I visited the professor in 1832, once I had saved enough money for the trip from my teaching. Moltique was incarcerated in a private sanatorium on the outskirts of a small village in the Alps. Somewhat by chance, I learned that his relatives did not want to have anything to do with him. The reason became clear to me in the sanatorium. The conceited, nasty professor had become a conceited, nasty lunatic, who wallowed in his own excrement and was afraid of animals – spiders in particular. My visit was fairly brief, I have to admit. When he saw me, his demented eyes lit up strangely and he pushed himself up from the wheelchair with his strong arms, shouting, ‘Are you the one who controls them, those creatures from the other side?’ Then he spat at me, shouted insults and made hand signals – I did not understand all of them. I turned round, descended to the village, ordered a hot toddy and decided to forget Moltique and the whole trip.
Only, I couldn’t.
They returned to my mind day and night. They still do. When I look at the pictures I have created, likenesses of the children I think I knew, I feel despair – a despair that has oppressed me for years. I will never find out if they really existed – and if they did, what happened to them. I have not tried to produce an image of Anna. Nobody in this world resembles her. Those forest-coloured eyes, hair the colour of a pine, small strong frame – courage, strength, wisdom. She is mine. My secret. Yearning is like a stick pushed from heart to brain. A torment, an ache. Was man created to bear such burdens?
Ten years ago, in 1859, an Englishman called Charles Darwin published a work called The Origin of Species, in which he posited that all types of beings, including man, descended from other creatures. Moltique tried to argue something similar on our expedition – before he got distracted by theories about werewolves. I recall wondering if Moltique was still alive and what he might be thinking of the attention Darwin was attracting. Moltique himself would have enjoyed the limelight. Caricatures or slander would not have troubled him, as long as they were drawing everyone’s gaze towards him.
I was not overly interested in Darwin and the uproar to which he gave rise. Instead, I happened to see a small news item about a man who exploited the publicity Darwin was getting to sell stories about some children who were half-human and half-animal living in a forest – he claimed to have sighted these creatures himself. I thought it might be Oliver Alleg. But I never found this mystery man and my suspicions were never confirmed. Bitter disappointment burned a hole in my soul. All the same, I am sure that Alleg found Anna and the children. Did he talk to them? What happened? Did he lose his wits in the solitude of the wilderness like Moltique – or did he meet the same fate as the men? I never found out, and now I never shall. I shall take my ignorance and pain to the grave with me. I shall not leave a descendant behind to carry the same trait as my mother – may she rest in peace – and I am proud of that, though I have been forced to disappoint Rosa with my anti-child sentiment.
I have led a life filled with denial and lonely questions.
Why did I not return to the cave myself, then? I did not know how. I had no idea where it was and how to get there. Nobody at the academy would receive me – and when I persisted in trying to gain admission, a group of men, fairly similar to Moltique’s gang, beat me up one night on my way home. To Rosa I claimed they were a bunch of drunkards. She tended to my contusions patiently, but with suspicion in her eyes.
I found myself in a cul-de-sac. My life was a sea of flames isolated by high walls.
Without Rosa, I would have gone mad. My efficient, capable, sensible, laughing, strong Rosa, my life on the brink of death. Rosa, if you ever read my diary, know this: in this life I have loved and love only you. In a parallel reality, somewhere over there, my heart belongs to Anna.
Somewhere over there, soon. Shall we meet?
Iax Agolasky died five days after completing his final diary entry, in his childhood home in St Petersburg. His wife, Rosa Dolores Agolasky, and their adopted daughter, Florence, were at his deathbed. In a letter she wrote the next day, Rosa told her sister Olivia about Iax’s passing:
I’m moving to Paris; yesterday, Iax fell into eternal sleep. Florence, myself and the children of shadows – as he called his favourite photographs – were by his bedside. You remember the photographs he created, enlisting villagers and dressing them so they were half-animal, half-human?
I suppose he was considered rather unhinged, but photography was his sole obsession.
