‘She should know about seeing stars, the way her old man knocks her about.’ He folded back his newspaper. ‘It’s superstition, Eevi. It’s to make people feel better about their lives, without doing anything to change them.’
She’d felt crushed. She’d avoided Mrs Peltonen on the landing for weeks, even though she loved the way Mrs Peltonen smelled of bread and called her ‘my little golden one’.
Eeva laid the paper straight in front of her, and dipped the pen in the inkwell. A heavy drop wobbled on the end of the nib. She tapped off the excess. She had forgotten how satisfying it was to have a pen that was just right, that sat in your hand and was full of words you hadn’t even thought of yet.
She looked out through the attic window. There were the trees, marching eastward towards where Lauri was. Her city was still there and her words would reach it.
11
Dear Lauri
You will be surprised to hear from me after so long. I am in service with a widowed doctor. I keep house for him. Do you ever visit the place you said that you would visit? If you write to me at this address I will get the letter. All the letters that come to the house are put on a table in the hall, for the doctor.
I hope that you and all our friends are well and that you have not forgotten me. Remember me to your father.
Your friend,
Eeva
Your friend, Eeva. Lauri was clever, he would understand that she was being careful. They had both been brought up to watch what they said outside the house. He’d know that she wasn’t writing freely. He’d understand what she meant by telling him about the doctor’s post table. He would write back just as guardedly, knowing that his letter might be read by other eyes than hers.
But suddenly caution sickened her. She leaned back from the table, distancing herself from the letter. And then what, she asked herself. I send a letter which says nothing, and Lauri sends back a letter which says nothing. Where does that get us? No, why be so careful if it means that there’s no meaning left?
She laid the letter to one side, and took another sheet of paper. She’d write again, differently. She would ask the doctor for an advance out of her wages, and pay her own postage. Matti would post a letter for her. He’d think it was a love letter.
Dear Lauri
It’s so long since I saw you. Sometimes I think I can’t remember what you look like, and when I do remember, your face is angry, just as it was the last time. Do you remember? You wanted to fight them when they took me away. And I said inside myself, ‘Don’t fight, Lauri, don’t give them any excuse to hurt you.’
I wonder where you’re working? I’m in service, that’s what we all go on to when we leave the House of Orphans. They train us up for it. The training seemed to last for ever, but when I look back it seems a short time.
There’s just me here but the work isn’t heavy. I don’t do the charring and the laundry is sent out. I work for a doctor who is widowed and has one daughter who never comes to see him. He’s a Swede. It’s not a bad job but this place is stuck out in the forest and at night you can hear the trees rustling and the wind, and nothing else. There are no lights and no people.
I’ve already lived three lives. Our life in Helsinki that you know about, the House of Orphans, and here. I don’t know how many lives you’ve lived. I’m the one who went away, and it’s easy to believe that the ones who stayed behind are still the same, but I know it isn’t true. Things have happened to you too, Lauri, and you won’t be the same. Maybe you aren’t even living at your apartment any more, and so you won’t get this letter, unless the person who lives there now knows where you are. You could be anywhere. Didn’t Mika used to talk about going to Petersburg again? Maybe that’s where you are.
I must finish now. I’ve got cakes to bake for tomorrow. I nearly started to write about all the things we used to do, but I don’t need to remind you about them. No, you’ll understand that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to write to you before, it was that I couldn’t. Maybe I could have found a way round it, but I didn’t.
You remember how they were always telling us the world was changing? Here, it hasn’t changed at all. It’s like stepping back a hundred years. When I see you, maybe you won’t be the Lauri I remember. You won’t have your blue cap, and you won’t be able to run faster than me and get to the corner just a bit ahead of me, and your hair will have fallen out. You’ll be an old man and you’ll say, ‘Where have you been, Eeva? I gave up thinking of you long ago. I waited for a long while but I couldn’t wait any more.’ And then you’ll show me your great-grandchildren.
But even if you can’t answer this letter, Lauri, keep it. Keep it as a talisman.
