Read The Rabbit Back Literature Society Online
Authors: Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen
Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary
M
ARTT I WINTER’S PHONE RANG.
It was good news, from Rabbit Market. For its
anniversary
, the market wished to acknowledge its most faithful customers with special baskets of treats. Would Mr Winter be at home to receive a gift delivery?
W
HEN THE BELL RANG
for the fifth time, Martti Winter opened the door a crack and peeped out.
A delivery girl stood halfway up the porch steps with a basket in her arms and a billed cap that hid her eyes. Winter opened the door all the way. He was wearing an English smoking jacket and well-tailored trousers with suede slippers peeping out under the hem. He felt he looked respectable.
The girl greeted him and expressed her apologies, explaining that there were a lot of baskets to deliver and the other delivery girl had suddenly taken ill and unfortunately Winter’s gift basket was the last one on the list.
She glanced at her watch. “It’s already after ten. So late! I’m very sorry, Mr Winter. You must already be getting ready for bed at this hour…”
Martti Winter gave a vague smile, waved a hand and assured her that no harm had been done.
The delivery girl smiled with relief and handed the basket to him. He took it with pleasure, thanked her, wished her a pleasant evening and warned her not to get too close to the dogs, who weren’t to be trusted.
As he turned to go back inside, the girl strode quickly up the last two stairs, grabbed hold of his sleeve and flashed a sheepish grin.
“Well, what is it?” Winter asked her. “Oh, of course. Forgive me, my friend. A little drinking money! Of course. Let’s see
what I have in my pocket. Well, well. A ten-euro note, it seems. Here you go.”
But the girl didn’t take the money. Instead she explained shyly that she had always admired his works, and that she hoped that instead of drinking money he would grant her another service. “I have a book with me, and I wanted to ask you to do one little thing that you really can’t say no to.”
Winter raised his eyebrows, flattered, but at the same time annoyed. “Can’t I? Well, perhaps I can’t. You’d like an autograph, I assume. Give me the book. I even have a pen in my pocket…”
The girl took a book out from under her coat and handed it to him. He stood staring at the book, still vaguely smiling, not knowing what to do with the pen in his hand.
The cover read
RABBIT BACK LITERATURE SOCIETY: GAME RULES. NOT FOR NON-MEMBERS!
Martti Winter gave a snort as he realized what was happening.
The delivery girl took off her cap, lifted her face into the light and offered him a challenge.
Ella followed Winter up the stairs. He was puffing like a steam engine.
“I assume I can keep the gift basket? Because if I can, I’ll be less upset. This style of challenge at least has the benefit of not requiring the challenger to crawl in a window or surprise you in bed or on the toilet.”
“Of course you can keep it,” Ella said.
There were a lot of stairs. On the second floor, Winter slumped onto a sofa, sweating hard.
“I haven’t played in a while,” he said between panting breaths. “I don’t think any of us older members have. In fact,
I had started to think that The Game might have been played out for me.”
He wiped the sweat from his brow and pointed a finger at Ella. “By the way, did you know that Arne C. Ahlqvist was hunting for you? She called me a couple of days ago and asked whether I’d had a chance to play with you. Aura is eager to play again since you arrived. She needs some new material for her novel. I don’t know what the other members’ plans are, but I’m sure the fresh blood is tempting.”
“What’s to stop you from playing with each other?” Ella asked.
“Nothing really, except that our jam jars are fairly emptied out, for each other. They say you can never know another person completely. With The Game you can, if you play it by the letter and spirit of the rules.” He smiled sadly. “That’s what makes it such a useful, but at the same time dangerous tool. You see, people dress themselves in stories, but The Game strips us naked at the first handshake. That’s why we older members don’t really enjoy each other’s company. Elias Kangasniemi once described The Game as psychic strip poker around a glass table.”
When he was able to breathe again, they went up to the third floor. The walls were of dark hardwood. The hallway was dim, although there were small lights lit everywhere.
“Of course, we might still be of interest to each other if someone happens to have an experience that would be useful,” he said, glancing at Ella over his shoulder. “Four years ago, for instance, Helinä had some health problems. Breast cancer, in fact. She went through all the treatments—radiation, poison, surgery. Good material. Even I was on my way to challenge her a couple of days after she got out of the hospital. But it so happened that there were already two of my colleagues skulking
around her house when I arrived—one of them sitting on the edge of the roof knocking on her window with a stick, and the other applying a screwdriver to the basement window. I left them to it and went home.”
