The Rabbit Back Literature Society (11 page)

A stony silence fills the library. Ella looks up at the ceiling. The skylight looks blacker than before. The night huddles tighter around the building.

If she really listens closely, she imagines she can hear the books quietly rustling on the shelves.

“After high school I went to university and studied library science,” Ingrid recites, through rigid lips. “I came here first as an assistant, and then, when Birgit Ström died, I became the librarian.”

Ella opens her mouth to speak, but the words evaporate from her lips into the dry library air. She shifts in her seat. Her ass is numb.

“All right,” she says wearily. “I don’t really understand what you’ve told me, but I accept your story.”

Ingrid Katz shakes her head. “I haven’t told you a story. The Game isn’t for stories. If only we could tell each other stories! Telling stories is nice. It’s nice to embellish them with all kinds of things, and leave out the embarrassing parts. You can make stories logical and understandable. But if we play The Game right, all that comes out is what’s inside you, nothing more and nothing less. I spill, you spill, we spill.”

She takes a deep breath and stands up.

“You’ll come to realize how The Game works,” she says, her voice lively again. She takes the scarf off and hands it to Ella. “In your head, you have a clear, rational version of things. You know—your own story, the one you tell in public. We all dress ourselves in stories. Then you start to spill, and for a little
while afterwards you don’t understand what you’re really saying anymore. And finally, always, the thing that is most shocking about spilling is you yourself. That’s the true nature of The Game. Here. Put this over your eyes. It’s your turn. I want your father’s death.”

A
FTER THE GAME
, Ella Milana slept for a week.

Her mother came to stand outside her door now and then, to bring her a sandwich and let her know what was
happening
in the outside world.

There was going to be a fireworks show to celebrate the new year. Marjatta Milana bought a raffle ticket when she went into town. The principal called five times to ask about the essays, which Ella still had not returned. Marjatta shovelled new paths in the snow and kept the old ones clear as more snow fell. She drove away two aggressive dogs that were hunting some small animal among the currant bushes. There was a good programme on television, which Marjatta ended up watching alone. There was a proper meal waiting in the kitchen.

A postcard arrived from Ingrid Katz. Marjatta Milana read it aloud, wondered that her daughter seemed to have taken up sports, and pushed the card under the door. It read:
You may feel achy after The Game. It’s normal, and will pass
.

On the seventh day Ella got up, dressed, took her bag and went out. The first flakes of a new snowfall were drifting to the ground. The drifts were full of shovelled paths. Ella walked along one of them to the shed, searched for a canister she knew was there for the lawn mower, came out with it and doused her bag with petrol.

She struck a match under the apple trees. Her mother appeared on the steps and rocked back and forth as she watched her through the branches.

The match flew in a graceful arc and landed in the bag. The flames swirled higher than Ella had anticipated and she fell backwards onto her bum in the snow.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing?” her mother shrieked. “Destroying a good bag! Aren’t your students’ essays in that bag, the ones the principal was asking about?”

“They’re infested with mould,” Ella coughed, waving the smoke away.

Her mother bustled over, grabbed her under the arm, pulled her to her feet, farther from the pyre, and tossed snow on the hem of her coat, which was smoking. Ella watched with
satisfaction
as the papers burned in the bag.

“I noticed it a couple of days ago. I don’t know where it came from, but I certainly can’t take them back to the school or give them to anyone. You know how these things can spread like wildfire.”

A week earlier, when The Game had ended and Ella had left the library with Ingrid Katz, Ingrid hadn’t offered her a ride, explaining, “I need oxygen. Need to clear my mind. Recovering from a spill takes time, and I have to come back and open the library in a few hours.”

When she got home, Ella wandered into her room and tried once more to get to work grading the essays still in her bag. She couldn’t understand anything she read. The pupils’ texts were more confused and shapeless than usual, positively incomprehensible in places. She was beginning to suspect that she’d suffered some sort of attack of the brain, but then she noticed that she was able to read other texts without difficulty.

The problem wasn’t her; it was the essays.

She watched the burning bag now, no longer baffled by the book plague Ingrid had told her about. At first it certainly had bothered her, but then she’d come up with a clever theory about the state of everyday reality:

Reality was a game board for all of humanity to play on, formed from all human interaction. You could in principle make it up out of anything you wished, provided you all agreed upon it. But it was easiest if everyone used square pieces, because they would all fit perfectly together and form a seamless whole.