Your friend,
Eeva
She sealed the letter, and wrote Lauri’s address on the front. Then she sat for a while, gazing out of the window without seeing anything. At last, as if something had been decided, she took another sheet of paper and copied the first letter she’d written, changing Lauri’s name. When she’d finished, she invented an address.
What do they do with a letter when the address on it doesn’t exist? Eeva didn’t know, but she thought that the letter would be put away somewhere in a corner of a post office, to gather dust. She would give it to the doctor. Even if he opened it, he’d find out nothing.
Thomas held the letter Eeva had given him to post. She’d already sealed it and written the direction. Strange, he couldn’t recall a street of that name in Helsingfors. But she must know. Probably it was in one of the new workers’ quarters that were springing up in the factory district.
He looked at the lines of the address. Her writing was good. An educated hand, almost an elegant one. How had she come by such handwriting? She’d written those words with the pen he had given her. It was his paper, his envelope. But these elements that belonged to him had become Eeva’s letter, just as the food that belonged to him went into Eeva’s body and became part of her.
He could own the food and the ink and the paper but he couldn’t own her words or the mysterious change which transformed his food into the flesh that tormented him. Don’t fool yourself, he thought. She was a servant and there were holes in her stockings, and yet she could write as well as Minna. Again he had the sense of another self inside her, inaccessible. What words had that private Eeva made?
He saw her as clearly as if he’d been in that attic room. He saw her dip her pen decisively in the pool of ink, and write on the creamy surface of the paper he’d given her. He saw her catch her under lip with her teeth, and look up with her green eyes, then down, into her private self.
He had to know. He held the envelope she’d given him up to the light. There was just one folded sheet of paper, no more. Thomas could see the darker outline of the paper within the envelope. He could open it and reseal it and she would never know.
No. No, he wouldn’t. What kind of a man would do that, in his own house?
He laid Eeva’s letter down on the silver tray that held his letters. His house was around him, with all its habits. His hall with its smell of polished wood, the oak post table, the pair of high-backed chairs that no one ever sat on. All of these belonged to him and had shaped him. Before he was even born, he had walked in this hall inside his mother’s body. Eeva was like the bird in the tale, that blew from one end of the hall to another, from dark night into dark night. She had no connection here. She was an orphan and a girl from nowhere, from generations of people who had owned nothing and left no mark on the earth.
She’ll go away, he thought. She’ll leave and I’ll never find her.
I could pay her more. I could arrange lessons for her. No one ever plays Minna’s piano. Eeva might like to learn.
As if Eeva had already learned, he seemed to hear the notes moving in the quiet hall. Her fingers would be sure on the keys. She would be one of those players who seem to listen their way into the music.
Something’s happening to me, he thought. I’m going crazy. Lotta’s right, I ought not to be livin
g out here like this, with Johanna dead. Lotta wants me to move into town and shut this place up. Well, maybe I should consider it.
But he knew he would not. He felt a pulse of pleasure at the bare thought of everything Lotta didn’t know and would never guess. Eeva, he thought. Eeva. In the kitchen, now at this moment, Eeva was. She would be stepping from sink to table, her heels clap-clapping. She would brush a piece of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand, because her hands were floury.
Eeva was under his roof. Let Lotta put that in her pipe and smoke it, he thought, his teeth bared in a grin Lotta had never seen.
Eeva gave her letter to Matti, with money for the stamp. She’d told the doctor that she needed an advance on her wages to buy personal things. As she’d reckoned, he asked no questions. Matti folded the letter away inside his jacket. His hands had a way of seeming careful of what they held, as if it were alive or might be. She trusted Matti: he would post her letter. Matti couldn’t read, but he admired Eeva’s handwriting. ‘It’s as good as the doctor’s,’ he said. ‘Where did you learn that?’
‘My father taught me.’
‘Ah.’
Matti wasn’t a man of words. He didn’t read them or trust them much. ‘Don’t you worry about your letter, Eeva. I’ll see it gets there safe, far as I can.’
