IT CAME FROM THE NORTH

EDITED BY DESIRINA BOSKOVICH

Cheeky Frawg Books

Tallahassee, Florida

Copyright © 2013, Desirina Boskovich.

All stories are copyright to the individual writers as noted on the extended copyright page.

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Many thanks to Jukka Halme, Irma Hirsjärvi, Anne Leinonen, and Tero Yspetäjä.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Desirina Boskovich

Hairball by Carita Forsgren

The Horseshoe Nail by Mari Saario

Not Before Sundown (excerpt) by Johanna Sinisalo

Elegy for a Young Elk by Hannu Rajaniemi

White Threads by Anne Leinonen

The Laughing Doll by Marko Hautala

Delina by Maarit Verronen

Chronicles of a State by Olli Jalonen

Watcher by Leena Likitalo

The Border Incident by Tuomas Kilpi

Ospreys by Tiina Raevaara

The Garden by Jyrki Vainonen

The Gift Boy by Sari Peltoniemi

A Heart Clothed in Black an excerpt from Pereat Mundus: A Novel, Sort Of by Leena Krohn

Those Were the Days by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Acknowledgments

Extended Copyright Page

Introduction

Finland, a nation of 5.4 million people, is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. Three-quarters of the country’s land area remains blanketed in forests. And with 188,000 lakes, Finland’s lyrical nickname, “land of a thousand lakes,” actually turns out to be a serious understatement. For Finns, nature is always near: a great presence, uncanny and powerful. What’s more, a quarter of Finland’s territory lies above the Arctic Circle, making it one of the northernmost countries in the world. In Finland’s far north, there are weeks of midnight sun in summer, and weeks of endless dark in winter.

Of course, the winters are tough, but Finns have developed ways to cope. They have their electric saunas, their libraries, and their high-speed internet, not to mention a healthy appreciation of innovative architecture. And they are inveterate readers, with outstandingly high rates of national literacy. More than 13,000 books are published every year, both original Finnish and works in translation.

Perhaps surprisingly, Finnish as a written language is relatively new. It has existed since the sixteenth century, but did not come into prominence until the nineteenth. During this era (1835, to be exact), the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, was published for the first time. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot from a number of historical sources, the 22,795-verse poem explores many of the literary and mythical themes that are nearest and dearest to the hearts of Finns. It remains both much beloved and heavily influential; in a way, it served as the foundation of all Finnish literature to follow. Some twenty years later, Aleksis Kivi published what would be his only novel, Seven Brothers (1870). Seven Brothers was the first great novel to be published in Finnish, and is considered by some to be the greatest still. Earthy and humorous, it describes the escapades of seven brothers who temporarily flee society and earn a living from the land. The text also incorporates retellings of folk tales and legends; in Finnish literature, one can trace the fantastic back to the very beginning.

Today, Finnish literature is flourishing: a healthy and inventive scene with great interest in literary and crime fiction especially, and a robust appreciation for diversity and cultural exploration. Entering this scene is a new generation of writers who are introducing speculative and fantastic elements to the literary mainstream. They are working in the realist tradition, while opening the doors onto a wider, odder version of “real.” A weird new subgenre is emerging: a uniquely Finnish surrealism, whose rules are being written by many of the authors contained in this volume. A few of these authors have even received the Finlandia, Finland’s highest literary honor and most prestigious prize—a generous financial award administered by the Finnish Book Foundation.

Meanwhile, the market for more traditional speculative fiction—science fiction and fantasy—remains fairly small. While the hunger for young adult fantasy has taken hold as firmly in Finland as it has around the world, serious speculative fiction for adults comprises only a tiny share of local publishing. Yet, the Finnish fandom scene is active and devoted, producing numerous fanzines and organizing a much-loved convention (FinnCon) that is open to all comers. Portti (Gateway) is probably the most widely recognized of the speculative fiction magazines; this hefty, glossy-paged publication also sponsors a prestigious competition. Portti, along with its associated contests and prizes, offers Finnish speculative fiction writers one of their main avenues for discovery, publicity, and financial compensation. The Atorox Award is another highly regarded commendation, awarded annually to the best science fiction short story.

For It Came From the North, I have selected stories from both sides of this literary divide: those working in the realist tradition, and those drawing more heavily on influences from genre fiction. Every story depends in some way on the magical and surreal, the weird and uncanny. Some of these worlds are completely foreign to us, distant and strange, while others look more like our own, perhaps a little skewed. In these stories, “reality” has many gradations and gray areas.

For all the variety and diversity of these stories, there are certain themes and resonances that emerge throughout. One theme is the nature of time and space; science (and science fiction) suggests that these concepts are fuzzier, slipperier, and more malleable than we might think. Both Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s “Those Were the Days” and Anne Leinonen’s “White Threads” explore this idea, and the human desire to shape our own destinies, conventional conceptions of time and space aside.

There is also a dark, melancholy theme running through this collection. Many of the stories suggest the isolation of the individual, amidst the strangeness and shadows of society at large. They hint that the true uncanny may lie in the human heart. And the characters who inhabit these stories seem isolated, remote, at a loss to connect, often bewildered by their encounters with others. Marko Hautala’s “The Laughing Doll,” Leena Krohn’s “A Heart Clothed in Black,” Sari Peltoniemi’s “The Gift Boy,” and Maarit Verronen’s “Delina” fall into this category.

Perhaps in corollary to the theme described above, several stories also explore relationships that bridge the gap between the human and inhuman. By their very nature, these relationships are complicated and bittersweet (but maybe no more than any others). These stories include Carita Forsgren’s “Hairball,” Mari Saario’s “The Horseshoe Nail,” and Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown (Troll: A Love Story in the U.S.).

Several stories explore the political-as-personal: the negotiation of social order and its impact on the individual. I include among these Olli Jalonen’s satirical “Chronicles of a State,” Tuomas Kilpi’s whimsical “The Border Incident,” and even, in an odd way, Leena Likitalo’s surreal “Watcher.”

And finally, as befits storytelling from the land of a thousand lakes, the pieces in this collection are possessed with a healthy awe of the strangeness of nature. Tiina Raevaara’s “Ospreys,” Hannu Rajaniemi’s “Elegy for a Young Elk,” and Jyrki Vainonen’s “The Garden” all expand on this theme, as does, again, Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown.

Reading these stories—and many other wonderful works of Finnish speculative fiction that could not fit into this particular book—has been a richly rewarding experience for me. These stories have challenged my imagination and stretched my vision of our weird, wonderful world, and all the other weird worlds it holds.

Hairball

Carita Forsgren

Translated by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela

Carita Forsgren is a novelist, graphic designer, and university lecturer in new media, who lives in Tampere with her husband and three sons. Her science fiction and fantasy stories have won numerous awards in Finnish genre competitions, and her debut novel, Queen of Three Moons/Months, occupied the Finnish bestseller lists for three months when it was released in 2009. She’s since published three additional novels. The story to follow was inspired in part by Alison Maclean’s short film Kitchen Sink (1989). In “Hairball,” Forsgren explores the more absurd aspects of love, identity, and the clog in the shower drain . . .

That morning, something stank. I noticed a slight odor as soon as I woke up. In the kitchen, it mingled with the aroma of fresh coffee.

“What’s that smell?” I asked my roommate, Rosa. (I sometimes wondered why her parents had given their daughter the kind of name you give a cow. On the other hand, Rosa did remind me a bit of a cow, with her large eyes and long lashes, round belly, and breasts that hung like udders.)

Rosa sipped her coffee. She was already fully dressed, as usual, with her hair and makeup done, and ready to go.

“Check the bathroom. Then you’ll know.”

“The drain?”

Rosa nodded her head, finished her coffee, and got up as soon as I sat down.

“You get to clean it.”

“Why me?”

“Because it’s your long hair that’s clogging it,” Rosa said flatly and ruffled her own one-inch crop.

It looked like I’d have to skip my morning shower.

After finishing my coffee, I took a tentative step into the bathroom. I soon had to retreat and return with reinforcements—an old dish brush, a bottle of chemical toilet cleaner (the label claimed it was groundwater-friendly, but I had my doubts), rubber flip-flops, a flashlight, plastic bags, a plastic bucket, and a done-in toothbrush. The shower drain had been a bit clogged for weeks, but now the floor had flooded.

I took off my socks and rolled up the legs of my sweat pants, and put on my flip-flops and long yellow rubber gloves. I was all geared up for combat. The stench tried its best to chase me away, but in vain. I was determined to win the battle, even if it rose to the epic dimensions of the Iliad or the Kalevala. A radioactive sign was printed on the packaging of the rubber gloves, which presumably meant that they could even handle nuclear waste. I hoped they would be enough protection.

My first attempt to defeat the drain almost failed. I couldn’t even get the plastic grating off. I made several attempts, but then realized that the hair and other goo were going to be stubborn adversaries.

I took off my gear and went back to the kitchen. I opened the flatware drawer and picked out a blunt, fairly worn-out knife, which might have belonged to Rosa. Back in the bathroom, I crammed the knife deep between the gaps in the grating and was able to use it as a lever. The grating came up slowly, inch by inch. I could now see that the grating was firmly in the grip of a black four-inch-thick mass of gunk-encrusted hair. To unclog the drain, I would have to pull it all out. By now, the smell had become like another person in the room. I had an image of it dancing around me in a shiny seventies disco outfit and John Travolta hair.

After a moment’s consideration, I grabbed the long, black glop of hair with my atomic rubber gloves and began to pull. I expected it to give, but it was surprisingly tough. It wasn’t easy, but I finally managed to pull it up, further and further, out of the darkness of the drain toward daylight and air. More and more kept coming out. I expected it to become thinner and sparser, but it only seemed to grow thicker and denser. Could all of this really be my hair? Some other garbage floating in the drainpipe must have been caught up in it as well.

How much did I pull out before I was done? Several yards, or at least that’s how I felt. When I reached the end, I almost tumbled backwards onto the damp floor. All I needed to do now was to stuff the gunk inside a plastic bag and take it outside to the trashcan. It lay in a pile on the bathroom tiles, reminding me of road kill that had festered on the highway so long it was impossible to tell what it had once been.

I poked the lump carefully with the handle of the dish brush. I was startled to notice that it quivered at the touch. I poked it a second time. The lump shrank back. After a third poke, it bunched up into a round mass. I opened the duck-shaped bottle of toilet cleaner and began to pour the green liquid into the drain, making sure not to turn my back on my new visitor. I wondered what would happen if I poured some of the poison on the hairball. I decided not to try. God knows how it would have reacted.

When I had scrubbed the drain clean enough, I began to detach the last hairs that still joined the hairball to the drain grating. I thought that something might happen when I removed the last strand of hair, but I was wrong. I decided to make my move. I grabbed the hairball with both hands and stuffed it into a plastic bag, which I then closed with a tight knot. The hairball barely fit inside the bag.

As I was carrying the bag out to the garbage shed, it felt as though the contents of the bag were wriggling a little. By then, it was 9:30 a.m. In an hour, I had to be at a lecture. I went back inside, got dressed, and left. By the time I was on the bus, I barely remembered my morning efforts. People are good at blocking out all kinds of unpleasant memories. Self-deception is the sweetest deception of them all.

In the evening, Rosa and I were relaxing by watching some silly talent contest on TV, trying to forget that we’d ever had brain cells. The doorbell rang.

“You expecting someone?” Rosa asked.

“My friends call or text before they come,” I said.

That could only mean one thing. Rosa and I had a plan for this situation. I turned off the TV and Rosa threw a floral tablecloth and some books on it. I went to open the door.

But it wasn’t the television license inspector. It was the hair creature waiting outside the door. Or it didn’t exactly wait so much as it slipped silently inside, as if returning home. Technically, it was.

“Who was it?” Rosa called from the living room.

“Some practical joker,” I answered.

“With a stink bomb?” Rosa asked, sniffing the air.

I was afraid of what Rosa would say if she saw our guest, but it stole quickly into the bathroom through the half-open door. I couldn’t let Rosa see it.

I found the hairball crouching behind the washing machine. I could just barely make out its dark mass in the beam of the flashlight.

“Stay there,” I whispered to it, not giving a thought as to whether it understood speech or not. “I’ll get you something to eat as soon as Rosa’s gone to bed.”

I’d already gone to bed myself, when I remembered the hairball and my promise to it. I poured a drop of milk into a bowl and left it in front of the washing machine. If Rosa asked about the bowl in the morning, I’d say that I thought the machine was leaking.

A surprise awaited me in the morning. The hairball sat by the kitchen table, drinking the coffee Rosa had made. I’m not sure whether it could be called drinking, though. Its top end stretched into something like an elephant trunk, which it then dipped into the coffee and started sucking. Sure, it still reeked, but its aroma was less pungent than yesterday. Or was it just that I’d gotten used to it?

The hairball nodded to me, as though in greeting. Rosa noticed and asked, “So, you know something about that?”

I told Rosa the truth, because lying or holding back would probably have been useless at this point. Rosa let out a sigh.

“You planning to keep it?”

“It’s not exactly mine,” I said uneasily. The hairball seemed to be following our conversation.

“I guess it can stay,” Rosa said at length. “As long as it’s housetrained and sleeps in your room. And whatever it eats comes out of your pocket!”

I shrugged my shoulders as a sign of consent. I didn’t even know what the hairball ate. Maybe I could use it as a garbage disposal?

In the following weeks, I realized that our guest wouldn’t be useful as a garbage disposal. It liked to eat the same food as humans, sitting by the table, maneuvering a spoon as well as any two-year-old. It had started to grow, probably due to the nutritious food. One time, I came home earlier than usual and caught it in front of a mirror, trying out a more human posture. It could change its shape, and after a couple of day’s practice, it had been able to grow itself arm- and leg-like protrusions and learn how to use them.

At first, Rosa acted coldly toward the hairball. She’d wrinkle her nose at its smell and avoid sitting in the same room with it. I admit, I did the same. It spent its nights in my room, in the warm nook between the desk, wall, and radiator. I didn’t know whether it could sleep. One night I woke up to a stench more pungent than usual, and found that the hairball had climbed into bed and curled up next to me. I shoved it onto the floor without hesitation.

The following night, the hairball tried to climb into my bed again, and again I kicked it off. The same took place two more times. Finally I grabbed the creature and threw it against the wall as hard as I could. It left a wet mark next to a poster of a boy-band singer. I struck the hairball a few more times with the handle of my badminton racket, until it finally understood to crawl out of my room.

The next morning, I was surprised to be up before Rosa, and on my way to the toilet, I saw the hairball sneak out of Rosa’s room. While the creature was brewing coffee, I knocked cautiously on Rosa’s door, steeling myself for my roommate’s inevitable fury.

But Rosa’s reaction wasn’t what I’d expected. She came to the door sleepy-eyed and yawning.

“I’m so sorry,” I began. “I threw it out of my room last night and . . . ”

“It’s okay,” Rosa said with a languid smile. “The creature’s alright, actually. You’ve just got to get to know it first.”

The hairball slept in Rosa’s room for the next month. One day, when Rosa had a big exam, I told the hairball that I was no longer mad at it.

“If you want, you can come back to my room,” I said. “You can even sleep next to me, if you don’t snore or smell too much.”

Rosa didn’t speak to me for a week after that.

My relationship with the hairball was purely platonic, until one night I dreamed that I was embracing my ex-boyfriend. When I woke up, I realized I was hugging the hairball, and it was hugging me back. That’s when I really got furious.

I kicked the creature onto the floor and started smacking it with the racket. It seemed as if its shape gave way to each blow and that it also expanded a bit. Each time I struck it, it looked more human. I threw aside the badminton racket and started punching it with closed fists, then switched to slapping it. I ended up stroking it with my fingertips, molding it, making it smoother.

The belly button went right there, like that. Its neck became shapely and its Adam’s apple nice and round, its shoulders wide enough. Muscular arms and legs, and of course, firm buttocks. Its hair was in dreadlocks, naturally. I molded a suitably strong chin and a good, although slightly crooked, windbreaker of a nose. The part of anatomy that I craved most at that moment, it, he, already had. That, I didn’t have to mold myself.

That night we made love over and over again, until we fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms, tired but satisfied.

“Morning,” he said to me when day broke.

The next morning, Hair and I were already making plans for our life together.

“I see,” Rosa said when she saw us together. After a month, we found a two-room apartment for rent through an ad on the internet, and Rosa no longer had to put up with our courtship rituals. Rosa, on the other hand, found herself a nice, bisexual man through an internet dating service (yes, Rosa and I had once been an item, but not for very long).

Hair wanted to take evening classes to get a high school diploma and after that maybe apply to a polytechnic. He was by nature interested in plumbing, but he would need an official identity, which he didn’t have. He was an industrious person, however, and didn’t want to lie around at home surfing the net or watching TV. Luckily, he was able to find a job at a construction site where they didn’t care about IDs. The construction workers soon noticed that Hair was extraordinarily talented in anything related to pipes and plumbing, and one job led to another.

We lived comfortably in our two-room apartment until I graduated two years later. I got a part-time job that matched my degree, we got engaged, and started to plan a family. My parents—especially my mother—had disapproved of Hair for many years, even though they didn’t know his real background. But when our first child was born, and my mom saw what a good father Hair was, my whole family warmed to him.

“Sure he smells, but you get used to it,” my 76-year-old grandaunt said about Hair. “He really has become a good man.”

Our daughter was followed by a son, and our life followed its course like the Earth its orbit. Or, at least, that’s how I felt. One day I left work early, with the flu brewing in my throat. We now lived in a row house in a sleepy suburb, and as I walked home from the bus stop, the spring sun shone on my face through the birches. The children would be home from school in a couple of hours, so I’d have a moment to myself.

I was wrong. As soon as I opened the door, my nose told me that Hair was already home. He was sitting on the sofa, sipping a beer.

“Oh, you’re already here,” I said.

“Mm. I got your message that you’d be home early. I decided to come home, too.”

I sat next to him on the sofa. He offered me a swig from his bottle, but I turned it down because of the flu.

“Are you seriously afraid that I’d catch something from you?” he said with a crooked smile, and continued: “We need to talk. That’s why I’m here.”

What did he want to talk about? Was he having an affair, maybe with Rosa? He shook his head.

“Are you happy with our life?”

Of course I was. Wasn’t he?

“Sometimes I feel like I want to get out to more open waters . . . the ocean or something.”

I sighed with relief. He was just planning for us to move closer to the sea again, or buy a new boat. Why not, it was a fine idea. Maybe we could go sailing in the Mediterranean; we could leave the kids with their grandparents.

“No, you’re not getting what I’m trying to say.”

“Okay, then explain it to me!”

“Look at me. What do you see when you look at me?”

I looked at him. I saw my husband, my partner for life, my best friend, the father of my children.

“I’m all that, yet I’m not. You only see what you want to see. Look at me for real, look at what I really am.”

I blinked, but nothing changed. He was still the same.

“Close your eyes and don’t move. I’m right next to you and I’m going to touch your hand. What do you feel?”

I felt his firm skin, his familiar and gentle touch. And then—for a second—I felt a moist, hairy mass between my fingers. I opened my eyes quickly and for a moment saw what really sat beside me. Then the vision was gone, and my handsome, though strong-smelling, husband was sitting on the sofa, without slimy protrusions or hairy trunks.

“You were able to see, weren’t you?” he asked me in a quiet voice. I nodded. That’s what he’d been all the time. Everyone, including me (but perhaps excluding my sharp-eyed grandaunt), had only wanted to see him as something else.

“But . . . if you haven’t really changed into a man, then how were we able to have kids?”

He didn’t answer. I thought about it. Before he came along, I had brought more than a few short-term boyfriends to the apartment I’d shared with Rosa. A couple of times the condom had broken and, of course, I had run to the shower. Hair had absorbed the sperm in the drain and copied the design. That’s how it must have happened. I didn’t want to hear the details.

The flu made me feverish, and everything started to feel even more surreal. Maybe that was why I was able to accept the truth about my life more easily. I still started to cry, though. Hair wrapped his arms around me.

“Hey, you’re not the only one,” Hair said. “We’re not the only ones in this situation.”

“What do you mean?”

I then learned that the nice old lady from next door was really a neglected compost heap. That my sister had just moved in with a vacuum dust bag. And that, worst of all, my grandfather had actually been a pile of used Bakelite and old bicycle tires.

I held my husband tightly, because I knew it might be the last time. I still had to ask, “Couldn’t we carry on?”

Hair gave me a bland smile, and kissed my lips quickly. Then he was apparently no longer able to resist the change that welled up from within him. His human form started to melt, transforming little by little back to its original form. In the end, I had to hurry to fetch a bucket and one of the kids’ plastic spades. I was able to scoop the slime off the sofa in time, before it left a permanent stain on the fabric.

After that I took two painkillers, washed them down with cognac, and considered what to do next. I tried to push my feelings aside, and even thought I succeeded.

The following Saturday, the kids and I made a trip to the seashore. I took a metal shovel from the trunk of the car and used it to scrape up what was left of Hair. Then I threw his remains off the pier into the sea.

I whispered a few sentences to commemorate Hair. The kids started to complain that they were cold. I’d told them that their dad had to go abroad all of a sudden. It was the same story I’d made up when their pet hamster died. I inhaled the sea air and felt the flu leave my lungs.

It has been three years. Last week I saw a familiar face in the newspaper’s foreign affairs section; Hair had become the new prime minister of the neighboring country. But I couldn’t care less about the news. I’ve already made myself a new dynamic spouse from telephone cords, computer cables, and old circuit boards, and I’m now expecting my third child. One day my new spouse will fall apart, too, when the inner tension created by my will starts to weaken in him. But at least this time I’ll be prepared for it.

I have to admit that sometimes I catch myself wondering what I really am. I look at my hand and try to see what it is that I’m really made of. Before he went away, Hair said that no one, or no thing, is completely what they seem.

So what if I’m really a human? I can see my skin, but cannot see the cells it’s made of, which ceaselessly take in nutrition and oxygen to stay alive. If I am a human, a bustling cluster of matter and energy, I’ll remain in this shape for a few decades, until I, too, disintegrate like everything else.

Oh Hair, you taught me to look beyond the surface, but I don’t like what I see.

The Horseshoe Nail

Mari Saario

Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

Mari Saario is an author, environmental consultant, and mother of three, who devotes her (admittedly limited) spare time to Finnish science fiction fandom. Winner of the Atorox Award in 2009, she has published around twenty short stories in Finnish fanzines and anthologies. For a few years she also served as the main editor of Spin, the oldest fanzine in Finland. In “The Horseshoe Nail,” a young girl encounters desperate travelers from another world, and is marked forever . . .

1986

Dad’s wondering whatever’s the trouble once again.

They looked down the enormous hole—it was really a huge round pit. Daylight showed in the roof at one place.

Dad wants to know who the hell has lost his keys again, and why isn’t the meal ready and waiting on the table.

The rope hung down from the little opening high above their heads. Julian looked round at Anne. “Can you manage to climb up the rope, Anne?” he said, doubtfully.

Mum makes a mistake and says she hasn’t seen any keys. Dad says it’s not his fault the broad is blind. Besides being ugly.

George went up like a monkey, hand over hand, her legs twisted round the rope. She grinned down when she got to the top.

Once again, Mum doesn’t understand and tries to explain that Dad must have laid down his keys himself somewhere last night. The first slap is more like just a push.

Everyone was up in the air, at long last, hot and perspiring. Julian had the precious bag safely under his arm. Timmy the dog sat down panting. Then he suddenly stopped panting and pricked up his ears. “Woof,” he said warningly, and stood up. They heard voices coming near.

The second push is harder. Mum trips at the table. A beer bottle starts rolling towards the edge and stops for a moment. Then it falls to pieces on the floor. A smell of fresh beer fills the room. Mum starts to holler. That’s the phase when you’d better leave, ‘cause next Dad’s going to start the real beating.

Alice tries to get up slowly and move towards the front door. Dad notices her, however, and yells: where’s the gadabout thinking of going this time. Just outside, to read. The interruption is enough for Mum who rushes to clean the beer off the floor with a rag. This time it seems to be enough for Dad, too; he goes to the fridge to get a new beer. Alice takes a quick look at the time. Just half an hour to go, then the sports program will start on the TV and it’ll all be quiet again.

Outside, on the swing, Alice opens The Five again; after this one’s over there’ll be only two more left. That’s a problem, ‘cause the library doesn’t open till Monday, and she’ll have read the books long before. Sure, the shelves at home are full of Granny’s old books, but most of those are boring or too long. Best to save The Five, she needs something to read for the evening. This one is getting to a real thrilling spot, though of course everything will turn out well in the end. It always does. The librarian has recommended the SOS-series, but Alice finds those too babyish. She is almost nine now and has known how to read since she was five years old.

Perhaps some of the old Super Detectives from the shed, then. Mum says they are silly and dangerous. Silly, yes, but exciting, real killings and such. Through the open window she can hear Dad’s voice rising again. No use going inside. She’d have to make do with the Super Detectives.

Dad’s cupboard in the shed is full of empty liquor bottles, old murder mysteries, and rusty car parts. Alice reaches for a couple of the magazines, careful not to knock the bottles. The clinking is just as disgusting as the smell caught in the Super Detectives. Underneath the pile there are some she hasn’t read yet. Alice grabs three and wonders where to go so as not to hear the voices from the house. The worst is to almost hear: then you imagine hearing even when you don’t want to. She doesn’t have her boots on, however, so the woods are out, and there’d be mosquitoes by the quay. But the smithy would be fine.

The path towards the smithy has become overgrown with grass, but the fresh grass rebounds immediately after her steps. Nobody would notice anyone’s gone to the smithy. Besides, it’s too far to serve as a junk shed or Dad’s booze hide. From inside, the grey hut seems almost like Alice imagines it had been in the old times. Two unbroken windows give light; in the forge the last coals are still left and rusted tongs hang from the wall hooks. No one except Alice ever goes to the smithy, and she always tries to leave it exactly the same. The discarded tools feel sad, but as long as they stay in place, there’s something left of Granddad Frank.

Here, in the smithy, the Granddad of the stories feels real, the master-smith whom the old people of the village remember, when Alice has asked questions. Granddad had been a go-getter, the first person to get a car and to put up electricity in several houses without any other learning than his own cleverness. He knew the old skills, too, and could hammer a cartwheel or a horseshoe as well as his own father, the former master-smith. He’d been an intelligent and kind man.

Carefully Alice opens the squeaking door of the smithy. Actually, she sometimes misses Granddad more than any other grownup. Granddad had been in the war and got bomb slivers in his stomach, and then some kind of cancer had grown by the slivers and he had died when Dad was just a kid. And no one has touched the forge and tools since then. Now the smithy is the only quiet place for Alice to come and read Super Detectives. She shuts the door behind her and bolts it; Dad need not have access here. Alice sits on the extra anvil block under the window and opens the adventure comics. Perhaps she’ll have time for two magazines; then it will get too dark. But by then it’ll be quiet at home, too.

The pounding shakes the whole smithy. Alice jumps up and hurts her head on the jutting window handle. There’s more banging at the door. A man shouts and Alice yelps with fear.

“Ahoy, you, Master-smith, are you there? We are in a hurry, come on now, quickly!”

Alice keeps silent, but the shouting and pounding only increase. From behind there’s another voice, male too, but sort of high-pitched, as if the man would prefer to sing.

“Brother, do not break the whole smithy. It’s not the poor door that lamed your horse. Nor shall the smith be better disposed if you thrust into his smithy covered with door frames. He must have left for a moment, we just have to wait. There’s still water in that bottle. Provisions, though, those ran out yesterday, while you have been too much in a hurry to think of such dull matters. Calm down now, my man.”

Alice hears two men and something big moving outside. Then there’s a blowing sound and she realizes the big creature is a horse. The men seem to settle down just at the smithy’s corner. Alice is terrified. She cannot possibly get out unnoticed; the windows are too small to climb out that way.

After a while of crouching, Alice calms down: no muggers would move about with a horse. There’s a stable in the nearby garrison where people may rent riding horses; the men must be tourists who have lost their way. Alice slips to the door, swallows, opens the lock, and pushes the door open.

The man with the horse is the first to turn towards the sound and Alice is frightened again, seeing a big hand jump to a sword grip. The whole man looks like they do on TV, except dirtier and shabbier. His chin is dark and unshaven, and his skin darker than usual, too. A gypsy, Alice has time to think before the man leaps to her and seizes her arm. Alice bursts into tears; the man’s voice is so rushed and loud.

“Lass, where’s the master-smith? Run and fetch him, and be very quick about it. Bring something to eat, too. But it’s the smith we need, wherever he’s gone. Hurry up now, snotty, go and run!”

“There isn’t any smith,” Alice hiccups.

“What do you mean there isn’t? This is a smithy and I know there’s a smith here, and a good one, too. The troops always use him when we pass this way. Are you daft or just contrary?”

Terrified, Alice sees the man’s arm lift. Very soon she’ll get a slap and it’ll be a hard one. But suddenly a light-brown leather glove from behind grips the arm, and the singing voice speaks again:

“Brother, it’s your horse and the road that has let you down, not the smithy nor this poor child. Calm down, now, sit on the tree stump there and drink some water, I’ll take care of this knotty business.”

The big dark man stops and breathes deep. Alice sees that he’s handsome like they are on TV. The big hand lets go, and Alice swallows a sob. The man’s voice is calm again.

“Strange times indeed, Reynard the Golden, when you have to calm me down. Porchys would scald me if he saw me acting like this. It’s just that every delay makes my bowels turn. You know yourself how tired the defenders are. But we must keep the pass.”

Alice can only stare at the face that’s now revealed behind the big man. The face comes down to her level as the thin man kneels. She no longer looks at the tawny golden brows rising up off to the temples, or at the pointed ears. Close by she sees the silky thin hairs that cover the man’s whole face, the sharp nose, and before all, the eyes. Big, golden brown eyes with tiny golden flecks. Like stars or sparks.

Alice forgets she’s staring while the man looks at her eyes just as closely. Suddenly, he speaks so fast that Alice finds it hard to catch all the words. She doesn’t quite understand the words she can hear, either.

“Yes, you are related to the master-smith. I can see the spark in you. You don’t look stupid, either. So forgive us; my impolite friend Agenor carries the fate of the whole realm in his heart. Such a business tires a man. Surely your father has told you about the war, considering how often he’s taken care of our troops here at the smithy during the battles before. Now we need him quickly and more than ever. My friend’s horse has to be shoed, so he can deliver his message. It’s worth the whole kingdom, you understand? So fetch here the Master-smith Qu-ou-koss. And if you’ll manage to get us some provisions from your mother, I’ll find something to reward you in my bag. Will you do that?”

At first Alice doesn’t understand at all, but then, suddenly the name the man pronounces so strangely comes clear. Alice Cuokos, her own last name. Master-smith Cuokos, Franklin Cuokos, her Granddad Frank.

“Franklin Cuokos is dead,” Alice finally coughs out to the golden eyes.

“Dead?”

The dark man jumps up again, but the golden-eyed one lifts his arm to stop him.

“Do not frighten the poor child again. There’s got to be a new smith, in a smithy as important as this. A fire like this does not die suddenly, and the girl carries the spark herself. Tell me, girl, did the smith leave a son?”

“Yes, but he’s not a smith, he never even comes here,” Alice stutters.

“Why not?”

“He can’t do anything like that, he’s a truck driver. Though just now he doesn’t have that job either.”

“I do not know that trade, but why not?”

To the golden eyes Alice manages to tell the thing she’s never said aloud before.

“Cause he drinks all the time.”

The thin man stands up suddenly and steps to the door, his hand on the age-old wood. The dark man still looks at Alice.

“I do not actually need a master-smith. The old horseshoe will do. Isn’t there anyone to make me a couple of shoe nails?”

Alice shakes her head. The dark man turns to the other.

“Reynard, the smithy is here, anyway. Couldn’t you . . . ”

“No,” answers the thin man, opening his eyes. “This forge has been cold for a long time, much longer than it should. The smithy’s time is almost over. I can speak to the memory of the glow, but nothing else. Each smithy has its own smiths, known by its special fire. I’d better keep off the hammer.”

The dark man falls down. When the strong shoulders start shaking, Alice thinks he’s having some kind of attack. It’s impossible that a grown man like that should weep. And yet she can see the streaks wiped by the tears on his dirty cheeks, when he looks at the thin man.

“So that was it, then. I could just as well hang myself from that branch and save the Sorians the trouble. Your horse cannot pass the portals and other portal-horses are weeks away from here. After that the most I’ll have time for is to die together with Porchys at the castle gates. Forgive me, Reynard the Golden, also for your people’s sake. You’ll be the next in line for the Sorians. At the most, your fire-tricks and deserts may buy some extra time. Forgive me, Porchys, wherever you are, your kingdom is lost for want of a shoe nail.” The dark man bows down in a silent bundle. Alice glances at the man called Reynard the Golden, but that one actually seems calm. Now he dances to Alice and kneels down by her again.

“Let me look at you once more, carefully. Yes, I was right; you have a very strong spark, so it must be there in your father, too. Tell me, has he ever held a hammer?” Alice remembers Dad’s efforts at house repair: mostly he doesn’t finish what he starts, but Alice gives a slight nod. Reynard flashes a quick smile; in a dash he’s up and kicks the other man, softly.

“Up, up to new hope, my desperate friend! I cannot grip the hammer, but I can advise both the forge and the hammerer. Let’s go and get ourselves a man to make your shoe nails.”

Then Reynard the Golden glances quickly at Alice before he goes on:

“We’ll meet the kind of hero who beats little children, so be prepared. You, girl, lead us now to your father and then go to your mother’s larder and get us proper provisions.” So far the men’s presence has felt like a play or something from a book. Alice starts walking to the house, expecting the men to disappear like a dream when she gets there. The sound of steps follows her all the way, however, and then Dad comes stumbling round the corner. Alice can see at once that he is seeking a row; his one quick look at the dark man is enough.

“What bloody gypsies have you brought here, girl? Get yourself inside; and you two, you go to hell, for disturbing the peace of decent folk.”

Alice closes her eyes in fear, but she can hear Reynard’s voice:

“Calm down, master, we were just passing by and had a look at your smithy. There’s something that interests us, and we’d pay you well.”

Alice opens her eyes and sees Dad’s face; Dad is disgusted by the looks of Reynard, but on the other hand, he’s always short of money.

“Aha, so you admit it, you’ve been sneaking around and thieving. I’ll call the police. And you, whatever freak you are, I warn you, I’ve got a shotgun, and if you don’t leave it’s your own responsibility.”

Reynard’s hand pushes Alice aside. It feels strangely warm, even through the leather glove, and she wonders whether he might be feverish. But quick and firm he is, anyway, and his voice is sharp:

“Whatever your arms, they are not here, but my friend’s sword and knife are not mere decorations. You’ll come with us to the smithy, be it easily or with trouble. Agenor, now!”

The dark man takes Dad’s arm and twists it. Dad groans to Alice that she should run away and call the police. Reynard the Golden glances at her and grins, then he takes a drink from an invisible glass and taps his stomach, before the men all start off to the smithy.

Inside the house Alice finds only silence. She sits at the kitchen table and reads a page or two from the open magazine: on the centerfold Prince Andrew and Sarah Duchess of York are smiling. There are several pages of photos from their wedding. Swords, kings, passes, wars, and messages tumble around in Alice’s mind. It cannot be true, not anything like that.

Then she remembers and rushes upstairs, to the little room that used to be Granddad’s working room. There’s not much to remind of him now, except his paintings on the wall. Alice has looked at this one little picture before and admired how Granddad, with just a few lines, had been able to draw the men and the horses waiting to be shoed. But now she looks closer. She’s seen photos of Granddad’s youth; they had carts and carriages then, they didn’t ride. But in the picture all the horses have saddles, and the men have swords and cloaks.

She hangs the picture back and goes downstairs; Mum is peeling potatoes in the kitchen. Alice takes a big hamper and goes to the larder; she answers Mum’s silent question:

“I’m just taking something to eat outside; I don’t want to stay in here.”

Mum turns back to the potatoes and her shoulders sag. Alice looks into the larder; perhaps she’d better take things that’ll keep on a journey. She packs hardtack and biscuits and, after a moment’s thought, four bottles of beer. Dad counts them, but Alice rather thinks he’ll have something else on his mind after this evening. Then a bottle of soft drink, and raisins, and a tin of peaches. From the fridge she takes two cans of milk, a bundle of sausages and some salami, and a large cheese. She throws a towel over it all so she can walk past Mum. When she gets out, she adds some potatoes from the cellar, and a bunch of onions and carrots from the garden. That ought to suffice. Finally, the little pushcart from the woodshed.

Alice has just reached the smithy with her pushcart when she is stopped by the shriek from inside. When the shriek dies down to a sob, Alice realizes it’s Dad. She bites her lip and peeks in from the little window.

The forge glowing red-gold is the only source of light in the smithy; it’s hard to make out the men from the shadows. At last, Alice sees Dad pressing his left arm to his breast. Agenor stands close to him, Reynard the Golden is alone in the corner, staring into the forge. Dad sobs, and Reynard is speaking, but in a strange, heavy way.

“The fire does not burn the one it knows. I’m sorry, smith, but that was . . . necessary. The fire did not know you. Usually, the offering is given . . . by and by. The apprentices . . . burn themselves many times. Agenor . . . the fire is tired. No . . . proper coal . . . old trash. Not with old  . . . iron . . . rust. A buckle . . . a knife edge . . . anything. Hurry up!”

Agenor grips the big smith’s hammer and wraps the fingers of Dad’s right hand around it. Then he casts his knife in the fire. Alice doesn’t hear what advice Dad gets, but she sees Dad clumsily lift up the glowing piece with the tongs upon the anvil. At the same time, the glowing forge darkens and Reynard steps forward. Now his voice is quick and bright again.

“We just need a couple of nails, so divide the piece into three parts and then hammer each nail at a time. Agenor, the fire doesn’t have proper food, nor does it like this smith. You, master, listen carefully. The quicker you get these done, the quicker it’ll be over.”

Alice sees how Agenor moves to the old bellows. His arms bulge out. For a moment the bellows, unused for decades, squeak of rust, but then they boom and the forge starts to glow hotter and hotter.

Reynard the Golden guides and Dad lifts his hammer; hands trembling, he separates the glowing parts and puts two of them back in the forge. The fire’s glow is reflected in his eyes; they stand open. The hammer strikes the first time. Then a second time. Reynard fixes his eyes to the flames; the fire brightens up, Dad hammers and hammers, Agenor works the bellows.

When the men stop, it’s already twilight. The smithy door opens; Agenor leads Dad out and sets him down by the wall. Dad stays there, staring into emptiness, and Alice draws a terrified breath, but then Reynard the Golden is there with his warm gloved hand on Alice’s shoulder. In the twilight, Alice cannot see the strange face anymore, but the voice is kind, almost merry.

“Down has the son of the master-smith sunk, but there was a spark, after all, when you blew at it enough. Let him sit like that, and when we have left, throw a bucket or two of water over him. He’s had enough beer already, judging by the smell. Must have tried to slake his spark that way. That happens, sometimes, when you get the gift but not the skill. But now Agenor has his shoe nails, and once I’ve put them on we’ll leave. So, is there any hope of provisions?”

Alice doesn’t look at his face; she just pushes the hamper to him. Quickly he takes up his knife, opens the package of salami and bites a mouthful. He looks and tastes the other stuff and kneels again by Alice.

“Strange provisions you have brought us. Now you have to tell me what to eat at once and what can be spared for later. Agenor knows only how to scorch meat in the fire, so it’s my job to keep us alive until we reach the portal.”

Years later, Alice remembers the following moments best of all. They go and sit on the smithy’s threshold to get some light from the fading coals. Alice tells Reynard the Golden about each item; he tastes a little of each. Hardtack and biscuits he considers excellent cookies. Alice advises him not to open the bottles or cans yet but he opens the bottle of pop anyway and takes a long thirsty swig. Alice cannot help laughing when he sputters, sneezes, and swears while the drink splatters around. Raisins excite him like a child, and he slips the delicacies into his mouth one by one with his nimble fingers. Alice takes a couple, too.

Agenor rudely interrupts their repast. Reynard the Golden packs the foodstuffs into the saddlebags and takes the new nails and a little hammer. Alice wonders again at his ability to see in the dark, as she more hears than sees Agenor’s horse being shod.

Agenor jumps up to his saddle. Reynard mounts, too, and leads his own smaller horse next to Alice. Alice can smell the animal, and up there the golden eyes seem to glow in the darkness like dying embers. A gloved hand reaches down and presses two round coins in Alice’s hand.

“Thank your mother for the provisions, give her the other coin and keep one for yourself. You need not give anything to the master; the Master-smith Qu-ou-koss always helped us for free. It’s a pity the smithy is dying down, but perhaps we shall not need it any longer. So we are not likely to meet again. Now we must hurry, Agenor wants to reach the portal.”

“Where are you going, then?”

The question slips from Alice without thinking. Reynard’s hand, radiating heat, sets on the top of her head and ruffles her hair.

“Sweet girl. I’ll go to where the war is still on. There’s always fire in a war and then people like me are needed. Besides, I’m not comfortable in Porchys’ court for long, anyway. It’s much too cold there, just like most other worlds. My own is different. Look how the fire pulses in the last embers of the forge and multiply that beauty a thousand fold. You have the spark, too, you know how to appreciate it.”

“Reynard, shut up your babbling tongue and take up the reins. You have to ride up front and light the way.”

Agenor and his horse are just a formless shape in the dusk. Alice feels the last warm pat on her head. The grass swishes and gravel rattles under the horses’ hoofs, until the sound fades in the night wind.

Alice goes to sit on the smithy’s threshold, turning her back to the outside, and stares at the forge. The red-gold flashing in the embers is beautiful, as if each lump had its own little fire enclosed. Alice feels that when the forge dies down, memories will die, too. Her fingers clutch the two coins. Those are the only evidence that it all happened. That Granddad Frank’s forge woke up once more, and Dad hammered shoe nails. That Alice, too, carries the smith-spark.

The hammer fallen from Dad’s hand lies on the ground. Alice tries to grip it. It’s incredibly heavy, and she lets go, disappointed. Somehow she had hoped that the magic would have included her, too. But a little girl is not going to be a smith. Nor will a big girl, either, not without instruction.

Each smithy has its own smiths, something like that, or so the strange golden-eyed man had said. The fire doesn’t burn the one it knows. Even if you’d be trained elsewhere, you had to make the fire into your own. The dying forge is like a heap of wonderful magic jewels you could take into your hand. Alice’s fingers move as if by their own volition and snap the little ruby-like ember from the edge of the forge.

The pain strikes. Alice bursts into tears; the red-hot ember falls from her fingers and flies back into the forge. Alice thrusts the burnt fingertips into her mouth and sobs. The hurt gnaws and frets and throbs and doesn’t stop. Alice runs out of the forge and slams the door after her. The hamper is left topsy-turvy by the threshold, the pushcart somewhere and Dad snoring by the wall. Alice stumbles weeping home through the dusk, the burnt fingers in her mouth. The tears smart when they flow by the corners of her mouth to the wounded fingers.

1996

The smithy door has to be opened carefully. The lower hinge is broken and the door sags floppily by the upper one, unless one is quick to put something underneath the lower edge. That irritates Alice. Johnny has promised to fix the hinge, like so many other things, but the summer will likely be over before anything gets done. He always finds time to go off with his pals, though; every weekend there’s something happening at somebody’s cottage, not counting all the rock festivals.

There’s too much light inside the smithy, the holes in the roof also being an item on Johnny’s eternal list of jobs-to-do-someday. Alice is worried that the rain will finally destroy the building. The only nice things inside are the bellows, their new light wooden parts shining in the daylight. Johnny has advertised his smithy-project and the quiet blond Mike has asked to join in, and he has fixed the bellows.

Alice pushes down the crank arm and hears a wheeze; the ashes in the forge puff up to a small black cloud. The movement vividly reminds her of the dark man. She lifts up her right palm to light: the burn mark on three fingers is her thermometer, white when it’s cool, and redder than the rest of her skin when it’s hot. Without the scar, and Dad’s big scar, everything would have been a dream.

Or perhaps that’s what it was. The last psychiatrist said how everybody was convinced that Dad had tried to burn up the smithy, while roaring drunk. Alice may have tried to prevent that—or even help, who knows, an ignorant brat as she had been. Nobody believed Dad’s stories about strangely attired gypsies and freaks. Some were sure Dad had done something worse to her. Alice can still remember the cold hands of the doctor, the metallic speculum, and the strange questions. Disgust makes her shiver.

Alice pushes the bellows down again. A new black cloud of ashes descends slowly back into the forge. All that is over now, anyway, and she’s going to move to the capital. The psychiatrist has said that students have their own medical care. Alice is not going to need any help; it’s enough to get away, to see new people and study cultural history. The doctor has recommended the ACOA, but Alice is not sure, Dad being dead now for five years already.

A third black cloud. She’s going to miss the old home, though, and the smithy, too. No knowing how long Mum will stay and live in the old house. Alice doesn’t really know what she’s going to do about the smithy, or about Johnny either. They’ve been dating now for two years and Johnny has started to talk about living together, but he does not want to move to the capital. And he ought to get a job, too.

Fourth cloud, puff. Alice knows she ought to go back inside and start packing. It’s difficult to choose what to take and what to leave, there’s so much old stuff connected with everything. The little drawing from the wall of Granddad’s old room Alice has already packed, however. Mum hasn’t even remembered it, and even now she’s just given a passing glance to it: yes, that’s the old smithy.

A strange atmosphere of leaving seems to permeate everything. Next time, she’d only be a visitor. An image of a golden-furred man leaning his hand on the smithy door comes to mind. The fantastic creature, Reynard the Golden, who spoke about fire and its own people. What will the smithy think about her going, she the only grandchild of the master-smith? Will it miss her? Resolutely, Alice shakes her head and tries to banish the strange feelings. Then she catches sight of the new heap in the corner, three big sacks of coal.

The sack feels a bit damp. Johnny and the quiet fellow must have brought them to test the bellows. Just like Johnny to leave the sacks underneath the leaky place. Alice grips the first sack to move it to a drier place, when she suddenly has an idea. Perhaps she owes it to the smithy to light a fire in the forge at least once, before she becomes a total stranger.

The first sackful of coals blows out such a thick cloud from the forge that Alice has to flee outside, coughing. Her face, hands, and clothes have all gone grey; she looks like a real smith now. The face and hands she can get clean in the old rainwater barrel, but that does not help with the clothes.

When the coal dust has settled, Alice adds the other sackful a little at a time. That’s enough, now, even these will take some time to burn. But that’s okay, for tonight. When she gets the fire going, she might grill some sausages here. The memory of the golden man and salami emerges. Here in the smithy it all seems so real.

Johnny’s lighter is in her pocket, but Alice feels herself stupid, clicking it to the coals. Of course it won’t catch without any incendiary fluid. Now how did the old time smiths do it? Then she has an idea and pours half of the lighter’s fuel on the coals. Now the flame catches on, and a little smoke draws nicely out the flue. There’s a quiet rustle, hardly audible over the wind and the whine of mosquitoes. Alice sits on a block and watches the miserly fire. Something is still missing.

Then she suddenly has to laugh aloud. Of course. Now she can throw her shirt off, too, she’s going to sweat even in nothing but bra and jeans. Soon every press of the bellows makes the new coals blaze, and the color of the embers turns deeper. Alice pumps and pumps and feels the forge coming alive. Fire is beautiful, even though she now understands you cannot take it into your hand. If only there was some real use for the fire. Alice feels the smithy smiling and weeping simultaneously. The last fire is burning in vain, without use.

When she notices the dark man at the door, Alice cries of fright and the bellows stop. She’s half blind, after staring into the forge so long, but the man seems to be wearing dark clothes and a cloak. Both look a bit less worn than ten years ago. As the man starts to speak, the worried voice, used to command, takes Alice back to the past in a flash.

“Is it a woman who is now smith here? Where’s your husband? Better cover yourself before he finds you here half-naked. Or maybe it’s best that you just keep on blowing the bellows. I have here a sick man, he needs warmth and shelter.”

For a moment, the shape disappears and again, Alice hears the horses outside. Then he returns, easily carrying a person wrapped in cloth. Agenor, Alice remembers his name, when the strong man sets his burden down on a dry spot on the floor. The hem of cloak falls away and reveals the sharp-nosed face. Now, the being’s skin is not the gold of fire but the whiteness of sun seeping through clouds. The strength of Reynard the Golden is gone and the sparkling eyes are closed.

Alice draws her shirt back on. Part of her is eight years old and back in a dream. Part hears the firm voice of the psychiatrist who tells her to let go. One disobedient part thinks that Agenor is an incredibly handsome man and doesn’t look a day older than last time.

The last part makes Alice kneel on the floor, next to Reynard the Golden. She has not imagined the inhuman features. The ears, the nose, the thin hairs covering the skin, everything is just as before, only paler. Suddenly the eyes open and they fix on Alice’s eyes. For a second, they look just as penetrating as before, but then the eyes slip and the eyelids half close. But the words come, slow and soft.

“Greetings, mistress, and excuse my friend’s behavior. Forgive us also how last time we scared your husband and little girl, though your husband did earn it. I would not have come to bother you, but I recognize this fire. I was surprised when it was kindled; perhaps we did after all hammer a proper smith of your husband? I do not understand, though, how it is that you have the spark, too. Or excuse me, these little villages, everybody is related to everybody. I’m babbling, guess I’m a bit unwell. I’ll close my eyes for a while again.”

Agenor comes in again, carrying the saddle blankets and his own cloak. He wraps them around the obviously unconscious Reynard and turns to Alice again.

“I heard some of that out there. This smithy is familiar to us, and the warmest place I could think of. Perhaps your husband has told you something? This is Reynard the Golden; he’s very ill and needs extra heat. I pray that he may stay here; I’ll be quicker alone to get help. Please try to get him something good to eat. We’ll repay your trouble, he’s an important man.”

Alice is only able to nod. In a moment Agenor is gone and she hears a horse neighing. Another horse answers, and Alice goes to look out the door: Reynard’s horse is tied to the knob by the rainwater barrel.

She goes back inside, and hesitatingly touches the man’s brow. It actually feels cool. If she didn’t remember the hand that felt hot even through a glove, she’d wonder why anything was wrong with him. Perhaps these people had something opposite to fever when they got ill? Alice realizes she just ought to go home and call the police. Or maybe an ambulance? Everything would come clear then. All her funny memories.

As she’s thinking on what the men have said Alice realizes that for them the last meeting has been only a short time before: they believe Alice is her own mother. If she goes now, she cannot know whether there will be anybody left at the smithy when she returns. She remembers the war the men spoke about. Ten years ago that was the strangest matter of it all; an eight-year old understood nothing about wars, not even in her own real world. Is that still going on? Is Agenor’s king—she cannot remember his name—still in power?

If the police or the doctors take Reynard the Golden, Alice shall never get to ask about the things she did not understand as a kid. And if Agenor had been able to walk to the house the last time, this time he’d come to look for Reynard. Alice remembers his anger, strength, and sword. She bolts the smithy door to keep the warmth inside and runs: if they are going to stay in the smithy the whole night, they’ll both need something to eat.

This time she need not worry about Dad or even about Mum, who’ll not arrive before tomorrow evening. Let that be the time limit. Now Alice runs into the kitchen and packs all kinds of food into a plastic bag.

She sees her blackened face in the hall mirror and swiftly washes it in the bathroom and brushes her hair. Then she takes off her dirty clothes and puts on shorts and a sleeveless shirt. It’ll be hot in the smithy. A sleeping bag and pad would be sensible, plus a torch. Carrying several plastic bags, Alice half runs back to the smithy. The door is still shut and hot air quivers up from the chimney. Alice is lifting the door open again when the voice calls from inside:

“Please shut it. The cold is coming in. Where’s Agenor?”

