The Rabbit Back Literature Society (18 page)

It was daylight outside. Where had the evening gone?

She went back to the album, picked up the magnifying glass and looked at the photo again. Laura White sitting on the lawn with Martti Winter and Aura Jokinen. The yellow label read:
A lesson in L.W.’s garden. L.W. finds a promising passage in young Winter’s notebook, and a budding sci-fi writer grows bored
.

In the background was Laura White’s house. Ivy climbed the wall and the house was surrounded by colourful flower beds. The sun was high in the sky, the shadows short. Laura White and Martti Winter were sitting on the shore of the pond, absorbed in the notebook he was holding as Laura White explained something to him. Aura Jokinen was looking away.

Ella followed Aura Jokinen’s gaze with her finger. She did it again. The girl was looking into the house. The front door was half open. In the entryway, masked by light and shadow,
stood a child leaning his arm against the wall and staring at Aura Jokinen. That detail had almost escaped her.

The magnifying glass revealed his delicate face.

He wasn’t any of the recognizable members of the Society.

“Nice to meet you,” Ella whispered to the boy in the picture, the first tenth member.

T
HERE WAS A SOFT PILLOW
, hot drops of moisture on her thighs—the lewd remains of a dream. Her eyes opened slowly. Light reflecting from the walls and ceiling flooded over her. Too much light.

Images floated halfway between the dark and the light. She tried to take hold of them, but they were woven into the
dimness
, too delicate for her touch.

Her mouth opened in a yawn so wide that her jaw cracked; air rushed into her lungs and out again. Her breath probed the flesh it inhabited, measuring its outlines and outer reaches,
focusing
until the most important details were in place. Ella Amanda Milana. Lovely, curving lips, painterly nipples, defective ovaries.

When she had assembled herself, Ella Milana pinpointed her location in time and space and imagined she could feel her personal future snapping into place in her spinal cord.

She swung her feet to the floor and recommenced her
literary
historical research.

She went downstairs and found a letter that made her an heir of the missing authoress.

The letter had been waiting for her on the kitchen table on a pile of fresh advertising flyers, not far from the butter dish and the bread basket. It had been sent by one Otto Bergman, Master of Law, and was addressed to “Ella Milana, Member, Rabbit Back Literature Society”.

“Something to do with the Literature Society,” her mother had said from behind her newspaper. The kitchen smelled of toast. “Open it and tell me whether it’s good news or bad news.”

Ella ripped open the envelope. At the very beginning of the letter it mentioned that the same letter had been sent to the other members of the Society. It had the stamp of a law firm. The paper was thicker than ordinary letter paper, its texture unusual against her fingers.

Ella poured herself some coffee and sat down to read it.

“It says that Laura White has willed all of her possessions to the Rabbit Back Literature Society except for a sum to be spent on establishing an annual writer’s grant. Her house will be separately transferred to the foundation and awarded to the members of the Society for their use in perpetuity.”

“Well, well,” her mother said. “But what does it mean?”

Ella kept reading. The letter said that every member of the Society would be paid a substantial sum of money once the will had gone through. The letter also emphasized that Laura White’s death would not be declared any time soon:

Ella thought she could hear the most distant part of her personal future creak, give way with a bang as it once again changed its shape, and then quiver somewhere inside her spine. She felt a little dizzy.

When Martti Winter opened the door, the first thing he looked at was the pack of dogs in front of the house. When Ella Milana waved a hand and said she had come for coffee, he was visibly cheered.

“Marvellous!” he said, showing her in with a hand on her back and checking the dogs’ positions as he closed the door again. “I’ll make us some coffee and we can have a piece of cake and a chat!”

The low winter light filtered through the windows. Ella noticed that in daylight Martti Winter’s home looked like a chocolate box—most of the furniture was confectionery in colour and shape, like dark and light chocolates.

He led her into one of the small downstairs rooms. Inside was a small, round table and chairs, a carpet the colour of vanilla ice cream and some small paintings. Ella sat at the table and set her bag down next to her chair.

On the table was a china teapot, a large chocolate cake, and a wide selection of sweet rolls, pastries and other treats.

