Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  The sack’s voice was so weak and hoarse that I could not immediately understand it. The sack asked where I was from, and said that it had not been born in Tainaron either. And I had only sat there for a moment when I realised that the bag contained someone alive and remembering. And when I had sat there for another moment, I knew that he was not old. Old age was merely his disguise, as childhood had once been. I knew it as I once knew that a certain very small creature was right when she shrieked: ‘I am not a child! I am not a child!’ I knew it because I had not been a child myself, either; I knew it because I shall never be old. I knew it because I had heard King Milinda’s question: ‘Was he who was born the same as he who died?’ and heard the answer, which was not yes or no. And now the park’s trees waved the shadows of their fluttering over my years and over the years of my companion, leaves that were still fastened to their branches, but were already yellow and would soon be dead, detached, absent.

  I asked what had been most difficult in life, and the bag answered: ‘The fact that everything recurs and must always return and that the same questions are asked again and again.’

  But before I could ask more of the same questions, the servant or descendant approached us with purposeful strides. Lightly he lifted his burden – its years were feathers to him – and, grinding the gravel under his feet, took him back home.

  I had got hot and, forgetting the old man in a moment, strolled slowly toward the harbour. There I saw the same white ship that once brought me to Tainaron; but why, I cannot remember.

  Not Enough

  the twenty-first letter

  How are you? How are things with you? That you are so implacable in your silence makes you gradually become more like gods or the dead. Such is your metamorphosis; and it is not entirely repugnant to me.

  For let me tell you what has happened to me. What has happened to me is that people are no longer enough. They are not enough, be they ever so great or beautiful or wise or complicated.

  They are not enough, even if their antennae were to stretch further than radar beams and their clothes were to be stronger than armour.

  For that reason I confess that everything I say contains the unspoken hope that it is linked with all my actions as well as to the moments when I just sit and look. Ardent hope! Incorrigible hope! That gods and the dead might hear. That gods and the dead might see. That gods and the dead might know . . .

  But there is only one who can make them hear their song. But he was one who became truly unhappy and was torn to pieces.

  Last night I returned to you after long years, from such a distance and over many obstacles. Barricades and brushwood fences, barbed wire obstacles and piles of stones rose up in my path. Craters, chasms and stinking trenches opened up before my feet. But my speed was so dizzying that I flew over peaks and depths and sped along the bright, frozen channel that led straight to your door.

  The bell rings through the house, through the darkness of the winter’s day, and you open the door, the same as before. How happy we are! How we embrace each other!

  But at once I notice how absent-minded you are. You are expecting something completely different; yes, I am right: you listen over my head, which is pressed against your chest. And now I, too, hear footsteps approaching below in the stairwell.

  Then the light of a living flame spreads across your face as you ask: ‘Are they coming here? Are they not close? Are they not familiar footsteps?’

  But I do not reply, and you would not hear what I said. Your arms have already loosened around me, and I have returned on the same road along which, just now, I sped toward you, trembling with anticipation.

  Dayma

  the twenty-second letter

  Yesterday I wished to try, for my morning drink, the Tainaronians’ favourite sweet, foaming dayma or daime, which is drunk through a straw. They like it so much that they drink it at every possible opportunity, cold or hot, and in addition to dayma they have dozens of other names for it. I have heard it said that in large quantities it has curious effects and that some may see strange and even improper things after drinking it.

  For my part, I did not notice any such effects. But everything I see here is strange, even without drinking a drop of dayma.

  I remembered a particularly pleasant little cake shop on the side of a canal where Longhorn took me soon after I arrived in Tainaron for the first time. I also wanted to try those particularly crisp herb pastries, as light as wafers, which smell of smoke and which I believe are not made anywhere else but in that bakery. My desire was so strong that my mouth watered and I had to swallow when the memory of the little pastries spread on to my tongue.

