The True Deceiver

  * * *

  “But where is everything? How did you find the space?”

  “We didn’t,” Katri said. “We carried a lot of it out on the ice, and Liljeberg took the rest of it to the auction house in town. He’ll bring you the money if they can sell it. Though it probably won’t be much.”

  “Miss Kling,” said Anna, “are you sure you haven’t acted a bit high-handedly?”

  “Could be,” Katri said. “But think about it, Miss Aemelin. What if we had presented you with every piece of discarded furniture, every single one of those sad objects, all those meaningless things? You would have stood there and tried to decide what should be saved or thrown out or sold. Now everything’s decided and settled. Isn’t that good?”

  Anna was silent. “Probably,” she said, finally. “But all the same, it was very high-handed.”

  Far out on the ice lay a dark pile of rubbish waiting for the ice to break up, a monument to Mama and Papa’s complete inability ever to get rid of possessions. How remarkable, Anna thought. The ice will go, and everything will sink, just go straight down and disappear. It’s bold, it’s almost shameless. I have to tell Sylvia. Later it occurred to her that maybe it wouldn’t sink, not all of it. Maybe it would float to another shore and someone would find it and wonder where it came from and why. In any event, it was not even the least bit Anna’s fault.

  Chapter Thirteen

  SERENITY RETURNED TO THE RABBIT HOUSE. Mats moved as quietly as his sister, and Anna was never sure if he was at home. When they happened to meet in the house, Mats would stop, pause for a moment, smile, and bow his head before walking on – his own chivalrous gesture. Anna experienced some of the same shyness that Katri felt towards him. She never thought of anything to say at these encounters, and anyway she thought it unnecessary to bother him with the conventional greetings that people exchange on a staircase simply because they happen to be passing. Mats and Anna were together only in their books; everything else was an accepted no-man’s-land.

  Sometimes Anna heard hammering in the house, but she didn’t go to investigate. As in the boat shed, Mats worked without being noticed and without showing his work. He just moved around, saw what needed fixing, and fixed it. There were many things in the rabbit house that had sagged or decayed or worn out – not a great deal; it was just an old house that had started getting tired. It was only after a time that Anna noticed that a door didn’t creak or a window could be opened, a draught was gone, a forgotten bulb was burning again – many small details that amazed and pleased her. Surprises, Anna thought, I love being surprised. When I was little, they’d hide Easter eggs all over the house for me to find, small, brightly coloured eggs with yellow feathers on them… You came in, you looked around, searched everywhere, and there was a bit of yellow fluff, sticking up just enough to be found…

  Anna tried to thank Mats when they drank tea in the kitchen in the evenings, but she quickly realized that it only embarrassed him, so she stopped. They read their books, and all was well.

  It was during this period that Anna began to be aware, in a new and disquieting way, of what she did with her time and what she didn’t do. She began observing her own behaviour more and more with every day that passed – the days that had passed unexamined for so long. When Anna lived alone, she had not noticed how often she let the daylight hours vanish in sleep. Letting sleep come closer, soft as mist, as snow; reading the same sentence again and again until it disappeared in the mist and no longer had any meaning; waking up, finding your place on the page, and reading on as if only a few seconds had been lost. Now suddenly it was clear to Anna that she had slept, and for quite a long time. No one knew, no one disturbed her, but still the simple and irresistible need to vanish into a nap became a forbidden thing. She would wake up with a start, open her eyes wide, grab her book, and listen. It was completely quiet. But someone had walked across the floor upstairs.

  Anna Aemelin no longer went to bed in the early evening, when it seemed more natural to follow the promptings of darkness and inclination than to follow the clock. Now she tried to stay awake. She would tramp around noisily in her room so they couldn’t possibly get the impression upstairs that that she had given up. And when Anna finally gave herself permission to go to bed, she couldn’t sleep but lay awake listening. The house had a new secret life, and listening to its faint and indeterminate sounds was like trying to listen to an important but immensely distant conversation – catching a word here and a word there, but never getting a clear grasp of the context.

