The Rabbit Back Literature Society

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  The things she’d spilled about her father’s death now belonged to Ingrid Katz—all of her rottenest, most repulsive, most horrible thoughts. She would have liked to leave them to rot in the back of her mind, but they had come out right after her beautiful thoughts, and the moment they had crystallized into words she had started to upbraid herself for them.

  She had managed to conceal her callousness from herself, but when she played The Game she vomited it all out. She’d heard herself say that her father’s death and funeral had meant no more to her than when an appliance that has been malfunctioning for a long time finally breaks down completely—mostly a relief rather than a loss. She’d listened like a bystander as she said that she had tried to grieve like she was supposed to, had even cried, but not for her father. For something else. She simply didn’t know how to grieve that difficult, irritating stranger they’d called Paavo Emil Milana.

  Even at the funeral, she had been thinking about everything else. As she laid a wreath on the coffin she’d been thinking about shaving her legs and buying her own mug to keep in the teacher’s lounge. All of these thoughts had spilled not just into Ingrid Katz’s but also Ella Milana’s ears, and once exhumed, they were difficult to bury again.

  She had even spilled the fact that it was sometimes a struggle to remember exactly how her father had actually died—of a heart attack in the middle of the garden. She remembered much better a dream she’d had a couple of days after her father’s death.

  In the dream there was a man who looked like dry leaves and rustled in the wind with an annoyingly loud noise. People were walking by with their hands over their ears, glaring at him angrily. Then the wind grew stronger and finally it was so furious that it carried the rustling man away with it. The people walking by stopped and applauded and Ella woke up clapping her own hands together enthusiastically.

  Winter had drawn out her nakedness the way it was in her own head. Ella had never experienced such nakedness, even at the gynaecologist. When she realized what was expected of her, she pretended to have a coughing fit and surreptitiously popped a yellow crystal. Only then was she able to get through the x-ray manoeuvre.

  And she had spilled it all for him—her skinny shoulders, her slightly too big but pleasingly round ass, the red, irritated skin of her hips, the half-moon birthmark on the inside of her left thigh, her perky, pink nipples, which would never feed a baby, and the veins that shone under the skin around them, her comically undisciplined pubic hair, the soft asymmetry of her labia and the bumps left where she’d once shaved them with an old razor.

  She had even spilled that perfect, arching line that she formed by twisting her upper body forty-five degrees—sometimes when she was alone she would look at it too long in the mirror, startled at the clarity of her own gaze.

  She’d talked about how she used to let her gaze sink through her skin, peel away the flesh and tear away the muscles until she could see the reproductive organs that would never produce life, whose presence she could never forget, even for a moment.

  Ordinary people could never surrender so much of themselves as the writers in the Society did—not even the most impassioned lovers, in spite of their claims of melting into each other and becoming one. The writers in the Society wrote stories, but they didn’t dress themselves in stories with each other, and that nakedness was hard to comprehend.

  Ella lay in her room and gradually rewove slender new stories inside her to replace the ones that had been torn to bits, and her condition started to improve.

  Her mother put something down at the foot of her bed, on top of the blanket, and said, “You left this in your father’s Triumph.”

  She didn’t open her eyes, but once her mother had left she moved her foot and something heavy thudded to the floor.

  Once she opened the album, she couldn’t contain herself. She flipped back and forth through it, peering at the yellow labels, too impatient to stop at a single photo.

  The first few pictures were black and white, the rest in colour. They had been taken by multiple people. Some of them were carefully composed and well photographed, others were clumsy, crooked, over-or underexposed.

  Finally Ella made herself take a breath and started to go through them one by one. She got out pen and paper and concentrated on each one carefully, making notes and observations, as a researcher should when analysing her subject.

  She hadn’t yet sent anything to Professor Korpimäki because her material was still too amorphous to provide a basis for even a preliminary report, but she might find something more substantial in these photographs.

  On the first page was a picture of Laura White and three children. They were standing on the steps of Laura White’s house. White had a slightly reticent smile on her face; the children were glowing with pride. The authoress was wearing a white dress that left her arms bare, and one hand rested on the shoulder of a boy in a billed cap. Two little girls in dark dresses stood holding hands.

  The yellow label read: Ingrid, Toivo and Aura with L.W. shortly after the founding of the Society, May 1968. Picture taken by Mr Vaara, who had a habit of popping in at Laura’s house “in a collegial capacity” until L.W. apparently made it clear to him that he was disturbing the children’s lessons.

  At the bottom of the page was a picture of Laura White captured in the act of twirling around in a summer meadow with her hands stretched towards the sky. Her figure was blurred to mere motion and her features were unclear—you could see the limbs of the trees through her furiously spinning face.

  I believe this picture was taken by a professional Rabbit Back photographer named Kaarle Kellokumpu, Martti Winter’s yellow label read. Apparently L.W.’s presence addled the man’s head and he succeeded in adjusting his camera in such a way that she became partially transparent.

