The Woman Who Borrowed Memories

by Tove Jansson

“I did,” he said. “But somehow it’s still too light. It only gets gray, it doesn’t get black!” He waited until the cook had finished serving and gone away. “There aren’t any doors in this house,” he burst out. “I can’t close myself in!”

  Stella stopped eating and looked at him. “You mean it’s just not working,” she said.

  “No. All I get is gray.”

  “Then I think you should find another studio,” said his wife. They went on eating, the tension gone. Over coffee she said, “My aunt’s old house is standing empty. But I think there’s still furniture in the little attic apartment. You could give it a try.”

  She called Jansson and asked him to put a heater in the attic room. Mrs. Jansson promised to leave food on the steps every day and to make sure the room was clean. Otherwise he’d have to keep house for himself and take a hot plate with him. It took only a few minutes to make all the arrangements.

  When the bus appeared around the bend in the road, he turned earnestly to his wife. “Stella,” he said. “It will only be for a couple of weeks, then I can finish up at home. I’m going to concentrate while I’m there. I won’t be writing any letters, just working.”

  “Of course,” said his wife. “Now take care of yourself. And call me from the general store if there’s anything you need.”

  They kissed, and he climbed onto the bus. It was afternoon, and sleeting. Stella didn’t wave, but she stood and watched until the bus was hidden by the trees. Then she closed the gate and walked back up to her house.

  He recognized the bus stop and the evergreen hedge, but it had grown higher and grayer. He was also surprised that the hill was so steep. The road went straight up, bordered by a confused mass of withered undergrowth and cut by deep furrows where the rain had washed sand and gravel down the slope. The house clung tightly to the hill at an impossible angle just below the crown, and the house, the fence, the outbuildings, the fir trees, all of them seemed to be holding themselves upright with a terrible effort. He stopped at the steps and looked up at the façade. The house was very tall and narrow, and the windows looked like loopholes. The snow was melting, and in the silence he could hear nothing but water dripping in among the firs. He walked around to the back. At the rear of the house was a one-story kitchen that merged with the hill in a messy, ill-defined rampart of rubbish. Here in the shadow of the firs lay everything the old house had spit out in the course of its life, everything worn out and unnecessary, everything not to be seen. In the darkening winter evening, this landscape was utterly abandoned, a territory that had no meaning for anyone but him. He found it beautiful. Unhurriedly, he went into the house and up to the attic. He closed the door behind him. Jansson had been there with the heater, a glowing red rectangle over by the bed. He walked to the window and looked down the hill. It seemed to him that the house leaned outward, tired of clinging tightly to the slope. With great love and admiration, he thought of his wife, who had made it so easy for him to leave. He felt his darkness drawing closer.

  After a long night without dreams, he set to work. He dipped his pen in the India ink and drew calmly—small, tight, skillful lines. But now he knew that gray is only the patient dusk that makes preparation for the night. He could wait. He was no longer working to make a picture but only in order to draw.

  In the dusk he walked to the window and saw that the house was leaning outward. He wrote a letter.

  Beloved Stella, the first full page is finished and I think it’s good. It’s warm here and very quiet. The Janssons had cleaned, and this afternoon they left a canister of food on the steps—lamb wrapped in cabbage, and milk. I make coffee on the hot plate. Don’t worry about me, I’m getting along fine. I’ve been thinking about leaving the margins ragged—maybe I’ve been too conventional. Anyway, I was right that the dominant needs to be black. Thinking of you, a great deal.

  He walked down to the general store and posted the letter after dark. The wind had come up a bit and the fir trees sighed as he walked home. The weather was still warm, snow was melting and running down the hill in furrows of sand and gravel. He had meant to write a longer, different letter.

  The days passed quietly, and he worked steadily. The margins had grown fluid, and his pictures began in a vague and shadowy gray that felt its way inward, seeking darkness.

