Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (3 page)

Doña Quixote says herself that she is not a person. I am inclined to believe her. But it could also be that it is the other way round: she is so much more a person than people generally that it is for that reason she seems peculiar.

But Doña Quixote is not the knight of the sorrowful countenance. When I think of her like this, from a distance, her shape is that of a flame, and I would like to stretch out my finger to warm it at her blaze.

I am not the only one who has the same desire. In the evenings, her little room is often full of chilly people. They arrive one by one and look askance at one another; each of them believes each of the others to be an interloper.

Indeed, I have never met so many unhappy people as at Doña Quixote’s house. Their unhappinesses are different, but all of them are alone and all of them believe they have fallen from the tree of life. Their lamentation echoes and multiplies as they bump into obstacles, and the obstacles are other people.

Doña Quixote is the only person it does not affect. She allows it to pass through her, and it sinks into the shade of the valley of silence, so that they may forget.

But Doña Quixote’s visitors often change. This year one no longer sees the same faces as last year. Where do they all go?

Sometimes it so happens that they meet Doña Quixote in the street and no longer recognise her. I have seen Doña Quixote greet them, even take hold of their coat-sleeves, but they look at her with such puzzlement that she becomes embarrassed and lets them go.

‘Why do they forget you so quickly?’ I ask, unhappily.

She thinks. Her violet gaze comes from an unimaginable distance.

‘If they remembered me, they would remember their unhappiness,’ she says.

The Procession

As a child, Doña Quixote once went into her parents’ bedroom when there was no one there and the rest of the family was listening to the radio in the living room.

Doña Quixote went up to her mother’s dressing-table; she wanted to see herself. But when she looked in the mirror, her reflection was not there. There were other people, quite unfamiliar, and many of them were wearing clothes she had not seen on anyone else: long cloaks, broad white collars, strangely shaped headdresses.

She looked and looked, and the people in the mirror, men, women and children, came and went in an unceasing procession.

‘Won’t it ever end?’ wondered the small Doña Quixote before the mirror. She was tired, and she would have liked to see her own reflection, but the stream of strangers did not stop.

She saw them as though through a window, but did not know whether they could see her when she asked: ‘When will it be my turn?’

‘Did your turn ever come?’ I ask Doña Quixote, who looks, in the light of the evening lamp, like an ancient Indian.

‘It was my turn,’ she said. ‘That, precisely, is what my turn is; only time had to pass before I understood it.’

Uta and Ekkehart

Uta lived in another city a long time ago. By now she has been standing in the nave of the cathedral for seven centuries.

When I was a child, I got a postcard of Uta from Naumberg. I fixed the card to the wall in the hall with a drawing pin so that whenever I went out or came in, I saw Uta’s delicate stone features.

Since then, I have seen other pictures of Uta. In one Uta is alone; in another her husband, Ekkehart, stands by her side. Between them, it seems to me, a deep and abiding silence intervenes.

Uta’s cloak-wrapped form is proud and reserved. She holds the loose robe closed under her chin so that its collar rises almost in front of her mouth. For that reason I look at Uta’s mouth almost furtively. It is like a pain that shames her, or a too intimate part of the body. It is tender and arrogant, a lovely wound, stubbornly forbidding.

Her right hand, which holds the robe, is invisible beneath it. But all the narrow fingers of the left hand are visible, slightly separated from one another. On her forefinger is a large, round ring, no doubt given her by Ekkehart. She has another jewel, too, in her otherwise simple attire: a buckle attached to the left shoulder of her robe, almost the same as on Ekkehart’s broad chest.

Her hair cannot be seen: it is hidden by a helmet-shaped headdress surmounted by a lowish crown.

Her eyes look past you. Her lower lids are slightly narrowed, as if what she sees does not really please her. Quite right: a faint contempt sharpens Uta’s gaze, so cloaked in tenderness and refinement that it is hardly recognisable.

Uta and Ekkehart. They are among the founders of the cathedral of Naumberg, aristocrats of their city. The unknown master who sculpted Uta and Ekkehart had never seen them. When their portraits were completed, they had already been lying for decades in the crypt beneath this skyscraper, which was not built according to earthly dimensions.

