House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Is it Magda coming back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She was standing, one hand on the back of the chair, listening.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open the door?’

  ‘Magda’s got her key.’ She was whispering. ‘She wouldn’t stand outside the door like that. Lauri, I don’t think it’s her.’

  ‘Who else could it be at this time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  All right. I’m going to look.’

  ‘Don’t! Don’t! Please don’t, Lauri. They’ll know you’re here.’

  The back of his neck hackled. ‘I’m opening it. If there’s anybody there, he’ll get more than he bargained for.’

  ‘No.’ She seized his arm, holding him back. ‘You don’t know who it might be. Wait. Listen.’

  There was no further sound. Absolute stillness, as if whoever was outside the door was waiting and listening too. And then Lauri was sure that he heard the faintest padding, like the footsteps of someone who has taken off his boots, going away from the door, across the landing, down the stairs.

  ‘Lauri! Don’t!’

  But he had crossed the room, and wrenched the door open. The landing was dark, empty. The stairs ran away into the shadows of the stairwell. Below, he heard the muffled thud of the apartment building’s outer door. He turned back into the room.

  ‘You were right,’ he said calmly, ‘there was somebody there, but he’s gone now. Don’t worry. It was nothing.’

  She didn’t answer. Her hands were like claws, ready to gouge the air. It had happened to her before, and he remembered every instant of it, when they had arrested his father, and taken Eeva away.

  ‘It was nothing,’ he repeated. ‘Come on, let’s go to bed.’

  ‘If they came for me again,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t let them take me, no matter what. I should have fought. I used to lie in bed in the House of Orphans and think about it. I should have fought.’

  ‘Then I should have fought too. But we weren’t strong enough.’

  ‘I didn’t even try. I should have used my teeth, my nails. I wasn’t that weak. But I couldn’t do it. I was frozen. I just let them take me away.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Eeva, it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘We let things be done to us. But never again,’ said Eeva. ‘No matter what happens. Never, never, never again.’

  29

  Dear Dr Eklund

  I am writing to you in the hope that you can help me. I know there is no reason why you should want to do this, but I have to ask, because you are the only person of importance whom I know.

  He’d recognized her handwriting as soon as he’d taken up the envelope. Her confident, educated hand, so much stronger than Minna’s.

  I have a good job now, and a place to live. Please don’t think that I am asking you for money. I am approaching you on behalf of my friend, who has been arrested.

  He has done nothing wrong. You can be sure of that. He has not committed any crime. But the way things are these days, it is possible to be arrested for less than nothing. You’ll understand that I don’t want to write too much about it.

  Is it possible for you to come to Helsinki, so that I can explain everything to you face to face? Believe me, I know that I have no right to ask this. I have nothing to offer you in return.

  She had signed her name. And then, in smaller writing, she’d scribbled:

  I must ask you not to tell anyone, not even your close friends.

  She meant Lotta, of course. Who else would he talk to? Underneath the postscript, she’d added her address. This disorder was the only clue to her state of mind. The body of the letter sounded as contained as she’d always been. I have nothing to offer you in return. What kind of a man did she think he was?

  He read the address again, but didn’t recognize the street. Probably she lived in a part of Helsingfors he wasn’t familiar with, but he would find it easily enough. He didn’t know Helsingfors all that well – he was the typical country bumpkin who just about knew his way around Kruununhaka but got lost anywhere else – but she was right, he did know a few people in the capital. But whether they were the type of people she needed, those professors and doctors with blossoming private practices who were the friends of his youth – that he very much doubted.

  But one person could lead you to another. Old Magnus Bergström, for instance, who’d given up medical practice years ago in favour of some sublime form of civil service – he was forever quietly making it clear that he knew everybody who was anybody, everybody who ‘mattered’, even in the highest circles – it would be worth looking up old Magnus as soon as he arrived.

  For he knew instantly that he would go. Nothing could stop him. Here was her handwriting. The link to her lay in his hand. He’d been sure he would never see her or speak to her again, but here she was. Quick as a breath, it all rose up in him: her way of moving around the house, her silence as she put a bowl of soup before him, the click of her heels. The curve of her cheek and the way she looped back a stray piece of hair behind her ear. The sight of her standing at the stove.

  Strangely, those thoughts of her in his kitchen were more real than the journey they’d taken together. Yes, the real Eeva remained here, in this house, with him.

  But could it ever be? Was it possible that he could make it so again? She’d sat down and written to him. To that extent, he was in her mind. To ask someone for help is an intimate thing, he told himself.

  He wouldn’t waste time writing back. No. By the time a letter got to her, he could be there in the flesh. He ran through his patients rapidly in his mind. There was no case so desperate that he couldn’t be spared for two or three days. He would set off at once, just as soon as he could send word to old Anders Holmberg to keep an eye on his patients until he returned. Anders would grumble, but he’d be glad enough to have something to do. Retirement didn’t suit him. And then I’ll throw a few things into a bag, he thought. I’ll call Matti to get the horses ready. It’s a long drive to the station, and it’ll be dark before we get there. I must remind him to check the lanterns – and we’ll have to put up in town overnight.

