Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (23 page)

At times it also seemed as if Babel had strung words together without inflecting them at all, at times that, by combining or splitting them, that he had given words quite peculiar under- or overtones.

A friend of the gypsies claimed that Mr Babel spoke their language, but when he brought a couple of them to Babel, they did not understand his speech any better than the others.

Once a certain linguist came, very eminent, looked sharply at Mr Babel and said: ‘Count to ten.’

He consented quickly and willingly, as he did to everything that was asked of him. Those who were nearby fell silent and gathered around Babel to hear better.

Babel let fly fluently and audibly: ‘Yks, to, tre, fier, cinco, sest, okto, nava, syn.’

Everyone looked at the linguist, who shook his head in disbelief.

‘There were ten different languages there,’ he said gloomily.

Babel spread his hands and inclined his head, so that everyone had to laugh.

The laughter of some, however, had an angry undertone.

Perhaps they believed that Babel was mocking them. Babel? Could there be even a drop of treachery in him? Such a warm-hearted, transparent man, who took part in everyone’s joys and sorrows, who leaped from place to place, as lively as a squirrel, always good-tempered . . . But Babel had a human heart.

He was seen everywhere and invited everywhere. Wherever weddings were celebrated, exhibitions opened, long evenings spent in conversation, Mr Babel was also seen. He took part in every event with equal enthusiasm, inclining his ear in every direction and allowing his tongue, his countless tongues, to sing.

When I had already met Babel many times at different events, it began to happen that his speech left after-sounds in my ear. When, in my memory, I listened to his words, it began to seem to me that I understood a few details, a fragment here and there. But Babel’s words had no connection with the event at which they were spoken. They seemed to be from some language’s elementary primer, except that they were knotted together from the words of a number of different languages.

Why on earth had he said to Mrs Raa in the canteen of the City Theatre, as he smilingly handed her a cup of coffee: ‘Water is as important as it is pleasant’?

This is, of course, a translation, and Babel spoke very quickly and indistinctly, but nevertheless I do not believe that I am entirely mistaken. His words took on such a meaning in my ears, at any rate. But when I asked Mrs Raa what Babel had been talking about in the canteen, Mrs Raa said: ‘Terrorism. Or was it vaccination? What a nice person he is.’

When, some weeks later, I met Babel in passing at the tram stop, he whispered something into my ear. I strained my attention and, to my bewilderment, thought I heard the following: ‘The horn is a wind instrument. A bull’s horn is strong. I have just visited the ironing woman.’

But there was also another
way
of listening to Babel. I realised that before long. One had to abandon all efforts, all attempts to understand, and simply give oneself up to his words as if one were lying on a jetty with the water whispering between the posts, as if one were leaning against a tree whose crown was shaken by the wind, as if one were to awaken suddenly after a quick dream and the city was murmuring behind curtains like a distant fun fair.

As long as one did not try to understand, as long as one merely looked at Babel’s twinkling eyes so that his singing note began to rock one’s head like a cradle, then it began to seem as if one understood everything, or at least the essence of what Babel wished to say. And then I, like many other of Babel’s acquaintances, began to nod to him, to say a word or two myself, and Babel seemed to understand exactly what I meant.

And quite soon I was already sure that whatever Babel was chattering about as he looked me in the eyes with his lovable smile, it was precisely, exactly what I had secretly thought to myself, but had simply not been able to express as eloquently, as vividly, as Mr Babel, one of the Gold-Washers.

Kinswoman Ouroboros

The Kinswoman was never counted as one of the Gold-Washers, even though she seemed to live permanently in the Gold-Washers’ house. But no one had ever been less like their room than the Kinswoman.

The Kinswoman was the embodiment of everything I would like never to become. Who was she, really? The Gold-Washers always just called her the Kinswoman, but I do not know whether she was really related to any of them. I never succeeded in hearing her true name. I believe there was no one on earth who remembered, not even the Kinswoman herself.

For she forgot even what had happened the day before and where she lived and with whom. The Kinswoman no longer owned anything, not even her own past. She no longer had any manners, any appearance, any memory, any critical faculty, any skills or characteristics that might have drawn others to her. Perhaps she had only ever had a few of them, perhaps she had lost their last traces little by little, one at a time.

