‘And,’ she added, ‘I’m the one he tries to pester with his attentions.’
Eino laughed. He couldn’t imagine the moth-eaten, shambling Axel trying to win any favours from Maria, who had grown heroically buxom after the birth of her last child.
‘And your daughter,’ she said. He didn’t laugh at that. He turned in his chair to look at her, but she was staring down at her work. In a few minutes, she’d start up again. These conversations of hers could last for days. It took her a long time to drag all the evidence back and forth, to get to the stage where she could demand that he take action about something or other. Naturally he knew what she wanted this time. She wanted Axel to go.
He said, ‘He’s useful to the community. I was never any good at book-keeping and that kind of thing.’
‘And how good is he?’
‘He was trained for it.’
‘I’ve sometimes thought he doctors the books.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Fiddling around with the figures, skimming some money off the top.’
‘It always balances out all right.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That’s how they do it.’
Eino ran his eye over the row of glass objects on the shelf above his desk, at the chair to his right, the shawl hanging over the back of it, and the rug down on the floor. Everything he looked at had been made by craftsmen in the community – each article had its own unity and integrity. When one of his students finished a good piece of work, it was like a woman giving birth to a child she’d been forming inside her for months. Axel would never be able to know that kind of accomplishment. And he had no family, either.
‘You have to make allowances for him,’ Eino said. ‘He’s on his own and he’s getting older.’
‘That just makes him harder to get along with.’
‘Please, Maria.’
‘It’s true. He doesn’t contribute. We could teach one of the young ones to handle the money.’
‘He’s my friend,’ Eino told her. ‘I don’t want to hear this.’ He turned back to the desk and picked up his magnifying glass. It probably wasn’t really true that he and Axel were still friends, but they had been once. He thought: Being a friend has destroyed Axel so that he hasn’t lived his life. He’s lived a small part of mine.
*
They walked out into the woods by the path they’d taken long ago when they first visited the family on the other side of the lake. At that time the farmer, from whom Eino had bought the land, lived modestly on his homestead with his wife and three daughters and two sons. One of the daughters was pretty; she’d come in to pour water in the bath-house. She’d had a shy smile and wore her hair in a long braid that hung down her back.
‘I want to talk to you about something,’ Eino said.
There had been a fresh snowfall the night before. Everything was coated, white, still. The trees were like ranks of statuary around them. It was beautiful, but Axel’s pleasure in the way it looked was accompanied by a sense of how dangerous it was. For several years he’d believed that when he died it would be the cold that would kill him.
‘It’s about the girls,’ Eino went on. ‘My own girls too, so it seems. They’re too young for you, Axel. I don’t blame you for wanting affection, but why don’t you find yourself someone nearer your own age? A nice widow, something like that.’
‘I’m sick of leftovers,’ Axel said. His voice was harsh and the tone sour.
‘I know it can’t be easy out here, but a few weeks back in town, say, and you could meet somebody.’
‘Who would look at a man like me? You think I don’t know what I’ve become?’
‘A shave, some new clothes. Plenty of women would look at you.’
‘All the desperate ones. Some miserable old maid that looks like an elk in a corset.’
‘You’d have to sober up. It isn’t too late for you to start off fresh, get married, have a family.’
Axel smacked aside a branch full of snow. The bough sprang up, releasing a cloud of powdery crystals. He said, ‘I had a family once.’
‘That’s over.’
‘Nothing’s over till you die. I’m beginning to understand that. I’ve been having some dreams lately – you know, there was a long time when I didn’t dream at all.’
‘Look at that,’ Eino said. He pointed to a place among the trees and rocks where one of the streams had melted and frozen again. The ice poured over itself in layers, its clear spaces mapped by ribs of depth and brightness: laced with white lanes, dark fissures, mines of shattered brilliance. ‘I’d like to make a vase like that. Just like that. And put spring flowers in it.’
Axel looked. The place didn’t seem very wonderful; just cold as hell, like everything else around him.
*
He used to think, back in Paris, how good it would be to breathe the fresh, cold air of his home. He’d stand by the windows and look out into the street, where the rain flooded down on the umbrellas of the crowds. Not even the rain could wash away the soot and grime. The air was no good. The rain itself came down dirty.
He thought that if they could get Karen to a better climate, she’d be all right. He tried to persuade her to go. She shook her head. Sometimes she was too tired to speak. Sometimes she’d actually refuse to see anybody. The school disbanded. Her servants were red-eyed when they opened the door to him. Eino said he’d tried to talk her into moving south and she’d told him that the doctors had already decided: it was too late for cures.
He met a student of hers in the museum one day: the old American woman, who started to sob, saying that it was too dreadful – a young life like that, and such a lovely girl; and when you thought of the real swine who were going to keep on eating and drinking for another forty years it almost made you despair. Yes, he agreed with her: there was no justice, no sense in it. He took her arm and walked through the galleries with her. She told him about how she’d fallen in love with paintings when she was a child; if she hadn’t longed to paint, she’d have wanted to be an eye doctor, because vision – everything about its workings, even the fact that it was there at all – had always struck her as miraculous. ‘And now that I’m old,’ she ended, ‘I’m losing it, of course.’
