I Loved a German

“But what is actually holy these days?” he asked. “What do you regard as holy? Tell me, for example: do you believe in God, the source of all that’s holy? Do you believe in him in any form at all? Do you feel in your heart anything eternal and limitlessly great, before which you want, once a day, a week, a month, even a year to sink to the ground with all your being, repent of your mistakes in all seriousness, trying to become a better person in the future? Don’t think I’m asking you for my own sake; I’m not much interested any more in the people of today and their gods and sanctities. Some things that have come from the past are much more alive to me than the people of today and their gods. I am only asking for the sake of her whose hand you are asking me and whom you say you love above all things in the world. So answer me with the voice of your heart’s blood, as you would answer her: do you have any basis for holiness, as I explained it to you? Do you ever fall to the ground before it?”

“Not quite that, but…“ I made to reply.

“So you don’t!” he intervened. “With you and God it’s the same story as with you and the corporation: he does exist and he doesn’t. But by what holy thing do you want to swear that you’re asking for Erika’s hand for life? Your parents’ god is dead for you, your forefathers’ idols have become indifferent and their traditions ridiculous. Of course your forefathers did have traditions, I know that – but what will you have to support you, what do you have to hold on to? How will you convince me that I should entrust you with the fate of the one who’s dearest to me?”

“Herr Baron, you’re asking more of me for the hand of your grandchild than any young man of today can promise you, if he is as honest and open with you as I am. I’m sure that the same change is going on among your young people, the same development, the same ruination, if you want to call it that, as you tried to find in me, but you wouldn’t refuse the hand of your grandchild to a young man in your own circle.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” he replied with an obvious lack of hesitation.

“So the basic reason for your objection is that I’m an Estonian, then?” I concluded.

“That is so, and yet it isn’t,” he said. “Your conclusion is off the mark, because, apart from the love that you keep praising, you think more of yourself than of your beloved. Have you ever really tried to imagine what would happen if you married my grandchild? Perhaps you’ll forgive me, but now finally I come to things that maybe we should pass over in silence. But the question is important to both you and me, so let us say everything there is to say now. If you marry my grandchild, you can’t be unaware that you’re marrying a baroness, can you? You love her not only as a young girl, but as a baroness, although that title is forbidden by law. Perhaps you are emphasising to me, an old man, my baronial status not so much for myself as for yourself, because it is not a matter of indifference to you whether you ask for your sweetheart’s hand from an old farmer or a former lord of a manor.”

“Yes, of course, but…” I wanted to interject, but he said, “Allow me, young man, I haven’t finished yet. So then you think you are not marrying a mere girl that you love, but you’re marrying a baroness. Well, what about the circle you are taking your young wife away from – how will this affect her? Will they see her only as your young wife? No, first of all they will see her as a baroness, and they will see her as that even when she doesn’t want them to. For what does that title mean to her, if she’s living with you in a one or two-roomed apartment, washing her own dishes and yours, polishing the floors, because you won’t have enough money to get help, just as we don’t at the moment. You’ll be lucky if it ends there – then the misery won’t be so great. But as I’ve already said, in your circles my grandchild would always remain a baroness, and that would mean that she could never be her own person. In a word, one way or another, she will remain outside of society. Moreover, she might be slightly detrimental to your career, for how could you be trusted completely if your wife, whom you love, cannot be trusted?”

“You’re wrong there,” I said, “there are plenty of men among us who are in similar positions, whose wives have not even taken the trouble to learn their husband’s language.”

“No, young man, it’s not I who am wrong, it’s you, if you think that such men and women can be completely trusted, that society can rely on them. But forgive me, this is probably unnecessary, for I wanted to say something quite different. You see, my grandchild would remain in your society as a more or less alien being. But what would happen in her own circle – the one she comes from? In marrying you she would even lose that, wholly or in part – we can’t ignore that. So she would be left completely high and dry, her whole world would be only you. So tell me now – shouldn’t I be demanding much greater guarantees from you than from a young German who might ask for my grandchild’s hand? In that case, my grandchild would have, apart from a husband, his circle of friends as well, with their interests and traditions, their joys and woes, their hopes and disappointments.”

“You’re quite right,” I said, beaten, and added, “but if you look at it that way, there can be no question of marriage between Estonians and Germans at all; there must be no love affairs between them; they must always remain hostile to each other.”

“You’re exaggerating, young man, because you’re in love,” he said quite calmly, as if this question didn’t concern him. “I think that if one side loses its social circle without gaining a new one, when it brings with it an old, pure pedigree and name which has not yet lost its power and dignity, then it must receive some sort of recompense from the other side, whether it’s a husband, like an ‘amen’ in church, or a certain economic advantage, which allows the lovers to live even without closer ties with one or the other social circle. That is how I understand it.”

“And according to your understanding I won’t satisfy you, either in my person or in my financial situation?” I asked.

“I may be wrong, but unfortunately that is so,” he replied. “I am old, I don’t understand things or people well any more – it’s possible, very possible, that judgements about their values should be made by very different yardsticks. But what can be done? I’m getting older by the day, not younger.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said, getting up, because I saw no point in continuing, “but I can’t do anything about the fact that I still love your grandchild. My honour and respect for her, though, has grown considerably now that I know she has such a grandfather.”

“Young man,” he said, now raising his head to look at me almost pleadingly, which led me to believe that he also loved her, “if you really love my grandchild, then forget that she is a baroness, and give her up; that’s the only good you can do her. Be content with love alone; marriage to you would be too heavy a burden for her. In any case I will do everything in my power to see that she does not take on that burden.”

I didn’t reply, because I didn’t dare to promise, and just bowed silently before him, as if in agreement, intending to leave, but he stretched out his hand to me, as if I were supposed to kiss it – as if it were my sweetheart’s hand.

“You’ll kindly forgive me, but my old limbs won’t let me get up from my chair. Please leave the doors open, so I can hear when Erika stirs. If you need to, come and see me. Talking with you is so interesting, but now I’m so tired that I’ll have a little nap before Erika comes. Then I’ll have to stir my stumps anyway.”

Those were the last words I heard from him. Outside, my first thought was, did the old man – that is what I called him, for some reason, as soon as I got outside – really believe everything he told me, or did he only tell me to convince me and thus get me to give up my love? I would still like to know that even now, as I write these lines. Did he really think I was the spineless and shapeless mollusc that he tried to convince me I was, or was it just his stratagem?

When I got back to my workplace, greatly delayed, I had a feeling that the whole world could read in my face what had happened to me in the past hour and a half. And evidently it was not only my feeling, for otherwise why would my colleague, who had previously advised me so personally and sagely, ask me without demur, “No luck, eh?”

“No,” I replied.

“Did you want to get a new one or extend an old one?”

“Get a new one,” I explained.

“Then things are not too bad,” he consoled me. “Loans that aren’t agreed are never called in, and bonds that aren’t signed cannot be protested against through a notary.”

Of course these were very wise words, but they didn’t ease my mind. I was going over the same old question: what now? – and could find no answer. When the depressing working hours were over finally, I hurried home impatiently, and I almost wished that I wouldn’t meet Erika at the lunch table that day, or better still, that I would never see her again. In my letter box at home I found a letter addressed in an unknown hand, which left me quite indifferent, like everything else. I tossed it carelessly on the table and then clean forgot about it.

But, strangely, my mood evidently had no effect on the world or other people: the landlady was much the same as before at the lunch table, offering food like mad and talking of love, as if there were some secret bond between those two things, while the landlord threw his clumsy jokes into the chatter, and the children seemed like wild creatures who had just been unleashed from their tethers. Even Miss Erika appeared, and sat at the table as if she knew nothing of my visit to her grandfather, or else had not the faintest idea of its outcome. There was something unusual only about me, for otherwise the landlady would hardly have set me to worrying so often about the young lady, as if she wanted to keep me alert with her words.

“The only young lady at the table, and she is left on her own,” moaned the landlady on Erika’s behalf. “Can your men, I mean the Germans, be so obtuse and impolite?”

“I’ve eaten so rarely with gentlemen at table that it’s hard for me to judge,” Erika replied to the landlady’s question. “The only gentleman I know well is my grandfather, but what attention or politeness can I expect from him? My aunt and I both look after him.”

“Mr Studious would probably like ladies to look after him,” said the landlady.

“So it should be, that ladies look after men, not the other way around,” said the landlord.

“Why should that be?” countered the landlady.

“Because there are more women than men,” explained her husband. “What’s more, they’re trying to take over all the men’s occupations – well, such as serving at table here. At least I would have nothing against it.”

“What do you think about it, miss? I don’t dare to argue with the young man about it today.”

“Perhaps our landlord is right,” Erika replied to the landlady.

“Mr Studious, would you tell us what happened to you today?” the landlady now turned to me directly.

“Happened to me? So far, nothing,” I answered.

“But later, what will be happening?” the landlady pressed me.

“Who knows? Maybe… There may be redundancies later,” I told her.

“I see!” said the landlady, considering, as if she now understood everything. “So that’s it!”

And for a little while complete silence reigned at the table, as all eyes turned on me.

“They’ve been talking about redundancies for years, but so far the number of staff has just kept increasing,” said the landlord at length, as if wanting to console and calm not only me, but everyone else sitting at the table.

“See that you don’t become redundant too,” said the landlady to her husband in a tone that suggested that she wished for it.

“I could use the holiday,” he replied.

“Couldn’t you two change places?” asked the landlady.

“There would be no profit in that, at least not for your spouse,” I explained, “fathers with families are not being laid off.”

“Well then, it’s quite simple: get married quickly,” said the landlady.

“Easy to say!” sighed the gentleman. “But where to get children just as quickly?”

“Where does a poor man even find a wife?” I said, and my words must have come from the heart, because Erika looked at me somewhat reproachfully. The landlady noticed her look – and I felt it.

“This is now spiteful talk against women,” said the landlady half-jokingly. “There are so many young girls who would go with a poor man, if he’s acceptable in other ways. What do you think, miss – would you go for a poor man if you loved him?”

This question made Erika’s ears burn, but she had time to recover, because the landlord commented on his spouse’s words: “Well, you see, my dears, all roads lead to Rome: happily we’ve got around to love again. How nice that everyone’s stomach is full; otherwise our appetites might have vanished.”

“Leave out the silly jokes now, the young lady wants to answer,” said the landlady.

And Miss Erika did answer, looking the landlady in the eye across the table: “My lady, I can’t answer your question, because I’ve never been in love with a man, and no man has wanted me for his wife.”

“You know, miss,” said the landlady now, “I don’t believe that until today you haven’t loved anyone, and even less do I believe that no one has wanted you for his wife. Are men blind these days, or what?”

“I suppose they are,” replied Erika adding, “at least as far as I’m concerned.”

With these words she got up from the table, as if she no longer wanted to continue the conversation, and moved with her young charges to another room. Now the landlord said to his wife, “Why do you embarrass the poor girl?”

“How do I embarrass her?” countered the landlady. “Young girls like it when they’re asked about getting married.”

“But you always talk as if there was someone here that she loves, and with whom she should get married,” declared the landlord.

“Carry on with your own story,” contested the landlady, but a red flush did steal across her face. “Our young man is so dumb and passive that… Mr Studious, does it seem to you too that I’m trying to bring you and the young lady together somehow?”

“No, I’ve never noticed that,” I replied. “That would be too wild – me and a baroness!”

“Wouldn’t it?” agreed the landlady, adding, as she turned to her husband, “You hear that? You’re the only one who reads such wild things and innuendos into my words. Nobody else does!”

When I went up to my room, I wanted to throw myself down on the sofa, but my eye fell first on the forgotten letter. I tore it open and read: Wait for me today, please, a quarter of an hour before the usual time, and over on the other side, not the usual place. Erika. I had to read it three times before I realised what the letter said. And then I was seized by an inexplicable terror. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps because I thought of what would have happened if I had completely forgotten the letter left on the table today and had gone to meet Erika at the usual time? Or were the words a quarter of an hour before the usual time, and over on the other side something to cause anxiety? Did I perhaps detect in the letter a tone that caused fear? Did I feel that the writer of those lines had not yet been made as dull and insensitive as I who was reading them?

And when I had thought about it, I started to consider those blows that had rendered me so dull and senseless that day. Firstly, of course, the redundancy. But after all, this wasn’t such a great surprise that it should have left me in a state of shock. The main cause must still be that old man, as I was still consistently calling the white-haired baron. And by that I didn’t mean to belittle him or insult him – no, but it was a sign that I no longer saw in him so much as a baron or former lord of the manor as an ordinary mortal – as person who had experienced much more of life than I had, and who had the same feelings as every old person, every old man I had met thitherto, but his understanding was somewhat different.

Yes, one of the blows must have been the fact that I went to talk to the baron, but happened upon a man who only had a past. He was tethered to the present by only one living soul, and even that one I wanted to take from him, to start building a future for myself. That is why he told me everything I’m now trying to understand. But actually I still don’t understand what he was accusing me of when he concluded that as a Korporant I lacked real seriousness about life. That was his term for it. What was he actually demanding or expecting of me? That same separation from this country and its people that he and his kind had been cultivating for centuries? Or, if he had not been doing that – as he tried to demonstrate – what was my task, then? Only the creation of a so-called upper stratum, rooted in the land and the people? So that I, for example, would claim some sort of privileges, while my kinsfolk – father, mother, brothers, sisters and so on – should be overlooked. But only a baron could think like that, not an ordinary old man, as I was beginning to regard him. That would go against common sense and human feelings. It would be ridiculous.

And yet he was speaking of it in terms of holiness. Actually, afterwards I had a clear feeling that for him the corporation was the dwelling place of this holiness, not only God in any form at all, as he expressed it. Or in his view, did the corporation come first and God second? God was left only when the corporation and its sanctity didn’t exist? For he only came to the question of God when he was disappointed in the sanctity of my corporation. That is how it appeared to me in retrospect.

As to the question of God, here at least everything is clear to me. For an old man like him, with his past, it could not be otherwise if he had to catch hold of God. Formerly, when he sat in his manor house and power enslaved him, it was natural that there had to be some sort of higher power, which gave him superior privileges and benefits, and now, when those privileges and benefits had gone, his great consolation was that there was still God, whom no nation or revolution could take away from him.

My situation was completely different to his, but he, an old man, could not understand that. I didn’t have the power to rule or any special benefits, and was not aware of the past either, so I couldn’t mourn its passing. I only have the future, which is not forcing me to be anything, so I’m free within myself. For only the past binds you, not the future, I believed at the time. That inner freedom of mine was something he couldn’t forgive, for perhaps he wanted to see in me and my contemporaries the real masters of the country, bound by the future perhaps even more than by the past, while the country and people, like a beautiful woman, must be conquered anew every day if you don’t want it to slip into someone else’s hands. At any rate he would have wanted to bind me to some tradition inherited from the past, which would have allowed him to guess how I would attend to both the past and the future. In other words, he wanted a sort of assurance. But our times are no longer like that – something he couldn’t grasp. No one could guaranteed against them harming them, so where was I supposed to find the guarantee he demanded of me?

Of course he was right in that my forefathers and my actual father had something certain, a tradition. But for him things were much easier in that regard than for me. For him it was still important that one season follows another. Every morning and evening his heart got a new assurance that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Every warm shower of rain on his spring sowing told him that there is something permanent and certain in the world, so it would be worth sowing and reaping the next spring too. The arrival of the birds in spring and their departure in autumn was for him renewed proof that everything was as before, that a fixed order pays, that tradition lasts, continuing on for many generations, so many that it is quite easy to start believing in eternity.

But what of that is there in me? When the redundancy comes, will someone say to me, It’s autumn now, we won’t be sending you out for purchases against the winter, or now spring is coming, that most beautiful season, we won’t disturb your joy? Would a bank or a shopkeeper say to me, today is the first sleigh-run, we’ll discount this bond for you, or today the starlings are singing so joyfully in their boxes, here’s a kilogram of sugar for you, young man, a second rye loaf, a third brown loaf, a fourth pat of butter and a tin of sprats? No, nothing like that has ever happened to me. So I’m only sure that everything has to be paid for, without anyone getting any assurance that they can pay for it.

Is there something of eternity in that? Or is there divinity in it – in paying, I mean? Perhaps there is but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel it yet, for maybe I haven’t gone far enough with the payment. Perhaps I have to pay in advance for several generations, before I start to feel the presence of divinity and eternity. So I have become detached from the eternity and divinity of my forefathers’ land and its nature, but haven’t yet attained a new eternity with its divinity. And will I attain it? That is perhaps what the old man meant when he spoke of the Estonian man who was supposed to be some sort of counterpart to me as a Korporant.

But if I had been what he called the Estonian man, would he then have granted me his grandchild, or would he have even come any closer to granting her? And if he had, then I ask – why? Did he believe that that proper Estonian man would have more eternity and divinity in his blood than I had, that he would be less detached from his father’s and mother’s land than I am? Did he believe that such a person has more seriousness about life than he thought I had, and that he could be trusted more than I am, especially at life’s difficult moments? Did he, that mad creature, really think that, since I was prepared to give up the corporation for love, I would also, in a certain case, be prepared to give up my love?

In that case he also doesn’t know what an Estonian man’s love is. Such a man may be detached from his own forefathers’ and mothers’ eternity, he may have lost all his sanctities, yet he is left with love, the love of a foreign woman, as happened to wise Solomon, and that enslaves him just as any of the greatest sanctities or deities would. But the old white-haired man didn’t understand that; only a proper Estonian man understands it. He knows what the wise Solomon knew: what use are a country and a people, and what use are God and his sanctities, if there is no love, the holiest of all?

Thus I reasoned to myself, my head in my hands, when I had read through Erika’s two-line letter. This mental tramping back and forth might have lasted about an hour, without my noticing the time. Only then did it occur to me to look at the clock, and now a new terror seized me: lost in thought like that I might easily have dropped off to sleep, as had already happened to me once, for nothing made me doze off more than thinking did: thinking and sleeping sometimes seemed to me like almost the same thing, for in sleep I solved puzzles that were insoluble when I was awake.

I jumped up from the sofa on to which I had dropped to think, and started pacing around the room – from corner to corner, four steps in one direction, four steps back, as if I were some criminal behind bars. And the longer I walked like that, the more clearly I seemed to feel the old man’s words invading my blood, and if not my love, then at least my respect and appreciation for his descendant, that blonde girl, was growing more and more. My feelings in general seemed to be taking a new direction, hard to express in words. Impulses that led to passions, lusts, were receding further away, and into their place, from somewhere deep within myself, came a spiritual tenderness and delicacy, which led only to adoration and veneration. I felt, in thinking of that girl, as if I were becoming purer and better, and as if I sensed a little of what that old man called falling to the ground before something boundlessly great and powerful.

