House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Magda, would you like children?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Magda instantly. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For me, this isn’t the right world for children.’ She released Eeva, and stepped back. As always she stood very upright. ‘But I’ll be glad if you think otherwise, for yourself. I think you’d have very nice children.’ She smiled quickly, and Eeva thought how smiles didn’t change. Magda would have greeted her best friend with just such a smile when they were little girls in pigtails, meeting on the corner to walk to school together. It was much easier to imagine Magda as a little girl than to imagine her with children of her own.

  ‘To me,’ Magda continued, ‘at this stage of history, we are passing through time rather than inhabiting it, if you understand what I mean. We think not about what’s here, but about the changes that will come. We put our lives second to that. Things will be better, but perhaps not for us.’

  ‘But – it’s a big thing, not to have children –’

  Magda frowned, then smiled even more brightly. ‘Perhaps. But anyway, I’m not so young any more. See.’ She bowed her head, so Eeva could see the parting of her hair. ‘Can’t you see the grey hairs? I keep pulling them out, but they come back.’

  It was true. There were a few grey hairs, like wires, in the mass of Magda’s hair. You couldn’t see them from a distance.

  ‘But you’re still young.’

  ‘Not so young, not really young at all,’ said Magda. For once there was no animation in her face, and Eeva saw that Magda was right. She was growing older. ‘It passes away quite quickly. You’re young, Eeva, look at you. No, not with that face. You’re not allowed to feel sorry for me. I’m much happier than most of the people I know. I love my work, my friends, the theatre, music. But children, no.’

  ‘Magda, you know when you’re having a bad dream, just for a while in the middle of it things seem normal, as if you’d got back into daylight. But there’s a part of you that always knows it is still the nightmare, and wants to cry out and warn the other part. But you can’t even whisper.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is like that. When I go to work – and someone comes in to complain about an order that hasn’t been delivered in time… and I look very carefully at the ledger and apologize and explain what’s happened… and all the time there’s this noise in my ears, like a black wind, so loud that I can hardly hear what the customer’s saying.’

  ‘You must eat. You won’t sleep if you don’t eat.’

  ‘I can’t. My throat closes up.’ She thought of the doctor, and how he’d urged her to eat the coffee-bread. It was true that she had felt better. The schnapps was good, too. Perhaps even now he was talking to one of his friends. People of influence all knew one another in just the same way as her father knew everybody, it didn’t matter if it was Petersburg or Helsinki, or Berlin. They were comrades, that was all that mattered.

  He had opened his black notebook with an elastic strap around it, to write down what she told him about Lauri. She had to tell him that it was crazy to write things down.

  That was the notebook he used when he was visiting patients. Later, he wrote up the cases at his desk. She recognized it at once. He was a good doctor, everybody said so. It made her feel safer, to think of being written into that notebook. But of course, once she’d said that it was risky, he hadn’t written a word…

  ‘We’ll try some soup tonight,’ said Magda. ‘Carrot soup with dill is good for the stomach. I’ll put it through a sieve so it’s easy to swallow.’

  Eeva couldn’t help smiling. Magda made soup with great lumps of potato and turnip, which bobbed about in boiling water for hours without imparting much flavour to it.

  ‘Magda, I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t here. I’d go crazy.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. You’re not the type. Things will be better soon. If they’re going to charge Lauri, we’ll find out what the charge is. But I don’t think they’ll charge him,’ went on Magda, glowing with self-sacrifice. She was giving Lauri back to Eeva. ‘They’ll question him for a few days and it won’t be pleasant, but then they’ll release him. Forgive me, Eeva, but Lauri simply isn’t of sufficient importance to them. Sometimes people get arrested, not because of what they are or what they’ve done, but as part of a game we don’t even know about.’

  Eeva said nothing. She couldn’t accept Magda’s comfort, or explain why Lauri might be of importance.

  ‘We just have to wait,’ Magda said, as if this was a cause for comfort.

  ‘How did you come to be so sure, Magda? You’re like a house which has a roof on it that doesn’t leak, and windows that fit, and the stove’s always burning.’

