House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Here you are, Eeva, drink this. You’ll feel better.’

  She took the bottle from him and tipped back her head to drink greedily, swallowing gulps of the fresh water. Some of it spilled out of the side of her mouth and ran down her jaw. When the bottle was empty he filled it for her again. This time she drank more steadily, and then she tipped the last of the water into her hands and splashed it over her face. The drops ran away, sparkling, into the moss. She was half in sun and half in shade. The greenish forest light wobbled over her and he smelled her skin. She reached to the nape of her neck and untied her kerchief.

  ‘Is there enough water for me to pour it over my hair?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He hadn’t drunk enough. He tasted his thirst as he filled the bottle again, from the basin that hadn’t yet filled again. He had to lay the bottle sideways in the water. Slowly it bubbled itself full, and he gave it to Eeva. She closed her eyes and poured it in a long stream over her hair, her forehead, her neck. She was smiling.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she murmured. ‘It feels wonderful.’

  There were drops and rivulets of water all over her. Water was running into the lines of her smile. He caught his breath at the scent coming off her, as water touched her warm skin and the sweat in her tangled hair.

  ‘You should try it, it’s wonderful,’ she said.

  He had got to drink. He didn’t bother with the bottle, but knelt by the stone basin and scooped up water, sucking it greedily into his mouth, swallowing, sucking again. And again, and again. How dry he was. He wouldn’t have believed how dry he was. His skin was parched like a desert. He scooped up the water and tossed it into his face, over his hair, over his clothes. The touch of water made him shiver and want more. He would drink and drink until his thirst was gone.

  ‘Is that better?’ she called to him. She’d taken off her boots and was massaging her feet in their cotton stockings. The heels of her stockings were quite worn out, and her skin was raw. And there was still half a day’s walking ahead of them.

  ‘You should bathe your feet,’ he said. ‘You’re blistered. I’ve a handkerchief, we can bandage your feet with it.’

  ‘Turn your back while I take off my stockings,’ she ordered him.

  He turned his back. Even so he seemed to see her – or maybe it was her shadow falling over him as she balanced on one leg, and then the other, to strip off her stockings. No, of course he couldn’t see her. It was only that he seemed to be aware of her all over. She wriggled her toes as she stepped across to the water.

  ‘It feels so good to take off these boots. No, I’m sorry, I don’t mean that they’re not good boots –’

  Looking at her he remembered what it was like to play by the stream, barefoot, plunging thigh-deep in the pool he’d dammed. The squelch of mud, so disgusting and so delicious, and then the mud sluicing off his feet, clouding the pool, and then drying between his toes with moss and wisps of grass – and the way his feet looked so white in the water, when they weren’t white at all in the air.

  She smiled back at him over her shoulder as she dipped her right foot in the shallow water. And then she bent, as he remembered bending, and spread her toes in the basin.

  ‘It’s so cold! It’s freezing!’

  ‘The water comes from deep in the earth.’

  She wiped her foot dry on her skirt, and then washed the other. She looked absorbed and happy, as a child is absorbed and happy. Some of her hair was coming out of its knot. She glanced back at him over her shoulder with a flash of happiness that he knew was the first real smile he’d ever seen on her face.

  They sat under the birches, eating bread and cheese. He thought that he’d never tasted anything better than the nuttiness of the black bread, the tang of the cheese. And he’d put in a slab of gingerbread, Lotta’s gingerbread, sticky-crusted and studded all over with almonds. Every time she made a batch she sent some over for him, in waxed paper. He broke the gingerbread, and gave Eeva the larger piece. They should have fruit, he thought, but he’d forgotten to bring any. But wait…

  He got up and began to prowl around the clearing. It was too early for wild raspberries, but maybe, in this sunny clearing, there would be ripe strawberries.

  Yes. There were the leaves, and the starry white flowers. Leaf, fruit and flower all together. He lifted the leaves. There they were, wild strawberries, flushed deep red. He pinched them softly. They were ripe. He would pick them all for her.

