Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  “Humans need shoes and clothes, books, pictures and mirrors. They need discussion and artificial heat. They need shops and cinemas and universities. They need midwives and undertakers. There is none of that here. There is only endless salty water, air, sand and rock.

  “That is what humans are, and a great deal more. They are so complex that it terrifies me. But I do not envy them any more, not at all. I will leave them the Magic Flute with pleasure, they need it much more desperately than we do here.”

  The wind ruffled the pelican’s feathers and Emil’s hair. The bird pointed at the windswept sea, at the line of the shore disappearing into the distance, from which arose the stench of bladder-wrack and rotten wood.

  “I am going that way now,” he said. “Somewhere over there is my family. But you must return.”

  “To the city?”

  It was needless question. He looked over his shoulder. Somewhere over there rose the towers and factory chimneys of his city. They weren’t visible from here, but the air in that direction was smoky, as if hidden by a gauzy cloud.

  “But if you’ll still be here next Sunday I’ll come and visit . . . ”

  “Next Sunday, or next summer, you will come here with Elsa and a blanket and a picnic basket and a pair of binoculars. You will drink coffee or lemonade, you will have swimming races with each other and you will look at the boats and the birds through the binoculars—”

  “And then we’ll see you,” the boy interrupted.

  “You may well see me, if I have not left yet. You may see me far away in a cove, wading with my family and friends.”

  “But how will I know that you’re there? All pelicans look the same to me.”

  “I will give you a sign.”

  “What kind of sign?”

  The pelican opened his beak and from his throat came forth a hoarse croaking sound.

  “But don’t all pelicans sound like that?” the boy insisted. “How will I know it’s you?”

  “I will then be just like all pelicans, and all pelicans will be just like me. But you do not need to know, that will have to be enough.”

  “I understand,” the boy said, but he didn’t. And after a little while he continued: “But you aren’t just like other pelicans, though. You’ve used a tie and lived in an apartment. You know how to read and write and lift your hat. You’ve sung in the choir at the Opera and you’ve studied science, even the theory of evolution and organic chemistry.”

  “I shall forget it all.”

  “Even the alphabet?”

  “Yes, the alphabet as well.”

  “Then I did all that work for nothing.”

  The boy became gloomy. The bird lowered his wing consolingly to his shoulder.

  “And if it was all for nothing? It was fun as long as it lasted. And I did learn it.”

  “But now you’re going to forget it, on purpose.”

  “I must. Otherwise I cannot live as an animal. I must forget much more fundamental things, like death. I must become immortal once again.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Animals are immortal because they do not know that they will die. Only humans are truly mortal. I will now begin a new life, which will have no end. But the life that I lived with you and with the city, my life as a human, that ends now.”

  “Forever?”

  “Forever. Because if I ever come back, I will no longer be me, do you understand? The one who returns is always different from the one who left.”

  But the boy was only thinking about the alphabet and forgetting.

  “You’ll forget me as well, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t forget you, definitely not.”

  “But you are a human and a human’s task is to remember. I, on the other hand, have died as a human, and the dead forget everything. The alphabet too, their whole lives. But that does not mean their lives become meaningless.”

  “They do,” the boy insisted sorrowfully.

  “Well, if everything is without meaning, then it is meaningless to mourn that meaninglessness . . . So be happy!” the pelican commanded.

  And when the boy just dug in the sand with his big toe, he said again: “Well, be happy!” so fiercely that the boy found himself laughing against his will.

  “Now I am going,” the bird said. “You must go too.”

  “Goodbye,” the boy managed to say. He hadn’t realised how sharp the pain of parting would be.

  “Farewell,” said the pelican.

  He rose on the wind with occasional beats of his wings, his head drawn back between his shoulders, his silvery stomach glinting. From the reed bed of a far-away cove a pale flock approached him with a great deal of noise and flapping wings. Joy gave wings to the pelican’s return, and in an instant the flock had enclosed him within their ranks.

