akonkka(at)mbnet.fi 

Anita Konkka

An extract from the novel In the Fool's Paradise written by Anita  Konkka,translated by A.D.Haun

From the yard I hear the banging of the cover of the mailman's  cart. A moment later the mail slot clacks. A reminder card from  the library comes, and letter from an employer. The library is demanding Claude Simon's Georgica, which I don't remember having borrowed. The employer thanks me for my interest in connection with the information specialist's job that was open. he tells about having endeavored to choose from among applicants the one whose prospects, abilities and qualifications would correspond to the task to be done and his organization's requirements and laments the fact that this time the choice has not fallen on me, but he will be glad to keep my application papers in case they want to employ someone like me in the company in future. He's a long-winded employer, usually they just thank you for your interest when they return your application.

I look at the employment advertisements in the newspaper and think about what I'll do. The Deaconesses Institute office is looking for a public relations officer and some advertising agency is looking for a creative individual who is ready to dive to the bottom of the world of the product and the consumer - whether it concerns toothpicks or social services. Once I judged that I was a creative person and applied for a position as a text writer, but I received no reply. When I mailed in my application, I had a nightmare the following night, in which I was running for dear life from an advertising who demanded that I think up an advertisement for laundry detergent."Omo beams, Omo screams" came to my mind, it wasn't adequate. Just as he was about to catch me, I woke up and realized that the advertising field wasn't for me.

I went to the library and found out that I'm victim of the computer. The clerk said that so many books are borrowed nowadays that their computer's capacity isn't adequate, mistakes occur constantly. She looked exhausted. her hair was dishevelled and there were red blotches on her cheeks when she cleared away the mountains of books that had collected at the circulation counter during the disruption of her work. I'd read in the newspaper that a contagious virus is threatening the world's database, a virus more dangerous than Aids. In the newspaper for the same day they explained about some research on changes in life on the job. The researcher had the opinion that the use of microelectronics comprised mystical elements: " it seems as though there's something smoldering beneath the surface", he said.

Georgica was on the self and I borrowed it, since it had announced in advance its desire to be borrowed. Judging by its stiff newness, no one had ever opened it. it belonged among the library's despised works. People are peculiar about wanting to borrow the same books as everybody else. Sometimes somebody takes an unknown book in hand, leafs through it and puts it back on the shelf. Whenever I see someone rejecting a book, I hurry over to it. In that way, I've found Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge's notes, Yeats' memoirs and finally Cesare Pavese's diary. On the cover was an ugly man wearing eyeglasses, who had a large nose, a cigarette end dangling out of his mouth and two days' growth of beard. I realize that such a face can't please everyone. There are people who would rather read beautiful writers, but I'm not choosy about external appearance. When I took Pavese's diary from the self, it opened to a place where it said: "A young man stops grieving after he's lost his love. This is happened to every man, that a woman has rejected him, but they haven't broken down or gone insane". When I read that, I thought that both genders have the same feelings, is there any difference other than the fact that there are nine holes in a man and ten in a woman?

On my trip to the library I met two mysterious men. One of the men I'd thought about last night, before I fell asleep: was he dead? - because I haven't seen him for several weeks. His name is "Prophecies Fulfilled" because he had a book with that title under his arm when I saw him for the first time. He's in his sixties or seventies, he could even be slightly older because I can't estimate men's ages very precisely. he's tall and thin, his posture is round-shouldered and his clothes are worn out. he has a dog-fur cap on his head. His cheeks are hollow and his eyes glimmer like water in a deep hole in a rock. He looks like a lonely man, perhaps his wife died years ago, or he never had a wife at all. He gets onto the bus at the second on Huopalahti Road and gets off at the railroad station square, or the other way around, if he's coming from the city. He seems to follow the same timetable that I do and I haven't had regular timetables for nearly a year. maybe an invisible connection exists between us. When I decide to go into town, he also decides to. he pulls on a coat, puts galoshes on his feet and cap on his head, takes a book under his arm and dodders across the road to the bus stop. Today the glimmer of a friendly smile appears in his eyes. Earlier he didn't indicate by any expression or gesture that he recognized me. perhaps he thought that I'd moved away, or died, and he felt happy when he saw me. The feeling is mutual. The book under his arm was Scandinavian Birds in Color, in my hand were Georgica and D.H. Lawrence's essays about subconscious and the imagination.

I met the other man in front of the library. He was also old. He gave me a white tulip and wanted to take a photograph but there was no film in his camera. He had neat dark clothes, a white shirt and black necktie. I didn't ask whether he was going to some friend's funeral, whether he never got that far and didn't dare to take the tulip home, because his wife would start to ask where he's been loitering around all day, if he wasn't even at the funeral? The tulip had wilted due to the lack of water. I put it into a green St. Remy bottle and now its stem is reaching animatedly toward the ceiling. The ceiling has footprints on it as though a dog or fox had been walking there. I've wondered about where they came from, but I've never gotten to the bottom of the matter. There are many things like that in the world that can't be explained.

8

I was about twenty when I met Aleksanteri for the first time. he appeared unexpectedly from between the selves of the Elanto grocery store and asked whether I worked there. I didn't answer, I glared at him crossly and turned my back. I didn't like him, because he was a handsome man and smiled self-complacently. I thought that he was trying to proposition me. At that time, men who talked to me had nothing else in mind. Some asked the way, some asked the time, but nevertheless at the end they always asked whether   go with them to look for the moon. I went with some, too. Later Aleksanteri explained that he thought I was a salesgirl because I had on a green coat. Afterward he was embarrassed about the mistake. He didn't know what had happened to him then. it was clarified last night when I read Lawrence's essays. Lawrence writes that a woman sends through the air a dark, intense invitation. Some man, who has the same vibration frequency, senses the call in his spinal cord. The man's daytime consciousness and ability to see become dim and he helplessly drifts into the woman's magnetic field.

