Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction

by Leena Krohn

  – Are all these children, surely they are not, say it out loud, are they my children?

  – But is it true that this is new to you? I thought that you understood, that this topic was familiar to you already, he said.

  How peculiar and kind of alarming that I hadn’t at first understood so obvious a thing!

  – Of course all the kids in this catalogue are yours and madam ex-spouse’s children, the man continued. – Potential children, I mean. In the book series are presented—and furthermore in particularly high quality, delightful holograms—all the children that you did or could have had with your spouse. It’s on sale now, the whole book series, imagine that. This sort of opportunity won’t come again. Of course as a whole it won’t fit into anyone’s home library, but you can pick how many parts you want. We print them according to your wishes. You can read the rest online, almost at the same price.

  – Take the book away, I said, now downright horrified, and handed over the tome. – I have one child, and that is enough. Besides, my spouse and I have lived apart for a long time. An addition to the family is no longer realistic in any way, not even when it comes to our ages and fertility.

  – But that isn’t relevant here in any sense, he argued, standing steadfastly there at the mouth of my tank. He didn’t move a muscle to take the book back. – Although it’s still very interesting to know what all our theoretical children would be like.

  – But thirty-two trillion pages! I said deep in thought as I still supported the heavy book. – I couldn’t possibly have the time or energy to wade through the whole tome, not even if I had still sixty and not twenty or so years left to live. And besides, there are other women in addition to my wife, those with whom I could have conceived children . . . And would have wanted to, I added in my mind.

  Of course, as I said it, I remembered above all else—but not only—Vera. The rare moments of happiness returned to my mind as if in a hurry and falling over each other: meeting at the gas station, hotel room number 105 in Budapest, a madam at the kebab grill, hasty intercourse at the tiny cave, the girls’ gymnastic teacher, the girl in the high school whose name I had already forgot, but whose gentle brush of fingers I never would.

  Although the book was heavy, I still almost fell into the entertaining bustle of memories that started to deepen into dreams when the sales representative’s penetrating voice jerked me back to full wakefulness.

  – A-ha! Apparently a new hope had awaked in the man. – Our publishing house can also map the shared offspring of you and the other women. He got excited. – As soon as you give me their names and social security numbers.

  – That wouldn’t even cross my mind, I snapped, already angry. – How can you even suggest that! Take away your horrendous book!

  – As you wish, he said, growing cold. – But remember, of course, that this offer was unique and won’t be repeated.

  At last he bowed and lifted from my hands the heavy tome. Before the man left with his book, he cast me a glance that seemed to contain both pity and disdain. I had apparently gotten rid of him, but his visit left many questions unsolved. I could feel the weight of the book still in my hands, its after-images wandered behind my closed lids, and when I opened my eyes, the tank’s walls showed reflections of bright faces like fresh flowers that had recently bloomed. I should have inquired what company was behind that huge enterprise, how profitable it was, and what sort of technology enabled such insanity. I wasn’t aware that such technology was even in development. Maybe that was due to the fact that I had lived in my tank for so long already and had followed rather lazily the latest developments in information and gene technology. Besides, the legal side of it all puzzled me. How was it possible that some company had managed to acquire both my and my spouse’s perfect gene map? Weren’t a citizen’s gene maps the property of the Health Department?

  Besides, I hadn’t thought to ask one very essential question: Would it be possible that I could have chosen what sort of child I would conceive if I had still wanted to conceive children? Had we progressed to that level already while I’d been floating in brine? Or at least, what sort of child I would never conceive? And here I thought specifically of the hydrocephalic child, the grasshopper child, the faceless child, and the one whose face the mushroom-shaped tumor had claimed. I thought, if I was given the opportunity to choose now, would I try to win my wife back just to have the joy of facing the adorable child’s face from page 613 that still gleamed before me serious and clear in the damp dimness of my tank.

  Those and the thousands of other nameless faces, also the faceless one, followed me to sleep. When I woke up, I did remember again that no one bore those kinds of faces. Those faces didn’t exist, those children, mine and my ex-wife’s all possible—of course only theoretically possible—heirs hadn’t been born to this world apart from one and would never be born. But I continued to think of my ghost descendants in their multitudes. I had already started to regret that I hadn’t agreed to order the tome or at least the very part of the book series that I had just seen. I felt tempted to show the pictures also to Beta. She should definitely see the book. I was kind of both pleased and horrified by the thought that there could be as many or even more heirs as there were individual people in the whole of humankind. They could inhabit many planets, those kids, the sisters and their brothers. What did it matter that they would never be born, that it was both in practice and theory an impossible thought? Some of them would have been born as psychopaths or while growing up slid into bad ways, embezzled, raped, murdered. Or the others might have maybe made the world a little bit more tolerable place merely by virtue of existing.

  All the children in the catalog were of the same age, about eighteen months old. That is an important age. A mysterious age. They have just passed their baby year. They have already assumed the basics of humanity, but they can yet become anything: robots, saints, metamaattis. And not only human, for if a wolf were to take them into its herd, they would become wolves, if a lamb, lambs, and soon they’d forget the basis of human language they had learned.

