Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Håkan yawned and wrote and yawned again: ‘It is worth weighing up very carefully when a quotation really does open up one’s own text, when it is just an extra additive or a proof of learning. A richly nuanced collection, but one that still needs adjustment.’

  Håkan found himself reading mottoes that, in recent years, were increasingly taken from Foucault or Baudrillard, or even Lacan. There were texts that swarmed with references to Baudelaire, Lorca, Dostoevsky, the pre-Raphaelites and pre-Cretan mythology.

  Some cultivated Dante with all their might, others Montesquieu. But they never remembered the latter’s words: ‘It seems to be a wise provision of nature that the follies of men should be short-lived; but books interfere and immortalise them. A fool, not content with having bored all those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come . . . he wishes posterity to be informed of his existence, and he would have it remember for ever that he was fool.’

  Many wrote 500 or 750 pages about their miserable lives, which even they loathed. But they wanted above all to write a novel, not an autobiography, and so they catalogued the events of their days in the third person. One began with spring 1995, another from December 1921. The main character was without exception noble, upright, faithful, intelligent and humorous, but he was always and everywhere surrounded by cheats, slanderers and plotters. His decency was shamelessly exploited, greedy and base characters schemed for their own benefit, violent, fraudulent and twisted people swarmed around him.

  Håkan wrote: ‘The reader is forced to wonder whether such minute documentation deserves archiving and would be more suited to the direct memoir, without any attempt at fiction.’

  A red plastic Christmas star had been lit in the window opposite. Håkan fetched a cup of camomile tea which he drank to soothe his stomach, and a tuna sandwich.

  But how could one even hope, Håkan thought, that amateurs would write well when professional reporters in relatively decent newspapers could present interviewees with questions like, ‘Some places to chill out in’, or ‘I hear you dig neat cars like crazy?’ And when a reporter meant to say, ‘You have apparently traveled a great deal,’ what he wrote was, ‘Your energy field has moved round the world a lot.’

  Håkan thought, as so often before, that since the 19th century no one – with a couple of exceptions – had written literature any longer. The development of the novel had already anticipated the decay of prose. But while readable sentences had still been written in the thrillers of the 1930s, now they were hardly ever encountered even in so-called literature. Indeed, Håkan preferred reading Rex Stout to contemporary prose. Today, authors wrote in an impoverished way, as if all their readers were idiots: truisms, platitudes, sensationalist confessions which nevertheless embroidered the narrator’s motives, short sentences in which one could wade as if in a stubble field without finding the first seed of thought. Such books should not, in Håkan’s opinion, be written, published or read.

  In the case of poetry, there was more of it to be found in the weather forecast, business news and stock exchange prices than in most of the collections Håkan read. The former had more truth about them, and poetry was precisely what was true.

  Håkan remembered the portrait of a certain Miss Lysbet van Duvenvoorden, a woman who lived in the fifteenth century. She held in her hand a slip of paper on which was written: ‘It makes me sad that one must hope for so long. Who is he who keeps his heart completely open?’

  He remembered the words of Charles d’Orléans: ‘I am he whose heart is clothed in black.’

  On Håkan’s desk a translation of the Persian Letters awaited him, but now he could not read any more; instead, he picked up the television remote control. A stage show was in progress on channel three. Men whose wives had left them, and wives whose husbands had left them, were telling the presenter about their unhappy marriages. Many wept bitterly. Then it was the turn of the cheats, those who had sinned.

  No need for a confessional any more, Håkan thought. The studio is a church, the media are the confessors, the public is God. The announcements of the Holy Spirit are heard during the advertisement breaks. What you say on television you say to God himself.

  Who would write, any longer, ‘O how healthy, how pleasant and sweet it is to sit alone and be silent and speak with God’.

  Håkan ate his tuna sandwich and listened to the confessions. Whenever those wretches had told their life stories – or the story they believed to be the story of their life – the audience applauded. One divorced woman had with her a remote control. The presenter asked why she had a remote control and the woman said that she always carried it with her. It was, to her, a symbol of the control of life that she had lost.

