I Loved a German

“To that I could no longer give any reply, I only wept to wash my soul of shame with tears, my body of the dishonour, humiliation, defilement. I went on weeping until I feel asleep. When I awoke in the night, I found myself under a rug, but I didn’t remember how I got there. Seeing grandfather in the dim lamplight still sitting by my bed, as if I were gravely ill and had to be watched over, I suddenly remembered everything again and once more burst into tears, though with less force than in the evening, for I began to feel a terrible pity not just for myself but for grandfather too, who was trying to calm me, saying, ‘Child, what’s wrong with you, that you can’t conquer yourself! The main thing is that your aunt can’t hear you in her room, for you don’t want her to know as well. It’s easier for two people to handle this than three.’ ‘There are already three of us,’ I said, to which grandfather readily agreed, saying, ‘And of course three of us, dear child; my old head is forgetting the third.’ ‘Do you really believe now, grandfather, that he loves me?’ I asked, trying to look questioningly at his face in the dim light. ‘And of course, child, now I do believe it,’ replied grandfather, adding, ‘Sleep until the morning, then you’ll understand it yourself without asking.’ ‘But why did he shame me so much then?’ I queried. ‘He saved you from shame, dear child,’ replied grandfather. ‘To shame a young lady is a very easy thing to do, but to keep her from shame, few men have enough manliness and love for that.’

“That is what he said to me that night, when I just couldn’t overcome my pain and shame. But in the morning it really was a little easier, as grandfather had predicted, although I didn’t get out of bed at all that day. I couldn’t move my limbs, because it reminded me of the humiliation and defilement they had endured the previous day. My aunt came to see me, felt my head and pulse, and said that my face was paler than theirs were. At any rate I would be wise not to move from the spot until the next morning. Thus she too approved of my staying in bed to recuperate. But when she was in my room, I suddenly remembered my suitcase and I became fearful that she might happen for some reason to touch it and feel that it was heavier than usual and ask what I had in it and why I had it. At the same time I was afraid she might open the drawer in the bureau to take something from it, and her practised eyes would immediately see that some of my things were missing. But neither one nor the other happened: grandfather had put the case aside and the bureau drawer remained unopened. I had no luck in love, but I did have some in shielding my shame.

“Lying on my own I started to gradually realise what had happened to me and my love the previous day, and soon I was blaming not you but only myself. Only myself, and I will until I die. I had come to you with the greatest thing that a poor young girl has in this world – love, and I had wanted to pawn myself and my shabby little things for it, but at the same time I had made a vow to a third person, though he was my grandfather, the only good person in the world, and I had kept that vow, as though it were greater, more important, dearer and more sacred than my love. I wanted to come to you with pure love, but I came with a pledge which changed my love to a lie and a deception. For I now believe firmly that, as you kneeled before me in the park and tried to put sense into my head with pleas and explanations, I could have happily and directly told you what grandfather and I had talked about and what we had both agreed, then you would have either taken me upstairs to your room and I would not have felt the shame and humiliation that burnt within me then and will probably burn within me till my dying hour. That scorching sensation is perhaps the principal reason why I’m writing, making a sort of testament to my love, which I have never been able to speak about.

“That I regarded the pledge I made to my grandfather as holier than my love, and thus forced you to confirm the decision you had taken, which in your situation was the only right and honest one, was the crime which I cannot forgive myself for. The traces of that crime, no tears, regrets, consolations or explanations can flush from my soul. When I had decided to come to you, as I did that time, no third party should have stood between us any more with a pledge or a vow, not even God or Jesus Christ. And when I gave that pledge to grandfather, I should have completely forgotten it at your place, or I should have broken it with a light and pure heart, and in the full knowledge that I was doing it for our love. But I didn’t have the self-abandonment or the heart to break my pledge, and thus everything that followed could not be avoided. You could not have done otherwise if you really loved me; in that grandfather was right; I could have done otherwise, but I chose not to.

“And the strangest thing of all to me, the most incomprehensible and therefore perhaps the most painful: I didn’t know you as well as grandfather did. Just to think that you love someone as I loved you and still do, and at the same time you can be mistaken about them and left groping around in the dark about who they are, whereas someone else who is standing alongside and looking indifferently, sees everything, understands everything – ah! even now I could lose my mind thinking about it. For grandfather, when he assured me that time that I couldn’t compromise myself, was thinking of nothing else than that. No, you wouldn’t compromise me; you wouldn’t do it, because you have a loyal and honest Estonian heart, as he would put it. Grandfather foresaw how I would come back from my honeymoon, and he feared that I might not survive it. He was wrong about me there, and he feared needlessly, but in the end he may be right in that, as in everything else.

“The only thing that consoles me is that you knew me just as little as I knew you. Even today you probably have no idea that I came to you in full knowledge of the consequences. I packed my little things in the suitcase with deliberation and took it with me. Then you believed the silliest lie about the suitcase instead of guessing the truth. The truth then was the most unbelievable thing in the world to you; what I did was so improbable, and you dared to assume so terribly little of me. You carried in the case in your hand all my body and soul, but had no idea of it. You had a whole world of love to carry, but didn’t notice a thing. You didn’t even understand my madness when I cried out to you in the greatest anguish there on the park bench that you loved my grandfather more than you did me. That was so strikingly stupid on your part, and to this day I wonder why you didn’t kiss me even once, or why I didn’t do that to you, for when I walked beside you, suitcase in hand, I had plenty of time to kiss you, if you didn’t kiss me.

