Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  But sometimes, although the house is full of people, it is very quiet, and then the neighbours say that the Guardian of the Oddfellows is holding a Great Day of Remembrance once again.

  ‘Whose memory are they celebrating?’ I asked Longhorn, and it became clear that it was not a question of any particular dead person. The matter is as follows: the Queen Bee gathers memories; she lives off memories, and it is perhaps only on account of memories that she receives so many people of so many different kinds. But she is not satisfied with any old memory; no, she can use only happy, sweet memories that sparkle with happiness, and if anyone were to try to offer her something cold and gloomy I think she would drive them mercilessly from her house.

  Longhorn said that everyone who needs it receives both a meal and a bed for the night at the Queen Bee’s house, but on certain days of the month everyone must bring her at least one happy memory in payment. That is the rent she demands, and there is no haggling.

  On that day the Queen Bee spreads a white cloth on the table and lights dozens of candles so that it looks as if Christmas has come. But the table is not set, for on the Great Day of Remembrance no food is offered, only memories.

  ‘But they really do satisfy your appetite,’ says the Queen Bee, and all her drunks and madmen and beggars agree, as they must in order to be able next day to partake of a proper meal.

  ‘Can I, too, participate in the Great Day of Remembrance some time?’ I asked Longhorn.

  ‘Everyone can,’ he said, ‘but not everyone wants to. And remember to take a really happy memory with you.’

  ‘Oh, I have plenty of them,’ I said light-heartedly, and when the next Great Day of Remembrance dawned I was sitting in the Queen Bee’s house side by side with her Oddfellows.

  I had already heard a few things about my table companions, so I sat a fair distance away from the Pickpocket (as if I had something valuable with me!) and even farther (although I felt ashamed of myself) from a black and spotted creature whom all the people of Tainaron dreaded, and who was called the Disease Carrier. But as I glanced around me, the Queen Bee’s Oddfellows did not look to me any stranger than the people of Tainaron in general, and it was my turn to feel embarrassed when I realised what curious and even suspicious glances were being directed at my own person. I, too, was now one of the Oddfellows, perhaps the most obvious of the entire company in my foreignness. I, who have always believed I can merge into almost any crowd, who have always believed I can examine others while myself staying in the background, was now experiencing what it was like to be the object of the Tainaronians’ attention.

  But the Queen Bee was sitting opposite me and, once I had recovered from the confusion, I could at least gaze at her as much as I liked, her motherly form and her tight, tiger-striped dress, and her tousled, dark face, lit by the hazy glow of her seeing tubes.

  ‘Let us begin!’ shouted the Queen Bee in her resonant bass, which brought to mind the buzzing of a sunny meadow. ‘Psammotettix, you are the first.’

  I turned and saw that with this handsomely reverberant name she was addressing a greying, modest and clumsy-looking gentleman who had, since the beginning of the session, been mumbling incessantly to himself. I suppose he was repeating the memory he had chosen so that he would not forget it at the decisive moment.

  With extraordinary speed, Psammotettix began a long story of which I understood scarcely a word, for it was interrupted – perhaps for effect – by a remarkable smacking and croaking noise which, at points of emphasis – so I supposed – became a rough croaking. The few words I could understand, because Psammotettix repeated them a number of times, were ‘foam’ and ‘bubble’; but that was all.

  On the other hand, the other participants in the Remembrance Festival followed Psammotettix’s performance with interest, and when it was over they showed their approval in an extraordinarily wide range of ways: by clicking the chitin plates of their backs together, drumming, glowing, changing their colour or clapping their limbs together.

  The Queen Bee raised a little hammer or club which gleamed gold in the candlelight, knocked it on the table and said: ‘Accepted!’, at the same time turning toward the Pickpocket, motioning him to start with a gesture of her hand.

  ‘Once I went abroad,’ the Pickpocket began hurriedly in a small voice, obviously nervous. The other Oddfellows interrupted him, howling:

  ‘Not true! Not true!’

