“So why is it so important to you that there is someone else who isn’t in a Korporation?” I asked.
“I told you,” she replied. “It’s not worth talking to a Korporant, because he’s a gentleman, but if I want to become more mature, how do I talk to a gentleman?”
“So what would you like to talk about?” I enquired.
“I don’t actually know what about,” she replied. “Whatever would develop me so that I wouldn’t be so silly any more, as everyone else thinks, even you.”
“I don’t think that,” I tried to contend.
“I’m sorry,” she said convincingly, “but you’re only saying that because you’re a Korporant, though actually you think something quite different. When our boys say, for example, that Estonian girls are more interesting than ours, because they’re supposed to be more mature, then I have asked several times – what should we talk about then, to be interesting, and to prove that we’re mature? What do you actually talk about to Estonian girls? But they reply, ‘About everything.’ Well, so talk to me about everything, I say. ‘I can’t, with you, because you’re not mature and it’s not interesting with you.’ So we debate, like squirrels on a treadmill. And that is why I thought that if I got to know an Estonian boy, I would start chatting with him so that I would soon become a more mature person. I thought I’d take the bull by the horns and say to the Estonian boy, Talk to me now so that I’ll become a bit more mature. In the end, let him treat me like … let him swear, as you did to begin with…”
“I beg your pardon – I didn’t swear!” I said.
“You said you were playing the fool,” she explained. “But how can you be a Korporant and a fool at the same time? Isn’t that swearing?”
“I was talking about myself.”
“Doesn’t matter, swearing is still swearing, even though you explained that you were doing it for me. I was terribly afraid that you would soon call me a fool, and I decided beforehand that no matter what you call me, I will bear it sweetly; perhaps it will make me a little more mature, as grandfather wishes. But you wanted to leave. Then it occurred to me that you’re a Korporant, and I felt terribly sorry for you.”
“Now I’m starting to understand you a little,” I said. “You have some sort of peculiar conception of Estonians and Estonian students. You think there’s something bold, crude and robust about them, but at the same time cunning, smart and cynical.”
“I really don’t know whether it’s like that,” she said. “But don’t your women members of the Korporation seem very bold, as they sometimes walk down the street, their caps over their eyes or tilted on their heads, and their hair hanging loose. The other students are perhaps even wilder, but I don’t recognise them without their caps on. And yet you shouldn’t think that I mean it badly – not at all. A mature person, a woman too, I suppose, must…”
“… be bold and sturdy,” I interjected, but with a certain hint of irony.
“Exactly,” she affirmed, “bold and sturdy.”
“And isn’t what you say a demonstration that you too can talk about interesting things?” I added.
“You’re wrong,” she replied with conviction. “I say what I think. Of course, my opinion might be silly, as it usually is, I don’t deny it, but it is my opinion. A month or so ago I had a chat with one of our Korporanten about much the same thing. He too called some women bold and sturdy. But when I wanted to know who these women were, he wouldn’t answer. Yet I, as is my wont, stupidly asked him what kind of women the Korporanten liked to sing along with, when drinking their wine. Of course, I asked that because I wanted to be more mature. But he started explaining things in such lofty and idealistic terms that I didn’t feel any more mature; I’d heard it all before and read it in books as well. So I said to him, Why don’t you take me or someone like me along to your drinking sessions, if wine and women are such ideal things? Take me, for goodness’ sake, if you’re a gentleman, take me along with other women and gentlemen, so that I can learn about maturity among the gentlefolk.”
“Did he take you?” I asked with a smile.
“No,” she replied simply.
“So why not?”
“It wasn’t for ladies, he explained to me. But I answered straight away: am I a lady, if I scrub away all day in my apron and teach the ABC to kids? Do ladies ever do such things? Or if they do, are they ladies for long? A lady is always a lady, he replied. And a lady must always remain silly and immature, I concluded. At that point he left me there, because he said I had a wicked tongue. He was no great loss to me, because I hadn’t matured one little bit with that kind of talk. Always the same thing: I’m a lady and therefore nothing is good for me, and since nothing is good for me, I won’t mature, and because I’m immature, I’m not interesting, and if a girl isn’t interesting, she can only hang around with her grandfather and aunt; no boy will find her attractive. You could stay like until you’re a grey-haired old maid and start to shrivel.”
“But I’m starting to love you, I do love you already, I’ve loved you from the start,” I said quietly, almost indifferently, as if I were merely pointing out a fact. I don’t even know why I said it, because I might just as well have said it the next day or the day after. But I must have felt that I had to say those words anyway, and therefore I was saying them then, so that they would no longer trouble my heart or scorch my soul. Of course it was downright stupidity to declare one’s love for anyone, let alone when you’re a Korporant, as she kept emphasising, and when you love someone so madly and rashly as I loved her.
Even today, when I try to understand or explain my declaration of love, I can find no reason other than what must have been the uniqueness of my love at the time. I had previously declared love half a dozen times, but I had always thought of it as a customary or polite gesture, and I had had enough patience to wait for a suitable place and moment. Today it happened on the street in the midst of passing and approaching people, who might even have overheard my declaration. I had taken nothing into account.
Another factor that determined my declaration may have been that she was at such pains to stress her regret that I was a Korporant. Evidently I wanted to prove to her that it didn’t matter that I was in a Korporation, I could still behave in an extraordinary manner even in an exceptional situation. In other words, I was trying to rehabilitate myself and win the young lady’s trust, respect and interest, even if she regretted the excessive sociability of a Korporant. She suspected something of the kind in my actions, because, while at first she couldn’t believe her ears, looking at me inquisitively as if I were mad, her face then turned bright red, so that even her ears glowed; she soon collected herself and said, trying to smile, as if it were all a huge joke, “Does every Estonian Korporant declare his love on the street, or are you the only one?”
“I don’t know about others, but this is the first time I’ve done it,” I replied.
“You mean you’ve declared your love in other places before now?” she asked with a little sting in her tone and a slight tremble in her voice.
“Always other places before now,” I assured her seriously.
“Why do I have the honour of getting it on the street?” she asked. “Is it perhaps because I’m a German? Or am I not enough of a lady, after what I’ve said to you?”
“Please have mercy, miss, and leave off that tone and those words, if you have even a speck of what I see and believe in you. Or do you think it would have been better coming at the lunch table?”
I saw actual terror in her eyes, but the freezing of her lips and the movement of her nostrils cannot have come from that. Instead of blushing, a pallor spread over her whole face. She kept her eyes lowered, twitching her eyebrows, as if trying the brush aside tears. Thus we continued our walk silently for a while. I only noticed that she mechanically changed her pace, to keep in step with me as her companion. After a while she asked, as if in curiosity and fear, “Is that how it comes out then?”