Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “Now a little music,” the pelican suggested, and the pianist dug a comb out of his pocket. Wildgoose accompanied the pelican as he sang:

  From earth we are made, but the Earth’s not enough:

  Too narrow to compass our dreams.

  A mean death, to walk one path time after time;

  How choking the everyday seems.

  He who rows the high seas without oars,

  Has no need of bowsprit or grapple;

  He knows the house of Hades as well

  As the priest knows the nave of the chapel.

  After that, the only thing left to do was to collect the rubbish and burn it, to put out the fire and to leave.

  “The left-over papers of the picnic club,” said the pelican and laughed, as they collected the paper bags and the greaseproof wrappers to burn them to embers. “Now they will no longer betray us. There will be no trace left of our presence.”

  “Except the ashes.”

  “You can pour water on top of them, and when they no longer glow we shall scatter them in the heather. Next year it will bloom the better for it.”

  A Discussion of Time and Angels

  “When I was a bird,” the pelican began one day.

  He really said: “When I was a bird . . . ”

  “When I was a bird,” he said, “I never thought about time. Of course I knew that when the sun went down the stars and moon would come out, and that when the stars grew pale and the moon drifted away, the sun would return. But I never measured time with the help of the heavenly bodies, I did not say ‘tomorrow’ or ‘last night’ or ‘next week.’ When my children were born, I sought food for them and I fed them, because that was what I had to do. But I did not think that with the help of that food they would one day grow big and strong. And when they had grown, I no longer remembered that once they had been no bigger than my foot . . . I did not know that History existed. I did not have perspective, that is it. Perspective is an important thing, and now I have it.”

  “What’s perspective?” asked Emil. He was embarrassed to have to ask the bird, he had heard the word some time before of course, but just at that moment he couldn’t remember what it meant.

  “It is the ability to see a little further. And from a little higher up as well, but not too high. If one looks from too high up, everything appears to be the same height, and to mean the same amount, or nothing. One must first look at what is nearby, and then at what is far away. Or vice versa. First at the matter itself, and then past the matter. First at that which is now, and then at that which was yesterday and which may be tomorrow. In this way, one achieves perspective.”

  “I’d rather have wings,” said Emil.

  “Do you mean that you would exchange your hands for wings?”

  Emil hesitated.

  “I’d like to have both.”

  The bird sighed. “But that is not possible. The kind of animal that has both does not exist.”

  “There are angels,” Emil contradicted him. “Although actually they don’t exist.”

  “There are and there aren’t . . . What does that mean? And what kind of animal is an angel? I have not heard of such a species, although I have read the Middle School Zoology Textbook from cover to cover.”

  “They’re not animals at all. They’re like people, except they have wings on their backs. And you can’t see them. People just talk about them sometimes, or sing about them: ‘The angel of the Lord came down . . . ’ ”

  “Is that so? And what do they do?”

  “They just fly around and protect little children, and when someone dies they take his soul to heaven. There’s also archangels, but I don’t really know if they do anything special. Angels are usually good, but then again there’s also black angels.”

  The bird considered this. “I would achieve a great deal if I had both hands and wings . . . ”

  The Bird Reads the Newspaper

  The pelican had subscribed to a newspaper, the most important one in the country. He had enthusiastically told Emil about this subscription in advance. He had still never read a newspaper, although he had held one in his hands while he was still illiterate, as Emil remembered from their first meeting. But now that he had learned to read, he wanted to order one for himself, and he thought it was a great luxury to have it brought to his door.

  The first morning that the paper was supposed to come, he was already sitting waiting on the doormat in the hall by four o’clock. When the paper-boy pushed it through the letter box, he felt how somebody on the other side of the door actually snatched it out of his hands.

  “Must be a dog,” he thought and continued his round. But it wasn’t a dog, it was a bird.

  The next morning, when the paper-boy arrived at the same door, it opened before he had a chance to carry out his job. A very strange-looking gentlemen, dressed in an extremely gaudy dressing-gown, stood in the doorway. He eyed the paper-boy so sternly that the boy was rather frightened.

  “Do not ever bring me a newspaper again,” the gentleman said.

  “But it’s ordered for this address. On the address list it says Henderson.”

  To confirm this, the boy showed the list in question to the severe-looking man in the dressing-gown, pointing with a trembling finger.

  “Nevertheless,” the gentleman said. “Do not bring it here. As far as I am concerned you may do with it what you will.”

  And that was the end of the pelican’s brief acquaintance with the newspaper, from which so much had been expected beforehand.

  The pelican assured Emil that he never intended to read another newspaper again in his life. As he told him this he seemed depressed and tired, almost ill.

  “Either it is lying,” the pelican said, “or then, even worse, it is telling the truth.”

  “It’s not lying,” Emil assured him. “It’s the biggest paper in the country. But why would it be worse if it was telling the truth?”

  “Because,” the pelican said, and seemed to be trembling in disgust, “it says such terrible things about people. I don’t want to believe them.”