But I didn’t stay pacing in that room until the appointed time, because I started to feel cold and warm at the same time. In between all the other thoughts came my immediate main concern: what am I supposed to tell her? What is my decision about the whole situation? Where do I even begin? Am I supposed to tell her today, already, that it would be best if we didn’t meet any more? Am I really supposed to accede to grandfather’s viewpoint, that our life together would be an unbearable burden for Erika’s health and her love? But can’t our love survive anyway – a love that doesn’t result in marriage? Those were the questions that danced continually in and out among my thoughts, without my finding a single answer.

Answers were not to be found outside either, where I roamed along badly lit streets, looking at my watch under nearly every street lamp. But the more often I did it, the slower the hands moved. And when the moment finally arrived, when Erika came running toward me, a little case on her arm, I was almost taken aback. Without saying a word we rushed onward together, as if we were escaping from evil pursuers or as if we were afraid of being late somewhere. Only after a while did she say, “I was afraid that grandfather might send auntie after me – that’s why I invited you earlier.”

“Your auntie knows already too?” I asked, taking the bag from her to carry it, to which she readily agreed.

“I’m no longer sure that grandfather hasn’t told her,” she replied. “But now I’m no longer afraid; here no one we know will find us and nobody will look for us in the dark park. The only trouble is this suitcase I took with me.”

“It’s so light to carry,” I said.

So we headed straight for the park.

“Is it true, what you said at the lunch table today?” Erika asked after a while.

“What exactly?” I countered, because nothing special came immediately to mind.

“How can you even ask!” she cried. “With a couple of words you half-killed me at the table, so that I could hardly stay and sit there – and now you’re asking me!”

“Oh, that redundancy!” I now said, because I recalled her look which was caught by the landlady. “For those words I beg you a thousand pardons, but I really didn’t know what to answer to the landlady’s question.”

“So you just said it anyway?” she queried, more happily, and for a moment I hesitated over whether to tell her the truth or conceal it at first. Finally I told her anyway, “No, it is true after all, and that’s why I shouldn’t have said it at the lunch table.”

“So you knew it already when you were visiting grandfather!” she almost screamed.

“Yes, I knew it already,” I said, crestfallen.

“You’ve known it for a long time!” she pressed me further.

“No, I heard it only this morning,” I explained. “If I’d known it a few days earlier, I wouldn’t ever have appeared before your grandfather.”

“But how could you tell grandfather that you’re hoping for a pay increase?” she now exclaimed, which was a double blow to me: firstly, they must have taken it seriously after all when they kept such a trifling thing as my pay increase in mind, and secondly, this pay increase revealed me as someone who, one way or another, was untruthful and deceitful, in short a person who can be trusted only guardedly. This was clear to me in a moment. Therefore I shouted, “Oh miss, you can’t even imagine my state of mind when I came before your grandfather! When I heard about these redundancies at the ministry in the morning, my only wish was not to go anywhere. But what was I supposed to do? Tell you that I wouldn’t be coming today, that I wouldn’t come at all until it was clear whether I have a job or not? But the decision might take weeks, even months. What would you want me to tell your grandfather? He would not have understood? No, I had no choice, I had to got and see him, because that seemed the only reasonable thing to do. Once I got talking with your grandfather, though, I liked him right from the start so much that…“

“You really liked him?” Erika asked happily.

“Believe me, I liked him so much that through him I started to love and honour you much more ardently. And I wanted so much to win his support and trust that I forgot the real or likely situation completely and came out with hopes that were aroused by my love for you. Because I had earlier assured myself so many times that if I managed to win your trust and love, then I would also achieve a salary increase, which would be insignificant compared with the first thing. So that was how I talked about it to your grandfather. But as soon as I had done it, my heart began to hurt within me, because I felt it wasn’t decent or proper to talk like that.”

“But if grandfather had changed his mind because of it, what then?” she persisted, as if enjoying my embarrassment.

“Oh Lord!” I cried, almost distracted. “I don’t know what then! It was so terrible that I had to talk like that to the one I least wanted to tell it!”

“But just think what I had to go through when I lied to my grandfather,” she said, as if in consolation. “For me it’s even harder. But thank God, my heart is so pure, and I’m glad that you lied too, for now you have your own sin of love staining your heart.”

And as if she felt closer to me because of that, and as if a particular wave of tenderness were rising within her toward me, I came closer so that her hand touched mine, and her shoulder touched mine, so as to almost support herself on me. But when my fingers closed tightly around hers, she seemed to awaken from a stupor, shifted away from me and slipped her fingers from my grasp, albeit gradually, as if regretting it or fearful of upsetting me.

Having reached the park, we sought out our old familiar avenue where we had walked when Erika had lied to her grandfather the first time. Today I was the liar. There were still plenty of leaves on the trees; today they dappled the light on to the road. Showers, storms and night frosts had done their work. Underfoot in the dark it felt like a thick, soft, scarcely rustling carpet. It smelt of damp and incipient mould, awaiting everything that was vital. This was the usual late autumn weather, neither warm nor cold, but sharply cool, as if a whiff of approaching winter could be felt. The wind had spent itself. The cloudy cover of the sky remained in place and no star penetrated it. Nor was the moon in sight, but from a faint glimmer of light through the clouds one could guess that the moon was moving unseen across the canopy.

Along the road people were moving; occasionally talk and laughter could be heard, sometimes it was peaceful and silent, as if everything had died. We were alone.

“Grandfather told you?” I said at length, when we had been silent long enough.

“He did,” she replied.

I wanted to say something else, for the silence emphasised that I couldn’t find the words. So the moments stretched into eternities.

“What now?” she finally asked.

“I don’t know – I don’t know anything any more,” I replied.

“You must know, you must decide,” she said oppressively.

“Of course I must,” I agreed, “and yet I don’t know. I’m desperate, I’ve been going crazy all day. Everything’s dark, everything’s confused, everything’s incomprehensible, only one thing is certain: I love you more and more, more madly, and that seems to rob me of my power to decide, because I’m terrified of losing you.”

“But you must do something so as not to lose me,” she said, as if wanting to entice me.

“I can’t find any way out,” I said hopelessly, at length. “Or if there were a way out, I couldn’t use it, not any more.”

“What way out would that be?” she asked with a slight tremble in her voice.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“But I want you to,” she said insistently, almost angrily. “I want to know what way out it is.”

“It’s what our landlady recommended,” I explained instead of answering.

“So she knows about our affair.”

“Probably not,” I replied, “she was just talking, as usual.”

“What did she say?”

“She said we should elope.”

“I’m ready for anything,” she said unhesitatingly.

“Are you even thinking about what you’re saying?” I asked, almost in terror, for somewhere deep in my being something seemed to emerge that wanted to postpone his insane step.

“No! What for? I’ll do whatever you want,” replied Erika just as unhesitatingly.

This moved me so much that I grabbed both her hands and kissed them almost tearfully on the gloves; in the meantime we had reached a solitary bench and wordlessly sat down on it. And when I had kissed her hands enough, I left them in my own, as if wanting to warm them.

“Our elopement would mean compromising you,” I told her.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, “but what’s to be done if there’s nothing else, if grandfather doesn’t really believe that we love each other?”

“Aren’t you really thinking of what will happen afterwards?” I exclaimed.

“Of course I am, if you are too, but if you aren’t, then I won’t either,” she explained.

“Then I have to think for the two of us,” I said. “Our landlord said that in the present circumstances elopement would be completely mad. For if I arbitrarily didn’t turn up at work today or tomorrow –”

“Why arbitrarily?” she interjected. “Can’t you ask for a few days off?”

“Now, when they’re all taking about redundancies?” I exclaimed. “Asking for days off at the moment would be like asking to be dismissed from service. So, one way or another, eloping would mean me losing my job. And what would we have gained by that?”

“I would be compromised,” she replied.

“And I would be forced to leave you on the spot, because I would have nowhere to put you, I wouldn’t have anywhere left to lay my own head, I might have to move to my parents’ in the country.”

“And I would go back to my grandfather, because he, no matter what is said and done, will take me back anyway.”

“And how would I look appearing before your grandfather, when I’d previously lied through my teeth to him about my salary increase and then fully consciously compromised you, when I knew that I was about to lose my job and had no other? If I hadn’t talked to your grandfather today, or if I respected him less, honoured him less, then maybe I could stand being such a swinish cad, but now...”

“… you love grandfather more than you love me,” Erika finished my sentence and started crying loudly. This was so unexpected for me that I completely lost my head. I simply didn’t understand what could upset her so much. I could do no more than kiss her hands, which I had gradually released from their gloves while talking. And when kissing her hands couldn’t silence her crying, I sank before her on my knees and beseeched her to calm down and listen to my explanation. And I summoned up all my wit to make her understand what sort of unhappiness, distraction, madness it would be to elope at this moment and compromise her. Gradually the weeping stopped and she started to realise how things stood, so that I could sit beside her again on the bench and warm her hands in mine and kiss them occasionally. She hardly uttered a word, as though she had become indifferent to everything. When I finally asked her whether she appreciated that I was acting this way out of love, she said submissively, while still convulsing with the last spasms of tears, “I understand you very well and I can respect all this. Of course you’re right, when you think about it, but at first I didn’t want to think, only love.”

“You are simply terrible in your directness!” I cried. “And I feel ashamed before you.”

“No, no, it’s I who am ashamed before you,” she said. “I’m terribly ashamed.”

While still holding her hands and with our knees together, I felt her body convulse with shaking, which extended to my fingers and ran down past my knees.

“You’re getting cold; we should walk,” I said.

“Yes, I got cold from crying,” she said by way of excuse, grasped her suitcase and got up from the bench. I tried to take hold of the case several times, but she wouldn’t relinquish it and claimed that carrying the case kept her warm. But I still had the feeling that she didn’t care whether she was cold or warm. She walked with downcast head; her pliant, sure and light step somehow became stunted, fumbling, as if her thoughts and attention were not where she was; her voice, words and movements betrayed a dullness that I had never noticed before. But when I approached her and tried to touch her anywhere, she jumped every time as if frightened, and I understood that now she needed peace, because her internal shock as she sat on the bench must have been somehow terribly great and deep. That consciousness, together with her continuing mood and behaviour, had an ever more depressing effect on me, and I came close now to starting to blubber, which would have made me utterly ridiculous in her eyes, which I feared dreadfully. In my depressed state I was aware of an increasing notion that if we had until today been speaking about the sins or crimes of our love, we had done it like children, but I committed my first real sin of love today, and perhaps that was the cause of everything that happened between Erika and me. A hot wave of pain passed through my heart each time I tried repeatedly to release her suitcase from her hand and she repelled my attempts with the same firmness. Finally I was seized by a sort of mad conception that everything would turn out well between us, nothing would have happened between us, if she had not had with her that annoying accidental case – it was I who called it accidental. And ever more persistently and with greater effort and new pretexts I tried to seize that bewitched object into my own hands, and no one could say how long I would go on trying to get that suitcase if Erika hadn’t said that now she had to go home, now she definitely had to go home. There was nothing left for me but to give in to the inevitable. Of course now I know that she didn’t have to go, and that only her aunt would be surprised at her staying any longer, while her grandfather would have awaited her arrival quite calmly. But with me life has always been such that I get to know the most important facts either too late or not at all. At school I got to know most of those things least needed for getting things done, while not a single person told me about the most necessary things, because they all evidently thought that people learn these things by themselves. All teachers and trainers are quite right about that, as surely that’s what happens with the majority, but not everyone. There are those like me who learn the most necessary things too late.

Erika was missing again for a couple of days from lessons and from the lunch table.

“The girl is getting out of hand,” declared the landlady, while the landlord tried to excuse her, explaining, “With the first chilly weather, everyone complains of colds and headaches.”

“How do you know that she’s absent because of illness?” she challenged her husband.

“Well, why then?” he countered.

“How would I know today’s young people so well that I’d know why they’re absent,” said the landlady. “Here’s our young gentleman, sort of half-dead for the past two or three days – why don’t you ask him what’s wrong? Of course you think that he’s affected by the first chilly weather too.”

“No, he has things of his own, we know that,” he replied.

“My lady thinks of course that today’s young people don’t care whether they’re in service or not,” I said in self-defence.

“Oh, what’s this!” cried the lady. “Now you have to hang your head because of a silly job! Will you hold your head up if I promise you half a year’s lunches on credit? I make my promise having seen the first shoots of the crop, as they say, because you will find a new position, if you lose this one – and what’s more, you haven’t even lost it yet.”

“New debts won’t make anyone lift their head,” I said, declining the kind offer, “especially when I don’t know when I can pay you back.”

“Why are you worrying about paying if I’m saying you’re the first shoots?” asked the landlady. “Believe me, it means very little to me whether I set the table for six to seven or seven to eight.”

“And to me it would mean very little whether I started paying for six to seven, instead of seven to eight,” I explained, “but since I’m only paying for one and I can’t even do that, it’s easier for me to go without lunch than to eat and not pay.”

“Well then, I can’t help you,” said the landlady, “but you must have special reasons why you don’t accept the offer I’m making.”

“No, my lady, I don’t have any special reasons apart from personal ones – that is, it’s the way I’m made.”

“And you can’t re-educate yourself?” asked the landlady.

“So far I haven’t been able to,” I replied.

“Well, we’ll try it in the future,” said the landlady somewhat threateningly.

“You’d always like to re-educate everyone as if other people were children beside you,” the man told his spouse.

“What are you men beside women other than overgrown children?” she replied to him.

“Do all women have to suffer delusions of grandeur like you?” ventured her husband now.

“So this is delusions of grandeur, is it?” asked the woman. “In this world it has always been so that women lead and men run, women command and men obey.”

“Be sure of being the best!” cried the man.

“My lady, you ascribe to women very dangerous qualities,” I said.

“Leading and commanding are always dangerous,” opined the landlady.

“One thing is sure, anyway: wherever or whenever anything goes wrong, there’s always a woman in the picture,” declared the landlord.

“Yes, revolutions are all made by women,” I said.

“You think so?” queried the landlady, as if tickled by it.

“No, I don’t think anything, but I’ve read it somewhere,” I said. “Women’s jewellery, fine style and precious stones wreck any kind of social order much more quickly than even inflammatory speeches by the fiercest of male rebels. There are dresses, coats and diadems in the world that have a much greater effect than dynamite, pyroxyline or any other explosive. They can only be compared with poisonous gases.”

“You must be unhappily in love at the moment, or you were in love earlier, otherwise you wouldn’t be finding things so topsy-turvy,” cried the landlady enthusiastically. “The French state, the royal court and the brilliance of its whole society were once created by women, not men. Frenchmen even today live on what women created.”

“No, my lady,” I contested, “to my mind it’s as I’ve suggested: not my idea, but one I once read when I was young and revolutionary.”

“Young and revolutionary, eh?” smirked the landlady mockingly. “Now, of course, you’re old and conservative.”

“At any rate much older and more conservative than when I read that French women, with their jewels and dances, did away with their king and after that themselves and many of their best men, by chopping off their heads.”

“Didn’t Nikolai the Strangler turn out to be a woman?” asked the landlord.

“Are you still on about your Nikolai?” said the landlady to her husband sneeringly. “You’d be better off giving us your opinion on this: if a man’s neck is twisted somewhere, it’s always done by a woman. Have I understood this correctly?”

“Well roughly,” concurred her husband.

“You, Herr Korporant, are of course of the same opinion?” the landlady turned to me.

“I don’t know women so well yet that I could express an opinion,” I replied.

“Just you wait, you’ll get to know them and then you’ll definitely share my husband’s opinion,” the landlady consoled me. “One day you’re neck will be twisted too.”

“May God grant that it happens as soon as possible, because it definitely will happen,” I said, laughing, though for me it was almost serious.

“It usually happens faster than anyone would expect,” explained the landlady. “There are men whose necks were twisted long ago, without them having the faintest idea of it.”

“I’d like a twisted neck like that for myself,” I laughed in response to the landlady’s words.

It was as if some god were sitting with us at the lunch table listening to our wishes, to fulfil them! At any rate I, on seeing Erika for the first time since the last evening, felt from the beginning that my neck was going to be twisted. I looked, almost amazed, into the face of the woman I adored, and found it altered and unfamiliar. Something bold and challenging had appeared in her, but her gaze avoided catching my eye. I got the feeling that I was not at the table at all. Even when I offered Erika something – and on this day I was trying harder than usual to do that – she somehow managed to remain very polite and yet did not grant me a single glance.

“Miss, don’t you want to tell us who is right, I or my husband? He thinks you’ve been gone because of illness; I think because of courtship.”

“Oh yes, my lady!” cried Erika “I am very sorry that I didn’t inform you. But my aunt and I have been at our wits’ end, so that I forgot everything: grandfather was mortally ill, and I was afraid that he wouldn’t recover. I have cried so terribly these past days, almost cried my eyes out.”

“I can see that even now,” remarked the landlady.

I looked at Erika’s face too, but couldn’t find anything that confirmed what the two of them agreed: it was only a little paler than usual, and her lips were convulsively pressed together.

“Grandfather got ill the evening when I was last here,” continued Erika. “I didn’t go home directly from here, but to visit an acquaintance, because I had in my case some things that I had to take away – my aunt sent them – and when I finally got there after a couple of hours’ delay, my aunt was running frantically through the rooms while grandfather lay in bed. But the doctor had left shortly before I arrived. This has been going on for a long time, as he has a weak heart, but every time it happens I completely lose my mind, because grandfather is the dearest person in the world to me.”

I had never heard such a volley of words from Erika at the lunch table before. The landlady was also surprised by it, as I gathered from her look.

“Then I did you a grave injustice, blaming your absence on courting,” the landlady apologised.

“Staying away from work for courtship even once is not worthwhile,” Erika explained.

“Oh yes it is,” opined the landlady. “It’s worth doing even worse things for courtship, if it’s the right one.”

“Well, then I suppose I haven’t met the right one yet,” laughed Erika a little nervously, glancing at me for the first time.

In the evening, when I was waiting for her in the street – I’d been doing that for half an hour before she came – she told me that she wouldn’t have time today, because the previous evening she’d received the worst dressing-down she’d ever had in her life.

“Just think about it,” she told me confidentially, “my aunt went out to meet me; she almost came in to ask if I was still here. Of course, in the end she went home with her nose out of joint. You can guess from that what was awaiting me at home. With great trouble I got grandfather around to allowing me an extra hour to come. At first I thought it was all over, and that’s why I didn’t tell the landlady anything.”

“Ah, so it wasn’t really grandfather’s heart trouble?” I asked.

“No, you’re wrong. Grandfather really was seriously ill,” she explained. “Of course it began with the terrible upset of my not coming home at the right time; God knows what was going through grandfather’s head. He must have feared that you really would compromise me, because he doesn’t know you so well. That ‘s to do with his ailing heart. He made me swear by all the saints about whether anything had really happened to me, and today he said, ‘Bear in mind, my girl, that if anything fateful happens to you, that will be the end of my life. So then, if you don’t want to be a nail in my coffin, come home every evening at the right time.’ So that is what I had to swear to do, and that way he allowed me to turn up for lessons again.”