When he got back to the apartment, he told Minna about the meeting. She didn’t appear very interested. She was reading a book on classical Greek sculpture. She kept turning over the pages of photographic plates. She said that everyone would miss Karen, naturally. He took up his post at the window again.
Karen died in the early summer. At the end she kept saying, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Axel started to cough on the way to the funeral. As he left the cemetery grounds, he felt the cough coming on again. He disengaged himself from Minna, who was leaning on his right arm. ‘Handkerchief,’ he explained. He coughed, blew his nose and then raised his head and saw a woman turn the corner at the end of the street; she walked hurriedly and looked back. It was Marissa.
He told Eino. Eino said, ‘She never gives up.’ He’d left her, but she had the child, who was still down in the country with one of her aunts, or an aunt’s family. Several lawyers had told him he didn’t stand a chance of getting the boy back through the courts. ‘If I knew where she was keeping him, I’d just grab him.’
‘She could go to the police for that.’
‘I’d take him home. Right up north. He’d be fine there, away from everything. It was the miscarriage that unhinged her.’
‘She was always that way,’ Axel said, ‘only she used to love you.’
‘I should have married Karen.’
‘You should have married Minna. Shouldn’t you?’
‘Don’t you start. That’s why I couldn’t stand it any more. Marissa kept saying that Karen had stolen her baby before it was born, and given it to Minna instead.’
*
When people went crazy, Axel thought, what you saw was usually simply the last stage of it, where everything broke.
He threw back a quick swallo
w of his drink and filled the glass again, coughing as he’d been doing for nearly twenty years. At first he’d believed he was imitating Karen. He’d noticed before how for a time surviving friends and relatives often mimicked the gestures or habits of speech they associated with someone dead. You could understand that – since the missing person was on their minds – their unspoken thoughts might announce themselves as movement. Minna used to say that people thought with their whole bodies: if you looked carefully, you could see it was true. But it might be more than that. It might be that the mimicry was intended somehow to keep the dead alive; that it was another reproductive process: like art, like memory, like the imagination.
He hadn’t forgotten Karen. While he drank, it was as if he could remember talking to her just a few days before, being in France: in Paris, in her drawing room with her. ‘And what did you think of that hideous exhibition?’ she’d say; or, ‘Tell me about the bank, Axel. Who got what wrong today?’
His memory of her was much clearer than his recollection of Minna. He recalled very little of the day when he came home and found the police and the stretchers, and the caretaker in hysterics. It was as though most of that day had been burned from his life, the heat from it blurring and melting the time before and after. He just remembered that it seemed to be raining forever as the time drew near for Minna to give birth.
He knew, of course. But all the pictures that should have gone with the information had been erased. He must have had to look at Minna afterwards, for instance, but he had no memory of it. He knew that Marissa, accompanied by Bruno, had climbed the stairs to the apartment. The caretaker had let them in. After that, most of the action could be pieced together only by what the caretaker was supposed to have heard. The police eventually came to the conclusion that Marissa, under the impression that Minna was carrying her lover’s child, had entered the apartment, pulled out a pistol, shot the little boy, shot Minna, and then killed herself.
It took them a long while to figure all that out. In the beginning, they were only interested in Axel. They asked him suspiciously, accusingly: Who is this woman named Marissa? Do you know her? If you don’t know her, why did she kill your wife? Who is the child? Is the boy yours? How long have you known the woman? Did you love your wife? Did you quarrel with your wife? Was your wife a woman of easy morals, as some of these artistic people are? Did she leave a will?
The questions were endless, coming down like the rain. He was ready to say anything to make them stop. He was prepared for them to take him out and put his head on the block. But Eino came and told them everything the right way around.
*
As he was drinking late at night he sometimes thought that it was curious: the catastrophe had made Eino stronger. It had even seemed to make him more intelligent; he’d come into focus after the killings. His speech, too, had changed. His talk was now incisive. When he spoke of the community’s work, he cared about his subject and could make other people care, whereas before, he’d been a rough speaker, so bigoted that he could sound wholly ignorant. And, in contrast, the smooth speech of Axel’s early years had grown rambling, disjointed, slurred.
He drank another glass. He finished the bottle. That night he had a dream.
He dreamt that he was standing at the entrance of a room that had a large table in it. Several people were seated around the table. There was talk and laughter, and an agreeable atmosphere of festivity. The host, at the end of the table, appeared delighted to see Axel and beckoned him in, greeting him warmly, and made him sit down next to him, where he had saved a chair. Axel felt extremely happy. His host then took up a decanter and poured out wine into a glass, which he handed to Axel. But Axel saw that the decanter had been emptied; he was the only one at the table who had any wine. He thought it would be rude to let the others go without anything. So he handed the glass back, in order that some of the wine could be given to the rest of the company. His host smiled, accepted the glass again, and, instead of doing what Axel had expected, turned to the sideboard nearby and set the glass there, where it remained throughout the course of the dinner.
