Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  I looked up the work’s name in the catalogue. It was Untitled. I have gradually reached the conclusion that at least one third of all the works in museums of modern art share the same name, unless they are Forms in Space.

  I went up to the guard and asked whether he knew what the subject of the picture was. It was, of course, in those surroundings, a most unsuitable question. It was not the intention for viewers to know what the works represented; neither were their makers able or willing to explain them in any greater detail. The question revealed to the guard my lack of sophistication, but I did not care. It was unlikely that I would ever see him again, and what was more, he did not know my name.

  But to my surprise the guard was able to answer my question. The picture really did represent something. He said it was a bullet-hole in a head, and even the head of an identifiable person. The murderer was so-and-so, and the victim was so-and-so, everything was very exact, but I have now already forgotten the names. The crime had taken place in the same city some years previously. The killer had fired the bullet into the other man’s head at close range.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. That the guard did not remember; probably no one else did, either.

  I glanced through the doorway to the next room. In the centre of it a dried tree-trunk had been set up. From the branches of the tree, people hanged. Some had dismembered hands, some dismembered feet, some dismembered genitals. One was missing his head. Everything was very realistic and believable.

  A little to one side was a small work which, at last, really appealed to me. On a high, narrow stone plinth was a finger, a single, pale finger. As I examined it more closely, I became fairly convinced that this was a forefinger. It was upright, reproachful, guiding or pointing at something, who knows. I remember the finger that pointed at the moon. I remember God’s finger, which hurled the spirit of life into Adam.

  I looked at the single, slim finger for a long time. I found it a very beautiful and memorable finger.

  As I was admiring the finger, Håkan stepped in, carrying a violin case. I did not, in fact, immediately recognise him, for he had shaved his head since I had last seen him. The violin case was also a surprise; I had not known that Håkan could also play the violin.

  Håkan was accompanied by a young man in an elegant silver-grey suit, who was carrying a video camera. Håkan himself was in some kind of a dervish outfit, or so I imagined, a white robe and under it a pair of brightly coloured trousers. Although I could not understand why he was dressed as a dervish. Håkan came up to me and we shook hands with ceremonial formality; it was a couple of years since we had last met.

  ‘What do you think of the exhibition?’ Håkan asked.

  Because I wanted to show a positive attitude, I said that I was particularly taken by the forefinger.

  ‘Oh, that,’ Håkan said. ‘It’s the artist’s own finger. From his left hand.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘You cannot be serious.’

  I felt myself growing depressed. I felt like leaving immediately.

  ‘I certainly am,’ Håkan said. ‘I know the maker well.’

  I almost felt like crying. Now the work no longer appealed to me one bit. Håkan told me that the artist had himself cut off the forefinger of his left hand. Then he had had it embalmed.

  ‘Does that shock you?’ asked Håkan, laughing.

  ‘Deeply. I think it’s awful,’ I said, seriously. ‘Really awful.’

  ‘I thought so,’ he said. ‘You do not understand that a true artist can give up his right hand, for example. Quite so.’

  Quite so! The smugness of the expression irritated me a great deal. Our conversation lapsed, and Håkan began to talk with his companion about camera angles and to look for electrical sockets. I began to wonder whether the corpses hanging from the tree were also real dead people. Perhaps the artist had fetched the bodies from the hospital or the morgue. Perhaps they were people who had perished in car crashes or terrorist strikes or suicides, so natural did they look. I did not dare ask Håkan anything about them; neither did I wish to inspect them more closely, fearing that my thoughts might be proved correct.

  The guard with whom I had spoken went up to the men and told them that it was forbidden to bring cameras into the room. I moved tactfully, if a little astonished, farther off. Had they not asked permission from the museum in advance for their performance? I began to fear that Håkan would get himself in trouble, and I did not wish to witness any incidents.

