The Rabbit Back Literature Society (19 page)

“Once Laura asked me to stay behind when the others were leaving. She gave me a caterpillar and said that my first task was to grow it into a butterfly. I put it in a pickle jar and gave it fresh leaves every day. I went to Laura’s house every day
specially
to take care of it. Then the caterpillar made a cocoon, of course, and one day a butterfly squirmed out of it. It was a tortoiseshell butterfly. I was incredibly proud of it, almost as if I had created it myself.

“Then Laura picked up the jar from the table, held it between us, and asked me what my feelings were about the butterfly. I thought about it for a moment, and I answered that I liked it and cared a great deal about it, because I had raised it. She nodded. Then she gave me a little brown bottle and told me it was ether. She told me to pour some into the jar.

“I obeyed, naturally. The butterfly began to behave strangely, rolled over and felt the glass wall of the jar with its proboscis. Laura said, ‘Look, it’s dying.’ And I looked.

“I was crying, and I was ashamed, and eventually my
butterfly
was lying dead at the bottom of the jar, and I still didn’t know exactly what I was expected to do.

“Then Laura gave me a homework assignment. She told me to write about something. I asked what I should write about. She said, ‘Anything.’ The main thing was that I should write at least five hundred words, about anything at all.

“I went home and sat with the blank paper in front of me for what seemed like ages. Then I started to write. I spent several days writing that piece. I hardly took time to eat or sleep. I got up secretly during the night and wrote. When the piece was finished, I went to my mother, who was reading a book in the garden, and handed it to her.”

Winter closed his eyes and smiled.

“It was about a cowboy named Billy James who had a horse that injured its leg. In the end he had to shoot the horse with his revolver. My mother read it with tears in her eyes, hugged me tightly, and said, ‘Good gracious, Martti, that is what I call a real story.’”

Ella leaned forward, the half-eaten cookie in her hand forgotten.

“What did Laura White say about your story?” She was more spellbound than was perhaps desirable in a researcher.

“She said I should write it again. She told me to write the whole thing three more times. When I’d written the fourth version, she let me read it to the others.”

They sat for some time without speaking. It felt natural that they should both think their own thoughts for a moment. Ella looked around. The room was high, the ceiling covered in chocolate-coloured panels decorated with skilfully carved reliefs of gambolling wood nymphs. Martti Winter said that he’d ordered them from a local woodworker with the proceeds from his first successful novel. The carvings were based on a dream he’d had numerous times.

“They would always lure me into their dance and then get me lost in a deep forest. It’s in their nature. They want to seduce you, to cause your destruction, but most of all they want to be seen. I sensed beforehand that if I commissioned the work, I would stop having the dream, and that’s what happened. But when I saw the woodworker later he said that he had started dreaming about the carving. I’ll bet his dreams were just as damp and horrible.”

Ella glanced at the clock and got up from the table.

Martti Winter said, “Ella Milana, my dear, will you come again tomorrow? I enjoy having someone to talk to for the first time in a long while. I had forgotten how pleasant a chat and a cup of coffee can be. For some reason you don’t get on my nerves nearly as much as most people do.”

“I may not be able to come,” Ella said. “I promised my mother I would go with her to Tampere to see my aunt.”

Ella broke that promise.

“I have a lot of work to do,” she told her mother the next morning. “I’ll drop you off at the station, of course. And if you plan to be in Tampere for the whole week I could drive there in the Triumph in a couple of days, once I’ve got my work where it ought to be.”

“Well, let’s do that, then,” her mother sighed. “Though I don’t see how your project’s going to fall apart if you leave it for a few days. What you need is to meet some nice young man and do a little courting before you forget how. I didn’t raise you to be an old maid. Even a wallflower has to bloom sometime.”

Ella looked over her notes. She was delighted at how much information she had gathered just from chatting with Martti Winter over coffee and cake. If Professor Korpimäki started asking her for her Laura White material, she would at least have something. A lousy researcher she would have been, if she let such information go uncollected.