The stairs creaked under his feet. He huffed, staggered, leaned on the wall for support. He was doubtless significantly overweight, but he nevertheless was a surprisingly stylish figure in his tailored trousers and expensive-looking morning jacket—at least when he wasn’t struggling, at the limits of his physical capacity.
Ella thought about the book-jacket photo. The man
preceding
her up the stairs was nothing like his youthful photo. But Ella didn’t believe that the person in the photo could have disappeared completely.
Maybe you just had to look at him the right way.
They arrived at a door painted blue. He opened it and gestured for her to go inside.
“My office,” he said.
Everything in the room was blue. The curtains were made of thick, blue fabric. The rugs were blue. The walls were covered in tapestries reflecting various shades of blue. In the corner was a cluster of three blue armchairs. On the blue bookshelf, all the books had blue covers. Even the computer on the blue desk was blue.
“Blue calms me,” Winter said. “It’s difficult to write a novel when you’re very nervous.”
They sat down on the blue chairs. Winter pointed to a blue drinks dispenser in the corner.
“I had that shipped from Japan last summer. It was a custom order. They didn’t have any blue ones ready-made. Get us a
spot of something if you would. The mugs are on top of the machine. I’ll have cocoa. You can have whatever you like. There are twenty-eight drinks to choose from.”
Ella dispensed some cocoa for Winter and a cappuccino for herself. The mugs were blue.
“If it’s up to me,” Winter said, “we may as well start at once. Have a stab at it. Make me spill.”
Ella cleared her throat and felt her cheeks reddening.
“All right,” she began. “My question concerns…”
Winter raised a hand. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”
Ella felt even more embarrassed. She smiled feebly, opened her bag and took out a handkerchief. Then she held it out towards the man’s boulder-like head, her arms straight, as if the blindfold could jump into place of its own accord.
“A pleasant coincidence,” she chattered nervously, “that my handkerchief is blue.”
A smile spread over Winter’s face. “Excellent. I hope it’s not too small. Please be so kind as to tie it on for me.”
Ella’s fingers were trembling as she wrapped the handkerchief around his head and tied it in a knot. The skin of his temples radiated heat against the inside of her arms.
M
ARTTI WINTER
sat across from her like a large animal sent to slaughter—laid bare, helpless, awaiting the fateful blow to the head. Ella cowered in his shadow, going over her well-polished question in her mind.
She gathered her thoughts, focused on breathing evenly and was able to make her voice surprisingly steady.
“There are nine known older members of the Society. But at a certain point, there were ten of you. I want to know everything you know about the tenth member, the boy who died.”
At first, Winter made no move.
Finally, he tilted his head and said, “Ah.
Him
. The most
talented
of the original members. You’ve dug him up. Good girl. No fooling around with trivialities. Straight to the secret nucleus.”
He smiled as he gave her this acknowledgement. But his breath had the heavy, aching murmur of a wounded bull’s. He looked for a moment like he might collapse.
Then he started to spill.
“When I was invited into the Society, all of the other members except for Oona were already in it. The Society had existed
for two years. Laura White had, as you know, created it in 1968. Oona came a few months after I did. Then we were all together. There weren’t any more members after that, not before you.
I was nine years old, going into the third grade at Rabbit Back School. The invitation came in the spring, when I was still a second-grader. The invitation knocked my life out of whack quite a bit. You see, I was the star player of the school football team. I had a true natural talent in handling the ball, although I can imagine you would find that a bit hard to believe now. I could beat boys many years older and much larger than myself, coming and going. Even our teacher, Mr Vaara, said that Martti Winter was a boy who was going to be the star of the Rabbit Back league.
It was a pleasant time. School went fairly well and I was idolized, the way masterful football players always are at school. I’ve always remembered how Mr Vaara once said in religion class that God might have created the heavens and the earth, but when it came to football, even God couldn’t beat Martti Winter. One of the girls in class had a father who was a pastor, and of course word of what Mr Vaara said got to his ears. Mr Vaara received some sort of reprimand from the principal, who was a regular churchgoer, but it didn’t matter, because everybody knew it was true—I did play football better than God.
Sometimes I still dream about it. Running across the grass, the ball obeying my every thought, kicking, dribbling, heading the ball, in control of every possible move, and as I approach the goal I’m unstoppable, and I kick the ball right between the goalposts, and it flies up into the sky and never comes down…
Oh, well. Now I’m just blabbering. All this culminated on the day in May when Mr Vaara asked me to stay after class. When all the other students had left, he informed me that the authoress Laura White had approved me for membership in the Literature Society.