  He had read the whole anthology and found it banal. There was only one story that was truly frightening. It placed its terror in full daylight in an ordinary room. But all the others gave him the opportunity to draw night or dusk. His vignettes were workmanlike depictions of the people and places the author and the reader would want to see. But they were uninteresting. Again and again he returned to his dark full pages. His back no longer ached.

  It’s the unexpressed that interests me, he thought. I’ve been drawing too explicitly; it’s a mistake to clarify everything. He wrote to Stella.

  You know, I begin to think I’ve been depicting things for much too long. Now I’m trying to do something new that’s all my own. It’s much more important to suggest than to portray. I see my work as pieces of reality or unreality carved at random from a long and ineluctable course of events—the darkness I draw continues on endlessly. I cut across it with narrow and dangerous shafts of light . . . Stella, I’m not illustrating any longer. I’m making my own pictures, and they follow no text. Some day someone will explain them. Every time I finish a drawing, I go to the window and think about you.

  Your loving husband

  He walked down to the general store and posted the letter. On his way home he ran into Jansson, who asked if there was a lot of water in the cellar.

  “I haven’t been in the cellar,” he said.

  “Maybe you could have a look,” Jansson said. “What with all the rain we’ve had this year.”

  He unlocked the cellar and turned on the light. The bulb was mirrored in a motionless expanse of water, as shiny and black as oil. The cellar stairs descended into the water and vanished. He stood still and stared. The walls lay in deep shadow, hollowed out where pieces of the wall had collapsed, and the fallen pieces—lumps of stone and cement—lay half hidden under the water like swimming animals. It seemed to him that they swam backward, toward the angle where the cellar hallway turned and went farther in under the house. I must draw this house, he thought. Quickly. I need to hurry, while it lasts.

  He drew the cellar. He drew the backyard, a chaos of carelessly discarded fragments, useless, coal black, and entirely anonymous in the snow. It was a picture of quiet, gloomy confusion. He drew the sitting room, he drew the veranda. Never before had he been so fully awake. His sleep was deep and easy, the way it had been as a boy. He woke instantaneously, without that half-conscious, uneasy borderland that breaks up sleep and poisons it. Sometimes he slept during the day and worked at night. He lived in a state of furious expectation. He finished one drawing after another. There were more than fifteen, many times more. He no longer bothered with the vignettes.

  Stella, I’m drawing the sitting room. It’s such a tired old room, completely empty. I draw nothing but the walls and floor, a worn plush carpet, and a wall panel with a repeating pattern. It’s a picture of the footsteps that passed through the room, of the shadows that fell on the wall, of the words that still hang in the air—or maybe of the silence. All of that is still here, you see, and that’s what I’m drawing. Every time I finish a drawing, I go to the window and think of you.

  Stella, have you ever thought about the way wallpaper loosens and opens? It happens according to strict rules. No one can depict desolation who hasn’t inhabited desolation and observed it very closely. Things condemned have a terrible beauty.

  Stella, do you know what it feels like to see everything gray and cautious all your life and to always try to do your best but all you get is tired? And then suddenly you know, you know with absolute certainty. What are you doing right now? Are you working? Are you happy? Are you tired?

  Yes, he thought. She’s been working and she’s a little tired. She’s wal
king around in her house, getting undressed for the night. She’s walking around turning off the lights, one by one, she’s as white as blank paper, as white as the innocent challenge of the empty surface, and now she alone gives off light, Stella, my star.

  He was almost certain that the house leaned outward. Through the window, he could see four steps but not the top one. He put sticks in the snow in order to measure the change in the house’s angle of inclination. The water in the cellar did not rise. It didn’t matter anyway. He had drawn both the cellar and the façade. He was now working exclusively on the ragged wallpaper in the sitting room. There was no mail. At times he was not certain which letters he had sent to his wife and which he had only imagined. She was farther away now, a picture, a faint pretty picture of a woman. At times, cool and naked, she moved through their large salon of white wood. He found it hard to remember her eyes.