  In the middle of his tumult, his thoughts halted. He touched the paper that Eeva had touched. She had laid her hand on it, like this, to steady it while she wrote. She had written a line or two and then looked up, thinking what to write. He knew exactly how her eyes would have looked. Wide, unfocused and full of light. He walked over to the window and stared out at the woods, where they lay shrouded in snow and ice. It was a windless day and the trees were perfectly still. The forest appeared to be deep in its winter sleep, and yet he knew that it was full of hidden life. The bare snow under his window was patterned by birds’ claws, which had sunk into the fresh new fall. A fox had come near, and then swerved away.

  How beautiful it was, and already the days were growing longer. February, and yet another winter passing away. It seemed to him that a lifetime wasn’t long enough to look out of the window and see those claw marks and paw prints sunk into snow and then frozen there, bluish and glazed in their hollows.

  Why was he so happy? There was no reason for this happiness. It swelled in him and wouldn’t be quieted, as if it were not his own emotion, but a dear guest. She might not come here ever again. Almost certainly she would never come. But for some reason those paw prints reminded him so forcibly of Eeva’s presence that he almost heard her footsteps.

  Without realizing it, he had crushed the letter between his hands. He unfolded it carefully out of its creases, and smoothed the paper. There were Eeva’s words again, but the ink was a little blurred now, from the sweat on his hands.

  Eeva could not keep still. At work, she had to be on the move. In and out of the stockroom, checking orders, stacking books, back in the shop asking customers if she could help them with what they were looking for. She did not sit down, even to drink her coffee. She had walked to work instead of taking the tram. Only constant movement kept down the thoughts that w
ere swelling in her head. Her mouth was dry. She had to keep licking her lips, and now the skin at the corner of her mouth was cracked.

  He was in prison at this moment. Now, while I lift my hand like this. Now, while I eat this bun. Now. As she drank her coffee, he might be lying on the floor, thirsty. At this moment they might be questioning him. She knew their methods. They asked the same questions over and over, looking for holes in the story. They claimed to have information from other prisoners.

  ‘There’s no point trying to keep anything from us. We know all about you already. Your chums have been singing like canaries.’

  Everybody knew how the Okhrana worked. They wanted admissions, confessions, evidence. They wanted the outline of a crime down in black and white, and they worked fast. A man could be arrested, interrogated, convicted and hanged in the space of a few weeks. A woman just the same. Look what happened to Perovskaya after the assassination of Alexander II: she was arrested and hanged within five weeks.

  They weren’t strangers who died like that. They were people you knew. Eeva’s father had met Perovskaya once, long ago in Russia, when they were all young. Someone took him along to the apartment she shared with Zhelyabov. He didn’t agree with everything she stood for, but she was a woman you had to respect. A lovely smile, she had. He told Eeva that. They hanged her outside on a gibbet, along with Zhelyabov and the others.

  But no one has died this time, she told herself. There hasn’t been an assassination. It’s all just words. What’s to link Lauri with anything? But the reassurance rang false in her ears. Plotting was enough. Gathering and talking would do it. Nothing had to happen to create a conspiracy, and only a fool would pretend otherwise.

  Even the degree of involvement didn’t matter much. It didn’t matter what you said. Once an arrest was made, what happened next had very little to do with what had happened up to then. You might think you were innocent when you went in, but there was no place in jail for innocence. One man pulled the next down, as if they were chained together and drowning.

  Why should the truth interest the Okhrana? It wasn’t their job. It was not the point. Getting a confession out of someone was the point, and if that confession implicated others, and if those others implicated others, then so much the better. The job was going along nicely. The bigger the sweep, the more likely they were to pull in someone who really did know something juicy. But the others were useful too, the ones who begged and swore and protested their innocence, and couldn’t give any information because they had none to give.

  She knew all these things. They’d been learned so early that they were in her blood rather than her thoughts. They were the reality that lay behind every meeting, every pamphlet, every speech where an agent of the Okhrana might well be present.

  It had been like that in Russia for generations, her father had taught her that, and these days the Tsar and his Governor-General had taken off the gloves as far as Finland was concerned. The Empire must kneel. Finland was part of the Empire, and Finland must be brought to her knees too.

  All they needed was a confession. Perhaps Lauri was hungry, thirsty. Or they had beaten him up and left him lying on the floor without a blanket. People went crazy from being left alone in the dark, or drinking salt water because they were left with that or the rage of their thirst. Their families were told that they’d had mental troubles all along.

  The Okhrana could do all these things and any others they thought of. In the case of terrorism everything was justified. When the security of the State, the Tsar and the Empire was at stake, the end most certainly justified the means. The Okhrana were in the front line of defence. They answered to the Tsar. That was their job, and it drew a certain kind of person like honey. Those were the people who had hold of Lauri now.

  They’d plucked him out of his life. Not a word was left behind. Such vanishings were all part of their method. She had no clue as to what he was accused of, if there was even a charge yet. Taken in for questioning.’

  He’d been lifted at four in the morning. An Okhrana job, for sure. He was probably at the Okhrana House now.

