I Loved a German

“Every educated person can write at least one novel – a novel about himself.” I’ve read those words somewhere, I remember it clearly. But I’ve forgotten where.

It’s very probable that I’ve read those words several times, because I’ve noticed that words are like announcements: they have to be repeated, otherwise they don’t catch your eye or stay in your mind.

There’s a reason why things happen like that: some thoughtful words appear first somewhere in a book, then in a magazine and finally in a newspaper. But the order of appearance might be the opposite: first in a paper, then in a journal and finally in a book – as a serious scientific study or a respected novel which schoolchildren have to read.

For as education grows from year to year, people are writing clever things all over the place, so that you hardly know any more what you should take up to read. So for an educated person the only intellectual relaxation and treasure house is the cinema, which doesn’t make you yawn or put you to sleep.

And yet the written word must have some importance in the future, there’s no denying it, or at least for now, and until educational institutions have been completely reformed. Since ancient times they’ve seen it as their duty to get young people used to reading boring books – only boring ones of course, on the correct assumption that the interesting ones will be read anyway, like it or not.

Apart from that, strangely enough, there are still people in the world who like to read books and other writings only when they’re bored. Even their tastes have to be satisfied.

And my last point: the written word is important for recording those things that don’t stick in your mind: such as the first sentence of these lines, so that everyone can look back at will and see who used it the first, second, third time and so on. Such a record could accommodate the names of all the films in the world, so that an educated person won’t have to go and see the same film again for the tenth time.

I wrote the above lines yesterday. I spent nearly half a day composing them. Actually I wanted to write something else, but that’s what came out. I realised once again that writing is a complex activity: I’m doing the writing, but someone else is doing the guiding.

Moreover, the lines I wrote don’t deal with the matter at all, but they might as well be left in. They could be left out too, it’s a matter of indifference – except to me, for whom those lines would be lost.

If I leave them in, my excuse may be the fact that the novel is a realm where one talks about what doesn’t concern the principal themes of the book. This is especially true of psychological novels.

Every novel has its own story, plot and psychology. The story is what is told, but might also be left untold, as has often happened recently. The plot is what is considered or meant by the story, or what is said intentionally or unintentionally. The psychology, though, can include everything that comes to mind in the telling.

So my lines from yesterday are part of the psychology, because they came to mind – except that they came to mind even before I started to tell my story.

But the reader shouldn’t infer that I definitely want to write a novel – let alone a psychological one. I am of the opinion that if novels in general were to die out tomorrow, only the authors would feel the loss, including their royalties and sometimes a few prizes that some people might count as royalties.

As for my intention to compose some sort of novel with its own story, its own plot and its own psychology, there are special reasons for that, which I will set about explaining shortly, in an attempt to be as precise and factual as my inexperience allows.

I am at present twenty-five years old, of average height and with blue eyes which are not large or expressive. There is no beard or moustache to speak of, since I either get shaved or do it myself when forced to, although I don’t like doing it myself, as shaving can be painful.

My hair is black, but with a sort of indefinite tinge that makes it different. I won’t speak of my eyebrows, because I’m not sure of them these days. One might also say the same about my hair. Generally speaking of colours it would be most correct only to specify whether they are natural or artificial.

The general shape of my skull is oval, but with a certain inclination or pressure toward the back of the neck, which is said to be the seat of reason – something that so far I haven’t made much use of. The jaws have a musculature as if fate had marked me to be a biter, though I don’t actually have an urge to sink my teeth into anything. Today, for instance, it’s now past twelve o’clock, but I haven’t eaten yet and I don’t know when or where I’ll get anything. It might seem strange to some people, even incredible, but nevertheless this is the case: I have jaws and teeth, I have a stomach and an appetite, which would like to put food in the stomach, but there is no food. At the same time the market is piled high with foodstuffs; I went there yesterday to take a look, because I had a cent or two in my pocket. I walked through row after row of stalls selling berries to admire their abundance and freshness, and sniff their almost entrancing smell. In some places I even asked the price, where the garden strawberries were especially fresh and plump. When an old woman wanted to measure some out for me, I said I’d have to take a further look at the market and the prices, because I needed to buy a large amount. I chose the plumpest and most appetising strawberries, and I asked the old lady what they cost because I wanted a taster, so I would know later where to buy them from. She couldn’t sell berries for less than a cent, she said. I gave her two and moved on. The woman shouldn’t have been thinking about the money; no, it was only a question of knowing what the berries tasted like. That’s what it should be. But a beautiful berry eaten on an empty stomach just seemed sickly-sweet and plain watery. I felt very sorry to have wasted my two cents.

When I had suitably distanced myself from the rows of berries, I went to where they sell bread – black, brown and white – from tables behind which stood large carts or vans piled with supplies. In my pocket I counted out a handful of money to work out what to buy and how much. In the end, however, I didn’t buy anything here either, because it occurred to me there would be no point in carrying all that bread home, when right by the courtyard at home there is a shop where you can buy the same thing just as cheaply.

Generally it isn’t appropriate or polite for an educated young man in the street to carry a little packet whose shape reveals to everyone that it contains a piece of bread. It’s a different matter if your packet contains sweet buns, cakes or a tart – quite a different matter, because that implies certain relationships, acquaintances, adventures, delicacy and love. A piece of bread only speaks of hunger, which everyone considers to be a vulgar and crude thing demeaning to everyone who encounters it.

So I headed home and bought from the shop – not the one by the courtyard, because I have very old bills there, but another one, a bit further away, around the corner – four hundred grams of dark bread and a herring, which I took between two fingers and held like a carcass away from myself, so as not to soil my clothes. Then I hurried half-running up to my room, locked the door behind me, sat down on a chair and munched on both the bread and the herring. True, there was a mouthful of bread left over – that I devoured dry in the middle of the night, when I was already lying down.

In winter, when my landlord’s family are at home and live on the first floor below me, it’s possible for me at least to get boiled water from their kitchen, but now when everyone is on their summer holiday apart from my landlord, whom I rarely see, I have to be content with cold tap water. Even in winter, getting the boiling water wasn’t just a matter of going and asking, or taking, for I had to enter into a friendly relationship with the maid which sometimes required more obligations than I was willing to take on. Never mind, one way or another I was able to arrange it and quite often she came up from the kitchen with the water and something hot or cold to eat, food that she found off-putting. I objected with all my heart to these additional things – I say really with all my heart, because it was humiliating and repulsive to me – I was angry with the girl, I cursed her, but it didn’t help. In the end I had to give in and swallow the pill.

On the first occasion I couldn’t object, so great was my hunger was so great, but I couldn’t bear to look at her tearful eyes. And if she’d been a little older or prettier, I wouldn’t have accepted a pork chop with fried potatoes either on that first occasion or later – and having to eat them like a thief. But the girl was youthful, about seventeen or eighteen, quite childish in her appearance, shabbily dressed, almost filthy, the slippers on her feet always full of holes and almost without soles, her face oblong, her nose longish, her mouth too big, her front teeth sparse and stumpy, her gums too prominent when she laughed, her eyes small under black brows.

In truth, her brows were the only part of her whole being that nature had not given her niggardly – her brows and maybe her hair, because it was black, a quite beautiful black and naturally a little curly. But otherwise it was quite pitiful to look at this poor creature either walking or standing: her neck was short and thick, her shoulders broad as if they belonged to a man, her waist too low, her legs too short, her whole body below the average height. So when she stood in her mundane shabbiness or wretchedness by the door, supporting one shoulder against the doorframe with her darned stockings in her torn slippers, holding a plate with another upturned one on top of it, wearing a soiled apron and her hair clustered on her head and with tears in her eyes, looking away as though she and not I should be ashamed, I felt such a deep pity for her that I might have accepted a dead frog or a rat from her and bolted it down, simply because she was what she was. For no other reason than the manner in which she stood at the door. Because if she had said a little earlier those words that she only said when I had started eating the chop and the potatoes, I would certainly not have accepted her gift. But no, she was silent until I’d half finished the plate and said, “The landlady has nothing to do with this; it’s my portion, which she gave to me.”

“But didn’t you have anything to eat,” I cried pushing the plate away.

“Young sir, I can’t eat pork chops anyway,” she replied. “I always give them away to someone else – to the cat or the dog.”

The morsel congealed in my mouth and my tongue reached for my palate. For this wretched girl I was replacing a cat or a neighbourhood dog! I didn’t know where to look. But when I did finally turn to her, I realised that everything she had said was a lie. The only true part was that she had brought me her tastiest morsels, and in their place she was gnawing on a bit of dry bread and sucking on a herring’s tail.

“Why are you lying to me like this?” I asked.

“No, sir, I’m not lying. I can’t eat such greasy stuff; I’m used to the lean,” she explained.

If that was true, then I was still playing the part of the cat or neighbourhood dog who gets what isn’t good enough for humans. But nothing could be done about it; half of the chop and half of the potatoes had gone now, and the rest was going to follow them.

Later with a full stomach as I laid myself out comfortably on the divan, my thoughts turned again to the girl, as she had leaned at first against the doorpost, a plate under her apron. And now she seemed to me, if not as some sort of beauty, at least no longer as ugly – pleasant, at least. And I tried to understand what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is pleasant and what is unpleasant. Of course I didn’t come to any conclusion. It only occurred to me that the landlady had engaged the girl mainly because of her ugliness and wretchedness, because she didn’t consider pretty maids to be suitable objects to have about the house, and above all she was wary of the neat manner of their dress. “These days nobody wants to work once they’ve got themselves some glad rags,” she would assert, and that conviction of hers must have been the reason she only let in ragamuffin girls like that one. I was amazed that even an experienced landlady like her could be so wrong about people, about men and women. Even though it made no difference that Loona might have been, like everyone else, made to be pitied, laughed at, joked about or found fault with, she could still stand by the door like that and see that she could please any man, even be beautiful in his eyes?

For the past couple of days I haven’t been able to write a line – I wasn’t at home. Three evenings ago, I went out following the incident I’ve just related to satisfy my hunger one way or another, and had rotten luck in the literal sense of the word. I only got back at about three or four o’clock this morning, and although the clock will soon strike three again, my head still hurts and I feel giddy. I was supposed to go out again, but for some reason I started rereading what I had written.

In my present state of mind, I’m struck by only one thing: I should have been clearer about my purpose of my writing, for why else would I have deviated so badly from my original intention? I started by describing my own appearance, but as soon as I got to the jaws and teeth, everything was suddenly forgotten, and there followed pages and pages only about food and about who brings me food one way or another. One thing I haven’t mentioned is that Loona’s explanation for bringing me food was of course all a lie and a deception, but not in the way I thought – quite a different one. Nor did the landlady make a mistake in choosing Loona as her servant, and I was wrong about her knowledge of people. But there’s a time and a place for all that.

Now I’ll return to my own appearance, and tell you: perhaps I was right to break off my description last time, which due my hunger. I very much doubt that a person’s outward appearance can be linked with their inner self. If I, for example, have a flat nose, who can definitely conclude from that that I can’t have the same natural qualities that some hook-nosed people have? You can’t. So why should I emphasise my flat nose so much?

It’s a different thing when it’s a question of women and love – quite a different thing. Women think that only straight-nosed and hook-nosed men are noble, so to speak, and that their love is to nobility as a bee is to honey. Simply ridiculous! As if nobility couldn’t be found behind an African wide nose. Several researchers testify that it’s to be found there in much greater numbers than amongst hook-nosed Europeans. And when my acquaintances assure me that I have a real Finnish nose, what I want to know is whether there’s any nobility such a nose? And does that nobility have anything to do with love? But then I ask, what is nobility anyway, and what does it mean to be in love?

So much for flat and hook noses, and therefore I won’t say any more on the subject, except that my broadish nose constitutes, along with my jaws and my shoulders, and especially my feet, a certain artistic whole: they all correspond to each other and are in balance. My gait, in particular, is of that kind: a little broad and longish, a little clumsy and angular. It is for wise heads to decide what to make of this, because they love to make mistakes, so that even wiser ones will have something to rectify. I do have three teeth – two lower molars and one front tooth at the upper right, just next to a canine, that have been filled, but I don’t think that affects my nobility or my knowledge; it only affects love, especially if the filling doesn’t fit, is made of bad material or has fallen out. Anyone who doesn’t know that knows nothing of love, just like those who think it doesn’t matter what shoes you wear.

A shoe is more important in love than a nose or personality, and the shape of the tip decides a person’s fate in temporal and eternal life much more than the flatness or curvature of a person’s nose. I have noticed this. Someone else will notice something else, and that is for them to write about. So I have the perfect right to say that I wear size 43 and 44 shoes alternately, whereas the only right size would be 43 ½, but those, the half-sizes, are not to be found anywhere. That’s why many older people pine for the old Russian times, because they were widely available then. The most suitable are the shoes with a wide toe, as can be inferred from my previous arguments, but I also wear those that are sharp as arrows, if fashion dictates it. So I’m not going to create a principle for myself about the toe of a shoe, just as I have no firm principles about human relationships, but I do think that if shoe toes keep changing their shape more and more often, then people should also change their principles more and more often, or even cast them aside and only follow fashion, which is perhaps the most modern principle and world view. The cobbler and the tailor have to calculate the direction of culture and the level of education.

My education is such that it can be called secondary or higher, as you wish. In my own opinion I have a higher education, because I have spent two and a half years at university and sat the Latin examination there, and I have documentary proof of this, if needed. I took off the fox fur and I was awarded the colours, so I am a full member of the graduate community. I left the university at my own wish, because I could no longer find any friends who wanted, were able or dared to lend me any more money. But through friends I became an intern at a bank for a few months, and afterwards obtained a permanent position at a ministry, which I lost because there were men and women, older and younger than me, who could prove that they had a greater right to my position or that they were better suited to it. So here I sit in my attic room for the umpteenth month, waiting for better times. Thank God the owner of this old two-storey wooden house believes in better times; otherwise he would have had to throw me out long ago and taken on a new lodger, someone enjoying slightly better times than I am right now. I pay ten crowns a month for the room, but I haven’t paid it for three months. The owner evidently believes that I will pay my debt one day. May God keep his faith firm and perform a miracle, so he won’t have to be disappointed in me or in other people.

So it’ll take a miracle for the landlord to get his rent from me soon, but I may get out of my present situation by more worldly assistance: I could go home to the farm. But that’s not what I want, for a hundred reasons, and those reasons don’t only concern me, but also my father and mother, my sister and brothers, in fact all my family, friends, acquaintances and associates. Despite all that, returning home to my parents’ embrace would require a degree of heroism or desperation from which there would be no escape. Thus I’ve decided to find a way out by writing the only novel that every educated person has to hand – for am I not an educated person? – that is a novel about myself. For God’s sake, let no one think that I believe I have a special talent or power, that I’m hoping for the arrival of some holy spirit in whose light everything will be done almost painlessly, as if by itself. No, I believe first of all in work, especially as I’ve read that one particular genius believes his works are ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration. Now if geniuses bring about their works almost purely through labours, why can’t I? And anyway where is the man who can say where the work ends and the talent begins in the case of modern novels? That is only for coming generations to decide, or not even for them. Nowadays the proof of a talent is the work done, which is like a talent. That’s why no first prize is ever given for even the most divine poetry, but it’s given for a great novel, however mediocre it may be. Talent is a gift from God and it would be immoral to reward anyone for what God has given them.

If I had some special gift which is called a divine spark, would I be troubling my head or heart about such worldly things as privation and hunger? Wouldn’t I warble like a skylark so that everyone would envy my great joie de vivre? Out of my tears and great sadness that sometimes snare my heart, I would make something that creates the illusion of an earthly paradise everyone would yearn for. Now, when I lack that divine spark, I think for the umpteenth time as I write these lines about how at six o’clock the doors of the grocers’ shops will close and I haven’t yet put anything between my teeth today, and I don’t have a crumb in the house to put there. For ages I’ve been fretting about going to the shop, but I’m still writing, although I know that in the end I’ll have to go anyway. And today I can go – not to the shop directly outside the courtyard, because I don’t have enough money to pay my old debts, but I’ll go to the one around the corner with my head held high.

Does anyone know why some people grow the nails of their index or little fingers long? I grew the index fingernail long on my right hand, although I didn’t know why I was doing it. But today my eyes were opened while I was eating: the long nail on the index finger is a great help in skinning smoked Baltic herring. It can be wonderfully adept at removing skin, even from a half-dried herring. Having arrived at this conviction, I couldn’t resist wondering how every senseless thing in this world has its own little purpose. The same should apply to hunger and privation. Where in the world could you put old crusts of bread, dried sprats, rancid herrings and stale hunks of rye bread if there weren’t people going hungry and living in privation? No, there would be nowhere to put them, and no one to sell them to, and they would go to waste, which would do great harm to the economy. But now, thank God, everything moves on, everything bears fruit, whether it be half-rotten apples or mouldy strawberries, worn clothes or galoshes with holes, scrap iron or dog-chewed bones.

As I ate, marvelling at divine order and dispensation, it appeared to me suddenly that throughout my whole life I have seen nothing but privation and hunger, and that it alone rules the world. My common sense tried to reject this, but I still felt this was right. Since childhood I have heard of nothing but privation and hunger. When my mother went to give straw or hay to the animals, my father always said that whether a lot or a little, she would have to give something, because a long winter lay ahead. Even in the spring he insisted that you had to be careful, because no one could be sure that the animals would find something in the forest. Even with the greatest care, there was always privation and hunger in the spring, and no one knew where to get fodder for the animals. The heifers had sometimes to be driven into the swamp, where they would gulp great mouthfuls of dry grass from the tussocks, and scattered clumps of reeds which stuck out here and there.

It was the same with people’s food: there was always talk of rationing, always calculation of how long this or that would last. And it didn’t last: very often the shortages would come. Of course there were times when they feasted, eating and drinking several times and beyond reason, but now it seems to me that that happened because tomorrow, and the day after, there would be so much to give up, and so they caroused today, just to get their fill of food and drink for once. Maybe everyone who eats and drinks too much in the world does it because of fear of the morrow, which may bring, if not hunger, then at least privation. There is still something today, there is still enough for today, so let’s eat and drink and be merry, because no one knows what the future may bring.

