Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (30 page)

Were they the same? How uncannily quick they were, although they looked unbudging. How hurriedly an autumn day could call them from their forgotten hiding places, shape them and melt them back into invisibility. And how purposeful was their own alchemy when they broke up dead forms and released a substance which would otherwise have remained a prisoner of what had been.

Examining them, the Gold-Washers began to realise that the forces they served – chaos and decay – were of the same origin as growth and order, form and procreation . . .

Only the mycelium survived from year to year. It could not be seen unless it was dug up, and then it dried, as a secret always dies when it is revealed.

Life and continuity were here, in its invisibility, not in the mushrooms themselves, which were seen and picked and which were born on the surface of the earth randomly as the universally ramifying mycelium of dreams and images pushes its own offspring into the light of day.

They wandered and sought in the deceptive landscape and their voices echoed far and then disappeared. Their words and thoughts – they were only dust, only smoke, only mist, they puffed forth from their mouths into the wind like a cloud of spores from the blade of a gill and dispersed without a trace, so it seemed.

But he who believes this is so will be surprised. There will come a time when he will ask: ‘What is rising over there? And there? And there?’

They are deeds that swell and then shrink, but beneath them spreads, wider and wider, the imperishable mycelium of words, images, dreams.

The Confessional

When I touched the skin of her hand, it felt like the flesh of a mushroom. It was spongy, soft, watery-white. It felt as though the blood no longer flowed beneath it. As if, if a knife had been sunk into it – I ask forgiveness for this image – it would have encountered no resistance, pain, blood. But she was alive, although she was dead.

When I happened, against my will, to hear a conversation between the Customs Man and the Gold-Washer, I knew at once what they were talking about. Many people spoke of it, both in the city and in the Tabernacle. But until that day I had not heard any details, not a single reliable explanation, and nothing like it had happened to any of my friends or my friends’ friends. In fact, I had thought the entire rumour ridiculous, hardly worth a sneer.

The Gold-Washer said: ‘Go to her. It will not last long, you know that.’

What were they talking about? Not about any epidemic disease, merely that some dead people did not wish to remain dead. Charon’s ferry brought them back to the shore of departure, but only to await the next sailing.

It had happened – or so I had heard tell – that some of them, whose death certificates had already been issued and who had been moved into the hospital cellars, walked out on their own two feet. They staggered back to their wards in their white shirts and their appearance caused hysteria, questions and accusations, outbreaks of terror and joy.

Accusations were levelled at the doctors who had confirmed the deaths, health officials fell silent.

People began to doubt the reality of death. They took their dead home and kept the bodies in their bedrooms until they began to rot.

The resurrected ones were not healthy, they were merely living, and many were attached once more to tubes. Their mortal injuries, knife-wounds, extreme frailty of old age, the last symptoms still remained. They were not really alive, but not quite dead either.

It was a travesty of resurrection.

And none of them lived very long in their post-mortem state. Their new life lasted only a day or two, a week, at most two. Of what had happened to them they remembered nothing.

I listened on the terrace of the Tabernacle to the words of the Customs Man to the Gold-Washer. I did not know whom they were speaking of.

‘He opened her shirt and bared her side to me. “Look,” he said. Under her shoulder there began a deep, blackish zone, a slightly shiny area, which disappeared beneath the belt of her skirt. What had caused it? “It’s not serious,” I said. “It’s only a bruise.” But I was lying. It was not a bruise. It was blotch.’

An aeroplane rumbled over the Tabernacle, and I missed something the Customs Man said. But he raised his voice once more: ‘Then I said to him – where did I get such strong words, perhaps they were too strong: “She rose from the dead for your sake, and you have abandoned her”.’

‘He looked at me in distress and replied: “But I – can – not! Don’t you understand: she smells already. I wanted her to come back, but not dead, not dead! Her flesh is already coming away from his bones. It has changed, it is decomposing. You take her into your bed, if you like.” ’

I should not have heard what the Customs Man said. His words were not intended for my ears. They were words for the confessional. But my chair had a high back, and it was turned toward them; they had not noticed me.