  At the end of the program, a woman psychiatrist leaped on to the stage, elegantly coiffed, wearing a violet blazer and a black mini-skirt. She glowed with vitality and belief in life. She hugged them all immediately, the cheats, the cheated, the disappointed. Here was the media Jesus Christ, who redeemed everything without sacrificing anything.

  Håkan, who had never been married, undressed, leaving only his vest on. He was used to sleeping like this, ever since his childhood.

  He turned out the light and, in the dark of night, remembered his cowardly reports, his cold heart and his hatred of people. He thought: If the human race ever dies out, it will choke on its own words. Wrong and unnecessary words, unclean and insincere words. God forgive me, forget that I too have added to them.

  Håkan turned on to his back and saw on the ceiling the faint glow of the Christmas star. Staring at it, he fell, as do the righteous, into the silence of his own heart, where poetry and prayer lived.

  Light as a Stone

  After the rain, many puddles appeared in the backyard, for the area had remained unlevelled and untidied after building. Piles of gravel and holes in the ground, pieces of brick, crooked nails and lengths of two-by-four were always in evidence. The builder had gone bankrupt, and no one had taken the rubbish from the building-site to the tip. The parents complained that one day one of the children on the block would fall into the pit and break a leg or lose their life.

  Now it had rained all night. An enormous cold puddle had appeared in the yard, almost a lake. Håkan sat, his head inclined toward his left shoulder, and gazed at it, entranced. Hanna hoped he would continue for a long time. A trickle of spit ran down Håkan’s thin cheek on to the neck of the new, blue sweatshirt he had got for his birthday. Perhaps Hanna could have half an hour’s peace.

  Hanna took Håkan out a couple of times a week. She did not enjoy it, but she hardly ever refused the job.

  Håkan could not go out by himself, although he had just turned twelve. His mother dressed him in the morning and then she and Hanna lifted him into his wheelchair. His school helper came to fetch Håkan on school days in the invalid taxi and brought him home in the afternoon. But on weekends Håkan sat in his wheelchair all day and liked to look out the window or listen to the radio. He could not read, and television made him restless. Certain advertisements, particularly washing powder advertisements, sometimes made him almost frantic.

  When Håkan got excited, the whole of his upper body turned anticlockwise in a severe cramp. It looked as if some malicious demon had grabbed him and twisted him, like a human screw. His head turned into an almost incredible position – like a doll whose face is on the back of the head. Hanna hated seeing it.

  Often Håkan got excited at the dinner table, for he did not really like to eat anything but rice cakes and raisins. Mealtimes were a torture for Hanna; she could not stand hearing the strain in her mother’s voice and Håkan’s bellowing. Often she ate so fast that she had a stomach-ache afterwards, just to get out of the kitchen and out of the house.

  Håkan’s favourite radio program was the shipping forecast. His mother had recorded it for him against his restless moments. It always helped him relax, his head sank against the chair-back and his eyes began to follow something that was happening on the ceiling.


  His grandmother’s presence also calmed Håkan. Hanna liked it too when grandmother took Håkan in her lap and sang to her as if to a little baby:

  In my arms I rock the spark

  in my lap I tend the fire,

  shelter this small human flame,

  comfort you, God’s little child

  Håkan could speak a little, but only mother and grandmother and Hanna understood what he said, for it was fragmentary, muttered and stammering. Seldom did he manage to utter a complete sentence.

  Håkan had some special pleasures that no one else appreciated. Sometimes he stared at a particular object – a spoon or a comb or a pattern in the carpet – for minutes on end, as if they had some secret message for him.

  In the evening, a little before he went to sleep, Håkan’s face became peaceful. All the involuntary movements ceased. He did not grimace or twist his head. Then their mother said that Håkan looked so wise – that his eyes were full of knowledge.

