Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Sounds of the Reed

  The Rattle

  ‘Father,’ moaned Latona, daughter of Pontanus. ‘You will poison us or blow up the whole house.’

  And she parted the curtains with an impatient gesture, and opened all the windows wide. And the raw and strong breath of the outdoor air, the distant sounds of the Golden Reed and the all-pervasive light of a winter’s day, the colour of skimmed milk, made Pontanus’s already austere face grow pale and his enterprises look more pointless than ever.

  Sometimes, around midday, a strange, coarse rumbling reached the side of the Tabernacle from across the waste heaps. At the beginning I had once or twice stretched out of the window to see what caused it; later, I no longer wished to look.

  I knew that a beggar wandered there, rummaging in the rubbish-heaps, who had some kind of rattle attached to the collar of his coat, a buzzer powered by batteries. An unpleasant cloud of noise surrounded him, like fear, wherever he shuffled.

  ‘Perhaps he has a disease,’ Pontanus said. ‘Perhaps he wants to warn passers-by.’

  Perhaps. I had seen the same spectre before, in the old churchyard. The sand and frost had been as hard as bone beneath my boots. The mossy, uneven flagstones had just been cleaned, the names and pious words engraved on them were visible to everyone once more, but no one stopped to read them.

  Before me swayed the ugly apparition, exuding vapours of meths and urine; under his greasy jacket bare his chest showed. He secreted a noise, the whine of a buzzer, which mixed with the stench and was one with it. He looked as if he had risen from one of the graves beneath him and his sparse hair was sticky chaff, but his face he never showed. His matted head lolled against his chest at an unnatural angle, as if the bones in his neck had been severed.

  Buzzing incessantly, he reeled along the sandy paths that surrounded the flagstones, and an invisible power flown from the north tossed the tow on his head and the branches above it.

  Had the same rattle not buzzed on the escalators of department stores and in queues in banks and government offices, in railway station tunnels and tram carriages, at fun-fair candy-floss stalls, within the white fence of the summer cafe? Its sound was like vengeance for an unremembered crime.

  Rattle, buzzer, clatter away. Lift your head, rattle-carrier!

  Make your face to shine upon us. Who knows when it will be my turn to fix a buzzer to my breast, which still swells, which is made to tremble sometimes by caresses, sometimes by laughter and tears. Rattle, clatter! Guide us, show us what we fear, when we must give way. Do not fall silent, so that we may know where we do not want to go, so that we may point: that way lies evil, that way lies the chasm. If one can only avoid it, the danger is over, and everywhere else the roads of freedom wander.

  But Pontanus closed the window.

  What would he have answered had I asked him then, as I so often wished: tell me, tell me straight, are you absolutely serious? Do you believe in quintessences and the king and queen and that everything is alive? Or can you say still more, do you dare say you know?

  If I had asked at a naked, everyday moment, a moment of the rattle, a moment of skimmed milk, when not a single thread of colour was reflected from the peacock’s tail, would his eyes have avoided mine? Would he have risen from his table and extinguished the Secret Fire and left the room and the Tabernacle without a backward glance?

  But I never dared ask, because I did not want him to bow his heavy head, because I wanted to believe that someone believed, at least one person in this rattle-city.

  The Sound of Humanity

  But the cry of the murderer sounded in our ears the longest of all.

  It reached as far as the courtyard of the Tabernacle – which Pontanus called by so refined a name as cour d’honneur – from the other side of the waste heaps. There, on the northern side of the refuse dump, grew, or rather struggled to grow, a thick spruce wood.

  It was a phantom forest, for the lowest branches of the spruces had shed all their needles, the saplings were mere trunks and the earth so trodden, hard clay, that nothing could germinate there any longer. But the clay brought forth bottle-shards, the earth’s crust flowered with plastic bags bearing red letters.

  Into this wood fled a boy who had killed his mother, raped a child, strangled a girl. His tracks smelled like toxic waste; dogs and motor-bikes growled at his heels. Barking and cries, the explosions of accelerating engines tore the ears of every Gold-Washer.