Reynard the Golden has wrapped all the coverings around himself, but he still seems to tremble. Alice closes the door and sits upon the stool. Reynard grunts and tries to sit up. After a few unsuccessful attempts he smiles, without joy.

“Don’t seem to make it. Could you please ask Agenor to help, I’d rather sit up. I must have been confused when he carried me here, but it seems you were dressed differently then. More or less . . . ”

Alice feels herself blushing; she’s probably half naked according to the men’s culture, with her shorts and bare arms. Anger makes her answer sharp.

“Your comrade has gone for help and told me to take care of you. I thought it’s going to be hot in here. How are you ailing? Should I make more heat? I’ve brought some food if you are hungry.”

The pale man finally manages to lift himself up to a sitting position against the wall, but the exertion seems to have taken all his strength. For a long while he just sits quietly, eyes closed, breathing fast. The voice at last is only a whisper.

“Excuse me again. Heat sounds good. Perhaps your husband has told you about the last time. Tell him it was worth it. We got more troops to the pass in time. The enemy’s main army was surrounded and beaten. But there’s enough cleaning up to do afterwards, wandering guerrillas and remnants of the army. I, and people like me, use fire. The other side uses something else. First, Agenor got reckless and then I was too gallant. I got struck full force. Now I’m feeling so cold . . . ”

In the middle of the sentence, the man falls quiet and his head droops. Alice wonders what will happen if Reynard the Golden dies in her hands. She remembers the fairytales of Brothers Grimm. What would be the proper punishment for a mere smith’s wife—flogging, cutting off her hand, or even hanging? But whatever could she say to the police, then. I’m sorry, but Prince Valiant and a few other inhabitants of fairyland used to come here to take care of their horses and they might turn nasty?

Reynard’s quiet body suddenly starts to shiver. Alice finds it hard to believe that the man could be cold, but his forehead does actually feel colder than before. Perhaps the thick woolen cape and the leather outfit aren’t letting the warmth seep through. A bit hesitantly, Alice kneels down and opens the cape buckle, and the thick garment falls down. The clothes underneath it are almost cold.

Under the cape there is a long belted shirt reaching to the hips, a waistcoat and trousers. When she lifts the man, he feels as light as a schoolboy, though his arms are muscled and the body doesn’t seem wasted. The cords, buckles, and hooks are difficult to open in the uneven light from the forge. The most difficult ones Alice simply decides to cut with Reynard’s own knife.

As Alice finally gets his trousers down a bit, it’s obvious that underpants are not used in Reynard’s world. He looks just like an ordinary man down there. Alice is embarrassed and a titter escapes her while she tugs him upwards by his armpits. Reynard mumbles something when Alice manages to get him on the clumsily constructed chair, covered with the cape and on level with the forge. After that she drapes his shirt over his pelvis; that will look a bit more decent when Agenor comes back.

Then Alice starts blowing up the fire. The bellows move effortlessly, and she remembers the quiet Mike with gratitude. The coals glow ever redder, the thin hair covering Reynard’s body shines in the eerie light, and sweat begins to flow into her eyes.

It’s hard to guess time. Alice takes little breaks to gulp a mouthful from the bottle of mineral water. Then she gets the idea to count the blows. Thirty, forty, fifty, like resuscitation. Sixty, seventy, the lungs of the smithy blow and its forge pulses like a heart, a red systolic flash, a cooler diastolic one, a flare of heat again from the systolic, eighty, ninety.

Hundred and twelve, and Reynard gives a deep sigh. Alice notices the strong movement of the chest when the jewel on his neck flashes. He opens his eyes, but Alice dares not stop yet. Hundred and fifteen, hundred and sixteen. Soon she’ll have to add more coal, luckily there’s still a sack left. Finally, the golden eyes notice Alice. Hundred and twenty-one, hundred and twenty-two. Reynard’s mouth opens, voicelessly. Then the limp hand lifts up to his lips and tilts an invisible drink. Hundred and twenty-seven; Alice stops the blowing. Heat makes her sweat run.

There’s fruit juice and a bottle of red wine in the bag and Alice lifts them for him to see, and decides to open both. She has even brought two mugs. Reynard smells at each, grasps the wine, and tosses it all down. The hand gives the cup back and Alice refills it. He drinks that, too. His voice is still hushed, but there’s more song in it than before.

“Warmth, at last. Your wine warms the inside, too. I have not dared to drink water for two days, for that cools me, too. But it feels better now. You are a clever wife. Last time I visited, your daughter brought us provisions. May I take advantage of your hospitality again? Fire needs fuel, and my own body is quite exhausted.”

Alice keeps lifting the provisions from the basket. The bread is fresh, the cheese quite squashy from the heat, so that it’s easy to dip pieces of bread in it. Reynard’s hands work fast, and Alice realizes she’s looking at a famished man. She picks up the cookies and raisins, and Reynard’s teeth crush them with surprised pleasure. Finally, he’s only popping a few raisins at a time into his mouth and concentrates on Alice, anew.

“Well, I owe you, once again. When we were here last, I didn’t have time to talk with your daughter, but now we seem to have time. I do not want to go to sleep, waking up might prove too difficult. So please ask what you wish, and I’ll answer if I can.”

“What happened to that war of yours?” Alice asks, to say something.

“We won, if there are any winners after such a long war. At least we weren’t destroyed. Porchys, the cousin of my short-tempered companion, may keep his throne and his head, many innocent and even some guilty persons may keep their lives. My own homeland remains wonderful. That is perhaps the best result one can reach with a war. That everything goes on as before and people have the right to be happy or unhappy according to their merits. But where are your husband and your little daughter? I liked her a lot; she had a bright spark and a brave soul.”

Alice decides it’ll do no harm to tell the truth. The evening has darkened and the only light comes from the forge; what happened ten years ago seems more real than the days in between. It’s time to stop being a scared little girl.

“You are mistaken, Reynard. I am that girl. When I met you, I was eight years old. No one else believed me. My father died five years ago. No one believed him, either. My boyfriend and his friends have been fixing this smithy to keep it standing. But it’s only a memory, now. There’s no smith here any longer. I’m leaving, too. I just happened to be here and fire the forge up, out of curiosity. I’m sorry.”

There’s a long, strange silence. To do something, Alice rips open the last sack of coal. An old shovel lies in the corner and she uses that to add coal to the fire, but the sack stains her arms black. A new heat wave fills the air. Reynard’s voice comes out stronger than before.

“I’d like to make sure of your story. Please let me look into your eyes.”

Hesitantly, Alice approaches him. The narrow fingers press lightly around her chin and Alice is startled, but the hands don’t let go. The fingertips are hot, again. The golden eyes fasten on her eyes. Sparks dance in the strange irises.

“You are indeed the same girl. Strange. I’ve thought the portals wouldn’t work if time pushes the worlds too much apart. Perhaps it’s just the smithy that has kept the worlds connected so far. During the time of the master-smith, we often came here. After the first visit, I knew this fire, and when you lighted it, it drew me into its shelter. But the fire seems to know you, too. Have you ever done any smith’s work?”

“No. But I burned myself, the last time. I was a silly child and imagined that I could touch a beautiful burning coal.”

Alice lifts her hand closer. It’s as if the strange warmth of Reynard’s fingers makes the scars redder.

“The fire has recognized you. You are not a proper smith, but enough so you still belong to the smithy. I do not know what is going to happen when you leave. This may be the last time when anybody finds this place.”

A smile lightens up Reynard’s face, and his tone becomes mischievous.

“But it was just my luck that even this much still existed. Poor Agenor, he’ll have to find his horseshoe nails elsewhere, instead. Unless you have children? A few bouncing boys to be trained as the next smith?”

Alice shakes her head fiercely and Reynard seems to be embarrassed. It’s as if the color of his face changes according to his emotions; the gold is shadowed.

“I’m sorry; it’s not my business to pry. I’m just a blabbermouth and dead tired, and afraid of falling asleep because of it. I have no children, either.”

Reynard stares into the forge. His skin seems to grow darker and the whole man grows somehow thinner.

“When my light is out, it will mean darkness for my family. Some people may be happy for that. I’ve never been in the homeland long enough. When I’m away, I long to be there. When I go there, the others feel like strangers. They live in fire and beauty, and have become blind to it. So I leave again and soon sit in the cold worlds and stare at embers to see a tiny flash of the beauty of my home. Could I have a little more wine, please?”

Alice hands the mug to the waiting hand. The touch of his fingers feels cooler again, though the smithy is warm like a sauna.

“Are you cold? I still have almost a sackful of coals left. I’m just afraid they won’t be enough until Agenor returns. Should you take my sleeping bag?”

Reynard the Golden glances down at himself; obviously he’s just now noticing that he’s got nothing on. A little smile flickers by the corners of his mouth.

“I apologize for my improper attire. In the warmth of the forge and in my sleepiness I’ve felt as if I were at home, and we don’t want too much between ourselves and the world, there. If you can still stand it, I’d rather not cover myself. You have done all you can. The fire warms my body, the wine my mind, and your presence warms my heart. The wavering flame either dies or revives; but I’d rather not be alone now. Please tell me about yourself and your world, to keep me awake.”

Alice pours herself some mineral water and sits down by Reynard. He tells her to start with the day they met last time. Alice tells about the strange day and the time that followed. About the father who was charged with abusing his daughter. About the varying groups of people who kept asking her, directly or obliquely, what had actually happened to her. Sometimes Reynard interrupts to ask a question, and Alice tries to explain what a psychiatrist is, or a school nurse. Other memories are just separate moments of childhood and teen years; going to the library, meeting Johnny. Then school ends, and it’s time for her to grow up. She intends to leave all the old stuff behind her. Home, the narrow neighborhood, Johnny, even the smithy. Though she’ll miss the smithy most of all. The story ends in silence, which Reynard finally breaks.

“A strange world. You have had to make all the choices alone. There are not many worlds where even a man is able to choose so much, and you’ve been just a little girl. Elsewhere you’d already be a bonny smith’s wife and borne your husband and family at least a child or two.”

A wry smile again, and suddenly Alice feels the hot fingers again, gently brushing her cheekbones and brows. The golden irises are full of sparks. The voice is just like ten years ago. It’s full of extraordinary music that made a little girl believe there’s a lot more to life than the everyday.

“Perhaps it’s just because your spark is so strong. Not quite fire, but brighter than I’ve ever seen in a human. Strange world that has forgotten its smithies and yet tempered you to be so strong. Instead of dimming out, you’ve just grown stronger, almost ready to burst in flame. You warm my heart, amazing smith’s daughter.”

The hot fingers do not leave Alice’s cheek, nor the golden eyes her own. Reynard’s fingers dance like flames from her cheek down onto her neck and over the shirt strap on her arm. They both turn to look how the long fingers draw lines in the coal dust on her arms.

Alice remembers how a little girl wanted to hold embers because of their beauty. Now she’s feeling like that again. Something enchantingly beautiful and alien is in front of her, and for a while she wants to forget that it may burn. The burn scars on her fingers glow red, as Alice’s hand lifts up to touch the narrow chest. Her fingers feel the golden down. The golden pendant glimmers when his breathing changes rhythm. The first kiss is like a light warm flutter. The second one, like looking at the sun with eyes open. The third already feels like scarring her skin with new burns.

Agenor’s saddle blanket smells of horse but shields from the cold ground. Before this, Alice has only made love with Johnny. Reynard weighs almost nothing on her thighs and he’s hot all over; sweat dries on Alice’s skin whenever she touches the downy skin. With Johnny, she’s usually kept her eyes closed, but Reynard asks her to open them. After that, the important things happen between their eyes.

Suddenly, Alice finds a lump of ice inside herself. Ice so hard it’s almost stone, but she’s been numbed to its presence. Now she’s feeling warmer inside than ever in her life. The lump of ice melts down to tears in her eyes, and Reynard’s nimble hot fingers dry them off. Finally, inside her the spark flames up and burns the ice out.

Alice closes her eyes and wants the silence and warmth to never end. But then a warm object presses on her chest. Reynard speaks, and it sounds to Alice strangely like a prayer or an oath.

“You are familiar to my fire, smith’s daughter. You just have to believe when I tell you it is stranger than I can ever make you understand. Though you have revived me for a moment, I need stronger help to heal properly. I have to go with Agenor. Take this pendant, it comes from my homeland. Perhaps it will help me find you, for you may be sure that I shall return to look for you.”

Alice feels his body is cooling again. She gets up, dresses, and puts half of the remaining coals into the forge. The puff of the bellows makes talking difficult, but Alice notices herself grinning like a fool, and Reynard from his chair answers with a smile. It feels wonderfully good.

Very soon Alice must start talking to keep him awake. She talks about news headlines, explains to Reynard what the Olympic Games are. Nothing that comes to mind is too insignificant, including the difficulties between Prince Charles and Princess Diana, or the wars going on. Reynard gets sleepier and sleepier, however, so when Agenor’s fist finally bangs on the door Alice is almost relieved.

And then she’s only in their way. Agenor has three men with him; one takes Reynard’s horse and gives his own instead. It looks like Agenor’s steed, and Alice guesses it’s the kind that can cross portals. Reynard the Golden is dressed up, wrapped in several thick capes, and then bound on his saddle. Everything happens quickly and efficiently. At last, Agenor takes a heavy leather bag from his belt and pushes it into Alice’s limp hands; she can feel coins through the leather.

The men are almost too busy to pay attention to Reynard’s weak voice, but at last Agenor motions them to be silent. So there Alice is, standing again by Reynard’s horse. His voice is but a whisper.

“All my words to you have been requests or apologies. It is so again. I ask you not to tell anybody about the pendant or about us before I return. I’m sorry about Agenor’s behavior. The money may still be of some use. I may not even touch you without making the others suspicious. I do not ask you to be brave, you have always been brave. But let your spark shine bright, the better I’ll find you. Until we meet again, smith’s daughter. One last request: could you tell me your name?”

“Alice Aurora Cuokos,” Alice manages to whisper through her hoarse throat.

Then, everything is over. Agenor commands the men to start, the horses reach the portal and Alice stands alone by the smithy door. Inside, the package of cheese, the empty wine bottle, and the half-eaten box of raisins lie on the ground. The sleeping bag lies crumbled in the corner. Slowly, the warmth fades from inside Alice. But the ice is no longer there.

2006

For the last fifty kilometers, Ilmar has been intolerable, and the irritation has infected the twins, too. In a chorus of bawling and complaints they finally arrive to Granny’s. The car has barely stopped before Ilmar jumps into Granny’s arms. Alice unloads Siri and Sara from the back seat. There’s the usual arrival chaos as all the kids want to tell their news simultaneously. Mike tries to restrain Ilmar, again, but the boy just keeps on babbling excitedly. At last Alice manages to interfere and explain that Ilmar has got a place in a special class. Granny smiles, takes the boy by the hand, and they go inside, where the treat of raspberry syrup and cakes is waiting for the kids.

“Well, Ilmar monopolized all Granny’s attention again; Siri and Sara got only walk-on-parts,” Mike comments.

Alice tries to concentrate on gathering the girls’ toys from the backseat. Mike is tired after his workweek. The supervisor training is hard, and Johnny is behind again with his child support. She tries to be grateful that Mike never blames Ilmar when the boy is present.

“We’ve all been waiting for that ADHD group so intensely, so why don’t you let the boy be happy now. I’ll take him for a walk to calm him down. The girls will get their time with Granny.”

Alice gives Mike a hard hug until he’s smiling. Together they go inside, where Siri and Sara are spreading their crayons on the floor. Ilmar is quite happy to go out with Alice, and while they put on their shoes, Mike promises that tomorrow they’ll fix the downstairs door together. That’s a magnificent offer of reconciliation. Ilmar idolizes the skills of his stepfather, and by the carpenter’s bench he usually shows no sign of getting over-excited.

Outside, Ilmar runs ahead and Alice follows him at her own pace. It’s nice to be home again. There’s one of her best old reading stones, and behind that, the pine where Dad once made a wonderful swing. Alice half grins; strange how after the years she’s remembering more and more the good side of Dad. A rustle on the wayside; and Ilmar jumps on the road, yelling wildly. Alice pretends to be scared and Ilmar is overjoyed. He’s had the patience to stay hidden quite a while, that’s a new achievement.

The boy’s grin almost lets Alice forget the nurse’s recent words in the child health center. The nurse had been considerate and understanding when she examined Sara and Siri. The girls had done great, and the nurse said the three-year olds were developing extraordinarily normally. Alice hadn’t seen that as any kind of news, and so she had almost missed the nurse’s next comment.

“It’s wonderful how you’ve pulled yourself together and got your drinking under control. When the firstborn is a FAS child, we naturally worry about the next kids, too. I’m always so happy to see one can get on from such a challenging motherhood.”

The words still echo in Alice’s ears. Mike has told her to make a complaint but she doesn’t want to poke around the matter. The lonely teenage pregnancy of a drunkard’s daughter must have had all the ingredients for a catastrophe. Alice looks at her son. She has read the description of FAS children on the internet: small head, narrow eye slits, thin upper lip, small jaw, short upturned nose, loss of groove between nose and upper lip, small teeth, hirsuteness, delayed growth, hyperactivity, weakness of coordination. No son of a fairy prince.

For a moment, the ancient hurt still stabs her inside. The vague longing for what might have been. The bitterness of being left alone once again. She had been forced to make decisions. It had been easy to blame Johnny, how he just didn’t remember insisting on unsafe sex when drunk. The only help had been his maintenance payments. Alice had to postpone her studies. The restless, peculiar baby who cried night and day.

Only after the nurse’s recent remarks had Alice realized that many people must have thought she’d been drinking during her pregnancy. Yet no one ever said anything. That was what especially irritated her. Surely everybody knew about Dad’s drinking bouts, and yet nobody ever asked whether things were okay at home. Nobody cared about Ilmar, either. Mike was the first to care about them both.

Ilmar runs to hug her; the golden brown eyes sparkle with joy. He loves being at Granny’s; there’s space enough to run and to make noise. Alice smiles back, and tells him it’s time to go back home. On the way they have to pass the path to the smithy. Alice stopped going there five years ago, after Mike’s proposal. Thinking about time that passes at different speeds has bothered her sometimes, but the thought is easy to ignore. Reynard the Golden would not have much joy in a ninety-year-old hag. The everyday world is different from dreams and fairytales. Mike gets along well with Ilmar; the relationship with Johnny functions well enough. Alice herself is mostly content. That’s how it’s got to be.

The evening passes quietly and everyone goes early to bed. Mike promises Alice she may sleep late next morning; he’ll get up with the kids. What a nice man.

In the morning Alice thoroughly enjoys her privilege. In the kitchen she meets an idyllic scene. Mum is pouring coffee for Mike; Ilmar has kid-coffee in his cup: warm milk, sugar, and a spoonful of coffee for taste. He sits there serious as an old farmer at his morning cup. The girls are constructing a pillow cabin on the living room floor. Alice wishes them good morning and sits down to have a wonderfully unhurried cup of coffee.

Mike glances at Ilmar and they both grin. Alice sees immediately that they have something they want to tell her about. She expects Ilmar to start, but the boy stares expectantly at Mike, who turns to Alice’s Mum.

“Please tell me, Brigid, what was your father-in-law called? The smith who worked in the old smithy?”

“Franklin Cuokos it was by the book, though people here called him Frank,” Mum answers.

“That’s what I thought. I just wanted to make sure who was haunting the smithy when we went there, Ilmar and I.”

Coffee spills out of the cup, briefly burning Alice’s thigh. Ilmar stares at his mother, but Mike is obviously enjoying the surprise.

“Well, not quite haunting, but a curious thing, anyway. We decided to go visit the smithy with Ilmar this morning. It’s in the boy’s family line, anyway, from the mother’s side and the father’s, both.”

If Alice still had the cup in her hand, it would splinter. Questions flood her mind and she cannot utter any of them aloud. She’s unable to hide the storm of feelings, and sees the astonishment on Mike’s face.

“I mean, your family has built the smithy, and Johnny used to repair it. The bellows, too, that I helped to fix. I told Ilmar how we first met just because of those bellows. Don’t look so shocked, the boy is old enough to hear such things.”

Relief floods over Alice. Mike is a good man to praise Johnny’s part of the repair; Ilmar doesn’t have that much to be proud of in his father. But then she has to clear her throat.

“Oh no, that’s all right, it’s nice of you to remember. But whatever ghost are you talking about? That quite scared me.”

“The smithy was such a special place for Alice when she was small, she spent a lot of time there,” Mum interrupts.

Alice swallows a bitter remark about the smithy being the best place to escape her quarrelling parents. She just stares at Mike, who goes on.

“Yes, it was curious. Ilmar of course wanted to test the bellows his dad had made and I let him blow a couple of times into the old forge. They had stiffened, and the leather parts leak more than they did ten years ago, but the boy managed to make a kind of blast. But the curious thing was that for a while, I almost saw embers glow in the age-old heap of dust. And damn it, but I even felt a wave of heat. I don’t believe in ghosts, but for a moment it felt as if the old Franklin would have come to say hello. And I’m not corked, for Ilmar felt it too, didn’t you?”

Alice looks at Ilmar, who nods. She realizes the boy is strangely quiet; normally he would have started babbling for everybody’s attention. Mike, however, notices nothing. He just hands his cup to Mum.

“So that’s our ghost story. Must have some explanation, but it was strange, anyhow. Didn’t you have some coffee left? Then we’ll go out with Ilmar to look at the downstairs door; we’ll get that fixed now. You bring the girls out, Alice.”

Once outside, Alice remembers the two small sacks of coal in the car for tomorrow’s grill party. It’s been ten years now. She just has to find out.

In the afternoon, Alice sneaks away to the old cellar. Some of the corner bricks are loose and the leather bag is still hidden underneath; it contains all the coins from ten and twenty years back. Sometimes she has looked at the coins in daylight and thought they are probably silver; some of the smallest may even be gold. But it felt right to just bury them.

The bag’s weight makes her stop. She’s got Ilmar, Siri, Sara, and Mike. To them she is a real person, an almost thirty-year-old mother, a teacher at the Institute, her briefcase full of summer exams she should grade. And yet it feels like a good idea to take the bag with her in the evening. One could buy something with the money. Such as information, if someone else should arrive, someone not the golden-haired man. Then the vague idea clears out and becomes a strong feeling: Ilmar has to come with her to the smithy.

Ilmar sleeps alone in the little room, so it’s easy to wake him up when the others have fallen asleep. He’s drowsy, but picks up when Alice tells him that they are going for an adventure at the smithy, just the two of them. The provisions are ready. Excitedly, he starts to put on his shirt and jeans, while Alice wraps his pajamas in the bag. His first words almost stop her heart.

“Mummy, why did the fire almost catch when we went there? I felt it was sort of asleep and when I blew, it almost woke up. Was that a ghost, Mummy, or was the fire asleep?”

Ilmar’s eyes are large in the dark when Alice takes his hand and whispers that that’s why they are going to the smithy, to look again at the sleeping fire. Barefoot they tiptoe to the door and then to the woodshed. There the bags wait for them, including rubber boots for both, as the path is bedewed. The boy keeps silent all the way to the smithy.

Everything seems quiet at the smithy. Before they split up, Alice had persuaded Johnny to repair both the door and the roof. At that time, she spent every possible moment in the smithy. First every evening, then every Thursday, every third Thursday of the month, and finally every anniversary. Fired the forge up, blew the bellows, waited and been afraid, with no effect.

Now the yard is all grown over with grass; the former open field is almost a new forest. In the dark, a torch is necessary and Alice has brought two. The other she sets above the door to lighten up the insides where everything is at its old place: the bellows, the forge, and the junk in the corners. Ilmar walks to the forge and pushes his finger into the ash. Alice sees his disappointed face when nothing happens.

“Ilmar, I’ll bring the coal. Fire always needs food, just like a grill. Then we can experiment; you go to the bellows.”

Ilmar takes his place and Alice empties the small sack of coals into the forge. It’s but a puny heap, and she adds the other sackful. Then she steps aside and looks at the confused boy.

“Mummy, it has to be fired with fluid or matches, or a lighter.”

“I know, Ilmar, but I thought you might want to try it first without. Like when you were with Mike.”

“Can you do that, Mummy?”

“No, but I know people who can. You just try it, there’s no hurry.”

Hesitantly, Ilmar grabs the bellows. He’s a slender boy, and it requires his whole weight to push down the stiff shaft and blow up a little cloud of ash. Alice watches carefully, but cannot see anything. The disappointment and relief mix in a sigh. Then she turns off the torch and the two of them are left in an almost dark smithy.

“Mummy, don’t do that. It’s scary in here.”

“No darling, it’s not. This is exactly the same smithy as before, only now we can see the glow better. Try again, please.”

Now they are both staring at the forge. Alice hears the bellows move again, and in the forge twinkles an almost invisible, tiny reddish glow. Ilmar sounds timid and excited.

“Mummy, I think I saw the fire. It sort of woke up. Shall I try again?”

“Yes, do.”

Her mouth is dry with tension when the bellows move again. Either the boy has gained courage or the bellows are moving more easily; anyway, the blow is much stronger. The glow is clearer, too, and for a moment Alice imagines a fleeting warmth. Ilmar giggles in excitement and blows again. The glow stays and brightens. The color spreads to the new coals; blow by blow the warmth increases.

Alice dares not look at her son until the forge is definitely fired. The embers glow with a familiar warmth that lightens Ilmar’s face, shining with happiness. The boy has rarely succeeded in anything as well as here; he glows with pride like a forge. He blows and blows until Alice tells him to stop.

The silence feels strange after the bellows are quiet. No one has appeared. It has of course been stupid to expect that. Perhaps Alice’s world is now too far away from other worlds and Ilmar is the only one left of his kind. Forever between two worlds, like his father, never at home anywhere.

Suddenly Ilmar announces that he’s hungry. Alice is seized by hysterical laughter. She remembers The Five, where no adventure was too special to be interrupted by a proper break for snacks. Ilmar has earned his provisions and eagerly attacks the bottle of soft drink and the potato chips.

Herself, Alice just takes a bite of chocolate. The wine, a small bottle of whisky, cheese, ciabatta, apples, and grapes are left in the rucksack. She tries not to think about it, but the sight of raisins brings tears to her eyes. No more wonders left for her.

Ilmar, however, is exceedingly happy about the marvelous adventure as he crunches the chips. Alice keeps staring at the forge, blinking away her tears. Then Ilmar’s sudden terrified whisper rouses her; the boy is staring open-eyed at the door.

“Mummy, Grandad’s ghost! He’s standing at the door.”

Alice jumps up and turns to the door; Ilmar overturns his drink and cries in fear. He crouches behind his mother, but Alice just stares at the familiar shape at the door. Her own voice is calm and firm.

“What are you looking for this time, Agenor?”

The dark man stoops to enter. Alice can see he’s not aged at all; only his attire is changed. The silver decorations, fur-linings, and silken fabric tell a tale of luxury and peace. His rude manners are the same, however.

“Good evening, wife. I need a smith again, and since there’s no one else in this godforsaken corner except your drunkard of a man, he has to make do. At least you have the fire burning again. Where is he?”

Alice is unable to cover her astonishment. Obviously, Agenor never looks closely at people below himself; it had been dark ten years ago and she’d been sooty and half-dressed. It still doesn’t explain why Agenor is asking for her husband. She has to ask.

“The smith you are seeking has been dead for a long time. There’s no smith here. Didn’t Reynard the Golden tell you this?”

The man wrinkles up his brows and for a second, Alice thinks she can see real feeling on the face. His words hit her below the belt as if he’d taken a smith’s hammer to her.

“My friend has died, almost a year ago, since the last time we came here.”

“How . . . what happened to him?”

Alice’s voice is but a tiny, frightened whisper. Agenor looks sharply at her but relents.

“I suppose you have the right to know, since you tried to help. The death is not counted against you, wife, don’t worry. We couldn’t heal the strike of cold he received. Those are especially dangerous for people like him, and still he took it to save me. I owe him. But that’s past. If you don’t have a smith here, I’d better look elsewhere for help.”

Agenor turns to leave, and for a moment Alice just stands, petrified. Then she suddenly dashes forward and catches his arm at the threshold. From the door she can see the dark, deserted yard and just one horse. Somehow that confirms it all. Agenor shakes his hand off, irritated, but Alice’s words bubble out in a rush.

“Wait, please. I had . . . time to speak with your companion that night. He said he found the smithy, the last time. How did you find your way here?”

“Now when you say that, wife, it is really a bit strange. Reynard the Golden taught us messengers some skills and we find the smithies when necessary. But only the ones with a smith. You tell me there isn’t one here. Are you sure? Not even a journeyman? Or an apprentice?”

Agenor looks behind Alice and she turns her head slowly. Ilmar is standing alone by the forge, watching with a combination of fear and curiosity. The lips of the nine year old tremble with fear and yet his eyes shine with excitement in front of a live fairytale prince. The light from the forge shimmers on his face, and for a moment his skin seems to have a dull golden luster. Agenor’s question comes as a surprise, but so does her own answer.

“Who’s that, then? A son of the dead smith?”

“He’s my son. Reynard the Golden promised to return and make him a real smith.”

The man nods, but Alice is terrified of her own words. That’s how the story goes in the imagination of a girl who reads too much. But Ilmar is a real child, even if the shimmering forge makes him look more like a fairytale creature.

Then Alice’s tortured mind is flooded by all the weepy scenes of school mornings. The worried contacts by teachers and school counselors. The support group for parents of overactive children. The special class for emotionally challenged learners. The endless repetitions of numbers and letters. Alice yelling her own frustration to a small, scared boy. The only experiences of success have been with Mike and with tools. And here, by the forge. Alice remembers her own Dad, leaning against the smithy wall. She remembers Reynard’s words about what happens to those who have the ability but not the skills.

Agenor watches as Alice goes to her rucksack. The cords of the leather bag have dried up to a permanent knot and she has to hack them apart with a knife. The jewel is uppermost. The warm colors of the gold and reddish stone shine on Alice’s hand.

“He gave this to me as surety of his promise. You said you owe him. I know you are a powerful man. You must know smiths. I’ve spared your money, I’m able to pay you.”

Agenor stares long at the jewel and for a moment, sorrow flickers across his face. Alice has never heard him speak with such a soft voice.

“So this is why I ended up here. My actual business is minor, my other knife is broken. But Reynard the Golden taught me to find smithies. He knew the forge fires and they knew him. Jewels like this are made in living fire in his homeland, these help even us to find smithies. I will honor his promise. I’ll take the boy with me. The name of Reynard the Golden still has weight; the boy shall get a good place. But if I take the jewel with me, I’ll probably not find this smithy anymore.”

Alice’s tears are running and she is only able to nod. She remembers the many times when she was a kid and wished there was anything she could do to make Dad stop drinking. Remembers her own anger for not being a boy, or otherwise a better child. Ilmar will not go through the same pain. His mother at least shall care about him. She asks Agenor to go out ahead.

Ilmar’s eyes are still wide open in amazement, but also tired. The night is far gone. Alice squats down in front of him and takes his face between her hands. The boy’s skin feels hot in the forge’s warmth.

“Ilmar, you lighted that forge fire wonderfully just now, and you are good with tools, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” The boy’s voice is weak and tired.

“You are actually so good that you’ve got to get to a place where you learn to be even better.”

“Oh, like the special class,” the boy’s interest is kindled for a moment.

“Something even better, your own special grownup to teach you. But you have to leave there now, with uncle Agenor. He is a friend of your father and he’ll take good care of you. I’ll give you some provisions, and money.”

“But aren’t you coming, too, Mummy?”

“The training is only for those who can light a fire without matches. Later on, you can show it to uncle Agenor. But I’m not able to do it, and I cannot come, I have to stay with Siri and Sara.”

“But do I have to stay there longer than one day, Mummy? Are you coming to pick me up afterwards?”

The lie is a huge sticky lump in Alice’s throat. She’s gone too far now, however. If she cancels this now, Ilmar is old enough to remember it. What would he say to his mother, later? Would Alice herself have gone at eight years, if she could have got rid of everything? At eighteen, she surely would have. Perhaps everybody gets only one chance. The lie fights its way out between her lips. She hugs the boy firmly and presses her face to his shoulder.

“You’ll see Mummy again very soon. I promise.”

Alice shoves the food, the blanket, and the bag of coins into the rucksack. She almost packs the pajamas, too, but then has another idea and leaves them out. Then she pushes Ilmar tenderly out the door ahead of herself and to Agenor.

“I could not foresee he’d be leaving today. There’s not much to send with him, he’ll need clothes and other stuff, but there’s money in the bag.”

The man has got his familiar expression again, concentrating on managing things effectively.

“I can afford to support a smith’s apprentice, for the memory of my friend. Don’t worry, wife. Reynard must have felt great potential in your son. I do not want to see such going to waste. Wrap my other mantle on him and lift him up to the saddle in front of me. What’s his name?”

“Ilmar Franklin Vulpes Cuokos.”

Alice is amazed how easily it all finally happens. The boy is half-dazed with tiredness and nestles in a bundle within the mantle. When the horse’s steps can no longer be heard, it’s time to concentrate on action. The striped pajama shirt is left crumpled in the grass by the smithy door, as if a little boy had just taken it off.

Inside the smithy it’s easy to fill the forge with old wooden junk. Splashing the whisky makes sure the fire will have a merry path, and finally Alice even wets the ceiling around the flue with whisky. Then she starts blowing the bellows. The wood burns with a high flame, growing ever bigger all the time. When the air is thick with smoke, Alice has to leave. She closes the heavy door fast and walks home at a brisk pace.

At home, Alice takes off her smoky clothes and puts them in the central heating oven where they use to burn trash. A little incendiary fluid added, and they burn along nicely. Her boots she washes and dries carefully. Then she takes a shower, washes her hair, and finally dries the bathroom floor.

Mike is fast asleep, the girls sniffling in their camp beds. Alice sets herself quietly down by her husband and wraps her arms around him. Mike feels nice and safe. Alice is empty of thoughts. Sleep comes quickly.

In the morning, Mum wakes them up and asks about Ilmar. Mike notices the pillar of smoke and steam arising by the forest. Alice cannot find the boy’s rubber boots anywhere. Mike calls the police and the fire brigade and goes to the smithy. Alice starts crying on Mum’s shoulder.

2014

There’s nothing more left of the smithy except some metal junk and a hollow in the earth. The fallen tiles of the forge form a slightly higher mound. There’s nothing to see any more in the place. Alice turns to go back home, when something glitters on the earth by her shoe. Curious, she bends down to pick it up, close to the late smithy’s stone threshold.

The little object shines with newness in the sunlight. Alice turns it around in her fingers and touches the sharp end with her fingertip. Though she’s not an expert, she judges this horseshoe nail is remarkably well made.

Not Before Sundown

(novel excerpt)

Johanna Sinisalo

Translated by Herbert Lomas

Johanna Sinisalo is an award-winning comic strip writer and scriptwriter as well as an acclaimed novelist; she also edited The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy(Dedalus, 2005), an excellent introduction to Finnish speculative fiction from 1870 onwards. Sinisalo first emerged in Finland’s speculative fiction scene, where her science fiction and fantasy stories earned her numerous Atorox Awards. In 2000, her first novel, Not Before Sundown (Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi), won Finland’s most prestigious literary award, the Finlandia Prize, bringing Sinisalo’s work to mainstream literary readers in a big way. In the U.S., where it was published under the title Troll: A Love Story, the novel also won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award (2004). In the opening pages of Not Before Sundown, we meet Angel, a young photographer, who is heading home from a rough night out when he discovers an unusual creature lurking in the courtyard . . .

Angel

I’m starting to get worried. Martes’ face seems to be sort of fluctuating in the light mist induced by my four pints of Guinness. His hand’s resting on the table close to mine. I can see the dark hairs on the back of his hand, his sexy, bony finger joints and his slightly distended veins. My hand slides towards his and, as if our hands are somehow joined together under the table, his moves away in a flash. Like a crab into its hole.

I look him in the eyes. His face wears a friendly, open, and understanding smile. He seems at once infinitely lovable and completely unknown. His eyes are computer icons, expressionless diagrams, with infinite wonders behind them, but only for the elect, those able to log on.

“So why did you ask me out for a drink? What did you have in mind?” Martes leans back in his chair. So relaxed. So carefree.

“Some good conversation.”

“Nothing more?”

He looks at me as if I’ve exposed something new about myself, something disturbing but paltry: a trifle compromising, but not something that will inexorably affect a good working relationship. It’s more as if my deodorant were inadequate.

“I have to tell you honestly that I’m not up for it.”

My heart starts pounding and my tongue responds on reflex, acting faster than my brain.

“It was you who began it.”

When we were little, having a bust-up in the schoolyard and looking for whose fault it was, that was the most important thing. Who began it.

And as I go on Martes looks at me as if I weren’t responsible for my behavior.

“I’d never have let myself in for this . . . if you hadn’t shown me, so clearly, you were up for it. As I’ve told you, I’m shit hot at avoiding emotional pitfalls. If I’ve really no good reason to think the other person’s interested I don’t let anything happen. Not a thing. Hell, I don’t even think it.”

Memories are crowding through my mind while I’m sounding off—too angrily, I know. I’m recalling the feel of Martes in my arms, his erection through the cloth of his trousers as we leaned on the Tammerkoski River railings that dark night. I can still feel his mouth on mine, tasting of cigarettes and Guinness, his moustache roughing my upper lip, and it makes my head start to reel.

Martes reaches for his cigarettes, takes one, flicks it into his mouth, flashes a light from his Zippo and inhales deeply, with deep enjoyment.

“I can’t help it if I’m the sort of person people project their own dreams and wishes on to.”

In his opinion nothing has happened. In his opinion it’s all in my imagination. I crawl home at midnight, staggering and limping—it’s both the beer and the wound deep inside me. Tipsily, I’m licking my wound like a cat: my thought probes it like a loose tooth, inviting the dull sweet pain over and over again—dreams and wishes that won’t stand the light of day.

The street lamps sway in the wind. As I turn in through the gateway from Pyynikki Square, sleet and crushed lime leaves blow in with me. There’s loud talk in the corner of the yard.

A loathsome bunch of yobs are up to something in the corner by the rubbish bins—young oafs, jeans hanging off their arses and their tatty windjammers have lifted to show bare skin. They’ve got their backs to me, and one of them’s goading another, using that tone they have when they’re challenging someone to perform some deed of daring. This time it’s to do with something I can’t see at their feet. Normally I’d give thugs like these a wide berth—they make my flesh creep. They’re just the sort of slobs that make me hunch up my shoulders if I pass them in the street, knowing I can expect some foul-mouthed personal insult hurled at me—but just now, because of Martes, because I don’t give a damn about anything and with my blood-alcohol count up, I go up to them.

“This is a private yard, it belongs to the flats. Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

A few heads turn—they sneer—and then their attention goes back to whatever’s at their feet.

“Afraid it’ll bite?” one asks another. “Give it a kick.”

“Didn’t you hear? It’s a private yard. Now piss off.” My voice rises, my eyes sting with fury. An image from my childhood is flashing through my brain: a gang of bullies from an older class are towering above me, sneering at me, and goading me in that same tone—“Afraid it’ll bite?”—and then they stuff my mouth with gravelly snow.

“Stick it up your arse, sweetie,” one of these juvenile delinquents coos tenderly. He knows I’ve no more power over them than a fly.

“I’ll ring the police.”

“I’ve rung already,” says a voice behind me. The tough old pensioner who lives on the floor below me and covers her rent by acting as some kind of caretaker has materialized behind me. The yobbos shrug their shoulders, twitch their leather jackets, blow their noses on to the ground with a swagger and dawdle away, as if of their own free will. They shamble off through the gateway, manfully swearing, and the last one flicks his burning fag-end at us like a jet-propelled missile. The slobs have hardly reached the street before we hear anxious running feet.

The lady snorts. “Well, they did do what they were told.”

“Are the police coming?”

“Course not. Why bother the police with scum like that? I was off to the Grill House myself.”

The adrenaline’s cleared my head for a moment, but now, as I struggle to dig out my keys, my fingers feel like a bunch of sausages. The woman’s on her way to the gate, and that’s fine, because my pissed brain’s buzzing with a rigid, obsessive curiosity. I wait until she’s off and start peering among the dustbins.

And there, tucked among the bins, some young person is sleeping on the asphalt in the yard. In the dark I can only make out a black shape among the shadows.

I creep closer and reach out my hand. The figure clearly hears me coming. He weakly raises his head from the crouching position for a moment, opens his eyes, and I can finally discern what’s there.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I know straight away that I want it.

It’s small, slender and it’s curled up in a strange position, as if it were completely without joints. Its head is between its knees, and its full black mane of hair is brushing the muddy asphalt.

It can’t be more than a year old. A year and a half at the most. A mere cub. By no means the huge bulk you see in illustrations of the full-grown specimens. It’s hurt or been abandoned, or else it’s strayed away from the others. How has it got into the yard in the middle of the town? Suddenly my heart starts thumping and I swing around, half expecting to see a large black hunched shadow slipping from the dustbins to the gate and then off into the shelter of the park.

I react instinctively. I crouch down by it and carefully bend one of its forearms behind its back. It stirs but doesn’t struggle. Just in case, I twist the strap of my bag all around the troll so that its paws are fastened tightly to its side. I glance behind me and lift it up in my arms. It’s light, bird-boned, weighing far less than a child the same size. I glance quickly at the windows. There’s nothing but a reddish light glowing in the downstairs neighbor’s bedroom. The glamorous head of a young woman pops up in the window, her hand drawing the curtain. Now.

In a moment we’re in my flat.

It’s very weak. When I lower it on to the bed it doesn’t struggle at all, just contemplates me with its reddish-orange feline eyes with vertical irises. The ridge of its nose protrudes rather more than a cat’s, and its nostrils are large and expressive. The mouth is in no way like the split muzzle of a cat or a dog: it’s a narrow, horizontal slit. The whole face is so human-looking—like the face of the American woolly monkey or some other flat-faced primate. It’s easy to understand why these black creatures have always been regarded as some sort of forest people who live in caves and holes, beings accidentally created by nature as parodies of mankind.

In the light, its cubbishness is even more obvious. Its face and body are soft and round, and it has the endearing ungainliness of all young animals. I examine its front paws: they’re like a rat’s or raccoon’s, with flexible, jointed fingers and long nails. I remove my bag strap from around it, and the cub makes no move to scratch or bite. It just turns on its side and curls up, drawing its tufted tail between its thighs and folding its front paws against its chest. Its tangled black mane falls over its nose, and it lets out that half-moan/half-sigh of a dog falling asleep.

I stand at the bedside, looking at the troll-cub and taking in a strong smell—not unpleasant, though. It’s like crushed juniper berries with a hint of something else—musk, patchouli? The troll hasn’t moved an inch. Its bony side heaves to the fast pace of its breathing.

Hesitantly I take a woolen blanket from the sofa, stand by the bed a while and then spread it over the troll. One of its hind legs gives a kick, like a reflex, swift and strong as lightning, and the blanket flies straight over my face. I struggle with it, my heart pumping wildly, for I’m convinced the frightened beast will go for me, scratching and biting. But no. The troll still lies there curled up and breathing peacefully. It’s only now that I face the fact that I’ve brought a wild beast into my home.

My head and neck are aching. I’ve been sleeping on the sofa. It’s ridiculously early; still dark. And there’s nothing on the bed. So that’s what it’s all been: a fantasy that won’t survive the first light of day.

Except that the blanket lies crumpled on the floor by the bed, and there’s a faint little sound coming from the bathroom.

I get up and walk slowly, in the light of the streetlamps filtering through the window, creeping as quietly as I can to the bathroom door. In the dusk I can see a small bony black bottom, hind legs, a tufted twitching tail, and I realize what’s happening. It’s drinking from the lavatory bowl. The juniper-berry smell is pungent. Then I spot a yellow puddle on my mint-green tiled floor. Naturally.

It has stopped lapping up water and has sensed that I’m there. Its torso is up from the bowl so fast I can’t see the movement. Its face is dripping with water. I’m trying to convince myself that the water is perfectly clean, drinkable. I’m trying to remember when I last twirled the brush around the bowl and put lavatory cleaner in. Its eyes are still dull, it doesn’t look healthy, and its pitch-black coat is sadly short of gloss. I move aside from the bathroom door, and it slides past me into the living room, exactly as an animal does when it’s got another route to take—pretending to be unconcerned but vividly alert. It walks on two legs, with a soft and supple lope: not like a human being, slightly bent forwards, its front paws stretched away from its sides—ah, on tip-toe, like a ballet dancer. I follow it and watch it bounce on to my bed, effortlessly, like a cat, as though gravity didn’t exist—then curl up and go back to sleep again.

I go back to the kitchen for a cereal bowl, fill it with water and put it by the bed. Then I start mopping up the bathroom floor, though I’ve got a splitting headache. What the hell do trolls eat?

Back in my study, I leave the door open, boot up my computer, connect to Navigator and tap out the word TROLL.

http://www.finnishnature.fi

Troll (older forms: hobgoblin, bugbear, ogre), Felipithecus trollius. Family: Cat-apes (Felipithecidae)

A pan-Scandinavian carnivore, found only north of the Baltic and in Western Russia. Disappeared completely from Central Europe along with deforestation but, according to folklore and historical sources, still fairly common in medieval times. Officially discovered, and scientifically classified as a mammal, as late as 1907. Before that assumed to be a mythical creature of folklore and fairy tale.

Weight of a full-grown male: 50–75 kg. Height standing upright: 170–190 cm. A long-limbed plantigrade, whose movements nevertheless show digitigrade features. Walk: upright on two legs. Four long-nailed toes on the hindlimbs, five on the forelimbs, both including a thumb-like gripping toe. The tail long, with a tuft. The tongue rough. The overall color a deep black, the coat dense, sleek. A thick black mane on the head of the males. Movement only at night. Main nourishment: small game, carrion, birds’ nests and chicks. Hibernates. Cubs probably conceived in the autumn before hibernation, the female giving birth to one or two cubs in spring or early summer. About the behavior of this animal, however, so extremely shy of human contact, there is very little scientific knowledge. Extremely rare. Supposedly there are about four hundred specimens in Finland. Classified as an endangered species.

Angel

This is making me no wiser. I click on SEARCH and come up with the following:

http://www.netzoo.fi/mammals/carnivores

Because of their great outward resemblance to humans or apes, trolls were originally mistaken for close relatives of the hominids; but further study has demonstrated that the case is one of convergent evolution. Considered a primate, the species was first erroneously designated “the Northern Troglodyte Ape”—Latin Troglodytas borealis. Later it was observed that the troll belonged to a completely independent family of carnivores the Felipithecidae, but the apelike attributions survived for a time in the nomenclature, Felipithecus troglodytas. At present, the established, scientifically accepted nomenclature of the species still bows to popular tradition as Felipithecus trollius. An interesting episode in the naming of the troll was a suggestion from the prestigious Societas pro Fauna et Flora: relying on the mythical and demonic connotations, they proposed the name Felipithecus satanus.

Only one other species of the Felipithecidae is known, the almost extinct yellow cat-ape (Felipithecus flavus), a roughly lynx-sized creature whose habitat is the heart of the Indonesian rain forest. The common ancestor of the species is believed, on fossil evidence, to have inhabited South-East Asia.

Though, on the evidence of its mode of life and dentation, the troll is clearly a carnivore, many scientists consider that the species does not properly belong to the order of Carnivora. Theories exist that the troll is more closely related to the insectivores and primates than to the true feline predators, and this is supported by certain anatomical features.

It has been suggested that several other species whose existence has not been scientifically established beyond doubt (such as the legendary Tibetan “Abominable Snowman,” or Yeti, of hearsay, and the mythical North American Sasquatch, or “Big Foot”) may also be humanity-shunning representatives of the Felipithecidae family.

Firm proof of the existence of Felipithecus trollius was not obtained until 1907, when the Biological and Botanical Department of the Tsar Alexander University of Helsinki received the carcass of a full-grown troll that had been discovered dead. There had been previous reports of first-hand sightings of trolls, but this legendary creature, oft-mentioned in folk tradition and in the Kalevala, was considered a purely mythical beast in scientific circles. Clearly, the occasional troll-cub encountered in the wilderness served to maintain myths of gnomes and goblins, especially since there is a theory that the trolls regulate any great increase in their population by abandoning newborn offspring.

The troll’s ability to merge with the terrain, the inaccessibility of its habitat, its shyness of human contact, its silent night-habits and its hibernation in cave-dens, causing them rarely to leave snow tracks, may partially explain the late discovery of the species. The troll’s zoological history is thus very similar to those of, for example, the okapi, not identified until 1900, the Komodo dragon (1912) and the giant panda (1937). In spite of abundant oral tradition and many sightings by the aboriginal population, these animals were long classified by scientists as myth and folklore. It is worth remembering that an estimated 14 million subspecies of animals live on the planet, of which only about 1.7 million are recognized and classified, or less than 15%. The relatively large cloven-footed animals, Meganuntiacus vuquangensis and Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, for example, were discovered as late as 1994 . . .

Angel

As I sit at my computer I glance from time to time at the bedroom. When I was drunk it seemed such a hell of a good idea to bring this touching, rejected wild-animal cub into my pad. An animal that may grow as much as two meters tall.

But even now, when I’m totally sober, the animal has something absolutely captivating about it. Is it just its visual grace to a professional’s eye?

Or is it that as soon as I see something beautiful I have to possess it? With my camera or with my eye or with my hand? With the shutter or by shutting the door?

Even though I won’t know what to do with it?

But nothing changes the fact that the creature’s still small. And sick. And weak. And totally abandoned.

I print off a whole load of internet material, without feeling it’s any help. I return to netzoo and click on EVOLUTION. I learn that “convergent evolution” refers to species that develop in ways resembling each other without there being any close zoological relationship. Good examples are the shark, the ichthyosaur, and the dolphin, which have developed from completely different vertebrate forms: the shark from fish, the ichthyosaur from land-dwelling reptiles, and the dolphin from land mammals. Nevertheless, they’ve all developed into streamlined, finned, and tailed animals in the same ecological group: swift piscivorous marine predators. There are many other examples: grassland-dwelling flightless birds, such as the emu, the ostrich, and the extinct moa; or such semi-aquatic marine creatures as seals, sea-lions, and herbivorous sirenians, notably the dugong and the endangered manatee.

I’m becoming hellishly well informed. According to the entry, convergent evolution means that, in widely separated terrains, the same atmospheric and environmental conditions can, through their physical properties, produce similar kinds of living organisms from totally different prototypes. Cases of convergent evolution are, on the one hand, the trolls and the South-East Asian cat-apes, derived from a small arboreal animal slightly resembling the mustelid or raccoon, and, on the other, the apes and hominids derived from proto-primate mammals. Both occupied the same ecological niche, where bipedalism and prehensile forefingers were survival factors for the species . . .

Nothing to help me, though. I look at my machine. It’s just a machine. I’ll have to try elsewhere.

I can only speculate about the effect of the telephone beeping at Dr. Spiderman’s—at my old flame Jori Hämäläinen’s, that is—“Hämä-hämähämäläinen,” because getting worked up always makes him stammer. Hämähäkki being Finnish for spider, he’s naturally been dubbed “Spiderman.” Eight beeps go before he replies, and his voice reveals he’s ready to flip his lid.

First I fumble for the customary “How are things?,” etc., but I know that this road will soon be blocked.