So square pieces had become the standard. Ella guessed this had happened sometime in the Middle Ages, or perhaps it came with the knowledge gained during the Enlightenment.

Occasionally, however, an unusual piece might fall into someone’s hands. The board had to be made according to strict standards, though, if you wanted to avoid problems with the rest of the world. So you had to disregard the non-standard pieces, had to maintain the right attitude about them.

And that’s how Ella handled the troubling question of the book plague.

The highest flames swirled up from the confiscated comic book. Its pages showed vaguely duck-like figures behaving bizarrely. She hadn’t looked closely at them since she’d come home from The Game, spent.

It was just a dream, the duck dressed like a sailor splitting an older duck’s skull with an axe and doing it again to another duck that happened along.

The page crinkled in the fire for a moment and was devoured.

Ella Milana sat at her desk planning her research project.

Her first stipend payment had arrived in her account that
day, so she had to make a start. She stared at her own reflection in the window, forming her first question about Laura White.

She also had to decide whom she would challenge next. She couldn’t challenge Ingrid Katz again until Ella herself or someone else was challenged. The rule book said:
You cannot challenge the same member of the Society a second time until you have challenged someone else or until you yourself are challenged by another member of the Society
.

Ella examined the printed list of Society members Ingrid had given her. It had a picture of each member, including Ella. Her picture had been taken at a local photo shop a couple of days before Laura White’s party. She looked like a hopeless, overeager idiot.

The list included contact information for each member. Except for the screenwriter Toivo Holm and the author
Anna-Maija
Seläntö, who lived in Sweden, all of the members were living in Rabbit Back, including Ella.

This was the list of all the members of the Rabbit Back Literature Society:

Ella looked at the photographs. She stopped at Martti Winter and thought at first that they had mixed up the pictures. Like the other members’ photos, it had been taken years ago. Instead of a fat, worn-out man, the photo showed a fine-featured, almost beautiful youth.

It was the same photo that was on the inside covers of his books. Ella suddenly remembered how in high school she had read his entire oeuvre, occasionally falling into a reverie over the photo of the lovely young man who’d written them.

She had always known that Martti Winter and several more of her favourite writers lived in Rabbit Back. It hadn’t meant anything to her. They might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Rabbit Back wasn’t a particularly large town, but like all towns it was made up of numerous compartmented social strata. The writers in the Society and ordinary people sometimes encountered each other on the street or in a shop, but that was an optical illusion. Even if the two people saw each other, even if they said hello, no real encounter had occurred. The writers simply lived on a different plane of existence than other people.

Ella took Martti Winter’s novel
Hidden Agendas
down from the shelf and opened it. There was the photo on the inside cover—a soft-focused studio portrait, sensitively lit and no doubt retouched. The picture let you know that the author wasn’t an ordinary person, he was some kind of literary god made flesh, an
enlightened
, more evolved being. Ella remembered how Silja Saaristo had greeted her at the party:
Ella! Welcome to the demigod gang!

Ella’s finger ran down the list of names. All of them had spoken to her at the party. She must have made a clumsy, childish impression. She wasn’t used to that kind of attention.

She thought about how Arne C. Ahlqvist had greeted her. Something about it had bothered her at the time. Because of her schooling, something had caught her attention, something that other people wouldn’t have taken any notice of. She had almost started a discussion with her about comma placement, because Ahlqvist had said to her:
It’s so nice to meet the new tenth member of the Society
.

As a language and literature expert, Ella, of course, would have put a comma between
new
and
tenth
. Without a pause there, or some kind of emphasis, indicated in writing by a comma, the sentence seemed to mean that it was nice to meet a new tenth member
who had replaced the old tenth member
.

And there had never been any more than nine members in the Society until Ella Milana joined.

Ella knew she was splitting hairs. Was she ever. It was like a sickness only lang and lit teachers contracted, and she knew exceedingly well that people just said things sometimes, that speech was imprecise, as well it should be. And she would have forgotten the whole thing if she hadn’t suddenly remembered another peculiar conversation, one that included a strange adverb.