  One evening when Anna couldn’t sleep, she became very irritated, pulled on her dressing gown, stepped into her slippers, and shuffled out to the kitchen for a glass of juice and a sandwich. The dog lay by the kitchen door and followed her with his yellow gaze. The big animal lay as motionless as a sculpture and moved only his eyes. “Behave yourself,” Anna whispered, making her usual detour. There were new rules in the refrigerator, everything wrapped in plastic so you couldn’t tell what was what without unwrapping it. For that matter, the whole kitchen was a new kitchen. What had changed, Anna could not discover, but in any case it was no longer her kitchen. Back in the days when everything was normal, if Anna got peckish in the middle of the night she would sometimes open a can of peas on the kitchen counter and eat them cold with a spoon while placidly contemplating the darkness in the back yard. Then she’d have a spoonful of jam and go quietly back to her bed. Now everything was different. This evening, in the unimpeachable act of drinking juice, Anna took out the bottle with anxious haste as if she were doing something forbidden, poured without looking, and thick red syrup ran out over the counter. And of course there stood Katri. She had come in silently as always and stood watching what Anna was up to.

  “I just wanted a little juice,” Anna explained.

  Katri said, “Wait, I’ll clean it up.” She took a rag, drenched it in red, and wrung it out in the sink.

  “Let it be,” Anna burst out. “It’s water I want, just water!” And she opened the tap so violently that water splashed out on the floor.

  Katri said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tray beside your bed at night?”

  “No,” Anna said. “I don’t want it to be nice.”

  “But then you won’t have to come out to the kitchen.”

  “Miss Kling,” Anna said, “maybe I told you how Papa never wanted his paper delivered; he wanted to fetch it himself. Every day he picked up his paper in the shop and read it before anyone else. Throw that rag in the garbage bucket.” Anna sat down at the table and repeated, “Throw it away. We throw things away that we no longer need.”

  “Miss Aemelin, does it disturb you, having us upstairs?”

  “Not at all. I can’t hear you. You’re always sneaking around.”

  Katri was still at the sink. She took her cigarettes out of her pocket, remembered herself and put them back.

  “Oh, go ahead,” said Anna peevishly. “Smoke away. Papa smoked cigars.”

  When Katri had lit her cigarette, she said, slowly, groping for words, “Miss Aemelin, maybe we could look at this thing as a purely practical matter. We have made an agreement. Mats and I have gained greatly by this arrangement, but if you think about it, so have you. It’s a kind of barter, reciprocal performance in kind. Certain services weighed against certain benefits. I know there are drawbacks, but they will lessen. We have to come to terms with it, accommodate to a voluntary contract. Couldn’t we just accept it as a contract with rights and obligations?”

  “‘Reciprocal performance in kind,’” Anna repeated with exaggerated wonder, looking at the ceiling.

  “A contract,” Katri went on earnestly. “A contract is really much more remarkable than you might think. It doesn’t just bind. I’ve noticed that for some people it’s a relief to live with a contract. It frees them from indecision and confusion, they no longer have to choose. Both sides have agreed to share and assume responsibilities. It is, or ought to be, a deliberate promise where people have at least tried
to be fair.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Anna said. “You’re trying to be fair.” She put her arms on the table to rest her back. She could feel sleep coming on.

  “Fairness,” Katri went on. “None of us ever knows absolutely for certain that we’ve managed to be fair and honest. But we try our best all the same…”

  “Now you’re preaching,” Anna interrupted, standing up. “You know everything, my dear Miss Kling, but do you know what? We arrange things this way and that way, and in the final analysis we still have our tails around in back.”

  Katri started laughing.

  “Mama used to say that,” Anna said. “Sometimes when she got tired of explanations. Now I think I’ll go to bed.” In the door, she turned around. “Miss Kling, there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. Don’t you ever get upset and speak rashly?”

  “I get upset,” Katri said. “But I don’t think I ever speak rashly.”