But I didn’t fight, did I? And my companions didn’t fight, at least I didn’t notice anything and nothing like that affected me. We had never seen our own mother’s and father’s heifers and piglets, and words about a struggle for a better future went in one ear and out the other, without affecting us in the least. And how were we supposed to fight from a school bench? By great learning? But we noticed too early that this better future that our fathers and mothers thought about at home would not fall into our laps because we’d got an education, quite the contrary: the better future would be tasted by those who haven’t learnt a thing, or who have, while learning, seen fashions, amusing pastimes, polite social activity. Those who acquire things are acquisitive but proper learning lessens acquisitiveness. This was the unavoidable conclusion we had to draw from our experience. Real learning trains the conscience, but we were growing up at a time when everyone was behaving as though such concepts were a logical error in need of urgent correction. Learning was supposed to awaken our mind and spirit, but everyone was living as if the mind was a silly fairy tale for children, and the spirit was only awakened by alcohol. Some teachers said that we had to learn so as to gain a sense of responsibility for our families, our relatives, our acquaintances, the whole Estonian nation and the homeland, because our whole future depended on responsibility, but we didn’t understand, or we forgot it when we saw that it was the irresponsible ones who were harvesting the fruit we’d been sent to school to obtain. Why worry our heads about it? So we could go bankrupt, like everyone else who had studied before us? Did our fathers and mothers study along with their piglets out in some remote forest, by a bog or on a hillock, so that we could learn to go bankrupt? Were they interested in science or art? Are they interested in it even now? Is that what they saw in our better future, and why they fought for it?

No, no! Not even my sister and brother are interested in such things. Even today they see nothing more in my studying than the investment of retained capital, which should bear as high an interest as possible. Father and mother, sister and brother, relatives and friends, acquaintances and strangers, they all have one notion: school is a place where a person is prepared for usury. No one knows really where or from whom the profit should be taken or can be taken, but everyone thinks they know that you go to school only so that one day you will earn as much as possible for as little effort as possible. Moreover, everyone has a strange presentiment – originating from who knows where or when, you could even say from a strange dream – not only that people who’ve been to school earn a lot of money for easy work, but that their school attendance affects the welfare, prosperity and abundance of their fathers and mothers, sisters, brothers, relatives, friends, and even their steers, heifers, piglets and chickens. They too all want to earn more for less effort, they too can start to eat and drink better, so that none of them will ever even dream of hunger and privation again.

The ancient story of the bizarre tragedy of the world was repeated. People spoke of education as some sort of Redeemer or Messiah, leading us to some higher and more ideal kingdom, but everyone was expecting an earthly Canaan, running with milk and honey. The world has surely always been that way, talking of one thing and thinking of another. And that is surely because nobody is content with what they have, they always want more, as if eternally gnawed by hunger or feeling anguish from privation. Somewhere far in the south there live tiny little white ants which wander indiscriminately from place to place, destroying everything organic in their path. They chomp up hundred-year-old furniture into pulp, and one fine day a person finds they are not sitting on a chair or sofa but a pile of dust. That’s what white ants are like, but do they differ that much from humans? Haven’t they also wandered for centuries from country to country and from continent to continent, and haven’t their pathways been littered with destruction? The ant is driven by hunger, but the human? The human driving force is hunger, which it has endured from the lands where its history is known. Even today, people confront people and nations confront nations, beating their breasts and trying to scream to outdo each other with proof that they are hungrier than others, and thus they have a greater right to wander around like the tiny white ants, seeking food and turning to ash and dust everything that happens to be in their path.

And so the idea settled down in me as I smeared butter as thinly as possible on a piece of bread, as I’d decided that a hundred grams should suffice for at least four meals. Evidently the natural tendency to save and stretch things out, inherited from my parents, was unconsciously at work in me, because I knew, as they did with their piglets, that a long and slighter hunger is better than a brief and horrible one. But until today I had never thought about it. None of us who went to school thought about it. At least we never talked about it among ourselves. Somehow we did our schoolwork, mostly making a face that said that we were doing it for someone else, not ourselves. We needed to play, have fun, go somewhere, look at or listen to something or simply wander around town, especially at forbidden times. We were all of the opinion that what was expected of us was pointlessness or senselessness invented by our parents, and pursuit of the forbidden was the only right and proper task in life. For if this wasn’t the case, why did those who no longer went to school go to those places we were forbidden to enter? Places frequented even by those who were supposed to monitor our walks, amusements, activities and acquaintances.

You could almost say that we were forced into something that we didn’t want or need and which everyone was trying to dodge, and they tried to take away from us everything that pleased us, tempted us and attracted everyone who wasn’t under the supervision we were. Even the cinemas couldn’t advertise themselves, they had to always stress that they were forbidden for young people. So why couldn’t we change our caps or simply hide them away so that our monitors couldn’t identify us as schoolchildren? Why couldn’t we change into apprentice tinsmiths, painters or joiners, so that we could get to see what was forbidden?

Those forbidden things could be necessary, that I don’t dispute, because I still don’t have a certain yardstick to measure when this or that food or drink, play or film, game or amusement is harmful to a person, when it is useful, when it is indispensable. But one thing I do know for certain: we didn’t believe a word of what we were told about the harm or benefits of things, substances and amusements. We didn’t believe it because those who taught us mostly didn’t live according to their teaching. And those few who acted according to their teaching mostly became targets of other people’s; they were quite simply ridiculous.

The same thing happened to our classmates when they tried so hard to bear in mind all sorts of prohibitions and restrictions: they were sissies, mother’s boys. More than that, they were suspected by the teachers of cringing, of telling tales, of all sorts of meanness. Nobody believed that any of us would be unaffected by such circumstances and things which day by day increased our passion – our peculiar hunger. Over the years we came to the conclusion that what they were doing was nothing less than irritating and enticing us with something sweet and tasty, but instead of giving it to us just saying, “You’ll have to wait.” But the others didn’t wait.

If anyone had asked us directly what was driving our hunger, we would have been at a loss for an answer, or at best would have answered: everything. And by “everything” we would have meant the glittering entrance of some cinema, or the door of a theatre with people pouring in, some rude novel, some ambiguous or obscene ditty somewhere in a poetry collection, an advertisement for a pub in a newspaper, a string of pearls glittering under furs around the neck of a fine lady, lips painted bright red, the laughing mouth of a woman approaching on the street, jazz music and dancing and some kind of nightclub, known by whispers to only two or three people. These were what surrounded us and what assailed our eyes and ears with every step, even though they were banned. This gnawed away at us day after day. This was what nurtured our hunger for something almost nameless, and yet we longed for a time when we could start to slake our hunger. We were waiting for that time in the same way perhaps that our fathers’ and mothers’ steers and heifers did, when in spring they bellowed in front of a half-empty fodder rack and they itched to get to a pasture and fill their mouths with as much of the last tussocks as would fit in their stomachs.

Our forgotten pastures should have been a university – or rather, not a university as such, but what’s associated with it, what’s around it: independence, freedom, doing one’s own thing, and just idling and loafing. Some had relatives, some had friends, some had acquaintances who had already been at university for quite a while and yet still hadn’t passed any examination or had passed pitifully few. What is more, we knew that in going to university you could get through an examination even without opening a textbook, just by cribbing study notes. To talk and think about all this felt just like manna from heaven compared to the eternal cramming and tests at school. So we went to university safe in the knowledge that now the holiday would begin, now it would be relaxation, entertainment and pleasure, and now we would have everything that had allured us and yet been kept away from us. Our cup had been filled to the brim, and there was nothing left to do but lift it to our lips and drink as deeply as possible.

Many, very many feelings we had like that. So what is there to wonder at, if we pushed our way into the Korporationen when we entered university? They were said to be, since ancient times, a nest of youthful carefree fun of every kind. Why otherwise would all the sons of our Vons, our barons and counts have gone there? They were supposed to know the meaning of pleasure, which means a carefree, joyfully dissipated life. Relatives and friends had been telling us this since we were born. God, they thought, had piled all the troubles and pains onto His parishioners, while at the manor the endless feasting just had to go on. The parishioners lived in constant privation, even hunger, while at the manor there was endless abundance, wealth and style. But now there were no more manors, there were just the parishes and the parish householders. What happened to the pleasures and joys of the manors, theirs style and wealth, their dissipated life? It couldn’t just vanish from the world, as it had been admired and envied too long for that, and it was too tempting and alluring. Our fathers would talk with pride about the time they sold a steer to the manor stables to be fattened – and why wouldn’t it tickle them, when their sons and daughters were wearing the same sorts of coloured student caps, having now become the objects of special pride and the emblems of the anticipated life of revelry as it was once lived in the manors.

We had taken over the manors, and now we were hurrying to take over their way of life too, not only among the young students, but in the towns, villages and farmhouses. We wanted to feel like real landowners, lords of our demesne, and we didn’t know how to express that desire any better or clearer than by trying it ourselves and being pleased that our progeny were also trying to live like their former masters and their progeny. We did what we could to carry on the manorial traditions, manners, ways of life, outlook, the whole ethical and aesthetic attitude.

Most of our manors were burdened with debts, and we took this as a model too. Most of the young people from our manors left university without completing any courses, being satisfied with merely studying; but we couldn’t do anything else if we wanted to be the proper heirs to the manors’ heritage. The young manor folk lived only for wine, women and song – well, our generation also wanted to kick up their heels. And the wealthier the country pile, the richer the manor, the more they felt obliged or called upon to follow the customs of the inherited manor in every respect.

And when the hard times came – as come they must, living like that – and the bankruptcies started, the young people were blamed, and that’s where we are now. I’ve had first hand experience of all this. Once the spiritual baggage of the manorial class was being taken over, was there anyone anywhere among the younger or older ones who sounded a note of alarm or stood in their way? Even today a girl’s eyes light up when young men put on their coloured caps. Fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers still feel a little ashamed or humiliated when a son, daughter, sister or brother turns up at home without that coloured cap. Not a single living person has ever asked me what I was studying or whether I had studied at all, but everyone wants to know which Korporation I was in and what we got up to. The main thing is this: do we live as the landed gentry did? Do we have the same customs, the same songs? Nobody wants to know if I speak German, but everyone wants to know if we sing in German. Do we drink in German?

There’s another thing that I’ve never been asked: have I been in love in German? I’m quite amazed I haven’t been asked this. But perhaps that’s a good thing. I wouldn’t have answered anyway, or I would have answered with silence. For this is the subject I’ve been meaning to write about from the beginning, and am finally getting round to, while up till now I’ve been talking about vacuous psychology. Has it somehow plumbed so deep into my soul that no force on earth can make me talk about it? Even if I should one day marry out of a great love, which I don’t believe I will, I wouldn’t feel obliged to confess it, because actually nothing has happened or come of it, and the great majority of girls, especially if they have worn the cap for a few years, would regard me as a bit stupid if I wanted to confess it to them before marrying in my own so-called novel. “Oskar, you really are a little ridiculous,” my bride-to-be would say, “what’s the point in telling me such things as if I were some uneducated village girl. We don’t even pay much attention to such things these days, because we’re becoming cultured, even without university and a Korporation cap.”

Of course this is the case, I don’t deny it. But the real heart of the matter doesn’t lie there, but somewhere else, perhaps in the first pages I wrote. That essentially my novel took shape and came about for precisely the same reason that I and so many others rushed to join a Korporation: we were under the spell of the past. What was so terribly provocative was our long-humiliated and mutilated sense of ourselves as slaves when we tried, even outwardly, to be the masters of slaves, which we hid within ourselves. If the slave within us over the centuries had not continually pushed himself upwards, we would not have been able to put our masters’ caps on, when the chance came. What would have been the point? What kind of satisfaction would we have had, if we’d felt like real masters? But we were the sons and daughters of our own folk, their flesh and blood. The smattering of education we had acquired had only slightly affected our brains; our emotional life was completely untouched by it. Our ideal was inherited from the past, and included coarse bread and communal granaries.

My love must surely smell of coarse bread and a dusty granary, and that’s why it’s so precious to me. My reason tells me to defend the break-up of the manorial lands, but my emotions tell me to cling compulsively to them, as do all my contemporaries. It is hard to break with the past so suddenly. In our hearts we circle around the empty dwelling places of our former masters, as if our consciences are troubling us. It’s like murderers feeling sorry for their victims. But I don’t feel any pity when I think of my love.

I wrote that last sentence at one o’clock at night. It’s now six in the morning. For some reason sleep deserted me early today and I was up and dressed before I realised why I was doing it so abruptly. But reading the last sentence from yesterday, I feel that it simply isn’t true. When I think of my love, I do feel sorry for something, though I don’t know what. Why then did I write the opposite last night? Did I want to mislead, reassure or console someone? And if so, whom?

Perhaps I should never read in the morning what I wrote in the middle of the night; the morning and the night do not understand each other, or rather they misunderstand each other. But this morning I didn’t read only the last page from yesterday’ I read everything else I’ve written. There isn’t much content there, but it’s about myself and that’s the subject, since I wanted to write a novel about myself.

As for the cult of the coloured cap, here I would like to defend myself and my fellows much more passionately this morning than I did last night. In my opinion there’s no objection to be raised against me or the others. We haven’t done anything that wouldn’t have pleased ourselves, others or indeed the whole country; we have represented the country and people as they were. We didn’t have any support from rich farmers in their grey baronial pomp: that came from every starveling cottager, peasant and tenant, every tailor, cobbler and saddler, every shopkeeper, businessman and industrialist, and every prophet of truth, palm reader and card sharper; if you want, every lawyer, doctor and pastor, every engineer, factory owner and banker, and every man of the people, public figure and politician. They all felt lifted up by the ears when their daughters and sons, relatives and acquaintances, or even they themselves pushed that coloured cap on to their heads. So why do people try to sling rocks at us for helping to pull the whole country up by the ears? If anything, they should have accused us of not doing it energetically enough.

And I wanted to do it and be personally responsible. I would have set all the wheels in motion so that the old German Korporation would finally abandon its lofty isolation or be forced into liquidation. I would have made it clear that it was wrong to see us as belonging to an Estonian Korporation, which would have been change in name only. In spirit we were the same Korporation as before. We were dreaming of the same superior position as our predecessors. All of us, like every person of sense, wanted privileges and favours, we didn’t pay particular attention to the sciences and the arts, but we perceive them as having a practical purpose or being an amusing recreation. We didn’t want to feel responsible to the country or the people, as we were mainly thinking of ourselves. And if these words didn’t influence people, I would have said, What? Don’t you trust us? Are you demanding real evidence? All right, gentlemen, what are your demands? Will you be satisfied if, one fine day, we announce that everyone is a traitor to his country who doesn’t defend the corporations and their principles? Or do you want something more? That’s what I would have asked them if I had had the opportunity.

And yet I probably wouldn’t have asked such questions at the time I was only a student – I’m only asking them now. In those days I didn’t have this novel to write and – who knows – maybe it’s this novel that’s provoked the foregoing questions and ideas in me. Maybe! I say this because we’ve always had love, and it’s even more fickle of us to abandon our own fatherland, mother tongue, nation and mentality. So it’s downright odd to hear that some people are trying to prove that we’ve become sober-minded, businesslike and practical – even in matters of love. Is it really sobriety, adherence to the facts and practicality when, even today, people abandon their fatherland, mother tongue and nation for love? Quite the contrary: it’s romanticism, it’s self-denial and it’s heroism.

And we’re the only ones who can sort things out in our homeland, and not a single German or Russian. Is there anywhere in all the Baltic lands a single German or Russian who would have betrayed his fatherland, his mother tongue or nation for love? No, no, my dear ones, only we, the original inhabitants of the Baltic lands, are capable of that. Nobody has loved us in our homeland for a long time, we have only been subject to pushing and pulling, and so we have come to learn, in our own skin, how much a human being needs love. That’s why we’ve begun to love foreigners in a self-denying way. Such a love is characteristic of the slave; the landowner loves selfishly. Evidently we still feel like slaves in our own country. The great doctrine of love was once passed down through women and slaves; both our men and our women have loved like slaves. Great love creates in our homeland a countless number of fortresses belonging to foreign nations, which cannot be destroyed by cannon fire from the fatherland, because love can only be overcome by death or even greater love.

But I don’t think even death would be worthy of my love. At any rate, her second love, whose consequence was marriage, did not do anything to my love. I often have the feeling that the marriage would have been no hindrance to Erika’s return, and that her return could happen in the near future: why, how or when? I can’t answer that. Even this morning, when I came back from the shop with half a litre of milk, a rye bun and a hundred grams of ham, I sat down at the table, started eating and was about to put a sliver of ham on my bun with my finger, when I suddenly felt that Erika was sitting there with me, watching me eat, and I asked myself if I really should take the piece of ham from its wrapping where she could see me, and I decided that on no account could I do that. And I got up from the table, took the little plate, knife and fork, and tried to eat my wretched breakfast as if I were sitting with my beloved at a banquet table.

As I ate, my eyes fell on the coloured cap hanging on a little peg on the wall, and the question sprang to my lips: how could I not be ashamed, as I ate like some rubbish collector or ditch digger, picking at a herring or skinning a sprat with the nail of my index finger, and how my habits have changed at the mere thought of the woman who thought it better to leave me here? Why am I actually fighting for this cap and its traditions, if it doesn’t make me a whit better, neither when it’s on my head nor when it hangs on a peg in front of me? And why didn’t I put up a fight for the woman who makes me a new man at the very thought of her? Perhaps it was because winning over a woman involves “culture”, which I didn’t have, whereas winning a cap required nothing more than borrowed money and empty vanity? Or maybe winning a woman also means money and vanity, but in much larger amounts than I had at my disposal, or could hope for in the future? But love? My love and hers? Or was she not in love? Was I the only one? No, she was also in love; I felt it then and still feel it now, but with the difference that for me that love was the whole world, and for her it was merely a part of it. For my love I was prepared to forget everything else, but she would only love if everything else was left to her as well. That’s how it was with her, as if it were an empty and peripheral thing in our lives.

It began one and a half years ago. I was living in this same room, but not as I do now – rather a little more comfortably. My income was small, but it was assured and at least enabled me to lead quite a decent life, in that those with an assured income have no hindrance to getting a loan and paying it back. I would eat lunch with the family, and that bill was paid in full. When I lost my job, I was forced to give up those lunches too. This didn’t affect my love, because it had developed to the point where it could continue even without polite lunches.

My landlady was one of those rare women who still love children. For this reason she was regarded as slightly ridiculous or “funny”, as someone called her. Her love for children went so far that she tried to treat everyone like children. First of all, her husband, the children’s father, had to put up with this. Even I could not escape such treatment when I wanted to eat lunch here. Equally Miss Erika had to submit to it, but she was treated as a slightly older child who taught German and the piano to the younger ones. The landlady didn’t love adults because they weren’t obedient enough, especially in these times. So she wanted to ensure that her little family always came to her, like obedient little creatures scampering around her. If her husband pulled a face, she would explain: “What’s it to you? You don’t bring them into the world or raise them. You have to be brought up yourself, and kept in check. And as for hardship, don’t say a word about it! You’ve no problem in getting fed. Our little shack and the farm can raise more children than I can manage to bring into the world. It would be different if we had twins or triplets as some people do. But there are none in our family, and I don’t think you’ve any either, do you?”