That is how she explained her situation, and that would all have been fine were it not that she had become so talkative. She had always been in the habit of thinking through everything she said, but now her words somehow came easily and superficially as if gliding indifferently over everything. Even about her grandfather’s illness she spoke as if it didn’t move her at all, and when she mentioned the coffin nail I didn’t doubt that it was mere empty words. I would have liked to tell her that, or at least ask her to explain why I might get that impression, but I didn’t dare. She spoke almost incessantly about her grandfather, her aunt, other relatives and acquaintances, but I got to hear only the most trifling things: who had seen whom, who had been where, who had said what, who had sent regards to whom, who had received a letter or card from whom, who had greeted whom, who had wished whom luck on what occasion, and so on ad infinitum. There was no longer any chatting or discussion, and none of what a young man and woman like to talk about most. And if I did try to say something that might have had any sense in my opinion, she glided over it quite easily, as if it didn’t interest her or she didn’t understand it. This happened not only on this day, but also on the days that followed, when I, despite all this, went to meet her every evening to accompany her home. The only relevant question that interested her at all was the redundancies for numbers of staff that hung in the air. Almost every day the conversation led one way or another to that, and if she was told that still nothing definite had been heard, she would repeat, “How silly that pointless fear lasts so long! Maybe it will come to nothing.”

“Don’t worry, something will come,” I replied. “The matter is being sifted and weighed.”

“I’m not worried,” she said, and suddenly in her voice there was a long-dead nuance – something that had been there once and I had had time to forget. “You obviously think that I’m expecting and wishing for you to lose your job.”

“No, I don’t, but…”

“But you have changed your opinion of me quite a lot,” she continued.

“Yes, sometimes I don’t believe my eyes and ears,” I remarked.

“But my opinion of you hasn’t changed,” she said, “except that I have tried to get sense into my head as grandfather wishes, and you also wished once, there on the park bench. That’s all.”

“Then I am the most ungrateful creature in the world,” I said, suddenly feeling tears in my throat. She must have sensed my change of heart, or even sympathised with it, because as we walked she shifted closer to me and was silent for a while.

But then finally came the day when I could tell her that redundancies in the ranks had had their effect on me. She gave me a frightened look, turned her eyes aside and said, “And yet!”

“And yet!” I replied just as tersely, and that was all we had to say on the subject. But both I and probably she, both of us, felt that the last reed of our future hopes had been broken. Of course that reed was more imaginary than real, but it was still something, because at least I had not tired of believing that I might miraculously be spared redundancy, then I would have a little spark of hope for a salary increase which I had been weighing up for a long time. So now everything had vanished, we knew it and we didn’t want to waste a single word or look each other in the eyes. It was made easier by the fact that our meetings still took place in the evenings and on poorly lit roads. One evening she said to me, “Oh, this evening we have to be quick, I’m expected.” She said it as if I were expected with her, so we both had to hurry. But obviously that concept only flashed into my head, as her next words clearly proved: “Do you remember my distant relative who used to say it was interesting to be with Estonian girls, but boring with me? I told you about him once. He’s back here; we’re supposed to go to the cinema together today.”

“Oh yes,” I said rather indifferently, “I do remember.” But behind this apparent indifference was a heart which was writhing in pain, especially as Erika carried on.

“He told me that he wouldn’t even recognise me, I’m supposed to have changed so much. They say my mind has opened up and I talk like a developed person. You see! He says I’ve been developing in the meantime. But you’re not listening to me, you don’t like me talking about him. Did you hear what I said?”

“Of course I did,” I replied with the same indifference. “I heard that you’ve developed in the meantime.”

“Well, good!” she said, relieved. “They say I have the eyes of an adult woman. Have you noticed that my eyes have changed?”

“Not your eyes,” I replied, “but your look, your gaze, maybe that has.”

“Ah, really!” she cried in joyful amazement. “You see, he’s right after all! I thought he was just telling me that, to get grandfather or auntie to say that.”

“Why would grandfather or auntie be made to say that?”

“To get them to – well, they might give a sign that Ervin should try to amuse me, interest me in something – and he’ll start from the assumption that I’ve developed in the meantime. But if you also think that a different look has come into my eyes, then maybe Ervin isn’t for grandfather, but simply for himself.”

“I still don’t understand why grandfather or auntie should…” I wanted to say.

“Ah, you know, lately I’ve been terribly melancholy, and they’re afraid that…”

She didn’t finish, and just as well, because even without that, I realised how silly it was on my part to force her to answer.

“When did you first notice that about my look, or my gaze?” she asked after a short pause.

“After you’d been gone for two days last time and then came back,” I explained, trying to make good my previous clumsy question. “Not only had your look changed, but your whole bearing, your appearance even.”

“So that was it,” she said slowly, as if to herself.

“Yes, that was it,” I repeated, as if I understood what she was thinking.

“But you don’t know what’s behind those words,” she said.

“My visit to your grandfather and the evening on the bench in the park,” I said.

“There’s something quite different, that you have no idea of,” she explained. “Only grandfather and I know about it.”

“And you can’t tell me?” I asked.

“Not at the moment,” she replied.

“Then when?”

“Some time maybe, maybe never,” she said, as if far away with her own thoughts.

“But just now you said you feel the same towards me as ever,” I declared.

“Of course I do, but I didn’t say that before,” she explained.

“Then I’ll repeat your words that distressed me greatly: ‘You love grandfather more than me.’”

“Did those words really distress you?” she asked.

“Terribly!” I assured her.

“I was in terrible pain myself, that’s why I hurt you too,” she explained. “But those words don’t affect me, because we’re talking about what I haven’t confided to grandfather, but what he knew from the start. Without him this couldn’t have come about. This is something between him and me, not between me and anyone else. You understand: this matter only concerns me and grandfather.”

“Then I don’t understand anything at all,” I said, as if satisfied with her explanation, but deep in my heart a worm of doubt was gnawing away. This didn’t concern only her and her grandfather; it couldn’t, as I too must be involved. Finally I felt obliged to ask, “So I have nothing to do with this business?”

“Not a bit,” she affirmed, and added as if in passing, “or if you did, the only explanation I could give is there wouldn’t be anything worth talking about.”

“Can’t you tell me which part of this trifling thing involves me?” I asked.

“Of course I could, very well, but…“

“But … go on and say it!” I cried.

“But that’s just it … I can’t talk about your part in it without explaining my own and grandfather’s, and I can’t do that now on any account,” she concluded, and that didn’t satisfy my curiosity at all, rather it increased it.

In the ensuing days too, whenever I steered the conversation to this secret business, she stayed firm in her resolve: she couldn’t tell me, because it was her own and grandfather’s affair, nothing to do with me. And it was the sort of thing, she said, she wouldn’t tell anyone at all, even if it happened – which it wouldn’t – and if it did happen that she would marry one day, then she wouldn’t tell her husband either, because it would be no concern of his.

“But if your mother were alive and asked you?”

“Yes, I might tell my mother, if she was like I imagine she was,” she replied.

“So you would love your mother more than me,” I concluded, to get her to talk somehow.

“That isn’t love, it’s understanding,” she explained. “Maybe you wouldn’t understand me, but mother would, if she’s the sort of person I imagine she was.”

“Grandfather is for you a substitute for mother then,” I said.

“Exactly,” she affirmed, “for me grandfather often stands in for mother, because auntie is busy with social affairs, she’s never at home and doesn’t love children.”

“You’re no longer a child.”

“In her opinion I’ll always be a child; both of us, grandfather and I, are for her a little like children, and so she keeps her distance, though we all live together.”

“You said before that you wouldn’t tell even your own husband about this thing,” I began again after a while, “but if the two of us could have been…” I didn’t quite dare to express in words what we two had once dreamt of marriage – yes, it seemed to me then, terribly long ago – when we saw in each other a husband and a wife.

“Then you would have known everything anyway, I wouldn’t have needed to say or explain anything. Or if I had done it, then…” She didn’t finish her sentence either.

“What then?” I asked.

“I don’t know what then,” she replied. “Then it might have been so, it might have been good to talk about it, but now it wouldn’t.”

Even now I think I feel how I was burning with curiosity then and how, along with that, there was sprouting within me a desire to stand close to her, so close that I would know everything, for I was convinced that standing close to her would make me omniscient. At the same time I felt that something beautiful and great had passed me by, never to return.

When we discussed this subject, she was thrown into a strangely sad or melancholy state, and that day we parted as if we had made each other sad or at least upset. At any rate this secrecy had affected me as if, for the first time in our acquaintance, I had left her for a day and not accompanied her home, as if I wanted thereby to loosen her heart and tongue or punish her a little. But when I turned up the next day she smiled at me most innocently, as she had done at the lunch table, and said in her usual happy and superficial tone, as if she were dealing with the most trifling thing, “Well, where did you get to yesterday? I looked and looked, I stopped a couple of times, I looked and waited and wondered to myself whether you’d fallen asleep again, like that other time, you remember, when you bumped into me on the stairs. Just think: what would have happened if I’d fallen down those high steep stairs that time!”

“Things might be easier for me now,” I said cruelly and grimly.

But she acted as if she didn’t understand my words, or as if she saw in them only a silly overblown joke, as she replied with a smile, “Oh Lord, these Estonian men are certainly comical, when they go to sleep rather than meeting! I thought you wouldn’t come and keep me company any more, but you’ve been spoiling me with your company. I didn’t want to walk all that way alone, so I asked Ervin to come and meet me today. Do you want me to introduce you? He has also been in a Korporation and knows other Estonian Korporanten. Very nice boys, he says.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but at the moment I’m not in the mood for new acquaintances.” Even as I said those words I felt that I should have given some other answer or at least spoken in a different tone, but what could be done. It had happened. I had acted as if I were insulted or as if I were burning with petty jealousy or lacked the courage to make contact with this young German, so that Erika could compare us side by side.

“Don’t get annoyed,” she said with the same lightness, “I was just joking. And Ervin isn’t an acquaintance of yours.”

If her first words only jarred me, then these words of hers actually irritated me. Had I, compared with her Ervin, become a figure of fun already, to be mocked and teased? It’s quite likely that today would have seen the first squabble between us, which might have grown into a real argument and quarrel, if she hadn’t been more tactful than I. Instead of waiting for me to speak, she let her own words soar with butterfly lightness, hitting me like a sledgehammer: “So I really must apologise if you’re not in the mood for new acquaintances, and I wish you a good evening right now, because Ervin’s waiting for me at the next corner. I didn’t let him come here, because I was afraid you wouldn’t want to meet him. But thank you very much for coming today and not forgetting me.”

At the end of the sentence all the lightness was suddenly gone, at least so it seemed at that moment. Suddenly my ears sensed that something had snapped, something had frozen in her throat, something she was struggling to hold in, so that it didn’t gush from her eyes. But for me it was not frozen and therefore filled my eyes. Half-blinded, I reached for her extended hand and began to kiss it crazily. I don’t know whether the odd tear also fell on it, but her hand shook. Suddenly Erika pulled her hand from mine, and hurried away.

“Can I come tomorrow evening?” I cried after her.

“If you don’t sleep in again,” she laughed to me over her shoulder, as if nothing had just happened between us. But it’s very possible that nothing had happened, everything was just my demented imagination, so I rambled on to myself as I gradually started walking after her, as if I wanted to accompany her despite everything. I’ll walk alone, but I’ll still accompany her, for if she weren’t there I might turn to someone else. So I thought, as if to console myself.

As I later thought over that parting – to tell the truth, on the following days I did nothing else but think about that parting as if it were a new challenge in life – I was firmly convinced that the strange world of dreams, in which I’d spent such happy hours, was coming to an end. Love had remained, might remain forever, but the dreams had returned whence they came – into oblivion. I only wanted to know one thing: when she went with another, did our love remain with her, the memory of that love? Was she also burying her dreams and leaving for herself just mere love without any egotism, for dreams do have a bit of that? What will happen to me if at some time I go with someone else, as she is doing now, while our dreams are so present and fresh?

These were irrelevant and pointless questions, but at the time they gave me a reason to live. When I recall that time now, I feel that my questions indicated one major thing: my love at the time was still far from free of egotism, as if my dreams had not had time to die. For what was the point in wanting to know whether your love is returned or not, when you have no more hopes? It is enough to know that you are in love, and in love you burn like a candle which will soon go out. Love free of egotism is only a glimmering sadness, a flickering hopelessness. It is born of death and gives birth to death. Or in a few cases, the lover becomes a saint, a hero, a sage whose wisdom is of no use to anyone, even to their own kind of sage.

That’s what I say now, as I write these lines, but at the time I was trying to suppress emotions, to throttle irrelevant questions even momentarily, and submit to impulses which now make me smile sympathetically. To begin with, that evening of our parting I decided not to appear at the lunch table the next day, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to endure the landlady’s knowing banter and Erika’s light-hearted laughter. And to make sure I didn’t go back on my decision, I didn’t go back home before the time Erika finished teaching. Coming home, I went from the street corner where Ervin was due to be waiting, as Erika had been thinking of introducing us. I wanted to see whether anyone was waiting there today, because if they weren’t, I could reasonably assume that no one had been there yesterday either – by fibbing, Erika had got rid of me more easily. My suspicion was actually confirmed: there was nobody on the street corner or anywhere near it. I hurried home at great speed, my heart blending pleasure and alarm, and in front of my house door I bumped into some young man, so that we both saw the need to apologise to each other. Only as I stepped in the door did it occur to me that this must be the Ervin I’d been looking for: taller than I, in a jacket, leggings and long socks. Definitely him! On the stairs I encountered Erika coming towards me, and today she was the one who practically ran me down in her hurry to get down the stairs.

“Good evening!” she cried when she noticed me. “Today I don’t have any time, grandfather is waiting.”

“Your grandfather has rather light feet,” I would have liked to reply to her, but before I had time to, she was out of the front door. It was true: yesterday’s goodbye had really been forever. If I had not taken the hints, they would soon have been followed by other, clearer ones.

Actually it had already happened, only I didn’t know it yet; I heard about it only the next day when I appeared at the lunch table, where the landlady said to me, “Where did you go yesterday? Firstly I knocked with a stick on the ceiling, and when that didn’t help, then my husband did, and I tried again, but you still didn’t come. Then I sent the girl up to look and she brought the news that your room was quite empty. And we were nearly bringing the ceiling down!”

“They kept me back at the ministry yesterday, I only came in the evening when the young lady went out; we met on the stairs,” I replied as indifferently as possible.

“You’re playing some game with the young lady,” said the landlady, “when she doesn’t come, you don’t either.”

This surprised me so much that I quite forgot my pretended indifference and asked anxiously, “Was she out as well?”

“Of course she was!” cried the landlady. “Don’t you know yet?”

“No! How could I know that?” I replied, trying to return to my former indifference. “I haven’t exchanged a single word with the young lady in the meantime. Yesterday on the stairs she just shouted good evening to me over her shoulder, that’s all.”

“And I was joking to the old man: look, our young folks have got to a state where they don’t even want to see each other at lunch. Because the young lady only turned up after lunch and wanted to give up her lessons completely. Only after a lot of palaver did I get her to promise to come every afternoon for a couple of hours until Christmas. She says her grandfather’s health has suddenly got worse; the young lady can’t be away from home for so long. Of course that’s what she says, but what’s behind it, who knows? More likely she’s going out with a man. It’s understandable, for what’s the point in such a nice girl waiting any longer – her most beautiful years are passing her by.”

“You’d make everyone go out with men, whether they’re Estonian or German girls,” said her husband.

“Of course!” cried the landlady with assurance. “Girls to husbands and boys to wives. If it were up to me, I’d even look for a partner for our Mr Studious. Don’t you want me to take you in hand?” she appealed to me.

“No, thank you,” I replied, trying to joke, “soon I won’t have anything to put in my own mouth, let alone a wife’s.”

“I’m thinking of someone who has enough to put in her own mouth, and enough for yours as well,” explained the landlady.

“That would be the worst of all – to live at a wife’s expense,” I said.

“I think so too,” agreed the landlord.

“You have experience of that, to be so sure about it?” she asked her spouse.

“A little bit,” replied the man, “because you’re rich and I’m poor.”

“But you’ve always had your position and your income.”

“Of course I have, but it’s always been a beggar’s kopeck compared with your income.”

“But has my income made you unhappy?” the landlady asked.

“Isn’t it enough that it isn’t my income?” countered her husband.

“Well, if our young gentleman looks at it the same way, he’ll have a long time to perish alone and maybe even starve,” said the landlady.

“It’s easier to starve than eat from a woman’s hand,” I said.

“But if you love that woman?” she asked.

“Where would you come by love so easily,” I said to myself, while the landlord rushed to support me, saying, “A starving man’s love is like a homeless dog’s howling in front of the house where it’s beaten.”

“Listen – don’t upset the young man with your silly jokes,” the landlady told her spouse.

“I’m not joking at all,” he said.

“But a rich woman can fall in love with a poor man?” she asked.

“A rich old woman can, with a poor young man,” opined the landlord.

“But not a rich young girl with a poor young man?”

“I’ve never seen or heard of it,” said the landlord, “or unless the young man is from a great family, exceptionally handsome, gifted, famous or something like that, which is the same as rich.”

“That’s definitely right,” I said, turning to the landlord.

“You have experience of it, to say it with such conviction?” the landlady asked me.

“Not personally,” I replied, “but I’ve never seen it, heard of it or read of it. That some man, especially a young one, rich and of good family, would fall in love with a poor girl and then, so to speak, renounce the throne, is possible, but a woman – she is very practical in love as in other things, much more practical than we men.”

I felt a real enjoyment in saying these words, obviously influenced by the events of the past few days.

“You men don’t know anything about a woman’s love, you only love yourselves,” retorted the landlady. “For us women, love is a question of life, for you it’s a question of fun.”

“That’s possible,” agreed the landlord, “but we give our souls over to fun more lightly than you give yours to life.”

“Just so,” confirmed the landlady, “you don’t seek love, only fun. We women are the only ones who love.”

“And the more seriously you love, the more practical is the purpose of your love,” the man replied.

“Ever more practical, more practical!” cried the landlady, now agitated, as if her spouse’s words concerned her personally. “A person wants to live, a person must live! Don’t you think so?”

“I’ve no idea what a person must do in the world.”

“But somebody has to know, and you men don’t!” cried the landlady.

“There is only one conclusion to our conversation: a person must love,” I said.

“But if a woman loves so much that she is ready to cut her ties with her previous life, you’ll immediately say, ‘A woman’s love always has a practical purpose, she wants to live or die. Only we men love rightly, because we don’t have a purpose, we only have fun.’”