I was at a complete loss, of course. I thought, what the dickens is that? I don’t remember applying to be a member of any society. The teacher looked very serious and asked whether I even knew who Laura White was. And I did know. She was that author woman who had written the Creatureville
books. The teacher said that she was a great figure and a magnificent person, a writer with incomparable insight into the human mind. And he said that everybody knew that the children who were chosen to be in the Rabbit Back Literature Society would one day become something important, and that I should be eternally grateful that I had been asked to join.
I didn’t understand any of this. The teacher babbled all sorts of things about the brilliant road of literature and how I had received a call to travel it. He even got a little teary-eyed about it, I think, and I’d never seen a grown man cry. Then he got out our composition books, those yellow-covered ones, and waved a bundle of them in the air and said that in any case they would have to get me a new notebook because Laura White had taken the old one with her.
The old fellow had a crush on Laura White. Everybody knew it. People laughed about it behind his back. Supposedly he had once tried to cuddle up to her at a party when he was tipsy, but a bee appeared from somewhere and flew between them and stung him on the lip. He had to mumble his way through the school day, his lip was so swollen. We practically died laughing, and he flew into a rage.
So Mr Vaara was excited, but I wasn’t—at least not in the beginning. I went home and told my mother what my teacher had said. But she already knew about it. He had called her at home, and she was radiating happiness, buzzing with joy. She hugged me and said that she had always known that her boy would be a great man one day.
My mother had never been proud of me before. I mean, of course she thought it was nice that I was good at football, but football was just a game, when it came right down to it—that’s what she thought. But this. She was completely excited that I had been anointed as a talented, promising writer.
So naturally I joined the Society.
I knew all the members by sight, and they all knew me. The six girls and boys in the Society were allowed to sit indoors and write during recess
while everyone else was driven out into the rain. Everyone thought they were a bit strange and snobbish, but since they were, in a way, in a higher class, no one dared to tease them. We were aware that they were on their way to being something great and important. And of course everyone knew the beautiful woman who led the writing club.
We boys were infatuated with Laura White. When we saw her in town, we would each put on an act, hoping she would look at us running around and showing off, and when I met her for the first time face to face, of course I froze completely.
To tell you the truth, I don’t remember anything about our first meeting. Maybe that says something about how nervous I was. I remember that my mother drove me to Laura White’s house in the car, that I got out and walked past the pond to the house with the sun scorching my back and knocked, and Laura White shouted from inside that the door was open.
I went inside, walked through the rooms and saw her sitting in a white dress surrounded by wicker furniture. “Come and have some tea, Martti,” she said, and I stumbled straight into her smile.
My next memory is of running towards home, thrilled. I was going to be a writer. The kind of person who writes all those books in the library and at the bookstore that everybody reads!
I had actually never read a single book in its entirety. Reading had never much interested me. But when I got home I went to the bookshelf, took out a book at random, and started to read. And when I got to the end of that book, I started another and then a third.
I didn’t get to know the other members well at all in the beginning. I learned to remember Ingrid Katz’s name first, and I even teased her about it. “Here, kitty, kitty,” I would say.
But Ingrid was actually a bit taller than me then, and she pushed me behind a door and put her mouth up to my ear and whispered hotly that I’d better not try that again or I wouldn’t like what would happen to me.
She always knew how to get to me, and the teasing stopped right then. Actually, we started to become friends, because I learned to respect Ingrid.
At first, belonging to the Society felt quite normal. It was like any other club. Laura White gave us writing homework, and we wrote stories over the week and then on Sunday we read them out loud and listened to what she had to say about them. Sometimes she commented on them, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she asked one of us to stay afterwards for some guidance, and then she explained in detail what was good about the story and what could use improvement. And often she would ask us all kinds of things about the theme of a story, using questions to make us understand the texts better.
There wasn’t anything remarkable about it, I suppose. Laura White knew how to write well and how to teach us to write well. The most important thing was that it made us really want to be writers. We wanted it more than anything else—so much that it was, in fact, unnatural for children, now that I think about it.
If any of us had doubts about the Society at any point, our environment made sure that none of us broke ranks. Adults treated us quite differently than they treated other children—almost deferentially. Laura had that effect on people. She told everyone that we were future writers, and everyone acted accordingly.
