Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (11 page)

I could no longer see my guide anywhere. I felt faint, and pressed my back against the damp stone wall. I already realised that I had been brought into a sepulchre. Before me on the earthen floor lay carcasses without number, but about them was such a ceaseless bustle that at times it looked as if there were still some degree of life in them. Around me moved dozens of creatures that were reminiscent in their appearance of the funeral director, but whose clothing was – if possible – still more brilliant. The more closely I examined them and their work, the more they reminded me of the toil of burying beetles.

I had descended into the Hades of Tainaron. I had asked: ‘What happens to the bodies?’ and the answer to my question was now before my eyes. One of the most prosaic and indispensable of the functions of the city of Tainaron was carried out here, shielded from the gaze of passers-by; but as I looked at their toil, my horror gave way and made space for impartial examination, even respect.

I spoke of Hades and a sepulchre, but in reality the space in which I found myself served the opposite purpose: it was a dining room and a nursery. Those who toiled here were not merely workers; they were also, above all, mothers. Now I could see that around every larger form flocked a swarm of smaller creatures, its offspring. As they did the work that had to be done for life in this city to be at all possible, these workers were at the same time feeding their heirs; and if the way in which they did it was not to my taste, where would I find more convincing proof of the never-broken alliance between destruction and florescence, birth and death?

So: there was a carcass, of which one could no longer detect who or what it had been when it was alive, so decomposed were its features. But I no longer felt sick, although I saw one of the mothers poking about in its pile of dross. For that was where the mother sought nourishment for her heirs, her snout buried in the stinking carcass, and look! there glistened a dark droplet, which one of the little ones drank, and after a moment the second received its share, and the third; no one was forgotten.

And here, then, was their work: to distil pure nectar from such filth, to extract from the slimy liquid of death health, strength and new life. How could I ever complain about what took place in the Hades of Tainaron? Truly, it is a laboratory compared to which even the greatest achievements of the alchemists are put to shame; but all that is done there is what the earth achieves every year when it builds a new spring from and on what rotted and died in the autumn.

‘Have you seen enough?’ someone asked behind me. I turned and saw Longhorn, who was standing at the mouth of the corridor, looking at me in a troubled way. I do not know whether his expression was caused merely by the stench, which my own nose hardly sensed any longer, or whether it was real grief. For his friend had just died, and I had hardly spared a thought for his feelings. But when our eyes met, I, too, felt the bite of suffering.

The kindness of his eyes! How had I never noticed it before? And they were so dazzlingly black, so wise and alive . . . But in fact I have seen just such a gaze before, and more than once. I have seen it – do not be shocked – in your eyes, too, different as they are. I have encountered it – or seen it pass me by – among acquaintances and strangers, at parties, in department stores, in my own home, in trains, on stations and in lecture-halls, shops and cafés; in summer, in the great lime trees in the park, where cast-iron benches have been placed for the citizens; and I am sure that at unguarded moments it has also resided in my own eyes.

That it ever disappears! It was the impossible, and unbearable, thing that, as I turned to look behind me and met Longhorn’s eyes, was relentless in us both, and the strange meal we were following as onlookers offered no solution.

The soundless glitter of immense treasures – That it could be extinguished and sink into the cold mass of raw material as if it had not been anything more than the moisture of lachrymal fluid on the surface of the cornea . . .

‘Come away,’ said Longhorn, with unexpected softness, and we left Hades without looking at each other again.

The Charioteer

the tenth letter

I have received a card from my home country. Yes, it was not from you; we know that. The bronze statue on the card is two thousand four hundred years old, but he whom the card shows is a mere youth. His forehead is encircled by an ornamental ribbon, and his hair curls, lightly gilded, over his ears. He holds a pair of reins in his hands, and his eyes are dark stones, glittering, mysterious and surprised.

