Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  The young Usher was, in Håkan’s opinion, an early example of the person of the future, one of them, who presage a new kind of humanity. A humanity whose senses had been sensitized and refined to such an extent that life was more and more difficult for them.

  And Håkan thought that he himself was of the clan of Usher.

  An individual with Håkan’s tendencies should at least have been as wealthy as the young master of Usher. To his misfortune, Håkan was not. He lived in a rented council flat, at an address which no one could have called a good one. Sometimes it seemed as if the building’s walls were like gauze. One could not, it was true, see through them, but the sounds and smells of life in all its banality spread almost unhindered from one apartment to another. As he went to bed, Håkan began to use ear-plugs.

  Håkan also suspected that his pain threshold was lower than normal. A mosquito bite, the accidental touch of a nettle leaf, tingled for days on his sensitive skin. And then his teeth, they were a constant torment to him.

  The yard was empty, full of parking spaces. Håkan’s attempts to create some beauty outside his own room trickled away to nothing. When, in the autumn, he had hidden some tulip and daffodil bulbs in the narrow lawn border, the children of the neighbouring stairwell tore up the first new leaves as they pushed out of the melting earth in the spring. Håkan never saw them flower.

  Håkan was happy that the building was painted. But on the second day after the work was completed, the newly painted wall was covered in grotesque tags and messy scribbles by an unskilled hand. The chaos advanced day by day.

  Håkan was able to keep his room more or less clean, but he could not forever halt the spread of disorder even here. One evening he accidentally knocked over the table lamp, its fine, green glass dome broke, and he could not afford to buy a new one.

  The next night, he woke up with a terrible toothache. It was in his lower jaw, in a tooth to which he had never before paid any attention. The pain wailed in his mouth, burrowing sharply ever deeper into his jawbone. It soon spread into his ear, nose and forehead. It was incomprehensible that such a pain should exist.

  Håkan curled up on his white sofa and whimpered. The pain was a living organism, multidimensional. It represented chaos, the power of ugliness and violence. He could feel its ill will, its purposefulness.

  How such an insignificant matter could change the whole world. How it was possible that because of just one wretched tooth it was impossible for him to maintain his normal daily plan.

  As the pain grew, the tooth grew too. This event could not be seen. When Håkan opened his mouth and looked in the bathroom mirror, the tooth was as small and white as before. But he could feel its real size; it had grown as big as a house.

  The tooth was certainly in Håkan’s mouth, but in a way he had simultaneously found himself inside it. That was how it was: he lived inside the tooth, and it was the most unpleasant place to live. The tooth began to fill the entire world.

  The tooth took the value from many things Håkan which had once believed in and which he had sought to acquire. He no longer cared even to think about them.

  One could not prepare oneself for such suffering. Accidents are like mutations. It is through them that life demonstrates its unpredictability. Fate, which people believe they direct, suddenly starts to play up.

  He was the tooth. The tooth was him, a whole world of suffering.

  And then, suddenly, the pain was absent. Håkan could not believe it, but he could no longer feel the tiniest shooting pain. First thing in the morning, he went to the duty dentist.

  ‘Everything is OK,’ said the dentist.

  ‘Can’t you find anything?’

  ‘No new cavities, no infection, tartar, nothing.’

  The case should have been successfully dealt with. But it was not. The toothache was a kind of turning point in Håkan’s life. It changed him. It made him depressed, and he constantly feared that an attack would start again one night. He felt as if the pain was lying in wait for him, if not in his tooth, then in some other part, member, space.

  It was as if a hole, a tear, had appeared in his sense-world, which demonstrating with frightening clarity that reality was something different from what he had hitherto supposed.

  It also seemed to him that the entire world was beginning to recall the house of Usher. It had a messy broken line like the one on the wall of the house of Usher, which spread and spread.

  One night he was woken again, but this time not by a toothache. As he started, Håkan did not understand what had woken him. An unfamiliar, low-pitched sound penetrated his earplugs. It was totally strange and was the kind of sound that did not please him at all.

  The sound was no doubt caused by some vehicle, but no ordinary car, lorry or even bus, or by a motorcycle. It was large, enormous, that he knew. It rolled onward somehow formlessly. Håkan did not know of a mode of transport which made such a din. Probably it was driving along the motorway, but at times he was not even sure of that. Perhaps it was flying, after all?

  The sound came first from the east, and seemed to rise and become denser as it grew nearer. When it reached Håkan’s building it echoed on high like a whistle, but afterwards it lowered again. It went lower and lower, to a deep bass, until finally it was no more than a vague rumbling before it disappeared completely.

  Later Håkan noticed that he was waking at the same time, despite the earplugs. It happened a couple of moments before first light, which had always made him anxious. And then the same sound was heard, and once again he could not recognise it. It belonged to the same category as pain. It was uncontrollable, absolutely strange, malicious.

  Håkan began to grow tired. He had been like a machine which had been kept constantly in action, which had not had even a moment of rest. He understood that he had since his youth been fighting against ugliness and disorder. It was an extraordinarily frustrating war. They always won; it was the law, the command of entropy. They might attack from anywhere, even from within him.

