The Rabbit Back Literature Society (22 page)

T
HERE WAS A LONG SILENCE
.

Ella thought the call had been cut off. Then Martti Winter spoke.

“Hey, I have a cherry cake here. And coffee. Come and see me. But you should go home before ten, for both our sakes. The Game isn’t good for us. We’ll just drink some coffee and talk. Or we could watch
Balanced Accounts
. It’s a good show. I have the whole series on disc.”

Ella hung up, went into the living room and turned on the television.

For the next several days Ella marvelled at the interesting shows on TV these days. She particularly enjoyed two Finnish series,
The Last Sixty Years of Our Lives,
and the show Winter had recommended,
Balanced Accounts
, to which she quickly developed an addiction.

As she was taking out the garbage one grey morning, Ella found footprints in the snow. Someone, probably Aura Jokinen, had been snooping around the house. Whoever it was hadn’t been able to climb the ladder to Ella’s room, however, because Ella had removed the ladder a few days earlier. She had in fact arranged things so that she could have some time to strategize before she had to submit to playing The Game again.

In the evenings she locked the doors and closed the drapes, and didn’t answer the telephone for any caller but her professor or her mother. During the day she went to cafés, flea markets, art
exhibits, kiosks and shops. She sought out conversations with the ordinary people of Rabbit Back that she met, especially if they were old enough to remember things that had happened thirty years ago. Almost all the local people were willing to talk about things, provided the conversation was started in the right way.

“That Petri Schäfer, the director of
Balanced Accounts,
is such a trickster…”

Ella was able to gather some new anecdotes about the Society and about Laura White, which would make her professor happy.

She asked people nonchalantly whether they happened to remember a boy named Oskar Södergran, from the early 1970s. No one did. There were no Södergrans living in Rabbit Back now, and no one remembered anyone by that name ever having lived there.

Ella stopped to tie her shoe near a round wooden booth in the centre of town that served as a board for posting announcements. A sign posted by the Rabbit Back Writers’ Association read:

The dates and times were at the bottom. Two lectures had already taken place. The last one was that evening.

When she got home, Ella programmed her video player to record the next episode of
Balanced Accounts
and a couple of other shows and spent a few hours writing down the anecdotes she’d gathered.

That evening she drove to the school in the Triumph, went up to the third floor and stepped into the auditorium, which was buzzing with voices. She would have sat in the back, but the only remaining empty seats were in the front row. The room was stuffy. Someone was explaining to an acquaintance that mould had been found at the school, and the library had been declared off limits, and if they couldn’t fix it the whole school would have to be demolished.

Toivo Holm strode onto the stage, noticed Ella and nodded in greeting.

The talk was interesting. It was supposed to end at nine, but Holm kept talking. Ella felt uneasy and glanced around. If anyone else left she would follow in their wake. But Holm’s stories of television actors and plot changes were so colourful that no one seemed to mind that the talk was going overtime.

The audience stirred when Holm revealed that he was
working
on a Finnish version of a popular American series about the sex lives of young women. “Of course, I’ll have to study up on the subject extensively before I can write about it,” he said.

When the clock on the wall said ten, Toivo Holm hopped off the stage in the middle of a sentence, leaned towards Ella, put his lips to her ear and whispered a challenge.

E
LLA SPILLS FOR FOUR HOURS.

Toivo Holm is interested in her erotic dreams and fantasies and everything she’s ever done that could be called sexual, and she talks about them as the rules of The Game demand, until she’s left with her mouth hanging open like a netted fish. Holm looks closely at her and sees that she’s been scraped hollow, emptied out, and he declares himself satisfied with her answer.

Ella takes off the blindfold like she’s removing the bandage from a seeping wound. The light burns her eyes. She feels dizzy and nauseated.

“You spill well,” Holm says, lighting a cigarette. “I got a lot of useful material for the new series.”

They’re sitting upstairs at the Rabbit Bar. Holm has had the room reserved for four days. It’s a cramped little nook, the walls hung with dirty wallpaper. The Hakkarainen Hostel would have been more pleasant, but, as always, it’s full of Japanese tourists come to look for Laura White’s body and admire her home town.

“Shall we have another round right away, or would you like to go downstairs and have a beer?” Holm asks, rubbing his bristled head.