  At last the boy had arrived. A steep cliff face cut off his escape, patrols encircled his panic.

  Then from the murderer’s throat there burst forth a whimper, there escaped a howl; the echo of his cry boomed from the cliff: ‘Mother! Where is my mother? Mother will defend me.’ And like an echo he was answered by the Kinswoman’s weeping from the courtyard of the Tabernacle.

  The Cougher

  I did not see with my own eyes the boy who shouted for the mother he had murdered. He remained only a voice, like the Cougher, who lived in the City of the Golden Reed, on its public transport system.

  How often I, too, used it to travel round this stony promontory, which protrudes into the sea like a forlorn finger testing the coldness of the water.

  Often, when I stepped inside, all the seats were already taken and on the journey as many as one and a half times the permitted number of passengers crammed themselves in.

  The proximity of strange bodies and strange smells was agonising enough, but in addition hands often appeared to torment me.

  The hands appeared from the midst of the crush and lived a life of their own, feeling, touching, even slipping inside your clothes if your position happened to be suitable. They did not belong personally to anyone; they just materialised from the rustling coats and the static electricity of man-made fabrics.

  On my last journey, I thought I felt again such a fumbling, greedy touch: I looked behind me, but saw only unstirring profiles and eyes that stared inward. And then the hatred in the conductor’s voice, a real, living disgust, pushed me, too, forward, as she raged, in all the city’s official languages: ‘Move right down inside the car!’

  Raincoats hissed, and there was an echoless cough. I pricked up my ears, was immediately on my guard: was the Cougher here?

  Yes, he was here, but for a long time I was the only one who knew it. For all that had happened was something completely ordinary: someone had cleared his throat. He coughed once more, and then again, and again. But nothing opened, and the disturbance continued.

  Such a thing can happen to anyone, of course. But this was only a foreword, a prelude.

  For as everyone was sinking back into a daze of indifference, we were shaken by the first real outburst of coughing.

  Where did it come from? From what blackened region, abandoned by angels? I heard the phlegm moving back and forth in the windpipe, wheezing and bubbling. I heard how it rose from soft, already decaying tissue, and everyone remembered, with a start, the secrets of their own guts.

  Every fit of coughing hit its mark. There was nothing behind which to take shelter. The seminal fluid of a mortal illness was being sprayed on to us. And as series of explosions followed another, I heard behind them a tightening silence. Hands became fists, but their helplessness was unfathomable. I did not dare push my fingers into my ears, and how would it have helped: this cough was not heard with the ears, but with every muscle and nerve-fibre.

  I know: the Cougher does not cough because he cannot help it, but because he wants to cough. He wants to blaspheme and dishonour his fellow-travellers. He wants to steal from us the air that we must breathe, this small, fusty, closed air-space. He wants to fill it with the tiny spores of his own ruin. And like a strange hand his cough gropes for a life that I believed to be my own.

  Pity him? Who could demand that? Whoever has heard the Cougher even once cannot be so sanctimonious.

  His cough has stormed his frothing slobber over my head: ‘Since I must, so must you, too . . . Where I am, there shall you be!’

 
I have heard that cough, I have heard how it insults everything that, to me, means love and life and immortality. No, I do not pity him, for whoever coughs like that is not a real person. For those explosions would have torn him to shreds if he were an ordinary citizen. For he would long ago have drowned and suffocated in the Niagara of his own poison.

  But he goes on, he goes on, for he is not a human being, but an incarnate plague, he is the Cough itself.

  My God! In the bus, an unpleasant thought crossed my mind: what if he knows something about me, something I cannot remember, something so shameful that the accusation of his cough is completely justified? Was he, then, my accuser and my judge, and was my punishment the hollowness of his cough?