  To my relief, however, I thought I heard Håkan say that everything had been agreed with the director. They were just presenting a small performance in the room. It would not last longer than a couple of moments. The guard appeared to be puzzled too, but shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Well, in that case . . . ’

  Håkan took up some kind of lotus pose in front of the fly case, a microphone in his hand.

  ‘Friends of art!’ Håkan said. ‘Honoured audience! The time is past when artists painted rectangular canvases in their studios. The museum is also no longer a place of privilege, as it was before. We can no longer distinguish between life and art. The artist has broken the barriers between them. Every artist is an exception, as is art itself. Every artist is suspended between earth and heaven in a divine levitation. And everything the artist does is art. He makes it of the banal, the profane, the most ordinary, of anything, of nothing. It is the work of creation!’

  Oh dear, I could not help thinking. Why is he talking such a lot? This is not good. And such . . . nonsense, for that is what it sounded like, at least to me.

  He talked and talked. The people, who had at first gathered in the fly room, began to grow tired. Some were already leaving, others spoke, half aloud. I was not surprised; my own thoughts, too, began to wander. I sat down on the guard’s chair in the doorway, although I do not know whether it was allowed. But I could not see the guard anywhere. I began to feel sleepy. I could no longer sense the smell, I had been in the room for so long. Sometimes I could no longer hear Håkan’s voice at all, all I could hear was the buzzing of the flies. I slipped for a moment into some other day, a July day at home in the country, a meadow where the neighbour’s cattle were grazing.

  Much more time had passed than Håkan had promised, at least three-quarters of an hour or even more. And Håkan was still talking.

  ‘It is the job of the artist to extend the concept of art,’ he said, ‘to make art of parts of life which have not previously been understood as art. Everything the artist does is, in the final analysis, art.’

  Had he not already said that once? I could see that the guard had returned to the room accompanied by an elegantly grey-haired lady in a suit. I imagine she was the museum director. I got up to stretch my legs.

  Then Håkan abandoned his lotus pose with a kind of half vault whose suddenness and virtuosity made the audience alert. He began to open his violin case, and I prepared myself for a musical interlude. But the object Håkan took out of the case did not look like a violin.

  ‘This,’ said Håkan, ‘is no musical instrument.’

  I went closer and saw that he was speaking the truth. For there was an axe whose blade shone with newness. The guard and the lady peered over my shoulder. I heard one of them draw a deep breath.

  ‘Art always demands a sacrificial spirit,’ Håkan said. ‘The true artist is ready to sacrifice even his life on the altar of art. And not only his own but, where necessary, also those of others.’

  At this point those standing in the front row moved furtively backward. I gulped. I hoped Håkan was not intended to do something he would later regret. And perhaps I, too; the man was, after all, a blood relative.

  ‘Every artist is an alchemist, a magician and a scientist,’ Håkan said. ‘His sacrificial spirit and his ecstasy are a counterweight to petrified materialism and dogmatic social logic. It is necessary for the artist to open up the vacuums, for him to tear open the road between art and real life, even if it means apparent injury.

  ‘The arti
st knows that there is no art without sacrifice,’ Håkan said, half-turning toward the glass case.

  ‘Fiat ars, pereat mundus!’

  Good God, he raised his axe. I could not stop myself shouting his name, twice even. The guard also screamed, and the suited lady tried to grab Håkan’s hand.

  Too late. The axe fell heavily and the glass splintered into a tinkling rain of fragments. At the same time as the audience jumped backwards, a cloud of flies rose from the shards, buzzing like a motor-saw. The other buzzing was from the cameraman’s video. The stench swelled until it was palpable. Small, unpleasant thumps were heard as the flies bounced off the walls and the ceiling.

  Håkan stood in the midst of this incomprehensible vision calm, even sublime, dangling the axe casually from his left hand.

  A girl whimpered; it looked to me as if she had been wounded in the face by one of the splinters of glass. The disorder was extraordinarily unpleasant, and I stood against a wall, behind the column where, a moment ago, the embalmed finger had stood. Now it was absent; perhaps it had fallen during the confusion and been trodden under people’s heels.

