The Rabbit Back Literature Society (21 page)
Read The Rabbit Back Literature Society Online
Authors: Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen
Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary
One of the notebooks was more green than blue. That one was for the proud, quiet boy, the best one, the one who died last winter, whom they decided never to talk about again.
All nine of them were at the secret meeting: Martti, Ingrid, Silja, Helinä, Oona, Elias, Toivo, Anna-Maija and Aura.
Laura White said that writers shouldn’t talk to outsiders about their own affairs except through their writing. She didn’t
even tell the parents of the living members of the Society about the boy’s death. The children knew that when people don’t talk about something, it gradually ceases to be true. Within a few months they had succeeded in wiping the boy almost out of existence. It had been easy, because none of them knew how he died. They didn’t want to know.
The dead boy’s notebook was on the grass at Ingrid’s feet. Martti didn’t understand how she’d got it.
The dead boy had made notes in his book all the time and wouldn’t show it to anyone except Laura White. He must have collected at least a thousand ideas for books in it, a thousand wonderful ideas. Every one of them would have given anything for just one glimpse into that green notebook.
Elias had once tried to take it by force. The boy flew into a terrible fit of rage and Elias was so afraid that he peed his pants.
Did you see his eyes when I tried to take his notebook away from him? I’m sure he would have killed me if I hadn’t given up.
Suddenly Martti understands that his duty is to protect the Society. Ingrid is delirious with fever, and angry—she might do anything at all. Martti imagines the parents breaking into Laura White’s house just as one of them is reading a story and tearing their children away.
Our child will not remain in a club where children are suddenly dying without warning. There are other hobbies besides writing. We’ll buy a violin or an accordion and pay for some music lessons!
He raises his arm and is about to shout to Ingrid, then he slips, falls with a thud onto his back, and slides into a patch of thistles. The sky rushes open and rain starts to drum against the ground. As Martti struggles back to his feet he sees the red
dress with the books running far off down the tree-lined road that leads to the library.
When Ingrid comes out of the library, Martti is hiding behind a tree. He watches as she stands in front of the building, damp and shivering.
Martti remembers what Laura White said about the library:
The building is quite pretty, almost worthy of all the books inside it
.
The authoress’s words also reached the ears of Tuomo Lindgren, the owner of the stone works. A couple of nights earlier, Martti had gone to the kiosk to buy his mother some cigarettes. Lindgren was there, bragging drunkenly to his friends that he would “knock Ms White’s socks off, make her eyes bulge right out of her head”.
Hell, I’ve got my own stone works, after all. I’ve got the cash to do whatever I want, and I’m the kind of guy who, if I think something up, even God isn’t going to stop me! I never read a book in my life, and I never plan to, but hey, if Miss Fancypants Author wants something to look at, I’m the man to do it, and you can bet it’ll get done. Do you know how much it costs to ship those damn marble blocks all the way from Italy? Do you? I do, because I just went to the bank to pay a pretty big bill for marble, and it didn’t even phase me. Ha!
Ingrid is standing in front of the building and her hands are empty.
She’s left Laura White’s books in the library.
Martti runs to her, his shoes splashing in the rain. Her shoulders burn under his fingers. “Ingrid! Ingrid! The books! The notebook! Why did you do it?”
Ingrid’s eyes glisten strangely. She sighs, goes limp and slumps to her knees.
“I guess I don’t feel very well,” she mumbles. “But I’m not sick. I just need to rest for a while.”
Martti leaves her and runs into the library.
He can see a book cart near the check-out desk. When he squints he can just make out the green-covered notebook among the others. It’s the most important one. He has to act fast.
He glances behind him and sees that Ingrid is no longer on her knees—she’s lying prone on the ground, her face in a puddle.
It’s impossible to run in two directions at the same time. He knows that. But grabbing the book will only take a couple of seconds—he can do it and still help Ingrid up before she drowns.
He dashes towards the cart, then stops like he’s hit a wall.
A long, grey face adorned with thick glasses appears in front of him.
Birgit Ström, the old librarian, is a friendly person, and she of all people knows to hold the young members of the Rabbit Back Literature Society in high esteem. On the other hand, she is merciless to anyone she sees as a threat to the welfare of the books.
Martti remembers a story he heard in town: The mayor himself once tried to walk into the library with an Eskimo pie in his hand. Birgit Ström craned forward from behind her desk, grabbed the ice cream, dropped it into the wastebin and welcomed the mayor to her “house of civilizing literature”.
