Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  But Håkan began to think about Julia’s flowers, which were not really flowers at all. Julia’s flowers were mathematical images, fractals that repeated themselves, always on the same principle. They were principles but at the same time animals, people, metaphors. Their whorls and spirals repeated endlessly.

  In the patterns of fractals Håkan saw evolution, growth and infinity as a mathematical metaphor. The wild flower of real life sprang from them. He could distinguish in them the forms of insects, molluscs and coelenterates. Their symmetry recapitulated the forms of organic nature, the patterns of ice and snow, surf, smoke and cloud, down and hair, tendrils and feathers. In them was the image-riddle of nature, there for anyone to see, always almost the same, but nevertheless self-renewing from moment to moment, at rest but in hectic motion.

  They were maps of the whole of reality, misleading labyrinths which continued from one order of magnitude to the next. The world of smallness was the same as that of largeness, but in between were human beings. Their eternity was not the boundlessness of size or time, but that of the mind.

  ‘Håkan! Are you listening?’

  The sunflower was a landscape of infinity. Spiral galaxies took flight from its floret, clouds of spores spread, societies and tribes, species were born and died.

  Remembering his lived life, Håkan thought he saw in its events – and his own deeds and misdeeds – the outlines of the same big pattern. How was it drawn, whose will was behind it? That of a presence, a force that realised itself through both coincidences and through his own choices. Håkan sensed it both in his happiness and his mishaps. He saw it in considered actions and coincidences, both yesterday and tomorrow.

  It was as if he had been called from somewhere, he himself personally, and he could distinguish the echo of his name, which was repeated in whispers, shouts and gestures.

  There was no end. Where there was disintegration, there assembly began. Where the end seemed to loom, the beginning immediately dawned, new-born life, vita nuova.

  ‘Mum told me to come and get you,’ Håkan’s daughter said. She grasped Håkan’s wrist with her warm fingers, and Håkan followed her like a sleep-walker, still deep in thought.

  In the kitchen window was an August sunflower.

  Acknowledgements

  The epigraph for Pereat Mundus, “There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men” comes from Carl Sandburg’s poem “Names,” from The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg: Revised and Expanded Edition, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003).

  Håkan is undoubtedly acquainted with the philosopher John Leslie’s The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, (Routledge, 1996).

  In the chapter titled “Aging early,” the lines quoted by the doctor, “Here babes are born old men, and youths are fit for the grave,” are by the Finnish poet Eino Leino (1878–1926), from the poem “Lapin kesä” (“Summer of Lapland”) in the book Kangastuksia (Otava, 1902). The lines in Finnish are: “Muualla tulta säihkyy harmaahapset,/vanhoissa hehkuu hengen aurinko./Meill’ ukkoina jo syntyy sylilapset./ja nuori mies on hautaan valmis jo.”

  In the chapter titled “Soon it will be time for overcoats,” the text Håkan reads is by Antonio Gramsci, quoted from Il Grido del Popolo (a newspaper published by Italy’s socialist party, 1916).

  In the chapter titled “A heart clothed in black,” the words “I am he whose heart is clothed in black” are by the French poet Charles d’Orléans, duke of Orleans (1394–1465): “Je suis celui au Coeur vêtu de noir.”

  In the chapter titled “A heart clothed in black,” the sentences by Montesquieu are from Letter 66 in Persian letters (Lettres persanes, Jaques Desbordes, 1721). The publisher of the English translation is G. Routledge, London. The translation in this novel is by John Davidson.

  In the chapter titled “Light as a stone,” the lines of the poem quoted are by the Finnish poet J.H. Erkko (1849–1906), from the poem “Tuutiessa,” from the book Runoelmia (1883). “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/From the heavens came the gift,/from the heavenly realms of fire./From the flames of godly love,/not from the fires of danger.” “Tuuditan tulisoroista,/kipenäistä kiikuttelen./Vaalin pientä valkeaista,/Luojan lasta liikuttelen./Taivahast on lahja tullut,/taivahan tulen kisoista./Luojan lemmen leikinnöistä,/ei vahingon valkeoista.”

  In the chapter titled “The aesthete,” the sentences by Edgar Allen Poe are from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, first published in 1839 in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and then in a slightly revised form in 1840 in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

  In the chapter titled “Closing eyelids,” the poem fragment is from the poem “Fairy Tale” in Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (1957). The translator of the poem is Lydia Pasternak Slater, Boris Pasternak’s sister. The poem can be found in Fifty Poems (London; Allen and Unwin, and New York; Barnes and Noble, 1963). “Tightly closing eyelids. Heights and cloudy spheres. Rivers. Waters. Boulders. Centuries and years.”

  In the chapter titled “With colorful lamps,” the lines Lisa quotes are by the Swedish poet Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974), from “Allt är så underligt fjärran i dag,” published in Aftonland, (Stockholm : Bonnier, 1953).

  The book The End of Time by Damian Thompson (Sinclair- Stevenson, 1996) was an important source for the chapter titled “A scroll when it is rolled together.”

