Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (15 page)

King Milinda’s Question

the twentieth letter

My immediate neighbour, on the same floor, is an extraordinarily old person; much older than the prince. Some people claim he is already over one hundred and fifty years old, while others, like Longhorn, say that he is only one hundred and twenty-five or one hundred and thirty. But everyone who sees his frailty understands that he has lived past his own time, and it is incomprehensible and even cruel that he must continue living here in the city of Tainaron.

He has a servant – or perhaps he is one of his descendants – who takes him out every morning. He is dry and light and has shrunk so small that he is carried in a kind of bag or sack. The bag is set in the sun on a park bench and its sides are turned down a little so that the old man can take the air and look at the flowers and the passers-by. There he is left, and after a couple of hours he is taken home again. In his bag he looks, with his thin limbs, like nothing but a bunch of straw, as dry as kindling.

Do you think there is a place where people do not grow old? I wonder if I ever met an inhabitant of such a country when I was quite young? And will he meet me again when my age is as great as that of the old man in the sack?

What a shock he will get. ‘My dear friend,’ he will stammer. ‘What dreadful thing has happened? Who has treated you so badly? Where is your thick hair? Why do you walk so slowly and with such a stoop? Tell me who is to blame, and I shall make him answer for his deeds.’

Childish, ignorant person! Let him go back to where he came from!

I have seen a vision that came from the sack. It looked just as if there were a mirror in it. And the straw rose to give a sign; it beckoned to me. And so of course I went, I went and sat down next to the sack, which was very humble considering that one hundred and fifty years fitted inside.

The sack’s voice was so weak and hoarse that I could not immediately understand it. The sack asked where I was from, and said that it had not been born in Tainaron either. And I had only sat there for a moment when I realised that the bag contained someone alive and remembering. And when I had sat there for another moment, I knew that he was not old. Old age was merely his disguise, as childhood had once been. I knew it as I once knew that a certain very small creature was right when she shrieked: ‘I am not a child! I am not a child!’ I knew it because I had not been a child myself, either; I knew it because I shall never be old. I knew it because I had heard King Milinda’s question: ‘Was he who was born the same as he who died?’ and heard the answer, which was not yes or no. And now the park’s trees waved the shadows of their fluttering over my years and over the years of my companion, leaves that were still fastened to their branches, but were already yellow and would soon be dead, detached, absent.

I asked what had been most difficult in life, and the bag answered: ‘The fact that everything recurs and must always return and that the same questions are asked again and again.’

But before I could ask more of the same questions, the servant or descendant approached us with purposeful strides. Lightly he lifted his burden – its years were feathers to him – and, grinding the gravel under his feet, took him back home.

I had got hot and, forgetting the old man in a moment, strolled slowly toward the harbour. There I saw the same white ship that once brought me to Tainaron; but why, I cannot remember.

Not Enough

the twenty-first letter

How are you? How are things with you? That you are so implacable in your silence makes you gradually become more like gods or the dead. Such is your metamorphosis; and it is not entirely repugnant to me.

For let me tell you what has happened to me. What has happened to me is that people are no longer enough. They are not enough, be they ever so great or beautiful or wise or complicated.

They are not enough, even if their antennae were to stretch further than radar beams and their clothes were to be stronger than armour.

For that reason I confess that everything I say contains the unspoken hope that it is linked with all my actions as well as to the moments when I just sit and look. Ardent hope! Incorrigible hope! That gods and the dead might hear. That gods and the dead might see. That gods and the dead might know . . .

But there is only one who can make them hear their song. But he was one who became truly unhappy and was torn to pieces.

Last night I returned to you after long years, from such a distance and over many obstacles. Barricades and brushwood fences, barbed wire obstacles and piles of stones rose up in my path. Craters, chasms and stinking trenches opened up before my feet. But my speed was so dizzying that I flew over peaks and depths and sped along the bright, frozen channel that led straight to your door.

The bell rings through the house, through the darkness of the winter’s day, and you open the door, the same as before. How happy we are! How we embrace each other!

