Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  They were just driving past a huge brick building that was surrounded by a high wall. At the top of the wall there was a double strand of barbed wire. The pelican forgot the hundred human languages and began to ask about the purpose of the wall.

  “It’s Pentonwood Scrubs,” Emil explained.

  “What on earth is Pentonwood Scrubs?” the bird laughed.

  “It’s a prison,” Emil explained. “Prisoners live there.”

  “Whose prisoners are they?”

  Emil considered. “Everybody’s,” he said, hesitating. “They’ve been condemned by the law.”

  “What is the law?”

  “It’s a book that says what you’re not allowed to do.”

  “Then what are you not allowed to do?”

  “Well, for example, you can’t steal. Or kill.”

  “Or sleep on park benches,” remembered the bird. “But the prisoners have done something that one may not do. And now they have all been put into the same building to live, what for?”

  The pelican asked difficult questions. But before Emil had time to think of an answer, the bus had arrived at the last stop and they had to get off. The trade-fair area was right next to it, filled with great dome-shaped tents and bustle. At the gate the pelican paid for both of them, but he had become quieter and looked distracted. Maybe he was still thinking about the hundred languages or laws and prisoners.

  They found themselves in an immensely huge noisy hall, where girls dressed in little red skirts were displaying odd-looking machines and gadgets.

  “This way, ladies and gentlemen!” cried one of the product-saleswomen, and Emil and the pelican pressed obediently closer. “This is an innovation that will be needed in every office and workplace! Secretaries and office managers! Once you’ve used it once, you won’t be able to give it up. Essential to every company!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Esteemed CEOs! May I present: the automatic paper shredder Destructor de Luxe! This unique document shredder cuts all your important papers into half millimetre strips! Five metres a second! Take a look!” And the young woman pushed a stack of thick paper into the mouth of the gently humming Destructor. The pelican watched and listened with his beak open, but Emil didn’t really understand what it was all about.

  “Observe!” the young woman cried triumphantly, and opened the box on the front of the appliance. She grabbed a handful of strips from it and thrust them right and left, almost pushing her hand into the pelican’s beak-bag.

  “Fantastic!” smiled a man who looked like an office manager, and he nudged the pelican’s crop so that it quivered.

  “Fantastic is the right word!” The saleswoman seized on the gentleman’s remark. “It is impossible for anyone to reconstruct the original from these strips. The Destructor de Luxe now at a special introductory price! Only fifteen hundred! A one-time opportunity! Don’t let it pass you by.”

  But the pelican and Emil had already done so. The pelican had seized Emil by the hand and was dragging him at furious speed towards the bus stop.

  “I need something to strengthen my nerves,” he said. “My figure is not suited to fairs.”

  So they went by bus to the pelican’s for tea. The bird himself had a raw flounder, but Emil devoured a coconut cake that the bird had bought especially for him.

  “You know almost everything about me, but I know hardly anything about you,” the pelican said between bites. “Were you born in the city?”

  “No, I’m from elsewhere. I only moved here last summer.”

  “So you are a stranger here too . . . Then it’s no surprise that I thought immediately that we had something in common. Perhaps you have the same illness as I do . . . ”

  “I’m perfectly healthy,” Emil muttered.

  “But don’t you ever have a pain here?” and the bird pressed his wing against his chest. “Don’t you ever feel as if there was some kind of fishhook there that was pulling you back to where you came from?”

  Emil hung his head without answering. A lump had risen to his throat and his eyelids were beginning to burn.

  “It is a difficult illness.” The bird looked discreetly away. “Some never recover. Then only one thing helps: one has to go back.”

  “But what if you can’t?”

  “Then one has to become accustomed to life as a chronic invalid.”

  He did use difficult words, Emil thought. Where could he have learned them? Mr. Wildgoose must read the dictionary out loud to him between songs in the restaurant.

  “What’s a chronic invalid?”

  “It is someone who suffers from an incurable disease.”

  “I don’t want to become a chronic invalid.”

  “Perhaps you do not need to. Perhaps you will forget, or return. And sometimes one can only forget when one has returned, and then left again. For it can happen that, when you get back what you wanted, it is not what you wanted at all.”

  “Do you mean that it isn’t home?”

  “It may be that it is the time, not the place, for which you long so much.”

  “I see.”

  Emil said “I see,” because he didn’t really understand what the bird meant. But he enjoyed listening to his cawing voice and his careful mode of speech, to which he was already accustomed. He no longer found the creature’s round, yellow eyes strange, nor did his lumbering gait strike him as ridiculous any more.

  He already looked at him as one looks at a true friend, seeing past the lead-grey pipe-cleaner legs and the shapeless beak and, strangest of all, the beak-pouch. He forgot them, just as love forgets that which is not important, but without knowing it he also loved the pipe-cleaner legs and the beak, and he would have been sorry if they had changed shape.

  Home in the Pupil of an Eye

  I have climbed these steps so many times. I have opened this door so many times. I have looked out of the windows into the yard. I have warmed myself by the hearth-fire. I have eaten at the table. I have lain in the bed.

  Z. Topelius

  The next day Emil got a letter from his father. In it he said that he could come to Mogham for a week right away.

