“I already looked at it, and it says that there have never been more than nine members. But is that information correct?”
There were several seconds of silence on the other end. Ella started to grow nervous.
She had felt a little silly when she’d dialled Ingrid’s number, doubting the official history because a science fiction writer making a passing comment had left out a comma.
Five endless seconds later Ingrid said, “If it’s in the book it must be true. You’re the tenth member. There were always nine members before, nine writers in training, plus their trainer, Laura White.”
Ella’s mouth was dry. “I hope you won’t be angry if I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re a terrible liar. I can tell from your voice that you—”
Ingrid coughed. There was another pause.
“Listen, if you really feel that something is being kept secret from you, go ahead and use The Game. But if I were you I would think twice before I decided to spill who knows what just to check some information that can be found in any literary history.”
15
ELLA MILANA trained her binoculars on Silja Saaristo’s house for three days. The house was on the east side of Rabbit Back, near a wooded knoll. The nearest neighbours were half a kilometre away. Ella parked the Triumph a little distance from the house and conducted her surveillance from inside the car. She ate sandwiches and drank coffee from a Thermos.
Then she thought of something that might prove useful. She took a day off from her stake-out to check her theory by reading a book she had started a few days earlier. She was delighted to discover that she didn’t need to go undercover. The answer was in the book.
As she drove up to the house with the headlights off, Silja Saaristo was standing on the terrace in the glow of the porch light. She was smoking a cigarette, wearing a bathrobe, and holding a glass of wine, all according to schedule. Saaristo was on her way to her evening bath, and was exposing herself to the cold to better enjoy the hot water.
She never locked the door until she went to bed around 11:30. The lock was sticky and stubborn, and since she went out to smoke about once every hour, it was easiest to just leave the door unlocked.
It was now ten past ten.
Once she went back inside, Ella waited a moment and then made her move. She lit her way with a penlight. She walked calmly across the garden, slipped in the back door, purposely leaving it open, and went to a dark corner to wait.
A cold current of air blew into the house. Saaristo would soon notice it from her bath and think she’d left the door open herself.
Ella waited fifteen minutes. She stood in the shadow of a bookcase, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
A cat appeared and wrapped itself around her feet.
Silja Saaristo toddled into the living room in her robe, her hair wet, calling the cat and hoping that it hadn’t gone out the open door. She pulled the door closed and locked it for good measure, but then stood looking out the window at the snow on the terrace.
There were strange footprints in it.
Saaristo stood stock still and lifted her hands to her cheeks with a look of intense concentration.
As Saaristo started to turn with a wary look on her face, Ella smiled to herself in the dark. Her heart was thudding but she was sure that Saaristo’s heart was pounding even harder. Ella sniffed the air and let herself imagine she could smell the other woman’s fear.
The mission had been greatly aided by her hunch that Silja Saaristo had planned her own murder, in her novel Lament of the Departed—the very novel that Ella happened to have started to read the week before. It was all in there—the bath every evening, the hourly cigarette, the sticky lock on the terrace door, the door left open, tempting her out of her bath, the worry over the cat, the footprints in the snow, and the dawning suspicion.
Ella did not, however, crack open the skull of the lady of the house with the heavy table lamp that stood on the bookshelf just within reach and was described in great detail in the novel, tape-wrapped cord and all.
Instead she whispered a challenge in the darkness.
16
Silja Saaristo Spills
SILJA SAARISTO offered Ella some tea and crackers with cheese, salami, and fresh peppers on top. When the crackers were eaten, Saaristo brushed the crumbs from her lap. Then Ella smiled, leaned towards her and tied a blue handkerchief over her eyes.
“I was just reading one of your books, although I don’t usually like mysteries very much,” Ella said companionably.
She had decided to behave as politely as possible to her fellow Game players. The Game gave Society members the right to invade the peace of the each others’ homes, and even to use violence, within the parameters of Rule 21, but be that as it may, one could still do the whole thing civilly and politely.
“Oh? Which book?” Saaristo asked.
“Lament of the Departed,” Ella said. “I might start reading more mysteries. It’s no wonder you won a prize.”
“I haven’t finished another book since then,” Silja Saaristo sighed. “And that came out two years ago. Or was it three?”
The cat jumped up onto the back of the sofa, walked the length of it with its tail erect, and dropped out of sight again.
“It’s been a while since I played The Game,” Saaristo said. “I was actually starting to miss it.”
Ella asked her question.
Silja Saaristo tilted her head, her mouth in a tight line, sniffled and finally started to speak:
“Well, yes, there were actually ten of us at one point, although we never talk about it. I think we all still feel a bit bad
about what happened to the Society’s most talented member, and then we all understand each other so well that we decided to forget the whole thing. And the death of a child is always such a hard thing, especially for other children.