  Where was he now? Which one of them was he?

  That one, sieving the surface of the water with its shapeless beak to catch the little fish that fled in every direction, or that quiet one, wheeling just above the surface admiring its reflected image, or was he that one, who was affectionately burrowing into the neck feathers of a young, brown speckled pelican?

  The boy didn’t know any more, and he never would.

  He found his shoes and, wading through the sun-scorched bladderwrack, he climbed the bank, from whose crest the dust rose from the dry road that led back to the city.

  But before the boy had managed to get that far, from behind him (or from his own breast?) was let loose a sizzling cry, a deep-throated sound of the bitterest sorrow, transfixing him where he stood. It raged for lost opportunities, for the human life whose price was so unreasonably high. It lamented, too, the grief of those who have loved each other in this world and who have been torn apart by time, or a moment of cowardice, necessity or the workings of chance.

  And nonetheless, when the boy turned the beach was deserted. The flock had gone on its way and the day was sinking into the clouds. The burgeoning wind fumbled under his clothes with cold fingers.

  There in the city they were lighting lamps, driving away the evening behind the curtains. They were gathering around the table and breathing each other’s warmth, before sleep and the parting of night.

  The boy quickened his step. Just as the animals were hurrying back to their nests as the sky darkened, so he headed towards the city.

  SHORT STORIES AND

  EXCERPTS FROM

  LARGER WORKS

  1990–2014

  THE PARADOX ARCHIVE

  Extracts from the novel Umbra (WSOY, 1990)

  Translated by Herbert Lomas

  This novel from 1990 confronts the paradoxes encountered by a doctor named Umbra, who works in a hospital. Some of his surgery hours are divided between a clinic called Aid for the Overstrained and a research center called Negative Influences. The research center cares for violent offenders who have committed some of the worst crimes against human beings. Leena Krohn explores the nature of evil and the nature of suffering through the doctor’s case load.

  The Paradox Archive

  Umbra was a man of order. His profession alone made him that, for sickness was a disorder, and death chaos.

  But life demands disorder, since it calls for energy, for warmth – which is disorder. Abnormal effort did perhaps enhance order within a small and carefully defined area, but it squandered considerable energy, and ultimately the disorder in the environment was only intensified.

  Umbra saw that apparent order concealed latent chaos and collapse, but he knew too that apparent chaos contained its own order.

  Life was as never-ending as Solomon’s knot. The Minotaur, couched in the heart of the labyrinth, was a paradox, an insoluble contradiction. And, once having grasped that, Umbra had set to work assembling The Paradox Archive, a great work of compilation. His purpose was to incorporate into a single whole different species of paradoxes: logical, mathematical, philosophical, visual, auditory, physical, geographical, cosmological . . . Th
e subtitle was going to be: Antinomies Today and Yesterday: Their Ethics, Metaphysics and Morphology.

  The provision of extensive artwork is also labour-intensive. As yet, the anthology was nowhere near completion. Umbra had been at work on his book for a couple of decades already; there was a vast amount of material; the Archive was swelling and swelling; but he was unable to come to a decision to stop assembling it.

  Practically all Umbra’s spare time was going into his Archive. Acquaintances who knew about his preoccupation brought along new paradoxes: the postcard that showed a curved hammer, banging a nail into its own handle; the card with the legend ‘Please Ignore This Notice’.

  When abroad, Umbra spent long hours in the art galleries; but not for pleasure: it was entirely with his Archive in mind.

  Umbra knew from experience that, confronted by a paradox, a person feels a natural repugnance and discomfort. Nevertheless, the person does draw near to it. It’s hard for him to take his eyes off it. He wants to peruse it from every angle. He finds himself adhering to it like a magpie to a tarred bridge. He flitters around it madly, like a moth round a lamp.

  Umbra knew that a person’s natural tendency is to explain a paradox away. Zeno’s arrow-paradox. The paradox of the liar. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Bell’s inequality. Schrödinger’s cat-paradox. Burali-Fort’s antinomy.

