Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction Read Online Free PDF

by the windows to see all that is already familiar to me: lights and signs, arrows and numbers, the swarming of overcoats and the dusty herds of the roads – and all of it flows past my tepid gaze, bordered by kerbstones, in a dense torrent.
    I remember the experiments I used to conduct in this room. How I tried to tame Time and always failed. How I examined how long ‘now’ lasted, and how long its memory, how I stretched it like chewing-gum and, when it snapped, how I became tired.
    My patience was not sufficiently great. My attention not sufficiently concentrated. The knife of a new event always came to cut time in two. It was a divided reality, and I learned that there, in the room of change.
    This room has its route and its timetable. But the contents of the room change, and with them everything.
    I have seen, here, a man who arranged the cities of Germany on the thin thread of his memory, I have heard how he dropped their names like coins into a box: Aachen, Augsburg, Berlin, Bonn . . .
    Wherever he comes from, there is no hope. Wherever he goes, there is nothing to be done. But those tiny pieces of knowledge he presses upon one: like a torn entrance ticket to something, a party that has already been held or cancelled . . .
    And we sit or stand in our places and nevertheless we glide forward. This oblong, lighted trunk that moves, all these forgotten heads at the windows . . .
    Sometimes in the street, at rush-hour, when the city bus drives past me, crammed full, I feel like laughing. What a sight! Just as strange as if a swarm of witches were riding on a broom above the city lights . . .
    Onward it rushes, always on time, always on its route, and its windows are entirely covered in frost or condensation, people’s breathing.
    Onward it rushes, past withering parks and windows just lighting up, and its cargo is the weight of many displaced souls.

The Room of Time
    Tick-tock.
    Some clocks really did make that noise. But most were silent: inside was a battery that made them keep time for a year, two years, or even eight.
    We had gone to the clock-shop, for the strap of Doña Quixote’s watch had broken. The clock-shop was very small, and strange in that it contained more ugly objects than I had ever before seen together.
    On the highest shelf were arranged, in order of size, a row of bronze-coloured goblets that recalled women constricted by corsets.
    If I were a competitor, I thought, and could see a trophy like that in advance, I would want to lose.
    On the walls hung pocket-watches on plastic chains decorated with turquoise and aniline-red spirals. There were ashtrays, too, in the form of riding-boots, mouths and lavatory bowls. But everything was covered in a thin, greasy dust, as if no customer had been here for weeks.
    ‘Good morning,’ says Doña Quixote.
    ‘Morning,’ says the clock-seller, and rises behind the counter, barrel-like and bloody-eyed, as strange as the things with which he has surrounded himself.
    He shows Doña Quixote watch-straps and photograph-frames sprinkled with gold-dust. They do not make an impression on Doña Quixote.
    She is looking at the digital watches under the glass. ‘They have no faces. They do not show time, they show the moment. There is no day or night for them. They have no history, do they have a future?’
    The clock-maker ponders, and I shift my weight from one foot to the other, looking at a plaque of juniper-wood. On it is branded: ‘One cannot keep house in cloud, in wind.’
    ‘I think people have already got bored with them,’ says the clock-seller. ‘They don’t buy as many digital watches as before.’
    ‘What is time, really?’ says Doña Quixote.
    ‘What?’ asks the clock-seller.
    ‘Time is matter,’ explains Doña Quixote. ‘Yes, it is matter and, furthermore, elastic. A kind of wax.’
    ‘Ah . . . ’
    ‘If you really want to,’ Doña Quixote says, ‘you can learn to model it. Stretch it like chewing gum. Roll it into a