Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  Hadn’t I this very morning thought – and it wasn’t even a thought but instead feebleminded confidence – that everything was tidily in its place, and that everything would stay the way it was. Against my better knowledge I wanted to believe that life is predictable and controllable.

  I did know, if I cast a searching eye on my certainty, that it was deceptive and illusory. But it still is what I cling to as my days pass: the treaty of life’s normalcy. But who has ratified it? Who guarantees that days follow one another the way they have until now? That all disasters are avoidable or at least abatable?

  Of course it wouldn’t be him. It wouldn’t need to be him. It was improbable that the same man would attack me again. I wasn’t going to give him another chance.

  But this man who revealed his savage face to me was but one of the numerous demons. He represented the horror that might leap at me anytime and anywhere – even where I haven’t expected any danger. Even from inside my own cells. Some of them might mutiny, ally, proliferate exponentially and wreak havoc and chaos until I sicken. Until I die. Or sudden braking, hydroplaning, unchecked skidding of a car. And with me inside! I would be crushed – my liver, my kidneys, my own sad heart, my body, so naked under all its clothing – between the armrest of the backseat and the crumpled roof of the car.

  It would happen. It will happen. How can I live, knowing this? Only by forgetting it time after time?

  The dishes of the previous customers and a crumpled candy paper lay on the marble table in front of me.

  I paused to look at those dishes, an espresso cup and a mulled wine glass, and didn’t want to think of my tormentor any more. I looked at them with devotion. There still was a drop of cold coffee in one of the cups.

  Those objects were filled with peace, safety, and human touch. They were useful, everyday, real, that’s how it felt. As long as I could concentrate on them, nothing would threaten me.

  I thought about the people who had drunk from the cups and left before I entered. Who had they been? A mother and a daughter? A man and a wife? Two friends? What had they talked about? Where did they go?

  I didn’t know anything about them expect that there were two of them. Nevertheless, I could almost see them leaning towards each other and could almost sense the faint memory of their voices about my table.

  Towards them I felt a compassion I could never feel towards the scum at the station. We sat at the same table, even though we couldn’t see each other. It’s one way to meet, even though the ones who had left first didn’t know it.

  And a certainty that made my ears roar now told me who he was. He was one of the Lords of Death, one of the fifty-eight blood-drinking deities I would meet in my final desolation, eye to eye, one after the other.

  Indeed, now I recognized him. Now I remembered him at last. It was him, my own death.

  “His body is the color of wine, he has three heads, six arms, and four spread legs; his right-hand face is white, his left-hand face red, and his middle face wine-colored; his body blazes like a sea of light, his nine eyes stare into yours in fury, his eyebrows resemble flashes of lightning, his teeth shine like copper; he laughs aloud, shouting ah-la-la and ha-ha, and lets out loud, whistling sounds of shoo-ooh.”

  Now that I had slipped from that devourer of human flesh, I could rest a while. But no lasting refuge existed. The doorman of the café wouldn’t be able to protect me forever. I would have to leave this pure and fragrant sanctuary with its chandeliers and its matte marble tables. And in the end I would have to leave my home, my office, my friends, even my body. Then, at the latest, the madman from the station and all the other bloodthirsty deities would appear before me. And in what a guise!

  “With their teeth gnawing on their lower lips, their eyes glazed, their hair tied into knots on top of their heads, big of belly and thin of neck, screaming – Strike! Kill! – licking on brains, tearing heads off bodies, pulling out entrails; this is how they come, and in their coming fill the universe.”

  And when they finally come, I will know what to do. I mustn’t run. I will have to stop and turn and face them with my eyes open. I will have to recognize those apparitions as my own images. I mustn’t run from them but instead shout in their faces, standing my ground: I know you. You are only phantoms from the void. You are the creatures of my own mind. You are no one but me.

  Even to him, the disgusting drunkard from the station, I would have to say: You are me.

  How can I ever do this?

  But if I cannot, they shall destroy me. They shall rip out my heart and my bowels, they shall slurp my blood and devour my flesh and suck the marrow from my bones, smacking their bloodied lips. They shall hang my skull with others like it on a necklace, to clatter and dance. They shall cut me into pieces, but still I cannot die. Why not? Because I will already be dead, because I will no longer have a body.

  Then they would come and put me to death time and again, and time and again I would have to endure the horrors of death – never dying. This they would do until I admit to this fact most difficult to tolerate. And admitting doesn’t mean uttering but understanding. It means I will not be able to lie to get off the hook. I will not be able to pretend to understand, but instead I will have to express what I believe and believe what I express.

  But now the light of the winter day and the light of candles mingled on the sheen of peoples hair that had been revealed from under scarves and winter hats, and on their faces, flushed and softened by warm drinks, made young once again.

  The danger I had evaded made me remember that I lived. I was alive! Unceasing life had carried me from my birth to this moment. I had not remembered this for weeks. Months! In this joy of rebirth I lifted the cup, the milky foam touching my lips, softly nutritious.

  How much time would I have to learn to understand? And how much would I need?

  My god, how many lives!

