The True Deceiver

  This time she went into the shop. The dog waited outside and the children were quiet.

  The storekeeper asked how everything was at the rabbit house.

  “Fine, thank you,” said Katri.

  “So Miss Aemelin is well? Has the old lady written her will?”

  They were alone in the shop. Katri was searching the shelves, and she asked if he had any of that hearth bread, the soft kind.

  “No. Has she lost her bite? Or her nerve?”

  Katri said, “Be careful. I’m warning you.”

  But he couldn’t stop. “It’s others have the teeth these days.” He hurled it towards her. “Right?”

  Katri swung around, and her eyes were wide open and pure yellow. “Watch it!” she said. “The dog will do what I tell him. And he has teeth.”

  She paid and walked towards home with the dog. Behind her, the children continued their monotonous hate song. Mats came walking down the village street and stopped suddenly when he heard the children chanting “witch”. His face went white.

  “Let it go,” said Katri. “They’re harmless.”

  But her brother walked slowly towards the children, his hands hanging down but open as if to grab, and the children fled, silently.

  “Let it go,” Katri said again. “You know you have to be careful about losing your temper. There’s no need. I don’t let anything bother me.”

  * * *

  That same evening, Liljeberg came to the rabbit house and wanted to talk to Katri about a dispute with the storekeeper. They went upstairs to her room.

  “It’s this business with the van,” Liljeberg said. “He pays for the petrol and gives me a discount on what I buy in the shop, but I want more pay. I’ve checked with drivers in town, and they get more. Now he’s saying that if I insist on a payrise, then someone else can drive the van.”

  “Is there anyone else in the village who could do it?”

  “Yes, one or two. And they’d work for less just because they think it’s fun.”

  “How big is your discount, and what’s your pay?”

  Liljeberg pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to her. “This is what I get, and this is what I want. And he won’t give in.”

  Katri said, “There’s one thing you may not know. He doesn’t pay for the petrol The government pays petrol for hauling the gas tubes from the fish pier out to the lighthouse. But they don’t know it’s a two-minute drive. And they don’t know he gets an extra allowance from the post office and hauls his goods in the mail van. He’s given them the wrong information, and they could take away his licences if they wanted to.”

  Liljeberg said nothing for quite a while. Then he asked carefully how Katri could be so sure.

  “I did the accounts in the shop for quite some time.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Liljeberg and was silent again. Finally he observed that it would be almost like extortion. The storekeeper might be double-dealing, but you couldn’t go ratting to the authorities; it was simply unthinkable.

  “Do what you like. Just let him know that you know what’s going on. He’ll raise your salary.”

  “Well, if you say so. But it isn’t something I like doing. But thank you anyway.”

  When Liljeberg had gone, Katri went on with her coverlet. There wasn’t a sound in the house. Katri crocheted quickly without looking at the work that occupied her hands. Crocheting was mostly a way of resting her thoughts. But they came nevertheless, one after the other, until she suddenly bent over under the weight of a single implacable insight that struck her as dreadful. She needed to talk to Liljeberg again, now, at once. She rushed down to the hall, threw on her coat, and motioned the dog to follow. It was already dark. In her hurry, she’d forgotten her torch, but she didn’t take the time to go back.

  The short cut to the Liljebergs was not tramped down, and again and again she walked right into trees, stopped for a moment, then trudged ahead with her arms stretched out ahead of her. She could smell the Liljebergs’ rabbit farm before she could make out the window through the trees. The lighted rectangle spread a pale light across the snow. They were probably eating their supper. She should have waited for morning; she was behaving badly, but it couldn’t be helped, and it didn’t matter. Katri left her boots on the porch. Edvard Liljeberg himself opened the door. His brothers were having their evening meal.

  “There was something I wanted to say,” Katri said. “It won’t take long. I’ll wait.”

  “No need,” Liljeberg said. “My dinner will keep. Let’s go in the small parlour.”

  The parlour was very cold; the brothers all slept in the big room. Katri didn’t want to sit. Hastily and harshly she explained. “I was wrong. Your salary is normal, and your discount on food almost on the high side. He probably has cheated people here and there, but he hasn’t cheated you. So I take back what I said. I was being unfair.”

  Edvard Liljeberg was embarrassed. He offered her a cup of coffee, but she thanked him no. Before she left, she said, “Just remember one thing: Going along with something doesn’t mean you give in to it. Keep an eye on him. And whatever else, you’re still the winner, because you like driving the van, and he doesn’t know that.”

  The powerful rabbit smell struck Katri as she came out into the yard. Now it was done. Maybe Liljeberg wouldn’t trust her any more, and that would be very bad. It was from the Liljebergs she would order Mats’s boat, and she would have to order it soon if they were to finish it by summer. No one could make Liljeberg believe in money that didn’t yet exist, or in the promise of a person who had put her honesty in question by losing her way on the straight path she had so inexorably staked out.

