The Rabbit Back Literature Society Read online

  Ella knew her short story hadn’t yet been printed. Perhaps later in the fall, the editor had told her. She shuddered as if someone had walked over her grave, and decided to call the editor and ask for the story back. She wasn’t ready to show it in public yet after all. It had been a bad idea from the beginning; she realized that now.

  There was a small news item on page four about a farmer named P. Lahtinen who had found a potato in his field shaped like Mother Snow. He had promised the unusual potato to Laura White, should she want it for her collection, and his wife had promised to make coffee and sweet rolls if the authoress came to pick it up in person.

  Ella lost interest in the newspaper. The yellow sign kept drawing her attention. DOG LITERATURE, in black capital letters, every time she looked at it. Eventually she started to ask herself why she didn’t leave.

  She had finished all her classes for the day, but she had a large pile of papers to grade in the evening. And her mother was expecting her to bring home food and medicine. There was no way of knowing how confused her father had been that day. She had also been looking forward to a little afternoon nap.

  But still she sat there, on the third floor of the library, leafing through the local paper and keeping the librarian under surveillance.

  What she was doing was crazy, she understood that. On the other hand, Ingrid Katz was behaving suspiciously. She hadn’t taken the discovery of the inaccuracies in the book as lightly as she had pretended. She also hadn’t seemed surprised that the library might contain books with significant discrepancies in their contents.

  Of course, Ella had run across a wide range of translations and outright translation errors, she’d read abridged versions of books, and books with missing pages, even one book with a missing ending. And sometimes official new versions of books were published when times changed and there was no longer a need to shelter readers from indecent language or dubious passages.

  But she had never seen the very plot of a book consciously or unconsciously altered as it was in this version of Crime and Punishment. A prank like that would take a very unusual saboteur and it was hard to imagine what the motive would be. And how could such a book remain in circulation for nearly twenty years without anyone noticing anything strange about it?

  Ella might have been behaving contrary to habit and to her own common sense that evening, but the existence of the irregular Dostoevsky deeply offended her, and when she was offended she could sometimes do impulsive, purely intuitive things.

  *

  The students’ papers in her bag were waiting to be graded, and her mother was waiting at home for groceries and her father’s medicine. People came and went.

  Two hours went by. Ella Amanda Milana, substitute teacher of Finnish Language and Literature, sat in the library watching Ingrid Katz, librarian. She was starting to feel foolish, but she couldn’t give up, not yet.

  Finally, the librarian left her desk and walked through the crowd of stone nixies and pixies to the book stacks.

  Ella shifted on her perch to see better. Ingrid Katz was standing at the D shelves piling books onto a cart. She emptied at least a metre of shelf and pushed the cart into the back room.

  The back room was where the librarians went to eat lunch and change clothes. The only entrance was behind the check-out desk. The door to the room was hung with a poster of C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It had a picture of the magic wardrobe with its door opened invitingly.

  Ingrid Katz came out of the back room and sat at the counter for a long time. Finally she went to the second floor to help a man in a hat with something.

  Ella had already left her previous position and descended to the lower level. She approached the check-out desk. She browsed the shelf of honour set aside for Laura White’s books and their numerous translations.

  Then she sprang into action.

  She walked behind the counter, unhurried and nonchalant. She glanced around, touched her front teeth with her tongue, and slipped into the back room.

  She formed a cover story in her mind in case Ingrid Katz found her there. She would say she was looking for Ingrid herself because she wanted to ask her a question and was in a hurry.

  In any case, what could the librarian do to her, even if she did find her there? Kill her? Knock her unconscious?

  Probably not, but she might very well call the police and file a criminal report on her.

  What a hubbub that would cause. It would make headlines in Rabbit Tracks. SUBSTITUTE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE TEACHER NABBED STEALING BOOKS. She would lose her reputation, and her job with it. She would have a criminal record that would follow her for the rest of her life.

  Ella was getting scared. She realized now that she had better leave while she had the chance. She thanked herself for coming to her senses in time, before she’d done something really stupid.

  Then she noticed the books on the table.

  They were in three stacks. There was a bottle of Jaffa soda, a mandarin orange, and a bag of liquorice next to them. Ingrid Katz’s lunch. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was at the bottom of one stack. Ella’s heart started to race as she picked up the book. She took five other books, too—the first few she could find that were thin enough to fit in her bag.

  Her fingers were as cold as magpies’ feet.

  At the bottom of her bag was a comic book she’d confiscated during her morning class. Ella laid the comic over the stack of books and closed the bag.

  Then she walked out of the library.

  2

  PAAVO EMIL MILANA was named after two historic runners: Paavo Nurmi and Emil Zápotek. When he was in his twenties he had been a runner almost comparable to his namesakes, just as his late father had wished—if not in performance, then certainly in spirit. He had the heart of a runner, as light and quick as a dragonfly.

  For thirty years he had run ten kilometres every day. He would go for a run in the morning before leaving for the office and then again as soon as he finished work, even on the windy night when his daughter was born. He wore out six pairs of running shoes every year, and was given a new tracksuit every Christmas. His family fondly called him the Rabbit Back Rocket, and the custom had spread to the rest of the town.