“Sweet Angel, golden-haired cherub,” comes Spider’s slightly nasal, taunting voice. “It’s not very long ago you gave me a very nasty kick in the gluteus—after scarcely a couple of months of your angelic blessings. So what, I wonder, makes you call me up now. And especially at this early hour.”

I splutter something about how I thought we’d agreed to be friends.

“I was beginning to think your mother had talked you round—she always did dream you’d be partners with a real doctor, didn’t she?” Spider lashes out, making me blush. Then his tone changes, sounding almost interested. “You didn’t manage to net that guy, did you?”

It’s already coming home to me that this call is a terrible mistake, but Spiderman goes on relentlessly.

“There you were, your great blue eyes moist with tears, trying to stammer out that I’m not your type, that I’m not the right one, and how ‘you’d be wounding me if you went on with a relationship where you yourself couldn’t be a hundred percent committed.’ And meanwhile you were going on about that other guy the whole time.”

Was I really? Hell, it was possible. As if I could have possessed him by talking about him, throwing his name about, would-be casually.

“You really relished his name on your tongue. Martti, Martti—Martti this and Martti that. Guess how flagrant and repellent it sounded. And it was crystal clear that all your would-be serious, pretty little speech meant was this: you wanted me out of the way, so you could be free to step on the gas when this object of distant adoration—obviously your right-and-proper future commitment—gave the green light. Or what?”

I’m speechless. Incapable of anything else. “So then. What do you want?” I clear my throat. This isn’t going to be easy. “What do you know about trolls?” There’s a howl of satanic laughter in my ear. “Angel, darling, now I must have your permission to be inquisitive. Are you writing an essay for school?” I mumble something stupid about having a bet on it. “You know,” I wind up helplessly, “about the sorts of things they eat.” I can feel the receiver radiating embarrassed silence into Spiderman’s ear. He finally bursts out, “You ring an expensive veterinary surgeon at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning to ask what trolls eat?” I know Spider can be a devil and always is, given the chance, but then he’s never been able to resist an opportunity to show off his knowledge either. I’m right. A familiar lecturing tone creeps into his voice.

He starts ticking items off. “Frogs, small mammals. They rob birds’ nests. Sometimes they’ve been reported as preying on lambs in outlying fields, but that’s probably just rumor. There’s a theory that they fish with their paws, like bears, which I’ve no reason to doubt. Hares. Game birds. Now and then a reindeer-calf caught by the leg can end up as a troll’s dinner. Sometimes they harass white-tailed deer, too. They eat carrion when they come across it. A full-grown individual requires a kilo or two of animal protein a day. Any more questions?”

I nod at the receiver and let out assenting noises.

“Definitely carnivores, but not omnivorous like, for instance, bears. Similar digestive system to cats. So if you’re punting on the troll’s diet as gnawing at spruce shoots by moonlight, your money’s down the drain. And if you want more information, Angel, my fairy queen, go to the library and consult Pulliainen’s The Large Predators of Finland.”

And then, cuttingly, he hangs up on me.

Iivar Kemppinen

Finnish Mythology, 1960

As with the folklore of other peoples, Finnish mythology finds a significant place for not only ghosts and fairies but many demonized animals, particularly the bear, the troll, the wolf, the snake, the lizard, the frog, the weasel, the shrew, the wasp, the death-watch beetle, and the louse. Demonic animals differ from ghosts and fairies in that they are usually clearly visible and recognizable, with the exceptions of the shy and secretive troll and the weasel. Sometimes, however, a demonic creature is so closely identified with faerie existence that a creature—the troll, for example—may be offered sacrificial food on an altar stone; and a pet snake has been accused of being a witch’s “familiar spirit” (Finnish Folklore Archives, Karttula, Juho Oksanen, No. 10129; Sortavala, Matti Moilanen, No. 2625).

Demonic animals have been much discussed in international scientific literature, and various theories have been presented. Finnish folklore itself has its own explanation for the demonic resonance and significance of the above animals: they are predatory or otherwise baneful beasts generated by Pohjola or Manala, the Underworld or Hades of northern Finnish folklore, and sent to be a torment and a scourge on the face of the earth. As representatives of the malign powers of Manala they are hated but at the same time propitiated and placated. Thus, if anyone does harm to these semi-supernatural creatures, such as a pet snake or frog, they will bring misfortune on themselves.

Tapio, the tutelary genius of the forest, originally personified the forest, the spirit of the forest, and as such is one of the earth sprites (Ganander, 1.89; Gottlund, 1.350). The genius of the gloomy forests is also called Hiisi, or Demon. Thus Tapiola and Hiitola, as names for the forest, mean they are the dwelling places of Tapio or Hiisi. But sometimes the forest itself is given the appellation Tapio or Hiisi, without any reference to a guardian or the forest fauna (SKVR VII 1, No. 810, 823). Similarly the Karelians refer to the forest people as Hiisi’s people, and Hiisi has acquired a Demon’s reputation as a representative of the malign forces of Manala. In the parish of Hiitola the forestlands are called Hiisi’s hills (Hiijje miät in the Karelian dialect), where bad Hiisis, or Demons, are said to live. Also, in a Karelian dialect, metšh (Finnish metsä, forest) means “the devil” (Kujola, 1.234‒35). This identification of the forest people with the Underworld’s people, the Demon’s people, has clearly occurred because the dark forest, with its bears, wolves, trolls, and other bugbears, was frightening, so that it was an easy transition to equate it with Manala, the fabled breeding place of the beasts of prey, given birth to by the Mistress of Pohjola, the Northland (§313).

Angel

On the bed a lusterless black flank is heaving feverishly. Wild cat digestion. I dash to the fridge and poke about frantically. Orange marmalade, kalamata olives, fresh but already somewhat wilted chili, Bavarian Blue cheese. A cat. A cat. What do cats eat? Cat food. And in a flash I recollect something: what’s the guy’s name downstairs?

Kaikkonen? Korhonen? Koistinen? The man with the young foreign wife. They’ve got some sort of a pet. Once I saw the man opening the front door, about to go in, and he was carrying a red leather harness.

So they’ve got a cat, for I’ve seen neither of them walking a dog.

Palomita

Sleep’s a well—I float up from it like a bubble. The water’s black honey. My arms and legs are trying to stir in the syrupy night. I drag my lids open, so my eyes smart.

I’m damp with sweat and my heart’s starting to race. For a moment I think the sound I hear is the bell on the bar counter back at Ermita. The bell that orders me out of the back room. But luckily my hand touches something, my eyes open, and I’m surrounded by the grey-blue of the room’s make-believe night.

I’ve been in a very deep sleep, as I always am when Pentti’s away. When I’m alone, as soon as I drop off I feel I’m spinning downwards. I don’t need to tense every bit of my body, like when Pentti’s beside me. No need to wake up at every sound. Pentti, when he’s asleep, sounds like someone suffocating.

The ringing isn’t at all like the horrible silvery bar-bell at Ermita. It’s tinnier and rougher and makes you jump. Ring-ring-ring it goes in the empty hall that Pentti’s removed all the coats from and locked them up in the closet for the time he’s off on his trip. I slip my slippers on and get my bathrobe off the chair. The bell rings again and again, as if someone’s in a terrible state. I get the footstool out of the cupboard and climb on it to peep through the peephole.

It’s the man from upstairs who’s ringing the bell. He’s fair and tall and curly-haired. I’ve seen him once before on the staircase outside.

I’ve learned always to look through the peephole. Pentti doesn’t want me to open the door to anyone except those he’s told me to. The peephole’s a well, where little crooked people live. Many times a day I get on to the stool and look out at the staircase. There aren’t often people there, but whenever I see one it’s a reward. The man rings the bell once more, and then he tosses his head. He’s giving up.

I’ve no idea why I’m doing it. But cautiously I open the door.

He’s speaking Finnish fast, and I can only pick up a word here and there. The words are twisty and misty, and they’ve long bits that ought to be said with your mouth open right to the back. Lucky for me I don’t have to depend much on Finnish, as Pentti hardly says anything and I don’t go anywhere.

The man says, “Excuse me.” He says his name, which I can’t hear properly, but it sounds like Miguel. He says he’s from the floor above, and he keeps on asking for some sort of food and repeating some word I simply don’t know.

It seems to be dawning on him that I don’t understand. Up to now he’s only been able to see his own problem, but now he’s beginning to see me. He begins speaking English, which I understand better, though not very well anyway, because at home we spoke Chabacano and Tagalog in the village, and they had to cut school short for me.

“Cat food?” he asks. “Have you any cat food you could lend me?”

In spite of myself, a smile crosses my face. We haven’t got a cat. Pentti wouldn’t put up with anything like that. Once, when he was drunk again, he took a lucky doll I’d been given by Conchita at the bar and flushed it down the lavatory. He’d noticed I used to nurse it in my arms sometimes, before going to bed. The doll blocked the drain, and Pentti had to pump away with a plunger for ages before it flushed clear again.

I shake my head and say no, no cat food. I ask if he speaks Spanish, but he signals no, with troubled eyes. I grope for some English words, trying to help. Just around the corner there’s a big kiosk that sells almost everything. One evening Pentti sent me to get some beer there, gave me some money and a piece of paper with the order scribbled on. I handed them over to the kiosk-keeper, and he handed me back six cold brown bottles. I didn’t know I was supposed to get a receipt, and when I got back Pentti said I’d kept some of the change. Myself, I did think they were a bit dear. I haven’t been back to the kiosk since, but I do remember it was stocked with almost as much stuff as the market.

Miguel wrinkles his forehead. I feel sorry for him. I can’t understand why he can’t run those two blocks to this kiosk, which is almost a little department store, but I’m eager to think of some way to help him. I think about cats, I think about what they eat. Cats swarm in the harbor. They love fish.

I leave the door open and rush into the kitchen. I open the freezer and take out a packet from a big bag of packed coley Pentti bought on special offer. The packets rattle like firewood. I go back to the door and push a frosty packet into Miguel’s hand.

“The microwave. Put it in the microwave,” I say, clearly. Those are words I’ve often heard, and I know them well. Miguel stares at the packet of fish and shifts it from hand to hand because it’s so cold.

He squeezes the packet. Thanks flow from his lips in a mixture of English and Finnish. And then he’s off, hopping up the stairs, a man with an angelically beautiful face and hair like a wheat field in sunshine. I hear the door slam shut on the floor above.

Elegy for a Young Elk

Hannu Rajaniemi

Hannu Rajaniemi is the author of the novels The Quantum Thief(2010) and The Fractal Prince(2012), with a third novel forthcoming in 2014. His widely acclaimed debut, The Quantum Thief, won the annual Tähtivaeltaja Award for the best science fiction novel published in Finnish. Originally from Finland, Rajaniemi now lives in Scotland; he holds a Ph.D. in string theory from the University of Edinburgh. His story "Elegy for a Young Elk," originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine, is concerned with the mind-bending consequences of highly advanced tech, along with the human desire to make meaning through words . . .

The night after Kosonen shot the young elk, he tried to write a poem by the campfire.

It was late April and there was still snow on the ground. He had already taken to sitting outside in the evening, on a log by the fire, in the small clearing where his cabin stood. Otso was more comfortable outside, and he preferred the bear’s company to being alone. It snored loudly atop its pile of fir branches.

A wet smell that had traces of elk shit drifted from its drying fur.

He dug a softcover notebook and a pencil stub from his pocket. He leafed through it: most of the pages were empty. Words had become slippery, harder to catch than elk. Although not this one: careless and young. An old elk would never have let a man and a bear so close.

He scattered words on the first empty page, gripping the pencil hard.

Antlers. Sapphire antlers. No good. Frozen flames. Tree roots. Forked destinies. There had to be words that captured the moment when the crossbow kicked against his shoulder, the meaty sound of the arrow’s impact. But it was like trying to catch snowflakes in his palm. He could barely glimpse the crystal structures, and then they melted.

He closed the notebook and almost threw it into the fire, but thought better of it and put it back into his pocket. No point in wasting good paper. Besides, his last toilet roll in the outhouse would run out soon.

“Kosonen is thinking about words again,” Otso growled. “Kosonen should drink more booze. Don’t need words then. Just sleep.”

Kosonen looked at the bear. “You think you are smart, huh?” He tapped his crossbow. “Maybe it’s you who should be shooting elk.”

“Otso good at smelling. Kosonen at shooting. Both good at drinking.” Otso yawned luxuriously, revealing rows of yellow teeth. Then it rolled to its side and let out a satisfied heavy sigh. “Otso will have more booze soon.”

Maybe the bear was right. Maybe a drink was all he needed. No point in being a poet: They had already written all the poems in the world, up there, in the sky. They probably had poetry gardens. Or places where you could become words.

But that was not the point. The words needed to come from him, a dirty bearded man in the woods whose toilet was a hole in the ground. Bright words from dark matter, that’s what poetry was about.

When it worked.

There were things to do. The squirrels had almost picked the lock the previous night, bloody things. The cellar door needed reinforcing. But that could wait until tomorrow.

He was about to open a vodka bottle from Otso’s secret stash in the snow when Marja came down from the sky as rain.

The rain was sudden and cold like a bucket of water poured over your head in the sauna. But the droplets did not touch the ground, they floated around Kosonen. As he watched, they changed shape, joined together and made a woman, spindle-thin bones, mist-flesh and muscle. She looked like a glass sculpture. The small breasts were perfect hemispheres, her sex an equilateral silver triangle. But the face was familiar—small nose and high cheekbones, a sharp-tongued mouth.

Marja.

Otso was up in an instant, by Kosonen’s side. “Bad smell, god-smell,” it growled. “Otso bites.” The rain-woman looked at it curiously.

“Otso,” Kosonen said sternly. He gripped the fur in the bear’s rough neck tightly, feeling its huge muscles tense. “Otso is Kosonen’s friend. Listen to Kosonen. Not time for biting. Time for sleeping. Kosonen will speak to god.” Then he set the vodka bottle in the snow right under its nose.

Otso sniffed the bottle and scraped the half-melted snow with its forepaw.

“Otso goes,” it finally said. “Kosonen shouts if the god bites. Then Otso comes.” It picked up the bottle in its mouth deftly and loped into the woods with a bear’s loose, shuffling gait.

“Hi,” the rain-woman said.

“Hello,” Kosonen said carefully. He wondered if she was real. The plague gods were crafty. One of them could have taken Marja’s image from his mind. He looked at the unstrung crossbow and tried to judge the odds: a diamond goddess versus an out-of-shape woodland poet. Not good.

“Your dog does not like me very much,” the Marja-thing said. She sat down on Kosonen’s log and swung her shimmering legs in the air, back and forth, just like Marja always did in the sauna. It had to be her, Kosonen decided, feeling something jagged in his throat.

He coughed. “Bear, not a dog. A dog would have barked. Otso just bites. Nothing personal, that’s just its nature. Paranoid and grumpy.”

“Sounds like someone I used to know.”

“I’m not paranoid.” Kosonen hunched down and tried to get the fire going again. “You learn to be careful, in the woods.”

Marja looked around. “I thought we gave you stayers more equipment. It looks a little . . . primitive here.”

“Yeah. We had plenty of gadgets,” Kosonen said. “But they weren’t plague-proof. I had a smartgun before I had this”—he tapped his crossbow—“but it got infected. I killed it with a big rock and threw it into the swamp. I’ve got my skis and some tools, and these.” Kosonen tapped his temple. “Has been enough so far. So cheers.”

He piled up some kindling under a triangle of small logs, and in a moment the flames sprung up again. Three years had been enough to learn about woodcraft at least. Marja’s skin looked almost human in the soft light of the fire, and he sat back on Otso’s fir branches, watching her. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

“So how are you, these days?” he asked. “Keeping busy?”

Marja smiled. “Your wife grew up. She’s a big girl now. You don’t want to know how big.”

“So . . . you are not her, then? Who am I talking to?”

“I am her, and I am not her. I’m a partial, but a faithful one. A translation. You wouldn’t understand.”

Kosonen put some snow in the coffee pot to melt. “All right, so I’m a caveman. Fair enough. But I understand you are here because you want something. So let’s get down to business, perkele,” he swore.

Marja took a deep breath. “We lost something. Something important. Something new. The spark, we called it. It fell into the city.”

“I thought you lot kept copies of everything.”

“Quantum information. That was a part of the new bit. You can’t copy it.”

“Tough shit.”

A wrinkle appeared between Marja’s eyebrows. Kosonen remembered it from a thousand fights they had had, and swallowed.

“If that’s the tone you want to take, fine,” she said. “I thought you’d be glad to see me. I didn’t have to come: They could have sent Mickey Mouse. But I wanted to see you. The big Marja wanted to see you. So you have decided to live your life like this, as the tragic figure haunting the woods. That’s fine. But you could at least listen. You owe me that much.”

Kosonen said nothing.

“I see,” Marja said. “You still blame me for Esa.”

She was right. It had been her who got the first Santa Claus machine. The boy needs the best we can offer, she said. The world is changing. Can’t have him being left behind. Let’s make him into a little god, like the neighbor’s kid.

“I guess I shouldn’t be blaming you,” Kosonen said. “You’re just a . . . partial. You weren’t there.”

“I was there,” Marja said quietly. “I remember. Better than you, now. I also forget better, and forgive. You never could. You just . . . wrote poems. The rest of us moved on, and saved the world.”

“Great job,” Kosonen said. He poked the fire with a stick, and a cloud of sparks flew up into the air with the smoke.

Marja got up. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m leaving. See you in a hundred years.” The air grew cold. A halo appeared around her, shimmering in the firelight.

Kosonen closed his eyes and squeezed his jaw shut tight. He waited for ten seconds. Then he opened his eyes. Marja was still there, staring at him, helpless. He could not help smiling. She could never leave without having the last word.

“I’m sorry,” Kosonen said. “It’s been a long time. I’ve been living in the woods with a bear. Doesn’t improve one’s temper much.”

“I didn’t really notice any difference.”

“All right,” Kosonen said. He tapped the fir branches next to him. “Sit down. Let’s start over. I’ll make some coffee.”

Marja sat down, bare shoulder touching his. She felt strangely warm, warmer than the fire almost.

“The firewall won’t let us into the city,” she said. “We don’t have anyone . . . human enough, not anymore. There was some talk about making one, but . . . the argument would last a century.” She sighed. “We like to argue, in the sky.”

Kosonen grinned. “I bet you fit right in.” He checked for the wrinkle before continuing. “So you need an errand boy.”

“We need help.”

Kosonen looked at the fire. The flames were dying now, licking at the blackened wood. There were always new colors in the embers. Or maybe he just always forgot.

He touched Marja’s hand. It felt like a soap bubble, barely solid. But she did not pull it away.

“All right,” he said. “But just so you know, it’s not just for old times’ sake.”

“Anything we can give you.”

“I’m cheap,” Kosonen said. “I just want words.”

The sun sparkled on the kantohanki: snow with a frozen surface, strong enough to carry a man on skis, and a bear. Kosonen breathed hard. Even going downhill, keeping pace with Otso was not easy. But in weather like this, there was something glorious about skiing, sliding over blue shadows of trees almost without friction, the snow hissing underneath.

I’ve sat still too long, he thought. Should have gone somewhere just to go, not because someone asks.

In the afternoon, when the sun was already going down, they reached the railroad, a bare gash through the forest, two metal tracks on a bed of gravel. Kosonen removed his skis and stuck them in the snow.

“I’m sorry you can’t come along,” he told Otso. “But the city won’t let you in.”

“Otso not a city bear,” the bear said. “Otso waits for Kosonen. Kosonen gets sky-bug, comes back. Then we drink booze.”

He scratched the rough fur of its neck clumsily. The bear poked Kosonen in the stomach with its nose, so hard that he almost fell. Then it snorted, turned around and shuffled into the woods. Kosonen watched until it vanished among the snow-covered trees.

It took three painful attempts of sticking his fingers down his throat to get the nanoseed Marja gave him to come out. The gagging left a bitter taste in his mouth. Swallowing it had been the only way to protect the delicate thing from the plague. He wiped it in the snow: a transparent bauble the size of a walnut, slippery and warm. It reminded him of the toys you could get from vending machines in supermarkets when he was a child, plastic spheres with something secret inside.

He placed it on the rails carefully, wiped the remains of the vomit from his lips and rinsed his mouth with water. Then he looked at it. Marja knew he would never read instruction manuals, so she had not given him one.

“Make me a train,” he said.

Nothing happened. Maybe it can read my mind, he thought, and imagined a train, an old steam train, puffing along. Still nothing, just a reflection of the darkening sky on the seed’s clear surface. She always had to be subtle. Marja could never give a present without thinking about its meaning for days. Standing still let the spring winter chill through his wolf-pelt coat, and he hopped up and down, rubbing his hands together.

With the motion came an idea. He frowned, staring at the seed, and took the notebook from his pocket. Maybe it was time to try out Marja’s other gift—or advance payment, however you wanted to look at it. He had barely written the first lines, when the words leaped in his mind like animals woken from slumber. He closed the book, cleared his throat and spoke.

these rails were worn thin by wheels that wrote down the name of each passenger in steel and miles

he said,

it’s a good thing the years ate our flesh too made us thin and light so the rails are strong enough to carry us still to the city in our train of glass and words

Doggerel, he thought, but it didn’t matter. The joy of words filled his veins like vodka. Too bad it didn’t work—

The seed blurred. It exploded into a white-hot sphere. The waste heat washed across Kosonen’s face. Glowing tentacles squirmed past him, sucking carbon and metal from the rails and trees. They danced like a welder’s electric arcs, sketching lines and surfaces in the air.

And suddenly, the train was there.

It was transparent, with paper-thin walls and delicate wheels, as if it had been blown from glass, sketch of a cartoon steam engine with a single carriage, with spiderweb-like chairs inside, just the way he had imagined it.

He climbed in, expecting the delicate structure to sway under his weight, but it felt rock-solid. The nanoseed lay on the floor innocently, as if nothing had happened. He picked it up carefully, took it outside and buried it in the snow, leaving his skis and sticks as markers. Then he picked up his backpack, boarded the train again, and sat down in one of the gossamer seats. Unbidden, the train lurched into motion smoothly. To Kosonen, it sounded like the rails beneath were whispering, but he could not hear the words.

He watched the darkening forest glide past. The day’s journey weighed heavily down on his limbs. The memory of the snow beneath his skis melted together with the train’s movement, and soon Kosonen was asleep.

When he woke up, it was dark. The amber light of the firewall glowed in the horizon, like a thundercloud.

The train had sped up. The dark forest outside was a blur, and the whispering of the rails had become a quiet staccato song. Kosonen swallowed as the train covered the remaining distance in a matter of minutes. The firewall grew into a misty dome glowing with yellowish light from within. The city was an indistinct silhouette beneath it. The buildings seemed to be in motion, like a giant’s shadow puppets.

Then it was a flaming curtain directly in front of the train, an impenetrable wall made from twilight and amber crossing the tracks. Kosonen gripped the delicate frame of his seat, knuckles white. “Slow down!” he shouted, but the train did not hear. It crashed directly into the firewall with a bone-jarring impact. There was a burst of light, and then Kosonen was lifted from his seat.

It was like drowning, except that he was floating in an infinite sea of amber light rather than water. Apart from the light, there was just emptiness. His skin tickled. It took him a moment to realize that he was not breathing.

And then a stern voice spoke.

This is not a place for men, it said. Closed. Forbidden. Go back.

“I have a mission,” said Kosonen. His voice had no echo in the light. “From your makers. They command you to let me in.”

He closed his eyes, and Marja’s third gift floated in front of him, not words but a number. He had always been poor at memorizing things, but Marja’s touch had been a pen with acid ink, burning it in his mind. He read off the endless digits, one by one.

You may enter, said the firewall. But only that which is human will leave.

The train and the speed came back, sharp and real like a paper cut. The twilight glow of the firewall was still there, but instead of the forest, dark buildings loomed around the railway, blank windows staring at him.

Kosonen’s hands tickled. They were clean, as were his clothes: Every speck of dirt was gone. His face felt tender and red, like he had just been to the sauna.

The train slowed down at last, coming to a stop in the dark mouth of the station, and Kosonen was in the city.

The city was a forest of metal and concrete that breathed and hummed. The air smelled of ozone. The facades of the buildings around the railway station square looked almost like he remembered them, only subtly wrong. From the corner of his eye he could glimpse them moving, shifting in their sleep like stone-skinned animals. There were no signs of life, apart from a cluster of pigeons, hopping back and forth on the stairs, looking at him. They had sapphire eyes.

A bus stopped, full of faceless people who looked like crash test dummies, sitting unnaturally still. Kosonen decided not to get in and started to head across the square, towards the main shopping street: he had to start the search for the spark somewhere. It will glow, Marja had said. You can’t miss it.

There was what looked like a car wreck in the parking lot, lying on its side, hood crumpled like a discarded beer can, covered in white pigeon droppings. But when Kosonen walked past it, its engine roared, and the hood popped open. A hissing bundle of tentacles snapped out, reaching for him.

He managed to gain some speed before the car-beast rolled onto its four wheels. There were narrow streets on the other side of the square, too narrow for it to follow. He ran, cold weight in his stomach, legs pumping.

The crossbow beat painfully at his back in its strap, and he struggled to get it over his head.

The beast passed him arrogantly, and turned around. Then it came straight at him. The tentacles spread out from its glowing engine mouth into a fan of serpents.

Kosonen fumbled with a bolt, then loosed it at the thing. The crossbow kicked, but the arrow glanced off its windshield. This seemed to confuse it enough for Kosonen to jump aside. He dove, hit the pavement with a painful thump, and rolled.

“Somebody help perkele,” he swore with impotent rage, and got up, panting, just as the beast backed off slowly, engine growling. He smelled burning rubber, mixed with ozone. Maybe I can wrestle it, he thought like a madman, spreading his arms, refusing to run again. One last poem in it—

Something landed in front of the beast, wings fluttering. A pigeon. Both Kosonen and the car-creature stared at it. It made a cooing sound. Then it exploded.

The blast tore at his eardrums, and the white fireball turned the world black for a second. Kosonen found himself on the ground again, ears ringing, lying painfully on top of his backpack. The car-beast was a burning wreck ten meters away, twisted beyond all recognition.

There was another pigeon next to him, picking at what looked like bits of metal. It lifted its head and looked at him, flames reflecting from the tiny sapphire eyes. Then it took flight, leaving a tiny white dropping behind.

The main shopping street was empty. Kosonen moved carefully in case there were more of the car creatures around, staying close to narrow alleys and doorways. The firewall light was dimmer between the buildings, and strange lights danced in the windows.

Kosonen realized he was starving: He had not eaten since noon, and the journey and the fight had taken their toll. He found an empty cafe in a street corner that seemed safe, set up his small travel cooker on a table and boiled some water. The supplies he had been able to bring consisted mainly of canned soup and dried elk meat, but his growling stomach was not fussy. The smell of food made him careless.

“This is my place,” said a voice. Kosonen leapt up, startled, reaching for the crossbow.

There was a stooped, trollish figure at the door, dressed in rags. His face shone with sweat and dirt, framed by matted hair and beard. His porous skin was full of tiny sapphire growths, like pockmarks. Kosonen had thought living in the woods had made him immune to human odors, but the stranger carried a bitter stench of sweat and stale booze that made him want to retch.

The stranger walked in and sat down at a table opposite Kosonen. “But that’s all right,” he said amicably. “Don’t get many visitors these days. Have to be neighborly. Saatana, is that Blaband soup that you’ve got?”

“You’re welcome to some,” Kosonen said warily. He had met some of the other stayers over the years, but usually avoided them—they all had their own reasons for not going up, and not much in common.

“Thanks. That’s neighborly indeed. I’m Pera, by the way.” The troll held out his hand.

Kosonen shook it gingerly, feeling strange jagged things under Pera’s skin. It was like squeezing a glove filled with powdered glass. “Kosonen. So you live here?”

“Oh, not here, not in the center. I come here to steal from the buildings. But they’ve become really smart, and stingy. Can’t even find soup anymore. The Stockmann department store almost ate me, yesterday. It’s not easy life here.” Pera shook his head. “But better than outside.” There was a sly look in his eyes. Are you staying because you want to, wondered Kosonen, or because the firewall won’t let you out anymore?

“Not afraid of the plague gods, then?” he asked aloud. He passed Pera one of the heated soup tins. The city stayer slurped it down with one gulp, smell of minestrone mingling with the other odors.

“Oh, you don’t have to be afraid of them anymore. They’re all dead.”

Kosonen looked at Pera, startled. “How do you know?”

“The pigeons told me.”

“The pigeons?”

Pera took something carefully from the pocket of his ragged coat. It was a pigeon. It had a sapphire beak and eyes, and a trace of blue in its feathers. It struggled in Pera’s grip, wings fluttering.

“My little buddies,” Pera said. “I think you’ve already met them.”

“Yes,” Kosonen said. “Did you send the one that blew up that car thing?”

“You have to help a neighbor out, don’t you? Don’t mention it. The soup was good.”

“What did they say about the plague gods?”

Pera grinned a gap-toothed grin. “When the gods got locked up here, they started fighting. Not enough power to go around, you see. So one of them had to be the top dog, like in Highlander. The pigeons show me pictures, sometimes. Bloody stuff. Explosions. Nanites eating men. But finally they were all gone, every last one. My playground now.”

So Esa is gone, too. Kosonen was surprised how sharp the feeling of loss was, even now. Better like this. He swallowed. Let’s get the job done first. No time to mourn. Let’s think about it when we get home. Write a poem about it. And tell Marja.

“All right,” Kosonen said. “I’m hunting too. Do you think your . . . buddies could find it? Something that glows. If you help me, I’ll give you all the soup I’ve got. And elk meat. And I’ll bring more later. How does that sound?”

“Pigeons can find anything,” said Pera, licking his lips.

The pigeon-man walked through the city labyrinth like it was his living room, accompanied by a cloud of the chimera birds. Every now and then, one of them would land on his shoulder and touch his ear with his beak, as if to whisper.

“Better hurry,” Pera said. “At night, it’s not too bad, but during the day the houses get younger and start thinking.”

Kosonen had lost all sense of direction. The map of the city was different from the last time he had been here, in the old human days. His best guess was that they were getting somewhere close to the cathedral in the old town, but he couldn’t be sure. Navigating the changed streets felt like walking through the veins of some giant animal, convoluted and labyrinthine. Some buildings were enclosed in what looked like black film, rippling like oil. Some had grown together, organic-looking structures of brick and concrete, blocking streets and making the ground uneven.

“We’re not far,” Pera said. “They’ve seen it. Glowing like a pumpkin lantern, they say.” He giggled. The amber light of the firewall grew brighter as they walked. It was hotter, too, and Kosonen was forced to discard his old Pohjanmaa sweater.

They passed an office building that had become a sleeping face, a genderless Easter Island countenance. There was more life in this part of the town too, sapphire-eyed animals, sleek cats looking at them from windowsills. Kosonen saw a fox crossing the street: It gave them one bright look and vanished down a sewer hole.

Then they turned a corner where faceless men wearing fashion from ten years ago danced together in a shop window, and saw the cathedral.

It had grown to gargantuan size, dwarfing every other building around it. It was an anthill of dark-red brick and hexagonal doorways. It buzzed with life. Cats with sapphire claws clung to its walls like sleek gargoyles. Thick pigeon flocks fluttered around its towers. Packs of azure-tailed rats ran in and out of open, massive doors like armies on a mission. And there were insects everywhere, filling the air with a drill-like buzzing sound, moving in dense black clouds like a giant’s black breath.

“Oh, jumalauta,” Kosonen said. “That’s where it fell?”

“Actually, no. I was just supposed to bring you here,” Pera said.

“What?”

“Sorry. I lied. It was like in Highlander: There is one of them left. And he wants to meet you.”

Kosonen stared at Pera, dumbfounded. The pigeons landed on the other man’s shoulders and arms like a grey fluttering cloak. They seized his rags and hair and skin with sharp claws, wings started beating furiously. As Kosonen stared, Pera rose to the air.

“No hard feelings, I just had a better deal from him. Thanks for the soup,” he shouted. In a moment, Pera was a black scrap of cloth in the sky.

The earth shook. Kosonen fell to his knees. The window eyes that lined the street lit up, full of bright, malevolent light.

He tried to run. He did not make it far before they came, the fingers of the city: the pigeons, the insects, a buzzing swarm that covered him. A dozen chimera rats clung to his skull, and he could feel the humming of their flywheel hearts. Something sharp bit through the bone. The pain grew like a forest fire, and Kosonen screamed.

The city spoke. Its voice was a thunderstorm, words made from the shaking of the earth and the sighs of buildings. Slow words, squeezed from stone.

Dad, the city said.

The pain was gone. Kosonen heard the gentle sound of waves, and felt a warm wind on his face. He opened his eyes.

“Hi, Dad,” Esa said.

They sat on the summerhouse pier, wrapped in towels, skin flushed from the sauna. It was evening, with a hint of chill in the air, Finnish summer’s gentle reminder that things were not forever. The sun hovered above the blue-tinted treetops. The lake’s surface was calm, full of liquid reflections.

“I thought,” Esa said, “that you’d like it here.”

Esa was just like Kosonen remembered him, a pale skinny kid, ribs showing, long arms folded across his knees, stringy wet hair hanging on his forehead. But his eyes were the eyes of a city, dark orbs of metal and stone.

“I do,” Kosonen said. “But I can’t stay.”

“Why not?”

“There is something I need to do.”

“We haven’t seen each other in ages. The sauna is warm. I’ve got some beer cooling in the lake. Why the rush?”

“I should be afraid of you,” Kosonen said. “You killed people. Before they put you here.”

“You don’t know what it’s like,” Esa said. “The plague does everything you want. It gives you things you don’t even know you want. It turns the world soft. And sometimes it tears it apart for you. You think a thought, and things break. You can’t help it.”

The boy closed his eyes. “You want things too. I know you do. That’s why you are here, isn’t it? You want your precious words back.”

Kosonen said nothing.

“Mom’s errand boy, vittu. So they fixed your brain, flushed the booze out. So you can write again. Does it feel good? For a moment there I thought you came here for me. But that’s not the way it ever worked, was it?”

“I didn’t know—“

“I can see the inside of your head, you know,” Esa said. “I’ve got my fingers inside your skull. One thought, and my bugs will eat you, bring you here for good. Quality time forever. What do you say to that?”

And there it was, the old guilt. “We worried about you, every second, after you were born,” Kosonen said. “We only wanted the best for you.”

It had seemed so natural. How the boy played with his machine that made other machines. How things started changing shape when you thought at them. How Esa smiled when he showed Kosonen the talking starfish that the machine had made.

“And then I had one bad day.”

“I remember,” Kosonen said. He had been home late, as usual. Esa had been a diamond tree, growing in his room. There were starfish everywhere, eating the walls and the floor, making more of themselves. And that was only the beginning.

“So go ahead. Bring me here. It’s your turn to make me into what you want. Or end it all. I deserve it.”

Esa laughed softly. “And why would I do that, to an old man?” He sighed. “You know, I’m old too now. Let me show you.” He touched Kosonen’s shoulder gently and

Kosonen was the city. His skin was stone and concrete, pores full of the godplague. The streets and buildings were his face, changing and shifting with every thought and emotion. His nervous system was diamond and optic fiber. His hands were chimera animals.

The firewall was all around him, in the sky and in the cold bedrock, insubstantial but adamantine, squeezing from every side, cutting off energy, making sure he could not think fast. But he could still dream, weave words and images into threads, make worlds out of the memories he had and the memories of the smaller gods he had eaten to become the city. He sang his dreams in radio waves, not caring if the firewall let them through or not, louder and louder—

“Here,” Esa said from far away. “Have a beer.”

Kosonen felt a chilly bottle in his hand, and drank. The dream-beer was strong and real. The malt taste brought him back. He took a deep breath, letting the fake summer evening wash away the city.

“Is that why you brought me here? To show me that?” He asked.

“Well, no,” Esa said, laughing. His stone eyes looked young, suddenly. “I just wanted you to meet my girlfriend.”

The quantum girl had golden hair and eyes of light. She wore many faces at once, like a Hindu goddess. She walked to the pier with dainty steps. Esa’s summerland showed its cracks around her: There were fracture lines in her skin, with otherworldly colors peeking out.

“This is Säde,” Esa said.

She looked at Kosonen, and spoke, a bubble of words, a superposition, all possible greetings at once.

“Nice to meet you,” Kosonen said.

“They did something right when they made her, up there,” said Esa. “She lives in many worlds at once, thinks in qubits. And this is the world where she wants to be. With me.” He touched her shoulder gently. “She heard my songs and ran away.”

“Marja said she fell,” Kosonen said. “That something was broken.”

“She said what they wanted her to say. They don’t like it when things don’t go according to plan.”

Säde made a sound, like the chime of a glass bell.

“The firewall keeps squeezing us,” Esa said. “That’s how it was made. Make things go slower and slower here, until we die. Säde doesn’t fit in here, this place is too small. So you will take her back home, before it’s too late.” He smiled. “I’d rather you do it than anyone else.”

“That’s not fair,” Kosonen said. He squinted at Säde. She was too bright to look at. But what can I do? I’m just a slab of meat. Meat and words.

The thought was like a pinecone, rough in his grip, but with a seed of something in it.

“I think there is a poem in you two,” he said.

Kosonen sat on the train again, watching the city stream past. It was early morning. The sunrise gave the city new hues: purple shadows and gold, ember colors. Fatigue pulsed in his temples. His body ached. The words of a poem weighed down on his mind.

Above the dome of the firewall he could see a giant diamond starfish, a drone of the sky people, watching, like an outstretched hand.

They came to see what happened, he thought. They’ll find out.

This time, he embraced the firewall like a friend, and its tingling brightness washed over him. And deep within, the stern-voiced watchman came again. It said nothing this time, but he could feel its presence, scrutinizing, seeking things that did not belong in the outside world.

Kosonen gave it everything.

The first moment when he knew he had put something real on paper. The disappointment when he realized that a poet was not much in a small country, piles of cheaply printed copies of his first collection, gathering dust in little bookshops. The jealousy he had felt when Marja gave birth to Esa, what a pale shadow of that giving birth to words was. The tracks of the elk in the snow and the look in its eyes when it died.

He felt the watchman step aside, satisfied.

Then he was through. The train emerged into the real, undiluted dawn. He looked back at the city, and saw fire raining from the starfish. Pillars of light cut through the city in geometric patterns, too bright to look at, leaving only white-hot plasma in their wake.

Kosonen closed his eyes and held on to the poem as the city burned.

Kosonen planted the nanoseed in the woods. He dug a deep hole in the half-frozen peat with his bare hands, under an old tree stump. He sat down, took off his cap, dug out his notebook, and started reading. The pencil-scrawled words glowed bright in his mind, and after a while he didn’t need to look at them anymore.

The poem rose from the words like a titanic creature from an ocean, first showing just a small extremity but then soaring upwards in a spray of glossolalia, mountain-like. It was a stream of hissing words and phonemes, an endless spell that tore at his throat. And with it came the quantum information from the microtubules of his neurons, where the bright-eyed girl now lived, and jagged impulses from synapses where his son was hiding.

The poem swelled into a roar. He continued until his voice was a hiss. Only the nanoseed could hear, but that was enough. Something stirred under the peat.

When the poem finally ended, it was evening. Kosonen opened his eyes. The first things he saw were the sapphire antlers, sparkling in the last rays of the sun.

Two young elk looked at him. One was smaller, more delicate, and its large brown eyes held a hint of sunlight. The other was young and skinny, but wore its budding antlers with pride. It held Kosonen’s gaze, and in its eyes he saw shadows of the city. Or reflections in a summer lake, perhaps.

They turned around and ran into the woods, silent, fleet-footed and free.

Kosonen was opening the cellar door when the rain came back. It was barely a shower this time: The droplets formed Marja’s face in the air. For a moment he thought he saw her wink. Then the rain became a mist, and was gone. He propped the door open.

The squirrels stared at him from the trees curiously.

“All yours, gentlemen,” Kosonen said. “Should be enough for next winter. I don’t need it anymore.”

Otso and Kosonen left at noon, heading north. Kosonen’s skis slid along easily in the thinning snow. The bear pulled a sledge loaded with equipment. When they were well away from the cabin, it stopped to sniff at a fresh trail.

“Elk,” it growled. “Otso is hungry. Kosonen shoot an elk. Need meat for the journey. Kosonen did not bring enough booze.”

Kosonen shook his head.

“I think I’m going to learn to fish,” he said.

White Threads

Anne Leinonen

Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

Anne Leinonen is the editor and publisher of Usva (Mist), a magazine of Finnish speculative fiction. With co-author Eija Lappalainen, Leinonen has written a number of books for young adults; these have been nominated for prestigious Finnish awards, including the Finlandia Junior and the Tähtivaeltaja Awards. Meanwhile, Leinonen’s speculative fiction for adults has also collected its share of accolades. Winner of both an Atorox Award and a Portti Prize, “White Threads” explores the fantastical implications of quantum mechanics, with a wink to Schrödinger’s infamous cat . . .

Helena

“And how are you today?” A female voice is asking.

The bottom sheet feels rough against bare skin and the quilt tangles around my legs like a snake. I blink my eyes open and the first thing I see is a grey plastic table. I’m in my own room again, at home. But there’s something strange in the bedroom, however, especially the yellow walls; I’ve never liked the color yellow.

I turn on my side and stare at the floor. A plastic mat. My head is humming. I know I’ve slept badly though I cannot remember what dreams I saw. Or perhaps I’m no longer capable of seeing dreams.

“I’ll bring you something to eat in a moment,” the voice continues, and the microphone snaps off.

I sit up; the floor sends cold thrills against my bare toes. It would be easier to stay and sleep the innocent sleep of the unaware, but I’ve got to wake up. I force myself to stand on my feet, and they carry me to the toilet, staggering. From the mirror the eyes of a middle-aged woman stare back at me with dark circles underneath them. With my hand I brush at the grey ends of the hairs on my temple.

I am Helena. Helena García Luna. I taste the words in my mouth until I feel sure that is my correct name. My memory does not deceive me, then. Not this time.

I open the mirrored cupboard and search a moment among the rows of hairspray bottles and cotton wool tops until I find the toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in a mug. I hold the objects in my hand and for a while I do not know what to do with them. They feel strange, alien, unknown beings that demand something from me. Then I squirt some paste in my mouth and my hands start to move the brush, they remember better than my head what needs to be done. Body memory. The memory of a touch. A soft feeling on my arm, something soft, warm, I miss something beside me that I’m not able to define. The rush of water covers my sobbing. I do not want them to notice I’m different today.

“Who’s them?” I whisper to myself, and the answers are immediately there for me. My guardians. They do not need to know that Helena is able to think again, that Helena remembers who she is.

I manage to rinse my mouth, but then I need to sit down for a while on the toilet seat and hold my throbbing head. I have to gasp for breath—each inhalation goes hard and when I breathe out I hardly know whether my lungs will be able to take in any more air.

There’s something very wrong with me, that’s why they have to watch my every movement. And at the same time I know that it’s horribly wrong to be watched, it makes me weak and ill. Fear cramps the pit of my stomach; I turn to the toilet and try to vomit but nothing comes up.

I stumble to the kitchen and take a look at my surroundings. The big green door leads out; I know there’s a long corridor outside with doors on both sides. A long downstairs lobby with plants, and behind the glass, outside air. But I’m not going out, not yet.

On the other wall there’s a blue door. I open it and see a row of shirts and two-piece costumes on hangers. It’s inordinately tidy in the kitchen, as if the room had just been cleaned. Inside the kitchen cupboards there’s a coffee set for four, a couple of plates, and a drinking glass.

From the window one can see a balcony with a stone balustrade, tiled roofs on high houses, television antennas, a bit of a mountain and the mute sky. The wind is waving the tree branches rhythmically. I cannot see the streets waiting down there, but from somewhere I hear a woman speaking as she greets a passerby: A good day to you, señor, how are you? . . . Very well, thank you señora, I think I’ll go and drop in at the butcher’s before siesta.

I sit down by the kitchen table. There are a couple of books that haven’t been worn down to dog-ears, a pile of standard writing paper, with writing on the pages, series of numbers, mathematical formulas. I take up the papers and look more carefully at the first one: the traveling salesman’s problem with twenty-five cities, a list of localities with distances and traveling times between them. My head starts to swarm with a series of numbers and answers, but I thrust them aside, I don’t want to compute, not now.

There’s a calendar on the refrigerator door with no year or any handwritten notes, as if my everyday life were one empty sheet: it has days but the days have no meaning. I remember that when I turned forty, I sold my house on the seaside and moved to an apartment house in the old city center. I used to have a job taking care of animals as a veterinarian’s assistant. But I’m not working any more. Something has happened to me that makes it impossible for me to be among other people any longer.

But I still miss the sea smell, the rush of waves, and the rough sand. I used to walk down on the beach in the evenings, when the fishermen were setting up their seats and their long rods on the mole. Again I understand that the scenes of my childhood are somewhere far away in the past, and just as unreachable as a miniature ship built inside a bottle.

I remember things that are far away but cannot remember yesterday or the days before that. Not even weeks, only the indistinct feeling that my life has changed.

The door clicks. I take a few steps back until I feel the table behind my back. After a torturous waiting the door opens and a woman comes in carrying a tray. She has short, dark hair and a white coat, and she looks me cheerfully in the eyes. There is a nametag on her lapel: Rodriguez.

“What day is it today?” I ask carefully.

“Tuesday,” the woman answers and sets the tray on the table.

“Really? September?”

The woman looks patient, but at the same time it seems as if my questions irritated her. And when I think about it, I really cannot say what difference the weekdays or even months would make. If I do not remember, time has no meaning, either.

The woman sets the tray on the kitchen table; I smell boiled egg and fresh bread. She turns around to look at me.

“Take it easy, there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I know,” I say, and I really do know that the woman doesn’t wish me any harm.

“Just call me Mireia.”

She has a face one can trust. At least she doesn’t want to harm me, I’m in no immediate danger; my life is not threatened. And yet I feel awkward. An unpleasant foreboding comes welling up inside me, from some earlier experience that’s imprinted in my body memory.

And then I remember the source of the touch. A cat’s deep green eyes flash in my mind and her gaze bores directly into me. She is my only true friend here. She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t try to profit from me; she protects me from all dangers, instead. I need to find her quickly. But how?

“Do you know where you are?” Mireia asks.

“In a hospital.”

“Why?”

“Because I forget things.”

Mireia turns around in my apartment, and my thoughts circle around one single thing. I have a request for her, but I do not know how I ought to present it. I’m not sure of what my position is, whether I’m an easy or difficult patient. I’m troubled with the idea that there are a lot of things I’d never be allowed to have.

“I’d like to have a cat,” I tell her.

“A cat,” Mireia says and a certain expression comes to her face. “Don’t you ever remember?”

“Just a little kitten.”

“Of course you don’t,” she says and her voice holds her anger in check. “But this is something new. I can ask, of course, but it’s hardly going to happen.”

She glances at the papers on the table but doesn’t pick them up. The door lock clicks shut after her.

I lift the cover off the tray and notice a tabloid folded beneath the plate and mug. I pick it up without checking the date, since after all, I do not want to know about the passing of time while I’ve been ill. I open the center page and see a news item about an accident near the Tibidabo amusement park. A child ran into the street after a ball and was hit by a car. He flew some ten meters in the air but fell softly on a terrace awning. The cloth checked the hit and they found only bruises on the child, though he ought to have died from the collision alone.

The news means something; otherwise it wouldn’t have come to me.

I lie down on my bed and keep staring through the window at the sky that has already begun to darken. We have to leave soon.

Mireia

I walked to the personnel coffee room and poured a full mug of the coffee the boys had made. Between the coke bottles, computers, and empty pizza boxes, I found some vacant space where I could set my cup and sit down on my arse. My feet were hurting; I ought to buy a new and better pair of sandals.

Behind the glass there were big black cupboards where videotapes kept running and recording the lives of Helena and the boy. The cupboards were locked, and only Salvatore had the key. We were not allowed to study the tapes before Helena crashed.

No one stood up for Helena’s rights and that made me sick. I had started to feel it was my duty to defend her. But how would I do that? I couldn’t even talk with Helena about what she really wanted from her life and fate. She just kept talking about cats. Maybe she’d seen the Institute’s phantom cat; she talked about cats so often. Or else Helena was remembering her occupation; she loved animals so much she lived more in their world than in the human world.

I was fed up to my ears with the same pattern repeating from week to week. We had tried all manner of things. We let Helena stay in her room alone and recover, without any disturbance. We tried to understand her panic, we treated her gently, without any irritations; and then again, bored with tactfulness, we forced her to start with a situation where she had to try to explain what had happened to her.

After each episode Helena was as helpless as a newborn, but she adapted to her environment with an amazing speed. She drew herself back to a normal state in a couple of hours. The fun just didn’t last long. Rise and fall followed each other in a rhythm of two, three days. At the longest, she lasted five days, at the worst, the cycle ran through in twenty-four hours. But the end result was inevitable. She always crashed.

“What’s up?”

Manuel appeared behind my back and hugged my shoulders. He was a novice recruited by the university, an eager young fellow working in the laboratory.

“Fortunately I’m not on duty tomorrow.”

“Helena, is it? Is it that serious?”

Manuel sat on the other chair and lifted his feet on the table in a relaxed manner. I had made the same complaint to Manuel before, but no one seemed to be bothered by Helena’s fate.

“I suppose you’ve tried to tell her what’s going to happen?” Manuel asked.

“It’s no help. To begin with, she doesn’t believe it, and even if you could convince her, she’ll still run away somewhere, stubbornly. We haven’t yet found out what drives her.”

He kept nodding. He was always very polite to me, because he knew I was related to Señor Cañedo, the director of the Institute. That relationship, however, had not benefitted me as much as many people thought. I got an assistantship but otherwise I enjoyed no privileges. I wasn’t even invited to the director’s society parties where the university bigwigs promoted their research to the sponsors.

“And she’s been here now . . . what, four months?” Manuel asked.

“Just about.”

“Basically she seems quite sane.”

“She must be suffering dreadfully since she always wants to get away.”

Helena was first found drifting on the streets, and was taken into custody by the city social welfare office. Nobody had reported her missing, as she had no family or close relatives to miss her. She had quit her job just before she was taken ill, so at her workplace they hadn’t suspected that anything was wrong, either. We found her by the regular screening, when we were searching for eventual oscillators from institutions and hospitals.

“Helena’s condition is no better, then.”

I shook my head. “It must be because of her illness, we’ve found no other explanation. She’s not able to control the oscillation. She instinctively starts to oscillate and always crashes with the same results.”

“But she is clearly talented, too?”

I nodded. “Just wait till she starts again to solve the computing problems we’ve left on her table. Last week she deciphered the traveling salesman’s problem with fifteen cities. You would need a supercomputer to do that. If she didn’t have that defect in her brain, who knows what she might accomplish.”

I couldn’t help it; my attitude toward the patients was awe. In a sense they were omnipotent; in the medieval times their deeds were the stuff of ballads, or they were burned at the stake. I’d even wondered why no military idiot had yet come to the university and demanded Helena for their experiments. But most likely the oscillators were able to keep such probabilities far away from their life. And fortunately, life wasn’t a movie.

“The team has already given up,” I clarified. “Except Salvatore who still wants to study her case. But then Salvatore is new.”

“He’s ambitious. If he could prove something he’d be able to get funding.” Salvatore’s predecessor had suddenly quit a month ago; they said he’d won a big sum in the Euro-lottery. Salvatore had been in the house for only two weeks and he already expected to be able to find something the Institute’s veterans hadn’t yet explained. Salvatore thought Helena a freak that ought to be cut into thin slices if necessary to get answers.

