If only I had seen sorrow in her eyes, because what I saw was a great deal more frightening: she gazed at me with the eyes of a woman unnaturally contented with her fate.
He has told us to leave in the morning. The Devil knows where he got the money from, unless all this time he has had a fortune buried somewhere on my land. That is unlikely, for even Beelzebub’s henchmen are not endowed with such patience. Anyway, at least the land is staying in the family. Until today, I would not have believed that he could run a pigsty, let alone a large estate, but now I would not be surprised to learn he was conspiring to acquire the whole municipality.
He is good enough to let me have a mare and a cart. No doubt he expected me to burst into songs of praise. I could argue that household goods are not part of the property, but it would probably not be worth doing so; he seems to be in great favour with the Bailiff. I suppose we must be grateful that we do not have to leave in our birthday suits.
The worst of it is, I can understand him. We have not treated him well. Pride comes before a fall indeed. We are paying now, by humbling ourselves.
Who knows, maybe I will find a position in Turku and I will yet be able to lead a life with Anna that is fit for a human being. Whatever else Henrik may say, he may be right that these times require new men. Fortunately, my aunt’s husband is well connected. According to Mother, he has long hobnobbed with the Russians. I just have to conceal the fact that I enlisted off my own bat to get to slaughter Russkies. The existence of documentary evidence is unlikely, unless Mauri has it under his mattress.
All in all, the more I think about this new turn of events, the more relieved I feel. Before long, I may be able to sleep at nights. Defeat came long ago; postponing its admission has only prolonged my agony. Now, finally facing up to my loss, I am freed.
I look at Erik’s sunken shoulders and I see in him an old man. Tomorrow he will look like the Farmhand. Grim thoughts will thin his hair, his lips will shrivel into dry lines, he will rub his aching loins surreptitiously. He will see the world through melancholy eyes and look away. I approach him from behind, I rest my hand on his shoulder and peer over it out of the window. The snowfall has ceased, the landscape stretches out, shivery and empty. Erik’s nape is cold bone. At times I would like to bury him as if he were a child who had died at my breast.
‘You didn’t have a woman, after all,’ I say.
‘I didn’t.’
‘And I thought you did.’
‘That’s not good.’
He has said sorry this way before. I twist my other arm round his waist. He does not move. He is a tree, abandoned by a forest that has crawled off and left him behind to be battered by the winds.
‘When do we have to leave, then?’ I ask.
‘He said we should go in the morning.’
‘Can he be that cruel?’
He turns; my hold on him loosens. ‘He’s come to an agreement with the Bailiff. Who knows what sort of a pact they have. If we don’t go voluntarily, soldiers might yet come to turf us out.’
When I see his face I understand that he is not crushed by sorrow. He is thoughtful and exhausted, but not sad. Something resembling a smile even plays round his mouth as his eyes travel the drawing room, as if he were seeing it for the last time. He says, ‘Strange how some tend to cling to places and others don’t feel at home anywhere.’
‘How do we know that Henrik hasn’t missed the place?’
His smile is cut deeper by an invisible knife. ‘I didn’t say anything about Henrik.’
‘But you meant him.’
He tilts his head, as he does often when in a playful mood. ‘What if I was talking about myself?’
‘Are you saying you’re suddenly dying to see the world?’
‘Well, I’ve heard there are these women out there,’ he says, and slaps me on the buttock. But instantly, his voice grows serious. ‘We should start getting our belongings together. We won’t take anything big; all the furniture stays here.’
‘How on earth will we manage, then?’
‘We will, somehow. We’ll start with the small things and build up as time goes by.’
‘In Turku?’
‘There or elsewhere. There to start with, at least.’
He leaves the room, lightly, speedily, prepared for the days to come. I am left to soak up this feeling. Soon I will leave these hostile rooms, which I have always roamed as if in a derelict church. Perhaps I will start combing my hair fifty times again, perhaps I will learn the habits of townspeople and take to sniffing contemptuously when I recall all this. It is good we are leaving. Our departure is already within me, awaiting birth.
I will not even bother to say goodbye to Father. I can see him sitting in the kitchen, swollen with inactivity and agreeably weary of everything. He would raise his warm, listless, indifferent gaze to me and say yes before even hearing me out. He would wag a fat finger at me and say something like, ‘Feel free to leave. Just don’t say one word about that animal.’
I had to wait outside at first. It was summer. The sickly-sweet scent of the lilacs floated in the shadows of the garden, and as the evening thickened into night, the birds of the dark began singing. One of the downstairs windows of the big house was open, letting out pale light and men’s voices into the yard. I could hear one man’s triumph and another’s disappointment. I promised to keep my mouth shut but I did not yet understand how profitable silence was. I was pleased when the maid was sent to bring me ale and sustenance. I thought it would always be my lot to be thankful for crumbs from others’ tables.
Come the autumn, I was allowed into the porch. I sat on an uncomfortably rickety chair, the smell of foreign tobacco wafting towards me from the drawing room, late-night carriages clanking past in the street. I tried not to look at the woman staring down at me from a painting hung between two candlesticks on the wall. I thought how grand it must be, to live in a pile like this. I myself would have loved to be a man with the money and the daring to hang naked women, breasts pendulous as sacks of flour, on the walls of a handsome villa.
Sometimes, the door leading into the drawing room was left ajar, and by craning my neck I could see them, sitting at a round table surrounded by grand furniture and busts twisted into strange positions. There were bottles and glasses on the table. The master of the house would always have his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up high on his muscular arms. The others, too, had loosened their clothing; only Erik squatted stiff and formal in his ill-fitting Sunday jacket and unstarched loose collar. He was so obviously a peasant, lost among townsmen. I believe he kept me with him for that very reason; he might have come from the country but he still had a manservant. I was sure he wouldn’t tell anyone that we were related.
He behaved well and with restraint, eyeing his cards coolly and, upon winning, shrugging off the other men’s congratulations. He resembled a gravedigger, or a verger in his Sunday best, who is privately mulling over a bottle he has concealed in the chapel foundations, or the tribulations of his wife, languishing in confinement, but who behaves in front of the congregation as if filled with the Holy Spirit. He barely touched a drop of liquor, merely moistened his lips with it cautiously from time to time. When he finally got up from the table at an early hour of the morning, he was in the habit of bowing clumsily to the other players and taking leave of them in such an everyday manner that he might as well have been leaving a meeting of the village society.