  Who are they really, the descendants, all our children and our blind, selfish love, the endless longing of genes to their similarity, continuity, and much further: to infinity? A child, who is born, is only seemingly something new, but in reality he is woven from past. A child is the combination of his ancestral fathers and mothers, a synthesis of those who disappeared, knowledge shipped from far away turned flesh.

  I thought of the catalog’s ghost children and felt pride. I was still their father, the father of them all, even if only a theoretical one. The thought pleased me, though these children didn’t exist—apart from my daughter—and would never exist. I loved them all and didn’t know, wasn’t certain, if I should apologize for the unborn or be happy for them.

  Filemon or the Wooden Man

  A young man who could barely move was led into my tank. Straightaway, one could see what caused it: his feet were wider than flippers and so bumpy that they resembled more the root balls of trees than normal human feet. He didn’t have shoes, which wasn’t strange, because one couldn’t have pulled any sort of shoes over those feet, not even felt boots. The skin of his hands couldn’t be called skin because it was rough, dark, and sheeted like tree bark and his fingers had stiffened apart so that they stuck out like the branches of a November tree. His hair greened, his lips were akin to cork, and his face grew fungus-like bumps.

  – You must see yourself, he said, pronouncing the words with effort, as hollowly as if they truly rose from the depths of a thick trunk, what’s happening to me. I’m turning into a tree.

  I had been resting in a pleasant state of languor when he stepped in, but now I stirred agonizingly awake.

  – Of such I’ve never heard of this before, I said, aghast. – What do the doctors say? Is it painful?

  – That the disease is rare and incurable, he replied. – But I feel no pain, just the opposite, all sensation is disappearing from my skin or actually turnin
g into some other sense, because my skin is hardening into bark. I’m becoming an oak. I hope now that I can without bitterness say my farewells to humanity and humankind. I believe that soon I will get to root, grow, and hum as a real tree. At the moment I still travel with a circus, and I’m presented for a fee to spectators who fall silent from horror or shout from disgust. But when the spring comes, I will go into a forest and find a suitable forest meadow where I can root in peace and get accustomed to my new life.

  He spoke very solemnly and reassuringly. But the incident wasn’t at all unique. How could I not have remembered Filemon up front, him who, too, turned into an oak, Baukis, who turned into a linden, and Dafne, who became a bay tree?

  – What would you say to such a creature? the man asked.

  I searched for the right words, and soon I felt as if I had indeed found them. I started speaking copiously as if falling into a trance.

  – I would say that you are presented now with a magnificent opportunity. Everyone changes, but you change differently from anyone else. Soon you will stop breathing but will start photosynthesizing. Your blood will change into sap and chlorophyll. When your metamorphosis is complete and over, you will be the king of trees and your leaves will be the sign of victory. You will be the allegory for fertility, wisdom, and good luck. In addition to your soon-to-be-over human life, you may continue in the wonderful shape of an oak for perhaps even a millennium. Your body will be home for millions of organisms; birds will nest in you and sing in your crown. Longhorn beetles’ tunnels will crisscross hidden in your bark. Squirrels will swish their tails, they will play tag in the spring sunshine when sap starts to circulate under your bark. You will bloom into buds late, but anemones and cowslips and corydalis will flower at your roots. At the end of September, your acorns will ripen and drop to ground. Jaybirds and spotted nutcrackers will spread your seed. You will offer shade and protection. You will hum like the organs and grow all your age. You will be part of the plant kingdom, earth’s breathing, its most beautiful mystery. From air and sunlight, you will transfer life to this star. Only because of you and your kind, it has been possible for a man to be born on earth, and maybe you will flourish still when there is no more humankind. You can go neither to south nor north, not to east or west, but still you move and your direction is the best: at the same time deep and high, into earth’s darkness and sky’s light.

  It seemed to me as if the man had become moved by my words. Before he left, he extended over the pool’s rim his dried and hard thorn fingers, which I squeezed. I noticed that they were full of buds.

  But during my whole eloquence I was bothered by something that I still couldn’t express to myself clearly. Only when the man, this new Filemon, had been guided out, did I start to understand what had bothered me. This case was extremely unbelievable. The man had worn a clean white long-sleeved dress shirt and straight dark trousers whose trouser legs were fashionably narrow. How on earth could he have maneuvered into that sort of trousers? How had he donned the shirt? When I reminisced I was certain that the garments hadn’t shown extra zippers; they hadn’t been particularly large. There was no way to dress a root-footed man whose arms were like bushes into such garments.

  I started to suspect that the young man had assumed such a horrendous look just to trick me. That he and his friends had just fooled around with me and now mocked my compassion and sincere pathos. That wooden man! My face heated as it occurred to me that they might have a hidden camera with which to film our meeting. The wooden man and his friends surely squirmed in laughter as they peeled extra bumps from the man’s sinewy, healthy feet.