The Kinswoman was a stripped person; only wrinkles and bent, brittle bones were left. She could not rid herself of them, even though she often tore off all her clothes and wandered naked around the Tabernacle.

Or of her whims or her bad temper.

The Kinswoman could growl like a mongrel and neigh and cackle. She concealed the sounds of all the domestic animals in her palate. Sometimes she also burst into a shrill flood of abuse whose reason or object was difficult to make out. When the Kinswoman was content, she sang or whistled – tunelessly, always at the same pitch.

But the Kinswoman and her whistling were tolerated at the Tabernacle. She was made as comfortable as possible, and she was served as if the Gold-Washers were bound to her by a secret debt.

‘Perhaps it is the case,’ Pontanus once said, ‘that without the Kinswoman there would be no Tabernacle.’

‘Do you mean,’ I asked in astonishment, ‘that the Tabernacle was built with her money? Is the Kinswoman rich?’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Pontanus. ‘As far as I know, the Kinswoman is poor as a church mouse. But without the Kinswoman, the Tabernacle would not be the Tabernacle.’

I did not understand Pontanus, and I never learned to like the Kinswoman. Often I left the room when she shuffled in. For when I looked at her I was afraid I would see the spectre of my own future.

I noticed that it was easier for me to bear her presence if I thought that she was, in one way or another, to blame for her state – her decrepitude. She had received a punishment – perhaps well-deserved – for something that I would never do.

But it was impossible not to meet the Kinswoman if one wanted to visit the Tabernacle. For she took part in every event, she sat in the best seat at the dining-table and she was served first.

When the Kinswoman woke from her afternoon nap, she would cry: ‘Mother! Father!’

And one of the Gold-Washers would always get up and go to the Kinswoman’s room and was mother and father to her.

The Kinswoman cast a long shadow on the walls of the Tabernacle. Harmless and thin as she was, an indefinite threat always wafted into the room when she stepped over the threshold.

Her behaviour was unpredictable. Sometimes the Kinswoman behaved like a respectable lady: she hung a cameo round her neck and offered the bread-basket to her neighbour at table, praised the taste of the fish. Then, without warning, she would begin to neigh like a bolting stallion, snatch a delicacy from her neighbour’s plate and upset her own portion on to the table-cloth. The guests tried not to notice what had happened and to continue their conversation, but often their words broke off and their smiles froze.

‘Dear Kinswoman,’ said one of the Gold-Washers, ‘perhaps you would prefer some shellfish salad.’

Then the Kinswoman was served with shellfish salad, and for a moment she looked favourably at the table-guests and wanted to raise her glass.

Once a concert was arranged in the Tabernacle. It included a premiere by the Gold-Washer with the hat, a concerto for bull-roarers and bowed harp, three wine-glasses and typewriter.

In the middle of the performance, the Kinswoman came in, stark naked, grinning broadly with her gums. The withered bags of her breasts sagged to her waist. She threw one of them over her shoulder and pushed the other into her own mouth. Her wrinkled vulva had been shaved hairless. She had torn hair from her head so that she was now half-bald. She set herself in the centre of the room, her breast in her mouth, and looked at us like a baby.

It was a provocation!

‘Doesn’t the Kinswoman feel the cold?’ shouted the composer of the sonata over the tapping of the typewriter and the clinking of the glasses. (I was to clink them when the Gold-Washer gave the sign.) ‘Wouldn’t the Kinswoman like this shawl for her shoulders?’

No, she would not. She had come as she was, and she wished to remain among us in that state. Then the Gold-Washer loosened his grip on the bull-roarers for a moment and brought an armchair for her from another room. There the Kinswoman sat, her knees drawn up, still nursing herself from her empty breast, which milk had surely never filled.

‘Ouroboros.’ Pontanus whispered to me, nodding toward the Kinswoman.

He meant the snake that ate its own tail, and whose picture hung on Pontanus’s work-room wall.

The Kinswoman was, in the same form, mother and suckling child and Ouroboros.