He had that natural delicacy which stopped him asking who the letter was for, or what it was about. She stood in the kitchen doorway and the warm spring wind made her skirt billow, then blew it back against her body. She was wearing a clean white apron and the sun was so brilliant that they both shaded their eyes.
‘Well, this won’t get my carrots planted,’ he said. ‘Soil’s just right, warmed up nicely. Anything you put in on a day like this’s going to grow.’
‘I’ll come and look at the kitchen garden,’ she said. She had a hunger for outdoors. At home she would have walked down to the wide, blowy harbour, to see the ships set out for Stockholm and Talinn and Bremen and Petersburg and all the far places. There were roads in the sea just as there were roads on the land, her father said. The emigrants went out from Hangö, and then they sailed to a place in England called Hull, then they took the big ships from Liverpool to America. That was the road they took.
She missed the smell and sight of the sea, and the feeling it gave that you could go anywhere and find new worlds if the old one wasn’t good enough. Matti had never seen the sea.
‘I’ll come now,’ she said, and untied her white apron so it wouldn’t get dirty. They walked together around the house, down the path, through the hedge and into the kitchen garden. It faced south, and was set on sloping ground to trap every drop of sun. It had the dazed look of a garden in spring, with the earth turned and broken and smoothed again, the fruit bushes unwrapped from their winter wadding of straw, and the glass cloches glinting with reflected sun. The soil Matti had dug and raked that morning was still damp, and a darker brown than the bare surrounding soil. The breeze ran over it, drying it. Eeva stooped to crumble the earth between her fingers. It smelled good. Sun and rain had got into it and sweetened the sour smell of winter.
‘I’ve never grown anything,’ she said.
He stared at her.
‘I haven’t. Not a single flower.’
‘You’re a real city girl, you are, eating potatoes all your life without knowing where they come from.’
‘They come out of sacks in the market, and if you’ve no money you can’t have them, I know that.’
‘Well, there’s the difference. As long as I’ve got my patch of earth, I don’t have to ask anyone for anything. All this here is grown for the house, but I keep my own garden.’
‘What do you grow?’
‘Same as I do here. Potatoes, cabbage, onions, carrots, beetroot, dill, cucumbers. I don’t bother with all these fine salads the doctor likes. Raspberries I grow, and white currants. These here, Eeva, they’re raspberry canes. The wild ones are the sweetest but for size you need the cultivars.’
He looked at home here, as if he owned the garden, Eeva thought.
‘Have you been inside our glasshouse, Eeva?’
‘No.’
‘It’s something to see. You want to take a look?’
‘All right.’
It was the doctor’s folly. He kept the glasshouse stoves burning through the winter, to keep out the frost. Pipes wriggled along the walls, filled with hot water. He’d had the system installed, on an English pattern. There was a vine, and citrus trees in pots which had been brought back from Italy one summer years ago. Matti said the word ‘citrus’ with pride, and told her that it meant oranges, and lemons. She didn’t say that she knew it already.
Matti opened the door. The air was dry and she snuffed the glasshouse smell of soil and earthenware and trapped sun. She could smell the lemon trees, too. They had fruit on them, green and yellow, and there were flowers opening on the trees at the same time. The leaves were dark and leathery, and the trees were as tall as Eeva, standing in their pots. She smelled the small waxen flowers, and their scent was so powerful that she closed her eyes.
‘They take up more water than you’d think, for all they come from a hot country’ said Matti, bending to test the soil. ‘In Italy they have systems to irrigate them, so the doctor says. He’s been there a fair few times.’
‘What does he do with the lemons? I’ve never seen them in the kitchen.’
‘He uses them for medicine. Spring tonics and such.’
She put her hand under the ripest of the fruit, weighing it. How strange to hold a fruit when it was still alive and growing, instead of when it was rolled into a heap on a market stall. The lemon was perfect, like a model of itself.
‘Should you like to taste it?’ Matti asked. He took out his clasp-knife, opened the blade, and cut the stem of the lemon. The blade of his knife looked worn and thin, but the lemon fell plump into his hand. ‘There you are, Eeva. It’s for you.’