As she drove up to Winter’s house for the seventh day in a row and walked to the door humming to herself, she noticed that there was a key left in the front lock.

A bicycle leaned against the porch, glittering with frost. Ella thought she recognized it.

She let herself in and listened to the silence for a moment. A plastic bag from Rabbit Market lay on the floor by the door, full of chocolates and other sweets. There was a pair of woman’s boots in the middle of the entryway with snow still on them.

She heard muffled talk from upstairs.

Ella went up to the second floor. She could hear a woman’s voice from a room she knew Martti Winter used for his daily nap—he had shown it to her a couple of days before.

She pushed the door open.

The venetian blinds cut the daylight into thin slices that painted stripes across everything in the room. The air was heavy and there was an odd smell that Ella didn’t recognize right away. In the middle of the room was a heavy-framed bed. Martti Winter lay on it. His breathing was laboured. Ingrid Katz was bent over him like a hungry phantom groping for blood to drink.

“Is he sick?” Ella asked, stepping over the threshold.

“Ah, the baby writer,” Ingrid Katz gasped. “Hello there. It’s getting crowded around here.”

Ingrid Katz and Martti Winter were nearly invisible, shadows cast over them like a pile of quilts. Ella squinted, trying to make out the scene. It occurred to her that Ingrid might be torturing or perhaps even murdering Martti Winter.

“Hello, Madame Librarian,” Ella said.

Ingrid snorted. “There aren’t any librarians here. Just I. Katz, author and member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society. I came to check on the condition of my comrade, to make sure he was all right.”

Martti Winter let out a groan like someone suffering an agonizing death.

Ingrid Katz smiled and shot a quick glance at Ella.

“Our dear fellow author has eaten till he’s a bit bloated and isn’t up to his usual duties. I know him like the back of my hand, so I have a certain responsibility for him. I know him almost better than I know myself. And the same is true for him. He knows me. Don’t you, Martti?” She smiled at him with tears in her eyes and whispered, “I know what makes him tick as if I’d built him myself. When you’ve learned a person’s thoughts and needs through and through, you can never leave him for good.”

Martti Winter whispered, “Ingrid, my call last night was a moment of weakness. I was terrified and alone. If you had answered, I’m sure I would have said right away that it was a mistake. You can’t come here with your own key anymore. That’s what we agreed on. You think you know me, but you don’t, not anymore.”

“Don’t I?”

“No,” he whispered triumphantly. “There are new things inside me.”

He groaned again. Ella noticed now that Ingrid’s hand was under the blanket, and she realized what it was she was doing to him.

She ought to have left. Everyone present, including herself, knew that it was the only sensible thing to do. Her feet wanted to leave; the door was waiting to be slammed. She didn’t leave.

She stood in the dark room to watch the strange scene that her presence didn’t seem to alter.

“Oh, you have new things inside you, do you?” Ingrid said, half teasingly and half sadly. “So you don’t need Ingrid anymore?”

“No,” Winter gasped. “I don’t. Don’t come here anymore.”

“That’s what he says now,” Ingrid said to Ella. “Now that poor Ingrid has done her job.”

“Naturally it was necessary to conclude what you started, without my permission and in the middle of my nap, but don’t provide this service for me again, Ingrid.”

Katz pulled her hand out from under the covers and wiped it with utmost calm on a tissue.

“If you can get the job done without me then naturally I’ll leave you in peace. I apologize. I simply thought…”

“Thank you and goodbye,” Winter said.

Ingrid nodded. “I do have a life of my own, after all, a family, children—and I’m a rather good mother. I try to live that life as much as I can. Except when I’m sometimes pulled into The Game, as I was the other day by our baby writer. And I worry about you sometimes. You know, I’ve been having bad dreams about you. We haven’t seen each other in ages, you and I, and when you called, I started to think…”

“There’s no need to worry about me,” Winter said gently. “Go back to your family and your library. But first give me a few tissues.”