Everything here is vertical as in a forest. But the glittering roses of the windows rise higher than the crowns of trees. There are no walls; only glass, pillars, ribs – only the fretwork of lath and staff, a thin line rising from octave to octave.

No, this is not a building, but a road raised up, a delirium knitted of stone, the megalomanic dream of a spider.

Little matter, more hope. And the higher the spears of the towers reach, the farther they banish what cannot be seen.

At their roots, in the midst of the strained pillars, a stone among stones, stands Uta. The evasion of her eyes, the collar raised to protect her face, the mouth that has been on the point of trembling for seven hundred years . . . Perhaps she would like to leave this place, withdraw into the shadows, decay and disintegrate into nothing.

Uta of Naumberg cathedral. Is there another statue which, in its unmoving stone, bears witness so incontrovertibly to the isolation of human flesh and the trembling of the spirit?

Cro Magnon Boy

I cannot take my eyes off him, although I struggle to look past him at the bustle of the streets, the markets and the parks. He does not notice me, but I reflect him like a shiny surface.

He always gets on the bus at the same stop, by the school for deaf children. He has a striped, knitted cap on his head, like the ones all the other boys have, but the forehead beneath it is as if forged by some village idiot of a smith: where, in other people, it becomes concave as it approaches the root of the nose, in him it dashes crookedly forward and creases abruptly above his eyebrows. It is like a rain-shelter, a little visor, which he himself must also constantly be able to see.

He is followed by another, smaller boy, and they, too, are able to sit, because in the mornings the bus is half empty.

The language of his hands hypnotises me: elongated, lumpy fingers, as if contorted by rheumatism. The hands of an old goblin, but beautiful, passionately sensitive.

What are they saying? I do not understand anything, not a word, but I should like to know: it must be important. The little boy, who is sitting diagonally opposite me, hears and understands everything. They gesture, nod and laugh, and the smaller boy even drums on his knees. They do not notice the other passengers.

When I follow the signs he makes with his hands, I remember an Indian dancer who visited the city years ago. I was unhappy when I went to see her performance, and I was unhappy when the performance was over.

But in between, while I watched her body live as though it were not a human body but a flower’s corolla, a flame, a beam of light, a lovely creature or something matter is perhaps intended to be, but that it always betrays and forgets – in between, as her brilliant sari fluttered and her wrists, her ankles, stretched, rose – I saw clearly that life, that joy . . .

And now, as the pantomime dwarf opposite me speaks in his strange tongue, silently and volubly, I seem to see again . . .

See, and forget once more. See, and forget.

The Tower

Out walking one Sunday, Doña Quixote and I found ourselves in a park, at whose centre stood an old, red-brick tower. The tower was crenellated and its bricks glowed with a dry, rich warmth like that of earth in late summer.

Behind the tower, the park was split in two by a broad concrete road under which ran a traffic tunnel, but farther off on the slope grew some large maples. They were just changing colour; their green had already begun its long retreat.

‘Come, let us sit in the shade,’ Doña Quixote said. ‘From here, we can see the pond.’

The pond was just a cataracted eye, muddy and overgrown. From it rose a mild breath of air, as from stale wine.

‘In this park there was once a murder,’ Doña Quixote said. ‘I read about it in the paper a long time ago.’

‘Who was killed?’ I asked, playing with a maple leaf.

‘A girl,’ said Doña Quixote. ‘She was raped and strangled by a boy she had never met before. Perhaps I would have forgotten that news item quickly if a certain phrase had not gone on echoing through my mind.’

I asked, since she remained silent.

‘Don’t hit me any more, I’m already dead,’ Doña Quixote said.

‘Look, a dragonfly!’ I pointed at the long, blue needle that had alighted on Doña Quixote’s sleeve.

Doña Quixote looked at the insect as it rested. On the harbour road a tram screeched; the dragonfly rose vertically into the air, remained motionless for a moment on the breeze and was gone.

Doña Quixote leaped up: ‘Come, let’s walk round the tower.’