Salvatore’s predecessor had experimented with tighter control, but irritating the oscillators just led to trouble. Helena had been tied fast in her hospital bed, but even that had not kept her back. If the oscillators were allowed to live as they wanted and research was only done in the laboratory with machines, nothing weird happened to anybody. But who would listen to me.

Everybody except Salvatore was tired of Helena. She was really of no benefit to the research at all. At the most, there was the boys’ fun in betting at what stage she’d escape her room again. It was very difficult to define the exact moment, since even our most sensitive movement control devices were unable to monitor her movements. That’s why they sometimes bet on the moment the cameras would stop working.

“But you must be excited about that little boy, anyway?” Manuel continued.

I sat up straighter. “He has developed enormously, but he’s not yet old enough to understand what it’s about. Salvatore dares not leave him alone even for a moment, so that his abilities won’t develop too far. His parents visit him almost daily.”

“I guess they must be shocked.”

I shrugged. “They consider it a religious miracle.”

“It would be fantastic to get to know him.”

The incident had even made the news. In the countryside, they’d found a five-year-old boy who was able to perform miracles. Various small things had happened in the boy’s family: a fire started by the gas stove had gone off by itself, and a huge crowd of butterflies had appeared inside the house whenever there was nobody else to watch. Then once it happened that the parents had woken up in the middle of the night because of awful screams downstairs. They found their sleepy son standing on the kitchen floor, and outside the back door, a burglar bawling in pain, one of his hands melted fast with the door handle. The miracle was so obvious and so public that it interested the media only for a week, after all, and the whole matter was accepted as just a tall tale. We were able to contact the family in peace and quiet and convince them of the importance of the research. The parents were so hysterical, they were happy to resort to the Institute. Anything, to cure the boy.

Manuel chuckled. “We haven’t achieved any results yet, either, but we’ve invented new approaches.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Next, we are going to try blind testing with a comparison group. Everyone will try to affect the random series of numbers the computer will generate.”

The lab boys liked to boast of their plans. Manuel, too, always tried to make an impression on me, since he was one of the lucky ones to be chosen as a test person. He let them pump various stimulating substances into his body, and afterwards sit for hours in a closed room observing whether there’d be any changes in him. I wasn’t impressed by experimental research and their boasts about it—it was sheer madness to strive to oscillate. I had watched Helena long enough to know that oscillation wasn’t meant for humans. When I’d spoken about my doubts, they just told me Helena’s condition was an exception.

When Helena crashed she forgot everything. The boy was quite all right, as long as he stayed inside the Institute and close to the restrictor. And if he crashed, he always remained aware of his special abilities. Helena’s problem was caused purely by some memory disturbance, possibly an early stage of hereditary Alzheimer’s disease that nibbled at her brain piece by piece and made her forget what she ought or ought not to do.

I shied away from speaking aloud about my doubts. I believed Helena and the boy’s condition was impossible to replicate artificially. Oscillation is a mutation only one person in a hundred million carries, and it certainly couldn’t be attained through experimental research. But even in that, there’s the damn probability, and probabilities are dangerous.

“Well, see you again,” said Manuel. He disappeared into the long corridor that led to the multiple security doors and from there to the rooms of the scientists.

It was like we all fumbled in the same darkness, trying to find a light switch, and maybe the house had no electricity, even. And being blind, we shouldn’t even be trying. We hardly knew what kind of bush we were sticking our heads into, and yet we just had to stick our heads in the bush. But perhaps I shouldn’t always have doubted; after all, I was paid to study the reports of the experimenters and try to see some logic in them.

Helena

I look again at the furniture in my room, all its details. Cameras have been skillfully planted in the corners. They are small but easy to find. Maybe they haven’t even tried to hide them, just made them as unnoticeable as possible so I wouldn’t be disturbed and worried.

I don’t want to have an anxiety attack, although that’s ridiculous, too; who is there to be hurt, even if I cry? But some ways have been engraved in my spine as the only proper ways to behave, and a memory from my childhood surges up to pester my mind. I’m in a bus, traveling to my aunt in the mountains; I desperately want to pee but I dare not go and ask the driver to stop. I dare not, for I’ve been taught that it simply is not done. Finally I leak under myself and my skirt gets thoroughly wet. I only cry after I’ve run off the bus, when nobody can see me.

They ask me a lot of questions. Do I remember what happened before I was brought here? Sure, I was working, quite normally. What about my giving notice, when did that happen? In my old life, when I was working in the veterinarian’s practice. So I do remember the practice? Of course, I specialized in the care of small pets, guinea pigs, mice, but also the more ordinary pets like dogs and cats. Did anything special happen there? I can’t say, what are you actually looking for with these questions of yours? Did I feel myself somehow different from others?

I realize I’m now in the condition they call my clear moment. And when I have my clear moment, I’m something more. I’m able to do things that are impossible for them. If I want to enjoy my power, I have to hurry, but where would I fly? Is this instinctive feeling of mine enough, that even if I’m in no danger, I still have to leave, as quickly as possible?

And how do I escape?

Mireia

The night shift was informed of the current research situation, and whether any problems were expected. That went with the terrain, of course: unexpected results, unforeseen expenses, and decisions that got stuck in the wheels of the university bureaucracy. The temptation to falsify research results was great. Presented on paper, the results sounded so unbelievable they made the sponsors keen to follow the situation on the spot.

I took leave of my colleagues and went in the dressing room to change. I skipped the shower; I could wash at home before going to bed to watch TV.

At first, I noticed the bowl on the floor. It was filled to the brim with dry cat food, somebody’s joke, obviously. Then I saw the cat. She stood at the end of the corridor and stared at me, her tail bristled up. I stopped in my tracks, careful to make no sudden moves. Cautiously I tried to shuffle closer, at the same calling to the cat.

I’d never gotten close enough to touch the cat and now, as always, she flung herself around the corner. I took a few running steps after her, but to no avail. Once again, the ghost of our Institute had gone on her way.

I took up my bag, signed myself out, and closed both the sliding doors and the courtyard gate behind me. I fastened my bicycle with its shopping basket firmly on the fence. I’d already started to struggle with its cranky lock, but on a moment’s impulse, left the bicycle leaning against the railing. For once, I could walk home—it was only a couple of kilometers anyway and the evening was clear. Even the full moon had risen in the sky.

The cat shouldn’t have been in the building at all. Señor Cañedo had, of course, accused one of us of keeping an illicit pet on public premises, but I don’t think anybody had smuggled her in. Who knows but that Cañedo had brought her himself? Or else she really was just an accidental stray cat that had found an open window (unlikely), and noticed an open door to the inner research premises (quite unlikely), and made her way to the apparatus past all security systems (impossible). When the morning shift arrived, they’d found the cat lying among the equipment. The cat had been approached with extreme care. Even if the restrictor under construction was safe and its radiation not dangerous, the cat might harm the sensors. Sleepily, the cat had turned to look at the arrivals, and at just the moment when she was about to be caught by the researchers, she had vanished without a trace.

The boys named the cat Schrödinger, after the scientist who, in his imaginary experiment, put a cat in a box with a death machine. In the thought experiment, the cat was simultaneously both alive and dead, until an observer opened the box and verified what had happened to the animal. The point was that the wave function of every particle oscillated, and it crashed to a certain position in the very moment it was observed. Quantum theories had for a long time been just that, theories, with ridiculous inherent contradictions and impossibilities; but we’d got ahold of the things the theory described. We’d found people who were capable of controlling the particle-waves, transporting particles into a superposition state, and choosing the probability they wanted among several branching possibilities.

To our knowledge, the cat was the only animal that was able to oscillate. But it was impossible to test her, or to observe what happened in her brain. When you caught her and started to connect her into the research apparatus, she slipped out of your hands and either disappeared behind the bookcases or literally dashed through the wall. Like the imaginary cat in the Schrödinger experiment, our stray was simultaneously both there and not there, but you could never know where and what she was doing.

It was scary to think about what the cat might be able to do. If she could pass through a wall, she could also instantaneously jump through a person. Fortunately, so far she had been content to just disappear and reappear as she liked. There were employees who hadn’t seen her even once, and there were people to whom the cat repeatedly showed herself. I’d seen so many miracles in the Institute that I believed the cat to be real and no delusion. The matter need not even be anything kind of lofty and systematic; perhaps the cat was just playing cat-chess. She wanted to see everyone else, but no one was allowed to see her. Perhaps that was why she was such a damn good oscillator.

My steps had taken me to my home alley almost without my notice. I glanced at the wine bar in the corner; the first customers were there already, enjoying the evening and good company. I went through the lower gate to the inner courtyard and closed the gate behind me.

My life was like a sordid replica of Helena’s situation. I lived alone, imprisoned by my recurring rhythm; after a day off I always returned to my research room. The only difference was that I remembered every day and that could be painful, to remember one’s own loneliness. But that was my own conscious choice, anyway; at least that was how I justified it to myself. I did not care about other people and their company. I’d tried dating, but living together had proved impossible. I was irritated by the other’s different rhythm of life, by the clothes left on the floor, by the blue cheese in the fridge, and by the closed bathroom door when I wanted a shower. When you lived alone, you could be the mistress of your own life. Or at least imagine that you were.

I made a cup of hot tea and stretched out on the couch for a while. There was a re-run of a popular quiz on the TV, but I couldn’t care less about it. I turned the lights off and climbed upstairs to sleep.

I laid my head on the pillow but couldn’t get to sleep. At this hour the environment was still in full sway. The woman next door was nagging her husband to fix the washing machine, a TV bawled aloud, and a cricket kept squeaking irksomely right next to my window.

Maybe I ought to do something about my loneliness.

Helena

I can’t get to sleep; little ants of thoughts are darting to and fro in my head. I have these clear moments and I never understand enough to hide or conceal them in time from other people. It might even be that I have nothing more to hide, that they already know everything about me and just want to verify one of their theories. Who’s to know? I’m a feather drifting in the room’s air, swaying to and fro but finally ending down on the floor. I can’t escape, because I’m too airy even to fly away on the wind, I just idle.

And yet I’d like to have at least a small private moment for myself, when I could be myself with dignity, without anybody’s watchful gaze observing me. I do not like to be watched. I want to walk among people without anybody seeing me.

I just stare at the ceiling, at the forms of twilight and the darkness oozing in from the window. The night wind waves the curtains, but it’s still broodingly hot: there’s going to be a thunderstorm on the sea tonight.

The apprehension inside me grows, moment by moment; it seethes and swells.

What will happen if I somehow get out of the door? How do I? And the answers start to roll open in my mind like a bundle of threads with several differently colored bits. Many of them are dark but there are some white ones among them. I just have to hide all the dark threads and concentrate on the white ones, and the door will open.

But I have to be extremely careful. I’m in danger. I can get out of the door, but never out of the building, unless I carry some protection with me. I’m unable to avoid all those webs and strands interwoven with me, the thoughts of others and the invisible encounters, unless I protect myself from their crossfire.

And for that I absolutely need the cat. She immediately appears close by and jumps at my calf. She’s my grey-furred friend, the once-abused foundling whose bruises I treated at the clinic. I laugh with happiness and lift her up in my arms, and she stares past me with complete indifference. But she’s there, anyway, as my safeguard.

I stroke the cat’s head. She pushes at my cheek and her whiskers sweep my skin. Hurry no time for hello. Must get away. Yes, but how? The door is definitely locked and the patio window is so small there’s no room for me to sneak through it.

What would be the easiest way to get out of the house? How would I get the door open? The cat stares at me as if waiting for something. Then I decide to try the door; perhaps the nurse has forgotten to lock it. The white threads. Thin, silky strands. I tremble with eagerness, for now at last I’m strong enough to make an effort.

“Let’s go,” I tell the cat. I snatch a coat off the rack and put it over my simple housedress.

I catch the handle in my hand. I pull at the door and it isn’t locked. The locking system is obviously playing up and the doors are open for the moment. There is no one in the corridor, but at any time somebody might open a door and rush into the corridor, in front of me, and then I’d have to go back to my room and they might harm me.

Go they not see us. The cat suddenly makes me bold; she radiates power there in my arms. I feel light, I know no one will come, no one will see me, I just need to walk out of this building and go wherever I want. I walk the way the white threads show me and let them lead me on.

I hurry to the lift, and from afar I see a white-coated man approaching in the opposite direction along the corridor, but he turns a corner just in time and never notices me. That’s how easy it is. Lift downstairs, through several other doors. Elation dances to my pulse inside me.

The gate, inner courtyard, outer gate. Movement sensors and alarms, but they are blind and mute, all of them. I laugh at them.

Immediately outside the building, the situation changes. Out here, there are so many crisscrossing thoughts, feelings, and people who may sense me. I turn to look . . . there is something in the house that has protected me. The cat lifts her head and sniffs at the environment. Machine do not worry I protect.

There’s an old bicycle in front of the gate, with a lock even, but that opens easily and falls down in bits and pieces. Someone’s been trying to snatch the bike and has broken the lock already, but has been disrupted in the middle of it. I put the cat in the shopping basket, get on the bike, and tread on the pedal.

I ride along the winding streets, through an overflow passage, and walk the bike directly to the water’s edge. I sit on the sand, to think. The sea beats at my toes. Lightning embroiders the sky but everything’s silent; the thunder stays far off over the sea. The lights of a luxury ocean liner are visible somewhere far away. The cat sits on the sand looking important and scratches the ground with her forepaws. She sits down to lick herself, before she steps up beside me. We go.

I lift her up in my arms and walk along the shoreline. I approach the city by the wharf; the area is full of empty wooden boxes abandoned by the fishmongers, overflowing trash cans left behind by the sunbathers, garbage bags deposited on the streets, and hungry stray cats circling the refuse.

Hurry this area marked.

“All right, let’s find more information somewhere.”

People stagger along the streets but they all walk by me, ignoring both the cat and me. I wipe the sweat from my brow and drift to the door of a small café; without noticing it, I’m inside. A man with a black moustache is wiping a table with a piece of cloth and spits on it before he lifts the ashtray up and wipes the surface once more. I sit at the corner table by the toilets. Somebody has forgotten a newspaper and a cup of cocoa on the table. I put the cat down on the opposite chair; she licks her paw and stops for a while to stare ahead.

I stir the drink with the spoon and sip the first mouthful. It’s hot and burns my mouth but that eases quickly. I’m hungry and I snatch a croissant from the neighboring table.

No time for play must find.

“Yes, yes,” I say aloud.

I pick up the afternoon paper and flip through its pages until I find the announcements. Wanted. For sale. To be given away. There they are: several pets. I quickly check on who wants to give away mongrel cats. All the names feel equally unfamiliar. No intuition to help me on.

Search trust us.

“Alright.”

I lift my eyes to the opposite wall and punch my finger randomly at the newspaper. Then I peek at what my forefinger has covered: an announcement from a lady who wants to give up her cat because of allergy. No mention of the cat’s age, but perhaps the kitten is just the right age. The place is close to the Tibidado amusement park, where that little boy was saved when he was run over by a car.

The cat jumps into my arms, pushes at my face, and rubs her mouth on my cheeks so hard that her chin hits mine, sharply. I startle. Now and then the cat seems deaf; I think that’s because she’s muffling all the sounds around herself—she likes to enjoy peace and quiet.

I step out onto the street. Imperceptibly, night has turned to morning. I walk to the bus stop by the park and bus number 435 comes, well-timed. I enter from the back door and entrench myself in the rear corner. The early birds load themselves in, but the bus fills from the front. I’m left to sit alone.

They must already be feverishly searching for me, but they cannot find me yet. I jump off the bus, walk up a steep street, and everything becomes crystal clear. A little blue tram is creaking down the street, its maw filled with tourists peeking out from the windows. It’s exotic, the city’s only working tram.

The cat stretches, fretful. She doesn’t want to crash, either, because she knows how miserable it feels to crash. She just wants to be home and safe as I do. But there’s simply no time for moodiness now. Must find kittens.

The kittens were born in the spring. The cat was recuperating from her wounds, and no one in the clinic had noticed either from X-rays or heart-films that she was pregnant. I’d been on night duty when the cat started to drop them, five altogether, five little eyeless balls.

“We are very close now,” I tell the cat, and now I’m actually running. I smile, because now everything is so easy and simple. I know why I’m like this; I know what I want.

Time is against us, but we have to keep fighting, time after time until we overcome. Fortunately, I’m now quicker than anybody else; in my multiple state I’m able to choose any probability, pick out the alternatives I like, and combine them to a reality favorable to myself. But there are so many observers around that I feel their perceptions and eyes battering at my body. The cat protects us both; she has created a space around me where all beings observing us become part of her world. Every time someone notices me, the cat has to support the weight of one more factor. She knows her business, but she is not indefatigable.

Then my way stops. There’s a barricade on the street to Tibidado, and the workmen have drilled the asphalt open. The crossfire of eyes is too much; it’s impossible to pass unnoticed. If I want to get on the hill, the only way will be to take a car somewhere or go to the metro station and ride one stop sideways. Underground.

Mireia

I rang the doorbell, a little nervous. A white-haired woman, perhaps in her seventies, opened the door. I shook hands with Senõra Sanchez and she asked me in to sit at her kitchen table.

Little espresso cups had already been laid on the table and the senõra went to turn on the gas stove.

“So nice for him to find a home,” the woman said. “I got him from the house for lost and found animals; I’d have liked to keep him, but it seems I’m allergic. I get short of breath and the doctor recommended that I ought to give up my animals.”

The water was boiling and the woman prepared the espresso with a pressure cooker. We drank the coffee and chatted on this and that. Finally, the senõra went to the rear room and brought a little furry ball to me in her arms. The cat was charming. His eyes were still greenish and he had a black spot on his nose. He was rather small, perhaps four months old. I held him in my arms and he immediately rolled himself into a ball and started purring.

“He’s so sociable. And he only approves of canned food.”

“I can afford to buy him whatever he needs.”

“Fine, fine,” the woman mumbled and poured more coffee in the cups. “I think such a fine cat deserves a proper home.”

The woman started to talk about why she found the cat unusually intelligent: how he seemed to understand every word, and look so attentively out the window.

“He warned me of the accident that happened to that boy,” she said.

“Of what?”

“When that boy was run over by a car,” she continued. “He pushed me up here to the window and we both saw how the boy flew. It was me who phoned the ambulance there . . . ”

I looked carefully at the cat, but outwardly there seemed to be nothing special about him. I offered money, but the woman wouldn’t accept any. She even gave me a basket to carry the kitten home.

Getting a cat had been a sudden fancy of mine. When I was staying awake through the night, looking out the window at the lightning-streaked sky, I realized there was no need for me to be completely alone. I could always get a pet, and why not a cat. They were independent and easy to care for; a kitten could manage even a long shift in my apartment.

I said goodbye to the woman, and was soon standing in a crowd at the metro station. The kitten kept mewing and turning restlessly round in the basket. I thrust my finger to him through a slit in the basket, but he drew back to the other side. He would soon get used to me.

The station controller announced that the train would unexpectedly arrive on another track. I started walking along with the crowd. I glanced behind my shoulder and bumped into someone. We both fell down. I stammered a quick excuse and stooped to help the woman up. It was Helena.

Helena’s gaze turned inwards and her look became distant and absent.

“This can’t be happening,” I said and snatched at her hand.

A stranger stopped by my side and asked whether we needed help.

“She’s my mother,” I answered quickly. “She has a problem with her memory.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

I led Helena aside from the crowd and seated her on the station bench. She held my hand, her eyes half shut; she hardly understood where she was, in fact. I asked her how she was, but she only babbled something. Helena had even forgotten how to form intelligible words.

“Why in the world do you wish to get away? Why don’t you stay close to the restrictor where you can be yourself, at least for a while?”

But Helena did not answer; she just stared ahead with unseeing eyes.

What must it feel like to crash? In a way she died every time it happened. When suddenly the greatness she must have felt changed back to ordinary life. Perhaps the amnesia was lucky in a way, ignorance of all that she had lost.

I’d now have an excellent opportunity to change the progress of events. I could push her into the first train to arrive at the station, push her towards the unknown and let fate lead her. Or I could hide her in my own home; care for her where other eyes would not see her. If she indeed had dementia, it would eventually weaken her health until she’d no longer even be able to breathe by herself, and she would mercifully perish from suffocation.

“What do you actually want?” I asked Helena. “Oh, how I wish you could tell me what you want out of life, yourself.”

But Helena did not answer; she just kept swaying where she sat. The passersby were looking at us and I affected a smile at them. It was only then I remembered the kitten I’d acquired. The basket lay by the bench, but the hatch was open and the kitten had disappeared. I didn’t even want to think or to feel guilty; the kitten had run away. He had either been trampled by people, or he would join the mass of the city’s stray cats.

I fished up my phone and punched the familiar number. After three rings, Manuel answered.

“You can’t guess where I found Helena this time.”

I told him the place and Manuel promised to come and fetch us. He advised us to stay where we were so that there’d be no surprises.

Helena was still in a state of disorientation; she would not recover before she returned to the shelter of the Institute and the restrictor. The restrictor prevented an observer from crashing the wave function. Its field destabilized our one and only reality to a state where an observation had not yet made the event real. The apparatus made it possible for me to observe Helena with my gaze without her crashing. But we had not yet been able to make the field strong enough to protect our patients outside the building, and every time Helena escaped outside, she had to protect herself alone. She had, however, grown more and more skilled with her escapades.

Manuel arrived in half an hour. I pushed Helena into the back compartment of the van and went to sit by Manuel. He tried to pump me for information about how I’d happened to surprise Helena in action, but I cut my answers short.

We received a cheerful welcome and I had to tell how I’d collided with Helena. Salvatore had already run through all the videotapes, and once again the recording had broken down before her escape. The method of escape was still a mystery. Perhaps it was one of those questions that would never be solved.

“We might try a new kind of test on Helena,” Salvatore said.

Salvatore was excited, the research had taken a huge leap forward, he said. He thought the restrictor functioned more stably. I smiled at him politely, said a few trite sentences and went back outside for air. It was siesta time, the screens were drawn shut in front of the shops, and only a few canteens were keeping their doors open. A market vendor had left a pair of unused sandals on the street. I tried them on and they seemed to fit perfectly. I left my old pair lying on the street.

I wandered into a nearby café and ordered a pint. I leaned on the counter and sipped the froth. A shiver went down my spine. The presence of other people felt disconcerting and I withdrew to the corner table, to a place where I’d be in shadow.

Next to me, a man in black was playing the slot machine. He tapped angrily at the levers, finally punching the machine, and then marched out. I walked to the contraption and pushed at the start—the man had forgotten a twenty-cent coin in the machine. With the first spin I got three oranges and the machine gave a cheerful tinkle. I was delighted: since the machine wanted to give me money I’d take whatever I could get, of course!

When the pot reached twenty euros, I took the winnings out and crammed the coins into my pocket. At that very moment something brushed my calf. I startled and turned to look. It was my own kitten, and I didn’t even have time to feel surprised before I stooped down to pick the kitten up. Cats seemed to bring good luck!

Want safety where mother? Safety, yes. In a daze I walked back to the Institute, with the cat in my arms. As soon as I got to the coolness of the lobby, the cat jumped out of my arms and vanished in the middle of his flight, and only then did I understand what I had actually found at the old lady’s house.

Helena

I close the window shades so that the scorching afternoon sun will not blind my eyes. The cat purrs in my lap and I caress her head, softly.

“I am Helena. Helena García Luna,” I tell the cat, and she stares me directly in the eyes. She understands me; at least that’s how I feel.

We need each other.

I hear a meow from the floor and a kitten pushes himself up in my lap, too. Where did he appear from? The door to my room is closed. There is a corridor behind the door, and after that, doors and a lift and alarms and the stairs out. And people one must beware of.

I make an effort, and remember that there are yet more kittens left. They did all survive. The veterinarian said it was a miracle, there were signs of torture on their mother; her fur had been shaved from the crown of her head and her abdomen, just as they do with experimental animals.

But the kittens are all right. Somehow I just knew that whatever happened, those cats would survive. And they dream cat dreams.

Seek next hurry hurry.

“Yes, let’s go seek,” I say, and at the same moment I see in front of me a bundle of threads with black strands and a few white ones. I choose a thread that has the door to my room open at its end.

The Laughing Doll

Marko Hautala

Translated by Jyri Luoma & edited by James Wheatley

Marko Hautala is the author of five novels that focus on the darker aspects of the human mind. In 2010 he received the Kalevi Jäntti Literary Prize for Young Authors for his novel Shrouds (Käärinliinat, 2009), a modern gothic tale set in a mental institution, drawing on the author’s own past experience working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. His first novel, The Self-Illuminated Ones (Itsevalaisevat, 2008) received the Tiiliskivi Prize. In “The Laughing Doll,” a friendly gathering of two couples takes an unexpected and grisly turn . . .

“But hey, does anyone remember the Laughing Doll?”

Milla looked dramatically around the dining table, her drunk eyes wide in the thrill of recollection. On the other side, Alisa lifted her hands to her mouth to cover a sigh. In fact, it was one high note ending in a minor vibrato.

“It was dreadful,” Alisa uttered to the hollow space between her palms.

“What are you talking about?” Sami asked.

“Just dreadful,” Milla and Alisa said together in a girlish conspiracy. Sami mumbled something and looked at Karri. Why can’t they behave, his eyes said.

Grown-up bitches.

“Is it some sort of urban legend?” Karri said, to escape Sami’s glare.

“Abominable . . . ” The women were laughing and weeping simultaneously. Sami sighed and wiped at a wine stain on the linen with a napkin.

“I’m sure the girls can tell more about it,” Karri said, hoping to gain with his eyes a mutual understanding.

“You’ve never heard of the Laughing Doll?” Alisa stared at each of the men. Karri shook his head and looked to Sami for support. He was preoccupied with the wine stain.

“The Laughing Doll,” Milla started, “is probably my worst childhood trauma. Really. The worst.”

“You have a few others beside that,” Sami mumbled.

Milla did not even blink at Sami, and she continued: “The Laughing Doll was . . . a murderer or something. A ghoul. It stalked the kids walking these paths through the local woods. And I remember . . . ”

Milla burst into a giggly moan. She shook her head the way she did when she talked about how tastelessly a man had approached her in the work place or at a restaurant.

“I remember walking home too late at night one autumn by that beach. The electricity was out; it was when that was still possible. The whole road was dark, and suddenly I had the feeling that there was someone walking by me.”

“Oh no,” Alisa said with her hands on her rosy cheeks. “Did you hear it—”

“I didn’t hear laughter, but I didn’t have to. I already knew. Based on those stories I already knew the sound of it . . . ”

“Ha-ha-ha,” Alisa helped with a machine-like, monotonous voice, and Milla shook her head and flailed her arms about.

“You know, I ran like I had never run before. My God, I was sure it was the . . . ”

“Laughing Doll,” Sami snorted to his wine glass.

“I think I even saw, amidst the trees, the shape of a creature walking like . . . ”

Alisa interrupted Milla by standing up from the table so that all the glasses spilled a little. She started walking in a bizarre, jerky fashion to and fro at the head of the table. It was like a clockwork toy with a damaged mechanism.

“That’s it,” howled Milla, and Alisa’s pantomime ended in a fit of laughter. “That night I couldn’t sleep at all, because I was afraid that if I looked at the window, it would be there and would start that . . . ”

“Ha-ha-ha.”

“Stop it, Alisa. Or I won’t sleep tonight either.” Alisa sat down, laughing, and put her hands down on Milla’s hand.

“You’ll sleep alright,” Sami said and smiled joylessly.

Milla wiped the tears from her eyes. Suddenly it was easy to imagine the same gesture in this same space, when there were no guests.

“Why did it walk like that?” asked Karri.

“How should I know?” said Milla. “It was somehow . . . like . . . ”

“Disabled or . . . a jack-in-the-box,” said Alisa. “A jack-in-the-box that was not turned off.”

”Awful.”

Milla smiled and gave one more lazy laugh. Disappointed, that the joy did not last longer.

“They said a madman used to live in those derelict cottages, missing a whole knee joint. All bone. A deformity of some sort.”

Milla lowered her hand under the table, and it was obvious that she was feeling her knee.

“Whatever,” she said. “Kids’ lore.”

“That’s right,” said Alisa. “Our Ines was also afraid of Karri’s furry gloves when she was little. She even had nightmares about them.”

There was a torrent of laughter, then silence.

“Oh well,” Sami said and emptied his wine glass in one swig. “Should us men go and get some fresh air?”

“Why not,” Karri responded and started to think of matters to discuss. Work, women.

Sami was probably not drunk enough in order to talk about the Thai whore who got sperm in her eye and asked for additional charge. That at least led to a proper conversation last time. Loyalty, guilt, the difference between men and women.

Sami cut two Cohibas. Milla and Alisa started talking about their old teacher, whom Karri also remembered. He and Sami had been at the same school as their present wives, two years senior. Alisa and Milla had been best friends since upper elementary school. Karri and Sami had affirmed the existence of one another while at school, nothing more. They remained hopeless outsiders during these evening get-togethers, for which Karri was not too keen on driving all the way from Helsinki. The whole suburb had changed. It was beyond Karri how Milla and Sami could continue living amongst the ruins of their childhood.

“No need for a coat,” said Sami and handed over a cigar.

It was a dark night in August. Sami sat with a quilt over his shoulders, smoking his cigar and staring at the woods. The sound of the sea came from behind the trees. In the daylight it was visible amidst the fallen lime trees. Now, one could only hear the hissing of the surf, smell the scent of the ocean.

“How’s things at work?” said Karri.

Sami paused, inhaling the smoke. “Nothing much,” he replied. “Got sacked.” Karri gave a laugh, but Sami remained drunkenly serious. Some ash had fallen over the quilt.

“Really?” asked Karri. Sami sucked on his cigar, until the fire end looked like a warning light, then he let the smoke rise up from his mouth.

“Yep.”

The silence was awkward. The wind was humming, as if a great wave was approaching from a distance. Next to them was a house, money was needed in order to keep it. A crumbling castle.

“Are you sure?” asked Karri. Sami’s nose produced a cloud of grey smoke. “Yes, I’m sure.” Silence.

“Oh shit. Does Milla know?”

“Yes.”

“How did she—?”

Sami shrugged his shoulders. “Laughed,” he said. “It’s always been like that, although she gets to go shopping in Shanghai every December.”

Karri regretted the fact that he had asked about the job. Instead, they could have just listened to the sighing of the reeds and lazy waves, the darkness that was no more summer, not yet autumn. Now there was restlessness in the air. A need for consoling words.

“The world’s nastiest weapon,” said Sami. “Women’s laughter.”

He put his hand on his crotch. “Paralyzing.” Karri nodded. He looked at the darkness of the trees and thought of Sami on his way to work. A part of life in the past as well.

When they returned inside, Milla looked over her shoulder with a routine smile. Her eyes were somewhere else.

“Cigar men,” noted Alisa and started to giggle.

Milla whispered something that made the ladies laugh with tears in their eyes.

By dawn, Karri was too drunk. He was afraid he might say aloud that he was truly sorry. Sorry about the decaying castle, the excesses of life. And about what happened between him and Milla in the end of a night out last year, when Alisa had gone to bed and Sami had passed out on the couch. How could Karri have known that all Alisa wanted was to laugh at Sami. To paralyze.

That night Sami had sat there all the time like a gorilla absorbed in thoughts. Or like a little boy fallen asleep in the backseat of a car, trusting that the parents knew where to go.

“Did Milla tell you?” asked Karri as he searched his bag for his toothbrush. “That Sami got sacked?”

Alisa sat near the mirror table of the guest room and rubbed her arms with lotion.

“No.”

She did not stop. The lotion made the skin on her arms shiny everywhere she touched.

“Sami said that Milla thought it despicable.”

Alisa sighed. “No, she didn’t. She was worried. For the kids’ sake.”

“I’m also a little worried.”

The lubricating hand stopped. “Don’t you worry about Milla,” said Alisa and looked at Karri in the mirror. Karri looked back and realized that they always talked

about Milla this way. Through the mirror. Karri brushed his teeth and left the toilet unflushed, in order not to wake Milla and Sami’s kids. When he returned to the dark guest room, Alisa stood in the center of the room and stared outside the window, her shoulders crouched and her fingers crossed over her bosom.

“There’s someone out there,” she said. Karri closed the door and looked at the window.

“Where?”

“Look. There’s someone standing out there.” Karri walked over and looked out at the dark yard.

He could see only the reflection of himself and Alisa, the shapes of the shrubbery in the glow of the streetlights.

“There’s nothing out there.”

“Yes, there is.” Alisa stood next to him and pointed at the black tree trunk in the back of the yard. “Next to the ash. I saw it moving just now.” Karri got closer to the window. He could see the bumps that might be interpreted as human, if so desired.

“You’re seeing things,” whispered Karri.

“No, I’m bloody not. It moved.”

“Some of Sami’s garden project. The wind moves it.” Karri kept his eyes on the black shapes, waited for a movement. “It’s not moving,” he said. Then it moved.

“Look,” Alisa hissed and backed away from the window. The thing, which had just seemed like the outline of a tree, was now moving across the yard with jerking steps as if it was dragging something behind.

“Goddamn,” muttered Karri and followed the movement of the shape until his forehead touched the cool glass of the window. The coolness passed through him, all the way to his fingertips. The shape disappeared somewhere behind the house.

“Go tell Sami,” said Alisa and squeezed Karri’s shoulder.

“Maybe it left.”

“Just go.”

Karri looked at the streetlights outside the yard. The black walls of concrete houses in the distance. A few lights were still on, like the flames of candles. The small, suburban tragedies, the plastic carpets coming apart at the seams and the dirt-yellow lights.

“Or I will,” said Alisa.

“All right.” Karri walked out of the guest room and closed the door behind him. He heard the door lock; Alisa making herself safe with her mirror and lotions. The darkness of the hallway made it impossible to move with determination. Karri felt about the white of the walls and tried to imagine the paintings in broad daylight. It was the same place where they had entered and kissed each other on the cheeks to show they were no longer kids, that they knew how adults would behave. Karri took the first step on the stairs and climbed with his hand on the rail. He could see the after-image of a loping figure in his mind and recalled the women’s laughter.

As he reached the top of the stairs Karri stopped. There was a sound coming from the bedroom. A grunt, coughing. Milla’s voice.

Karri looked around and saw someone sitting at the table. His skin tightened, belly turned into rock. The creature had been there the whole time. As if it was attached to a tree.

“Howdy,” the voice uttered.

Karri froze, too terrified to explain why he was creeping around and listening to Milla’s grunting.

“Feel free to put the lights on.” Karri felt for the switch. The light’s yellow gleam revealed Sami like a lump of dough on the chair. Exhaustion and intoxication pressed his right eyelid down. The other eye stared at Karri.

“There’s someone in the yard,” whispered Karri.

Sami sighed heavily. “Sit yourself down,” he said. “Let’s drink ourselves silly.” Karri looked at the bedroom door, then Sami. His chin was moist from red wine. There were wine stains on his shirt.

“Really. There’s someone lurking around.”

“Why don’t you sit down.” Karri let go of the stair rail and walked to the table.

Sami started filling a glass before he even had time to sit down. It was Milla’s, but what did it matter anymore?

“It’s probably some junkie from the flats,” said Karri. Sami gave a laugh. “You should get motion detectors or—”

“The fucking Laughing Doll,” Sami interrupted. The silence that followed the words was rustling, like there was a fireball trapped inside it. “You wanna hear?” asked Sami.

Karri was not sure. When he touched the glass of wine, there was a brief fragmentary recollection of Milla’s lips, her hand wandering under the table touching his knee.

“It was no fucking Laughing Doll to begin with. And it wasn’t a psycho or anything . . . ”

Sami waved his hand in the air. His fingers were numb.

“It was a fucking weakling. They used to call it a Laughing Mask. That is what it was called originally.”

Karri glanced at the bedroom door. He would be partly to blame, if Milla and the kids woke up.

“It tried to be everybody’s pal, but nobody wanted to be with it. They sliced the tires of its bike and in the springtime they left it alone on an ice raft. Everyone was waving at it from the shore. But it just kept laughing.” Sami emptied the glass with one gulp and poured some more. “Then we decided to put an end to its laughing. We went to one of those deserted buildings on the shore and took the Laughing Mask with us. We told it that it wasn’t brave enough to go down to the cellar of one of those buildings, that people had got killed there. Of course it dared.”

Karri tried to interrupt, but couldn’t get his mind off the figure moving outside. In his imagination, it ran to the woods, lifted into the air and flew over the fallen tree, touching the reeds.

“We . . . ”

Sami interrupted and stared in front of him. Karri stared at the rubbery skin of Sami’s face; underneath, the muscles were twitching. The reflexes of distant memories. “They bolted the basement door. They said that now you stay down there with the dead. Let’s see if you’ll keep laughing.”

Sami drank some more, stirred the glass so that he could get the last sip.

“It remained locked up the whole night,” he mumbled. “And the next day when they arrived, it had stopped laughing. After that it never did. People started to fear it. Respect.”

Karri did not want to touch the wine glass anymore. On its surface the microbes of him and Milla intermingled. For a brief moment he was sure that Sami would realize it during some inebriated moment of sensory clarity. But he kept looking at his hand resting on the table like an alien being.

“That’s the source of those legends, the fables old wives can’t shut up about. Blah, blah.”

Karri fixated on Sami’s hand. The fractals of the red stains at the curve of his thumb. On the refrigerator door handle there was also a stain. And on the floor. The footprints leading from the bedroom. They would look dismal in the morning, when the sunlight entered through the wooden blind. Milla’s moan was again audible. Now it echoed at the walls longer. Karri felt a cold vibration in his spine.

“Milla and . . . ” he began, but could not finish.

“They won’t wake up,” said Sami and suddenly he sounded completely sober.

Karri’s drunkenness was also gone. Just like that. He could see the kitchen, the yellow light and Sami’s hand in a stunning state of clarity. There was ringing in his ear canals like he was under water. The tingling of drowning, a warning signal. He slowly stood up from the chair. His hand searched for the wine glass. Like the hand of a blind man. The hand of someone used to darkness.

Karri turned away slowly and walked down the stairs. Sami’s shadow did not follow. The stairs felt like they would give in any second.

He opened the guest room door, forced Alisa to pack. He shook her by the shoulders when words did not help. They clattered with their bags to the back door, walked by the shrubbery, the ash, and the cherry tree to the gate, then to the car parked in the street. Alisa cried and threw accusations all the way, so that the sound of the reeds and the waves was inaudible.

In the car Alisa banged against Karri’s shoulder and arm, which was pushed stiff against the wheel. They didn’t even say goodbye to the kids. Blah, blah.

When Karri started the engine, he could see from the rearview mirror the crumbling castle and its only lit window. There, he could see a figure of a lonely man. When he squinted, he could see his shoulders shaking. Spasmodically, unnaturally, as if he was a mechanical toy in the circus. It was a mysterious movement. Perhaps he was crying, perhaps laughing.

When Alisa was finally convinced that they had to leave, she called the police, screaming hysterically. Karri drove on. He pressed the gas pedal, looked at the rearview mirror, and thought that in the glow of the rear lights he could see someone following them. A figure behind the car, moving along the dashed line on the street. Lightly, determinedly, as if looking for an embrace. The weightless shadow of a boy woken up from the ruins of childhood.

Delina

Maarit Verronen

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Maarit Verronen has been publishing since the 1980s and writing full time since 1994; she is the author of novels, short stories, collections, and travel books, and has received many literary awards and nominations. In 2011, her book Bright Clear (Kirkkaan selkeää) won the Tähtivaeltaja Award for best science fiction novel published in Finnish. In “Delina,” a traveler returns to a place visited in his youth, where he encounters a woman he once thought he knew . . .

The stranger met Delina at a development organization’s work camp, but Delina was not a volunteer. Delina lived in the country permanently.

The stranger did not spend very much time in Delina’s company. His evenings were spent with fellow volunteers in the village cafe, where Delina’s parents did not allow her to go. During the day, both of them worked in their separate ways: Delina at home and the stranger in the work camp’s fields.

The stranger did, however, get to know the girl well enough to hear that she was in love with a soldier called Zmiri from the nearest garrison. This soldier was arrested once when he and his comrades drunkenly molested volunteers—but Delina knew nothing of the case.

Once the stranger went on a trip to the mountains with Delina and her friends. There, on the shore of a beautiful little lake, Delina asked the stranger to find her a place at a foreign university. He promised to do his best, but warned her that he could probably not be of very much help.

In reality, the stranger did nothing. He was, after all, not so very interested in development work; he had joined the camp above all to have fun a long way from home. And he did not wish to become anyone’s personal guardian. That is, after all, what he would have become if Delina had moved to a country where she knew no one but him.

The stranger wrote to Delina twice, but to his relief he received no answer to his second letter. And so contact was broken.

When, twenty years later, the stranger returned, now as a reporter on a newsgathering trip, he was shocked. He was overcome by an unpleasant feeling. At first sight, Delina’s village had not changed at all.

On closer inspection, the better-kept houses in the village looked a little more dilapidated than before, and some of the less well-kept shacks were new. In any case, the village was a sad exception in comparison with what the stranger had seen in the other parts of the country. The country had at last begun to prosper, but apparently in some unfortunate areas a better future was still awaited.

The stranger remembered the right turnings and the right house. As he walked along the road and stepped into the garden, he was stared at almost as curiously as the volunteers had once been stared at, but now the neighbor’s children came to beg money and chewing gum, and an old woman asked across the fence whether he would like to live in her house cheaply.

In response to the stranger’s knock, the door was opened by a large-boned, middle-aged woman. She was wearing a droopy frock, a stained apron, nylon stockings with holes in them, and trodden-down slippers. Her dark, curly hair was struggling to break free of an elastic band.

“Delina?” the stranger asked, hesitantly.

The woman looked at him for a second with empty eyes, as if the name said nothing to her. Then she nodded, and the relieved expression that had risen on the stranger’s face died away.

The stranger said his name and asked whether Delina still remembered him. The woman looked at him uncertainly, and for a moment it looked as if she was about to shake her head. In the end, however, she left the question unanswered, and asked the stranger to come in.

They asked after each other’s families, and Delina wanted to know how long the stranger was saying, where he lived and whether he was on holiday or perhaps on a business trip. He heard that Delina had three children and that her husband had a job in the capital.

“What is your husband’s name?” the stranger asked.

“Arun,” Delina said.

“You didn’t marry Zmiri, then?”

An astonished expression appeared on Delina’s face: “Zmiri? What Zmiri?”

The stranger did not ask any more questions. He changed the subject and tried to keep up the conversation. Delina looked as if she was listening, but on closer inspection—particularly if the stranger made a reference to something he had said earlier—it occasionally became obvious that she had not heard a word.

At one point she herself seemed to realize how absent-minded her behavior was. She said that in her village nothing much happened and no one was really interested in much beyond how to survive from one day to the next. Even with tourists, no one chatted so much as before; they just sold things to foreigners. Delina also said that she no longer read books or newspapers; the television was now her source of information.

Delina did not ask the stranger to stay that night: the house was so full of visiting relatives that there was no room that could be reserved as hotel accommodation. He understood that it would be best to leave after his cup of coffee.

He did not look to one side or the other, or even in front of him, as he walked through the sagging gate and on to the dusty road. A young girl appeared unexpectedly before him, and they almost bumped into one another.

“Delina?” the stranger said again.

He knew that the girl would answer in the affirmative. She looked exactly the same as twenty years ago, and he guessed that the daughter was named for the mother.

The girl asked, with a good command of what was for her a foreign language, whether the stranger needed an expert guide, and quoted her daily rate. He did not want a guide. He explained that he had been to visit an old friend, but it did not interest the girl in the least, and she did not trouble herself to appear interested once she knew that she would not be paid for it.

The stranger walked back to the main road and wandered for a moment before he found the cafe on whose terrace he had sat with the volunteers. He ordered a coffee and had to wait for it for a long time, even though it was a quiet time of day. A woman who looked like an old whore finally brought the coffee and some cold water in a dirty glass.

“Delina!” someone shouted from the kitchen, and the waitress turned her head.

Then the stranger understood.

Nevertheless, he asked the waitress to sit down; said that he would like to ask her something, and gave her a bank note. The woman looked bored, lit a cigarette and scratched herself, but took the money swiftly and slumped onto the chair.

“Were you born here?” the stranger asked. “Are you married? How old are you?”

He could see that Delina-the-waitress felt his nosiness to be unnecessary, but she answered nevertheless. Yes, she was born in this village, and eloped with her husband to get married, and now she was thirty-seven years old. Her husband had died, knifed in the streets of the capital some ten years ago, good riddance. A bad man, who had beaten her a lot and drunk all their money. His name had been Zmiri.

The stranger was silent for so long that Delina got up to go, but she sat down again with a sigh when the stranger asked her to. There was something else he wanted to know.

“Do you know a woman who has the same name as you, who is the same age and who has moved away? Gone somewhere, studied?”

“There is one. She got a scholarship from some aid organization and left. She’s married to a foreigner. They come here sometimes.”

The stranger did not wish to meet anyone else in that village. He circled the buildings back to a path that led toward the nearest town.

On the way, he passed the graveyard, and all he had to do was cast a glance over the low fence to see yet another possibility. In the corner was a solitary grave whose inhabitant had died at the age of nineteen, eighteen years ago. And from somewhere there appeared, once again, a begging child, who was able to tell him that this Delina had drowned in a mountain lake.

The stranger had nightmares about Delina for the rest of his life, and he believed he deserved them.

Chronicles of a State

Olli Jalonen

Translated by David Hackston

Olli Jalonen is a renowned Finnish writer and the author of more than twenty novels and short story collections. He has lived in Finland, Sweden, and Ireland, and worked as a journalist, a publicist, and a scholar (all of which may have inspired the story to follow). Jalonen’s work has received many awards, including the 1978 J. H. Erkko Award for best debut novel (now known as the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize), and in 1990, both the Eino Leino Prize and the prestigious Finlandia Prize. In “Chronicles of a State,” an anonymous narrator relates the surprising story of his career, and an infamous politician’s rise and fall . . .

I have no reason to lie. There has never been a reason for me not to give my name.

But if someone here were to ask me who I am, then perhaps I should answer, quite simply, I am the man who wrote the history of the State of K, a book so well known that I need not say my name or give myself any greater introduction.

An abridged version was made for schoolchildren as soon as the book was ready to be published as a full-length history book. That complete version was eventually never published; it was shortened instead and given the same name as the abridged version. It had to be changed quite a lot and large sections of the manuscript were omitted the better to fit the book into the schools’ Know Your Neighbors series. The Modern Age. A Short Course for Intermediate Students.

Workbooks were produced, along with supplementary texts and interactive learning material, everything necessary was done, audio material was compiled and illustrations added to the text to form a single, gleaming package. It was very well received in schools. Over fifty thousand schoolchildren have had to read extracts from The History of K, or at least look at the pictures or take part in the activities.

And so I have never had to introduce myself further because people simply know who I am. They wouldn’t know my name in any case, because the publisher thought it wise, for reasons of layout and marketing, not to print the author’s name on the front cover or in any advertising, and eventually it was omitted altogether.

It doesn’t bother me. It isn’t lying.

You had to do something; there was no way of finding work in a foreign country. There are no benefits here for defectors from neighboring countries. Neither should there be. Some get by and some don’t, and those who don’t only have themselves to blame.

When I first arrived here, if you managed to get across the border—back then the checkpoints were still heavily guarded and the borders were secure—you were locked up in a special center for the duration of your interrogation and background check. In my case this took only three months, as I had been in such a high position previously. I had to turn every stone the authorities thought of. No matter, interrogation doesn’t bother me. Everyone has a job to do and is simply stationed where they are told.

During these investigations we were given food and one set of clothes: a pair of straight trousers, a flannel shirt, underwear, and brown walking shoes. In the first few years I used them rather a lot, as I was collecting material for the history book and had to live from hand to mouth with the savings I’d brought when I left.

When I started putting the history together, I began very far back in time. That’s the way to write a history, if it’s done well that is, building up piece by piece from the foundations right to the top, the way people used to build strong brick houses back in the olden days.

Writing about events a very long time ago simply isn’t very interesting, I was advised when I showed the publisher my first version of the manuscript—no more than a synopsis in fact. No, I said and immediately tore out almost ten thousand years from the beginning of the book.

I concentrated instead on what I myself knew and what I had experienced in my own life and what I felt was otherwise important. This made sitting around in archives a far easier task, as familiar decades, names, and images were already in some sort of mental order and there was no need to double-check everything or qualify information with footnotes or references.

Many excellent photographs still existed from those decades. All the most important events had been documented impeccably. Back then every photography studio and agency had had plenty of resources and enthusiasm. In retrospect, even the landscape looks slightly more luscious. Buildings were smaller and there was no need for thoroughfares as wide as a runway, not even on the main roads leading into the capital. There were charming little parks and long, empty beaches for which the State of K was renowned abroad. Tourists still flocked there, and there was no need to restrict people’s coming and going due to any exceptional circumstances.

That was perhaps the golden era. It was as though the country had grown year upon year, the number of people and factories and almost everything else besides increased steadily, the State became richer, its power around the world grew and as a nation it grew from the inside until finally it was worthy of its name. Why shouldn’t I have concentrated more on those golden years?

The publisher only wished to leave this period in the manuscript by way of contrast, so that previous times could serve as something of a colorful background to the bleakness of later events. We have to shepherd the younger generation very carefully indeed; a disaster or an attack of this scale is not at all possible here, but it is a healthy and chilling reminder to see it happen as close to home as in our neighboring country—perhaps this can be an important lesson for our youngsters today, I was told at a meeting of acommittee whose function it was to standardize teaching material as I was presenting the outline of my book.

By way of contrast, all the good of those years was condensed into five minutes and three double-page spreads after which, without any explanation of the various factors leading up to the events which followed, that whole peaceful era of growth and development was cut short with a documentary report:

“Thus far there is no more specific information about the chain of events in the northeastern reactor zone. A crisis group, established alongside the research committee, does not rule out any possible explanation. The fusion silos may have been the target of a large-scale enemy strike or a contained attack. Technical protective structures around the reactors may have collapsed. The accident may have been triggered by the sudden destruction of data in the operating systems. At worst this may be a case of an uncontrolled release of accumulated gas inside the fusion reactors themselves, otherwise known as helium cancer. The State news service stresses that citizens have no need to fear for their lives or their health. The accident is localized and has been contained entirely within the northeastern reactor zone.”

I was probably the best person to write The History of K, or at least the sections dealing with these particular stages in its history, as I watched events unfold both inside and outside the northeastern zone. When the accident occurred—or the attack or whatever they eventually decided to call it—I was working as a journalist for Channel Two and had just come back from the reactor zone. I had been carrying out a series of interviews for an item about farming entitled “Pure Food.”

A number of farmers had been relocated in sectors within a given radius of each of the seven fusion reactors in order to put the wasteland to use and to capitalize on the excess heat given off. People were so skeptical about any food originating from these farms—over 70 in number—that details of the origin of any produce had to be changed before it could be distributed to retailers.

When people at Channel Two started asking for volunteers to investigate the accident at the reactor, I simply felt I was the most suitable to go. I had just returned from the zone, I knew my way around and had many contacts there. In the last few years visas were seldom granted, and permanent residents were not permitted to travel outside the zone.

I finally convinced the channel’s director and my superiors. I signed a voluntary consent form and a confidentiality agreement, checked a car out of the depot, took an array of broadcasting equipment and set off through the State towards the northeast.

There was very little traffic. The closer I came to the zone the fewer cars I passed, while traveling in my direction there was no traffic at all. At the beginning of August, when I had first gone there to interview the farmers, I had passed a steady flow of lorries from the aluminum and steel factories near the border. Now even service stations were shut, though luckily I had taken a full canister of fuel with me.

