House of Orphans

  She was squatting down now, intent on something. A bee.

  ‘No, Minna! Don’t stroke a bee.’

  She looked round at him, her hands braced on her knees, her face alive with pure, intelligent curiosity.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it can’t help stinging you. Look.’

  He went over to her, and showed her where the bee kept its sting.

  ‘It wouldn’t want to sting you, Minna, because when a bee stings it dies. But it wouldn’t be able to help itself, if it was frightened, or angry.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You can look at bees as much as you like, but don’t touch them.’

  He went and sat down again. Now she was collecting sticks, pretending to make a fire and singing to herself. She seemed perfectly happy. It was a little cooler in the forest, although the air was still close. Probably it would thunder again that night, when she was in bed, and then in the morning the air would be fresh and sweet. But it was good for her to run around in her petticoat. That dress was too tight.

  There she was, his little girl. It was as if he’d never realized it properly before. I have a little girl. I have a daughter, he thought. For the first time it seemed like a bag of riches that would be slowly undone, year by year. When they’d first told him he had a daughter he’d gone in and there she was, already swaddled in her cradle, neat and tidy, like Johanna’s doll. He hadn’t picked her up.

  It was getting late. She’d be wanting something to eat.

  ‘Shall we go home soon?’ he called to Minna across the clearing.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘All right. We’ll play a little longer.’

  ‘I’m not playing, I’m cooking the dinner,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you are. I’m sorry, I didn’t see. Can I have some when you’ve finished?’

  She nodded, and bustled off to fetch more sticks for her fire. All the years to come, he’d thought with sudden happiness, leaning against the tree trunk.

  But it hadn’t happened like that, and here he was, and here she was.

  ‘I’ll get us some more coffee,’ he said. ‘Don’t leave yet, Minna.’

  ‘Lotta’s very angry.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine.’

  ‘But you don’t care.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Lotta’s one of my oldest friends. What she thinks is important to me.’

  ‘But not quite important enough,’ said Minna. ‘Not important enough to stop you doing what you want.’

  ‘Haven’t you done what you wanted?’

  She shrugged. ‘Out of all the things I could have done, you mean? Out of all the many possibilities that were open to me?’

  ‘There were other things you could have done.’

  ‘I’m married, Father. I have my own house. No one tells me what to do. If I choose to leave this house tonight or next week, that’s my own decision.’

  He could well believe it. She was stronger than Ulf and she would rule the marriage.

  ‘But you’ll have children, Minna. Everything changes then.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

  He looked at her in surprise. ‘But surely –’

  ‘No. You have no idea what my life is like. You’ve never once visited us. You don’t want to see my life. All you care about is your own.’

  The injustice of it brought his anger up to the surface at last.

  ‘So when did you invite me?’

  ‘When did I invite you! You’re my father. Strangers wait for invitations. No, you don’t want to come because you’d rather stay here where you can control everything. This house, Lotta, all your patients who are so grateful to you, everyone who thinks it’s so sad that Mother died and that all you’ve got left is a daughter who doesn’t care about you, your damned trees that you keep planting everywhere so there’s no light in this house, the memory of this and the memory of that – yes, you love it, don’t you? And for heaven’s sake don’t ever take the risk of travelling a hundred miles and getting some perspective on it. And now, to make it all perfect, you’ve got this girl to moon after.’

  ‘Minna!’

  ‘Yes, it’s shocking, isn’t it? You would never have thought I could be so coarse. But I most certainly can be. Mooning after, that describes it exactly. And unlike me, she’s stuck here. She can’t get away from you. Have you ever thought about that? No, I know what you think: Poor old Minna, married to that dreary Ulf, no wonder she’s so narrow-minded and can’t understand my rich, complex life. Yes, I may be narrow-minded, but at least I’ve got a heart. I feel sorry for her, if you want to know. That girl. Just because she’s poor and ignorant, she has to put up with you, and she can’t get away.’

  They glared at each other. Both had risen from their chairs. Both had their fists clenched, pressed against their thighs.

