Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (43 page)

Ugliness, untidiness, ill-considered and awkward details really made Håkan suffer. Wrong lighting. Clashing colours. Even when he was walking outside, he noticed the street paving, the design of the street lamps and the quality of their light, the patina of the bricks. He should always have been seeing landscapes, views, perspective, something open and continuous, something elevated and clean.

Above all, mankind had to be beautiful. Poor Håkan! Around him he saw a general mess, badly behaved youths, people fed on junk food, uncivilised adults with bad skin, dull hair and self-inflicted illnesses. The city was full of vulgar and overweight characters who drank whole-milk, spoke unnecessarily loudly as if they wanted to share even the most unpleasant details of their insignificant lives with passers-by. Men who peed in lifts and stairwells.

Women who called their girlfriends by their surnames and said: ‘Let’s make tracks!’

People who wore horribly bright, shiny and hissing clothes made out of poor materials and two sizes too small. Lustful people who went to bed with anyone at all and bragged openly about their sexual perversions. Their insensitivity made Håkan’s blood boil. They could not tell the difference between Mozart and Wagner. They had never even heard of Mondrian.

Ugliness is immoral, Håkan thought. Ugliness is the ruin of civilisation.

Håkan liked Edgar Allan Poe’s story
The Fall of the House of Usher
a great deal. It tells the story of a young man whose sense of hearing was so sensitive that ordinary life and the unavoidable sounds associated with it brought him great suffering:

He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses: the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

Håkan had read the story again and again. He felt an affinity with the hero, a real aristocrat. In a way he also felt that he could almost be mistaken for that refined young man. And it frightened him, for the story’s hero did not exactly live happily to the end of his life.

The young Usher was, in Håkan’s opinion, an early example of the person of the future, one of them, who presage a new kind of humanity. A humanity whose senses had been sensitized and refined to such an extent that life was more and more difficult for them.

And Håkan thought that he himself was of the clan of Usher.

An individual with Håkan’s tendencies should at least have been as wealthy as the young master of Usher. To his misfortune, Håkan was not. He lived in a rented council flat, at an address which no one could have called a good one. Sometimes it seemed as if the building’s walls were like gauze. One could not, it was true, see through them, but the sounds and smells of life in all its banality spread almost unhindered from one apartment to another. As he went to bed, Håkan began to use ear-plugs.

Håkan also suspected that his pain threshold was lower than normal. A mosquito bite, the accidental touch of a nettle leaf, tingled for days on his sensitive skin. And then his teeth, they were a constant torment to him.

The yard was empty, full of parking spaces. Håkan’s attempts to create some beauty outside his own room trickled away to nothing. When, in the autumn, he had hidden some tulip and daffodil bulbs in the narrow lawn border, the children of the neighbouring stairwell tore up the first new leaves as they pushed out of the melting earth in the spring. Håkan never saw them flower.

Håkan was happy that the building was painted. But on the second day after the work was completed, the newly painted wall was covered in grotesque tags and messy scribbles by an unskilled hand. The chaos advanced day by day.

Håkan was able to keep his room more or less clean, but he could not forever halt the spread of disorder even here. One evening he accidentally knocked over the table lamp, its fine, green glass dome broke, and he could not afford to buy a new one.

The next night, he woke up with a terrible toothache. It was in his lower jaw, in a tooth to which he had never before paid any attention. The pain wailed in his mouth, burrowing sharply ever deeper into his jawbone. It soon spread into his ear, nose and forehead. It was incomprehensible that such a pain should exist.

Håkan curled up on his white sofa and whimpered. The pain was a living organism, multidimensional. It represented chaos, the power of ugliness and violence. He could feel its ill will, its purposefulness.

How such an insignificant matter could change the whole world. How it was possible that because of just one wretched tooth it was impossible for him to maintain his normal daily plan.