Not once did I have to go through routine inspections on the northeastern motorway. On the slip road there were only a handful of deserted checkpoints with security cameras hidden in black boxes high up on the lampposts.

It had been a week and a day since the events in the reactor zone. Problems in energy distribution had begun to emerge, power cuts and heating failures. At the darkest time of night people said they could see a faint glow on the horizon in the north and the northeast, like a cold, gossamer fire. If fire can be cold, that is; I remember pondering this question while on the road.

Autumn seemed to have arrived sooner than normal. It was as if there were more brown leaves on the trees than the previous year, and fewer yellow ones. Who can say which leaves are right and which are wrong? The grass is still growing but winter will come eventually. Snow claims the grass, and it is no more. But then grass reclaims the snow, and winter is no more. Or is it so? I remember thinking like this as I drove onwards. Of course, with many years of hindsight all this seems like an omen of what was to come, but back then they were nothing but scattered fragments of thoughts, and it felt somewhat overwhelming to see the forests and verges turn more autumnal by the hour.

A being so much bigger than man can’t hide his handiwork, Father would say when things happened which were utterly beyond anyone’s control. Just like in April every year when the stream would flood the garden. My younger sister and I would take the red plastic sledges left by the front steps and try to row across to the flagpole at the other end of the garden. Above the yard the water was always the greyish color of clay, its surface speckled with shining colorful patches where naphtha and petrol for the aggregate unit had spilled from their tanks during the winter.

Bigger than you and me, Father used to say about his cancer, and went on to live with it for another ten years, at least; he was always moving the deadline forward slightly. First it was when Eeva started school, then when Eeva had turned twelve so that Mother wouldn’t have to take on such a burden. Then when I had finished school, though he didn’t quite make it that far.

I drove along the motorway lost in thought. Everywhere around me dusk began to fall, though according to the given sunset time it should have been light for a good few hours yet. A thin mist had formed across the sky but the sun could still be seen clearly through it, a dim orange glimmer nowhere near the horizon.

The sky was not darkening, it was becoming dusky. As if a matte gauze had been drawn before the sunlight.

I could hear a distant humming, and above the horizon there appeared a pale, shimmering patch of light, a glow. I couldn’t quite make it out, but it no longer dispersed in the northeast.

A lorry with a trailer sped past, heading back towards the cities. Its cab was concealed with a darkened windscreen and on its left side all the lettering and paintwork seemed to have been burnt off, leaving the metal plating scarred and rusted.

Soon after this I was forced to slam on the brakes. The road appeared to be blocked. An enormous pile of scrap metal was spread across both carriageways. I tried to drive around it and along the embankment. An electrical current ran through the body of the car. Outside there was a crackling sound and the smell of burning.

I drove past without stopping. A delivery van had fallen on its side. It seemed to have been caught inside an electric field. Sparks flew forth and struck the road. Nothing but a heap of metal, charred and burnt, fire-damaged pieces of platform and cargo, and probably several bodies too.

When I switched on the radio I heard a crisis-council bulletin on the news claiming that human casualties had been avoided altogether in the reactor zone, collateral damage was minimal, and life within the immediate proximity of the so-called accident site had gone back to normal. The so-called accident site, said the newsreader. I was puzzled by that expression. By now I was so close to the zone border that there was no mistaking the dimmed sky and the strange gusting wind; it was clear that across the border something on a very large scale had taken place, something irreversible. And as for the lorry with its side burnt off and the delivery van lying across the road, they weren’t simply “nothing.”

Throughout the rest of the journey I had to drive through those electric fields; the car motor kept choking and cutting out, but it would always start again. Once I had arrived at the edge of the zone I stepped out of the car and tried to listen for any sounds beyond the ridge.

A high ridge surrounded the entire reactor zone. Before construction of the reactors had begun, an additional protective layer had been built on top of this ridge. Evidence of trucks transporting earth could still be seen—a clear line cutting through the terrain below—though these churned patches of soil already nurtured a covering of small plants and bushes. Above the shifted soil, the color of the ground was different too: lighter stone and gravel, as if the coast of the Yoldia Sea had been moved and transplanted into the middle of the forest. On either side of the northeastern motorway stunted forest plants covered the ground until about ten or so meters from the ridge.

There at the top you could look down into the zone. For I long time I stood on the spot, unable to do anything but stare, as I hadn’t prepared myself for such widespread devastation.

From the bottom of the ridge farming plains stretched out towards the first three of the reactor’s silos—or what was left of them. The outer walls of the silos had all collapsed. The enormous external pipes of the spiral-shaped cooling system had been ripped apart and the water cisterns and deuterium tanks lay in piles of shredded and twisted steel, aluminum, and titanium. A dirty mist hung in the air, everywhere except directly above the defunct silos, which still glowed like bright orange furnaces. The light was so bright that you couldn’t look at it directly.

Nowhere was there the slightest sign of life. Both the roads leading to the reactors and those to the farms were empty and everything on the surrounding plains was quiet and motionless.

Something like this had never been predicted. Risk analysis and calculations based on theoretical scenarios had consistently shown almost negligible probability of any accident. In all the material I found while sifting through piles of literature and archive sources for my history book, I never once came across a statement to the contrary. Presumably other ways of handling the same data did exist, but only select statistics were ever made public.

Standing at the top of the ridge, looking down on the destruction below, I was a different person from the one I am now; it was so long ago. Now I understand more—or so it seems—but back then I thought I knew exactly what was right and what task then awaited me.

I was the first reporter allowed access to the zone after the events of the previous week and I had the necessary equipment in the car to broadcast reports. Because all official communication sought to downgrade the scale of the damage to keep the public calm, I felt it was my duty to tell the truth, the whole unvarnished truth.

I continued on my way deeper into the zone. I got back in the car and drove down the ridge to the checkpoint on the northeastern motorway. On my previous visit in August the checkpoint had been fully manned, complete with security police and stringent border control. Now the entire station was deserted, the gate had been left open and all the steel latches unlocked. The security cameras on the walls of the building looked broken and their lenses had all been turned upwards to face the sky.

I drove to the transport and maintenance center where either a great gust of wind or a pressure wave had smashed the windows and toppled waste bins. There was no one in sight, not even bodies. Across from the center stood the zone’s one and only school; it too stood empty, like on those deserted evenings during a public holiday. All manner of paper, plastic rubbish, and chaff blew about the yard driven by the wind. Veils of smog had darkened the daylight to a premature evening and the raging fires above the fusion silos could now be seen more clearly blazing against the sky.

It was from there that I immediately sent the first of my live broadcasts from the scene of the accident. Reception figures soon reached a level unprecedented on Channel Two. Because of this widespread support I was allowed to continue my broadcasts almost every day, even though there had been plans afoot amongst the board of directors to put an end to them altogether. There was a great deal of pressure from above, because the State communication strategy was based firmly on keeping a low profile, and it had been decided to keep the situation in the reactor zone as quiet as possible, so as not to cause mass panic. Of course, nowadays I realize that this is one way of going about things, but at the time I had only one option and so I worked tirelessly to make public as much news from the zone as I could. Given the situation, anything less wouldn’t have felt right.

The worst of it was that the hundreds of people who lived in the reactor zone had, perhaps even deliberately, been forgotten about altogether. From my previous correspondence in the area I knew that, beneath all the downtown buildings and cellars, a variety of bunkers had been dug out and equipped to be used in the event of an accident or heavy radiation. I went out in search of anyone hidden there, despite the fact that the channel had told me not to go any further into the zone and I was informed by the office of the Secretary General himself that any weakening of State security with images of corpses or the seriously wounded was expressly forbidden.

I couldn’t understand such an edict and I did not uphold it; it was only due to the mass support for my live broadcasts that the channel and the State communication office allowed me to continue reporting at all.

Within a matter of days I had become renowned throughout the State of K, and I realized at once the opportunities this presented for me. I made the kind of programs I thought were just and right, and I began calling them The Truth Show. I started and finished every broadcast with the words: “This is A.C. Hahl for The Truth.”

I could no longer be sidelined or kept quiet. I made sure the fate of the reactor zone remained current news, and once the problems in energy distribution started to grow and the effects of the reactors, all the while blazing and churning out radiation, began to be felt elsewhere throughout the State, my words had increasingly more clout.

From the northeast everything will spread elsewhere. It’s like a cancer. It can be quiet for a long time, then flare up all at once. I’ve seen the signs at close proximity. Sometimes the wind whips up, then blows on past and is forgotten. But it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s bigger than you or me. Through my broadcasts I tried to tell people that the seeds of devastation had already spread throughout the State, you no longer needed to travel out to the reactor zone to see it.

I managed to implement so many changes and improvements that I can no longer remember them all. Few people in their lifetime can ever raise an entire mountain range, but I did. Using earth brought from elsewhere, the protective ridge around the reactor zone was built hundreds of meters higher. That was my doing. As a result of this someone on a debate program at Channel Two suggested that the new mountain range be named the Hahl Mountains after me, because they would never have been built higher if I hadn’t used The Truth Show every day to demand it and to show people that the collapsed silos and blazing reactors must be shut off in their own stone box behind the mountains. Protecting the rest of the State cannot be dependent upon the sum of a mere few dozen billion.

This is how best to effect change. If you reiterate the same fears and the same sensible measures with proper argumentation enough times, even difficult decisions will begin to seem like the only justifiable solutions. No one in their lifetime can make mountains grow, the person suggesting the naming of the mountains had said. No one can move thirty kilometers of mountains by themselves, I commented in a later broadcast. As a backdrop to this item we used a newly drawn map with the words “The Hahl Heights” printed above the mountains.

The Secretary General called me at the studio straight after the news broadcast and said that, from the State’s point of view, words like this were absolutely right given the current situation. I thanked him like an imbecile. But as soon as that short and one-sided conversation ended, I knew that things could no longer continue like this. I mustn’t, mustn’t thank people, mustn’t do favors for which other people can take the credit, and all in the name of the State.

I simply knew this for a fact. From that day onwards my path was marked out. You can’t see the future, but you can look far ahead.

As the situation throughout the State worsened by the day, eventually the Secretary General had to be changed. Things all happened the way they should. The head of Channel Two became the new Secretary General. This, of course, suited me perfectly, because such a decision would never have been made without the refracted light of The Truth Show, and I knew very well that the new Secretary General would remember this as long as he was in office.

I was promoted first to the position of head of programming at Channel Two and later to a position directly beneath the Secretary General, where I was to control all State broadcasting and all channels.

The situation was such back then that we couldn’t afford to risk anything at all. We had to establish a body to unify the content of all scheduled programs, and I was that body.

I retained my own program, but now it only ran once a week. I began prerecording sections in the office studio and storing them ready in the archive, suitable for a variety of different occasions but so that they looked like live broadcasts. It isn’t lying, because you don’t always have to visit a place in person when you already know exactly what is happening there.

Rather, knowledge is when at any given moment you know what is right or good. Or, at the very least, what is appropriate.

When I received the promotion and was moved into the Secretary General’s office as chief controller, I had to learn to know far more. In such a position, as the head of all State channels, you simply can’t be ignorant of anything. You must be able to respond quickly and say what is right or, at the very least, what is good for the State. Of course, this all varies depending on the particular instance in question and the constantly changing circumstances. So if, say, the given circumstance is the climate, then the instance in question will be that day’s weather. Then, of course, you also have to dress accordingly. If the suit fits, then it is the right suit.

For anyone to talk to me of change would have been pointless. In a new position like this the need for change was natural, because you had to learn to know more. You won’t find summer roses blossoming in the snows of January.There’s no use floating around in the past relying on your imagination.

I’m no longer in contact with those who saw fit to talk to me of change. In fact, it’s for the best. In my new position I certainly couldn’t have been seen to take a personal interest in my former friends’ business over those of other people. I finally removed The Truth Show from Channel Two and ordered it to be shown once a week on all channels simultaneously. This way, programming became far more balanced. Staff at the Secretary General’s office thought this a very sensible solution too, because it helped ensure the wide reception of certain important decrees.

Despite this, there were some people who saw fit to criticize me for such rational thinking. I simply let them talk and listened patiently. It’s a good way to treat your staff; let them vent their anger, then they’ll be humble again for a while once they realize that they ought to be ashamed of what they said. And if they are not humble, there are other means.

In difficult situations like this you need to take decisive action, and the situation throughout the State was far from good. The air temperature was cooling because of the clouds of smog and soot particles drifting across the striped sky. The entire energy system had to be reorganized by regulating and rationing consumption and by collecting red-hot earth from the reactor area and packing it around heat-retaining units.

So even though everything was getting worse all the time, we had to give the impression that things were in fact improving. This was part of my new job. I had to play the State optimist, even though I was aware of so much.

When I was transferred to the position beneath the Secretary General, my workplace moved into the head office building. The Secretary General’s offices were on the eleventh floor. At that time, my office was four floors lower, on the seventh floor. Even from my window you could see the sky in the north and the northeast, and how the reactor zone was marching closer by the week.

Nothing was done about it and no one seemed to take responsibility for anything. I began to talk about these matters very discreetly amongst a small group of trusted friends. Whenever appropriate, I reminded people that I would remain loyal and faithful to the Secretary General, though I had no faith whatsoever that he would be able to turn things in the State around.

All these plans were nothing but talk within small, closed circles, and none of it was meant to get out in any way, but, of course, eventually it did. That very day, when I first heard the rumors of calls for reform amongst the leading factions of the security police and the army, I went up to the Secretary General’s office on the eleventh floor and told him of the rumors I had heard, and a little more besides. The Secretary General looked concerned and, for the very first time in a matter of such importance, he asked for my advice.

I had already developed an appropriate proposal. I suggested creating a new, more expansive task force, one with a far greater mandate. If we take the initiative ourselves and place an axe on the table, it’ll knock the wind out of the sails of anyone grumbling, I said. The Secretary General then asked me to lead this task force. Naturally I agreed because of the benefits this would bring the State, but I suggested that alongside this new assignment I might also continue as chief controller of the television and broadcasting network. The Secretary General thought this a very sensible idea indeed.

I moved my office up to the tenth floor. From the windows you could see even more clearly the blazing skies, the governmental district, and far out across the State.

From the very first days everything became crystal clear to me. A constant flow of issues and decisions made their way up to the head of the task force, and I had great confidence in myself; I knew which direction to steer the State in order to get through the present adverse situation with as few casualties and sacrifices as possible.

I increased inspection and surveillance at every level to ensure that dissentand opposition were not allowed to gain a foothold. In exceptional circumstances such as these, basic rights have to be compromised for the general good. Only once people have accepted this fundamental principle can they become fully integrated members of society, but if they won’t accept it they’ll be left on the outside, in opposition to everyone else.

All manner oftroublemakers and revolutionaries were moved out of the cities and resettled near or inside the reactor zone. There was plenty of work available measuring pollution and fallout, or in various purification and clearing up operations. And of course much of the workforce was sent to harvest foodstuffs and transport them back to the cities. The fields had died back and the soil left barren after the farmers had gone and the weather had turned cold so suddenly, and so this workforce had to be instructed in how to gather food in new ways, harvesting year-old self-germinated wheat, mushrooms which grew in the cold, potatoes left in the ground, mutated crops and lots of other items people weren’t used to gathering or eating—or certainly not for the last hundred years.

Because organizing mass food distribution in these changed circumstances required a great deal of work, we had to find a suitable workforce. In a relatively short time, life in the State became much calmer and less crowded, as the worst of the grumblers and doubters and the entire antisocial, undesirable part of society was sent to carry out useful labor near or inside the reactor zone.

From within my small conversation circles I got rid of anyone I felt I couldn’t trust one hundred percent. Several people’s careers possibly came to an abrupt end over nothing, but as the head of a task force like this you simply can’t be too careful. The security forces have to be unified behind you like a bar of pure steel.

At the same time I watched my back and announced new decrees and orders, all formally in the name of the task force, and I was constantly using the State channels and broadcasting network to help me convince people that I alone was behind all these new measures.

My orders were all good. They were firm. People couldn’t possibly have been unclear about the fact that things were not going well, but now at least they had the assurance that matters were being dealt with and that people weren’t afraid to talk openly and frankly. And once life in the cities began to calm down and the streets became quieter, it was impossible not to notice that something positive was finally happening.

For three weeks I appeared in all news and current affairs programs on every channel talking about the present situation and defending the new restrictions and orders. I left legislation about all citizens’ compulsory security service up to the citizens themselves. In due course an opinion poll was conducted via all channels.

Over 98 percent of people voted for the option Yes: I wish to be involved in protecting the general good.

When I was named the new Secretary General the following week, by this point it was nothing but a formality. The former Secretary General had been on negotiations abroad and had decided to stay there. I transferred a suitable amount of money to cover his pension and sent him one of the embassy staff, whose job was not only to help him write his memoirs but to ensure that no potentially damaging claims or columns about the State of K were disseminated through our neighboring countries.

The very day I became Secretary General I gave a speech to the citizens on all channels. The speech features in my history book too, or rather the most important parts can be found in the supplementary material. After all, I couldn’t very well censor myself out of the Chronicles of K altogether.

“Almighty God, who art in Heaven, give this nation the strength to bear its suffering, give the fully integrated members of the State of K the courage to endure this strife, give us a common will and a selfless mind. Let us find strength in unity, though ordeals be sent to test us. God of Heaven and Earth, give me the strength to lead this State through the trials and tribulations beyond our control set upon our path.”

This is how I began my first speech as Secretary General. I had isolated two ways in which I could establish my power quickly and effectively. It was important to speak directly to the citizens and to focus on strengthening morale.

There is no nation as weak as one that is empty within. As Secretary General I wished to impose meaning on people’s lives.

I decided to give religion an important role in leading the State. Both cults and the church were given more airtime, but their message was unified. Preachers had speeches written for them at the Secretary General’s office. A few of the cults didn’t accept this as the only sensible method of ensuring the general good of the State, but they were eventually banned, their preachers prosecuted or exiled without charge, and members of their congregations separated from one another in small communities in the north, far away from the cities.

I gave the security organizations increased powers of authority, though naturally I still had a perfectly realistic idea of their work. Their job within society is not to protect, it is to guard. Plucking out weeds, that’s how I defined the job of the investigative police, while giving new orders about the role of the security services in these changing circumstances.

Whenever a new law or a regulation was qualified with the phrase “changing circumstances,” it was like trying to remain afloat in a rocky waterfall. There was already chaos everywhere, and I was in the middle of it all. The striped horizon was blazing furiously day and night. All State information was brought up to the Secretary General’s office, but from the eleventh floor windows you could see just as well and just as clearly that the horizon was ablaze. Every week the northeast and the north edged their way closer. You didn’t need statistics filtered through numerous different bureaus to tell you that. From such a height you could see that, behind the stained sun, a chill was marching forward, a deep frost and a white aridity.

It was sent by God to rape the earth. That was the message a prophet of the Ash Cross cult tried to spread as a broadcasting preacher. I was forced to do something about it because no one else would. There’s no need to frighten people like that. For humility to flourish there need only be an appropriate level of fear. If there’s too much, what will flourish instead is anger and repression. Anger is difficult to control. It’s like boiling earth, a quagmire. A society built upon anger cannotmake any moves. Anger has to be dealt with early enough in order to channel it properly. It can be used effectively, but it has to be kept at a manageable level, dominated by fear.

The eleventh floor is over thirty meters from the ground. From up there everyday things on the ground look very small. Unity Square down below would sometimes fill with swarms of people—despite the fact that this was supposed to be one of the most closely guarded government districts in the State—but from a height of thirty meters it makes no difference whether there are a hundred people down there or a thousand.

Often I would draw a chair up to the corner of the large windows and gaze out, down into the square at support rallies organized by the army and the investigative police or out to the northeast and the striped, glowing sky, which by now had spread and already engulfed both the north and all of the east.

If people aren’t willing to see, they won’t see anything. In a new place everything looks perfectly clear at first. You know exactly what has to be done. Then your eyes grow accustomed and your mind becomes numb. You’re at once awake and asleep, and while you’re awake you’re making sure that no one disturbs you while you’re asleep.

If I made a mistake, then it was this. When you no longer have the will to see, then you certainly won’t see a thing. There’s no mention of this mistake in my history book, or anything else about the final stages of my reign, for that matter.

I’m not a saint, and I’m not stupid. Omitting things isn’t lying. I have no reason to lie. I’ve never had a reason to lie, neither in the State of K nor here. But then again, who would be mad enough to nail themselves up for nothing?

A being so much bigger than man can’t hide his handiwork, Father would say when things happened that were almost beyond his control. Or was it that some things are bigger than you and me?

Every April without fail the stream would flood the garden and my sister and I would try to row across the yard. She was so light that she could row a plastic sled all the way to the flagpole at the other end of the garden, but it took a couple of planks and some styrofoam to carry me. The water was a grey color from the clay in the garden and shone, it was like a mirror in which you could see your face and behind that the great clouds in the sky.

I don’t suppose I would ever have gone to the zone to report on events had Eeva and Aspi not been settled there. Young couples were asked to go there to farm the wasteland in between the reactors, so-called “Pure Food” Farms were established, more to help create a positive image than because they reaped any great economic benefits. That was over twenty years ago now. Eeva and Aspi’s two daughters were born there.

I first went there to do a report on farming, then after the reactors had been destroyed I volunteered to go back and report on the news. Eeva and Aspi’s younger daughter Taira had died. No one who had been living in the zone was allowed across the border back into the State. I would go and visit Eeva, Aspi, and Ireina whenever I was up there reporting, and take them food and money. This could have got me into a lot of trouble, as any form of contact with the zone was forbidden, but I still visited and took them money every now and then.

Aspi was employed as a dirt transporter when hot earth began being moved from the reactors to the areas surrounding the heat-retaining units. By replenishing the hot soil, energy could be transferred to other areas of the State. Aspi was put to work with others who had lived in the zone and those sent across from prisons. Transporting dirt required a large workforce: work was conducted in three shifts a day, seven days a week.

Eeva joined the Ash Crosses and on the command of some prophet cremated all those who had died in the reactor explosions, dug up those already buried and burnt them, committing their bodies to fire and air.

I can’t be held responsible for what happened to Eeva and Aspi’s family. How could anyone have helped them when even keeping in contact was forbidden and strictly controlled? Of course, reporters are even more closely guarded than others, and once I took on a more powerful position I could hardly be seen to favor my own relatives. The law is the same for everyone, and I couldn’t be responsible for bringing a shadow like that upon the Secretary General’s office, let alone upon myself.

You can’t do everything you want. People who had lived in the zone were simply not granted permission to leave; it was nothing to do with me, it was a question of general order and security. Eeva and Aspi didn’t understand anything beyond themselves and with their constant letters and requests they put me in a very awkward position. As if it were all my fault, or as if I alone could have decided their fate. As it turned out, this couldn’t have been further from the truth.

After the devastation, the zone wouldn’t even have existed for the rest of the State without me and The Truth Show. There would have been nothing but emptiness. The wind would have howled behind the border, but there would have been no one there; there are never people on the other side, just disturbance and problems. As long as people continue talking about something, at least it exists. But when people don’t talk about it, the wind just howls and the northeastern sky is aglow day and night with aurora borealis, and even that is explained away as protuberances of the sun, and the power cuts and the lack of heating are what they are: nothing but terrorism or the work of the enemy. Without State publicity the northeastern zone would have disappeared altogether.

I didn’t allow the zone to be forgotten. Something removed from the mind doesn’t exist. In my reports I etched out an image of the zone so many times that it stayed put. Without The Truth Show the people living in the zone would have had nothing. There was no point in Eeva and Aspi sending me their letters, first to me personally, then to the channel and finally to the Secretary General’s office when I was promoted; keeping such contact caused me a lot of trouble.

When I first visited the zone everything was well and good. Eeva and Aspi were farming their land, Taira and Ireina were little. I was filming my report and interviewing people. At night you could see a glow burning in the sky above the reactor silos, like seven bright moons in a line.

Once the silos’ outer walls, several meters thick, had collapsed in the explosions, the reactors became little suns. The protective structures around the silos fell to pieces and the ceramic mass melted. Everything in the vicinity was burnt to a crisp and the light could be seen for hundreds of kilometers, filtered into radiant beams. When the light had gone, all that was left was the heat. When the heat began to disperse, the sky was left striped with soot and smog. Light is colder when parts of it are missing. Under this constant shadow the zone was plunged into a grey twilight, which at first was contained and limited to the zone itself, but then began to spread its chill to the rest of the State. First the weather changed, then the climate. From my panoramic windows at the Secretary General’s office, I had to acknowledge it as it moved closer week by week. There was nothing anyone could do about something like that advancing.

In The History of K, I included an extract from the prophecy of the Ash Crosses, because after all these years it seemed to encapsulate something very true about those times.

“And the sky disappeared, like a parchment rolled up, and all the mountains and the islands and the plains were uprooted and moved towards the north, from which night was cast upon the earth; from which the rapist of the earth arises, sent by God. The end of ends is nearer than near, no verdant plants shall grow on earth, bushes shall stand barren, fruit shall fall to the ground unripe, the ground shall be covered with hoar frost, frost shall be covered with ice, ice shall be covered with snow.”

Back then these words spread a message of fear, and there was no need to increase fear throughout the State. There need only be an appropriate level of fear, then humility will flourish. If there is too much fear, there is only paralysis or anger and cornered rage. These are dangerous matters—all anger and activity must be turned as swiftly as possible against either the external or the internal enemy, thus reaping benefit from them too. All tumult which reigns within the human soul can be used to govern.

I was good as Secretary General, skilled, but at a time like that nothing is quite sufficient. A cold era had arrived. The sun was striped with sheets of radiation and soot belching from the collapsed reactors and could no longer warm us.

Like a crooked Venetian blind it covered the State halfway across the sky, from the horizon up at a forty-five degree angle. Hundreds of thousands of square kilometers had been caught in a dry, snowless winter, and every month when I received new readings and results, winter had indeed come closer. Statistics no longer spoke of winter but of winters at varying definable stages. The coldest was the dead zone at the middle of winter, on either side of this were autumnal winters and before them vernal winters or dead summers; month by month they approached like a great beast.

As Secretary General I ought to have been able to prevent such a thing from advancing, but nobody has that kind of power—no amount of knowledge or technology can regulate the weather or the climate. Nobody mentioned the A.C. Hahl Mountains any more, raised to protect the State; in fact, they had been deleted from most newer maps.

And despite the fact that all State information right down to the thoughts of our citizens was brought up to my office, carefully collected and screened, I still couldn’t prevent it. I couldn’t make out the whole, just disconnected pieces, like sailing throughrocky rapids, all you can see is what you can make out through the spray and the boulders as you rush forward headlong.

One of my mistakes was that I became too caught up with the details, when what I should have done was simply concentrate and try simply to see. I didn’t trust other people, after the first few months I no longer trusted anyone at all, and so I tried to make as many decisions as possible myself, and it was this which eventually ruined what was left of my ability to see. Those who opposed me were isolated from society; unity was the priority—my priority, everybody’s common priority. Thus unified, the State was to grow to a new level of greatness, until it was true to its name, the State of K, but by then it had already outgrown itself. A cancer had grown within it, born of itself, fanning its own flames.

I restructured the voluntarysecurity-service organizations, as both around me and directly below me I needed easily maneuverable forces. There’s nothing on my conscience about what happened back then. If unity is the democratically accepted goal of the majority, then it is everyone’s common aim. There is no acceptable justification for working against the State.

Those who opposed this were convicted of treason. I wasn’t the one who made these decisions, but I did give the State courts clear instructions. Anyone even remotely suspect was interrogated, because interrogation is by far the most effective method of speedily banishing inappropriate thoughts from the mind.

The office research department kept a close eye on changes in public opinion and in people’s reactions. Very often I gave speeches on all channels directly to the people. I had to try and convince our citizens that perhaps this cold era would never come, or that it would never reach us, or that it would be so far in the future—and not during our lifetimes—that we would never have to prepare ourselves for all those winters. Autumns would not become winters, but every year winter would blossom into spring, and June would not be merely the beginning of the dead summer.

My position required me to speak with an air of hope: that everything would change for the better as long as the State had the necessary strength of character and remained unified. Given the situation, I either had to increase trust and faith amongst the people or frighten and threaten them with the internal or the external enemy. This was my job, but no matter how much fear or hope the leaders of a mighty State can compress into their words, no matter how much they tell people to turn a blind eye, they can never purge the mind of every single citizen. Of course I knew that the State would never become a single pure block of steel, not even if you were to melt it down and forge it again, for inside there will always be unmelted grains of sand and grit.

The people swimming through those rapids haven’t made the river flow. There’s nothing on my conscience about what happened back then, because all power had to be concentrated on what was good for the State. No one can prevent the future from coming. I tried hard, but my time in the rapids was wearing thin.

When I began to uncover conspiracies and resistance, at first I tried to deal with it gently. The final six months alone were a very dark time indeed. The security-service organizations were faithful to the last, and I had to use them like a stone in my hand.

At first you try to swim, just swim, then you try to stay afloat and dodge the rocks. Then you stop caring.If you take a knock, then so be it. In a tight spot people always have to cut their losses. Ultimately all you can do is look out for yourself.

There’s nothing on my conscience whatsoever about what happened back then. Things simply happened the way they did. Of course there were some small matters I could have dealt with differently. When it was time to leave, I moved to the nearest neighboring country. Here I have never had to lie or deny my name.

Here I can live in peace. No one comes up nosily asking who I am. Here I am nameless. Or rather, not nameless, but the nameless person who wrote The History of K. That is my name here and the previous one I have given up.

Watcher

Leena Likitalo

Leena Likitalo is an up-and-coming talent whose stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Waylines, and Abyss & Apex, along with genre magazines from Finland. She attributes the inspiration for her uncanny tales to years spent on horseback and at the bottom of chilly pools playing underwater rugby. “Watcher,” which first appeared in Weird Tales #359, is her first story in English. It’s a subtle yet stunning portrait of a broken civilization, caught in an unforgiving cycle . . .

1.

If we weren’t confined by the grey walls, they would fall off the edge. There was no choice but to obey the Watcher, to stay inside in the cool, while the Butterflies kept walking along the glittering edge of the disc, day after day, night after night.

I envied the Butterflies nevertheless, their long delicate limbs and quick steps, the smoothness and effortlessness of their movements. Light made their translucent hair and wings glimmer in shades of red, silver, and gold regardless whether it came from the stars or sun. I desired to be one of them, for it was always twilight inside.

The memory of my kind is short, but we knew the herd wasn’t always the same. It was better not to think about it. We were all safe if we just sat on our chairs in the oval-shaped room and pretended to listen.

The dim room was devoid of any details except the two opposite doors, tall and small, each rivaled in darkness only by the other. Me and my kind were forbidden to open the doors, but we couldn’t stop wandering near them or imagining where they might lead. The tall door was locked anyway and only the Watcher could open it. The small one was unlocked and it tempted us all because there was a window above it.

The lanky towering creature that we called the Watcher was always there, observing, asking us to gather around him, always prompting us to listen, but he couldn’t be trusted. He was not one of us. The Watcher smelled different, of unhealed wounds and burnt flesh. His face was hidden behind a metal mesh mask and his body was covered in a smooth silver armor that made his awkward steps creak and click. At rare times he seemed almost gentle and caring, though even then he couldn’t understand the need to see the Butterflies.

Sometimes the Watcher failed in his task. He was just one and we were many. When that happened I would creep with my chair next to the small door where the grey walls threw almost black shadows. If you climbed on your chair and rose to your toes, you could see outside through the narrow window. If the Watcher would still not notice me, that’s what I would do.

The sight blinded me every time, made my heart beat extraordinarily fast with the greatest fear and anticipation. Sometimes the Watcher would notice me just then, lift me down, grasp me by my tail, but if I evaded him, the window would reveal a view to another world.

The Butterflies always walked along the edge of the disc, always the same circular route, day after day, night after night. They often looked sad despite all their magnificence. It might be that they didn’t understand how privileged they were, how free they were compared to me and my kind. They could smell the shades of the wind and feel the sun caress their ethereal faces. They weren’t confined inside grey walls.

But such was the way things were. Me and my kind were destined to sit in the oval room and listen to the Watcher. When he spoke of duty and necessity his voice echoed mechanically from the walls and we didn’t question his words, not anymore. The older ones in the herd said that a long time ago we had, but nothing good had come out of it. The walls had just turned darker and the floor cooler beneath our bare paws.

We did remember Watcher’s warning. He wanted us to understand that we all had our own place and if we would break the balance others would suffer. The Watcher had said that if we weren’t confined by the grey walls, the Butterflies would fall off the edge. We tried to believe him, but the temptation to open the small door and walk outside was greater still.

2.

We all hated each other, though hate was not quite a strong enough word, for we detested everything and our life was full of pain and agony.

We could not quite decide which were worse, the days or the nights. Sunlight made balancing on the hard diamond path easier, but during the days the sun tore at our useless wings and whipped our backs so that we bled and cried.

Yes, the light made our tears glitter, but that was a meager consolation. And the nights . . . the nights were cold and we shivered so much that our hair twisted and danced in strange ways. It was so chilly that our tears froze and dropped over the edge into the black abyss below. It reminded us that one of us had to fall, and that we hated even more.

But, we hated those in the grey round house more than we despised each other. We could not see them, but we knew they were there, watching through the narrow window, keeping track of who passed by, waiting for a mistake, an excuse. They were ever creeping there behind the grey round walls.

We had to walk all the time, step after step, rough diamonds prickling our feet so that it was almost unbearable to touch the ground. We could never rest, never stop. We were always tired, always anxious. All the time they were watching and we lived in fear. We had to walk for if one of us halted the door of the house would open. Thus we kept circling the disc, going around the house so many times a day that it was impossible to keep track of the laps.

And time after time the door would still open despite all our efforts. First there would be a warning gust, but the wind would soon grow incredibly strong. We would hang on to whatever we could, the path, the edge, each other. The wind would punish us, tear our skin, shred our wings into tatters, rip off our hair, until one of us would fall. Those that were the slowest or unluckiest would end up hanging from someone’s arm or leg. Those who were new might even try to help, reach out and offer one last chance.

The wind would stop after our sacrifice. We would find our places in the circle and where one of us had fallen there would wait a new one. They were always the same, big eyes filled with wonder, touching their unspoilt fragile wings, playing with their smooth silky hair, clueless as to why we had to walk. For walk we must, each day and night. And as days went by they too would learn that to save yourself, to save us all, you never grasped anyone’s hand.

3.

I stand in the middle of the oval-shaped room and call the rodents to gather around me. Some of them obey immediately, others linger in the shadows of the grey wall. I try to be gentle when I herd them together, but sometimes they don’t listen and I have to grasp them by their tails. Then they squeal and whimper like they’re in pain, but they don’t really know anything about pain.

The real pain is to know, to wait for your time to go. Remembering makes my bones ache, my hands tremble beneath the metal shell though my body has already healed. I pity the rodents and envy them although I know they fear and hate me. The rodents forget easily and have to be reminded, but even so they never understand that I’m protecting them.

Most of the time the small creatures seem happy enough. They play on the floor, chase their tails, rub their whiskers together, and don’t listen to me. Their minds are elsewhere. They adore the Butterflies, consider the creatures outside the lucky ones. They think that it is freedom to walk the diamond path underneath the merciless sun and cold stars. They don’t know how tormenting it is to wait for the eventual fall, to wait for someone to push you over the edge.

Lately my pain has grown stronger; the burden of knowledge is too heavy. Like always I ask the rodents to come to me, to listen to my words, and some of them come, but not all. I know one of them is near the small door, but I can’t make myself stop it. My agony has become overwhelming.

As I start repeating the same words all over again the small rodent opens the door. He steps outside, squealing with excitement, and then the wind begins. The rodent reaches out for the door, but it’s too late. The Butterflies are screaming. I can hear their pleas for help, asking us to close the door, but I can’t make myself do that either. It is my time. One of them must fall.

Then the door closes. Someone scratches the door outside, begs me to open it. I ask the rodents to come to me and they obey. They whimper behind me, quiver tails between their hind legs, hope I’ll protect them like I always do. Soon enough the scratching sounds become fainter, cease. The grey walls turn darker and the floor becomes cooler, but I speak softly to my herd until they forget and fall asleep.

When it’s safe to leave the rodents alone I walk to the other door. The tall door slides open and I walk through the archway, enter the narrow corridor. Then I follow the curve of the wall until I come to the chamber.

There is no other furnishing in the white room except a low table. On the table lies a fallen Butterfly, limbs broken, hair tangled, body mangled. I have seen the sight so many times before that it doesn’t make me shiver anymore.

It is time to undress. I step down from my metal heels, unhook my mechanical gloves, open my silver belly, strip off everything. Finally I lift off my helmet. All that time the Butterfly lies still, unknowing, not remembering. Yet.

I work carefully as I dress my armor on the Butterfly. I gently fold what’s left of the wings against its back, straighten the broken limbs, cover the burns with skin of metal. When I put on the helmet, the Butterfly jerks, once, twice, remembers.

The new Watcher awakens, stands up. He stretches his artificial limbs, moves in agony, moans soft metallic hisses. He walks around the room in circles, habit well-learnt too difficult to stop.

I wait, but I can’t stay still. I move my healed, shortened limbs. I can’t resist touching my fur, so soft after the days in metal prison. My tail curls up to my side like it has a life of its own and the ground feels cool under my paws.

After a hundred circles the Watcher stops, comes to me and helps me up to the table. The Watcher stays silent as I close my eyes. He has been through the same cycle as many times as I have.

I lay still and wait for the deep sleep. When the darkness comes I will forget, for there must be a balance. We are all the same and nothing will ever change.

The Border Incident

Tuomas Kilpi

Tuomas Kilpi is both an author and publisher. Currently, he serves as the managing director of Finn Lectura, a small nonfiction and textbook publishing house in Helsinki. He has also written twelve books, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Kilpi has a degree in theoretical philosophy, which may have influenced the story to follow; in “The Border Incident,” a modern fairytale bumps up against dark, surreal imagery, and reality’s various layers appear to influence each other in mysterious ways . . .

Somewhere, far closer than you may suspect, there is a land where turnips grow in neatly painted pots, all lawns are immaculately shaved, and there is a striped toucan standing on top of every lamppost each night.

In this country everything is very ordered. The people there live their lives according to strict rules and regulations. They are known as the Norms and their country is called Normalia. Every morning, all of them get up from bed putting their best foot forward, brush their teeth with vinegar and vigor, and yodel their national anthem six times a day.

Or at least almost all of them do.

Because this is a story about a Norm who did not want to frogmarch to school or scrub pavement during the weekends; not to mention what part a wheelbarrow and a barrel can play in an incident at the border.

The capital of Normalia is surrounded by countryside dotted with dams, whirling windmills, and fit farmers. But if you walk far away from the city, traveling from sunset to sunrise, sleeping during the daylight hours in groves or under bridges, you will finally reach the border of Normalia, not too far from mountains with snow-covered peaks.

The border is marked on the ground by a straight chalk line, around which every blade of grass has been plucked away. At night, small insects build castles and mounds out of the chalk, and during the day the border guards of Normalia carefully smooth them out.

There is only one place for crossing the border, and it is watched over by a very old Border Guard. He has been standing there from dawn till dusk for decades, guarding a border that nobody has ever even tried to cross.

But this was all about to change one fine morning when a young girl approached the border crossing pushing a wheelbarrow in front of her. This was most unusual, for the Border Guard seldom had visitors.

The newcomer was walking briskly along a road lined with sunflowers. She was wearing the official school uniform of Normalia, as was mandatory for all children in the realm. The wheelbarrow was by no means empty, as somebody had lifted a sturdy-looking wooden barrel into it.

The approaching girl was therefore a most peculiar sight, but the Border Guard was nothing if not dedicated to his duty, so he did not let any trace of his wonder be seen on his face. The official set of rules as laid out by the governing committee of the Normalia Border Guards (section XIII, subsection 3, first paragraph) very clearly prohibited any inappropriate facial expressions, and the Border Guard had never broken any rules during his long years of service. In this regard he was a very typical Norm.

The girl pushed her wheelbarrow down the hill and stopped only when the tip of the wheelbarrow was touching the Border Guard’s well-pressed uniform (which was in and of itself a violation of section XIX, subsection 7, third paragraph).

“Move, you lumpen oaf,” the girl said.

The Border Guard frowned. He was certain that this would be classified as an appropriate response by the official subcommittee of facial expressions.

“And where do you think you are going, little girl?”

“There,” the girl said and pointed with her finger across the border. “And my name is not little girl. My name is Sign.”

“Sign? What nonsense is this? What is your number?”

A great wave of anger appeared on the girl’s face, like a sudden swell in a storm.

“I have no number, I have a name. And I have already told you what it is. So are you going to move, or do you want me to come and kick your fat ass?”

Now the Border Guard was truly baffled. During all these years, nobody had talked to him like this. Nothing in his training had prepared him for such a situation. Filling out forms, yes. The careful pressing of the uniform, surely. How to pin your medals in a correct fashion, undoubtedly.

Cheeky girls trying to get across the border, not so much.

“Now let’s start from the beginning,” the Border Guard said. He was certain that he had simply missed something important in their discussion so far. There had to be a rational explanation for all this. But Sign just tapped her feet impatiently.

“Why do you have a wheelbarrow and a barrel with you?” the Border Guard inquired, pointing at her belongings.

“One never knows what one might come across, right? In case I find a treasure or something. And maybe it will be so big I cannot carry it. So I will just load it into the wheelbarrow.”

“What about the barrel?”

The girl sighed deeply.

“Well, the treasure could be a liquid one, couldn’t it? It’s a bit hard to transport such a treasure in a wheelbarrow. It may spill. So you need a barrel, everybody knows that.”

“And where exactly did you say you were heading to, little girl?”

“Across.”

“Across what?”

“The border of course. Do you have mold in your ears or something? Are you just slow or truly dim?”

The Border Guard touched his ears. A big lump of wax appeared on his finger and he stared at it with a confused look on his wrinkly face.

“You mean . . . Across the border . . . There?”

“Yes, yes. Across the border, over there, don’t you see? It should not be so hard to understand.”

“But that just isn’t . . . It just isn’t done.”

“And why not?”

“My dear little girl, nobody has crossed the border since . . . Well, at least ten score years. That is how long I have been here. And before that my esteemed predecessor guarded this border. And he never mentioned anybody going across. Don’t you know what lies on the other side?”

Now she was almost boiling with rage.

“Of course I don’t know! How could anybody know what lies there if nobody has actually been there? But trust me, I will find out what ever it is.”

“But there are . . . You know . . . It is not common knowledge but . . . ”

“But what?”

“There are . . . ”

“What? Basilisks? Three-eyed cyclops? Your twisty toenails?”

“No, there are the . . . ”

At that moment a sharp whistle cut off the Border Guard, mid-sentence.

Coming down the hill behind the girl was a thin man with a crooked nose, his coat full of shiny buttons and even shinier medals. He carried himself with an air of silent smugness.

“A-ha! Got you at last. Well done, Border Guard!”

“Um . . .Ahem . . . ” said the old Border Guard, who found this sudden onslaught of people to be quite baffling.

“Don’t you have anything better to do?” the girl said to the newcomer. “Go swimming or something.”

The air around the man grew even smugger, if possible. He pulled a big book from his bag and started to go through it. After finding the correct spot he started to write something down with a golden pen.

“Date . . . Time of day . . . Encouraging . . . Unlawful . . . Swimming . . . No swim instructor certification . . . Conspiracy to commit . . . No redeeming circumstances . . . . ” After making a note of the notables he slammed the book shut.

“Just one more thing to be taken into account when your case is heard. That I can guarantee, or I am no School Inspector.”

“So what are you then?” Now the girl was beaming brightly. “A mean maggot? A great big ball of slime?”

The School Inspector snorted and marched up to the Border Guard. With a slightly trembling finger he pointed at the girl.

“Take a look at that seemingly innocent creature, Border Guard. In such a form lives a great evil.”

“Well, then . . . ” The Border Guard was cut off before he could continue.

“Yes, that is right. Because do you know what type of being stands there in front of us? How horrible is the burden of crime this young person carries on her slender shoulders? No, of course you don’t know. So let me tell you, but stand your ground, good man, for the truth is so dark that it will chill your blood and threaten to ruin the good name of our fair country.”

Now the School Inspector was almost shouting, spittle spraying from his lips.

“This girl is . . . Oh, the word is almost too gruesome to be said aloud, but she is . . . she is . . . a truant!”

The Border Guard looked at the School Inspector with great bewilderment before fixing his gaze on the girl.

“But there’s no . . . I mean we don’t . . . . ”

“Yes,” the School Inspector said with a trembling voice. “There hasn’t been a single truant in Normalia for a dozen generations, but now we have one, an obnoxious being, society’s shame, a stain on our nation’s pride, a dark chapter . . . ”

“All right, all right,” the girl said in a bored voice. “I admit and confess everything. I have had enough of this. Would you like me to get back to school?”

The School Inspector could only nod, speechless.

“Right,” the girl said. “I am just going to take my barrel and head back. And I will go straight to school once I get there.”

A wild flash of cunning appeared in the School Inspector’s eyes.

“Aha! Don’t even think of fooling us like that. I know that if I turn my back on you, you will just try to sneak across the border.”

The girl sighed again.

“Well then, let’s do it like this. You can both stand right there and watch out that I will really head back. Is that fine with you?”

The School Inspector and the Border Guard nodded in unison. The girl grabbed her wheelbarrow and turned around, away from the border. With the official sets of eyes on her she started to push the wheelbarrow back up the hill. It was a steep climb, but the girl did not give up until she had made it to the very top. Once there, she stopped and lifted the barrel out of the wheelbarrow, giving the wheelbarrow a gentle tap.

“Thanks for the help. You have been a good friend, but now I need a more speedy ride.”

While all this was going on the School Inspector and the Border Guard were following her actions with great puzzlement.

“What is she doing now?” the Border Guard wondered.

“Who knows, but there is a crooked soul in that small body,” the School Inspector fumed. “She is capable of absolutely anything. But so am I. After all, I am not for nothing the most senior School Inspector of Normalia,” he added, while making sure that all his medals were in order and shining brightly in the sunlight.

Meanwhile on top of the hill the girl had turned the barrel on its side and pointed it down towards the border crossing. She climbed into the barrel, took a deep breath and said quietly to herself, “Going down, here I come.” Then she pushed hard against the side of the barrel, sending it spinning down the hill—directly towards the Border Guard and the School Inspector.

“My . . . My . . . Goodness . . . . ” said the Border Guard.

“No! This cannot be!” screamed the School Inspector and blew his whistle so hard that some plaster fell down from the walls of the border post, four roses dropped their petals, and several grasshoppers felt dizzy for a while. But the sound did absolutely nothing to the barrel, which kept on spinning down the hill, smashing into blades of grass and some daffodils—and finally into the Border Guard and the School Inspector.

The officials had no chance to escape, so the force of the collision blew them apart like two bowling pins.

The Border Guard found himself in a bed of roses—all carefully de-needled, as is the standard practice in Normalia—while the School Inspector landed on top of the border post in a most undignified manner and flopped back down with a twist and two spins.

But the barrel carried on with an irresistible force. It crushed the gate at the border, took a high bounce, and flew straight out of Normalia.

As the barrel hit the ground it was smashed into pieces, sending out a cloud of dust that covered the whole scene. Somewhere from within the cloud one could hear the Border Guard moaning, “Oh dear. I just knew this was not going to end well.”

Far away from the border, within walls made out of cold stone, a very old woman woke up from an even more ancient sleep and filled her lungs with freezing air. Today, her creaky bones whispered, it all starts today.

Slowly she winched herself into a sitting position, her bare feet touching the slabs of the floor.

There was something else in the room. Darkness that spun in the air, just a few feet away from her.

The woman pulled a piece of rotten fruit out from her robes and held it out in her hand.

The darkness broke up, turning into a mass of countless flying insects, with gleaming wings and dark eyes, swarming over her hand, devouring the fruit and covering her arm, some of them climbing over her face and slipping between her lips.

Yes. Today it has begun.

Ospreys

Tiina Raevaara

Translated by David Hackston

Tiina Raevaara is a young, up-and-coming writer whose dual career as a novelist and a Ph.D. in genetics has generated plenty of interest . . . and given her plenty of fodder for her work. Her second book, a collection of short fiction titled I Don’t Feel You Beside Me (En tunne sinua vierelläni), won the Runeberg Prize, a prestigious Finnish literary award. She has also authored a popular science book on the relationship between humans and dogs throughout the ages. In “Ospreys,” Raevaara explores the network of life that springs from one very peculiar swamp…

Rain falls to the ground, warm and heavy. Already the air is damp; dampness rises from the ground bringing with it the scent of the swamp, a strange blend of mud, peat moss, marsh tea, and methane.

Swamps are always paradoxical. They are at once dead and alive; they decompose, and, at the same time, from that very decomposed matter they produce life. Swamps grow at the surface and die from the inside, simultaneously, for thousands upon thousands of years.

I sit down carefully on a pine stump and fill my lungs with the heavy air. Nothing smells quite as intoxicating as swamps—and the smell is not even at its most powerful now, as the marsh tea and arum lilies are only just beginning to blossom. After that the air is injected with a new, sweet note.

Today is April 15th, the day on which, for at least the last thirty years, I have come back to this same swamp, to this exact same spot. Very little has changed; the woods may have encroached slightly on the swamp, making it smaller; the sparse pine trees around the swamp have thickened almost imperceptibly and are more gnarled than before; the silhouette of the forest is more even.

The ospreys’ nest is still in the same place, on a plywood platform affixed high up in the pine trees. Local bird enthusiasts built the platform a couple of years ago, after a storm had blown over the tree housing the birds’ former nest—a handsome giant, the swamp’s tallest pine.

Back then I waited breathlessly to see whether the new nesting place would suit the ospreys, but when they finally arrived it was as if they already knew that the nest had moved ten or so meters from one pine tree to another.

How the ospreys have come to nest at this same swamp for so long is a mystery. Large birds of prey can theoretically live for decades, but the plumage of the present couple indicates that they’re not that old. On several occasions I have noticed that the ospreys are younger than before, though how this happens I don’t know. One spring the old couple simply stops coming and a younger one arrives in their place—but always on the same day, April 15th.

Only on a handful of summers has their nesting failed. Otherwise I have generally been able to tag two angry osprey fledglings—though sometimes there has only been one. On rare occasions there have even been three.

Every year the ospreys arrive in exactly the same manner. I sit down at the edge of the swamp; the weather is always like this: rainy, warm, and close. I sit for about an hour before the birds arrive; I want to build myself up to it, let the swamp consume me, because then the arrival of the birds seems all the more impressive.

All of a sudden they appear above the swamp, silently, two great birds of prey, wingspan over a meter and a half. They glide downwards, to come calmly to rest in a spruce tree at the edge of the swamp, look around for a moment, and listen, making sure that nothing has disturbed their peace.

Then they rise up again, two fair giants, drop from the sky to their nest, their meter-high twig-castle, and give several screeches of joy; their realm is still intact.

On this day too they arrive in precisely the same way, the majestic figures soaring across the edge of the woods. For a moment they hang comically in the air, the tips of their wings describing a circle against the dark clouds, then they descend to the edge of the woods to scan the surroundings before settling in their nesting tree.

The ospreys are home again.

Looking through the binoculars it seems as though two fledglings have appeared by the end of May, though one can never be sure of the precise number without climbing up to the nest and checking. At first it is difficult to distinguish the light-brown fledglings from the twig-castle around them, but gradually they grow and become more active and inquisitive. The adult ospreys take turns to bring them fish from the lake a few kilometers away. The osprey fledglings’ calls begin to sound more and more like those of the adults; their shrill calls carry far from the nest of twigs and the adults respond with a slightly less demanding squawk.

