Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “Come now, you are not that bad, you must be exaggerating now.”

  That did not help at all; she became even more furious than before.

  “Get out of here! This instant!”

  Hunger gave me courage. “And my pay, madam? If I could have, for example, one of those fish . . . preferably the pike.”

  The woman wrenched the refrigerator door open and grabbed hold of one of the fish.

  “Here’s your pike!”

  She flung it straight into my eyes, a cold fish, which on top of everything was the bream. But in that situation it would not have helped me to complain, so I left with what I had been given. From the staircase I heard Billy’s angry voice: “I want the bird back! Bad mummy sent the bird away.”

  “The man was bad,” I could hear the woman saying. “Mummy is good, mummy will make porridge for Billy, there there. Let’s sing together now: ‘One potato, two potato, three potato, four . . . ’ ”

  I left the building, hiding the fish under my shirt. It was my first wage, and I suppose I should have felt joy and pride, but the circumstances were such that I had reason to fear it might be my last as well.

  My experiences of working life were not encouraging, but I decided to try again. Perhaps childcare was not a good field for me after all. Perhaps I had a brilliant future awaiting me performing some other task in life. In fact, I was quite sure of it. All I had to do was find out what that task was.

  The Pelican’s Story 3

  Almost Human

  Evening fell once more upon the city, a late summer evening. I trudged back and crawled under the boat which had already once offered me shelter for the night. My friend from that morning was not in evidence; perhaps he had moved his dwelling when he noticed he had an unwanted neighbour.

  I put my head under my wing, but I could not get to sleep; the events of the day were happening all over again. A scratching man offered me a knuckle sandwich and a small schoolboy told me strange things about time, the sun and the earth. I flew around in a stairwell and I tied tangled shoelaces, I buttoned and buttoned hopelessly and I ate part of a jar of human child food. An angry woman shouted ugly words at me, called me a monster, ugh, how ugly it sounded. A wet fish slapped me in the eyes once more, and self-pity brought tears to them.

  And so I had arrived in a human city, I had voluntarily given up the wind beneath my wings and learned to use them as hands are used. My feet too, my naked feet, which were not protected with the skin of any other animal as human feet were, they too had suffered as I wandered here and there along the stone-paved streets in the shadow of stone houses.

  I had exchanged the sand of the shore, the foam and the reed-beds for the hard, stone streets, and the harmonious cries of my children for the screeching of cars and the hum of cupboards that radiated an icy chill. Was it not an indescribably stupid exchange? Was I not myself clearly a fool? Should I not have got up straight away and left the boat, and walked all the long road back, though my feet burned and ached?

  I did get up and leave, for sleep was shunning my little boat, but I did not intend to go back to my homeland quite yet. My mind was restless and gloomy, it sought comfort, and before I knew it my tired feet had led me back to the Opera. But now no elegantly-dressed people were milling around in front of it, and the great arched windows were dark. I crept to the door and pressed my ear against it. Not the slightest sound of a flute, nor a single note of Papageno’s joyful song could be heard from inside.

  Where had it all gone, the music, the joy and the life?

  In order to rest my feet I sat down on the steps in front of the door. The faint hope still smouldered in my mind, that before long the lights would light up and the flute would begin to murmur. But it did not happen. I fell asleep, and slept, dreaming confused dreams, until morning.

  In my dreams I was lying once again beneath the lime tree, but the blue man came and grabbed me by the collar. He threatened to throw me in jail, if I did not tell him immediately how many seconds there were in a year.

  “Have mercy,” I begged in alarm. “I do not have a head for numbers at all. A year is a long time, and I am so tired.”

  He did not release my collar from his grip, but rather shook me even more vigorously. I had to open my eyes, and I was not lying under a lime tree at all, but on the cold steps of the Opera. The man who was shaking me by the collar was real, but he did not have a peaked cap. The sun was shining.

  “You can’t sleep here.”

  You could not sleep anywhere, I was beginning to learn that by degrees. I rubbed my eyes and stumbled to my feet with aching wings. There was something familiar about my awakener; that was right, he had torn pieces of paper in half and guarded the entrance to the most holy sanctuary of the Opera.

  “What are you doing here?” asked the man suspiciously. “Can’t you find a better place to sleep?”

  “I am looking for work.”

  “Are you an unemployed tenor, or what?” And the man laughed mockingly.

  I had been called many things in my short life as a human: vagrant, monster, and now tenor. It was beginning to annoy me.

  “Better a tenor than a paper-tearer,” I said, though I had no idea what a tenor did.

  “There’s skill in that, too,” the man reflected. “And I have to do a lot more here than just tear paper. Last thing at night I check that no one is left dozing in their seat and I lock the doors, first thing in the morning I open them.”

  “You have a long day.”

  “There were two of us here, but the other one has a blocked intestine. They still haven’t got anyone to replace him, the pay is so bad.”

  “What if I tried?”

  “You? Weren’t you a singer?”

  “I could certainly try tearing paper for a change.”

  Thus I became the youngest doorman at the Opera, lp., tmp. Which means lower pay-bracket and temporary.