  ‘Well,’ Magda began briskly, ‘I don’t know about that.’ But her colour deepened. ‘When I said that about passing through life, I didn’t mean that it makes what we do any less important. What is life for, if we don’t look out for each other? I can’t count the activists I’ve known who were selfish or even cruel in their private lives. We make excuses for them. But I don’t want to be like them. In fact I refuse to accept that private life is something separate, with rules to which our political understanding doesn’t apply. It’s all of a piece. What we do is what we do. What we do is what we have to answer for, not what we intend to do.’

  ‘You mean Sasha?’

  ‘Not especially. But I don’t trust him any farther than I could throw him. You peel off one Sasha and there’s another underneath, and another, each of them with a different face.’

  ‘I know what you mean. But isn’t everybody like that?’ She thought of Anna-Liisa’s face, wreathed in pleasure when the doctor visited. She even had a special voice for when the doctor was there. But her eyes flashed warning, and all the orphans knew it. ‘One step out of line and you’ll answer for it later.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Magda. Her voice was constricted. ‘My God, Eeva, we’d theorize at the gates of death. You must go.’

  Again, she lifted her hand. She rapped on the blank wood until her knuckles hurt. Surely there was a stir behind the door. She paused to listen. Yes, she was sure he was in there.

  ‘Sasha,’ she said, ‘open the door.’

  A second later, without warning, the door opened and she almost fell into the room. Already Sasha had turned his back to her and was walking back to bed. He sat down heavily, then lay back, closing his eyes.

  ‘Sasha!’

  ‘Close the door.’

  She closed it, and came over to the bed. The light was grey and cold. She had forgotten that the room was so dark in daylight, because it overlooked a courtyard wall. The bed was a mess, and it smelled of sleep and sickness. The thought of Lauri sleeping here made her shudder.

  An enamel pail stood by the bed, with a sponge at the bottom of it. Beside the pail was an open bottle of vodka. There was no glass. He must have been drinking straight from the bottle, and there were only a couple of fingers left.

  She looked around the room. Clothes and books lay scattered over the floor. On the table there was an upturned box, and papers tipped out into a plate of porridge. The bronze mirror on the wall had been knocked sideways. Its glass was shattered. The whole room looked as if it had been slapped across the face. But by the wall there was a rack with four pairs of boots placed immaculately on it, all of them freshly polished. None of the boots was Lauri’s.

  ‘Wake up, Sasha, open your eyes. I need to talk to you.’

  Sasha lay sunk into the stew of the bed. If she hadn’t seen him open the door, it would be easy to believe that he’d been lying there, unmoving, for days.

  ‘Don’t come near me,’ he said. ‘I’ve got grippe.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said.

  At last his eyes opened and looked at her. No light came into his face.

  ‘Don’t stand so close,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t want to catch what I’ve got.’

  His face was the colour of candle fat. His features seemed to have spread, as
if there was nothing to hold them in place.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you about Lauri.’

  ‘Lauri,’ he said, turning his head on the pillow. ‘You’ve come to talk about Lauri.’

  ‘What else would I have come for?’

  ‘Maybe to see if there is anything I need?’

  His eyes were small and dull. He looked at her resentfully. Perhaps he really was ill, and had wanted to be left alone with his sickness. His face looked very strange with the life gone out of it. She had the uneasy feeling that this Sasha was a complete stranger, and that it would be hard labour to get to know him.

  ‘Lauri,’ he said again, rolling the r in the Finnish way, as if imitating someone, ‘Lau… ri.’

  Suddenly, with a terrible cat-like movement, he sprang up into a crouching position on the bed. He swayed on hands and knees, thrusting his yellow face at her.

  ‘Don’t you come here talking to me about Lauri, as if he belongs in your handbag,’ he said. His voice shook with rage.

  She would not flinch. She would hold him back from her. He was not going to rise off that bed or come a finger closer to her. She would beat him down, as she’d beaten him down in the bookshop.

  ‘What had you to do with his arrest?’ she asked.

  ‘I?’ he exclaimed theatrically. ‘I? Why, nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you believe me?’

