Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (82 page)

Had his father changed? Had Jessie, with his curly tail, grown fat and old? His father fed him sugar in secret, he didn’t believe them when they said that it was bad for dogs’ eyes. He would certainly see Joe Hunter, who was doing his GCSEs at the school in the nearby village and wanted to go to the city to study to become an electrician afterwards. They used to lie in the loft of the Hunters’ barn and read old issues of Playboy that Joe’s father had ordered long before.

But in fact Emil already knew that, although his father and Jessie and Joe might not have changed, he himself had, and that would be enough to change everything.

His father stood at Mogham station in a checked shirt and velvet trousers, not the sort of thing he had worn before. Emil saw him from his window seat before his father noticed him, but he didn’t wave, no, quite the opposite, he drew back a little. It was as if he wanted to gain some time, and he certainly didn’t rush out of the train first, but only after the families that were loaded down with rubber rings, fishing rods, picnic baskets and barking dogs.

“Good afternoon, Emil,” his father said.

It sounded formal. In the city family members never said ‘good afternoon’ to each other; they always said “hello” or “hi.”

They didn’t hug; they shook hands and then his father patted him on the shoulder. Emil thought it was better that way.

“You can sit on the bike’s luggage rack.”

Emil had sat there dozens of times before, it was the same bike, but nevertheless it felt new. He felt embarrassed to put his arms around his father’s waist, and so he held on to the springs under the saddle. His feet touched the ground, he noticed for the first time.

His father cycled fast and they didn’t talk during the journey. Emil saw the patch of sweat on his back grow wider: it was the first hot day in a long time.

Old Granny Hunter stood in front of her henhouse and waved to them. He couldn’t see Joe.

The maple tree by the gate had grown and darkened. When he saw the main building and the porch emerge from behind the lilacs, he didn’t feel the joy he had expected, but rather the opposite: surprise and displeasure. The house wasn’t plain stone any more, it had been pebble-dashed.

No one ran barking to greet them. Jessie’s chain was broken and his kennel looked empty.

“Dad, where’s Jessie?”

“Jessie’s dead.”

Emil didn’t ask when and how it had happened. He didn’t want to know. But he remembered the times when he had been mean and impatient with Jessie, when he had smacked him and even once kicked him, although without shoes.

His father braked and he jumped off the bike. They were home.

The baby, Mary, had red hair like her mother, but it was as fine as silk and it stuck up in tufts from the top of her head like a bird’s feathers. She had just learned to laugh, and she liked Emil, she quite obviously liked him. She laughed, her mouth wet and toothless like a little old granny’s, when Emil held her by the arms and spun her round and round.

But Margaret was afraid when she saw that. She snatched Mary away. “Don’t treat the baby like that!”

Mary started to cry and Emil explained: “She liked it, honest. She was laughing just now.”

“Does it look like she’s laughing to you?”

Then Margaret took the baby to the bedroom, but Emil set off for the Hunters’.

“Is Joe home?”

“No, he went to Rita’s. He’s always over there.”

He should have guessed. Joe was never home. Or if he was, Rita was there too. And when Rita was there, Joe looked at Emil from the height of fifteen years, looking down on him. At the Hunters’ they said that Joe was “married,” and sometimes they said it mockingly, sometimes with good-natured amusement. Of course he knew what being ‘married’ meant, he thought it was something that adults were, not people like Joe. Rita did look like an adult, she had breasts, she had had them for many years. Back when they went to the same school, one of the teachers had said that Rita was mature for her age. He meant them of course, the breasts.

Emil climbed into the loft of the Hunters’ barn. There were breasts there too, tits. When he opened an old Playboy, the pictures of tits leaped straight out at him.

Looking at them didn’t amuse Emil any more. He took a pile of magazines as a pillow and lay on his back in the sawdust. He lay there in the half-light and stared at the roof-beams, between which the August sun leaked in stripes.

