The Rabbit Back Literature Society (27 page)

Doctor Jansson’s hands were trembling as he took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes.

“That book is in a place of honour on my shelf, and in my capacity as a doctor I’ve ordered myself to look at it every day—once in the morning and once in the evening. This prescription has helped me to keep my ego from overreaching, which it has a tendency to do. That book has helped me remind myself daily that though we humans have learning and wisdom and imagine we know everything—imagine ourselves gods—events will take their own course, in spite of divinities such as ourselves and our little ideas and assumptions. We thought we’d lost Laura forever, and we got her back again. Why? Because anything can happen—even the kinds of things that we can’t predict or
understand. For that same reason, we have to accept that Laura finally did leave us the way she did, tragically and unexpectedly.”

The old man stared into the distance. Then his furrowed face quivered and a smile spread over it.

“Tragically and unexpectedly, I say, but in actuality it was a beautiful thing.
Poof
, she’s gone, and in her place is white, wildly dancing snow! You know, Ella, it’s just like Mother Snow says in Laura’s last book:

E
LLA MILANA
stands with her back to the bed. Her clothes fall to the floor.

The dim room smells like dark chocolate. Ella ties the
blindfold
over her eyes, turns, gropes her way to the bed and reaches both hands out in front of her.

He takes hold of them, and a small yelp escapes her.

Afterwards she draws another X on her calendar and smiles.

The whole thing was hard at first.

The first time, she got caught under him and nearly
smothered
, her side crushed. The second time, she sprained an ankle and almost broke her nose. Their third time it ended with him making an ill-advised movement and getting an attack of
lumbago
and starting to yell out loud, unable to stop. Ella called a doctor who came and pumped him full of three syringes of painkillers.

The fourth time ended with both of them laughing uncontrollably.

The fifth time went better. Neither was noticeably injured and they both had an orgasm—they were finally starting to find a way to fit their bodies together.

Ella and Martti Winter never talked about their
relationship
, and they didn’t comment on each other’s actions—words can be razor sharp when it comes to tender matters of the flesh.

The only exception was an ode that he wrote to her—to her nipples, to be precise. At first she thought it a ridiculous idea, but when she heard the poem she ran out of the room with tears in her eyes.

Things you don’t talk about aren’t completely real. After the fifth time, as Ella is rinsing herself in the bathroom, she tries to recount the experience in her mind. She wants to find something in it to shape into a memory.

It isn’t easy. She doesn’t remember the act at all, except for a surreal general impression and an idea that formed in her mind at the final moment: she was a little crawfish swirling in the eddies of the sea, slamming herself again and again against something large and powerful.

Ella Milana returns to the bedroom. The bathrobe she’s wearing is much too big for her. She lets it slide off onto the floor, steps out of the pile of fabric, and starts putting her own clothes on.

He looks at the outline of her body in the dimness.

“What?” Ella asks.

“Ella Milana,” he says, “May is half over, and the weather report promises a warm, sunny day tomorrow. It’s time we went for a picnic. Let’s have one out in the garden. I’ll make the food.”

“Oh,” Ella says happily. “Can I bring anything?”

Winter is breathing heavily. Ella turns to look at him.

When he finally answers, his voice is scooped hollow.

“Bring a shovel.”

T
HE DOGS
haven’t gone anywhere.

Ella Milana and Martti Winter counted all the dogs gathered around the house on April Fool’s Day. They got as far as thirty-eight.

Every now and then someone appears at the house to pick up their pet and take it home. Within a few days, the
creature
runs away and comes back to Winter’s house again. The
Rabbit Tracks
dog psychologist A. Louniala has been flooded with questions from weary dog owners. The dog column has tripled in length.

When Ella gets out of the car on the day of the picnic she realizes it’s been a long time since she’s paid any attention to the dogs. She’s started to think of them as a normal part of Winter’s front garden. The dogs, for their part, haven’t shown any interest in her comings and goings lately. When she opens the back of the Triumph, however, and takes out a shovel, the dogs prick up their ears and the atmosphere turns tense.

The hair on the back of Ella’s neck stands up.

To get to the front steps she has to pass a large Great Dane.

She gets nervous, of course, and stumbles, and the shovel falls to the ground with a clang.

The Great Dane shows its teeth and lets out a deep growl.

The snarl continues as she goes into the house and pushes the door shut behind her.

For the picnic they take along a picnic basket, a blanket and the iron shovel.

Ella and Winter go out to the garden. When they’ve found a pleasant spot under an apple tree, they spread the blanket out on the grass and sit down to drink some coffee and eat some chocolate cookies.

They smile at each other with shared understanding.

They might be about to rewrite the history of Finnish
literature
. They’ll probably destroy the Rabbit Back Literature Society in the process. But first they intend to enjoy their picnic. It’s a beautiful day.

