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.