“You were quite sure that I would come,” she said with a smile.

Winter raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“The table’s already set, I see,” she said, pointing at the dishes of treats.

Winter nodded awkwardly and went to fetch her a cup and plate.

The two of them chatted about the weather, the passing of time, the stray dogs running around, the flavour of the
chocolate
cake and the mythological figurines scattered around the house. There was a knee-high, stone gnome in a corner of the room, grinning wickedly, and a wooden carving of a woman lolling near the door, a dazzlingly well-endowed figure, her lower body veiled by her hair.

“I didn’t buy them myself,” Winter said. “It’s impossible to live in Rabbit Back without receiving them from everyone as gifts.”

Ella wolfed down a meringue, talked a bit about Laura White’s house, and then enquired, as if the thought had just occurred to her, whether it would be at all possible to get into White’s house and look around.

“I was supposed to meet her, and then everything happened the way it happened…” she said, “and it would be so interesting to see the place where it all began.”

Martti Winter pondered the question over two strawberry waffles and one caramel napoleon. “I understand, of course. You got the letter from the lawyer. And naturally I can see why you would feel a desire to see the house. The rest of us spent a lot of time at Laura’s house in our day.”

“I’m sure you must know the place through and through,” Ella sighed.

Winter shook his head. “Not through and through. There are a lot of places in that house where we never went. We didn’t run around the place. That was unheard of. We knew from the start where it was all right to go and where it wasn’t. We always went where Laura told us to.”

He sat sunk in thought for a moment. “So I can assure you that all ten members of the Society will better acquaint themselves with the place as soon as the estate is distributed—including you, naturally. That may take five or ten years, according to the attorney’s letter.”

“Yes. Ten years,” Ella said. “I was thinking, though, that perhaps we could take a peek at the house earlier than that. After all, someone ought to check in on the place.”

Winter smiled at her eagerness and explained with elaborate patience that the house was taken care of by a trusted employee, “Old Man Bohm”, who lived nearby and went now and then to make sure the pipes hadn’t broken and turned the place into a swimming pool. “I don’t think any of us has a key to the house,” he concluded.

Ella gave up the fight and led the conversation back to the delightful flavour of the cake, a subject on which they were in perfect accord, but she couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that must be in that house—letters, notes, photographs, unfinished manuscripts, maybe even Laura White’s personal diary.

“I had a question about one of the photographs,” Ella said. She put the photo in front of him. It was the one of Aura Jokinen and Laura White together. “See the boy standing in the doorway?”

Martti Winter raised his eyebrows. “Why, yes.”

“Do you think it might be the tenth member of the Society?” Ella asked. “The first tenth member?”

Winter looked at the photo up close, squinting, his mouth partly open. “It could be. It must be. As far as I know, no other children but the members ever visited Laura’s house. She didn’t especially like children, actually. She liked the ten
of us, of course, but she thought of us as specimens. We weren’t ordinary children to her. She said something once about how children—all children except us, of course—were in her opinion tiresome, noisy, stupid, soulless creatures who gave her a headache.” Winter smiled. “That wasn’t the sort of thing one put on the cover of a Creatureville book, of course. She just didn’t want to have anything to do with children except at one remove, through her books. Once she actually said that she was surprised that it was children who read her books, since she had by no means written them with children in mind.”

Ella asked whether the photo helped him remember anything more about the dead boy. Winter cut himself a fourth piece of cake and poured them both some more coffee. Then he looked at his guest with a sly smile and wiped his lips. A few crumbs fell onto the breast of his dark shirt.

“Do you mean that we should take a break from coffee and continue The Game where you feel we left off?”

Ella was taken aback by his gentle teasing. She was
immediately
conscious of the fact that her nakedness was his to control. His gaze at the moment was tracing her birthmarks and other distinguishing features with a sureness that was impossible to mistake. She felt herself at a disadvantage. She had a moment of panic, but then looked with cold, analytic eyes at the man who had won her nakedness from her.

What a big lump of a creature he was, with his pudgy hands, pumpkin head and gingerbread smile! Let him have the map to her flesh if it made him happy. It was nothing but a stripped doll in the clumsy, sweaty hands of an oaf who didn’t even know what to do with it.