  To my disappointment, I could no longer find the cross-street of the ring boulevard on which the café was located. I thought I was following the correct route; I turned at the same street corner as before, and carried on along the side of the canal, but soon I found myself in quite unknown quarters. There were unfinished buildings and enormous industrial shells from which the sound of turbines and the fumes of combustion engines rose into the air. The people there also looked completely different, poorer and smaller than the Tainaronians who had sat on the terrace of my favourite café. At last I found a glum coffee bar where badly foamed dayma was served in thick handleless cups and where the bread was dense and heavy.

  ‘I should like to have a map of Tainaron,’ I said yesterday to Longhorn. ‘It would be much easier to wander here alone, and you would not always have the bother of being my guide. I could not find a single map in the department store. Could you perhaps find a map somewhere? Would it be possible?’

  ‘Unfortunately it is impossible,’ he answered.

  ‘Why impossible? Have all the maps sold out?’

  ‘That is not why,’ he said. ‘No comprehensive map of Tainaron has ever been made.’

  ‘What? No proper map has been made? But that is very strange,’ I said, dissatisfied and astonished.

  ‘It is not at all strange,’ Longhorn said abruptly. ‘It would be sheer impossibility to draw up such a map, a completely senseless project.’

  ‘Why so?’ I asked, increasingly irritated. ‘To me a kingdom which has no map is not a real kingdom but barbary, chaos, mere confusion.’

  ‘You still know very little about Tainaron,’ he said quietly. ‘We too have our laws, but they are different from yours.’

  I felt a little abashed, but that did not wipe away all my irritability.

  ‘A map cannot be made,’ he continued, ‘because Tainaron is constantly changing.’

  ‘All cities change,’ I said.

  ‘None as fast as Tainaron,’ Longhorn replied. ‘For what Tainaron was yesterday it is no longer today. No one can have a grasp of Tainaron as a whole. Every map would lead its user astray.’

  ‘All cities must have maps, at least of some kind,’ I continued to argue.

  Longhorn sighed and looked at me kindly, but a little wearily.

  ‘Come!’ he said, and took me gently by the arm. ‘Let’s go!’

  ‘Where to?’ I asked.

  ‘We are going to the observation tower,’ Longhorn said. ‘To make you understand.’

  The observation tower was built on the same hill as the funfair. I had not noticed it until now, for the movement of the Ferris wheel had taken up all my attention. We had to climb for an agonisingly long time up the narrow wooden stairs which circled the outer wall of the tower like a creeper. I do not like such high places, and I felt as if the wind were rocking the frail construction. We climbed and climbed. As we circled the steps, the Ferris wheel, too, kept returning before my eyes; its carriages, now empty, shook and swayed, and its movement made my dizzy. We climbed, and I regretted that I had taken up Longhorn’s offer.

  Midway, I said to Longhorn: ‘Now I cannot climb any farther. Let us stay here. We can see enough from here.’

  But Longhorn’s ears were deaf, and he continued his astonishingly agile clambering. At times he seemed to glide upward – but of course he did
have more pairs of legs than I. He did not even glance behind him, and I had to follow him. I went on climbing.

  At last! We were standing on the upper platform, but I had grown dizzy and did not immediately go right up to the rail. My eyes were sore from the wind and sunshine which, up here, seemed blindingly bright. I tried to breathe slowly; I swallowed and fastened my eyes on the fibres of the platform’s planks. I had decided that I would not complain any more; for I suspected that Longhorn now considered me spoilt and bad company and by no means did I wish him to tire of acting as my guide.

  But I could not help hoping that Longhorn would put one of his narrow, long upper limbs around my shoulders. He appeared not to have noticed my uncertain state, but was gazing absorbedly and – so it seemed to me – with eyes moist with pride the panorama that opened up before us. He began to hum a wordless song which I had never heard before, and its monotonous melody and the peaceful wave-forms of the timber fibres restored my balance.