  “It would be best if you left tomorrow, then,” said Emil’s mother.

  “I don’t know if tomorrow . . . ”

  Did Emil really say that? Even he was surprised. After all, hadn’t he been waiting for this letter every single day since school ended? And it came only now, when July was already almost over . . .

  The fact was, he was scared. Because his father’s new wife Margaret would be there. There was the baby too, Mary, who he had never seen before. And then he thought about the pelican and his obligations as a teacher. For some reason he was a little afraid of that too: to leave the pelican alone in the city. But he couldn’t explain even to himself what could be frightening about that.

  Nevertheless, Emil could not hide the quiver of joy in his voice when he had a chance to tell the pelican: “Tomorrow I’m going home.”

  But the bird’s beak became paler than before.

  “For good?”

  “Just for a week,” Emil said hastily.

  “After that you probably will not have time to come here any more.”

  “We’ll sort something out,” Emil assured him. “Of course I’ll come.”

  The creature pressed his hand formally.

  “I am glad for you. Have a good journey, Emil. A very good journey!”

  Emil left first thing in the morning, and his mother took him to the train before she left for work. She came as far as the compartment in the carriage and lifted his bag up to the rack herself.

  “Wait a moment,” she said. “I’ll be back.”

  From the window Emil saw her running along the platform to the kiosk. When she came back she had a chocolate and nut bar in her hand, which she pushed into the breast pocket of Emil’s denim shirt.

  “Couldn’t you come with me, mum?”

  “No, I can’t.” And her expression grew tense. “I’ve got to go now, they’re alre
ady announcing it.”

  She hugged Emil and he was embarrassed; that sort of thing didn’t happen very often. Slowly, at first almost silently, the train slid into motion, and his mother, waving from down on the platform with a sorrowful expression, slid in the opposite direction just as silently.

  The railway yards were left behind, and the train sped through huge industrial estates, and districts where tall buildings, like the one that Emil and his mother lived in, stood side by side. But the green spaces between them became wider and the vegetation denser, joining together and becoming countryside. There were real cornfields, where combine harvesters made the rounds, or stakes stood in straight lines like yellow soldiers. There were woods, real woods, which the slanting rays of the morning sun lit up so that they were full of sharp strips of shade and glowing green leaves. There were houses, not twelve storeys any more, not even four, but low, whitewashed houses with pine fences, with garden swings, with laundry hung up to flutter between two birch trees. There were grey barns and lakes and the train sped ever deeper inland, towards the North.

  Had his father changed? Had Jessie, with his curly tail, grown fat and old? His father fed him sugar in secret, he didn’t believe them when they said that it was bad for dogs’ eyes. He would certainly see Joe Hunter, who was doing his GCSEs at the school in the nearby village and wanted to go to the city to study to become an electrician afterwards. They used to lie in the loft of the Hunters’ barn and read old issues of Playboy that Joe’s father had ordered long before.

  But in fact Emil already knew that, although his father and Jessie and Joe might not have changed, he himself had, and that would be enough to change everything.

  His father stood at Mogham station in a checked shirt and velvet trousers, not the sort of thing he had worn before. Emil saw him from his window seat before his father noticed him, but he didn’t wave, no, quite the opposite, he drew back a little. It was as if he wanted to gain some time, and he certainly didn’t rush out of the train first, but only after the families that were loaded down with rubber rings, fishing rods, picnic baskets and barking dogs.

  “Good afternoon, Emil,” his father said.

  It sounded formal. In the city family members never said ‘good afternoon’ to each other; they always said “hello” or “hi.”

  They didn’t hug; they shook hands and then his father patted him on the shoulder. Emil thought it was better that way.

  “You can sit on the bike’s luggage rack.”

  Emil had sat there dozens of times before, it was the same bike, but nevertheless it felt new. He felt embarrassed to put his arms around his father’s waist, and so he held on to the springs under the saddle. His feet touched the ground, he noticed for the first time.

  His father cycled fast and they didn’t talk during the journey. Emil saw the patch of sweat on his back grow wider: it was the first hot day in a long time.

  Old Granny Hunter stood in front of her henhouse and waved to them. He couldn’t see Joe.

  The maple tree by the gate had grown and darkened. When he saw the main building and the porch emerge from behind the lilacs, he didn’t feel the joy he had expected, but rather the opposite: surprise and displeasure. The house wasn’t plain stone any more, it had been pebble-dashed.

  No one ran barking to greet them. Jessie’s chain was broken and his kennel looked empty.

  “Dad, where’s Jessie?”

  “Jessie’s dead.”

  Emil didn’t ask when and how it had happened. He didn’t want to know. But he remembered the times when he had been mean and impatient with Jessie, when he had smacked him and even once kicked him, although without shoes.

  His father braked and he jumped off the bike. They were home.

  The baby, Mary, had red hair like her mother, but it was as fine as silk and it stuck up in tufts from the top of her head like a bird’s feathers. She had just learned to laugh, and she liked Emil, she quite obviously liked him. She laughed, her mouth wet and toothless like a little old granny’s, when Emil held her by the arms and spun her round and round.

