“That I regarded the pledge I made to my grandfather as holier than my love, and thus forced you to confirm the decision you had taken, which in your situation was the only right and honest one, was the crime which I cannot forgive myself for. The traces of that crime, no tears, regrets, consolations or explanations can flush from my soul. When I had decided to come to you, as I did that time, no third party should have stood between us any more with a pledge or a vow, not even God or Jesus Christ. And when I gave that pledge to grandfather, I should have completely forgotten it at your place, or I should have broken it with a light and pure heart, and in the full knowledge that I was doing it for our love. But I didn’t have the self-abandonment or the heart to break my pledge, and thus everything that followed could not be avoided. You could not have done otherwise if you really loved me; in that grandfather was right; I could have done otherwise, but I chose not to.
“And the strangest thing of all to me, the most incomprehensible and therefore perhaps the most painfuclass="underline" I didn’t know you as well as grandfather did. Just to think that you love someone as I loved you and still do, and at the same time you can be mistaken about them and left groping around in the dark about who they are, whereas someone else who is standing alongside and looking indifferently, sees everything, understands everything – ah! even now I could lose my mind thinking about it. For grandfather, when he assured me that time that I couldn’t compromise myself, was thinking of nothing else than that. No, you wouldn’t compromise me; you wouldn’t do it, because you have a loyal and honest Estonian heart, as he would put it. Grandfather foresaw how I would come back from my honeymoon, and he feared that I might not survive it. He was wrong about me there, and he feared needlessly, but in the end he may be right in that, as in everything else.
“The only thing that consoles me is that you knew me just as little as I knew you. Even today you probably have no idea that I came to you in full knowledge of the consequences. I packed my little things in the suitcase with deliberation and took it with me. Then you believed the silliest lie about the suitcase instead of guessing the truth. The truth then was the most unbelievable thing in the world to you; what I did was so improbable, and you dared to assume so terribly little of me. You carried in the case in your hand all my body and soul, but had no idea of it. You had a whole world of love to carry, but didn’t notice a thing. You didn’t even understand my madness when I cried out to you in the greatest anguish there on the park bench that you loved my grandfather more than you did me. That was so strikingly stupid on your part, and to this day I wonder why you didn’t kiss me even once, or why I didn’t do that to you, for when I walked beside you, suitcase in hand, I had plenty of time to kiss you, if you didn’t kiss me.
“By the way, Ervin will probably not believe to his dying hour that we didn’t ever kiss each other; all my assurances to the contrary can’t convince him of the truth. To get him to believe it, I also told him how at our last meeting you clutched me around the legs, and what I said to you then, explaining that, if I can tell such a thing, then I would say I say that we didn’t kiss if we had. But even that didn’t help; I could see from his face that he didn’t believe me, and that now he believed me even less. I’ll never forgive him for that, nor that he once said about you, ‘Either he kissed you or he didn’t feel himself man enough to need you as a woman.’ Those two things have perhaps also helped me to write these lines.
“But you mustn’t conclude that Ervin was bad to me – no, certainly not. Likewise you mustn’t think that we had a bad life. We didn’t. He is decent and good to me, and he probably even loves me in his own way, and looks after me as far as it is in his power. As for me, I appreciate him and I can respect him, but to my mind he is a little childish, even childlike sometimes, for he thinks it’s enough to be good to someone and take care of them. He has probably never known what love is. I don’t think he has ever really loved Estonian girls either, although even now he keeps recalling them. But a man who has not really loved is not a real man, for only love is the measure of a man. But he seems to have the understanding of a child.
“Oh yes! Living next door to us is a little boy, Oskar by name, but they call him Ossa. I really like that! I make it my business to go next door, just to hear the mother, a young woman, calling her son Ossa. And I want to see the boy too; he’s terribly manly and reminds me somehow of you. If I have a boy, I’ll definitely call him Oskar and start using Ossa as his nickname. I’ve talked about it to Ervin too; he doesn’t have anything against it, because he doesn’t know that your name is Oskar too and I could call you Ossa, even now. Were you called that when you were little? Ossa, Ossa, Ossa! It sounds like music, it sounds like divine music. Do you still want to hear that music from my lips? When I am no longer around, you can know that I died with that music on my lips.
“The young lady next door, the same one who calls her little boy Ossa, has said to me several times that I’m looking terribly ill. It won’t end well like this, she tells me. She says my workload is too heavy, I should look after myself, my husband should keep an eye on me, to see that I don’t do too much. When she talks like that she always calls me a young madam who shouldn’t live like other people, like farm people, used to everything at ground level. Have some mercy on yourself and your child, young madam, Ossa’s mother says to me, and sometimes she has tears in her eyes – why? I haven’t asked her. It’s good for me to be soothed with words, because she can’t do anything else, and perhaps I go so many times to that farmhouse to hear Ossa’s mother’s soothing words.
“Everything turned out differently to what anyone could expect or assume. Here I am now. In everyone’s faces I read my own death, even grandfather’s face, whom they brought here at my request, and I will certainly die, because I want to die. My child is already dead. She was a daughter and I couldn’t ever have called her Ossa if we had both lived. That is good, it’s best that way, because I feel I loved the name I hoped to give her more I loved than her. It’s also good that there is something in the world that brings oblivion; it’s just a shame that oblivion also expunges love, which is so miraculously beautiful, such a terribly beautiful thing, as you yourself once said, when I still didn’t know what a dreadful thing love is – that it should never vanish.
“But perhaps even death doesn’t bring oblivion? No, no, that cannot be! God cannot have brought people into this world with allowing them a death that leads to oblivion! God could not have given people love without adding the means to obliterate crimes of mercy from their memories! And my last wish, my last anguished cry on this earth to Him is that He forgives me my crime, for which I cannot forgive myself. By keeping my pledge I lost my happiness in life, our dream of life, and now what was killed is dragging me with it, as if the dead were ruling over the living.
“Yet I’m not complaining, I have no grievance. I only feel sorry for you. My pain for your sake is so terrible that I rejoice in death. I don’t have the courage to ask your forgiveness for my crime; it’s much easier for me to die. But if you had to forgive me after all, then I know that we were two foolish children, who took account of a thousand things, in the past, present or even the future, but not of our own love. But when I am no longer here, don’t think of anything else but our love; it will comfort you. Love me a little longer as you loved me when I was alive. It is so easy to die beloved. Not to regret, not to mourn, only to love!