  Now, at fifty-five, Paavo Emil Milana spent his days sitting in the back garden among the grass and daisies and nettles, the currants and apple trees, the frogs, hedgehogs, bugs and butterflies. His garden season started as soon as the snow melted and didn’t end until the first frost.

  The change had come over the past six years.

  It was no use offering him a book to read. It was no use trying to get him to go swimming, boating or visiting. He just wanted to look at the garden, to watch it grow—that’s how he explained it to his wife, Marjatta, who had begun to think of herself as a widow and sometimes suffered from a terrible feeling of guilt because of it. Old age doesn’t always wait till you’re old, was her way of answering him.

  Every day seemed to break off another little piece of Paavo Emil Milana’s personality, and piece by piece he was less and less the Paavo Emil Milana she had married.

  At the moment, Paavo Emil Milana was looking at his daughter over a wet pair of spectacles. “Can’t a person decide for himself where he wants to sit?” he said angrily. “Have we turned communist? Is that what you’re telling me? A communist country, where a man can’t sit where he wants to? Et tu? Show me your party card. You must have it in a pocket somewhere.”

  Ella looked at his tense bearing. His grey, too-long hair flowed under the brim of his hat. Her mother would no doubt be tiptoeing into the garden with the scissors in her hand sometime soon. A tangle of chest hair lay under his plaid shirt.

  “Anybody can sit wherever they like,” Ella said. “That’s your prerogative. It’s just that it’s raining out here.”

  He looked at the sky in surprise.

  “And Mum says to come inside,” Ella added.

  Paavo Emil Milana tore his hat off his head. “If your mo
ther says to come inside, then by all means do so. Children should obey their parents, contrary to what the Reds seem to think. Who exactly is your mother?”

  “I mean she wants you to come inside.”

  “Aha. Are you that teacher, then? My daughter?”

  Ella admitted she was, for the third time that day.

  He peered at her over his glasses, a flash of bewilderment in his eyes. Then he smiled slyly. “I’ll be right in. You go on ahead. I just have to listen for a moment.”

  “I already went on ahead twice,” Ella said, “and you’re still sitting here. You’re not trying to trick me, are you?”

  “I have some things to do here,” he explained vaguely. “I won’t be long. You go ahead, sweetheart.”

  “You’re getting wet.”

  He looked indignant. “Wet? Let’s think about the rain, shall we? Little spheres of water falling from the sky. They’re harmless. Do you think that water only belongs in lakes and ponds and rivers, in pipes and bathtubs? What troubles we go to, building ourselves waterproof roofs, clothes, umbrellas, all to keep from having anything to do with water. We try so hard to separate ourselves from it.”

  He lifted his arms as if to embrace the rain.

  “But we are made from water. You are, and so am I. Water is flowing through us all the time. The same water everywhere. Is water God? It is certainly life, at least. Life has its source in water. Just think about that.”

  Ella stood for a moment longer with her father in the rain as he sank back into solitary silence. They looked in the same direction for a little while.

  There was a meadow on the other side of the garden fence. In the middle was a gazebo, a picturesque but dilapidated structure surrounded by thistles and nettles. A dark figure stood inside it looking out.

  Years ago, a party for the whole neighbourhood had been held there. The hosts were a family who had recently moved to town and wanted to make a good impression. As was the custom in Rabbit Back, they had been showered with gifts of mythological statuary—elves, forest nymphs, gnomes, and one life-sized goblin, as big as a man, a crystallization of the artist’s darkest impulses. The ecstatic party-givers had placed the statues around their house and garden, but the grim expression on the face of the goblin had so frightened their children that they had quietly carried it off to the gazebo. Ever since, it had made the gazebo a favoured place for the children of the town to test their bravery.

  Now the goblin seemed to have company. Three dogs had gone under the gazebo roof to get out of the rain. Soon they, too, grew uneasy and trotted away.

  Ella’s father rubbed the side of his nose. Ella’s gaze floated through the rain and fixed itself on her father’s unshaven cheek, and the scar visible under the stubble.

  The garden was the only place where her father felt at peace anymore. He was almost happy there. Soon winter would force him to sit indoors for months.

  Ella fetched an umbrella, placed it in his hand, and went back into the house.

  A curved stairway led to Ella’s old room. The fifth and fourteenth steps squeaked when you stepped on them. Ella hadn’t stepped on those steps since the age of five.

  A lot of her old things had been taken out of the room. Her mother had made it into a sewing room. Ella Milana didn’t remember her mother ever sewing anything but the flowered curtains that hung in the sewing room’s open window, wet with rain.

  Her substitute job would soon end and she would be transferred to another district. Until then, she would sit at her old writing desk and grade literature papers. Her legs didn’t quite fit under the desk anymore.

  There was a bag of sweets at a corner of the desktop. She paid herself one for each graded paper. After every fifth paper she went downstairs to clear her mind. Once she’d finished all twenty-five, her work for the evening would be done. Then she would take a look at those books.