“I see our budding author is quite wet,” Birgit Ström says, reaching her long arm out in front of him as if she were about to give him a hug. “Perhaps the bard should take a look at himself. Look how he’s dripping on the floor! Drip, drip, drip. As we all know, books definitely do not like water. Perhaps our young writer should come back when he’s a bit drier. Someone
has already run through here all wet and left puddles on the floor. What a shame.”
Martti stares at the librarian’s breasts, which hang down like long beanbags. He spins around and runs out to help the sputtering Ingrid out of the puddle. Then he takes her home.
Martti searches the library for the notebook for four days. He goes through the stacks systematically, one book at a time. Sometimes he has to start over when he realizes he hasn’t been thorough enough. Hopelessness and exhaustion creep up on him and he even considers asking the librarian for assistance.
But he rejects the idea, because if he did, the entire future of the Society might be in danger.
He spends all day Thursday and Friday searching, going home only to eat. Birgit Ström observes him and assumes he’s performing some task given to him by Laura White, since he doesn’t say anything.
Then the weekend comes and the library is closed. He returns on Monday and Tuesday, and late on Tuesday afternoon, when he’s up to the letter J, he sees the notebook, with
RABBIT BACK LITERATURE SOCIETY
printed on its spine, peeking out from between two thick books. Martti can barely repress a squeal.
He checks to make sure Birgit Ström isn’t in visual range and pulls the notebook off the shelf. Its cover is stuck to the book next to it. When he peels the books apart it makes a nasty sound and some of the green fabric from the notebook’s cover remains stuck to its neighbour.
He looks to right and left, and up to the higher levels as well, where a golden light makes the dust motes dance, then stuffs the notebook under his shirt and walks out of the library.
The memory breaks off at this point. The boy with the book stops, leans forward on the axis of time, grows three decades older, and is sitting in a blue room wearing a blindfold.
Martti Winter finishes speaking. He lets the moment rest. There are no more words. “May I have some more soda?” he asks from within the darkness, which he has come to strangely enjoy. “And put a crystal of yellow in it.”
A bottle materializes in his hand and he drinks from it.
“What happened then?” the girl’s voice says.
“I didn’t open the notebook,” Winter hears himself say. “I didn’t dare. I knew that if it was going to be opened, the whole Society ought to do it together. The book should either never be opened, or we should open it together and destroy it. That’s what I thought. I went
to tell Toivo and Elias that we needed to have a meeting. I sent Toivo to tell Oona, Helinä and Silja. Elias told Aura and Anna-Maija. I told everyone that they shouldn’t disturb Ingrid because she was home with a fever.
We met on top of the hill where the water tower is. It was getting dark, and the members had to make up all kinds of excuses for being out so late.
The sun was setting and the light shone only on our hilltop. All the rest of Rabbit Back was already covered in darkness. I told the others that I had the dead boy’s notebook, but I didn’t tell them where I’d got it. They didn’t need to know that Ingrid had stolen something from Laura White’s house.
They were all amazed, excited and afraid. I’m sure I was more afraid than they were, although I acted like a cool-headed leader. I insisted that not a word should be breathed about the notebook or our secret meeting to anyone who wasn’t there. Not to Laura White, not to our parents, not to Ingrid. I’d brought Ingrid a big box of liquorice as a sort of secret recompense for what I was planning to do.
Ingrid said later that the last thing she remembered about that day was our argument at the dead rat’s grave, and I saw no reason to tell her what went on while she was in her fever.
I made my comrades swear. Everyone spit on the same spot on the ground. Then we mixed the spit together and each one put their finger in it and put some of the common spit in their mouths. It sounds stupid and revolting now, but we all took the ritual very seriously. Even Elias didn’t joke about it.
I said that I thought the notebook should be destroyed to protect the Society and that there would be no discussion about it, but that we ought to discuss whether we should read it before we destroyed it.
We knew that the most gifted writer in the Society had diligently filled up his notebook. We knew the kinds of stories he had read to us. He wasn’t any older than us, but his stories were so great that all we understood about them was that they were extremely good and very deep. When we listened to him read them, we were all overcome with sacred reverence, even though we hated the boy himself.
We all understood that the notebook contained ideas for at least a thousand books.
I asked who wanted to read it, but no one dared to look at me.
Then I asked who wanted to go home and forget the whole thing, and no one said anything.
