Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (2 page)

The house’s name was the House of Laughter.

We took the children to the House of Laughter. We went in without paying, since the booth where tickets were sold was empty.

I laughed seldom, and constrainedly – did little more, really, than sneer. An ordinary mirror image is, for me, at least as strange as the reflections caused by the convex and concave mirror surfaces here.

I did recognise myself in the form of bottle and a pumpkin, with a barrel-like pancake-face and as tall as a flag-post. I recognised myself from the fact that the eyes of all these ghosts were inhabited by the same absence as my own. It made them even more ridiculous, but at the same time it felt bitter.

I thought that if I were to spend longer with my reflections, I would become confused with them, and no one would be able to say any longer where they had their origin.

But the children had fun. They ran around the House of Laughter and wanted me to admire their caricatures, their grins and their echoes.

Until the doors banged. It was an unmistakable noise, even behind the laughter: someone was slamming the doors and bolting them. Immediately afterwards, the lights went out. Darkness slipped out from behind the mirrors, over the mirrors, down to the bottom of the mirrors. As if it had been there all the time, simply awaiting its opportunity.

For a moment, too, all sounds were absent, until I heard the children cry out.

‘I’m here! I’m here!’ I heard myself shout, and began to grope about me.

Strange: I really did exist, although the reflections had gone.

Their unseen arms wound themselves around my hips, and I told them all was well. We just had to wait.

We waited. The darkness had taken all the images. It had separated forms and reflections and put what only seemed to exist into its large pocket. But the darkness itself had countless reflections.

We waited. Nowhere is the darkness so deep as in the House of Laughter. From mirror to mirror it repeats itself and deepens, rises in a scream from the mirror’s well only to fall into another chasm. Its echo is stronger than the scream itself.

We waited. And I was still not sure the reflections had really gone. Hidden by the darkness, they were waiting with us, as grotesque and unjust as before.

If the minotaur exists, I thought, it must live here, and all its swaying heads are our own.

Someone flicked on a cigarette lighter. A little old man had joined us.

‘This way,’ he said, and set off in front of us. The flame wavered on the walls and the roof and all the reflections followed him, bottles and pumpkins, barrels and flag-poles.

When we got out of the House of Laughter, the sky was pale green as glass, but the coloured lights of the fun fair were already being switched on, all at once.

I had forgotten there were so many colours.

Straw

The winter had been hard, and a haze of indifference had surrounded me for a long time. My tongue was covered with a kind of film, and everything in life had lost its flavour. When I tried to grasp something, my hand became paralysed. A sticky substance isolated me from the world.

Early that spring, I met Doña Quixote for the first time. Where on earth was it? There, on the high hill where one can see the city and the harbour and the sea.

I was sitting on the pedestal of a statue when something passed me by. It was as long and thin as a piece of straw, and it moved so lightly that it seemed to slip along above the dust of the road. It had a pair of binoculars at its neck and it stopped by the railing and began to look out to sea.

The ice had just melted and the sea was breaking up into the year’s first white horses. The piece of straw stood on the spot for so long and was so motionless that I soon forgot there was anyone there.

I, too, believed myself to be invisible. My coat was the same colour as the stone of the statue, and I imagined I blended unnoticeably into the fluttering clothes and noiseless cries of the cluster of people.

But the piece of straw had turned, and was examining the sculpture.

‘What do you think?’ she said.

‘Are you speaking to me?’ I said, alarmed.

‘I can’t see anyone else here,’ she said calmly. ‘Do you think they will be saved?’

‘The shipwrecked people, you mean? I’ve never asked myself that. A statue isn’t a story, you know,’ I said smartly.

‘No, that’s true,’ she conceded. ‘But that cry – I’ve heard it elsewhere in this city. And then you start questioning . . . yourself, above all.’

‘Do you get any answers?’ I asked.

‘I seldom answer,’ she said. ‘But I don’t need to: life answers. It is generally a long and thorough answer.’