  Then the hammer fell again, the others fell silent, and the Pickpocket began: ‘Once in a foreign country, in a big city, my job took me to a certain department store. It was the eve of a great festival, and the people were swarming about, announcements and music flooded from the loudspeakers and the shoppers’ attention was taken up with the brilliant displays and the shouts of the product demonstrators. The conditions were perfect, one could say, and for that reason that day was perhaps the most productive of my entire career.’

  At this point the Pickpocket paused; grumbling began to be heard around the table and I saw the Queen Bee purse her lips.

  ‘I cannot accept this,’ she was beginning, but the Pickpocket shouted hurriedly, ‘I have not finished, that is not all. You see, just as the department store was closing and I was already leaving with my swag, a fine lady swept past me with a bag on her shoulder, decorated with pearls. My practised eye noticed immediately that its silver lock only seemed to be closed and in a second I had caught up with the lady. I did this (and he waved a sharp nail in the air), the bag opened soundlessly, and in my own pocket there was – so I thought – a fine wad of the country’s currency. But (and the Pickpocket raised a limp, demanding silence, for the guests had begun to babble once more) what did I see when I examined my trophy more closely? The notes were merely thin piles of paper, quite empty all except one. On it was written, on it was written . . . ’

  And here the Pickpocket’s voice fell and he began to writhe on his chair, looking beseechingly at the Queen Bee.

  ‘Carry on,’ she said, nodding approvingly, but this did not seem to calm the Pickpocket.

  ‘No, I can’t, not with all these people listening,’ he managed to mutter, gesturing at the other guests.

  ‘He has forgotten his memory!’ came a shout, and another: ‘That’s not a happy memory at all!’

  ‘Come here,’ ordered the Queen Bee. ‘Whisper it in my ear. I shall consider the matter.’

  And the Pickpocket went up to the Queen Bee and whispered a couple of words into her ear.

  I tried to prick up my ears, but I was far too far away, and I regretted my choice of place, for I desperately wanted to know what could have been written on the paper that could turn the Pickpocket’s disappointment into a happy memory.

  ‘Accepted!’ acceded the Queen Bee, and to my horror she turned to look at me, and the lenses of her seeing tubes glittered with strange colours.

  Then something unexpected happened to me: my past disappeared. It sank among millions of other pasts, so that I could no longer distinguish a single one of my own memories, happy or sad, from among the swarm of countless memories.

  It was as if walls and fences had fallen, as if dams – very necessary – had burst, and in the floodwater there floated long-forgotten fragments of conversations that I had happened to overhear, remarks from novels and films and a vortex of human faces and destinies which sped past me like bubbles in a surging wake.

  Through it I could, however, see the unwavering face of the Queen Bee, which was still waiting in front of me, majestic and demanding, a trace of dissatisfaction already apparent in her expression. Desperately I grabbed one of the memories that spun around me and, extraordinarily enough, I knew its origin: it was a survey from a weekly magazine whose readers were asked to remember star moments from their lives. Praying mentally that it would be good enough for the Queen Bee and that my deception would not be noticed, I began:

  ‘This happened ten years ago. My lover was massaging my face. Then, suddenly, I was seized by a sensation of lightness. Before my eyes a door
opened, and behind it was a lighted room. Such a light room I have never seen, before or since. I went into the room. I have never felt as good as I did then.’

  That was all. But as I set the sentences of the little interview one after another, from memory, which now worked with the accuracy of a photograph, I realised that it was no deception. What had happened had happened, all of it, to me, and I remembered the smell of my lover’s fingers and the fact that it had been the first cool, high day after a long summer.

  And, dumbfounded by the superabundance of my life, I fell silent, and waited for the rap of the golden gavel.

  ‘Accepted,’ the bass of the Queen Bee rang out, and I saw a veiled smile spread over her face as if something inexpressibly sweet had just dripped on to her palate. In such a way my memory, too, although stolen, was added to her collection, to the great store of honey which was the basis of her economy, to the honeycombs from which she drew her happiness and her hospitality and which no thief would ever empty.