  Taking a break from the grading, she glanced at the Dostoevsky, which lay on the bed, waiting. She had read through Raskolnikov’s death as soon as she got home. She’d decided to save the rest for later.

  She tried to forget about Dostoevsky and his companions and immerse herself in the literature assignments.

  The essays blared through her consciousness with their insights, opinions, attitudes, misconstructions, confessions and justifications. Jokes, banalities and metaphors assaulted her sensibilities, and the floodgates of language standards creaked as dubious sentence structures and hyphenation errors dribbled through their cracks.

  Every imperfect essay left a dent in Ella’s mind. Sometimes their incorrect formulations would stick in her mind for days, swirling and blocking her thoughts. A couple of weeks earlier she had made a count and discovered that during her lifetime she would read approximately 74,148 such essays. Then she would retire, her head permanently dented by these odd sentences.

  When she had only seven papers left to her evening’s work, Ella stopped to admire one about the works of Agatha Christie. It struck her as above average, even exceptional. It was fresh, clear, and well organized. It wasn’t about any Dostoevsky or Kundera, but for a high school student it showed some rather mature thinking.

  She gave the essay a perfect ten and drew a little parrot next to the number.

  Then she started to wonder if she should submit the paper for the Laura White file. The principal had made it very clear that all work earning a perfect ten should be copied for Laura White’s file. But he had also urged caution in awarding perfect tens.

  We enjoy a long and glorious tradition in our writing, so declaring a student’s linguistic creation perfect should not be taken lightly. As a young teacher, Ella, you would be wise to keep in mind that a text can be very good without being commendable, and that even a commendable text is not the same thing as an exceptional one. It’s terribly kind of Ms White to take notice of our school in her search for the new members she desires, and we should under no circumstances inflict any mediocrity on her.

  The Laura White file was a brown leather portfolio that was kept behind the principal’s desk. Ella had heard that Laura White sometimes appeared at the school, drank coffee with the principal in the school office, and took the papers from the file with her to read. She wanted to see the work of any good new writers in order to consider them for membership in the Rabbit Back Literature Society.

  But the Society hadn’t accepted any new members in three decades.

  Ella read the Agatha Christie essay again, saw a hint of mediocrity in it, and wrote a minus after the ten.

  Later that evening Ella was looking out her bedroom window and saw her mother leading her reluctant husband away from the garden. The wind was increasing, the stalks of grass and the limbs of the trees bending towards the glistening, wet earth.

  “Library police. Good evening,” a voice said behind her.

  Ella spun around.

  Ingrid Katz, librarian, gestured towards the books lying on the bed and smiled.

  “I just came to tell you that you forgot to fill out an official check-out form for those books. And all of them are, unfortunately, out of circulation. So I can’t loan them out anymore. It’s odd that they should have ended up being taken out. I thought I had taken them off the shelves. But it’s so easy to make mistakes, isn’t it?”

  Ingrid Katz was standing in the middle of the floor in her socks with her head at a questioning tilt. Ella swallowed her excuse. She felt belligerent.

  She managed to sound like the injured party as she asked how it was that the Rabbit Back library had happened to collect such a large number of defective works of literature.

  Ella had spent half an hour looking through the books she’d stolen. There were many books in the pile that were unknown to her, so she couldn’t tell if they had any errors in them. But two of them were books she knew well, and she had found flagrant, bizarre, scandalous errors in them that would have had to be the work of an entire conspiracy of rogue printers.

  Mersault, the main character in Albert Camus’s The Str
anger, wasn’t convicted of murder, as he was in the official version of the novel. Instead, Josef K. broke into the prison, helped Mersault escape, and remained behind in his place. And while Aslan, the lion god in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, had sacrificed himself for the human children, this Aslan made short work of the White Witch by taking her head between his teeth.

  “This is ridiculous,” Ella said. “How in the world can something like this happen and not be in all the papers!”

  Ingrid Katz shrugged.

  “These things happen sometimes. What else can I say? There’s nothing in it to make a splash in the tabloids. Literature doesn’t interest a large audience. These are almost all old books. Somebody working at a printer’s just decided to have a little joke at the reader’s expense and did it to amuse himself.”

  Ingrid paused for a moment and leaned down to pick the books up from the bed.

  “Well,” she said. “I guess I’ll take these with me. I understand that you’re interested in them, and they would no doubt be collector’s items on the open market, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t let anyone have them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, no. It’s against the rules. Any faulty copies must be destroyed.”

  “There must be a lot of these pranksters at the printing houses,” Ella said. “All of these books were printed in different places. I checked. Unless there’s one malicious individual moving from one printer to the next.”

  Ingrid Katz thought for a moment.

  “Yes. It could be a conspiracy of printers’ employees, or one individual saboteur. In any case, it’s my job as a librarian to remove the offending copies from circulation. And I hope you won’t talk about this in public. I really wouldn’t want book collectors to descend on our libraries and try to steal these irregular books. I’m sure you understand.”

  Ella didn’t say anything.