I think I was the seventh member, if I remember correctly. Yeah. When I was invited to join, there were five of the present members—Ingrid Katz, Toivo Holm, Aura Jokinen, Elias Kangasniemi, and Anni Seläntö. Something like that. Ingrid, Toivo, and Aura all joined at the same time, when they were eight, and Ms White invited the others one by one after that, whenever she found someone good enough—she monitored school essays, from what I understand. But the member chosen sixth is completely forgotten nowadays.
After he died, nobody talked to us about it. It may be that no one outside the Society knew he was a member. I think some of the group went to the funeral, though. Maybe they did. I didn’t. I can’t stand funerals—a carcass in a wooden box, everybody sniffling and sobbing. I didn’t even go to my grandma’s funeral, although I think church is lovely, so beautiful and peaceful. I told everybody I was sick.
He came from someplace else—he didn’t go to school with us. He may have lived in a different district. I don’t think we ever knew where he lived. Anyway, he sort of came and went as he pleased—sort of an outsider, if you know what I mean. Some thought he was mysterious and interesting, but I thought he was just stuck up. He had a sort of a smirk.
Sometimes we tried to get him to tell us where exactly he lived. He wouldn’t say. We might have left him to himself, but the thing was, he was clearly the most talented one of us, a real prodigy.
Martti was the second-best writer in the Society, but this other boy was something else entirely, in a whole different league. We were all ordinary kids, talented kids maybe, but still, just kids. This boy was like some fucking Mozart, writing incredible stuff when he was just little.
I don’t remember anymore exactly what he wrote, but when I heard him read his stories out loud in Laura’s reading room I remember thinking, “Fuck, thanks a lot, guess I’ll give up writing now.” And I wasn’t the only one. That much talent piled up in one person can be fucking depressing for other people. You can start to think, Fuck, I wish he would just die.
He always had this diary with him where he wrote down all his thoughts and ideas. He would never show it to anyo
ne, the fucking diva. Not to me, anyway. I did try to get him to show it to me a couple of times and I promised that if he did I would show him anything he wanted to see.
This all probably sounds pretty terrible. I wasn’t a little harpy, honest. Ha ha, I just wanted really badly to see his diary. You understand, don’t you? He was so secretive about it. We were just kids, and all kids play doctor at some point, do naughty sorts of things like that, but it was all quite innocent, really.
I was going to Sunday school at the time, although I was supposed to stop when the Society was meeting—we always met on Sundays at Laura White’s house to read the stories we’d been assigned and practise writing. I always pretended to be a cool customer, an experienced girl, but I can tell you now that I didn’t officially lose my virginity until I was eighteen.
Maybe kids are different today. Less innocent. That’s one reason I’ve never wanted to have kids. I was pregnant once, though. It’s wonderful. Being pregnant suited me. I used to take my clothes off and look at myself in the mirror, just so I’d remember. Think about it—your breasts grow and your body starts to change and you don’t have to deal with your period for a while… I knew the whole time that I was going to have an abortion before it was too late, so I felt a bit crummy, but I wanted to get as much out of it as I could anyway. Experiences are important, especially for a writer, but of course you’ve probably…
…I’m going off on a tangent. So I was nine when I joined the Society. Once—it was in the winter, I remember, all of us marching to Laura White’s house in our knitted caps and mittens… Anyway, Ms White gave us a sort of murder assignment.
We were supposed to choose one member of the Society and write a story where something bad happens to them. She said we could choose someone we envied or secretly hated a little, and get our revenge out through writing. She emphasized that it was all just a game and that none of us should get mad about it.
Martti Winter was already a member by that time—he joined a little while after me—and I think I remember that Ingrid and Martti agreed to think up something really awful for each other, although I don’t know if there was really any bad feeling between them. I didn’t want to make any agreement like that, I just wanted to do the writing the way it had been assigned.
And I envied that talented kid something awful. I’d been in the Society for a year or so. I decided to murder him in my story. I remember I actually giggled when I started to write it. The rest of my family was wondering what little Silja was up to, cackling to herself. They were terribly proud of me for getting into “Laura White’s Writing Club”. They could never remember the name of the thing. Or maybe they didn’t want to remember it—the name was a touch pompous for such a little tyke.
I wrote at least five different versions of the story before I got it right. I don’t remember what happened in the best story, but I do remember that in one of the rejected versions I invited the wunderkind for a walk along the railroad tracks, knocked him down, tied him to the tracks, and stayed to wait for the train. Kind of like in an old black-and-white film, the Keystone Cops or something. Ha ha. A typical kid’s fantasy, isn’t it? But I wasn’t satisfied with anything that didn’t feel believable, even back then. So I thought up something better.
But those murder stories were never read at the meeting. Because he really did die. It kind of took the fun out of it. I burned my story in the woods. I felt mean for having written a story like that.
I don’t remember now whether we ever knew how he died, but anyway, Ms White called Ingrid, and Ingrid and Martti came to tell us one Sunday morning that the meetings had been cancelled for a while and that our most talented member was dead. The Society was on hiatus for several weeks—at least we didn’t meet at Ms White’s house, and the cold winter got colder all the time—you couldn’t even go outside—but then over the spring we gradually forgot about it and everything continued as it was before, like nothing had ever happened. And we never said a word about that boy again.