  But Margaret was afraid when she saw that. She snatched Mary away. “Don’t treat the baby like that!”

  Mary started to cry and Emil explained: “She liked it, honest. She was laughing just now.”

  “Does it look like she’s laughing to you?”

  Then Margaret took the baby to the bedroom, but Emil set off for the Hunters’.

  “Is Joe home?”

  “No, he went to Rita’s. He’s always over there.”

  He should have guessed. Joe was never home. Or if he was, Rita was there too. And when Rita was there, Joe looked at Emil from the height of fifteen years, looking down on him. At the Hunters’ they said that Joe was “married,” and sometimes they said it mockingly, sometimes with good-natured amusement. Of course he knew what being ‘married’ meant, he thought it was something that adults were, not people like Joe. Rita did look like an adult, she had breasts, she had had them for many years. Back when they went to the same school, one of the teachers had said that Rita was mature for her age. He meant them of course, the breasts.

  Emil climbed into the loft of the Hunters’ barn. There were breasts there too, tits. When he opened an old Playboy, the pictures of tits leaped straight out at him.

  Looking at them didn’t amuse Emil any more. He took a pile of magazines as a pillow and lay on his back in the sawdust. He lay there in the half-light and stared at the roof-beams, between which the August sun leaked in stripes.

  He had returned home, but it wasn’t his home. It wasn’t Brook Farm in Mogham, which he had been dreaming of for long months. His home had been the stone one, where Jessie had struggled against his chain in front of the porch and wagged his tail at all the passers-by, but especially at Emil. His home had been the farmhouse where his mother would turn the dials of the radio in the evenings to find some music that she liked, and once she had found it, would yell to the bedroom: “Adam, come and listen to this!” Now there was a new three piece suite and a stereo in the farmhouse, but the old radio, the kitchen table and the sofa-bed had disappeared. It was so elegant that Emil didn’t really know how to exist there. Even the air seemed to him to smell different from before. And though the doors and windows were in their old places, Emil could not be deceived: in his absence a miserable exchange had taken place, the old home had been lifted up and taken away into the unknown, but this pebble-dashed one had been brought to replace it. Even the door, although it looked unchanged, the broad farmhouse door with its knotholes, whose lines were so familiar, didn’t the door creak in a different way than before?

  Sometimes, there in the city, when Emil had looked in the mirror, he had almost expected to see a little Brook Farm in the depths of his eyes, very small and grey with its slate roof and the green maple, the real Brook Farm and Jessie, dozing in the blue shade of the lilacs. And it was the only place where that real old home could be seen any more. He carried it with him everywhere, and it wasn’t very light, but he carried it like a man and he would carry it from now on.

  “Someone who suffers from an incurable disease,” wasn’t that what the pelican had said? Was that what Emil was as well now?

  Only now did he understand the immutability of loss, his first loss. But in return it gave him something, without which one could not be human: it gave him a past.

  In the evening, Emil, sitting in his bedroom where there was no longer anything belonging to him except the iron bedstead, heard Margaret and his father talking in the living room. The door was closed and he couldn’t make out the words, only a murmuring which rose and fell. But there were tears and anger in that murmuring, and it continued into his dreams, grinding on and on.

  In the morning Emil sat on the steps of the porch and peeled potatoes for Margaret. He was only wearing his swimming trunks and he had a towel draped around his neck, since he had been intending to go to the public beach to swim when Margaret called to him from the sink. When she thrust a dish o
f potatoes into his arms, saying curtly: “Could you peel these before you go to the beach,” he had thought about saying something nasty. But he couldn’t any more when Margaret turned suddenly back to him again: “It would be a great help to me, Emil.” And her hand, still wet from the dish water, brushed his overgrown fringe to one side.

  When he sat there on the porch, he could still feel the woman’s hand on his forehead and hear his name the way the woman’s lips had shaped it. His face growing hot, he peeled the scabby potatoes and hoped that Margaret would speak to him again in that voice, so gently. Emil. Emil. Emil.

  But someone sat down heavily next to him and lit a cigarette. His father. “How’s your mother?”

  Emil had been waiting for this question, but his father only asked it now. “Fine.”

  That was what he said, although he had thought about saying a great deal more. That his mother was always tired and angry, that they were always short of money and that the city . . . What could his father understand about the city?

  It was so still that the cigarette smoke rose straight upwards. Emil looked at his father out of the corner of his eyes. He saw the weather-beaten cheek and the pores on the bridge of his nose and the paler groove at the corner of his mouth, which straightened for a moment as his father sucked on the cigarette. He remembered that there had been a time when he leaned his head against that cheek and that veiny neck freely, without embarrassment. When he had felt the regular, sure beat of his father’s arteries in his own skin. He would never feel it again. He would never even want to feel it again.

  “What’s it like in the laundry? Is it really bad?”

  “I haven’t been.”

  “Hasn’t your mother told you?”

  “No.”

  His father dropped the cigarette butt onto the sand and ground at it with the tip of his boot. Almost all the potatoes were now peeled.

  “Well, have you found some new friends yet?”

  “I’ve got one.”

  That one was the pelican, Papageno, Mr. Henderson. He supposed he could be called a friend.