I got an idea and I said, Fine, this is what we’ll do. Does anybody have a watch? Someone did. Good. I told them I would leave the notebook here on the hilltop overnight and go home. Each one of us would have an hour to come and read the dead boy’s notebook, or not to come if they didn’t want to. I would come last, at sunrise, and destroy the notebook. I could burn it in the sauna oven at home, since my mother would be heating it up the next day.
And that’s what we did. The notebook was left on the top of the hill.
When day was breaking, I woke up on Church Hill, where I had been sleeping in some bushes, and went to get the notebook from the water tower, as we had agreed.
So I didn’t know for sure whether the others had read the notebook or not, and we agreed that it was something we could never ask about in The Game. But I could see in their eyes later that they had read it, every one of them. I don’t remember anything else about the book itself, but I do remember that it had amazing things in it, things that I couldn’t even really understand at the time.
And every night, to this day, I still dream about that notebook. I tried for a long time to forget about it. I regretted reading it. In the end I did succeed in forgetting its contents. I don’t remember what was in it, at least not when I’m awake, although I’ve tried a few times. But every night I dream that I’m reading the notebook that the dead genius wrote, the book Ingrid stole, that I and the others read by the water tower that night. And every time I dream about it, I wake up with at least one or two ideas.
All of my ideas come from that notebook. A couple of times I’ve thought an idea was my own, and tried to start writing about it, but then Silja Saaristo would manage to publish a novel about it first, and then Elias would write something about it, and I’d know I’d been mistaken. I don’t have any ideas of my own. Maybe none of us do. All we have are the thousand ideas that we stole from the dead boy.
And that’s where I get the ideas for my books
.
T
HE GAME ENDED
when Martti Winter, the great author, fell asleep in his chair, knocked out by the yellow.
Ella put her feet up on her chair, wrapped her arms around her legs, thought for a moment, and said, “I accept your answer.”
They sat in the blueness for five minutes, silent and unmoving. Then the great author shifted in his seat, smacked his lips, and woke up enough to sigh, “And to top it off, I couldn’t destroy the notebook. I wrapped it in oilcloth and buried it in the garden. Which may explain why it’s come here.”
Ella stiffened. “Why what’s come here?”
Winter had fallen asleep again.
Ella gathered up four blankets from the neighbouring rooms and covered him with them. She was about to leave when he reached his empty hand towards her, as if it held something fragile and valuable, and whispered, “His name is on the first page. Look. Such lovely, neat handwriting. ‘Oskar’, it says. ‘Oskar Södergran’.”
Ella went downstairs into the piano room. She opened the terrace door and was about to step outside. She heard the barks and growls of the pack of dogs on the other side of the wall and decided to stay inside.
She shut the door and pressed her face against the window. Not a single light was burning in the garden.
She wondered if there was anyone in Rabbit Back who could install garden lights at this hour of night.
Sorry, I know it’s late,
but we need light immediately in Martti Winter’s garden, where the statues dance their frozen dances and the trees spread their branches like squids in some historical nightmare—can you come right away?
While she was wading through the snow in the garden she had been overcome by the feeling that a malevolent creature was lurking nearby.
And somewhere in the garden was the notebook of Oskar Södergran, who died when he was still a boy.
Ella felt herself growing angry at the turn things were taking. Secret members, stolen notebooks, pilfered writing ideas—it was all so ridiculous!
She touched her nose to the window glass, focused on her own reflection, and thought that if she kept this up her research was bound to uncover Laura White’s body and a mass grave filled with other bodies and a bomb left over from the war and several buried treasures and a selection of secret tunnels that led to amazing, unknown places.
She tugged the curtains over the window and began looking through the antique bookcase which held all of Martti Winter’s works behind a pair of glass doors. There were twenty-four of them. She opened the doors, took out
Mr Butterfly
, and looked at the photo on the jacket flap for a long time.
After a moment’s search she found a pen, wrote something in the book, and left the book and the pen on the piano.
When she walked out the front door, the dogs went quiet.
There were dogs everywhere—they had even surrounded the Triumph. Most of them were at the side of the house, right near the wall. They looked like they were keeping an eye on all the doors and windows. They watched her pass with black eyes, ears stiff.
Ella knew one of the dogs. He was her neighbour’s old beagle, recognizable from the star-shaped spot on his side. She had often given him a pat.
“Tiplu,” she said, “your mama’s going to be very worried about you.”