As the pain grew, the tooth grew too. This event could not be seen. When Håkan opened his mouth and looked in the bathroom mirror, the tooth was as small and white as before. But he could feel its real size; it had grown as big as a house.

The tooth was certainly in Håkan’s mouth, but in a way he had simultaneously found himself inside it. That was how it was: he lived inside the tooth, and it was the most unpleasant place to live. The tooth began to fill the entire world.

The tooth took the value from many things Håkan which had once believed in and which he had sought to acquire. He no longer cared even to think about them.

One could not prepare oneself for such suffering. Accidents are like mutations. It is through them that life demonstrates its unpredictability. Fate, which people believe they direct, suddenly starts to play up.

He was the tooth. The tooth was him, a whole world of suffering.

And then, suddenly, the pain was absent. Håkan could not believe it, but he could no longer feel the tiniest shooting pain. First thing in the morning, he went to the duty dentist.

‘Everything is OK,’ said the dentist.

‘Can’t you find anything?’

‘No new cavities, no infection, tartar, nothing.’

The case should have been successfully dealt with. But it was not. The toothache was a kind of turning point in Håkan’s life. It changed him. It made him depressed, and he constantly feared that an attack would start again one night. He felt as if the pain was lying in wait for him, if not in his tooth, then in some other part, member, space.

It was as if a hole, a tear, had appeared in his sense-world, which demonstrating with frightening clarity that reality was something different from what he had hitherto supposed.

It also seemed to him that the entire world was beginning to recall the house of Usher. It had a messy broken line like the one on the wall of the house of Usher, which spread and spread.

One night he was woken again, but this time not by a toothache. As he started, Håkan did not understand what had woken him. An unfamiliar, low-pitched sound penetrated his earplugs. It was totally strange and was the kind of sound that did not please him at all.

The sound was no doubt caused by some vehicle, but no ordinary car, lorry or even bus, or by a motorcycle. It was large, enormous, that he knew. It rolled onward somehow formlessly. Håkan did not know of a mode of transport which made such a din. Probably it was driving along the motorway, but at times he was not even sure of that. Perhaps it was flying, after all?

The sound came first from the east, and seemed to rise and become denser as it grew nearer. When it reached Håkan’s building it echoed on high like a whistle, but afterwards it lowered again. It went lower and lower, to a deep bass, until finally it was no more than a vague rumbling before it disappeared completely.

Later Håkan noticed that he was waking at the same time, despite the earplugs. It happened a couple of moments before first light, which had always made him anxious. And then the same sound was heard, and once again he could not recognise it. It belonged to the same category as pain. It was uncontrollable, absolutely strange, malicious.

Håkan began to grow tired. He had been like a machine which had been kept constantly in action, which had not had even a moment of rest. He understood that he had since his youth been fighting against ugliness and disorder. It was an extraordinarily frustrating war. They always won; it was the law, the command of entropy. They might attack from anywhere, even from within him.

He was no longer as particular about himself as he had been. His daily schedule began to falter. Increasingly often, he skipped his session at the gym. Sometimes his main meal was a hamburger bought at Jaska’s grill bar. In the evenings he ate cheese snacks and watched television.

Håkan put on weight. He might wear the same socks for three days in a row. Perhaps this was the reason why he caught athlete’s foot.

A cleaners’ strike began in the city. The streets were filled with rotting food, mustard-smeared paper, parts of plastic monsters, broken tamagotchis, spent batteries. At the beginning, Håkan carried a rubbish bag with him, but it was full before he reached the first corner. He began to look at the passers-by, at the crumbling walls of the buildings, at the holes in the tarmac, in a different way. He tried to see in them beauty and order. He tried to say ‘yes’ to the ugly world.

One day, he began to carry his own things out into the street. He took two boxes of books, crockery, lamps, chairs, a radio and a telephone. By evening they had all disappeared.

