“Don’t worry, something will come,” I replied. “The matter is being sifted and weighed.”
“I’m not worried,” she said, and suddenly in her voice there was a long-dead nuance – something that had been there once and I had had time to forget. “You obviously think that I’m expecting and wishing for you to lose your job.”
“No, I don’t, but…”
“But you have changed your opinion of me quite a lot,” she continued.
“Yes, sometimes I don’t believe my eyes and ears,” I remarked.
“But my opinion of you hasn’t changed,” she said, “except that I have tried to get sense into my head as grandfather wishes, and you also wished once, there on the park bench. That’s all.”
“Then I am the most ungrateful creature in the world,” I said, suddenly feeling tears in my throat. She must have sensed my change of heart, or even sympathised with it, because as we walked she shifted closer to me and was silent for a while.
But then finally came the day when I could tell her that redundancies in the ranks had had their effect on me. She gave me a frightened look, turned her eyes aside and said, “And yet!”
“And yet!” I replied just as tersely, and that was all we had to say on the subject. But both I and probably she, both of us, felt that the last reed of our future hopes had been broken. Of course that reed was more imaginary than real, but it was still something, because at least I had not tired of believing that I might miraculously be spared redundancy, then I would have a little spark of hope for a salary increase which I had been weighing up for a long time. So now everything had vanished, we knew it and we didn’t want to waste a single word or look each other in the eyes. It was made easier by the fact that our meetings still took place in the evenings and on poorly lit roads. One evening she said to me, “Oh, this evening we have to be quick, I’m expected.” She said it as if I were expected with her, so we both had to hurry. But obviously that concept only flashed into my head, as her next words clearly proved: “Do you remember my distant relative who used to say it was interesting to be with Estonian girls, but boring with me? I told you about him once. He’s back here; we’re supposed to go to the cinema together today.”
“Oh yes,” I said rather indifferently, “I do remember.” But behind this apparent indifference was a heart which was writhing in pain, especially as Erika carried on.
“He told me that he wouldn’t even recognise me, I’m supposed to have changed so much. They say my mind has opened up and I talk like a developed person. You see! He says I’ve been developing in the meantime. But you’re not listening to me, you don’t like me talking about him. Did you hear what I said?”
“Of course I did,” I replied with the same indifference. “I heard that you’ve developed in the meantime.”
“Well, good!” she said, relieved. “They say I have the eyes of an adult woman. Have you noticed that my eyes have changed?”
“Not your eyes,” I replied, “but your look, your gaze, maybe that has.”
“Ah, really!” she cried in joyful amazement. “You see, he’s right after all! I thought he was just telling me that, to get grandfather or auntie to say that.”
“Why would grandfather or auntie be made to say that?”
“To get them to – well, they might give a sign that Ervin should try to amuse me, interest me in something – and he’ll start from the assumption that I’ve developed in the meantime. But if you also think that a different look has come into my eyes, then maybe Ervin isn’t for grandfather, but simply for himself.”
“I still don’t understand why grandfather or auntie should…” I wanted to say.
“Ah, you know, lately I’ve been terribly melancholy, and they’re afraid that…”
She didn’t finish, and just as well, because even without that, I realised how silly it was on my part to force her to answer.
“When did you first notice that about my look, or my gaze?” she asked after a short pause.
“After you’d been gone for two days last time and then came back,” I explained, trying to make good my previous clumsy question. “Not only had your look changed, but your whole bearing, your appearance even.”
“So that was it,” she said slowly, as if to herself.
“Yes, that was it,” I repeated, as if I understood what she was thinking.
“But you don’t know what’s behind those words,” she said.
“My visit to your grandfather and the evening on the bench in the park,” I said.
“There’s something quite different, that you have no idea of,” she explained. “Only grandfather and I know about it.”
“And you can’t tell me?” I asked.
“Not at the moment,” she replied.
“Then when?”
“Some time maybe, maybe never,” she said, as if far away with her own thoughts.
“But just now you said you feel the same towards me as ever,” I declared.
“Of course I do, but I didn’t say that before,” she explained.
“Then I’ll repeat your words that distressed me greatly: ‘You love grandfather more than me.’”
“Did those words really distress you?” she asked.
“Terribly!” I assured her.
“I was in terrible pain myself, that’s why I hurt you too,” she explained. “But those words don’t affect me, because we’re talking about what I haven’t confided to grandfather, but what he knew from the start. Without him this couldn’t have come about. This is something between him and me, not between me and anyone else. You understand: this matter only concerns me and grandfather.”
“Then I don’t understand anything at all,” I said, as if satisfied with her explanation, but deep in my heart a worm of doubt was gnawing away. This didn’t concern only her and her grandfather; it couldn’t, as I too must be involved. Finally I felt obliged to ask, “So I have nothing to do with this business?”
“Not a bit,” she affirmed, and added as if in passing, “or if you did, the only explanation I could give is there wouldn’t be anything worth talking about.”
“Can’t you tell me which part of this trifling thing involves me?” I asked.
“Of course I could, very well, but…“
“But … go on and say it!” I cried.
“But that’s just it … I can’t talk about your part in it without explaining my own and grandfather’s, and I can’t do that now on any account,” she concluded, and that didn’t satisfy my curiosity at all, rather it increased it.
In the ensuing days too, whenever I steered the conversation to this secret business, she stayed firm in her resolve: she couldn’t tell me, because it was her own and grandfather’s affair, nothing to do with me. And it was the sort of thing, she said, she wouldn’t tell anyone at all, even if it happened – which it wouldn’t – and if it did happen that she would marry one day, then she wouldn’t tell her husband either, because it would be no concern of his.
“But if your mother were alive and asked you?”
“Yes, I might tell my mother, if she was like I imagine she was,” she replied.
“So you would love your mother more than me,” I concluded, to get her to talk somehow.
“That isn’t love, it’s understanding,” she explained. “Maybe you wouldn’t understand me, but mother would, if she’s the sort of person I imagine she was.”
“Grandfather is for you a substitute for mother then,” I said.
“Exactly,” she affirmed, “for me grandfather often stands in for mother, because auntie is busy with social affairs, she’s never at home and doesn’t love children.”
“You’re no longer a child.”
“In her opinion I’ll always be a child; both of us, grandfather and I, are for her a little like children, and so she keeps her distance, though we all live together.”