Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (99 page)

I saw other faces that were so attractive that I got stuck staring at them, spell-bound for several minutes. Especially one little boy (or possibly a girl; sex is difficult to deduce from these young children solely based on a facial picture), the second to last child on page 613, radiated unique charm, vitality and precocious wisdom. Staring at that face, I felt something new—or maybe more accurately a feeling familiar from early youth—something akin to love, an agonizingly painful longing. But my attention was caught by the fact that not one of the children smiled; they were somewhat expressionless or on their faces rested in a kind of precocious baseline-seriousness. Despite the great deviations, all the children, even the oddest and ugliest, resembled to some extent each other (the term “family-resemblance” surfaced in my mind), and in all of them, anyway, there was something incredibly familiar. This familiarity perhaps distressed me the most, like the distress of a word waiting on the tip of the tongue that never gets out.

What sort of children were they actually? Whose children? The pictures looked like passport holograms: the kids were shot directly from the front and everyone (except of course the blind one and eyeless) looked directly into the camera. Their background was just a white sky or maybe a curtain, I couldn’t tell. They also looked naked, though in the pictures only a bit of bare, delicate shoulders showed. Why did these children feel so incredibly familiar to me? Every page contained at least a hundred holograms, but after each page I became more and more certain that I must have in some place seen the young people in the pictures. But how could that be possible? I hadn’t met such a huge number of kids in my entire life.

The flurry of thousands of children’s faces numbed me, but on one page I suddenly stopped. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was a childhood picture of my own daughter, Aava. There was no doubt about it: in the picture was Aava. How could I not recognize her pure blue eyes, those that even in that age bore a quizzical gaze, and the fine arch of her brows? But I had never seen such a picture of my daughter.

– Where did you get this picture? I harshly asked. – Who has taken it?

– But no one took it, he replied, seeming confused. No, no one did. It’s a fully synthetic and automatically developed hologram.

– How? I asked.

– Based on your genetic map of course. Does this child then really exist?

– Most certainly and really she does exist.

The man leaned from the pool’s thin rim to peek at the book. Because I had to hold it up with both hands, I couldn’t point at the picture with my finger. He followed my gaze and pointed correctly at my daughter’s picture with his own forefinger. I couldn’t help noticing that on his finger gleamed a gaudy ring. He must have progressed in his career commendably.

– This child? he asked.

– The very child! That’s Aava, my own daughter, now sixteen.

I must have looked not only appalled but also angry. I was overcome by dizziness and the sense of falling though the brine supported me and the book as loyally as before. That sensation was caused by the surprise brought by a new certainty. Finally and at last I understood, knew with absolute certainty, why these children looked so familiar: because they all resembled me. My mouth let out a kind of grunt before I managed to say:

– Are all these children, surely they are not, say it out loud, are they my children?

– But is it true that this is new to you? I thought that you understood, that this topic was familiar to you already, he said.

How peculiar and kind of alarming that I hadn’t at first understood so obvious a thing!

– Of course all the kids in this catalogue are yours and madam ex-spouse’s children, the man continued. – Potential children, I mean. In the book series are presented—and furthermore in particularly high quality, delightful holograms—all the children that you did or could have had with your spouse. It’s on sale now, the whole book series, imagine that. This sort of opportunity won’t come again. Of course as a whole it won’t fit into anyone’s home library, but you can pick how many parts you want. We print them according to your wishes. You can read the rest online, almost at the same price.

– Take the book away, I said, now downright horrified, and handed over the tome. – I have one child, and that is enough. Besides, my spouse and I have lived apart for a long time. An addition to the family is no longer realistic in any way, not even when it comes to our ages and fertility.

– But that isn’t relevant here in any sense, he argued, standing steadfastly there at the mouth of my tank. He didn’t move a muscle to take the book back. – Although it’s still very interesting to know what all our theoretical children would be like.