  She was still there, he realized with a shock of recognition. That little girl, so angry and passionate; she hadn’t died. She was still there, inside Minna. He’d got so used to the thought that she was Johanna’s daughter, cool, critical and graceful like her mother, and he hadn’t seen that there were other sides to her, equally powerful, but held in shadow. But now the hot light of her anger made them visible.

  ‘Don’t go yet, Minna,’ he said again, but in quite a different tone. ‘I want you to stay.’

  She was listening, alert as a fox. ‘You want me to stay?’

  ‘Yes. You’re my daughter. It’s been far too long since I saw you. I didn’t realize that you were waiting for me to visit. I was thoughtless, I see that now.’

  ‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll stay for a while.’

  And then he went too far. As soon as the words were out he knew they should never have been said. ‘I know it must seem like madness. I don’t know why I feel like this about her, but –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about it. If you talk like that any more, I’ll leave at once.’

  ‘We won’t talk about it,’ he promised her quickly. ‘Sit down, Minna, I’ll see about that coffee. And you must have something to eat. You’ve eaten nothing.’

  He went out, closing the door. And there she was, as if she’d appeared out of his longing. Eeva, standing stock-still, with a letter in her hand. He hadn’t even looked at the post that morning. He’d completely forgotten it.

  She heard him and turned, stuffing the letter into the folds of her skirt as if she thought he’d snatch it from her. Her face was transformed, flushed with triumph and relief. Her eyes were wide, their pupils dilated as if she’d just emerged from a dark hiding place. He would never have thought Eeva could look like that. There she was, staring at him but not really seeing him, because he wasn’t important, he didn’t matter now. She was safe inside her own life. He’d thought of her as an orphan, and then as his servant, and then as Eeva, the object of…

  No, she was never an object. She was everything. She seemed to have slipped into his innermost self and become it, crowding out every other thought. She was his thought. His dreams and all his longings walked about, cased in her flesh. But no, she was not his. She was a girl holding a letter which had nothing to do with him.

  ‘So that’s that, Eklund, you fool,’ he told himself roughly, not believing it yet. It couldn’t really be so. He couldn’t feel so much, want so much, while she felt nothing for him and everything for someone else. Then the pain of it reached his mind and he clenched his teeth, shut his eyes, and blundered back, out of her sight.

  15

  We conclude that revolutionary violence is no more and no less than a necessary defence by which the oppressed classes defend themselves against the violent force of those institutions of state power which keep them in a state of subjection. For this reason such violence is not only to be considered as justifiable, but also as a morally correct course of action. Revolutionary violence, properly considered, represents a duty rather than a choice.

  If only he could agree with the pamphlet without having to think about it. If he possesse
d that same hard, simple truth which didn’t admit doubt, then how much easier his life would be. He’d be sure that the removal of one man, or ten – or ten hundred, maybe – would be a solution.

  There was the Baltic, stretching out before him, with barely a wrinkle on it. Well, the sea wasn’t going to argue with him. Lauri picked up a stone, weighed it in his hand, and hurled it as far as he could. It dropped into the water with a deep ‘plock’ and disappeared.

  One man is removed – or ten, or maybe twenty, and there’s a solution. Or at least, the beginning of a solution. There’s no gain without pain, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and how can social justice be achieved without destroying what stands in its way? Such deaths are a necessary part of a process which possesses its own victorious logic.

  No, nothing was ever achieved without blood. There were deaths which were necessary, as a surgical operation was necessary to the curing of the body, no matter how dangerous and agonizing, no matter how bloody It was Sasha who’d said that bit about a surgical operation. Sasha’s eyes shone with conviction. He looked like a doctor explaining to a fearful patient that yes, there was still hope. Everything could be cured, if the patient would only put himself into Sasha’s hands, and trust him completely.

  But, thought Lauri later, it’s only agonizing and dangerous for the patient. The surgeon doesn’t feel it. That is, I suppose he feels the knife going in. Like cutting meat, it must be. Flesh doesn’t want to be cut, it resists. And then the blade hits the bone.