The weather today is hot, the sun is shining from a cloudless sky, and the swamp is buzzing with flies. I stand at the edge of the woods for a moment, hoping that the two adult ospreys will soon fly off on a fishing trip.

However, the ospreys don’t seem interested in catching anything; instead they jump up and down and dive down to the base of the nesting tree. There must be something very interesting on the ground directly below the nest.

I set off, striding the ten or so meters from the edge of the woods to the nesting tree. Walking across marshland is difficult; not only does it give way, one could also easily be swallowed up altogether. By moving quickly enough and sticking to a route I learned years ago I manage to not get wet above the waist.

Once I am closer to the nest, the fledglings begin to peer over the edge. First they give out their normal call, but when there is no calming response from the mother they clearly begin to panic. For now, the adult ospreys observe me from the lower branches of a nearby tree, but I know that they will attack if I start climbing up to the nest. The ospreys at this swamp have always been particularly hot-headed.

Between the tussocks I can see a patch of green, getting darker, becoming almost blue. Fabric, perhaps something a hiker lost. With both hands I grab hold of the rags, weakened by the sun and the dampness, and try to pull them out of the swamp and into view. It seems that something more than clothes has sunk into the moss—something far heavier. I thrust my hand into the warm swamp, and grope around for a moment until I get a better grip on something firm, like a branch the width of a wrist. I take a firm hold, lean my entire body weight backwards, and try to wrench the secret from the concealing folds of the marsh.

The first thing to rise from the swamp is a hand, then shoulders and a head slumped to one side, then a torso, and finally a pair of legs. The acidic water has dyed the body an even brown color; its eye sockets gape, large and hollow, but the body looks otherwise intact. I think it is a man’s body; its broad shoulders fill out the grey army jacket, and a loose belt is tied around the hips, which are covered in combat trousers and a flannel shirt. I take a look at the shoes; one foot is still wearing a rubber boot—it must be at least a size 45. The other boot has disappeared somewhere in the depths of the swamp.

Something is not quite right. I take a few steps backwards and readjust my mosquito hat. I can’t say what—it isn’t the fact that even the adult ospreys are now sitting quietly watching my endeavors from the top of the nesting tree, nor is it that the air is warmer and the smell of the swamp more pungent than before. I wouldn’t hear the screech of the ospreys even if they were to stand right at my feet, nor would I notice if the surface of the swamp were to boil.

Perhaps what disturbs me so much is that the clothes on the body are exactly the same as my own, the ones I always wear on my osprey trips. They are clothes typical to many ramblers; army jackets and combat trousers can be bought from any outdoor pursuits or army surplus store; three out of four people who visit the swamp wear knee-high black rubber boots; the color of the flannel shirt is indistinct after its time in the water.

And still every detail on the clothes is identical to my own. I wipe the sweat from my brow; I can’t say whether what unnerves me the most is ultimately the humidity of the air or the tightening sensation around my chest. I lean over the body and am surprised that it doesn’t seem to give off a rotten smell. The only smell is that of the swamp, at once alive and dead.

Water belches from the pocket when I slip my hand inside. It is cold, having been brought up only a moment before from the cool insides of the swamp, and has not had time to warm up. At first I can’t feel anything firm inside the pocket, but then my fingers come across something thin and soft. I pull out the soaked piece of paper: a folded sheet of newspaper. RECORD STORMS TO HIT CENTRAL FINLAND, claims the headline. GALES EXPECTED TO BLOW DOWN TREES AND CUT OFF ELECTRICITY. I try to take a closer look at the upper edge of the darkened, ragged paper. The newspaper is dated April 15th, two years ago.

There is something else in the pocket too: a car key, exactly the same as my own. I look up at the sun; the light flashes in my eyes and for a moment all I can see is dark shadows and white blotches of light. It is myself I have raised from the swamp: dead for two years.

An osprey screeches high up in its nesting tree. The world stops still.

The air is heavy with rain. I expected the storm to have reached us, but for now huge droplets fall lazily to the ground in a sheer curtain. The dampness makes me feel uncomfortable; the sweat on my face can’t evaporate, but runs instead in a stream down my wet shirt collar. According to the paper the storm should have arrived early in the morning, but it seems still to be gathering strength. The papers have predicted record storms.

I will never stop marveling at the scent of the swamp; I always think I can remember it, even in winter, but when in spring I make my first trip to the ospreys’ swamp the smell almost attacks me and makes me reel momentarily. Once the giddiness has passed I feel somehow stronger and cleaner. Of course, the smell is the only one possible for the swamp: a blend of past and future; that which is dead, that which has already decomposed, and that which is only just coming into being.

I know this swamp intimately. I know safe places to tread so that it doesn’t swallow you up. I know of a pine stump where it’s nice to sit; a place with a good view of the ospreys’ nesting tree.

Today is April 15th, the day the ospreys arrive. They have always arrived like this, for at least the last thirty years, for as long as I have been visiting this swamp, this osprey marsh—boggy, treacherous, yet so beautiful and so dear to me.

The ospreys’ nest is at the top of the swamp’s tallest gnarled pine. Though the pine must be ancient, the trunks of trees in swamps never grow particularly thick. The ospreys’ castle of twigs looks disproportionately large compared to the rest of the tree, but the construction has nonetheless survived the winds and the weight of snow through the winter. Every spring, before the female lays eggs, they repair the nest—exchange dirty pieces of padding for clean ones, and fetch new twigs to replace those already broken or about to snap.

I know in advance how the ospreys will arrive, for it is the same every year. With the arrival of the ospreys, the hands of the great clock of the universe again move round, irrevocably. I am merely an onlooker, sitting between warmth and damp at the edge of the swamp, watching as that which has already been determined takes place. I always wish to get here early, though for years the birds have always arrived at the same time, almost to the minute. But I do not follow time as I sit in my shrine at the edge of the osprey marsh; for at that moment, time, for me, has stopped still.

They appear above the swamp all of a sudden, in perfect silence, two great birds of prey with a wingspan of over a meter and a half. Their wings are motionless, only the wind seems to carry the birds into view from behind the treetops, then down towards the spruce jutting up from the swamp.

I would have thought that, after all these years of observing the ospreys arrive with clockwork regularity, my body would feel their presence even before their dark silhouettes glide across the sky. How I wish to feel their impetus; to sense, to anticipate, that soon they will arrive—yet every year they take me by surprise. They rest on the top of the spruce tree and ascertain that nothing within their territory has changed. Each year they do this in the exact same way. Then they rise up again, two fair giants, drop from the sky to their nest, and give several screeches of joy; their realm is still intact.

This is how the ospreys’ homecoming should end, but behind the birds something else glides across the sky, something that finally hides the peering spring sun behind the clouds. With the ospreys has come a storm, driving behind them, chasing them, its dark-grey clouds thickening just above the swamp. The birds do not seem the least perturbed by the oncoming danger; they continue sitting in their nest and turn their beaks towards the strengthening winds.

For some strange reason I begin running towards the nesting tree, I don’t know why; I run, sink into the swamp, then run again. At the base of the nesting tree I turn my face towards the sky and look right at the eye of the storm. The world is engulfed with a bang and with bright light.

I can neither see nor hear, but I know that the lightning hits the ospreys too. The birds give a shriek and float down to the surface of the swamp.

It is April 15th, a day that, for the last sixty years, has held a special significance for me. Every year on this same day, at the same hour of the morning I come to this swamp, this boggy osprey marsh.

Today the ospreys will return on their migratory flight, just as they have returned throughout my time here, and long before. And today once again I will sit at the edge of the swamp and witness the birds’ successful journey come to an end.

Today I will once again leave the swamp, and return home not as I was before, but stronger and more whole.

“You going there again?” they ask, my grandson and his wife, though not disparagingly. They stopped this long ago—in fact it was during my son’s day that the scolding tone disappeared from their voices for good. Perhaps they imagine that one year I might forget about the swamp and the ospreys altogether, though they are not in the least surprised when they see me once again preparing to leave.

“Why?” ask the youngest ones, those who have just learnt to talk and who still believe that everything is marvelous and fascinating.

“The swamp preserves well,” I reply, a little glint in my voice, but none in my eyes.

And everyone laughs. They know that, when I return from the swamp, I will be stronger, fresher, newer.

The forest smells only of the forest, dry and warm, and does not even hint at the swamp hiding in the dell. The swamp-smell hits me only once I am there. Heavier than the rest of the air, it has gathered at the bottom of the dell, enfolding everything that dares cross into its territory. After the smell, the swamp itself attempts to capture me; my boots sink into the slick moss and again I have to familiarize myself with how best to walk across such a treacherous surface. The heavy steps strain my back, which suffers complaints that have built up over the years and whose treatment requires more than just exercise and rest. What I shall enjoy most is when the pain is no more.

The osprey marsh is still there, still damp and fragrant, alive and dead, just as always before. My swamp, my life and my death merging with it, a single accumulation amongst the layers of peat. The swamp, its life stretching back thousands of years; my insignificant existence alongside it.

I breathe in the moist air; the dampness will surely increase, as it has rained all morning—heavy, warm drops of rain. The damp air has already seeped in through my clothes, sticking the cloth against my skin.

Suddenly they appear in the sky above the treetops, two forms carried on the wind. I concentrate on watching them, not even blinking; their long, slender wings, their bird-of-prey profiles.

Again, a storm follows in the ospreys’ wake.

The Garden

Jyrki Vainonen

Translated by Juha Tupasela and Anna Volmari

Jyrki Vainonen is both a highly regarded writer and an accomplished translator, respected for his Finnish translations of the works of Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, and William Shakespeare. A scholar on Swift, Vainonen has lived in Ireland, and written a thesis on Swift’s Irish pamphlets; Swift also happens to be the protagonist of Vainonen’s recent novel At Swift’s Doors (Swiftin ovella, Tammi, 2011). In 1999, Vainonen’s first short fiction collection was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Debut Title of the Year Award. The Explorer & Other Stories, a selection of Vainonen’s short fiction, is available this year from Cheeky Frawg. In “The Garden,” a young boy observes his parents’ puzzling encounter with a mysterious plant . . .

When my parents had finished their work in the garden that Friday, the legs of dad’s boots and mom’s slacks were all covered with pollen. Where the pollen touched skin, it turned into yellowish goo that only smeared when wiped, stuck on their hands, and wouldn’t come off even with soap and a scrubbing brush. “There’s nothing to do but wait, it’ll wear off with time,” dad consoled mom at the watering barrel, when there was nothing for it but to give up. Mom looked desperate, shook her head, and looked at her hands, which were red from all the scrubbing.

My parents climbed up to the porch, and mom ducked inside right away. Dad noticed me sitting on a wicker chair at the end of the porch, where I was leafing through a nature book, even though I couldn’t read.

“It fell off and split open, Jeremias. Mom and I didn’t even have time to get out of the way.”

Dad’s eyes burned with excitement. Dad’s bald patch was splotched with goo, and there were flakes of pollen in the gray curls that framed his scalp. Dad was taking off his boots in the doorway. They weren’t cooperating, and wouldn’t come off dad’s bare, sweaty feet just by him wriggling his leg. Finally he bent over with a grunt and helped them off with his hand. Then he sighed deeply and wiped his hands on his pants, which were already covered with dirt and paint stains.

I crouched in the farthest corner of the porch. The shadow of the ash that grew at the corner of the house fell there in the early evening. I lay the book on my lap. Dad was pacing barefoot on the terrace, his thin calves brown and covered with a net of veins. His feet were dirty, and I could see black gunk between his toes, the kind I got sometimes.

“That pod was completely filled with pollen. There was so much of it, several pounds for sure.”

I could just barely make out dad’s words. He was muttering through the corner of his mouth, which is how I knew that he was upset, that the fruit falling had ruffled him, and mom, too.

I knew the pod he was talking about. Early in the summer, a bulge had appeared on top of a bush that grew at the back of the garden, right on its tallest branch. Over the summer, the small lump swelled into a seed pod, hard as bone. Now, at the end of the summer, and right before it fell off, the pod had grown to the size of a human head and its skin was smooth as eggshell.

We didn’t know what the plant was that the fruit was growing on. Though we’d carefully waded through herbariums and books on plants and bothered friends and relatives who knew something about gardening, we hadn’t been able to figure out what that bush was. The bush had already been there next to the fence, squatting on a patch of grass bleached by the afternoon sun, when we had bought the house a year ago—yard, garden, and all. We hadn’t noticed the plant before, because it wasn’t particularly impressive or pretty. Its wooden branches were thick as wrists, smooth, and covered with dark bark, and its leaves were the size and shape of hands, and they flapped in the wind, as if they were made of thin sheets of tin.

Because of the sound of its leaves, we named it the tin bush. Later we also started calling it the bulb bush and the pod plant.

Late in the spring, before the bulb appeared, the top branch had for a week been home to a white flower the size of a fist. It had attracted swarms of bees and other nectar-drinking insects. Sometimes the petals were completely covered by insects rummaging around in the mouth of the flower, and we had been afraid that the flower wouldn’t be able to carry the weight of all of them and would break off and fall to the ground.

But it held up after all, and when the flower finally withered, that strange bulb appeared in its place.

After that, my parents would sometimes spend their breaks sitting on a bench from where they could keep an eye on the seed pod. I, too, got into the habit of putting a ladder underneath the pod and studying it every day, carefully tapping its dark brown shell with my fingers and running my hand along its surface, which always, even during the most sweltering days, felt cool against my palm. I measured the ball diligently with a measuring tape, until I was able to tell my parents that it was swelling about half an inch a week. They told me that I didn’t have to guard it all the time, it wasn’t going anywhere, and they shook their heads when I told them I was afraid someone might steal it. It wasn’t long before the branch that the seed pod hung from started to bend under the weight of the fruit. The last weeks before the bulb fell off, the branch had been sticking sideways out of the bush looking out of place and a bit funny.

Now the pod lay split open at the base of the bush—and I hadn’t seen it fall! I closed my eyes tightly and imagined the four-inch-long stem of the fruit snapping off its base, the branch that had suddenly been freed from the weight of the bulb swinging upwards with a swoosh, and a few seconds later the seed pod hitting the rock surrounded by chickweed with a thump—and splitting open.

Dad slipped inside after mom. I scrambled out of the chair and off the porch. The kitchen window was open, I heard mom clattering the lid of a soup pot. I made my way to the path that led to the back of the garden through beds of perennials. The flower beds were in full bloom. The blazing yellows, reds, and whites weaved a scented veil around themselves. In the haze, bees and flower flies buzzed and butterflies fluttered, perching on flowers only to leap into the air again right away. The grass along the path rose all the way to the backs of my knees, because once something took root in our garden, it was allowed to grow.

A scarecrow was standing askew at the edge of the vegetable patch. Dad and I had hung empty tin cans on its arms, back, and belly. In still weather, the cans didn’t clatter. Behind the scarecrow, a belt of shrubs rippled: honeysuckle, dogwoods, and lilac. It was cool underneath the lilacs, and I had often snuck out there to rest on the hottest days. It was still so hot that my sandals stuck to the soles of my feet.

I found quite a mess at the tin bush: the seed pod halves lay on their sides on the ground. One half had rolled to the right side of the rock, the other to the left. There was pollen everywhere: on the husks and the rock, on the grass in a circle many feet wide, on the lower branches of the tin bush. I was careful not to get too close so as not to get myself dirty. Good thing it’s not windy, I thought. If there was the smallest gust of wind, the dust would be everywhere, and it would turn into paste on my sweaty skin.

As evening fell, first mom, and then dad, said they weren’t feeling well and went to lie down in bed. “Jeremias,” dad said, “We’re going to rest for a while. There’s some soup left over. It’s in the fridge. Have some in the evening if you’re hungry. And there’s bread in the cupboard.”

He closed the bedroom door and I was left all alone. It didn’t bother me, I liked being alone. Soon, there wasn’t a sound to be heard from the bedroom. I thought that my parents had fallen asleep, because they were sick and tired, but also because they were baffled by the bulb bush having dropped its fruit. Had dad even remembered to cover his head in the afternoon heat? Mom always had to remind him to wear a sun hat.

I let my parents sleep. I went to the watering barrel to skim off the soapy foam that mom and dad had left floating in net-like tiles on the surface of the water. I sharpened the sickle’s blade with the whetstone, so that dad wouldn’t have to do it in the morning. For days now, he had been planning on cutting the hay and weeds behind one of the beds of perennials. I wandered around the garden counting raw apples—one finger, one apple—but there were so many that I lost count.

In the end, I settled on just sitting quietly on a bench. I was sure that I could hear the plants growing: their roots rustling in the darkness of the soil, earthworms munching their narrow tunnels into the earth, and moles snuffling in their nests beneath the vegetable patch. Dad had told me about the life of a garden, about what happens in nature.

At eight in the evening, I got hungry. In the kitchen, I ate cold vegetable soup and sweet sourdough bread made with sunflower seeds and malt. For dessert I found some yoghurt that mom had made in the fridge.

I still couldn’t hear anything through the closed bedroom door. The whole house was very quiet, only the fridge whirred from time to time. A small bird chirped for a short while out in the garden, right under an open window. When I got to the window, the bird had already flown further away. I could now hear its nervous voice behind the hedge, coming from the shelter of the foliage.

After I’d eaten, I sat on the porch for a while and leafed through the book that I still hadn’t finished. There was a big, red picture of a sunset. As I looked at it and stroked the page with my fingers, I noticed that the sun actually was setting, bathing the crowns of the trees in crimson before dropping down behind them. It was the lightless moment before dusk. The time of shadows, I thought as I glanced around furtively. The ground began to cool, the night pressed dew onto the grass and fanned the scent of soil and moldering plants. The buzz of insects had already ceased, and the sounds of birds could no longer be heard either.

I held out on the porch for almost two hours. At half past ten it was already too dim to do anything outside, and I got goose bumps on the skin of my bare arms. I slipped a bookmark between the pages, closed the book, went inside, and knocked on my parents’ bedroom door. No answer. I knocked again, a little louder. No answer. I turned the handle and carefully pushed the door open.

Although it was dark in the room, I could see right away that mom and dad were still sleeping. They were resting side by side on their backs, dad on the right and mom on the left, and they were holding hands. They were still wearing their gardening clothes. The stains of pollen stood out as dark patches on the fabric. Dad’s mouth was open, as it always was when he was in a deep sleep.

I tiptoed out and closed the door behind me.

It wasn’t until I got to my room upstairs and slipped under the covers that it occurred to me that dad hadn’t been snoring. He always snored when he slept on his back.

Mom and dad didn’t get out of bed the next day, or the day after that. The sickness seemed to have sapped the last shreds of their strength. Every time I peeked inside the bedroom, they were resting on their backs, holding hands, with serene faces. I was certain that when I wasn’t there to see it, they were smiling at each other, and that gave them strength to fight the sickness.

I took care of them as best I could. In the morning I would open the bedroom blinds and open the window a bit to let in the fresh air.

They needed light, that I knew. Sunlight and fresh air. The light that seeped in through the narrow gaps in the blinds made the room stripy. My parents look quite strange, pallid, blotchy, and stripy. Now and then it even seemed as if the color of the pollen stains had deepened, that the edges of the stains had spread out. Sometimes, as if with their last strength, without opening their eyes, mom and dad tried to talk to me: their eyelids quivered and the corners of their mouths twitched, and if I leaned down close to them, I could hear fragmented words: . . . food for you, Jeremias  . . . don’t worry . . . this will  . . . pass . . . water . . . the garden . . .

Twice a day, at one in the afternoon and at six in the evening, I stacked food on a tray and carried it to my parents’ room. I had cleared off the nightstand. Luckily I knew how to boil potatoes and fry the bits of meat that mom had stocked the freezer with during the winter. I picked salad, onions, and cabbage from the vegetable patch. There was also bread in the freezer, the good wholegrain bread that mom baked. Whatever else I needed, I got from the store: mom kept the food money in a coffee can in the back of the pantry.

But mom and dad were in such bad shape that they had no appetite. I tried to persuade them to eat, but it didn’t help. Their meals stood untouched, and stacks of trays started to pile up in the room. After a couple of days, clouds of shiny black flies burst into the air from the piles of dishes, and after buzzing in the air for a while, landed in different places all around the room: near the ceiling, on the wall, on the lampshade, on plates, on the edge of a glass of juice. The boldest of them even used my parents’ foreheads or bellies as runways.

The flies soon got used to me and didn’t get scared off. They were so fascinated by the food, so hungry, that I could get a close look as they tugged on pieces of meat or salad with their long mouths. Every once in a while, they would groom their legs or shake their wings.

Since mom and dad didn’t seem bothered by the flies, I let them be. God’s innocent creations, mom would say. Dad thought that mom was too gentle.

I had tucked mom and dad in under a woolen blanket, which usually hung over the back of the couch in the living room. I thought they might be cold, because they had felt cold when I had touched their foreheads a few days earlier. As they didn’t complain about the smell coming from the leftovers that clung to the room, I started to close the window for the night, so that they wouldn’t catch any more of a cold.

During the daytime, I worked in the garden. There was plenty of work, maybe even too much for just one person, but I did everything I could. Luckily, dad had taught me. I watered and weeded, cut the grass, and used the sickle on the hay behind the bed of perennials like dad had talked about before he got sick. After a while, I began to build a fence around the compost. Actually I just picked up where dad had left off, as he had already put up most of the posts. I hammered rails between the posts and then nailed planks upright onto the rails, leaving an inch between them. I didn’t get the planks completely straight, but I thought the fence turned out pretty good just the same. I was disappointed, though, that dad didn’t have the strength to get up and take a look at it.

In the evenings I often sat in my parents’ room and told them all the things I’d done in the garden. I knew how important the garden was to them and how they enjoyed hearing about my chores and that I was taking care of things now that they were bedridden. I tried to tell them everything as best I could, putting my heart into it and gesturing with my hands. I told them about the chirping crickets, the frogs splashing around in the small pond, and the birds that would stop by for a drink. I told them about the leopard plant’s yellow flowers and about how I’d snipped away the dried leaves and the stems of the blossoms that had already withered in the perennial bed. How I’d sawed the fence planks in the backyard on the sawbuck that dad had made, and how sawdust had piled up next to the buck, under the spot where I used the saw. I told them how handy I had been with the hammer, how neatly the nails had sunk into the rails of the fence. I described the mosquitoes that swarmed above the water barrel in the evening in the light of the setting sun.

What I didn’t tell them was how many times I had hit my finger with the hammer, that the thumb and middle finger of my left hand ached and the fingernails had turned black.

Mom and dad listened to my stories in silence with their eyes closed.

I understood that they didn’t want to waste their energy on talking, but I still wished that they would have thanked me for my hard work and that mom would have caressed my hair or cheek. One time I whispered in my mom’s ear that I missed them, but she didn’t open her eyes, just kept on sleeping. I started to feel a bit shy.

It was sweet how, day in day out, they kept holding hands without being ashamed, even though I could see. And I was so happy when, sometimes, I thought I saw one of them nod their head at me approvingly.

One day, a new plant had grown at the foot of the pod bush. A deep green sprout, four inches tall, had pushed up in the middle of the seed pod halves and the grass and the pollen plastered on the ground. I put down my watering can and bent down to examine the newcomer: would we be getting a new tin bush? I ran to tell mom and dad straight away.

The next day I found another sprout next to the first one. Then a third, and so on, until the bush was surrounded by a circle of strong, fast-growing sprouts that buried the seed pod halves beneath them.

When the phone started ringing, it almost scared me to death. It was evening and dark. I was lying in my bed hugging my teddy bear when that insistent, disturbing sound reached my ears. I sat up. I thought that a racket like that would wake the dead in their graves, as mom would sometimes say. When the noise just wouldn’t quit, I got out of bed and crept down the stairs in my t-shirt. Step after step the ringing got louder, more metallic, more insistent.

It had surely woken up mom and dad.

It felt as if the entire house was throbbing in time with the repetitive ringing, as if there was a gigantic, chiming metal heart somewhere deep inside the building. I was about to pick up the receiver when the noise stopped. I stood in the deserted hallway with my arm stretched out, certain that whoever had been calling would soon try again. That beautiful, black object attached to the wall at the height of my eyes kept silent, however.

After I peeked inside my parents’ bedroom, I pulled the telephone cord out of the socket.

It was lucky my parents hadn’t been woken up by the ringing. And it wouldn’t ever wake them up, I thought, as the plug clattered onto the floor. I made sure that the front door was locked and all the windows were closed. As I climbed back upstairs, my ears were still haunted by that metallic noise. It clanged in the walls of the hall and deepened the darkness in the corners.

I lay in bed and waited for sleep to come. I decided that I would no longer bring food to my parents. They weren’t eating, and the room was already full of trays, dishes, and cutlery. I didn’t have time to clear them up, because I had to tend the garden, though it would be good for them to have food when they woke up. They’d be hungry for sure.

The next morning, the smell had become so strong that I could taste it. The flies seemed to have multiplied even more, and white, lively larvae were grazing in the mold on the sides of some of the chunks of meat.

I still had to go to the room, and regularly at that, since I had to take care of the watering. Everything that grows needs moisture, as mom used to say. Water is the alpha and omega, the elixir of life.

I water the strong, deep green sprouts growing in dad’s head, in the middle of his bald spot. Mom’s right palm is also looking promisingly green, as are both of their clothes.

The pollen stains shed a moss-like fluff onto the floor, and the fluff has grown ever so thin roots through the fabric. The roots are attached to my parents’ skin and if I bend down close enough, I can see that the roots have spread their webs underneath their skin. Their veins have become so pale that they’re completely invisible.

I water them four times a week. At the same time I pick up the bits that have fallen off. One of mom’s ears plunked onto the floor yesterday, and dad’s left arm, which for the longest time was hanging over the edge of the bed, has now fallen clean off. There is a hollow in his shoulder, where the shoulder joint used to be. At the bottom of the hollow, I can see some green sprouting. I wrapped it carefully in a clean piece of cloth after I shooed away the flies.

Last spring, we covered the vegetable patch with gauze, and now it’s thriving!

Some evenings, I still spend time with mom and dad, because I know that it’s important to them. I tell them how well everything is growing in the garden and what a handsome grove of seedlings has spread out around the tin bush where the seed pod once fell. I describe the shoots that are now over nine feet tall and the white flowers that have appeared on top of them. Whenever I compliment dad on the nearly three-foot-tall bulb bush growing out of his forehead, he always looks pleased.

I’m certain that mom squeezes his hand with pride then. I’m certain that the knowledge gives them joy and comforts them and that it’s helping them get better. Maybe already tomorrow they’ll get out of bed and continue what’s most important in the world: nurturing new life.

The Gift Boy

Sari Peltoniemi

Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

Sari Peltoniemi is the author of many books for children and young readers, along with a number of science fiction and fantasy stories. In 2002, her novel Elk (Hirvi, 2001) won the Kuvastaja prize for the best Finnish fantasy novel; her novels have twice been shortlisted for the Finlandia Junior Prize, an award for the best Finnish novel for children or young adults. Peltoniemi, a former rock star herself, has also penned the lyrics to numerous rock songs. Her work is highly influenced by Finnish folklore and mythology, and her stories often delve into the experiences of those marginalized by society; the weakest and most vulnerable, who may be first to notice the intrusion of the fantastic and supernatural on their daily lives. “The Gift Boy” is the story of an unusual tattoo artist, who discovers strength, sorrow, and a strange kind of love in her life at society’s edge . . .

That spring I turned fifty and received a helper as gift from Heron Hannusson. I made no fuss about my age and had invited nobody to celebrate, but Heron, he knew me. He knew I’d be waiting, anyway, that I would wake up early on my birthday morning and start watching for a visitor at my door. He also knew well enough that if no gifts came, I’d sulk for a long time and take a lot of trouble to invent some malice I could cover up as innocent and unintentional.

The gift boy Heron sent was much to my liking. He had a man’s build already, strong and much taller than me, but his face was a child’s face. He had shorn his hair off and let Heron ornament one arm all over with colorful tattoos. When he arrived, he kept swaggering and smoking an aromatic pipe, but his hand was trembling.

“What am I to do with you?” I asked, when he explained that he’d been sent by Heron.

He smiled, embarrassed, and drew on his tobacco.

“Heron has taught me to make tattoos. Look! I’ve made them myself.” He bared his other leg from ankle to knee, and I saw that, too, was covered with vine ornaments.

“You need not make your figures yourself, anymore,” he boasted, and smiled so I could not help but smile back.

“Do you wish to stay with me?” I asked. I asked it in a friendly, dispassionate manner. I hid my own appetites, carefully.

The boy nodded.

“Heron did not force me. I have come to learn from you and help you.” He measured me with his eyes, though he tried to do it without my notice.

“You are free to leave any time you wish,” I promised gently, though I already had decided not to let this boy leave me. He knew, too, that I was able to bind him to myself if I so wished. Still, he stepped in my house mannishly and self-assured, and promised: “I will bring much joy to you.”

“What is your name?”

“Peregrine,” he said, blushing. Which meant he most likely was called Jon or Kip or Mats, but I promised to call him Peregrine. Indeed he brought me much joy that spring, but I did not get that joy for free. I kept asking myself, Why would Heron give him to me—what had Heron been thinking about?

Often I secretly watched Peregrine while he was chopping wood without a shirt on, tumbling with the dog in the yard, or tattooing a mark on a customer’s skin. Often when I turned my eyes to him, he looked at me expectantly and then illuminated our room with his smile. Sometimes, in the presence of a customer, he used a word in his speech that secretly pointed to the preceding night, and I blushed like a girl.

Heron would have laughed his ears off had he seen me like that. I did not grant him the pleasure. All that summer I never invited him to visit me, even though I supposed he was expecting it.

I also knew very well that my happiness would be short-lived. Peregrine was not the kind of humble boy who serves his Mistress unselfishly and endlessly loyal.

When the eldest daughter of the manor came to seek my advice and to ask for the woman’s mark on her breast, I already knew to expect trouble.

She had just turned eighteen and wished to know what I would see on her path. According to that, we would choose her woman’s mark and then prick it visible underneath the hollow of her throat. I saw nothing special in her, neither great passion nor sudden death. I chose the lily as her mark, and with that she was very pleased. She kept asking about love, as girls always do, and I promised her a handsome and wealthy man—which was how the merchant’s sturdy son could generously be described—but gave her no exact information, of course.

She’d been eying Peregrine all the while, and neither had the boy been shy about his glances. Both showed their disappointment when I took out the bit and the mallet.

“Doesn’t your apprentice do the tattoo? I’d heard he’s the one doing it nowadays for you,” the girl moaned.

And Peregrine: “Why don’t you let me do the mark?” The girl was opening the laces on her bosom and Peregrine hovered restlessly around behind me.

“All right then,” I promised. “But you have to be very sharp and careful so you won’t smudge the girl’s skin and her future.”

“I know how to do it,” Peregrine bragged, and I well knew it was so. Yes, he did; he was sure of hand and sharp of eye.

I realized they wished me to absent myself from the room, but I did not leave. The tattooing took a long time, Peregrine was delaying it on purpose, but I did not leave.

When finally the girl had paid and gone, Peregrine said:

“We have to please them so as to get good pay. When they speak well of us in the village, there’ll be more and more coming to you. You wish, don’t you, that . . . ”

“Did I ask you something?”

Peregrine smiled with his little boy’s face, but defiance sparkled in his eyes.

“You did your work well,” I said, and turned my back.

After that one, a swarm of other girls came, and then, matrons. Everyone wanted to see my Peregrine and be treated by him. Those who had already received their woman’s mark asked for something else. One wanted an auspicious blue ring, another wanted a sun-figure to grant male children, a third just wanted a decoration for her revelries. I was present to give power to the figures, but it was Peregrine who made them. I wondered constantly why I did not bind him to myself, since I could have done it easily, and even in a way in which he’d never notice anything, except that he felt good beside me.

During the years I’d gotten used to loneliness. Whenever I yet yearned for a man’s embrace, I could always have gone to Heron. I had never felt a need to glance obliquely pained at the mirror and grieve over my aging. That matter had been as natural as the year’s turn, and as little had I tried to meddle in it as in the autumn’s rains or the snow’s melting. Now I was spreading my face with unguents every morning. When I walked around in the cottage I drew in my sagging stomach. And once again I asked: Why had Heron sent that boy? Had I ever tormented him . . . badly, anyway?

I chanced to hear the talk of two maidens close to my cottage. When I noticed the girls I hid myself from them and walked by their side within the cover of the forest, so I could listen closely to everything they talked about.

“You must demand that Peregrine makes the figure,” said one of the girls and the other answered:

“Yes, of course. Everybody is talking about Peregrine and his soft hands.”

“Yes, but that’s not the only reason. Now listen to what my mother said—and my aunts agreed with it. They said there is no power anymore in the figures that Thistel is making. Thistel is old and barren.”

“—and Peregrine is anything but!”

For their age, the girls laughed lewdly. Then the other asked:

“Why then must we go to Thistel? Doesn’t Peregrine make the figures for her anyway?”

The other one shook her head.

“For sure, Thistel has given him some magic potion to drink; otherwise Peregrine would have gone away already. But believe me; Peregrine will wake up from the spell once he gets stronger.”

“And what will happen then?”

“You’ll see!” And again they giggled so unashamedly I almost showed myself and chased them off. Yet I allowed Peregrine to make pretty figures for both of them and let him strut around the girls, so naively manly I’d have laughed, if only my mouth would have twisted to a smile.

That night I wanted—once again—to deny Peregrine access to my bed.

“Sleep on the floor,” I said, when he sat on my bedside and drew off his shirt. His tattoos seemed to glow in the twilight. Surely they did glow, at least those made by Heron. I’d often heard talk about how figures made by Heron nowadays were visible in darkness. It was only a matter of time before Heron would reveal to me the secret ingredient producing a glow like that. But now Peregrine was sitting on the edge of my bed, his back towards me and his shoulders hunched up. Surely they had grown to a man’s shoulders only shortly before his arrival to me. Their breadth and angularity made my eyes water. I drew him close to me before he even had time to ask. That’s what happened every time.

If I’d had a female friend I could have asked for advice. Had there been anyone who knew me better than I knew myself, I could have asked why I kept behaving like this. Why did I demean myself? It was not love, neither was it pure lust. What was it, then?

What about the men, the boys—the candidates for husbands and fiancés? They, too, visited me sometimes, though most preferred to go to Heron. What would happen once they came to notice the game Peregrine kept having with their women? It seemed likely my falcon would get a proper hiding. I was waiting for it.

But even in this matter the boy had it easy. He charmed the men, too. Of course he did not surpass me in bestowing power to his figures or in seeing the things to come. I doubted whether he had any secret powers at all. Perhaps it was just that he had something I knew that I lacked, myself: he needed other people and was comfortable with them. He had a good word to say to every person, even to me. But I was nothing more than one among them all. Heron had spoken to me about it, that I was indifferent to the people I tattooed, in contrast to him. Not that it would have been necessary for the work itself. Heron just did not understand why I actually bothered making figures and putting my powers into them; why did I not support myself in some other way, since I was not able to love the people I gave my mark to.

“Why don’t you gather berries and mushrooms, keep a little poultry and some cows. Or if you really wish to be a shaman, be one. Come and be my apprentice,” Heron used to repeat. As if I’d have need of his teaching—a man who wept in my sight whenever he’d been drinking enough beer, and didn’t even know enough to be ashamed afterwards. Sometimes he was extraordinarily tiresome and simple-minded indeed.

With the same tiresome simple-mindedness, Peregrine charmed the men of the village. He could prate on half a day with any farmhand about thoroughly trifling matters.

With the young men, he whispered out of my hearing, and sometimes he made them figures that were so indecent I couldn’t even look at them.

“I did not tell you to make them like that,” I said. “I won’t put my power into those.”

“Those figures are powerful enough in themselves,” he said, and the young men did not even consider themselves swindled, they just laughed and paid the same as ever. And the older ones acted nearly as stupidly.

As time went on, I came to understand that if I didn’t send Peregrine away very soon, I’d lose my authority altogether. But how could I have sent away my own puppy? I had to find some other way, and I did. It would not be well done, but it was the only way possible.

I thought I understood now what Heron had intended. He had sent Peregrine to me to teach me a lesson. Heron would be disappointed, and punished, too. I would find a way to humiliate him so badly he would not quickly forget it.

I let my thoughts mature. Carefully I chose the ingredients I was going to use when the time was ripe. I let Peregrine make ever more figures and withdrew myself completely ever more often. My conscience troubled me somewhat in the evenings when Peregrine crept to my side, smiling, and in every other way tried to please me, whenever he had time off from other people. I appeased myself with the thought that perhaps it would not be necessary for me to carry out my plan at all—perhaps people would notice that there was no power in Peregrine’s figures and would again turn to me.

But as I could have guessed, Peregrine first managed to go too far. Had he actually thought I wouldn’t wake up as he got up from the bed in the small hours of the night and crept outside? Even he couldn’t have been naïve enough not to realize I’d guess where he went and from whence he returned, hands and face so permeated with woman-smell that a quick wash in the spring couldn’t possibly hide it.

“I prepared new colors for you,” I told him, when he sat himself at the breakfast table, stroking his brow.

“The old ones would have done, yet,” he smiled. “You know how to make colors that do not dry or fade.”

“They’d lost their former brightness, anyway. We cannot afford to make mistakes, my boy. You know that, don’t you?”

I unintentionally raised my voice and the boy startled. I quickly set the pot of gruel down in front of him.

“I went to the spring,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“You do as you wish and go where you want,” I snapped, again unintentionally, and he looked at me like a child who has stolen a piece of bread from the cupboard.

“Eat now,” I said, more calmly, and touched his neck lightly. “There’ll be a lot of people coming today. Your fame has grown. I suppose hardly anyone goes to Heron any longer.”

The familiar proud smile appeared on his face again. He groped at me, but I withdrew.

“It’s going to be a busy day. Warm up some water and wash yourself.”

I kept observing him during the day, when he started using the new colors. He dipped his needle happily and without worry as always. And why should he have suspected anything?

He never learned of my plan, although I’d done everything with the utmost care, and in a way where the results would be as plain and disastrous as possible. Each tattooing color included plenty of poison. Not lethal, but otherwise as nasty as possible: the red produced difficulty of breathing, the blue filled the whole body with many-colored blisters, the black made nails drop off from fingers and toes, the green raised a fever.

None of the poisons had any effect. All the evening I was filled with horror and eagerness, waiting for some word from the village. I would stand up for the boy; I would not give him up to be punished. Instead I’d give an antidote to the villagers and the promise that Peregrine would never again touch any one of them with his needle. But no one arrived; not that evening, neither the next one. Little by little Peregrine used up all the colors. I did not get time to prepare new and even stronger colors, for Peregrine left me.

He left in the night, secretly, as he had done before. This time, however, he hung back a while. I thought I heard him give a sob at the door, but when I lifted up my head, the cottage was already empty.

So how long did I listen to the voice of my pride? The voice that clearly let me understand I’d be the laughingstock of the whole village if I ran after a youngling along the village street? Not for very long. How long does it take to string up the moccasins on your feet and snatch a cape to cover yourself? I knew to direct my steps towards the manor.

I ran like a black storm cloud. My skirts billowed while I ran and my tears fell on the wayside moss.

“My gift boy, my falcon . . . he was given to me and to no one else.”

Only then did I stop, breathless, when I already saw the manor house shining on the hill. In the morning light the building in its whiteness looked almost like a noble palace, like a place of wise and important people, no clumsy peasants.

I thought of the manor women and my hate actually made me stop and think. By force I would not get Peregrine to return.

Woe for me. My feet turned back to the woods by themselves. My mind spiraled towards the marsh and I started running again. Bloody saliva was collecting in my throat, and I saved and filled my mouth with it, but now my steps were lighter. I ran with increasing swiftness and force; I closed my eyes and looked at the image of the marsh.

I pushed my way far into the marsh and then I spit my blood into the bog.

“Come,” I cried, but I could hear no answer.

Only now did I feel fear, but only for a passing moment. Then I cried even louder:

“Come! I, Thistel, tell you to come!”

I cried a third time. Now I realized my heart was thumping so hard that my whole body kept twitching. Even so, I opened my mouth to cry once more, but then I heard quiet laughter and a mocking voice repeating:

“I, Thistel, tell you to come!” The voice went on: “Why do you think you can tell me to do things?”

“You have always obeyed me. My powers are . . . ”

“Your powers? You have asked and I have given. Why shouldn’t I, when you have treated me well? But now you are telling me, little one.”

Again I heard laughter and now it had a sound that made me quickly say:

“I’m asking again. Please come with me.”

The laughter stopped, and there was nothing to be heard save the sounds of animals and the soft whisper of wind farther off.

I waited some time, but finally there was nothing to it, I had to get up and walk away. I had always got everything I needed from the marsh, and brought my own little gifts to it. My eyes started to water again when I thought that now I’d perhaps lost even this—the source of my powers—because of Peregrine. No, perish the thought.

I dug a little bottle from my bosom and took a sip of strengthening. It eased my mind quickly, but I knew I could no longer stop. For a moment I lifted up my arms and looked at the figures on my hands. There was a curled snake in both hands. One had been made by Heron, so long ago its color had faded, and the other was made by Peregrine, on my birthday. That one shone brightly and seemed to guide me, but it was I who was guiding myself. It was I who was driving myself.

Since I got no help from the marsh, I got myself other means. I had to make careful preparations, and so it was evening when I once more arrived to the manor. During the day I even started to hesitate, but whenever doubt entered my mind, I only had to think of Peregrine. I only had to remember how he entered my home and looked at me the first time.

I let the snakes loose from my sack as soon as I got to the courtyard. I told them to go and do evil, and they obeyed me yet, even though I forced them to act against their nature. They were thick black adders, and they slithered across the courtyard towards the doors so that the sand seemed to be moving and darkening. They left curly patterns in the sand, as if somebody had raked the whole courtyard.

I hurried behind my snakes into the main building. I’d never been there, but knew to head towards the staircase, since there was a terrible bawling and crying to be heard from upstairs. The double doors to the hall were open. A group of women—the mistress, the daughters and some ladies I did not recognize—were rushing about the room and trying to shake off the snakes. The snakes were hanging from their arms, necks and hair, and not releasing their grip. Pieces of furniture were falling down, crockery flying and breaking on the floor; even a window broke with a clink when something was thrown against it. I couldn’t help smiling. Then I noticed an infant crying on the floor and saw that she, too, had been bitten. With a wry mouth I shouted:

“Where is Peregrine?”

No one was able to answer; hardly anyone even noticed my presence. I left the women to their pain and returned downstairs. I found my way to the servants’ quarters and the kitchen, where my adders were attacking the cook and the maids. They were not able to run away, nor did they yet scream like the ladies upstairs, they just kept staring at the snakes, mouths and eyes wide open.

“Peregrine?” I asked.

“He is not here anymore,” one of the maids finally managed to answer.

I told my snakes to stop. “Where has he gone?”

“He went to Heron’s.”

Had I been mistaken? Had all my work been in vain? “Did he leave a message for me?” I screamed. Again I felt my face twisting while I screamed so hard it hurt. Even my voice sounded distorted and strange.

The cook begged me to call off the snakes, but the maid answered:

“He left no message to anybody. He just came and went, and when he left he said that if we need him, we should henceforth seek him in Heron’s cottage. No longer at Thistel’s.”

I waved my arms and the snakes continued their work. I knew they were just as horrified as their victims, but I cared nothing about them, either. I went on my way, dark and terrible, tireless.

Heron’s hut was in worse shape than mine: the roof hanging over the leaning wall like the cap of a rotten mushroom. The window looked like there would never be anyone there on the alert for incomers, everybody would just be allowed to come and go as they pleased. And yet, Heron never got tired of insisting that he did his work better than I do mine. That in each of his figures he left a seed for good to grow from. He really did not understand that people would not care for his shoots, however regularly he would seed them.

And yet I had considered Heron my only friend. Time and time again I’d let him into my cabin and even visited him myself. Sometimes I had shut him out and sometimes left him myself, when I’d got tired of his whining and babbling. But was that enough of a reason to take back one’s gift?

I kicked the door open. Inside it was dark as ever and I had to blink my eyes to get used to the darkness. I opened my bag, but then I heard the voice of Peregrine:

“No use bothering the creatures. Let them go.”

I did as he told. Then I went to him and put my hand on his cheek.

“Why did you leave? And why did you leave in secret?” Peregrine kissed me on the mouth and turned his back. I was left looking at the tattooed snakes on my hands. They could be discerned, though it was dark. In the darkness even the older snake was more visible than in daylight, and only now did I realize that the snakes were identical. They mirrored each other.

So, finally, I was not surprised when Peregrine again turned towards me, and it was Heron standing in front of me. Peregrine’s smooth head was covered with Heron’s long hair. The child’s face had resumed a beard and a rough surface. I could just get out the words:

“You are not able to do this.”

“You’ve always underestimated me, Thistel. For my sake you sent your adders to bring death to the manor folk. But don’t you worry; I’ve taken care of them.”

As if I’d been sorry for the manor folk.

He stroked my hair. Then I felt fatigue filling me. I realized how much of my power I’d passionately wasted during the day, and I knew it was too much. I was completely empty.

“Stay with me, Thistel. Teach me and let me teach you. We are old already. We should not waste . . . ”

“Was this why you went to such great trouble?”

“I did not wish to annoy you. You know I’m not evil-minded.” He helped me up when I asked and tried to take me in his arms. I dragged myself to the door, anyway, and out. He did not call after me but I felt his eyes. I had no strength left for walking and fell down.

Heron came to me and carried me back to the cottage. He covered me with a fur softened by wear and started to mix something in the pestle.

My eyes started to close.

“I will not have your shoots,” I whispered, but Peregrine came into my dreams and lay beside me.

A Heart Clothed in Black

(an excerpt from Pereat Mundus: A Novel, Sort Of)

Leena Krohn

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Leena Krohn is one of Finland’s most respected contemporary authors. A diverse and prolific writer, her work includes novels, short stories, essays, and books for children; her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 1992, she won the Finlandia Prize, Finland’s most prestigious literary award. Krohn’s brilliant novella Tainaron: Mail from Another Cityis available in English, as is Datura, out this year from Cheeky Frawg. Pereat Mundus,the novel from which this excerpt is taken, won the Young Aleksis Kivi Prize when it was published in 1998. In the vignette to follow, the novel’s many-faceted protagonist, Håkan, takes the form of a disgruntled literary critic, who is about to experience yet another odd encounter . . .

Håkan opened a new cardboard folder. He was talking to himself, as was his habit.

“What have they got for us this time?”

It was another collection of poetry. Fretful even before starting to read it, Håkan began to leaf through the pile of paper which, in terms of thickness, could have been a novel. Håkan read: “the bleary backyards, eyes open like fevered lilies,” “the noise of the telephone lines of desire speeds to you,” “the traps of stamenate letters await you as their prey.”

Håkan did indeed feel himself to be prey, in a clamp and a trap. He bent humbly over the keyboard and began what was already his fourth report that week: “This extensive collection demonstrates its writer’s industry and ambition. However, the writer uses very unwieldy imagery. Such expressions as ‘amorous geldings’ or ‘adverse furniture’ etc. will leave the reader a little cold.”

Håkan’s job was to read the manuscripts of amateur writers for a large publisher: prose poems, essays, collections of poetry, short stories and aphorisms, historical novels, fantasy novels, autobiographies, and in recent times also experimental, interactive fiction. He had been reading for more than a decade: three, four or even five manuscripts a week. That was almost twenty manuscripts a month, a couple of hundred a year.

And Håkan did not merely read: he wrote a page or page and a half reporting on each manuscript and left it with the publisher’s literature department.

Håkan did his work without any particular lust for power, his only aim to earn his living, which remained modest despite a considerable number of weekly hours worked. The fee for each report had remained the same for more than a decade. Without any wish to do so, Håkan wielded cultural and political power. Relying on his reports, the publisher decided to publish or reject the manuscripts. Almost always, it rejected them, for only one or two percent of the manuscripts it received were put on the publisher’s list.

Once Håkan himself had thought he would be a writer. But when, as a young student of literature, as a result of a request from a publisher friend, he had begun to read other people’s attempts, he had quickly, almost as if beaten, abandoned his dream.

In those manuscripts he had seen, as if reproduced in the fragments of a mirror, his own incapacity. Their narcissism, artificiality, lack of concreteness, scattered thoughts, and feeble emotions were also among his own weaknesses. He was man enough to admit it to himself. When he wrote poems and little stories, he always, as he began, seemed to see before him, in the space of thought, a text which he only had to write down. It was bright, light, logical, and universal. But it was an entirely different piece of writing from the one which appeared painfully on the screen of his computer. The original text escaped irretrievably from his grasp. The prey remained uncaught.

Over the years, his work as a reader had become increasingly burdensome and unpleasant to Håkan. Only once or twice a year did he bring back to his studio a manuscript that brought him a little hope and confidence. Writing reports took Håkan longer and longer. He had begun to feel that reading a manuscript exacted much more from him than the time he could have used for real literature. And real literature did exist, although at his most miserable he was in danger of forgetting it. Reading manuscripts also robbed him of his enthusiasm for life, his self-respect, and his belief in humankind.

Sometimes Håkan still believed that if he had never started working as a reader, he might after all have developed into a writer. Now it was, in any case, too late. The destructive flood of manuscripts had drowned beneath it his flexibility, his open world-view, and who knows, any talents of his that might have been worth developing.

There were months in which he only managed to read ten or fifteen manuscripts, and then he lived on tuna fish and porridge and was forced to ask his bank to give him a month’s mortgage holiday.

As he read, Håkan often gesticulated and grimaced. He would grind his teeth, snort contemptuously, even swear aloud. Sometimes he said: “For heaven’s sake!” or “Oh, really?” At others he would hiss, “That’s it!” And, with increasing regularity, “Completely pointless!”

An expression of contempt had begun to establish itself on his increasingly bony features.

At first, Håkan had signed his reports with his own name. But a few years ago he had abandoned this incontestably decent habit. He now submitted his reports anonymously and sent them straight to the editors in the literary department. The publisher did not reveal the name of the report-writer, even on request.

It had become necessary to adopt this slightly impolite procedure because of increasing numbers of telephone calls and letters. Only those whose manuscripts had been rejected and who felt they had been treated unfairly contacted Håkan. But, of course, they were in the majority, by a long way.

A certain case, which was in itself insignificant but which had enraged Håkan, had given him the final grounds for anonymity. One Tuesday, when Håkan was getting off the local train carrying a heavy briefcase full of manuscripts that he intended to return to the publisher, an unknown male stopped him.

“So you are Håkan B.,” he had said.

Unsuspecting, Håkan had conceded that he was indeed the person in question.

“So it’s you,” the man continued, piercing him with a glance; its significance was by no means clear.

Håkan waited for the man to introduce himself, but this he did not do. The unknown man was well-dressed and had recently paid a visit to the barber’s. To judge by his appearance, he could have worked at a bank or in a life-insurance office. He was certainly not a manual worker or in receipt of unemployment benefit.

As Håkan walked on along the station bridge, the man attached himself to Håkan’s left side.

“What an ass!” the man said, and Håkan started strongly. He did not believe he had heard correctly.

But the man said again: “Ass!”

Håkan continued walking steadily without glancing at the man again. His voice deep with hatred, the man hissed new and quite extraordinary insults and curses into Håkan’s left ear.