They have a long, meandering conversation about the chocolate cookies. Winter ordered them especially from Rabbit Market, as well as the cream puffs.

Their relationship is founded on an agreement that they will only talk about unimportant things. Over the spring they’ve kept their physical experiments, banter and laughing paramount.

Summer has started outside the walls, but inside the garden there are still wintry spots—there’s even some ice still at the base of a few of the statues. This Thursday, however, is a sunny one, in honour of which Ella is wearing a short skirt and a red summer blouse with white polka dots.

She feels a little chilled.

Her blouse amuses Martti Winter, who makes some
discourteous
comments about it that cause Ella to laugh out loud.

Winter is wearing a brown suit, more sporty in cut than usual. He calls it his “sauntering suit”. It has a tie embroidered with gold thread, which is now hanging over a limb of the apple tree, where Ella perfunctorily placed it.

They sit on the blanket and eat their picnic lunch.

The shovel is leaning against the tree behind them. It isn’t yet time to pay any mind to it.

Ella is still researching the history of Laura White and the Rabbit Back Literature Society. That’s what she’s being paid to do, after all.

Martti Winter tells her brief anecdotes about the authoress during their afternoon coffee conversations. Since the
information
spilled in The Game can only be used as literary raw material, their coffee chats keep Professor Korpimäki satisfied without breaking the rules of The Game.

Ella plays The Game with all the members of the Society except for Winter.

In addition to her research, she’s begun writing a novel. She’s already written ten pages and filled numerous journals with notes. No one knows about this, not even Martti Winter.

The developing novel is based on Laura White’s story—or rather, on the nine different stories Ella has gathered from the things that have been spilled to her.

Some of the stories are more usable than others.

Two weeks ago, Ella finished The Game she’d started with Aura Jokinen. The still-recovering sci-fi writer did her best to spill, but it was difficult to make out what she was saying. Her thoughts were fragmented and vague, and many things remained unclear, which she herself understood all too well.
“I’m sorry, friend, but my mind isn’t quite working. Or my speech.”

Ella felt sorry for her, but she knew when she started The Game that Jokinen’s view of Laura White would be unsuitable for her purposes. She doesn’t want to write science fiction, and she isn’t thrilled with the idea of a supernatural horror story,
either. She intends to write a proper psychological novel,
respectful
of the realistic tradition of Finnish literature.

Ella has acquired some useful material from The Games she’s played over the past few weeks with Helinä Oksala, Elias Kangasniemi and Oona Kariniemi. Two days ago she finally got to play with Anna-Maija Seläntö. Seläntö came to Rabbit Back to speak to an amateur writing club and got it into her head to go out for a late dinner, to the delight of Ella, who was stalking her in the Triumph.

Ella’s been thinking she’ll use Seläntö’s succinct point of view about Laura White’s nature as a starting point for her book. A novel about “a schizophrenic personality trying to heal itself by pumping out children’s books and making the children who read them see the monsters” is much more likely to be taken seriously than one about the ghost that’s sprung up in Aura Jokinen’s suffering mind.

Ella is made of slender stuff, but she casts a surprisingly large shadow over Winter.

She’s standing behind him. She got up a moment ago to stretch her legs, and now she has the shovel in her hand. Winter glances at the rusty shovel and continues to eat his cookies.

Ella notices him looking at the letter lying unopened on the blanket. It came four days ago. The sender’s name is on the envelope:
Mirja Södergran
. Ella showed it to him as soon as it came and said that they should open it together—once they dug up the dead boy’s notebook.

“We had the mythological mapper come over three days ago,” Ella says.

She’s chatting idly, as if she doesn’t know that the shovel
she’s nonchalantly holding has become a scalpel with which to excise the Rabbit Back Literature Society from literary history.

“My mother entered a raffle last year, I guess, and she won a free mapping. It got overlooked last autumn for some reason, and the mapper showed up the other day to do it. You know me—I would have sent her to bother the neighbours, but Mum was at the house and she said that when you win something you ought to accept your prize. So the mapper went out to our garden with a sleeping bag and slept for a couple of hours under the berry bushes.”

“Did you get a good report?” Winter asked, giving her such a mournful look that she felt guilty.

She forced herself to smile and showed him the document the mapper had written for them:

After this introductory statement there was a form with a long list of possible mythological creatures. The mapper had detected two different types in the Milanas’ garden:

Ella remembers the other mythological mapping—the one the mapper wrote for Martti Winter, warning him not to show it to anyone. She looks at him and guesses that he’s thinking about the same thing.

Ella thinks about the ground under her feet.

The names and order of the layers of earth that she learned in school pass through her mind. She can see the soil, the stones and moraine. She can smell the little animals burrowing in their dens. She can hear the moles, ants, beetles and centipedes scratching in their tunnels.

She closes her eyes and feels the quiet, deeply nested
mysteriousness
of the earth.