  Anna Aemelin got used to having her house invisibly inhabited. All her life she’d been getting used to things until they no longer seemed dangerous, and now she did it again. Soon she no longer heard the footsteps overhead, no more than she heard the wind and the rain and the parlour clock. The only thing she couldn’t get used to was the dog. She still detoured around him and, once past, she would whisper to the motionless animal, expressing her fervent and unswerving opinion on some subject.

  Anna had given the dog a name because nameless things have a tendency to grow. She stripped the animal of his menace by calling him Teddy. Anna knew perfectly well that she was not to interfere with the dog’s strict training, so it was not out of kindness that she threw him scraps of food in secret. “Eat,” she whispered. “Hurry up, little Teddy, and eat before she comes…” But sometimes as she passed his watchful yellow gaze, she would hiss, “Stay on your rug, you horrid great beast!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “SYLVIA?” ANNA SHOUTED. “Is that you? I’ve tried to reach you again and again but you’re always out… Is this a bad time? Do you have guests?”

  “It’s just my ladies,” Sylvia said. “You know, it’s Wednesday today.”

  “What Wednesday..?”

  “The Culture Society,” said Sylvia, over-articulating.

  “Of course. Naturally… Can I call back later?”

  “Call whenever you like; it’s always nice to hear from you.”

  “Sylvia, could you come out here? I really mean it, could you come and visit..?”

  “Of course I can,” said Sylvia’s voice. “It just never seems to happen. But sometime we really ought to get together and talk about old times. We’ll see. Let’s talk again, all right?”

  Anna stood by the telephone for a long time and stared at the snowdrift through the window without seeing it. A great sadness gripped her. It can be sad having a friend you’ve admired too much and seen too rarely and told too many things that you should have kept to yourself. It was only to Sylvia that Anna had talked about her work – without reservation, boasts and cruel disappointments all jumbled together, everything. And now all of it was there with Sylvia, unloaded on her over the years in a dense clot of rash confidences.

  I shouldn’t have called, Anna thought. But she’s the only one who knows me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  EMIL FROM HUSHOLM had his ice-fishing holes a couple of hundred metres out from the fishing shacks on shore. Sometimes his wife helped him check his nets and sometimes Mats. He always pulled up the nets himself, while whoever was with him let out the line. There was never much in them, a cod or two that they ate themselves. One day he was out with Mats, it was sleeting and fairly warm. He broke up the night ice around the edges of the hole, and Mats shovelled it out until the water was clean.

  “Well, now,” said Emil, “I’ve got a little surprise for you. This time you can pull up the net and I’ll take care of the line. You ought to be able to handle that.” The boy didn’t seem to understand, so Emil went on. “I mean, I reckon you can at least pull up a net. I thought you might like to be trusted for once.”

  The insult dawned on Mats only slowly, and his gentleness made it sting all the more. Emil strode away to the other end of the net, where he was almost hidden by the sleet. Then he came back and stood ready and waiting, holding the line. Finally he shouted, “Well, are you just going to stand there? Can’t you even pull up a net?”

  Then fury rose up in Mats, the rare fury that only Katri knew about. He grabbed the end of the net rope and felt the net’s living weight and stood still while his fury grew.

  “Well?” roared Emil, who was also losing his temper. “Pull! Are you really the village idiot?”

  Mats took out his knife and cut the rope in two, the net sank under the ice, and he turned and walked in towards the shore, past the huts and the boat shed, across the road, up the hill, and into the spruce woods behind the rabbit house. The snow was thawing, and at every step he sank in over his boots, then one boot caught and his foot came up wearing only a sock. He swore and drove his knife into the trunk of a tree, where it stuck and where it stayed.

  Mats passed Anna in the hall, stopped for a moment and bowed his head in his usual gesture of respect. Anna did the same. As he moved on, Anna mentioned in passing that some new books had come from town.

  There was much talk of the severed net. Emil said, “The poor boy’s crazy. He’s nice, but he’s crazy; that much is crystal clear. I let him pull up the nets, because that’s fun for a boy if there’s fish, and he just stood there and sulked, and I got a little annoyed and hollered, that was all.”