But what life and riches shine from them! It is hard for me to believe that what I see is merely coloured light reflected from stone. What a coincidence that it arrived just as I had sent you my last letter! For, don’t you see, he has the same gaze, the one I was talking about, which hurts me, which I recognise everywhere.

But this young man is astonished at something; even his mouth is astonished, already ajar and about to open. I am sure I am not mistaken in remembering that I once saw a similar expression on the face of someone who was dying; all the tubes had been disengaged, and his eyes were wide open. The same concentration marks both their faces and forces both of them forward in an invisible race.

Why is it that it is in the form of this young man’s face that I should most like to remember the face of humankind . . .

Tracks in the Dust

the eleventh letter

Have I told you that Tainaron has a prince? As a foreigner, I was unexpectedly offered the opportunity to attend his reception. I asked Longhorn for advice as to how I should dress for the occasion and what behaviour was expected. I felt his answer was vacuous, and did not help me one bit.

‘You can go in whatever you like,’ he said. ‘You can ask whatever you want.’

And then he added: ‘It’s not important, after all.’

‘Not important?’ I was astonished. ‘Do you just go there as you are, straight off the street, and say whatever comes to mind to the prince?’

But he did not give me any more clues, and I went there by myself, in my best dress of course, but distinctly nervous.

The prince lives in the middle of the city, in his palace, which is surrounded by a moat. The drawbridge was down, and there were no guards to be seen. People were going in and out, and no one paid any attention to me. I had been given a piece of paper, a promissory note which I tried to proffer to some of the passersby whom I guessed to be members of the palace staff, but no one wanted to accept it; everyone just waved their hands vaguely: ‘It’s not necessary.’

‘Where does the prince hold his reception?’ I asked three different times, and it was only on the third occasion that I was directed to the right place; but no one bothered to come with me as a guide, and the corridors along which I walked were empty. Through doors that had been left open I saw various different rooms: tambours, halls and stairwells, new colonnaded corridors and courtyards where landscape gardens had been built with pavilions, artificial lakes and bridges.

The prince received visitors in the tower at the heart of the palace, in the donjon. I saw him from a distance from the dim passageway on whose stone floor my shoes tapped alarmingly noisily.

The door to his reception room was wide open, and I could not see anyone else in the vicinity.

The salon was oval in shape and small. At its centre was a single chair, on which the prince sat.

The room was very high, in fact as high as the tower, so that the prince looked as if he were sitting at the bottom of a well.

I stopped before stepping across the threshold, for I did not know how I should approach him. He sat motionless, but seemed to be looking me straight in the eye. He was very old and frail. The way in which the light fell around him and on to his domed head from the upper windows made the vision desolate and melancholy.

I think I stood there for a long time, anxiously, but just as it began to seem to me that the prince was sleeping with his eyes open, his forelimb rose in an encouraging gesture, slowly and ceremoniously. I stepped into the room.

‘Your highness,’ I began, ‘I have come . . . ’

‘Yes, yes,’ he interrupted me before I had time to begin. ‘It’s perfectly clear. You can ask whatever you want.’

I had prepared many kinds of questions concerning both domestic and foreign policies, trade links and tax reform, but at the moment they all fell out of my head.

‘May I ask, may I ask,’ I mumbled, ‘how you are?’

This was, of course, completely inappropriate, I understood that myself. But I could not get anything else out of my mouth, and I looked at him, dumbly, waiting for him to rise and announce that the audience was over.

Strangely enough, he seemed on the contrary to be engrossed by my question, as if it were completely apt for that time and place.

‘As to my health, I have nothing to complain about,’ he said, in such a low voice that I had to lean forward to hear. ‘But I am worried about my ears. There is a murmuring in them all the time. Or else a ringing, of a little silver bell.’

And he suddenly shook his head, so that the fluffy blue collar that surrounded his neck hissed and rustled.

‘And then there are the nights, they are definitely too big. They have grown larger and larger since the princess left, and the princess left thirty years ago, in her prime. You will not believe how small they were when she was still here. This small!’

