‘Once he’s dead, things will be better.’
‘Why will they be better? What sort of man is he?’
‘The Tsar’s man.’
‘But then if he’s killed, it’ll only lead to worse things.’
‘No, that’s true in the short term, but in the long term, people will organize against oppression, they’ll rise up. Killing a man like that isn’t an end, it’s a means to an end.’
‘You mean, he isn’t being killed because of what he’s like.’
‘In a way he is. But it’s more than that.’
‘I don’t see how it can be more than that. What people are like, that’s what matters, isn’t it?’
‘But Eeva, it’s not the only thing. You’re being – you’re being naive.’
She was sitting up in the bed now.
‘So it’s Sasha who’s doing it, on his own? He’s not getting you to do his dirty work?’
‘We’re all in this together.’
‘I’ll tell you something, Lauri, you say I’m naive, but I wouldn’t be soft enough for that. Let Sasha kill if he wants. It’s in his nature, anyone can see it. But it’s not in yours.’
What were they doing, arguing? She slipped across him, out of the bed, as quick as a fish. She scooped up her dress from the floor and wrapped it around her. ‘He’s dangerous, Lauri. He’s the sort that leads you across a swamp and says you’ll be all right if you follow his footsteps. And then suddenly he skips away so light that you can’t see where he’s put his feet, and you’re sinking, but he’s gone. He’s safe and you’re sinking, with your throat full of mud.’
He wondered if anything like that had happened to her, in the years he didn’t know about. One day he would know about those years.
‘Let him get on with it, Lauri,’ she urged. ‘It’s all right for someone like Sasha, because he’s the sort who won’t go crazy afterwards, when he realizes what he’s done. He’s not like you.’
‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’
‘No, you don’t want to,’ said Eeva. Her hands clutched the stuff of her dress close to her. But he’d seen her body, touched her, been inside her. So why was she hiding from him?
‘What I’m saying,’ Eeva went on, ‘I’m not saying it to make you angry. That man you’re talking about, he’s living his life, now. This minute, he’s doing all the things we do. Maybe he’s even got a girl with him. He doesn’t know you’re going to kill him. Don’t you see that it’s terrible, that he doesn’t know?’
‘He won’t have a girl with him, he’s too old.’
‘You’re doing it for Sasha. And Sasha’s pulling you in so that afterwards you’ll be the kind of person he wants you to be. You’ll be like him.’
26
Sasha came home two days later. He was there, sitting on the bed, head bowed, when Lauri returned from work. Lauri’s first thought was that he’d been beaten up. There was that battered look about him. But there wasn’t a mark on his face.
‘So there you are,’ Sasha said. There was a note of accusation in his voice, as if Lauri had been the one who’d disappeared.
‘But where were you? What happened? We thought you’d been picked up.’
‘Nothing happened,’ said Sasha. His voice was flat. He might have been reading out someone else’s words. ‘Nothing happened, and nothing’s going to happen. It’s all off.’
‘What is?’ But he knew, of course, instantly. Bobrikov was off. No more ‘talking about Bobrikov’. He was going to live.
‘That fucking Swede’s pulled out,’ Sasha went on in a monotone. He examined his nails closely, and began to push back the cuticles. Sasha had very well-kept nails.
‘Why?’
‘Christ knows. Of course he’s trotted out his reasons. His father’s dying, so he’s got to take care of his old mother. What would she do without him? And the estate, of course, it’s his now. An inheritance like that tends to change your point of view. He’s got his life mapped out for him now. The old mother, hunting, fishing, selling timber… and then he’ll get married to some old friend of the family and the cycle will begin all over again. Give him a few years and he’ll be talking fondly about the wild days of his youth.’
‘I suppose, if you have all that handed to you on a plate –’
‘Pre-cise-ly. But would our Swede have come up to scratch, even without the convenient death of papa? The fact is, when it came to the crunch he didn’t like the look of Bobrikov’s blood. He’d rather shoot capercaillie.’