  When he was with Sasha, Lauri was sometimes sure with Sasha’s sureness. Above all, when Sasha was there, Lauri could believe that to think like Sasha and be like Sasha was what he should aim for. Sasha was like that. He had a power in him. And he was Lauri’s closest friend, ever since they’d first met in Petersburg nearly two years ago. And even though Lauri was back home in Helsinki now, he and Sasha were still together, sharing a room. Sasha came and went. He was always disappearing unexpectedly, staying away for a few nights, reappearing again. Sometimes he spoke at meetings, other times he sat for hours writing at the little card table in the corner of Lauri’s room. He’d given up his clerical job, he told Lauri, to devote himself full-time to political activism. There were funds to support people like Sasha, Lauri guessed, people whose work was so valuable that it was a waste of time for them to keep on with their jobs.

  Strange in a way to think he’d known Sasha for less than two years. He was like a brother. Lauri had gone to Petersburg when his father died, only three months after Eeva’s father. Everything in Helsinki was falling apart. Lauri wanted to get out. An old workmate of his father’s took over the apartment.

  He was glad he’d gone to Petersburg. It had all worked out so much better than he’d dared hope. He’d had a few contacts before he went, but essentially he’d been on his own. It was Sasha who’d found Lauri work at the bookbinder’s. At first he’d been a dogsbody, but he’d shown some aptitude and he’d been taken on as a sort of apprentice. Nothing formal, but he got training. It was all thanks to Sasha – he had a contact with old Pavlov through an underground printing works.

  If only Lauri could be as clear as Sasha, and share his certainties. After all, Lauri believed and wanted everything that the others believed and wanted. Before he’d met Sasha he’d tried to get a job in a textile factory. He’d heard a rumour they were taking on new hands at the Thornton Mills, and off he’d gone. But the conditions were far worse than anything he’d seen in Finland. It was bad enough for the men, but God alone knew how the women survived. They looked more like scarecrows than women as they streamed out of the factory into the Thornton hostel, with their shawls flung over their heads. He stood back as the machine-like rush of bodies went past him. Their faces frightened him. Hard, desperate faces of women who laboured all day and still couldn’t feed and clothe themselves.

  He’d told Sasha about that day, and Sasha said that it was an illustration of the effects of international capitalism. Didn’t Lauri know that the Thornton Mills belonged to English plutocrats?

  Then he’d tried a boot factory. The conditions were better there than in the mills, but fines were levied for everything. No matter how well you did your work, you couldn’t stop your wages vanishing in fines. Every fiddling little thing that went wrong, every minute late, if you had to leave your machine to take a piss when you shouldn’t – you got fined. It was a good racket for the bosses. They got the work out of you, and then they got half your wages back in fines. He stuck it for a couple of months and then he couldn’t do it any more, couldn’t go on with it. All those stoppages out of what he’d sweated for and desperately needed – no, it was too much. But you had to bear it because there was no choice. He was on the point of giving up and going back to Helsinki.

  If he hadn’t met Sasha at the Evening School for Adults, he’d have had no chance. He’d been wary that first evening, because he knew no one, but Sasha had been at the economics class. It was supposed to be a ‘household management’ course, but the teacher stretched the subject – he was ‘one of us’ – and Lauri and Sasha had got talking afterwards, along with Kiril Vasilievich, the teacher. It was clear that Sasha and the teacher were good friends, like equals, the way they talked. And they’d drawn Lauri in, asked him lots of questions about Helsinki and what was going on there. They knew people Lauri knew. Kiril Vasilievich had met his father many times, and he’d known Eeva’s father well, he said. He’d talked about them with a warmth that made Lauri feel for the first time that he wasn’t a stranger in a foreign land. As he spoke, Lauri seemed to see Mika and Pekka, young men together, full of life and dreams, knowing nothing about their futures, or about him, or Eeva.

