The Rabbit Back Literature Society (4 page)

She had walked this same route thousands of times, the first time when she was six years old, when she first started going to the library. When she returned to Rabbit Back to be a substitute teacher, she had ridden her bike to the school one Monday morning and before she knew it the breeze had wiped away thirteen years of her life.

She felt herself worrying whether she’d got her mathematics homework done and whether Johanna Rantakumpu would like her today and wondering if they would have P.E. inside and she would have to listen to Salli Mäkinen’s taunts about her too small breasts and too fat thighs, and wondered whether she and the other girls would go after school to walk up and down in front of Laura White’s house again, hoping that the miracle would happen and the authoress would see them and
open her office window and invite them in for juice like she’d done with Aliisan Niemennokka two years ago, and maybe she would read to them like she had to her, from the Creatureville book she was writing, and who knows, maybe she would invite one of them to be the tenth member of the Society.

Then the uphill climb had eaten up her speed and the
passing
years had returned and she remembered that she was just a dreamy substitute teacher with defective ovaries and gracefully curved lips.

For a few seconds she was deeply sad. Then she felt relieved, and laughed so hard that she ran into the ditch.

Ella stopped the Triumph in front of the pharmacy. Her mother got out of the car and ran to fetch her father’s prescription. Ella glanced at his profile.

He was still quiet. The day was bleak and rainy, the bank and the shops were looming grey bulks in the drizzling wet. Umbrellas glided back and forth.

Ella looked at her father, who seemed to be waking from a dream. She noticed a figure opening a jammed umbrella in front of the car.

The woman in the rain looked small and slim, which slightly surprised Ella—she had imagined Laura White to be bigger, more imposing somehow.

The raindrops dampened and darkened White’s pale summer dress, but she finally got the umbrella open and walked away.

It crossed Ella’s mind that she could have offered the greatest children’s author she would ever know a ride. But the moment passed and White disappeared into the rain.

Her father breathed heavily.

Her mother appeared in the rearview mirror and dived into the car. “Well, how is everything?” she said.

Then Paavo Emil Milana opened his mouth and spoke the first of two poems that gave his wife a terrible shock.

Ella’s mother poured some coffee into her cup. There was a plate of cinnamon rolls on the table that she’d baked to celebrate her husband’s homecoming. No one felt like eating them.

Ella’s father sat in his office looking out the window. Ella and her mother had led him there, and he sat in his chair like an obedient son. His cuts and bruises were healing quickly, but his skin still looked messy, like mischievous, heartless children had drawn on it, scribbled and smudged all over it.

“What’s got into him?” Ella’s mother said. “He’s never been much interested in reciting poetry. And now he decides to start.”

She pressed a slip of paper into Ella’s hand. “I wrote it down. You’re a language and literature teacher. Tell me who the author is.”

Ella shook her head. “It doesn’t sound familiar. But I can call someone and ask.”

And she did call, but Professor Korpimäki didn’t recognize the poem, either. “Where did you say you found it?” he asked in a friendly tone.

“My father recited it,” Ella said. “And since neither of us knew who the author was, I thought I would call you. Thanks anyway.”

The next night her father sat up in bed and recited another one. Ella’s mother handed her the paper at the breakfast table. It read:

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
many weeks later, when Paavo Emil Milana was dead and buried, that Ella Milana started to think about what Ingrid Katz had told her.

It was the author Ingrid Katz. You could tell because the author Ingrid Katz was more relaxed than the librarian Ingrid Katz, although she still had that something predatory about her.

“Laura White liked your story,” Ingrid had said.

They had been chatting politely for five minutes, talking about anything but the tainted books, or the theft, or why Ingrid had asked Ella to come back to the library. Ella nodded and tried to look interested, as she had been doing. She’d actually been thinking about Paavo Emil Milana’s current state.

She was also thinking that she had never been in the library after closing hours. It felt like she was up to something a bit perverse.

Ella’s right eye started to twitch.

They were sitting in the children’s section drinking coffee and eating yellow cake. The table was much too low and there were plush toy versions of Bobo Clickclack, the Odd Critter and the other Creatureville characters between them. Ella felt strange eating and drinking in the library. After all, there was a sign that said
ABSOLUTELY NO EATING OR DRINKING IN THE LIBRARY!