“None in our whole clan that I’ve heard of, thank God,” replied the landlord.

“Thank God indeed!” agreed the landlady, and went on to explain, turning across the table to me, as if I required some of her practical wisdom: “Because it would do no good if several came at once; they would all grow big at the same time. So it’s better if they come one at a time, so that the line doesn’t run out. I’m planning to live to at least seventy, and only rest for the last five years – until then I’ll have to have someone to push and pull around, so they know how much I love them.”

“That’s a nice love to have!” sniggered the landlord. “So what’s your way? If you love someone, then keep away,” she replied.

“That’s more like it, yes,” he said. “Leave people in peace if you love them – why keep pushing and shoving?”

“Young man, is that your understanding of love too?” she asked me, and since a large mouthful prevented me from answering immediately, she continued, “You’re still young and inexperienced in life, so listen to what I’ve got to tell you: from my experience of men, all of them understand love incorrectly. They all say roughly the same as my husband does: if you love someone, leave them in peace. Young lady, do your men say that too?”

“Oh madam, I don’t have a single man!” replied the young lady, blushing all over and casting a glance at me, as a sign of thanks for my just having offered her a pickled cucumber.

“I don’t mean your man personally – I mean men in general in your society,” she explained.

“I’m very rarely in contact with society, or not at all,” she said evasively.

“You mean that men are the same everywhere,” the landlady concluded from this, “you’re only embarrassed to say it, young lady. They neglect their women.”

“But what if they don’t like women?” the young lady now ventured, and my gaze passed involuntarily over her shoulders, waist, arms and hips, as much of her as could be seen sitting at the table. She noticed my appreciative gaze and blushed again.

“Heavy-boned, like me,” I said to myself, feeling something passing through my heart – a little jerk or shudder, a tiny warm flash. As I realised later, this was the start of everything that followed.

“What! Don’t like them!” cried the landlady in reply. “But how can they like them when the woman doesn’t wait and doesn’t hang around? No miss, that is not how it works. You’re young and you don’t know men. Believe me and learn this lesson: if the man doesn’t show interest, then we have to do something. We have to make it clear to the man that he loves us – then he’ll start to behave as he should.”

“What are you talking about! The girl is only young!” the landlord chided his wife.

“You’re saying that I was old when I got involved with you?” she asked her husband. “No, my dear old man, I too was only young then, but without me we would never have become a couple, because you were so in awe of my parents’ house that you would never have dared take the first step, although you’d been in love with me for ages. It’s true – that’s how it was. And I was only twenty-six then…”

“The young lady isn’t twenty-six yet,” said the landlord as a counterargument.

“How old are you really, young lady?” the landlady now asked, and when she noticed her embarrassment and blushes, she went on, “What is there to be ashamed of – we’re a family! Society is another thing. Take no notice of the young man, he won’t be the one courting you, or even if he did want to woo you, you won’t be going to him. So tell me, boldly, how old are you?”

“I’ll soon be twenty-three,” she now replied.

“Already!” I thought, as I looked into her face.

“Well, you hear, old man, the young lady is already twenty-three and I was twenty-six; a couple of years make no difference. So young lady, bear in mind what I tell you: you’ve got to take the initiative yourself – men are so strange and funny these days. Men used to buy themselves wives, but now they’re dead against it if they have to pay for anything.”

“Women used to be different,” her husband chimed in.

“Men must have been different then too, that’s the main thing,” parried the lady.

“Women used to be harder-working and more obedient, then…”

“So you mean I’m not hard-working?” she asked her husband.

“Well, but are you obedient?” he countered.

“Who do you think I should be obeying?” she challenged her spouse.

“A woman should obey her husband if she wants the man so much to marry her,” he explained, slightly evading the question.

“If a man buys a wife, I suppose she obeys him,” opined the landlady.

“Nowadays she doesn’t anyway,” said the landlord.

“Oh, she’ll be obedient then,” maintained the landlady. “But if I have my own home, why should I obey my husband?”

“Can’t you do it out of great love?” I interjected in the family banter.

“Yes, you can obey your husband out of love,” the young lady added.

“But if the husband wants to put you on to a mortgage, could that be done out of love?” asked the landlady.

“Maybe you could do even that out of love,” I replied.

“Well, young man, you don’t know what love is,” said the landlady with conviction. “It’s out of love that a wife has to keep a watch on her husband and guide him, so that he won’t fall into other women’s snares, because that would make the him unhappy, as well as his wife and children too. And you know, men are like that – any slag of a woman can twist them round her little finger, no trouble at all. That’s how it is with love in this world, take note of that, young people!”

Nobody argued with her any longer and so the meal continued in silence. For some reason we were a little embarrassed. The young lady was bent over her plate, and seemed to be hurrying to finish the food her landlady had offered her. She declined to take any more, although the host was pressing her to do so. I also declined, as if I were following the young lady’s example.

“Go on and have some food!” the landlady told me, “then the young lady will dare to take some more.”

“Maybe I could, for the young lady’s sake,” I half agreed, and started to hand over my plate.

“No, no, not for my sake, I can’t eat any more, I really can’t,” she rushed to assure me, and motioned as if to leave the table.

“Then I won’t eat alone,” I said and resolutely withdrew my plate.

“These young people today are certainly stubborn,” said the landlady almost angrily.

“You’re a funny person,” said the landlord, trying to turn everything into a joke, “you talk about love all the time, and then you want the young people to eat.”

Days passed without any sign that anything romantic was burgeoning between me and Miss Erika. Various illnesses occurred in the family that kept a couple of the children for a few days in bed, and so the young lady didn’t eat with us at the table, but in the bedroom where she tended to the sick children. The landlady insisted on her eating at the table first and taking meals to the children afterwards or, better still, giving them to the children first and then coming to the table. But she definitely wanted to eat with the children, as if to keep away from the table and our company. This was very keenly felt because nursing and feeding the children were not really her duties, but she did it on her own initiative and she took on the responsibility. The landlady also felt that the girl was deliberately keeping away, and this offended her a little, because she went to great lengths to make sure no one insulted her, her family or her household.

“The old haughtiness is still there,” remarked the landlady with a glance of mild reproof, when she thought that the eight-year-old boy and six-year-old girl didn’t realise what the fuss was about.

“Listen, what’s it got to do with haughtiness when she’s sitting with your sick child?” remarked her husband.

“I can decide in my own house when and how my sick child is sat with,” she retorted.

That is where the conversation ended. But the landlady had evidently not forgotten it, and some sort of secret worm was eating at her heart. And when the children’s illness passed, so that the whole household could sit at the table again, she kept on offering me and more especially the young lady, more and more food to eat, and when finally the latter jokingly tried to claim that she must keep her waistline, because slimness was now the fashion, our landlady retorted, also jokingly, “Why are you so worried about your waistline? You’re better off eating your fill; then you’ll feel much more confident. We might not have a manor, or a castle, or a country mansion here, but thank God, we do have food – no shortage of that! And I like it when people are pleased with the food I make.”

The landlady added this last sentence only after a little pause, having taken note of the effect of her previous words. For me they were like a whiplash in the face, to say nothing of the young lady, who seemed to turn red to the very lights of her eyes, so that even the children noticed the sudden change in her face, and the six-year-old daughter cried out in amazement: “Mamma, mamma, look how red miss’s face has gone!”

“I’ve had a headache since this morning and now I’m suddenly hot and flustered,” said the young lady, trying to excuse her blush.

“The children have been sick – now it’s your turn,” said the landlady.

“Oh no, my lady, I’m not getting sick from them, it will be over soon,” she explained.

“But remember, young lady, that if anything more serious happens, you won’t come in, you’ll infect the children, God forbid!” intoned the landlady.

“Don’t worry about that, my lady,” the girl assured her. “I’ll keep my promise – if I really get sick, then…“

“Very good, very good,” the landlady interrupted her.

“But now we can get up from the table, everyone’s eaten and the children can start working.”

So we got up, and the young lady disappeared into another room with the children. Now the landlord said, turning to his wife, “Why do you treat her like that? She’s very nice.”

“How do you mean ‘like that’?” she asked, as if she didn’t understand.

“Well, all that about food, manors and country houses,” he explained.

“I can talk about what I like in my own house,” she said.

“But when it hurts others… You could see how the girl blushed, even the children did…”

“The children might be the only point you’re right about,” she opined, “but anyway – why should I be so delicate about it? Let them think a little about what service means.”

“Have no fear about that, my dear woman, they think about that right enough.”

“Well, I want to think that they think a great deal about it too,” she now explained and, turning to me, she asked, “Mr Korporant, do you also think that I shouldn’t have said it?”

“My lady,” I replied, repeating the term used by the young lady, “I don’t know whether you should have said it or not, but I wouldn’t have said it myself.”

“Well, thank God, at least you’re fair!” cried the landlady triumphantly. “Of course you wouldn’t have said it, and if I had been you, I wouldn’t have said it either. You’re right there. You’re a man, and you’re young as well, and a member of a Corporation to boot. If I were in your place, I might even get to love the young lady; at least I would try and see if she would start to love me.”

“Yes, yes,” grinned the landlord, “you go on about love, and then you talk to her like that!”

“Leave love out of it – you don’t know anything about it!” she told her husband.

“Of course I don’t,” he agreed, “but you do. You think that the girl can be loved for her fair hair and blue eyes, and you can’t forgive her for that.”

“You think I’m jealous of the girl, do you?” she asked.

“Jealous of her pure heart,” the landlord laughed, but you couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious.

“What use are blond locks and blue eyes when your face is full of pimples like the young lady’s?” said the landlady with mock pity, and this touched a raw nerve with me, because I too had felt some pity for the young lady when I first saw her pimply, flushed face.

“Love comes, pimples go, love goes, pimples come,” said the landlord, half-joking, half-serious as before.

“What are you so pleased about today?” the landlady asked her husband, but he didn’t answer immediately. First he gave a hearty chuckle and only then did he explain: “It’s not that I’m pleased, but the way you get so worked up about that girl is something I find ridiculous. Shouldn’t we be recommending some face cream for those pimples of hers? Mr Corporation Member, you might take on that job!”

“This is becoming a criminal case, I’d better go!” I joked, and I left the householders there and went up to my room. I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that it really had become a criminal case. I kept on thinking that I had once compared the young lady’s bone structure to my own and then felt a little tug at my heart. I kept seeing her blond head, which really did have some natural curls, and her blue eyes and pimply face. I couldn’t help it and could get no peace at all. Finally I went out and mooched around the town for hours, hither and yon, as I used to do as a student, when I didn’t want to be at home and had had enough of sitting in cafés. Whether I did it consciously or not I still can’t say, but I came back at just the moment when the young lady was supposed to leave the household. We came across each other on the stairs, I doffed my cap, she wished me good evening, but we both – at once – stopped on the same step, as if we had something to say to each other, yet we remained silent and the next moment continued on our ways, I upward, she downward. But after a couple of steps I stopped again and called out quietly, as if in secret, “Miss!”

“Yes,” she replied, turning around, looking up at me readily, as if she had expected my call.

“Could I come and keep you company?” I asked.

She started to laugh in a strange way, lowered her eyes and spoke hesitantly, as if doubting something: “I don’t know…”

But I was already coming down the stairs, saying, “Let me come, miss, I so much want to. Of course, if you have special reasons why I shouldn’t come, then…”

“No, why should I?” she cried, as if embarrassed. “No, no, please, if you…”

She didn’t finish – we both stepped on to the street.

“I wanted to beg your pardon for something, ma’am,” I said, although why I called her “ma’am” I don’t know. Her eyes turned to me with a shocked expression, as if she were seeking a sign of mockery or a grin on my face.

“Beg my pardon?” she wondered. “I don’t recall you doing…”

“Not me, but the landlady today at the lunch table,” I interjected.

She blushed on hearing those words in the same way as she had before, and it was embarrassing for me to recall this to her mind at all, the more so as it didn’t concern me in the least. I don’t know what devil it was that drove me to say something like that. But there was nothing to do about it now, I had to continue, and so I explained: “I just wanted to tell you that I don’t condone such treatment, I condemn it, and as a gentleman I should have stepped in to defend you at the table, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how to.”

“It was nothing,” she said.

“But miss, why try to make it into something other than it really was!” I cried, with a certain with a certain impatience and reproach. “The landlord started talking about it as soon as you’d left.”

“Oh really?” she asked in surprise, though I don’t think she was surprised at all, but only suspicious of everything I said. Although I didn’t understand why I chose to use those particular words, I openly declared my position: “Forgive me, miss, but I feel that I’ve been a bit of a fool. You don’t believe a single word I’m saying, and you don’t believe me because the one who treated you so unfairly is Estonian, and I, who am trying to ease this injustice somehow and put it right, am also Estonian, while you are a German. Isn’t that so, miss? If there had been some young German man at the lunch table today in my place, listening to what I heard, and if he had gone out walking and talking with you, you would have reacted quite differently.”

“You’re the first Estonian who’s talked to me like this,” she said.

“Don’t you want to talk to me like this, as you’ve never done with an Estonian before?” I asked.

She didn’t reply, and we continued walking side by side in silence. After a while, I sought her eyes and found her dejected face; she swallowed spasmodically and I realised that she had tears in her throat. She was doing everything in her power not to let them into her eyes.

“I apologise with all my heart for daring to upset you,” I said when I saw this, “but I suppose it’s best if I go.”

“Please stay,” she replied, adding after a little pause, “I’ll be all right in a moment.”

So we carried on side by side in silence, keeping in step, which was easier because she was wearing low-heeled shoes and so her pace was just as fast as mine.

“Why do you take it so much to heart?” I said at length, to comfort her in a comradely way, as if walking side by side at an even pace had given me courage.

“I don’t,” she replied. “I’ve got used to it already.”

“So this happens often?” I asked.

“I don’t know about often, but it does happen,” she explained.

“You don’t get used to a thing like that,” I countered.

“I do, believe me, really,” she assured me. “But when you started talking to me like this, it was unexpected, and I didn’t know what to do. And if I don’t know what to do or say, I tend to start crying.”

“Life’s difficult, isn’t it?” I asked in an off-the-cuff way, but she replied quite seriously: “No! Why should it be? Grandfather is always asking me whether it’s hard for me, and he doesn’t believe me when I say that it isn’t. Grandfather decides by his own experience. But I don’t know about what used to be, hardly anything at all, and even what I do know I increasingly forget with each passing year. A couple of years ago we visited the estate we once owned in the country, and there we were shown around it. The changes were pointed out to us, but what really stuck in my mind was the orchard – yes, I remember that and it was big and beautiful. But otherwise – new settlers everywhere, and most of the park had been broken up, grandfather explained. For him of course it was a different matter, as he lives only for what used to be.”

“How simply you put it,” I said for something to say.

“So what’s to be done?” she asked. “Parents – it’s much harder for them of course. My brother, for example, he can’t help it, he has to go several times a year to his old home in the country, summer and winter too, and every time he comes back, he says how beautiful it was. Thank God I’m younger, it’s much easier for me.”

Suddenly she seemed to wake from a dream, looked at her watch and said, “But now I really must run home, grandfather has been waiting for ages!”

“Can’t I come any further with you?” I asked.

“No, please, no further, I’ll go alone now. Thanks for coming.”

“But might I come tomorrow or the day after?” I had to ask.

“Will you want to?” she asked back.

“Only if you let me.”

“Me and my kind – nobody wants to be with us. My cousin explained to me once that we are too bony and wooden; Estonian girls are much more interesting.”

“Is that possible?” I started laughing.

“Yes, my cousin said so,” she affirmed gravely. We shook hands and parted.

From that first walk I brought back with me a sort of disappointment. I couldn’t explain the cause of it. Perhaps it was the directness and openness with which she responded to my openness? Or was it those final words about her own and others’ “woodenness”? Perhaps the final effect on me was when we shook hands, and I felt as I left how strong and rough her hands were. They were a worker’s hands, but with longer fingers than I have usually noticed.

The consequence of all this was that as I came home I almost regretted that I had asked permission to accompany her on the next evening as well. But I consoled myself with the fact that asking permission like that did not oblige me to do anything; it was a matter of simple courtesy.

The next day at the lunch table I tried with varying degrees of conviction to appear as if nothing special had happened between me and the young lady. I observed that she was doing the same. But our efforts were evidently overstrained, and the landlady seemed to notice something unnatural in our exchanges. Finally she couldn’t restrain herself and expressed her suspicions to me: “Mr Studious, please be more attentive and polite to the young lady; her bread ran out long ago, but you don’t seem to see or hear anything.”

“Sorry,” I replied, “but miss doesn’t love to eat dark bread at lunchtime.”

“You still have to offer it,” explained the landlady. “And since when were you so well acquainted with what the young lady does or doesn’t love?”

“Are you going on about love again?” interjected the landlord. “Yesterday you made us all lose our appetites – today you’re doing the same thing.”

“I didn’t start on about love today – it was Mr Studious,” she retorted to her husband. “And don’t you interrupt other people’s conversation – I’m asking since when has the young gentleman known what the young lady does or doesn’t love. Let him answer me. What did they teach you in the Korporation, if you haven’t learnt to answer?”

The young lady cast a furtive glance at me which I took to mean that she was awaiting my answer with a certain tension.

“That the young lady does not love bread with her lunch,” I finally responded, stressing the word not, “I know because she has never accepted the bread I’ve offered her; what the young lady does love I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Oh yes you have,” said the landlady mischievously. “You must know that if you offered her chocolate, she wouldn’t refuse you. All young girls love chocolate.”

Again everyone became uneasy and silence followed. In that general silence I decided to myself that I wouldn’t accompany her today. But when she rose from the table to leave, and cast a glance at me in which I read the question “Are you coming today?” I strove to reply with my own look without further ado: “Of course I’ll come.” That is what happened later, except that we didn’t meet on the stairs as before, but on the street, several scores of paces away from the house.

“Why does the landlady always try to steer the conversation around to love?” she asked me straight away. This was unexpected and took me aback. But I quickly pulled myself together and replied frankly, giving a joking nuance to my tone: “Apparently she wants to tease us.”

“Does she know something already?”

“No, she doesn’t, but she guesses.”

“So quickly!” she cried in amazement, adding, “I behaved at lunch as if everything was as before.”

“You were very sweet,” I replied.

“Was I sweet, really?” she asked, and I felt this came from her heart. To make her happy I assured her: “Very!”