  In the chapter titled “The restaurant is closed,” the song fragment quoted is from Anton Chekhov’s play The Three Sisters, Act II. Translation by Julius West (1881-1918). “Oh my house, my house, my new-built house./Newly-built of maple-wood. Its walls are like a sieve!”

  In the chapter titled “A letter from a colleague,” the account of Phineas Gage’s accident is derived from Antonio R. Damasio’s work Descartes’ Error (Avon Books, New York, 1995).

  In the chapter titled “Made of time,” the lines quoted are by the Argentinan author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), from “A New Refutation of Time,” published in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, edited by James E. Irby and Donald A. Yates, (New Directions Paperbook, 1964). “Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

  In the chapter titled “End-of-the-world party,” the poem fragment quoted is from “The Haunted Palace” by Edgar Allan Poe. The complete 48-line poem was first released in the April 1839 issue of Nathan Brooks’ American Museum magazine. It was eventually incorporated into “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a poem written by Roderick Usher. “While, like a rapid ghastly river,/Through the pale door/A hideous throng rush out forever,/And laugh — but smile no more.”

  In the chapter titled “End-of-the-world party,” the second poem fragment quoted is from “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe, which was first published, after Poe’s death, in Sartrain’s Union Magazine, 1849. “They are neither man nor woman – /they are neither brute nor human – /they are ghouls –.”

  DATURA,

  OR A FIGMENT SEEN BY EVERYONE

  2001

  Translated by

  Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela

  The First Seed Pod

  A Delusion We All See

  I can only blame myself and a certain flower for my current state. Or two flowers, actually.

  The first I saw when I was seven years old. Someone had picked some flowers in the garden at our summer house and put them in a vase. The tallest had just opened—incandescent orange with dark leopard spots. The midday sun filled the room and the flower embodied summer lushness. I looked at it and asked my sister what flower it was.

  “A crown imperial,” she replied.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I was sure she was right about the name, but I looked at this flower differently than I had at any flower before. A new idea was germinating in my mind, and it made me say, “
It might not be a crown imperial.”

  “It’s a crown imperial,” she said.

  “But it might not be,” I insisted.

  What made me say that? A sudden thought that the flower was unknowable, not just by me, but by anybody, even people who knew its name. But I wasn’t able to express this epiphany in a way that other people could understand. I didn’t mean that the flower had some other name. What I wanted to say had to do with being, not naming. The name of the flower was something completely arbitrary and beside the point. The flower was not what it was called. Not this flower. Not any flower.

  We were misled even by our own perceptions. They revealed hardly anything to us about the true nature of the flower. The essence of the flower—what or who the flower truly was—was somewhere else, is always somewhere else.

  “Go ask grandma,” my sister said.

  I asked. I was sure that grandma would understand what I thought I now understood.

  But grandma also said, “It most certainly is a crown imperial.”

  Why am I telling you this? Because I then understood that this one flower could not be known, and later I have learned that this same otherness applies to all living things—people, the world, our entire reality. What we are able to perceive—see, hear, smell, and measure—gives us enough information to get by on a daily basis, but too little to understand what everything really means.

  Perhaps it was that bit of information that wounded me. Perhaps that was what later made me so vulnerable to seduction by that other flower.

  My sister thinks that my bad health is partly due to the people I met while editing The New Anomalist. I was infected by their distorted perceptions, that’s what she says. The accusation isn’t fair. She doesn’t know about my relationship to datura. The same flower, tragically enough, that she once gave me with the best of intentions. The damage it caused is permanent.

  When I think about datura, I remember the Marquis, the chief editor of The New Anomalist, and all the magazine’s readers and contributors. I had never known that people could have such odd ideas. Together, the datura and these people formed a new pattern, a wavering structure into which I innocently stepped. It was a trap from which escape would not be easy. In a way I am still fighting for my freedom.

  It has been so long now. You’ll have to tell me the year, I can’t remember today. The flower changed me, my perception of the world, and my sense of time, as well. The world is no longer the same place, and neither am I.

  This is what I think I’ve learned: reality is nothing more than a working hypothesis. It is an agreement that we don’t realize we’ve made. It’s a delusion we all see. Yet it’s a shared, necessary illusion, the end product of our intelligence, imagination, and senses, the basis of our health and ability to function, our truth.

  Hold on to it. It’s all—or nearly all—that you have. Try to step outside of it and your life will change irreversibly, assuming you survive at all.

  If you want, I’ll let you read the notes I made at the time. I’ve expanded them here to pass the time. They aren’t pure diary entries. The dates are missing, and I doubt they’re in chronological order. How well these entries describe what really happened isn’t any clearer to the writer than they are to the reader. To describe events is to distort them. Like pressing flowers, books preserve the appearance of events, but not their original dimensions.

  A woman dressed in white came to me again tonight. She is not welcome here. It’s now dawn, and I have been up almost all night.

  My eyes seek the sky, the luminous clouds, before sleep. A devout person once wrote, “All is vanity, all is delusion except these infinite heavens.”