There's a natural explanation for everything and if there isn't a person invents it. But I don't understand why I didn't meet Aleksanteri for fifteen years, even though we walked on the same streets, knew the same people, travelled in the same buses. I met him for the second time in the number sic streetcar. I didn't recognize him because he didn't look the same as when he was young. he introduced himself and asked me the news about some acquaintances that we had in common. I didn't know because I hadn't seen them since my student years. We didn't say anything strange, but I was so confused at meeting him that I inadvertently left the streetcar a couple of stops too soon. I wondered why he came to talk with me. I thought that it was because of my colourful wool sweater, even though that didn't seem like a very plausible explanation. At night I had a nightmare. I woke up to some noise echoing from the stairwell. When I went to look at what was happening there, I saw the outer door's lock was broken, the door was partly open and there was a black handbag by the grillwork at the head of the stairs. It seemed to me that something had happened. In the morning there was a stabbing pain in my right temple which developed into a headache that lasted three days. I wrote that sorrows come in a black bag, and that falling in love happens at the moment when you can't be on your guard. When you notice that it's happened, there's nothing more to be done. I was so close to love then but when I wrote that, I wasn't thinking of Aleksanteri and didn't know that he had married Vera half a year earlier. Probably I didn't even know that his first wife had died.

Mysterious feeling - and thought-currents flow between people and they know more about each other than they believe they do. I don't see any farther than my nose, but something is living inside me that sees and arranges events in my life. Somebody knew what would happen when two years later it pulled me into motion as I was in the middle of cleaning my house. The water bucket and mop remained on the kitchen floor. I put on my city clothes and started for the bus stop at a run. The bus driver stepped on the gas. he had a bad day or he wanted to annoy people. it was probably due to the heat wave, I thought at the time. Now I think that it wasn't a coincidence. everything has some diabolical purpose. Once I had to go to Stuttgart, even though I was on my way to Munich. I climbed onto the wrong train. it was a useful mistake, because I met an old friend of mine in Stuttgart. He taught me how to consult the Chinese oracle I Ching for advice. When I was young he taught me how to listen to Bach and Mozart. If you would always meet just the sort of people whom you've planned to meet, nothing new would happen. But nowadays why do I think so much about the beginning? Is it a sign of the end? Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt when she looked back and Orpheus lost Eurydice. When you fall in love, you become superstitious and begin to see evil omens in everything. You're like a sailor at the mercy of the forces of nature.

9

From the window I can see two intersections and the end of an old gravel road. Now it's a park path. I often dream about that path. its name was West Road. It began in the south on the seashore and in the north it joined the road leading to Turku. there was a gravel pit beside it, whit swallows' nests on the its side. I got sand for the cat there, when I was a child. Now the insurance company building is in that place, but I can't see it from the window, because a medical center building, which resembles a bunker, is in front of it. The arm of a tower crane swings around behind it. The "cat" moves back and forth along the arm. I don't know what the right name for that part is, where the cable is lengthened and shortened, but it's called the "cat". if I lived on the top floor, then when the trees are leafless, I would see Aleksanteri's building, which has four corner apartments. Perhaps I'll go to live there, because a Gypsy told my fortune for me on the Swedish ship, that I'd grow old in a corner apartment or a corner building.

Life is straightforward. I move slowly toward north. On the telephone book's map, I calculated that during my life I've moved two or three kilometres forward. Even a turtle is faster than me. I haven't made a step, neither not left, neither east not west, because those three buildings in which I've lived were set in the same line. I was born near the sea. I lived on Park Road, on the corner of West Road for twenty years and now I'm growing old on the corner of Ulvila Road.

Today I'm a year older than yesterday. During the night I turned thirty-eight. At this age, there's possibility that I'll be born again. The next chance for that is only when you're fifty-six years old.. Being reborn means that a person sees his fate in a new light. For a long time I thought that I didn't have a fate. I was so inconspicuous that not even waiters saw me. Usually I had to leave a restaurant with a dry mouth and a clear head.

I was born on a day when the good spirits of happiness, long life, honor and wealth hastened too meet me, and according to predictions about my funeral, there would be no lack of high-ranking officials. I haven't caught a glimpse of the good spirits, but at the moment of my birth a bird flew into the room, which my mother considered to be an auspicious omen. She didn't know what bird it was, but she guessed that it was a small owl. After researching my fate, I've come to the conclusion that it functions every seventh year. it waits in every person for the moment, the way the egg cells wait in a woman, but children aren't born from every egg cell. You can prevent your fate from being fulfilled if you live an orderly life, go along the same streets you've always gone along, don't change your place of employment, stamp your time card, eat and go to sleep at the same time, spend your vacation in the same place and avoid talking with people you don't know.

I talked about fate with the Gypsy that I'd met on the Swedish ship. She was a professional in the field and told me that she'd read in the book of nature about past and future events. She'd learned to read in Terijoki. For twenty marks she saw from my palm that in the near future there would be much happiness and great changes in my life. It happened that way because three months later I lost my job. She give me a piece of advice for free, that I should be more secretive, it wasn't necessary to tell everything, because the difficulties that I had were due to excessive honesty. At the end she said that my fate would improve at a mature age if I stopped trusting in people. Then she shifted over to the ship's television corner to watch a James Bond video.

©  A.G.Haun, Anita Konkka