  Chapter Twenty

  WINTER NOW ENTERED A NEW PHASE. The shoreline was silent. Out on the ice, the wind had opened glassy patches between long strips of snow. There was a lot of ice fishing, and Emil from Husholm’s red snowmobile could sometimes be seen on its way to ice holes further out, his wife behind him on a toboggan. The snowdrifts shrank and grew fragile, but the ice was still strong, even in the bay and around the headlands. And day after day, the weather was clear. One morning, Anna went down to the fish pier and looked out across the ice trying to catch sight of the big pile of furniture that Katri had condemned to sink, but the light from the sky blinded her and she saw nothing. Hammering came from the boat shed, two men hammering in a regular rhythm that stopped simultaneously and then started again. Anna sat down on a tub and closed her eyes in the sun.

  “Beautiful day,” said Katri behind her. “You forgot your sunglasses.”

  Anna thanked her and stuffed the sunglasses in a pocket.

  “And the mail has come. Another letter from the plastics company.”

  Anna’s back stiffened and she closed her eyes even tighter. Finally she remarked that the sun was beginning to feel warm, and she started to whistle softly to herself. Katri stood where she was a short while, before going back to the rabbit house.

  * * *

  Anna had managed to forget the plastics company, along with so much else. What she called the brown envelopes, typewritten, never decorated with flowers, had cast a shadow on her life for far too many years. For the most part, Anna got away with thanking them for their interest, how nice it was her rabbits could be put to use, yes the terms were acceptable, cordially yours. But sometimes they were difficult; sometimes they wanted information, facts that Anna couldn’t locate in her memory or in the drawers of her cabinet. Then in cowardly despair she would put the troublesome letters in the Drawer for Further Consideration and somehow manage to forget them.

  Of course the plastics company should have gone the same route. They had written several weeks earlier asking for copies of every contract she had ever signed relating to the rabbits. Anna was on her way to the cabinet just as Katri started beating rugs outside in the yard. Anna stopped with the letter in her hand, then went back and read it several times, but there was nothing in it she might have misunderstood. In the end, she opened several drawers in
her large cabinet at random and every drawer was chock-full of letters and unintelligible papers. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to close them again and hide herself in a book.

  But the next morning, she was seized by this new kind of conscience, and the plastic company’s “as soon as possible” burned right through the envelope in fiery letters. Hastily, so she wouldn’t have time to change her mind, Anna emptied several drawers on her bed and started rooting through the letters. She quickly realized that she had to sort them into piles. The bed wasn’t big enough, and piles began tumbling to the floor and getting mixed up. She had to continue on the rug. And it was impossible to remember which pile was which, so she was constantly putting letters in the wrong pile, and her back hurt. As noon approached, she went after Katri.

  “Look what a mess they’ve caused me,” she said. “They want to see all my contracts! How am I supposed to know where they are? And on top of everything, Mama’s and Papa’s letters are mixed up with mine, every Christmas card and every receipt since the eighteen hundreds!”

  “Is there more of this?”

  “The whole cabinet is full. The stuff I thought I didn’t need is there higher up. Or maybe in the middle…”

  “And they’re in a hurry?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll have to wait,” Katri said. “This will take some time. But I think I’m pretty good at organizing.”

  Mats carried everything up to Katri’s room, and the cabinet was empty. To Anna it felt like a great defeat, but her relief was even greater.

  * * *

  Briskly and with increasing amazement, Katri began to sort through the deluge of confusion that an inattentive, impractical person can produce if given enough time. Katri read here and there and began to suspect the worst, but at the moment she had only to find the contracts. When she did find them, she saw that they could not be shown to anyone. No rational person, seeing how profoundly Anna had let herself be cheated, could ever be induced to offer her better terms. Katri explained this to Anna.

  “But they’re waiting,” Anna objected. She was very anxious.

  “They’ll have to wait. We’ll write and say we’re expecting their offer as soon as possible.”

  “But what do we say about the contracts? Maybe that we’ve lost them?”

  “Contracts don’t get lost. Why should we lie? We’ll say nothing.”

  * * *

  It was then the brown folders came into the house. Katri had them sent from town. She stopped crocheting. Evening after evening, with great care, she went over the draughts of Anna’s business letters. They were undated, and the pages, never numbered, were often found in different drawers. With patience and something of the instinct of a hunting dog, Katri figured most of it out. All her life, she’d had a strong need for clarity, for putting everything in order, and working with Anna Aemelin’s letters gave her a sense of calm fulfilment. As time went by, Katri got a pretty clear picture of what had transpired over a very long period of time, and she began doing the maths. She added up the sums that Anna Aemelin had lost by being almost criminally credulous or quite simply careless and lazy. Some of it could be written off to an unwillingness to say no, or to social conscience, but less than she might have expected. Mostly, Anna had simply not cared. Katri wrote the lost sums in a black notebook.

  “How’s it going?” Anna asked in the door. “Dear Miss Katri, I’m afraid I’ve been a bit careless…”

  “Yes, unfortunately. You’ve made very imprudent agreements. There’s not much here we can rescue.” While Katri went on about percentages and guaranteed minimums, Anna stood in sullen silence before the line of brown folders, each of which had a square label in her own lovely handwriting telling what it contained. She wasn’t listening. The folders depressed her. It was as if everything she’d done and left undone had suddenly been itemized and laid out in implacable order for all and sundry to consider and disparage.