  Sasha hadn’t been sleeping at home that night. He was away for a couple of days, at a meeting in Turku. When he’d come back, one of the neighbours had crept out to tell him what had happened. Three men, in plain clothes. Police.

  All this had come to Eeva second-hand. She hadn’t even spoken to Sasha yet. She would have to talk to him, but he was avoiding her and she was avoiding him. When she wasn’t working, she was running around the city trying to get help, advice, information, anything.

  Magda said, ‘Keep calm. Wait. Don’t draw attention to yourself. It’s hard, but it’s the only way you’ll get through this. The most likely thing is that he’ll be released in a few days.’

  She must see Sasha. It was weakness in her not to see him, but she shrank from it. She was afraid. Her fear wasn’t because of what Sasha might do to her, or even what he might tell her. It was like the fear you have when you lift the cover from a dish of meat that has been standing too long in summer, in a warm place. The stink of it and the crawling of flies.

  But what would Lauri think, if he knew that she’d already written to the doctor for help, but hadn’t even seen Sasha?

  She must offer to leave Magda’s apartment. It might be risky for Magda to have Eeva here, with her link to Lauri.

  Even the thought of leaving the apartment frightened Eeva. It was like the beginning of the end of her life. Her new life in Helsinki had sometimes felt too good to be true, and now it seemed that it was. What if the Okhrana took her in too?

  I would go mad, Eeva thought. As soon as the door was locked, I would begin to go mad. They wouldn’t have to do anything to me. But perhaps everybody thinks that, and then they find strength. She’d heard of a comrade who asked to be shut in a cupboard which was too small for him to sit down, so that he would be able to practise and overcome his fear.

  If she was arrested, she would lose her job. Eeva couldn’t believe that the bookshop would keep her on after that. It would be hard to find work. No job, no apartment. No Magda.

  If only we had a place of our own.

  Yes. She and Lauri, far away and together. It wasn’t escapist romantic rubbish, but the only thing that might save them. People who talk about the revolutionist having no private interests, no affairs, sentiments or ties: they are the escapists. ‘He has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world.’ Those are words that sway a crowd and make its blood leap. Yes, but then what? It’s impossible to do those things, to ‘sever every link’ and be a ‘merciless enemy’ and all the rest of it. In a private room it sounds hollow. Nobody can live like that and nobody does, thought Eeva, unless it’s death that interests you and not life. And even then, death gets its own way.

  ‘You don’t die in a group,’ her father said once. ‘Even if they string you up in a line, you die alone. It’s a private thing.’

  He knew that. He prepared for it. But in spite of everything, when the time came to die, he struggled. She moistened his lips and washed him and sat up with him, but she could not lay her head on his pillow, or die in his place.

  A place of our own, far away.

  Lauri’s a marked man, now, even if they let him out. He’ll be watched.

  Why did she send that letter? Probably the doctor won’t come. Why should he want to get mixed up with all this?

  30

  Thomas stood in the middle of the room. A fair-sized room, not badly furnished. A bed in one corner. What gave life to the place were the colours. A splash of red from the rug on the floor, blue and white tiles on the corner stove. There was a vase of dried beech leaves on the table, and a plate of apples. Framed drawings hung on the walls. A good room.

  So this was where Eeva lived. She had only the one room, he supposed. He stood in the middle of it, looking around because he was afraid to look at her.

  ‘I’ll take your coat.’

  He unbuttoned his overcoa
t with clumsy fingers. Before he could take it off, she was there, helping him, sliding the sleeves off his arms. She folded the coat very carefully, as if it were precious, and laid it on the bed by the far wall.

  ‘Sit down, please,’ she said. ‘I’ll make coffee.’ He dared to look at her as she lifted the pot from its shelf and began to prepare the coffee. He glanced quickly and then away, as if the sight of her burned him. She was wearing a close-fitting woollen dress and she looked older, different.

  No. Be honest, he told himself. The difference is that she is not your servant any more. This is her place, not yours. You don’t know where her clothes came from, or how she bought them. It changes everything.

  She looked like a young student teacher. Poor, but that didn’t matter, because everyone in her milieu would be poor. For them, money wasn’t the important thing. They were young, they had their lives stretching out vividly ahead of them, like clouds at sunrise. They had sacrificed everything else for the chance of education. Their heads were full of books and ideas and dreams. A pang of envy went through him as he pictured her life, and the friends of her own age who would crowd into her room and drink coffee and eat buns and laugh about things that no outsider could possibly find funny. There’d be no barriers between them, no awkwardness. They belonged together.

  It made him think back to his own student days; although, of course, he had never been poor. Only a little foolish sometimes, wasting money he didn’t have.

  ‘You found the house, then,’ she said, still busy with making coffee, her back to him.

  ‘Oh yes, very easily. But what a lot of building’s been going on everywhere. It must be five years since I was last in Helsinki, and there are new buildings shooting up wherever you look. The place is like a building site.’

  ‘Yes, there’s even going to be a new railway station.’

  ‘I suppose that’s progress.’

  Why were they talking such a stream of inanities? He had no interest in the new railway station.