While she spoke, the landlady looked at me intently, as if her words were intended just for me. And though at the time I couldn’t accept those words, they still affected me painfully, for, I don’t know why, I was reminded of Erika sitting and crying on the bench because I was supposed to love grandfather more than her, and afterwards, of her carrying her little bag and keeping it away from me.

When the landlady started talking about men and women and their love, it affected all that was most sensitive in my nature and evoked my most painful memories. I would gladly have given up her lunches, but was hindered by various circumstances. Primarily the fact that the young lady had withdrawn, which on no account was due to grandfather’s health, but only her conversations with me and with Ervin. If I left the lunch table immediately, I thought that I would reveal my own conversations with the young lady, and I wanted avoid that for my own sake and, until much later, for hers as well. However things stood, it seems to me that despite everything I was still hoping for I knew not what. And revealing what I was hoping for was beyond my powers, although I suffered day after day at the hands of the chattering landlady, let alone the fact that, like it or not, I had to take part in that myself. Another reason why I was forced to continue my lunches was that they enabled me, for a little while each day, to occupy the spaces she moved in, breathe the same air as she did, accept her greetings along with the others, and afterwards hear her voice through the door as the lunch continued. This was painful, but at the same time calming. The last link between us was not yet broken, I thought. I could still see her white curls, her evasive eyes, her disfiguring pimples, which in recent times had given her an especially hostile appearance, as though warning me, You see what happens to a young lass when she abandons one young man and goes with another.

Those two main reasons were accompanied by others. We had earlier talked about how I would give up the lunches when I lost my position, but my position was continuing, so why shouldn’t I come to lunch? Both my position and Erika’s lessons would soon be coming to an end, so what was the point of prematurely losing the chance of the last contact: on Christmas Eve she wouldn’t be coming any more, and on the same day I wanted to travel to the country.

In the run-up to Christmas I was struggling like a fly in a spiderweb. Work got out of hand and I made mistakes that bordered on madness. Everyone must have come to the conclusion that management would have been quite right to dismiss a colleague of my calibre. So be it! That didn’t interest me in the least. But my colleague, who was definitely going to continue sitting at his desk either because of his wife and newborn child or for some other reason I didn’t know of, told me once, “You really are off your head! What amazes me is that so far not a single woman has snapped you up. Really unbelievable!”

“Do women love people who are off their heads?” I asked.

“They don’t, but you can get hold of them more easily,” replied the colleague. “Because a man like you can hang around any street corner, and if your chance comes, you’ll go through fire and water for it.”

“So I’m not mad enough then?” I exclaimed.

“No, you are, otherwise you wouldn’t make serious mistakes so often, which is a great shame for you, if you’ll allow a comrade to point it out. In this way you’re spoiling your chances of getting a new job, believe me,” my colleague told me almost heartily. And when I didn’t answer his words, he continued, “But perhaps you’re the same sort of man as a distant relative of mine, who also wore the colours. Women didn’t sink their teeth into him either, for he was already so highly regarded that he always said – joking, of course, but still with a bit of truth in it – he said that he’d get married only to the daughter of a king or a prince, nothing less would satisfy him, because plenty of them were available. And you know how it ended?”

“He got himself an emperor’s daughter,” I said.

“No, he fell so completely in love with his father’s shepherdess that, believe it or not, he married her and they’ve been together for over two years. Everyone predicted that the boy would leave the girl after a couple of months or at least a couple of years definitely, but to this day he hasn’t, and there’s no sign of him planning to. I’m sure you’re going to do the same.”

“I’m holding back,” I explained, “I’ll fall in love with the shepherdess and marry the emperor’s daughter, to win her father’s throne back for her.”

“The wolf howling at the moon!” he cried, and that was a harder blow than anything else he’d said, because I’d once used those words about myself, when my dreams took hold of me. Then I had perhaps spoken in part to titillate my “king’s daughter” – to move her and awaken her love for me, while in reality I had changed into a wolf howling at the moon.

That was how I lived through the whole pre-Christmas period, like a howling wolf. Not that anyone heard my howling, for two-legged wolves only howl in their hearts. A few times a day I would go and look at my letter box, as if some message were supposed to come that would end my howling, but the box was always empty, or I mostly found messages in it that made me howl even more madly if they didn’t leave me indifferent. Very often, if not every day, I found myself wandering close to home as Erika was leaving her lessons, as if I wanted to find out whether Ervin was coming to call every day. And he did. At least there wasn’t a day when a tall male figure was not waiting for her, and at that distance on a poorly lit street I couldn’t see any more.

For some reason I got interested in whether Erika and he were keeping away from any kind of premises or places of amusement, and in this way I wasted my last pitiful cents on cinemas, cafés, theatres, concerts and dancing to find out whether the couple were there or not. But not a single time did I find them anywhere, as if they had disappeared into thin air, except Erika turned up for lessons at the right time and the tall male form was there to meet her after her lessons. So the holidays came without anything special happening, although day after day I had some strange presentiment of something happening, I didn’t know what. For the last couple of weeks I hadn’t seen Erika at all, or if I did, at a distance, recognising her form, her gait, posture or bearing. I had only heard her when she talked to the children or read aloud by the piano: eine, zweie, eine, zweie… On Christmas Eve I met her in the street when she hurrying by with holding some packages. Yet she did stop straightaway, when I took my hat off to her.

“You’re attracting people’s attention,” she said to me with a sad smile, reminding me of my bare head.

“I don’t care,” I replied, but I did put it back on.

“You still only think of yourself,” she said as a mild rebuke or snub.

“No, miss, I only think of you,” I replied so loudly that passers-by could have heard it. “All these days and nights my thoughts have been about you.”

“Do you have to say it so loudly?” she asked with a smile.

“I could say it even louder,” I replied.

“Then I must run, otherwise you’ll compromise me in broad daylight in the middle of the street,” she laughed with affected lightness, but the word “compromise” was a strange reference to our past which sounded like a scream to me.

“How are you, dear miss, if I may ask?” I said when she stretched out her arm. “Shall we go for a stroll once more down the Avenue of Lies?”

“Don’t talk so cruelly,” she appealed to me directly.

“I’m not,” I said as if excusing myself, and added, “So you won’t come to see us any more?”

“No, I won’t have any time,” she explained.

“I’m going away to the country today,” I said.

“Have a good journey then!”

“Have a good stay here!” I replied. “Or may I help you carry your packages home?”

“No, thanks, I’m not going home yet,” she said.

I had intended to stay longer in the country, but at first I kept my room in the town just in case, to have somewhere to lay my head should there be a change in my luck while I was in the country. And so it came about: in the country I was in for more than I could have imagined, for everything was different to what I’d believed. Perhaps this was influenced by the fact that I’d brought my notification of dismissal with me, although I added as a consolation that in a couple of months I would definitely get a much better job. That may have consoled others but not me, and because of this I concluded that everything was not different at home; I was the one who was different. I had changed under the influence of recent events, but home perhaps had not. My mother, father, sister and brother did not feel things the same way I did. Perhaps they didn’t have anything against my staying at home for a while, as a so-called freeloader. When I went to bring in the hay or the wood, not what you would call urgent work, I went with my brother instead of my father; my father didn’t have any pressing business at home, but an old person could take a little rest. Once my mother said to my father in everyone’s hearing, “Look, old man, isn’t it good that you have two sons to bring in the hay from the forest to the hayloft!”

But my father answered my mother quite simply, “If they were just going to carry the hay into the hayloft, they didn’t need to rub their arses so long on a school bench, they could have done with much less. Or is the school bench only good for wearing out trousers?”

“Why do you bring that up now?” mother upbraided him. “Of course it’s just that you’re a hard man to please, even when you have an educated son and the hay is coming home with his hard work.”

“That’s another thing: he hasn’t forgotten haymaking at school,” said father, “but I would have liked to take more pleasure in my own work and effort, that’s the thing. Why trouble your head so much and bring debts on yourself and others, if you still have to earn your crust by working with your own hands?”

“The papers say that haymaking is easier and you can do it better if you’ve been properly educated at school,” said my brother.

“Do you believe the papers and everything they carry on about?” father said sarcastically. “In the summer the paper announced lovely weather, so why was the rain soaking your skin? Best to ask Oskar himself if it’s easier now for him to carry the hay.”

“What is there to ask?” I interjected. “It’s obvious that it’s harder.”

“I think it’s harder too,” said father. “And you went to school to quit the hardships of farm work. But there you are – where do you get it, when everyone wants to get it? The world is that way – there isn’t enough to go round for everybody. They barge into the countryside, then there are shortages there, so they all head back to the town, then that gets crowded, so there isn’t enough room for everyone. We might have more space in the countryside, but I’m afraid everyone will soon be so educated that no one will want to live in the country any more. Things are so crazy now that there’s a school for everything. You want to be a housewife, there’s a housewives’ school, you want to be a lady, there’s a school for young ladies, and for cooks there’s a cookery school. But as for potatoes, nobody knows how or can be bothered to peel them any more; it’s best to cut them up for the pigs. There’s nothing for it but to open a potato-peeling school.”

“One has already been opened,” laughed my brother.

“Well of course, what can you do,” opined father, “when people have got so blind that they won’t turn up their trousers any more and won’t learn to stop up the pigsty door without schooling in it, as old people used to say in my boyhood. But what’s mad is that as soon as a person’s gone through housewives’ school or school for young ladies, they don’t want to be a housewife or a young lady any more. And as soon as a man has learnt at school to turn up his trousers and stop up the pigsty door, he’s only good enough to be a master in the town.”

“Things are not as bad as you make out, father,” said my brother. “You see, the farmer at the farm on the church road is an educated man, and he makes a terrible fuss and bother of things.”

“Of course he makes a fuss and bother – with other people’s money. Take notice, son, we have to pay for that educated farmer’s fuss and bother,” warned father.

“Why?” asked my brother. “We don’t have anything to do with him.”

“But what if the debts caused by all that fuss, bother and new-fangled ideas are written on the chimney?” responded father.

“Who would come and write those on our chimney?” contested my brother, defending his view of the supposed mortgage on the neighbour’s house.

“My dear child, where would they write, then?” cried father. “In the end they write debts on the chimneys of those who still have a chimney. And he doesn’t have his own chimney any more, that’s surer than sure, and he and his little wife can sell his place to the highest bidder, but he’ll never see the money back that he’s put into it.”

“Of course that is surer than sure, that he’ll never see that money,” agreed my brother.

“Well, but whose money was it that will never be seen?” asked father. “According to my stupid reasoning, it belonged to all of us who live on our own money and not in debt.”

“But we have debts too,” said my brother, and now all eyes turned on me, for they all knew that those debts were incurred by me.

“Of course we have debts,” agreed father, “and they’re connected to the school too, but our place is worth more than them many times over. Or don’t you think so?”

“I do,” said my brother.

“You see!” cried father triumphantly. “So we can pay off our debts and help to pay off that educated farmer’s debts at the same time when he goes bankrupt; after all, the money is supposed to come from somebody’s pocket.”

“But if it’s given away?” asked my brother.

“No, son, in this world nothing is given away,” replied father, “or if it is, it’s taken from others’ pockets. You know what I tell you, children, and you, Oskar, don’t take offence that your father tells you this: it’s the same story with the educated farmer and his fussing as with your fussing about your coloured cap – that’s the conclusion I’ve come to, when I think about your education and everything else. Other people, who are more decent and modest, have to pay for it.”

“Old man, you’re spoiling what little pleasure we have with your talk, when we’re together rarely enough as it is,” said mother, and you could feel from her voice that the tears were not far from her eyes.

“Father, I’ve told you once already that I’m voluntarily giving up my right of inheritance in favour of Enn and Mall – isn’t that enough?” I said, as if emboldened by Mother’s words.

“No, son, it isn’t enough,” replied father, “your schooling costs more than either Enn or Mall will inherit.”

“So then, I’m in debt to Enn and Mall,” I concluded.

“You don’t owe me a thing, Oskar,” said my brother with a heavy heart at the embarrassing turn the conversation had taken.

“Nor me either!” cried Mall, getting up from her chair and going into the other room, no doubt to hide her tears.

“I didn’t mean that either,” explained father, “but I only said it so that you’d know how things really are. I don’t believe Enn would ever regard you as her debtor, Oskar, when I’m not –”

“Father, why are you even bringing up this subject?” shouted my brother. “Do what you think is right, and let Oskar and me do what we think is right. But since this subject has come up, then I’ll tell you one thing straight from the heart, Oskar, that if you come home now, or whenever you do come home, I’m always pleased, if only because my educated brother hasn’t forgotten us. Of course

I’d be even more pleased if you were doing well, and not just to get something from you.”

Those words made me wipe my own eyes and blow my nose, so the family atmosphere was perfect. But we menfolk don’t weep; we just sat silently, each by himself.

So then, everyone was pleased when I came home, but would they also have been pleased if I’d stayed at home longer? That question went unanswered, and it didn’t occur to anyone to ask it. Yet it was the main question that came to my mind only later – together with another, even more important one: am I also pleased to come home, let alone think of staying longer? For what help is others’ pleasure, if I’m sad myself? And that last question became increasingly pertinent with every passing day.

I thought of my situation as somehow unnatural. It was hard to bear the knowledge that we all – father and mother, brother and sister, myself, had once had other hopes for my future than what I had achieved, and others still had hope and belief in me that I wasn’t able to realise. There was such a big gulf between everyone’s dreams and realities, especially other people’s, that life became hard for me. What could I do about the gulf between us clearly conveyed not only by people’s faces, words, looks, but also by the bony backs and flanks and sagging necks of horses, the bleating of lambs and the lowing of cows in the byre, and the cluster of stumps where the forest had been, when I went walking, a gun on my back and a dog by my side?

Walking as a hunter used to be one of my favourite pastimes. The mere sight of a sniffing and tail-wagging dog or the sound of his barking would make my heart beat faster. A hunting dog’s pleasure pleased me as well. Now I was going in search of that pleasure, but I didn’t get very far on the snowy fields, meadows, pastures or forests, with the same white covering everywhere, which deadened the sound of steps and voices before I forgot all about the joyful dog and his barking. Or if I noticed them at all, it was something confusing, disturbing. It was painful to see a dark spot passing across the silent, bright white surface and making a noise. Why this, when all around everything had sunk into slumber, when all around was nothing but a white dream, as if someone were remembering their long-dead mother, who loved whiteness! Yes, white with a red rose! Why that joyful barking, when all around, as far as the eye could see, was a silent sadness, as if someone were mourning hopelessly! The dog should run its snout deep into the snowy plain under a cloudy sky and howl, its tail between its legs.

But of course the dog didn’t do that, for he didn’t know that there’s a gulf between belief, hope and dreaming on the one side, and reality on the other, or that I lacked the luck or power to bridge that gulf, whether I was living in the country or in the town. That may be the same gulf that the old man meant when I sat before him like a poor sinner and failed to take life seriously enough. He was probably right about that, and today even the dog could have confirmed that, if anybody had asked him. But since there was nobody to ask, he looked at me almost tearfully and whimpered, for what else should he do? When he drove his hunted prey towards me, I either didn’t notice it, or if I did, I didn’t shoot at it, and if I did shoot, I didn’t hit it. Thus the dog learnt to know the gulf between belief and reality, for I was looking more at the hare’s tracks than the hare itself, more the length of the hare’s leaps than the leaping of the hare. It had a long stride too, I thought as I measured the tracks with my eyes, knowing exactly who it represented. And how could I shoot that same hare who reminded me of that other one who didn’t have long legs or ears, but is tall, who doesn’t fear the barking of a dog, but might also bark, if there were no gulf between belief and reality in the world.

Nobody at home could understand how I failed to bag a single animal after firing so many shots. Only my sister seemed to realise something, for she looked at me with an alert gaze and asked, when we were alone, “Have you forgotten how to shoot, or are you thinking hard about someone?”

“I was thinking about myself and my situation,” I replied.

“You were thinking about yourself and you let the hare run away,” she smiled brightly. “But I thought you were thinking of someone else when you let it go.”

“Why did you think that?” I asked with interest.

“But you’re a bit strange anyway. You used to be like that once, and then you changed, but now you’re back to who you were before. Then you went hunting for a young bird and you let that go too, but not quite like today. That’s why I thought that if you can’t catch them, your mind’s on other things.”

“Of course,” I agreed, “my thoughts are in town.”

“So she’s in town,” said my sister, while a blush rose to my own face.

“Who’s she?” I asked, as if I didn’t understand.

“She’s the one you didn’t kill the hare for!” laughed my sister, as brightly as before. “She’s beautiful, terribly proud, wouldn’t even talk to my sort! Can’t you tell me then?”

“Only on one condition,” I replied, approaching her, ”you mustn’t breathe a word to anyone.”

“All right, just tell me,” she replied happily.

“I don’t have a hope of a position in town, that’s why I couldn’t catch the hare,” I said, and I must have done it very hopelessly, because my sister burst into tears. But my own eyes were getting wet too, because in saying it I wasn’t thinking of my job, but of her, the only “her” who hadn’t gone from my mind for a moment.

“And I was stupid enough to think you’re again with some…,” she was going to say when she had throttled her tears.

“We think too much, dear sister,” I interjected, as if afraid of what she was going to say. “We think, and the hares and life run past us.”

“Hares and life run past us,” she repeated tearfully, as if some wisdom lay in those words. “Yes, you’ve reached full manhood and you still haven’t caught anything. Mother once said, when we were talking together, that our Oskar could take a really rich wife if nothing else helps.”

So my mother in the country was just as wise as town mothers are, at least our landlady, who thought that the easiest solution for the problems of life is for poor boys to take rich wives and poor girls to take rich husbands. Women generally seemed to think that life takes a turn for the better if you take a wife or a husband. But instead of that, my father asked me before I left the country, “Are you thinking of graduating from university or have you given it up?”

“For the time being I’m only thinking of supporting myself,” I replied.

“Well, but are you hoping to get ahead in your career with your half-finished education?”

“I’ll manage, if there’s a position,” I said.

“You say that as if you had no hope of it,” my father pointed out. “Yesterday I read in the paper about the heavy redundancies and I thought, Look, they’ll shut the door in your face.”

“I don’t think they will,” I explained with an indifferent air, “because a higher education is an advantage.”

“But you haven’t finished anything,” he protested. “That’s why I sometimes think that you should just try to get it finished. If you can’t get by otherwise, I might try to help you, though things are tight with me too. I was talking about it with Enn, and she doesn’t seem to have anything against it either. She said, ‘Well, he’d have to get a roof over his head,’ and added, ‘if there’s someone to take him.’ So you see, it’s up to you. Just don’t start thinking that I can give you everything, no, I could only help you out. You’ll have to be a man, bear that in mind, you’re old enough for that. For when does a person get any sense, if not at your age? I even wanted to say to you that if you’d try to give up your old life, that cap and all that other German stuff, then maybe you’d get rid of your old friends and start doing a better job. What the Germans had has been messed up; their estates and everything have been taken over, and now they’re ruined. It’s not right. Of course, you’ll know best about that, but I thought I’d better say it anyway – maybe it’s your own way of life and habits that are to blame, that you somehow can’t get a roof over your head, as Enn says.”