  But I had a job, I had taken a step towards true humanity. I was given a jacket which was cranberry-red, and whose front was dignified by two rows of gold buttons. I learned to tear tickets deftly and quickly, and my gaze quickly distinguished the freeloaders, usually young scoundrels dressed in everyday clothes, from the flow of incomers. I recognised them, but I would pretend not to notice their criminal intentions; on the contrary, I would turn my back as soon as an appropriate opportunity presented itself so that they could slip in for free, or I would tear the forged paper slips that they offered me as supposed entrance tickets without batting an eyelid. I acted in this manner because I knew that the true experts and art lovers were found in this group, precisely this group, not the aristocratic audience from the front row and the private boxes.

  From afar I admired the Opera’s primadonna, La Sambina, who at times would give me a gracious nod, and at others fly past without noticing me, but wafting the scent of flowers over me. Sometimes I also had the good fortune to watch the rehearsals from the doorway, with the little ballet students, who stretched out their legs in their butterfly costumes, or the choir, whose warm-up exercises were amusing to hear.

  I was no longer a vagrant, but I dwelt under the boat until my first payday. Then I was able to pay the rent for this apartment, which one of the choristers told me about; Mrs. Greatorex, my landlady, happens to be her aunt.

  I led a moderately regular life, but I still could not imagine bringing my family to the city. My pay was so poor that it only just sufficed for the rent, the necessary clothing and my daily meal of herring. I have also tried to learn to enjoy human food, since there are situations in which I must take my meals in the sight of others, and I have noticed raw fish giving rise to feelings of bewilderment in many circles. I do not touch meat, but I have learned to endure coffee. I shun the human habit of eating their food hot, and I must stir and blow on my coffee for a long time before swallowing it.

  I have had the opportunity to hear operas other than The Magic Flute as well, but I never cared for any other as much. I learned what is meant by tenor, libret
to and recitative. Sometimes in the evenings, as I was turning off the lights in the halls and corridors, I was inspired to test the capacity of my own voice. Once I dared to step onto the stage and, in the position of the operetta prince, I sang a song I had made up myself:

  Like a bird on the wing I glide and sing;

  I have no use for business suits:

  They shroud my supple frame, and look

  As good as a saddle would on a duck.

  Then, to my surprise, loud clapping rang out from the dark auditorium, from under the red lights that indicated the exit. “You have a good voice,” someone said. “Why don’t you join the choir?”

  It was the choir master, who had called in to fetch the mink wrap that his wife had left in the theatre. He found it, and he found me, and I was permitted to begin singing in the back row, among the tenors.

  “It’s unlikely that you’ll ever get a solo part,” he commiserated, “although as far as your voice is concerned you have the ability. But we couldn’t make a hero out of you if we tried. Your looks, your bright nose, your short legs and your unusually wide feet . . . I suppose you understand.”

  I certainly did understand. Humans considered me to be ugly, although in my time I had been one of the handsomest young pelicans on the coast. But I had to swallow it, just as with many other things in the human world, because I had chosen to play the game.

  In the beginning I did not understand anything of the notation of course, and I sang by ear, repeating the words after the others, constantly fearing that my lack of skill would be noticed. But before long I began to see regularity and logic in the incomprehensible marks: the higher the sound you sang, the higher the little black circles were on the lines, and vice versa. Thus, I learned to read musical notation before I learned the alphabet.

  My salary as a chorister was rather nominal, so that soon I began to consider new ways of making money. The choir-master’s observation about my lack of suitability for solo parts caused defiance to rise within me; if I could not get the role of first lover on the stage of the Opera, I would certainly have a chance to sing solo somewhere else. I wasn’t just any chorister, I also composed songs myself; nor were they at all bad, in my own opinion. I even believed that there were people who would pay to hear them.

  And there were. I was hired to work at a certain restaurant two nights a week. The restaurateur wanted “funny” songs, and I wrote them for him. Many were without rhyme or reason, but the audience liked them.

  I made friends with my accompanist, the pianist Wildgoose. He was a frail old man who smoked enormous numbers of cigarettes and who had warts on his fingers, but that did not interfere with his playing: he was an artist. But so was I, or so Wildgoose said to me, when I had sung my first song. It was the Little Night Song, which you shall soon hear. Wildgoose did not particularly care for The Turkey Song, which, by contrast, was among the restaurateur’s favourites. It goes like this:

  With Christmas Eve a week away

  The turkey’s feathers moulted.

  Said he, “As roast on Christmas Day,

  Pre-plucked, I can’t be faulted.”

  But sage and onion shunned the bird,

  Its fate was not so grand:

  The farmer’s wife shrieked, “How absurd!

  This fowl is second-hand!”

  Whenever I had Turkey on my set list Wildgoose would look depressed and play wrong notes on the piano, as if in protest. I did not turn a hair, but continued to sing as if I had not noticed anything, and by the time we started the next song he had already calmed down.