Ingrid Katz had a peculiar smile on her face. Ella looked past her. A short distance away, an exhibit of mythological sculptures was gathered as if for a night-time council.

“As you can guess, this caused a bit of a stir in the Rabbit Back Literature Society. Something like this, after such a long silence. Ms White first told Martti Winter and Martti told me. Martti should have been the one to tell you, but these days Martti is what he is. He doesn’t appear in public very often. It couldn’t have been more than ten years ago that you couldn’t go anywhere without running into him. But nowadays,
poof
, you never see or hear from him.” She shook her head sadly. “Except maybe at the Rabbit Market bakery. They have the best pastries in town, and do you know why? Because Martti Winter is a regular customer there! They make custom pastries for him, if you can believe that.”

Ella felt awkward. She wondered if Ingrid might be drunk, tried to smell it on her breath. All she could smell was liquorice and coffee.

Ingrid Katz wasn’t the most brilliant author in the Society, but Martti Winter was its undisputed star. His works had been translated into dozens of languages. He was one of those rare Finnish writers who had become rich from his writing. His works were popular with both critics and a large reading audience.

Unlike Martti Winter, Ingrid Katz wrote small books. Critics liked them well enough, but they never got much publicity. As far as Ella could remember, all of her books were young adult novels filled with people committing suicide and having
abortions
and losing their virginity and suffering alcohol poisoning while living with parents who fought constantly and were in all ways unbearable.

“So, since Martti wasn’t able to get in touch with you, the task fell to me,” Ingrid said with a sigh. “But that’s all right. You and I know each other, after all, because of that incident the other day.”

She smiled jovially. “Well, what do you say?” she asked.

“About what?” Ella said. She was finding it hard to concentrate.

“About what we’ve been talking about!” Katz said. “About being the next to receive an honour that hasn’t been bestowed on anyone in a very long time. And not because Ms White wasn’t looking for new talent. I haven’t seen her terribly recently, but I know that she reads the
Rabbit Tracks
literary supplement regularly. And she has her own portfolio there at your school.”

“The Laura White file,” Ella said.

Ingrid Katz nodded. “To be honest, I found your story… what was it called?”

“‘The Skeleton Sat in the Cave Silently Smoking Cigarettes’,” Ella said.

“Yes. Well, I didn’t see anything remarkable in it when I read it in the paper. It seemed to me like a typical bit of slick
lang-and
-lit-teacher’s prose. Very good, no doubt, for someone at your level of training, but not at all extraordinary. I just thought: Uh-huh. Next. But then I’m not the one who took nine
tentatively
promising children and trained them to be nine more or less successful authors, so what’s my opinion worth? If Laura White sees something in your story, then there’s something in it. And something in you. I can’t see it, but I believe in it.”

Ella was flustered. “This is all a little… I’m sorry, but could you spell out exactly what it is that you mean?” she said,
smiling
apologetically.

Ingrid Katz looked more serious and put her coffee cup back on the table.

“I’m talking about an offer,” she said. Her expression was inscrutable. “Laura White promises to make a writer out of you, if you wish to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society.”

S
ITTING IN THE BATHROOM
after the funeral, Ella Milana remembered how her father had once read aloud to her from a Creatureville book when she was a child. It was a book Santa Claus had brought a couple of days before.

She remembered her father’s weight on the edge of her bed, his soft voice painting pictures in her mind. She remembered how she had kept her eyes closed. She had a vivid memory of the going-to-sleep passage in the book:

She remembered interrupting her father and asking him what the part about Emperor Rat meant and how they would keep him away, since everyone in Creatureville was so afraid of him.

Her question was followed by such a long silence that she thought he must have tiptoed out of the room. But he
hadn’t—when she opened her eyes, he was still sitting there. He was pondering her question seriously—with such fierce concentration, in fact, that she started to feel afraid and
regretted
that she’d asked it.

“It seems to me,” her father finally said with a sigh, “that Emperor Rat is one of those things that we’re supposed to forget about. He’ll come if he’s going to come, but we shouldn’t start dwelling on it, and we certainly can’t start actively expecting it to happen.”

Autumn seeped into the grass, plants and trees and gushed from the treetops up into the sky to cover the landscape.

Ella and her mother hunkered indoors out of the rain. The house felt grey and huddled tight. It was colder than usual for this time of year. Neither of them felt like lighting the old tile stove that they used to supplement the electric heat.