But at once I notice how absent-minded you are. You are expecting something completely different; yes, I am right: you listen over my head, which is pressed against your chest. And now I, too, hear footsteps approaching below in the stairwell.

Then the light of a living flame spreads across your face as you ask: ‘Are they coming here? Are they not close? Are they not familiar footsteps?’

But I do not reply, and you would not hear what I said. Your arms have already loosened around me, and I have returned on the same road along which, just now, I sped toward you, trembling with anticipation.

Dayma

the twenty-second letter

Yesterday I wished to try, for my morning drink, the Tainaronians’ favourite sweet, foaming dayma or daime, which is drunk through a straw. They like it so much that they drink it at every possible opportunity, cold or hot, and in addition to dayma they have dozens of other names for it. I have heard it said that in large quantities it has curious effects and that some may see strange and even improper things after drinking it.

For my part, I did not notice any such effects. But everything I see here is strange, even without drinking a drop of dayma.

I remembered a particularly pleasant little cake shop on the side of a canal where Longhorn took me soon after I arrived in Tainaron for the first time. I also wanted to try those particularly crisp herb pastries, as light as wafers, which smell of smoke and which I believe are not made anywhere else but in that bakery. My desire was so strong that my mouth watered and I had to swallow when the memory of the little pastries spread on to my tongue.

To my disappointment, I could no longer find the cross-street of the ring boulevard on which the café was located. I thought I was following the correct route; I turned at the same street corner as before, and carried on along the side of the canal, but soon I found myself in quite unknown quarters. There were unfinished buildings and enormous industrial shells from which the sound of turbines and the fumes of combustion engines rose into the air. The people there also looked completely different, poorer and smaller than the Tainaronians who had sat on the terrace of my favourite café. At last I found a glum coffee bar where badly foamed dayma was served in thick handleless cups and where the bread was dense and heavy.

‘I should like to have a map of Tainaron,’ I said yesterday to Longhorn. ‘It would be much easier to wander here alone, and you would not always have the bother of being my guide. I could not find a single map in the department store. Could you perhaps find a map somewhere? Would it be possible?’

‘Unfortunately it is impossible,’ he answered.

‘Why impossible? Have all the maps sold out?’

‘That is not why,’ he said. ‘No comprehensive map of Tainaron has ever been made.’

‘What? No proper map has been made? But that is very strange,’ I said, dissatisfied and astonished.

‘It is not at all strange,’ Longhorn said abruptly. ‘It would be sheer impossibility to draw up such a map, a completely senseless project.’

‘Why so?’ I asked, increasingly irritated. ‘To me a kingdom which has no map is not a real kingdom but barbary, chaos, mere confusion.’

‘You still know very little about Tainaron,’ he said quietly. ‘We too have our laws, but they are different from yours.’

I felt a little abashed, but that did not wipe away all my irritability.

‘A map cannot be made,’ he continued, ‘because Tainaron is constantly changing.’

‘All cities change,’ I said.

‘None as fast as Tainaron,’ Longhorn replied. ‘For what Tainaron was yesterday it is no longer today. No one can have a grasp of Tainaron as a whole. Every map would lead its user astray.’

‘All cities must have maps, at least of some kind,’ I continued to argue.

Longhorn sighed and looked at me kindly, but a little wearily.

‘Come!’ he said, and took me gently by the arm. ‘Let’s go!’

‘Where to?’ I asked.

‘We are going to the observation tower,’ Longhorn said. ‘To make you understand.’

The observation tower was built on the same hill as the funfair. I had not noticed it until now, for the movement of the Ferris wheel had taken up all my attention. We had to climb for an agonisingly long time up the narrow wooden stairs which circled the outer wall of the tower like a creeper. I do not like such high places, and I felt as if the wind were rocking the frail construction. We climbed and climbed. As we circled the steps, the Ferris wheel, too, kept returning before my eyes; its carriages, now empty, shook and swayed, and its movement made my dizzy. We climbed, and I regretted that I had taken up Longhorn’s offer.

