Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (26 page)

And the Gold-Washer raised his tricorn hat.

‘You make an effort, although the days darken and speed away. For a Gold-Washer, life is too short and too simple. It is as cramped as your bottle. There is no progress to be seen, we simply wander back and forth and disturb the sediment.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Pontanus. ‘But you must go now. For I must start the fermentation.’

‘Let us go,’ the Gold-Washer said. ‘But carry on, Pontanus, carry on, carry on. What other difference is there between our lives and those of the book-lice except this futile labour, your toil, Pontanus, and my madness and this tricorn hat.’

The feasts of paupers continue.

Our glasses are filled with dregs.

So rarely does the peacock

show the brilliance of its tail.

As soon as the peacock turns,

grasp the moment now.

Take hold of its loveliest feather.

Take with you the whole rainbow.

The Shattering Path

‘What on earth is she doing?’ I asked Mrs Raa. Both our gazes were fixed on the Glass-Girl, who was moving among the guests, looking anxious, in her hand a brush and dustpan.

‘Don’t you know where she got her name?’ Mrs Raa asked. ‘You can see for yourself what she’s doing.’

It was true. The Glass-Girl was sweeping again. She slipped between the guests, reached out, bent down, and swept the floor with her brush here and there between the shoes and chair-legs.

It has to be said that it was not the best possible time for such an activity. The Glass-Girl’s slow and uncertain way of moving recalled a person fumbling in a dark, unfamiliar room; she took each step as if she feared a trap.

Some guests lifted their shoes, smiled and moved out of her way, but others frowned and stood their ground without interrupting their conversations. Some paid no attention to her whatsoever.

‘Who told her to do that?’ I asked. ‘In the middle of a party?’

‘No one,’ said Mrs Raa, who knew. ‘Do you really still not know the Glass-Girl? Now she is having one of her turns again. Let us just be thankful she doesn’t use a vacuum cleaner.’

Now the Glass-Girl had reached the corner where we were sitting on uncomfortable trelliswork chairs. They had been designed by the Executioner. She nodded vaguely to us, thinking of other things, apologised and bent to look under the chairs, one after the other.

‘Have you lost something?’ I asked.

But she replied with another question: ‘Have you broken anything? Perhaps a glass?’

And she gestured toward the stemmed glass I held in my hand.

A most unexpected question. I, too, looked at the glass, doubtfully as if seeking a crack. It was a very good glass, clear and cold; the lights of the evening glittered in its frost.

‘This one is certainly sound,’ I said to the girl, and she said quickly: ‘Yes, of course, perhaps
that
one is. But it looks to me as if there are splinters over there. As if something were glittering there.’

She was still staring into some corner underneath the chair. I got up quickly and moved my chair aside.

‘Look. Nothing but dust.’

‘But in it, it seems to me . . . Don’t you see? Tiny little fragments, a little broken glass . . . It’s no trouble, I’ll just . . . ’

And she grasped her brush and gracefully, with a charming and economical movement, swept the dust into her dust-pan. Relief flickered across her pale, clean face.

‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Raa. ‘Rest a while. I’ll bring you something.’

But she was already looking at another corner, her eyes narrowing, her brush still at the ready.

‘In just a moment, thank you very much. I just have to . . . Just a moment . . . Goodbye!’

And in a moment she was far away, among the other guests, busy at work whose necessity she alone understood.

Later, when the evening was already far advanced, a bonfire was lit in the courtyard and the guests of the Tabernacle gathered around it.

Then I thought I heard a crackling that did not come from the fire. It had rhythm and weight, it came from footsteps. But never before had walking on sand given rise to such a sharp sound – it was as if someone had been crunching on hard bread.

I turned to see who had such a biting tread. I could distinguish the shape of the Glass-Girl, but now she did not have a brush. I saw her small face as a lantern in the light of the lanterns. But while the other lanterns had been hung in the trees to mark the Gold-Washers’ territory in the night, her face flickered alone in the shade of the Tabernacle.

