Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (25 page)

Such was the Glass-Girl’s Great Work.

Colour or Ash

The Cap of Good Fortune

Sometimes the cap of good fortune descended on to my head. I believe the Gold-Washer’s iridescent hat was related to my own extraordinary headdress.

It was not mine, of course; I was merely allowed to carry it for a few moments, like a princess her diadem. I do not know where it came from and why it came to my head in particular, neither could I predict when it would appear. Suddenly it was simply there, a covering for my hair; I felt with my scalp, my temples, its light, sweet weight, as if a caressing hand had been left forgotten on my head.

But it was not a hand, nor anything human. For the moment it lingered on my head, I felt secure, as if I were sheltered by all-enveloping, warming, elastic armour. I was immune to sudden strokes of destiny, invisible demons who sought their victims from house to house, quarter to quarter. And, more astonishing still: not even time or its vassals could tyrannise me when I bore on my head the cap of good fortune.

I recognised the shimmering gaze that I saw in my own mirror-eyes always when I wore the cap of good fortune. The Torso looked around him in the same way when the Glass-Girl put two or three white capsules on his tongue. This gaze, it seemed to me, was bright enough to change and make new, to clean and ennoble everything it touched. As the owner of the cap of good fortune, I was even convinced that I could never again be unhappy or ill. I knew then that joy is the state for which human beings are born and in which they are meant to live and die.

The cap or skullcap pressed more tightly against my eyebrows and my skull began to experience pleasure all over. It was localised but it belonged to the entire organism, like sexual pleasure. Strong, wise, and with sovereign pride I looked around me: the square was paved with precious stones, and a flaming mirror had been raised against the sun. It was a high building whose western side was nothing but sunset windows.

Every word I heard then resonated in my skull like the sound of a wonderful instrument.

‘It is beautiful,’ said the woman beside me at the meat counter of the supermarket as the shop assistant held out a joint of meat for her to see.

And the woman was right: anything as beautiful as that juicy red lump, bloody, fresh, had hardly been seen.

A strange pleasure! What was its origin? What was its destination? Its rapid current, which sped me along in its foam as I sat, peaceful and independent, at the marble table of a cafe and watched the progress of a ray of sunshine on the green frond of a palm, washed the shores of both day and night.

Perhaps Pontanus’s dry water swirled in its eddies, for I never got wet from its spray or drowned in its waves.

Poor Pontanus. In my own state of immortality, his efforts and his Great Work seemed more futile than ever before. For all had already been given; that, too, for which I had not remembered to ask. I had no debts, no dues. I was permitted to rest in the golden seedcase of the world in gratitude and praise.

If there is such a thing as the Holy Spirit, did not the cap of good fortune pour it over me? Did it not show itself in the meaning that filled everything I perceived? A meaning that glowed with the colours of a peacock like a hot summer’s day, like summer at its height . . .

How their enchanting fan refreshed my gaze, wherever I looked: at the earth or at the sky, at people’s clothes or into their eyes, at carved or uncarved wood, at the solitude of my own room or at the stones of the street, trodden by all.

The Lens

A friend, whose name I do not now happen to remember, lived in another town. It was a small coastal town, beautiful and old. In summer it was visited by many travellers, for a deep, narrow bay penetrated into its centre, an ideal harbour for yachtsmen.

There must have been a time – years ago – when I, too, visited it every summer.

My friend lived alone some distance from the centre of the town, on the side of a hill. About his house I can now say only that it had a wooden balcony with a direct view of the bay. Indeed, all other recollections flee headlong from the flickering light of my memory.

We stood on the balcony side by side – or perhaps my friend was slightly behind me, but I leaned on the rail and drank in the evening’s landscape with my eyes, one draught after another.

Coloured lamps had been lit on the piers and shoreline boulevards as if a great feast were approaching, and their reflections rippled in the clear water. But the western sky had not completely dimmed, either; a glowing strip threw its golden reflection over the whole town, and over us, up here on the balcony.

And then I felt again a touch on my hair.

My god, how happy I was! – just as if the gold came from us ourselves, up here on the balcony . . . As if we, our own eyes, had reflected drinkable gold into the water, on to the town, on to the dizzying sky’s last shore.

