Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction by Leena Krohn

blowing.
    ‘I’ll just go and water the plants upstairs,’ he said, and closed the lid of the aquarium.
    ‘I’ll wait here,’ I said.
    I watched his back as he went upstairs. From the small, black-and-white picture twilight poured into the room, spreading like a ring on water.
    The beginning of spring spread itself before me, dazzlingly empty. It was a table spread with a spotless cloth, set with the empty dishes of weeks of lonely days.
    The fish whisked its tail, and I wanted to say to him: ‘You don’t know me.’
    ‘You don’t know me.’ How quickly I grasped, as my crutch, the secret comfort of all those who have been rejected: ‘You don’t know me. If you knew me, if you knew who I really am, you would love me forever.’
    He returned, the empty watering-can in his hand, and eyed me carefully.
    ‘I suppose I should turn off the aquarium light,’ he said.

The Remoteness of All Glory
    Doña Quixote is ill. I have never seen her so gloomy and ill.
    I am in a hurry and I should have gone somewhere quite different. But I came here, nevertheless, knowing nothing of her state in advance.
    Doña Quixote is lying between the sheets, wearing all her clothes. She has even left her shoes on her feet.
    ‘I thought I would die last night,’ she says.
    ‘What happened?’ I ask.
    ‘I had such a bad nightmare,’ she says, like a little child.
    ‘Would you like some sage tea?’ I ask.
    She does not answer, and looks as if she is still gazing into her nightmare.
    I make Doña Quixote some sage tea and she swallows a couple of gulps obediently. Then she pushes the cup away and says she wants to go away. Away completely. She says her strength has withered and crumbled. She says her eyes have grown dim. She says she has reached a place where all that is true is the remoteness of all glory.
    Her words make me cold and my gaze avoids her eyes. I, too, am disappointed, as though my trust, my hope had been in vain.
    I hear her sigh.
    ‘I am growing tired,’ she said, ‘and so are you. And if it is for the last time, then let it be so. But whatever does not stir, remains.’
    She sits on the edge of her bed and her long, white fingers hang like quills.
    ‘Do you want to hear the dream that woke me up?’
    ‘I do,’ I said.
    ‘It was very short,’ Doña Quixote says. ‘I was in a strange country, in a strange city. It was night. Around me were nothing but ruins. I saw hands, feet and heads that thrust their way out of the cracks between stones or lay, mutilated, on the pavement. They continued as far as the eye could see so I could no longer find a clear space to step on.’
    She falls silent and stares with sightless eyes at a flower on her carpet. I take Doña Quixote’s guitar from the corner and ask her to play something.
    ‘Play “All the bright lanterns”, for example,’ I say.
    But she does not touch the guitar.
    ‘Whose dream did I dream?’ she asks. ‘Whose dream am I dreaming? Oh, how cold I am.’
    I fetch a large blue shawl from the cupboard, I ask her to drink another cup of tea. I ask whether she would like to watch the television news, and when she continues to be silent. I turn the set on.
    The television shows a strange city that has been bombed. The television shows a shanty-town that has been destroyed. The set shows men and women, girls and boys, all dead, all lying in the filth of the road, with snuffed-out faces.

A Room of One’s Own
    The piece of things. The comb that lies on the table before me between the pen and the book. The bottle of Aquila ink and a lump of blue glass I found on the beach at Murano. My gaze often moves over these things like a fly, understanding nothing of their purpose or origin.
    Sometimes, on the other hand, when I look around me and see things that have been made and produced, sold and bought for money, I am astonished. Whence comes this persistent feeling that they are concealing a secret? That my room, although I know there is no one here but me, is