Father said all of this quietly and calmly, as if just in passing, and as if he’d planned it well in advance, so I started to wonder whether these were his own ideas or someone else’s, and I said cautiously, “You haven’t talked about this before.”

“Look, son, I haven’t had to think about it before, but if you’ve come away from the university, then… Enn mentioned once that men tend to play the German, riding on the shoulders of power, sort of. But we only have mums and dads, brothers and sisters, and they’re poor. That’s what she once said, and I’ve started thinking too, that if you really…”

Those were the lessons I was fed at home to turn me into a man, as they said, if a “man” meant a person who had a decent income and a reasonable life. In a nutshell, I was assured at every step that I didn’t have that in their opinion, although they didn’t know yet that I had nothing at all.

But the more I was lectured and the more they worried about my past and future, the more I was being driven back to the town, although I didn’t really know what to do there. Nevertheless I did know one thing: I wanted to be closer to her, to the one I compared to a snowfield, to a running hare, to its tracks and its ears, with everything I saw and heard. I no longer hoped for anything, but a piece of my past was buried in her – a large piece, I felt – and for the first time in my life I seemed to realise why people, estates, whole nations, cling so much to their pasts.

But it was one thing to think about going to the town, another to go there; one thing to dream, another to act. I wanted to get to town to escape the annoying talk, the embarrassing looks, and the general feeling that I was a bother, a trouble to someone. But in town that is what I became. For when I tried to carry out my intention of no longer taking lunch with the family, I was given no peace, day or night, until finally the landlady caught me in the middle of the street, because evidently that was a politer place for our conversation than up in my room. Out of stubbornness I had refused to set foot in the family’s rooms, and she told me she wanted to have a serious talk with me. So we walked and looked for quieter places, as if we were a couple of lovers, drawing aside from people, and we talked about my lunchtimes and the future, for the landlady was able to easily link those two subjects, saying, “When a person can’t eat a proper lunch, he can’t become a proper person and has no future.”

“But why should a person have a future?” I asked, merely to ask and to draw the conversation into some impersonal realm.

“You’re talking like a child!” cried the landlady. “Really, you men are children!” she continued almost in rapture, for nothing moved her mind so easily as the thought of children. “So is a person a butterfly or a midge, to be without a future?”

“People don’t have a greater future than any midge,” I said sagely. “They’re merely born, they live and die, nothing more.”

“Nothing more!” cried the landlady in amazement.

“What else then?” I asked. “Perhaps a person leaves behind bigger piles of rubbish than a midge.”

“Something, anyway!” cried the landlady as if in triumph. “Bigger piles of rubbish! If anyone who doesn’t know you heard that, they would definitely think you’re either a halfwit or unhappily in love.”

“Thank God!” I mentally repeated the landlord’s words, “at last we’ve got around to love.”

“Believe me, Mr Studious, men always start talking like that when they’re unhappy in love. Unhappy love only changes your own life and other people’s into a pile of rubbish.”

“Then people are only unhappy in love,” I tried to wisecrack, “for just think about it, my good lady, what have we got from the ancient Greeks and Romans? A pile of rubbish!”

“What about the pyramids?” she asked. “What about the pharaohs’ tombs? They’ve lasted thousands of years and they’re not rubbish yet!”

“What’s the significance of a few thousand years, when the age of the earth is counted in millions?” I retorted.

“But what’s the point of you going to school, if you talk like that?” said the landlady.

“I wouldn’t have talked otherwise – it was just an idea,” I replied.

“So now out of hunger, a noose around the neck or a bullet to the head, eh?”

“Why those?” I asked back.

“Because that’s how you’ll end up anyway, if you go God knows where to eat your lunch, just to get it a few cents cheaper. How long will your health stand it?”

“Half the world goes God knows where to eat lunch these days, and if so-called culture carries on developing at the same rate, soon everybody will be going God knows where to eat lunch, especially in towns,” I explained in self-defence. “Even you, my dear lady, used to talk about it.”

“And I recommended it, did I?” she asked. “I mentioned it as a warning. I don’t believe in any culture where you don’t get fed properly. If every last thing is changed into a factory business, then all culture will come to an end. Strange that they haven’t made or invented machines that play football or lawn tennis!”

“That’s a slightly cleaner activity than preparing food, that’s why.”

“And you think people love cleanliness? I don’t think so. Why do people smear themselves with grease and oil so terribly? As if they were some kind of machine? Believe me, I have a feeling that a person doesn’t want to be anything other than a machine.”

“Well, you see,” I said, “you must agree that if a person is a machine, you can shove any old food or fuel into it at any factory or office.”

“Phew, shocking!” she cried in English, and asked, “So you don’t care what sort of can or hose it’s done from, then?”

“Almost,” I said, adding, “Please, madam, you said ‘shocking’. But where do all these cans and ready-made sauces and condensed milks come from? The place where they say ‘shocking’. I read in some book about an Englishman who complained about his wife’s carelessness and laziness in preparing food. But is there culture in England? Or isn’t there?”

“Listen, you’re arguing with me about nothing,” she said. “You’re arguing so as not to come to the point. An Englishman has a place to live, where he can get God knows what to enrich his stomach, with plenty of preserves and sauces and our bacon, but you don’t have a place to live. You don’t have factories and plants to make the food for your stomach in droplets and powders, when you’re exhausted from working. That’s why you have to eat differently from an Englishman.”

“I do eat differently.” I replied. “I don’t put our bacon in my mouth, and tinned food and all sorts of sauces are priced out of my reach.”

“Ah, let’s leave off this useless chat,” she said impatiently, “and talk sensibly. You say you can get by more cheaply without a proper lunch. All right, I believe you. But you do eat lunch, don’t you?”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,” I replied. “As my pocket demands or denies.”

“Ah, so even going completely without lunch?” she exclaimed.

“As it happens, sometimes without lunch, sometimes without breakfast or dinner,” I said.

“Is that really so?” she enquired, as if she didn’t believe me.

“Just so, my dear lady,” I confirmed.

“And you don’t want to eat lunch at my place even on the most favourable terms any more?”

“No, thank you,” I replied.

“Then you know what I think, and forgive me for expressing my opinion: you’re not refusing the offer of lunch just for reasons of economy; you must have some other reasons.”

“What others?” I asked, starting to laugh, but I felt that my laugh betrayed what the landlady was guessing. My laughter clearly gave me away.

“I don’t know what others,” she said. “There must be something in us or our lunches that you don’t like. But I will tell you one thing: as long as you won’t eat a proper lunch, I won’t take the rent for the room from you either.”

“Then I’ll pay it into your current account at your bank or I’ll look for another room,” I replied.

“Look, tell me what’s wrong with you!” she now cried in surprise. “I’d like to help you and it won’t cause me any difficulty – why don’t you want my help?”

“My dear lady, I don’t need help at the moment,” I replied, “and that’s that.”

“How can you not need it, when you can’t even eat lunch any more?”

“Oh Lord! There are more people like this in the world than there are who do eat a proper lunch,” I replied, as if indifferent. “And as I said before, if culture carries on developing at this rate, there soon won’t be any more proper lunches made.”

“Forget your culture and your development! I don’t want to hear any more about them!” she cried, getting agitated. “Your culture is only good for poisoners!”

“My dear lady, real culture might be at the point where it makes people immune to poisons. You know that anaemic people are given rat poison. I had a school friend who was regularly fed on rat poison, which they used to call arsenic. Just think, that if a tiny droplet of rat poison is fed to a person, what would happen if he could ingest a large amount of it. Perhaps a person might live only on rat poison and that would be the real culture.”

“You turn everything into a silly joke,” said the landlady, “but I’m no longer so young that I’m interested in men’s silliness. I only wanted to talk directly and openly with you.”

“Not much has come of that for me with younger ladies,” I explained. “These days a woman can rarely find a relationship with a poor man.”

“Yes, I’m very sorry,” she said, “that I wasn’t able to make my proposal more attractive to you.”

“No, madam, don’t be sorry,” I consoled her. “You did all you possibly could, but it’s not a matter of you or your lovely proposal; only of me, believe me. I have undertaken to try and stand on my own feet for once, but, permit me, my attempt won’t remain just an intention. However, if the day ever comes when I really need help, then you, my dear lady, will be the first one I turn to.”

“Do you promise?” she asked, almost moved.

“I promise,” I said.

“Then I forgive you all your sins,” said the lady, with a lightened heart.

And so we parted to meet again very rarely and fleetingly, although we lived in the same house, and heard each other’s footsteps on the stairs or elsewhere. But if I believed that the matter was now settled and peace would prevail in the house, I was soon to discover my error. It was no time before a new emergency occurred: the trouble with a servant I described earlier. And what the landlady failed to achieve was achieved by her maid, and one might say that she did it almost with ease, only because she was in my opinion so shabby and pitiful – even shabbier and more pitiful than I was myself in my own opinion at the time. Yet that secret bringing of food for me became more embarrassing and repellent every day, partly because I thought that sooner or later the landlady would find the servant out, and how could I then show my face or move about the house! So one day I said to the maid, let today be the last time, I wouldn’t eat her stolen food any more, because I no longer needed it.

“So, sir, you’ll start coming down to lunch again?” asked the maid.

“Why would I come down?” I responded, astonished because I was struck by the thought that it didn’t matter whether I ate with the others downstairs or alone upstairs. “How can you even ask?”

“Why can’t you then, if you say I shouldn’t bring you any more food?” replied the girl.

“I’ll eat elsewhere,” I said.

“How come elsewhere, all of a sudden?” asked the girl, uncomprehending. “But where am I supposed to put this food? Who’ll eat it up?”

“But you said you have a cat or a dog,” I exclaimed.

“The cat has run away God knows where, or some dog has killed it, and I don’t dare to give any more to the dog, the lady strongly forbade it. She said the dog will get fat and sleepy, won’t hear anything or bother to bark when it needs to.”

“Well, then eat it yourself, but don’t bring me any more,” I said.

“No, I won’t eat such fatty food as our landlady makes,” said the girl.

“Then throw the food in the rubbish bin, but leave me in peace!” I finally shouted, because the girl was like an annoying fly or mosquito, buzzing around my ear.

“Fatty food like our landlady makes can’t be thrown in the bin,” exclaimed the girl, standing by the door. “And they’ll soon find the chunks of meat, and it’ll finally come out that I’ve been taking them.”

“But for pity’s sake, what’s it got to do with me?” I turned on the maid.

“How can it not have, when up until today you’ve been eating up everything I brought you?” the girl replied with a very naive expression.

“I told you – I won’t eat any more, and that’s that!”

“But what am I supposed to do?” asked the girl in desperation.

“Do whatever you like,” I replied. “The simplest thing would be to tell the lady that you can’t eat such fatty food, and ask for something leaner instead.”

“I can’t do that,” exclaimed the girl, “because then she’ll ask straight away, ‘How have you been able to eat until now?’ And I can’t answer, ‘I didn’t eat it, I gave it to the dog.’ Sir, you don’t know our landlady. If I told her that I’d given the roast chops, beefsteaks, cutlets and meatloaves she’s been cooking to the dog, first she would knock me to the floor and then she would drive me out the door with my rags. Nor can I say that I’ve been secretly bringing food up to you and you’ve been eating it.”

“Well I never!” I shouted. “If you really do, Loona, I’ll wring your neck, remember that. Crying and begging me like a heap of misery, and when I finally accept, then…”

“No, sir, when you accept, as you did until today, then I don’t say anything, but then I don’t need to, but if you don’t accept any more, then I don’t know what…”

“I don’t, that is as certain as an ‘amen’ in church,” I interrupted her.

“Then I really don’t know what to do. I’ll have to look for a new position, I suppose, I have no other choice,” said the girl, and started to cry.

“Loona, you’ve gone crazy!” I shouted, getting up from my chair and stepping over to her. “Because the mistress makes such fatty food, you have to look for a new job, is that it? Come to your senses, for goodness sake.”

“You won’t eat the food because I bring you it; if someone else did…” she snuffled.

“Believe me, Loona, I wouldn’t take that food from anyone,” I consoled her.

“So you want me to go away from here,” she went on crying.

“No, I only want you to leave me alone … stop bringing this food.”

“But I can’t do that anyway if I have to look for a new job,” sniffled the girl. “I’ll have nothing else to say to the lady but that you won’t accept food any more.”

“Devil take you – look for a new job!” I shouted.

“But there are no jobs like this to be found anywhere!” whined the girl. “There are no jobs to be had if I go looking, because no one will have me.”

“What the devil can I do about it?” I said forcefully, because the business was starting to annoy me. “In the end, if you have no other way out, go and tell madam that you stole food from her and brought it secretly to me. And so that it would be more believable and likely, you can add that you’ve been coming up here to sleep or that I encourage you steal the food.”

Now the girl’s heart was full, and she suddenly turned to me, looked straight at me angrily with wet eyes and said, “I’m not a liar and a cheat, as you think, that I should say such things about myself and others. And I haven’t been stealing either. If I have lied, it was only on madam’s orders and from what she taught me.”

Suddenly I felt my heart going cold in my chest, as if something icy had been put around it. Only after a little while did I dare to ask, “So what was your lie about from the lady’s instructions?”

“Do you really believe, sir, that it was my idea to start bringing up food for you?” she responded in amazement.

I looked at her like a pillar of salt, then turned around and sat down in a chair.

“What a swine!” I finally blurted out through clenched teeth. “What wretchedness!”

“That’s what I say too,” the girl agreed. “It’s simply a sin to lie and cheat like that!”

“But why did you do it then, the devil take you?” I shouted, turning around in my chair and looking angrily at the girl.

“The lady told me to,” she replied. “First of all the lady asked me if I liked you at all, sir, and when I answered that I do – for what was I supposed to say? – she went on and asked if I wanted you to stay alive, sir, and when I answered that I did – for why would I wish you dead? – the lady said that you had had two big misfortunes, sir, that might kill you if the two of us, meaning the lady and me, didn’t come to your aid.”

“What misfortunes were those supposed to be?” I asked, feeling ice around my heart again.

“You lost your job, sir, and your girlfriend left you,” replied the girl.

“I did lose my job, but I don’t know anything about a girlfriend,” I exclaimed.

“No, madam said that your girlfriend had left you, sir,” affirmed the girl, “and by girlfriend she meant our miss, who came here before Christmas. Madam also said she was a baroness.”

“Wonderful!” I cried, trying to turn the matter into a joke. “Well, go on!”

“Well, and madam said that you loved the baroness terribly, sir, so terribly that, well, you’d do yourself in if you didn’t get her. And you didn’t, because miss went to another man, a German of course. And that’s why the two of us, madam and I, had to save your life, sir. Because madam said that if you’re unhappily in love, sir, and starting to starve as well, then you’ll definitely do yourself in. But that’s shameful, when a young Estonian gentleman kills himself over a German lass, she said. And since you wouldn’t accept food from the lady’s own hands, sir, she taught me how to come and talk, and what to do to make you accept food. If nothing else helped, I was supposed to say or give you to understand that I love you, sir, and therefore want to feed you, because if you love someone, then you want to feed them, as birds feed their young. And when you started talking of that love today, sir, I couldn’t bear the lying and cheating any more. Of course you can’t love me or anyone else, sir, if you love that beautiful baroness. So it’s all a lie, what I’ve been telling you here, all of it, everything, everything. I haven’t stolen anything or lied, I only said what the lady told me to, and I brought you what the lady put on the plate. She even made me put on a black apron while I was bringing it, because then you’d believe me more easily, sir, she said. I had to be very stupid and dirty, for then you’d accept the most food, sir. That’s what our landlady is like. And so when I started to cry, it was only because I had to lie. I had to say that my stomach can’t take fatty food. But that’s a complete lie, because I have a good stomach and good health: I could even eat wooden pegs and granite, and still my stomach would be fine. And the kind of chops that I was bringing you, sir, I could easily put away two of them, and it wouldn’t do me any harm. At Easter sometimes at home I’d eat six or seven hard-boiled eggs at a sitting, that was nothing for me. That’s the kind of good stomach and health I have.”

“But you know, Loona,” I said, “you may have a good stomach and health, but you’re the same sort of bitch as the lady is. To lie like that, to pull my leg, that’s damn nasty work!”

“Yes sir, you’re quite right about that, it is damn nasty work,” agreed the girl. “But madam said to me, ‘Loona, I’ve made a person out of you and I’ll make you a better person, in the end I’ll introduce you to a good husband, if you help me save the life of the young gentleman you love.’ That’s what she said: you love, as if she was going to introduce me to you, sir.”

“But that’s enough now, dear Loona,” I said, “go, so I don’t see or hear you ever again!”

“Yes, but what about the food? I can bring it tomorrow, because now, when…”

“Now, when everything’s settled – go to hell, you and your madam!” I thundered. “I don’t want to hear or see you ever again, do you understand for once?”

“Then I’ll have to leave this job and go away,” said the girl, starting to cry again.

“Good riddance!” I shouted, “So the air will be clean again!”

“So why must I lose my job just because you lost yours, sir, and your girlfriend left you,” whined the girl, “because if there hadn’t been the two big misfortunes, madam wouldn’t have forced me to lie so terribly. Who will feed my old mother, if I’m without a job? And it’s certain that I will be, because madam told me that if I dared to even breathe a word about this to you, sir, she’d beat me within an inch of my life, kick me out the door and give me such a reference for other landladies that they wouldn’t even want to spit on me.”

“Then go and die with your mother!” I said with the same brutality, and yet I was starting to feel sorry for the girl, because obviously she wasn’t guilty of anything, or only insofar as she obeyed the lady’s commands and believed her dire predictions.

“Anyway, what’s wrong with gentlefolk,” the girl concluded, drying her tears, as if she had already submitted to her fate, “is that one forces you to lie and cheat, another stuffs his belly with all the best stuff, but a poor servant has to suffer. For when I say that you won’t accept food any more, it’s clear straight away to her that I’ve blurted it out to you. What’s more, she’s bound to believe that I’ve done it out of love – for what other reason could there be – and then it’ll all be over, a noose around my neck. I believed everything, but I didn’t believe that you, sir, were like this.”

“So what do you think I’m really like?” I asked.

“One who won’t accept food any more,” said the girl.

“And you think that after you’ve told me everything…”

“Sir, now it will be easier to carry on eating, because there’s no more lying and cheating, or if there is, then it is for us in front of madam, but not for me and madam in front of you.”

