The Rabbit Back Literature Society (3 page)

It made her smile.

She contented herself with Ingrid’s explanation for the irregular books. Later she came to realize that under one reality there’s always another. And another one under that.

E
LLA WAS WATCHING
her mother look at old slides.

The hum of the projector filled the living room. It smelled like old times. Colour photos of a happy family glowed on the white wall.

Click
. A mother, young and thin, smiling shyly.
Click
. A father posing as a runner with a false French moustache under his nose and a little girl clinging to his leg.
Click
. The father with his arm around the mother, who looks small and happy.
Click
. The mother standing in the garden naked, young, the father spraying her with the hose.
Click
. The little girl sitting in the garden swing with a book in her hands,
click
, in the hammock,
click
, in a boat. The backgrounds changed, but the book remained. The lawns were pristine, no bugs creeping through them, the sky a deep blue, and although there were red sunsets, night never came.

Ella sat in the corner with her chin on her knees and tried to send her mind back to the living, original memories behind the slides. She breathed in the scent of the projector and tried to follow its trail to the traces of memory in her mind.

She remembered the smell of the grass when she lay on the lawn reading a book of fairy tales. She went back in her mind to how her father’s sweat smelled when he would sit down next to her on the sofa after a long run. She also found the scent of coffee and fresh cardamom rolls on Sunday afternoons, and the smell of the blue salve her mother spread on her back and chest when she was achy.

Ella Milana followed her memories as closely as she could. She tried to build these scents into a three-dimensional image around her and make it move. She pounded on her memory like a coffee machine on the blink, but her past returned only in small fragments. If all of her remembered images from birth to confirmation were laid end to end, they would have formed at most a short film of ten minutes, grainy, fuzzy and confused.

Ella couldn’t remember things that she knew about on her own. She had memories of memories, or of things she’d been told.

Her dwindling memories were copies of the originals, copies that she regularly made new copies from, blurrier than the previous ones, fading to invisibility. Maybe she herself was blurry, a partially altered copy of the Ella Amanda she had been yesterday.

She had always trusted that she would have some kind of past she could return to, re-examine. But lately her mother grew nervous whenever Ella tried to ask her about the good old days. Her mother didn’t want to waste her time dwelling on the past. All she was interested in were television shows and entering raffle drawings in the hope of winning a prize. It was no use asking her father about anything. Disease had nibbled Paavo Emil Milana’s memories to pieces.

It was horrible, the swathe decay could cut through a
person’s
memory. Swallowing up even the present moment. It was absolutely unbearable.

Paavo Emil Milana’s glasses were found in the end. The frames were broken into four pieces lying in different parts of the garden.
The left lens was in the potato patch, the right one in the middle of the rose bushes. There were deep scratches on the left one.

“Paavo, honey, do you know how expensive glasses are? And you break your only pair and toss them around like a little child.”

Paavo Milana squinted at his wife.

“I didn’t break anything. The damned gnomes ambushed me. They didn’t like me looking at them.”

Marjatta Milana looked at her daughter.

“Old age doesn’t always wait till you’re old,” she said,
stroking
her husband’s hair. “Your hair needs a cut. It’s as ratty as a forest troll’s. People would hardly know you were a person if I didn’t look after you.”

When Ella Milana, substitute language and literature teacher, finished the last lesson of the day, one of the boys came up to her with a briefcase in his hand.

“May I have my comic book back?” he asked. When he saw the expression on her face he thought it best to swear that he would never bring a comic book to school again.

Ella dug through her bag and handed him the comic. He thanked her and started to leave, but then didn’t.

“Well, what is it?” Ella asked impatiently. “It may be a little torn, since it’s been lying in my bag for two weeks, but nobody told you to read it during the lesson.”

The boy shook his head. “Yeah, but… it’s not that. This isn’t my comic.”

Ella raised her eyebrows.

“Of course it is. I’m a literature teacher. I don’t carry comic books around in my bag. I have placed exactly one comic book in this bag in my entire life—the one I confiscated from you.”

The boy flipped through the comic book’s pages with his brow furrowed, then tossed it on the desk and pushed his hair back. “Interesting comic, but it’s not mine.”

Ella sighed.