He had returned home, but it wasn’t his home. It wasn’t Brook Farm in Mogham, which he had been dreaming of for long months. His home had been the stone one, where Jessie had struggled against his chain in front of the porch and wagged his tail at all the passers-by, but especially at Emil. His home had been the farmhouse where his mother would turn the dials of the radio in the evenings to find some music that she liked, and once she had found it, would yell to the bedroom: “Adam, come and listen to this!” Now there was a new three piece suite and a stereo in the farmhouse, but the old radio, the kitchen table and the sofa-bed had disappeared. It was so elegant that Emil didn’t really know how to exist there. Even the air seemed to him to smell different from before. And though the doors and windows were in their old places, Emil could not be deceived: in his absence a miserable exchange had taken place, the old home had been lifted up and taken away into the unknown, but this pebble-dashed one had been brought to replace it. Even the door, although it looked unchanged, the broad farmhouse door with its knotholes, whose lines were so familiar, didn’t the door creak in a different way than before?

Sometimes, there in the city, when Emil had looked in the mirror, he had almost expected to see a little Brook Farm in the depths of his eyes, very small and grey with its slate roof and the green maple, the real Brook Farm and Jessie, dozing in the blue shade of the lilacs. And it was the only place where that real old home could be seen any more. He carried it with him everywhere, and it wasn’t very light, but he carried it like a man and he would carry it from now on.

“Someone who suffers from an incurable disease,” wasn’t that what the pelican had said? Was that what Emil was as well now?

Only now did he understand the immutability of loss, his first loss. But in return it gave him something, without which one could not be human: it gave him a past.

In the evening, Emil, sitting in his bedroom where there was no longer anything belonging to him except the iron bedstead, heard Margaret and his father talking in the living room. The door was closed and he couldn’t make out the words, only a murmuring which rose and fell. But there were tears and anger in that murmuring, and it continued into his dreams, grinding on and on.

In the morning Emil sat on the steps of the porch and peeled potatoes for Margaret. He was only wearing his swimming trunks and he had a towel draped around his neck, since he had been intending to go to the public beach to swim when Margaret called to him from the sink. When she thrust a dish of potatoes into his arms, saying curtly: “Could you peel these before you go to the beach,” he had thought about saying something nasty. But he couldn’t any more when Margaret turned suddenly back to him again: “It would be a great help to me, Emil.” And her hand, still wet from the dish water, brushed his overgrown fringe to one side.

When he sat there on the porch, he could still feel the woman’s hand on his forehead and hear his name the way the woman’s lips had shaped it. His face growing hot, he peeled the scabby potatoes and hoped that Margaret would speak to him again in that voice, so gently.
Emil.
Emil.
Emil.

But someone sat down heavily next to him and lit a cigarette. His father. “How’s your mother?”

Emil had been waiting for this question, but his father only asked it now. “Fine.”

That was what he said, although he had thought about saying a great deal more. That his mother was always tired and angry, that they were always short of money and that the city . . . What could his father understand about the city?

It was so still that the cigarette smoke rose straight upwards. Emil looked at his father out of the corner of his eyes. He saw the weather-beaten cheek and the pores on the bridge of his nose and the paler groove at the corner of his mouth, which straightened for a moment as his father sucked on the cigarette. He remembered that there had been a time when he leaned his head against that cheek and that veiny neck freely, without embarrassment. When he had felt the regular, sure beat of his father’s arteries in his own skin. He would never feel it again. He would never even want to feel it again.

“What’s it like in the laundry? Is it really bad?”

“I haven’t been.”

“Hasn’t your mother told you?”

“No.”

His father dropped the cigarette butt onto the sand and ground at it with the tip of his boot. Almost all the potatoes were now peeled.

“Well, have you found some new friends yet?”

“I’ve got one.”

That one was the pelican, Papageno, Mr. Henderson. He supposed he could be called a friend.

“That’s good, you have to meet people.”

But the pelican wasn’t a person. Emil suddenly missed his wise yellow eyes, his peacock dressing-gown and his huge beak.

Emil stood up. He was ready.

“I was going to go for a swim.”

His father practically beamed.

“Off you go then, don’t let me stop you. This weather won’t last much longer now.” But before Emil had had time to take the potatoes to the kitchen, his father’s voice stopped him again.

“Emil?”