There wasn’t much more to the dream than that, but Axel was disturbed by it. He’d begun to feel out of place even when he was still in the dream. He’d obviously done something wrong while trying to be polite. The host hadn’t exactly disapproved, but neither had he understood the reasoning behind the action of his guest.
In the morning Axel couldn’t get up. One of the apprentices was sent over with some soup, but no one began to worry until the evening, when the doctor came – a young man whom Axel didn’t trust or like.
‘I’m all right,’ Axel told him. ‘No ringworm here.’
‘You’ve got a fever.’
‘It’s the winter. I always do.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t. Not like this.’
Axel opened his mouth to argue, and an extraordinary thing happened: he leaned forward, gave a little cough, and was suddenly covered in blood. The doctor said, ‘God in heaven.’ Axel couldn’t say anything; he was astounded at how easily it had happened, and almost without pain.
Eino came to see him. ‘You’ll get well,’ he assured Axel. ‘We’ll feed you up.’
Axel stared morosely into Eino’s face. He could get well, perhaps, but it was going to be a struggle if he had to put up with the horrible, healthy food they produced in the community – rough black bread and turnips, bean stew, cabbage forever. ‘A little beefsteak and champagne,’ he suggested, ‘might do me some good. It wouldn’t hurt the rest of you, either. No wonder you’re such a dreary bunch.’
‘Calm down, Axel. We’ll get you better. I promise.’
‘Maybe. Yes, maybe. But you should have stayed in the cities, you know. Karen was right about that.’
‘We’ve talked that to death.’
Axel laughed. He asked, ‘Where are you going to find spring flowers at this time of year?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Ice. I could go out into the snow right now and not feel it. I’m as hot as if I’d just come out of the sauna. We could go for a walk.’
‘Tomorrow, maybe.’
‘I don’t know why you think I’d be interested in your wife. I wouldn’t want her even for a holiday weekend. Hunched over her nasty handwoven things, nagging –’
‘That’s enough, Axel.’
‘Anyway, I’ve got a wife of my own. Wonderful girl, full of character. Beautiful black hair. Fine artist. She was so good to me. I know she never loved me, but she was really nice to me. You can’t imagine.’
Eino pushed his chair back and rushed out of the cabin. He returned in the morning to see if Axel was better, but the fever continued.
Axel lay in his bed and thought. He sweated and drowsed and wondered how he could pay Eino back for not helping him. Eino had everything, and now he thought he was such a great hero, too. He was busy changing the world. Finnish art and culture wasn’t enough for him – on top of all that, he wanted to change Finnish politics. Finland for the Finns, he’d say: Our art must be our own, from our own forms – rivers, stones, trees – and our ideas should be our own as well, not Swedish or Russian or German.
It didn’t make sense to bury yourself in the country if you wanted to do anything higher than farming. Art flourished among the bright lights. Down in the country all you could raise was beets and manure. Man is a city-dwelling animal: Axel remembered that from school. ‘City-dwelling’ was usually translated as ‘political’. And Eino was just as wrong about that; to go forward, they needed to copy and import more ideas – to become international. A lot of small countries had become great because they’d gone out and brought the rest of the world back to their people, not closed the doors against outside influence.
Eino was wrong. On the other hand, Eino had succeeded. He hadn’t lost heart because the French were always going to be better painters. He’d just gone ahead and done the work he’d planned for himself. And it was good, you had to give him credit for that;
and not like anybody else’s, either. Nevertheless, it wasn’t art. It was tables and chairs. And furthermore – why was it that Eino, always so desirable to women, invariably settled down with the ugly ones? He’d never built that big house he’d wanted, either.
Axel dozed and woke again. The fire was high: someone must have come in and built it up while he’d slept, and gone away again. There was a soup tureen on the table beside him, a bowl of fruit, and buttered bread on a plate. He wasn’t hungry. He turned away from them.
He remembered his family, the houses where he used to live; he thought about his parents: as they were when he left home to go to Paris, and before that, in his childhood. They’d given him plenty of good advice and help. Had he wanted to end like this?
Why had he been so obsessed by the idea of becoming an artist? If he’d decided just to have a good time instead, he could have been happy. Maybe there was something in him, like a weight, that would always drag him down. He knew that – probably – if he had kept his mouth shut all those years ago, he could have held on to the girl in St Petersburg, made several rich friends, gone to many splendid dinners and balls and other celebrations: become known and liked by a crowd of interesting people, and – possibly – have won her in the end, although that wasn’t likely: there had been other, more sophisticated young men around, and also less sophisticated, if she’d had a mind to try that too. Of course, she might have forced him into the stand he’d taken. She might have wanted an excuse to break with him. The attitude of the maid had suggested that. Not that any of it mattered. In any case, he had lost. But most of the loss was his fault. He should have caught hold of whatever he could get, and enjoyed it.
He remembered his dream about the host who had offered him the glass of wine. And suddenly he realized the meaning of it: the host was God and He had given Axel the full glass he was meant to drink. It couldn’t be distributed among any of the other guests because it was intended for him alone. It had been the life he was supposed to live. And when he had refused it, it had to go unused by anyone.
Mrs Caliban and other stories Page 31