  And now they were both dead, both their fathers. Life was so quick, you wouldn’t believe it. One moment it embraced you and the next it let you go.

  Sasha had not only got Lauri in at the bookbinder’s, but he’d also made sure that Pavlov looked after him. With what Pavlov had taught him, Lauri had no problem getting a job when he came back to Helsinki.

  Yes, Sasha had opened the doors of Petersburg for Lauri. He’d taken him along to meetings, and introduced him to comrades all over the city Sasha knew everybody. He told Lauri which speakers were good and which weren’t worth listening to. Sasha knew which of the Evening School teachers were ‘one of us’ and which were liberals, well-meaning but useless. You could always tell. There were little phrases and questions that showed where a teacher’s sympathies lay. ‘Our’ teachers taught you far more than the others. They were dedicated to pushing you as far as you could go.

  Kiril Vasilievich was typical of ‘our’ teachers. He taught maths, too, and took the class on to fractions and decimals, when they were supposed to stop at arithmetic. Political discussion took hold, and even though Sasha had warned Lauri that there would always be a spy from the Okhrana in every class, it seemed that almost anything could be said as long as the Tsar wasn’t named, strikes weren’t mentioned, and the Church wasn’t attacked openly. There were ways round that: codes that everyone in the know understood, and explained privately to those who were politically inexperienced, as long as they showed signs of being ‘one of us’.

  It was like the talk in Eeva’s apartment, years ago, when he’d still been a child. He and Eeva were always together those evenings, playing or reading or falling asleep. Eeva had studied at her little card table – just like Sasha, now he came to think of it – with that one candle to light her book and paper. She knew Russian and Swedish, as well as Finnish. She was supposed to be going on to English. She read Russian poetry and studied mathematics. He was lazy in those days, couldn’t be bothered with education even though Eeva’s dad tried to get him interested. He was half sorry for Eeva, having to work so hard, and half jealous because her father expected so much of her.

  Well, Lauri spoke Russian now, and he’d learned mathematics and political theory. He and Sasha had shared a lodging in Petersburg. It wasn’t much – a narrow room with damp running down
the walls – but it grew to be like Eeva’s apartment in the old days. People dropped in at all hours to drink tea and talk and argue, to discuss the last meeting and look forward to the next. Sometimes speakers would stay with them, rolled up in a blanket on the bed he and Sasha usually shared, while the pair of them slept on the floor.

  It was when Sasha and he were talking quietly at home, after the others had left, that Lauri brought out the cold little doubts that he would never have raised in company. Maybe there were other ways of changing things, maybe everything didn’t have to be swept away…

  ‘You’re talking like a liberal,’ Sasha would say. ‘“Let’s make things better bit by bit, hold a literacy class, improve hostel conditions, prepare a petition to shave half an hour off the working day for the poor things. Then maybe they’ll put up with it all for a bit longer.”

  ‘But why should you be a liberal, Lauri? Liberals are people who’ve got something to lose. They’ve got a stake in the system and so they want it to last. That’s why they work to make it just bearable enough so that the workers continue to put up with it. Liberals believe they’re doing so much good with their Guild of Literacy, their Temperance Leagues, their campaigns for clean milk. The workers ought to be very grateful indeed.

  ‘But they’re papering over the cracks, that’s all. No, it’s even worse than that, Lauri. These liberals are trying to stick up wallpaper because they know that the walls are falling down. But why should you be fooled? You’ve got nothing to lose. You’ve got no stake in the present system. There are no thoughts you can’t dare to think, Lauri.’

  ‘What thoughts?’

  ‘It’s not going to happen peacefully. You know that. It’s not possible. They’ll give us half an hour off the working day if they’ve got to. They’ll give up a tiny fraction of their profits, if that means they can keep the rest. I would too, if I were in their shoes. It’s logical. In fact the extraordinary thing is how blind they are, how they fail to grasp that if they gave just a little more now, they’d still be able to keep almost everything. But they don’t realize it, and they will never realize it. Fortunately for us.’