“Who knows, you wretch, if as soon as you get downstairs, you’ll tell madam everything we’ve been saying here,” I said.

“I’d sooner have my tongue shrivel in my mouth than breathe about this to madam!” yelled the girl. “For the sake of my own skin, I can’t. Besides, I’ve been on your side from the start, and I told madam that if your girlfriend let you down…”

“She wasn’t my girlfriend,” I pointed out.

“Oh, really, wasn’t she?” queried the girl. “So that’s a lie too! It’s all a lie! But madam assured me that she was, and that’s why you couldn’t stand the sight of miss’s face. On the other hand I liked her a lot and I’d have liked so much for you, sir, to have a girlfriend like her. But she shouldn’t have let you down. And when she did let you down, I said to madam that when a girlfriend cheats, what are we doing it for, we aren’t girlfriends and we don’t love anyone else. But madam said that cheating must have been involved, because you weren’t eating, sir, and if you don’t eat, that’s the end. ‘Loona,’ she said, ‘she cheated because she didn’t love him, so we have to cheat because we do love him,’ because we were loving when we wanted to save your life, sir.”

“I think that’s a lie too,” I said. “You didn’t even feel a whiff of love for me, you only wanted to feed me your chops and cutlets, come what may, and when you couldn’t do it otherwise, you used lies and trickery to help you, madam first and then you. But would you please tell me why you’ve come to tell me this to my face? Do you really think I’m going to carry on eating now?”

“Yes, I really thought that you would, once you knew everything,” replied the girl. “And I had nothing more to lose, when you said you wouldn’t eat any more. Because madam said, when you accepted the first portion from me, you remember, when I cried and begged – that’s when she said to me in the kitchen, ‘So, Loona, now things are all right, but just bear in mind, girl, that if the young gentleman doesn’t eat any more, it will be your fault, because you’ve blabbed or let it be understood by him, then I’ll box your ears and drive you by the tail out the door, because shitbags like you are for me to kick out.’ Well, when you suddenly said today, sir, that you wouldn’t eat any more, it was clear to me at once: now they’ll kick me out. And then I thought at the last extreme, that maybe it would help somehow if I talked it all out nicely, how your girlfriend cheated you, madam cheated you and I cheated you. But if that doesn’t help either, then my heart’s clear of the filth anyway, I thought, because I’m an honest girl, I don’t steal, lie or cheat. And now it’s up to you, sir, whether madam kicks me out as a shitbag or not.”

At these last words the girl started crying again. I sat thinking, reasoning out the whole thing. Now everything appeared in a new light. Even the landlady’s lectures at the lunch table contained a new substance and a kernel of truth. But how could she know it all so well? Were the sparrows on the roof also chirruping about lovers? Did she read our secrets in our behaviour, words, looks, smiles, blushes, clumsiness and even silences? Or was there something behind it when the girl talked about a girlfriend who cheated? Or was that really just a ruse? I didn’t want to believe it, but I was starting to, and at the same time I felt infinitely naive and stupid. “Men are big children,” I recalled the landlady’s favourite expression.

“So is this really the end then?” asked the girl at length, rousing me from my thoughts.

“For me it is, yes, Loona,” I replied.

“So there’s no use in a person being honest and fair?” she complained.

“Do you really think I could accept your food and put it down my throat?” I asked at last, seriously and pragmatically, for this bundle of misery was beginning to arouse my pity, as she had the first time, when she stood on the same spot, a plate under her shabby apron.

“Yes, sir, I believed that if I told you everything and you saw that I’m completely innocent and honest, not cheating or lying, then you’d take pity on me and start eating again. Or if you didn’t pity me, why did you pity me the first time? Why did you accept my food at all? If you hadn’t taken it, madam wouldn’t have made me do anything. It’s all because you started eating then. You ate, and madam made me lie, that’s why I’m suffering for nothing. Please, sir, I’m begging you, keep on eating – spit it out, once it has been around your mouth a couple of time, but eat, I’ll do anything in the world you want me to. If you say I have to keep quiet, I’ll keep quiet; if you order me to talk, I’ll talk, and if you even order me to come up in the night, like you said at first, then…”

“Loona, are you thinking about what you’re saying?” I asked her. “You said you’re an honest, decent girl.”

“And I really am,” she assured me, “but what am I supposed to do if you won’t start eating?”

For a moment I had a feeling that I was in a madhouse. People, their faces, movements, the spaces and lines around them – everything shifted and became somehow strangely angular, misshapen, unfamiliar, unimaginable and incredible, as if appearing to me in a funhouse mirror. Along with this I felt my heart beating more weakly in front of this girl, particularly as a new thought occurred to me: what if I do carry on eating? Things can’t get any worse than they are, more likely better. Let the landlady believe that with her deceptions she’s getting me to eat and taking no payment, but I will make a note of the lunches I have eaten, and if I ever get any money, then I’ll pay off my debts, and then let’s see who’s pulling whose leg, who gets the last laugh. So I said, “Loona, all right then, I’ll save your skin this time, but first you have to answer a few questions.”

“Ask away – I’ll answer them all, I’ll do everything you want,” she asserted.

“Would you tell me where you and madam got this story of the cheating girlfriend from?” I asked.

“Madam got that one on her own, it wasn’t me,” she explained. “She started complaining that you weren’t eating anything any more, sir. Well, that meant you’d fallen in love. Then she’d seen you and the young lady outside; I don’t know where. And to make quite sure, she sent me out into the street a couple of evenings to watch the young lady leaving her lessons; well then it was all clear. Afterwards I didn’t need to do anything more than come upstairs each evening to see if your room was empty or not, sir. But it was always empty when the young lady had left us. In the end I simply listened to whether you came before the young lady went downstairs or not, sir. Sometimes madam and I listened together. She would make out as if she had something to do in the hall, but I knew for sure that she came to listen for your steps. I’m not fooled by her tricks. And that’s how we got to know as well that you weren’t going out with the young lady any more, because there was someone else, taller and smarter, with a jacket and socks on.”

“You went outside to look?” I asked.

“Of course I did that too,” she replied. “But after that I didn’t, because madam said it was clear anyway: a gentleman going with a German lady, and the bumpkin’s left drooling.”

“So that was the dirty, puny laundry of my great and pure love,” I said to myself, thinking over everything I had heard that day. But to tease a little more out of it, I carried on asking, “The landlord was the third player in your game, of course?”

“No, madam kept everything secret from him, because she kept assuring me, ‘Bear in mind, Loona, if you have a golden husband, then poke one of his eyes out, if he’s good, then both eyes, but if he’s bad, make him blind and deaf, for only then can we women get a little life in this world.’ Those were madam’s words then, and they still are. And all I’m telling you is quite true, because I’m talking as if I were standing before the preacher at communion. In future I won’t lie to you any more, if madam tells me to – I promise you that – but when I come to you, I’ll tell you everything straight, like it is, as long as you start eating that food of lies and cheating.”

“All right, Loona, I will, for your sake,” I said.

“How good you are!” she cried in quiet ecstasy, came a couple of steps closer and looked me in the eyes, moved, and I felt that even the most wretched being, the most unhappy face, can sometimes reveal beauty which is captivating. I was aroused from my meditation, as she continued, “I really don’t know what I can do or give you in return!”

Like it or not, I had to admit that I was, one way or another, completely beaten by women. Erika had left me, madam had arranged things so that despite refusing, I was still forced to eat her lunches, and Loona had played with me like a cat with a mouse. I should have asked myself whether I was the only one she was playing with. She could have been talking about me to madam, just as she talked about her to me. Perhaps both madam and I didn’t believe her when she deceived us? Perhaps both of us were convinced that we were pulling each other’s legs, while actually we were both being duped by Loona?

But never mind – why worry about something that was in the past and couldn’t affect the present? One thing was certain anyway: the revelation of lies and deceptions and all sorts of behind-the-scenes tricks and schemes ultimately had an enlivening and energising effect on me. My failed love affair, which warmed my breast and drained my body, took on a slightly clownish air which gradually came to make me smile. Perhaps it was all just an empty delusion best forgotten – sooner rather than later.

And there’s nothing better to encourage mind games than work and activity, I thought then. A certain obstinacy added to that conviction, as if something primeval within me was rising up against my surroundings. Ah, so everyone thinks they can play with me, and twist me whichever way they want, I said to myself. When the mood comes, they take away my job, when another man comes along, then love takes flight, someone else’s whim has me eating food I don’t want, and still another twists my resolution hither and thither. But I wanted to show everyone that it wasn’t as easy to play with me as they thought.

I started looking for employment because I understood that everything revolves around that, and only an income can make you independent. Day after day I did nothing but run around the town visiting old friends and acquaintances and acquiring new ones, and everywhere the conversation ended the same way: how do I get hold of a job? Through personal contacts, or despite them, I wore out the doors of public and private enterprises, for I was convinced that a man like me is suitable for every trade. Apart from that, I wrote letters, because I wanted to know whether in the whole country there was a place for a man who’s ready to work his fingers to the bone.

But there were none – no places for me, at least not for a long time. Occasionally I got some smaller positions, but they didn’t last long. Yet day after day, month after month, they helped me onward, and I also sought extra sources. I did what so many young people try to do: I started to write, “to create” something and “to rush off” the odd translation. As we have so many newspapers and journals in this country, I thought that I would have to be a complete fool if I couldn’t cobble together some vaguely suitable lines of prose.

In those days I smeared a lot of expensive paper with foreign ink, because I wanted to do things properly and soundly at least as far as my raw materials were concerned. The result was that in some quarters I was regarded as an upstart or even a rich young man who wanted to make a name for himself in literature – there were such people in this country – and they were very surprised when I talked of payment. What the hell are you wasting expensive paper for, if you’re writing for money? I was asked – and I was stuck for an answer.

It took some time before I could get a foot in the door with my “creations”, and even then perhaps not on my own merits but through the old-boy network. But who cares! The main thing was to make a breakthrough, as I called my partial advantage. At any rate, work and activity, effort and bustle, gave me faith in myself, and no longer did I go around with the hangdog air I had when I went to the country and then returned. I even had enough faith in myself to write this book.

And so perhaps I would have waded through thick and thin, if something had not happened that flung me back to square one, in terms of my state of mind. Suddenly I was again the plaything of forces whose existence I didn’t want to believe in. It all appeared to be just a game, a tease, a deception and an illusion whose origins were unclear. Maybe it was too, but then illusions meant more to me than facts.

Coming home one day I found a letter in the box whose address made my heart tremble so that I could feel it in my hands. For a moment, I felt that for a long time I’d done nothing but wait for this letter and this handwriting, as though my life were a dream.

It was pure coincidence that I came home so early that day; I often stayed out until late evening, if only to show the landlady how little I valued the lunches that she forced on me with lies and deceptions. But my “bohemian ways” were promoted by a conviction, acquired I don’t know from where or how, that if you want to become a writer – and I did at the time – you have to be homeless. In other words, you mustn’t go home, but spend your time anywhere else.

Why I came home early that day I don’t know. Was it pure chance or was I led by some presentiment? Who knows? If I had somehow been delayed, it would have been hard to imagine what would have happened to me. The mere thought of it made my heart, all my blood, run cold. But now I ran upstairs, locked the door and ripped the letter open, to find only a few words:

I will wait for you this evening

at eight o’clock on the Avenue of Lies. E.

That was the whole letter, but I read it and read it as if I couldn’t read it to the end. Every word seemed a mystery with some ominous significance. Why would we meet at all? And why so late? Why did she call the walk we loved so much the Avenue of Lies? Or did she mean some other place by that name? What sort of place? No, it must be that place! The place where she had spoken of lying to her grandfather, and where I confessed to my own lie. Or were other lies connected to that walk? Did she want to speak of them, or was this the start of something new?

I was wondering about that when there was a knock at the door. Of course it was Loona with her food – the food that was stolen and the source of so much mendacity – for only she would creep up the stairs like a cat. Gladly I would have shoved her and her “stolen goods” down the stairs, but what could I do, I had to let her in.

“Today I don’t have the slightest appetite,” I complained while the girl placed her plate on the table and I felt the hidden letter burning a hole in my pocket.

“You have a new sweetheart again, sir?” observed the girl with a bashful smile.

“I might have a secret one that I don’t know of,” I replied.

“There are no such sweethearts,” she said. “See that you don’t get sick.”

“My head is so groggy,” I remarked.

“If the trouble’s in your head, then eating will help,” she explained.

“But if it’s in the heart, what am I supposed to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but if it’s in the stomach, pepper and ashes will help.”

“I think my trouble is more in the heart or the head than the stomach, so I don’t need to eat pepper or ashes,” I told her.

“You’re making a joke, sir – you haven’t done that for ages,” she said, stopping by the door and holding on to the lock. “Madam did say that lately you’ve been happier than before.”

“Where did madam get such a good look at my face?” I asked.

“On the street, I suppose; she would say, ‘Thank God, sir seems to be getting over that German lass,’” she explained.

“Did she call the young lady a lass?” I asked, scarcely able to control myself at the girl’s use of the word about Erika. When I looked her in the face and let my eyes wander all over her, it seemed incomprehensible to me that I had felt pity for her and let myself be twisted this way and that inwardly.

“Madam has been calling her that to me right from the beginning; only at the lunch table would she say ‘miss’ and ‘my young lady’, because you and the children were there,” she said.

“I and the children,” I repeated. “So the young lady was a ‘lass’ and I was counted as one of the children?”

“Didn’t you know that already, sir?” she cried in amazement. “Madam is always saying, if a woman doesn’t have children, she remains a ‘lass’ till her death, even if she marries ten times. Childless women run after men like young lasses, so madam says. But men, she says, always remain children, because they don’t bring children into the world. An adult person has to have given birth, madam says.”

“So make sure you don’t remain a lass until you die,” I said.

“Madam is always saying that. She says, ‘Listen, Loona, you have the sort of face that’ll keep you a lass until you die, because love won’t come to you.’ But she always comforts me and says, ‘Happy are the people who don’t know what love is, because love is a terrible thing’ – that’s what madam says. And to get children you don’t really need love terribly much; it’s enough if you just like a man a little.”

“Perhaps the children would come even without liking him,” I observed.

“You’re joking again, sir,” she smiled bashfully, “but madam is talking seriously when she says, ‘Loona, look what a terrible thing love is – a person doesn’t want to accept food any more, or anyone, then you have to feed him on lies and deceptions like some animal.’ That’s what she says about you, of course, sir. But about the young lady she says, ‘If she falls head over heels for a man, there’s no other cure for her love than marriage.’”

Those words dumbfounded me, so that soon Loona had to end her tale, of course in the hope that she could continue it next time, because she was obviously trying to keep the pledge she had given: not to deceive me any more, and tell me truthfully everything she heard madam say about me. But perhaps madam really was right, that I had declined her kind offer regarding the lunches because of love? And did Erika really fall head over heels for a man to find a cure for her love? Might a solution be sought here to today’s letter, inviting me to a meeting? Did the words “Avenue of Lies” indicate that everything was somehow deception and lies?

My brain and my heart were torn by endless, maddening questions. I almost went crazy from reading the terse letter over and over again. The food lay where the girl had left it, and when I finally noticed it, it was completely cold and congealed, especially since it was roast lamb with potatoes. I took a couple of pieces, but my mouth became lined with cold fat and I left the rest untouched.

I had to decide how to spend the several hours I had left until I went to meet her. Visit some friend? Impossible! I wouldn’t have been able to say a word to anyone, listen to anyone’s words or endure anyone’s presence. I recalled how once I had gone to sleep to pass the time and been ten minutes late. A whole ten minutes, and nowadays time is measured in seconds, as I keep reading in the newspaper’s sports pages.

Nevertheless I didn’t want to read the sports news now, though I felt obliged by circumstance to compete with someone – try my strength, jump higher or longer than someone, smash someone’s nose, deal him a knockout blow or have that done to myself, so that my sense of time would vanish from my consciousness for a moment. While sports news was boring me, so was everything else I could read, though I had done more reading in recent times than ever before. This resulted from my attempts to write. It seemed to me that my personal life, personal experiences and skills were so feeble, superficial, vulgar and ordinary that it was not worth putting them down on paper. Life had passed me by, and I had passed it with neither of us leaving a trace on the other, as though we had run in opposite directions on carefully oiled bearings.

It’s strange and funny to think that this could be the case. Perhaps I was in such a state that I started to think others must have had the same experience, or at least many of them. Why else would writers read so much? I mean writers who digest dusty tomes instead of experiencing the freshness of real, uncharted life. Intellectually we are doing the same as we do physically. Instead of feeding ourselves on green grass, we kill and eat the animals that eat the grass. And if a genius were to suddenly appear who would write a book that was utterly true to life, with nothing to do with other books, then probably no one would read it, just as eating green grass has been left to ruminants. Life is too hard to ruminate and digest, so books are for ruminating. Life is for living.

But what’s even easier to digest than a book written from other books is the cinema, because it’s a book that has been chewed and digested several times over. On the whole it’s as easy as going the pub, café, church or chapel. Right now I needed the easiest option of all, because my mind was sick and my heart heavy. I needed oblivion. So I decided to go to the cinema, where I could doze by myself in the darkness, while familiar, almost indifferent events passed before my eyes and rehashed platitudes caressed my auditory nerves. But even there I had to change places several times, because each time I ended up next to people who were continually whispering, reading the subtitles aloud, humming and whistling along with the songs or tirelessly munching, as if they were being fed by the kilogram. That day I was even disturbed by people laughing heartily in my presence or searching in their pockets and handbags for handkerchiefs to wipe their tears or blow their noses. This was done solely to annoy me.

Eventually I found a quiet, peaceful place by the wall, where there was no one in front of me or behind me. There I could have thanked God with all my heart that he had enlightened people and let them erect a building where they come together as if in church and spend their time as if they were in the pub.

As I left the cinema, the sun was already going down, but the glow of the evening sky still showed that approaching spring was already being hinted at. You could feel it in the air, in the shining stars and in the eyes and voices of people. Because a sudden thaw had recently occurred, the pavements were decorated with scattered piles of snow and shards of ice, and their ugly and filthy black appearance had been covered by fresh, bright white snow which pedestrians were now sweeping aside. A light chill pinched as if teasingly at the tip of one’s nose or earlobes, forcing people unconsciously to quicken their step. I too hurried, although I could have dawdled with all the time I had. I wanted solitude, as if I had to prepare my heart for the coming meeting.

This year’s meagre snow had, with the thaw, turned into to water or slush on the pathways, and then hardened with the cold mostly into rough ice, which didn’t hinder walkers. Where skis had once slid along and left their endless tracks, people could now stride freely on their own legs. The bright fresh snow was fading in the twilight, and further darkened by the shadows of the trees. The ground surface felt untouched and pure. Here and there the old porous snow gave way under the weight of my footsteps and seemed to crackle in warning, but the fresh white carpet in its softness had a muffling effect and I only heard a light crunching and scratching sound which barely made an impression. A strange drowsy silence and peace prevailed, broken only by bright headlights on the highway, which sent blinding shafts of light between the coal-black tree trunks, piercing the pedestrians’ eyes, as if screaming in pain.