“It’s terribly nice to hear something like that about myself; I’m always hearing it about other people,” she laughed, but I felt she meant it seriously.

“That can’t be so,” I contested.

“But it is, of course,” she assured me. “I don’t even have time to be sweet. At home I have all my indoor work and then I give lessons as well, because the family doesn’t give me enough of them. And the kitchen makes my hands ugly and breaks the skin on my face – who can be sweet like that? We have a charwoman who comes twice a week for a couple of hours. In the evenings I’m tired, so that if I have to read something aloud to grandfather or play chess with him, I sometimes fall asleep. But our boys don’t like tired girls, they want to be able to carry on, have fun and laugh. There are enough like that among the Estonians, so that’s where they look for them. And I don’t have any pretty clothes either, they barely cover my body. You can’t be sweet if you’re bumbling around the rooms with an apron on. I’m changing, and I’ll be pretty indifferent to my looks if I live the way I’m having to. Even grandfather notices it. He’s said to me a few times that a young girl mustn’t be so careless about her looks, because then others won’t care about her either. Everyone’s becoming careless, the men are too. But it isn’t good when even the men are indifferent to a young girl.”

“Does your grandfather really tell you that?” I asked.

“Several times he’s said it,” she assured me, looking me in the face. But she must have surmised suspicion in my eyes, because she rushed to reassure me. “He really has said it. But you’d have to know my grandfather, then you’d believe me. He is, you know, of an age a bit like – you understand? But that’s what I like most about him. I like him more than anyone else in the world. He’s the only person I can really talk to. My old aunt, who also lives with us, and all the other people are so cunning and worldly-wise that I can’t get on with them. Are your people so terribly clever too?”

“How should I take that?” I wondered.

“Your girls for example, who go to university and wear the coloured cap; I’ve seen them on the street – are they terribly clever? Do Estonian boys like clever girls, the kind that know how to smoke and drink? Do you like them?”

There were so many questions at once that I didn’t know which to answer. And as I thought about where to start, she said, “Of course you don’t want to answer, you’re afraid of hurting me. You like clever girls too, but you don’t want to tell me that, because I’m not clever at all. Well, and then…”

“No, miss, it’s not like that,” I contested. “For a start, I don’t understand why you think you’re not clever at all.”

“Well, listen, what cleverness can there be about a girl like me, working at home with an apron on, and then teaching little kids the piano or their ABC book?”

“The fact that you can ask me that only goes to show that you aren’t so very…” I didn’t dare to finish the sentence, so she continued, with a laugh that came from the heart: “… that I’m not so very silly. Thanks for being frank! Now at least I know that you think the same of me as so many others do: I am silly, but not so very much. The only person who thinks differently is grandfather. He never calls me silly, only ‘immature’. He always says, ‘Dear child, whatever will become of you and how will you end your own days, when my eyes have been closed? You, poor creature, won’t get anywhere, you won’t see or hear anything, you’ll be knocking around at home or fussing over those lessons. But that’s not how a young person matures.’ So that’s why I want so much to know what those mature people actually do and see. I once asked my brother, when he finally came home, but he replied it wouldn’t be decent for a young girl of my age to hear or talk about it. That was about two years ago, and when you started talking like that to me yesterday and I started crying, my only fear was that you’d leave me there and go away. Because I thought straight away, as soon as I heard your words: thank God, now I’ve finally met the right person! If he can tell me things like that to my face, then he’ll definitely tell me other things; I only have to dare to ask. So everything had to depend on me – on my courage. But it was a pity that…” She stopped.

“What was, if I may ask?” I interjected, because I wanted so much to know what the pity was.

“I don’t think I should tell you that.”

“Tell me, please,” I begged.

“It’s about you – I’m afraid of offending you.”

“I forgive you everything in advance – just tell me.”

“It was a pity for me that you are a Corporation member,” she said then.

A hot wave surged through my whole body as I heard these words, as for the first time I understood very clearly that I had begun to love this girl, and her words generated a fear in me that I might lose her for no other reason than that simple reason: a coloured cap hung on a peg at my place. It was downright ridiculous how it affected me, that she suspected me because of those colours. My love for her must have already been very deeply rooted. This love might perhaps have been already within me before I felt it at all. It might have been latently coursing through the blood of my ancestors for centuries, unconsciously of course, a burning hatred, a worshipful adoration and a flaming love, centuries old. Now it welled forth into consciousness, saw the light of day in me. And not because she was walking and talking with me, but simply because she was who she was. At once I felt that I was in love with her bones and limbs, her gait, her eyes, into which I didn’t dare to look, fearing all the time to reveal my inmost self.

“Now you see, I shouldn’t have said it,” she concluded, when I didn’t know how to react to her in words.

“Quite the opposite!” I cried then, “it’s very good that you said it. But won’t you explain to me why you feel sorry for me as a Corporation member? And are you still sorry?”

“I still am,” she replied as if delaying, thinking over whether she should have said it or not.

“But why?” I asked insistently.

“Aren’t the Estonian corporation members about the same as the German ones?” she asked in reply, and when I tried to deny it, but couldn’t find quite the appropriate words and proofs, she asked again: “But why would you be in corporations if you didn’t want to be? Don’t you have Weib, Wein und Gesang?”

“We do, but …,“ I wanted to explain, but she interjected impatiently, “Better not to say anything, because you’ll say it like a Korporant. I’ve talked to the ones I know, I know very well. You can’t know anything anyway. You simply evade the issue, because you’re a Korporant. You’d say that a corporation member can’t talk to ladies about everything. A Korporant can’t talk to ladies about men’s things, you all say that. But tell me – can other students talk to ladies about everything? You do have other students too – you’re not all in the Korporation? Or, you arrange everything, as we do, so that no student may really talk to ladies about anything, because you have to be polite, you have to be gentlemen. So maybe you understand why I was sorry that you are a corporation member. Or rather, I wasn’t sorry for you, but for myself, that’s how lost for words I am. At first I was so glad that I was getting to know an Estonian student…”

“I’m no longer a student now,” I interrupted.

“Have you already graduated?” she asked.

“No, but…”

“You mean you left because you lacked money, I know that. But surely you’ll get some money again and then you’ll carry on studying. Anyway it doesn’t matter whether you’re going to university or not, you’re still a Korporant and that’s what’s important to me. For I would be so very pleased if I’d got to know someone else who wasn’t one; we do have people like that ourselves.”

“So why is it so important to you that there is someone else who isn’t in a Korporation?” I asked.

“I told you,” she replied. “It’s not worth talking to a Korporant, because he’s a gentleman, but if I want to become more mature, how do I talk to a gentleman?”

“So what would you like to talk about?” I enquired.

“I don’t actually know what about,” she replied. “Whatever would develop me so that I wouldn’t be so silly any more, as everyone else thinks, even you.”

“I don’t think that,” I tried to contend.

“I’m sorry,” she said convincingly, “but you’re only saying that because you’re a Korporant, though actually you think something quite different. When our boys say, for example, that Estonian girls are more interesting than ours, because they’re supposed to be more mature, then I have asked several times – what should we talk about then, to be interesting, and to prove that we’re mature? What do you actually talk about to Estonian girls? But they reply, ‘About everything.’ Well, so talk to me about everything, I say. ‘I can’t, with you, because you’re not mature and it’s not interesting with you.’ So we debate, like squirrels on a treadmill. And that is why I thought that if I got to know an Estonian boy, I would start chatting with him so that I would soon become a more mature person. I thought I’d take the bull by the horns and say to the Estonian boy, Talk to me now so that I’ll become a bit more mature. In the end, let him treat me like … let him swear, as you did to begin with…”

“I beg your pardon – I didn’t swear!” I said.

“You said you were playing the fool,” she explained. “But how can you be a Korporant and a fool at the same time? Isn’t that swearing?”

“I was talking about myself.”

“Doesn’t matter, swearing is still swearing, even though you explained that you were doing it for me. I was terribly afraid that you would soon call me a fool, and I decided beforehand that no matter what you call me, I will bear it sweetly; perhaps it will make me a little more mature, as grandfather wishes. But you wanted to leave. Then it occurred to me that you’re a Korporant, and I felt terribly sorry for you.”

“Now I’m starting to understand you a little,” I said. “You have some sort of peculiar conception of Estonians and Estonian students. You think there’s something bold, crude and robust about them, but at the same time cunning, smart and cynical.”

“I really don’t know whether it’s like that,” she said. “But don’t your women members of the Korporation seem very bold, as they sometimes walk down the street, their caps over their eyes or tilted on their heads, and their hair hanging loose. The other students are perhaps even wilder, but I don’t recognise them without their caps on. And yet you shouldn’t think that I mean it badly – not at all. A mature person, a woman too, I suppose, must…”

“… be bold and sturdy,” I interjected, but with a certain hint of irony.

“Exactly,” she affirmed, “bold and sturdy.”

“And isn’t what you say a demonstration that you too can talk about interesting things?” I added.

“You’re wrong,” she replied with conviction. “I say what I think. Of course, my opinion might be silly, as it usually is, I don’t deny it, but it is my opinion. A month or so ago I had a chat with one of our Korporanten about much the same thing. He too called some women bold and sturdy. But when I wanted to know who these women were, he wouldn’t answer. Yet I, as is my wont, stupidly asked him what kind of women the Korporanten liked to sing along with, when drinking their wine. Of course, I asked that because I wanted to be more mature. But he started explaining things in such lofty and idealistic terms that I didn’t feel any more mature; I’d heard it all before and read it in books as well. So I said to him, Why don’t you take me or someone like me along to your drinking sessions, if wine and women are such ideal things? Take me, for goodness’ sake, if you’re a gentleman, take me along with other women and gentlemen, so that I can learn about maturity among the gentlefolk.”

“Did he take you?” I asked with a smile.

“No,” she replied simply.

“So why not?”

“It wasn’t for ladies, he explained to me. But I answered straight away: am I a lady, if I scrub away all day in my apron and teach the ABC to kids? Do ladies ever do such things? Or if they do, are they ladies for long? A lady is always a lady, he replied. And a lady must always remain silly and immature, I concluded. At that point he left me there, because he said I had a wicked tongue. He was no great loss to me, because I hadn’t matured one little bit with that kind of talk. Always the same thing: I’m a lady and therefore nothing is good for me, and since nothing is good for me, I won’t mature, and because I’m immature, I’m not interesting, and if a girl isn’t interesting, she can only hang around with her grandfather and aunt; no boy will find her attractive. You could stay like until you’re a grey-haired old maid and start to shrivel.”

“But I’m starting to love you, I do love you already, I’ve loved you from the start,” I said quietly, almost indifferently, as if I were merely pointing out a fact. I don’t even know why I said it, because I might just as well have said it the next day or the day after. But I must have felt that I had to say those words anyway, and therefore I was saying them then, so that they would no longer trouble my heart or scorch my soul. Of course it was downright stupidity to declare one’s love for anyone, let alone when you’re a Korporant, as she kept emphasising, and when you love someone so madly and rashly as I loved her.

Even today, when I try to understand or explain my declaration of love, I can find no reason other than what must have been the uniqueness of my love at the time. I had previously declared love half a dozen times, but I had always thought of it as a customary or polite gesture, and I had had enough patience to wait for a suitable place and moment. Today it happened on the street in the midst of passing and approaching people, who might even have overheard my declaration. I had taken nothing into account.

Another factor that determined my declaration may have been that she was at such pains to stress her regret that I was a Korporant. Evidently I wanted to prove to her that it didn’t matter that I was in a Korporation, I could still behave in an extraordinary manner even in an exceptional situation. In other words, I was trying to rehabilitate myself and win the young lady’s trust, respect and interest, even if she regretted the excessive sociability of a Korporant. She suspected something of the kind in my actions, because, while at first she couldn’t believe her ears, looking at me inquisitively as if I were mad, her face then turned bright red, so that even her ears glowed; she soon collected herself and said, trying to smile, as if it were all a huge joke, “Does every Estonian Korporant declare his love on the street, or are you the only one?”

“I don’t know about others, but this is the first time I’ve done it,” I replied.

“You mean you’ve declared your love in other places before now?” she asked with a little sting in her tone and a slight tremble in her voice.

“Always other places before now,” I assured her seriously.

“Why do I have the honour of getting it on the street?” she asked. “Is it perhaps because I’m a German? Or am I not enough of a lady, after what I’ve said to you?”

“Please have mercy, miss, and leave off that tone and those words, if you have even a speck of what I see and believe in you. Or do you think it would have been better coming at the lunch table?”

I saw actual terror in her eyes, but the freezing of her lips and the movement of her nostrils cannot have come from that. Instead of blushing, a pallor spread over her whole face. She kept her eyes lowered, twitching her eyebrows, as if trying the brush aside tears. Thus we continued our walk silently for a while. I only noticed that she mechanically changed her pace, to keep in step with me as her companion. After a while she asked, as if in curiosity and fear, “Is that how it comes out then?”

“Not before now, only today,” I replied.

“But that’s terrible. Just think what would have happened if you’d said the same thing to me at the lunch table. It would have been really horrible.”

“Love is sometimes horrible.”

“Love should be beautiful,” she affirmed.

“It is beautiful, it’s so beautiful that it gets horrible.”

“So beautiful that it gets horrible,” she repeated to herself slowly, as if pondering whether these words hid some idea, or whether they were just like so many other words.

“Love is beautiful and it makes you happy,” I said. “Walking beside you and talking like this, I’m happier than ever before, I’m the happiest person in the world.”

“Do you really believe what you’re saying?” she asked, with a sort of happy sigh.

“My words are only a little drop, a tiny speck, of what I feel for you, for the fact that you exist at all, that the two of us are together. I don’t have words to say what’s inside me. If I were a poet, a singer, composer or anyone, and I could express it in any way at all, what I feel and how, then I would be world-famous overnight, we’d both be carried aloft, we’d be drowned in gold.”

“Do Estonian girls talk about love like that too?” she asked, as if she wanted to draw me down from the heaven of emotions into the earthly everyday.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “I only know I said those words for the first time.”

“But you said at first that you’ve loved before, declared your love before.”

“Please don’t ever remind me of that,” I said. “There is only one real love in anyone’s life, and nothing else counts.”

“There is only one real love in anyone’s life,” she repeated like a distant echo, and I felt her drinking in and tasting every word, every syllable, every letter, every sound. After that she asked me in quite a different tone, “But what did they reply to you, the ones you declared your love to?”

“I’ve never declared my love in quite that way before,” I replied.

“You must have said something!”

“Please – I can’t answer that today, maybe some other time. I can’t even think about that today.”

“Now you’re becoming a Korporant, a gentleman again,” she said, “now, just when things are getting so interesting. I’m so sorry about that. But what’s even worse is that grandfather is waiting at home, I have to go.”

“Right now?” I asked, and my voice and actions must have betrayed alarm, because she started to laugh and said, “Now, now, it’s only till tomorrow, tomorrow at the lunch table we’ll see each other. But it’s terrible – what faces we’ll have tomorrow! The landlady is bound to read everything in them.”

She reached out her hand to me, I took it in my own two, and pressed it to my lips with such force as if I were about to leave her forever there. Her long fingers crunched a little, and were shot through with a pulsation, from pain or some other cause, I do not know to this day.

“You shouldn’t kiss my hands,” she said, making a slight attempt to draw it back, but she let it rest on my lips, “they’re what I use to scrub the floor with.”

“I’m ready to kiss those floors that this hand has scrubbed,” I replied in a kind of drunken stupefaction, when she finally released her hand from mine.

She turned and left. I stood as if dumbfounded, staring after her. After a few steps, though, she looked back, and seeing me still there, she stopped, as if uncomprehending. I don’t know what I concluded from that, but the very next moment I leapt towards her.

“Tomorrow I’ll try to tell some lie to grandfather,” she said with a shameful smile, “and then we’ll have a little more time – shall I?”

“Erika, you’re an angel!” I cried, calling her by her name for the first time.

“Good heavens, not so loud, other people will hear!” she implored. “And don’t hope for too much; grandfather won’t let me be alone for very long.”

“I could climb to the top of Oleviste spire and shout to the whole town that you promised to lie to your grandfather for my sake!” I declared, without curbing my enthusiasm.

“You’re frightening me!” she said, starting to laugh, and ran off. I stared after her until she vanished behind the next street corner.

Yesterday Erika had expressed the fear about how our faces would look when we appeared at the lunch table, and all evening and half of today I had assured myself that I wouldn’t come to lunch at all, because I might not have the right amount of control over myself, but when lunchtime arrived, my feet led me unthinkingly into the dining room. Yet it all went more easily and smoothly than either of us had dared to suppose. Today the landlady paid no attention to us, because she was preoccupied with cooking and food preparation.

“Well, my dear masters and porkers,” she began, full of good cheer, “today I’ve made you a joint of roast veal, so hold on to your tongues – otherwise they’ll go into your stomachs when you start eating. Each of you can toss on your oat gruel as much salt and butter as your heart desires, I did it myself just for the children; otherwise the boys will empty the box before the older folks even get a look at it.”

And there was nothing to be done; even if the boys wanted to put their own butter on it, promising to do it very sparingly, they had to be content with what their mother gave them.

When the roast appeared on the table, the landlady turned to Erika and said, “Miss, let your plate be the first one today.”

“My lady, what about the children? I can wait,” replied Erika.

“No, no, young miss,” said the landlady, “today you’re the first, because it’s for your sake I’ve been slaving over the roast. On other days the children can get served first, and then the grown-ups.”

Erika’s face coloured as she handed her plate to the landlady, no doubt fearing who knows what bomb exploding with the woman’s next words. But nothing came that was worth worrying about. Today the landlady was extremely delicate and polite.

“You’re not interested, young lady, in why I’ve taken so much trouble and devotion just for you over the roast today?” she asked, adding, “Carrot and turnip as well? White beans? Today I’ve put a double portion of brown butter on them.”

“No, my lady, I’m interested in why today I have the honour of…”

“Not honour, but gratitude,” interjected the landlady. “And not only to you, but gratitude to all German ladies.”

“But I’m not a lady at all yet,” laughed Erika, breaking into the landlady’s words.

“If you aren’t one already, you will become one, because a nice young miss like you will never be an old maid; men simply won’t leave you alone, you’ll see. And once you’re a lady, then remember today’s roast, the cabbage and carrots, the beans and everything else that’s still to come. They’ve been made from your recipe. Not yours personally, of course, but German ones in general, I mean, from German ladies in the good old days. From when my mother sent me into service with them, more or less like you now, with us. Not that we were in desperate need of it, because we had our own nice little home then, but my mother said to me, Off you go, you’ll get to know things that’ll make you smarter, and you’ll learn about what you need in life. And I’ve never regretted that I went into service. Whatever was bad about it I’ve forgotten, because that’s how I was – not used to carrying bad thoughts in my head – and what was good I’ve held on to. So if today’s meal, miss, is at all tasty for you…”

“Everything is marvellous, my lady,” interjected Erika.

