Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (38 page)

‘Twenty-three,’ the nurse remarked.

‘Truly,’ the doctor said; the poet was right when he wrote, “Here babes are born old men, and youths are fit for the grave”.’

‘He hasn’t had a chance to experience any more than other people of his age,’ the nurse said. ‘But he seems so wise.’

‘He has the experience of old age. It changes anyone. In the space of a couple of years his body has become that of an eighty-year-old. His metabolism has increased by a factor of about seven. He should have seven nights and seven days in each twenty-four hours.’

‘Pity the mother,’ the nurse said. ‘She will have to bury her son as a weak old man.’

‘Pity us all,’ the doctor said, and sighed. ‘Soon we will be living on a star where everyone is old. But the oldest of all will be the young.’

Small Fusion Bombs

‘Have you heard of tabun, sarin, soman? Do you know how cheaply the entire human race can be done away with?

‘I am sure you imagine that the threat of World War Three has receded, since relatively small resources are now devoted to armaments. That is a naïve figment of the imagination.’

As time goes on, Håkan’s messages have become increasingly fundamentalist and taken on a more threatening tone.

‘It may completely have escaped your notice that the arms race has begun again, and is accelerating? Do you remember what enriched uranium really means? What about fissible material? The danger of a nuclear war started by accident is even greater than a couple of decades ago. The threat of a deliberately started conflict much more likely. It is relatively easy for almost anyone, including terrorists and other criminals, to lay their hands on the raw materials for atomic weapons. It is even possible to make small fusion bombs without plutonium or enriched uranium.

‘Perhaps you still imagine, as we were led to believe in the old days, that you can sweep nuclear pollution away with a broom? I will say nothing more about poorly maintained nuclear power stations. I will only mention that there are many dozens of them in use at this moment and that in coming years we may expect the failure of more than one operating system.

‘Organic poison gases can be made in even the poorest laboratories. I hope you realise that the even more effective VX will kill even if only a few milligrams are present on the skin. And how? The very thought! Some natural poisons, like shiga, are even more deadly. Viruses, bacteria and fungi are manufactured not only for warfare but also for the destruction of grain crops. One single inhaled organism of Q fever leads to inevitable death.’

Fakelove felt increasingly weary as he read Håkan’s messages. He had no intention of answering this one, either. But his silence did not stop Håkan.

‘Everyone knows that ozone loss has not been halted. Skin cancer, weakening of the immune system, blindness, early aging will increase rapidly in the coming years. Even worse are the indirect consequences, for all living organisms, both on land and in the water, suffer from the ultraviolet-B wavelengths of sunlight. The consequences of the decline, perhaps even the complete disappearance, of plankton will be catastrophic. The very thought!’

‘Artificial intelligence systems,’ Håkan wrote, ‘will before long supersede the workforce in all countries. We will never again be able to rid ourselves of mass employment. Before long, excess population will be reduced by other means besides rationing the birthrate. When synthetic evolution has progressed far enough, what will we be needed for? It will be best to prepare for full-scale war with other species, but probably we will lose in any case. Robots will do away with the human race. Therapise them if you can!’

Fakelove was beginning to be fed up to the back teeth with this millennialist’s rantings. He was an apocalyptist, scaremonger, a bird of ill omen, a real killjoy. The man was really getting on his nerves. Fakelove should never have taken him on as a client.

Fakelove thought he could discern in Håkan dissonance, hatred and angry disappointment. Not in the least surprising, but Fakelove acknowledged that his own attitude to Håkan was no longer entirely friendly. His carefully maintained empathy was threatening to crumble.

‘Our system has already slipped into a critical state from which there can hardly be a return. That means that even an insignificant change can trigger a chain reaction leading to catastrophe,’ Håkan wrote. ‘That process has probably already begun. Immense forest fires, tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, famines, political and economic crises are marks of its acceleration.’