Ingrid looked at Ella thoughtfully. Suspiciously, in fact. “But Martti, does this girl really like you?”

“You would have to ask her that,” Winter said wearily. “But please don’t.”

Ingrid Katz walked twice around the bed and stopped at the foot, her hands on her hips. “Well, Martti, I’ll leave you in
peace. But you must promise that you’ll be all right. And that if you’re not all right, you’ll let me know immediately. I don’t need you, but I do need to know at all times that things are all right with you.

“Well, goodbye then,” Ingrid said to Ella with everyday good cheer, as if she’d been there watering the flowers.

Then she calmly left, with a smile on her face.

Ella was left alone with Winter.

He was still lying motionless on the bed. The conversation he and Ingrid had just had seemed inauthentic to Ella, made of paper. As if she’d walked into the middle of a play. Maybe that’s what happened when people became writers and knew each other so well that there was no need to speak anymore. Authentic communication was quickly replaced by written drama.

Ella adjusted the blinds to let more light into the room. She would have opened the window as well but she couldn’t make the latch work.

There was a black and white photo on the wall of Martti Winter and Ingrid Katz at about ten years old. They were holding hands. In the background was Laura White’s house and the swing in her garden. White herself sat on the swing holding a pen and a notepad.

Ella paced back and forth around the bed and looked at Winter from different angles, trying to teach her eyes to see his essence in new ways.

While she did this, she came up with the beginnings of a theory of the varying sources of human attractiveness. Attractive people come in two forms. Some people are attractive like beautiful objects that awaken aesthetic pleasure—they make
you want to own them, and to be seen in their company. People like Martti Winter, on the other hand, are attractive like
museums
, or palaces, or other architectural structures that a person seems to return to again and again to walk around and enjoy the atmosphere.

“So you came today, after all,” Winter said, turning his large head on the pillow to look at her.

“I should pour that glass of water over you,” Ella said.

She tried to make her voice cold, but the words rang like a gust of July wind. She sighed and stretched her hand out into the darkness. She wanted to touch his face and turn it towards the light, wanted to see the eyes that looked out from the Martti Winter jacket flaps. But he took hold of her wrist, held it for a moment, and shook his head.

“You should go now. Come back tonight after ten.”

Ella nodded and left.

That evening they played a round of The Game that brought the history of the Society into a whole new light, or rather threw it into an even deeper shadow, Ella thought later, sitting at her desk in a state of intellectual vertigo and aftershock.

Ella rang the doorbell. Martti Winter opened the door. He was wearing nothing but a wristwatch. The watch looked expensive and stylish. Ella guessed that it cost about as much as a
midsized
car.

She seemed to have lost her words somewhere.

Winter glanced at his watch, which Ella also tried to
concentrate
on. He said it was a couple of minutes past ten, and then he challenged her.

Ella nodded and glanced nervously at the dogs, who were staring at them from every direction. Winter’s nakedness seemed to make them nervous, too. There were more dogs than there had been before. Ella and Winter went inside and the pack of dogs stayed safely outside. Ella breathed easier.

Her discomfort returned, however, as Martti Winter went up the stairs. His flesh filled her whole field of vision. She
followed
him, her gaze fixed on his heels like a vice. They went into the blue room and sat in their usual places. “
Ecce homo
,” Winter said, and spread his arms.

Ella obeyed and looked at him, although she would have liked to look away. There was too much light in the room. He’d brought in too many lamps. There was something
pornographic
in the situation. She felt like crying. Winter picked up a handkerchief from the table and surprised her by tying it over his own eyes.

“I’m going to teach you a new manoeuvre. It’s called the mirror. It’s different from the other moves because the blindfold is tied on the challenger instead of the spiller.”

“Why?” Ella asked, her voice squeezed into a tight bunch.

A grim smile oozed over Winter’s face.

“That will become clear to you as we play. I’m going to make you my mirror. I apologize in advance for this, but…”

“The Game is The Game,” she said.