  ‘It’s not a question of my believing or not believing. What I think doesn’t matter. All I want is to know what happened.’

  ‘Lauri’s my friend.’ His voice thickened. He was letting himself be drunk now, sliding into it. Drink’s a good refuge, she thought. You can hide whatever you want in drink. ‘Good friend. Comrade. Women don’t know bout that. My comrade. Do anything for him.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said coldly. ‘I don’t know about it. I want you to tell me.’

  It was very warm in the room. She was sweating inside her coat. He was falling apart, she could see it happening second by second. Whatever had held him together was slowly giving way. He must have been drinking for days. Or else he was letting himself come to pieces.

  ‘You think you’re so high and mighty,’ he jeered suddenly. ‘I bet you look in the mirror a hundred and twenty times a day, don’t you? Oh, it’s me, it’s me. How lovely, it’s me. That’s what you think.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked.

  ‘No reason. No, no reason. It just popped into my head.’

  He seemed to be playing with the words in his mouth, as if he were a child sucking toys.

  ‘Can’t you get up? You say Lauri’s your friend, but here you are lying in bed drinking, when he’s been arrested. What good’s that to Lauri? Don’t you want to help him?’

  ‘Makes no difference,’ Sasha muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It makes no difference what I do or what you do,’ he said. His voice was suddenly clear, challenging. ‘Do you think it’ll help if you go sniffing round the Okhrana, you stupid girl? Do you think that I’m a miracle worker? The only thing that affects the outcome is what they happen to need at this par-tic-ular his-tor-ical moment.’ He reeled off the possibilities in a mocking sing-song: ‘In-terr-og-ation, con-fess-ion, charge, arrest, trial, sentence… or maybe none of those at all, what do you think? Throw-the-young-hothead-into-the-cells-and-let-him-cool-his-heels-there-for-a-few-days. And all the rest of it, de dah de dah de dah. What matters is what they need. No, that’s still not right. Not what they need: what they want. And de dah de dah de dah.’

  ‘Why do you talk like that? This isn’t a game. It’s Lauri we’re talking about. Your friend.’

  ‘I’m talking about Lauri. But you aren’t listening, because your head is full of crap that doesn’t apply any more. You think that everything happens for a reason. Isn’t that it? A leads to b and b leads to c and de dah de dah de dah.’

  ‘Why don’t you stop saying that? They haven’t arrested him for nothing, have they?’

  ‘Bobrikov’s alive. Nothing’s happened to Bobrikov whatsoever. You know about good old Bobrikov. Not only is he alive but he’s also in robust health, busily signing decrees and proclamations and Russifying Finland as fast as he can. Get rid of the silly little Finnish army, get rid of silly little Finnish postage stamps with lions on them, and, for heaven’s sake, get rid of all the troublemakers. Russian manufacture is so much more reliable, don’t you find? It’s business as usual for Bobrikov, and the Tsar’s happy as a clam.’

  ‘So why have they arrested Lauri?’

  ‘Maybe he stepped out of line.’

  ‘Stepped out of line. What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You tell me,’ said Sasha. He flopped back onto the bed and lay there grossly, all his handsomeness gone. She glanced around the room again. There was another bottle of vodka on the washstand, half full. She picked it up, went over to Sasha, and slowly, deliberately, began to pour out the vodka onto the floor.

  ‘What are you doing, you bitch? That’s my vodka.’

  ‘Not any more.’

  He lunged across the bed but the move made him dizzy and he fell back on the pillow.

  ‘Got more bottles anyway,’ he mumbled.

  ‘I’ll set a match to this vodka and every other bottle in the place if you don’t get up. Someone should set a match to you, Sasha. Then you’d jump. You’re going to get up, wash yourself, get dressed and go out and you’re not going to come back until you’ve talked to everyone you know and found out everything they know. All your wonderful contacts that you’re always boasting about. They can make themselves useful for once.’