  Translated by Vivii Hyvönen

  Lucilia Illustris

  Do you remember, my love, the object we saw, on that temperate summer morn:

  Charles Baudelaire

  The unused sidetrack led to an overgrown yard of a derelict factory. This was the Ultima Thule of the city, the kind of neighborhood people moved into only if they had no alternative. It had housing projects, a supermarket, a primary school, two kiosks, a bus terminus, some paint factories and National Railways’ storage areas.

  The last thing to have been manufactured in the low factory halls were Christmas ornaments, and if you bothered to look in through one of the broken windows you could still see a length of silver tinsel glimmering on the dusty floor.

  I know this, because I looked in – because I saw that forgotten glimmer.

  Behind the barracks that had served as a canteen, the yard sloped down steeply and soon crumbled into a sandpit.

  The neighborhood residents used the sandpit as an unauthorized dump. All the usual junk had been thrown in: fridges, tires and hubcaps, defective office equipment, corroded oil containers, and leaky canisters, the contents of which were best forgotten. There were parts of things so far removed from their original form that it was no longer possible to guess their function. A living room suite in plush was covered in stains not only of mold but also of wine and sperm spilled at some party, decades ago.

  In summer, mayweed and willowherb and mugwort seemed to do all they could to hide the things discarded by people, but it was not enough by far.

  And it was summer. One of the armchairs of the suite had been placed on the rusty tracks. It looked as if it had been brought there for a performance, a bluff, a cheap jest. As if the onlooker was supposed to think of it as a private vehicle that might, at any moment, speed away southward, to where the old sidetrack met with the main line, and still onward, all the way to the railway station in the city.

  Behind the armchair, between a burned Datsun and a Strömberg electrical stove, there was something else. Admittedly it was peculiar that it had lain unobserved for so long. Now it was the center of all our
attention.

  A cotton blanket, which had once been yellow and flower patterned, was wrapped around it tightly and bound repeatedly with plastic cord. The blanket was already partially decomposed, it had been soaked both in rain and in the fluids secreted by its contents.

  Not even the highest of fevers in a living being can rise as high as the heat of decomposition. Its furnace had consumed not only its very source but also the blanket covering it. The colors had faded and merged, the patterns could barely be guessed at, only fuzzy blotches remained. But the havoc was not wreaked by bacterial activity alone. Insects, too, flies and their larvae, beetles and many other species, had participated in the destruction.

  Summer was at its peak, the morning so early that the city had not yet woken. A bird I didn’t know chirped on the bank of the sandpit in an elder shrub, its berries already reddening. Some sand slid down as if under someone’s steps. I looked up, but there was no one. The sand shifted by itself.

  The shutter of a camera clicked repeatedly. The photographer performed a complicated choreography around his subject, crouching down, shooting a short hand-held series, setting up his pedestal in a new spot, and shooting again.

  The rest of us – the inspector and I, and the two patrolmen, who had been alerted to the scene by an anonymous phone call – looked at the bundle in silence, without an objective, until one of the patrolmen retched. At that moment, as if in mutual agreement, all the men moved, almost started, back, away from the source of the stench.

  I could not. I was already pulling on rubber gloves. On the contrary, I had to step closer and bend down over the roll. I had to do my due. Despite having felt weary as soon as I saw the bundle. It meant weeks of toil.

  – A fucked up job, one of the patrolmen said in a thick voice.

  I glanced at him coldly and opened my tool bag to choose the right pincers.

  Although I would gladly have sat down in the worn armchair, where someone had read quietly on winter nights long gone by. I would have sought the hidden switch to make it shoot forward, dug my head deep into the headrest, and sped away from the officials and the unknown cadaver, as far as the tracks went.

  But soon I forgot the armchair and was captivated by the wrapped up world, which emitted a buzzing tune. I didn’t open the package yet. It wasn’t time to open it yet. The others were already too far, they didn’t hear the tune, and had they heard it, it would have driven them even further.

  I have never been able to close my ears from it. It was the sound of decomposition, which is the sound of life in death.

  Once a man, a poet of sorts himself and my lover at the time, read the poem A Carcass by Charles Baudelaire aloud to me while drunk with whisky. I had not heard of it before.

  – It’s for you, he said, – remember it always.

  I will. I can estimate that the corpse that the narrator of the poem and his lover saw at a bend in the path, on a bed sown with gravel, had lain dead for no more than a few days. It had reached the second stage of putrefaction, was soon to reach the third, for it reeked and the inner gases still distended it, but its skin was already starting to tear: “opened her stench-swollen belly.”

  I have also heard the sound Baudelaire writes about, “a curious music”, which resembles the wind, or a stream, or the rustle of grains. Its source is the movement of insects, the overlapping of sheets of insects, their swarming, digging, feeding, breeding, hatching, growing, and preying.

  When I first heard its tune, my innards almost overturned. Now it doesn’t have this effect on me anymore.

  I’m an entomologist. In my youth my studies took me to many countries. In one small town, the name of which I have forgotten, I had lunch in an untidy café. On the wall of the ladies’ room someone had written in a swift, sketchy hand: Time is nature’s way of preventing everything from happening at once.