She starts to feel dizzy.

She opens her eyes and glances at the sky, where the fluffy parade of clouds continues its noiseless march. Martti Winter looks in the same direction and mutters something about “flaming, vengeful eyes” and a “retreating enemy”. Ella looks at him worriedly—it takes her a moment to realize he’s
reciting
poetry.

As the sun disappears behind a blanket of clouds, the air cools and the shadows pour their darkness over the whole garden.

They look at the darkness of the sky until the sun bursts through and shines on their faces again.

Martti Winter turns to Ella and says they might as well get started—now is as good a time as any.

Ella nods, then immediately shakes her head. She opens her mouth to say something clever, but nothing appropriate comes to mind. She stands there, blinking like a mute,
simple-minded
child.

Martti Winter’s eyes are murky. He smiles patiently and takes the shovel out of her hands. Then he walks away and wades through the raspberry bushes holding the shovel, which looks very tiny in the grasp of such a large man.

Ella hurries after him. This is her project, after all, she reminds herself; this corrective surgery on literary history is a fulfilment of her wishes.

Winter tramps a path for her through the rattling underbrush, wider than is necessary. The thorns on the berry bushes
nevertheless
scratch her legs and catch on her skirt—she’s apparently too clumsy for a trek through nature. She tries to avoid the thorny branches and Winter leaves her behind, and just then she turns her head and notices a figure looking at her from the bushes.

Ella stiffens and puts her hand over her mouth so she won’t yell.

The sun cuts out a silhouette of the figure on her retina.

She can’t make it out very well even when she squints, but when she takes a couple of sideways steps, the sun is hidden behind a tree trunk and she can see it better.

It’s standing near an apple tree and two maples, in the most inconspicuous of places: a naked wood nymph.

It’s carved out of dark wood. Its surface skilfully mimics the forms of living flesh. No wonder her hurried eye was fooled.

Ella steps closer and sees that the nymph’s wooden features are badly worn. Her delicate lips, the thin edges of her nostrils, and the nipples on her small breasts have nearly disappeared, but a memory of them is still perceptible. Her slender hands are cracked, pressed against her body as if she were trying to stop them from decaying completely.

A melancholy expression plays across the nymph’s face. Ella carefully touches the smooth wood of her cheek, then hurries after Winter.

As she walks past the nymph her skin tingles. She can’t help turning to look behind her.

Now she can see the figure from the back. It’s bark-covered wood, with dry branches growing out of it. From this angle the illusion is lost. There’s no woman at all—just an old, broken stump quietly decaying in a garden.

Ella reaches Winter. He’s stopped near the wall under a large maple tree. She asks if they’re in the right spot—is this where little Martti Winter hid the dead boy’s notebook?

Winter starts to dig.

Ella stands a little ways off. Winter swings the shovel in a dangerous-looking manner. Dirt patters over Ella’s shoes. The deepening hole fascinates her and she doesn’t notice at first that the pack of dogs has broken into a pandemonium of howls and a cold gust of wind is rushing through the garden, whipping up leaves, rattling branches and settling around them in a whirlwind.

Ingrid Katz wrinkles her brow at a noise in the library foyer.

She snorts and leans over the check-out desk.

Aura Jokinen is rolling towards her in an electric wheelchair that needs to be oiled. Beside her walks a thin man dressed in black with a frizzy mane of hair and lots of jewellery.

Ingrid guesses that the leather-coated man is a member of an organization that worships the works of Arne C. Ahlqvist and their paranoid-schizophrenic vision of reality. The club holds regular Arne C. Ahlqvist discussion groups. Sometimes they come to her house to interview her for their newspaper, to deliver the assorted prizes she is invariably awarded and to ask for autographs.

“He came to do an article on Arne C. Ahlqvist,” Jokinen explains after greeting Ingrid. “And to bring me a prize, for the seventh time.”

Jokinen’s mumblings are hard to understand, though she tries to speak clearly. She says that she dropped in to ask if the library has a new book that isn’t yet in the bookstore.

“Let me guess,” Ingrid Katz says. “The book you’re looking for is
The Return of Emperor Rat
, by Laura White.”

Aura Jokinen nods and nervously fingers the wheelchair controls.

Ingrid Katz sighs. “You’re only the tenth person to ask about it since the library opened half an hour ago. I called the bookstore—it’s the same story there. People asking for a book that they don’t have for the simple reason that it doesn’t exist.”

Aura Jokinen shakes her head, drools a little down her front, and says, “I’m sure I heard, or maybe read somewhere, that it had been published. I heard the publisher found it…”

“They didn’t,” Ingrid Katz says. “Someone must have dreamed it and talked about it and at some point the dream
became a news item. Trust me—I just called Laura White’s publisher and he, at least, doesn’t seem to have found any such manuscript.”