Anna had several explanations for her rabbits’ flowery fur, and they all seemed to work if she just got a good start and didn’t think too much. But today, for the first time, Anna Aemelin couldn’t come up with a single reason – poetic, rational or humourous. The flowers were simply an irrelevant phenomenon that seemed suddenly silly and quite without charm. In the end, she just drew rabbits, one rabbit on each letter, and afterwards covered them all with flowers. But that was as far as she could go. She waited a long time. She was thoroughly disgusted with herself, and finally she got angry, put rubber bands around A, B and C and carried them up to Katri.
The pink guest room was just as it used to be and yet strange, maybe just larger and emptier. The window was ajar and it was cold inside and smelled sour from cigarette smoke. Katri had been sitting and crocheting. Now she set aside her work and stood up.
“Do you like it in here?” asked Anna abruptly.
“Yes. Very much.”
Anna walked towards the window, stopped, turned, and stood in the middle of the room with her letters in her hand.
“Shall I close the window?” Katri said.
“No. Miss Kling, those things you said about agreements… That both partners have rights and obligations. Look at these.” Anna put her letters on the table. “The children ask question after question. Is it my obligation to answer? What rights do I have?”
“Not to answer,” Katri said.
“I can’t do that.”
“But you have no agreement with them.”
“How do you mean, ‘agreement’..?”
“I mean a promise. You’ve written to each child only once, isn’t that right? And you’ve made no promises.”
“Well, as it happens…”
“You mean you’ve written to some of them more than once?”
“What am I supposed to do? They write and write, and they think I’m their friend…”
“Then it is a promise.” Katri walked over and closed the window. “You’re trembling,” she said. “Miss Aemelin, sit down. I’ll give you a blanket.”
“I don’t want one. And I haven’t made any promises. I don’t know what you mean.”
“But look at it this way: You’ve taken something on. That means you have an obligation, doesn’t it? Namely, that you’ll do the best you can.”
Anna was still standing in the middle of the room. She had started to whistle, a toneless, barely audible whistling through her teeth. Suddenly she said, angrily, “What’s that?”
“I’m crocheting a coverlet.”
“Oh, of course. Everyone crochets. I wonder how many beds there are in this village…”
Katri continued. “Agreements are all about fairness…” And Anna interrupted. “I’ve heard all that before. Both parties contribute and both parties gain. What does that have to do with my children? And what do I gain?”
“New editions. Popularity.”
“Miss Kling,” Anna declared, “I am popular.”
“Or friendship, if you prefer. If friendship amuses you and you have time for it.”
Anna gathered up her letters. “This wasn’t at all what I wanted to talk about,” she said.
“Leave them,” Katri said. “Let me read them. I’ll try to understand.”
* * *
Later in the evening they sat opposite each other in the parlour and Katri explained. “I don’t think this has to be so hard. The children have things to ask and things to tell, and what they all want is roughly the same. You could have a form letter, a prepared text in photostat. When you need to vary it, you can add a postscript. And of course a personal signature.”
“And you could sign them for me,” Anna put in quickly.
“Yes, that would save you time. Or you could stamp the signature.”
Anna sat up straighter. “Photostat? Form letter? It’s not my style. And what happens if siblings write to me, or children in the same class in school, and they compare their letters? I can’t possibly keep track of all the names and addresses.”
“A card catalogue would take care of that. And eventually you ought to have a secretary.”
“A secretary!” Anna repeated. “A secretary! Is that what you think, Miss Kling? And what, for example, would she write to all the Sad Cases? For that matter, you’ve mixed up my piles, there was A, B and C… now I don’t know which is which… How would a secretary answer ‘Dear Miss Aemelin, what should I do with my parents?’ Or ‘Why does everybody get invited except me?’ and so forth, on and on… It’s me they’re asking, not anyone else, and for that matter, they’re all unhappy in their own way, and it seems to me they have a right to be!”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Katri said drily. “Miss Aemelin, I’ve read all these very carefully, and I can only conclude that A, B and C could all be included under a single heading. They all want something – for instance, comfort – and they want it as quickly as possible because it’s very urgent. These letters could in fact be seen as small attempts at extortion. No, don’t interrupt. Their letters are awkward and misspelled, and so they’re touching and give you a bad conscience. But they’ll learn, they’ll get more proficient. And when they’re grown up, many of them will write the letters that I help you throw away.”
“I know. Out on the ice.”
“No. Have you forgotten? Up in the attic.”
After a moment’s silence, Anna remarked threateningly that children can’t be fooled, and she leaned back in her chair and whistled slowly between her teeth. Katri stood up and turned on the light. “You sentimentalize them because they’re little,” she said. “But the format doesn’t matter. I have gradually learned that everyone, absolutely everyone of every size, is out to get something. People want things. It comes to them naturally. Of course they get more skilful with age, and they’re no longer so disarmingly obvious, but the goal doesn’t change. Your children simply haven’t had time to learn how it’s done. That’s what we call innocence.”
“And what is it Mats is out to get?” said Anna hotly. “Can you tell me that?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on. “This wasn’t at all what I wanted to talk about, which is this: How did the rabbits get all covered with flowers?”