  The Cloaked Moth

  the twenty-fifth letter

  Do you remember the entomologist who thought he saw a cloaked moth on the ground? He was delighted, and picked it up, only to realise that it was no more than a piece of rotten wood. Then, of course, he threw it away in disappointment.

  I wonder why – already preparing to leave – he nevertheless crouched to seek once more the piece of branch he had thrown away. But how diligently and closely he had to examine it before he saw: it was a cloaked moth after all.

  Tonight the earth carries the city steadily on its shoulders. Even the heavens are motionless, and the buildings have long roots. I confess: I have countless times been forced to return and fetch home what I have abandoned and thrown away as worthless. Other colours glimmer from beneath the camouflage coat, and who knows which of them is right.

  When I open the curtain, I see a half-darkened street, and nothing is happening there, but in the emptiness which is not now fractured by steps the restlessness of the first step and the exhaustion of the last combine.

  Tonight I see in the half-light as if it were broad daylight; I see so far and so clearly that I can make you out too, cloaked moth.

  The Gate of Evening

  the twenty-sixth letter

  Yesterday Longhorn and I visited the city museum. I wandered rather absent-mindedly through the echoing halls and corridors, which were full of the utensils of times gone by, tools, clothes and furniture. A flood of dates and names of kings flowed from Longhorn’s mouth – his memory is astonishing – but hardly a detail lodged itself in my memory, although it would have been an opportunity to learn a great deal about Tainaron’s past.

  Weary, I happened to stop in front of a glass case where only one object was on display: a cap of some kind. It was deep black, but magnificently embroidered with stars, moons and suns. Gold and silver thread glittered as if the head-dress had just been sewn, but from the label fixed to the case I read that it was many hundreds of years old. In the centre of the cap – or perhaps it was a calotte – was a small hole.

  ‘What kind of cap is that and why is there a hole in it?’ I asked Longhorn, finally interested in what I saw.

  ‘It is called the Gate of Evening,’ Longhorn answered, delighted at the interest I showed, and immediately eager to give me all his information. ‘In the old days, when Tainaronians grew old and frail and it was time for them to depart, one of their heirs brought them a cap like that. The dying person put it on their head, and it eased their last moments.’

  ‘How on earth?’ I asked.

  ‘Because the hole is a gate, and it showed them the direction in which they were to go and so they did not stray from the right road.’

  In the next room, too, there was something that aroused my interest: a row of masks. They were not demonic masks of the kind one often sees in folk museums; they were not grimacing or cruelly decorated or spattered with blood. I saw quite ordinary faces of the citizens of Tainaron staring peacefully out of point or compound eyes, antennae gently outstretched. One could see hundreds of such faces as one walked in the city; and that was what was most extraordinary about the masks.

  ‘What are these used for?’ I asked Longhorn.

  ‘Ah,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There was a time when a peculiar festival was held in Tainaron at the time of the autumn equinox, the day when day and night are equally long. These festivals gave employment to an entire profession: mask-makers. For the revellers had three kinds of mask: the first represented their faces as they were when they were quite young, the second showed their faces as they were at the midpoint of life, and the third mask as they would be when they were very old. They used the first mask in the morning, the second at midday and the third from evening to midnight.

  ‘So at some time of the day their mask was like their own face?’ I understood. The custom seemed very strange to me.

  ‘Yes, it was the day of the equinox,’ Longhorn said. ‘It spanned a whole life.’

  ‘And when were the masks taken off?’ I asked.

  ‘The masks were taken off at midnight,’ he replied. ‘They had fasted all day, but then they were allowed to eat and drink. There was everything in profusion, and beggars, too, were permitted to come to any table they wished.’