Håkan tried desperately to remember where he might have met this character and how he had hurt him. As their shoes clattered in rhythm on the tarmac he thought he understood. It seemed that they had never met. Perhaps the man’s abuse was not really personal, although he seemed somehow to have discovered Håkan’s name.

“You,” the man said, “are lacking in both intelligence and heart. I doubt you even have a cortex.”

A cortex? Swallows twittered and pecked at something between the rails. The station clock shone in the cold morning twilight like a second moon. They pushed forward toward the station’s swinging doors, side by side like comrades, in the thick torrent of people hurrying to work.

How, when, and where had this completely unfamiliar man gained such an extraordinarily unflattering image of him? Håkan pressed on as usual, his shoulders a little hunched forward, still not responding to the man’s aggressive outbursts.

“Has no one ever told you that those articles in the Literary Critics’ Society yearbook are pathetic scribbles? They should never have been published.”

Once again, Håkan did not respond, and the man did not appear to expect him to. The two articles to which his persecutor referred had appeared in the yearbook five and eight years earlier. It was quite extraordinary that anyone should still remember them. Both of them dealt with a subject that one would not think passion-provoking: they pondered the problems of the philosophy of art, with particular reference to the relationship between the authentic and the copy.

Håkan felt the man’s nervous panting in his ear. For a moment he felt him shake with an anger that had no doubt been seeking an opening for some time. Håkan feared that the worst could happen at any moment: the man would hardly be able to control his rage for much longer, but would soon attack him physically, push him into the cold mud of the bridge and strangle him with the soft green scarf that Håkan had recently bought to guard against the cold November winds.

But Håkan pushed open the heavy glass door and nothing fateful happened. Now the man shifted from literary scholarship to something completely different.

“Only an idiot like you,” the man said, “could wear a scarf of such a ghastly color.”

It was as if he had grasped Håkan’s thought about the scarf he would be strangled with. Only when they had reached the newspaper kiosk did Håkan turn suddenly toward the man and say simply: “Goodbye,” and for some reason made to grasp the man by the hand.

At the last moment he realized how completely at variance with the situation his impulse was, and pulled his hand away.

The man had stopped in front of him, very close to him; his flood of words had now ceased. He stared at Håkan with wide eyes made sharp by hatred. Håkan felt that the inimical stranger could see him, his faults and mistakes, as if enlarged, without subterfuge or defence. The man could see his bad posture, the ugliness of his aging body, the boil on his chin, and the folds in the flabby skin on his neck—as if they had been what was essential about Håkan. It occurred to Håkan that perhaps the green scarf, which had delighted him, did not suit him at all. Perhaps it made his pallid cheeks unpleasantly green.

“You think you are looking at me,” Håkan said soundlessly, “but you are wrong. I am quite different.”

Hatred is not blind—but nevertheless, it is, for unlike love, it sees only what is visible. And for a moment Håkan felt himself to be one and the same as his intellectual, emotional, and physical weaknesses, to be their sum and nothing but.

Håkan descended the elevator with his head bowed, unnaturally stiff. He still felt the man’s burning gaze on his neck. Only as he reached the station tunnel did he understand that he had probably read the man’s manuscript and written a report on it. It could not have been a flattering one.

As soon as he reached the publisher’s office, after leaving the manuscripts and his opinions with the editorial assistant, he announced that from now on he did not intend to sign his reports with his own name. The leading editor of the literary department was fetched. He approved Håkan’s demand so calmly and as such a matter of course that Håkan was amazed. It was only now that it occurred to him that the publisher’s other readers (whose identity he did not himself know) perhaps never appeared under their own names. He alone had been so naïve that he had for years signed his reports and thus submitted himself to the intrusions and anger of rejected writers.

After this Håkan became more cautious as a writer of reports. He did not wish for any more lifelong enemies in addition to the numerous ones he imagined he already had. Sometimes, as he lay awake, Håkan felt an unknown anger seeking, in the darkness, his slowed heart.

But at the same time he could feel his self-respect crumbling. Håkan had once believed in honesty, unconditional and unflinching directness. But now he knew that the consequences of frankness could be terrible and completely unpredictable. He was not only afraid for his own peace of mind. After all, there was some primitive sympathy in him even for the writers. Who stood to benefit from his sincerity? How much would it weigh against the damage he had caused? Could he pride himself in a directness that resulted in deep and lengthy discomfort, perhaps even in acts of desperation?

That was why Håkan attempted to seek a balance between his true opinions and necessary expressions of politeness. He watered down even justified annoyance and made frequent use of such phrases as “perhaps,” “a little” and “not necessarily.”

He would have liked to have written, “You are wasting both your own time and other people’s. Have pity on yourself, your family, and the overworked editors at the publisher’s. For God’s sake, go and do something of benefit to both yourself and your fatherland.”

Instead, he wrote dryly and falsely, “The manuscript contains promising starts and interesting trains of thought, but it remains fragmented and uneven.”

Or he would very much have liked to say: “You are not well. Stop this chatter and get yourself a therapist before you are forced into rehab and a straightjacket.”

But he wrote: “The reader will not easily grasp perhaps personally significant lines such as ‘As the century departed he hanged the iris on its line,’ or ‘Anne inside the plum / a museum car her skirt / in the ice-cream bar.’”

When Håkan read a collection of aphorisms whose author aspired to be a humorist as well as a satirist, he wanted to write: “You miserable wretch, so you think you amuse the writer? Your pseudo-jokey rhymes make me sick.”

But instead, he wrote, “The manuscript also attempts satire, but these experiments remain a little feeble.”

Håkan had a particular horror of aesthetes who imagined that being a poet—even in cases where this was merely a title the writer had awarded himself—would isolate them from the activities and senseless business of ordinary people.

Another wearisome category included those writers who constantly lined up learned quotations and mottos or musical terms. But the writer’s own thoughts, what he himself had to say, would have fitted on one line, and even if it was a new and previously unwritten line, one forgot it as soon as one had read it.

Håkan yawned and wrote and yawned again: “It is worth weighing up very carefully when a quotation really does open up one’s own text, and when it is just an extra additive or a proof of learning. A richly nuanced collection, but one that still needs adjustment.”

Håkan found himself reading mottoes that, in recent years, were increasingly taken from Foucault or Baudrillard, or even Lacan. There were texts that swarmed with references to Baudelaire, Lorca, Dostoevsky, the Pre-Raphaelites and pre-Cretan mythology.

Some cultivated Dante with all their might, others Montesquieu. But they never remembered the latter’s words: “It seems to be a wise provision of nature that the follies of men should be short-lived; but books interfere and immortalize them. A fool, not content with having bored all those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come . . . he wishes posterity to be informed of his existence, and he would have it remember forever that he was fool.”

Many wrote 500 or 750 pages about their miserable lives, which even they loathed. But they wanted above all to write a novel, not an autobiography, and so they catalogued the events of their days in the third person. One began with spring 1995, another from December 1921. The main character was without exception noble, upright, faithful, intelligent, and humorous, but he was always and everywhere surrounded by cheats, slanderers, and plotters. His decency was shamelessly exploited, greedy and base characters schemed for their own benefit, violent, fraudulent, and twisted people swarmed around him.

Håkan wrote: “The reader is forced to wonder whether such minute documentation deserves archiving and would be more suited to the direct memoir, without any attempt at fiction.”

A red plastic Christmas star had been lit in the window opposite. Håkan fetched a cup of chamomile tea which he drank to soothe his stomach, and a tuna sandwich.

But how could one even hope, Håkan thought, that amateurs would write well when professional reporters in relatively decent newspapers could present interviewees with questions like, “Some places to chill out in,” or “I hear you dig neat cars like crazy?” And when a reporter meant to say, “You have apparently traveled a great deal,” what he wrote was, “Your energy field has moved round the world a lot.”

Håkan thought, as so often before, that since the nineteenth century no one—with a couple of exceptions—had written literature any longer. The development of the novel had already anticipated the decay of prose. But while readable sentences had still been written in the thrillers of the 1930s, now they were hardly ever encountered even in so-called literature. Indeed, Håkan preferred reading Rex Stout to contemporary prose. Today, authors wrote in an impoverished way, as if all their readers were idiots: truisms, platitudes, sensationalist confessions which nevertheless embroidered the narrator’s motives, short sentences in which one could wade as if in a stubble field without finding the first seed of thought. Such books should not, in Håkan’s opinion, be written, published, or read.

In the case of poetry, there was more of it to be found in the weather forecast, business news, and stock exchange prices than in most of the collections Håkan read. The former had more truth about them, and poetry was precisely what was true.

Håkan remembered the portrait of a certain Miss Lysbet van Duvenvoorden, a woman who lived in the fifteenth century. She held in her hand a slip of paper on which was written: “It makes me sad that one must hope for so long. Who is he who keeps his heart completely open?”

He remembered the words of Charles d’Orléans: “I am he whose heart is clothed in black.”

On Håkan’s desk a translation of the Persian Letters awaited him, but now he could not read any more; instead, he picked up the television remote control. A stage show was in progress on channel three. Men whose wives had left them, and wives whose husbands had left them, were telling the presenter about their unhappy marriages. Many wept bitterly. Then it was the turn of the cheats, those who had sinned.

No need for a confessional any more, Håkan thought. The studio is a church, the media are the confessors, the public is God. The announcements of the Holy Spirit are heard during the advertisement breaks. What you say on television you say to God himself.

Who would write, any longer, “O how healthy, how pleasant and sweet it is to sit alone and be silent and speak with God.”

Håkan ate his tuna sandwich and listened to the confessions. Whenever those wretches finished telling their life stories—or the story they believed to be the story of their life—the audience applauded. One divorced woman had with her a remote control. The presenter asked why she had a remote control and the woman said that she always carried it with her. It was, to her, a symbol of the control of life that she had lost.

At the end of the program, a woman psychiatrist leaped onto the stage, elegantly coiffed, wearing a violet blazer and a black miniskirt. She glowed with vitality and belief in life. She hugged them all immediately, the cheats, the cheated, the disappointed. Here was the media Jesus Christ, who redeemed everything without sacrificing anything.

Håkan, who had never been married, undressed, leaving only his undershirt. He was used to sleeping like this, ever since his childhood.

He turned out the light and, in the dark of night, remembered his cowardly reports, his cold heart, and his hatred of people. He thought: If the human race ever dies out, it will choke on its own words. Wrong and unnecessary words, unclean and insincere words. God forgive me, forget that I too have added to them.

Håkan turned onto his back and saw on the ceiling the faint glow of the Christmas star. Staring at it, he fell, as do the righteous, into the silence of his own heart, where poetry and prayer still lived.

Those Were the Days

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen

Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho

Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen is an author, a Finnish language and literature teacher, and the father of three sons. After winning several of Finland’s speculative fiction contests, Jääskeläinen decided to become a writer. To date, he’s published two novels and two short story collections. His debut novel, The Rabbit Back Literature Society(2006), will be available in English for the first time this year. In “Those Were The Days” Jääskeläinen draws on meta-fictional techniques—a mock autobiography, trimmed to Sunday-reading lengths—to explore the true nature of time, dreams, and predestined love . . .

READERS’ DIGEST – SOMETIME A.C.A. (AFTER CALENDAR ABANDONMENT)

BOOK OF THE MONTH

THOSE WERE THE DAYS:

MY LIFE WITH THE LADY LIBRARIAN

FROM “THOSE WERE THE DAYS” © OSWALD MORROW.

PUBLISHER: D. DIETRICH & COM INC., BONN.

Oswald Morrow was a successful information ferryman and family man who gave up his former life for the woman of his dreams, Ms. Boumgarden, whom he had known for years as a librarian. Together they developed the Weekday Theory that shook their contemporaries to the core, a theory with dizzying loops which they explain in their book Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday? Immediately after its publication the book rocketed to the top of bestseller lists. The theory, questioning the conventional patterns of thought of its era, quickly made the couple multimillionaires.

“Since my childhood I hated the idea that in every one of life’s choices I’d have to be satisfied with just one of many alternatives—I found it altogether intolerable that choosing one alternative automatically meant forsaking all the others. I was always the ‘Hesitant Henry’ who wanted to both eat his cake and save it. And yet; when I finally realized it was indeed possible, I still chose the same alternative every time—a life with my Lady Librarian!”

After the publication of this bestseller, the readership of People magazine voted Oswald Morrow the Romantic of the Year. Now Morrow, one of the world’s most famous time-speculators, has written a new book. In his autobiographical work Those Were The Days he tells his amazing story, exposing the events and fates behind the sensational Weekday Theory.

Encounters in the Library

All those years there among the books—we never actually talked, me and that aging lady with whom I’d become infatuated, as I already realized at an early stage. She wasn’t beautiful, but youth trembled on her skin in a way that implored you to have a past with her. I cannot express it any better than this. Whoever has experienced a similar feeling will understand; others shouldn’t even try. I went to the Library on Tuesdays now and then, to read papers or to borrow a book that appeared intellectual. All this I did only to catch sight of the Lady Librarian sitting there, behind her hardwood desk, old-fashioned horn-rimmed glasses on her nose.

Sometimes when I walked past the desk, she’d glance up at me from behind her reading glasses, as if she’d recognized me. Sometimes I felt she was about to say something intimate, surprising, and meaningful to me. Something beyond the limits of conventionality. For those moments I lived. Those condensed seconds turned up to revive me during the days when the weariness of life assailed me. They kept me awake during the many nights when my wife was already asleep and I still waited for my six-phased dream period to start.

The woman behind the desk never said anything to me, nor I to her. Yet I was sure she was considering it. Just as I was. While I waited, I lived with her in my dreams.

Sometimes we passed each other amongst the shelves, and then we couldn’t help getting close to each other. We even touched each other. It’s useless to even try describing the effect her nearness had on me. “Excuse me, would you please let me through here, I have to reach the Ibsen there beyond you,” the woman would say quietly, and I would always answer with something like: “Oh, I beg your pardon, I’m in your way again. There, can you get past now? By no means would I wish to put myself between you and Mr. Ibsen.”

I do not want to insult my ex-wife Hannelore, but even disguised in platitudes those seemingly absentminded encounters were more erotic than anything I’d ever done between the sheets.

The Library stands by a green-bordered river in the northern part of my hometown, close to the famous Maple Bridge, once visited by hordes of photographing and wondering tourists. By that time, the first detected time turbulences still ran neatly and safely along the river’s channel, through the river water. Tourists used to toss coins and handkerchiefs off the bridge, trying to hit the turbulences. Time decelerations were called back-vortexes. When tourists hit a back-vortex, they’d marvel at how the falling object suddenly stopped some distance above the river’s surface and, from the viewpoint of the people standing on the bridge, remained floating in the air. Actually, the coin was just transferred into a different, much slower time current than the one on the bridge. Seen from inside this slower time current, the coin would have continued falling at a completely normal speed, whereas the people on the bridge would have seemed to be moving super-fast, like insects in an extremely sped-up film. The time accelerations were called time torrents. An object hitting a time torrent vanished from sight in an instant, as if greedily snatched away by an invisible hand.

And, of course, there were always some madcaps wanting to experience the change in time personally, without a thought of the possible consequences before it was too late. The time torrents weren’t particularly dangerous; the jumper just seemed to scramble up the bank the same moment he hit the water. But the slowing time back-vortexes were considerably more problematic. Few of the daredevils jumping into a back-vortex completely understood beforehand what the leap meant for their social life—afterwards the matter would, however, become abundantly clear. When the foolhardy divers climbed out of the river, after what seemed to them a short swim, for the rest of the world a much longer time period would have passed—generally a few days, or in the worst cases, years. The jump could cost the daredevil a girlfriend or boyfriend, spouse and employment, or student residency. They eventually had to organize a special support group for back-vortex swimmers. When warning signs seemed to have no effect, an electric fence was finally constructed along the river’s banks.

At that time, before the Great Time Flood and the disastrous riot, the Time Research Institute loomed on the riverbank opposite the Library. The Institute was devoid of any outer charm. Its appearance brought to mind a clumsy, callous child or a grey-faced bureaucrat who seemed a nonentity but kept plotting and scheming in his twisted mind. Unlike the infamous Time Research Institute, blown up in the riot, the Library fortunately is not one of those new soulless buildings constructed with orders to save costs, but an old venerable stone building rich in atmosphere, instead. On its façade, obviously finished at a leisurely pace, one can still see the dreamy touch of an artist’s chisel. But for a few blackened licks of soot, the Library’s outward aspect remained as it was before the violence.

On the first floor were sanitary facilities and several small lecture and meeting rooms; downstairs one would sometimes bump into the grey-suited city bureaucrats who probably never had any business on the upper floors—literature being something their kind couldn’t understand. On the second floor was the children’s department, in spite of its large windows always a shadowy place, where I sometimes sought books for my son to read before my divorce. The third floor featured a large festival hall, and once you climbed up to the fourth floor, you finally found the adult department and reading hall—and the wonderful lady, my spectacled Lady Librarian. The Library had a lift, too, but for some reason that only became clear later, I preferred the stairs.

The Library steps were broad and stony. Whenever I reached the top, I felt, besides sweaty and oddly humbled, like a child who’d slipped into one of those places where only adults are allowed. And yet I was already a grownup man, husband to my wife and father to a small boy. But in the moments I spent near the Lady Librarian, I again turned into that thirteen-year-old boy I’d been when I first saw her. Infatuation had boiled up inside me quickly and fiercely, like a kettle of milk forgotten on the stove. By that time, to be sure, she’d only been a library assistant in the children’s department, from where she was transferred upstairs four years later. At the very same time I also left the world of children’s books and began to get acquainted with adult literature in the Lady Librarian’s charming sphere of influence.

As far as I could remember, the Lady Librarian had simultaneously felt extremely dear and familiar to me, and extremely unattainable. She was about fifteen years older than I. Although the gap between us had strangely narrowed with the passage of time, I still felt too shy from old habits to even consider crossing it.

“I’ve Had Dreams About You”

Whenever I put a book chosen from the shelves on the lending desk, I observed the Lady Librarian’s reactions. I wanted to find out what kind of books she appreciated. She wasn’t easy to gauge, her expressions were always strictly controlled, but practice made me a master.

In a certain light one could see pretty furrows under her dark eyes. Some of my choices amused her, such as the Tropic of Cancer, which I borrowed at the age of fourteen; then the furrows under her eyes seemed to get laughingly deeper. Anna Karenina made her brows jerk, revealing amazement. At that time I was fifteen and trying to appear more mature in her eyes than I was. I suppose she saw right through me. A couple of years later, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco, and Tolkien finally earned me a nod of approval, though it was so minute that nobody except a practiced observer such as me would have noticed it.

Then, twenty-two years after our first meeting, while I was in the middle of all the fuss and hurry of organizing a move to another city with my family, I suddenly fancied dropping by the Library once more. I approached her and dropped the book I’d picked up from a shelf at random into her lap, and to my complete surprise all the dreams where I was living with her tumbled out.

It was as if someone else was speaking with my mouth. When my outburst was over, she glanced at the book I’d brought, took off her spectacles, and then stared at me a long while without visible surprise. My stomach hurt and my ears buzzed. The situation felt unreal. I actually had, on impulse, gone and revealed to her my dreams like some obsessive idiot. I believed I had at last crossed the limit; on one side of which there are sane persons who might have some obsession, a bit original but firmly controlled, and on the other side those basket-cases whose removal into rubber-walled homes was just a matter of time.

The woman’s lack of expression tortured me. Probably she was just wondering whether I was only a harmless idiot or the kind of freak who necessitated an alarm. She usually acted with restrained kindness towards everybody, but I’d once seen a glimpse of another side to her. She couldn’t stand people with intellectual disabilities. Once, a group of four youngsters with cognitive impairments had come to the Library with their instructor, looking for illustrated books about foreign countries. I watched the situation from one side; the eager book-seekers didn’t have the patience to be properly quiet, and the cheerfully noisy group drew everyone’s attention. When they approached the Lady Librarian, she turned pale, stiff, and tense. I could actually smell her aversion towards these harmless people. Now, I was afraid she’d react the same way towards me.

“Yes, we live by the seaside in a white house, and the porch could use some painting,” the Lady Librarian finally said. “And our little daughter is a miserable violin player.”

“True,” I heard myself admit (my voice seemed to come from somewhere far away). “So let’s stop sending her to lessons with Ms. Lindeman. She’d rather gather cockleshells on the beach.”

For a while the situation felt completely natural. She smiled and I smiled; the library hall seemed to brighten around us, and we looked at each other as if it had been the world’s simplest and most obvious thing. Even colors deepened: the brown in the woman’s hair shone browner than any brown I’d ever seen. Never before had we exchanged more than a few superficial words, but here, now, the two of us were discussing our dreams over the library’s lending desk. And how come we happened to share the same dream, in which we lived together with a daughter? How nice, unique, and interesting!

Except I was close to fainting; while my soul felt like a balloon striving to fly off, the flesh on my bones hung heavy and listless. Not even with my wife had I discussed my dreams, since she was rather inhibited when it came to intimate matters. “Dreams are private, just like arseholes,” she’d once said. “They exist, they are common, but they should nonetheless never be talked about.”

It was true, of course. Publicly revealing one’s dreams could result in a heavy fine and forfeiture of civil rights for a long time. And now I’d gone and poured my dreams out to the Lady Librarian! I might as well have dropped my trousers, handed her a torch, and mooned her.

I glanced around furtively. How many had overheard? What kind of job promotions could a man with an indecent exposure record expect? “Publicly revealed his dreams in the City Foundation’s Library, in the middle of a Tuesday.”

“Your finger,” the woman said. I inclined my head questioningly. “The finger,” she repeated and took my hand with a grin. She recorded my DNA on the lending terminal, let go of my hand, and gave me the book. Her smile was once more the epitome of customer service. Obviously she, too, had suddenly remembered the rules of proper conduct. In a public place you didn’t talk aloud about your dreams, or do anything else improper, after all. That’s what mothers tell their little children. “You are welcome,” the Lady Librarian said, without looking me in the eye.

“Thank you,” I muttered. I grabbed the book and blundered out of the adult department on stiff legs. There was a restroom downstairs; I went there to wash my face and to collect my thoughts, but I didn’t even have time to touch the faucet before I doubled over and threw up until my stomach was empty. I heard how the toilet-robot, smelling the mess, clicked out of its niche behind me and waited to fulfill the purpose of its existence: disinfect the basin.

Of the next two Tuesdays I remember nothing but my wife’s distant voice; I suppose she persistently tried to ask me something about the move. My son most likely also came to explain something to me every now and again, which always ended with an inquiring series of sounds that I didn’t have the energy to even try to translate into meaning. Some person of importance might have phoned me, but after the call I couldn’t remember with whom I’d just spoken. I packed things more mechanically than the most primitive E-class robot worker. In my mind, packing had nothing to do with the approaching day of our move. My brain had almost totally disconnected from the external world, while my hands kept tossing data cubes, folders, pens, pots, socks, clothes, and papers into empty boxes my wife Hannelore kept fetching from the supermarket. At times I vaguely realized I’d broken some object, but none of that seemed to matter in the least.

“Daddy’s nervous about the new job,” I heard my wife whisper to our son several times. What a nice explanation.

I was supposed to take a transfer vacation of seven Tuesdays before I started working at my company’s new location, “The Node.”(It was the node of net-crossings, central to the information ferry transport). With my promotion I’d also been promoted to Chief of Information Ferrymen, and at first I’d been very excited. The promotion meant more money and more challenges. I’d always been a virtuoso at forming, organizing, and handling information packages, which of course made me competent to control the ever-increasing four- and soon to be five-dimensional net ferry transport, using the newest results from the Time Research Institute in the planning of its technology. But now I actually didn’t even remember the new job anymore.

On the third Tuesday my eyes focused on an object in my hand. It was the book I’d borrowed from the Library. It was Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

I took the book, climbed over the mountain of boxes, and returned to the Library. The Lady Librarian was waiting for me behind her desk and looking at me expressionlessly.

“We have to talk. When the library closes,” she said.

Something terribly powerful was churning below her cool veneer. It was just as though I’d been looking at the beginnings of a volcanic explosion at the bottom of a frozen pond, seconds before the ice ceased to exist forever.

“Yes,” I answered and returned the book. Blindly I leafed through newspapers while I waited for the Library’s closing hour. Headlines flashed on the surface of the reading table: IRAN OFFERS ECONOMIC AID TO EAST-AMERICAN MUSLIM REPUBLIC. INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT DENIES RUMORS OF TIME EXPERIMENTS. SPEAKER OF POPULAR TALK SHOW REVEALED TO BE A SEX ROBOT–GROOM HAS NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. SACKED MANAGER OF T.R.I. REVEALS: TIME EXPERIMENTS HAVE BEEN GOING ON FOR OVER THREE DECADES! T.R.I. ADMITS TO EXPERIMENTS: “WE TRIED TO SLOW DOWN WORKING HOURS.” PROBLEM CHILD: SON OF ICELANDIC RESEARCHER MANUFACTURES 328 COPIES OF FAMILY’S DOG GUNVALD IN CELLAR! “DADDY EXPLAINED TO ME HOW IT’S DONE,” SAID THE THIRD GRADER.

I tried to smile at the news of the 328 Gunvalds, but my face felt cold. I kept glancing at the woman sitting behind the desk. She was watching me rather strangely. I pondered whether I ought to leave, after all. What if she was just wondering why I was still sitting here? What if I’d misunderstood something?

But when eight o’clock arrived and all the customers except for me had left, she locked the door, put on her brown coat, and came over to me. Her smile dispelled all my doubts. “Let’s go,” she said.

Coffee and Great Insights

We descended the stairs, my Lady Librarian and I, and made our way to the café round the corner. There we sat at a private table, not wanting other ears listening in on our conversation. She ordered a coffee and a big cinnamon bun. It was quiet; the radio was softly playing some new production by the virtual Edith Piaf.

Yess! More original than the original! a husky DJ kept assuring us, himself probably just the virtual voice of some radio legend.

Nothing new was good enough for people nowadays; everything had to be neo-twentieth-century. People were coming to blows over tickets to the new Hitchcock movie Fatal Moon, starring Jimmy Dean, vir, and Greta Garbo, vir. Traditional film wasn’t doing well at the box office and actors had to work for scraps, as devotees. Their work and the medium were considered too elitist for the tastes of the common people.

For some time already, the production of films had been the task of comps simulating past masters. I had actually begun to get used to the idea. Chaplin movies by the comps weren’t so bad, after all. Same with comics. I’d bought my son a Carl Barks comp from the series Great Historic Storytellers for his sixth birthday. For a couple of weeks it had churned out one new duck comic after the other, day and night, in the corner of the boy’s room and, except for a few occasional oddities, they all seemed brilliant.

Finally the overexerted comp had coughed and caught fire; in its last moments its scorched circuits spat out a half-finished story, a story with several serious stylistic flaws. Obviously the essential Comics Code circuit of Barks’ production had broken down. In the story a nuclear bomb, jury-rigged by Gyro Gearloose, devastated Duckburg in revenge for a lost football match. The story included a strange, somehow familiar subplot, in which the secret of Uncle Scrooge’s wealth was exposed to be a pact with Satan; Uncle Scrooge also suffered from syphilis, caught from Glittering Goldie during his Klondike years, which was slowly ruining his brain. Finally I realized the Barks comp had obviously been drawing material from the Net, at least from Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, which I’d read at the age of fourteen.

But the newest new was the author comps—a real sacrilege! Anybody with enough money could buy a comp version of Dostoyevsky, Pullman, Waltari, Irving, or Tolkien (the selection was getting wider all the time) and make it produce text according to the given parameters. Luckily not quite everything was possible, after all, as one of my colleagues found out while trying to make the Tolkien comp write a porno version of “The Lord of the Rings”; he had to give up the endeavor when the system crashed time after time. The Tolkien comp had no erotic circuit at all. “As long as I sit behind my desk, not a single comp book gets into the Library,” my companion snorted when I mentioned the matter. Her cheeks flushed a pretty pink with indignation. I smiled in mute admiration at her temper.

The new trends in the movie industry and literature weren’t, however, a central subject of our conversation that night. Until that Tuesday changed to the next one, we sat in the café and talked about our dreams. Sometimes we held each other’s eyes, sometimes we stared out at the boats moving up and down the Maple River beyond the window. They were research boats of the City Technical Department. I vaguely remembered hearing something strange had happened on the river. Some rumors told of an accident, others of a mysterious discharge that probably had something to do with the recent fire at the Time Research Institute.

At some stage we took each other’s hands. Everything was wonderful, fabulous, and complicated, and at the same time surprisingly plain and clear.

By morning we’d kissed some twenty times, germinated our amazing Theory of Weekdays, and acquired a huge headache. At that stage, the theory was, of course, just a confused collection of vague, partly contradictory ideas, the majority of which even we didn’t take seriously. Many of the ideas made us laugh, but some also aroused our fears.

Before we parted, we agreed to meet again, and as an aside, to also spend the rest of our lives together. After our night at the café we felt crazy and courageous, yet I remember fearing that our romantic certainty would evaporate with the new day and that we’d end up with nothing and remain prisoners of our former life.

I went home and informed my wife I could no longer live with her. I told her I’d had another woman for a long time already (which was only technically a lie). My wife nodded absentmindedly. I imagined I’d got off scot-free: obviously my wife had also been harboring secret thoughts of divorce. Brilliant! We both could then deal with the situation maturely and with equanimity.

But when I’d collected my suitcase and returned to the hall with sprightly steps, she made a scene after all. She attacked me like a madwoman. We wrestled a moment until I finally managed to pull her fingers from my hair.

My son watched me silently from the top of the stairs when I stepped past my shaking wife, who was panting from exhaustion, and left. My hands were trembling, my face had bloody scratches on it, and I felt as though I was hanging partly loose from my own body. I was simultaneously joyful and terrified. I closed the door behind me, heard the latch click—and that click rang in my mind for a very long time.

A couple of weeks later I contacted Hannelore to settle the practical arrangements with her. Besides considerable alimony, she also wanted to keep the house, the car, and all the movables inside the house. I felt guilty and consented to all her demands.

After nominal opposition I also gave up all claims to our son. This may sound callous, but if I’m completely honest, I actually didn’t want anything, or anybody, from my former existence in my new life. Of course I cared about my son. However, the feeling was distant and unattainable, as though coated with lead and sunken somewhere in the bottomless mud of myself.

I took a hotel room just a few blocks away from the Library and went to sleep. The six dream-sequences in arrears streamed through my consciousness; six different versions of reality. The dreams were now clearer than ever before. Familiar people in different roles. Places simultaneously familiar and strange. The house by the seaside. The Lady Librarian who was my first and only wife in the dream. Our completely unmusical daughter, whose stubborn efforts to learn to play the violin amused, touched, and infuriated us. And the cat: at some stage this peculiar-looking nuisance of a cat padded into the dream, appearing out of nowhere, having evidently decided to stay with us. What a super-Freudian symbol constructed by the unconscious, I remember thinking afterwards. The cat obviously signified female eroticism, or perhaps my own feminine side. Whatever.

When I woke up I only remembered a part of my dreams, fragmentary bits here and there, although I could recollect more of them better than before. Little by little I learned to remember more. The Lady Librarian and I developed a mental technique by which we could, step-by-step, recall to mind those six dream sequences almost perfectly. This technique is fully and clearly demonstrated in our book Is Every Day Indeed a Tuesday? (The book Is Every Day Indeed a Tuesday? is available from the Readers’ Digest only as an electroflash version to your Home Book. We regret that the 10,000 numbered copies of the Special Edition are already sold out. Ordering instructions on p. 128. – Ed.)

Leaving my family was curiously easy for me. After everything that had happened I no longer felt bound to my former obligations. I understood that I’d just wrecked my former life and left amongst the ruins a woman and a child, the two people I would have unhesitatingly died for only a day before. Well, winds blow, emotions flow. I knew that under normal circumstances I’d have felt like a miserable bastard who deserved to be stoned to death. I’d always condemned people who did things like that to their families. How I had loved standing on the moral high ground, filled with my own supercilious nobility! But now I discovered that when you get close to the very greatest insights, matters like guilt, duty, and responsibility are amazingly easy to ignore. When a person experiences reality-quakes, things acquire completely new proportions. And the victims will always be the ones whose lot it is to become less important in relation to the whole.

I lived in the hotel for a week. I notified my employers that I wouldn’t be around anymore. I had some savings and decided I could always find another job at a later stage. I wasn’t afraid of changes or uncertainty—I actually glowed with enthusiasm and energy. Now and then I felt almost manic. Then I moved in with my Lady Librarian. By no means did she live in a seaside villa (that we acquired only later); instead, it was a small apartment at the end of a street guarded by linden trees, in the eastern part of the city, which we inhabited.

When we weren’t making love, we talked and made notes on our observations and thoughts. By day I typed out our notes while I waited for my lover to come home from the Library. Gradually, the Weekday Theory took its final form, and we noticed there was a whole book piling up on the desk. I don’t remember which one of us first got the idea of offering it to a publisher, but we were both just as excited about the idea.

I didn’t know it then, but the book was to become a bestseller that made it possible for us to live out the rest of our lives without financial worries.

The Amazing Theory of Weekdays

In the next chapter I shall try to explain, as concisely as possible, the central characteristics of the Theory of Weekdays. I’ll also aim to make it easily understandable, although I probably won’t manage that. For a layperson it will be difficult, if not impossible to comprehend the theory, and I’ve therefore included a chart that hopefully clarifies matters a little—although a simplification will necessarily also mean a mild distortion of the subject. (The chart is included as a folded appendix inside the back cover – Ed.)

Nowadays no rational person even imagines that he could keep count of time’s course any more. Not that very many would even want to do that. Measuring time is just as strange a thought for the younger generations as playing chess on the wing of a bird in flight—it’s strikingly difficult, and besides, there are quite a lot more sensible things to do. There will, however, always be brave, eccentric individuals making the effort, the fascination with desperate endeavors perhaps being the characteristic that makes us human.

Once in a while new versions of clocks and calendars appear in the shops. They are extremely complicated and difficult to interpret with their hour systems that vary from zone to zone, and their whole- and half-jump-days. Ideological Clock Movements organize long and expensive courses for those brave enough to try learning the secrets of time measurement instruments and with enough money and leisure. For a while the new kinds of clocks and calendars might seem to function, some of them actually quite well, but before long even the best mechanisms always prove to be nothing more than beautiful objects that have no predictive power at all over the changing currents of time. And that’s why people buy clocks and calendars, of course, to acquire unique ornaments. Time cannot be measured nowadays. One could just as well try to build an instrument that measures the average speed and direction of every single bird’s flight across the sky.

Once, however, time was measurable. For instance, during the latter half of the last millennium, measuring time was a quite essential part of human culture. In my youth time still used to be measured rather accurately. Today’s youth can’t even imagine “The Old Time” we oldsters reminisce about, which obviously had a rather linear character. The ancient linearity of time feels rather funny in a city that’s been fragmented by time turbulences to the point that it’s become unfit to live in. Once, clocks were indeed something more than just complicated toys for eccentrics, but that’s no longer the case. If time’s passage nowadays still follows some unknown logic, that rationale is incomprehensible to both the human intellect and the enormous computing power of the comps.

Since our first meeting, the Lady Librarian and I thought about the essence of time a great deal, and I’d say our interest in time never ran out completely. We were children of our own time, after all. In our youth, time passed at an even rate, just as fast as everywhere else, and it could be logically divided into equal parts, based on the movements and positions of heavenly bodies. The parts of time had several kinds of names, too. People in the past actually amused themselves by talking about time.

A particular day, for example, would be called Tuesday. Tuesday could mean either the whole calendar day or just the part of it spent awake. As for the sleep phase, it was divided into six separate parts that were called Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. The names were borrowed from an ancient custom that divided a year—an integral whole formed by four successive seasons—into weeks, each of which had seven days. (The system of the days of a week was abandoned with the great Calendar Reform sometime in my early childhood. The global counting of years, on the other hand, was only abandoned sometime after the Great Time Flood, although a person’s age is still defined in subjective years.)

But all this is incomprehensible to the younger generations. I have, indeed, noticed their expressions when old people, without realizing it, use such archaic phrases as “after a month,” “yesterday,” “two years ago.” It’s difficult to discard old habits, even if all the phrases denoting an objective and uniform passing of time are now just as useless as the notches carved into a boat’s side to try and mark a good fishing place, as told in that ancient moral tale.

The Theory of Weekdays originated in this way. For a start, I and my wife-to-be considered our dreams, which had something very special to them. We had indeed been having similar dreams. That in itself was a very intimate and exciting realization. Just talking about dreams was apt to make one blush, and when one also noticed such convergences . . . now and then it actually became hard to breathe.

In our dreams we lived together, and we both remembered many corresponding details in those visions. Parts of the details had to do with our shared life, others with the scenery and inhabitants of the city. We knew each other’s bodies already long before we’d touched each other even once. I knew with clinical exactness how to arouse her passion. Her body fascinated me, but it held no surprises for me. Before I’d even dared to really look at her, I’d already seen her breasts with photographic exactness: so small they could have belonged to a boy, and the dark brown, rather reddish shade of their nipples that reminded me of a wilting rose petal.

The more we talked about our dreams, the better we began to remember. And little by little the dreams started to feel all the more tangible. We began to suspect that they actually were real, as irrational as the idea felt at first. And finally, when the dream images had become clarified to the utmost, we knew it with a certainty. Gradually the different days of the week glided through our minds in clear parallel rivulets with a considerable number of similarities, but even more differences between the days.

We began to order the dreams we remembered chronologically. We talked, negotiated, debated, and made notes. We wrote down the events in our dreams on paper slips and then shuffled these in front of, beside, over, and after each other. Some events formed a continuum; others were parallel to each other, as sort of alternatives. In the older dreams, the awake-phase was illogically called Monday, and on Tuesday, then, came the first of the six dream phases. In the Monday phase, Tuesday had for a long time felt like a dream; we remembered seeing Monday dreams where we reminisced about our dreams of the other days in2 which we didn’t always know each other. In the later dreams (that is, Monday dreams) we began to realize that the other days of the week were actually real. In Tuesday we’d had a Monday dream where we became aware it wasn’t a dream. It was in this dream that we’d had an insight, which we only discovered much later. Except, what we in Tuesday thought of as a dream, wasn’t a dream, after all.

At this stage of my explanation, the reader can probably easily believe that any effort to really understand these swaying and obscure constructions aroused in us weird feelings and a great deal of stress. For quite a while I was plagued by a depression, for which I had to seek help from the pharmacist’s. When my brain had been strained to the utmost, I even considered returning to my old family and to the safe one-dimensional life I’d lived. I suspected that the Lady Librarian also felt the temptation to push me away at times and to abandon the whole issue. Once, we didn’t say a word to one another for eight Tuesdays. We weren’t actually giving each other the silent treatment, we both just needed to come to terms with the issues we were dealing with, before we were able to explore them with each other. Our state of mind may be illuminated by a particular incident one Tuesday, when the Lady Librarian suddenly punched me in the face without any reason or forewarning whatsoever; I touched my bloody nose in amazement, and she, just as surprised by what she’d done, burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom for the rest of the Tuesday. We both kept drawing different schematics and managed to quickly lose the thread of their logic again. One day I even caught my Lady Librarian constructing some kind of three-dimensional model of the phenomenon from paper, tape, and bits of string. By and by, and extremely gradually, the fundamental nature of the complicated issue became clear to us.

At first we didn’t remember any other parallel days, except Monday. But when Monday had become clear enough, bits and pieces of the other dream phases began to surface in our minds—at first something from Sunday, then, later on, from Saturday also. Finally all the other days of the week came to us; with each clarified day, the preceding day cleared up. In Monday we had already remembered the other weekdays for quite some time, and when (in Tuesday) we’d managed to remember Monday, we rather quickly acquired in our minds the remaining weekdays, too. Please note, however, that in the other weekdays, except for Tuesday and Monday, we were still blessedly ignorant at this stage of the whole Theory of Weekdays (although in those days, too, we remembered having dreamt about the other weekdays). It felt weird, of course; it was as if we’d been secretly watching ourselves through a double mirror.

Monday was in any case our first new day, at least from Tuesday’s point of view.

Our World of Monday

On Mondays we lived (had for years already lived) in a large white villa by the seaside, close to the woods of Bachenwachen. It was a beautiful place. In Tuesdays there was an ice cream stand with closed shutters, which had last been open some time in my childhood. We had built the villa with the money we’d made from a book we’d written, in which—right, just that—we treated the Theory of Weekdays. The same money guaranteed us a rather pleasant life, and my wife would not have needed to work in the Library, but she absolutely wanted to. The thing was, she couldn’t entrust her beloved books to anybody else. “Those geniuses from the City have tried again and again to cart away the books to some dump and replace them with flash-down versions,” she would explain, affronted. “Sure, their arguments are quite rational. Flash-down books are very practical. You don’t even have to come down to the Library to get a book. But those stupid bureaucrats don’t understand that other values exist besides dull and stupid rationality! Only a paper book is a real book.”

In Monday, remembering other weekdays and creating the Theory of Weekdays had been a much longer and more laborious process than it was in Tuesday. That might have been because I was much happier in Monday than in Tuesday and didn’t even feel inclined to remember the other parallel, less perfect days.

We’d already lived together for years then, I and my Lady Librarian, and I’d never married or even dated Hannelore. (Though in Monday it was also the dreams that had brought us together.) I did know Hannelore; she was married to one of my schoolmates and they had two children, one of whom looked very much like my Tuesday son. Sometimes we’d even meet with Hannelore and her family. But when we started remembering Tuesday in Monday (which obviously had happened quite a while before we’d started remembering Monday in Tuesday), we began to avoid them. Embarrassingly enough, I sometimes surprised Hannelore staring at me with an odd expression on her face. On some level of consciousness she obviously also remembered our Tuesday marriage. If not as a real memory, then as a dreamlike recollection. It was, after all, in the dreams that I, too, connected with the reality of the other weekdays. I began to understand why talking about dreams was the taboo it was. Dreams are quite a bomb, especially to the institution of marriage. I already had experienced this firsthand myself, and after the publication of the Theory of Weekdays, the divorce rate exploded.

And we had a daughter, our blond Giselle who played the violin. Actually, playing the violin was already history; it finally ended one warm evening when my wife and I had made sure Giselle was already asleep, then stole away with her violin and buried it in the beach sands, giggling. The following morning Giselle woke up, naturally noticed that her violin was missing, and scowled at us suspiciously over the breakfast table. She, however, never inquired after her instrument, nor did she ever utter a single word to show she’d even noticed its strange disappearance—she loved to tease people like that sometimes; she was an exciting character in that way.

And the next morning, when Giselle found a stray star-backed cat in our yard, washed and combed it, and adopted it after ardent appeals and our eventual blessing, I think we were mostly quits.

Sunday

Common to all weekdays was that Alice worked in the Library. (Her name was Alice, by the by, Ms. Alice Boumgarden, born Hesse. The last name was a relic from a previous short-lived marriage—Mr. Boumgarden had thought it prudent to run off to sea and get sunk along with his ship, torpedoed by pirates, into the depths of the Mediterranean). In Sunday, however, Alice had never been transferred to the adult department; she was still a library assistant in the children’s department.

I considered this a great injustice, but Alice soothed my anger—she’d herself wanted to stay with children’s books. She understood that now, considering it in Tuesday, although her Sunday self was still quite bitter. She came to realize how, behind her own back, she herself had done all kinds of little things that gave others the impression that she wasn’t someone who could be given responsibility for the entire Library. Her reason was that deep down she wanted to stay involved with children. That’s what she believed, anyway. The Sunday version of my Alice was, for some reason, a bit fonder of children, and at the same time, more stubborn than the Alice from the other days. And even though she’d have very much wanted to have children of her own, she couldn’t admit it either to herself or her friends. After her husband had absconded, she’d emphasized her independence to a ridiculous extent, though Alice did eventually yield enough to start feeding a stray cat that had adopted her yard as its territory.

In Sunday we hadn’t become acquainted, yet. We were stalking each other, mostly in a hesitant way—at times almost brave enough to take the decisive initiative, but always withdrawing at the last moment. In Sunday I also had a wife I actually didn’t even like, plus two sweet daughters. On the pretext of my daughters’ reading needs I regularly visited the children’s department of the Library by myself to secretly catch a glimpse of the Library assistant.

Seen from Tuesday and Monday, our germinating Sunday romance was painful to follow. We wanted to shout out eager encouragements to ourselves through the dreams, urge ourselves to finally take the risk and at least exchange a few words. But we knew we couldn’t hurry the matter. We remembered very well how confusing, from Tuesday’s viewpoint, the memories of our parallel lives in dreams had been. Our life together was of course, to some extent, accessible in Sunday through dreams, as it had been in Tuesday, too, and would therefore in all probability finally make one of us act. We just had to be patient and wait.

That’s what we agreed to do in the end. After all, confusing one’s Sunday self by hurrying things along surely wouldn’t do any good.

And yet I noticed that Alice secretly tried to influence her Sunday self through dreams. She spent long hours writing the same sentence over and over again: TALK TO HIM, ALICE, FOR GOD’S SAKE! HE IS INTERESTED IN YOU! The Sunday Alice probably woke up wondering about the strangely monotonous dreams delivering her a very simplified message.

And finally, one drizzly Sunday, the beautifully aging library assistant scared the wits out of the man who’d once again come to borrow some books for his little daughters, which they didn’t really need. The woman blurted out that her name was Alice and she’d seen him in her dreams, and when the man—after retrieving, with numbed fingers, the books from the floor—answered by saying something about a white villa by the seaside, their lives were very beautifully derailed from their former ruts.

Saturday

Saturday everything happened quickly and painlessly. We both happened to go to the same pub. I was a bachelor, and had just quarreled with my girlfriend (who wasn’t Hannelore, by the way). I’d launched myself on a boozing spree around town. Alice, too, was out by herself; she wanted to celebrate her tiny salary increase which would allow her to eat one more cinnamon bun a day. After some roaming about we found ourselves sitting at the same table. We recognized each other immediately, and drunk as we both were, began talking frankly about everything all at once: the dreams, the white house by the sea, Giselle, the cat.

The next morning we woke up in the same bed. After some hangover pills, we made the first notes for our book. We were embarrassed and very confused; because of the intoxication we’d progressed much too fast with one another, but such feelings were soon to make room for our growing enthusiasm.

Friday

Friday morning we walked along the riverbank road, shaded by maple trees. The leaves rustled in the wind. A fleet of boats from the Technical Office was patrolling the river. We had, once again, come to a meeting of the Literary Discussion Club, which was organized every sixth Friday, though nowadays we were the only two members left. We’d gradually shaken off the other seven founders, by orchestrating the intentional inefficient flow of information, and continuously changing dates and venues for meetings. Not that we explicitly collaborated on anything like that; we weren’t that obvious. Ours was a purely tacit agreement. But that didn’t make it any less real.

We met in cafés, outdoors—everywhere that was quiet enough for intimate discussion, on the one hand, and public enough so that we could go on believing our own façade, on the other. We had to fool ourselves, too, you see. After all, we were both married, and actually quite happily.

“I think Heathcliff is an implausible figure,” Alice said. “Exaggerated.”

A cool summer wind made her brown dress flutter. It was the same shade as her hair. She walked beside me with long, stretched-out steps, feet a little too thick to be really beautiful. Her shoes clicked and rustled over the riverbank’s stonework. The gulls for one reason or another no longer thrived by the riverside; my ears missed their screams.

I pointed at the water. “Boats, again. That one there seems to be in some kind of trouble.”

There were three men in the boat. They were yelling loudly to the other boats. Then they suddenly fell silent and froze. The boat, too, stopped strangely in the middle of the stream, while the other boats gave it a wide berth. “There’s the turbulence!” one of the boatmen bellowed. “The turbulence! Stay away! Mark it down! Damn it!”

“Time turbulence,” Alice said lightly. She wrapped her words in an amused coolness. “Discharges from the Time Research Institute. I read about it in a scandal sheet in the reading room. I didn’t quite believe it, but now I’m not so sure anymore.”

“What the hell,” I said. “The boat isn’t moving at all. Nor are the men. It’s as if the river has stopped flowing at their point.”

“Not the river. Time.” Alice said. I glanced at her; I wanted to see her expression. Her expressions were like chocolates to me. The wrinkles under her eyes were impishly deepened by the laughter bubbling beneath the surface of her smile. “According to this reliable and respected newspaper of ours, something happened in the Time Research Institute, which has dangerously polluted the river. It isn’t dirty, to cite the article. The water just doesn’t ‘follow a uniform temporality’ anymore.”

“‘Temporality’?” I tried to understand the meaning of Alice’s words, while the boat’s crew remained petrified, statue-like on the river. The sight was altogether absurd.

“That’s what the paper said. Time turbulence. The boat obviously drifted over a place where time has almost stopped. There was a scientific diagram about it in the paper. Looked very convincing. If you get to a place where time has slowed down, the rest of the world suddenly seems to be moving at a tremendous speed, as though you’d jumped on a merry-go-round! Poor men—to get stuck on a boat in a time turbulence. Though that seems more like a back-vortex to me.”

“‘Time turbulences,’” I repeated. “‘Back-vortexes’?”

“I don’t really believe in that,” Alice laughed. She frowned and poked me in the side with her elbow. “The boat’s stuck in something, of course; some scrap vehicle, or something not visible from here.”

I looked on, spellbound, as grapnels were thrown to the crew of the petrified boat. The hooks stopped mid-air, a few hand-lengths before they could reach the statue-like crew, the ropes hanging in air that seemed to have become viscous, as if a large bowl of jelly had been dumped over the crew and boat.

The men didn’t seem to be reacting in any way to what was happening around them. Not even the strong wind blowing over the river appeared to have an effect on their clothes or hair.

To avoid a threatening headache, I turned away from the river and the boats. “If this Heathcliff wasn’t an exaggerated figure, we’d hardly be talking about him here. Really interesting characters are always exaggerated. The essence of literature requires it. Think about Captain Ahab for instance. Are you saying you remember a single flat person in literature?”

“Josef K? Apropos whales—remind me to buy some fish at the market. I haven’t told you: an acquaintance’s cat fell in love with me when I was visiting, and it decided to move in with me. Its original mistress came over five times to fetch it, but finally got bored with having to fetch the creature. After the sixth time, she solemnly announced that Starback—the cat, that is—would in future be officially my responsibility. The bastard ripped up my reading chair, but I guess I’ll let him stay. I’m going to change his name, though. Too obvious. The hairball seems to belong to me in some mysterious way. Or rather, I belong to him. Do you ever get that kind of feeling?”

I smiled to myself.

We started to walk away from the river, towards a little café on Waffle Street, a few blocks away. They sold such sinfully delicious cinnamon buns that after eating them you’d need absolution, and besides that, the back tables hid you from people’s probing eyes. I hailed us a taxi. The next morning’s newspapers would provide quite enough information about time discharges, river pollution, and what all that would mean in practice. The day was much too sweet to be wasted on anything except the 352nd meeting of the Literary Discussion Club with a Lady Librarian called Alice.

In the café Alice suddenly blanched. I followed her eyes and saw the family at the window table. Their disabled child was grinning and gabbling away peculiarly; talking was obviously difficult for the boy. Alice couldn’t take her eyes off the child, and seemed actually ill. To redirect her attention, I cautiously began talking about my dreams as a sort of natural sequel to all the other strange events.

“Do your dreams include a white villa by the seaside?” Alice suddenly asked.

Thursday

Gradually people began to notice the blind man, who sat huddled in a wheelchair and seemed to be waiting for something. Whoever was this person, buffeted by fate, who spent days on end sitting outside in the Library courtyard?

