Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “The topic of my thesis is ‘Hairstyles at the Presidential Independence Day Ball across the Decades,’ ” she told me. “But let’s go to my son’s room. There is a photograph there that will surely interest you.”

  Without knocking, she opened the door to a room that gave the impression of having been staged to look like it belonged to a typical schoolboy. Airplanes on the wallpaper and model aircraft hanging from the ceiling. I was bewildered by the computer that I saw on the writing desk. It was a model so ancient that it belonged in a museum. The room was very tidy, so much so that it didn’t actually seem lived in.

  “Is your son at school?” I asked. I was a bit surprised that a woman her age could have children that were still in school.

  “Not in school, not even in the school of life,” she replied. “Up there,” she pointed toward the ceiling.

  I got to listen as she explained that her only son had died of meningitis at the age of fourteen. She had preserved the room untouched for the last ten years.

  “This is where I keep my photo albums,” she said. “Just a few days ago I noticed something odd. Hold on.”

  She opened the top drawer of the writing desk and took out an album.

  “Come sit here next to me,” she said, and patted the steering wheel pattern blanket on her son’s narrow bed.

  I sat and waited gloomily as she leafed through her album. I didn’t want to stay in that room, or in that house, any longer than I had to.

  “Here it is! Take a look! It was taken right here. The last photo of my son.”

  The colors of the photograph had faded. A young boy with blond hair sat at the desk, maybe in the middle of building a model aircraft. He looked completely engrossed in what he was doing and wasn’t looking at the camera.

  “Either this picture has changed,” the Hair Artiste said, “or I just haven’t noticed it before.”

  “Changed in what way?” I asked.

  “A new shadow has appeared in the photo, right here,” the Hair Artiste said, and pointed at the wall behind the boy in the photograph. “Do you see it?”

  I looked. Indeed, a broad shadow could be seen on the airplane wallpaper. What was there to say about it? Was this really the reason I’d been sent out on a house call?

  “Can’t you see?”

  I saw the shadow, but what was she expecting me to say?

  “It’s the shadow of a wing! Can you see the ends of the feathers? See, it starts right by my son’s shoulder. And there isn’t anything in the room that could cast a shadow like that. I took the picture, so I know for sure. And you know what else? This picture was taken just three days before he died. That very night he fell ill, and he fell into a coma the next day in the hospital.”

  I looked at the dark shadow of a wing on the wall, and the pain in the woman’s voice tore at my heart.

  “Now he has his wings,” the mother said. “I know he’s earned them.”

  “Such a beautiful picture,” I said. “And such a beautiful boy. This is a precious memory of him. But . . . ”

  And I had to tell her, as delicately as possible, that that beauty and the miracle in the photo were of no use to The New Anomalist.

  “I wish you all the best with your doctoral thesis,” I said as I was leaving.

  “If you ever need your hair done for a party, call me,” she said.

  She’d already forgiven me for not wanting to publish the picture of her son, who had become an angel.

  “There’s nothing I couldn’t do with hair like yours.”

  Don’t Be Cruel

  The parastore had gotten new wares. A rock ’n’ roll fish, for example. I’d tried everything to prevent the Marquis from adding it to our selection, but in vain. We now had one hundred sixty fish in stock. They were everywhere: in the bathroom and under the desk and piled on top of the hat rack. I was sure that the fish was a bad investment, but the Marquis insisted that it was super popular in many countries and that it had sold in the hundreds of thousands.

  I hated that atrocity. You couldn’t even make out what species of fish it was. It was made out of plastic or fiberglass and activated by a motion sensor. When an unsuspecting person came within a foot of it, it would start to sing and shake its tail.

  The packaging said: Natural design! High quality! Enjoy you friends’ amazed faces when the fish surprises them with its song and dance!

  “What kind of fish is it even supposed to be?” I asked the Marquis.

  “Hmm. It could be a pikeperch, or maybe an arctic char? What difference does it make?” the Marquis said. “Or it could be some American fish. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it in this corner of the world.”