I never remembered having seen a view to match it . . . Joy, which had flickered miserably for long years, received new fuel from the glow in the west and now burst into tall flames.

But my friend, whose name I still cannot recall, did not share my admiration. Then I did not ask the reason, for I outstripped his mood with the wind of my own indescribable joy. I wanted somehow to record the moment that was so great, and thought: I shall take a photograph of the view! At once I turned to my friend, whose name I do not remember, and asked to borrow his camera.

Well! There he stood, with his camera in his outstretched hand, as if he had at once divined my intention.

I raised the viewfinder to my eyes and passed it along the horizon and the surface of the water. But did my eyes deceive me? Where now were all the colours? I could no longer see hundreds of coloured lanterns, the mirror of the water did not shimmer and the sunset had vanished. I saw only a burnt-out, ash-coloured landscape, and a single streak of blood in the western sky above it.

Now the viewfinder was angled so that I could see only water through it. It was like this: I no longer saw water rippling in the lights. I saw beneath the surface. It was dark and leaden like the sky, but transparent none the less. And there, beneath the water, surrounded by the town and the harbour, rested two immense beings.

They lolled side by side, and their broad carcasses covered the entire bottom of the bay from one shore to the other. One of them lay on its back so that its white belly showed; to me it looked like a cross between a pig and a fish. The trunk of the other was more reptilian; it recalled a leguana or the tuatara of the Tabernacle, but much bigger.

I did not regard the couple with shock or horror, but an immense stupefaction made the camera so heavy that it slipped from my hand on to the balcony floor.

I made no move to lift it. The bang was audible, perhaps something broke, too, probably the lens. But my friend, whose name I still simply cannot remember, did not seem even to notice what had happened. He stood motionless, his arms hanging by his side, and his unfocused gaze was dusted with the same ash as the evening sky. We did not exchange a single word, but I knew he knew.

My head was bare, the cap of good fortune had gone. I was once more at the mercy of chance and necessity.

But I simply cannot any longer remember even the features of my friend’s face, or even whether he was clothed or naked. And where his face should be I see only a misty oval, as featureless as Venus covered by cloud.

Prisoners of Glass and Mirror

The Triumphal Fanfare of Yikuhatsa

There was a great deal of glass in the Tabernacle. There were many windows, and they were large. On autumn evenings, when all lights were burning, the Tabernacle was as transparent as Pontanus’s bottle or the Gold-Washer’s terrarium.

Pontanus was visiting the book-lice in the room of the Gold-Washer who was writing about the past, significance and fate of the book-louse.

On the window-sill was a large and carefully tended terrarium. The Gold-Washer had gone to a great deal of trouble to transform the glass vessel into a landscape worthy of the book-lice. There was a hillock covered in a thin layer of new grass. There was forest – a couple of sword ferns, and a blue lake in a squat plastic cup. There was a steep cliff on which the book-lice were able to practise alpine climbing, and boulders in whose crevices they could sleep through the hottest moment of the day.

‘Neither people nor book-lice – ’ said Pontanus, who had bent down to follow the insects’ activity. Two lice were gnawing at a third, which was still wriggling.

We awaited the continuation of the phrase in vain. From another room, the whistling of the Kinswoman could be heard and, behind it, the silence of the chess-players.

‘ – nor the tuatara.’ Pontanus said. ‘All of them are only trials. Experiments, endless variations. They take time, a long, long time, and the experiments may seem cruel, but’ (his finger rose) ‘they are necessary. For another age will dawn. It will develop from this age like a caterpillar from its chrysalis.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘But whether it will be a better age, that we don’t know.’

‘Time will tell,’ said Pontanus. “The millennia will decide.’

‘They will decide in favour of the book-louse,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘We shall go the way of the dinosaurs, but the book-louse will go on haunting the earth’s crust. And if that happens, it will be because it must happen.’

‘Come,’ said a Gold-Washer who stood, panting, on the threshold, on his head a worn-out hat. When he opened the door, they smelled smoke. ‘Over there – on the waste heap – oh! an amazing fire!’