The Glass-Girl was walking away from me and away from the bonfire. I rose to call her. How could her footsteps, formerly so soft, so cautious, crunch so loudly in the frosty night of the Tabernacle?

But I did not call her; I fell silent when I saw the path on which she was walking. At first I thought that it was hoarfrost, that the ground was frozen. That her heels were crushing the surface of a puddle that had shrunk into a crust of ice.

Where was she going? In each of her footsteps there was both the crackling of the fire and the tinkling of ice, but now I could see more clearly: there was neither fire nor ice – she was treading pure glass, splinters, fragments. Her fear had combined with the sand like soda, and the secret fire that burned her in vain had ripened, in its kiln, a sparkling harvest. The Glass-Girl’s path was now covered in broken glass; it shattered, tinkling, under her steps, and behind her opened the silver wake of her own fear.

How magically it sparkled and glittered!

What Was Seen in the Knife

Ash-trays filled. Glasses and eyes emptied. Through the veil of smoke and buzz of conversation they pierced passages from one group to another, from the book-case to the window, from the superabundance of the tables to the centre of the floor, from the crush of the sofa to the solitude of the doorway. In this way they wove into the room a shimmering network, a force-field, that flexed and expanded with the warmth of their steps, their speech and their gazes.

Then the longing for a mirror began once more in Latona.

She became absent-minded and could no longer bear to listen to the arguments of her father and a Gold-Washer, or to Babel’s impassioned cries.

‘It’s a question of balance,’ said her father. ‘The right timing . . . so that the quintessence does not . . . not to mention control of temperature.’

‘Watu wazuri.’ said Babel. ‘Vehosek – sermanahan . . . ’ The Gold-Washer tried to catch her eye, but Latona herself could not meet his: her eyes had become mixed up with the flock of strangers’ eyes.

How she yearned for her own eyes! But there was not a single mirror in the room, only empty walls and some strange pictures, such as the engraving above the sofa. It was framed, but it had no glass, no reflections.

Instead of her eyes, she saw a medieval city with three cubes floating in the air above the towers and bridges.

It was a long time, many hours, since Latona had last seen her own image. Her face must already have changed many times.

Was it vanity that now made her uncomfortable? Latona, the daughter of Pontanus, pressed her hands to her cheeks, but her fingers were blind; they did not tell her how she looked.

What had happened to her face during these unguarded hours? She felt she could no longer control it. In whose power was it? Perhaps it had already changed or aged unrecognisably. Perhaps it had become diseased, perhaps it had even been
infected
by another face that she had looked at, such as the Torso’s or the Kinswoman’s.

Latona felt as if she had, against her will, raised into the realm of the gaze strange expressions and insinuations that anyone at all could read and pick in passing.

Troubled, Latona wanted to wipe them from her skin, but ordinary water could not wash them off; she must bend over the surface of a mirror.

She looked at the window, seeking her own reflection, but it was still so early that the windows conducted gazes through them. Latona did not see her eyes; she saw only the Child of the Tabernacle, who was cradling his solitude, a black silhouette against the slanting spring light.

Latona looked at the tables and saw that the plates and glasses had already been cleared away. But on one of the side-tables was a cheese-tray, bottles and a knife that no one had yet used. It was serene, as clear as spring-water.

Latona walked up to the table and grasped the knife as though she intended to cut a piece of Tilsit cheese. She tilted it with quick fingers until the light shone on it and, relieved, she saw something pale and questioning, solitary and her own, something which hesitated and which was encircled by a glimmer of hair.

And when her hand moved, almost imperceptibly, the clean blade gave back first the drawing and a corner of the ceiling, then the back of the trellis chair and her father’s stooped shoulder and forefinger and finally the Gold-Washer in his glittering top hat, who was calling to her with all his eloquence and all his mischievousness in the knife-bright distance of the room.

Sounds of the Reed

The Rattle

‘Father,’ moaned Latona, daughter of Pontanus. ‘You will poison us or blow up the whole house.’