  “I have to know what species it is in case a potential customer shows up and asks me, though I have to admit that I have a hard time believing anyone would want to waste their money on something like this.”

  “The world is full of imbeciles,” the Marquis said. “They’re never in short supply. I’ve pinned my hopes to them. I admit it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to waste their money on this. Did I mention that hundreds of thousands of these have been sold worldwide?”

  “You did. But what does this monster have to do with the paranormal and The Anomalist?”

  “Wouldn’t you call a fish that sings and dances an anomaly? Listen to this!” The Marquis pushed a button.

  The abomination lifted its head. Its tail began to flap. It opened its jaws, and I peeked in. I saw a salmon-red cavity filled with white plastic spikes and a small speaker that was blaring, “Don’t be cruel!” Apparently the fish was a contra tenor.

  The Marquis tilted his head to listen, pleased with both the fish and himself.

  “Turn it off, please,” I said. “Judging by its voice at least, it’s a sleazy kind of fish. Does it know any other tunes?”

  “It should also sing ‘All Shook Up,’ ” the Marquis said. “Should we give it a listen?”

  “No, never mind. I have work to do.”

  “Look, it even has a wonderful little stand so that you can put it on your desk.”

  “For God’s sake, don’t put that nightmare on my desk!”

  “On the bookshelf then.”

  “Does this mean that every time I go to the bookshelf to get something, it’s going to start singing ‘Don’t be Cruel’?”

  “Or ‘All Shook Up.’ But there must be an off-button somewhere,” the Marquis said.

  “Find it,” I said.

  The rock ’n’ roll fish made me so very depressed. I started to think about how that kind of junk was manufactured, and it made me want to cry. I thought that maybe there was a person out there somewhere, a single mother perhaps, who had to get up at 5:50 a.m. every morning to go to work at the rock ’n’ roll fish factory.

  She drinks a cup of cheap instant coffee and then wakes up her anemic little child. Feeds and dresses it and puts it in a pram. Waits for the bus in the rain to take her crying, fatherless offspring to the daycare center across town. Then she takes the rush-hour metro, bus, or maybe both, to the industrial area on the northern fringe of the city. She punches in and, under the cruel glow of the fluorescent lights in the prefabricated factory hall, assembles an endless procession of fish. Shoves batteries and speakers into their guts and glues plastic fins to their backs or stands to their bellies. She does this from seven till noon, eats leftover tuna casserole for lunch, and goes on and on.

  The winter sun has already set, but still I see her thin hunched neck in front of me. Her legs are aching by now. Her armpits are sweaty, her ankles cold. I can see her pale, unfailing fingers as she tests the fish. Each one activates in turn and sings to her, “Don’t be cruel!” “I’m all shook up!”

  The Face in the Cheese

  The seed pod of the datura plant is the size of a walnut and is covered in small thorns. When it ripens and splits open, four compartments with light brown, asymmetrical inhabitants are revealed.

  That day was the most bitterly cold we’d had that win
ter. I had just opened one seed pod and shaken out its contents into a small ceramic cup when the phone rang.

  “We have, in our kitchen, just witnessed a miracle,” a breathless woman’s voice said.

  “What kind of a miracle?” I asked cautiously.

  The lady on the other end of the line was calling from the north. She’d bought a piece of bread cheese from the local dairy, twenty-one ounces, she explained to me. A national delicacy, bread cheese is flat, tasteless, and slightly rubbery. The rounds are baked, which gives the cheese its distinctive brown spots. Nevertheless, many people find it delicious, especially when served with jam.

  The woman and her husband had planned to enjoy some freshly baked bread cheese with their afternoon coffee, but before they could get that far, the wife noticed a certain recognizable image in a cluster of dark spots.

  “You’ll never believe what it is.” she said, lowering her voice to indicate confidentiality. I waited.

  “A face,” she said. “The face of our Lord.”