He nodded. He was frightened now, too.

“I want you,” he said, “to look at me as if you were my mirror, and convert my image into words and spill out everything that you think when you look at me.”

E
LLA SITS
before his great nakedness, small and terrified.

Martti Winter says, “If you have some yellow, now would be a good time to use it. If you don’t have any of your own, I have a bottle in the downstairs medicine cabinet. It clears the mirror very effectively. There’s a mini-fridge under the table. You’ll find some soft drinks there.”

Ella’s gaze wanders over his flesh. She doesn’t feel well. She opens the little blue refrigerator, takes out a bottle of Jaffa, finds three crystals of yellow in her bag, and drops them into the bottle. Then she drinks half of it.

“Spill,” Winter whispers. “Be my mirror. Service your fellow author, as the rules of The Game demand.”

“I see a naked man,” Ella begins, then clears her throat.

She concentrates. She closes everything out of her mind but the rules of The Game. Nothing else matters but honouring the rules of The Game. She has to build a precise picture of his nakedness in her mind and clothe it entirely in words, without concealing a single thought.

She relaxes as the sodium pentothal starts to take effect. Words form in her mouth, syllables line up on her tongue like the carriages of a mountain railway. She drinks the rest of the soda and notices that she’s already begun to speak.

“You’re big. So big. It’s bewildering how much skin you have,
like the frame tent I slept in as a child with my parents, and yet you manage to fill it completely. Your flesh shakes like jelly when you breathe. Looking at you makes me think of a large, soft creature that’s been brought onto land from the depths of the ocean. You’re not meant for humans to see. You have

Ella continues looking and talking.

She goes over his arms and legs, gives a precise
description
of his ears and the small details of his skin, notices a pale scar on his leg, occasionally returns to fatty forms whose shapeless excess is simultaneously troubling and fascinating. Somewhere deep inside she realizes that her words are cruel, but her surrender to the yellow and the rules of The Game has done its work.

Martti Winter sits the whole time in his chair motionless, listening.

As she spills, Ella gets up from her chair and comes over to Winter. Doing something can be spilling, too, she thinks hazily. She puts her hand on his chest, leans over, and kisses him.

He seems to answer her kiss from very far away.

Then Ella asks whether he’s satisfied with her answer. He nods, brushes her cheek and asks her to present her question.

She backs up, her legs rubbery from the yellow.

She stumbles and falls towards Martti Winter. Her hands sink into the folds of his stomach up to the wrists. She’s
horrified
, tries to get back on her feet, loses her balance again and falls face-first into his arms.

“Oops,” she mumbles. “I don’t seem to be all that graceful today.”

A moment later, back in her own chair, having collected herself, Ella asks, “Do we have to play The Game to the end today? The yellow makes me tired. Maybe I could ask my question the next time.”

“No,” Winter says. He takes off the blindfold and looks at her. “If we don’t play both turns today, as the rules require, we won’t be members of the Society anymore.”

To Ella’s relief, he goes to get dressed. She’s beginning to get used to his beanbag-chair shape, but she likes him better with his clothes on.

He comes back in gold slippers and black socks. The straight legs of his trousers fall over them. Ella remembers him talking earlier about his tailor. Under his luxurious smoking jacket she can see a white collar and an expensive silk tie.

“So,” he says. “Make me spill. Shall I wear the blindfold again, or would you like to try ‘the mirror’?”

Ella shakes her head and starts to tie the blindfold over his eyes. “I just want to ask you about one small thing so we can go to sleep. That’s my right, isn’t it? I have to make sure that you spill the entire truth, but the question can be easy and simple, can’t it?”

Winter concedes that she is correct.

Ella continues.

“You actually answered this same question a year ago in a magazine interview. So, Mr Winter—where do you get the ideas for your books?”

Ella smiles.

She assumes he will be amused by the carefree superficiality of her question.

Wrapped in his blindfold, Winter turns pale.