The beagle turned his head away.
The other dogs pricked up their ears, alert. A large German Shepherd under a garden light got to its feet and took a couple of steps towards her.
Ella felt not just cross now, but also stupid. That would really complete her evening, to feed herself to a pack of dogs!
She opened the door of her dead father’s Triumph, got in the car, and closed the door behind her. The window was nearly frozen over, but she could stop and clean it once she’d got away from Winter’s occupying canine army.
Ella Milana had always thought of Martti Winter as a genius.
Now it seemed the ideas in his novels had been stolen from the notebook of a child prodigy. The same shadow had been cast over the work of the other writers in the Society. Even Ingrid Katz might have read the dead boy’s notebook before her comrades got to it.
“Shit. It’s all shit,” she said several times, as Ingrid had taught her the night of Laura White’s disappearance.
Ella sat at her desk and thought about what she’d learned and about what would happen when she published the results of her research. She drew a chart on a piece of paper. She had to organize her thoughts.
The revelation was sure to cause a scandal. As Ella
understood
it, however, it wouldn’t diminish the value of the works
themselves—they were what they were, whether they were created by the person mentioned on the cover or by somebody else. But it would send a shockwave through the history of literature.
Ella wrote:
REVISION OF LITERARY HISTORY. WORKS RETAIN THEIR VALUE. SCANDAL! INCREASED SALES?
The rules of The Game stated:
Secrets revealed during The Game are confidential. They can be used as the raw material for literature, but they cannot be published in any other form or be made known to anyone outside the Society. Any member who knowingly breaches this confidentiality will be punished by permanent expulsion from the Society
.
Ella would have to betray Winter, and the whole Rabbit Back Literature Society, which now included herself. In fact she would throw the writers of the Society into such darkness that they would never get back into the light. The idea theft would inevitably destroy their credibility. The media would rip them to shreds.
With stiff fingers she scratched onto the paper:
ME: NO LONGER A PLAYER—INFORMATION SUPPLY CUT OFF! NO SHARE IN WHITE’S INHERITANCE. RELATIONS WITH WRITERS BROKEN. SOCIETY DESTROYED. TRAITOR.
Then something disturbing started to creep in at the edges of Ella’s consciousness. She tried to chase the thought away before it became too clear, but her hand started to move across the paper of its own accord, and the following appeared:
HOW DID OSKAR SÖDERGRAN DIE?
Ella blinked. What if someone in the Society was responsible for Oskar Södergran’s death?
She clenched her cold fingers and wondered just how much the other children of the Society had hated and envied Oskar Södergran. Enough to steal his ideas, at any rate, and use them
to build their own careers, that was clear. But enough to cause his death? Competition strong enough to drive someone to murder?
Ella felt a tingling in her gut.
For her own peace of mind she had to assume that the members of the Society were innocent of the boy’s death—at least until she was forced to conclude otherwise.
She looked at what she’d written. It brought tears to her eyes.
What joy is there in research, anyway?
someone had once asked in one of her methodology courses. The teaching assistant’s answer had made an impression on Ella at the time:
Research brings order to the world. It makes things clearer, helps us to understand things. Could there be any more joy than that? Did you ever put together puzzles as a child? The universe is a puzzle with billions of pieces. Putting it together is society’s highest shared responsibility, our right and our joy—and not only that, it is what separates us from the whole rest of creation, with a few possible exceptions.
Ella buried her face in her hands and let out an exasperated sigh.
In her dream, Ella Milana was climbing the water tower hill.
The cement steps were steep and narrow, so she was going carefully. To fall would be fatal. She wondered whether she would get there in time, whether the green notebook would already be buried in Martti Winter’s garden. She had to get there to make notes for her research. She needed to write down everything she could, because anything that wasn’t written down would be lost forever.
A red streak on the horizon foretold the approach of sunrise, but Rabbit Back was still in shadow, the people asleep.
She heard a creak and turned around. The steel door of the cement booth was ajar.
She peeked inside. There was a little table in the room. Around it were ten small chairs of different shapes and sizes, truly bizarre little chairs, and Ella couldn’t fit into any of them.
There was a book on the table. It wasn’t the green notebook, it was a printed novel. The cover said
THE RETURN OF EMPEROR RAT, BY LAURA WHITE. UNFINISHED, UNPROOFED COPY
.
Ella reached for the book, then jumped when someone behind her said:
It’s coming, and she’s leaving
.