  And, indeed, many paradoxes could be explained away. They were easy nuts to crack: you could swallow them as soon as you’d understood how they came about. But though some of the paradoxes and antinomies were explicable, not all of them were. Extricating yourself from these looked an impossibility. These you couldn’t prove absurd, for their contradictoriness was not linguistic or logical: their roots went much deeper. The latter Umbra called Ur-paradoxes. The existence of even one such was sufficient to knock sideways the most perfect and prepossessing of weltanschauungen.

  When Umbra approached the ultramicroscopic, he observed the abstract paradoxical poetry of the subatomic: particles that were waves, that were light. The whole process was simultaneously sharply defined and obscure. When Umbra contemplated the extragalactic remotenesses, the spiral nebulae, the fields of force, the black holes, the same torment was awaiting him there. When Umbra tried to focus on what used to be called the soul, and was now termed the mind, or consciousness, or even a computer program, a miasma of the same obscurity drifted from its peculiar architecture, painfully blurring the outlines of action and purpose.

  How aggravating! As if a sort of enveloping veil of smoke constantly lay between himself and what was called reality – whose objective existence he so very eagerly wished to credit.

  But try as he would to understand the reality of paradoxes, or the paradoxes of reality, whatever scale he used made him equally vertiginous: it was knowledge of the infinite.

  Absolute infinitude was beyond perception. No one had experienced it. Nor did anything more irrational exist than infinity. Therefore a rational person ought really to refuse to believe in its existence.

  Umbra considered himself a rational person. But it was precisely as a rational person that he could not deny the existence of infinity. For although infinitude was not directly perceptible, it was perceptible indirectly. Infinity was a logical necessity. Pondering on infinity, Umbra felt impotence and downright despair. But he pondered about it incessantly. For it existed because it had to exist.

  Umbra studied, or rather dabbled in, the various forms of infinity – cycles, metamorphoses and continua. There was infinity of thought and statement. Consciousness was infinite. There was infinitely divisible time, infinitely divisible matter, infinitely divisible space-time, indestructible energy, and, in mathematics, the infinite succession of natural numbers.

  As a boy Umbra had placed two mirrors opposite each other. He had inserted his hand between them and seen two processions of hands retreating into infinity. The processions in themselves were mere reflections, fictions. But what he thought he was seeing was precisely what he was indeed seeing.

  Infinitude, even when only imagined, had all the distinctive characteristics of an actual experience. If absolute infinity only existed in the human mind, where then did the human mind exist, if not where everything else did: in what was called reality – and was infinite?

  Humankind was a single entity, so Umbra supposed. Sounding out others’ opinions he’d never clarify what reality was like, or even if it existed. So he might as well rely on his own experience.

  But Umbra had no direct experience of infinity. He was unable to form an image of it. He did not perceive infinity; but he knew of its existence. The finite that he did perceive implied the existence of infinity – just as, that earlier day, perceiving three dolls nested inside each other, he ‘saw’, in a flash, an infinite continuum of nuns.

  The finite consisted of a series of infinites; and limited human life consisted of moments, from which infinite continua extended. Again, the infinite consisted of finite beings and an interminable series of moments. The infinite was not for the benefit of man, yet it entered into everything human. To Umbra, the existence of the infinite was proof of imperfection: it showed the vanity of aspiration, incompleteness.

  And, as he extracted a can of beer from the fridge, selected a washing-machine program, wrote prescriptions, read the evening paper, or listened to his patients’ complaints, Umbra never stopped mulling over the perspectives against which all his actions availed nothing.

  How come they nevertheless existed? That they did exist Umbra had convinced himself. Was it not because the consequences of actions too were infinitely extensive, and, as a result, even the shortest human life didn’t remain without significance, set against the cosmos as whole?