Midway, I said to Longhorn: ‘Now I cannot climb any farther. Let us stay here. We can see enough from here.’

But Longhorn’s ears were deaf, and he continued his astonishingly agile clambering. At times he seemed to glide upward – but of course he did have more pairs of legs than I. He did not even glance behind him, and I had to follow him. I went on climbing.

At last! We were standing on the upper platform, but I had grown dizzy and did not immediately go right up to the rail. My eyes were sore from the wind and sunshine which, up here, seemed blindingly bright. I tried to breathe slowly; I swallowed and fastened my eyes on the fibres of the platform’s planks. I had decided that I would not complain any more; for I suspected that Longhorn now considered me spoilt and bad company and by no means did I wish him to tire of acting as my guide.

But I could not help hoping that Longhorn would put one of his narrow, long upper limbs around my shoulders. He appeared not to have noticed my uncertain state, but was gazing absorbedly and – so it seemed to me – with eyes moist with pride the panorama that opened up before us. He began to hum a wordless song which I had never heard before, and its monotonous melody and the peaceful wave-forms of the timber fibres restored my balance.

I gathered my courage and looked downwards. We had been climbing for a long time, but I was still astonished that we were so excessively high up. I shaded my eyes and saw, in the dizzying depths, the plain of Tainaron, patterned with the shadows of frantically scurrying clouds. I also realised that the tower must be a little skew, for the horizon was clearly slanted. Directly below us was the little funfair, today deserted, with its gaudily coloured tents. Even the highest carriages of the Ferris wheel were far below us. Far away glass and steel glittered, bronze and gold glimmered, when a shimmering ray lit up the windows of a skyscraper or the cupolas of churches. This was Tainaron, his city, theirs – never mine.

But it was an astonishing city! Longhorn’s pride was understandable. I had never understood how enormous Tainaron was. I saw the cone-like areas which I had once visited, only to be dampened by the queen’s tears, I saw the prince’s palace park with its paths and pagodas, and in the east the endless, muddled skeins of the slums.

We were so high up that from below all that could be heard was the occasional shriek, isolated, a shriller cry than the rest, and mysterious clinking sounds which I had also heard at night and whose origin I had never been able to trace. It sounded as if someone were tapping a glass with a silver spoon in order to make a speech. A little farther up, and everything would have been completely silent.

‘Here is everything I have,’ Longhorn said. ‘You, too.’

The shining belt of Oceanos with its stripes of foam encircled us on all sides. A haze hid the horizon to the south, but to the north a high, silver-glowing cloud formation was visible, so motionless, in contrast to the clouds that slipped over Tainaron, that it looked like a metal sculpture. Its shape was like that of a human torso.

‘Is there a storm brewing?’ I asked.

‘It is not a storm,’ he said. ‘Worse. It is winter. Although it will be a long time before it reaches us. But when it is here, I pity those who have not already gone to sleep!’

I already felt cold now, in full sunlight. We looked in silence at the majestic shape of snow and ice. To me it still did not look as if it were changing shape or approaching Tainaron.

‘Perhaps it will not come this time, after all,’ I said to Longhorn, half in earnest, and hopeful. ‘Perhaps it will stay up there in the north.’

‘What a child it is,’ Longhorn said in an aside, as if there had been a third person with us on the platform. Then he continued, turning to me once more: ‘I did not bring you here only to look at the coming of winter. Do you see?’

Longhorn gestured toward the northern edge of the city, below the winter, where there swelled a cluster of dwellings of different heights and shapes. It must have been because of my sore eyes that their outlines looked so indefinite. As we looked, it seemed strangely as if some of them were in motion.

‘What is happening there?’ I asked.

‘Changes,’ he said.

That was indeed how it looked. Clouds of dust spread on the plain – and in a moment all that could be seen where the crenellations of towers and blocks had meandered were mere ruins. But there had been no sound of any explosion.