  Days and nights and many weeks went by. He worked the whole time. When a drawing was finished, he set it aside and forgot it, continuing at once with a new one, a new white paper, a blank white surface that offered the same challenge, the same limitless possibilities, and an absolute isolation from outside help. Each time he began to draw, he made sure that all the doors in the house were locked. It had begun to rain, but the rain didn’t concern him. Nothing concerned him except the tenth story in the anthology. More and more, he thought about this one story, in which the author had subjected daylight to his terror and, against all the rules, enclosed it in an ordinary, pleasant room.

  He came closer and closer to the tenth story. It was everywhere, and finally he decided to kill it by drawing. He took a fresh white paper and placed it on the table in front of him. He knew he had to make it visible, the only story in the whole anthology that was genuinely full of horror, and he knew he could illustrate it only one way—it was Stella’s living room, her consummate room, where they lived their lives together. He was amazed but utterly certain. He walked around and lit the low lights, all of them, and the windows opened their eyes out toward the illuminated terrace. Beautiful, strange people moved slowly in groups of two or three, and he drew them all, calmly and surely, with small, gray, skillful lines. He drew the room, a terrifying room without doors, bulging with tension, the white walls shadowed with imperceptibly tiny cracks. He let them run on and widen. He drew them all. He saw that the window-wall’s enormous sheet of glass was on the point of bursting from the pressure from within, and he began drawing it as fast as he could, and at the same time he saw the cleft that opened in the floor and it was black. He worked faster and faster, but before his pen could reach the darkness, the room he was drawing turned and crashed outward to its ruin.

  Translated by Thomas Teal

  THE OTHER

  THE FIRST time was in the milk shop as he stood looking at the display of cakes under the glass counter, completely indifferent to the ingratiating pastries but eager to avoid looking at the clerk. Suddenly, and with dreadful clarity, he saw himself. Not in a mirror. He actually stood beside himself for an instant and thought quietly, There stands a skinny, timid, stoop-shouldered fellow buying cheese and milk and a piece of ham. The apparition lasted only for a second.

  Afterward he was upset, and on the way home he wondered if he had strained his eyes with the latest lettering—the text was extremely small. He put his food between the windows where it was cold and sat down at his drawing table to finish the commission. He opened his drawing instruments and filled his finest pen with ink. And there it was again, powerfully. With a sharpening of all his senses, he stood beside himself and observed a man drawing tiny, fine, parallel lines, a man he did not like but who aroused his interest. This time, it lasted a little longer, perhaps five seconds.

  He felt a slight chill, but his hands weren’t shaking, so he finished the job, cleaned it up, and put the sheet in an envelope. The whole time he was writing the address, licking the stamps, closing the metal clasps, he was on the verge of gliding away to stand alongside himself, watching a man prepare a parcel. It was a very close thing. He put on his hat and coat to go to the post office. Down on the street, he started to tremble and clenched his jaws so tightly that they hurt. Nothing happened at the post office. He cashed a money order and bought some stamps. He decided to take a walk along the harbor, although it was raining and quite cold—a calm, purposeful man taking a quick walk to relax and dispel his thoughts. Exhaustion sometimes produces phenomena that can be easily explained. They vanish if you leave them alone and refuse to let yourself be frightened.

  He avoided looking at the people he passed. The wind was blowing from the water, and the warehouses along the waterfront were closed. He walked and walked, trying to occupy his thoughts with something of interest. He could think of nothing but lettering. He tried to capture and hold on to the tiniest scrap of usable thought, but the only thing he really cared about was lettering. In the end, he let his troubled mind rest in a large, quiet surface of letters, a text arrangement of perfect beauty to which the key was distance and balance. That’s the way it is with letters—distance and space are what matters. He usually started inking from the bottom up so that he wouldn’t be distracted by the meaning of the words.