“Well, so it should be, because it all comes from German ladies and the good old days. And finally…”

“And here comes the moral part of the story,” declared the landlord.

“Finally the moral part always comes if you’re a housewife and a mother, and if you are no longer a housewife or mother, there is no need for it any more,” said the landlady with conviction. “And really it was…”

“… the Lenten sermon about fasting that I wanted to give,” chuckled the landlord, again intervening in his wife’s flow, while trying to trickle some brown butter from the bean bowl on to his plate, as a result of which the beans poured on to the plate, the table, his knees and the floor.

“Listen, stop chiming in to what I’m saying,” said the landlady, turning to her husband, and seeing his treatment of the beans, added, “You are a pig, not a bit cleverer than your boys, always leaving leftovers under your feet.”

“Nah! If you haven’t served in a noble house, food is one of things that…” the landlord was about to make a silly joke, but the landlady stepped in: “Then listen to your wife’s Lenten sermon about food, about preparing and eating it. That’s the whole moral story here – today’s roast, along with the potatoes, fresh cabbage, beans and turnips and carrots.”

“Pickled and fresh cucumbers, cauliflower, pasta and tomatoes are missing,” noted the landlord in a matter-of-fact manner.

Now they all burst out laughing, so heartily that even the landlady had to join in, like it or not. Only a while later did she manage to say, “Now try and talk seriously at the dinner table! They’re all laughing and joking. And yet there’s nothing to laugh at here. Would you laugh if you didn’t like your meal? No, you’d all have glum faces. But haven’t you ever been interested in how tasty food is prepared?”

“I’ve never been,” replied the landlord, lifting fresh cabbage to his mouth, “I’m happy to leave those matters to the servants.”

“But if there were no more servants?” asked the landlady. “Some will be found,” replied the landlord.

“But there aren’t any who know how to or want to.”

“Well, if there aren’t any servants, then the women and ladies themselves do it,” said the landlord.

“No, my dear man, there’s a shortage of servants because there are no longer any proper ladies of the house, no housewives – that’s the whole issue. You think just like other men, that you open some new soup kitchen and in come the serving people. But they don’t. A servant only comes from a house, remember that. When there are no ladies treating housekeeping as important any more, how can there be servants who know their skills? Now ladies regard it as a personal insult if someone dares to think that they’re interested in housekeeping, but at the same time everyone complains and expresses amazement if a complete stranger isn’t enthusiastic about the mess they’ve been paid to clear up. What a terrible injustice! You pay the poor creature fifteen or twenty crowns a month, and she doesn’t into raptures about your duster or the sooty bottom to your pot.”

“They’re very right not to, because a machine can clean up dust, and you can cook with gas or electricity with no soot,” remarked the landlord.

“Why then do people go to London to learn cleaning?” asked the landlady.

“They go to London for the English language,” he explained. “Don’t you want to send your daughter there when she grows up?”

“I do, but on one condition: before going, she should learn to clean the bottom of my little pot at home, and then let her go to London to clean grime, or she’ll come back as soon as she can! Straight back even wilder than when she left, and then there’ll be nothing gained from the English language. No, my little piglet…”

“Now listen…” her husband tried to interject.

“Shut your mouth for once,” shouted the landlady, “because the dinner table is the only place where you’re dining with us all, otherwise you’d run off straight away, as soon as I start to say something. And I’m happy to call you a porker, because you run like the piglets to the trough, without knowing where the food comes from or how.”

“But chickens don’t know that either,” cried one of the children.

“Chickens do know,” contested the other. “Haven’t you seen how they lift their heads up and watch if something’s going on?”

“Quiet, children!” cried the landlady. “Don’t interrupt when mummy’s talking. When I was small, I wasn’t allowed to open my mouth when grown-ups were speaking.”

“That’s why you’re trying to keep them quiet now,” remarked the landlord.

“You’re not a bit smarter than your children,” said the landlady to her husband, almost angrily. “Let me tell the young lady what I have to say; it will interest her, won’t it, miss?”

“My lady, it’ll interest me very much,” Erika confirmed.

”I think it will interest you to know what an Estonian lady thinks of you and how she appreciates you. And I appreciate you very highly. The German lady I worked for was perfect and a proper lady of the house. She kept and cherished her kitchen and her home.”

“So, now we’ve come to the matter of love, and now you can’t be sure any more what will come or how it will end,” I said to myself, and threw a glance at Erika, but she didn’t notice it, because her eyes were fixed, whether out of interest or a sense of duty, on the landlady’s lips, and the word “cherished” seemed to leave her quite indifferent.

“And since the lady of the house loved her home and kitchen, she learnt to love her maid too. The German lady had respect for the titles of lady and housekeeper, and therefore the position of her assistant, her maid, was worthy of respect as a decent calling in life. Not like nowadays. A housewife is now a lowly creature among women, and her assistant is regarded as lower than some night-soil man.”

“Mummy, what’s a night-soil man?” interrupted her little daughter.

“You are silly!” cried her younger brother. “That’s the one who cleans up after others.”

“But then Loona is a night-soil man, she cleans up mine and…” The daughter wanted to explain in her bright voice, but her older brother put his hand over her mouth and they were suddenly quiet. The children burst out laughing, even the little daughter laughing along with the others, as her mother carried on talking: “You see, from a very young age! Where do they get it from? You silly child, if you talk like that about Loona, then I’m also your night-soil woman, a cleaner for all of you.”

“A proper lunch table conversation with white beans and fresh cabbage,” noted the landlord mockingly, while I said to myself, “Doesn’t matter about the night soil, as long as it’s not about love.”

“Dear man,” said the landlady, now turning to her husband, “if I have to pay your charwoman day after day, then I may dare to talk about it, even at the dinner table. And I demand respect for my work, like any other person. You think of course that paper smeared with printer’s ink is grander than a pan smeared with grease.”

“It’s not just me, the others think the same,” declared the man, who was very proud of his position at the office.

“But why do you complain that there are no other housewives apart from one or two and that no one wants to go into service any more?” asked the landlady. “Why do you cry that there are no children any longer, when you all prefer smeared paper to the smeared pan? Paper won’t feed your children. If I weren’t so superstitious, I would say, Thank God, my children have so far escaped serious illnesses and all sorts of complications only because I have kept a hold of the pan and pot handles when I was cooking and boiling food for them. You, my husband, are healthy only because I have fed you myself, otherwise you would be stooped there in the office suffering for ages, or you might even have kicked the bucket. But of course I don’t say that, because I’m afraid that as soon as I say it, everything will fall on me and my children that I had just been thanking God for avoiding. God doesn’t want to be thanked for the things we can worry about. Illnesses and diseases are in the soup pot, not in God’s hands.”

“Then a new faith ought to be created, the religion of the soup pot,” said the landlord.

“Well, it would be more useful to believe in a soup pot or a greased pan than in smeared paper or any sort of tubs and vessels where you keep women’s paints and colours that men admire,” the landlady lashed out now like a whip at her husband’s stare. “A German woman, since I am talking about her, was the mainstay and the keeper of her home and hearth; now everybody is enthusiastic about those women who are masters at breaking up homes and hearths. And I tell you, my dear young lady, that if the German men had been as virtuous as the German women, you would not be sitting at our table now. Because…”

“For God’s sake, please, no politics!” said the landlord, as if outraged.

“What about politics?” replied the landlady, who had evidently got into her stride, “I’m only saying what I personally think.”

“Nobody believes that you’re alone in thinking this; everybody is convinced of this general opinion. It’s what Estonians think,” explained the landlord.

“No, my dear man, listen to me first. Then you’ll see that ideas like this can only be held by a few Estonian women familiar with the steam of the soup pot. You see, I think that if German men had been as clever and virtuous about their affairs as German women have been, they would have all gone with our men over beyond Narva and near Pskov, but not down to Võnnu. No one would have gone there if they’d been equal to their women. And if they had all been beyond Narva and near Pskov, our history would certainly not have taken such a sudden turn. Or what do you think, Mr Studious?” she turned to me while I was staring wide-eyed at her, “might our history have been different, if all the Korporanten, even the German ones, had gone beyond Narva together and over near Pskov?”

“I don’t know,” I fumbled for an answer, “but it seems to me that the whole supposition…”

“… rose from the steam of the soup pot, eh?” interjected the landlady. “All right! So why are you a Korporant, Mr Studious?”

“Leave those questions alone!” the embarrassed landlord reprimanded his wife.

“Let me ask now,” replied the landlady, “I do want to hear how Mr Studious answers. My own children will grow up and go to university; I want to know.”

“It’s hard to give an answer to your question,” I said at length, in utter confusion, since I felt that this woman was not to be feared only when she started talking about love, or wanted to feed you to bursting at the dinner table, but on several other occasions too. How was I supposed to answer her? Everything that I wrote above? In Erika’s presence I had to say I was a Korporant because coursing in my veins were dozens of generations of slaves’ blood, and that I too felt like a slave, as do my parents, brothers, sisters, relatives, acquaintances, complete strangers, because why would they otherwise admire me in my coloured cap, which leads me down to Võnnu, but does not call men to arms beyond Narva or near Pskov? And should I perhaps add to that that my present mad love was rooted deeply in slaves’ blood and that every glance I cast on that girl in admiration, every word with which I tried to approach her, every movement, every action whereby I tried to please her, every dream of mine in the middle of the day or late at night, was nothing more than a little glow-worm’s service of devotion bowing before the moon? Perhaps I should explain in self-defence that just as nothing that is not in the water can rise to the water’s surface, nor can anyone who is not in society rise to the top of it? Prophets of a new faith arise every time that society is bursting with a new faith. So why do you hang prophets, but not the society that created the prophets and lifted them up on its shoulders? Only to make things easier for executioners and gravediggers – and for no other reason. Well, pass judgement on me as a Korporant, because I and my companions are fewer than the whole Estonian nation that admires us. Was I really supposed to say all this to the landlady? Even now I don’t know whether there is an ounce of truth in these words and pronouncements. Maybe my explanations will turn all of society and the Estonian nation on its head, maybe my mad love will thus only become a bit of tomfoolery, which doesn’t correspond to any reality. All of this flashed like lightning through my brain as the landlady said with a haughty smile, “You see now what you men are like – Germans or Estonians. It’s all fiddle-faddle with you, and then you wonder that history is going that way and not another. You put your cap on without…”

“But why do women do it, if men are just fiddle-faddle?” said the landlord, to support me.

“Girls?” responded the landlady. “They want to please the boys.”

“But if the boys want to please the girls as well?” replied the landlord.

“Exactly!” I cried and added, “and that’s all.” And I was surprised at my own failure to realise that simple answer to the landlady’s question in the first place. But as with everything in the world, there had to be a natural reason for my failure to realise it. Now I can guess the reason why: I was afraid of the word “love” and therefore I also refrained from mentioning “liking”, because that’s how it is with people: loving is never far from liking. This was proven today as well. Hardly had I uttered my happy words than the landlady said, turning to the young lady, “You see, miss, how men make their lives easy: when some foolishness hits them, instantly love is to blame, which is the same as saying we women are to blame.”

“But, my lady, maybe that’s true,” she said.

“There it is: I was seeking support from you, but you go over to the men’s side,” joked the landlady. “But I warn you, miss, be careful with men. If we trust them too much at a young age, then we’ll trust them too little in old age, and both of these will do us harm.”

With that wise adage, we rose from the table because we had all finished eating long ago. I went up to my room, but I couldn’t find peace there at all. My body was heating up, actually burning, inside and out. Time passed at the pace of a snail feeling its way carefully with its horns. But to me that protracting animal was repulsive, because it forced me to think, and at the moment I didn’t have a single beautiful, useful idea. Everything that came into my head worked against me. I couldn’t escape the feeling, try as I might, that at today’s lunch something wounding and humiliating happened to me. I was wounding and humiliating myself – that was my conclusion, except that there was no way I could collect my thoughts and clarify where my own mistake lay. Finally, I could stand it no longer and left the house. But even on the street I could find no consolation or ease. After about half an hour I came back home, and when I looked at the clock I saw that the young lady would be free in just a couple of hours. To revive myself in time, I threw myself on the sofa, if not to sleep, then to rest a bit. As I closed my eyes I tried to think only of the young lady, not of myself. I remember that all my interest was concentrated on one question: did she lie to her grandfather today for my sake or not? That question was to my mind parallel with another question: does she love me, even a little? And with that last question I woke from my sleep, which had lasted ten whole minutes longer than anyone should be allowed. For the first moment I was senseless. My arm, holding the clock, fell listlessly on to the sofa, and there I was oblivious, until the next moment I jumped to my feet, grabbed my cap and coat, and rushed downstairs as if on fire. But having got to the second floor, I very nearly tumbled on to the reason for my hurry: Erika was coming up the stairs towards me. There must have been something terrifying about my demeanour, because she froze to the spot and asked, “Good Lord! What’s wrong?”

“I’m late!” I cried. “Sorry, but –”

“Wait for me outside, I’ve forgotten something,” she replied and carried on up the stairs, while I continued downward. But as soon as the outdoor air struck my face, I asked myself, Did she really forget something, or did she only come back for my sake? And I had to struggle with myself with all my might not to creep back up the stairs and listen to whether she went inside to ask for something, or would come back after me anyway after a while.

When we were at last side by side on the street, she said with enthusiasm, “It was so interesting at the lunch table today!”

But somehow I couldn’t share her enthusiasm, and that was painful to me. For how great could my love for her be if her enthusiasm didn’t become mine as well? So I walked almost sadly, my breast full of tingling pain, and not knowing what to say. But she didn’t even notice it, she was glad that just for once they had been talking about things that were new to her and could help her to mature. She even wanted to tell her grandfather what had been discussed today at lunch, but she would have to wait a little, because Erika had already spun a great long lie about why she had to stay out longer today.

“I lied in a way that I can use again in the future,” she told me. “But I’m not going to explain it to you, I‘m keeping it to myself. It’s my sin alone, you have no part in it.”

“Our first sin, our first crime,” I said.

“How terrible that what is beautiful turns straight into a sin!” she cried. “Grandfather is always repeating to me that whatever I do, I shouldn’t lie to him, and now it’s happened anyway, as if it were meant to.”

“If you lied for love, then your sin will be forgiven you,” I said, as if taking her confession.

“But if it was for forbidden love?” she asked. “I’ve heard so often about forbidden love.”

“Then you are doubly forgiven, because forbidden love is great love,” I explained, without really knowing whether that explanation was right or whether it made any sense at all. But she asked with great interest, “Is forbidden love really great love?“ And since I didn’t answer straight away, she carried on: “What really is forbidden love? What kind of love is forbidden?”

“For instance, if a king’s daughter fell in love with the son of a fisherman or a peasant,” I answered.

“But if the fisherman’s or peasant’s son loved the king’s daughter, would that be forbidden?” she enquired.

“No, that wouldn’t be,” I explained. “A small person may love a greater one, a lower may love a higher, not the other way round. A wolf may howl at the moon, but the moon has to this day never howled at a wolf; that is the order of things.”

“That was a joke, about the wolf and the moon, wasn’t it?” she said. “You said that because the moon suddenly happened to shine on us.”

“That’s why,” I replied. “I suddenly had a feeling that I’m also a wolf howling at the moon.”

“Why?” she wondered. “I don’t understand, because…”

“It’s best that way,” I said, and asked, “shall we go to the seaside?”

“I’m afraid of going there, I might be recognised in the moonlight and grandfather might find out that…”

“… that the moon is walking with a howling wolf,” I laughed.

“You mean you thought of me as the moon?” she asked, amazed.

“No, I was thinking of a king’s daughter.”

“No, you were thinking of me, and I’m so embarrassed.”

“Why are you embarrassed, if I thought of you?”

“I can’t tell you that,” she replied in a voice as if she had to blush.

“But who can you tell it to?” I asked.

“If I had a mother, then to her,” she didn’t hesitate to reply.

“So what would you tell her?”

“I’d say that someone compared me to the moon, but…”

“But?” I asked, when she stopped.

“Now we come to what I can’t say any more,” she explained.

“To your mother, you could.”

“But I don’t have a mother,” she said. “I don’t even remember my mother, or only something white as if through a fog, and auntie says that must be a memory of my mother, because she loved to dress in white – white silk with a red rose. Last year there was a reception at the German Embassy, and there I saw a lady in white silk with an enormously big red rose, and I asked auntie, might my mother have been like that lady, but auntie said, ‘Ah, phooey! Not at all! Your mother was a fine lady.’ So I don’t know what my mother was really like, I only remember from auntie’s answer that that lady there at the embassy was not fine enough, she thought, to be my mother.”

She went on talking for a while about the German Embassy reception, her auntie and the lady in white with the big red rose, who she only remembered dimly memory as something white. It was nice that she talked and I could be silent. I too was thinking of my own mother, among other things, I thought that if she had died in my early childhood, what sort of memory would I have of her? At any rate not white, because my mother was one of those, as I recall her, who thought that you can’t wear white, because it gets soiled too easily and it always has to be washed. That was the difference between my mother and Erika’s, and somehow that difference had been carried over to us, I thought. And as Erika spoke, I was walking silently beside her and imagining her dressed in white, and I felt that I was starting to love that white as a distant memory or enchantment, entirely different to my love up to now. Suddenly it seemed to me that what had gone before was not love at all, but only a sort of mental stupor, which had come over me and everyone of my age who grew up in the period after the Great War and the Revolution. We had heard of love only as desire, nothing more, because anything beyond that belonged in the realm of Platonic ideal, or romance divorced from time and sense, both of them ridiculous. I was taught that by the life around me, I was taught it by the talk I heard about love, I read about it in books. Even in the hands of poets, love became only a tickle or an obscenity, and since hymns didn’t contain either the one or the other, it wasn’t worth reading them. But what happened with me must have happened with so many youths: when we had tickled ourselves enough or told enough dirty jokes, and satisfied our desires, then little by little the moment would arrive when we were overcome by a strange restlessness. And then we dreamed of some distant white thing that walks, a red rose on its breast, and sings of something great and beautiful, something like our mother in the flesh, who has left us an orphan at an early age. At any rate I have had that feeling so many times – I can’t answer for others – but I have never had the courage to admit it either to myself or to others. It’s possible that I couldn’t have admitted it, because that distant and beautiful dream was only a dim surmise, not a deep feeling giving rise to ideas. Only today in the moonlight, walking like this, did I understand really what for so long I had been longing for: I had been yearning for a great love, one I’d never heard of in all my life, the very thought of which might make a person ridiculous. But today I was no longer afraid of ridicule, not today, while Erika talked about her mother as if she were that great white something.