  “Like what?”

  “There was an article about a boy who kicked another boy to death because he would not give him a cigarette, and another about a man who cut off a locksmith’s ear.”

  “That sort of thing happens these days, from what I hear. In cities.”

  “I also read an article about a squadron of bombers and multi-target missiles. A missile is a contraption that can be hurled across thousands of miles to a pre-arranged point. Perhaps it sounds unbelievable, and it frightens me to tell it, but it is designed to rip human dwellings and human flesh to pieces, to bleed all the blood from human bodies, to scatter them and their surroundings as dust into the air. And there are so many of these bombs and missiles, so it said in the paper, that each person on the globe could be killed dozens of times. It did not say a word about animals, but they would certainly suffer the same fate, they would suffer it even before the humans.

  “This is not an interpretation, it was said so clearly that it could not have been misunderstood. It is not just terrible, it is also irrational, but nevertheless I have heard people say that humans are the most rational of all animals.

  “I am now greatly bewildered, I have never been so astonished in my life. I am bewildered by humans, who can both play the magic flute and create missiles. What are they really? What kind of creature are they? And if my beak is growing shorter, as I sometimes feel it is, if my feet are becoming narrower and my feathers are falling out, if one day I find I have a real human face, will I become the same as them?”

  The Mournful Man

  The pelican had been to a completely new place, and he told Emil about his impressions.

  “I noticed some time ago that here and there in the city there are handsome buildings with towers, and at the top of the tower there is some kind of decoration. On Sundays you can hear bells ringing in them, and then large numbers of people wander in that direction, but on other
days they look quite deserted. Out of curiosity I decided yesterday to go and take a look at what they really do in those buildings.

  “The inside reminded me of the opera or the cinema. There were lots of benches there too, but in front of the benches there was no white screen, but rather some kind of table and a barrel-shaped box. Attached to the wall above the table there was a man carved from wood, who—it is terrible to relate—was nailed up by his hands and feet. On a stage in front of the table was an oblong box, which was covered with white frills. There was a man speaking in the barrel who was dressed in black, and around his neck there was something that looked just like a little white food label.

  “I sat down on a bench the back row, because I wanted to hear what he had to say. And his speech was rather odd, too. It became clear that there was a dead man in the box, who he referred to in his speech from time to time. The man had been hard-working and respectable, he had led a blameless life, which had, when judged humanely, been cut off all too soon, and behind him he had left a large crowd of mourners along with his widow and children.

  “But the box would only be a temporary resting place for the man. And now the man in black used a word which I had never heard before: ‘ascension.’ There would come a time, so the man in the barrel claimed, when all the dead would rise from their graves and gather for the last judgement. They would have two alternatives before them: eternal joy or eternal torment. And they would receive one or the other according to how they had behaved here on Earth, but above all according to what they had believed. If they had believed in the mournful man who hung on the wall from his hands and feet, they would be assured of their place in joy. This mournful man, as the man in the barrel explained, had died for the sins of humankind and made ascension possible for them. He himself had ascended shortly after his death, and on judgement day he would divide the dead into those who were going to joy and those who were going to pain.

  “All this was new and shocking to me, but I wasn’t completely sure of whether I was supposed to take it seriously or whether it was the same thing as in the Opera or the cinema, which the décor resembled. Was everything here just pictures and imagination, designed as consolation and diversion for those who are too accustomed to reality or those who are afraid of it?

  “The word death itself, which the man in black repeated constantly, had previously been unfamiliar to me as a concept. Among those of my kind, you see, death in the way he spoke of it does not really exist. He spoke of it as the inevitable end of all earthly life, but we, there on the coast, in a way we live forever. We too have, of course, seen dead companions, who have been killed by humans or by some other animal, but that is chance, accidental, not the rule. I myself have never thought about my own death, but if it should happen to me—the idea of which entered my head for the first time as a human—I would not believe that I should ever rise to my wings again. The waves or the sand would swallow my body, and that would be all.

  “A old woman wearing a headscarf who was sitting next to me joined her voice in song with the rest of those sitting in the room:

  Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

  Bears all its sons away;

  They fly forgotten, as a dream

  Dies at the opening day.

  O God, our help in ages past,

  Our hope for years to come,

  Be thou our guard while troubles last,

  And our eternal home.

  “Brightly-coloured wreaths of flowers, lilies, roses and aquilegias, were placed on top of the box, until it was completely covered in glowing colours. Then four men came and took hold of the box, each by his own corner, and set off carrying it down the central aisle towards the outer door. I followed them behind all the other people.

  “The box was carried into the park that surrounded the building, up to a freshly-dug hole. It was lowered with the help of ropes to the bottom of the hole, and the man in black who had spoken inside the building stepped forward again. He took some sand in a small trowel, scattered it on top of the box and spoke the following words:

  “ ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

  “Following his example, the rest of the people did the same thing, but without saying anything. They sang again, and then people dispersed. I went on my way as well, amazed by these events.”