  By the time he reached the promontory, he felt calmer. A very long time ago, when he still suffered from ambition and disappointment, someone had said that he didn’t love his letters and that it showed. The remark had hurt and troubled him. He had seen text arrangements that were considered vivid and expressive. They struck him as clumsily done—not even retouched. For him, the stamp of quality was objectivity and purity. Lettering and mathematics have exactly the same potential for perfection. There can be only one right answer.

  Now he had the wind at his back. He passed a sign at the ferry and noticed in passing that the letters were awkward and ugly. His attention slid away and a quick stab of anxiety swept over him. He tried to look at boats, joints in the stone pier, iron rings, moorings, anything at all, the way a person entering a strange room searches for conversation pieces among the room’s indifferent objects. Finally he tried to think about the daily newspaper, about reports of great and frightening significance, but all he saw was a great blurry text of stocky typefaces, black in the headlines and otherwise completely unreadable. He started to run. It came closer. It came back.

  He stopped and took a big step to one side and they walked on together. This time it was very distinct and lasted for maybe a minute. A minute is a long time. He saw his own overcoat flapping about his legs in the wind and caught a glimpse of a pinched profile under his hat, the profile of a gentleman who cared about nothing, a gentleman who was out walking because he didn’t want to go home. His interest was mixed with contempt, and he wondered if the man who walked beside him was afraid and if he too felt contempt. He felt warm and vaguely impatient.

  The phenomenon ended and all he saw was the wet asphalt. Mechanically, he went on walking. His heart pounded rapidly and hard. No one had ever looked at him that way before, with such interest and intensity. He walked into the park and sat down on a bench as if he were waiting for someone. His heart was still pounding and he didn’t dare raise his eyes from the ground. Nothing happened. He waited for a long time and nothing happened. He did not try to understand, he only waited. When it began to rain, he rose in disappointment and went home. It was not yet evening, but he fell asleep at once, hugely tired, and slept straight through to morning.

  He woke in an odd mood that he didn’t recognize as expectant. He dressed himself with great care, shaved, tidied his room—listening the entire time. It occurred to him that he might be listening for the doorbell or the telephone, so he turned off both. He did not work today. He moved as quietly and slowly as possible, back and forth across the room, and as he moved, he fussed with the small objects set out for use or decoration, moving them about and putting them back, listening uninterruptedly. He took two pretty glasses out of the cupboard and put them back again. The day passed.

  It came at dusk, as he looked o
ut the window. Again they stood side by side, utterly still so as not to upset the balance in this remarkable displacement, confusion, or whatever other name might be given to what they were experiencing. He felt the same sympathetic contempt, but a new warmth and quickness pulsed through the sympathy he felt for the person he was visiting. He was strong. A few minutes later, he was alone again, but for those few minutes he had been very happy.

  He was alone all that day and all that week. He prepared himself, but nothing happened. Disappointment and anticipation became almost an obsession. He thought about nothing but the opportunity to stand to the side. That’s what he called it in his head, standing to the side. He returned to the places where they had been together and waited for a long time. He tried to remember books about doppelgängers and dual personalities but could no longer recall their names, and he didn’t want to consult bookstore clerks and librarians. The meeting he was preparing for was extremely personal and secret. It could not be hastened or explained. All he could do was render himself utterly, impersonally receptive. He knew for certain that he was a receiver—he radiated nothing but expectation. So he waited.

  Finally he succeeded. He stepped out of himself without even feeling contempt for the person he’d left. They stood there side by side as they’d done before and gazed out the window. He allowed delight and alertness to wash through him like a warm wave. His hands burned, his totally new hands. The whole time he stared out the window. Then the two of them glided back into each other. This happened with a sense of weary reluctance and left behind it a feeling of disappointment, flaccid and ghastly. He was alone in the room. He ran to the door and back to the window, at his wit’s end from abandonment. Again and again he thought, bitterly, He doesn’t look at me anymore, why doesn’t he look at me? He remembered the story about the doppelgänger who killed himself. He couldn’t work.