“It was nothing,” she said.
“But miss, why try to make it into something other than it really was!” I cried, with a certain with a certain impatience and reproach. “The landlord started talking about it as soon as you’d left.”
“Oh really?” she asked in surprise, though I don’t think she was surprised at all, but only suspicious of everything I said. Although I didn’t understand why I chose to use those particular words, I openly declared my position: “Forgive me, miss, but I feel that I’ve been a bit of a fool. You don’t believe a single word I’m saying, and you don’t believe me because the one who treated you so unfairly is Estonian, and I, who am trying to ease this injustice somehow and put it right, am also Estonian, while you are a German. Isn’t that so, miss? If there had been some young German man at the lunch table today in my place, listening to what I heard, and if he had gone out walking and talking with you, you would have reacted quite differently.”
“You’re the first Estonian who’s talked to me like this,” she said.
“Don’t you want to talk to me like this, as you’ve never done with an Estonian before?” I asked.
She didn’t reply, and we continued walking side by side in silence. After a while, I sought her eyes and found her dejected face; she swallowed spasmodically and I realised that she had tears in her throat. She was doing everything in her power not to let them into her eyes.
“I apologise with all my heart for daring to upset you,” I said when I saw this, “but I suppose it’s best if I go.”
“Please stay,” she replied, adding after a little pause, “I’ll be all right in a moment.”
So we carried on side by side in silence, keeping in step, which was easier because she was wearing low-heeled shoes and so her pace was just as fast as mine.
“Why do you take it so much to heart?” I said at length, to comfort her in a comradely way, as if walking side by side at an even pace had given me courage.
“I don’t,” she replied. “I’ve got used to it already.”
“So this happens often?” I asked.
“I don’t know about often, but it does happen,” she explained.
“You don’t get used to a thing like that,” I countered.
“I do, believe me, really,” she assured me. “But when you started talking to me like this, it was unexpected, and I didn’t know what to do. And if I don’t know what to do or say, I tend to start crying.”
“Life’s difficult, isn’t it?” I asked in an off-the-cuff way, but she replied quite seriously: “No! Why should it be? Grandfather is always asking me whether it’s hard for me, and he doesn’t believe me when I say that it isn’t. Grandfather decides by his own experience. But I don’t know about what used to be, hardly anything at all, and even what I do know I increasingly forget with each passing year. A couple of years ago we visited the estate we once owned in the country, and there we were shown around it. The changes were pointed out to us, but what really stuck in my mind was the orchard – yes, I remember that and it was big and beautiful. But otherwise – new settlers everywhere, and most of the park had been broken up, grandfather explained. For him of course it was a different matter, as he lives only for what used to be.”
“How simply you put it,” I said for something to say.
“So what’s to be done?” she asked. “Parents – it’s much harder for them of course. My brother, for example, he can’t help it, he has to go several times a year to his old home in the country, summer and winter too, and every time he comes back, he says how beautiful it was. Thank God I’m younger, it’s much easier for me.”
Suddenly she seemed to wake from a dream, looked at her watch and said, “But now I really must run home, grandfather has been waiting for ages!”
“Can’t I come any further with you?” I asked.
“No, please, no further, I’ll go alone now. Thanks for coming.”
“But might I come tomorrow or the day after?” I had to ask.
“Will you want to?” she asked back.
“Only if you let me.”
“Me and my kind – nobody wants to be with us. My cousin explained to me once that we are too bony and wooden; Estonian girls are much more interesting.”
“Is that possible?” I started laughing.
“Yes, my cousin said so,” she affirmed gravely. We shook hands and parted.
From that first walk I brought back with me a sort of disappointment. I couldn’t explain the cause of it. Perhaps it was the directness and openness with which she responded to my openness? Or was it those final words about her own and others’ “woodenness”? Perhaps the final effect on me was when we shook hands, and I felt as I left how strong and rough her hands were. They were a worker’s hands, but with longer fingers than I have usually noticed.
The consequence of all this was that as I came home I almost regretted that I had asked permission to accompany her on the next evening as well. But I consoled myself with the fact that asking permission like that did not oblige me to do anything; it was a matter of simple courtesy.
The next day at the lunch table I tried with varying degrees of conviction to appear as if nothing special had happened between me and the young lady. I observed that she was doing the same. But our efforts were evidently overstrained, and the landlady seemed to notice something unnatural in our exchanges. Finally she couldn’t restrain herself and expressed her suspicions to me: “Mr Studious, please be more attentive and polite to the young lady; her bread ran out long ago, but you don’t seem to see or hear anything.”
“Sorry,” I replied, “but miss doesn’t love to eat dark bread at lunchtime.”
“You still have to offer it,” explained the landlady. “And since when were you so well acquainted with what the young lady does or doesn’t love?”
“Are you going on about love again?” interjected the landlord. “Yesterday you made us all lose our appetites – today you’re doing the same thing.”
“I didn’t start on about love today – it was Mr Studious,” she retorted to her husband. “And don’t you interrupt other people’s conversation – I’m asking since when has the young gentleman known what the young lady does or doesn’t love. Let him answer me. What did they teach you in the Korporation, if you haven’t learnt to answer?”
The young lady cast a furtive glance at me which I took to mean that she was awaiting my answer with a certain tension.
“That the young lady does not love bread with her lunch,” I finally responded, stressing the word not, “I know because she has never accepted the bread I’ve offered her; what the young lady does love I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Oh yes you have,” said the landlady mischievously. “You must know that if you offered her chocolate, she wouldn’t refuse you. All young girls love chocolate.”
Again everyone became uneasy and silence followed. In that general silence I decided to myself that I wouldn’t accompany her today. But when she rose from the table to leave, and cast a glance at me in which I read the question “Are you coming today?” I strove to reply with my own look without further ado: “Of course I’ll come.” That is what happened later, except that we didn’t meet on the stairs as before, but on the street, several scores of paces away from the house.
“Why does the landlady always try to steer the conversation around to love?” she asked me straight away. This was unexpected and took me aback. But I quickly pulled myself together and replied frankly, giving a joking nuance to my tone: “Apparently she wants to tease us.”
“Does she know something already?”
“No, she doesn’t, but she guesses.”
“So quickly!” she cried in amazement, adding, “I behaved at lunch as if everything was as before.”
“You were very sweet,” I replied.