Gradually she felt a return of the strength he had
momentarily
stolen. He sensed the change; Ella could see it in his eyes, the same eyes that were in the photo of the handsome young author on the jacket flaps.

“Actually,” she said softly, “I was thinking we could just talk about it like two normal people.”

“I see,” he said, surprised. “I can certainly tell you, at least, that I still don’t remember the boy’s name.”

“Really?”

“Really. We never actually wanted to get to know him. He may have been a member of the Society, but he was never
one of us
. We didn’t want to know his name. We didn’t want to know anything about him.”

Ella looked surprised.

“Think about it,” Winter said. “A child on his way to becoming a writer, like us, and yet so far above us that we couldn’t even imitate him. How could we possibly have liked him?”

“I assume you weren’t overwhelmed with grief when he died, then?”

“Grief is the wrong word,” Winter said with a vague look in his eyes. “We were shocked, of course. But we didn’t grieve. On my own behalf I can say that although I wasn’t glad he had died, I did feel liberated, in a way. Like I had escaped from his shadow.”

Ella looked at the layers of chocolate cake. A disturbing thought came to her.

“Shall I put on some music?” Winter asked.

“No. Or go ahead, if you like.”

“Don’t you like music?”

Ella smiled. “Music is just sound at varying pitch to me. It
crumbles in my ears like a rye crisp. And I didn’t come here to listen to music.”

“Why did you come, then?”

“To drink coffee and chat,” Ella said. “You invited me. Have you forgotten?”

She looked at Winter. He had a surprised smile on his moon face that made her nervous.

“Well, what is it?”

“You’re blushing.”

“Blushing? Don’t be silly. Why in the world would I be blushing over a cup of coffee?”

Then she realized that her cheeks were, in fact, hot.

“Like a little girl,” he said teasingly. “What were you just thinking about? Tell me. I’ll give you a cookie if you do.”

“I wasn’t thinking about anything,” Ella said coolly, fearing that she was blushing even more. She was remembering with excruciating detail the dream she’d had the night before.

They looked at each other for a long time—a young woman with lovely, curving lips and a defective part at her very centre, and a massive man with old photograph eyes in a moon face and a half-eaten Danish in his hand.

“At this part of the movie the girl always gets up and leaves,” Winter said at last. “In case you’re not sure what to do.”

Ella shoved the photo back into her bag and stood up. “Goodbye, Mr Winter. Thanks for the coffee and cake.”

He walked her to the door.

Ella went down the icy steps slowly, a slight smile on her lips, until she saw a German Shepherd and a spaniel skulking on the other side of the snowy meadow.

“What draws them here?” she asked, pulling on her gloves.

“That I don’t know,” Winter said. “But you should come again, for coffee and a chat. Before we play each other out
completely
and stop saying hello when we meet. That will happen eventually, but we’re not there yet.”

Ella Milana returned to Martti Winter’s house for five days in a row.

They drank coffee, ate baked treats and chatted. Ella enjoyed herself but didn’t forget her research—at every visit she
managed
to gather useful information.

Winter talked more about how Laura White had taught him to look at everything with an outsider’s eyes.

“We were supposed to look at ourselves that way, too,” he said. “She would take us in front of a mirror and make us stare at our own reflection until it started to feel alien and peculiar. Then we were supposed to write a description of ourselves and imagine that it was written by someone else, someone who had never seen a human face before. She tore up my first five attempts. It wasn’t until the sixth one that I accomplished what she was looking for.

“When I read it aloud to the others, Silja Saaristo ran out of the room and threw up. Laura looked ecstatic, her eyes were glowing, and she clapped. ‘Look at Martti!’ she shouted to the others. ‘He has a writer’s eyes.’

“I didn’t show that piece to my mother. It used to make her cry when I made faces and twisted my eyes up. ‘You’re such a good-looking boy,’ she would say. ‘Don’t deliberately make yourself ugly.’ If she had read the description I wrote it would have broken her heart.”

The story of the butterfly made a particular impression on Ella.