He stretched out two of the downy pincers of his forelimb for me to see: they were almost touching. I looked at them with polite interest and nodded.

The prince leaned backward in his chair and spoke now more audibly, as if with greater warmth: ‘When the princess had died, I often went into the city incognito, in strange armour. I stood by the bridge and did not let anyone by without inspecting him or her thoroughly from head to feet. But I never saw the princess again, for I should have known her in any disguise, even if she had been through the most comprehensive of metamorphoses, that you may believe. For the images of shared secrets had remained in the princess’s eyes, and they, at last, would have revealed her immediately, but in the uninterrupted flow of oncomers there flowed only the loam of strange memories . . . ’

And the prince’s voice fell. I suspected that the audience should have ended long ago, and it tired me to stand before him as the only hearer of his ancient yearning. No one came to fetch me away, and in the palace there was a soundlessness as if there were no one else there.

‘Do you know why we have been forgotten?’ the prince whispered unexpectedly, and his choice of words surprised me: why that ‘we’, it was not really right in this situation, and why did he lower his voice in such a familiar way?

‘Because it is all the same to them,’ the prince whispered, ‘what I do now, where I go or what I say, everything is permitted now. Do you understand?’

‘No, I do not believe it, your highness,’ I said hesitantly, but his forelimb crooked and beckoned me closer.

I bent obediently toward him and came so close that I thought I heard the little silver bell he had mentioned, as well as the scent of some bitter herb. Then he whispered into my ear: ‘In reality, I am no longer the prince.’

He drew away to see the effect of his words on me. I can say that they did not really have any effect. I was convinced he was speaking the truth. Only thus did the emptiness and indifference which I had encountered in the palace – and earlier – make sense.

‘I see you believe that I . . . ’ the prince said heavily. ‘But do not worry, that is not the case, not in the least. Know this: times change, but each is only one time of many. So what; it can be changed, like a change of clothes. Today I still sit in my palace. But often I ring my bell for a long while and no one comes. My shirt still bears the arms of Tainaron, but the wine which is brought to me is no longer of the same quality as before. So what. For tomorrow I shall be in exile, or my body will lie in that landscape garden on the little wooden bridge and the national guard will have pierced it with newly sharpened bayonets.’

Now he finally rose to his feet – I had been expecting it for a long time – and I realised, with relief, that the audience was over. I bowed respectfully, and when I turned, I saw only my own footprints in the heavy dust that completely covered the stone floor of the donjon.

Their solitude proved to me with complete clarity that no one had visited the room for ages, and that the prince himself had not left it.

He was a lost cause.

The Day of the Great Mogul

the twelfth letter

I do not know why I pick up my pen again. No longer because I might expect return mail. But I would like to tell someone that something strange has happened, some curious, unpleasant changes, and I have no idea what has caused them. Perhaps it is temporary, and my life will return to how it was before. Perhaps, too, the days that were like prizes, long ago, will return.

I have not travelled anywhere, but this city is now different. The change does not please me. When I look out, I see that it is as if it has been unclothed. The most important thing is absent; the thing that once, just a moment ago, made me strong and happy. I look at the ground, I look at the sky, and everywhere is the same absence, in the eyes that crowd the streets and the department stores as if they were seeking their lost pupils in the windows and sales counters. If I were to send you photographs of Tainaron before and Tainaron now, you would say no difference is visible, and perhaps it is so; but nevertheless I know that everything is decisively different.

If the sounds of the city were to be muted for a moment, I could hear a secretly crumbling sound as if a trickle of sand were falling from the side of a sandpit. And the vital force, which I believed to be inexhaustible, runs and runs somewhere where no one can use it.

Is this what is known as growing old? Do I see it everywhere, although it exists only inside myself? And what once was happiness around me, was it too a mere reflection? But in that case how can I know anything of what Tainaron is, what it is like?