Read The Rabbit Back Literature Society Online
Authors: Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen
Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary
Ella asked her question.
She had formed it carefully beforehand so that it wouldn’t be too broad or vague, precisely according to the rules.
“I want information about those books you took off the shelves and destroyed. You weren’t honest with me about them. Tell me the truth now.”
Ingrid Katz turned pale under the scarf. She made a
nervous
movement, touched her swollen lip again, and said, “I’ve tried not to think too closely about it. This is the one thing that Martti Winter doesn’t know about me, as far as I know what he knows and am not just thinking I know. But all right. The Game has started, so I’ll spill.”
E
LLA STOPPED HER
and asked her what she meant by “spill”.
Ingrid’s mouth smiled. “It’s one of The Game’s more recent terms. You draw it out, and I spill it. I spill, I spilled, I am spilling. At some point we wanted to distinguish between playing The Game and telling stories, because storytelling is an art, but The Game is something else entirely.
“You see, The Game doesn’t produce stories, it produces material for stories. That happens when you break open the stories and let their unformed essence spill out. That’s what The Game is for. Everybody has valuable material inside them that The Game can help to draw out.”
Even with her eyes covered Ingrid Katz seemed to sense Ella’s confusion.
“I suppose it sounds a little tasteless,” Ingrid said
apologetically
. “I may have been the one who suggested the term. You won’t find it in the rule book. I was thinking about collecting sap from trees. It seemed like a beautiful idea in a way. To go to the woods and make a little hole in a tree and come away with something valuable without doing any damage. Arne C. was very enthusiastic about the term, but she has her own ideas about it now. She suggested we call The Game
Nosferatu
, but I let it be known that I would quit the Society the second such a name was adopted.”
Katz began spilling by telling Ella that she wasn’t the only book thief. “You wouldn’t have got it into your head to sneak in after those books if I hadn’t committed my own book theft a good thirty years ago.”
She hesitated.
“At least that’s one way to look at it,” she added uncertainly, “now that I’m putting my feelings into words. It’s weird. I’ve never let myself think it through to the end until now.”
She said she’d been twelve years old. It was the first week of July. “We—Martti and I—were spending the morning on the hill by the school. We started acting childish, making rivers and dams, the way children do. We were going to Laura White’s house but first we wanted to play in the mud. It was like that on the hill, a good place to dig rivers in the dirt. It was nice. It was exciting
to see how the water would go where we wanted it to, and we decided to go to the dead rat’s grave before we went to Laura’s house; we thought we still had time. Martti had on a new pair of leather shoes and they got all dirty, of course. He tried to make light of the whole thing, said, “It’s just a pair of shoes,” but I knew that his mother was going to tear into him. I promised to take his shoes to my house and ask my father to do something with them. My dad was a cobbler. He had a shop where the Brumerus kiosk is now
…
Well, Martti was very grateful, just sighing with relief, even though he tried to hide it from me. And
…
Ingrid is quiet for some time, then says, “I’m sorry. Maybe all this doesn’t have anything to do with the books. I don’t know. But I’m trying to go back in my mind to that day, and one detail leads to another, and so on.
“It’s extremely difficult to remember things correctly. I
remember that day in one sense, but of course it’s not clear, not a whole film in my head that I can just reel out for you. There are breaks in the film in several places, part of it’s dim, some of the story is jumbled, a lot of it is faded almost completely away. There are alternate versions of some of it. The days get mixed up. I remember the feelings, but are they the original feelings or are they the feelings I have when I remember it?
“You must have noticed sometimes how when you tell a story you make up all kinds of additions to it, partly because it improves the story and partly because there are always gaps in your memory. You can’t do that in The Game. The Game isn’t for telling stories. In The Game you leak out whatever is deepest within you, nothing more and nothing less. But I’m sure you read about it in the rule book, so I’ll stop explaining. Please be patient, though, and don’t pinch my lip quite yet. I’m rummaging through my head as I talk and gradually I’ll muddle into a deeper memory and some superfluous things might come out in the meantime. Anyway, I do remember the rat… I got it
for my birthday. A dead rat. Or that’s what I thought at first, when I found a package on the kitchen table with a dead rat in it. I thought it was one of my father’s deep lessons. He was always playing those kinds of tricks on me. I found out later that he had found the carcass in the cellar and swept it up into the first piece of paper he found to take it outside, and then forgotten it on the table when he went out to his workshop.
