The Rabbit Back Literature Society (16 page)

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?

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.