  I didn’t know how to react. Finally, I managed to say, “Really. To think. That’s quite . . . ”

  “You can even see His crown of thorns. Our neighbors came by to look at the cheese and they also recognized Him right away,” the lady said. “I never thought I’d be blessed in this way! We thought we’d offer your magazine an opportunity. You can come and take a photo of it, exclusively. The whole piece of cheese is still in the fridge. We haven’t touched it, and we don’t plan to.”

  I thanked her for the offer and said that the case was interesting as such and quite unusual, but unfortunately we were very busy at the moment and didn’t have anyone available to take such a long trip.

  “Who was it?” the Marquis asked me, once I had hung up after brief good-byes. I hadn’t seen the man in over a week, but now he’d just happened to stop by to pick up some correspondence related to pyramidology.

  I told him a miracle had happened. Not exactly the apparition of the Virgin Mary, but something similar. Jesus had appeared in bread cheese.

  “Hmm. That would make a good ‘Picture of the Week,’ ” the Marquis said.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  “That’s actually a brilliant idea. Why don’t you do a human interest piece. Take your camera and drive up there first thing in the morning.”

  “That’s two hundred-fifty miles! For a piece of cheese? Is that your idea of human interest?”

  “It is,” the Marquis said coldly. “You can spend the night at a motel.”

  The temperature rose quickly the next day, though it stayed below freezing. I informed the bread cheese woman that The New Anomalist was interested in her apparition after all. She was delighted. I drove two hundred-fifty miles in a blizzard, the last fifty miles crawling along narrow village roads behind a snowplow, passing an art barn, a sheep-farm-cum-craft-shop, and a village grocery shop that had been converted into an interactive café.

  Now and then, I had the unpleasant feeling that someone was sitting in the back seat. It was a new phenomenon, a hollow twinge of fear, that I hadn’t experienced prior to that winter. A few times I even glanced behind me and almost lost control of the car on the slippery road.

  The house was a typical small wooden house of the kind built by veterans after World War II, pale green, one-and-a-half floors high. A flower pot had been hung on the porch next to the door. The heather inside it had frozen. Snow had piled up over three jalopies parked behind the sauna cottage in the yard. The man of the house probably spent his retirement fixing them.

  The woman I had spoken to on the phone came to greet me. She sat me down on a couch amid embroidered cushions. Behind the couch was a woven wall hanging, which I thought depicted Leda and the Swan, though the bird in it looked more like a goose.

  “Why don’t we have some coffee first and then you can see Him,” she said. “You do have your camera with you? You’ll be amazed, I promise. It’s just like an icon.”

  Only more ephemeral, I thought to myself.

  I drank a cup of coffee accompanied by homemade sugar cookies. Heartburn was rising in my gullet by the time the apparition was brought in, and I couldn’t hold back a burp. The cheese had been placed in a crystal bowl, maybe even a christening bowl, which in turn had been placed on a doily. I can’t say that I was impressed.

  “There!” the lady said victoriously, and pointed with her finger. The guidance was very necessary. A sympathetic eye could just make out a splotch resembling a human face in the pattern of spots on the surface of the cheese, just like you can see human faces, hats, churches, and cats, in stained wallpaper, fluffy clouds, or the wood fibers of a table.

  “Oh,” I said. I wasn’t able to manage much more enthusiasm, though I realized that the woman was disappointed by my lame reaction. This house call was starting to remind of me the visit to the Hair Artiste. I decided to give the Marquis a few choice words when I got back to the city.

  “Just think,” the woman said, “I don’t believe this cheese will ever get moldy. It’s still as if it’s freshly baked, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t think that at all, but held my tongue. To me, the cheese already smelled somewhat suspicious. Upon closer inspection, its dried-up edges already had a tinge of green to them.

  I drank my coffee and took some photos of the cheese, as the Marquis had insisted. I’d never had a more ridiculous assignment. I asked the woman a couple of questions, so that I could say that I’d interviewed her. “Where did you buy the cheese? Did you notice the face right away? Has anything like this happened to you before?”