  Suddenly Katri interrupted herself and said, “Stop whistling.”

  “Was I whistling?”

  “Yes, Miss Anna. You whistle all the time. Please don’t. Anyway, as I was saying, now that you have these folders, this will all be much easier. You can find what you need right away and get a clear picture of the situation.”

  Anna gave Katri a long look and said, “The situation…”

  “Your business situation,” said Katri, slowly and amiably. “Your agreements. What you’ve said and what they’ve said. For example, you need to know what percent they gave you last time if you’re going to ask for more. Right?”

  “And what’s that you have on the floor?” said Anna suddenly.

  “I’m sewing them together into a coverlet. I’m trying to get the colours to go together.”

  “Oh, yes. Getting the colours to go together.” Anna picked up one of the crocheted squares laid out on the floor and studied it closely. She turned away and said, brusquely, that it had been very nice of Katri to organize her correspondence because now they could find anything, supposing they wanted to find it, which she hoped would not be necessary, since, all things considered, it was all water under the bridge.

  “That’s true,” said Katri sternly. “It’s water under the bridge. And the water will keep coming unless someone does something about it.” She paused for a moment and then asked, “Anna, do you trust me?”

  “Not particularly,” said Anna sweetly.

  Katri started to laugh.

  “You know what, Katri?” Anna said, turning around. “Somehow I like you better when you laugh than when you smile. This coverlet is a fine piece of work, but the green is in the wrong place. Green is a very difficult colour. And now I think a nice walk would feel good. Why don’t you bring Teddy along and give him a little air?”

  Katri’s face closed again. “No,” she said. “You’re not good for that dog. He only goes out with me or with Mats.”

  Anna shrugged her shoulders and, with sudden spite, commented that Katri’s interest in money seemed somewhat exaggerated. In her family, money was not considered a proper topic of discussion.

  “Really?” Katri said. The word came out like a blow. “You don’t say! An improper topic?” She had gone pale, and she took an uncertain step towards Anna.

  “What’s the matter?” Anna said, backing away. “Don’t you feel well?”

  “No, I don’t feel well. I feel really ill when I see how you throw money down the drain for no reason at all. Because what you throw away, what you so utterly despise, is quite simply possibilities. Don’t you understand? The possibility of becoming so secure you don’t have to think about money, the possibility of being generous, the potential for new ideas that can’t grow without money. Without money, a person’s thinking gets narrow. It shrivels! You have no right to let them cheat you this way…” Katri had been speaking in a very quiet voice – a new, frightening voice – and now she stopped. The silence stretched on and grew awkward.

  “I don’t understand,” Anna said.

  “No. You don’t understand.”

  “You’re so pale. Is there anything I can do..?”

  “Yes, there is something you can do,” Katri said. “You can let me manage your affairs. I know how. I do. I can double your income.” When the silence descended again, she added, “I beg your pardon. I’ve said too much.”

  “Indeed,” said Anna. “But you seem to be feeling better.” She was using her mother’s voice, that long-gone, benevolent, supercilious voice. “My dear Katri, you may do precisely as you like. But you mustn’t get the idea that I am in any way deficient in security or generosity. And my ideas, I can assure you, are quite independent of my income.” Anna gave Katri a little nod, a slight flexure of the neck, and left the room. On the stairs, she felt suddenly exhausted and had to stop for a moment. Then it passed.

  “Rashly?” Anna whispered contemptuously. “Rashly? She, Katri, who thinks she never speaks rashly? And what did she mean? What is it that’s my fault?”

  Downs
tairs the dog lay glaring at her with his yellow eyes, the superior, dangerous dog that she was not to touch or feed. For the first time, Anna went straight over to the big animal and clapped him on the head, and it was a powerful clap that was anything but friendly.

  * * *

  “Dear Sirs, We regret that Miss Aemelin has not had an earlier opportunity to answer your query of the…” Katri looked at the query. It was two years old, but maybe it wasn’t too late. The offer was very advantageous. Katri set down her pen and stared blankly out the window. Beside her on the table she had a Guide to Business Correspondence and an English dictionary. The letters in English were difficult, but she managed. Teeth clenched, Katri wrote her stumbling but exceedingly explicit letters to the people who, for their various reasons, saw the flowery rabbits as a source of profit.

  The unavoidably simple wording of the letters gave them an air of finality that was almost brutal. Every time Katri managed to inflate a fee or trade a one-time payment for a royalty, she noted her success in the black notebook. She also noted down the amounts preserved by saying no to all sorts of charities, amateur enthusiasms, and general cries for help from impractical but obstinate individuals. Everything was written into the notebook, every penny honourably recorded. Katri told herself it was money she had earned for Mats by not giving in and never rashly asking for too much. The answers she got to her letters were cold but respectful, and very rarely did she have to modify her demands. Neither party added a polite closing sentence about the weather.