“Your memory of your mother is like that building there in the moonlight,” I said, pointing to the castle, which shimmered vaguely through the foliage thinned by the autumn storms.

“Not like that,” she said, when she had surveyed the front of the moonlit castle for a little while, “nothing is like the white memory of my mother.”

“Only the memory of a great lost love can be like that,” I said, as if to myself, because it didn’t matter what I said or did, I was still thinking of my great love and wanted to touch it in words, somehow make it audible.

“So is the memory of a great lost love easy to bear?” she asked.

“So is your memory of your mother easy?” I responded.

“Yes, very easy,” she explained. “She descends sometimes like a delicate veil before my eyes, but even the slightest disturbance, mental movement or just exertion makes her rise, to be more clearly seen, back into the air, or glide further away, getting tinier and tinier, until there is nothing left of her but a small dim blot, God knows where, in infinity. Whenever I see it I think that that blotch or speck is nowhere else but in my own eye, my left eye in fact.”

“If the speck is in your left eye, how can you see her with both eyes?” I asked.

“Really!” cried Erika, as if she had discovered something new. “How can I see her with my right eye if she is only in my left? That means it isn’t after all a black spot in my left eye, but a memory of my mother.”

“The memory of a great lost love,” I repeated my previous statement, as if it would please me, or should please Erika.

As we chatted we walked back and forth along a narrow road under the trees. To tell the truth, I was drawn by the broader roads and the more open places where the moonlight shone. But when I said that to Erika, she said, “No, please let’s not! I like this dimness now, these rustling leaves under our feet and the patches of moonlight here and there.” But as if she feared somehow grating me with her words, in the next moment she added, “All the same, if you really want to, we could…”

“I don’t want anything,” I interrupted, “I thought perhaps you…”

“No, so we’ll stay here,” she decided.

“This is the best place in the whole world,” I said as if to console myself. “The best place and the most beautiful avenue in bright moonlight. What do you think, miss, if we walked here like this until ten o’clock, till twelve, till two, till the morning when it gets light?”

“Good God!” she cried. “What would grandfather and auntie think?”

“Let alone if they found out that you’re walking with me, an Estonian boy,” I said.

“Then I’d tell them straight away that you’re a Korporant, so that…”

“Please, not that!” I declared, trying to take her by the hand, but she withdrew her hand, started laughing and said, “Don’t take me by the hand, I would get terribly embarrassed.”

“Why embarrassed?”

“My gloves are frayed, that’s why,” she explained.

“So are mine,” I laughed back.

“That doesn’t count, you’re a man.”

“What?” I cried. “If it isn’t possible for a woman to buy whole gloves in place of frayed ones, it’s shameful, but the same situation isn’t shameful for a man?”

“Not like that,” she countered, “but if a young girl doesn’t mend her frayed gloves, that is shameful, that’s very shameful, auntie’s always assuring me.”

“That means a young lass with frayed gloves is lazy and careless, but a young man with frayed gloves is a quite proper and decent gentleman,” I concluded.

“Exactly,” she affirmed, “a young lass with frayed gloves is lazy and careless, auntie is always telling me.”

“So you yourself are lazy and careless, if you come walking in the moonlight with frayed gloves on.”

“No, sir, I’m not lazy and careless, although I’m walking in the moonlight wearing frayed gloves,” she retorted.

“Why not, if auntie says that?” I asked.

“Because I had a choice of walking with you in the moonlight or doing some darning at home. So why did I lie to my grandfather, if I was going to go home anyway?”

“Then we’ll have two sins on our souls: a lie to grandfather and frayed gloves,” I laughed.

“Those are only my sins,” she said. “You may laugh, of course, but I don’t know which causes me more pain on the conscience: the fact that I lied to grandfather, or that my work is waiting undone. Late in the evening I can’t manage, because then I go to sleep.”

“Poor thing!” I pitied her. “Please give me your hand here, and you won‘t be embarrassed any more or less, I’m just looking with my own eyes at how big the sin of the gloves is, and what’s troubling your heart.”

And now, as I took her hand, she let it happen without evasion, even stopped and stood in a pool of moonlight, as if she wanted to give me the opportunity to view how much darning her knitted gloves would need. I raised her hand closer to my eyes, as if I couldn’t be certain otherwise, but when I saw the open finger-ends of the gloves, I rapidly pulled them back as sheaths and pressed my mouth on the bare fingers. She squealed, and her hand made an indefinite movement, as if she wanted to free herself, but stayed on my lips.

“Now you’ve torn my poor glove right open,” she said, like a grateful remark, as we walked on a little later.

“If it were up to me, you’d have quite different gloves, not these lousy ones,” I said.

“You’re right about that, they’re simply lousy,” she agreed with me about her gloves, “but let me fix them; then you’ll see that they’re quite decent to put on for the autumn darkness.”

Thereupon our talk ended for a little while. Erika looked at my face furtively a couple of times, as if seeking something or finding something beyond understanding. Noticing this, I was happy to carry on in silence, to see where her seeking and considering would end. And it ended with an indefinite, timid question: “Are you always like this?”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“I don’t know how to say it,” she replied. ”Or if I do, you won’t like it.”

“Say it boldly, it doesn’t matter if I don’t like it,” I insisted.

“Well – so like a Korporant,” she said, and elaborated: “Stiffly polite.”

“So is it stiffly polite and Korporant-like to call your gloves lousy?” I asked.

She replied with a question: “But if you kiss my hand in those lousy gloves?”

“But if I say that if it were up to me, you would wear quite different gloves, is that very polite too?” was my next question.

“Isn’t that polite?” she asked in turn.

“How should I take that?” I said, evading an answer.

“Why isn’t it polite?” she pursued.

“Maybe it’s hard for you to understand this,” I said. “I myself only realised what my words meant after I’d said them. I meant one thing by my words, but they might mean something else which is not polite at all.”

“But is that polite – what you meant by your words?” she asked.

“In some situations, they might even be impudent,” I replied.

“But today?” she enquired.

“Miss, forgive me, but the wolf is howling at the moon,” I replied.

She was silent for a while and then said, as if turning aside, “I’m terribly embarrassed. I can’t really understand it at all, but I am embarrassed, maybe just because of it. But couldn’t you tell me quite clearly what your words really meant? Let me be embarrassed – it doesn’t matter, because here under the trees you can’t see my face anyway.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of when a young man gives gifts to a female stranger?” I asked.

She was silent for a while and then cried, “Phooey! So that’s what your words meant! But just think, that doesn’t embarrass me at all; I don’t think I’m even blushing.”

“Quite understandable, because it’s so very foreign to you,” I explained.

“But what did you mean when you wanted quite different gloves for me?” she asked, although I was already hoping that she would forget that question or be happy to leave it.

“Believe me, miss, it isn’t good for a person to become overly sophisticated,” I responded.

“Why isn’t it good?” she asked, quite dismayed.

“Sophistication makes a person unhappy,” I said, because I had read somewhere in a book or newspaper about why the number of suicides was increasing. It claimed that the development of civilisation is inevitably accompanied by a higher rate of suicides, because it is much easier to arouse a person’s desires than to satisfy them. Civilisation tickles the passions of millions, but satisfaction is available only to thousands, even then only partially, with a certain bitter yeasty residue even at the bottom of a tasty cup.

“Sophistication makes a person unhappy,” repeated Erika thoughtfully. “But why then does everybody talk about it, why does everybody want it?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Well, that’s not right,” she resolved. “You’re only saying it to get out of answering the question. Everybody matures and I want to be more mature: if others become unhappy, why then must I alone be happy – or happier?”

“That’s right,” I agreed, thinking of how to revolve my own perplexity, “because it’s best that everyone is equally happy or unhappy.”

“Sir, I’m waiting,” she said jokingly, but there was anxiety in her voice, as if she guessed what I meant.

“Spare me today – I’ll tell you some other time,” I begged her.

“No, tell me today, otherwise I won’t sleep tonight.”

“There’s nothing to say,” I said. “When does a man worry for a woman’s sake? When he’s marrying her. That’s all I meant.”

I waited for her to say something, but she was silent, only raising her left hand to her breast, as if she had to keep something there, as she leaned forward a little into a curve. Faded leaves rustled under our feet, and through the leafless crowns of the trees the full moon cast shimmering silver beams here and there on our path.

“Forgive me, miss, for thinking like that,” I said at length. “Don’t believe that it’s like that; I can’t help it. It might hurt you, but…”

“You’re wrong,” she interjected, “it doesn’t hurt me at all, but I assumed everything, not that. And how you said it, too! My heart was ready to explode!”

“If you knew how happy I am!” I cried.

“That my heart was ready to explode – is that why?”

“Oh no!” I replied. “And yet, that too! Just to hear that your heart would explode for my sake.”

“For the sake of your words,” she corrected me.

“It doesn’t matter – me or my words. From the beginning I have never, looking at you, thought anything else than about when I would ask you if you’d become my wife. Of course today I wouldn’t have done it either, I simply didn’t have the heart for it. But from day to day I was more and more afraid that some obstacle would come, so that I wouldn’t get to say those words to you. That’s why I’m so glad that it turned out like this today. Now, whatever happens, at least you know what I think of you. But I’m not demanding an answer from you – not today. It’s enough for me to be able to talk to you like this. If it had depended on me, then I wouldn’t have done anything else this evening than repeated to you how I love you, adore you, venerate you. Don’t ask why, for I know as little as you do. And if I at first called your gloves lousy, it was only because I wanted, but didn’t dare, to say to you, how much I desire to cover and enfold you in everything that is beautiful, precious, sweet and fine in the world. For the first time in my life I feel that I’ve discovered a totally new world, which is bigger, wider, grander and more beautiful than everything I’ve seen before, and all because this new world was created by you, that this new world is you. For ages I haven’t known what is faith, but thanks to you I could have faith and even start believing in my blessed soul…”

“Please, no more!” she said, touching my arm, and that was the first touch from her side.

“Forgive me,” I replied, “of course it was terrible of me to…”

“No, it’s too beautiful,” she said. “I can’t take it, it’s too sudden.”

“And of course, too sudden, you can’t do that, I understand,” I agreed, but continued straight away, “but my dear miss, do understand me: I was terrified, I am terrified even now, that I can’t say fast enough everything that I have to say and I must say.”

“I’m terrified too, when you talk like that,” she said. “What eyes will grandfather make when he hears it! And auntie too, God forbid! This should be kept as far as possible from her.”

“Right, you have a grandfather and an aunt!” I cried in real amazement, because in speaking of my own terror, those two had not occurred to me at all.

“Not only a grandfather and an aunt, but a whole set of relations and friends,” she explained.

“Quite right: whole set of relations and friends,” I repeated, and suddenly I was convinced that it was this that caused my secret unexplained terror, that everything could break up before it had even begun.

Now followed a number of days of which I don’t really have anything to say, because the same thing was repeated: we met at the lunch table and afterwards on a walk together, or only accompanying her home when Erika had no opportunity for a walk. She could tell some lie to her grandfather to keep away from home longer, but the circumstances, the conditions did not allow anything to be changed with a lie. And for the first time she felt, and perhaps I did too, that there was something inevitable about life, something fateful, that nothing could oppose. You struggle like a fly in a spider’s web, which might stretch a little this way and that, but which finally means that you can’t get anywhere.

Today, thinking back with a peaceful mind to what then happened, I’m amazed at how little it takes to feel happy, so happy that the glow of that happiness colours the rest of your life, no matter how monotonous, quotidian, dull and senseless it may be. We two in our happiness did not have anything other than a few shared lunchtimes, where we had to strain to conceal our feelings, and shared walks on the dark autumn evenings, where we couldn’t even enjoy the colours of foliage falling from the trees. We didn’t even have shelter to escape the rain, be close to each other and exchange silly words that could be forgotten in the next moment, as we looked into each other’s eyes, where you can read everything that you have ever dreamed of, or where you read new, unrealised dreams. Even in the rain we walked side by side, our shadows upon each other, which kept us apart at a respectable distance, as if we were complete strangers and we had said nothing to each other that could endear us.

To tell the truth, she didn’t say anything endearing to me or about herself; it was only I who talked, as if it were a question of the very warmest friendship, a spiritual affinity. She only listened and did not dispute; she didn’t reject my forceful words, as if they were spoken from her heart as well. Now it seems to me more and more that she couldn’t have said anything particular, because only I knew what I could not be silent about. For her perhaps my words were only an interesting pastime, my soul’s outbursts an amusing experience which could make her more mature, as she had kept emphasising. My actual endearments, which never went beyond hand-squeezing or kissing, must only have enriched her wisdom about life, so that one day it would be easier for her to go her own way.

But every time I analysed our relationship thoroughly to myself and sifted the minutest events through the filter of reason to ascertain that this was without doubt mutual psychic devotion, some ridiculously trivial fact about our exchanges would come to mind and I would renew the work of mentally sifting, choosing and picking through facts which might prove the opposite case. So in the end I’m always going round in circles, and getting nowhere after hours of racking my poor brain. But I don’t do this in order to grasp some sort of absolute truth, for what sort of truth could have convinced me that those minute facts and even the most trivial words can be explained and interpreted in one way or its opposite? For ultimately what is the significance of her not coming with me to any place, only a couple of times to the cinema, and even then to a shabby one?

Of course, she may have acted that way because she was ashamed of showing herself in my company, because I mostly spoke Estonian to her, being convinced that she could manage better in my mother tongue than I in hers. Moreover I was used to the fact that poor, ungrammatical Estonian did not shame anybody, and gave them more of a foreign and grandiloquent charm, whereas my bad German would be humiliating to me and to her. I remember her once expressing amazement that I, as a student, a Korporant into the bargain, did not have a rich command of the German language. By way of explanation I told her of my own and other people’s new orientation, directed toward England, but she immediately asked whether they have corporations and colours in England too. Unfortunately I had to admit, like it or not, that there aren’t, just as I should have confessed that despite my new orientation I had no command of English either.

Yes, if I had wanted to be completely honest and open, I should have said, My dear miss, I don’t really have command of anything, and maybe I even got into the corporation because I don’t have command of anything. Why talk about German or English, when even my Estonian is faulty, because I studied French, which has remained poor because of English, while my English limps along behind my German, and my German is hobbled by English and French? Everything I have studied I know only to the extent of wanting to be what I am not. If I want to please others – and every young person does – then it is with some foreign mannerism or trick, a foreign language or custom. And I am a little troubled that this is the way I best display my intellectual clumsiness and mental immaturity, and thus I detract from my own and others’ respect, because I and my companions don’t have much of that. I am proud but have deficient self-confidence, and I am haughty, but low on self-esteem. It’s as if I had grown up among upstarts, who would make grand gestures while cringing at the same time, make promises but break their word, and take on obligations but not think of fulfilling them unless they were financially rewarding. I and my contemporaries regarded ourselves as smarter than our fathers, more advanced, more cultured, but we lived with blameless hearts at their expense, and willingly extended and multiplied their mistakes or we ruined what they had created. I don’t have any use for becoming myself, being myself and staying that way, as some foreign poet exhorts me to, because I have always seen, heard and read quite the opposite: everyone tries to become, be, and stay something else, not themselves, and I want to be like everyone else. Or should I and my contemporaries really become virtuous – be ourselves?

No, my dears! I come from the country, but I don’t know if I would please anybody by doing that, when every boy and girl is rushing to the city. I am an Estonian, but I don’t know where I should boast about that. I am a student, but these days that is appealing only when I have my coloured cap on, as if that item itself were the educated Estonian. Take note of that, dear miss, if you don’t want to be disappointed in me. For it follows from all that that I don’t have much belief in myself: no one can believe in what he doesn’t have. Only once in my life have I felt that belief with all my body and soul, all the blood in my heart, and others should have felt it together with me, but about that, dear miss, I cannot tell you, because that would lead us finally down to Võnnu, about which you probably don’t want to hear. It would lead us to a completely unknown man, who said to us, “Brothers! Every one of us has been up against two, three, maybe even ten Russians, even a dead Estonian has come up against a Russian – so can’t a living Estonian come up against a German, who is mortal?” Never mind that the speaker himself perished – we won because we believed, and even I believed, in ourselves. But that belief has vanished; I don’t know why. That is what I should have said if I’d wanted to be open.

And yet, obviously I’m deceiving myself and the reader too. At that time these thoughts scarcely occurred to me, but came to me later and still are as I write about it. Then I would more probably have asked, Isn’t it more likely that she wasn’t so much ashamed of me as afraid of her own people, who would immediately pass on to her grandfather and auntie, to the whole clan, that our meetings should be eliminated at all costs, although Erika might have to change her position in service or even lose it? And of course I consoled myself then that she was more afraid of her own folk than ashamed of me or my stumbling use of language. She was more ashamed of herself and her own plain raiment than of me and my awkwardness, and therefore she refrained from appearing in places where there were bright lights and eager eyes. For in this world there is nothing more humiliating and shameful than poverty, which is seen in your face, your look, your clothing and your jewellery.

And she didn’t want to let me pay with my own money for tickets, as she would recall our conversation about the broken gloves; spending her own pennies more often at the cinema was obviously beyond her means. She seemed to have a different understanding of money to myself and many of my contemporaries. We borrowed without troubling ourselves too much about when and who would pay back the loan for us. We all had some sort of hopeful faith in our futures and our surroundings, while she seemed to live only in the present, where deprivation prevailed.

And so, in the rain, our only natural shelter was those awnings that stood in the park on the ends of posts, but we could use even those only rarely, because under most of them we found others who also seemed to have nowhere to go. The situation was made especially difficult because I didn’t even have an umbrella and I had to borrow one in emergencies from the landlady, who was of course very obliging, but looked me in the eye with such an expression that, like it or not, I had to come up with reasons why I needed shelter. But she would always block my excuses and say with a laugh, “Don’t do too much terrible explaining, otherwise I’ll think you’re fibbing – that your conscience isn’t clear.” That made things embarrassing, and so on many occasions in the autumn I walked in the drizzling rain without an umbrella, just my coat collar pulled up, while Erika, on the spot, carried a little umbrella, which scarcely covered her shoulders and dripped water either on to my head or under my collar, if I didn’t walk at a suitably respectful distance.