Looking at her while tinkling the wine-glass and listening to the bull-roarers and the tapping of the typewriter, I felt I had seen her somewhere else.

I remembered it as the Gold-Washer smashed one of the wine-glasses: it had been in a museum, far away in Europe, She languished there on a bronze pedestal in an uncomfortable position. She was naked there, too, and her appearance was that of a carcass dug from a grave. There the Kinswoman, too, had a name: she who was once the beautiful wife of the kettle-mender.

The Meadow of Humanity

‘I have noticed,’ said the Gold-Washer who loved book-lice, ‘that Pontanus believes in people. I mean people as a possibility, a prelude and a stepping-stone. Poor Pontanus. He really is a heretic.’

‘Aren’t heretics people who don’t believe?’ I asked.

‘Not now,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘Now heretics are those who believe.’

We were sitting in a room like a coffer, long and narrow. But one could see out of it, and in two directions, for both walls were full of windows.

A shower of rain had gone over, the City of the Golden Reed sparkled and shimmered. Its reflections patterned all faces indoors, too. And outside the summer trees ran all the way along the boulevard to the shore, but people’s houses looked into the street shadows.

Before us sat, peacefully, a great beast of the savannah: a lady wearing a leopard-patterned coat and a leopard-patterned scarf and leopard-patterned boots. The room swayed past the cathedral and over a bridge and across a square that was swarming with people.

‘What value can there be in something that is so numerous?’ asked the Gold-Washer, who was looking out of the window at the ceaseless motion of feet, the hustle of insect-like running. ‘For all that is plentiful is cheap. All that is over-abundant is harmful.’

Strange that it should be a Gold-Washer who said so, the Gold-Washer who loved book-lice. There were many of them, too, they had spread everywhere. If one looked at the ground and bent blades of grass and overturned stones, one could not avoid finding book-lice.

But it was clear that here, in the relationship between value and quantity, was the question of his life, or one of them.

There was a stop and the leopard disappeared, but in her place sat another woman, who was covered in the hide of an unborn lamb.

‘Is she crying?’ I asked.

For it looked as though she was. There was no sound, but her shoulders shook under the lambskin until we reached the emperor’s statue. There she rose and went past us to the central door. But look! Then we saw that her face was twisted, in thousands of creases, not from weeping but from laughter!

‘It takes all sorts,’ said the Gold-Washer dejectedly, and raised his sombre eyebrows.

‘If you take them in your tweezers,’ I said to the Gold-Washer, ‘then who will survive?’

Then my gaze fastened itself upon the bench opposite. What a creature! He terrified me. In almost every respect, he was different from anyone else I knew. Surely he was not really a proper person. He was a fake, that was it! But if I am asked to describe him, my words curdle and break.

His face – well, some would call it a face, but not I. To me it was a fen, a swamp, quicksand, that swallowed up gazes. But there were eyes in that marsh, got from God knows where, and what eyes . . . I refuse to describe them more closely, for it was the eyes that – once and for all!

There is little to say of his clothes, he was wearing clothes like the others, human clothes. And there was hair on his head, shoes on his feet, but they did not help – one could even say: they revealed him even more glaringly, they were so clearly parts of a
false costume.

It seemed to me that the creature who was sitting opposite had finally denied his humanity, abandoned it or sold it. Now he was merely pretending to belong to the same species as the others who sat in the carriage. His eyes gave him away. No observation could make them stir. Absent from them was the fluid, living gold of consciousness, which Pontanus expected to develop in his bottle.

I looked at the Gold-Washer, but he did not appear to have noticed anything. What if there had been a conductor in the carriage, would that individual have been allowed in at all? The officials of the local transport service are exact in their duties. They carry only people and lapdogs.

My gaze returned to him again and again. If one looks at such a phenomenon too earnestly and for too long, one can catch an infection. Did I?

It felt as if I had when we returned to the Tabernacle, to the other Gold-Washers. I wondered whether I recalled him who I felt was no longer a person.

And in the evening I went to Pontanus and watched him work in order to forget my own state. It smelled there, but I did not care. Pontanus was calculating something. I watched the dance of his large hands on the keyboard.