Do you want to ask me anything else? Nothing else comes to mind right now about him, but if you ask me something, I can try to remember.
Actually I do remember that I must have been somewhat traumatized by the whole thing. My mother once told a humorous anecdote at a dinner party about how when I was that age I used to wake up in the night in a panic and shout, “Murder, murder, he was murdered.” She meant that I was already becoming a crime writer. I don’t remember it at all. She says that no matter how many times she asked me, she never got any explanation for why I was screaming murder in the middle of the night.
Anyway, none of us felt like making much noise about the fact that the boy who died was a member of the Society, or even that somebody we knew was dead. We had an agreement not to. We met at this place in the middle of the forest, skied there a couple of days after it happened, and we vowed to each other that we would keep quiet about it, on threat of I don’t know what. We thought that if our families knew that somebody in the Society had died they might get the idea that the Society wasn’t good for children and forbid us from participating. Some of our families had, in fact, already complained that it took up too much of our time and our school work was suffering, and we didn’t want to give them any more grist for the mill. We all wanted to be writers, more than anything, ever.
I don’t think there was much talk about the death of the genius in Rabbit Back. He must not have been from Rabbit Back, or at least he wasn’t well known here. And then Jaakko Lindberg, the teenage son of a doctor, an upstanding member of the community, broke into a store and stole some beer and got drunk and got run over by a train, which was lucky for us, in a way. He was pretty much smashed to bits, and that became the only subject of conversation for quite a while.
I actually went with a couple of friends to the railroad tracks to look for pieces of Jaakko, which they said had been left there, although we didn’t find anything, thank goodness. We’d heard a story that his parents had promised a thousand marks’ reward to anyone who could find his face. It was pretty grotesque because I’d had a bit of a crush on Jaakko, although he was a lot older than me. But the rumour of the reward and the missing face proved to be a wild goose chase. It was something the kids invented. Somebody’s parents had been talking about “losing face” and it started this whole story, can you believe it?
By the way, I already have a question for you. Sorry for saying this—it’s none of my business, since you can ask anything you want in The Game, but your questions have been quite easy. I remember whatever I remember and spill it for you. Flimsy memories. The Game is usually played rougher, with more present tense than past tense.
So I ought to tell you that what I’m going to ask about isn’t nearly as easy as reminiscences like these.
Silja Saaristo is quiet. She seems contented, cheerful.
Ella slurps her tea, which has gone cold, and gathers her thoughts for a moment. Saaristo is right. Ella spills from deeper wells in The Game, and all she gets in return are vague bits of Society history, the confused memories of children, tenuous recollections.
But although spilling has proven more painful than she had imagined, The Game is nevertheless progressing just as she wanted it to progress.
The individual pieces may not be very useful from the point of view of literary-historical research, but the picture that’s gradually emerging from them is a unique whole, the sort of history that no one could possibly collect, no one but Ella Milana, the tenth and final member of the Society—an outsider admitted to the inner circle.
After all, she can support herself for the next year just collecting information. That means a lot. Even if she never gets particularly deep with her research, she can at least pay the bills, and her inheritance taxes, and have some money to save.
If she does her work well, if she finds even just one precious nugget, she might be able to give up teaching forever and have a place in the academic world. How many times has Professor Korpimäki tried to persuade her to throw h
erself into literary research?
Ella, you have the research bug, and I don’t say this to just any student. Your thesis doesn’t need a lot of padding to make it a dissertation, and if you decided to continue what you’ve made a good start on, you can trust that I’ll do everything I can to help. You’re right that the world of research is sometimes a façade hiding something rotten, but here in our department you will always have a friend as long as I’m here.
Ella can well imagine returning to the university to make a career in research. She has always enjoyed putting together puzzles, both metaphorical and concrete.
Once when she was six years old, she refused to leave a house her family was visiting because she wanted to finish a puzzle she’d started. The evening had run late because the puzzle was too difficult. It had ten thousand pieces. She’d finally fallen asleep still working on it and been carried home.
The next day she ran away, walked three hours, and rang their doorbell. Hi. I came back to finish the puzzle.
Ella doesn’t really know why she became a teacher instead of a researcher. Maybe she thought it would be easier for a teacher to have children and support them.
Most of Laura White’s Creatureville books were quite ordinary children’s stories. The characters were eccentric and had silly, exciting adventures. But there was something extraordinary about them. A woman from Rabbit Back wouldn’t have become a world-famous children’s author if there weren’t. This extraordinary quality lay in their mythological layers, as Ella Milana’s master’s thesis had shown.
Of course, Laura White’s success could also be explained by her ability to express “a childlike sense of wonder combined with sly observations about life”, as the History of Finnish Literature put it. But “no other writer’s books succeed in using old folk mythology in the multifaceted, enchanting, and surprising ways that Laura White’s books do”, as Ella declared in the introduction to her thesis.
The Rabbit Back Literature Society Page 11