I looked at her more closely. Her face was like that of a mountain-dweller: lean, clear and fearless. Her eyes gazed out from among shadows, darkly brilliant and precise. She was dressed ascetically, in the Chinese mode: in a dark, military jacket and trousers.

‘Is that what you do?’ I asked, already a little interested. ‘Ask yourself all kinds of questions?’

‘Yes,’ she conceded, looking at me distantly.

‘And life answers?’ I continued, a drop of derision spilling into my voice.

She eyed me now so penetratingly that I would have thought her gaze impudent had it not been unflinchingly tranquil.

She looked straight into my non-existence, at the spot where there is something like a needle-prick, but so deep that one could throw all one’s belongings into it, one’s memory and one’s doubts, one’s demands and one’s subterfuges – yes, all one’s life – and there would still be nothing at all there.

‘I had a question in which I lived for a long time,’ she said. ‘Many years. And one day I remembered I had forgotten it. It had gone, and from that I knew that I had received an Answer.’

Her words and her way of speaking baffled me. I turned to look at The Shipwrecked.

‘I think they drown.’

‘Perhaps you are right. They drown if no one hears them.’

Then she went on, looking at the sea, ‘Once I wanted to be, for people, something like – like a piece of straw.’

It almost amused me. That was, after all, what she quite clearly was.

‘Do you come here often?’ I asked.

‘Every Tuesday and Thursday.’

‘Always?’

‘Always,’ she repeated, and tapped her binoculars. ‘I have to be able to see the horizon.’

Then she turned. Without saying goodbye, and without paying any more attention to me, she began to descend the hill among the great lime-trees. Some of the trees were so old that they had great rents and hollow wounds, filled with asphalt and strengthened with iron bolts. Before I realised it, I was walking with her past The Wader, around whose thighs the water rippled, cold and indifferent.

At the steps that lead down to the street she stopped, took off a shoe and shook a couple of grains of sand from it. Shoe in hand, standing on one leg, she paused to think about something, like a large, old crane.

I was standing smiling a couple of steps above her when she raised her eyes. ‘Oh, you’re still there.’

She put her shoe back on.

‘And I am here.’

She tapped on the step with her shoe. ‘And where someone is standing, no one else can stand.’

That sentence – a self-evident truth, obviously enough, but above all the conviction with which she spoke it – touched my heart, which had long been silent and cold. She had begun to go down the steps again, but I did not follow her.

‘Go wherever you like,’ I said to her back. ‘As far and for as long as you like. But there will come a Tuesday or a Thursday, fine or chilly . . . ’

I had remained standing, my hand on the rail, and I saw, far away in the street, her hurrying, thin form. I looked at my own shoes and saw beneath them the granite step, the rose-pinkish stone and the glittering crystals, more living, more real, than many long years.

The Place where You Stand

And was it not stone, the very first thing I saw in this city?

It was everywhere, carved and uncarved, rough and polished until it shone. It was used to cover the surfaces of the squares and edge the narrow pavements. It formed the foundations of buildings; it was used to build steps and pedestals of statues and grandiose memorials to great men.

It pushed itself through subsoil and thin humus, like a forehead thinking a sombre thought, in parks, back yards and unbuilt sites. Even the roads that led to the city were cut and blasted through the same basic material. It was this place’s plinth and raw material, it was the city’s seal and destiny, like the sand of Rotterdam, the mud of Venice or the oil-shale of Pittsburgh . . .

I have seen a quiet street here, and a main road that is as busy as the river of Tuonela
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. In a dream, I grew cabbages by its side, and the unbroken caravans of cars destroyed every single round head.

On the corner, under a large clock, is a coffee bar where one can buy grass and bootleg alcohol. One night there was an important meeting there, and I sat in the corner eating soup.

One of the participants in the meeting, a young man whom I half-knew, came up to me.

‘May I?’ he asked, and took the spoon from my hand. He fished something out of my plate of broth and, carrying the spoon held out in front of him, took it to show his own table.