As the clock approached eight, I no longer had the patience to use the whole pavement for walking, but almost shuffled on the spot at the point I hoped to see Erika appear from. Once again I was mistaken: Erika came not from the direction of town but from the park, and thus had to traverse the entire Avenue of Lies before she could reach me. I was so taken aback by this that I didn’t know what to do or say. That familiar form also seemed terribly foreign and new to me, and the greatest impression on me was surely made by Erika wearing a fur jacket instead of a coat, and a fur cap instead of a hat.

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t be here,” said Erika after our greeting.

“And I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” I replied, because I wanted to say something and couldn’t think of anything better.

“I came punctually,” she defended herself.

“But I’d been here at least half an hour beforehand,” I said.

“I noticed that in the darkness – so many footprints – and I wondered whether they were yours or a stranger’s,”

“They’re all mine,” I assured her, “before me it was pure, untouched snow. I walked and walked and finally came to a stop, thinking that you’d come from over here.”

“But you see, I came from the other direction,” she said playfully and obstinately.

“I was really surprised that you came from the other side,” I explained.

“Why?” she asked, as if startled.

“I don’t even know,” I replied. “With you I never know what will happen to me. If I believe one thing, it turns to be another. I thought I saw you from far away and recognised you despite the darkness, but now…”

“…now you don’t know at all,” she finished my sentence.

“That’s it, I don’t know at all,” I affirmed.

“You see how quickly everything is forgotten,” she said somewhat instructively and sadly.

“No, miss, quite the opposite: I see that it’s not forgotten, and can’t be.”

“But why didn’t you recognise me then?” she asked, affecting a light tone, while her voice was trembling with excitement.

“You’re quite different to what I imagined, and there’s more within you than I can guess, that’s why. I feel downright afraid when I see what you really are like. If you were like I’d imagined, then forgetting would be easy, but you aren’t, you’re quite different, so how could I forget you?”

“You shouldn’t talk to me like that,” she said quietly and pleadingly, but in a way that provoked me to go on: “Forgive me, miss, for not being able to say better what I want to say, but firstly, while walking here alone, I decided that, for whatever reason you invited me here today, I want to assure you of one thing: I love you as I always did, I love you as never before. I didn’t even believe that I would still be in love like this; your letter proved it to me. Every word in it made my heart tremble. It hardly mattered to me what you wrote; the main thing was that you wrote, and that I could hold in my hand the same piece of paper that you’d recently touched, for that had made it precious and holy. Of course it’s silly and ridiculous of me to talk like this, but it’s the truth. I dare to tell you this, because I believe that anyone else would laugh at me, but you wouldn’t. You’ll forgive my madness and stupidity, because you understand me. Although I don’t know why we’re here today…”

“Don’t you remember how, when we last met on the street, you expressed a wish to come walking one more time together on the Avenue of Lies?” she interjected, as if wanting to stop my words.

“Did I ever call this pathway the Avenue of Lies?” I asked in surprise.

“That is what you called it, and that’s why I did too in my letter…” she explained, trailing off.

I was confused. All the time I had believed that she invented that name; she thought I did. Which of us was wrong? Or were we both wrong?

“I’d completely forgotten that,” I said at length.

“I hadn’t,” she said. “Your wish stayed in my mind all the time. And since I’ll now have to leave town for a long time, I wanted to fulfil your wish before that.”

“Are you going to the country, if I may ask?”

“To the country,” she said softly, as if she didn’t want to speak of it. So I said, “I went to the country too.”

“Was it nice?” she asked.

“Snow, nothing but snow,” I replied. “Everywhere was white. And do you know what it reminded me of? Someone who was white all over.”

“Do you mean my mother?” she asked, as if alarmed.

“Yes, her,” I affirmed. “In the middle of the snowy plain I even thought I saw her, as you once described her, but there was no red rose, there was nowhere to take one.”

We both suddenly fell silent, as if afraid to make a sound. Only a while later did she say, “It’s terrible, you telling me that today.”

“Why so terrible?” I asked.

“My mother is dead,” she said.

“She was already dead when you talked about her,” I said.

“Things were different then, quite different,” she responded. “Now I’ve come here to fulfil your last wish before I go away.”

She said this as if she had appeared by my deathbed, or so it seemed to me. Now suddenly I had the feeling that something white was moving among the trees ahead of us, creeping closer and closer, until it stood unnoticed between us.

“Because I’m leaving, I’m in a terrible rush today,” she continued, arousing me from my daydreaming. “No one knows that I’m here. I didn’t even tell grandfather. I was visiting a relative and took a short detour; that’s why I came from the other direction. If it weren’t for that visit, I wouldn’t have been able to come. That’s what I was afraid of when I wrote that letter, but I’ve managed it as luck would have it.”

“So do you have to go straight away?” I asked. “You don’t have any more time at all?”

“I should have been gone already,” she replied.

I didn’t know what to do or say, for such a rapid departure made every word senseless, every action futile. She too stood in perplexed silence, as if some dumb white being really stood between us. Finally she extended her hand and said, almost in a whisper, “So, live well, and many thanks…”

Her words were broken off, for I had grasped her hand, pressed it to my lips and fallen to my knees in the snow. And when she withdrew her hand in fright, I grabbed madly at her clothes, and in the next moment, around her legs, pressing my face against her knees, which tried to escape or turn aside, but stayed on the spot.

I had suddenly been overtaken by an instinctive terror that I could lose her forever, which would mean losing myself. I was ready to do anything and swear any oath, if only she would stay. At that moment I could have given up my own sister and brother, father and mother, land and nation, language and faith – of which I had none anyway – if she had wanted it. A single word from her mouth and I would have even left my corporation, with its colours, which I had once venerated so much, and “become that real Estonian man”, as her grandfather put it, although my father and mother, sister and brother, relatives and friends, even the whole Estonian nation, would have opposed it. At that moment I wouldn’t have cared about anyone or anything that came to mind, if she had asked it of me. But she didn’t ask anything of me, she just stood there, with me down on the ground, clutching her knees as if terrified of death. She stood and tried to disengage herself, without really knowing how to do it. I felt her hand touching my hair once, for my cap had fallen into the snow, but momentarily she drew back, as if scorched, and uttered these words of pleading: “You ought to have mercy on me, for just think what would happen if my fiancé got to know that you had held me like that.”

That had an effect – more of an effect than who knows what else. My hands dropped loosely into the snow and she took a couple of steps backwards. She was silent. At least I don’t remember hearing a word or a sound from her. I got up, seeking support from a nearby tree, which seemed terribly big and black to me.

“Your cap is on the ground,” she said finally and made to go and fetch it, but I got there first.

We were silent. Then she said, “Forgive me that I had to tell you that, but I couldn’t have done otherwise, I didn’t know how, believe me.”

“You forgive me too, for what I did,” I replied, “but I too couldn’t have done otherwise, believe me.”

I felt those words coming from my heart, from the depths of my soul.

She hesitated about what to do. Finally, though, she stretched out her hand to me again, which I held for a moment in both of mine, without daring to raise it to my lips again. Then she went, leaving at a run along the Avenue of Lies toward the castle, as if her home were there. I watched her leave without averting my eyes once, until there was nothing left of her to see or hear. And as I stood there, black myself amid the bright white snow and the black trunks, it seemed to me for a moment that there had been nothing, only illusions in a yearning heart, chimeras in a scorching soul. Ah, if only one could take an aching heart, if one could catch a pining soul, and send them to their natural home – the land of illusions!

I sat down in the snow, resting my back against the tree that had at first seemed so terribly big and black to me, and started to cry. I did that quite simply and pragmatically, as if I wanted to be myself for once.

That was the end of my love, and that was how I wanted to end my book, for I am not making it up, I am only describing facts. But he whose face is at once birth and death, love and oblivion, did not want my book to have an ending like that, so I’ve no choice but to continue writing. The following lines have little to do with my love, and in that sense they add nothing to my book, and I could have left them unwritten. Instead they tell of her love – the love of the woman who invited my heart and soul into the land of illusions.

The fact that I really intended to end my book with the foregoing passage is demonstrated to myself and others by my having carefully read through what I had written, corrected it in places where I found deviations from the truth, rewritten several parts of some pages, made interpolations which belong to another time than that of the actual event described, and even submitted it to a couple of publishers, without receiving a reply. One day, however, I read a death announcement in the newspaper, which read: Erika V., née K. I hadn’t known her married name, for it had never interested me, but I do remember her maiden name, and that was the one in the death announcement. Likewise it showed the age of the deceased, the name of the home that was mourning her. Thus there was no doubt – Erika was dead! There was no more Erika! The world had become a poor and empty place! The world had become an absolute void, where no organic being could live! That is what my heart cried out. What would I have given now, sacrificed, for that announcement to be an illusion, a mere sickly ghost, a deception!

But no, it was a fact, and I had to do something, go somewhere; I couldn’t just sit in my garret, staring at the newspaper, as though my redemption and my blessing were to be found there. But what should I do, where should I go? That was the question. After long hesitation I decided to appear before the grandfather of the deceased once again, or at least make an attempt to. It was crazy, I appreciated that, but I did it anyway, because I couldn’t do otherwise.

This was the only time in the course of my love that I was really happy, and no doubt that was only because she was already dead. When I appeared at the house of mourning, everything was empty and silent, as the deceased had yet to be brought home from the hospital. The old gentleman was quite alone among his ancestral inherited furniture, and opened the door for me when I rang the bell. Whether he had become even whiter I don’t know, but he certainly was even more stooped, his face more sunken and the skin on his face and hands had taken on a waxy tinge.

At first he didn’t recognise me, or pretended not to, but when I told him who I was, and reminded him of my previous visit, he didn’t let me continue, but invited me into the back room, taking me through the hall, where as before the piles of things from the dead past were on view, and into the smaller room, where he sat once again in his high-backed armchair and asked me to take a seat before him. I should have spoken, but my mouth, my tongue and my throat became painful and tight, when I saw how tears coursed over his now wrinkled and yellowed face, and his drooping moustache, one after the other, and dripped on to the soft dressing gown that covered his thin, wizened body. Thus we sat in silence for a while. Finally I managed to say, “I beg your pardon so very much that I’ve come to trouble you at this moment, but I could not do otherwise, I had to know why and how, so quickly, so suddenly, so incredibly unexpectedly…”

“What is there to tell you,” he replied quietly, without raising his eyes, as if it concerned a trifling matter. “Quite natural that it came like this, but if it had come otherwise, it might perhaps have been more natural. “A first birth, some sort of premature failure, a lack of the necessary help and skill for something which is just as natural as death in the countryside, a long distance to town, and who knows what else. I am old, I am of the soil, but death doesn’t want me, as if my sort of soil were of more use to someone in this world than a young and thriving life.”

“I too, grandfather, would have been ready to offer my life for hers, if I’d been asked to,” I said.

He raised his head a little, as if he wanted to see better who was calling him grandfather, let his head fall again and said, moving his tired hands, which had acquired a waxy sheen, “Perhaps you should have said that to me better when you were sitting the first time in that chair and talking about her; then she might still be alive today.”

“Ah, grandfather!” I cried covering my eyes with my hand. “Then I was so unhappy and frantic that I haven’t dared talk to you properly until today, because they were threatening to take away my job, as they did do later.”

“I know that, I know everything and I understand you. I am not going to reproach you, rather I blame myself that I, so old, with the smell of the soil about me, am trying to command life and love. But as you see, nothing good can come of that, when the soil takes command over love. Soil only turns everything to soil, even love, no matter how great and self-denying. Then I believed more in your words than in you. But young people’s words cannot be taken seriously, for they are bad at knowing people, especially when it concerns themselves. I should have known that you are a true Estonian man after all, with the heart of a true Estonian man, the kind of whom I’d seen plenty in my own life. Let me tell you a little story about that loyal Estonian heart. It must have been in the sixth year of this century when the Baltic lands lost the quit-rent by the command of his blessed majesty the Tsar. Of course you won’t remember it, you will have only heard or read about it. I was living at my country estate then. That was a golden age, but nobody wanted to believe then what a golden age it was. A person is never old or wise enough to really judge his times. Just this last year, when you were sitting right here in front of me, I complained in my heart about the bad times, because it was you asking for my grandchild’s hand, not someone else. But I do the same again today, because the only joy of my old eyes and ears is no longer among the living. In those days, in the sixth year of the century, when that order came from his blessed majesty the Tsar, I said, Must my manure not be carried and my rye not be reaped because of a decree from the Tsar of Russia? Where can I get so many working hands overnight so that I can give up the quit-rent system without a loss? And despite the Tsar’s order I sent a messenger to the distant parts of the forest among the tenants who worked in lieu of rent, and I made him tell them that they should carry on doing their work, because not even his powerful majesty the Tsar could do anything against voluntary quit-rent labourers, particularly as we were working the matter out between ourselves; for a tenant it was easier to do work than pay money, and it’s better for me to receive work than money. And believe it or not, the answer came from tenants everywhere that they would do as their baron wished, not according to the decree from his majesty the Tsar. Only one owner of a big place in a far corner of the estate lands, who had about twenty versts to travel to his work – in those days we didn’t know kilometres yet in this country – said that he would hold to the Tsar’s command, that is, he would start paying his rent in money, because he didn’t want to rattle so far over the land with a group of people and tools to the estate. Well, do you understand the people? For several generations in a row the estate has got by on quit-rent, and now suddenly it doesn’t. Moreover, if this tenant did take part in the labour-intensive tasks, others will follow him, because everywhere the messenger had been told that if others take part in the quick-rent work, then we will too, and if others drop out, then we will be too. There was nothing else for me to do but get the master of the big place invited to the manor. He didn’t come. He didn’t come because he didn’t have time and his mind was made up. The farmer said that he would act according to the law, so why should he go to the manor? And do you know, young man, what I did then? I had a horse hitched to a little sprung cart, because that was the easiest way to get to the distant parts of the forest, I took a coachman’s boy beside me and I drove to the farmer’s home. I hadn’t been there for a very long time and I didn’t recognise my own lands and people, or know how they were living. Whether it was theft of timber and secret distilling, as I had been told, or a lot of work and economies, as the people themselves claimed, it was clear that one way or another the farmer by the forest lands had become a wealthy man. He was living like a powerful and respected farmer behind my back, nobody interfered in his activities. The forester was the only check on him, but he was a law unto himself. I hadn’t raised the rent for ages, as they did on neighbouring estates every few years. And a farmer like that didn’t want to do quit-rent for me. The only explanation: he had got rich, proud and even pretentious. It turned out that there were two farmers on that farm, father and son. When I talked to the father, he claimed that the matter didn’t concern him, because he’d handed everything over to his son, but when I turned to the son, he laughed at me and said, ‘Why is the baron wasting his breath, when it was father who decided? So then I went – I, the baron and landlord – from Herod to Pontius Pilate out there in the distant forests. And since I didn’t get a definite answer even when father and son were both standing in front of me, I told them, ‘If you cannot do this quit-rent, you can look for a new place for yourself!’ But to that the son – a man of about fifty, stout and strong, so a pleasure and a joy to look at, hair and beard all over like his father, who was way over seventy, but not half as white as I am now – replied quite simply: ‘All right, baron, we will look for a new place for ourselves, a bit of open country, there’s plenty of it out in the backwoods. We’ve already been casting an eye in that direction, because we thought, isn’t this matter going to end the way these things always do, so we can go before the spring if you wish, Baron. We’ve lived well without squabbling, so we’ll leave the same way.’ That’s what the son said. And you won’t believe me when I tell you that those words brought tears to my eyes. Do you understand a person who is prepared to leave his forefathers’ home for the sake of the silly quit-rent? I didn’t at the time. I just sat down next to the grey-haired father on a block of wood and told him in his language: ’Don’t you feels shame and pity that you are leaving your forefathers’ and my forefathers’ land, where everyone has lived a beautiful and heppy life, over the lousy qvit-rent? Do you really luff that great and stronk Russian kaiser and his precious decree more than your forefathers’ and my forefathers’ land? You wants with a light heart to abendon your own home place and your baron, when he comes tventy versts alonk these pine roots, alonk these stones and stumps? Do we luff each other so liddle that when comes the stronk Russian kaiser’s decree, we starts to sqvabble and leave our own homeland? Am I beink to you a bad baron landlord, a bad person? Is my forefathers been to your forefathers a bad landlord and bad person? You open your mouth and say with your grey head to my grey head, I am beink a bad baron landlord, a bad person?’ Now the father replied to me, ‘No, baron, you are a good person and your forefathers were all golden people.’ ‘So then why won’t you do quit-rent any more, when I ask you to? So is it unjust and bad that I want to die as I lived? Do the work until one or other of us dies.’ ‘I would of course do it,’ said the father now, ‘but my son doesn’t want to.’ But the son was standing there listening to our talk, with women and children nearby. ‘Kaarel, won’t you just give in, since the baron has come so far and talked so nicely to you?’ said a woman’s voice behind my back. ‘Yes, Kaarel, let it be as it was while you’re alive,’ said the father too. Eventually Kaarel uttered these words: ‘All right, baron, if the others agree, so do I, or else I’d be alone in breaking relations with the manor.’ And so they carried on doing the labour with a pure loyal heart, and maybe they would be doing it to this day, if the new times hadn’t come. This story came to mind when I thought about your first visit and our conversation. I told you at the time that your Korporation and colours, your singing and drinking were empty stuff, eating away at the spirit, that you didn’t have the right spirit, the right Baltic spirit. Spirit is what brings life to singing and gives a sense to drinking. You argued then against that right spirit, you said that you sing and drink without spirit or that you drink with a new spirit, as far as I understood you. I believed you then and that was my mistake. I believed your explanation of the new spirit or of singing and drinking without spirit, but I should have been wiser than you in your youth and known that it is not from spirit that singing and drinking come, but spirit comes from singing and drinking. And if you drink and sing properly, as they did in the good old days in the Baltic lands, then you should acquire the right Baltic spirit, the right Baltic spiritual disposition, which drives you to distinction in every sense. And that is what gives a special beauty, brilliance, glow and glory to things, socially, economically, racially, and in class terms, and raises even the greatest follies of youth to an ideal light, an admirable elevation. Seen from that viewpoint the conversation with you has been a real pleasure and consolation, because not all is lost in our dear homeland when the younger student generation cultivates the right spirit. The old generation, the alien substance that arose from Russification in the Baltic lands, wanted to trim everything down to one level, which is completely foreign to us all in terms of history and development, tradition and culture, but the young generation is heading back on to the right Baltic track. Instead of manors there are settlers, but the spirit and soul of the manors, their high ideals, are coming into bloom again. They who bind themselves to earthly things or destroy the spirit, that everlasting and elusive thing, are mistaken in their materialistic blind faith. If the powerful Russian Tsar was unable with his decrees to force a loyal and just Estonian man to give up quit-rent for the sake of his merciful baron, who could demand of youthful students that they had to give up the true spirit of their homeland? That is how I have reasoned to myself about the future of our dear homeland, and I have come to the joyful conclusion that the past is not completely dead yet, that the past is the only living, vital, and life-giving period in the destiny of people and nations, for only the past enables development, and the spirit of the golden past is only now perhaps starting to spread and take root in our homeland, becoming the treasure of the masses, whereas until today it was the private property of individuals. My only fear,” he continued in Estonian, “is that they cripples the right Baltic past and spirit, as they don’t understand the real drinkink and singink. You says to them, when you goes to them, they must understand that really true drinkink and singink, then comes that really true spirit, that loyal Estonian spirit, which sits on that grey old man, when he says to his son, “You goes does that qvit-rent for your dear baron landlord, until he dies. I talked about this with my grandchild when she was still at home,” he continued in his own language, after a little silence, “but she was still too young to be interested in spirit. Moreover, spirit isn’t a woman’s affair; they seek the soul and love. Yet she did tell me that your young women seek, like your men, the true spirit of the homeland in drinking and singing. But how is it with your soul and love? Who cares for it when everyone is seeking the spirit in singing? Spirit does not love, it assesses. Or is there no longer a need for soul and love? That is the only thing that makes me think, makes me worry about the beloved and loyal Estonian people. But I am old, I am of the soil, I no longer understand well how…”

I got up to leave, because I thought I perceived that the old white-haired man was talking only about immediate inconsequential things to prevent me from leading the conversation to what our thoughts dwelt on all the time, he as he talked, I as I listened.