  In the Most Silent of Silences

  I can hear my own breathing. As I breathe in, the same high note always plays, like a note from a distant violin, or the hum of a nearby mosquito. As I breathe out, a heavy wagon rolls down a dirt road, a rough country wagon pulled by draft horses of the kind I imagine were used before the automotive age. These sounds accompany my being as persistently as my awareness of the passage of time. The more silent the world, the more clearly I can hear them. In fact, it’s these sounds that give me time—its tempo and physiology, its give and take. The air that flows in and out of me is the substance of time—it’s time itself.

  In girls’ school a tall cupboard was brought into the gymnasium once a year. Every girl had to bare their bosom and climb inside. But the eye that illuminated them was not interested in their budding breasts. To that eye, their busts were merely a haze through which it scrutinized the throbbing chambers of their lungs. Each year the same doctor repeated the same demands: “Breathe iii-in! Hooo-old it! You may go!”

  The doctor then allowed the girls to let out the time that they had held trapped in their lungs and step out of the temporary prison cell. Even back then, my wagon moved in the dirt of the road, though somewhat more lightly.

  I’m already up and have arrived at the office of The New Anomalist, though my workday hasn’t actually begun yet. I’m tired from my cough, which woke me up early. A cough is a lack of order; it interferes with the rhythm of time. It’s January once more, and my umpteenth birthday.

  My uncle once wrote in my friend book:

  Your heart is an empty book

  Waiting for each day’s fresh-marked page

  Your joys, your sorrows, the record of an age

  Sights and wonders, the draught of life you took.

  The year draws to its close, and January begins anew.

  I feel the irritation on the inner surface of my bronchi, how swollen they are, how red.

  In the dark recesses of my chest, alveoli perish one by one. How many are there? How many do I need to be able to live and breathe? How little I know of the ceaseless workings of my insides—a space where thrombocytes float to the beats of my still-hot heart.

  As I make some coffee, I watch the winter day break outside the window next to the ceiling. The same life force that passes through my chest is the wind that sways both the empty swing in the playground opposite and the lone, naked tree in the yard. The tree’s branches and roots, the branches of my alveoli and vascular system, even river deltas, all organize themselves according to the same laws, follow the same patterns.

  I wonder why the swing hasn’t been put away for the winter. I wonder at the silent collaboration between my organs and cells that continues without me—the end result of that collaboration—knowing or having to do anything about it. It goes on so that I can sit here underneath the window and watch the wind swirling in the empty yard and wonder why the swing has been left outside for the winter.

  The door bell rang just once, and so softly that I doubted my hearing. I opened the door, just to be sure, and there stood a man, neat and shy, belted up in a raincoat. Behind him a curtain of sleet reached all the way to heavens. Mumbling so quietly that I had to strain my ears, he introduced himself and told me he was a subscriber to The New Anomalist.

  “Since mumblemumblemumble,” he whispered.

  Naturally, I asked him to come in and take off his coat.

  “I’m also interested in alternative mumblemumble,” he continued after hanging his coat slowly and carefully on the coat rack and arranging himself as meticulously in one of our two kitchen chairs.

  His hair was silvery and recently barbered. In his white shirt and elegant dove grey suit, he could have passed for a politician or the CEO of a mid-sized technology company. Perhaps he was one or the other, I never did find out what he did for a living.

  “It’s a very interesting branch of mumblemumble, if I may say so.”

  I was cold and had the urge to cough. I longed for another cup of coffee. My wearying dreams had been haunted by dwarfs and boa constrictors.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch what that alternative thing was.”

  “Audiotechnology,” he said.

  “I see,” I said, without seeing at all.

  He looked at me in anticipation and I looked back at him. Wh
en I realized he wasn’t going to continue, I had to confess: “I can’t say that I know what alternative audiotechnology is.”

  He raised his eyebrows, this well-behaved man in a grey suit. He was the Master of Sound. That is what I call him, and I often find myself reminiscing about him. I’ve forgotten his real name. He was one of the many acquaintances I made while working as a subeditor of The New Anomalist. He was one of the ones—the heretics, the monomaniacs—whose obsessions took up residence in my head.

  He said, “Sounds are everywhere, even where you wouldn’t think mumblemumble. We don’t hear them, but they exist nonetheless. Even in the most silent of silences.”

  Datura

  When the violin plays—today in pianissimo—I can smell it. A saccharine, almost foul scent exudes from the flower, my birthday present. From its pot, it dominates the room, my gaze, my nose. How heavy and yet translucent the white trumpet-shaped corolla are. How they bend and sway with the slightest touch of a finger.

  It arrived with my sister and brother-in-law as a present, but also as a gatecrasher.

  “Have you seen this type of flower before? I can’t remember what it’s called,” Noora said as I unwrapped the cellophane surrounding the plant. “Roope hasn’t seen it yet either. Maybe you both know what it is. The lady at the flowershop told me its name, but I was in such a rush that I wasn’t listening.”

  “Now that’s what I call a shrub!” Roope said.

  We appraised the specimen. Its stem was an intense green and its blossoms white as moonlight. Looking at it made me dizzy. The dozen long, trumpet-like flowers reminded me of alabaster jewelry. A few had already withered. I saw the seed pods, round and thorny. I’d never owned such a plant, but one summer, I had admired one in the botanical gardens in another city. There, having wintered inside a greenhouse, it had grown and branched out into a small tree.