‘I have repeatedly tried to turn your attention toward your own intensifying intellectual and emotional crisis,’ Fakelove wrote. ‘I confess my disappointment and frustration in this client relationship of ours, since I have not yet succeeded. I am beginning to be persuaded that you would really like the end of the world to arrive as soon as possible. This points to strongly self-destructive motives. Could it be at all possible that you might consider the reasons that lie behind such a wish?’

This message, too, fell on deaf ears. Håkan continued more volubly and passionately than before: ‘Ethnic wars, the impoverishment and pauperising of the environment, eco-catastrophes, illnesses, the lack of clean water will concentrate and accumulate. We in the West believe that they are a cross only for the poor, always the burden of other people, far away and unknown, strange peoples and races. We think that we can stay beyond the reach of such disasters forever. It is a serious mistake. What happens to them today will be with us tomorrow.’

Fakelove’s patience began to be at an end. He now spoke more directly: ‘You are not in the least willing to co-operate. I do not believe that you need treatment for your phobia. Your problem is different. You want to sow scepticism, despair and negative thought among your friends and relatives. That aspect of you is worrying. You should confront this side of yourself honestly.’

In his next message, Håkan announced his desire to become Doctor Fakelove’s private client.

‘I believe that our interaction may be most useful on both sides,’ he wrote.

But Fakelove wrote a swift reply: ‘Dear Håkan, unfortunately I cannot at this moment take on any more private clients. I believe that it is time to end our collaboration, for it has not proved fruitful. I am inclined to think that it is of no real use to you in your current life situation. I would call your disease apoterrorism. It undoubtedly requires immediate treatment. I will only debit your account with half of your treatment costs and I am sending you the contact details of a couple of excellent therapists of whom one or the other may offer you personal therapy. I wish you a lighter future free of fear and obsessions.’

Maliciously, he sent Håkan the name of his old teacher, who had given him only an average mark in the psychopathology of hysteria. The other therapist he recommended was a young scholar who represented the transhuman and ecopsychological movement.

After writing to Håkan, Fakelove felt, for the first time in ages, almost happy. After a good lunch he happened to walk past the city’s best men’s clothes shop. It was a newly opened designer label store in whose window he noticed a fan of elegant silk ties.

Fakelove spent a long time making his choice. He finally decided on a tie on whose pine-needle green background there glowed golden gladioli. The touch of silk restored his balance, which Håkan had momentarily succeeded in upsetting.

Soon It Will Be Time For Overcoats

Håkan wrote on the blackboard: THE PLACE FOR SAUSAGE WRAPPERS IS NOT ON THE PAVEMENT.

‘OK, let’s try to parse this sentence. Let’s begin with the predicate. Well? Who will tell me? Or you can come here to show me. Who will volunteer to come up to the board?’

The class did not react discernibly to this question.

‘Will no one volunteer? You do know this much about sentence analysis. Your own mother tongue! We went over it in the last lesson. You there, Rami, come up here for a change.’

‘Won’t.’

Rami slid underneath his desk, as slack as a skein of wool, and put his hands over his ears.

‘Jasmine?’

‘Nah. Ain’t got the time.’

The girl had taped a mirror to the inside of her desk-lid. She was busy putting on makeup. She was applying luminous violet lipstick broadly to her thin lips, pressing hard, right down to the dimple in her chin.

‘Henry?’

‘Get . . . ’

Håkan was only too happy to give up.

‘OK, let’s go over it once again.’

Taking the calculated risk that the glue-balls the class favoured – which attached themselves to wool, in particular, leaving an indelible mark – would be aimed at his new cardigan, Håkan turned to the blackboard. It was, in any case, the most innocent form of disturbance in this institute of learning. He underlined the answer, making the chalk squeak unnecessarily loudly. The din behind his back increased.

‘Well then, let us take a new sentence from this morning’s paper: SOON IT WILL BE TIME FOR OVERCOATS. And now tell me really simply, which of these seven words is the verb. Think now. Apply your grey matter just a little bit.’

