Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page B

pretty little ball. Throw it away, except that it is a boomerang. It comes back.’
    And Doña Quixote leans on the counter and the countless clocks as if it is she, in fact, who has to try to sell them.
    ‘Last summer I happened to be there when the city stood still. Smoke sat motionless above the roofs. There in the street, a cyclist pedalled and pedalled, but got nowhere. The traffic lights stuck at red and the bells of St John’s church could only ring, “ding, ding, ding” . . . ’
    ‘Give me that,’ she says next, and points to a watch-strap.
    The clock-merchant hurries to try it on her stick-thin wrist, and after that he has to go into the back room, where he makes a new hole in the strap. He is extremely polite, hurries to open the outer door and, on the threshold, thrusts his card into Doña Quixote’s hand.
    On the journey home, Doña Quixote is quiet and anxious-looking.
    ‘Do I look old?’ she suddenly asks. I deny it quickly.
    ‘You’re lying,’ she says cruelly. ‘I looked in the window and saw for myself. I do look old.’
    ‘What window do you mean?’
    ‘The clock-shop,’ she said. ‘I saw my head there among all those dreadful things, and it was very old.’
    I say no more, and she would not listen if I did. She stops in the middle of the pavement, and her face is naked, and tired.
    ‘Time is a tiger,’ she says. ‘It has no morals. None!’
    Then she strides forth again, so it is hard for me to keep up with her. At the crossroads where we have to part, she grasps my arm and smiles mysteriously.
    ‘Do you know what it is that is unaffected by time? Do you?’
    Her eyes have the glimmer of valleys at evening.
    I shake my head, and she whispers, ‘It’s the twinkling of an eye, do you believe me?’

Patroclus, too, is Dead
    On a bright, ringing frosty day I meet, at Doña Quixote’s house, the Incurable One. It is as if the city has been dusted with icing-sugar; a glittering layer of snow-dust has frozen to the walls and the branches of the trees.
    The Incurable One is sitting in Doña Quixote’s uncomfortable armchair, as pale as if he, too, were made of snow.
    Once he used to come here often, but now he spends long periods in hospital, and movement has become increasingly difficult for him. Seven years ago his daughter died in a car crash, and soon afterwards his wife departed.
    But now he sits by Doña Quixote’s window, and the February light casts blue lines of shadow across his forehead and neck. He sits almost touching the radiator, but he seems to exude a coldness its warmth cannot reach.
    Doña Quixote and the Incurable One are talking about birds. Birds are the Incurable One’s great love, but he says it is years since he has seen the spring or autumn migrations.
    Doña Quixote says that one night, when she was walking along her own street, a barn owl flew out of the garden porch.
    ‘It flew low and soundlessly,’ said Doña Quixote. ‘And as it passed us, it looked straight into my eyes.’
    ‘Owls can hypnotise you,’ said the Incurable One, and nodded.
    He glanced at the high sky and sighed. ‘Spring is coming. I should like to see the birds return once more.’
    ‘They will fly again,’ said Doña Quixote.
    The Incurable One rose with difficulty, fetched his briefcase from the hall, and pulled out a large book.
    ‘ “Dear friend”,’ he read, ‘ “you too must die, why do you complain so? Patroclus is dead, and he was a far better man than you. Death and a cheerless fate threaten me, too. There will come some morning, or evening or noon, when someone will destroy my life in battle . . . ”.’
    He read with a weak but vital voice, and the words that he left in the room rang as crystal-cold as the February day.
    In April I rang on Doña Quixote’s door. When she opened it, still on the threshold, she said: ‘Patroclus is dead.’
    We went to walk on the shore. It was a day when everything was breaking and melting, vanishing and lifting, the kind