I didn’t know what to do with it. I imagined my father would ask me in the evening what I’d done with my gift, and I ought to have a thoughtful answer. That’s the way my father was. He was always inventing different challenges and tests for me. So anyway, I decided to give the rat a proper funeral. I went and asked Martti to come with me
.
Martti was excited. He came over and put together a little coffin for it and it was the finest little coffin I had ever seen.
He made a fabric lining for it out of his handkerchief. I said wouldn’t his mother be angry with him for putting an expensive handkerchief in a rat’s coffin, but he didn’t say anything. He was so serious.
That happened in the morning. When Martti and I were on our way to Laura White’s house we decided to go by the rat’s grave again. We had put a sort of little cross on it. We made it out of popsicle sticks, I think. When we were at the grave, Martti started crying. I was shocked,
wondering
what was the matter. He explained that he was imagining his mother lying dead under the ground.
I told him that his mother was alive, unlike my mama, but his tears just kept coming. I socked him in the arm as hard as I could. I said he ought to save his crying for when there was a reason to cry. That was one of my father’s sayings. I made it my business to instruct Martti.
He got angry and ran away towards Laura White’s house. I remember I stood there for a long time before I realized that he had left me standing alone at a rat’s grave. So I walked after him.
The way to Laura’s house seemed terribly long. When I got there, I walked around in the garden for a while trying to decide whether to go inside at all. I went to the edge of the pond and was about to rinse my face with the cool water, but then I was startled by a branch or a reflection and I ran to the porch. The pond in Laura’s garden made all of us nervous—it was fun to skate on in the winter, but during the summer we didn’t go near it. I don’t know why.
When I think about it now, we could have swum in it. Don’t children usually enjoy swimming? For some reason we just never did. Maybe it was because of Laura. She hated and feared the water. She never went
swimming
and probably never went boating either, and she preferred not to go near deep water, and we probably got that attitude from her
.
Anyway, I went inside after all and I heard voices from farther inside, from the corner room. The others were there, already reading their stories out loud. I think I heard Martti’s voice above the others, and oh how I hated him at that moment. And to top it off, it hit me just then that we were supposed to write something about our mothers for that meeting, and I hadn’t written a single line. I wanted to cry.
I was all mixed up. I didn’t know if I should go in where the others were or just go home. I may have had a fever, too. I was shivering. It felt like something had shut me off from everything. And then I went and looked around the house, although I was a little bit afraid to walk around by myself. I’d never really looked around Laura White’s house before, and now I had decided to do it for the hell of it, just because I got the idea in my head
.
Ingrid Katz stops speaking and points to her mouth. “Excuse me, but could I have something to drink? There’s some water in the back room, I think. All this talking is drying out my mouth. I haven’t talked so much at once in a long time. My job keeps me quiet most of the time. Since the signs specifically prohibit talking.”
Ella fetches a paper cup of water from the back room. Ingrid sips it, apparently pondering what to say next.
“The next thing I have any complete memory of is running away from the house with my heart pounding and two books in my hand. The other children are still in the corner room with Laura and I have
those two books in my hand. Jesus.
What happened in the house is a little dim and confused. I was walking around, opening doors and peeking into places. I remember peeping into some drawers and seeing a wonderful music box which I would have liked to have
for myself. It had a ballet dancer. And I remember a big chair that I sat in for a while. It had a strange smell, sour and damp and sort of mossy. I closed my eyes and imagined I was in the woods, and I think I may have fallen asleep in the chair. Then I can almost remember that I went into another room that I thought led into the entryway, but I ended up right back in the same room I’d left. I felt sort of lost. But I’ve always had a lousy sense of direction.
I have to say now that I can’t be sure of the rest of this. It’s in my head, but I don’t know if it’s a memory. I mean, it could just as well be some dream or fantasy. I put it in one of my children’s books and worked on it so much that I don’t really know how much of the original memory is left.
