Something resembling a smile even plays round his mouth as his eyes travel the drawing room, as if he were seeing it for the last time. He says, ‘Strange how some tend to cling to places and others don’t feel at home anywhere.’
‘How do we know that Henrik hasn’t missed the place?’
His smile is cut deeper by an invisible knife. ‘I didn’t say anything about Henrik.’
‘But you meant him.’
He tilts his head, as he does often when in a playful mood. ‘What if I was talking about myself?’
‘Are you saying you’re suddenly dying to see the world?’
‘Well, I’ve heard there are these women out there,’ he says, and slaps me on the buttock. But instantly, his voice grows serious. ‘We should start getting our belongings together. We won’t take anything big; all the furniture stays here.’
‘How on earth will we manage, then?’
‘We will, somehow. We’ll start with the small things and build up as time goes by.’
‘In Turku?’
‘There or elsewhere. There to start with, at least.’
He leaves the room, lightly, speedily, prepared for the days to come. I am left to soak up this feeling. Soon I will leave these hostile rooms, which I have always roamed as if in a derelict church. Perhaps I will start combing my hair fifty times again, perhaps I will learn the habits of townspeople and take to sniffing contemptuously when I recall all this. It is good we are leaving. Our departure is already within me, awaiting birth.
I will not even bother to say goodbye to Father. I can see him sitting in the kitchen, swollen with inactivity and agreeably weary of everything. He would raise his warm, listless, indifferent gaze to me and say yes before even hearing me out. He would wag a fat finger at me and say something like, ‘Feel free to leave. Just don’t say one word about that animal.’
I had to wait outside at first. It was summer. The sickly-sweet scent of the lilacs floated in the shadows of the garden, and as the evening thickened into night, the birds of the dark began singing. One of the downstairs windows of the big house was open, letting out pale light and men’s voices into the yard. I could hear one man’s triumph and another’s disappointment. I promised to keep my mouth shut but I did not yet understand how profitable silence was. I was pleased when the maid was sent to bring me ale and sustenance. I thought it would always be my lot to be thankful for crumbs from others’ tables.
Come the autumn, I was allowed into the porch. I sat on an uncomfortably rickety chair, the smell of foreign tobacco wafting towards me from the drawing room, late-night carriages clanking past in the street. I tried not to look at the woman staring down at me from a painting hung between two candlesticks on the wall. I thought how grand it must be, to live in a pile like this. I myself would have loved to be a man with the money and the daring to hang naked women, breasts pendulous as sacks of flour, on the walls of a handsome villa.
Sometimes, the door leading into the drawing room was left ajar, and by craning my neck I could see them, sitting at a round table surrounded by grand furniture and busts twisted into strange positions. There were bottles and glasses on the table. The master of the house would always have his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up high on his muscular arms. The others, too, had loosened their clothing; only Erik squatted stiff and formal in his ill- fitting Sunday jacket and unstarched loose collar. He was so obviously a peasant, lost among townsmen. I believe he kept me with him for that very reason; he might have come from the country but he still had a manservant. I was sure he wouldn’t tell anyone that we were related.
He behaved well and with restraint, eyeing his cards coolly and, upon winning, shrugging off the other men’s congratulations. He resembled a gravedigger, or a verger in his Sunday best, who is privately mulling over a bottle he has concealed in the chapel foundations, or the tribulations of his wife, languishing in confinement, but who behaves in front of the congregation as if filled with the Holy Spirit. He barely touched a drop of liquor, merely moistened his lips with it cautiously from time to time. When he finally got up from the table at an early hour of the morning, he was in the habit of bowing clumsily to the other players and taking leave of them in such an everyday manner that he might as well have been leaving a meeting of the village society.
In winter, however, his demeanour and appearance changed. He had learnt to lose. His collar began to droop, his eyes goggled feverishly, he kept licking his lips in a tortured manner and twisting about in his chair. He no longer despised the liquor but drank it down like all the others. Often, after we had left the house, he did not want to seek out the cheap quarters where we had been in the habit of spending the night, or what was left of the night. Perhaps he felt that fleeing the town distanced him from his losses. So we sped through the moonlit landscape, ignoring the frost and the blizzard. I was chilled by the frost but a mysterious source of warmth had lit up inside me. Although I did not yet know about the future, although I had no inkling of it, I was close to bursting into a song as I held the reins in my numb hands. I felt much more than mere joy at his misfortune. I felt as if I had died and were about to be brought back to life.
He did not always lose. Sometimes he won and paid his debts in order to have the opportunity to lose again. I noticed his increasing restlessness in between the trips to town. The house with its outbuildings, the surrounding forests and fields, were no longer enough for him. He was constantly on the move, stamping hither and thither aimlessly. His face was etched with premature lines, and his eyes stared hard, as if out of the mouths of caves.
Winter turned into spring and we were given the war. Erik gambled, lost, won, lost again. The lilacs began to blossom once more. I did not know I would shortly enlist in the army when we made one more journey to town and the luxurious white-painted house that had become Erik’s private Sodom. I sat in the porch, as always, and this time I understood that it was not fate kicking Erik but human inventiveness. I saw through a chink in the doorway that the other gamblers – the master with his relaxed demeanour, two porky-faced burghers and a tall man with a permanent, ghastly grin – were giving each other signals. Both Erik and I should have realized a long time ago. They were rubbing their necks, scratching their noses, or tugging at their whiskers so frequently that you would have thought they were victims of an attack by a swarm of angry fleas. Tortured by his anxiety, Erik didn’t notice anything, and I lacked the courage or the will to burst into the drawing room and tell him.
As we were leaving, the master followed Erik to the steps. He did not address Erik with the same playful brotherliness he had adopted in the summer, and even into autumn. His voice took on a rough, earnest tone as he said, ‘I’ll give you a few weeks. After that, the matter will have to be arranged.’
‘There’s a war on,’ Erik said. His voice wheezed, as if it were being squeezed through a narrow tube. ‘It’s difficult to arrange anything.’
The master gave it some thought. ‘All right. Until the hostilities have ended. But not beyond that.’
So Erik was granted time by the Emperor and the King. Soon I understood that the war suited him. Of course, he did not really like war itself, but it kept him at a remove from the inevitable march of events that awaited him once battle ceased. After we had finally retreated into the miserable winter camp at Tornio, I realized that he did not miss home at all. He would rather lie around, hungry and cold, amid the stench of congealed blood and rotting flesh. When we received the order to depart, he walked the long journey virtually wordless, day after day only opening his mouth when forced to. Not until we were walking along the familiar village road did he come out with, ‘Might be worth your while starting to look for work.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘You just never know. Could be I’ll lose the house.’
At that moment, I was too tired to think about it. I put the matter to one side. I expect I would have done so even if I had known about the letter waiting for me at home.
Once I had read it, I sat in my room for a long while without moving. You could hear the emotional voices of the womenfolk, who were mobbing Erik in another room. Meanwhile, I stared at the unpapered wall with watery eyes and tried to digest the fact that I had been liberated. I had not even known that I had an uncle living in the New World, let alone one with a fortune to leave me. The news was almost too massive to absorb, but absorb it I did. Fortunately, I had also learnt patience, for I needed it now, along with resourcefulness. First I had to invent a pretext for travelling to the capital to arrange my affairs, and then another for going to Vaasa to speak to the Crown Bailiff. I needed to be long-suffering and cunning in persuading the Bailiff to carry out his official duties, but before that, I had to pay a visit to the manor house, a Gomorrah erected for Erik’s personal use but the Promised Land to