  In the end there was less than a handful. When he’d picked them all, he laid them on a dock leaf, and carried them to her.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Wild strawberries. Me and Lauri used to –’ She stopped, and her old mask of caution dropped over her face. He pretended not to have heard.

  ‘Yes, I didn’t think there’d be any,’ he said, talking soothingly for the sake of sound, not words, the way he would talk to the mare when she was nervous, ‘but because the sun comes through just here, they’re ripe. Look, they’re quite big. Would you like them? Hold out your hands.’

  She cupped her hands and he dropped the berries into them. She ate one of the strawberries, frowning. ‘It’s good. It’s nearly ripe, but not quite. They’ll get sweeter.’

  ‘Maybe the others are better.’

  She ate a few more, tasting them like an epicure. ‘They want a few more days. But aren’t you going to have any?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you like them?’

  ‘Yes, I like them. But I’d rather you had them.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. I’m like that sometimes.’

  With Lauri, he thought, tasting the name. You’d give him all the wild strawberries you picked.

  ‘I used to pick berries for my father, the last summer when he was ill. One of the neighbour’s boys, he was a delivery boy and so he had a bike, and he used to let me borrow it on Sundays so I could go berry-picking, as long as he got a pailful. My dad liked wild raspberries, but only when they were really ripe – you know how they go, dark purple and then they dissolve the moment you put them in your mouth. And of course it was hard to bring them back on the bike when they were as ripe as that. They’d get bounced about and they’d turn to mush. So you had to judge it just right and then he’d eat them.’

  She swallowed the last of the strawberries, and licked the juice off her palms.

  ‘We must go,’ she said, but she didn’t get up.

  ‘Yes.’

  The sun was growing hotter. He could hear bees, flies, a chaffinch, the rustle of the birch leaves as a breeze passed and then left them limp.

  ‘We could sleep for a while,’ he said, but he knew it was foolish. The heat would keep them sleeping until four o’clock or later. They would get there very late. But what did it matter? She was here, so close he could hear her breathing and watch the droop of her eyelids. He knew the forest well enough. There was no danger of getting lost. Just a few more hours, that was all he wanted.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We must move on.’

  I must remember every minute, he told himself. Everything that happens. It gave a strange extra consciousness to the journey, like one of those nights when the shadow of the waking world bulks against the brilliance of dreams.

  There was the raw place on Eeva’s heel, with its flap of rubbed skin, and his own fingers tearing and tying a bandage from his handkerchief. And then the smell of the citronella oil that they dabbed on their wrists, and behind their ears, to keep off the midges and mosquitoes.

  White swans on the black water of the lake. Mute swans, sailing with their necks straight. The splash of the boatman’s oars in the water and the smell of stale alcohol leaking out of his skin. Eeva’s fingers trailing in the water, the jump of a fish. The soft knocking of the boat against the long wooden jetty on the other side of the lake, and the way the man grunted when he got his money, and bit into the coin, then spat on the water.

  The weight of Eeva’s bundle when finally she let him take it from her. Not really heavy, though, not re
ally heavy when he remembered that in that bundle was all she possessed. Why, Minna brought many times that amount just for a few days’ stay. Some people seem to dig themselves deep into the earth and stuff their burrows with goods, he thought, while others stray over the surface of it, empty-handed.

  He would give her money. Whatever she said, he’d do that. He’d planned it, and he had the notes ready to slip into her bundle when she wasn’t looking.

  How the glare of the day dissolved into soft evening warmth and golden shadows. Their shadows marched with them along the high road. They were both covered in dust by now, so the difference between them was less obvious than it had been when they set out. He no longer looked like the Doctor, and she could have been any peasant girl on her way to market. They walked like people who have no choice but to walk. Side by side they travelled on, stepping aside when a cart came by with its choking cloud of dust. Eeva called out, ‘How far are we from the railway station?’ and the carter called back that it wasn’t more than an hour’s walking, and that was when Thomas first felt a pang of fear. The journey would end. He would lose her.