  The album contained many photos of the Society children in nature, exploring rivers and streams and large boulders. Ella recognized Martti Winter at about the age of ten, sitting on a branch of a birch tree grinning, and the little girl holding on to his ankles was clearly Ingrid Katz. The yellow label confirmed this. The Rabbit Back Literature Society on a picnic. We had thousands of picnics where we ate a snack and wrote short exercises and sometimes wandered deeper into Rabbit Wood. Wonderful outings, where we saw all kinds of strange and beautiful things. Afterwards I tried a few times to find the places where L.W. had taken us, but unfortunately I never did.

  In one dim, black and white photo, Laura White was walking in the deep forest with a dreamy expression, followed by the nine young members of the Society, of which only the features of the first three could be easily made out—they were Ingrid Katz, Aura Jokinen, and Silja Saaristo, sticking out her tongue. On the yellow label, Martti Winter had written that he’d taken the picture himself, in July of 1971.

  Ella covered her mouth to keep from shouting out loud. There were nine children visible in the photo and one, Martti Winter, behind the camera.

  Ten children in all.

  So obviously one of them was the gifted child, the one who died less than a year after the photo was taken.

  Ella looked at each child in turn and was able to identify four more of them with near certainty: Anna-Maija Seläntö, Toivo Holm, Helinä Oksala, and Oona Kariniemi. The two that remained were fuzzy, dim figures in shadow, one of which could be tentatively identified as Elias Kangasniemi.

  The other was the tenth member of the Society, the dead boy.

  Ella started to look for him in the other photos. There had to be a better picture of him somewhere! A photo might give her a chance to learn his identity and the cause of his death.

  She knew that he died in 1972. The members of the Society had been between the ages of 11 and 13 at the time. Halfway through the album they started to look like teenagers. The last photos showed what were clearly adult writers posing surrounded by their published books, with champagne glasses and cigarettes in their hands. There was a photo of Ingrid Katz and Silja Saaristo in the water, their breasts bare, an
d farther off stood Elias Kangasniemi, also in the water, scratching his pubic hair.

  The later photos offered useful information, but for now she had to put them aside and concentrate on the early pictures, where she might find what she was looking for.

  Of course, Ella didn’t really think she would find a photo that would present the tenth member of the Society. The members who were still living had decided to forget their dead comrade and wipe him from the Society’s history. She was almost sure that the album would have purposely left out the boy who had been made a non-person. She was counting on finding something that Winter and the other members hadn’t noticed. She had a researcher’s training, after all. The Society’s writers weren’t real researchers, trained to analyse their subjects systematically. They were like a bunch of Pizarros, making expeditions into each other’s minds, unconcerned about the damage they inflicted.

  The kind of people who make mistakes.

  Martti Winter had made a mistake when he forgot that the shot he’d taken showed the tenth member, dimly visible.

  She started to look through the pictures with a magnifying glass. She stopped only to resist her mother’s occasional attempts to drag her downstairs to drink some coffee or eat some soup. She developed a pounding headache and nearly cut off the circulation in her back and legs completely, but she couldn’t stop.

  Finally, she let out a grunt. The magnifying glass fell to the floor. She clambered up with stiff, numb legs and hobbled across the room.

  It was daylight outside. Where had the evening gone?

  She went back to the album, picked up the magnifying glass and looked at the photo again. Laura White sitting on the lawn with Martti Winter and Aura Jokinen. The yellow label read: A lesson in L.W.’s garden. L.W. finds a promising passage in young Winter’s notebook, and a budding sci-fi writer grows bored.

  In the background was Laura White’s house. Ivy climbed the wall and the house was surrounded by colourful flower beds. The sun was high in the sky, the shadows short. Laura White and Martti Winter were sitting on the shore of the pond, absorbed in the notebook he was holding as Laura White explained something to him. Aura Jokinen was looking away.

  Ella followed Aura Jokinen’s gaze with her finger. She did it again. The girl was looking into the house. The front door was half open. In the entryway, masked by light and shadow, stood a child leaning his arm against the wall and staring at Aura Jokinen. That detail had almost escaped her.

  The magnifying glass revealed his delicate face.

  He wasn’t any of the recognizable members of the Society.

  “Nice to meet you,” Ella whispered to the boy in the picture, the first tenth member.

  27

  THERE WAS A SOFT PILLOW, hot drops of moisture on her thighs—the lewd remains of a dream. Her eyes opened slowly. Light reflecting from the walls and ceiling flooded over her. Too much light.

  Images floated halfway between the dark and the light. She tried to take hold of them, but they were woven into the dimness, too delicate for her touch.

  Her mouth opened in a yawn so wide that her jaw cracked; air rushed into her lungs and out again. Her breath probed the flesh it inhabited, measuring its outlines and outer reaches, focusing until the most important details were in place. Ella Amanda Milana. Lovely, curving lips, painterly nipples, defective ovaries.

  When she had assembled herself, Ella Milana pinpointed her location in time and space and imagined she could feel her personal future snapping into place in her spinal cord.

  She swung her feet to the floor and recommenced her literary historical research.

  She went downstairs and found a letter that made her an heir of the missing authoress.