I could feel eyes probing me, like an itch on my skin. I already recognized several of the footsteps that regularly passed by me. As they drew closer, their rhythm would always falter slightly. A few times somebody even decided to approach me, although I tried to look as self-sufficient and unfriendly as possible. Do you need help, sir? Are you perhaps going to the Library, sir?

No thanks, I used to answer. I’m just here to look at the scenery, that’s quite obvious, isn’t it? Please remove yourself; you’re obstructing my view.

Without exception, my rudeness was followed by a moment’s surprised silence and then a sound of receding footsteps. Offense felt has its very own rhythm, and nothing offends people quite as much as a rude rebuff of proffered help.

I felt stupid, like a lunatic even, not because I was being rude to kind people—it’s not for blind cripples to be friendly, after all—but because I did indeed spend all my days sitting in front of the Library, just like some crazy pigeon expecting an undefined but pleasant miracle.

If only I’d gone into the Library the first time, like I’d intended. I wanted nothing, except to know whether a certain person I’d imagined to be there really did sit upstairs. To be sure, I had no rational grounds for my belief. I just had to know. That’s why I came here the first time, and that’s why I returned every morning.

But I hesitated too long. I could neither go forward nor withdraw. In vain, a voice from some ancient movie kept yelling in my head: Soldier, don’t lie down under fire!

Of course I could’ve braved it and asked someone I heard coming out the Library, “Excuse me, but was there a middle-aged woman working in the adult fiction department, a lady with shoulder-length brown hair, with a little grey in it, dark eyes and glasses, and rather small breasts? Yes, and such exciting lines under her eyes?”

I could have had certainty so easily. And that’s where the problem lay: I was deadly afraid of an answer. “No, there was no such woman. There was a young, blond lady with big breasts, and sometimes there’s a spindly young man with glasses. I’m sorry, I’ve never seen a middle-aged lady with brown hair and small breasts in the Library.”

I was sitting in the yard, maybe for the eighth day, when my wheelchair suddenly gave a jolt and started moving. “What on earth?” I squealed.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” a voice said behind me. “I’ll help you into the Library, and there’s a lift in the foyer. It’s too cold to stay outside, waiting. Besides, you are in people’s way, you with your chair. What’s that supposed to mean, anyway, sit in the Library courtyard for days without coming in? Do you expect the books to come running into your arms?”

“Where did you get the idea that I was even on my way to the Library?” I protested.

“Yes, you are,” the woman answered, wheeling me around quickly. “Hoopla, here’s the start of the stairs! Sorry for the bumpy ride, they’ll probably never put up a ramp here. Just lucky they haven’t wheeled the books away yet.”

“You behave as if we were old acquaintances,” I said. I noticed I was sounding like a grumpy old geezer.

The woman was silent a moment; we stopped in the middle of the stairs. “But so we are,” she said then, her voice tense. “Old acquaintances. I’ve walked past you on so many Thursdays already. It took me quite a while before I realized. Recognized. I almost missed you in those sunglasses and that wheelchair. You are different in my . . . ”

There was a pause. I listened to her puffing as she resumed pulling my wheelchair up the staircase.

“Yes?”

“Oh, sorry. I must sound crazy!” the woman said. “It’s just me being silly, a sign of my peculiar sense of humor. You know what dedicated lady librarians are like. One’s got to read as many books as possible so one knows what’s there on the shelves, and one’s poor head gets all mixed up in the process. Something like this happened in a book I read, and I just—oh, sorry. I won’t bother you anymore. I’m not mad, just a little impulsive sometimes. I kidnap innocent people to play my own little games. I keep my imagination on a rather long and loose tether and every now and again it sort of escapes to bother bystanders. Well, here’s the lift. Oops, oh my, your legs almost got stuck in the doors. Are you feeling ill?”

I felt breathless; I was moving altogether too fast from one nerve-racking situation to another. “The lift? I don’t really feel comfortable in lifts,” I said. “When I was young, a miserable lift cable broke along with its miserable emergency backup, and I fell seven floors inside the lift. A freak accident that couldn’t possibly happen, they said. That’s what they told me afterwards. My legs were broken in every possible place, and my eyesight knocked straight out of my brainpan. And since I now have certain difficulties getting up stairs, I’ve been avoiding buildings with more than one floor.”

My explanation sounded silly. There was no need for me to explain anything. I always talked too much when I wasn’t in control of a situation.

“Now me, I don’t like swimming,” the woman said. “I’m sorry I forced you into the lift. I assume you don’t live in an apartment building, then.”

“Actually, I do. On the ground floor. But sometimes I dream of moving to a detached house. It can even have two floors; I should be fine falling one floor in a good lift. I wish I could move into a big white villa by the seaside, for instance. I’ve dreamt about one like that sometimes. If I ever win the lottery, I’ll buy a big white villa by the sea, even build one, if there isn’t one available. But then, I never buy lottery tickets.”

I waited for the woman’s reaction to my words. I thought I recognized her now, however irrational the idea seemed, but if only I could ask her to describe herself. Excuse me, Ms. Librarian, but do you happen to have pretty small breasts and brown hair? My cheeks felt hot.

“A white villa by the sea would certainly be nice,” the woman finally said. “But it’d be sad to live alone in a house like that. The nearness of the sea can feel heavy if one lives alone. I read that somewhere. Now think of all that roaring, and the long lonely strips of beach . . .. Besides, you’d have to install cross-country tires on your wheelchair so you wouldn’t get stuck in the wet sand. And a strong motor, so you won’t get caught by the rising tide.”

“Well, I have actually dreamed of a charming daughter, as well; so I wouldn’t be alone. She could push me along the beach.”

“Giselle,” the woman said. “Her name might be Giselle, for instance.”

“Violin,” I said. “Would play it. Giselle, that is. Poorly.”

The words slipped out my mouth in every direction; I couldn’t get a grip on them. I kept swallowing loudly. Our conversation had turned completely absurd, but it had its own peculiar logic. If I’d had a pair of functioning legs under me, they’d have buckled by now and I would have fallen and hit my head against the lift wall.

“Ms. Lindeman’s spaniel,” the woman continued in the same vein.

I clutched my chair. I was afraid I’d fall to the floor, at her feet. Last night’s dream, I thought, head humming. We were having a lift conversation about the very same things. Two excited children might have talked much the same way about a wonderful but forbidden TV program, of which each happened to see only fragments.

The lift came to a stop. The cables barked in the lift shaft. Something banged metallically. The doors, however, refused to open. The woman had stopped us between floors. I felt her cinnamon breath warm on my skin. She’d had buns for breakfast. She loved cinnamon buns, yes. She had small boyish breasts, brown hair, and she ate cinnamon buns morning, noon, and evening. Chewed them with a blissful expression on her face. I knew it. She bent down towards me, surely looking at me carefully, her hair touching my ear.

“Dug it up from the sand,” I said. “That spaniel. The violin.”

She started to laugh, or actually to guffaw, and I’d have joined in her laughter if I hadn’t been so afraid of the lift pulling the same trick on me as its ancient colleague had done. The recollection of Ms. Lindeman standing in the doorway was simply so madly ridiculous, though nothing like that had ever happened in reality. Ms. Lindeman with the sandy violin in one hand, the spaniel’s leash in the other, and a sullen, shocked expression on her perpetually worried face. “I know this violin!” Ms. Lindeman had cried, her flabby wattle trembling. “Don’t you believe for a moment that I wouldn’t recognize this violin, poor little Giselle’s poor dear instrument! You uncivilized barbarians!”

In my life, many people had asked me whether the blind see dreams. Generally I acted as though I hadn’t heard the question, and most people immediately realized they’d crossed over the lines of propriety and never asked again. Yes they do, the answer sounded in my mind. And they wake up from their dreams, hearts ready to burst, with the remains of laughter still lingering on dry lips. On their retinas: a fading, beloved image.

The lift jolted and started its ascent again. The doors opened. I sensed a wide plateau opening up in front of me, filled with bookshelves. This was the place that I came to in my dreams to meet the lady I didn’t really know, but with whom I was deeply in love. In the dream I always ascended the stairs on my own two feet and met the Lady Librarian with eyes that could see.

“Excuse me,” said a male voice. It hinted at slight intoxication. “You’re not allowed to bring cats in here. The cat library is somewhere else, if anywhere. I don’t know if they read anything, do you? Oh, Ms. Boumgarden, good morning to you. That your cat? The lift seemed to get stuck for a moment. I took the liberty of using the lift key when I noticed it, though the alarm bells didn’t ring. Did you push the stop button by accident? Or did the cat do it? The cat, of course: they’re always up to mischief as soon as you turn your eyes.”

“Good morning to you, Porter. No, the cat’s not mine,” Alice said. “I don’t have a cat. Perhaps it mistook the building. There’s a cat food factory a couple of blocks away.”

“Neither have I,” I said. “I don’t like cats. They scratch. Is there a cat here?”

A cat’s moist lips touched my hand then, as if reminding me of something I’d forgotten. Perhaps mildly reproaching me for not remembering. It wasn’t mine, but for some reason I suddenly felt responsible for it. I scratched it carefully, experimentally, and a moment later there was a warm, live furry blanket in my lap, that trembled lightly.

“That’s odd,” the Porter said. “I somehow imagined Ms. Librarian would have a cat. Perhaps I’ve only dreamed it, then. Pardon my French, ma’am, sir, I’m just a loudmouth. Jabbering on about my dreams to ladies and library customers. Me, I say what comes to mind; listening is your own responsibility. Shut your ears, ladies and gentlemen, here comes the Library porter! An irresponsible orator but you’d be hard pushed to find a better ladler of soup! But the cat, though . . . it’s got to go out. The lending terminals don’t know how to record cats’ fingers. Do cats have fingers? I don’t know.”

When the porter had left (his endless babble still sounding from the descending lift), the Lady Librarian kissed me directly on the mouth without warning. I lifted my hand and lightly touched one of her small breasts, thereby confirming her identity one more time, and pulled back my hand a moment before the touch would have become too obvious, even vulgar. The kiss also ended as soon as it had begun, but it resounded in my flesh like the toll of a great bell of destiny.

The cat in my lap purred contentedly. “Listen, is there a star on the cat’s back?” I asked.

“You know there is,” the Lady Librarian said.

The Golden Chain of Days

Wednesday never opened up to me. All the other weekdays became clear, one at a time, but for some reason I never remembered Wednesday. We found each other one weekday after the other; we steadily became aware of the existence of the other weekdays, and so the days gradually linked up into a kind of golden chain. In the phase when the days neared complete clarity in our minds, they began to settle in our minds into an unbroken, almost seamless continuity.

After Thursday we lived on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Sunday was followed by Monday and Monday by Tuesday, but between Tuesday and Thursday there seemed to be a black hole. Wednesday always was to me the dark spot of the week, so that I moved directly from Tuesday to Thursday. Alice never admitted to remembering anything from Wednesday. The strange truth about Wednesday was revealed to me only much later, after Alice’s death, and with it many other problems occupying my mind were solved.

It was paradoxical that the clearer we remembered the different days of the week, the more confused our lives became. Our residences kept changing from one day to another, and so did our family relations, our personal histories, even our feelings. The city around us took on different forms in different days. Buildings differed, and so did traffic arrangements. Our city was already known for its complicated driving routes, which nobody could learn to master. Where one day a market square would exist in one place, a bus station or a park would have sprung up the next. Perhaps the dreams originating from other days of the week were causing the mix-ups.

Thursdays I woke up blind and paralyzed. After I remembered the other days, I started to loath my Thursday’s wheelchair. Finally, I didn’t even bother to get out of bed then, which eventually caused me all kinds of nasty physical complaints from bedsores to muscular atrophy. My body in Thursday remained paralyzed by the childhood lift accident, while in contrast my mind was freed from those restrictions and afflictions through my dreams and memories of the other weekdays. Gradually though, I was forced to rehabilitate myself, and live again in Thursdays, too.

Fridays I thirsted for Alice on the one hand, but on the other I also loved my wife Marissa; just like Alice also genuinely cared for her own Mr. Boumgarden, who had never run away from her. We didn’t even touch each other in that weekday, although we could remember, with painful vividness, what we meant to each other in the other days of the week, and what we did together. We even abstained to the last from kisses. We met under platonic circumstances in the daytime, at our Literary Discussion Club get-togethers, where we indeed only discussed literature, and we always parted again and went to bed with our beloved spouses. We knew that when next we opened our eyes, it’d be Saturday, and Alice and I would lie naked in each other’s arms in the bedroom of our two-room flat, at least half a city away from the place where we’d gone to sleep in Friday.

Saturdays it felt strange to think that our spouses Marissa and Mr. Boumgarden were left behind; when they woke up in the morning, they found us next to them, since they still lived in Friday. When Alice and I had finally lived through all the other days of the week (except maybe Wednesday) and woke in the next Friday, we returned to the arms of our spouses. They never had the faintest idea that we’d been living other lives in the meantime. We felt a strange guilt for what was happening, and yet, in the reality of our spouses, we’d slept through the night decently next to them.

Saturday was an easy day for both of us, in so far as I was free from all former commitments to start with and so was Alice. However, Sunday we woke again under different circumstances: I’d left my wife and my two beautiful daughters and suffered from heavy compunctions. I lived with Alice in her little dark studio apartment, and waited for the possibility to move into a house by the seaside.

And Mondays we had Giselle with us, our beloved Monday child, who didn’t exist in the other days of the week. Once I came home from the city with a pale-colored dress in my hand and started to show it to Alice.

“Look! Is Gise home yet? This is just what she’s been talking about!”

Only after seeing Alice’s expression, mixed with sorrow and amusement, did I realize my mistake.

“Oswald,” Alice said tenderly, “your idea is very nice, but it’s not Monday today! Giselle will only be home in six days. You’ll have to buy the same dress again in Monday, there’s no one who can use it today.”

This kind of life was very exhausting. Keeping track of the correct day of the week was difficult but necessary—slips usually had their consequences. When we went out, we met several people who played different roles in different days of the week. The man Alice knew in Mondays as a good friend and a detective chief superintendent, was an alcoholic petty criminal in Tuesdays, who tried to sponge money off her for booze. He got increasingly difficult to get rid of, when Alice one Tuesday inadvertently went over to him and greeted him cordially for a friendly chat, thinking it was Monday. For me it was difficult to remember on which day Hannelore was my friend’s wife whom I ought to greet with polite kindness; when she was my own ex-wife, who’d spit in my eye whenever I didn’t remember to dodge her; and when again she was a complete stranger I’d never even met.

We lived in a state of constant confusion, and the words “nervous breakdown” began to appear more and more often in our discussions. However, some generally inexplicable incidents became understandable when the explanation could be sought in the other days of the week. One strange incident occurred in three separate weekdays: a woman known to be altogether respectable killed a man who’d been a total stranger to her. By all accounts the man was a decent family father and a reputable citizen. In Friday the woman, a salesperson in a store’s kitchen appliances department, stabbed the man dead when he asked the price of a knife set he’d found. The woman managed to stab him with five of the six blades in the set, before people came to the rescue. In Saturday the same woman saw the man step in front of her car on the pedestrian crossing and, instead of hitting the brakes, she stepped on the gas. In Sunday she worked as a waitress in a little restaurant, and put a strong poison in the man’s mussel soup, knowing he was a regular and exactly what it was he ate. According to eyewitnesses the woman had said, “It’s on the house,” before the man dropped to the floor, frothing at the mouth.

The incidents caused a great sensation and amazement in their respective days of the week. “A senseless murder!” the headlines shrieked. “Murderess cannot explain her actions!” I wished I could have explained to people, and especially to the woman herself, the reason for what had happened. In Thursday the man was a degenerate who’d completely lost control of his life. He’d been drinking wine and taking diverse drugs when he raped and murdered the woman’s fifteen-year old daughter. When she heard of her daughter’s death, the woman went mad and threw herself off the roof of an apartment building. It was clear that Thursday’s events had entered her consciousness through dreams in the other weekdays, too, and drove her to commit those seemingly inexplicable bloody crimes.

Completing the Continuity

We couldn’t go on with a life like that anymore. The constant necessity to adjust to all the changes drained all our resources. We decided we ought to unify the continuity, and seal up the rest of the seams. We needed to make the different days of the week as similar as possible. In all the weekly days we would move into our one white house by the seaside and exclude all the rest of the daily changing world.

There was something very ironic about the situation. Since my childhood I detested the idea that in every one of life’s choices I had to be satisfied with just one of many alternatives. I found it altogether intolerable that choosing one alternative automatically meant forsaking all others. How difficult it was to choose just one chocolate from an entire box when there were so many different sweets to choose from, each the most tempting one in its own way. How difficult to choose one of two interesting girls, and turn one’s back on the other! How painful to stay with the one you chose, when every day you met new women, each one fascinating in her own special way.

So many times I wished for a chance to choose all the alternatives. I was always the “Hesitant Henry” who’d have wanted both to eat his cake and save it. And now it was possible. I lived six (or seven) separate lives. For instance, in Friday I was married to the sweet and kind Marissa, yet in all other days I could live with my Alice, technically without even being guilty of adultery. I really could both eat and save the aforementioned cake.

And yet, when I finally realized it was indeed possible, I still chose the same alternative every time—the life with my Lady Librarian!

In each day of the week we wrote our book, caused a sensation, got rich, and built ourselves a white house by the seaside and, but for Alice’s trips to the Library, left it only in exceptional cases. We no longer invited our friends for a visit. We’d become tired of keeping track of what each person was in which weekday, and what we were talking about in which day. In Friday, to complete the continuity, we forced ourselves to break the hearts of Marissa and Mr. Boumgarden, and broke our own hearts at the same time; but we did that for each other’s sake. Besides, without those hard decisions we’d have inevitably lost our minds.

Giselle remained a problem for a long while; her one-day-only-life was a constant source of confusion for us. Eventually we had the idea of furnishing her room exactly the same way in every weekday, so that the house looked similar throughout the week. Then we could pretend that our Giselle was away on a trip, except in Mondays. We missed Giselle very much, and when she woke up in Monday mornings, she always found us in her room. She thought us very odd. She’d last seen us the evening before when going to bed, and just could not understand the overflowing “good mornings” she received.

Then she got hold of the book we’d written about the Theory of Weekdays. We tried to protect her from it, but the effort was destined to fail. She considered the theory for a while, then presented us with a very sensible question: “Dad. Mum. If you have seven separate lives, why is it that I have just the one?”

Multidiurnals and Monodiurnals

In our book Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday? (in the Monday version: Is Every Day Indeed A Monday?), we present the hypothesis that every person has seven separate lives, which can be more or less perfectly recollected through the technique we have developed. In the other days’ versions we were, however, able to include a theory specifying our original idea even further: the Theory of Multidiurnal and Monodiurnal People.

At the time, it seemed there were two kinds of people: those to be found in every day of the week, and those who existed in only one weekday. When we studied the issue, we made an important observation: the decisive factor differentiating monodiurnals from multidiurnals was their birth dates. Those born after the year 2137 were all monodiurnals. I and Alice and all the others who proved to be multidiurnals were born before the year 2137, Marissa and Giselle and a lot of other monodiurnals after this time point. Something special must have happened around the year 2137, something that divided the lives of people alive at that time into seven separate lines.

We tested the idea by researching old newspapers published on different days of the week. The newest papers no longer featured the old-fashioned exact dates, but the older editions did. (The purely technical matter that before the Great Calendar Reform, one and the same day of the week had seven different names alternating in a certain order, felt a little funny. So for instance the old newspapers we studied in Thursday were also named after the other weekdays. Later on, it understandably occurred to us that the Great Calendar Reform might just have been an effort by anonymous authorities to hide the sevenfold differentiation of the time line. With the concepts becoming confused enough, it’d be difficult to raise the issue.)

The newspapers confirmed that the year 2137 was the turning point: to be exact, December 12th in 2137. Until that date, the daily news of each day was identical. In the newspapers of December 12th, a small fire at the Time Research Institute is mentioned—the article including a statement to the press by the Institute’s director. According to the statement, no dangerous situation ensued at any stage.

However, the next day’s papers already differed in every weekday. Not too much, though. At first the differences could be found in small events such as bicycle accidents, brawls, slight differences in picture angles, even in the wording of articles. But gradually the differentiated timelines began to diverge more and more—a consequence of even the smallest decisions naturally accumulating and forming longer chains. For instance, when Tuesday’s newspaper reported on the decision to build a new shopping center in a certain place, Friday’s paper had a small article about a residential home for people with disabilities on the same site, while Monday’s paper included notices for the shows at a movie theater at exactly the same address.

The conclusion was quite obvious: the accident at the Time Research Institute divided everyone’s lives into seven separate lines. Those born after the accident at the TRI were usually born in one day of the week only; the child’s parents naturally living separate lives in the different time lines.

The opportunity to live seven different lives was thus given to just a select group of humans. I don’t really know about cats. Starback found us in all the days of the week. This doesn’t fit the overall picture, since as a young cat Starback was obviously born after the decisive date. I wondered about this quite a while. Finally I came to a kind of conclusion, although I haven’t had the strength to consider it very critically: it’s said that cats have nine lives, so perhaps the belief is true. Perhaps all cats, by their very nature, live nine parallel lives, while we multidiurnal humans have, as an exception to our species, reached seven of them!

I still don’t know which of us have finally been happier—the monodiurnals or the multidiurnals. Living seven parallel lives hasn’t been a blessing for everyone. When our book was published, sensible people started behaving in completely irrational and irresponsible ways. Families broke up, children were orphaned. The book had been a way for us to share our exciting observations with the whole world and to maybe earn some money for our new life. It never occurred to us, not once, that it might derail the lives of so many people. In hindsight, of course, we ought to have expected it. Alice and I, however, never thought the matter through as far as that. Perhaps we should have done so.

Well, the Weekday Theory also brought some people a lot of happiness, but to a considerable majority, it only brought grief, confusion, and fury. The situation between Hannelore and myself was repeated almost identically thousands of times. The most unfortunate situations involved couples where the one was multidiurnal and the other monodiurnal. Often the multidiurnal partners remembered their other, better lives and went in search of the loved ones they knew existed in other weekdays, while the monodiurnals became even lonelier than before. And even when the multidiurnal one stayed with the monodiurnal partner, the most incredible dramas of jealousy took place. The monodiurnal one had no way of controlling what the partner was doing in the other weekdays.

I had it easier than most; after all, in every day of the week I loved the same woman, Alice. When less lucky people remembered the other weekdays, eventually reached their continuity, and noticed themselves loving seven different people simultaneously, the therapists were up to their ears in work.

The city filled with tragicomic tales. There was a bishop who became aware of his totally immoral life as a pimp, male prostitute, and rock musician in the other days. There was a judge, reputed to be quite harsh, who in all the other days of the week lived the life of a mafia godfather. There were white racists who woke up in other days in the arms of partners of different races, their children noisy beyond the bedroom door. There were Thursday’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, who worked in the porn business in Fridays, and in TV factories in Saturdays. There were fierce enemies who found out they were friends or even lovers. The surprises of the other days of the week were sometimes happy, sometimes shocking, depending on the viewpoint: a certain Monday bum, for instance, had a pleasant surprise when he discovered he was Tuesday’s chairman of the board in a bank; but the Tuesday’s banker didn’t find the realization that he was Monday’s bum quite as happy a surprise.

The most sensitive ones succumbed to desperate deeds; others tried to reconcile the separate parts of their identity as well as they could. It caused a great sensation in Thursday when the mafia godfather gave in to his deeply moral judge self and arranged for almost five hundred members of his organization, including himself, to be sent down with long jail sentences.

At times, the social order seemed close to imminent collapse. Muggings and murders increased explosively. Psychiatrists saw an enormous number of new patients. As a diagnostic concept, “schizophrenia” acquired completely new dimensions. Throughout all this, our book was printed and bought in huge amounts in all the weekdays.

Things were thus altogether confused, but my Lady Librarian and I lived our sheltered, suddenly well-to-do new life, in a white house by the seaside. Sometimes we received roses and thank-you-cards from people who’d found a purpose in their lives after reading our book. More often, though, we received homicidal threats from deserted spouses, orphaned children, people who’d lost their zest for life, and from religious fundamentalists who attacked every new idea on principle. The guards we employed made sure no one got near us, with either a bunch of roses or a loaded gun. The armed bodyguards would’ve also followed Alice to the Library, where she insisted on working, very much afraid that in her absence the printed books would be destroyed on the sly. Alice, however, didn’t wish to spoil the Library atmosphere with gunmen.

The Great Time Flood

The Theory of Weekdays is now almost forgotten. Not counting the cases preserved in back-vortexes of time, all the multidiurnals are by now either dead or with one foot in their grave; the world belongs to the monodiurnals again. The multidiurnals still left might just as well be monodiurnals, the chains of days having broken again. Monodiurnal or multidiurnal people’s lives certainly remain just as confused, in whatever day of the week they’re living now.

I’ve already said something about the time turbulences in the Maple River and the fates of people who dived into them. After the river was fenced off, things were kept orderly for some time. Now and then, however, the most curious ones cut holes into the fence to make their time jumps. The people of the city started getting used to the river’s time turbulences. They bragged unashamedly about it in all the guidebooks advertising the city, and the time turbulence was put forward everywhere as the official Eighth Wonder of the World. But then something happened, which later came to be called the Great Time Flood. Somebody had the bright idea of throwing dynamite into the river, and as a consequence the turbulences rose up from the river and spread throughout the city as invisible rivulets. The capricious tugs of the time turbulences continuously played all kinds of practical jokes on people, some amusing, others merely cruel.

The city has now officially been classified as unfit for living. Every inhabitant has been allotted a new home in one of the less dangerous neighboring cities. Except for occasional adventurers, extremists, and researchers, tourists are no longer seen in the city. But have the inhabitants left? Mostly not; after all, your hometown will always be home.

When children go out into the street, they might step into a time turbulence or puddle, and return home either a couple of seconds after leaving it or decades later. Workers might go on working overtime until the sun finally burns out. This will probably be the case of two employees at a small watchmaker’s in the city center. Their shop was flooded by an exceptionally strong back-vortex—scholars call such phenomena “time freezes.” Housewives could go shopping in a department store that’s been imperceptibly polluted with time turbulences, and stay there a whole lifetime without noticing it. And when at last they step out one day with their shopping bags to return home, they are likely to find their children in the city’s retirement homes or in its graveyards. But still, people haven’t moved away, they just adapted. You don’t just leave your hometown. I don’t know whether it’s stupidity, defiant pride, genuine love for one’s native place, or a fear of change. Myself, I’ve stayed mostly because I’m stupid and too lazy to change my abode.

Alice and I frequented a department store called “Madame.” Once we were on our way there when we heard it had been blockaded by time. We immediately went over to observe the phenomenon. Through the windows you could see that the store was filled with totally immobile shoppers who, from their own viewpoint, were still moving about normally. An observer patient enough would, perhaps, have seen the customers moving ever so slowly. And if you could manage to stand absolutely immobile by the window long enough, the people inside might’ve noticed you as a quick flash. There were placards attached to the windows, with messages to the victims of the time-freeze: “COME OUT AT ONCE, YOU ARE IN A BACK-VORTEX!” The doors to the store were sealed and warnings posted in front of the building. Unfortunately it was, and still is, impossible to help the people trapped inside. The first of them will get out just in time to see their children retire. Even if one of them might stumble onto what’s going on, and look out the window, just turning her head will take half a decade from an outsider’s point of view.

No one has yet found out how we, in the faster flow of time, could get help to the victims of back-vortexes. I once saw a rescue crew trying an idea which at first sounded simply brilliant: they pushed a long-handled hook into the back-vortex with the intention of yanking the shoppers out into the faster flow of time, one at a time. But just as the hook penetrated the border between time zones, the movement of the part that crossed it became just as slow as everything else inside the department store. Social welfare authorities have actually considered pushing family members left outside into the department store, so as to keep families together.

Naturally, the authorities have tried to mark the invisible turbulences as clearly as possible with blinking lights, signboards, even fences. New bridges are being constructed over the observed turbulence sites all the time. Efforts to protect the city’s inhabitants from the turbulences are pretty hopeless, though. The time currents don’t stay in their channels very long, and forever keep finding new courses . . . and new victims. At their worst, the turbulences are completely invisible; often, however, you can notice them if you watch closely enough. Light, for instance, is refracted differently by time turbulence. Often a time turbulence also has a time of day that differs from its surroundings, sometimes even a different season—it’s presently summer in the city, I guess, but I know of several back-vortexes where it’s still last winter, or some winter before that. And similarly, in the time torrents it could already be a future winter.

Tradesmen selling walking sticks have become rich. People happened to think of walking on the streets with an outstretched stick. The idea is simple but it works: when the stick hits a time deceleration, it suddenly seems to get stuck midair. Walking sticks have already prevented thousands of people from stepping into time decelerations.

The turbulences have even intruded people’s homes, and a walking stick isn’t necessarily of much use then. How many of us have the patience to walk around our homes with an outstretched walking stick? Recently, there was a documentary on the TV about a family that had a strong time deceleration flowing into the bathroom from the toilet drain, just as the unlucky father sat down to relieve himself. The man still has no idea that something’s happened, but the family is getting frantic. The children don’t want to be separated from their schoolmates, so the proposal by social welfare authorities that the whole family should go into the turbulence to keep the father company is absolutely out of the question. The mother misses her husband very much but says she cannot leave her children before they’ve come of age.

According to the dramatization in the documentary, the events as a whole will unfold probably along the following lines, from the man’s point of view: The father sits down on the toilet seat and starts to relieve himself, while he’s leafing through a magazine. In an instant of his time, the bathroom door is opened and closed thousands of times, but much too fast for him to notice in any way, while the relatives and camera crews swarm in and out of the room. After he’s sat there a while, he’ll see his wife come into the bathroom, ten subjective years older. The wife tells the astounded husband the shocking news: the bathroom was overcome by a back-vortex. They’ll quickly flee the bathroom. Besides encountering temporal psychologists, they’ll also find a group of weeping relatives, headed up by their grown-up children and excited grandchildren who will at last meet their legendary grandparents.

After seeing the documentary I burst out laughing. I hoped the man would not tarry, wiping his arse and washing his hands, before making his way towards the bathroom door and normal time. At some stage I realized I was weeping, after all.

The Time Research Institute perhaps might have been able to do something. Perhaps. The Institute’s officials, for quite a long time anyway, presented statements according to which the problems were temporary, and it was only a matter of time before they were solved. Unfortunately, the people of the city got sick of waiting, and one day, the Time Research Institute was blown up in violent riots.

I understand the feelings of those people very well. In a sense, I participated in that Tuesday’s attack myself. Though I didn’t invade the Institute, or throw a single bottle or stone, I was just as guilty as the others in my hatred. If I’d been given something explosive, I would have no doubt thrown it at the building. For Alice’s sake. Her Tuesday’s fate was the fault of the Time Research Institute, and on the day of the riot there was black hate rattling inside my ribs.

The Departed

After the Time Flood it was dangerous to be out and about in the city, but of course I couldn’t persuade Alice to stay home in any day of the week—she one day announced that she’d knock me unconscious if I so much as tried to prevent her from going to her beloved books. She said it with a playful smile, but I knew her well enough to understand she meant it in earnest. I had to admit she had a point. The bureaucrats were just waiting for a suitable excuse to close down the Library they considered so old-fashioned, and my ever-vigilant Lady Librarian’s absence would have provided them with the perfect opportunity to do so.

On the morning of the Tuesday that later came to be remembered as Riot Day, I decided to accompany Alice to the Library. Ominous forebodings were darkening my mind. Sunday’s version of Starback had recently died and been buried. The cat still living in the other days had later refused to move from the place we’d buried him in Sunday. Moreover, Starback refused to eat and drink and do anything but mourn its own death. We were getting a feeling we’d soon have seven dead cats on our hands, altogether. Finally we got the idea of taking cockleshells to the grave place each day of the week, and that seemed to satisfy some peculiar need of the cat—when we had thus noted the departure of its Sunday version, it meowed, had a good stretch, and departed to live its remaining lives.

Giselle wondered very much about her cat’s behavior and even more about our cockleshell ritual. But, of course, we hadn’t the heart to tell her that her darling cat had lost one of its nine lives. Perhaps she guessed it, nevertheless, the smart girl. Be that as it may, our family had for the first time encountered death, and the incident left me feeling uneasy, even if the victim this time had been just a cat.

We’d found an extremely competent, multidiurnal chauffeur who knew every back-vortex and time torrent in the neighborhood. We paid him a top salary for his services, and he indeed deserved every penny. The chauffeur took better care of us than we ourselves would even have known how to ask for. To stay up-to-date with the road network’s conditions required constant background work. To serve us as best as possible, he used part of his salary to maintain an army of assistants he’d collected for each day of the week. The task of this army was to personally check beforehand all the routes we were about to use. The man worked for us in all the days except Wednesday, that day which never seemed to open up to me. I once tried to squeeze him for information about that day, but he insisted that in Wednesdays he lived in a little village on the other side of the country, and only rarely came to the city to visit his second cousin. “Have you ever met me and my wife in Wednesday?” I asked him once.

“I haven’t had the honor,” the chauffeur said. He glanced at me oddly in the rearview mirror.

“Have you been to the seaside in Wednesday, where our house is in all the other weekdays?”

“I guess there’s some big white house in the same place in Wednesday, too, but I really haven’t been to take a closer look. And frankly, I don’t even remember Wednesday all that clearly. It’s a kind of in-between-day for me, separate from all the others. It’s so different, you see.”

The chauffeur knew more than he let on. I could see it in him. However, I didn’t want to pressure him. In the first place, we couldn’t afford to lose a master driver like him, and he knew his own value well enough. He might very well work for us and call us sir and madam, but if we started thinking too much of ourselves, he’d find himself another job in no time. Men like him said exactly what they wanted to, and nothing more.

On the other hand, I was a bit scared finding out about Wednesday; otherwise I’d have hired some other multidiurnal ages ago to find out more about our fates in that day. As a matter of fact, I actually started avoiding opportunities to find out the truth about Wednesday. I asked the chauffeur about the matter, yes, but only because I trusted him to tell me nothing that was bad for me to know.

That fatal Tuesday the chauffeur was driving us to the Library, as usual. He apologized for having to drive through a couple of time torrents on the way, but they actually just speeded up the trip—the main thing was to stay far away from the dangerous back-vortexes and time-freezes. When we arrived at the Library, Alice suddenly cried out and dashed from the car. Looking up, I saw thick black smoke billowing out the Library door.

The Library was on fire! Alice rushed towards the flames, with me charging after her. I estimated I’d catch her in good time before she got inside. I yelled her name, ordered her to stop, but of course she didn’t listen. The books were in danger, and the dedicated fool that was my Lady Librarian intended to save what she could, never caring about her own life. Did she imagine she could carry all her beloved books out by herself?

“Alice,” I shouted. “Wait for the fire brigade! You can’t do anything alone! Alice!”

I almost reached her. My hands even touched the collar of her coat. Then something strange happened. Alice sped up, became a series of sequential, translucent images that led inside the burning Library, and presumably up the smoke-filled stairs. I blinked. The images started to dissipate, and I noticed a fire engine appearing from nowhere in front of the Library. Super-fast red-clad ghosts flickered around the fire engine; it was impossible to focus on them. I stumbled, the strange visions making me dizzy. “Alice!”

“Mr. Morrow,” a man’s voice said.

A fireman’s feet were standing in front of me. Lifting my eyes, I saw at the upper end of the feet a stocky body and a sad face black with soot. I was helped up. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Morrow. We weren’t able to save her, she had already suffocated by the time we got here. Could you please come and identify her?”

“Whom?”

“Your wife. The chauffeur notified us of the fire. He tried to go after your missus, but the flames were too high already.”

“My wife ran into the burning Library just now. Go save her, before we talk about anything else.”

“It all happened this morning. You . . . ”

“What about me?”

“You stepped in a time puddle. Be careful, it’s still there behind you. See there, the light’s refracted peculiarly in that place. Listen, this must be damned confusing for you. You’d better go and talk to our psychologist, she’ll know better what to say. These cases are always bloody shit.”

I looked around. The fire had been extinguished; the firemen were spraying down the last hotbeds with hoses. The sun was actually shining from a different direction than just before; during a few of my heartbeats, the morning had become evening.

“Where’s Alice?” I asked, as if I hadn’t registered a thing the fireman just said. He saw in my eyes, however, that he didn’t have to explain the matter to me again.

I went to the hospital morgue to identify the body of my Lady Librarian. She was still pressing a burned book to her breast. I couldn’t read its name, the cover was much too blackened. When I left the morgue, the chauffeur met me outside. He’d gone to have his burns tended. His hands and face were bandaged. Clearly he’d gone after Alice as best as humanly possible.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Morrow,” the chauffeur said when we drove out of the hospital’s parking lot. He swung the steering wheel and we barely evaded a back-vortex shimmering in the middle of the road, with snow swirling inside it. We’d almost collided with last winter. “I saw you freeze mid-step, and I realized at once that you’d hit a time deceleration. I tried to catch up with her, but there was too much smoke, and the fire beat against me with a blinding heat. I tried, but I couldn’t get ahead. I ought to have been able to do something. Something at least. Madam was up there, amongst the burning books.”

“I know you did your best,” I said. “You’d be dead yourself if you’d gone any further.”

“You’ll meet her again,” the chauffeur said. “You know that, don’t you? On Thursday. You may not feel like that now, but you are a very lucky man!”

He was right—our multidiurnality was now a greater consolation than I ever understood before. But I didn’t want to seize upon that consolation just yet. In Tuesday, Alice was irreversibly dead. Nothing could change that. She was a multidiurnal and she had seven lives, unlike many others, but in spite of all that she was dead today, to me. I’d have to grieve her first death as much as I would grieve the last one.

I was thinking about what I’d tell Thursday’s Alice about Tuesday’s events. How can you tactfully convey to a person the news of her own death?

The chauffeur switched on the radio. They were talking about riots. There’d been an attack against the Time Research Institute. A black thought began to pulse in my mind: Without the time turbulences I’d have reached Alice in time. I touched the chauffeur’s shoulder. “Let’s drive there,” I said.

“Would that be quite prudent, now? The routes have not been secured yet.”

But then the chauffeur saw my expression in the mirror, and said no more.

The Chain Breaks

As I already confessed, I was also there to destroy the Time Research Institute. I can only blame myself for the events following the Institute’s destruction.

That Tuesday a mob gathered at the Institute. At first people were content with angry shouting, but gradually the hate and bitterness condensed past a critical point, and stones, walking sticks, and bottles started flying through the air. The last straw had been a school bus plunging into a time freeze on the north side of the city that same morning. A group of little school children were now preserved to the end of eternity inside a time glacier. Thanks to the Time Research Institute.

Finally, the berserk vanguard kicked down the Institute’s doors and invaded the building. The researchers tried to escape through side doors, but the crowd cornered them. The researchers were made to suffer the consequences of people’s long smoldering rage. I don’t think any of them survived more than a few seconds.

The explosion came as a surprise to everybody. Suddenly, fire, smoke, and burning matter burst from all the doorways and windows of the Time Research Institute. Ears were deafened. People screamed and ran. A stench of blood hung in the air, mixed with a heavy electric smell. I rushed toward the car, and my chauffeur didn’t wait for an order to move. From somewhere afar came the sound of sirens. I felt dizzy.

At home I stood on the terrace, numb, looking out at the darkening sea, until I could stay awake no longer. I went to bed. I took a sleeping pill and again wondered what I’d tell Alice when I woke up. It’d be Thursday; I’d have to tell Alice the news without seeing her, without even being able to run after her should she get hysterical. After all, it was the day in which I was a blind, paralyzed man, using a wheelchair.

When I opened my eyes, it was morning. I stared at the light surface of the ceiling and got up from the bed. There was a blue sea beyond the window. Alice wasn’t in the bed. That’s when I realized I was neither blind nor paralyzed. I ran out into the yard, and began kicking at the door of the rear building until the chauffeur opened up.

“What day is it today?” I yelled.

He rubbed his neck, looked at the sky, looked at me.

“Today’s Tuesday,” he finally said with a strange expression. “It’s Tuesday today, again.”

We stared at each other.

“Mr. Morrow . . . Oswald. I’m very sorry.”

I could see he was. Wordlessly I turned away from him and slowly walked back to the white house. I took a tranquillizer and went back to bed, to wait for some understanding to hit me full force.

Tuesday’s Prisoner

The chain had broken. And not only for me. The chauffeur also said he lost contact with the other days of the week. It didn’t mean so much for him as it did for me. I didn’t have to ask any other multidiurnals to know that Tuesday had come loose from the other timelines. Neither was there any doubt about the cause, it being the destruction of the Time Research Institute. It couldn’t have been a mere coincidence. Something vital had been destroyed inside the building, and as a consequence of the explosion, I was shipwrecked in Tuesday.

I couldn’t even reach beyond Tuesday in my dreams any more. I tried in vain to repair the contact, using the technique we once described in our book Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday?

The other days of the week still exist, somewhere. I still live with Alice in them, and in Mondays we, of course, have Giselle with us. At least I hope so. I do hope the Library fire never occurred in Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but at the same time I’m afraid that Tuesday’s events have similarly repeated themselves in the other weekdays, finally culminating in the explosion of the Time Research Institute.

I’ve lived a lonely life in our house by the seaside. Sometimes I go for a ride with the chauffeur; nowadays we’re more like friends than employer and employee. I’ve had to cut his salary, but he hasn’t complained. Old age has taken my strength, and I’ve barely got enough money left to hire a personal nurse to take care of me.

I think a lot about Alice and all my lives with her. I wanted to tell our story to the whole world. I’m an old man, however, now lacking the energy for strenuous writing. So I’ve decided to let a comp take care of it. The chauffeur found it in some bookshop sale; it was programmed with the personality of an author who lived at the end of the 1900’s, rather unknown in his own time, but later proclaimed a genius. It’s easy to use: I switch the apparatus on autobiographical mode and start talking about these memories of mine to its microphone, which is designed to look like a gramophone. It doesn’t matter if I jump from one thing to another, and talk incoherently every now and then, the comp’s been programmed to solve such problems. It takes care of the narrative succession of events for me, and also the forming of sentences, punctuation, and all the other things I can’t manage to care about any longer.

Wednesday

After Alice’s death I finally got to know about Wednesday—our dark day. The chauffeur visited the hospital for the aftercare of his burns, and when he returned, he brought me a plastic bag containing a partly burned book. I examined it for a while and saw it was Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.

“They asked me to bring this to you,” he said. “It was in madam’s hands when the firemen found her. For her it was the most important book she wanted to save first. And I might be making a bad mistake now, but I think you have the right to know. It may help you to understand many things, perhaps also madam’s death. I wasn’t being quite honest with you when you asked about Wednesday. I have indeed met you in Wednesday, too—the both of you. You see, I at once sought you out in all the other days, when you first hired me as a chauffeur in Tuesday. But in Wednesday you couldn’t really afford to hire a chauffeur.”

And the chauffeur told me the whole story. In Wednesday, he found us in a big white house by the seaside. And finally, after getting to know us better, he’d started to drive us around, even in Wednesdays. He said we could use all kinds of free entertainment, but the house where he found us hadn’t been our private home, as it had seemed at first glance, but a home for people with disabilities.

He’d gone inside, presented himself to a woman in a nurse’s uniform and asked whether persons called Oswald Morrow and Alice happened to live there. Yes they did. Had been for any number of years. Both, however, had severe cognitive impairments, and they had no money, so they weren’t likely to hire a chauffeur, the nurse informed him. But would he have any use for a cat? Alice had saved it from the beach and nursed it back to health; some mongrel had savaged it real bad. Why does it need saving, he had asked. You can’t really keep cats in the home, she said, however much the residents liked it. Even the cinnamon buns they baked lately had more cat hair than cinnamon in them.

The nurse said that at the age of fifteen Alice had almost drowned in her parents’ swimming pool, after she’d been drinking too much wine at her birthday party and fallen in. She’d been pulled out and revived, but the lack of oxygen had already caused lasting injury to the girl’s brain. Alice had forgotten many major skills, and finally, when she came of age and her parents could no longer manage to take care of her, she’d been brought to this home, where she’d lived the last few decades.

The chauffeur had gone on to talk with Alice. She smiled at him ingenuously and started showing him a book she’d received as a present from her parents on her fifteenth birthday.

“Listen, I didn’t have time to read this, and now I can’t read at all anymore. I try, but I can’t. Sometimes I almost remember the letters and how to read. You know what: I’ve had dreams where I can read. They are lovely dreams. Do you read books? Look, there’s Oswald, he’s my special friend. I lived here for a long time before he was brought in. He’s younger than me. You know what happened to him? He was in a lift accident. He wasn’t hurt otherwise, but he hit his head so bad his brain went wrong. Sort of like my brain, but worse. We are good friends, Oswald and me, but he doesn’t always remember me. And he never talks to anybody, not to me neither. But he’s cute, and I like him. Listen, don’t tell this to the nurses, they’re such snoopers, but sometimes I go to Oswald at night and stay with him, in secret. We got our own rooms, it’s nice, but sometimes I get scared when I’m all alone. We’d get engaged, Oswald and I, but he doesn’t know what engaged is. What’s this book called? Can you tell? I’ve forgotten again. Would you read it aloud to me? What? What’s a bronty?”

1. Editorial note: In the original publication of Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday? it was not made clear that Saturday and Sunday are included in Oswald Morrow’s definition of a weekday. This revised edition contains that update. – Ed.)

2. The author distinguishes between days “on” which he did things and days “in” which things occur nowadays. In the distant past people could do things “on” different days, as these followed linearly, while these days, timelines and realities have broken up to such an extent for multidiurnals that they must now distinguish time from its earlier manifestation, and see it as a kind of place. – Ed.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to acknowledge the Elina Ahlbäck Literary Agency, Danelle Boskovich, Neil Clarke, Carita Forsgren, Val Grimm, Pasi Karppanen, Peter Owen Publishers, Liisa Rantalaiho, and Jeremy Zerfoss—and of course, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. My deepest thanks to all of you for your support, contributions, and expertise.

Extended Copyright Page

“Hairball” by Carita Forsgren © 2008. Originally published as “Karva” in USVA 1/2008. Translation by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translators.

“The Laughing Doll” by Marko Hautala © 2010. Originally published in USVA International 2010. Translation by Jyri Luoma and edited by James Wheatley. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.

“Chronicles of a State” by Olli Jalonen © 2003. Originally published as “Koon aikakirjat” in Värjättyä rakkautta (‘Dyed love’), Otava, 2003. First English publication in The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, Dedalus, 2005. Translation by David Hackston © 2005/2013. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.

“Those Were The Days” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen © 1999. Originally published as “Oi niitä aikoja: elämäni kirjastonhoitajattaren kanssa” in Portti 4/1999. Translation by Liisa Rantalaiho. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator. For rights queries, please contact the Kontext Agency.

“The Border Incident” by Tuomas Kilpi © 2013.

“A Heart Clothed in Black,” excerpt from Pereat Mundus by Leena Krohn © 1998. From Pereat Mundus. Romaani, eräänlainen (‘Pereat mundus. A novel, sort of’), WSOY, 1998. Translation by Hildi Hawkins. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“White Threads” by Anne Leinonen © 2003. Originally published as “Valkeita lankoja” in Portti 4/2003. Translation by Liisa Rantalaiho. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.

“Watcher” by Leena Likitalo © 2012. Originally published in Weird Tales #359. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Ospreys” by Tiina Raevaara © 2006. Originally published as “Kalasääsket” in Novellit 2006, Gummerus, 2006. First English publication in New Finnish Fiction, Gummerus, 2006. Translation by David Hackston. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.

“Elegy for a Young Elk” by Hannu Rajaniemi © 2010. Originally published in Subterranean Press Magazine, Spring 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Horseshoe Nail” by Mari Saario © 2007. Originally published as “Kenkänaula” in Portti 1/2008. Translation by Liisa Rantalaiho. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.

Excerpt from Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo © 2000. Originally published in Finland as Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi, Tammi, 2000. Published in Great Britain as Not Before Sundown, Peter Owen Publishers, 2003. Translation by Herbert Lomas. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.

“The Garden” by Jyrki Vainonen © 2007. Originally published as “Puutarha” in Lasin läpi (‘Through the glass’), Loki-kirjat, 2007.Translation by Juha Tupasela and Anna Volmari. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translators.

“Delina” by Maarit Verronen © 1999. Originally published in Löytöretkeilijä ja muita eksyneitä (’The explorer and other lost people’), Tammi, 1999. Translation by Hildi Hawkins. Reprinted by permission of the author and the translator.

Other Nordic Titles from Cheeky Frawg

Our Cheeky Frawg publishing house has made a strong commitment to Finnish fiction, and will also be offering Swedish writer Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath. We hope to expand that commitment past 2014, but obviously 2014 will be consumed mostly by our Leena Krohn omnibus (to be published late in the year).

Print and E-book

Datura by Leena Krohn, translated by Anna Volmari and Juha Tupasela. Our narrator works as an editor and writer for a magazine specializing in bringing oddities to light, a job that sends her exploring through a city that becomes by degrees ever less familiar. From a sunrise of automated cars working in silent precision to a possible vampire, she discovers that reality may not be as logical as you think—and that people are both odder and more ordinary than they might seem. Especially if you’re eating datura seeds. Especially when the legendary Voynich Manuscript is involved. Where will it all end? Pushed by the mysterious owner of the magazine, our narrator may wind up somewhere very strange indeed. “Datura is luminous—at once a secret history of losers, dreamers, and quacks, and a lyrical argument on the nature of reality. I thoroughly enjoyed it.” – Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. Enter the strange and wonderful world of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck with this feast of darkly fantastical short stories. Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the “Pyret” or the title story, “Jagannath,” about a biological ark in the far future, Tidbeck’s unique imagination will enthrall, amuse, and unsettle you. How else to describe a collection that includes “Cloudberry Jam,” a story that opens with the line “I made you in a tin can”? Marvels, quirky character studies, and outright surreal monstrosities await you in the book widely praised by Michael Swanwick, Ursula K. Le Guin, China Miéville, and Karen Joy Fowler. Winner of the Crawford Award and shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Introduction by Elizabeth Hand.

The Explorer & Other Stories by Jyrki Vainonen. This sly book showcases the quietly strange, unsettling short fiction of this acclaimed Finnish writer. Vainonen is renowned for his Finnish translations of the works of Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, and William Shakespeare. Vainonen’s first collection of short stories was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize and his work has been featured in such iconic collections as the Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy. This first English-language collection includes stories from Jyrki Vainonen’s three collections and is translated by J. Robert Tupasela and Anna Volmari, with one story translated by Hildi Hawkins. Introduction by Johanna Sinisalo. “Vainonen’s deceptively cool voice lured me into a world where horrors and wonders lurk just beneath the surface." – Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath

E-book only

Tainaron by Leena Krohn. The classic novel by an iconic Finnish author, a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Tainaron: a city like no other, populated by talking insects, as observed by the nameless narrator, who is far from home. Afterword by Matthew Cheney. “The novel contains scenes of startling beauty and strangeness that change how the reader sees the world. Krohn effortlessly melds the literal with the metaphorical, so that the narrator’s exploration of the city through its inhabitants encompasses both the speculation of science fiction and the resonant symbolism of the surreal.” – Locus.

Forthcoming in 2014

The Leena Krohn Omnibus. A not-to-be-missed and unstoppable thousand-page celebration of iconic Finnish author Leena Krohn. This epic volume, to be issued in hardcover, trade paperback, and e-book editions, will include the short novels Pereat Mundus, Tainaron, Dona Quixote & Other Citizens, and Gold of Ophir, among others, in addition to a selection of short fiction, essays, and poetry. The omnibus will also feature appreciations by other writers.