  It was late at night by the time I returned from the city, and the vault of the sky was as black as the calotte which I had admired during the day. But behind the reflections of the city I could sense the promises of other lights, perhaps as deceptive as they. Here, too, their distance is as flabbergasting and strange as on the harbour pier where once, pierced by them, we lingered.

  But I shall need no other gate of evening.

  The Umbellifers

  the twenty-seventh letter

  We grow cold and look inward, for the frost has breathed on us and the city is making ready for a long hibernation. The season is over and the city people withdraw to their homes, doors are locked, conversation decreases. In the streets there are fewer and fewer people and vehicles, and all of them have particular destinations.

  In many shop windows I have already seen a careless scribbled notice announcing that the shop will next open in the spring. Only one in three or four street lamps are lighted in the evenings, and later – so I have been told – only squares and crossroads will be lit.

  Tourists are scarcely to be seen any longer. Who would be amused, after all, by touring a cold, dark city?

  It is sad, sad. I think the lights of Tainaron should shine now that the sun is seen only seldom, more plentiful and colourful than before, but instead the city becomes dimmer and more impoverished.

  Life stops in a thin crust of ice like frozen water and in the eyes of the few passers-by there is only the glimmer of the need for well-earned rest, but I am restless and wish to live. I wish to come and go, I wish to do something with these hands I see before me on the table so pale and helpless; I wish to debate important questions and eat and clink glasses.

  Too late! Longhorn, if I mention my wishes to him, merely shakes his head and reassures me: ‘In the spring! When the winter has gone.’

  And I see, of course I see exhaustion in his black jewel-eyes, I see that he himself would already prefer to withdraw to his home and stays on his feet only because I am here and in a way his guest. Always, before I meet him, I intend to say: ‘Go, do go, you do not have to stay awake for my sake; I shall manage very well here.’ But the words stick in my throat, for I know I shall be lost when he is gone.

  And one cannot even see the fireflies here any longer; they have completely disappeared from the streets, and that, more than anything else, shows what hard times await us. Even the house of the Queen Bee looks bolted, and I cannot imagine where all the Oddfellows have scattered.

  But today when I went past the house’s battened-down shutters, I saw a little light coming out of one of the cracks. I got up on tiptoe and peered inside, but I did not see the Queen Bee. But the empty room was filled with a warm, rosy glow whose source is in t
he honeycombs of memory.

  Perhaps its warmth will suffice for the Queen Bee, however long and hard the winter. The Dangler’s balcony, too, is empty, and the street below it, one of Tainaron’s busiest thoroughfares, cuts through the city, empty and clean. Just occasionally a hawkmoth or two rushes past me in its late refitting. Elsewhere it is quiet, but in my head clatter the melancholy words: chippings and clay! Chippings and clay!

  The spring tide is over, and Oceanos is murmuring its winter story. It is unlikely that I shall ever again come to gaze longingly over its swelling waters.

  If now it were to happen that a letter were to drop on to my doormat, I know what it would say. You would write: ‘Why do you not go away?’

  I can hear you say it, rather coldly and a little didactically, as if you were offering me something on a plate, but looking away at the same time. And I admit that I have heard those words before; I have asked myself the same question. And perhaps, if someone were to say the word, I would go. I taste the word in my mouth; how fresh and pure it tastes.

  I had my reasons for coming to Tainaron; I am sure they were important reasons, but I have nevertheless forgotten what they were.

  ‘Come!’ What if I were to say that to you? It would be in vain, quite in vain, for all I could show you would be the wintry stalks of the umbellifers in the meadow at the Botanical Gardens.

  Upright like them, I remain in this land of sleepers.

  Date as Postmark

  the twenty-eighth letter

  Today I opened the door, and before me rose the Rhinoceros Beetle, as gloomy and simple as a mountain. He is a friend of Longhorn, but I have only met him in passing before.

  ‘Come inside,’ I asked, but he went on standing on the spot, swaying, and I could not fathom what he wanted.

  ‘Have you seen Longhorn recently?’ I asked at length, for I had not seen Longhorn for many days.