  I gathered my courage and looked downwards. We had been climbing for a long time, but I was still astonished that we were so excessively high up. I shaded my eyes and saw, in the dizzying depths, the plain of Tainaron, patterned with the shadows of frantically scurrying clouds. I also realised that the tower must be a little skew, for the horizon was clearly slanted. Directly below us was the little funfair, today deserted, with its gaudily coloured tents. Even the highest carriages of the Ferris wheel were far below us. Far away glass and steel glittered, bronze and gold glimmered, when a shimmering ray lit up the windows of a skyscraper or the cupolas of churches. This was Tainaron, his city, theirs – never mine.

  But it was an astonishing city! Longhorn’s pride was understandable. I had never understood how enormous Tainaron was. I saw the cone-like areas which I had once visited, only to be dampened by the queen’s tears, I saw the prince’s palace park with its paths and pagodas, and in the east the endless, muddled skeins of the slums.

  We were so high up that from below all that could be heard was the occasional shriek, isolated, a shriller cry than the rest, and mysterious clinking sounds which I had also heard at night and whose origin I had never been able to trace. It sounded as if someone were tapping a glass with a silver spoon in order to make a speech. A little farther up, and everything would have been completely silent.

  ‘Here is everything I have,’ Longhorn said. ‘You, too.’

  The shining belt of Oceanos with its stripes of foam encircled us on all sides. A haze hid the horizon to the south, but to the north a high, silver-glowing cloud formation was visible, so motionless, in contrast to the clouds that slipped over Tainaron, that it looked like a metal sculpture. Its shape was like that of a human torso.

  ‘Is there a storm brewing?’ I asked.

  ‘It is not a storm,’ he said. ‘Worse. It is winter. Although it will be a long time before it reaches us. But when it is here, I pity those who have not already gone to sleep!’

  I already felt cold now, in full sunlight. We looked in silence at the majestic shape of snow and ice. To me it still did not look as if it were changing shape or approaching Tainaron.

  ‘Perhaps it will not come this time, after all,’ I said to Longhorn, half in earnest, and hopeful. ‘Perhaps it will stay up there in the north.’

  ‘What a child it is,’ Longhorn said in an aside, as if there had been a third person with us on the platform. Then he continued, turning to me once more: ‘I did not bring you here only to look at the coming of winter. Do you see?’

  Longhorn gestured toward the northern edge of the city, below the winter, where there swelled a cluster of dwellings of different heights and shapes. It must have been because of my sore eyes that their outlines looked so indefinite. As we looked, it seemed strangely as if some of them were in motion.

  ‘What is happening there?’ I asked.

  ‘Changes,’ he said.

  That was indeed how it looked. Clouds of dust spread on the plain – and in a moment all that could be seen where the crenellations of towers and blocks had meandered were mere ruins. But there had been no sound of any explosion.

  ‘That part of the city no longer exists,’ he said calmly.

  ‘Not an earthquake, surely?’ I asked fearfully, although I could not yet feel any tremors.

  ‘No, they are merely demolishing the former Tainaron,’ Longhorn said.

  Longhorn raised his finger and pointed westward. And there, too, I saw demolition work, destruction, collapse, landslides. But almost at the same time, in place of the former constructions, new forms began to appear, softly curving mall complexes, flights of stairs that still ended in air, solitary spiral towers and colonnades which progressed meanderingly toward the empty shore.

  ‘But . . . ’ I began.

  ‘Shh,’ Longhorn said. ‘Look over there.’

  I looked. There, where a straight boulevard had run a moment ago, narrow paths now wandered. Their network branched over a larger and larger area before my very eyes.

  ‘And this goes on all the time, incessantly,’ he said. ‘Tainaron is not a place, as you perhaps think. It is an event which no one measures. It is no use anyone trying to make maps. It would be a waste of time and effort. Do you understand now?’