  The emotion that I had experienced while meeting him turned into anger, and I was ashamed by my words, which I now recalled as pompous and hollow. But then I saw again the man’s eyes, that had looked at me from amidst the dark bark-skin, and I remembered their suffering, which I couldn’t imagine as false, and I started to doubt my own disbelief. Maybe the garments had hidden zippers or slits after all?

  In this confusion and ignorance, I fell asleep.

  The Queen of the Night and Other Strangers

  A woman came to me to talk about, as she put it, the problems in her marriage.

  – That is not my field, I told her. – Maybe you should meet a lawyer or a private investigator. Or a priest or a therapist, depending on the severity of your problem.

  – But I came to you, she said, so beautifully that I gave up. – Besides I expressed the matter poorly. Actually, this is about something else than marriage.

  – All right, tell me of that something. Don’t be offended if I look like I’m asleep. I often close my eyes while listening to a client. That makes me concentrate better, I said, pronouncing those words already from my own pleasant darkness.

  – My husband, who otherwise was a lucid and calm man, often saw nightmares, she began. – In which he fought against who knows what—a beast, an unknown enemy, a robot. Often, for some reason, I woke up just before he started to toss and scream reverberantly, out of horror or anger. Perhaps some change in his breathing prepared me for his nightmare. I told him that it was just a dream, patted him as if he were a child, which we don’t have, and soon he fell asleep again. But one night I saw a nightmare myself. I saw that I punched and kicked my husband in a rampant rage. Why I did so, the dream gave me no explanation. There was only that short attack amidst the rush of the small hour’s dreams, and I woke up to that.

  – The dream astounded me, and I didn’t understand why I had such a hostile dream, because the relationship between me and my husband was warm and heartfelt. I studied myself and couldn’t find a reason for the hostility of the dream; I had no scores to settle with my husband. I had never felt even the temptation to slap him, let alone punch or kick radiating such blind rage. The dream made me feel guilt, and I didn’t mention it to my husband, though sometimes at the breakfast table I might have told him my dreams. Actually, I was afraid. I feared for my own sanity, because to me such rage surpassed the limit of normality even in dreams. But I calmed myself thinking: “Dreams are dreams”, and then forgot the incident and lived a day of wakefulness.

  She fell silent, and when I cracked my eyelids because of the silence, I saw she had sunk into joyless thoughts.

  – Did something else unpleasant happen? I asked kindly and closed my eyes again.

  – Exactly so. Two weeks later, in the waking world, I was sent an email. It contained messages between my husband and another woman, dozens of letters. They were love letters. My husband had a lover.

  – And that’s when you recalled your dream, I said.

  – Yes, that’s when I remembered. I understood that the dream had prepared me beforehand for what would happen and that something in me had already known about it. There were many letters, for a duration of almost two years. The moment when I understood what I’d read was one of the turning points of my life. But I had already beforehand, in my dream, spent all my rage, and only disappointment remained.

  – My spouse was a businessman, who tried to sell dated technology: personal weather stations and self-illuminating cellphone covers. He did many business trips, or I thought them to be business trips until I read the mail I’d received. The messages revealed that his lover, named Josephine, lived in a city on the other side of the globe. The quality of the relationship didn’t leave much to doubt, for the very first letter that I read had this sentence: “I remember the night when I saw all your graces, you the Queen of the Night, but your smile was the most beautiful of them.” Many of the messages ended in the words: “With countless kisses, fond hugs, and always loving more.” Those sickly sweet words almost amused me, but only almost. For after them, in every message, I read an invisible post scriptum addressed to me. It was written in big letters, thickened, and underlined. The post scriptum said: “I don’t love you.”

  – Attached in the letters was a picture that my husband had taken of his lover. Josephine was bony, swollen-lipped, and not young anymore, though younger
than me. In the picture she smiled the smile of a girl in love.

  – From that moment on, our marriage was as useless and pointless as those poor cellphone covers that my husband sold. After a quick glance you could mistake the cover for the phone itself, imagine that one could still stay connected, send, and receive. But pick up the cover and you’ll notice it’s empty, light, and useless.

  – The sender of the messages was unknown to me. Her name was Arunja. Suddenly I’d gotten involved with three strangers: besides Josephine and Arunja, there was also my husband, with whom I’d lived for fifteen years. The cover letter, attached to which I received the love letters, was as full of hate as my own dream. It was in coarse language and spoke both to the writer’s vulgarity and her ill will.

  “I send this letter so that you know your man’s woman. These are just few of many, and why he loves my country. I got your husband’s password when he visited my country with Josephine and I read his letters because he sleeps with the woman and wants to betray mine. Josephine is an evil woman. She uses witchcraft and traps for men and is hungry for sex and money. Your man know her not but give her many money and gifts.”

  – The messages that Arunja sent me were apparently authentic, and my husband could do nothing but admit the relationship.

  – And there was yet another? I asked. – Or third, however you want to count. This woman, Arunja, who sent the letters?

  – That, my husband denied. He didn’t know anything about the sender of the messages, knew no Arunja and thought the names were faked. He’d had no romance with Arunja nor any other woman than Josephine. Anyone can use a false name while sending email, that’s what my husband said.