  The letter had been waiting for her on the kitchen table on a pile of fresh advertising flyers, not far from the butter dish and the bread basket. It had been sent by one Otto Bergman, Master of Law, and was addressed to “Ella Milana, Member, Rabbit Back Literature Society”.

  “Something to do with the Literature Society,” her mother had said from behind her newspaper. The kitchen smelled of toast. “Open it and tell me whether it’s good news or bad news.”

  Ella ripped open the envelope. At the very beginning of the letter it mentioned that the same letter had been sent to the other members of the Society. It had the stamp of a law firm. The paper was thicker than ordinary letter paper, its texture unusual against her fingers.

  Ella poured herself some coffee and sat down to read it.

  “It says that Laura White has willed all of her possessions to the Rabbit Back Literature Society except for a sum to be spent on establishing an annual writer’s grant. Her house will be separately transferred to the foundation and awarded to the members of the Society for their use in perpetuity.”

  “Well, well,” her mother said. “But what does it mean?”

  Ella kept reading. The letter said that every member of the Society would be paid a substantial sum of money once the will had gone through. The letter also emphasized that Laura White’s death would not be declared any time soon:

  Laws governing declaration of death set out the conditions under which a missing person may be declared dead. The general conditions are that a person has been missing for an extended period of time and has not provided information about themselves, or said person has clearly perished in a devastating fire or other accident likely to be an immediate danger to life. Because Laura White cannot be seen as having been the victim of such an accident, but rather disappeared at a party, and because it cannot be proved beyond a doubt that she did not leave the party of her own free will and that she is not, for her own reasons, remaining out of contact in an unknown location, her death cannot be declared until her body is found or after the passing of five years’ time without any communication received from her.

  Ella thought she could hear the most distant part of her personal future creak, give way with a bang as it once again changed its shape, and then quiver somewhere inside her spine. She felt a little dizzy.

  When Martti Winter opened the door, the first thing he looked at was the pack of dogs in front of the house. When Ella Milana waved a hand and said she had come for coffee, he was visibly cheered.

  “Marvellous!” he said, showing her in with a hand on her back and checking the dogs’ positions as he closed the door again. “I’ll make us some coffee and we can have a piece of cake and a chat!”

  The low winter light filtered through the windows. Ella noticed that in daylight Martti Winter’s home looked like a chocolate box—most of the furniture was confectionery in colour and shape, like dark and light chocolates.

  He led her into one of the small downstairs rooms. Inside was a small, round table and chairs, a carpet the colour of vanilla ice cream and some small paintings. Ella sat at the table and set her bag down next to her chair.

  On the table was a china teapot, a large chocolate cake, and a wide selection of sweet rolls, pastries and other treats.

  “You were quite sure that I would come,” she said with a smile.

  Winter raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  “The table’s already set, I see,” she said, pointing at the dishes of treats.

  Winter nodded awkwardly and went to fetch her a cup and plate.

  The two of them chatted about the weather, the passing of time, the stray dogs running around, the flavour of the chocolate cake and the mythological figurines scattered around the house. There was a knee-high, stone gnome in a corner of the room, grinning wickedly, and a wooden carving of a woman lolling near the door, a dazzlingly well-endowed figure, her lower body veiled by her hair.

  “I didn’t buy them myself,” Winter said. “It’s impossible to live in Rabbit Back without receiving them from everyone as gifts.”

  Ella wolfed down a meringue, talked a bit about Laura White’s house, and then enquired, as if the thought had just occurred to her, whether it would be at all possible to get into White’s house and look around.

  “I
was supposed to meet her, and then everything happened the way it happened…” she said, “and it would be so interesting to see the place where it all began.”

  Martti Winter pondered the question over two strawberry waffles and one caramel napoleon. “I understand, of course. You got the letter from the lawyer. And naturally I can see why you would feel a desire to see the house. The rest of us spent a lot of time at Laura’s house in our day.”

  “I’m sure you must know the place through and through,” Ella sighed.

  Winter shook his head. “Not through and through. There are a lot of places in that house where we never went. We didn’t run around the place. That was unheard of. We knew from the start where it was all right to go and where it wasn’t. We always went where Laura told us to.”

  He sat sunk in thought for a moment. “So I can assure you that all ten members of the Society will better acquaint themselves with the place as soon as the estate is distributed—including you, naturally. That may take five or ten years, according to the attorney’s letter.”

  “Yes. Ten years,” Ella said. “I was thinking, though, that perhaps we could take a peek at the house earlier than that. After all, someone ought to check in on the place.”

  Winter smiled at her eagerness and explained with elaborate patience that the house was taken care of by a trusted employee, “Old Man Bohm”, who lived nearby and went now and then to make sure the pipes hadn’t broken and turned the place into a swimming pool. “I don’t think any of us has a key to the house,” he concluded.

  Ella gave up the fight and led the conversation back to the delightful flavour of the cake, a subject on which they were in perfect accord, but she couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that must be in that house—letters, notes, photographs, unfinished manuscripts, maybe even Laura White’s personal diary.

  “I had a question about one of the photographs,” Ella said. She put the photo in front of him. It was the one of Aura Jokinen and Laura White together. “See the boy standing in the doorway?”