“Well then you’ve caught me. I admit it. That comic is part of the secret comics stash that I carry with me at all times. Forgive me. I’ll give back your comic as soon as I can find it among my comics collection.”

She stared at the boy until he gave up and left the classroom. Once he had left, Ella put the comic back in her bag. As she turned her phone back on she noticed that she had two messages.

The first was from Ingrid Katz. She said that Laura White had seen Ella’s short story in the
Rabbit Tracks
literary supplement and liked it. Ingrid also added, in a peculiar tone, that she needed to meet with Ella sometime soon to talk to her about an important matter.

The other message was from Ella’s mother and was more howled than spoken.

Ella’s father had been taken to the hospital in an ambulance after some sort of accident in the garden. “Call me as soon as you get this message,” her mother’s keening voice pleaded. Then, remembering her phone manners, she added, “Thanks. I’ll talk to you later.”

P
AAVO EMIL MILANA WAS IN
Room 4 of the overnight ward.

He was covered in cuts, scratches, scrapes and bruises. Ella and Marjatta Milana sat next to his bed. There were old people in the other three beds, staring at the ceiling, their mouths black holes.

He’ll live, the doctor had assured them. He hadn’t lost as much blood as they’d thought when he arrived, and his abrasions looked worse than they were. The old fellow had been quite confused when they brought him in, there was no denying that. They still didn’t have a cure for Alzheimer’s, at least not here at the health clinic, heh, and whatever shock he’d had would pass sooner or later. He might eventually be able to tell them what happened, or then again he might not. That was how it was. Sometimes you just had to accept that you would never know for sure—it could be one thing, could be another. But the sedative they’d given him ought to let him sleep through his injuries for a few hours.

The doctor said he didn’t want to speculate about the nature of his injuries, but he speculated anyway.

His wounds seemed to be partly gashes and partly animal bites. They could very well be self-inflicted. He could have hurt himself with sticks or stones. Maybe he had stumbled in the garden and panicked and hurt himself on the sticks and thorns. Did he, by chance, have any suicidal tendencies? A garden is a lovely thing, but it’s also full of sharp sticks. It was possible,
too, that some small animal, a rat perhaps, had attacked him. In any case, he’d been given a tetanus shot.

“I don’t know what happened,” Marjatta Milana told her daughter. “I was washing the dishes. I had just been cutting out
Reader’s Digest
car sweepstakes coupons and your father had been sitting in the garden all morning. Then I had the idea to go out and cut his hair at last, make him look a little more human. I fetched the scissors and went outside, but he wasn’t in his chair.

“I was afraid that he might have got lost in the woods, although he’s always stayed in the garden before. I had
sometimes
wondered if he might take it into his head to go into the park and through there into the big woods, which go on for who knows how far. I was about to call the emergency number, and then I heard a voice from the raspberry patch. And there he was, covered in blood. Oh my Lord, my heart just leaped from my chest. I was afraid I’d have some kind of attack and both of us would be left lying there in the garden to rot.

“But he was still alive. He was lying in the bushes on his back and making this weak sound. I said, ‘Don’t worry, Paavo, help is coming,’ and then I ran inside and called the emergency number and then I guess I called you… I don’t remember what I did… and your sister, too—I’m embarrassed to say it, but I think I did call her, sputtered something…”

Ella thought her mother was going to start sniffling, but she just cast a weary glance at her husband.

“This is all just too much somehow. And the kitchen’s such a mess. The dishes just left to lie there… oh blast, I think I must have ruined my new porridge pan. I left it on the stove. If you could manage it at all, could you go to the house and clean up
a little? There’s no reason we both have to stay here, and I’m sure you have your work to do.”

Ella had been scrubbing the pan for an hour and a half when her mother called. Ella’s father had woken up and recognized her, but he wasn’t saying anything sensible. “What am I going to do with him?” her mother sighed.

Ella wondered whether her mother wanted some kind of blessing from her to send him to a nursing home.

“Keep trying,” she said.

