The True Deceiver (9 page)

“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!”

“S
YLVIA?”
A
NNA 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.

E
MIL FROM
H
USHOLM
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.

“M
ISS
K
LING
. 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 damage 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.

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.”