Bobrikov’s blood. There it went again. Sasha spoke of the blood as if it had already been spilled. It didn’t belong to Bobrikov, but to Sasha, or Lauri, or anyone else who had an interest in it. Bobrikov wasn’t his own man now. He was ‘about-to-be-shot Bobrikov’. If he was shot his blood would spread out, naked and public, for anybody to gawp at. That was what Sasha wanted and intended.
‘A crisis of conscience, you could call it,’ added Sasha, his voice touching the word ‘conscience’ with a flick of contempt. ‘Don’t look so worried, Lauri. We’ll find someone else.’
‘It’s not finding someone else that worries me. He – the Swede, I mean –’ for Lauri still stumbled over this business of people having no names – ‘he knows everything, doesn’t he? What if he –’
‘He won’t. We’ve made sure of that. No, we’ll find someone else,’ went on Sasha. ‘But it’ll be tricky. You should have seen the way he shot the heart out of that target. A beautiful bit of shooting. I don’t know when I’ve seen anything as good. But I was wrong about him, wasn’t I?’ His voice became even more inward, meditative. ‘That’s the trouble with idealists. They have ideals. They get a massive hard-on talking about them but when it comes to bedtime they just can’t… get it up. The reality is never quite beautiful enough.’
‘Don’t take it so hard, Sash.’ He would have done anything for Sasha at that moment. Promised anything. The relief was so huge, like being given back your life. He wanted to throw his arms around Sasha, hug him and dance him around the room.
‘I’m a failure,’ said Sasha, his voice leaking with sudden self-pity. ‘Everything I touch goes wrong.’
‘That’s shit and you know it. Take your boots off and have a lie-down. You’re dead tired, that’s all it is. I’ll go out for some vodka.’
‘No, don’t go. Don’t leave me. You’re my friend, aren’t you, Lauri? You believe in me, don’t you?’
No need to rush for that vodka, Sasha must have had plenty already. Suddenly he sounded quite drunk, which cast a different light on everything he’d been saying. Was there even a real Swede? The whole thing could have been one of Sasha’s elaborate games, thought Lauri suddenly. No, the thought was so disloyal that he pushed it away. But Sasha was looking as if he expected something. He hadn’t answered Sasha’s question, that’s what it was.
‘Course I do,’ said Lauri.
‘We’re mates, aren’t we? Comrades?’
‘That’s right.’
But ‘mates’ always sounded wrong, coming from Sasha. It wasn’t his language. Sasha had studied at a gymnasium, he’d told Lauri that. He knew Latin.
‘Never give up,’ said Sasha, and laughed loudly. His eyes glistened. ‘There’s always a second chance. Just because this has turned into a prize fuck-up doesn’t mean we can’t try again.’
‘No,’ said Lauri. Probably Sasha wasn’t fooled by his show of disappointment. It wasn’t going to happen. Bobrikov was never going to know a thing about pol-it-ic-al ass-ass-in-ation. Whatever Bobrikov was up to at this moment, he could carry on with it, whether it was wiping his arse or wiping the brow of his widowed mother. If he had a mother. Probably not, he was too old. And Lauri didn’t have to wake in the night with his thoughts grinding like stones, wearing him away. The Swede had pulled out.
He wanted to get drunk – or no, not get drunk, be drunk, now, this minute. ‘I’ll get that vodka,’ he said.
It took Sasha less than a day to find out about Eeva and Lauri. Maybe he
talked to Magda, or Lauri let something drop, but Eeva didn’t think so. Magda didn’t trust Sasha, and she certainly wouldn’t confide in him. And surely Lauri would want the same as Eeva did. Not to have other people’s sticky paws all over what they did, before they even knew what they were doing.
Sasha dropped into the bookshop the morning after he came back. He picked up a volume of Runeberg, flicked through it as if to find something he liked, and then settled himself to read, absorbed, lounging against a bookshelf. But he couldn’t be very absorbed – he barely spoke Swedish.
Why did he annoy her so much? There was no reason he shouldn’t stand there and read. Students who had no money came in day after day to finish a book. Shabby students with eyes that swallowed books like food. She never minded their hours of browsing. They’d buy later on, when they had the means.