“Tell them it’s a secret. Tell them they don’t need to know.”
“Exactly,” said Anna. “You’re right. That’s the best thing you’ve said tonight. They don’t need to know, and I don’t want to know. So there!”
Chapter Seventeen
ANNA AEMELIN HAD A STANDING ORDER with the bookseller in town. Every now and then, he’d send books to her with Liljeberg – adventure stories, books about the seven seas and impassable landscapes and voyages of discovery undertaken by curious and intrepid men in the days when there were still anonymous white patches on the world map. Sometimes he sent classics and sometimes boys’ books, but the general theme old Miss Aemelin had chosen never varied, and these books formed the unfailing linchpin of Mats and Anna’s friendship.
The books came wrapped in brown paper, the address in yellow. Katri never opened them, just placed them on the kitchen table. Anna and Mats unpacked the books in the evening. Mats got first choice, and he always chose a book about the sea. When he’d read it, it went to Anna, and then they’d talk about it. It was a ritual. They said little about themselves or the things that happened around them. They spoke only about the people who lived in their books in a world of steadfast chivalry and ultimate justice. Mats never talked about his boat but often about boats.
* * *
Anna managed to forget the discarded letters that gradually accumulated somewhere in the attic, but one night they fluttered up in her dreams. She dreamed that she carried the unread letters out onto the ice, far out to the dark pile of abandoned but once cherished possessions, now shoved ruthlessly into a heap, and there she dumped them – the pleas of unknown correspondents, their confidences, their clever suggestions. She just threw them, and they flew away in a blizzard of letter paper, an endless, boundless
postal storm, flew up to heaven in a single great reproach, and Anna woke up and jumped out of bed drenched with sweat and bad conscience.
She went out to the kitchen, the friendliest room in her house. The books still lay on the table, brand new, shiny in their tempting adventure colours. They smelled good. Anna raised one book after another to her cheek and inhaled the evanescent smell of unread book, unlike any other. She opened the lightly cleaving pages, which rustled at first touch, and studied the bold, stormy pictures, a vision of the improbable as the artist nevertheless imagined it. Anna did not believe this particular artist had ever experienced a real storm or wandered lost in a jungle. That’s why, she thought. He makes it even more awful and terrible because he doesn’t know. I doubt Jules Verne ever got to travel… I draw what I see. I don’t have to yearn. Anna turned page after page and studied every illustration. Slowly, her anxiety abated.
The book dealer’s bill was still on the table. Anna folded it again and again, held the paper in her fist and thought, this is a bill she’ll never get to see. Somehow she’d surely figure out that the bookseller is cheating me too.
* * *
After the net incident with Husholm’s Emil, Mats stopped doing odd jobs in the village, but he went to the Liljebergs’ boat shed as usual. There no one talked about anything but boats, when they talked at all. When they closed for the day, Mats went home to his boat designs. The walls in his room had once been blue like most of the house, now they had faded to the indefinable colour of an old blue leather binding or bluebells in a herbarium. The damp had stained and bleached the narrow room with its angled ceiling, and Mats thought the walls and ceiling looked like a sky with flying storm clouds.
He was very happy. There was nothing unnecessary in his room. The window was small and looked out on the woods. Huge old spruce trees filled the view like a dark, snow-flecked wall. It was like being alone in the boat shed. Katri had put one of her crocheted coverlets on the bed. It too was blue, but clear blue, like a signal. As always, Mats slept without dreaming and never woke up in the night.
Katri did not see much of her brother, mostly just at meals. The quiet silence of kinship that had been theirs had lost its particular time and space. Sometimes in the evening Katri had some errand to the kitchen. Mats and Anna sat across from each other at the kitchen table and read. They always stopped reading while Katri was in the room, but they no longer asked her if she’d like a cup of tea.
Chapter Eighteen
ANNA WAS VERY ANNOYED. She had spent an entire day trying to put together a form letter, a perfect letter that would answer, inform, comfort and suit every child. But however much she tried, it sounded more and more stilted.
“Look at this,” she said. “Just look at it, Miss Kling! Do you see now that I was right?”
Katri read the letter and said that it seemed unclear and that it failed to suggest in any way that all future correspondence was cordially discouraged.
“But don’t you understand that the whole idea is impossible? Every child needs a personal letter.”
“I understand. You’ll just have to do it your own way.”
Anna put on her glasses, then took them off again and polished them for a long time. She said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but I can’t write letters any more. It doesn’t feel right.”
“But haven’t you been writing them for years? I mean, you’re a writer.”
“That’s all you know!” Anna said. “It’s the publisher puts together the text. I draw the pictures, you know, the pictures! Have you even seen them?”
“No,” Katri said. She waited, but Anna said nothing. “Miss Aemelin, I have a suggestion. Could you give me a couple of the letters and let me answer them? As an experiment?”
“You can’t write,” said Anna quickly. Then she shrugged her shoulders, stood up from the table and left the room.
* * *
With the same ease that Katri Kling could duplicate signatures, she could also imitate voices and another person’s choice of words and manner of speech. It was a talent that had gone begging. She had occasionally tried to amuse Mats by mimicking the neighbours, but he didn’t like it.