  So my life as a human gradually settled down. I have already lived among humans for a year. I have an apartment and a job, even a few friends, particularly Wildgoose and now you. But although my economic situation would now allow me to bring my family to the city, I have not yet dared to do so. Doubt gnaws at me: I fear that I would, after all, do wrong by my loved ones if I brought them here to the world of humans. And my children are already grown up; perhaps they no longer remember their father and his dreams of humanity.

  On many nights I have simply paced back and forth in these narrow foot-covers and thought. On many nights I have got as far as opening the front door to go back to them, but some power, curiosity, habit, defiance has made me return to my bathtub, where I spend my nights.

  I have become human, that’s what it is, I have become human more quickly and more fully than I could have believed, and now there are things here, in this city, which I do not want to give up.

  The Opera, for example. Is there an Opera there, on the coast, on the granite cliffs and in the reedy coves? No there isn’t, nor is there anything of that kind at all. There are all kinds of whistlers and song-warblers, of course, the gulls cry and the ducks quack. The wind blows over everything so that it sighs, and the water rumbles and gurgles in the caves in the cliffs. I have heard people talk about “the great symphony of nature”, but it is not a symphony at all, because it has no beginning, no end and no direction, it just is, always and forever. And I have learned to love limits and purposes, meaning and themes, that which is made, thought and built.

  And now a terrible doubt plagues me. I doubt that I could become a bird again at all. Am I still capable of being my children’s father and my wife’s husband? And will they be enough for me . . . ? Oh, it is a terrible doubt, but how can I eradicate it?

  I feel that my outward appearance is also beginning to resemble that of a human more and more, that my wings are growing fingers and my beak is narrowing to a nose, my webbed feet into soft soles. I have begun to moult, just like the turkey in my song. Perhaps soon my feathers will fall out altogether and I will be naked under my clothes like a human.

  Home Before Dark

  “What, are you asleep?”

  “No, not at all.” Startled, Emil lifted his head, which had sunk unnoticed onto his breast.

  “I am a bad bird, keeping you awake in this way. What will your parents say, when you are away this late.”

  “Dad—he won’t say anything . . . He’s not here. And mum’s often out herself in the evenings, she won’t be angry.”

  “Does she know that I am a bird?”

  “She doesn’t believe it. I did tell her once, but she didn’t believe it.”

  “Perhaps it is better that way. I am grateful that you had the energy to listen to me for so long. But before we go to our rest—if you will allow it—I would like to sing you my Little Night Song.”

  This certainly suited Emil. And the pelican sang:

  Come home before the day is dead,

  Come through the twilight, silken-head.

  When your bed is woodland shade

  The world grows strange,

  The world grows strange.

  The golden fish he splashed and sank

  Through shadows to the sandy bank.

  And if there’s time he’ll make his bed

  In coral caves, when day is dead.

  The russet fox he had to run

  On Sunday from the huntsman’s gun

  He raced for home to warm his bed

  And cubs, before the day was dead.

  The snail alone is never found

  Away from home when night draws down.

  He shuts his door and rests his head

  Still long before the day is dead.

  Come home before the day is dead

  And evening finds you far from bed

  And turns the path that leads you back

  To shadows black,

  To shadows black.

  Not everybody makes it home;

  Long fingers pluck them as they roam

  And wrap them, sleeping, in the night

  Till morning light,

  Till morning light.

  Glass and Diamonds

  Glass and diamonds.

  Dreams and life.

  The Fair

  Emil taught the pelican to read every day that week, but on Saturday they had a day off. The pelican had seen an advert a
bout a big trade-fair on the other side of town.

  “What is a trade-fair?” he asked Emil.

  “It’s a kind of exhibition where they show you new things, machines and inventions.”

  “Shall we go to look?”

  “Yeah, let’s!” Emil was excited. He had never been to a trade-fair either. But then he became gloomy. “I think it costs something. I’m completely broke.”

  The bird patted him on the back encouragingly. “Let me pay. I have just received my salary. We must go and see all the machines and inventions.”

  So they went on the number seven bus to the other side of town on that bright, late-summer day, and through the bus windows the city watched them, more friendly than ever before.

  They sat at the front of the bus and the pelican pointed with the tip of his wing at everything that went by: ice-cream sellers and girls skipping and a canary in a cage at a ground floor window. He exclaimed and said, “My, she is a nimble girl,” and “What does ice-cream actually taste like?” (since he had never eaten ice-cream) and “Canaries are not the sharpest tools in the box, you know.”

  Whenever they went through a square or over a bridge or past some unusually large building, Emil had to say where they were and what the building was, but he almost never knew.

  The pelican also spelled out the posters and shop signs, with Emil’s help: Massive sale today! New nightclub opening here soon! and Bakery—Boulangerie.

  “What is this Boulangerie?” the bird asked.

  “It means bakery as well, but it’s in another language,” Emil explained.

  “Oh yes, of course.” The bird was quiet for a moment.

  “I used to think that all humans everywhere spoke the same language amongst themselves, just like all pelicans.”

  “There’s at least a hundred different human languages,” Emil informed him.

  “But doesn’t that make everything much more difficult?”

  “It certainly does,” Emil said. He had already noticed this in school: French was not one of his stronger suits.