Ella tosses him the blindfold and he ties it over his eyes.

Holm fumbles for the ashtray, stubs out his cigarette and asks for her question.

Ella
had
planned a question for Toivo Holm—a strategic, pointed question about Oskar Södergran and the notebook. The game is, after all, supposed to be her tool, to be used for literary historical research, as she is constantly reminding herself.

But she knows that sometimes The Game starts to use the players.

She can’t help smiling and asks Holm to tell her about his most shameful sexual experience.

Holm flinches. His posture slightly shifts. He’s no longer relaxed and confident, but tense.

As he starts to speak, his voice is small and fearful.

“For a long time I thought of myself as a nice person. Empathetic, sensitive—soft, even. I’d actually been rejected a few times for being too nice. But six years ago

A
FTER SLEEPING
for three days, Ella was awakened by the telephone.

She immediately remembered how The Game had ended.

When she told Toivo Holm that she was satisfied with his answer, he collapsed and rolled out of his chair onto the floor, weeping. Ella ran out of the bar and drove home.

Now she was awake and her mother was on the phone explaining that she was having a lovely time at her sister’s house and asking how Ella was, and why she sounded so sleepy. She wasn’t sleeping in the middle of the day again, was she? Her mother was planning to extend her visit by months and might even end up living there.

“Emmi has such a big, empty house here now that the
children
have their own lives and families and Tauno’s gone, too. And this way you can work on your research in peace.”

Ella listened to her mother’s explanation and said that as far as she was concerned her mother could stay at Aunt Emmi’s house as long as she liked. Ella would be fine. She was a big girl.

A thought occurred to her. “Hey, Mum, does the name Oskar Södergran mean anything to you? A boy about twelve years old or maybe a little older, who used to spend time in Rabbit Back in the 1970s?”

“Hmm… let me think. The name is familiar for some reason… why don’t I ask Emmi? She lived in Hare Glen for a while with Tauno. Hold on.”

A moment later Emmi came to the phone. “Hello, Ella? Yeah, there was an old woman named Naakkala who lived for a while next door to us, or a little farther away. I think Stiina was her first name. Old as could be, but in the summers she went around on a bicycle and in the winters on a kicksled. And I think I remember that there was a little boy with long hair at her house sometimes. We didn’t really know them. Tauno didn’t like to get too involved with the neighbours. But he might have been old lady Naakkala’s grandson, her oldest son’s boy, from Helsinki—or somewhere in the south, anyway. He had the face of an angel, and I think his name might have been Oskar or Osku or something like that.”

Ella asked her Aunt Emmi if she remembered anything bad happening to the boy.

Emmi dithered for a moment and then remembered that maybe something nasty had happened to him. “Once when I was on my way to the post office, old lady Naakkala passed me on the way, crying. She babbled something about how Oskar wouldn’t be coming to Grandma’s house after all, that he was never coming again. He and his mother had been in a car accident. That’s all I remember. No, wait. There was one other thing. Your mother says she wants you to put an envelope in the mailbox. She says she left it on the spice rack or someplace. It’s an entry to win a year’s subscription to
Rabbit Tracks
.”

When Ella put down the phone she immediately forgot about the envelope, she was so relieved. Winter and the other Society members may have been thieving magpies and a disgrace to their profession, but at least they weren’t guilty of child murder.

Her mood improved. On Monday she called the rectory to ask about Stiina Naakkala’s church records. Pastor Karhunen,
who answered the phone, thought he remembered the woman. They agreed to meet at the rectory the following day at two.

Ella went into town early. She went to the flea market and then to Mother Snow’s Café, where she often went to eavesdrop on conversations and sometimes participate in them.

Although Mother Snow’s was almost in the centre of town, it was surrounded by a thick stand of trees criss-crossed with winding footpaths, which made it easy to lose your sense of direction.

The atmosphere in the café was unchanged. There were eleven tables in all. One of them was a table for one with a glass top, roped off between two posts. It was reserved for the exclusive use of Laura White. On the table was an old Creatureville book—a valuable first edition—watched over by both the proprietress and several stone Creatureville characters.