  ‘What would you know about it?’ said Sasha, as if to himself. ‘You think it’s all so simple. In your little porridge life with Magda, you’re safe. Friends stick together, true love lasts for ever, comrades are loyal, enemies have horns on their heads and hard work brings its own reward. But everything has its double, don’t you know that? If you love someone, you also hate them. If something’s true, then it’s also a lie. So why not be honest about it…’ He was mumbling now, deep in the labyrinth of his own thoughts. ‘Why pretend? Cowards – hypocrites – that’s what they are. Love. They should be made to swallow poison to wash away their lies. Everything’s been betrayed already, don’t you understand that?’

  ‘Everything?’

  He looked at her suddenly, sharply. ‘I’m your friend, Eeva, that’s why I’m telling you all this. I’m not going to lie to you. But I could kill you now, and no one would be any the wiser. They would think you’d been arrested, just like Lauri, and by the time they found out that you hadn’t, you’d be far away.’

  A taste of iron filled her mouth. She gripped the vodka bottle tightly. This had all happened before. The man who was vanished out of her father’s house. They got him drunk and took him away and that was the end of him. An informer, working for the Okhrana, probably. No one ever saw him again. He had never even been to the apartment, they could all swear to that. They had all worked together, like parts of a machine, to remove him. But Sasha was careless. He could never work like that.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to kill me. You’re not going to touch me.’

  His eyes measured her. She knew how fast he could move, but she would be faster. She would crack the bottle down on his head. But the bottle wasn’t enough. He must fear her.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Eeva,’ he said at last. ‘Put that bottle down, for heaven’s sake. It was purely a the-or-et-ical remark.’

  ‘Magda knows I’m here. I told her I wanted to talk to you about Lauri. She’s coming over if I’m not back when I said I would be. She doesn’t trust you. So you see, no one will believe that I’ve been arrested.’

  She saw his body relax. He wouldn’t try anything now, she was sure of it. He was relaxing. He didn’t have the hardness in him to do it. All the same, she kept her grip on the bottle.

  ‘How you girls do sti
ck together,’ he said lightly.

  ‘Was it you?’ she asked. It was all coming together in her head. That man pretending to be a comrade. Laughing and drinking with her father and the others, while they watched him. He was no good. His acting wasn’t up to standard, and he asked too many questions. But Sasha was a wonderful actor.

  ‘Tell me, Sasha.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Was it you, Sasha? Was it you? Is that what you meant when you said everything has its double? You said that everything’s been betrayed already. So tell me, who’s done the betraying? You were Lauri’s friend, but at the same time –’ She swallowed.

  His hand brushed the air in irritation.

  ‘That’s just silly, Eeva. Sometimes things simply happen… and you don’t know why,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing simply happens, Sasha. Someone makes it happen.’

  His eyes held hers. His expression changed. Pure, childlike surprise lit his face, as if a six-year-old Sasha had come back to find himself trapped inside the flesh of this man who smelled of vodka, piss and sweat. He had been so clever for so long. He had got the better of them all. It should have gone on for ever and now it was stopping.

  Maybe he’s not acting any more, thought Eeva. Maybe this is it, and there are no more Sashas left to show themselves.

  ‘They’ll release Lauri,’ she told Sasha. ‘I’m sure of it. Whatever you did, or why, I don’t want to know any more. It doesn’t matter. Lauri will come back, and it won’t have anything to do with you. He won’t have anything to do with you any more.’

  But Sasha was still gazing at her with clownish, childlike surprise.

  ‘He had to do it,’ said a different Sasha-voice, through the doorway that the vodka and God knows what else had made in him. The voice was very young, not more than six years old. The pupils were dilated, as if they had swallowed the man. The face stared up at Eeva.

  ‘Why?’

  But there was no answer.

  She was back in the House of Orphans. They were whispering after dark, out of their nightmares, while she sat by the bed of a sick child. She had a spoon in her hand, and a cup of water with salt and sugar mixed into it. The doctor had told Anna-Liisa to let Eeva stay up and feed the child. Sometimes she almost slept. She couldn’t help it. Her head dropped, her eyes swam, and then she jerked back to herself. A mutter of pain rose from the bed, and the little girl gabbled out words, too quickly for anyone to follow.