They all went out to look. The smoke seemed to be floating down the cordilleras of waste, but in fact the fire was not there, but much farther off. The sky glowed red over the southern half of the City of the Golden Reed, and the windows of the Tabernacle were blazing. They heard the sound of sirens.

The ravens of Edom were there, too. They sat on a sofa that had been carried out into the courtyard, dressed in their best clothes, as if attending a first night. The distant red touched their foreheads, too, and made them younger by years, by decades.

‘Something terrible is happening there, I know it,’ the Glass-Girl said. ‘Assassinations. Arson. Massacres.’

‘Sit down,’ said the Gold-Washer. ‘Look at them. They know how to get the best out of this.’

Between the ravens of Edom sat an old Gold-Washer, who was continuing his lifelong sentence: ‘even if he never admitted it was true, there was not a doubt as to what was really going on, although it must be admitted frankly that none of us at that time understood that even he – in those difficult circumstances . . . ’

‘Vittere tele!’ Babel shouted. He had climbed a little way up the side of the waste heap and was gazing through a pair of binoculars.

‘What did he say?’ Latona asked Pontanus.

‘He said it’s a fine view.’

‘Not in the least,’ countered a Gold-Washer. ‘He said the flames of hell warm us so sweetly. He said that without hell we would all freeze.’

‘Is the whole city on fire? Shouldn’t we do something?’ the Glass-Girl asked, and coughed.

‘Absolutely,’ said a Gold-Washer. ‘Bring my glass harmonica and take the bull-roarers for yourself. You, Latona, can fetch the bowed harp.’

In a moment the Gold-Washer announced: ‘The name of this piece is the Triumphal Fanfare of Yikuhatsa.’

And, rotating his glass harmonica under the red sky, the Gold-Washer joined his triumphal fanfare to the simple, disconsolate song of the sirens.

Sediment

‘In my bottle,’ said Pontanus to the turbaned Gold-Washer, ‘spring and summer and autumn and winter alternate. It is the universe in five decilitres. Matter within it changes in the same way as matter outside. When I look into the bottle, I see what happens to you and to me.’

‘What happens to us?’ the Gold-Washer asked.

‘You know it all,’ Pontanus said. ‘Birth and death, growth and copulation and resurrection.’

‘Really, oh,
that’s
what you mean,’ said the Gold-Washer. Beside the scales on Pontanus’s table they saw a pestle, a mortar and a small bar magnet, as well as a pastry-brush, which Pontanus used in handling his fine powders. He warned us not to move or open the bottles.

‘The impurity must remain on the bottom,’ he said. ‘It must be left in peace.’

‘What are you doing today?’ asked the Child of the Tabernacle as a curtain of snow floated outside the window.

‘I shall take four parts of antimony and two parts of iron and mix them together thoroughly.’

‘What will you do next?’

‘Then I shall add the Secret Fire and heat it.’

I was there, too, when the snow had melted, and saw his head bent over his work and his incipient baldness. Because the window was open to April, drop followed drop until night in a continual race. When the sun struck the bottle on the window-sill, it threw a crooked rainbow on the wall; it was pale, but it still contained all the colours.

‘What are you doing today?’ asked the Child of the Tabernacle.

‘Today I shall wait.’

‘What will you wait for?’

‘For this mixture to turn white,’ said Pontanus. ‘There is nothing else to do.’

And the days fly by; very soon the autumn equinox is at hand.

‘What are you doing today?’ asked the Child of the Tabernacle.

‘I shall dry this mixture,’ said Pontanus, ‘and pound it to a fine powder with the pestle. Then I shall take three parts of it and mix with one part of Sun, add a little Secret Fire and heat it again.’

‘I can’t make head or tail of this,’ said the Gold-Washer, who stepped in with a crooked smile, wearing a tricorn hat.

‘All the skill!’ said Pontanus, raising his finger, ‘is in differentiating between the fine and the rough. All the skill! For God’s sake! Don’t touch that bottle. The sediment must not be moved.’

The Gold-Washer set the bottle down carefully on the table and patted Pontanus on the shoulder.

‘You certainly make an effort,’ he said. ‘Thank you for that, Pontanus.’