Oona Kariniemi was known for her profound love stories. At the party, Kariniemi had been talking with four older men when she noticed Ella, waved and darted between the men to come and talk to her.
Are you
the
Ella Milana?
she had screamed, a wine glass in her hand.
I knew it! That story of yours in
Rabbit Tracks
was excellent. You use the language beautifully. We’ve never had any real language professionals in the crowd, just us writers, but we’ve got along somehow. Of course our editors have had a lot of cleanup to do, ha ha. But hey, it’s really great to get some new blood in the Society. Thanks to you we have a tenth member again
.

She had definitely used the word
again
.

Ella picked her phone up from the bed, searched for Ingrid Katz’s number, hesitated a moment, then pushed the green button. She made a face at her reflection in the black window.

Ingrid answered on the fifth ring. “Evening, Ella,” she said, a little breathless, apparently on her evening walk. “How can I help you?”

“Good evening. Sorry to bother you, but could you please tell me: have there ever been any other members of the Society besides the nine of you?”

The librarian’s breathing rasped over the phone. “You’re a lang and lit teacher. You must have a copy of
A History of Finnish Literature
on your shelf.” Ingrid laughed. “Look in there, if you don’t remember.”

“I already looked at it, and it says that there have never been more than nine members. But is that information correct?”

There were several seconds of silence on the other end. Ella started to grow nervous.

She had felt a little silly when she’d dialled Ingrid’s number, doubting the official history because a science fiction writer making a passing comment had left out a comma.

Five endless seconds later Ingrid said, “If it’s in the book it must be true. You’re the tenth member. There were always nine members before, nine writers in training, plus their trainer, Laura White.”

Ella’s mouth was dry. “I hope you won’t be angry if I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’re a terrible liar. I can tell from your voice that you—”

Ingrid coughed. There was another pause.

“Listen, if you really feel that something is being kept secret from you, go ahead and use The Game. But if I were you I would think twice before I decided to spill who knows what just to check some information that can be found in any literary history.”

E
LLA MILANA
trained her binoculars on Silja Saaristo’s house for three days. The house was on the east side of Rabbit Back, near a wooded knoll. The nearest neighbours were half a kilometre away. Ella parked the Triumph a little distance from the house and conducted her surveillance from inside the car. She ate sandwiches and drank coffee from a Thermos.

Then she thought of something that might prove useful. She took a day off from her stake-out to check her theory by reading a book she had started a few days earlier. She was delighted to discover that she didn’t need to go undercover. The answer was in the book.

As she drove up to the house with the headlights off, Silja Saaristo was standing on the terrace in the glow of the porch light. She was smoking a cigarette, wearing a bathrobe, and holding a glass of wine, all according to schedule. Saaristo was on her way to her evening bath, and was exposing herself to the cold to better enjoy the hot water.

She never locked the door until she went to bed around 11:30. The lock was sticky and stubborn, and since she went out to smoke about once every hour, it was easiest to just leave the door unlocked.

It was now ten past ten.

Once she went back inside, Ella waited a moment and then made her move. She lit her way with a penlight. She walked calmly across the garden, slipped in the back door, purposely leaving it open, and went to a dark corner to wait.

A cold current of air blew into the house. Saaristo would soon notice it from her bath and think she’d left the door open herself.

Ella waited fifteen minutes. She stood in the shadow of a bookcase, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

A cat appeared and wrapped itself around her feet.

Silja Saaristo toddled into the living room in her robe, her hair wet, calling the cat and hoping that it hadn’t gone out the open door. She pulled the door closed and locked it for good measure, but then stood looking out the window at the snow on the terrace.

There were strange footprints in it.

Saaristo stood stock still and lifted her hands to her cheeks with a look of intense concentration.

As Saaristo started to turn with a wary look on her face, Ella smiled to herself in the dark. Her heart was thudding but she was sure that Saaristo’s heart was pounding even harder. Ella sniffed the air and let herself imagine she could smell the other woman’s fear.

The mission had been greatly aided by her hunch that Silja Saaristo had planned her own murder, in her novel
Lament of the Departed
—the very novel that Ella happened to have started to read the week before. It was all in there—the bath every
evening
, the hourly cigarette, the sticky lock on the terrace door, the door left open, tempting her out of her bath, the worry over the cat, the footprints in the snow, and the dawning suspicion.

Ella did not, however, crack open the skull of the lady of the house with the heavy table lamp that stood on the bookshelf just within reach and was described in great detail in the novel, tape-wrapped cord and all.

Instead she whispered a challenge in the darkness.