The True Deceiver (8 page)

“This feels right,” Liljeberg said and smiled at Katri. “There ought to be a big fuss when people move up in the world.”

* * *

Anna phoned her childhood friend Sylvia, who lived in town. She couldn’t think of anyone else to call now at a moment’s notice.

“It’s been a while,” said Sylvia’s well-modulated voice. “How is everything out there in the big woods?”

“Fine, everything is fine...” Anna was out of breath. They might be here any moment. Quickly and out of sequence she tried to tell her friend what had happened – Katri, Mats, the dog... Everything was about to change, everything...

“You don’t mean you’ve taken boarders?” Sylvia said. “Surely you don’t need to. I mean, you’re quite well off, aren’t you? By the way, are you working on anything, a new little tale?”

Sylvia’s interest in her work had always been very important to Anna, but not right now. Anna replied snappishly that she never worked in the winter, which Sylvia ought to know, and then went headlong into her news about Katri while she tried to see down to the road through the veranda window.

“But dear Lord,” said Sylvia in a pause. “You sound so
agitée
. Are you feeling well?”

“Yes, yes, I feel fine...”

Anna’s friend began to describe some alterations she’d had done in her apartment and talked about the newly started Wednesday Society for Culture, which Anna really ought to join. And Anna should finally come to visit. It was important to get out and about, she knew that well enough, all the years she’d been a widow. “One shouldn’t be alone, it leads to so much thinking...”

“But I’m not going to be alone!” Anna said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you! There are going to be four of us, didn’t you hear me? Four of us, counting the dog...” Liljeberg’s van was coming. “They’re coming,” she whispered. “I have to go...”

“Well, we’ll talk again. Now take care of yourself and think twice before you do anything hasty. You cannot be too careful with boarders. I’ve heard so many stories. And as I said, drop by my little lair some day when you’ve got the time.”

“Yes, yes, of course... Goodbye, I’ll say goodbye now, goodbye...”

“Goodbye, little Anna.”

They were coming up the hill. Anna stood close to the window and watched them come. Her heart had started pounding in a primitive impulse to get away, to just flee as far as the road would take her. So stupid. Why did she behave this way... and she’d been unpleasant to Sylvia, whom she liked so much and admired, had raised her voice and been impatient, although Sylvia was only being considerate and had even remembered to ask about her work... It had been a mistake to call. But it had felt absolutely necessary that someone she trusted should listen, listen carefully, and ask questions and maybe say, “But that sounds wonderful!” Or, “My dear Anna, what an exciting idea! You simply know what you want and go after it – just like that!”

* * *

Mats and Anna went up the stairs to the second floor. He said, “Can you believe it, Miss? I’ve never had my own room before.”

“Haven’t you? How remarkable. Now, what I thought was that if Katri took the pink room, you could have the blue. It was very popular in its day.”

They stood in the door and looked. Mats said nothing.

Finally Anna said, “Don’t you like it?”

“It’s awfully nice. But you know, Miss, it’s too big.”

“How so, too big?”

“I mean, for one person. I’m not used to such a big room.”

Anna was distressed. She explained that there weren’t any smaller ones.

“Are you sure, Miss? When people build such big houses, they usually have some cubby-holes left over. They figure wrong and wind up with extra spaces under the roof.”

Anna thought for a moment and said, “Well, we have the maid’s room. But it’s full of stuff, and it’s always been too cold.”

They went to the maid’s room, and it really was very cold. Furniture, objects, things that had once been objects, odds and ends – all of it piled randomly up towards the angled ceiling, a chaotic jumble broken by a shaft of winter light from the window at the far end of the long, narrow room.

“This will be fine,” Mats said. “Excellent. Where can I put all this stuff?”

“I don’t really know... Are you sure you’d like to live in here?”

“Positive. But where shall I put all the stuff?”

“Wherever you like. Anywhere... I think I’ll go lie down for a little while.” The room had frightened Anna; it seemed threatening to her and tremendously
melancholy
. She went away, but the room followed. Very early images wandered through her head, images of the maid, Beda, who had been with them since she was a girl and had always lived in the dreadful room upstairs. Beda, who gradually became large and sleepy and who slept whenever she was free, just pulled up the covers and slept. How ghastly, Anna thought. I remember, they’d send me up when they needed her and every time she was just sleeping. What happened to her? Did she move away? Was she sick? I can’t remember. And all that furniture: where did we have it? I didn’t recognize it, but it must have been somewhere, it must have mattered. It must have been important to someone at some time...

Anna lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling. There was a little wreath of plaster roses around the light fixture on the ceiling, repeated in a long ribbon around the bedroom. She listened. Heavy objects were being dragged around upstairs and then dropped with a thud. Steps came and went, and silences that strained her hearing to the utmost. Now, again, something being dragged and dropped, everything up there changing places; all the past, which had rested above Anna Aemelin’s bedroom as distant and undisturbed as the innocent dome of heaven, was in a state of violent transformation. All the same, Anna thought to herself, everyone has to have things the way they want them, and now I’m going to sleep. She pulled the pillow over her head, but sleep didn’t come.

* * *

“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.

S
ERENITY 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.”