  He was no longer as particular about himself as he had been. His daily schedule began to falter. Increasingly often, he skipped his session at the gym. Sometimes his main meal was a hamburger bought at Jaska’s grill bar. In the evenings he ate cheese snacks and watched television.

  Håkan put on weight. He might wear the same socks for three days in a row. Perhaps this was the reason why he caught athlete’s foot.

  A cleaners’ strike began in the city. The streets were filled with rotting food, mustard-smeared paper, parts of plastic monsters, broken tamagotchis, spent batteries. At the beginning, Håkan carried a rubbish bag with him, but it was full before he reached the first corner. He began to look at the passers-by, at the crumbling walls of the buildings, at the holes in the tarmac, in a different way. He tried to see in them beauty and order. He tried to say ‘yes’ to the ugly world.

  One day, he began to carry his own things out into the street. He took two boxes of books, crockery, lamps, chairs, a radio and a telephone. By evening they had all disappeared.

  In the spring the social security office received a telephone call saying that there was a troublesome tenant in one of the council rental buildings. The rent had not been paid for months. Alarming sounds were heard from the apartment day and night. It sounded as if furniture was being splintered. And then the stench from the apartment could be smelled as far as the stairwell.

  Håkan lived there.

  The social workers obtained the key from the caretaker. They pushed their way into the apartment. It was almost empty. The electricity supply had apparently been cut off some time before. The kitchen cupboards had been dismantled. An heirloom sofa, which Håkan had not had the energy to carry out, had been slashed open with a kitchen knife and garbage and leftovers had been poured inside. On the bare floor of the bedroom sat a naked Håkan. He had written a rude word on the floor in his own excrement.

  Håkan smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded.

  Closed Eyelids

  Who
needs an electric saw? The opera? A Teflon saucepan? The internet?

  Not the sleeper, at any rate. The sleeper becomes very economical. Totally economical. He hardly consumes anything, except the air he breathes. He does not need entertainment, electronics, foreign trips or even food. Only the dead are more economical. When a person sleeps, he does not even need other people.

  Eyelids tight closed,

  Fords, rivers and streams

  Håkan got up later every morning. And nevertheless he noticed that he was the first to be up on his feet in his building, perhaps in the whole block. Sylvia, who had gone to sleep early in the afternoon, was breathing evenly and deeply on her own side. When he peeped into his daughter’s room, he saw that she had kicked off her covers again. Although it was cold in the room, Laura had not woken up. Håkan covered her carefully, but a little roughly. He hoped his daughter would wake up so that he would have company at breakfast. Mostly, it was a vain hope.

  Many times a day, he went to see his sleeping wife and daughter, hoping that they would wake up and remember that he, too, existed. But each day he had to wait longer. Håkan felt increasingly unnecessary. And he was not even happy that they consumed so little.

  For Håkan it was a something of an occasion when they woke up. But recently they had just hurriedly drunk and eaten some light snack and then returned to their places.

  At first they said, as they woke: ‘I just had a strange dream in which . . . ’. Or: ‘I dreamed a funny dream – ‘. Or: ‘In my dream . . . ’.

  But soon they stopped talking about their dreams.

  Sometimes Håkan had the feeling that their nocturnal experiences were so significant and mysterious that they did not want to share them with anyone.

  Sylvia and Laura were not exceptional; it was, rather, Håkan who was. Almost all the other inhabitants of the city were asleep. Throughout the history of humanity, the need for sleep had remained approximately the same. Formerly, an average night’s sleep was seven hours and forty-five minutes long. But during the previous decade, the average period of sleep had began, unexpectedly, to rise, and now most citizens needed as much as sixteen hours’ sleep a night.

  The exact reason for the increased need for sleep was unknown. There was talk of a change in the sun’s radiation, ions, ozone loss, a fluctuation in the speed of the earth’s spin, an increase in the quantity of melatonin, sometimes this, sometimes that.

  Perhaps the officials had put something in the food supply or the water, something that made people sleepy? That was what some people claimed. Håkan did not believe it, because it would mean that the state would lose tax income. It is true that a person who is asleep needs very little, but he or she does not produce anything, either. If you have to sleep for sixteen hours a day, you cannot work for eight, or even six.

  The legal working day had indeed shrunk and shrunk. People were already spending two-thirds of their lives in bed, many even more. If they woke at eight, an irresistible sleepiness overcame them around three in the afternoon. But most did not wake up until after midday.

  Offices opened their doors later and later and closed them earlier and earlier. Cash machines no longer worked. Of twelve television stations, only one was left, and it broadcast programs for just one hour a day; none on Mondays. No one any longer demanded that shops should be freely open. Most of them stayed open for just three or four days a week.

  And if people spent increasing amounts of time asleep, what happens to law and order, export and import, the state of the highways and the standard of education, health care and the social services? Little by little structures and forms, traditions and operational plans, crumbled. Matters held in common, politics, no longer existed. The population slept; the country grew poorer.

  The birth rate, too, was falling. People’s sleepiness had its effect on sexual behaviour, too. The need for sleep was stronger than any other passion, money, love or food.

