“Was I sweet, really?” she asked, and I felt this came from her heart. To make her happy I assured her: “Very!”
“It’s terribly nice to hear something like that about myself; I’m always hearing it about other people,” she laughed, but I felt she meant it seriously.
“That can’t be so,” I contested.
“But it is, of course,” she assured me. “I don’t even have time to be sweet. At home I have all my indoor work and then I give lessons as well, because the family doesn’t give me enough of them. And the kitchen makes my hands ugly and breaks the skin on my face – who can be sweet like that? We have a charwoman who comes twice a week for a couple of hours. In the evenings I’m tired, so that if I have to read something aloud to grandfather or play chess with him, I sometimes fall asleep. But our boys don’t like tired girls, they want to be able to carry on, have fun and laugh. There are enough like that among the Estonians, so that’s where they look for them. And I don’t have any pretty clothes either, they barely cover my body. You can’t be sweet if you’re bumbling around the rooms with an apron on. I’m changing, and I’ll be pretty indifferent to my looks if I live the way I’m having to. Even grandfather notices it. He’s said to me a few times that a young girl mustn’t be so careless about her looks, because then others won’t care about her either. Everyone’s becoming careless, the men are too. But it isn’t good when even the men are indifferent to a young girl.”
“Does your grandfather really tell you that?” I asked.
“Several times he’s said it,” she assured me, looking me in the face. But she must have surmised suspicion in my eyes, because she rushed to reassure me. “He really has said it. But you’d have to know my grandfather, then you’d believe me. He is, you know, of an age a bit like – you understand? But that’s what I like most about him. I like him more than anyone else in the world. He’s the only person I can really talk to. My old aunt, who also lives with us, and all the other people are so cunning and worldly-wise that I can’t get on with them. Are your people so terribly clever too?”
“How should I take that?” I wondered.
“Your girls for example, who go to university and wear the coloured cap; I’ve seen them on the street – are they terribly clever? Do Estonian boys like clever girls, the kind that know how to smoke and drink? Do you like them?”
There were so many questions at once that I didn’t know which to answer. And as I thought about where to start, she said, “Of course you don’t want to answer, you’re afraid of hurting me. You like clever girls too, but you don’t want to tell me that, because I’m not clever at all. Well, and then…”
“No, miss, it’s not like that,” I contested. “For a start, I don’t understand why you think you’re not clever at all.”
“Well, listen, what cleverness can there be about a girl like me, working at home with an apron on, and then teaching little kids the piano or their ABC book?”
“The fact that you can ask me that only goes to show that you aren’t so very…” I didn’t dare to finish the sentence, so she continued, with a laugh that came from the heart: “… that I’m not so very silly. Thanks for being frank! Now at least I know that you think the same of me as so many others do: I am silly, but not so very much. The only person who thinks differently is grandfather. He never calls me silly, only ‘immature’. He always says, ‘Dear child, whatever will become of you and how will you end your own days, when my eyes have been closed? You, poor creature, won’t get anywhere, you won’t see or hear anything, you’ll be knocking around at home or fussing over those lessons. But that’s not how a young person matures.’ So that’s why I want so much to know what those mature people actually do and see. I once asked my brother, when he finally came home, but he replied it wouldn’t be decent for a young girl of my age to hear or talk about it. That was about two years ago, and when you started talking like that to me yesterday and I started crying, my only fear was that you’d leave me there and go away. Because I thought straight away, as soon as I heard your words: thank God, now I’ve finally met the right person! If he can tell me things like that to my face, then he’ll definitely tell me other things; I only have to dare to ask. So everything had to depend on me – on my courage. But it was a pity that…” She stopped.
“What was, if I may ask?” I interjected, because I wanted so much to know what the pity was.
“I don’t think I should tell you that.”
“Tell me, please,” I begged.
“It’s about you – I’m afraid of offending you.”
“I forgive you everything in advance – just tell me.”
“It was a pity for me that you are a Corporation member,” she said then.
A hot wave surged through my whole body as I heard these words, as for the first time I understood very clearly that I had begun to love this girl, and her words generated a fear in me that I might lose her for no other reason than that simple reason: a coloured cap hung on a peg at my place. It was downright ridiculous how it affected me, that she suspected me because of those colours. My love for her must have already been very deeply rooted. This love might perhaps have been already within me before I felt it at all. It might have been latently coursing through the blood of my ancestors for centuries, unconsciously of course, a burning hatred, a worshipful adoration and a flaming love, centuries old. Now it welled forth into consciousness, saw the light of day in me. And not because she was walking and talking with me, but simply because she was who she was. At once I felt that I was in love with her bones and limbs, her gait, her eyes, into which I didn’t dare to look, fearing all the time to reveal my inmost self.
“Now you see, I shouldn’t have said it,” she concluded, when I didn’t know how to react to her in words.
“Quite the opposite!” I cried then, “it’s very good that you said it. But won’t you explain to me why you feel sorry for me as a Corporation member? And are you still sorry?”
“I still am,” she replied as if delaying, thinking over whether she should have said it or not.
“But why?” I asked insistently.
“Aren’t the Estonian corporation members about the same as the German ones?” she asked in reply, and when I tried to deny it, but couldn’t find quite the appropriate words and proofs, she asked again: “But why would you be in corporations if you didn’t want to be? Don’t you have Weib, Wein und Gesang?”
“We do, but …,“ I wanted to explain, but she interjected impatiently, “Better not to say anything, because you’ll say it like a Korporant. I’ve talked to the ones I know, I know very well. You can’t know anything anyway. You simply evade the issue, because you’re a Korporant. You’d say that a corporation member can’t talk to ladies about everything. A Korporant can’t talk to ladies about men’s things, you all say that. But tell me – can other students talk to ladies about everything? You do have other students too – you’re not all in the Korporation? Or, you arrange everything, as we do, so that no student may really talk to ladies about anything, because you have to be polite, you have to be gentlemen. So maybe you understand why I was sorry that you are a corporation member. Or rather, I wasn’t sorry for you, but for myself, that’s how lost for words I am. At first I was so glad that I was getting to know an Estonian student…”
“I’m no longer a student now,” I interrupted.
“Have you already graduated?” she asked.
“No, but…”
“You mean you left because you lacked money, I know that. But surely you’ll get some money again and then you’ll carry on studying. Anyway it doesn’t matter whether you’re going to university or not, you’re still a Korporant and that’s what’s important to me. For I would be so very pleased if I’d got to know someone else who wasn’t one; we do have people like that ourselves.”