– But thirty-two trillion pages! I said deep in thought as I still supported the heavy book. – I couldn’t possibly have the time or energy to wade through the whole tome, not even if I had still sixty and not twenty or so years left to live. And besides, there are other women in addition to my wife, those with whom I could have conceived children . . . And would have wanted to, I added in my mind.

Of course, as I said it, I remembered above all else—but not only—Vera. The rare moments of happiness returned to my mind as if in a hurry and falling over each other: meeting at the gas station, hotel room number 105 in Budapest, a madam at the kebab grill, hasty intercourse at the tiny cave, the girls’ gymnastic teacher, the girl in the high school whose name I had already forgot, but whose gentle brush of fingers I never would.

Although the book was heavy, I still almost fell into the entertaining bustle of memories that started to deepen into dreams when the sales representative’s penetrating voice jerked me back to full wakefulness.

– A-ha! Apparently a new hope had awaked in the man. – Our publishing house can also map the shared offspring of you and the other women. He got excited. – As soon as you give me their names and social security numbers.

– That wouldn’t even cross my mind, I snapped, already angry. – How can you even suggest that! Take away your horrendous book!

– As you wish, he said, growing cold. – But remember, of course, that this offer was unique and won’t be repeated.

At last he bowed and lifted from my hands the heavy tome. Before the man left with his book, he cast me a glance that seemed to contain both pity and disdain. I had apparently gotten rid of him, but his visit left many questions unsolved. I could feel the weight of the book still in my hands, its after-images wandered behind my closed lids, and when I opened my eyes, the tank’s walls showed reflections of bright faces like fresh flowers that had recently bloomed. I should have inquired what company was behind that huge enterprise, how profitable it was, and what sort of technology enabled such insanity. I wasn’t aware that such technology was even in development. Maybe that was due to the fact that I had lived in my tank for so long already and had followed rather lazily the latest developments in information and gene technology. Besides, the legal side of it all puzzled me. How was it possible that some company had managed to acquire both my and my spouse’s perfect gene map? Weren’t a citizen’s gene maps the property of the Health Department?

Besides, I hadn’t thought to ask one very essential question: Would it be possible that I could have chosen what sort of child I would conceive if I had still wanted to conceive children? Had we progressed to that level already while I’d been floating in brine? Or at least, what sort of child I would never conceive? And here I thought specifically of the hydrocephalic child, the grasshopper child, the faceless child, and the one whose face the mushroom-shaped tumor had claimed. I thought, if I was given the opportunity to choose now, would I try to win my wife back just to have the joy of facing the adorable child’s face from page 613 that still gleamed before me serious and clear in the damp dimness of my tank.

Those and the thousands of other nameless faces, also the faceless one, followed me to sleep. When I woke up, I did remember again that no one bore those kinds of faces. Those faces didn’t exist, those children, mine and my ex-wife’s all possible—of course only theoretically possible—heirs hadn’t been born to this world apart from one and would never be born. But I continued to think of my ghost descendants in their multitudes. I had already started to regret that I hadn’t agreed to order the tome or at least the very part of the book series that I had just seen. I felt tempted to show the pictures also to Beta. She should definitely see the book. I was kind of both pleased and horrified by the thought that there could be as many or even more heirs as there were individual people in the whole of humankind. They could inhabit many planets, those kids, the sisters and their brothers. What did it matter that they would never be born, that it was both in practice and theory an impossible thought? Some of them would have been born as psychopaths or while growing up slid into bad ways, embezzled, raped, murdered. Or the others might have maybe made the world a little bit more tolerable place merely by virtue of existing.

All the children in the catalog were of the same age, about eighteen months old. That is an important age. A mysterious age. They have just passed their baby year. They have already assumed the basics of humanity, but they can yet become anything: robots, saints, metamaattis. And not only human, for if a wolf were to take them into its herd, they would become wolves, if a lamb, lambs, and soon they’d forget the basis of human language they had learned.