  I stood in the crush at the front of the bus and, past a fur coat smelling of mothballs, I saw the driver crouched over his steering wheel. He was suffering, I could see it from his neck, his whitened knuckles. We were still on the bridge, the journey was continuing and the final stop loomed like a promised land on the far side of towers, squares, crossroads. It was a miracle, it was a mercy, that our bus, which the Cougher’s fits of rage shook like a bottle, did not turn, shuddering, into the wrong lane and dash across the parapet of the bridge into the quiet of the canal, where even the cougher would finally have been silenced.

  Do you know what I wanted to do then? I wanted to push my way through the fur coats and the winter raincoats, bend over the driver and grab the dashboard. It was full of levers and switches and signal lights, and I would have tried all of them, one after another. For I felt, for a moment I was sure, that there must be a button which I could press to end this disturbance, which would have silenced the cougher’s drumfire.

  There must be such a button there, there must be one somewhere, since there are levers at whose touch cities dissolve into emptiness and crowds puff into dust and whirlwinds of ash, spin and disperse like smoke into the silence of the night . . .

  The Gong

  It’s true, isn’t it, that there are sounds that can empty, repel and neutralise other sounds? Such was the sound of the gong, it was as pure as the gold of Ophir. I turn the gong against people’s talk, quarrels and rattling, against the cough and the howling of the murderer.

  There was a time when I heard it again and again during the afternoon rush-hour, in the tumult of buying and selling, when people had heavy loads to carry and the sunset made the eyes of those who were hurrying home seem bloodshot. Boi-oing!

  The whole street was streaming with faces, collars and hats, hair, scarves and overcoats, and they slipped forward like sails, carried by their own emptiness. Everyone else was anxious, everyone else was far from home, but he who came toward me was at home with every step, his destination was the moment of striking when brass flowered.

  There he was, as anonymous as all the shadows of the street, slipping past me with his shaven head, around him the gold-brown wind of his cloak, lingering in his smile. His stick, too, I remember; there was a round knob at the top and it struck precisely, struck unhesitatingly like the hammer of fate and stopped at once, struck and drew away into the still quivering air, and in the iridescent colours of the windows flashed the brass of the gong.

  What do you think, did he go round the entire city sounding out in the same way, so that not a single note arrived too early or too late, and so that he never sprained his bare ankles, which were encircled by the cords of a pair of sandals, even on the streets that were cobbled?

  His blows were a thread which bound the whole city together, as if someone were to bend over and pick up from the paving-stones everything that had been forgotten, so that nothing should remain unconnected and alone any longer.

  And if you, too, heard it, do you not regret that you did not do as you wished: that you did not dance after him, clapping your hands, clip and clap, whenever his stick boomed on the gleaming convex surface?

  But although you only turned to look after him, bag in hand, did you not, in reality, go after him none the less, and did not someone else, and someone else again, and did we not together celebrate the fact that the city was, for once, single and united, whole, our own, and that it lived with all of us, without ever tiring throughout the moments of the day?

  The Silence of the Meadow

  The sun shone into the room, distant and low. It was the oblique unglowing gaze of a winter’s day.

  A grey squirrel was leaping about in the pine-tree beyond the window, amusing the Child of the Tabernacle. The others stayed inside and felt the cold, because the inhabitants of the Tabernacle felt the cold every winter. Its designers had forgotten the fourth season.

  The tuatara had not been seen for some time. The ancient lizard was sleeping soundly in its den of a cardboard box in an empty room. All three eyes were closed, and one of the Gold-Washers had wrapped it in some red wool so that it would not feel the cold as they themselves did.

  Pontanus came from his room to the stove, rubbing his hands.

  ’Things are going well,’ said Pontanus. ‘They’re going very well. In a day or two I shall have reached the black stage.’

  ‘Right,’ said the Gold-Washer who was always present and always speaking, both aloud and silently.

  ‘That’s what he said in the spring,’ said the Gold-Washer who loved book-lice. ‘That’s what he’ll say next year.’

  ‘Maybe he will,’ said the first Gold-Washer. ‘But the main thing is that he is making progress.’

  We all fell silent, for the rumbling had begun again.