After several nights spent thinking about her father’s case, she had developed a theory that the problem was a
mathematical
rather than a moral one. It wasn’t right to drive your own husband or father from his home and put him in an institution unless it happened to be unavoidable. As time went on, however, the individual by the name of Paavo Emil Milana was less and less the Paavo Emil Milana that she and her mother knew, and more and more some other person that Ella wasn’t particularly eager to get to know. Once her father’s share dropped below a certain percentage, it would, according to Ella’s theory, be time for him to part with the rest of the family and move away.

It was already late in the evening. Light poured in through the west window and filled the room with the reddish brown colour of the curtains. Ella left the pan to soak and spread the local newspaper on the kitchen table.

Next to the paper sat a clay gnome that Ella glanced at now and then. Her mother had made it in the art club a couple of years earlier.

The sculpture wasn’t bad, but when you looked at it up close and turned it in the light, you could see its features in detail. At
first Ella had found it hard to believe that it had been made by her mother, a woman who, like most people, normally made mashed potatoes, socks and lingonberry jam, not art.

The local ceramicists for the most part produced water sprites, pixies, elves, and gnomes. Laura White had made these creatures popular all over the world through her children’s books, but in Rabbit Back in particular you ran into them everywhere you looked. They were presented as prizes in raffles, given as presents, brought to dinner as hostess gifts. There was only one florist in Rabbit Back, but there were seven shops that sold mostly mythological figurines.

Ella thought the statues were tasteless and depressing. She had asked her mother what had possessed her to go to the art club and why her first and last project there would have been a gnome, of all things. Her mother had said something about how the idea had just popped into her head in the garden while she was digging the carrot bed.

She’d had her hands in the dirt up to the wrists and had gradually found herself falling into a kind of stupor. She
completely
forgot what she was doing and noticed that she was thinking about a gnome. She started to feel faint and dizzy, and had some difficulty getting back to the house to lie down.

“It made me worry that I was going to turn out like your father,” she said. “That there was something wrong with my head. Some brain malfunction. That gnome stayed in my mind, haunting me, and I had to get it out somehow. So I thought I’d try art, since I had a couple of friends in the club.”

Page three of
Rabbit Tracks
advertised a “mythological mapper”. It was the newest fad.
ORDER NOW! MYTHOLOGICAL MAPPING FOR YOU OR A FRIEND!
The service included an
explanation of all the mythological creatures occupying your property. According to the ad, it cost eighty euros, and could be ordered through the Rabbit Back Mythological Heritage Society.

Every fourth issue of
Rabbit Tracks
included a pull-out
literary
supplement, with the pithy name
Ten
. Ella read the current supplement. She hadn’t called the editor to withdraw her
submission
. Her story had been published on page five.

The supplement published local amateur writers. Rabbit Back boasted not only Laura White and her protégés but also a large contingent of amateur authors. The town was known to have no less than six writers’ associations, and that was without counting the most noteworthy writers’ association, the Rabbit Back Literature Society, which accepted members only at Laura White’s invitation. The possibility of joining the Society was practically theoretical, since the entire present membership—nine lifetime member authors—had all joined in the first three years after the Society was established in 1968.

It was said that Laura White had been asked how many
writers
she imagined she would find in a place like Rabbit Back. At the time, the Society had only been in existence for four years, and none of its members had yet been published.

Laura White had held up the fingers of both hands. So the answer
might
be “ten”, which was the preferred
interpretation
—that the authoress intended to discover and train ten new Rabbit Back writers in total. Of course she may have just been raising her hands to fend off the question. In any case, the literary supplement had taken its name from the incident.

The story was Ella Milana’s first published work of fiction. It had a complicated, lovely title: “The Skeleton Sat in the
Cave Silently Smoking Cigarettes”. She’d found the theme for the story close by. It was about a young woman with faulty reproductive organs.

Ella had once met Anna-Maija Seläntö, a member of the Rabbit Back Literature Society who now lived in Sweden. Seläntö had given a lecture at the university, and after the lecture Ella had asked the writer how it felt to see her own works published. Seläntö had smiled sweetly at her and whispered, “You know what? It makes you understand why a dog eats its own vomit.”

Ella stared at her story and remembered the essays waiting in her bag. She’d set herself a strict schedule. She was supposed to have graded a third of the papers today, fifteen altogether, to keep the backlog from growing as new essays came in every couple of days.