The other ten tables were larger and intended for customers. They were dedicated to the Rabbit Back Literature Society. Each table had the works of a member of the society on it—except for the tenth, which was empty. There was a sign on the wall that read:
READING IS NOT REQUIRED BUT IT IS RECOMMENDED.

Martti Winter’s table was the one closest to the pastry case. Aura Jokinen’s was usually occupied by a crowd of young people, sometimes by older sci-fi fans. Families with children made their way to Ingrid Katz’s table, which had a pile of children’s books on it and a high chair provided.

The tenth table was set aside for the Society’s tenth member, whom Rabbit Back had awaited for so long, with no inkling that the tenth member of the Society had died, his ideas stolen and published secretly.

When Ella, the new tenth member, appeared in the café, old Eleanoora shook her hand, led her to the tenth table, and lamented the fact that there was as yet nothing on it to read.

“But who knows, perhaps soon?” she said with a smile. “You know, I remember how you used to come here for ice cream on Sundays when you were a little girl. Every time you came you would look through those books and even then I thought to myself, I wonder if that girl’s going to be a writer. Birgit Ström always said, ‘Little Ella might just have what it takes if she ever gets the writing bug.’”

When Ella had come to the café after Laura White’s
disappearance
, Eleanoora had been quiet and serious, bringing her some coffee and a roll and whispering, “Ella Milana, the tenth table is still yours, and it still looks awfully empty.”

Ella sat at the bookless table as usual. She drank coffee and read the paper. Now and then she glanced around at the books on the other tables and pondered darkly about how many of them actually belonged to the tenth table, which actually belonged to Oskar Södergran.

The Helsinki paper had once again found some news about Laura White’s disappearance, “the tragic riddle of the century”. The full-page article discussed police speculation that when spring came and the snow melted, some random wanderer would find the authoress’s body, probably in some dell or hollow. The article also reported, however, that “local experts” said that in the past many others had disappeared into Rabbit Wood, never to be found.
What Rabbit Wood takes, Rabbit Wood keeps
. They also interviewed a man who had been part of the search on the night of the disappearance and nearly driven his snowmobile into a ravine.

The section at the bottom of the page was about the tourists arriving in Rabbit Back from all over the world. Dozens of White’s admirers had arrived over the winter, particularly from Japan and Germany. There was a picture of two Japanese young people standing at the edge of Rabbit Wood with snowshoes on their feet and packs on their backs. The caption read:
TWO BOYS FROM OSAKA INTEND TO FIND LAURA WHITE’S BODY
.

Ella had started to tire of the missing author. After all, she was collecting material about her life and works, and the disappearance had nothing to do with it.

She leafed ahead to the culture section. Aura Jokinen smiled at her from the page. The article said that Jokinen’s new novel had won a prestigious international sci-fi prize. The caption read:
MOTHER AND SCI-FI WRITER ARNE AHLQVIST SEES THINGS DIFFERENTLY.

Ella leafed through the paper and accidentally overheard the conversation of a small group at the Silja Saaristo table. A middle-aged man was turning Saaristo’s newest novel over in his hands, saying something about how confused the mystery was in the book, and that he had suddenly stopped sleeping well, how he’d been sleeping poorly for a long time.

A young woman asked if he was having bad dreams. He said, “I’m still only dreaming about that writer. I’m a grown man—I can handle a few nightmares—but my kids are having them, too, waking up the whole house screaming.”

An older woman took up the lament and said that she had thrown all of the Creatureville books out of her house in front of the children, to calm them down. “But then the little things had a dream that Laura White’s body crawled in the window
and put the books back on the shelf and started reading them again. I don’t know what to do.”

The man spoke in a voice flat with exhaustion. “And then there’s the constant Creatureville reruns and documentaries about Laura White you have to put up with. I don’t believe they’ll ever find her body, even if all of Japan comes to look for it. It’s going to lie in the woods and rot.”

The young woman said in an unnecessarily loud voice, “Laura White’s body isn’t anywhere in the woods. It’s sneaking around in our dreams.”

The group fell silent. Old Eleanoora had a coughing fit.

The silence continued.

The man coughed, got up and went to get more coffee for the women. The women started talking excitedly about the things they’d bought at the flea market.

Ella left the café. It was 1:40 in the afternoon. She stopped on the steps for a moment to button up her black coat and wrap the white scarf she’d bought at the flea market around her neck. She looked at the snowy trees that hid the school and the library. Magpies sat here and there in the shadowy limbs, watching the café.