But all this essential shabbiness did not dampen our spirits at all; in fact, we felt like two orphans who had suddenly stumbled on some fairyland. In the dampness of an autumn evening we dreamed of our shared future. Or rather, I did, and her silence or indirect words indicated her assent. For example, she might suddenly interrupt my plans: “You should practise speaking German more often.”

“We should speak German together one day, and Estonian the next day,” I said.

“Estonian is terribly difficult,” she opined.

“Well, I’ll teach you it,” I promised, without taking my own promise seriously. Life and circumstances seemed in general to me crazily easy at the time, and I was ready to share out all sorts of promises.

“But then you’ll have to learn German properly,” said Erika to counterbalance my words.

“I’ll be speaking it like my mother tongue,” I pledged.

“You really will?” she asked with suspicious pleasure.

“I will,” I assured her, adding, “but you will then have to learn to pronounce our õ sound so that when the children…” The words died in my mouth, but that was of no use, because my last utterance made me feel terribly ridiculous. But either she didn’t notice the ridiculousness or pretended not to, and said, “Unlucky children! That letter will break their tongues in their mouths. Why does such a ghastly letter exist? Can’t you get by without it?”

“That letter is our national pride,” I explained. “Through it we’re related to the great and small nations of the world.”

“Who do you mean?” she asked.

“The Russians and the English, for example,” I replied. “A linguist explained to me once that just by tracing our õ sound you can conclude that our future will be great and brilliant or great and brilliant has been our past. I of course preferred the future, but the linguist was content with the past, because he thought a dead ancient Greek to be worth more than some obscure nation that still survives today. So you’ll definitely have to change your opinion about our õ, if you want to be happy.”

“You’re joking of course, aren’t you?” she asked.

“No,” I replied, “you would learn our language more light-heartedly if you adopted the linguist’s attitude, who said that through the õ sound we are related to the English and the Russians.”

“I don’t want to be related to the Russians,” she said.

“But the English?” I enquired.

“Grandfather says the English are cruel,” she said.

“I don’t know about that,” I replied, “but the English and their language rule the world. It would be good to be related to the rulers of the world.”

“You mean you don’t love the Germans,” she seemed to conclude from my words.

“At least one of them I adore,” I replied, touching her hand. “I want to keep repeating that to you, so that you’ll look on me as a blessing on your soul. And if you don’t want to become related to the English or the Russians through our õ, then I’m quite content with that.”

“No, no, I want to, if you want to,” she said, quickly interrupting, as if she feared my next words.

“You are good, you are good as gold,” I said.

“Do you really believe that?” she asked.

“I believe it absolutely,” I replied.

“Grandfather is always saying that I have such a good heart, he’ll never be afraid that I’ll make him sad.”

“When could I talk to your grandfather?” I then asked.

“Why would you?” she replied in an alarmed voice.

“I want to decide my own fate and yours,” I explained, “because I can’t wait any longer, not knowing. You have mentioned your family and relations fearfully so often, that I’d like to see one of them face to face. And since you regard your grandfather as the best of them all, then perhaps it’s best to make a start with him.”

“Grandfather is of course the best,” she said, “but I beg you, not yet, not so quickly.”

“You mean you’re afraid?” I asked.

“Yes, I suppose I am,” she agreed. “I simply don’t dare to talk to him about you.”

“You don’t need to,” I went on, “simply tell me when I can find him alone at home, and leave the rest to me.”

“No, no, no, for God’s sake, not like that! You mustn’t do that on any account, otherwise –”

“Otherwise what?”

“I don’t know what I’m afraid of, but I’m afraid, afraid,” she repeated.

“What will become of us both if you’re so afraid?” I said, as if suspecting misfortune.

“I don’t know, but I’m really afraid,” she affirmed.

“We still have to come to a decision about what is to become of us and our love,” I persisted.

“And of course we must,” she agreed submissively, “but I’d still like a few more days, for…“

“Maybe you don’t want me to even…“

“No, no, I do,” she cried to interrupt me, “but grandfather has to be prepared, I have to tell him everything first; it’s better that way, I feel.”

So that is how things stayed. But they developed much more simply than Erika had feared. Since she was troubling her heart about it and shedding tears, her grandfather was inclined to dry her tears. And that was a natural end to the matter, leading to Erika telling him everything, starting with her lie and ending with me and my visit to her grandfather.

“Well, and what about grandfather?” I was keen to know. “What kind of face did he make? What did he say? Was he angry?”

“Not angry,” replied Erika.

“What then – delighted?”

“Not that either.”

“You mean – sad,” I concluded.

“Yes, exactly,” she affirmed, but it was evident that she had trouble explaining the situation.

“But he must have said or done something?” I persisted. “Something happened between you?”

“I cried and grandfather stroked my head,” she said in a voice that wanted to cry again.

Of course, now that I recollect our situation, there was reason enough to cry, but at the time I was as if struck by blindness. To continue our discussion undisturbed and confer, we went to the park, but hardly had we got there than it started to rain heavily, after which a wind gusted all day long. Because of the fallen foliage there was really no shelter for us from the wind or rain. Finally I hit on a good idea to seek shelter from the bad weather under the thick spruce trees. It was a happy thought, because the spruces were on the edge of a slope and the wind was blowing from the hill, so we were protected against both wind and rain.

I don’t know when I’ve ever been so grateful to an animate or inanimate object as I was to that thick spruce tree when two of us stood under it. Even now, when I go to the park and walk past it, a warm glow passes through my heart, and if I were religious, I would thank God over and over again for creating that spruce and giving it wide-reaching roots, so that its branches could be just as broad, and what is more, not upright like a pine, but hanging down, so that the rainwater would trickle beautifully to their tips and hit the ground drop by drop, welcomed by the thirsty fibrous roots. At that time my thoughts did not extend so far, and were not concerned at all with such indifferent matters as God and Nature.

In a strange way, even then, a painful surge ran through my heart when we had found shelter from the rain, for I thought to myself, Now we’re under a spruce with our love. That was my father’s saying for people who had ended with nothing but themselves. That saying was a depressing parallel to the words used in the Bible about the Saviour: the birds have nests, the foxes have holes, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head, but we two were in place of the Son of Man, and our love in place of his head. So scripture would be rewritten to say: the birds have nests, the foxes have holes, but love has nowhere in the world to go.

Yet we were happy sheltering under the spruce, and I asked, “Did grandfather say anything?”

“He did, he did,” she replied. “He said, ‘Dear child, have you noticed yourself that you’re talking about a lie and a love all at once? Doesn’t that make you think,’ he said. ‘Until now, when you didn’t have a love, you didn’t have lies either, but love came, and so did lies. What will become of love if it drives you to lie like this!’ That’s what grandfather said.”

“Had you never lied to grandfather before?” I asked.

“Never,” she affirmed. “To auntie, yes, but not to grandfather, because he was always so good that there was no need to lie to him.”

We were silent for a little while, as if saddened that our love had led to lying even to the best person in the world. Then I ventured, “But what did grandfather say about me? Does he want to meet me?”

“When I asked him, he…“

“He gave in,” I interjected. “That’s what I thought straightaway, because I believed only good about him, from what you’ve said. But when may I come?”

“Grandfather didn’t say that,” she replied.

“But that’s the same as not letting me,” I said, disappointed.

“No, no,” she rushed to reassure me, “grandfather definitely promised and he will keep his promise. Grandfather is the sort of person who, once he takes on something, he does it, even if the whole world is against him. So if he is with us, we have nothing to fear. He only said, ‘All right, let him come, but not today or tomorrow, not the day after either, because I want to rest. Too much excitement all at once.’ We have to understand that about grandfather, because he lives in the past. As for today, that’s just a dream to him, and he’s too old to talk about the future. He told me the last time, when I wanted to talk about our future, leave him in peace about the future, as he has nothing to do with it. Of course he gave advice to think more about the past than the future. One thing he did promise, though: he promised to keep quiet about our affair, keep it completely to himself; so he did care that much for our future.”

“That’s good,” I said, “now it’s the three of us against the whole family.”

“Yes, now there are three of us,” she repeated in agreement, but in a tone as if she didn’t believe at all that we really were three sticking together. Rather I would conclude from her tone of voice that there weren’t even two of us any more, but each of us separate – myself, herself and grandfather. We were all enduring the same thing, but each in our own way and with our own thoughts and feelings.

The next day Erika was absent from the lunch table and the landlady said, by way of explanation, “The young lady wrote that yesterday evening she had to go out in the rain, got her feet wet and got a bad cold with a little fever. She’ll have to stay in bed for a couple of days, and she begs to be excused.”

Since no one apart from the children reacted to these words, she continued, “The young lady has been a bit strange generally recently – terribly absent-minded! She must have started courting.”

“There’s nothing else for you but love,” remarked the landlord.

“What else could there be for a pretty young girl?” replied the landlady.

“Is that the only worry in life?”

“No, but young girls don’t feel any other worries,” she explained.

“That’s how it was when you were young, but nowadays young people are different,” countered her husband.

“Yes, nowadays young people are more practical,” I said, endorsing the landlord.

“Are you, Mr Studious, so practical?” asked the landlady, turning the tables on me.

“I’m not a young girl, and the talk was of girls,” I parried by way of answer.

“So why do you think that girls are more practical than boys?” asked the landlady.

“Women are always more practical than men,” I explained.

“Women grasp situations quicker,” opined the landlord. “Now is a practical age, so that…“

“… women are practical,” continued the landlady mockingly. “I don’t understand where you men get it from. The papers are saying that German girls are staying single because of a shortage of men, but why don’t they marry Estonians, if they’re so practical?”

“Estonians don’t want them,” said the landlord.

“Don’t imagine it,” cried the landlady. “Estonians want them right enough, but German girls don’t want them, because they’re not practical. They require an Estonian man to be young, educated and rich, but there aren’t enough such men even for Estonian girls. A practical girl should be satisfied with much less. Lucky if a man has one of those qualities. If he’s rich, he doesn’t have much education or youth, and if he’s educated, well then, she’d have to give up on the youth and the wealth, while youth sometimes wins over good education and wealth. That’s what a practical woman would think. And yet nobody wants to think like that, so don’t talk to me about practicality! We were talking recently about corporations, which both boys and girls can join. Is that very practical? You should know, Mr Studious.”

“It isn’t practical at all,” I said.

“So why does everyone try to do it, if it’s a practical age and people are becoming practical with the times, as my husband thinks?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Perhaps because of some idea or fashion.”

“Well, you see, young people aren’t practical at all, if they run around because of an idea or fashion,” decided the landlady. “That’s what I think of German girls too, including our miss. If I could give her advice, I would tell her, Why fuss uselessly about your emotions; you’re better of falling on the neck of some man, and if there are no Germans, find an Estonian.”

“According to your advice she would soon have a child on her lap, but she’d have to demand child support from a court,” said the landlord.

“No, my dear man, you don’t know yourself and your brothers as well as we women do. There’s no need to make men worse than they really are. There are still enough among you to instil love and fidelity in a woman. The only problem is that there’s so little fidelity around these days. If I were a young girl now, I wouldn’t fear for a moment that I wouldn’t find a man in my whole life.”

“And we haven’t buried each other yet,” joked her husband.

“But we will, I don’t doubt that for a moment,” said the landlady gravely. “Listen, you men, you aren’t as wise and strong as you think you are. And as for women’s practicality these days, allow me to doubt it. I think that whatever else happens, the most practical thing a woman has is love.”

“But if women don’t love any more, what then?” asked her husband.

“Don’t blame men, at least,” replied the landlady. “But of course that’s silly! A woman loves as she always did; only foolish school learning, literal book knowledge, has driven them to believe that maybe something could replace love and fidelity.”

“My dear lady, do you believe what you’re saying?” I asked.

“But of course,” she replied unhesitatingly.

“The facts speak against you, though,” I opined.

“What facts?” she asked. “Divorce proceedings? Claims for child support? Don’t believe what people, especially women, say in front of courts, let alone when they talk about love and alimony. If they often love in order to get alimony, they mostly make claims when they’re not in love. But all these are distant things that leave us cold. Don’t you want to answer one question from me? But you, old man, don’t butt in; the children have left the table, and let me say what I think. So therefore, Mr Studious, if a nice lass like ours, even if she is German, were to lay her hand on your shoulder – of course she’d have to know how to do it – and say that you’re the beginning and end of her life, you’re a blessing on her soul, her redemption on earth…”

“This sounds like your own declaration of love at the dinner table,” remarked the landlord, while I felt a blush coming unbidden to my face.

“I asked you not to butt into our chat,” said the landlady, turning back to me: “What do you think – what would you do with a nice girl, such as our young lady, if she said that to you? Could you really just drop her?”

“I really don’t know, because my income…” I wanted to explain.

“Ah, what income!” interposed the landlady. “You pull yourself together, start working, worry about your income, when a girl really does know how to put her hand on your neck.”

“You should open an introduction agency,” remarked her husband.

“Quite surely, a good introduction agency would be much more useful than bad employment agencies, of which we have more than enough,” the landlady told her spouse.

“Yes, that’s true,” he replied, “but have you ever thought that usually every hand that’s placed on the neck of a man is heavier than a yoke on a bull?”

“If that were so,” she replied, “then why are people killing themselves for love more often than they used to?”

“The growth in suicides isn’t only explained by love,” said the man, somewhat disdainfully.

“Well, what then?” she asked. “The economy? Well, only you men could believe that. But, young man, answer me frankly, what would drive you most easily to suicide – hunger for food or for love?”

“It would be worst for me, I think, if both hungers came at once,” I replied, for I felt that I should easily deal with both together.

“Of course, the two together would be worst, but taken one at a time, hunger for love is more painful than hunger for food, because you can steal food, but not love. Once you start believing that your life’s happiness is in somebody’s eyes, there’s nothing for it but to…“

“… get a bullet in the head, a noose around the neck, dive into the water or under wheels,” her husband finished her sentence.

“Exactly,” affirmed the landlady, “or you turn the whole world upside down to lure the eyes of happiness into your room.”

“For otherwise there’d be no one to divorce a couple of years later,” mocked her husband.

“Rubbish!” she shouted. “Let’s ask Mr Studious whether he would be thinking of a divorce a couple of years later, if he got those eyes that shine the joy of his life?”

“I don’t know any such eyes,” I lied.

“And you never have?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” I replied hesitantly, as if trying to recall something.

“You don’t think so,” she repeated. “That’s just it! I simply don’t believe that there could be any natural young man anywhere who hasn’t dreamt of eyes that glow with the joy of life. Those who say so are fibbing or they don’t know themselves. It’s the same story with you. I’ve already told you once that if I were a young man of your age, I would have long ago fallen head over heels for our young lady, asked for her hand in marriage and maybe even eloped with her, if there had been no other way out. But you sit with her at the table as if you were made of wood, or you were keeping a bag of ice under your heart.”

Things were becoming embarrassing for me, so I had to be extremely much on guard. The only incomprehensible issue was whether the landlady was talking like this intentionally and deliberately to tease me, or was doing it because she hadn’t the faintest idea of my relationship with Erika.

“A practical question,” said the man, turning to his spouse, “is where would you elope to with a young lady like ours, if you had the same income as this young man?”

“Ah, where?” wondered the lady. “Doesn’t matter where. How about Haapsalu or Tapa?”

“And for how long?”

“For a couple of days, for then everything would be facing the inevitable.”

“Very good,” said her husband. “But meanwhile, what’s the situation with your position in service, your only source of income? The gentlemen in a ministry, a bank or an office are of course very concerned about where our precious young man has got to, what unfortunate thing has happened to him, aren’t they? No, my dear woman, under those circumstances you wouldn’t elope anywhere, and you wouldn’t find a single sensible girl who’d want to commit that foolishness with you. For after a couple of days, when you come back, someone else is sitting in your place at the ministry, bank or office, who isn’t liable to go off eloping. And the girl in whose eyes the joy of your life recently glowed, will cry her eyes out when she sees how rapidly she has made herself and others face the inevitable.”

“If all young people thought like you, there would be half as many marriages,” she told her husband.

“Mr Studious can draw only one conclusion from that: he has a long way to the harbour of marriage. He can’t elope with any girl worth eloping with, and without eloping he won’t get, or won’t be allowed near, any girl that he’d want to elope with.”

That was the brief outcome of a long discussion, which was a bad prediction for my love. And that prediction came true quite quickly, more quickly that I could ever have guessed.

When Erika appeared a couple of days later at the lunch table, she was paler and sadder than ever before. To the landlady she said the reason was her bad health, excessive tiredness, her grandfather’s illness and several other distresses burdening her soul and body.

In the evening, when I met her outdoors, she told me that she had no time at all, but added straight away to console me that grandfather was expecting me the next day between ten and eleven because then her aunt would not be at home. She herself would be going out at that time, she said, so that grandfather and I could be quite alone. I did plead with her to sacrifice half or a quarter of an hour to me, but in answer she only quickened her step, hurrying homeward at a half-run as if her house were on fire.

“What point is there in me coming to chat with grandfather tomorrow if you treat me like this yourself?” I said finally, while trying to keep up with her pace. “For three days I’ve been waiting for you as the blessing of my soul, and now you run away from me to your grandfather and aunt. I can only draw one conclusion from this: you don’t care for me at all or you keep your heart more for your family and relations.”

Now she slackened her pace, almost wanted to grasp my hand and cried, with tears in her throat, “Have pity on me, at least you!”

That shut my mouth, because suddenly I had a feeling that I should take her like a little chick and pucker my lips to her, as I had so often done with their down feathers. What else should I say?

“This is terrible,” I said at length. “Otherwise today is so beautiful again, after a long time: clear sky, stars shining. See how many there are! The land is dry and frost-covered, but we’re running side by side as if we were being chased.”

“Don’t you remember any more what you once said about love?” she said.

No, I didn’t remember anything special, for I had said this and that about it.

“You called it horrible,” she said. “I didn’t believe you then, but now I’m starting to. You must be a lot cleverer than I am.”

“Everything’s supposed to be foolish about love,” I said.

“I’d like to be a lot more foolish than I am,” she sighed after a little while.

“So would I,” I said, “only if it rescued the love. If only we didn’t need to run like this, as if love were running away from us.”

But we had reached the street corner where she usually stretched out her hand to me. When she did that today, she said, “Tomorrow then, between ten and eleven.”

“Tomorrow,” I replied. “But when will you have time for me?”

“Tomorrow too,” she replied, and left, as if it were hard for her to stay longer in my presence. I stood on the spot like a post, where she had left me, and I didn’t move until a couple came along who bumped into me as they passed; then I turned around and went back. Only some while later did I notice that I was walking those streets where we had so often walked together. And I took it upon myself that day to walk through all the places that had been touched by her feet, viewed by her eyes. I did it as a sort of test of whether I could be in one evening in all the places where we had spent time over the weeks.