‘Thank you, Matti.’ He’d acted so swiftly she hadn’t had time to stop him. Who’d have thought Matti would do that? She wouldn’t have stopped him anyway. Imagine her having a lemon in her hand that had been cut from a living tree, while she watched.
‘I wonder what it tastes like.’
‘I’ll cut it for you.’
He brushed some crumbs of soil from the board shelf by the glasshouse door, and laid the lemon on it. His clasp-knife sliced through skin and flesh, and the lemon fell into two pieces. Beads of juice sprang onto the cut surface, like beads of sweat. She picked up one half, and held it to her nose. The scent was quite different from the scent of shop lemons. It was fragrant and fruity, but not acid at all. She put out her tongue and licked off the beads of ripe juice.
‘I like it,’ she said.
‘You should squeeze it out and make yourself a little drink. Lemon cleanses the blood.’
‘Don’t you want to taste it?’
‘That’s not my style, Eeva.’
And all the time, she thought, her letter was there in his jacket pocket, growing warm with the warmth of the glasshouse. She felt herself flushing with the heat. It was like being in the sauna, sweat prickling on her skin like a thousand bees. But in the sauna you are naked, your skin like that lemon with the juice on it.
‘I come in here sometimes, in winter, just for a warm-up,’ said Matti. ‘But I keep the door locked, ‘case someone gets in careless, and leaves the door open and we lose the trees and the vine.’ The stubby ends of the vine had buds beginning to break.
‘Is it a grape-vine? Do real grapes grow on it?’
She had seen grapes, but never tasted them. She had seen them pyramided in the windows of expensive shops.
‘You’ll see them in the autumn. Fine grapes we grow here. When Mrs Eklund was alive she’d have them in the centre of the table on a white dish, with the bloom still on them. She’d come down here and cut a bunch for the table, with a pair of silver scissors she had. I never cut a bunch the whole season.’
‘But you do
now.’
‘That’s right. ‘Less you come down and cut them for me? It’s a woman’s place to do that, it seems to me. Mrs Eklund never washed the grapes ‘fore they came to table, to keep the bloom on them. She kept a bowl of water on the table to wash the grapes.’
Eeva saw herself in this same glasshouse, when the bare vine was thick and heavy with fruit. She wasn’t sure how grapes grew. Did they hang off the branches, like apples?
‘Most likely the doctor’s still got those silver scissors somewhere.’
‘What was she like?’
But he stared, blank, as if the question held no meaning for him, and she was embarrassed at having asked.
‘I’d better get back,’ she said, and saw that Matti was relieved. He wanted to be alone now, back with his glasshouse and his soft black earth waiting for the carrot seed. He’d wanted her here, and now he didn’t.
You won’t forget my letter? she wanted to ask, but she kept silent. That was the way she knew, keeping silent and waiting.
Clouds had blown over the sun. Good spring weather, sun and then rain. She was restless inside herself. It was spring fever, she knew that. You ate salads of young nettle shoots and dandelion leaves, to curb it. Or else you found a boy and went walking with him where no one else would find you. Her body shivered. She’d never done that, never gone courting as they called it. ‘You’ll be educated, Eevi,’ her father had said. ‘You’ll make something of your life. Everything’s changing and the more it changes the better the world will be.’ But she’d ended up in the House of Orphans all the same. So what, she told herself. I’m out of that now. That was just a stage. A historical stage, she added, smiling, remembering the phrases that had droned in the background while she read and worked.
Her letter would go to Helsinki. She could trust Matti for that. But it was quite possible that Lauri wouldn’t answer it.
She walked back to the house.
‘You’re on your own, my girl,’ she muttered to herself in the rough voice she sometimes had to use against her own weakness. She stopped under one of the young birches Matti said the doctor had planted, to replace some that had been cut down. The leaves were unfolding, green and tender as they’d never be once the sun and wind had hardened them. She looked up at the colour of green against the blue sky that was half blotted with clouds. It was as true as she stood there. She felt the words coming true inside her. She was on her own and her life belonged to her, only to her.