  There was plenty of noise, and more guards ran into the room through both doors at the same time as the counter-current carried the audience, pursued by the flesh flies. They ran out as fast as they could, holding their clothes up to protect their faces, at a gallop. There was a clattering as from hundreds of trotters and hoofs. The cameraman followed at their heels, continuing constantly to video the proceedings.

  I stayed behind to look for the finger, I was suddenly so sorry for it, the innocent little finger, the lonely finger that would never again find its own hand. But I could not see even a nail, either it had been stolen or then it had been beaten to dust by the audience’s heels. There was one, at least, of the victims of art.

  Håkan, on the other hand, was calmly putting his axe back in the violin case. When the police finally arrived, there was not much argument. By that time the room was almost empty, with the exception of the guard, myself and the museum director.

  ‘Maybe the artist went a little too far this time,’ one of the constables said. ‘After all, you can’t do just anything in the name of art. And in a museum, too!’

  ‘As if you understood anything about it,’ Håkan said, almost tenderly.

  But he followed them without resistance, smiling composedly. Doubtless he considered his performance a success. At least they did not put him in handcuffs; for that I was grateful on behalf of my poor old uncle.

  As he reached me, Håkan stopped, as if expecting praise. I only said to him, shaking my head, ‘Håkan, Håkan!’

  What else could I have said?

  The Ice-Cream Seller

  ‘Where’s that sound coming from,’ Elsa asked in astonishment. ‘Just as if someone were writing on a typewriter.’

  ‘But no one uses a typewriter on the beach,’ her mother said. ‘It must be a lawnmower. Or an outboard motor.’

  ‘But it’s coming from the ice-cream kiosk!’ Elsa said. ‘Let’s go and see!’

  On the empty beach stood a small, white building. Why was the beach empty, although it was such a hot day, Elsa and her mother wondered. Generally, on clear days, it was difficult to find a space for your bath-towel, and there was a long queue for the ice-cream kiosk. Today they did not see a soul. It was like witchcraft. But they did have the beach to themselves.

  When they got close to the kiosk, the energetic tapping was even clearer. Elsa glanced at her mother and said: ‘That’s no motor.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ her mother said.

  Inside the ice-cream kiosk sat Håkan, writing on a small traveling typewriter. Håkan was wearing a black suit, a white shirt and a dark blue silk tie. He was writing with great concentration, sitting upright, grandly. From time to time his eyes absent-mindedly scanned the horizon and the deserted beach.

  ‘A new ice-cream seller!’ Elsa said.

  ‘Looks like it,’ her mother said. ‘What a costume for the job.’

  ‘A bit silly!’ Elsa said. ‘He’s sitting in the kiosk, writing. I wonder why?’

  ‘Go and buy some ice-cream,’ said her mother in a tired voice, closing her eyes again. ‘I’ll wait here in the shade. Perhaps he will be able to take enough time off writing to sell you a cone. You certainly won’t have to queue like you usually do.’

  ‘Won’t you have one?’

  ‘Yes, I will, bring me a mango one, if he has one,’ her mother said.

  Elsa looked at the ice-cream kiosk. A haze shimmered over the sand. It was as if the kiosk were inside a cloud, but it was also a cloud of words.

  As Elsa approached, Håkan raised his fingers from the typewriter’s keys.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

  ‘Why are you writing?’ Elsa asked.

  ‘Because I have to.’

  ‘Aha. What are you writing?’

  ‘My will,’ Håkan said. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘The sort where you say who will get your things when you are dead?’

  ‘A different sort,’ Håkan said. ‘And what would you like?’

  ‘Mango ice-creams. Two. Are you intending to die soon?’

  Håkan put two scoops of pale yellow mango ice-cream into each of two waffle cones.