We walked round the tower. It had eight sides and three floors and only one, tightly bolted, door. Who had built it, and for what purpose? We did not know. But it was part of the landscape as if it had grown there, as if it had roots. Doña Quixote strode ahead of me, tall and severe, like a tower herself.

‘Shall we go?’ I suggested, but she did not seem to hear.

‘Do you know what she meant?’ Doña Quixote said, and stood still.

‘What?’

‘By what she said, that girl. Have you heard small children playing hide-and-seek? Have you heard how a child will call to its seeker from its hiding place, “I’m not here”?’

And now the boy will always walk around this tower. It will always split his landscape in two.

‘But don’t you believe in something like reconciliation? Or if not reconciliation, then oblivion or – perhaps grace?’

But Doña Quixote did not answer, but beckoned with her finger to the dragonfly, which was quivering on her shoulder once more, on its wings the cold glimmer of scales.

The Mummy

I have been travelling a long time to reach this town, where I have never been before and of whose language I speak only a few words. When the train arrives at the station, it is already evening, and my suitcase is heavy. I look on the platform for a porter, but instead a man in uniform steps up to me and gestures for me to follow him. When I hesitate, he shows me his card, from which it is clear he is a policeman or that, at any rate, he has a policeman’s authority.

He takes me to the left luggage office and points to my bag. ‘Open it,’ he urges. I do so, and he examines and turns over everything I have, rummages through my socks, shakes the books and even opens a small box of chocolates.

‘Why?’ I ask, but he does not answer. Only when he unscrews my alarm clock do I realise he is looking for a bomb, and I also remember that just a short time ago, at a different station, an unsuccessful attempt at an assassination took place.

Well then, I do not have a bomb, and he pushes my bag toward me abruptly, without apology. But his unnecessary suspicion has already meant I have missed the bus in which I was to have continued to a nearby village to a family I know. The first boarding house I find is full, and in the second I discover there is a big trade fair in the city.

I walk up one street and down another, dragging my suitcase, which does not contain a bomb, and peering at hotel signs. The streets are flooded with people, but I cannot even hope to see any familiar faces. In a cramped and dark reception I am finally handed a small key, for a sum that is unreasonable.

When I open the door, I see the room is already inhabited: in the other bed lies someone wrapped in blankets, turned to the wall and apparently fast asleep. This does not please me; I have paid for a single room and feel I have been cheated. But I am tired; I do not have the energy to go downstairs again and object in a foreign language.

On the back wall is a tall mirrored wardrobe; I see myself on the threshold, as unremarkable as anyone else in the bustle of the street. I undress silently and quickly, so that my room-mate will not waken.

I lie awake for a long time in the room which does not belong to anyone, and whose objects exude the anonymity of all rooms that are only passed through. It is difficult for me to sleep, as I think of the many paths that have passed through this hole. It is difficult for me to fall asleep, as my room-mate is so motionless and her breathing so light that I can hardly distinguish it in the small quiet spaces of my own breathing.

I do not believe she is sleeping.

When I awake, I know I have been sleeping. Someone is crying as if she has been crying for a long time, many hours hiccupping and panting. The bed below the window is shaken by violent convulsions of grief.

I listen to these eruptions of emotion tensely, thinking I should really get up and ask: ‘What is it?’

I stir, shift, and begin to lift the coverlet, but she seems to understand my intention and attempts to stifle her moans. I cannot decide: I lie for a long time in the darkness without a cover, and I grow cold. The stifled groans swell once more, sighs take the space and the air from the room, and the stranger’s tears moisten my own life, too, with their bitter rain.

Endless weeping! Limitless grief! It gushes like a hot geyser from the chasm in that unknown life, so deep that it does not seem possible to find enough to fill it anywhere, it erupts as lava that reaches and petrifies all movement. The ebb and flow of the sobbing rocks my bed, and her tears combine with the sombre waters of my memory so that, with horror, I too feel them begin to surge.

No, I do not want to remember, I say to myself. But what good is it? My memory is that sheet-wrapped mummy.