‘You came to visit,’ I say.
He takes his time replying. ‘Depends how you see it. To visit or to stay.’
‘St Petersburg wasn’t up to much, then?’
‘Some of us can’t stand being in one place for too long.’
‘We know. You went on a long trip, anyway.’
Those hard, lidless eyes of his. He still thinks he can use them to drill all courage out of a person. If I were another kind of man, I would gouge them out of his head, though he is my brother. But he would probably scare folk to death with his sockets alone.
‘I happened to hear in the village,’ the Farmhand suddenly says, ‘that if someone has run away from the Emperor’s army and if that someone happens to be wise, he hides away in some backwater.’
Henrik turns to stare at him and says, in a voice that tells me his grey eyes have blackened, ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Just sprang to mind,’ the Farmhand replies. ‘I’ve heard of such men.’
‘Such men should have sought an honourable discharge,’ Henrik says. ‘I can tell them how it’s done.’
The Farmhand nods. ‘I’m sure you can. But someone mentioned another thing: that some men have had experience of being cheated of an animal and then of another, a mare the second time round, and that such men should consider…’
‘What mare?’ Henrik interrupts. He stands stock still, dangerously relaxed, his hands by the side of his thighs, and scorches the Farmhand with his gaze. Only now do I discern Mauri, small, shivering and frail, near the stable wall. I had all but forgotten him. Henrik turns to me. ‘Is there not an almshouse in the village? Be a good place for old folk who have lost their wits.’
‘I expect there’s an almshouse,’ I say, ‘but I don’t happen to know anyone who should be carted there.’
Instantly, Henrik smiles his rare, long-toothed smile. ‘Is that the word of the master?’
‘The word of the master of this house, at least.’
The grin freezes on his face. ‘Very well. But perhaps we’d better go indoors to talk. As long as you keep that ancient lunatic away from me.’
‘I don’t normally need to be kept away from anybody,’ the Farmhand says calmly. ‘I suffer from a malady that keeps me away without being restrained.’
Henrik snorts and starts towards the step. I have never heard the Farmhand whistling before. The action carves deep holes into his already sunken face.
Mauri lurks close to the stable wall, not moving. He is sucked into the wall as if he has been left there by mistake. The shadows of the forest edge creep towards the field, and yet the sky is a single smoky cloud. I thought I would resolve the matter, I really did. But I bloody well did not.
I have kept his clothes in chests; I do not know why. It is certainly not for sentimental reasons. Living with a man could be compared to sharing your home with a dog or a pig, or a creature from another country – a monkey, say. Any one of those could grow dearer to your heart than a man. Not that I hated him. I could not be bothered, I lacked the energy, and to be fair, he never came into the house in muddy boots.
If I had stooped to hatred, I suppose I should have hated my father. Admittedly, the only cause for hatred he gave was his miserable failure. And he hardly set out to run his affairs into the ground, to the point where he had to marry his daughters off in a hurry; otherwise, he would have had to include them in his firm’s list of losses, along with the other unpaid debts. And I could not even take malicious pleasure in the fact that my older sister was more or less forced to marry her short-sighted accountant. She, at least, was able to stay in Turku. My destiny, on the other hand, turned out to be a man who surfaced from the back of beyond. He was a relative of one of Father’s business acquaintances, and prepared to make certain financial sacrifices in order to acquire a particular item to take home with him. In his far-flung native district, they called this item not ‘the lady of the house’ but ‘the housekeeper’.
I took little notice of him at the beginning, when he began to frequent the soirées we held at our house; he was a taciturn outsider, sitting on the periphery of the company, laughing hoarsely at all the witticisms later than everyone else. One evening, however, when all the other guests had departed, I noticed to my horror that my parents had left me alone in the drawing room with this odd stranger.
I could put up with all his quirks, apart from the way he fiddled incessantly with his waistcoat buttons. This action drew my gaze to his long, crooked fingers and aroused unclean thoughts. His dark, shining eyes, which all the time moved about uncertainly, posed further difficulties, and to me he seemed near-decrepit. All the same, good manners required that I listen to him. When I did so, I woke up to find myself staring deeply into a black abyss. I understood that a decision had already been made and that this conversation was nothing but a formality. I bitterly regretted having learnt to swim, in defiance of the conventions governing girls in our circle. I could not even usefully throw myself into a river.
‘It’s the biggest house in the area,’ Arvid said in his gruff, muted voice. He did not speak with any pride, he merely stated the fact coldly. He was peering at a space somewhere between my feet and the wall. ‘And it’s not far from Vaasa. And you can visit the capital, too.’
‘So it’s in the country,’ I said. My voice could have come out of the pocket of his much-abused waistcoat. ‘I suppose you have domestic animals.’
‘Domestic animals?’ he repeated. He looked baffled for a moment. ‘Aha, you mean cattle. Yes, we’ve got cattle and fields. As I said, it’s the biggest farm in the village.’
I tried desperately to think of something sensible to ask. ‘Will I have to milk cows, then?’
He appeared determined to pluck a button off his waistcoat. ‘No need. There are maids for all that.’
‘Do you have dances?’
A rivulet of perspiration appeared on his forehead and set off on a journey towards one of his bushy, near-black eyebrows. ‘Of course there are dances. In summer in particular, we have fêtes. A really big fête at Midsummer, and dances at weddings, of course.’
We were quiet for a while, I chewing my tongue secretly, he staring tenaciously at a space where I saw only the toe of my shoe, sticking out from under the hem of my dress, and floorboards, and a smattering of dust the maid must have missed. Then he sat up straight, left his buttons in peace and began looking at me with the same expression I had once seen on a shaggy male dog in the street, just before it mounted a passing bitch.
‘I can buy a new carriage,’ he said. ‘A real carriage with a canopy.’
‘And a piano?’
‘Of course a piano.’ Relief spread across his face. ‘How could I forget? It was uppermost in my mind. I must get a piano.’
I have still not seen that piano. Instead, I gradually became used to this house and to people whose speech tells you they have rough palms. I did not even try to get used to the desolation of the fields and the menace of the forests, but I did find a place on the riverbank where I could sit by myself among the subdued murmur of the water and the scent of leaves decomposing in the shadow of the embankment, without hating anybody. I learnt to understand housekeeping and the significance of each of the individuals who have ended up in this household, especially that of the Farmhand, who has always been much more important than one might deduce from his station. When I began carrying Henrik in my womb, I was afraid, but I decided to cease fearing. I sensed that motherhood was terrible, perhaps sweet at times, but above all terrible. Not because one human child would be more horrendous than another, nor is it so that offspring cannot bring joy when little and be useful when grown up, but because motherhood makes it possible for future generations to be rocked by dark tragedies. On the other hand, I concluded, it could not be my fault alone. I could not be its origin. There must have been before me, maybe long ago, a woman who sinned gravely and who left her fall as a legacy to her female offspring: an Eve of her generation who had imagined she would be forced to milk cows with her fine, delicate hands.