“By the way, Ervin will probably not believe to his dying hour that we didn’t ever kiss each other; all my assurances to the contrary can’t convince him of the truth. To get him to believe it, I also told him how at our last meeting you clutched me around the legs, and what I said to you then, explaining that, if I can tell such a thing, then I would say I say that we didn’t kiss if we had. But even that didn’t help; I could see from his face that he didn’t believe me, and that now he believed me even less. I’ll never forgive him for that, nor that he once said about you, ‘Either he kissed you or he didn’t feel himself man enough to need you as a woman.’ Those two things have perhaps also helped me to write these lines.

“But you mustn’t conclude that Ervin was bad to me – no, certainly not. Likewise you mustn’t think that we had a bad life. We didn’t. He is decent and good to me, and he probably even loves me in his own way, and looks after me as far as it is in his power. As for me, I appreciate him and I can respect him, but to my mind he is a little childish, even childlike sometimes, for he thinks it’s enough to be good to someone and take care of them. He has probably never known what love is. I don’t think he has ever really loved Estonian girls either, although even now he keeps recalling them. But a man who has not really loved is not a real man, for only love is the measure of a man. But he seems to have the understanding of a child.

“Oh yes! Living next door to us is a little boy, Oskar by name, but they call him Ossa. I really like that! I make it my business to go next door, just to hear the mother, a young woman, calling her son Ossa. And I want to see the boy too; he’s terribly manly and reminds me somehow of you. If I have a boy, I’ll definitely call him Oskar and start using Ossa as his nickname. I’ve talked about it to Ervin too; he doesn’t have anything against it, because he doesn’t know that your name is Oskar too and I could call you Ossa, even now. Were you called that when you were little? Ossa, Ossa, Ossa! It sounds like music, it sounds like divine music. Do you still want to hear that music from my lips? When I am no longer around, you can know that I died with that music on my lips.

“The young lady next door, the same one who calls her little boy Ossa, has said to me several times that I’m looking terribly ill. It won’t end well like this, she tells me. She says my workload is too heavy, I should look after myself, my husband should keep an eye on me, to see that I don’t do too much. When she talks like that she always calls me a young madam who shouldn’t live like other people, like farm people, used to everything at ground level. Have some mercy on yourself and your child, young madam, Ossa’s mother says to me, and sometimes she has tears in her eyes – why? I haven’t asked her. It’s good for me to be soothed with words, because she can’t do anything else, and perhaps I go so many times to that farmhouse to hear Ossa’s mother’s soothing words.

“Everything turned out differently to what anyone could expect or assume. Here I am now. In everyone’s faces I read my own death, even grandfather’s face, whom they brought here at my request, and I will certainly die, because I want to die. My child is already dead. She was a daughter and I couldn’t ever have called her Ossa if we had both lived. That is good, it’s best that way, because I feel I loved the name I hoped to give her more I loved than her. It’s also good that there is something in the world that brings oblivion; it’s just a shame that oblivion also expunges love, which is so miraculously beautiful, such a terribly beautiful thing, as you yourself once said, when I still didn’t know what a dreadful thing love is – that it should never vanish.

“But perhaps even death doesn’t bring oblivion? No, no, that cannot be! God cannot have brought people into this world with allowing them a death that leads to oblivion! God could not have given people love without adding the means to obliterate crimes of mercy from their memories! And my last wish, my last anguished cry on this earth to Him is that He forgives me my crime, for which I cannot forgive myself. By keeping my pledge I lost my happiness in life, our dream of life, and now what was killed is dragging me with it, as if the dead were ruling over the living.

“Yet I’m not complaining, I have no grievance. I only feel sorry for you. My pain for your sake is so terrible that I rejoice in death. I don’t have the courage to ask your forgiveness for my crime; it’s much easier for me to die. But if you had to forgive me after all, then I know that we were two foolish children, who took account of a thousand things, in the past, present or even the future, but not of our own love. But when I am no longer here, don’t think of anything else but our love; it will comfort you. Love me a little longer as you loved me when I was alive. It is so easy to die beloved. Not to regret, not to mourn, only to love!

“A couple of those objects that I had in that worn suitcase, which you also carried that evening and which I didn’t let out of my hands later, will accompany me; all the others I have destroyed. Thus I leave together with my shame and love. Love me because of my great shame, which I am taking with me.

“My last wish is that my death notice be put in an Estonian newspaper. That is for you. If you read that announcement – it is complete, so you won’t mistake my name, you will recognise me – and if you are still interested enough in my fate to go to my grandfather’s place within three days – he’s expecting you – then you will receive this letter from him. He promised that, and I believe he will keep his promise as well, just as I once kept the pledge I gave him. But if you don’t go to grandfather within three days, he will burn this letter without reading it himself or letting anyone else read it. Thus no one apart from grandfather and us two knows of this letter, not even Ervin, and only I know its contents, and you may know it too if you appear within three days.

“I have said everything I have to say. Now I feel pure and blessed, at least before you. I only ask, love me a little longer, a little while longer! If I don’t come to your mind at any other time, perhaps I will when you happen to pass along the Avenue of Lies, where you once clutched my legs and where I committed my crime. Think of me for just a moment with love. Think because, although I killed our life’s dream, I wanted so much to be like an open book to you, and if I couldn’t be that in my mortal body, then I am that now with a living soul. Take it and love it, as long as you live. I will never cease loving you. Erika”