In the spring the social security office received a telephone call saying that there was a troublesome tenant in one of the council rental buildings. The rent had not been paid for months. Alarming sounds were heard from the apartment day and night. It sounded as if furniture was being splintered. And then the stench from the apartment could be smelled as far as the stairwell.

Håkan lived there.

The social workers obtained the key from the caretaker. They pushed their way into the apartment. It was almost empty. The electricity supply had apparently been cut off some time before. The kitchen cupboards had been dismantled. An heirloom sofa, which Håkan had not had the energy to carry out, had been slashed open with a kitchen knife and garbage and leftovers had been poured inside. On the bare floor of the bedroom sat a naked Håkan. He had written a rude word on the floor in his own excrement.

Håkan smiled and nodded, smiled and nodded.

Closed Eyelids

Who needs an electric saw? The opera? A Teflon saucepan? The internet?

Not the sleeper, at any rate. The sleeper becomes very economical. Totally economical. He hardly consumes anything, except the air he breathes. He does not need entertainment, electronics, foreign trips or even food. Only the dead are more economical. When a person sleeps, he does not even need other people.

Eyelids tight closed,

Fords, rivers and streams

Håkan got up later every morning. And nevertheless he noticed that he was the first to be up on his feet in his building, perhaps in the whole block. Sylvia, who had gone to sleep early in the afternoon, was breathing evenly and deeply on her own side. When he peeped into his daughter’s room, he saw that she had kicked off her covers again. Although it was cold in the room, Laura had not woken up. Håkan covered her carefully, but a little roughly. He hoped his daughter would wake up so that he would have company at breakfast. Mostly, it was a vain hope.

Many times a day, he went to see his sleeping wife and daughter, hoping that they would wake up and remember that he, too, existed. But each day he had to wait longer. Håkan felt increasingly unnecessary. And he was not even happy that they consumed so little.

For Håkan it was a something of an occasion when they woke up. But recently they had just hurriedly drunk and eaten some light snack and then returned to their places.

At first they said, as they woke: ‘I just had a strange dream in which . . . ’. Or: ‘I dreamed a funny dream – ‘. Or: ‘In my dream . . . ’.

But soon they stopped talking about their dreams.

Sometimes Håkan had the feeling that their nocturnal experiences were so significant and mysterious that they did not want to share them with anyone.

Sylvia and Laura were not exceptional; it was, rather, Håkan who was. Almost all the other inhabitants of the city were asleep. Throughout the history of humanity, the need for sleep had remained approximately the same. Formerly, an average night’s sleep was seven hours and forty-five minutes long. But during the previous decade, the average period of sleep had began, unexpectedly, to rise, and now most citizens needed as much as sixteen hours’ sleep a night.

The exact reason for the increased need for sleep was unknown. There was talk of a change in the sun’s radiation, ions, ozone loss, a fluctuation in the speed of the earth’s spin, an increase in the quantity of melatonin, sometimes this, sometimes that.

Perhaps the officials had put something in the food supply or the water, something that made people sleepy? That was what some people claimed. Håkan did not believe it, because it would mean that the state would lose tax income. It is true that a person who is asleep needs very little, but he or she does not produce anything, either. If you have to sleep for sixteen hours a day, you cannot work for eight, or even six.

The legal working day had indeed shrunk and shrunk. People were already spending two-thirds of their lives in bed, many even more. If they woke at eight, an irresistible sleepiness overcame them around three in the afternoon. But most did not wake up until after midday.

Offices opened their doors later and later and closed them earlier and earlier. Cash machines no longer worked. Of twelve television stations, only one was left, and it broadcast programs for just one hour a day; none on Mondays. No one any longer demanded that shops should be freely open. Most of them stayed open for just three or four days a week.

And if people spent increasing amounts of time asleep, what happens to law and order, export and import, the state of the highways and the standard of education, health care and the social services? Little by little structures and forms, traditions and operational plans, crumbled. Matters held in common, politics, no longer existed. The population slept; the country grew poorer.