And she parted the curtains with an impatient gesture, and opened all the windows wide. And the raw and strong breath of the outdoor air, the distant sounds of the Golden Reed and the all-pervasive light of a winter’s day, the colour of skimmed milk, made Pontanus’s already austere face grow pale and his enterprises look more pointless than ever.

Sometimes, around midday, a strange, coarse rumbling reached the side of the Tabernacle from across the waste heaps. At the beginning I had once or twice stretched out of the window to see what caused it; later, I no longer wished to look.

I knew that a beggar wandered there, rummaging in the rubbish-heaps, who had some kind of rattle attached to the collar of his coat, a buzzer powered by batteries. An unpleasant cloud of noise surrounded him, like fear, wherever he shuffled.

‘Perhaps he has a disease,’ Pontanus said. ‘Perhaps he wants to warn passers-by.’

Perhaps. I had seen the same spectre before, in the old churchyard. The sand and frost had been as hard as bone beneath my boots. The mossy, uneven flagstones had just been cleaned, the names and pious words engraved on them were visible to everyone once more, but no one stopped to read them.

Before me swayed the ugly apparition, exuding vapours of meths and urine; under his greasy jacket bare his chest showed. He secreted a noise, the whine of a buzzer, which mixed with the stench and was one with it. He looked as if he had risen from one of the graves beneath him and his sparse hair was sticky chaff, but his face he never showed. His matted head lolled against his chest at an unnatural angle, as if the bones in his neck had been severed.

Buzzing incessantly, he reeled along the sandy paths that surrounded the flagstones, and an invisible power flown from the north tossed the tow on his head and the branches above it.

Had the same rattle not buzzed on the escalators of department stores and in queues in banks and government offices, in railway station tunnels and tram carriages, at fun-fair candy-floss stalls, within the white fence of the summer cafe? Its sound was like vengeance for an unremembered crime.

Rattle, buzzer, clatter away. Lift your head, rattle-carrier!

Make your face to shine upon us. Who knows when it will be my turn to fix a buzzer to my breast, which still swells, which is made to tremble sometimes by caresses, sometimes by laughter and tears. Rattle, clatter! Guide us, show us what we fear, when we must give way. Do not fall silent, so that we may know where we do not want to go, so that we may point: that way lies evil, that way lies the chasm. If one can only avoid it, the danger is over, and everywhere else the roads of freedom wander.

But Pontanus closed the window.

What would he have answered had I asked him then, as I so often wished: tell me, tell me straight, are you absolutely serious? Do you believe in quintessences and the king and queen and that everything is alive? Or can you say still more, do you dare say you know?

If I had asked at a naked, everyday moment, a moment of the rattle, a moment of skimmed milk, when not a single thread of colour was reflected from the peacock’s tail, would his eyes have avoided mine? Would he have risen from his table and extinguished the Secret Fire and left the room and the Tabernacle without a backward glance?

But I never dared ask, because I did not want him to bow his heavy head, because I wanted to believe that someone believed, at least one person in this rattle-city.

The Sound of Humanity

But the cry of the murderer sounded in our ears the longest of all.

It reached as far as the courtyard of the Tabernacle – which Pontanus called by so refined a name as
cour d’honneur
– from the other side of the waste heaps. There, on the northern side of the refuse dump, grew, or rather struggled to grow, a thick spruce wood.

It was a phantom forest, for the lowest branches of the spruces had shed all their needles, the saplings were mere trunks and the earth so trodden, hard clay, that nothing could germinate there any longer. But the clay brought forth bottle-shards, the earth’s crust flowered with plastic bags bearing red letters.

Into this wood fled a boy who had killed his mother, raped a child, strangled a girl. His tracks smelled like toxic waste; dogs and motor-bikes growled at his heels. Barking and cries, the explosions of accelerating engines tore the ears of every Gold-Washer.

At last the boy had arrived. A steep cliff face cut off his escape, patrols encircled his panic.

Then from the murderer’s throat there burst forth a whimper, there escaped a howl; the echo of his cry boomed from the cliff: ‘Mother! Where is my mother? Mother will defend me.’ And like an echo he was answered by the Kinswoman’s weeping from the courtyard of the Tabernacle.