  The station looked as if it had been closed for a hundred years. The last train had gone. He wanted to give her money for lodging, but she wouldn’t take it.

  ‘There’s no need,’ she said. But he argued, told her she must wash and eat, that he would find somewhere decent where they’d look after her.

  ‘They won’t take a girl on her own,’ said Eeva. ‘They’ll think I’m not respectable.’

  The thought of sleeping in a room in that town frightened her. As long as she stayed out of doors she was still on her journey, and no one could break it. Anyway, it was going to be a warm night, she said. She’d go off into the woods and wrap her cloak around her. She wasn’t frightened. This time of year, there was almost no night at all.

  ‘It’s better to keep out of people’s way,’ she said aloud, and he knew that nothing he said would change her mind.

  They walked out of the town again. Eeva’s head was bent and she moved slowly. Usually he liked to stride out, but her slowness didn’t trouble him. He fell in beside her, and matched his step to hers.

  She seemed lost in herself. The new boots were covered in dust, and she was limping, in spite of his handkerchief bandage. He would have given her his arm, but he didn’t want to break the trance of thought that held her.

  Perhaps she wasn’t thinking at all. Perhaps she’d reached that stage of weariness when it was almost easier to walk than not to walk.

  They passed the straggle of poor houses at the edge of town. Children stared after them. That meant nothing, but he could not shake off the long gaze from a woman beating her rag rug over wooden railings. Her face and body were gaunt as an old man’s, but her belly bulged.

  She was probably not more than thirty, although she looked sixty. He’d attended too many lined, worn creatures who looked more like the grandmothers than the mothers of the babies they bore. He did his best for them, but as they twisted in labour a look would come on their faces – hard, flat, antagonistic – as if he were to blame.

  Eeva must never look like that. And yet common sense told him that she’d be lucky to escape it. He felt the woman’s gaze on his back, as if he were being stalked.

  He could never remember exactly how they found the place. They turned off the road, onto a track across the meadows. Now they were walking through long grass which was already damp with dew. He snuffed its sweetness and let the grass heads feather against his fingers.

  And there was the little hut. It seemed to have been abandoned. The door hung open, its wood silvery and split at the knot-holes. Long grass rippled around it. Timothy, fescue, cocksfoot – they had all come into flower early this year, with the heat. The hay hadn’t been mown. It should have been mown by now, he thought. As for the hut, surely nobody ever came there. The wooden walls and floor ran with spiderlings.

  But the place was clean and dry enough. He pulled a bunch of grass and swept the floor for her, and once they’d sat down he dug what was left of the black bread out of his knapsack. He broke the bread, and gave her the larger piece. The bread tasted sweet, and he ate his share slowly, feeling that this was the first time he’d ever really tasted it. Morsel by morsel, the dense sour-sweet bread dissolved in his mouth. Strange, he thought, how often you eat when you’re not really hungry, but when you are truly hungry eating becomes something serious, almost holy. He could feel nourishment flowing to every part of his body, like the warmth of a fire.

  But Eeva wasn’t eating. She kept her bread in her hand. He urged her, but she shook her head. ‘It’s too heavy,’ she said.

  Suddenly he remembered the chocolate he’d put in at the last minute. Weeks ago, it seemed, although it was only this morning. He rummaged and there it was, squashed at the bottom of the knapsack, misshapen but solid. It had melted and then hardened again, and the shine had gone off it. But it was still good chocolate.

  He held it out to her.

  ‘Go on, take it. You need strength for the journey.’

  She took the chocolate and broke it as carefully as she could into two equal pieces, and then she put her own share to her mouth like a squirrel and nibbled at it, as if it were too rich for her to eat at once. Suddenly she shivered all over, reviving.

  ‘It’s good!’ she said.

  He sat, watching her eat. He would keep the rest for morning, and maybe she’d have forgotten that it was his share. He watched her face.

  My poor Eeva, my dear little Eeva, he thought, but the thought seemed unreal and it fell away from him, into an enormous space. She wasn’t poor or dear, and she was not his Eeva.