Ella told her mother about the memory that had come to her so suddenly. Her mother was watching a television show called
The Last Sixty Years of Our Lives
. Without turning her head, she told Ella she had remembered it wrong: “As far as I know your father never read aloud to you. It must have been me.”

When the show was over, her mother started writing a
shopping
list for the next day, which was a Monday. Monday had always been the family shopping day. Her mother always said that writing shopping and to-do lists made it possible to keep things under control that would otherwise have weighed on her mind.

Ella sat next to her. There were crumbs and coffee stains on the kitchen table. Ella was tired. She had been up late trying to grade papers, but nothing had come of it. She was tired. Two hours earlier she had started to listen to her own breathing,
and then her mother’s breathing, and now she couldn’t stop no matter how she tried.

The air rasped in through her mother’s nostrils and flowed through her windpipes into her lungs, then came back out again with a weary puff and a drawn-out wheeze that had a faint rattle in it. Now and then she sort of wolfed all the air in at once and snorted it out so quickly that there was no way her lungs had any time to absorb the oxygen into her bloodstream.

Breathing was somewhat complicated when you really thought about it. Ella wondered whether people die sometimes from starting to think too much about things that you’re not supposed to pay any attention to, like breathing.

She looked at her mother’s shopping list and forgot her ponderings for a moment.

Her mother looked at her intently, her eyes dry.

“Might as well get everything taken care of,” she said, and rapped her knuckles on the table. She was sitting up very straight
in her chair, but her neck was bent backward somewhat, her head tilted feebly to one side. “Let’s go to the florist, too. I’m sure Kuutti knows how to handle these cemetery sorts of things. You’ll never hear a word of complaint about Kuutti’s Flowers. Satisfied customers, living or dead. By the way, do you want to be next to your father and me at the cemetery? I need to know so I can order the right size headstone.”

Ella didn’t answer.

“I’m not trying to force you into the same grave,” her mother said soothingly. “I was just thinking that if we’re going to be taking care of these sorts of things I might as well ask you about it so that you wouldn’t complain about it later—tell people you hadn’t even been invited to share a plot with your family. I’m trying to take everything into account, including you, now that you’ve moved back home and everything.”

“Thanks, Mum,” Ella said. “That’s very thoughtful.”

“And there are money matters to think about,” her mother said in a hurt voice. “You’ll save a pretty penny if we put you under the same stone as the rest of your family. It may not feel like a pressing issue to you now, but you ought to plan ahead.”

“What would you think if I wasn’t buried in the same plot as you and Dad?”

Her mother looked at her sharply, then nodded, hers eyes wet now. “That’s that, then,” she said, and scribbled something on her shopping list. “We’ll just buy a headstone for two. You can look for your own plot and choose all the features you want to buy.”

The next night Ella Milana dreamed about the library.

The library floor was covered with grass. Ella was hurrying
between the stacks looking for something. She stopped at the M shelf. There wasn’t a single book with her name on it.

She burst into tears. She’d never felt so terribly sad.

“Look on the E shelf,” someone whispered from above. “But if you see Dostoevsky, please don’t tell him I’m here. I had a ritual burning of his clothes, because they were cancerous, and he’s quite cross with me. He also accused me of lying, and what’s more, he’s right.”

Ella looked up and saw a long-necked cat sitting on top of the shelf. Much higher up there were bright-winged fairies hovering, guarding the library.

“Be careful not to step on those,” the cat said, looking down at something. “You don’t want to make them angry.”

Ella looked down at her feet and saw small, shadowy shapes scuttling here and there.

She walked forward carefully so she wouldn’t step on anyone and, following the cat’s advice, found a row of books under E written by Ella Amanda Milana.

She ran her fingers excitedly along the spines of the books, greedily reading the titles of the novels. They were enigmatic, fascinating, brilliant titles. Some were just one word, others were extremely long. She sobbed with happiness.

The cat appeared on the top shelf again.

“Hurry!” it hissed. “The gates are open. Listen! Oh, listen! Listen to that rumble, that thundering clatter. They’re coming. And everything, everything’s still left undone!”

Ella plucked one of the books from the shelf and wondered at its weight. The cat laughed.