But I do remember something like this—there was a colourful place on the wall where the light was really interesting and I had a delightful thought that, hey, it looks like there’s a door there, and then I touched the wall with my fingers and it gave way and suddenly there was a door opening in front of me.
All these books appeared in this room. And I stepped inside. At some point I started to feel bad, I got dizzy and shivery and wanted to throw up.
I don’t remember anything about the room itself, I just remember the dream I’ve had many times. In the dream, the room is full of water and I’m swimming from shelf to shelf looking at the books. And in the dream I see one book on a shelf that I’ve been looking for everywhere for a long time, and another one that I really must have, and then I swim towards the door with the two books in my hand and I’m about to drown because the books weigh so much.
And then I always wake up
.
Ingrid grows quiet again and seems to be gathering her thoughts. “A lot of overlapping, hellishly unclear memories,” she laughs. “It’s annoying! It’s such a mess! Like at first there are a lot of films overlapping each other, and then I’m running out of the house with the books under my arm, feeling thrilled and guilty
at the same time, horrified and confused, like you are when you have a fever. And then the memory breaks off.”
Ella rubs her brow, trying to make something out of Ingrid’s story. “So what does this have to do with the library books?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” Ingrid says, “but at my deepest, I feel like it’s related. If you’ll wait a moment, I have another memory. In this one, I’m coming out of the rain into the library. I remember the cold and the wet, remember how
water is dripping off me onto the library floor. I’m quite wet and shivering. The stolen books are under my dress, against my stomach, and I so want to get rid of them.
And I don’t remember what books they actually were, although I know I looked at them. I had dreams about them, but it’s hard to remember dreams precisely later on; they disappear completely as soon as you start to focus on them. But I did still remember that, at least in my dream, there was something weird about the books, something that made it so that I couldn’t possibly keep them. One of them frightened me, something about a dead emperor—don’t ask, I really don’t know—and the other was a bit hazy, fluid and
wavering
, and when you read it you started to get dizzy and see double, or triple.
I waited for the old librarian, Birgit Ström, to go somewhere, then I went into the back room and closed the door behind me. I thought she was going to have a poo. Sometimes she would take a long time in the toilet and the smell of her poo would spread out over the library. I ran, all wet and chilled, to a book trolley and shoved the books in with the others and my hands were shaking terribly, and I guess after that I just left. I don’t remember anything more
.
Ingrid grimaces and her voice becomes thin and old as she continues. “Those trolleys were for the books that had already
been returned and were waiting to be shelved in different parts of the library. So the books I put there infected all the other books on the trolley, and they spread the infection through the shelves. That’s how it all started.”
Ella leans forward and stares at the librarian’s dry lips. “You called it an ‘infection’,” she says. “What kind of infection do you mean? Some kind of mould?”
Ingrid looks limp. “You’ve seen what an infected book looks like. I don’t have a name for it. In my head I sometimes call it ‘the book plague’—on those rare occasions when I dare to think about it. Or maybe you could call it a ‘book mutation’. If you wanted to talk about it at all. Maybe the world is what it is. But there are things you can’t talk about. You just keep quiet about them, and I would put this on that list.”
Her face grows tense.
“I don’t know what exactly it is. There are changes in some of the books. They somehow become… how shall I put it… fluid. And your Dostoevsky was a particularly bad case. It changed even more before I burned it.”
She stretches her mouth into an ironic smile. Ella wonders if the air of the library is getting thinner or if she’s just imagining it. She feels like the blindfolded Ingrid is leading both of them to the edge of some kind of cliff.
“I noticed when I was in school that there was something strange about the books in the Rabbit Back library. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I felt from the very beginning that it was my particular problem.” Ingrid thought for a moment, then changed the subject. “When I was younger I once had a little trouble, the kind of thing that can happen to a girl who messes around with the wrong kind of boy. I knew it was there but I
didn’t want to think about it. I just shut off my mind until I’d gone to the doctor and bought the pills, and when I took them, I thought about something else altogether.”