  Emil explained to the pelican that the building in which this had occurred was a church, and the events which he had witnessed were called a funeral. The man who had stood in the barrel was a priest and his audience were the congregation.

  “So the church is for dead people,” the pelican concluded.

  “No, no, it’s for God, of course. And lots more things happen there than funerals. Every Sunday there’s a service, where the priest preaches, and then they marry young couples there and they give communion and they confess sins, if it’s a Catholic church. But the one that you went to must have been Protestant.”

  “So there are two kinds of churches.”

  “No, there are lots more kinds,” Emil explained. He struggled to remember. “There’s Orthodox and Anglican and Presbyterian, there are Mormon churches and Methodist churches and Baptist churches and Free churches. Muslims have their own churches, and they’re called mosques, and Jews have synagogues. I don’t know everything about it.”

  “Are there then so many gods? How does one know which one to worship?”

  Emil got confused. “I think there ought to only be one. And some people say that even that one doesn’t exist.”

  The creature turned his head. “And the mournful man? Who was he?”

  “That was the son of God,” Emil explained.

  “Does he have any more children then?”

  “No, just the one. But then there’s the Holy Ghost . . . ”

  “Does he belong to the same family?”

  “In a way. It’s very complicated. It’s theology.”

  “But who is the mother?”

  “Mary. The Virgin Mary.”

  “How can she be a virgin if she is a mother? Isn’t she God’s wife?”

  “I don’t think so, I don’t know. It’s theology, I already said that.” Emil was starting to be annoyed by the pelican’s endless questions.

  “An unusual family . . . ” The bird stared ahead thoughtfully. “But that mournful man, you know . . . I liked that man. Hanging there above the table,” (“altar,” Emil interrupted) “nailed by his hands and feet, he looked at us sitting on the benches so patiently and beautifully. He looked just as though he pitied us, though he himself was in such a difficult situation.”

  They didn’t talk any more about theology that night.

  The Bird Studies Science

  Emil went to return some overdue comics to the city library. The pelican was sitting in the library in a small nook between two shelves, engrossed in a thick volume. He sat with his wing on his cheek and his backwards-sloping forehead wrinkled. He had got hold of some spectacles—perhaps because he needed them, perhaps just so that he could look learned. He didn’t notice Emil until the boy tugged on the back of his coat.

  “This is extremely interesting,” he said, indicating the book he was examining. “Extremely interesting.”

  “What is it?”

  “This discusses the theory of evolution and the first stages of life on earth. I have been studying biology all day, but tomorrow I intend to move on to organic chemistry. Yesterday I became familiar with physics and the day before with astronomy. Last week I devoted myself to algebra, geometry and musicology. Next week it will be the turn of linguistics and history, but at night I read literature.”

  Emil felt quite dizzy from such a long catalogue of sciences.

  “Do you remember everything you’ve read then?”

  The pelican snorted. “ ‘Everything’ is perhaps not the correct word. But I certainly remember what is most important.”

  “What is most important?”

  “Well, that depends on many factors. But generally speaking one ca
n say that the most important thing is that which remains when everything else has been forgotten.”

  “I see. So you remember what’s most important, and what’s most important is what you remember.”

  “Precisely, you are an ingenious individual, as I have always known. Now I shall say to you as a bird and as a human, that the most important thing, and the most valuable thing you can remember, is surprise.”

  “Surprise?”

  “Just that. The more you read, the more you are amazed. In the end one hardly need bother to read at all any more. One just sits and is astonished.”

  “By the way the world works?”

  “And by the course of time.”

  “This reading’s not much use, then.”

  “That depends how one takes it. No one can ever comprehend for sure what is ultimately of use and what is not. But you humans have comprehended many things: the lumpfish’s diet and the length of the ice ages, the distance to Alpha Centauri and the trachea of the arthropod. You have short beaks compared to us pelicans, but you have managed to poke them into all places. There is no animal in the world more curious than you. Or stranger. How are we to comprehend you?”

  The creature buried himself in the book once more.

  The Conductor

  The pelican had learned to use the radio and stereo. Almost always when he was on his way to visit him, Emil could already hear the sound of stringed instruments when he was on the stairs, for the pelican was particularly enamoured of violin concertos. He also began to go to concerts, he even got a season ticket for the city’s concert hall. He quickly learned to imitate the conductor’s gestures, and very frequently, his eyes half-closed, head thrown back and swaying like a tree, he would lead an imaginary orchestra before an audience that consisted of Emil alone.

  His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, and his love of art seemed to be limitless. Along with science he was interested in all the fine arts—literature, music, films, theatre and opera. As well as all this, on Sundays he would go on tours of the city’s art galleries and museums. He accumulated expertise with surprising speed, greedily, as if he had only a very limited amount of time at his disposal. He seemed to be abandoning his old dreams of moving his family to the city, for he gave up his job as an attendant at the opera and stopped singing in the choir so that he could devote himself completely to the arts and sciences. Now he only sang in the bar a few nights a week to buy his daily fish.