“Heavy as a stone, isn’t it? But they make the pages out of crushed stones, of course. Hey, why don’t you open it?”

Ella opened the book and was horrified to see that the pages were empty. She took down another book, and another.

“They’re all empty,” the cat said tauntingly. “You’d better hurry up. I’d start writing if I were you. Do you want to know how to write novels? I’ll tell you the secret: start on page one and keep going, in order, until you come to the last page. Then stop.”

“Just write! What will I write with?” Ella shouted. “I don’t have a pen! All my pens are in my pocket and I’m not wearing any clothes!”

It was true—she wasn’t wearing anything but socks, and even they were mismatched.

The cat scoffed. “Everybody comes to the library naked. That’s why they come here—to dress themselves in books. And if you don’t have a pen, maybe you can ask him.”

The cat cast a dread glance over Ella’s shoulder. Ella realized that there was someone standing behind her. Breathing down her neck. The breather was having difficulty staying in rhythm.

Ella noticed a book on the shelf titled
A Guide to Smooth Breathing
. It looked as if she had written it.

She picked up the book and tried to turn around, but she couldn’t move. It was too cold. Someone or something had put its cold hand against her skin. The stinging cold on her back seeped through to her internal organs. It hurt.

The cat meowed and leaped out of sight. Snow started to fall.

Torrential rain began on the first of October and lasted for three and a half weeks. The school parking lot turned into a little lake where frogs splashed. Children flocked around the parking lot shrieking something about a water sprite and a long-lost boot and ran around splashing in the water.

Ella Milana didn’t want to take time off from work. She drove to the school every morning in her late father’s borrowed Triumph, walked into the teacher’s lounge in her father’s boots, changed into her own shoes, taught her classes, and went home, which was now partly hers, apparently—that’s what she’d been told.

Her mother focused on small daily chores and melted into tears now and then.

Ella didn’t cry, but her thoughts tortured her. She was
constantly
aware that while the rest of the world went about its business, her father, Paavo Emil Milana, was lying in a hole in the ground not half a kilometre from the school. There must be beetles and millipedes wriggling into his ears and mouth and nostrils all the time. She was particularly tortured by the thought that basically anyone at all could dig him up and drag him someplace, prop him in his seat in the coffee shop.

How strange to leave a member of your family lying in a shallow hole and go on with your daily activities!

One morning in the middle of a grammar lesson, in the middle of a sentence, Ella started thinking: if a person has a soul, was her father’s soul gradually escaping, like air out of a leaky tire? She didn’t particularly believe in the soul or in God, but the thought kept coming back to worry her.

She was offered condolences in the teachers’ lounge. Her students didn’t offer condolences; they were just still, silent, and troubled. When Ella tried to lighten the mood, it only made the situation worse.

“What’s the matter?” she shouted, unable to resist. “Did somebody die?”

The principal asked her to come and talk to him.

“Listen, students are afraid to come to your class. And it’s
understandable. Death is a serious thing for young people, and when their teacher starts using gallows humour about her own father’s death, it’s going to upset some of them. I think it would be best for you to be more frank with them in your next class, and tell them you’re sorry. That way we can keep this unfortunate complaint off your record.”

The next day Ella Milana taught a class the nature of which became clear to her only as she picked up the chalk and started writing on the blackboard. Afterwards she admitted that it might have been an overreaction, but she never did regret it.

She wrote a sentence, turned back towards the class, smiled, and said:

“Let’s have a surprise quiz. Please diagram this sentence and identify the parts of speech. You have ten minutes.”

The sentence was:
OUR TEACHER’S FATHER LIES DEAD IN A HOLE THAT WAS DUG IN THE GRAVEYARD HALF A KILOMETRE FROM THE SCHOOL AND THERE ARE BEETLES LIVING IN HIS EARS.

After class Ella went to tell the principal that she was going to the doctor because she wasn’t feeling well. She mentioned in passing that she’d been invited to join the Rabbit Back Literature Society as a full member.

The principal glanced blankly at the “Laura White File” and nodded to indicate that he’d understood.

Ella Milana’s substitute position was supposed to last until December. She explained to the doctor that she was suffering from depression, forgetfulness, and bouts of crying. The doctor wrote a prescription and gave her a sick leave slip for the rest of her contract.

She wadded up the prescription and shoved it in the Triumph’s ashtray.