The Rabbit Back Savings Bank donated a typewriter to each of us and we thought they were the most wonderful things we’d ever seen. I still have mine in the garage somewhere. It’s the one I wrote my entire first novel on. I did it for sentimental reasons—by that time I had a more modern machine I could use.
But amid all this there was one drawback. I lost my football stardom.
The ball wouldn’t obey my thoughts anymore. It slipped, went in the wrong direction, and when I drove it towards the goal during break, it would just jump to someone else, and I would be left stupidly standing there with no ball.
It was a hard spot for me. I can still remember the expressions on the others’ faces when I fumbled it out of bounds. They were disappointed, sad, sometimes even scornful.
My days of glory were over. I was left alone. My former friends asked me to go swimming or biking less and less often, until finally, when I tried to tag along with them uninvited, they had to spell it out for me. My best friend, Pekka Jansson, said, “Go play with your writing friends, Martti, since you’re going to be such a great writer and all.”
I gave him a bloody nose, and burst into tears to top it off. The boys shook their heads at each other and left without saying much. And then I left, just like Pekka told me to, and went to find my writing friends. What else could I do?
“This is certainly interesting,” Ella interrupts, “but my question was about the tenth member.”
“Yes, I’m coming to that,” Winter says in a distant, distracted tone, no longer poised.
Ella understands that this is all a part of spilling. Spilling is not the same as telling stories. The spiller has to stop using words to build stories, to forget everything that makes a good story, above all to forget trying to entertain the listener.
“Things come out in the order they come out,” Winter says. “So. I was
a better football player than God, but the Society was a different situation. I was a better writer than many of the others to start with, and some of the members envied me, most of all Silja Saaristo. Compared to the tenth member when he came, though, I was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
When I read my own stories aloud the others would sigh with envy and admiration, but it felt empty to me because I knew that as soon as that boy
started to read his story, mine would be dust, nothing but horse shit, stuff no one would even remember.
I’m sure you’ve heard of child prodigies, kids who seem to have a natural command of something that it takes other people a lifetime to learn? That boy was like that.
The rest of us were all pupils at the Rabbit Back School, but the little genius was from someplace else. Sometimes he was gone for a long time and then he would appear again and read us his literary output. He didn’t spend much time with the rest of us and I don’t think he really talked with most of us either, although the rest of us became fast friends and did everything together for many years.
It was understandable in a way. The other nine of us felt like we were better than other people, somehow entitled, young gods, the miraculous future of literature. Damn. I’m sorry for laughing in the middle of The Game, but for kids we really were self-important little shits. And since he was many kilometres above us he had to maintain his dignity, maintain some distance from more mediocre writers.
That’s how we understood it.
We also envied that boy so much that we were hardly likely to let him come along with us anyway. I’m sure he sensed that we were freezing him out. We would hardly even look him in the eye.
But I don’t have any facts about him. I can dimly remember his face, or at least the impression it made on me. Once, for instance, I was looking at Ingrid when she was sitting on the steps at Laura White’s house—I had a bit of a crush on her. Later I found out that she was utterly in love with me, but she couldn’t show it because I was a year older than her, and at that age a year is a wide chasm. I was looking at her and thinking to myself that she certainly had a pretty face, when all of a sudden that boy was standing beside her and looking at me in a peculiar way.
And suddenly I thought that, compared to him, Ingrid was positively ugly. If Ingrid was pretty, then that boy had the face of an angel, that’s how divine his features were.
Except that I didn’t like his eyes. There was something disturbing about them.
I don’t remember his name. I’ve tried to remember it over the years. I assume that all of us children knew his name, but when he died we agreed that we would never talk about him again, and things you don’t talk about have a way of escaping your mind.
I’ve sometimes had dreams where he comes to my house and grabs me by the shoulder and kisses my cheek and whispers something in my ear, but I can never quite hear what he’s saying. And I wake up from the dream covered in sweat every time, as if I’d had the worst kind of nightmare.
He died in the early spring of 1972. I was eleven years old at the time. Ingrid came over to my house in the morning and told me. Laura White had come to her house and told her that the boy was no more and that the meetings of the Society would be cancelled for a while.
I don’t know whether Ingrid said how he had died. Maybe I didn’t even ask. I have an idea that he drowned in the pond in Laura’s garden. I don’t know where I got that idea. I just remember that when I went by the pond a little while later there was a hole in the ice and I thought, That’s the hole he fell through and drowned, him and his ever-present notebook.