‘Do you want to depict things? This is the most precise way there is. Drawing, bah! Words, bah, bah, bah!’ So he would hector me. How angry he was if I described things half-heartedly, vaguely! ‘Brown or grey?’ he might demand if I described, say, a bird I had seen. Words were inadequate in his eyes: ‘You make mistakes with them; they demand too much from their users. And you can lie with them; claim a beautiful object is ugly and a dirty one is clean.’
Without Félix Tournachon, the master photographer I told you about, he would surely have gone totally mad. Thanks to Nadar, he was able to take pictures with light in his final years. There is – was – much that was bewildering and unusual about Iax; one such thing is that he insists – insisted. This is hard: how do I put him into the past tense when I still feel his hand on mine?
But yes, he was adamant that he invented photography, only as an idea, on that strange expedition he went on as a young man. Sometimes I feel that understanding that excursion would have been the key to his soul. He is – was, was! – somehow pained and driven in his documentation. His diaries! There are many. I don’t intend to read them. I will allow his soul to rest in peace; my own, perhaps, too. In this life I have loved and only love him, my Iax. In a parallel reality, somewhere over there, he is no longer mine.
Olivia, can you believe I’m writing this? Now I must weep.
Acknowledgements and Postscript
Following the expedition, Iax Agolasky stopped working at the academy. First he became a teacher, then he found work at a small art gallery, where he met his future wife, Rosa Dolores Drulane. They married in 1839. While having his twentieth wedding anniversary photograph taken by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon in 1859, Iax again became interested in this new form of documentation, which matched the visions he saw in the forest. Tournachon (1820–1910), known as Nadar, was a French photographer, cartoonist, author and hot-air balloonist. A pioneer of portraits, Nadar published numerous photographs of his contemporaries, including Guy de Maupassant and Sarah Bernhardt, and also made friends with his subjects.
Despite the age difference, Iax and Nadar shared several interests and had a similar sense of humour. Iax benefited from Nadar’s good advice and soon built his own camera, testing different exposure and printing methods. In 1866, Iax became seriously ill. This did not prevent him from working hard on the children’s photographs, using cyanotype, a cheap and simple technique.
Iax died, broken by a long illness, in 1868. The fate of the negatives following his death is unknown. Mrs Rosa Dolores Agolasky lived on her own after her husband’s demise and passed away in 1870.
I thank the photographer Pekka Nikrus for acquainting me with Moltique and Iax Agolasky, via an exhibition of his work. I wanted to give the children a voice. Instead, I found myself in a forest in north-west Russia, getting to know Iax himself, rather than the children. We share a burning desire to remember, and to remind future generations of our existence. During our joint expedition, I understood that, however hard we try to capture our experiences, we still cannot be totally sure about what is real and what is illusionary. And when we die, we take our fleeting sorrows and joys with us, quite as if they had never existed, as if we were mere illusion ourselves. There is something consoling and, at the same time, melancholy about the thought. Iax, is that what you wanted me to convey through your story?
—VIRVE SAMMALKORPI
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AUTHOR
We celebrate Virve Sammalkorpi as one of the most powerful voices to emerge in Finnish literature for a generation. She published her first novel in 1999 and has written seven novels in total. Sammalkorpi’s most recent novel, Children of the Cave, won both the 2017 Savonia Literature Prize and the Kuvastaja Prize for the best Finnish Fantasy Novel. This is the first time one of her books has been translated into English.
TRANSLATORS
Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah form a multilingual mother-and-daughter translation team. Emily and Fleur have co-translated works by numerous Finnish poets and novelists. They are also the translators of Peirene No. 7, The Brothers, Peirene No. 11, Mr Darwin’s Gardener and Peirene No. 16, White Hunger.
Copyright
First published in Great at Britain in 2019 by
Peirene Press Ltd
17 Cheverton Road
London N19 3BB
www.peirenepress.com
This ebook edition first published in 2018.
First published under the original title Finnish-language title Paflagonian perilliset
Copyright © Virve Sammalkorpi, 2016
This translation © Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah, 2019
Virve Sammalkorpi asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.
EISBN 978–1–908670–51–9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Designed by Sacha Davison Lunt
Photographic Images: Filip Fuxa / 123RF
Typeset by Tetragon, London
This work has been published with the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange.
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