  But nevertheless there were those who said that this is precisely how things should be. People were awake in order to sleep, in contrast to what had previously been thought. True life was lived at night, without bodies, on the astral level.

  Often Håkan lay down in the middle of the day next to Sylvia, pressed his face into her hair and hoped to be able to fall asleep too, but after tossing and turning for an hour he got up again. He could not help it that he only needed seven or eight hours sleep.

  Håkan tried to work, to write theatre reviews as he had always done. But how to write when only one or two of the city’s theatres were still functioning? And if there was sometimes a first night, there might be no one in the audience apart from Håkan. His applause fizzled out, and the curtain no longer rose.

  The arts section shrunk still further, but so did even the economics and sports pages. The section editors were hardly ever seen, and the newspaper was no longer published at weekends. More and more often, even on weekdays, an edition was published which went by the name of a double issue. It was just as thin as all the other editions, but the next day no paper was published. News was no longer news; much of it was published again and again. One could just as well read a paper from last spring.

  Eyelids tight closed,

  Fords, rivers and streams

  Håkan had read the lines before, when and where he no longer remembered. The poem had a knight and a maiden who slept and slept, trying from time to time to wake up, but then falling asleep again.

  Although Sylvia was asleep, Håkan talked to her a lot. He told his wife things he had never intended to tell her. About his own youthful dreams, the deaths of his mother and father, how he longed for Sylvia’s presence. He also made a confession. He told her about Nadya, with whom he had once made love in the office when everyone else had gone on their summer holidays. After that he buried himself in his wife’s sleeping, sighing flesh. But afterwards he felt guilty, as though he had raped Sylvia.

  Håkan understood that the end was unavoidably approaching. The sleepers were slipping farther and farther away from him. Their muscles, heart, lungs, were working at increasingly small capacities. Their bodies were beginning to dry and shrink. He had tried to keep his family awake, but it was painful to everyone and a sheer waste of time; he soon gave up.

  Eyelids tight closed,

  Fords, rivers and streams

  Håkan envied those who slept. To see a stream of dreams welling up unfettered and free – that was what Håkan wanted. Sometimes he imagined that all of those who slept lived together somewhere. They did not dream solitary dreams, but he had been left awake by himself. It was like a punishment, but he did not know what for. The rejected world of wakefulness, the world of action, meant less and less compared to the reality of visions.

  In the evening, at the usual time, he finally fell asleep. What a mercy to travel away from the city along the corridors of dreams. As he fell asleep, Håkan had reinvented a childhood game: he tried to determine when wakefulness changed into sleep. He never found that moment. Sometimes he dreamed of his wife and daughter or his father and mother, who were dead. But when Håkan woke, he always woke to grief. He had not really met them; they were merely sleep-phantoms, creations of his own memory.

  But once, in the busy stream of images, some current took him to a somewhere completely new. Håkan noticed that his dream was not the same kind of sleeping as before. It was not sleep at all, but a kind of third state of consciousness. He noticed that he liked it. Then he saw Sylvia.

  ‘So you finally found your way here,’ Sylvia said.

  Håkan looked around him in astonishment. He could not give a name to what he saw. His surroundings were quite unfamiliar. No buildings, no trees, but glowing colours and changing geometric shapes, ornaments and spirals, which recalled flowers, snowflakes, diamonds . . .

  ‘What kind of place is this?’

  ‘Place? This isn’t a place at all.’

  ‘But this area must have a name,’ Håkan said. ‘Are we in the country or the city? Are we at home or abroad?’


  ‘We are not in the country or the city. We are not at home or abroad. Why should we be? This is here. Everything is here.’

  Håkan understood. He had arrived, and he meant to stay.

  Fakelove’s Night

  ‘Darling, no more,’ Ella begged in her gentle voice, as so many times before. ‘You don’t need to, it’s fine like this.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Fakelove asked. He was unpleasantly aware that he had neglected Ella in recent months. And of the fact that, despite his skills and manly exertions, Ella did not enjoy their sex.

  ‘It’s fine like this,’ Ella said again. She was about to say something else. Fakelove waited. He turned on to his back. And, after a long silence, Ella finally whispered what Fakelove had been afraid to hear. ‘It won’t work.’

  ‘Do you mean: not with me?’

  Once again, Ella fell silent for a long time. Fakelove heard her holding her breath, they both held their breath, until Ella finally dared whisper: ‘Perhaps.’

  Fakelove got up, fetched his cigarettes and put on a dressing gown. He lit the outside lamp and went out to the steps to smoke. He still smoked a couple of cigarettes a week, although he offered nicotine addicts tips on how to give up.

  The night spread and echoed around the expensive area where Fakelove lived. The eternal, primeval, untamed darkness whose denseness the garden’s Japanese lanterns only deepened. He sat in its heart and its immenseness, its strangeness, penetrated his consciousness. It was no wonder that children feared the dark. He feared it too.

  The colours had become shadows. The garden rustled differently from in the daytime. In Fakelove’s oval swimming pool the water rippled, cold and strange. The water looked fake, it moved slowly, impenetrably, dull black like oil.

  On the garden swing there sat, alone, the crumpled shadow of the maple. Like someone suffering from a stomachache, Fakelove thought.