“You’re going already,” he said on seeing me stand up, as if he had been expecting me to go for a long time. “It’s better that way, because the others will soon get home. But do forgive me for not letting you get a word in at all; I only talked myself. Ever since my grandchild left her home, there’s no one left to talk to, and that’s why…”

We had got to the door and I was about to open it.

“How are you doing now? You have a job?” he asked.

“I don’t have a secure job, just casual work,” I replied.

“That’s how it is nowadays, there’s nothing secure any more, everything is casual, and that’s why, the first time with you…”

I was already halfway through the door, ready to close it behind me.

“Once everything was different in this world, quite different,” he said. “When my grandchild was still at home there was…”

I hurried to go, for once again I saw tears welling up under the yellowed, creased and thin face, while his mouth made movements as if it were that of a little child. Nor could I hold back the tears any longer. But hardly had I walked a few steps when he called me back, as if he still had something important to tell me, yet he no longer said a word, and merely thrust a letter into my hand in the doorway, and only when I had turned it over between my fingers, looking for the address, without finding one, did he say, emphatically and as if afraid of someone, “That is for you, I almost forgot… an old man’s head. Take it, put it in your pocket and go.”

I obeyed his order and left. The door shut behind me. I hid the envelope in my pocket and didn’t dare to take it out even to look at it, as if it were the trace of a serious crime, hunted by snooping noses, hidden curious eyes. But I turned it constantly between my fingers, as if I wanted to caress and fondle it endlessly or discover its secret. Why did grandfather pass this little packet to me like that? I pondered to myself. Had he really forgotten? Or did he never reach the decision, the whole time, whether to give the packet to me or not, and only at the last moment was he moved to do it?

As I debated this, I didn’t once call to mind the name of the only person who could have wanted me to have this envelope. I kept it from me like we keep the fear of death. I tried to remove it from mind the way even as I fondled it deep in my pocket. I tried instead to recall the words of the white-haired old man, but it was all forgotten except one thing: “The past is the only living, vital and life-giving period in the destiny of people and nations.” And I muttered to myself, “Only for the sake of the past should people live and die. Only for the past can and should one sacrifice everything.” All the way home I repeated these ideas in endless variations, as if I had nothing else to think about in the world. Actually I was repeating the ideas because they indirectly expressed what I had not yet dared to make explicit: Why am I still alive, when my past is dead? Why am I still myself, when she is not herself? Why do I move and think, while she is lying motionless and her mind is petrified? Why do I still have a present and a future, when she has only a past, or not even that – a mere emptiness, only what does not exist and which hitherto no human tongue has been able to name? Why? Why? That was what I really wanted to think on the way home, yet I didn’t dare to – not yet.

At home I found that the envelope contained a letter written on thin silk paper – no doubt silk paper because it would take up less space and could thus be hidden or forwarded more easily. The letter was in German and evidently written at intervals, as I could tell from the ink and from the fact that at the end it was written in pencil and the handwriting was so bad as to be almost illegible. There were no signs of a date, as if the author of the letter were thinking of eternity – no date, year or mention of a night, evening or morning. I reproduce the letter unchanged, although it may be that I have misinterpreted the end of the letter in translating it. Here it is as it was in my trembling hand.

“I’m writing these lines because I feel death approaching. But don’t think that I’m sick, that there is anything wrong with me or that I’m suffering. No, my fragile health is good and there is nothing wrong with my state of mind either, considering my mental and physical condition. And yet I feel the approach of death, maybe because the doctor told me last time in town that my condition is not quite normal, but possibly also because at our last meeting you talked about my mother, which somehow had a horrible effect on me. I know that sometimes a person can live with a horrible feeling in abnormal conditions much longer than in normal conditions without such a feeling, and yet I cannot get rid of my premonition, and therefore I thought of writing these lines to you. But they will reach your hand only when my premonition has become a fact. If it doesn’t, I will destroy them because what I want to write seems to me so terrible and unbelievable that for a quite some time it was beyond my powers to put it down on paper and keep it hidden somewhere. You too, if you ever read these lines, must destroy them when you have read through them. I’m writing them only to you, so that you will know how I have loved you and how I still do – that is the only purpose of these lines.

“But I don’t really know where to start, because at the moment it seems to me that it’s not at all easy for me to say where the beginning of love is, and where it ends. In writing these lines I believe quite firmly that I loved you even before we got acquainted, but I didn’t yet know then that it was you that I loved. I suspected it even in the first days of our friendship. But when you came to keep me company, to ask forgiveness for the landlady’s behaviour, I didn’t doubt it any more. And the next evening – it must really have been the next evening – when you were late and ran into me on the stairs, because I came back for something I’d forgotten – yes, if you hadn’t come at all then, I might well have managed to come up and knock on your door. At least I believe that now, because at the time I had not forgotten anything, but I wanted simply to see what was keeping you so long. And how my heart was trembling! Simply terrible!

“Do you still remember how once in the park you called yourself a wolf howling at the moon? And I was supposed to be the moon or a king’s daughter. At the time I felt so ashamed that I could say that only to my mother – those were my words then. But now I can tell you too, because what comes next is much worse. When you called me a king’s daughter or the moon come down to earth from the heavens, it reminded me that I have around my body something broken and torn, and I thought, what would you think of me and what would you say to me if you suddenly saw or found out what is torn in me and where. It was so terrible to think that you regard me as a king’s daughter or a bright moon, while around my body I carry something cracked and torn. I was also missing a button somewhere, in the place of which that morning I hurriedly put a tiny little safety pin. So, now you know why I was ashamed: a lousy king’s daughter and a white moon with a safety pin.

“There was one thing about you that I didn’t like at all: your great politeness and respect toward me. You behaved with me as if I was – I don’t know what. But I didn’t feel anything special about myself, only love. That is what I wanted and expected. I came with you into the dark park only so that something would happen to me that would develop me, as I said at the time, but nothing happened. Sometimes I had a desire that you would be shameless and carefree towards me, that you would treat me as a thing and handle me, but you didn’t, and I was disappointed. Now that I have been handled, I am even more disappointed. And I haven’t developed either, for there is only one thing that develops me, and that is love. Now I know that, and I reproach you no more.

“But I did at the time. I did even when you visited grandfather and we met afterwards, and you told me in the park about your first lie told for love – do you still remember that? But both your lies and mine, up to that day, had been to protect our love, and therefore they were right, and not a sin or an injustice, as we thought at the time, first yours and then mine too. But what I did that evening went against our love and was an outright crime, and that’s perhaps the reason I ‘m now suffering this premonition of death, for a person can be forgiven all crimes, but not a crime against love. I at least will never forgive myself.

“Of course, to this day you don’t know what happened between me and grandfather after your visit. I didn’t talk about it because I had vowed not to, and others were unable to talk about it. And the fact that I kept my pledge to grandfather was itself a great crime I cannot forgive myself for. Of course I should have vowed to grandfather, but even more I should have broken that vow for the sake of myself and our love – told you everything there on the park bench, when you were kneeling before me; then I probably wouldn’t have needed to write this letter.

“When you’d left grandfather and I came home and heard what you had talked about and what answer you received, I got down in front of grandfather, kissed his hand, clutched him around the legs, just as you did with me later in the park, so that I thought at the time that you were imitating me, except that I comforted myself that my legs are perhaps not as bony and hard as grandfather’s. And as I held him, so that he couldn’t get away from me, I cried and I begged him, because I thought you hadn’t pleaded well enough, although I’d impressed it upon you before I went out. But my tears and pleas helped as little as your talking did, for grandfather remained deaf and dumb. He only said, ‘Dear child, it’s wiser this way, as I’m doing it, and one day you’ll thank me for my present refusal. Young love comes and goes, and no one knows where it comes from and where it goes. They cry who have to give it up, but those who get it often have to cry much more. I am keeping you from that excess, which is no consolation.’ Those were his words.

“But I wasn’t reconciled to grandfather; finally I jumped up and shouted at him: ‘All right, grandfather, if you won’t allow it, I’ll go without permission! I’ll elope, I’ll compromise myself, I’ll make a scandal for you, for auntie, our relatives, our acquaintances, so bear it in mind, grandfather, I’ll be compromising myself with an Estonian.’ But even then grandfather remained calm, and said, ‘No, dear child, no, you won’t compromise yourself with an Estonian. You can’t compromise yourself.’ ‘You and auntie will have to watch over me then!’ I cried. ‘I’m going to my lesson and I won’t come back, then your strength will be tried, grandfather. And I am quite sure that you will take me back when I come, because you love me more than you believe.’ ‘Of course I’ll take you back, no matter how and where you come from, you’re right about that, dear child, but that is why you won’t be compromising yourself, because you too love me more than you believe, ’ replied grandfather. But I shouted at him: ‘No matter how much I love you, grandfather, I love him even more, much more. Because you won’t agree, I have no choice but to compromise myself.’ Yet grandfather stuck firmly to his decision: he wouldn’t agree and I wouldn’t compromise myself, I couldn’t compromise myself. And when I challenged him about what could prevent me from compromising myself, he was lost for an answer. Finally I said to him, ‘Grandfather, if you’re so sure that I won’t compromise myself, that I can’t compromise myself, then promise that when I still do compromise myself, you will happily take me back if you need to, and defend me against auntie and the others. Dear, dear grandfather, leave me just this crumb of hope!’ – I begged him and once again fell at his feet. Grandfather was silent for a while, as if thinking it over. Then he said, ‘Dear child, do you really understand what you’re asking of me?’ ‘I’m asking you for love, grandfather,’ I wept, screaming at him, ‘only a bit of love, grandfather; my life is wretched and poor anyway, as you keep repeating to me every day.’ But grandfather put his hand on my head, which was always his greatest sign of tenderness, and then said, ‘Perhaps you’re not asking me for love, but for your own life, that’s what you’re asking for.’ At the time I didn’t understand those words, and so I could say light-heartedly: ‘Grandfather, what is life without love? If I have to give my life for love, then I’ll do it happily. Just promise me, dear grandfather, that you won’t push me out, no matter what happens to me!’ Grandfather was silent again and I awaited my fate crouching at his knees. At last he said, ‘But child, will you give me your word, you understand? Your solemn oath, that you will never breathe a word of what we have been talking about now to a single person, even the one you want to go to? Can you swear that to me and can you keep your pledge? For if you don’t keep it, then I don’t agree to your ever going.’ And as if he already regretted the conditional promise, he added as he withdrew, ‘You really must understand me, dear child, I am not giving consent on clear conditions, but I am forgiving you for your action, if you keep your pledge. It is terrible that I have to make you promise, and I do it with a bleeding heart and will never forgive myself. People are probably right when they hint to you that old age has robbed me of some of my sense.’ ‘Right now I see and believe that you are fully in your right mind,’ I shouted back to grandfather and vowed to him everything he had asked of me. And my heart was filled with such great joy and happiness that I kissed grandfather’s eyes, hands, knees, even feet in great gratitude to him. But he remained silent, austere and sad, trying to restrain my endearments and said, ‘Dear child, you’ll lose your own sense – what will become of you afterwards?’ ‘Afterwards I’ll come singing and flying, I promise you, grandfather,’ I said, but he remained gloomy: ‘Child, better not to promise that; promises given lightly are hard to keep.’ That was the last thing he said to me, and I left home warbling, suitcase in hand, which later you got to carry. Whether grandfather saw me leaving with a case I don’t know, but certainly he noticed when I came back home with it.

“Do you still remember exactly what happened between us that evening? For me it is all as if burned with a hot iron on my heart. And not only my heart, but my whole body and soul. And even if I live for thousands of years, it will not be extinguished; I have the feeling now. You obviously didn’t have the faintest idea at the time who or what was walking beside you, just as you didn’t realise why I had a little suitcase in my hand. You could carry it quite indifferently, because you wanted to be polite. Your failure to guess, your failure to realise, proved to me best of all how terribly mad my action was going to be. But now I see in your incomprehension only a consolation, because if you had been able to guess even a scintilla of my real intention that evening and still act the way you did, then at least God might have had mercy on me and killed me with a thunderbolt when I thought of starting to write these lines.

“I had put in the little suitcase my glory box, because I was leaving home to spend my first wedding night with you, wasn’t I? I haven’t really understood that to this day. But if you had said to me that evening that you had no money to go anywhere or elope, or you were hindered by some other circumstance, and you had added that the only way out was if I came up to your room, then I would have done that without a word, unhesitatingly. All the time I was intoxicated with the happiness and pleasure that I could give myself to you, and I had to use all my strength to behave myself, not to start screaming from sheer joy. I suppose you can never imagine how close I felt to you, to your soul, when you took that suitcase from me containing my few things, which were already destined for your touch. I was overjoyed at the thought of what you would do if you knew or guessed what you were carrying in the case. For me too those little things became more precious in the belief that you would love and admire them simply because they belonged to me, had been close to me.

“But you know as well as I do how that great joy and intoxication ended: with my own great sobbing on the park bench, where you consoled me with common sense. Your sense may have been right from your own viewpoint, I didn’t dispute that then, nor do I do so now. But what help was my own, your, even the whole world’s sense, human and divine, when I had tearfully begged my grandfather on my knees to forgive me for coming to you? Could anyone’s sense bring about such a miracle, that I would suddenly no longer know how, with what feeling, with what trembling of the heart I had chosen my own little things and put them in my case? Could any sense at all undo it as if you had never carried my things in that case? No, my darling, no sense was needed any more, but rather the loss of sense. Oblivion was needed, because oblivion is sometimes the only thing that is merciful, oblivion and death, which is surely only a great oblivion.

“Are you still amazed that later I carried my own case, and would not hand it over to you under any conditions? And if you are still wondering, then we can no longer understand each other and our love has run empty. I had come with everything that I had, and I had brought with me my own shabby things, but you didn’t want me. Not even my belongings, whose shabbiness I really acknowledge only now. You had carried perhaps only because you saw the case, not knowing that you were carrying things that were destined to cover my body.

“On coming home from some friend’s place I would often tell my aunt about my amazement at the beautiful objects and jewels I’d seen there, and ask her whether I would ever get any such things, or when I would get them, but she always said to me, ‘Make do with what you have; you won’t be taking a husband yet.’ Now I wanted to go to my husband and I took with me my best and prettiest things, but my husband wouldn’t accept me, as if he were of the same opinion as my aunt. You can’t take a husband with those things.

“I don’t know if there has ever been a more pitiable creature in the world than I was that evening with my suitcase. At the mere recall of what I was carrying in my case and with what feelings, assumptions, hopes and dreams I had put them in there, a deadly shame burned in my heart, my whole body and my every movement so terribly painfully that to repress a loud scream I had to clench my teeth, which made a crack as they came together. You know that my body trembled all over at the time, and you thought that it was the cold, but I was shaking from the terrible shame and terror. It was about what I was supposed to do with my case and my things now, and where would I go. I was ashamed of myself, particularly because you were there, and the only good fortune was that the park was so dark, otherwise I don’t know what would have happened. In the light I would not have dared to get up from the bench, I wouldn’t have dared to take a step, make a movement, for I felt thoroughly humiliated, desecrated. I wanted to go straight home to grandfather, but I didn’t even dare do that. I didn’t have the courage to tell you that I no longer could, and I had to escape, so terrible was my shame and so thoroughly wretched did I feel.

“And how was I to appear before grandfather? How was I going to look him in the eye? Where could I put the suitcase so that he couldn’t see it when he came to open the door? How could I move about in full view of him? Believe me, at that time I had the feeling that I would rather compromise myself with anyone than return home in the same state as I had left it. And if some shameless scoundrel had encountered me on the road, I would have gone off with him and then done away with myself. But of course nothing of the kind happened, for who would disturb a badly dressed lady when she is walking with a worn suitcase in her hand? Who would even cast a glance at her? So I reached home safely.

“I was really lucky when I reached home, for grandfather was alone and opened the door himself. But from his first glance I realised immediately that he understood the extent of my shame. This robbed me of my self-control so that I threw down my case with a bang, and without taking off my outer clothes rushed past grandfather, ran to my room, collapsed on the spot and burst into tears.

“I didn’t notice when grandfather followed me, nor did I know that he had picked up my case and brought it to my room. I only felt someone taking off my overshoes, as if I were a little baby who couldn’t manage it herself. After that he somehow pulled off my coat, removed my cap and took them to the peg in the hall. Only then did he sit down with me and start to gently stroke me, as if this were the only remedy for my frantic crying.

“Finally he spoke, very quietly and sadly, as if asking my pardon: ‘I told you before, dear child, that I can’t permit it, I mustn’t agree to it, you mustn’t go…’ ‘Now at least I know that he doesn’t love me,’ I sobbed, almost angrily. ‘No, dear child, now even I believe that he does love you,’ said grandfather, adding, ‘He loves you more than you actually like at the moment.’ ‘He has shamed me for my whole life!’ I screamed. But grandfather stroked my hair and said, ‘Ah, child, child, if you only understood what an injustice you’re doing him!’