The Customs Man said: ‘How can we live our lives if the dead will not stay in their graves? If all the undead rise up? What will we do if death no longer exists?’

Then the Gold-Washer spoke. The Gold-Washer who was always present and from whom words streamed. He spoke in a very low voice, perhaps bending close to the Customs Man’s ear, so that I could make out a word here, a word there.

‘ . . . to fear . . . even the angels . . . if they were to see it . . . the resurrection of the body . . . so that the flesh may not . . . the trumpet of the last days . . . ’

The tone of his voice was gentle and persuasive; it calmed me, too, the eavesdropper. The anxiety that had gripped me as I listened to them disappeared and I felt as if I had fallen asleep in my chair. When at last I got up, I could no longer see the Customs Man anywhere, or the Gold-Washer.

I never heard them, or anyone else, speak of the matter again. It was forgotten in the city and it was forgotten in the Tabernacle as if no such thing had ever happened.

For only a very few falsely dead ever appeared in the entire city – and all of them between October and December. No confirmed case was ever reported from elsewhere in the country. By the beginning of the year everything had gone back to normal: those who died stayed dead.

Some had received a second chance, a new life. But how short and shadowy it was, hardly worthy of resurrection. And they had to pay for it with another death, both the resurrected ones and those who loved them.

At last the hymn of the migratory bird was sung, but those who remained at the edge of the pit cried soundlessly: ‘Do not come back. Stay where you are – or are not. Do not turn back unless you can return through the womb of woman, naked, without memories, newly born.’

In Arabia There Is One Tree

The Marseillaise

The Gold-Washer who loved book-lice told me: my eyes were dazzled. It was a spring sky and I was sitting under a large tree at the edge of the forest and waiting. I was probably supposed to meet someone there, but I no longer remember whom I was waiting for or why. All I remember is that he never appeared before me in the field embellished by the foliage. How dry and reddish-brown it was, like a laterite landscape.

The sun shone and I sat and sat in the swaying shadows under a tree that was unknown to me, not impatient but as calm as the noonday through which I was living. I leaned my head against the trunk of the tree so that my eyes, when I did not close them completely, wandered lazily among the branches, in their spacious house that stretched in all directions.

Then I started; I looked at the tree’s leaves. What was wrong with them? The leaves were tattered, there were holes in them, or else they were only half-leaves. The summer glowed, but in the tree some disease was wreaking its havoc or some insect was gnawing at the green mantle without which the tree would not live for long.

I jumped up and pulled a branch down. Now I saw: the branch was, in fact, a highway, along it hurried an endless stream of wanderers, and suddenly its fresh top leaf moved. Not because of the wind, for the day was still. Something was happening on the underside of the leaf: its point detached itself. It looked as though someone had cut the leaf with small, sharp scissors, as accurately as a seamstress a length of fabric.

Immediately the detached piece began to move. I could see that it was carried by a stocky but agile pine sawyer whose jaws, in relation to its size, were disproportionately massive.

Well! It was only than I understood that everywhere in the tree the same thing was happening: leaves and pieces of leaves were wandering along the roads of the branches as if of their own accord, but all in the same direction: downward, toward the earth!

I saw that a well-trafficked road passed close by my shoe. Every one of those who followed it carried a juicy piece of leaf, they looked like green pennants. I followed the procession with my eyes. It went round the stone, disappeared for a moment between bunches of grass turned brown by the sun, but then appeared again and zig-zagged once more, until – where did it go?

I bent over and saw that the leaf-cutters were marching, one after another, into a shady crevice under the earth and with them, bit by bit, the tree’s summer, its green garment, disappeared into the darkness.

What were they making from it under the earth? Were they cooking themselves a tasty stew, were they making themselves clothes or a soft bed of love for themselves and their heirs?