  ‘I’m not intending to at all, but it might turn out that way all the same. And not just for me. That will be eighteen marks.’

  Elsa took the exact money from her purse for Håkan.

  ‘Other people too, do you mean?’

  ‘Have you noticed,’ Håkan said, ‘that there is no end in sight for this heat-wave at all?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elsa. ‘It’s great. You can go to the beach every day.’

  ‘Great or not so great, depends on how you look at it,’ Håkan said. ‘You have to prepare yourself for everything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Heat-waves are not always harmless,’ Håkan said.

  ‘Do you mean that someone could die from the heat?’ Elsa said, dubiously.

  ‘Why not,’ Håkan said. He began to tap away again and no longer paid Elsa any attention.

  Before Elsa could reach the shade with her ice-cream cones, they were already half-melted.

  ‘That ice-cream kiosk man said some strange things,’ Elsa said to her mother. ‘I began to be frightened.’

  ‘Did he frighten you?’

  ‘He said someone could die. And he was writing his will.’

  ‘He was kidding you,’ her mother said. She went back to the ice-cream kiosk. Håkan was writing with such concentration that at first he did not notice his customer at all. Elsa’s mother tapped on the counter with her nails, and Håkan raised his head and stopped tapping.

  ‘I hope you’re not frightening little children,’ Elsa’s mother said.

  ‘Sorry?’ Håkan asked.

  ‘Did you just tell my daughter someone might die?’

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

  ‘That you said so?’

  ‘I mean, someone could.’

  ‘Why not? But an ice-cream seller doesn’t necessarily need to discuss such subjects with a child.’

  ‘In general, no. But these times are exceptional. There is a lot it is worth talking about. There is a lot it is worth preparing for. Especially if you have a family.’

  ‘What are you talking about now? What sort of times?’

  ‘Pay attention to the weather, is all I will say. And the birds.’

  ‘The birds?’

  Elsa’s mother eyed the shore and the sea. She did not see a single bird.

  ‘But there are no birds here.’

  ‘No,’ said Håkan. ‘And no people. Very strange, isn’t it?’

  Mother went back and said to Elsa: ‘Best not to pay attention to what he says. I think he’s a little, a little – ’

  ‘Crazy,’ Elsa suggested.

  ‘Exactly,’ her mother said. ‘Strange, anyway.’

  ‘Ugh,’ Elsa said. She had found a su
n-cream bottle.

  ‘What’s is it?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Sun cream! It’s leaked into the bag. Our sunglasses and hair-brush and your book – everything is covered in oil.’

  ‘Isn’t the top on properly?’

  ‘It is,’ Elsa said.

  ‘There must be a hole in it somewhere,’ mother said.

  Elsa wiped the bottle and cork and inspected both carefully.

  ‘There isn’t,’ Elsa said. ‘There’s no hole anywhere.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Elsa’s mother turned round to take the bag and fished out the bottle of sun-cream. Its cap really was tightly closed. Her fingers slipped as she tried, in vain, to twist it open, but all their things were stained with the yellow oil.

  ‘It’s a mystery,’ Elsa said, almost content. ‘And it will never be solved.’

  ‘Perhaps. Isn’t it time for you to go for a swim?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Yes, but first I want another ice-cream,’ Elsa said.

  She did not really want ice-cream. But she wanted to continue the conversation with Håkan.

  ‘That’s the last for today, then,’ her mother said. ‘And don’t hang around talking to that man.’

  ‘Another mango?’ Håkan asked Elsa.

  ‘No, something else.’

  ‘We also have pistachio,’ Håkan said to Elsa. ‘You don’t get that everywhere. Were you frightened just now? I didn’t mean to scare you. But facts are facts.’

  ‘Not really. I’ll take the pistachio, then,’ Elsa said. ‘A big one.’

  Her temples had begun to hurt. It felt as if there was a slight scent of sulphur in the air.

  ‘Are you a real ice-cream seller?’ Elsa could not help asking.