‘Look!’ said the young man.

A murmur of disbelief and disdain filled the entire room. I tried to stretch my neck to see what was in the spoon, but the young man held it up so high that I could not see anything.

From there I have walked here, to the quiet street. Here is the yard I have seen in a picture: a small back yard and a street musician, a small man with his violin. The walls were full of windows, but not one of them opened. Along the bottom of the picture was written, in a feeble hand, ‘Alone with God.’

‘To live under the eyes of others.’ Open and closed, free and flowing spaces. Streets, rooms and yards. Staircases, squares and towers. Temples. Market-places. Bridges and steps, white ships. Faces that drift along the street like detached petals.

When the street-lights go on, the stone is no longer heavy. A deep glow lights up the patina of brick and plaster. The trees in the park are the evening’s silhouette.

‘Take note of the grace and softness that one can see, as one walks the streets, in the faces of men and women as evening approaches, and bad weather . . . ’

A pile of matter, a mechanical chaos, a little Babel: that is the city in daylight.

No, now it is something else: the place where you stand . . . It is consciousness, an independent and spacious form, it is a vehicle that transports the inheritance of night and day through endless zones.

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Tuonela is the underworld in Finno-Ugrian mythology.

The Brightness of Glass

All around the city, in market-places, squares and on street-corners, small towers have been erected. I look at them for my delight; they please my restless eye.

If I were asked to describe them, I would say they were green. Yes, they are the same green as the trams and the rubbish-bins in the park. But their walls are, for the most part, of window-glass. They can be seen far away, for lights always burn within them, and there is no lock on their door, but only a handle, so anyone can step inside at any time.

I have even seen queues in front of these towers in the evenings, after the office day is over. I have seen people step inside alone, money in their hand, and the heavy door closing automatically behind them. For two, such a tower is cramped, and yet it is built as a meeting-place, made for dialogue.

But an anonymous rage is directed at these narrow glass rooms. Cracks like stars have been made in the glass walls, and often I have had to return home without success: it is not possible to make contact.

But, for me, these towers are as beautiful as Chinese pagodas. The greatest publicity combines, in them, with the greatest privacy.

He who has entered can be watched by anyone who remains outside in the darkness of evening. I can see him through the glass as clearly as in underwater light. I see a finger picking one number after another from a disc, and thereby choosing its own route.

The profile of his face does not move; it lingers in its own peace like a statue. Inside the tower is a quiet pool in the current.

But he who has stepped inside the tower has been able to go still further. I can see him there, it is true, but he himself is already elsewhere, in the place where he sends his voice. I see his lips opening, and, impatient in my waiting, I feel envious that he has already arrived.

At night, these small green towers are the lighthouses of the city. In their glass-bright isolation, their transparent solitude, they bear witness to the reality of contact.

When I was ill, I dreamed of a small glass house like that, just that and nothing else. All through the dream, nothing moved; the dream itself was an empty, green cell that made a sound. It called incessantly, reverberating as if it were ringing out in a very open space, in a night-time station hall or the depths of the past.

But there was no one to answer it, for although it was I who dreamed the dream, I was not there either.

Doña Quixote

Whenever someone whines that miserable expression, ‘That’s life’, and nods his head with kindly condescension, I remember Doña Quixote. I see her narrow white fist pounding the table so that the ashtray dances and hear her passionate contradiction, made with all her strength: ‘No! That’s not life! That’s not life at all, unless you make it like that yourself . . . ’

How tall and thin she is. Sometimes it seems to me that she is constantly growing, not in the same way as children, but as if a reaction to gravity were constantly trying to pluck her free of the ground.

I am always shocked when I look at her ankles and her wrists. I am amazed when I see her feet. How can she stay upright and go forward on such thin ankles and such narrow feet?

One night I see her from behind as she stands in front of a window, and I start. For it seems as if there were a tree in the room.