He was not really sure any more that they had any, or that it was in any sense a question of wanting to. Presumably they were simply unable to fulfil the requirements of the course. Håkan had noticed the same thing as all the other teachers in the school. In class after class, the school was attracting more and more unwilling, and less and less capable, students. It had been forced to lower pass levels, compromise course requirements. Using the standards of thirty years before, only a fraction of each class would have matriculated.

With what idealistic, even revolutionary, aims Håkan had begun his teaching career at Lower Lieviö secondary school. The area was poor; here it was principally the children of penniless families who completed their compulsory education.

Literacy was no longer a matter of course. Because of parental pressure, they were forced to give matriculation certificates to students who had not even learned the letters of the alphabet and for whom even the most primitive calculations were overwhelming. And how to teach foreign languages to those whose mother tongue vocabulary consisted of only a few hundred words and who did not know the difference between adjectives and verbs?

‘Hyacinthe, where are you going?’

What ridiculous names they give their children, Håkan thought.

‘Need a poo,’ Hyacinthe said.

How this school had invested in increasing the children’s motivation, how their successful achievements had been underlined and rewarded, how teachers had attended courses every Saturday, how collaboration between home and school had been encouraged, how educational psychologists, therapists and welfare officers had been employed, how timetables had been rearranged and teaching methods developed. It had all seeped away into the sand.

The computer, music and art rooms were up-to-date. The classrooms were decorated as comfortably as living rooms, there were rugs in the corridors, even sofas in the classrooms. The teachers had lent works of art from home and hung them on the walls. On the windowsills, at first, geraniums and small cultivations of herbs had flourished, with the intention that the children themselves should tend them. But they had not bothered to water them, and now the window-boxes had been taken away.

It was not a question of a lowering in the standard of education, but of something much more serious.

‘Let’s tell it like it is,’ the mathematics teacher said. ‘The new pupils are always stupider than the ones before.’

The average IQ had fallen year after year and would apparently continue to do so. There were a number of explanations for the phenomenon. Some people thought environmental factors were to blame: radiation, the impoverishment of the soil.

The headmaster of the Lower Lieviö secondary school had his own theory. He believed that evolution had reached its high point and at the same time its dead end and that development was now running in the opposite direction, toward simplification, impoverishment, the loss of skills.

In the headmaster’s opinion, political decisions lay in the background. Behind this backward development, he believed, were the cleansings which, in the preceding decades and centuries, had been carried out in great numbers. Strangely enough, they had always been directed at well-educated, highly literate people, the country’s intellectual elite. It was not even two years since the last operation. Hundreds of thousands of highly trained professionals in various fields had been liquidated, along with their children – scientists, linguists, doctors, writers, the country’s highest military leaders . . .

Håkan did not want to believe it. It was not a politically correct explanation. Intelligence was not inherited in the same way as the shape of one’s nose or the colour of one’s hair.

But his own political correctness had begun to deteriorate. Håkan looked at his pupils. What he saw around him was extremely incorrect, both politically and socially. Some of the students were increasingly apathetic; it was impossible to keep them awake throughout the school day. Some even brought pillows and blankets with them from home to make their sleep as comfortable as possible. Some, on the other hand, were hyperactive; they could not stay still for a moment, their legs danced, their arms flailed, their eyes rolled like those of an animal caught in a trap.

Håkan was particularly annoyed by his pupils’ habit of eating secretly at their desks. Once Håkan had surprised a boy whose mouth was covered in blood.

‘What have you got there?’ Håkan asked. ‘Show me.’

The boy tried to prevent him from opening the desk lid, but Håkan pushed his arm away by force. He certainly knew that he should not do so. He could be kicked out of the school for what he had done, but the thought was pleasing to him.

In the desk, wrapped in newspaper, was a lump of raw meat; the boy had taken a great bite out of it. It was the heart of a cow.

Lunch-hours themselves were hair-raising. There was no longer any question of table manners. Some pupils never learned to use knives and forks, but ate all their meals with their fingers or licked them straight from the plate. There were also those who tipped their food on to the table and slurped it up from there.