In the corner was a hat rack. On top of it sat a green parrot, eyeing her. Ella started to say something to it, but then there was a loud noise outside.
When she looked out the door, she saw Laura White’s body loping down the hillside like a skittish white rabbit.
It’s coming
, the parrot said.
What is?
Ella asked.
What’s coming?
Emperor Rat. It’s coming, and she’s leaving.
Two days after The Game, Professor Korpimäki called Ella Milana and asked how her information gathering was coming along.
“Very well,” Ella exclaimed in a voice oozing with
enthusiasm
. “Rolling along like a freight train. In fact, I was just on my way to the post office to send you something.”
When the call ended, she finished the television show she’d been watching, then went upstairs to her room, dutifully wrote out some descriptions of Laura White and the activities of the Society, and sent them to her professor.
She didn’t include the information she’d collected playing The Game. The crumbs she’d gathered chatting with Winter would be enough to thrill him.
Ella had another dream:
She was lying naked in her bed and hundreds of literature professors were standing around her room, Professor Korpimäki among them. He leaned over her, plucked absent-mindedly at her pubic hair, and whispered,
We’re very worried. You understand, don’t you? We have to have that notebook.
I understand
, Ella said, trying to pull the blanket up and cover herself. The blanket was the size of a handkerchief and filled with notes she’d written in secret that she didn’t want the professor to see.
I believe you, really I do, but the others aren’t as confident that you’re up to the task,
the professor said, taking a pistol out of his breast pocket and aiming it at her head, then passing it to her, handle first.
Take this. Don’t hesitate to use it if the situation demands it.
Ella woke up, and lay awake the rest of the night.
When morning came, she had come to some kind of compromise.
Of course she could do more research. She could use The Game for good. There was no better tool imaginable for research on the Society. She didn’t have to make any final decisions one way or the other. She wouldn’t reveal any shocking or sensitive information to her professor just yet. And she wouldn’t reveal what she was doing to the other members of the Society.
*
Ella called Martti Winter, started by babbling trivialities about the weather, then burst out with, “We have to talk about the notebook in your garden.”
Winter asked Ella in a shocked tone what she knew about the notebook.
Ella explained what he had said when he’d continued to spill in his sleep. “Maybe even as a child you knew instinctively that some things are too valuable to destroy, even to protect the Rabbit Back Literature Society. And now we have to dig it up. If it’s the source of all the members’ works, it’s an extremely valuable literary-historical document.”
Winter pointed out that the notebook had been buried for thirty years and must surely have decomposed. Ella reminded him that he’d told her he’d wrapped it in oilcloth. “We should dig it up as soon as possible.”
Winter didn’t give up. “Some things are better left buried. Ask me again some other time. I have to think about it.”
Ella said she would call back tomorrow.
“Tomorrow? Let’s see… No, I can’t do it tomorrow. Tomorrow I plan to have a little nibble of something and relish the fact that I’m still considered a real author. Ask me in thirty years, or perhaps a little later, preferably a couple of days after my funeral.”
The silence lasted an entire minute.
Then Ella said, “Just so you know, Mr Winter, I know who the tenth member of the Society was. I have his name.”
“Where did you get this alleged name, since even I don’t know what it is?” Winter yelled.
Ella told him she’d got the name the same way she got the memory of the notebook. When he asked her, as she had
expected, to tell him the name, she laughed. “Just because the great Martti Winter gave it to me doesn’t mean I have to give it back.”
“Fine,” Winter said. “Now that I think about it, I don’t want to know. Please don’t tell me. Don’t ever tell me or I’ll… um… I’ll have you killed. I have money, and money can buy a contract killing. Look, nobody’s thought about that boy or his notebook in years. And I intend to forget about the whole thing. So please be so kind as never to speak to me of it again.”
Ella thought for a moment and said, “What room are you in?”
Winter said he was in the piano room.
“There’s a book on top of the piano. Open it and tell me what’s written on the first page.”
“I think I know what’s in my own book,” Winter said
wearily
. “What have we here? Why, it’s an old photo of me. Then two blank pages. Page four is a list of my works. Impressive. I have been industrious. Page five, the title:
Mr Butterfly
, and the author’s name, Martti Winter.
C’est moi
. And then there’s something written in pen here—what the devil?…”
“I wrote the dead boy’s name under yours,” Ella said. “I thought it belonged there.”