When I had tramped enough cobblestones I went to the park and to those trails we had measured with our steps countless times. I even went to look at our shelter, and as luck would have it there was no one there that day. Like a wolf in the dead of night I crept finally under that spruce where we had last sought cover from the rain. I supported my back against the trunk and stood there, hands pushed deep into my pockets.

As I started walking back, the grass and moss had frozen, and crunching underfoot. I was content to go on walking on that frozen moss, but on hearing that crunching sound, it brought a painful feeling to my breast, as if, step by step, I were trampling something to pieces.

And as I now think back to that feeling, it seems to me that to this day I’ve done nothing else than trample something to pieces in myself – step by step, day by day, hour by hour. Writing these lines now is surely nothing other than trampling all that happened to pieces, to get rid of her, because otherwise I couldn’t go on living. And if that really were the case, what does it mean to a person that the heavens are broad and high, and millions of stars shine in them, created by God? What are these great and beautiful things for, if we have to crush everything beautiful in ourselves? Or must the heavens and their stars and God the creator exist just for that reason? Yes, maybe just for that reason, for otherwise there would be so many who couldn’t stand their own lives. The moon and its quarters, the sun and the clouds, spring and autumn, summer and winter, warmth and cold – perhaps they all exist only for a fool like me to have something to anticipate, hope for and believe in, so that procreation and death will not end.

The next day my main worry was whether I could get free between ten and eleven o’clock. And I decided to do it by hook or by crook, even if it cost me my job.

But that morning there was a rather special excitement at the ministry, the reason for which the secretary had let slip was coming redundancies. Actually this was nothing new, as they had been talking of redundancies even before me, and it had been repeated during my time at the ministry, and yet there was always a reason to take on new staff from time to time. Why the secretary’s words had such an effect just that day was at first incomprehensible to me. The secret whisperings of others seemed strange to me, which I hadn’t noticed before.

“They talk about it for a while, and then everything stays the same, like today,” I said to a colleague who was sitting at the same table with me.

“No, now there’s something real behind it,” he replied, “and the first ones to get the sack will be the ones who came last and don’t have a wife or children.”

“So you and I will be among the first to go,” I concluded.

“Not I,” he contested, and added, jokingly or sarcastically, “Today I registered, and with God’s help I might be doing a baptism in a few weeks. So if they can just wait a little, I’ll soon be a father.”

“Then I’d better hurry too,” I tried to parry with a joke, “if that’s supposed to help.”

“They don’t want that,” he replied, now quite seriously. “They’d rather sack people from the ministry than have them take a wife.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“Me?” he shrugged. “Why would everyone have to do what I do? Believe me, dear friend, our combined salary with my wife is less than ours on our own without a salary.” Since I didn’t understand this, my colleague went on to explain. “Let’s say you lose your job, how much will you be short to live on in a month? It’ll only be for a while, I think, as you’re bound to find something else. This is how I would calculate it: ten crowns for a room, right? Fifteen crowns for food, would that be enough?”

At the time that sum seemed small to me, but now I would tell my colleague that you can get by on less, as long as you bear in mind that you mustn’t walk much, or you won’t last. I can say that on the basis of my own experience. But I didn’t say anything then, so my colleague was free to carry on: “We’ll put five crowns for amusements, you understand: a cheap cinema sometimes, upper back row at the theatre, a couple of times at the café even, a little piece of cheap scented soap, a box of tooth powder, sauna a couple of times a month, on the cheapest day of course – in other words, quite a decent living for people like us, and taken together the shortfall is thirty crowns a month, if you don’t end up in some job. But do you know how it is with a wife? You take your salary from the ministry, and if you start living, by the end of the month the shortfall is forty or fifty crowns. Now just calculate which is more profitable – salary with a wife or no salary and no wife. Now believe me, my dear colleague, as far as salary goes, it’s not worth running after a wife. But of course, if you have other reasons… Because there are women who earn on their own, or who have assets – well now! That’s quite another matter.”

“But how can you be so sure, if you only registered today?” I was keen to know.

“I just told you that I registered today and in a few weeks we’ll have a baptism,” he replied. “I mean I’ve been married for quite a while, so why shouldn’t I know? You’ve been getting book learning all the time, I’ve been learning from life, and what’s more I’m quite a few years older than you. I got this job here through my wife.”

“Oh I see!” I said, as if amazed.

“Of course,” he affirmed. “And through my wife I know about the redundancies at the right time, so we could register at the appropriate moment. For if a man has the right wife, he does everything at the right time – bear that in mind! A woman, if she’s the right one and loves properly, is like a boa constrictor round your neck, you can’t get rid of her so easily.”

“And I don’t want to,” I said, for my part.

“Quite right: you don’t want to, that’s the main thing,” he assured me, and then asked, “but how do you know all this?”

“Some lady told me recently,” I replied. “She assured me that if a woman can get her arm around a man’s neck, then –”

“Then it’s like jiu-jitsu,” laughed my colleague. “Quite right! Just like that!”

“Not just like that, but the idea’s the same,” I explained.

“Well, what are we talking about, if the idea’s the same,” he said. “The idea’s the main thing.”

That was our conversation during the break, while I was itching to go to the boss to get some leave between ten and eleven o’clock. While chatting and itching, though, I was debating with myself: if there really will be redundancies now, as has long been threatened, then I will probably be the first one to get the boot, as my colleague thought. So what am I seeking from Erika’s grandfather, what can I tell him, if I am a decent person at all and if I’m not completely senseless? Do I go and tell him that I love his granddaughter madly, or do I go to ask that same granddaughter’s hand in marriage? To do the first is stupid, and to do the second is criminal or ridiculous, if today or tomorrow I’m going to lose the job I have.

Yet I had to go and ask permission, because I couldn’t fail to go; I had wanted and promised to. But now it all seemed to me downright incomprehensible and senseless. I was being led like a blind man somewhere, as if some woman already had really put her arm around my neck. Or should those words only be understood metaphorically? There was nothing for it: I had to go.

And I did go, although my heart was turning cold within me. Even coming away from my boss, there must have been something unusual about my face, because everyone looked at me quizzically and my colleague joked from his desk, “You mean: register or baptise first?”

“No, just to arrange a loan,” I replied.

“A smart man after all!” sighed my colleague. “To borrow and have fun, it’s worth it, but to love and then get married, nah…!” He didn’t finish, and I left.

On my way my feet took one step forward, two steps back, so to speak. Looking back now, I cannot wonder enough at myself, my state of mind and my understanding. I had dreamt of such a moment in the past, and in my head and heart I had everything wonderfully ready to say to that unknown old gentleman, so that he would grant the hand of his granddaughter whether he liked it or not. So why all this reluctance to go, and why was my state of mind almost sinking to hopelessness? Maybe it was the discussion at the lunch table at home recently? Or my colleague’s sarcastic joking chit-chat this morning? Or was my state of mind really depressed by the knowledge of the coming redundancies and the possible loss of my job? But until today I hadn’t really appreciated that job anyway, and I’d been thinking of finding a better one, to enable a more decent way of life. So why did I no longer hope for that job? Was it because even the present bad one threatened to vanish? So was I a chancer, driven by nature or love, who believed in greater winnings soon, if he manages to gain smaller ones that vanish with his latest failure and the loss of all other hopes?

At Erika’s home she opened she door herself. She was already wearing a coat and hat, as if hurrying off somewhere, but was only awaiting my arrival. Anxiously she whispered to me, along with her greeting, beseeching, “But ask grandfather nicely! Be sweet to him!”

As I took off my overcoat, she went to announce me. Her speech and every and action betrayed her extreme excitement and she appeared to be very pleased when she finally took me to her grandfather, only to disappear.

“Through here, please,” she told me, as I composed myself in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, framed in mahogany. Grandfather was waiting for me in a smaller, office-like room, after I’d passed through a spacious hall, which was piled high with redwood furniture, as if they didn’t want to leave space for any people to live or exist in. A single glance at this wealth and finery – for that is how I appreciated it then, and still do now, with slight adjustments – and my already grim mood immediately changed into one of despair. Certainly I must have loved that fair-haired girl madly at that time, and that love must have been much deeper than I can even explain to myself now, otherwise I would probably have turned on my heels, grabbed my coat and hat from the peg, and run out the door without a word. For what was the point in my appearing before that unknown old gentleman if I had the slightest wit to assess my own situation, past and future? But I didn’t have that wit, or if I did have it – for otherwise why did my heart sink so low within me? – then I was driven crazy and completely stupefied by a much stronger force than human wit.

So I carried on through the hall piled with furniture into a smaller room, where a thin, white-haired gentleman sat in a tall armchair, but I couldn’t make out the lines on his face clearly, because the blinds on the window cast a dim light and his back was to the window. As I stepped in he continued to sit calmly, but stretched his bony hand out to me kindly, almost joyfully, and that hand seemed to glow in the gloom, like his hair. He said, “A choy to see you, for my dear Erika has tolt me all about this business. Be so goot and take a seat in front of me there, so I can well look at you.” And when I, stupid as I was, sat down in the chair he’d indicated, without remembering to introduce myself politely, the old gentleman continued: “I am so glat that I can, after a lonk time, again speak this Estonian lankuach, for I luff this lankuach, but I no lonker haff anyone to speak it with. Now again sits before me one echt Estonian man, so that I can speak this dear Estonian country’s lankuach, as when was in the old days.”

“Herr Baron,” I tried to interject, but he cut me off by crying, “Why shoult I be Herr Baron, if Estonian lankuach? Estonian man, if he is real man, says always Sir Baron, not Herr Baron! That way speak one town man and he is not the real Estonian man. And why you say me Herr Baron, if Estonian state and government strictly forbit it? Do you call my dear Erika also Baroness?”

“No, I don’t, Herr Baron, but…“ I tried to explain.

“Why shoult I be Herr Baron, if my granddaughter not be Baroness and if state and government strictly forbit it? We shoult be oll now that citizen, Estonian Republic citizen, so goes the right name.”

“Herr Baron,” I said now decisively, “I grew up in the country and in my eyes you will remain Herr Baron until you die.”

“Then you is rebel against own Estonian state,” he replied, and so my intended flattery fell like a sling on my own neck, which this white-haired old gentleman battered into a coma with his next words, uttered now in German, the more freely and precisely to express himself: “If you still want to regard me as Herr Baron, then naturally you should honour my grandchild with the same rank. Or don’t you think so?”

“Yes it is, Herr Baron,” I replied trying to continue, “my honour and respect for your grandchild…“ but he couldn’t wait for the end of my sentence, interjecting, “I don’t understand you properly. You said you grew up in the country and you regard me, as your father does too, as a baron until I die, but why are you honouring me with a visit today, if you regard my grandchild as being of baronial rank?”

“Herr Baron,” I tried to say, but he wouldn’t give me a chance to continue, and went on, “Allow me, young man, I know what you want to say, because my grandchild has explained it all to me. I’m not accusing you of anything, not making any reproaches. I am old, I am already approaching the smell of the soil, the grave awaits me and I have seen much more of the world than you have, young man. And I tell you: I have seen more of the Estonian people than you have, and God grant that you love it as much as I have. Of course you won’t remember the year 1905, but I do, and I was one of those who wouldn’t let Russians armed with knouts into the grounds of our estates. What that meant at the time is something for you to ask your older brothers, if you have any. Ask your father, your mother, if they are alive. But the Estonians even burned and plundered my home, though not in the way they did other places, because I, and my father before me, had a different attitude to the people than many others, and so the people on my estate were different to those on others. I’m telling you all this only so that you won’t misunderstand or decide wrongly. Times and circumstances have changed in the meantime, yes – what can you do, they’ve completely changed – but the fact that I’m a baron and will remain one until I die in your and your father’s eyes, as you put it, can’t be altered by times and circumstances. The same applies to my grandchild, who is in my direct bloodline. Or do you disagree?”

“No, Sir Baron, times and circumstances can’t change blood, let alone so quickly,” I agreed.

“Quite right!” he cried, “at least not so quickly. Breeding is more permanent than times and circumstances. And I tell you, young man: my pedigree is old and exceptionally pure, if that interests you. The government of the Republic of Estonia is interested in that anyway, because it has learnt to respect the breeding purity of animals, which pleases me very much. Maybe one day they will go so far as to respect human strains too, as I do. And therefore I ask you, young man, what do you have to offer if you marry my grandchild, whose dowry is at least an ancient pedigree, if nothing else under present circumstances?”

“I love her more than anything in the world,” I cried, rising from my chair and almost wanting to fall at the feet of this white-haired old man, as if he were venerated by me. But he remained quite calm, asked me to sit down again and said, “Young man, don’t be so sure that your love for my grandchild is greater than her love for you. At your age we men don’t yet know anything about the greatness of a woman’s love; we only get to know and appreciate that much later. At your age we’re more interested in our own passions and desires than a woman’s love. At least I have reason enough to think that if your love is great, which I’m happy to believe, for otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you like this, then my grandchild’s love is at least as great, if not greater. So one love confronts another, but you have still not earned my grandchild’s pedigree by any means. What do you have to offer her in return, so that your marriage would be at least a little between equals, so to speak, not a misalliance in every sense?”

“Herr Baron, I really don’t know what I can offer,” I said in awkward embarrassment.

“Haven’t you graduated from university?” he asked.

“Unfortunately not.”

“You’re a member of a corporation?”

“I am, Herr Baron.”

“Then of course you will have debts, as I too incurred debts in my time in a corporation, although my pocket money must have been much greater than yours could have been.”

“I haven’t ever had pocket money,” I said.

“All the worse,” he replied, “your debts must be all the greater for that. You’re a professional, it’s been explained to me; can’t you tell me how long you have to work to pay off your debts, if you spend all your money on paying off the debts? An honest and frank answer, please.”

“At least a couple of years,” I said.

“Well, in that case, things can’t be too bad,” he said, as if considering, and added, “but how big is your current salary?”

When I had given him an exact answer about that, he said, as if hopelessly, “But how are you proposing to start living when you get married? You won’t even get a one-room apartment if you want to liquidate your debts in even ten years?”

“I’m hoping for a pay increase soon, because I have connections and acquaintances,” I now said, although I should rather have answered, “I’m afraid of losing even this job I have.”

“It’s difficult to base such an important decision as marriage merely on hopes,” he said. “I am a poor man, but I do have a greater income than you and I am completely free of debt now; yet my grandchild finds it necessary to earn a living. If she were to marry you, then, in order to get by somehow, she would have to start earning twice or three times as much. Firstly, there is nowhere to get such a position, or if there were, then love or health would not sustain you for a long time, quite apart from the fact that my grandchild’s health is not of the strongest. You can draw your own conclusions from all that.”

“But Herr Baron, you are forgetting the main thing – love,” I said.

“Quite the contrary, I was just emphasising that given the circumstances, love would not sustain you for long,” he said. “And if you really love my grandchild, and honour her as well, then you shouldn’t get her into a situation, with her youth and inexperience, that would be a heavy trial not only for her, but also for yourself. You, as a corporation member, should understand that more easily than anyone else, because you belong to a circle where it is thought that each nationality should have its special and chosen stratum or rank, with a natural right to hope for easier opportunities than the great mass or hoi polloi –”

“Herr Baron, you are wrong there, or at least you’re exaggerating,” I said.

“Where am I wrong?” he interjected impatiently. “That you don’t believe in, desire or want or hope for an elected or higher position? Now listen, young man, you don’t have to try to prove anything to me, an old Baltic German. Our corporations were not only for drinking and singing, and you had to keep quite pure from women. The corporations made men into what they had to be in later life, and therein was their main significance. If in your own corporations you have forgotten that single thing, which used to entitle them to drink, then I am very sorry that that fine old institution has slipped to such a low level. But tell me, young man, do you really need corporations in order to drink and sing together? If that is so, then I had better change my decision about you completely and give up, on any account, granting permission to my grandchild to marry you, since at the moment the only major obstacles to it are economic ones.”

“Sir Baron, I am in great perplexity,” I said, “as your grandchild, Miss Erika, suggested to me at the beginning of our acquaintance that I am too much of a Korporant, but you want to accuse me of not being enough of one; I can see no way out of this dilemma, even if I were richer than I am.”

“I understand my grandchild very well,” said the old gentleman. “In getting to know you she had hoped to find a simple and well-educated young Estonian, but now she has met a Korporant, who one way or another was supposed to continue the same thing that has become a stumbling block perhaps even to us. Naturally this disappointed her somewhat. But believe me, Mr Studious, my disappointment is even greater and deeper if I hear from your own lips that you are not continuing anything at all, but you only drink and sing. Or you don’t drink, do you?”

“Herr Baron, how am I supposed to take this?” I stammered, a little embarrassed.

“Well, anyway,” he said. “Of course, it cannot be otherwise, that is natural. But let me ask you directly and openly: so you don’t do anything else when you meet but drink and sing? Forgive me, an old man, but I’m interested in the development and progress of my homeland.“ And he said in Estonian, “I luff this Estonian nation, that’s why I want to know. I understands: you comes together, you drinks and sings, and if you gets enough drink and sing, then you starts this dear Estonian nation to lead and rule, because it be one stronk nation, as I myself with own ear hears. But how lonk you thinks to sing and drink so and to rule this Estonian nation? My heart gets heavy when I so thinks, because I luff this Estonian nation, I vill luff him with own old heart, until it stops.” In his big armchair he seemed completely hunched as if from extreme exhaustion; only his shiny white hair and almost identical hands, supported from the elbows on the arms of the chair, glimmered clearly in the gloom. After a little while he continued in his own language: “And my heart is pained for my own dear grandchild, who is the only worry and joy of my old age, because it seems to me that she has given her young love away to a man who doesn’t really know the seriousness of life, for he is a member of a society that only drinks and sings.”

“For the sake of my love I am ready for anything, even to leave the Korporation,” I said, trying to save whatever could be saved.

“That only makes the matter worse,” he replied.

“Herr Baron, I don’t understand you,” I exclaimed. “I’m in the Korporation, and that’s bad; I leave it, and that’s even worse.”

“Exactly!” he affirmed. “Even worse! For that only goes to prove it: you lack seriousness in life. You take steps and you take on obligations that you are prepared to give up at the drop of a hat. For me and my contemporaries the corporation and its colour were a shrine, and will be until I die; it was the same with my marriage: I intended that to be a lifelong one. But of course, I am old, the former sanctities are vanishing; even wives are exchanged like shirts these days, as if they needed laundering.”

“When I came to you, Sir Baron, it was only to ask you for Miss Erika’s hand for all her life. And by all that’s holy, I swear…”