“They’re too real,” he said.
“How so?”
“I see how awful they are.”
Katri stopped playing a game that wasn’t fun. But in the letters from Anna, her talent was put to use. Easily and skilfully, she reproduced Anna’s uncertainty and her awkward kindness getting lost in needless small talk. Beneath the kindness there were still glimpses of egocentricity. But gone was the timid inability to say no. There were no more half-promises that might tempt some youngster to become a pen pal. Katri bid them an honest farewell that only an unusually stupid or blindly ingenuous child could misunderstand. Anna read through what Katri had written and was bewildered. It was her voice but not her voice, a distorted picture that came closer and closer with each letter she read until she set the whole pile aside and sat silently for a long time.
It was a peculiarity of Katri’s that silence never made her ill at ease. She just waited. Finally Anna picked up the letters again, searched through them, fastened her eyes on Katri, and said, “This is wrong! Here you’re not me! If a child is mad at her parents, it’s no comfort that the parents may be having troubles of their own. That’s the wrong comfort! I never would have written that. Parents have to be strong and perfect or the child can’t believe in them. You’ll have to fix it.”
Katri’s reaction was suddenly vehement. “But how long can they rely on what’s not reliable? For how many years do we fool these children into believing in something they shouldn’t believe in? They have to learn early, or they’ll never manage on their own.”
“I’ve managed on my own,” said Anna tartly. “And done very nicely. And look at this one: you say that sooner or later every child gets mad at his parents and it’s natural. Do you think I could have written that?”
“No, that was a mistake. There I wasn’t being you.”
“No, that wasn’t nice. If all children get mad, then that particular child is less important. He’s just like all the other children.”
“Well, maybe, but they move in packs,” Katri said. “They do their best to be all alike. It’s a comfort to them that all the others behave the same way.”
“But some of them are individualists!”
“It’s possible. But then they need to hide in the pack all the more. They know if they’re different they’ll be chased away.”
“And what about this one?” Anna went on. “Where’s the chitchat? He’s tried to draw a rabbit – obviously no talent at all – so here you could write something like ‘I’ve hung your picture above my desk’… This one’s learning to skate, and her cat’s name is Topsy. You can fill nearly a whole page with the skating and the cat if you write big enough. You’re not using the material.”
“Miss Aemelin,” said Katri, “you’re actually quite cynical. How have you managed to hide that?”
Anna wasn’t listening. She put her hand on the pile of letters and declared, “More affection! Bigger writing! And talk about my own cat: describe it, talk about it…”
“But you don’t have a cat.”
“That doesn’t matter. The whole point is to give them a nice letter… You have to learn how it’s done. But I wonder if you can. I almost think you don’t like them.”
Katri shrugged her shoulders and smiled her quick wolfish smile. “Neither do you,” she said.
Anna’s annoying blush rose over her cheeks, and she put an end to the conversation. “What I think has no significance. But they need to believe in me, to know I could never deceive them. And now I’m tired.”
* * *
Oh, Anna Aemelin, the only thing you care about is your own conscience. That’s what you cherish. You’re a charming little liar. A child writes, “I love you, I’m saving my money to come and live with you and the bunnies,” and you answer, “How lovely. You’ll be very welcome.”
And it’s a lie. The promises made by a guilty conscience acknowledge and settle no debts… You can’t hide. In the long run, you can’t even try to make it easier for yourself by not daring to say no, by kidding yourself that everyone in the final analysis is nice and can be kept at a distance with promises or money… You know nothing about fair play! You’re a difficult opponent. The truth needs to be hammered in with iron spikes, but no one can drive nails into a mattress!
* * *
Relief at not having to write letters to children dug an unexpected hole in Anna’s well-regulated day, which became easy and empty and difficult to fill. But she continued to add her beautiful signature and to draw a rabbit at the bottom of every reply Katri placed before her. One day, when Anna was tired, Katri made a slip. She signed the letters and drew the rabbits herself. They were pictured from behind, sitting in the grass, which made it easier. Nevertheless, Katri’s rabbits were boldly and carelessly drawn. Anna looked at them and said nothing, but her glance was as cold as the whirling snow outside the house, and Katri drew no more rabbits.
* * *
Anna called Sylvia a couple of times, but there was no answer.
Chapter Nineteen
OCCASIONALLY PEOPLE STILL CAME to Katri for advice on some perplexing problem, but it happened only rarely. They didn’t like going up to the rabbit house on their own business. It somehow made their private affairs too visible. Of course it was Katri who answered the door when they rang the bell, but old Miss Aemelin would come rushing up behind her like a startled bird and stand looking over Katri’s shoulder, wondering what it was about and whether she should make some coffee or maybe not or maybe tea. It felt all backwards, and when they finally climbed the stairs to Katri’s room, it seemed almost shameful, like sneaking out to ask a fortune teller for advice. It was at about this time that the children started shouting “witch” when Katri passed – wherever they’d got that idea. Children smell things in the air, like little dogs. They were silent as Katri walked by, and then, with one voice, and in a monotone, they’d start chanting.