I could have sat under that tree all that sunny day, and the procession would never have ended. One stream led out of the crevice and up the trunk, another down the trunk and back inside the earth, bearing its verdant booty. It was their job, it was probably heavy labour, real drudgery; but no task has ever looked to me as easy or as much fun or as meaningful as the work of the leaf-cutters.

But they were destroyers, were they not, they were gnawing away at the life-force of the tree. And nevertheless I felt toward them deep understanding, kinship, real tenderness . . .

How long would the tree suffer its loss? How could it defend itself against such numerous robbers?

The tree could not run away, it could not dash its enemies to pieces with its massive branches. But I wanted to believe that it would survive. For the tree was large and the leaves many, so many that the leaf-cutters would not be able to cut all of them. When autumn arrived, their work would be over, they would sink into a torpor in their den. And in the spring the tree would recover. It would be able to start from the beginning and put out leaves with new energy.

It was already late. He had not come, and would not now come. I went away, but as I walked I thought only of the leaf-cutters: that day after day, all through the long southern summer, the same streams would flow in and beneath the tree. Whatever happened, the leaf-cutters would hurry on there and their flags would flutter.

Those leaf-cutters – they know what they are doing, they do not stray. Each of their flags is a sign of hope, their path is sign posted far into the future. And their tree of life still flourishes: the more leaves are cut from it, the more zealously it puts out new greenery.

While I become gruffer and gloomier day by day, smile more slowly and more seldom, and my face becomes dry and pallid. I have to sleep in the afternoons, and I am no longer to be seen at openings or sales or demonstrations, nor do I visit the southern harbour when the ice is breaking.

But the leaf-cutters continue – they do not grow tired. Their flags do not crease. Their soundless marseillaise for their own species, their own life-form, still echoes in my mind like a hymn of victory of a strength that will never arise from my own lips.

Just a Shadow?

Just as Thisbe had his mulberry tree and the gods their Yggdrasil, I, too, have my own tree. I have encountered it only once, as Alexander the Great encountered a tree whose branches bore fruit in the form of speaking animals’ heads. It was as large as the redwoods under which, in the silence of film, Kim Novak wandered, wanting to remember. In their sap runs the common memory, the calligraphy of larvae on their bark is history that does not err.

Even if I wished it, I could not do to my tree what the leaf-cutters do. I can only look, look, look, for of course I do not have a tree, but only the shadow of a tree. Only the cooling shade of my tree of Araby! No bird will ever be able to land on its branches to scream its sad tidings.

At night, twenty years ago or twenty-five, I stood in a city courtyard, surrounded on every side by walls of stone, walls of brick, I stood and gazed at the windowless wall, unable to tear my eyes away from it, in the sway of an extraordinary rapture, holding my breath.

What did I think I saw there? There was nothing but a shadow, the shadow of a tree fell across the building’s wall, so that the sun must have been shining, the day was clear.

I did not see the tree itself, but it must have been growing behind me; it did not interest me enough for me to turn and look. What kind of tree was it? Perhaps a broad-leafed, hardwood tree, it was so extraordinarily luxuriant, its crown branched broadly over the entire surface of the wall.

What I saw were only shadow-branches, a shadow-trunk and shadow-foliage, as yet quite tender, as the spring was early.

I looked: how naturally, with what undeniable self-assurance the branches grew from the trunk and spread into the unbounded space of freedom, even if this was only a wall, perhaps the dilapidated brick wall of a school. But the sun had so completely saturated its surface that it already radiated the heat of the coming summer – and of all past summers.

There was a breath of wind and the leaves moved and rustled, and I, I bowed before the shadow cast by the tree as though before a real prince, bowed stammering, almost whimpering, out of my mind with joy.

Who was there with me? What other people were there? Schoolchildren and teachers? Father and mother? Sisters and brothers?

A whole crowd stood silent in the yard as I took a step, two, and my hand rose to point to the tree’s shadow, which the wind was moving on the wall’s bricks: Oh look, look, oh look, look, look . . .