She decided to leave them in her bag for now. No one expected a substitute language and literature teacher to grade papers every single night of her life, did they? It was a heretical thought, but it made her smile. In her mind, she gave the finger to all the powers of the universe that were trying to make her feel guilty about the uncorrected essays.

That was the day Ella saw Ingrid Katz, who told her an
important
piece of news.

But she was so preoccupied with the vestiges of Paavo Emil Milana that were still in her father, and a mother whose husband was rapidly becoming a stranger to her, that all she had to say at the time was “Oh, you don’t say”.

Paavo Emil Milana spent four more days in the hospital. Then they brought him home.

Ella drove the Triumph, her father sat beside her and her mother was in the back seat. It felt strange. Her natural place in this car with these people was in the back on the right, where she could see the scar on her father’s cheek.

She had asked him the same question almost every time they rode in the car. “Dad, where did you get that scar?”

Her father rarely told bedtime stories or stories of any kind. Made-up stories weren’t his thing. Ella couldn’t remember ever seeing him read a novel. But every time she asked him this question, he gave her a different answer.

A drunken sailor tried to stab me in the throat and I dodged his knife and got cut on the cheek,
he said once.
I fell out of a tree as a boy when I was trying to climb up to a magpie’s nest and a limb tore a scratch in my cheek,
he said the next time.

Another time she asked, the answer was
I was cutting across a meadow with my aunt when I was little and there was an angry bull in the field. It almost caught us, and when we jumped over the fence, it just barely scraped my cheek with its horn
.

One of the answers he gave made Ella’s mother scream.
You see, Ella, I once bought your mother a kitchen knife as a birthday present, and she had wanted a nightgown, and your mother was so upset that she took a swipe at me with the present I’d given her, and she would’ve killed me if I hadn’t escaped to the bathroom
.

Ella didn’t remember much about her childhood, but she remembered the smell of the inside of the Triumph. It gave her a headache, but she loved it. Sometimes she thought that if she could just sit in that car long enough she would get all her old memories back.

The car didn’t belong to her father anymore, although the name on the registration was still Paavo Emil Milana. He would
have been shocked at the state of the car. Before he got sick he worked on the car every week—checked everything out, cleaned the motor, washed it and rubbed it with Turtle Wax. One time when he was waxing the car he declared, “Show me a man who doesn’t take care of his car, and I’ll show you a man who’s lost his soul.”

Since she’d returned to Rabbit Back, Ella had occasionally driven the Triumph to work, but she preferred to ride her bicycle if the weather permitted.

When she left the house to pedal to the school, the first two kilometres were slightly downhill. The breeze was sweetly cool against her skin in the warm air of August. It was wonderful just to sit on her bicycle seat and let her speed build up by itself.

There were old wooden houses along the dirt road and gardens with their scrubby old apple trees and stone guardians, and here and there newer brick buildings. Along the way she could also get a glimpse of two old playgrounds, a tiny beauty parlour, the beach, dogs, fields, horses and trees—oak, maple, lime and birch.

Halfway to the school the road plunged into a grove of spruce trees where it was always nearly dark. In the summer the air was thick with hungry gnats and she pedalled as fast as she could.

Then the road merged with a paved road and that’s when she had to start pedalling just to keep moving. The road passed more houses, a headstone carver’s, and two workshops—one of which made wooden statues of Laura White characters that were sold all over the world.

The road was as hilly as a child’s drawing; first down, then up, phew! then down, and up again to the highest point, from
which she could see the roofs of central Rabbit Back and all the surrounding areas, and even farther on a clear day, all the way to the shimmering horizon. After a few of these hills and valleys she had to slow down, because there was a path between two spruces and a large stone that she always took as a shortcut. It took her straight to the school yard, provided the ground wasn’t too swampy.

Halfway down the path there was a pond that looked like a puddle but was said to be bottomlessly deep. Henrik, the Johansson’s boy, had once pushed a long pole into the pond without touching bottom, and then it felt like something tugged on the pole and the boys all ran away.

Ella had never taken that story seriously, but she passed the pond as fast as she could. She’d had foreboding dreams about the place. She heard strange noises and saw weird reflections on the surface of the pond.