Free The Listener by Tove Jansson Page B

always lit at four in the morning. The Christmas trees at the filling station were lit, but they were shaking their branches in the storm as if terrified and trying to tear themselves free. She stared at them for a long time, and when they finally blew down, at almost the same moment, and were swept across the street, their lights winking out, she cried out in relief. It was cold in the room, which faced the full force of the storm. It no longer came in gusts. Now the wind pressed in on the city from the sea in a single continuous roar, a rising and implacable mass of sound. Power, she thought, how I love power! The onslaught was so violent that she stepped back from the window. What a storm! What a night!
    What is night? Sleeping till the next day; trying to sleep away your tiredness so you can face what you don’t want to face; hiding yourself in a cautious little death for which you’re not to blame – for hours that seem like seconds when you wake up. She walked back and forth between the windows and thought, Call! Call meand ask me if I’m frightened. She watched the storm tear the snowdrifts on the street into spirals and press the snow against the façades of the buildings like great outstretched hands. The greenish light had grown darker. And dreams, what are they? They dig up your fear and display it, enlarged by cruelty. There is no rest, there is no comfort!
    A large object flew past her window and struck the side of the building with a crunch, then flew on – wherever, whatever. The wind was like a great groaning, a scream. Neon lights burned here and there across the city like coloured inscriptions in stone, worn almost away, and the snow rose up from the ground everywhere and from all the streets like an enormous curtain. She could no longer see any lights at all, and there was nothing she could do but listen and wait. So it goes, she thought. Thus it will be one day when everything cracks and falls and there is nothing more to remember and hold fast to, and we will have to rethink everything from top to bottom, if we have time. It won’t matter if we’re strong or weak, and nothing will make an impression on anyone. Everything will be erased and extinguished.
    The city was empty; no people and no cars. The temperature had fallen. Her window was a whirling greenish wall of snow, and she stepped back slowly into the room. The storm had gone beyond reason and imagination, merely a powerful, uninterrupted shuddering. This shuddering was universal – in the windowpanes and the walls that protected her, in the air around her and in her teeth and her gut. She moved further back, against the wall. Rightnow, she thought, right now I can see that everything is utterly simple. I know what I want. Everyone is standing like this in their rooms tonight. They’ve woken, all of them, and don’t dare go near their windows and don’t dare go back to bed. They realise that it’s not merely a question of living and enduring but rather of something else entirely, but they don’t know what.
    How can a storm of tropical strength find its way to a land of snow, a dreary, dependable land where we light Christmas trees to appease the darkness? Windowpanes shattered in well-built stone houses over the few short hours of the visitation, and sheet-metal roofs were carried away in several areas near the harbour. The storm flew into her violently opened room in an explosion of ice-cold air that was thicker than flesh. It pressed her against the wall and pressed against her eyes and eardrums and into her mouth, while all around her the room fell to pieces like the wings on a dragonfly. No truths applied and nothing had a name that could be used and recognised.
    She crept towards her bedroom on hands and knees. The only thing that mattered was getting to her bed – her bed by the wall below the water pipes – and hiding in it. She felt the doorjamb with her hands. The floor was covered with snow and shards of glass, and when the