  ‘But Håkan does not know very much, really,’ Hanna said. ‘He doesn’t even go to proper school.’

  ‘It’s knowledge you can’t learn in any school,’ her mother said. ‘It is knowledge which is on the other side of experience and book-learning. It is divine, pure, original knowledge.’

  ‘Where could Håkan have got it?’ Hanna asked, a little jealously, but her mother did not reply.

  And then there were the puddles. Håkan loved to look at puddles, perhaps because in fine weather they were like mirrors.

  Today, before the water had evaporated or soaked into the ground, Hanna had pushed Håkan into the yard, to the edge of a puddle, and sat him in a position from where he could see the water with as little difficulty as possible.

  ‘What’s he looking at?’ Lotte asked from the swing.

  Lotte’s father had built the swing himself, and set it up in the yard, because the residents’ association had not provided any toys. When Lotte was in a bad mood she said that Hanna was never allowed to use it.

  ‘How would I know, I suppose he sees something,’ Hanna said irritably.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to stare into a muddy puddle for hours on end,’ Lotte said.

  ‘Each to his own,’ Hanna said, vexed.

  Hanna, too, gazed into the puddle. It did not look like a muddy puddle. After the cold September night, the sky had cleared and deepened into an infinity above the towers of the new housing estate. Even the puddle looked blue and clean, if you looked at it from a distance like this. Hanna sort of understood Håkan. But through the blue, if you went closer, you could also see the gravel and the rubbish.

  ‘Let’s play,’ said Lotte, stopping suddenly. She jumped so hard that the swing seat spun and rattled against the bars.

  Lotte and Hanna began to play pitch-and-toss. Håkan suddenly became restless and began to jabber. His right hand gesticulated furiously.

  ‘What’s wrong with him now?’ Lotte asked.

  Hanna grabbed Håkan’s hand and tried to calm him. Håkan’s hand did not remain in her grasp, but pulled free. His heavy head drummed on his left shoulder and his feet hammered the wheelchair’s footplate. His eyes had rolled back, and his hand waved toward the puddle.

  ‘What is it, Håkan?’ Hanna asked. ‘What is there?’

  ‘Swimswim,’ Håkan said.

  ‘What’s swimming?’

  Hanna, too, glanced at the water. Something really was swimming or sliding at the bottom of the puddle. An empty space opened up in her insides. A stone was moving slowly deep in the shadows of the puddle, a large, rough lump. Deep, though? How could the puddle be deep enough for such a large stone to be able to move inside it?

  Hanna understood, raised her head and looked upward. She was just in time to see a dark boulder, almost the size of a car, disappear from view behind the roof of a new office building. It was like the erratic boulder at the city beach where they sometimes went. Hanna climbed up on it each summer and jumped off it on to the soft sand, a little farther each summer.

  ‘Did you see?’ Hanna asked Lotte.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There! Something flew.’

  ‘Was it a seagull? An aeroplane?’

  ‘You couldn’t see clearly,’ Hanna said. She noticed that she did not even want to say it to Lotte.

  An unexpected fear gripped Hanna’s middle. Quite such fear, so strange, she had never experienced. Håkan’s hand had gone limp. He looked almost as if he were sleeping. But one eye was half open and still pointing toward the puddle.

  ‘We have to go home now,’ Hanna said.

  ‘What for? You only just came. And he’s gone quiet again,’ Lotte said.

  ‘He’s not wearing enough clothes,’ Hanna said.

  Hanna pushed Håkan into the lift and pressed the button for the fifth floor.

  ‘You back already?’ said her mother with displeasure. ‘Håkan needs a bit more fresh air.’

  ‘Håkan wanted to come home,’ Hanna lied.

  She went into her own room and pulled the curtains to. She sat on her bed and took a book at random from the shelf. She opened it, but the stone flew from page to page and darkened the letters. After a while she got up and looked cautiously through the slit in the curtains. The sky was deep and empty. Below, she saw the flat puddle, which from this angle looked almost black.