  As for people’s deeds, as far as they came within Umbra’s purview, did they not drag in their train infinite hallucinatory perspectives – perdition, paradise and purgatory? And these perspectives, were they not bound up in not only deeds, but consciousness itself, in fear, sorrow and – love?

  Who was Umbra? A mere dabbler on the threshold of infinity, a childlike man, unprovided with more advanced scientific training, lacking mathematical gifts, artistic sense, and mystical vision. His only guides in assembling The Paradox Archive were wonder, will and stubborn patience.

  But sometimes Umbra remembered that beyond the infinite and the finite there loomed something still more wonderful, something that was neither finite nor infinite.

  ‘HE’

  Three visitors arrived at Aid for the Overstrained: a woman, a man and a ‘he’. Umbra was already acquainted with the man and woman: they were husband and wife, and Umbra had cared for their son’s mumps. The ‘he’ was new to Umbra.

  ‘We’ve got a slight problem,’ the woman said. ‘How would feel about giving this one an examination? Of course I do know that normally you only deal with people, but I thought . . . ’

  ‘What model?’ Umbra broke in.

  ‘Just a straightforward Eccehomo neural computer,’ the man said. ‘Self-operating internal circuits. Superbrain: quantum memory and artificial intelligence. Speedtransistors – a thousand times faster than neurons. Self-programming.’

  ‘Quite. So take it away: to maintenance, or something. I don’t have a clue about these things,’ Umbra said.

  ‘When you acquire one of these, you wonder how on earth you managed before,’ the woman said. ‘But with this one we’ve had nothing but problems. It’s not his workings. He’s just back from his annual maintenance – been thoroughly overhauled.’

  ‘So what are you talking about – some sort of psychiatric problem?’ Umbra hesitated. ‘You realise I’m just a GP.’

  The woman gave him an impatient look.

  ‘Ask him himself. He’s perfectly capable of answering on his own behalf. He converts your voice into data. And he’s got a first-class speech synthesiser.’

  ‘So what’s bothering you?’ Umbra asked.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ the robot said in a toneless voice that revealed nothing. Umbr
a turned to the couple with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Did you know that?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s what he told us too,’ the man said.

  ‘Someone’s been programming him to say that. Your son perhaps . . . ’ Umbra said.

  ‘No,’ the woman said. ‘He’s learned it all by himself.’

  ‘That’s what he says, but he doesn’t mean what he’s saying,’ Umbra argued.

  ‘Well, what does he mean then?’

  Umbra gave a shrug. ‘Could be he’s just shooting his mouth off. I mean, they don’t mean, think, know, remember. They just “mean”, “think”, “know”, and “remember”. Maybe he isn’t frightened, just “frightened”.’

  Though on the other hand, Umbra thought to himself, they presumably do really count and don’t merely “count”.

  ‘So what’s the difference, then? Besides, he hasn’t got a mouth, has he?’ she said and gave a snort of laughter.

  Perhaps she was right. Perhaps there was no difference.

  The man came in decisively: ‘Eccehomos never mean something different from what they say.’

  ‘But does it matter if he’s frightened? Does it make him suffer?’

  ‘Difficult to say,’ the man reflected. ‘It certainly makes us suffer. I can’t tell you how irritating it is to have him keeping on repeating the same old thing in the midst of every single program.’

  ‘Must be a virus,’ Umbra said. ‘They’re all over the place. Could hardly be anything more than that. Boot it up with some anti-virus program.’

  ‘We’ve tried every possible one – every virus-detector, every anti-virus program: Perfect Murder, Adieu, Dr Rambo, Nevermore – no result, not a thing,’ the man said. ‘It’s no virus.’

  Fear, it seemed to Umbra, didn’t exist if the fearer didn’t suffer from his fear. And up to now – so Umbra considered – suffering had been a peculiarity of living creatures. This Eccehomo was a bafflement. If the robot really did suffer . . . For intelligence, in Umbra’s view – whether artificial or human – was not the same as consciousness. But a being without soul was incapable of suffering: suffering belonged essentially to the soul.