“What?”

“Aren’t you bored here? What with Joe being so busy with his own life, and anyway there’s been so many . . . changes. With Jessie going and dying and all.”

Emil’s back was towards his father and his voice was steady.

“I’m not bored.”

“That’s good,” his father said. “Well, I’m really pleased.”

“Yes,” said Emil. “I’d better go to the river.”

He walked along the dirt road at a rapid pace, his towel over his shoulder. The ears of the Hunters’ barley hung down heavily, he picked one and rubbed it in his palm. They were ripe, next week they would be harvested.

But by then he would be in the city.

The White Screen

“Ah, you’ve come back.” The pelican opened the door with a smile. “Welcome back to the city. Are you better?”

“I wasn’t ill.”

“Perhaps I am remembering wrong, I beg your pardon.” He was his old self, as polite as ever. And Emil was pleased to see his dressing-gown, the one that was decorated with peacocks, and which made its wearer as bright as a peacock too.

Emil sat in the armchair and opened his satchel to get the primer out. But the bird raised his hand to stop him.

“We don’t need that any more. While you have been in your beloved Mogham I have learned to read fluently without assistance. The lessons are over.” As a demonstration, the pelican took a book from the bookshelf and opened it. They must have been Mrs. Greatorex’s books, since the pelican could hardly have had the money for such a library.

He read:

“ ‘—come on, kitten. Let’s go home.’

“The girl spun around angrily. ‘Do you mean to water those damn begonias again?’ she yelled.

“ ‘But kitten . . . ’

“ ‘Get your hands off me,’ cried the girl and threw the remains of her drink into the man’s face. There was only a teaspoonful of cocktail and two pieces of ice.

“ ‘For God’s sake, little one. I’m your man,’ the man cried, drying his face with a handkerchief. ‘Don’t you understand? Your man.’

“The girl burst into sobs and threw herself into the man’s arms. I stepped past them and left. All cocktail parties are the same, including the dialogue.’ ”

“A cocktail is some kind of alcohol, then,” the bird said thoughtfully.

“I suppose so.”

“I must try it some time. They say that it makes you happy. Have you tried it?”

“Not spirits, but I’ve had wine. I had a sip once at Christmas.”

“Did you become happy?”

“I was already happy. I just thought it was bitter.”

“I suspect I have been lied to. This girl, as well, in this book . . . Was she supposed to be happy? No, she was angry and wild. And tearful. But how was it? It went well, did it not?”

Emil had to admit that it did. He closed his satchel again and started to leave, feeling dispirited. He was no longer needed here.

“Don’t you want some tea? Don’t you want to hear what I have been doing during your absence?” the bird exclaimed unhappily.

“Of course I do!”

That was exactly what Emil wanted, and, relieved, he sank back into Mrs. Greatorex’s armchair. The pelican disappeared into the kitchen to arrange the tea-tray.

As he was pouring the tea into the cups, the bird remarked: “I must say, the other day during my evening stroll I found myself in a strange place. I joined a certain queue, just for the sake of it, and for that pleasure I had to give away a whole five pounds.

“After that I was let into a dark hall, which was full of chairs just like at the opera. And people sat side by side there too, facing in the same direction. But there was a white screen on the wall, and a jet of light was directed towards it over the top of people’s heads. Other things came with the light, sounds and human forms. The screen turned into a window, from which one could see a great distance and all sorts of things. It was like the opera, but nevertheless it was not the opera.

“We sat in the dark, but we looked into a bright room. There was a man and a beautiful woman, who were talking together in a completely different way from how I have heard people talking.

“The woman was holding a long cigarette holder in her hand and was resting on some kind of sofa.

“ ‘Edward,’ she said languidly, ‘you have betrayed me, you bastard.’

“ ‘That’s not true,’ the man denied. ‘Don’t believe what poisoned tongues tell you.’

“ ‘Are you so bold as to claim that this isn’t your handwriting?’

“And the woman, with a haughty expression, threw some kind of paper in front of the man.

“ ‘A mistake! A misunderstanding!’ whined the man. ‘I have become the victim of a conspiracy.’