  “I don’t know how you dare have him in the boat shed,” Fru Sundblom remarked, and the storekeeper chimed in to say that for all they knew that dimwit might chop up the boats, blood will out, you can’t get around it.

  “Now take it easy,” Edvard Liljeberg said. “If Mats had his way, he’d handle those boats with velvet, that’s how much he loves them. And whatever you give him to do gets done and done well, even if he is kind of slow. But you can give him any small job you like. I’ll have a beer.”

  “In any case,” Fru Sundblom cackled on, “the two of them come from bad stock. I’m not one to talk, but… I mean, how do you dare?”

  “Oh, I think I dare,” Liljeberg said. “I’ll gamble on that boy. And on his sister. She may not always be so easy to deal with, but she’s raised that boy. She’s got courage and she’s honest. What are you all so worked up about?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed, she knows what she’s doing,” Fru Sundblom said. “Anyway, now they’re sitting pretty. Old lady Aemelin is loaded.”

  “Shut up, you old bat,” Liljeberg blurted out. His brother took his arm in warning, and Fru Sundblom jumped up from the table so suddenly she knocked over her coffee cup.

  “There, you see,” said Edvard Liljeberg. “Anyone can lose his temper and fly off the handle. But it’s better than being mean. And so let me tell you something, all of you, and you can pass it on. The Klings are honest people, and whatever they do, they have their own good reasons.”

  And he left the shop.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “MISS KLING. It is very considerate of you to open my mail. But I have a little eccentricity that may strike you as childish – I enjoy opening envelopes. Like cutting the pages of a book or peeling an orange. It’s just not the same once it’s done.”

  Katri studied Anna with furrowed eyebrows that formed almost a single line above her eyes. “I understand,” she said. “But I only open them to see what to throw out.”

  “But my dear Miss Kling,” Anna said.

  “You know, the things you don’t need to bother with – advertisements, appeals, people who want money and are trying to cheat you.”

  “But how can you know?”

  “I know. I feel it. I can smell flimflam a long way off, and I throw out everything that stinks.”

  Anna did not know what to say. Finally she pointed out that considerateness could go too far. Unfortunately, the damag
e was done, but in future Katri should set aside the rejected letters, to be looked at later.

  “Where?”

  “For example, somewhere in the attic…”

  “Fine,” Katri said and smiled. “Somewhere in the attic. And here are the bills from the shop. I’ve checked them thoroughly. He’s cheating you systematically. Not much – fifty pennies here, one mark there – but he’s doing it.”

  “The storekeeper? It’s not possible.” Anna looked with distaste at the bills, written in smudged blue ink, and pushed them away. “Yes, yes, I remember. You told me he was malicious, something about that liver… Fifty pennies here and fifty pennies there… But why him, why should he be specially malicious?”

  “Miss Aemelin, this is important. I’m certain he’s cheated you. Deliberately. Probably right from the start. Over time, it comes to a lot of money.”

  “Malicious?” Anna repeated. “When he’s always been so friendly and polite..?”

  “People are two-faced.”

  “But why should the storekeeper dislike me?” Anna said, with innocent amazement. “I’m so easy to like…”

  Katri insisted. “Let’s just talk about the bills. Believe me, they don’t tally. I can count. We need to go into this.”

  “But why? Is it necessary? Don’t you really just want to punish him?”

  Katri observed tersely that Anna should do as she wished, of course, but that she needed to know what was going on.

  “Yes, yes,” said Anna calmly. “There are so many things a person might worry about.” And she added, by way of explanation, “What with one thing and another… Don’t you agree..?”

  * * *

  Anna Aemelin sat at her desk answering letters from small children. She had arranged their letters in three piles. Pile A was from the very young, who expressed their admiration in pictures, mostly drawings of bunny rabbits. If there was a written message, the child’s mother had written it. Pile B contained requests that were often urgent, especially with regard to birthdays. Pile C was what Anna called the Sad Cases pile, and these letters required great care and reflection. But all three – A, B and C – wanted to know how the rabbits got all covered with flowers.