  I could not deny that I understood that Tainaron lived in the same way as many of its inhabitants; it too was a creature that was shaped by irresistible forces. Now I also understood that I should never again taste those smoke-scented wafers which I had wanted so much this morning. And yet I understood very little.

  ‘I am thirsty,’ I said to Longhorn, longing once more for the foam of dayma.

  The Dangler

  the twenty-third letter

  I really must say that many of the inhabitants of Tainaron have the most extraordinary habits, at least to the eyes of one who has come from so far away. Quite close to here, in the same block, lives a gentleman, tall and thin, who is in the habit of hanging upside-down from his balcony for a number of hours every day. This strange position does not seem to interest passers-by in the least, but when I passed under him for the first time I was so startled that I immediately thought of running for help. I thought, you see, that there had been an accident and that the man was clinging to the wrought-iron decorations of the balcony with his feet. Longhorn, who was beside me, remarked coolly that he had selected his pose through his own free choice and that I would be wise not to interfere so eagerly in other people’s lives. I admit that I was offended by his remark, but recently I have begun meekly to take his advice.

  I see the man most days, and whenever I walk under his balcony I greet him, even though he never responds. In fact, I think he is either asleep or meditating. In his chosen state he is so limp and floating that he recalls a garment that a washerwoman has hung out to dry. With incomparable calm he suspends his head above the busy street without stirring, even when the fire brigade drives under him, sirens wailing. He always looks the same: a bright, even gaudy, green, so that one can make him out from the broad steps of the bank at the end of the state like a living leaf against a red brick wall . . .

  Does he dream as he hangs there, sometimes suspended from just one limb, but nevertheless apparently completely relaxed? I believe that is exactly how it is. I know from my own experience the difference between the immobility of fear and the immobility of the hunter, but this is neither. I believe he dreams, dreams swiftly, passionately and incessantly, dreams with death-defying intensity without sacrificing even a jot of consciousness to the struggles of everyday waking life. I believe he must have long ago become convinced that all action is unnecessary, or even dangerous.

  There are days when I think that this gentleman is admirable and his way of spending moments of his life most enviable. On such days I, too, would like to concentrate on sweet communion with my private visions as headlong and with the same kind of mental calm as he. But do not imagine that it would be possible. In the evenings, even if I shut my window tightly, turn out my lamp and fill my ears with cotton-woo
l, this city teems before me, still more restless and colourful than in full daylight. Then I should like to get up and got to see whether the green gentleman is still hanging head-first from his balcony. I should like to climb up there myself and position my limbs just like his. Then, with my blood flooding my head, all of Tainaron would begin to dissolve into the mists and I, too, should begin a dream, endless and leaf-green . . .

  But if, in the morning, my nocturnal experiences return to mind, if I have idled through agonising labyrinths, I know that I would not wish to spend my life in the city of dreams. If, on such a morning, I pass under the Dangler’s balcony, I am more inclined to pity him than to admire him.

  Then I know that in my dreams I can never capture the same sun-glow and that the air that I breathe can never, there, flow as freshly in my cells, and I can never see so sharply or so far; and I believe once more that what is true can be seen by everyone, everyone.

  The Guardian of the Oddfellows

  the twenty-fourth letter

  I admire her; I call her the Queen Bee. But Longhorn has another name for her, the name of an already forgotten saint: The Guardian of the Oddfellows. And indeed that is the nature of the Queen Bee: she cares tenderly for those whom many here in Tainaron consider strange and to be avoided: street singers, beggars and ladies of joy, people who are cracked in various ways or lost in their own drug-worlds.

  All sorts of people visit the Queen Bee, both by day and by night. The light is always on in her house and the door is always swinging – to and fro, for it is a double-hinged door of the kind that one sometimes finds in obscure cafés. There is no threshold or latch, and the hubbub and singing from the Queen Bee’s house can be heard distinctly a couple of blocks off.

  There is room for everyone, although her house is not large. No, it is very, very medium in size and as modest in its external appearance as countless other houses outskirts of the city.