Who are they really, the descendants, all our children and our blind, selfish love, the endless longing of genes to their similarity, continuity, and much further: to infinity? A child, who is born, is only seemingly something new, but in reality he is woven from past. A child is the combination of his ancestral fathers and mothers, a synthesis of those who disappeared, knowledge shipped from far away turned flesh.

I thought of the catalog’s ghost children and felt pride. I was still their father, the father of them all, even if only a theoretical one. The thought pleased me, though these children didn’t exist—apart from my daughter—and would never exist. I loved them all and didn’t know, wasn’t certain, if I should apologize for the unborn or be happy for them.

Filemon or the Wooden Man

A young man who could barely move was led into my tank. Straightaway, one could see what caused it: his feet were wider than flippers and so bumpy that they resembled more the root balls of trees than normal human feet. He didn’t have shoes, which wasn’t strange, because one couldn’t have pulled any sort of shoes over those feet, not even felt boots. The skin of his hands couldn’t be called skin because it was rough, dark, and sheeted like tree bark and his fingers had stiffened apart so that they stuck out like the branches of a November tree. His hair greened, his lips were akin to cork, and his face grew fungus-like bumps.

– You must see yourself, he said, pronouncing the words with effort, as hollowly as if they truly rose from the depths of a thick trunk, what’s happening to me. I’m turning into a tree.

I had been resting in a pleasant state of languor when he stepped in, but now I stirred agonizingly awake.

– Of such I’ve never heard of this before, I said, aghast. – What do the doctors say? Is it painful?

– That the disease is rare and incurable, he replied. – But I feel no pain, just the opposite, all sensation is disappearing from my skin or actually turning into some other sense, because my skin is hardening into bark. I’m becoming an oak. I hope now that I can without bitterness say my farewells to humanity and humankind. I believe that soon I will get to root, grow, and hum as a real tree. At the moment I still travel with a circus, and I’m presented for a fee to spectators who fall silent from horror or shout from disgust. But when the spring comes, I will go into a forest and find a suitable forest meadow where I can root in peace and get accustomed to my new life.

He spoke very solemnly and reassuringly. But the incident wasn’t at all unique. How could I not have remembered Filemon up front, him who, too, turned into an oak, Baukis, who turned into a linden, and Dafne, who became a bay tree?

– What would you say to such a creature? the man asked.

I searched for the right words, and soon I felt as if I had indeed found them. I started speaking copiously as if falling into a trance.

– I would say that you are presented now with a magnificent opportunity. Everyone changes, but you change differently from anyone else. Soon you will stop breathing but will start photosynthesizing. Your blood will change into sap and chlorophyll. When your metamorphosis is complete and over, you will be the king of trees and your leaves will be the sign of victory. You will be the allegory for fertility, wisdom, and good luck. In addition to your soon-to-be-over human life, you may continue in the wonderful shape of an oak for perhaps even a millennium. Your body will be home for millions of organisms; birds will nest in you and sing in your crown. Longhorn beetles’ tunnels will crisscross hidden in your bark. Squirrels will swish their tails, they will play tag in the spring sunshine when sap starts to circulate under your bark. You will bloom into buds late, but anemones and cowslips and corydalis will flower at your roots. At the end of September, your acorns will ripen and drop to ground. Jaybirds and spotted nutcrackers will spread your seed. You will offer shade and protection. You will hum like the organs and grow all your age. You will be part of the plant kingdom, earth’s breathing, its most beautiful mystery. From air and sunlight, you will transfer life to this star. Only because of you and your kind, it has been possible for a man to be born on earth, and maybe you will flourish still when there is no more humankind. You can go neither to south nor north, not to east or west, but still you move and your direction is the best: at the same time deep and high, into earth’s darkness and sky’s light.

It seemed to me as if the man had become moved by my words. Before he left, he extended over the pool’s rim his dried and hard thorn fingers, which I squeezed. I noticed that they were full of buds.