The rectory was in the old parsonage. Ella was greeted by a small, frail man with a beard that protruded long and thin like a winter-killed creeping vine. He made small talk about the quantity of snow that had blown over the path, asked Ella to wipe her shoes on the mat and wondered how much more snow Our Heavenly Father would grant to Rabbit Back, with it already heaped so high that the rectory’s old building
superintendent
couldn’t fight it much longer.

Ella shook the pastor’s hand and they went into his office. “Please sit down, Miss.”

Pastor Karhunen said he hadn’t known old Stiina very well—no one had—but he had met her adult children at her funeral: Iiro, Eino, and Olavi.

“I have a lot of faults,” he said, “and the Lord in his mercy forgets them every evening, provided I bear them in mind. Remembering names, however, is one thing I’ve never had any problem with.”

He remembered Olavi Södergran being there with his wife Mirja. A stylish woman in a wheelchair. Her spine had been damaged in a car accident.

“They said that they’d lost their child in the same accident. They were a very impressive and attractive couple. Did I
mention
that Olavi Södergran was blind? He made a joke over coffee about the blind leading the crippled and she smiled at it—apparently his quip didn’t sting in the least.”

The pastor offered Ella a chocolate and smiled, thinking of Olavi Södergran’s humour.

“The author Laura White was at Stiina’s funeral, too, by the way. She came up and kindly shook hands with Olavi and the old woman’s other sons and said she had known Stiina a little through Oskar. I talked for a long time with Olavi and his wife about literature and the Lord’s mysterious ways. Beneath the humour I could see a certain kind of grief, the kind that can be a particularly hard blow to non-believers. I told them I could send them some passages from the Bible that would provide both beautiful literature and the comfort of God’s word, if they wanted me to.

“You’re a literary person. If you ask me, there are passages
in the Bible that a lover of literature has to appreciate, even if they have no interest in religious matters. The Book of Job, for example. A great mystery, and full of wonderful metaphors. None of this purple prose.”

He paused, gazing at her expectantly, and when she promised to make it her business to get to know the Bible on a literary level, he nodded with satisfaction and continued.

Although the Södergrans had said they were agnostic, they had given him their address so that he could send them some biblical selections.

He picked up a slip of paper from the table and handed it to her.

“You said you had some information for the Södergrans about their departed son? I don’t have their phone number, unfortunately, but here is their address. This is where they were living six years ago. They might very well still be there.”

That evening Ella wrote a letter to Olavi Södergran and his wife Mirja.

She started with polite greetings. She followed with an apology for the manner in which she was reminding them of a tragic incident in their past, but said she believed that what she had to tell them was the kind of information they would want to know, particularly if they were, as she had heard, great lovers of literature.

I am Ella Milana, the most recent and final member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society. I have recently learned that your son Oskar was a member of this same organization before his death. I have conducted some literary historical research within the Society and learned something that I think you, as Oskar’s parents, ought to know.

She tried to describe eloquently, without directly blaming anyone, how Oskar’s literary ideas lived on in the work of the Society members:

I’ve been told that the other children of the Society—those who are today the most important names in Finnish literature—had the opportunity, due to circumstances, to read Oskar’s notebook after his death, and that it was this very notebook that was largely the inspiration for their most significant literary output.

At the end of the letter she added her own contact
information
and her desire to meet them and exchange thoughts on their son Oskar and the time he had spent in the Rabbit Back Literature Society. She spent three hours polishing the wording of this request until she had it in a form that, though polite, sensitive and subtle, could not easily be declined.

When she’d finished the letter, she started looking for a stamp. She didn’t find one, but as she searched, an envelope fell off the spice rack—the letter her mother had asked her to post. The last unused stamp in the house was stuck to it. The letter was addressed to the offices of
Rabbit Tracks
. Ella used scissors to cut off the stamp and glued it to her letter to the Södergrans. Then she went out and dropped it in the nearest post box.

She felt a deep satisfaction, but she knew that it would quickly fade. Nevertheless, she let herself enjoy the knowledge that she had just put an important piece of the past in its rightful place. It was a small victory in the larger battle against disintegration.