  Håkan had shown Hanna the stone. Without Håkan, there would not have been the stone, either. Hanna had the crazy idea that Håkan had somehow put the stone in the puddle – or the sky. Håkan had only watched it in the water, but Hanna had seen it both in the water and in the sky.

  Hanna understood that now only she and Håkan knew something. Håkan would never be able to tell anyone what they had seen, and Hanna, on the other hand, did not want to. She could not even be certain that Håkan remembered the stone in the depths of the puddle any more.

  The door slammed, and Hanna knew that her grandmother had arrived. A little later she heard her grandmother singing:

  From the heavens came the gift,

  from the heavenly realms of fire.

  From the flames of godly love,

  not from the fires of danger.

  Hanna began to think that perhaps Håkan had known to expect the stone. He had known that it would come some day. That is why he had always wanted to look at puddles.

  That evening, Håkan was very peaceful and absent.

  ‘Look at him now,’ their grandmother said to their mother, ‘he has that wise look again.’

  Hanna went and sat on the edge of Håkan’s bed.

  ‘Håkan, do you remember?’ Hanna whispered in his ear. ‘There was a stone. In the puddle. Do you remember how it flew?’

  Håkan did not say anything, but he turned his gaze toward Hanna as if he had understood. Then Hanna, too, saw his knowledge, which was at the same time sorrow, their own, and shared.

  The Aesthete

  Håkan was an aesthete. The room in which he lived had to be beautiful, clean and well-ordered. Every individual object he owned – his saucepan, his lamp, his chair, his spoon – had to please the eye. His handkerchiefs were cotton. He loved modest elegance, objects in which beauty and functionality combined. Objects one could caress with one’s finger and whose material the skin also loved: the porosity of ceramics, the warmth of the fibres of wood, the striations of stones, the coolness of glass, its light, its amorphous, slow life . . .

  He always ironed his shirts. He changed his socks and his underwear every day. Every evening he polished his shoes. Although he lived alone, he set the table beautifully for his meals, particularly at the weekends, used a tablecloth and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He grew herbs in his kitchen window, sprinkled basil on his pasta with tuna sauce and splashed a little wine into his mushroom soup. Twice a week he went to the gym.

  Ugliness, untidiness, ill-considered and awkward details really made Håkan suffer. Wrong lighting. Clashing colours. Even when he was walking outside, he noticed the street paving, the design of the street lamps and the quali
ty of their light, the patina of the bricks. He should always have been seeing landscapes, views, perspective, something open and continuous, something elevated and clean.

  Above all, mankind had to be beautiful. Poor Håkan! Around him he saw a general mess, badly behaved youths, people fed on junk food, uncivilised adults with bad skin, dull hair and self-inflicted illnesses. The city was full of vulgar and overweight characters who drank whole-milk, spoke unnecessarily loudly as if they wanted to share even the most unpleasant details of their insignificant lives with passers-by. Men who peed in lifts and stairwells.

  Women who called their girlfriends by their surnames and said: ‘Let’s make tracks!’

  People who wore horribly bright, shiny and hissing clothes made out of poor materials and two sizes too small. Lustful people who went to bed with anyone at all and bragged openly about their sexual perversions. Their insensitivity made Håkan’s blood boil. They could not tell the difference between Mozart and Wagner. They had never even heard of Mondrian.

  Ugliness is immoral, Håkan thought. Ugliness is the ruin of civilisation.

  Håkan liked Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Fall of the House of Usher a great deal. It tells the story of a young man whose sense of hearing was so sensitive that ordinary life and the unavoidable sounds associated with it brought him great suffering:

  He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses: the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

  Håkan had read the story again and again. He felt an affinity with the hero, a real aristocrat. In a way he also felt that he could almost be mistaken for that refined young man. And it frightened him, for the story’s hero did not exactly live happily to the end of his life.