneath my feet and I remembered once more that beneath Tainaron is nothing but a crust, as insubstantial as one night’s ice.

  Proof Copy

  the thirteenth letter

  The rapist panted in my pursuit, reducing the distance between us with horrifying speed. Then I remembered that what I was seeing was a dream and that I therefore had an opportunity: with all my strength, I forced my feet to leave the ground, and as the murderer’s filthy paw fumbled for my ankle, it slipped beyond his grasp and past the highest branches.

  My unbelief had saved me, but the poor creature who believes that everything is true is the victim of his dreams.

  Today I remembered that many years – many grace-filled years ago, I should say, for that is what they have been – we were walking up a street between two churches, and you said: ‘The soul is what is visible.’ Do you remember?

  When I happened to look in the mirror a moment ago, you said it, from a long way off, but as clearly as you did then. I seldom look in the mirror, but always there is someone there who gives me my eyes. And the root of my nose is bluish; a line has inscribed itself at the corner of my mouth like a drypoint groove. But this is no proof copy, and the acid of everyday life corrodes, prepares that which is the soul.

  Once you said, moaning: ‘I would love you even if you were someone else.’

  You are crazy! How the word reassured me, how calm it made me.

  But yesterday morning I stood in front of a large department store where I planned to go and buy clothes, and the sun had just risen behind the roofs of Tainaron. I came to a halt because I happened to glance at my legs, for no particular reason; and from them grew two shadow-trees, and both of us were whole, I and the other.

  Oh, I have something wider than a prairie, wider than Oceanos. I do not know where to put it, to whom to present it. I cannot show it; I cannot use it. It is too wide for this city; one life is too small for it. No one needs it, but today it has me flying and singing.

  Sand

  the fourteenth letter

  The new day dawned low and cloudy. In my melancholy, I set out for a walk – alone – for Longhorn, after all, has his work, of which I know almost nothing; but I assume it is some kind of business activity.

  I wanted to see something I had not seen before, and for that reason I set out toward the eastern part of the city, although I well remembered that Longhorn had urged me to stay away from those parts. When I asked why, he merely said that it was not safe to go there alone.

  But it was midday, after all, and I was walking along a broad esplanade bordered on both sides by high poplars which were still green. Looked at from a distance, they recall the crowns of some other tree, standing on their bases. I walked past the theatre, on whose eaves snouty caryatids slumber; that building has a particular charm. I came to a cross-street full of expensive specialist shops and pretty little cafés. I myself have often sat at their clean tables, but now I did not stop. I was in a hurry, as if on my way to some agreed meeting.

  Now I came to streets which were unfamiliar. I could no longer see business plaques or inventively decorated shop windows. The buildings became more
closed, dilapidated and lower. I sank into melancholy, and for a while I went on hardly glancing around me, but the unevenness of the gravel under my heels startled me. Now I realised that the streets in this part of the city were not paved, or even asphalted. They were deeply rutted, in an almost unpassable condition, but neither did there seem to be any kind of traffic any longer in these parts. Pavements, too, had been left unbuilt, and between the buildings there meandered indistinct lanes. After a few steps I was forced to ask myself: were they buildings? For is it not the case that the buildings in which we live and our friends live have straight and solid walls? Are their roofs not covered in slates or tin and are their windows not made of glass?

  As I walked, I remembered entrances and heavy front doors whose handles were of brass, gutters that drummed in the rain, and chimneys and chimney-pipes which, seen from an attic window, looked like solitary people. And behind the window panes? There should have been the glimmer of white curtains, eyes, cats and the dim perspectives of the life of strange rooms . . .

  But there was nothing of the sort to be seen. The habitations past which I walked were lacking in all the characteristics of proper dwellings. First of all, there were no straight lines. Everything curved and twisted, meandered without direction, without clear corners. The dwellings rose from the earth, earth-coloured, made of clay and loam. They had indefinitely shaped openings in place of windows and doors. Where were the columns and capitals which one could admire in almost every square in the centre of the city? Where was the rosy golden glow of the cupolas, and the window recesses with their rich mosaic patterns? The wall-niche and the sandstone shapes that beckoned to them? The slender roof-groins and the pointed arches? The pilastered galleries and the atriums with their flowering trees?