Some of them would never have any money, you could tell that already. They were born to study and be poor. They would talk to her, once they’d got over their fear that she’d make them buy something.
‘If you’ll permit me, I’d like to show you a poem I’ve written…’
Sasha was pretending to be like those students, but the poems he held in his hand meant nothing to him, and not only because he wasn’t fluent in Swedish. There he stood, like an actor who had been directed to look absorbed in his book. He could convince an audience, maybe, but not her.
He waited until she’d served half a dozen customers, and there was a lull, and then he came over.
‘So… how are you?’ he asked with a kind of intimate pity, as if she had an illness people didn’t usually talk about.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Good. That’s excellent news. Your health is equal to the involvements of your life.’
‘I’m certainly busy,’ she said briskly. ‘These books have to be shelved, and we’re stocktaking.’
‘I know you’ve been busy,’ he said silkily. ‘You and Lauri. I came in to offer my congratulations.’
He was a devil. Why Lauri couldn’t spot it, she didn’t know. She’d given Sasha the benefit of the doubt at first, wanting to like Lauri’s friend. But she soon realized that Sasha didn’t even want her to like him. He wanted her to have to pretend to like him, to have to put up with him because she had no choice. But Sasha was on her territory now.
‘You’ve got a good imagination, Sasha. No wonder you like books so much. Why don’t you put your hand in your pocket and pay for that one?’
‘Lauri’s in seventh heaven. He told me he couldn’t believe how – willing – you were.’
‘Get out.’
‘You’re a lucky girl. He really appreciates you. He was making me quite jealous with his descriptions.’
Eeva put down the pile of books she was holding.
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ she said.
‘What do you mean? Lauri was quite specific.’
‘You’ve got it wrong, because you think you can talk to me how you like. You’re mistaken. No one is ever going to do that to me again. You can show me some respect.’
There was a fire inside her and she was only just keeping it from leaping out of her mouth and scorching the pile of books. She was back there. She was sweeping the floor of the House of Orphans, knocking her broom against the beds where rows of sick children lay. She was watching Anna-Liisa fold the hands of a dying child so it would look tidy. She was in the kitchen of the doctor’s house, and Mrs Eriksson was washing the china with her hat on, showing Eeva how it was done but not trusting her to do it. She was marching to church in a crocodile, two by two, glanced at by the people of the town. There go the orphans. Luckier children, who were not orphans, would prink in their Sunday clothes, and stare boldly from the shelter of their parents.
‘You’ve got it wrong,’ she said to Sasha. ‘All your plotting and planning and you know nothing. You come in here and steal books, not because you’re hungry and you want to sell them, not because you’re desperate to read and you can’t afford to buy books, but because it feels exciting. That’s all. That’s the only reason you want to do anything. You want a thrill. You get your excitement, and you dress up what you do in words to make yourself sound good. Comrade. That’s a laugh. Who are you a comrade of? Where do you come from? You’re not fit to put the word in your mouth. You leave me alone and you leave him alone.’
She faced him, kept her eyes fixed on him. She had spoken low, so no one else would hear. She would keep her job, and she would get rid of Sasha. She wouldn’t turn her back on him. Very slowly, he put the book of poems down on the desk.
‘I thought we were friends, Eeva,’ he said. She saw that his eyes were ripe with tears which he could shed at any moment. He could make himself feel anything he wanted, she thought, any time he needed to. Already he was flooding with pity for himself. He was so good at it, so real. He was a snake with a thousand skins.
‘You’ve never given me a chance, have you?’ he said, as if appealing to a larger audience that was to be the judge between them.
‘Nobody gives anybody any chances,’ she said. ‘You have to make them.’
He showed his teeth. ‘Hold on a minute, Miss Bookshop Educator. I don’t happen to need your valuable lessons. You’ve got nothing to teach me about making chances.’ The self-pity dropped away. Suddenly he was full of himself again, cocky with secrets, Sasha the initiator. ‘I’m a man of action, not words,’ he bragged.
