Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

sobbing rocks my bed, and her tears combine with the sombre waters of my memory so that, with horror, I too feel them begin to surge.
    No, I do not want to remember, I say to myself. But what good is it? My memory is that sheet-wrapped mummy.
    And as I struggle in the darkness to bar the door to the procession of humiliation and disappointment, regret and shame, bitterness and misunderstanding, fear and loss, it rises, the thing that was still a moment ago, the grief of my faceless room-mate, rises as high as Hokusai’s wave, and I hear the thundering I know has always, incessantly, sounded around my mean, closed, dry life.

Mozart Cheated Us!
    In November a desperate man came to see Doña Quixote. He said his innards were scorched by a hatred so bitter it would be enough to burn the entire city to ruins. He said it smoked in his brain just as phosphorus can smoulder in still-living flesh.
    ‘Water does not quench phosphorus,’ was what he said, ‘and no comfort can ease my wrath.’
    On Doña Quixote’s table was a record sleeve, and as he spoke the man took it in his hand and turned it with restless fingers. It was Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
    ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!’ said the man, and his voice crackled like rifle-fire. ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!’ he cried a second time, in the manner in which a court usher calls the name of the accused who is to appear before the judge.
    ‘He is a liar,’ the man said. ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart cheated us.’
    ‘How did he cheat us?’ asked Doña Quixote, calmly.
    The man laughed bitterly. ‘Because he deceives us into believing things that don’t exist. Just remember the clarity of his string quintets, The Magic Flute ’s noble ideal of brotherhood and Tamino’s unselfish love or the delight of the glockenspiel . . . There is nothing like that to be found in the world, and he must have known it himself.’
    ‘But,’ said Doña Quixote mildly, ‘he also has the Dies Irae and the Ave verum corpus. ’
    ‘Yes,’ the man conceded. ‘They are his, and they are the world’s. Everything else is sweet deception, the empty chiming of a glockenspiel.’
    The table jolted, and the man drew back, startled. Doña Quixote, who had pounded her fragile fist down in front of him, looked at him with blazing eyes.
    ‘Do you think,’ said Doña Quixote, low and maestoso, ‘do you really think he was unable to see beyond the days of wrath, dizzyingly far, as far as here, and still further? You think you can’t survive. How long has Mozart survived?’
    The man sat in silence for a long while. He seemed to have calmed down, and after a time began to speak of something quite different.
    As he left, and was already bidding us good night, he lingered on the threshold. I felt he intended to say something important, but he merely commented, ‘The weather is easing,’ put his cap on his head and left.
    ‘Hell’s revenge burns within my heart,’ muttered Doña Quixote after he had gone. ‘Do you know who he was? He was the Moor, Monostatos.’
    And then she hummed: ‘Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön . . . ’

The Room of Change
    All rooms move. Each of them swings in a pendulum motion between evening and morning, moving its inhabitants closer to the unknown land where they will be no more.
    But this room wanders through the streets, and the inhabitants within are constantly changing. Whenever it stands still, someone leaves and others take his place and they seek a space for themselves among the crowd of evasive eyes.
    When I was a child, I saw them differently. I saw them there, at the door, as they paused for a moment before they made their exit, holding a pole under a sign which read: ‘Do not stand in front of the mirror.’ I only had to narrow my eyes a little and I could see them as they had once been, to narrow them again, and on their faces was the satiety of age.
    I no longer see in this way. Now I am one of them and, like them, I take my place