  She’d taken off her boots. Tomorrow she’d set out again, but this time he wouldn’t go with her. He would have nothing left of her. Only her name would stay with him. He’d be able to talk about her with Matti sometimes.

  Do you remember when Eeva… Do you remember how Eeva…

  Matti would think it odd, but he’d humour the doctor.

  She lay down on the floor, and wrapped herself in her cloak. They didn’t talk, nothing happened. She fell asleep. She wasn’t afraid of him, he thought. She trusted him enough to fall asleep in his company. He watched her breathing for a while and then he propped himself against the wall, so that anyone coming into the hut would have to step over him before they reached Eeva. He would close his eyes and doze for a while, but he wouldn’t sleep…

  He fell instantly into a dream so delicious that it pinned his body down. After a while – less than an hour, probably – the stiffness of his neck woke him. The dream vanished like a perfume.

  It was morning. Yes, the sun was already slanting across the grass. In the short space of his sleep a new day had arrived.

  He never forgot the sight of the meadow through the open doorway. The grass was swaying in a light wind, as if a hand were gently stroking it. A swift darted into sight. It skimmed the flowering grass heads, and then was gone. They sleep on the wing, he thought. They fly from the moment they’re fledged, until their death.

  She was still sleeping. Her mouth was slightly open, and a little bubble of spit had collected at the corner. She breathed steadily and evenly, lost in sleep. There were the veins on her eyelids, delicately blue under the waxen skin. One of the spiderlings was exploring on her cheek. It twinkled down the line of her jaw, and then to the corner of her mouth. He stretched out, ready to sweep it away. If it got into her mouth or nose it would make her sneeze, and she’d wake.

  But no. The minute yellow and brown spiderling felt at the moisture of Eeva’s spit, and then it ran away into her hair. He smiled to think of it journeying through the tangles that had fallen out of the knot she wore on the nape of her neck. Eeva stirred and a smile flew over her face and vanished, just like someone trying to write in water. That was how babies smiled, he thought, and they frowned like that too. Fleeting processions of smiles and knitted brows that some people said were due to indigestion. But maybe they were signs of
the baby’s hidden life. He used to sit beside Minna’s crib and think that her dreams were more passionate than her days, and wonder what she’d tell him, when she was able to speak.

  The thing about a baby, he thought, is that anyone could end its life just by putting out a hand. But no one does, except a brute. So the baby has power, although it looks helpless. And Eeva had power, he realized, looking at her. He couldn’t cross the tiny distance that separated him from her. He couldn’t touch her. There was her face, still so new that her frown didn’t have a line to hide in. It flowed over her skin like water, and disappeared. When she was thirty, thirty-five, how would she look? Would she be stripped of all her beauty, like that pregnant woman on the edge of town, carrying yet another ball of baby in the cage of her pelvis?

  No, there was no sense thinking of it. He was old, and she was new. She didn’t want what he had to offer, even though he could look ahead and see what it might save her from. For who wants to be saved? All Eeva saw was a hungry old man, itching to touch her. In a little while the light would grow so strong that she’d open her eyes. And that would be the end of it.

  She opened her eyes. Before she even really saw him or knew who he was, she smiled.

  He waited for the train with her. It was almost noon, and burning hot. The heat took the place of speech. What a summer: as hot as Italy. But in Italy it would have seemed more natural. Italians had planted their gardens for shade, put in pools and fountains, and tiled their floors with cool stone. But here, we don’t know what to do about such heat, he thought. Every time it comes, it surprises us. We lie panting like dogs.

  They sat side by side on the bench. A silence that was almost like boredom had fallen between them. He was so intensely aware of her body that he could not think what to say to her. At last he said, ‘You’ve got the food safe?’ and she nodded. He’d bought more food than she could carry, as soon as the shops opened. White rolls, black bread, ham, raisins, cheese, fresh milk, more chocolate, almond cake, some cans of sardines… Poor girl, she could barely lug it along, and as for the cans of sardines, they were digging into her back.