  To me it seemed odd that graffiti of such consequence was to be found in the restroom of such an inconsequential lunch bar. When I read those words it was as if they had been written just for me. I was unable to imagine the person who had written them. I only saw the hand that wrote.

  I have kept both the poem and this sentence in mind all these years.

  Timing – that is my task. The wall of the restroom told the truth: If time didn’t exist, everything would happen at once. There would be no separate cause and effect. There would be no infinite chains of causality. But now: things follow each other in a definite order so that the effect never comes before the cause. This applies not only to life but to dying and death, too.

  You may want to ask: Why do you state the obvious? I answer you: Because in it lies the real secret.

  As a side job I participate in forensic examinations. I am called whenever a body is found whose time of death needs to be narrowed down and who, usually, has died of unnatural causes. This occurs four or five times a year. I have to resist, overcome, or at least set aside my revulsion, my pity, my fear, and my grief. Yet it would be foolish to think that I’ve become free of them over the years. They remain, but I can act in spite of them.

  I am summoned to the scene as soon as the body is discovered. I travel around the country carrying a bag with tens of small boxes. They’re for the insects. In them I collect all the insects I can find on the surface of the body and in its vicinity.

  Only then is the body taken to the forensic department. There I resume my examination: I go, so to say, deeper than skin, I take samples, analyze insects, determine their species, and relative amounts, and stages of development. Of course, all the other routine tests that the pathologists consider necessary are also performed at the department. Only when I am finished and they are will the remains be handed over to the next of kin and the mortician.

  Most of the victims are women or girls. Some are homeless men. Once I had to analyze an already mummified body of an infant.

  In a sense my position is similar to that of the meteorologist. The further into the future the weathermen have to forecast, the less accurate their predictions become. It is like moving away from a radio station: the static increases until the transmission is lost altogether. This happens very quickly: even a month away is too far to predict. The countless different variables turn estimates into mere guesses.

  I “predict” backwards and my task is the easier of the two: the timing of a single phenomenon, the death of a certain organism. Still, my observations are subject to the same laws. The longer the body has been left to lie, the less accurately can I state its time of death. If the body is found in four or even five days, my accuracy is within hours. If it is found after weeks, then we are speaking of days, if months, then weeks.

  And there comes a time when I hold my peace.

  I work neither for the prosecutor nor for the defense attorney. But my expertise can be used to prove both the guilt of the guilty and the innocence of the innocent. As an entomologist, though, I am not interested in matters of guilt and innocence.

  All I want is to answer the question: When?

  To the deceased I say: Tell me when you died so that they may know who killed you.

  Some childish person once asked me: Don’t the victims come to haunt you?

  Why in god’s name would they haunt me? I didn’t kill them. I don’t fear them. I may fear and despise the ones who have brought their bodies into the state in which I find them. But the victims I hardly even pity. They have felt blind terror and unbearable pain, but now it’s over. It’s truly over. No, they are no longer where I see them. They are not the ones to fret over whether their remains lie in a family grave under a block of granite behind a wrought-iron fence, or rot nameless among the trash of a landfill.

  The victims don’t rise from their graves like the horror characters of B movies as seething, mottled shapes with beetles for eyes, their noses devoured into a single cavity, their skin – or what once was skin – shifting in slow waves to the pulse of an armada of maggots.

  Those who have met a violent end do not differ from those who h
ave died of so-called natural causes. All death is violence.

  But if another person has brought about the end, the aftermath lasts longer. Sorrow cuts more excruciatingly, tears stay hot longer. And the burning furnace of fury. Its is a heat very different from the fumes of decomposition that cleanse, loosen, and, in the end, renew.

  Decay is the prerequisite for all spring.

  Still, nothing is more abhorred and recoiled from as decay when it concerns our own material: human flesh.

  The different stages of decomposition vary depending on the temperature and the surroundings. I have to be well versed not only in taxonomy and the duration of the various stages of insect life, but also in the circumstances and conditions of each scene. As they say, a body cools after death. But before long, although the warmth of life has left the skin, the body’s inner temperature begins to rise. As I said: Not even the highest of fevers in a living being can be as high as this afterglow, the fire of rot.

  And now begins life in death and after death, although – as it has been said – everything doesn’t happen at once. It should be understood that the insects come in waves, which follow one another in a predictable order. Although decomposition is a continuous process, to facilitate the investigation it is best divided into several stages.

  In my investigations I follow the five-stage system of M. Lee Goff.

  At the fresh stage, which lasts between a day and a week depending on the surroundings and the weather, the first wave arrives. How swift they are! How, in fact, do they know? I don’t have the expertise to answer. I doubt anyone has. Blowflies land in just ten minutes, before a human nose could detect even the faintest of odors. The process has begun. From then on the activity is incessant. Such thorough, meticulous and methodical purification is nowhere else to be found.

  The first wave insects, which are mostly none other than blowflies, are sometimes called “the garbage men”. They assault and swiftly destroy the soft tissues. They are interested in all body orifices, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth. As they toil, they make way to the ones that come after and prefer cartilage or dry skin.