  I soon ran out of questions. I felt hopeless, and everything around me looked ugly and banal. The cushions, Leda, and, above all, the miracle of the cheese.

  Her answers also became short and bland. I realized that the woman was disappointed in her interview and that both of us were eagerly waiting for the visit to end.

  “The bible circle from Sorainen parish is coming tomorrow. A whole bus load,” she told me on the porch, as I was taking my leave.

  “To come look at the cheese?”

  “The cheese, of course,” the woman said. “And on Wednesday another bus load is coming from Kätkälä. I’m charging them a small fee, compensation for the extra cleaning. They track in so much mud on their shoes.”

  I looked down, concerned, but I’d taken my shoes off as soon as I had entered. But the woman still seemed to have something on her chest.

  “I gave you exclusive rights to the story,” she said. “So . . . ”

  “Do you mean—?”

  “Well, I think some sort of small reward would be in order,” she said. “This being a miracle and all. I did give you exclusive rights.”

  “We don’t usually . . . We didn’t discuss anything like this.”

  The air between us grew even colder.

  “On the other hand,” I said to get myself out of the situation, “maybe we could give you all this year’s issues free of charge?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It being a miracle and all.”

  “And next year’s as well,” I said in a panic.

  “Well, alright then,” she consented, still clearly dissatisfied.

  I felt relieved once I’d closed the door behind me, and my mood improved quickly. The blizzard had eased up, the temperature had dropped again, and the starlit sky shone above me. From the cold earth, I looked up into even an greater coldness. I looked at the misty belt of the galaxy, and in the emptiness made out the constellations that human eyes had invented and named.

  In the few steps that I took beneath Ursa Major from the porch to the car, I had time to think: Why did I think the woman was strange and look down on her for seeing the face of her Savior in a piece of cheese? What about the faces in the flowers, the stars, and the symbols in the Voynich manuscript? Or the Hair Artiste and the shadow of a wing in her photograph? And didn’t Mr. Chance, too, see a deeper meaning in coincidence?

  Every eye roams the indifference
of the universe in search of signs, figures, images, messages. They can be found everywhere in the cosmos once you learn to see with human sight. Who’s to say whether it’s a strength or a weakness? It’s the way human beings are made, the way we’re born. Why is it that life and meaning seem to spring up wherever we humans direct our attention?

  The car wouldn’t start at first, but once the engine warmed up and I got onto the dark road, I felt that my head was clearer than it had been for a long time, and now no one was sitting in the back seat.

  Would it show more courage to acknowledge right away that humans don’t have a special place in the universe and that our fate is no more important than that of individual cell? We lonely souls playing with our strange brains under this brief sun should not be called cowards.

  The road led home and south.

  Loogaroo, a Classic

  Her name is Loogaroo. A beautiful name, like a song or a distant mating call. Loogaroo herself is beautiful as well, in an unapproachable, exotic way. Her hair falls on her shoulders in a shining bronze swirl, her satin shirt is an iridescent black, and her pale skin, either powdered white or just naturally that unusual shade, glimmers like moonlit snow. Her nose is pierced, with a silver ball hanging from it. She wears a dog’s collar, the kind with metal spikes. She, if anyone, is “cool.”

  I realize that here before me is a woman who could drive men mad, who could make them commit senseless deeds. Despite the fact that she is enchanting in her own way—or maybe because of it—I feel a hint of antipathy toward her. I try to hide it, of course, even though I don’t exactly smile at her. The things she says to me put me off.

  And she, too, remains stern faced. Throughout the interview, she is grave, solemn, didactic. She’s a little over twenty, twenty-five at most. Her attitude could be considered amusing in someone so young if one failed to realize that she is actually a professional of sorts.

  Loogaroo senses my dislike, no doubt, and returns the sentiment. She looks down on me. I can see myself from her perspective. I’m an insignificant reporter, a fastidious and conventional everyday person, who sleeps at night and wakes up in the morning well before the eight o’clock news. I am one of the plain cogs of the society she despises.