“Exactly,” affirmed the landlady, “or you turn the whole world upside down to lure the eyes of happiness into your room.”
“For otherwise there’d be no one to divorce a couple of years later,” mocked her husband.
“Rubbish!” she shouted. “Let’s ask Mr Studious whether he would be thinking of a divorce a couple of years later, if he got those eyes that shine the joy of his life?”
“I don’t know any such eyes,” I lied.
“And you never have?” she asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied hesitantly, as if trying to recall something.
“You don’t think so,” she repeated. “That’s just it! I simply don’t believe that there could be any natural young man anywhere who hasn’t dreamt of eyes that glow with the joy of life. Those who say so are fibbing or they don’t know themselves. It’s the same story with you. I’ve already told you once that if I were a young man of your age, I would have long ago fallen head over heels for our young lady, asked for her hand in marriage and maybe even eloped with her, if there had been no other way out. But you sit with her at the table as if you were made of wood, or you were keeping a bag of ice under your heart.”
Things were becoming embarrassing for me, so I had to be extremely much on guard. The only incomprehensible issue was whether the landlady was talking like this intentionally and deliberately to tease me, or was doing it because she hadn’t the faintest idea of my relationship with Erika.
“A practical question,” said the man, turning to his spouse, “is where would you elope to with a young lady like ours, if you had the same income as this young man?”
“Ah, where?” wondered the lady. “Doesn’t matter where. How about Haapsalu or Tapa?”
“And for how long?”
“For a couple of days, for then everything would be facing the inevitable.”
“Very good,” said her husband. “But meanwhile, what’s the situation with your position in service, your only source of income? The gentlemen in a ministry, a bank or an office are of course very concerned about where our precious young man has got to, what unfortunate thing has happened to him, aren’t they? No, my dear woman, under those circumstances you wouldn’t elope anywhere, and you wouldn’t find a single sensible girl who’d want to commit that foolishness with you. For after a couple of days, when you come back, someone else is sitting in your place at the ministry, bank or office, who isn’t liable to go off eloping. And the girl in whose eyes the joy of your life recently glowed, will cry her eyes out when she sees how rapidly she has made herself and others face the inevitable.”
“If all young people thought like you, there would be half as many marriages,” she told her husband.
“Mr Studious can draw only one conclusion from that: he has a long way to the harbour of marriage. He can’t elope with any girl worth eloping with, and without eloping he won’t get, or won’t be allowed near, any girl that he’d want to elope with.”
That was the brief outcome of a long discussion, which was a bad prediction for my love. And that prediction came true quite quickly, more quickly that I could ever have guessed.
When Erika appeared a couple of days later at the lunch table, she was paler and sadder than ever before. To the landlady she said the reason was her bad health, excessive tiredness, her grandfather’s illness and several other distresses burdening her soul and body.
In the evening, when I met her outdoors, she told me that she had no time at all, but added straight away to console me that grandfather was expecting me the next day between ten and eleven because then her aunt would not be at home. She herself would be going out at that time, she said, so that grandfather and I could be quite alone. I did plead with her to sacrifice half or a quarter of an hour to me, but in answer she only quickened her step, hurrying homeward at a half-run as if her house were on fire.
“What point is there in me coming to chat with grandfather tomorrow if you treat me like this yourself?” I said finally, while trying to keep up with her pace. “For three days I’ve been waiting for you as the blessing of my soul, and now you run away from me to your grandfather and aunt. I can only draw one conclusion from this: you don’t care for me at all or you keep your heart more for your family and relations.”
Now she slackened her pace, almost wanted to grasp my hand and cried, with tears in her throat, “Have pity on me, at least you!”
That shut my mouth, because suddenly I had a feeling that I should take her like a little chick and pucker my lips to her, as I had so often done with their down feathers. What else should I say?
“This is terrible,” I said at length. “Otherwise today is so beautiful again, after a long time: clear sky, stars shining. See how many there are! The land is dry and frost-covered, but we’re running side by side as if we were being chased.”
“Don’t you remember any more what you once said about love?” she said.
No, I didn’t remember anything special, for I had said this and that about it.
“You called it horrible,” she said. “I didn’t believe you then, but now I’m starting to. You must be a lot cleverer than I am.”
“Everything’s supposed to be foolish about love,” I said.
“I’d like to be a lot more foolish than I am,” she sighed after a little while.
“So would I,” I said, “only if it rescued the love. If only we didn’t need to run like this, as if love were running away from us.”
But we had reached the street corner where she usually stretched out her hand to me. When she did that today, she said, “Tomorrow then, between ten and eleven.”
“Tomorrow,” I replied. “But when will you have time for me?”
“Tomorrow too,” she replied, and left, as if it were hard for her to stay longer in my presence. I stood on the spot like a post, where she had left me, and I didn’t move until a couple came along who bumped into me as they passed; then I turned around and went back. Only some while later did I notice that I was walking those streets where we had so often walked together. And I took it upon myself that day to walk through all the places that had been touched by her feet, viewed by her eyes. I did it as a sort of test of whether I could be in one evening in all the places where we had spent time over the weeks.
When I had tramped enough cobblestones I went to the park and to those trails we had measured with our steps countless times. I even went to look at our shelter, and as luck would have it there was no one there that day. Like a wolf in the dead of night I crept finally under that spruce where we had last sought cover from the rain. I supported my back against the trunk and stood there, hands pushed deep into my pockets.
As I started walking back, the grass and moss had frozen, and crunching underfoot. I was content to go on walking on that frozen moss, but on hearing that crunching sound, it brought a painful feeling to my breast, as if, step by step, I were trampling something to pieces.
And as I now think back to that feeling, it seems to me that to this day I’ve done nothing else than trample something to pieces in myself – step by step, day by day, hour by hour. Writing these lines now is surely nothing other than trampling all that happened to pieces, to get rid of her, because otherwise I couldn’t go on living. And if that really were the case, what does it mean to a person that the heavens are broad and high, and millions of stars shine in them, created by God? What are these great and beautiful things for, if we have to crush everything beautiful in ourselves? Or must the heavens and their stars and God the creator exist just for that reason? Yes, maybe just for that reason, for otherwise there would be so many who couldn’t stand their own lives. The moon and its quarters, the sun and the clouds, spring and autumn, summer and winter, warmth and cold – perhaps they all exist only for a fool like me to have something to anticipate, hope for and believe in, so that procreation and death will not end.