A man of action. His meaning hit her like a blow. She glanced round to check that no one was listening.
‘I know what you’re talking about,’ she said, still quietly. ‘You think I don’t, but I do. You disgust me with your action. You want to drag Lauri into it, so he’ll finish up the same as you. But Lauri’s not your type and he never will be.’
‘He’s been talking to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘That was extremely stupid.’
They were speaking under their breath now. Close, too close. She shouldn’t have put the books down. Sasha was pressing up to her, so close she could smell him.
Suddenly she became aware of a student who came in most days. He wasn’t reading, he was watching them. He was one of the students who showed her poems. He liked her. He was watching Sasha, sizing up the situation, not happy. He was a thin, mild young man, but he was bracing himself. Any minute now he’d come over and ask if she was all right.
‘You’d better go now,’ she murmured. ‘People are watching you.’
She’d done it. She’d got him out of the shop. After the heat of her anger and his, she was cold and shaky. He’d frightened her more than she’d thought he could. Yes, he was a snake. But he would leave her alone now, she was almost sure of it. He wouldn’t dare do anything to her face, and she would never turn her back on him. She’d scorch him with words he didn’t expect, the way she had scorched him just now, until he backed off. But why did Lauri choose a man like that for a friend? What was the attraction? Surely it wouldn’t last. Lauri would soon see Sasha for what he was.
‘There’s a meeting tonight,’ said Sasha, falling into step beside Lauri. Lauri was on his way back from work, and hadn’t expected to see Sasha.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before? I’m meeting Eeva.’
‘She’ll understand. Something’s come up.’
Something’s come up. How well Lauri knew that sentence, after two years with Sasha. Something’s come up. A switch of meeting place, a bundle of leaflets under a coat, a roll of banknotes, a new location for a clandestine printing press, a stranger sleeping on their floor and vanishing at first light, a change of tactic, a policy agreed at the highest level…
Each of these things introduced in the same way. Laconic, businesslike, toughly conspiratorial. That was the style Sasha preferred.
‘Something’s come up. It’s essential that you’re at the meeting. It’s about that business of the Swede.’
‘I thought you said it was all off.’
‘For now. Not for ever. There are people who need
to meet you.’ Lauri couldn’t help feeling flattered. He had progressed, then, if people needed to meet him.
‘Where’s the meeting?’
‘I’m going to take you, but we need to hurry’ Sasha glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got exactly twenty-five minutes. We’ll do it. There are comrades from Petersburg who’re waiting for us. They’ve got to leave later tonight.’
‘But Eeva’s expecting me –’
‘For God’s sake, Lauri! She understands. She’s one of us.’ Sasha was terse tonight, a man of actions not words.
‘How long will it last?’
‘Not more than an hour. I’ve filled them in about you, but that’s not enough. They need to see you in the flesh.’
Eeva would be waiting for him. She was making beef and barley soup with dumplings, and after supper Magda was going out.
Once Magda was gone, the apartment would be their own. His body ached. He wanted a stove, food, warm water to wash off the day’s work. He wanted to sit at the table, stupefied by heat and the smell of food, watching Eeva, his elbows propped on the wood. She would stir the soup with her back to him. He would watch the nape of Eeva’s neck, her shoulder blades, her thin, supple waist. She’d be flushed with steam and a bit preoccupied until the supper came out perfect.
A thin wind was working its way down the street like a blade of ice. These side streets were almost empty at this time. Everyone home from work, boots off, as close to the stove as they could get.
‘All right, then, let’s go,’ said Lauri. The image of Eeva by the stove shrank inside his mind, but it was still as bright as a lamp. A child darted across the frozen street ahead of them, carrying an armful of kindling, and hammered on a door. It opened, a slice of warm light spread onto the snow, then vanished as the door slammed shut again. Lauri turned up his collar, pulled his earflaps down and lengthened his stride. They were walking into the wind. It stung until his eyes watered, and he lowered his head to protect them. For a moment the streets were blurred so he could hardly see them, but Sasha was at his side.