  We heard it many times a day, for the Tabernacle lay under a busy flight-path. Above our heads people rushed eastward and westward, reading currency exchange rates and eating soft-boiled eggs, if it was morning. Sometimes the booming bellies of the aeroplanes seemed to touch the wings of the Tabernacle itself, as if to entice it, too, into flight. But the Tabernacle did not rise into the air, no, it just rattled and shook. As long as the building quaked, we could not speak, only wait.

  And remember the summer’s day when a bomb concealed in the hold had torn a hole in the side of such an aeroplane. We heard the explosion and all of us ran outside, everyone but the Kinswoman and the Gold-Washer who just sat and talked.

  We saw the aeroplane tilt and lose altitude, but it carried on, it disappeared from view. Later we heard that it had landed at the airport of the Golden Reed exactly on schedule, even though there was a yawning rent in its body. But through the glare against which we shielded our eyes hurtled three or four packages. They were passengers who had been sucked out of the opening in the body and into the sunshine. It was the sun of a summer’s day, but up there it was still terribly cold.

  The noise of those masses of air! We saw them being thrown into the void, bound to their chairs. Quite certainly they had in their laps today’s newspaper and a film-wrapped breakfast. Spinning, soundless as autumn leaves but much faster, they were torn away from their connection with humanity, from the unreal life they had prepared for themselves to the inhuman reality of death.

  The top-hatted Gold-Washer spoke or pretended to speak to Latona, who was crouching by the fireplace in the stunning rumble. His mouth was moving, even his ears were moving, but there was no sound.

  A summer pasture was dimly visible in the winter of the Tabernacle, the flowering side of a valley behind the refuse-hillocks. One of the aeroplane-seats had landed there, in the silence of the meadow, in the silence that returns after the worst has happened, the rumbling and the explosions and the tearing steel.

  The passenger was still sitting, bound by his belt, but he was broken like a flower and the gaze of his eyes was detached, absent. In their emptiness, those unblinking eyes were like the sky; but they had no other perspective but its pure, glimmering blindness.

  And the aeroplane had gone. They recovered their stolen voices, even the buzzing of a fly. It bounced against the windows of the Tabernacle, a little winter fly. For it could not know that the light toward which it struggled and strained was the brightness of snow and death.

&nb
sp; Room for the Soul

  Sometimes I spent the night in the Tabernacle. Every night there was different, like every day in the Tabernacle. Sometimes I drank the mother’s milk of dreams, rushing headlong from one image to another, farther and farther away from the house of the Gold-Washers and the book-lice.

  But if I could not sleep, I could hear from below the squeaking of the bowed harp or the tinkling of the glass harmonica and, from time to time, strange cracks, as if the lash of a whip were striking thin skin.

  On such nights, the solitude of the Gold-Washers filled the air of the Tabernacle with heavy secrets. I lay waiting for something, the splitting of the heart of night, the tearing of the curtain of the temple, the angel’s trumpet. But nothing happened. The Tabernacle swam steadily, ploughing deep through the timeless night.

  But around the time of the winter solstice, in the deep of the Tabernacle’s night, I awoke to a hoarse bellowing. It was the kind of shout that cannot be suppressed, when torturing-irons break the leg-bone.

  I put on my clothes, the door flew open as if of its own volition, and I fell down the stairs into the great common room. All the Gold-Washers were already there, but no one noticed my arrival. In their midst, the object of their undivided attention, swayed a narrow, dark tower. It was the old Gold-Washer, whom I had never before seen taking a single step. I had not guessed he would be so tall.

  He was just standing, his shoes rooted to the ground, but swaying above like a tree on a hill. He stood and shouted: ‘One must also leave room for the soul! Room for the soul!’ It was an entirely new and detached sentence. I wondered whether it was connected in any way with his long, lifelong sentence, which he had still been building the day before. Perhaps he had now reached the end of it. Perhaps a third sentence would follow soon.

  Around the Gold-Washers I could see, at least, the Executioner and Babel and the Customs Man and the Gold-Washer who always wore a hat. But now he had no hat at all, so that he looked naked and even a little pitiable.