House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  All the things her father had told her were like jewels which she kept in a box where no one could see them. His remembered anger flashed in her memory.

  ‘The Russians want to make serfs of us, Eevi, like they made of the peasants in Estonia. And those Swedes’ll help them to do it, just as long as it doesn’t hurt their own position. They’ve no loyalty to us, even though they’re supposed to be our fellow countrymen. You must understand, Eevi, that working people mean nothing to those high-up ones. We exist for their use.’

  He was the only one who called her Eevi.

  ‘What’s a serf, Dad?’

  ‘Someone who doesn’t belong to himself. You should know that. That’s how they live in Russia, like slaves tied to the land. Serfdom’s been done away with, so they say, but I can tell you there’s not much change. The Russians said they wouldn’t bring their systems here, but now they’ve changed their minds, and the Swedes couldn’t stop them even if they wanted. Which they don’t. Russification, they call it.

  ‘Listen, Eevi, because this is important. The high-up ones, the ruling classes as we call them, they’ll even help a foreign power against their own nation, if it protects their personal interests. Or their class interests. You know what I mean by that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘The things I tell you, don’t forget them. Keep them inside yourself.’

  He began to cough. He was huddled up by the stove, too close to it. She couldn’t have borne to be so close to the heat, but he was always cold. There was cold in his bones, he said, but as if it was a fact and not as a complaint. His bones were sharp under his shirt. If it hadn’t been for his TB they would have emigrated, the two of them. They would have gone away to America and had a different life. There were thousands of Finns in America now, whole towns full of them keeping their own language and customs. They had farmland such as they could never dream of here. Her father told her all about it when she was little, six or seven maybe, before his illness began, when he still thought they’d be able to leave.

  ‘You’ll learn English, Eevi. I don’t want you to live in a ghetto like the Jews. If Finns want to live in Finnish towns, why leave Finland? We’ll go to New York. You’ll learn English. You’ll get a proper education. Some people will tell you that America’s easy, you only have to stoop down to pick gold off the pavement. But that’s foolishness. Nowhere’s like that. There are systems everywhere. But in America, you belong to yourself. There’s no Tsar over there, no Grand Duchies.’

  He’d paused, she remembered that. He’d laid his hand on her hair and gone on as if speaking to himself, not to her any more: ‘Even if it doesn’t happen for you, it can happen for your children.’

  But there’s no use thinking of America, once you’ve got TB. They have doctors who examine everyone when the ships dock. They sound your chest and make you cough. You’ll be sent back if you have a communicable disease, they won’t even let you through Immigration. Back you go on the long journey home, with all your money gone and nothing to show for it. Her father knew all about it. He explained everything to her – that was his way. He’d brought her up like that, not hiding what life was like.

  Her mother had died when Eeva couldn’t remember, and her aunt lived with them until she married. Eeva was seven then, and could manage the cooking. Her father worked in the shipbuilding yard. Casual work, most of the time. Sometimes there was money and sometimes there wasn’t. He’d had a permanent job, but the bosses didn’t like him.

  Her father knew everyone. He was respected. There were meetings in their apartment, and people came and went and sometimes they paused as they came in, to look over Eeva’s shoulder where she sat studying. They would stare at the page of figures her father had set her, or the passage of Swedish she was learning. Her father told her that languages would set her free, allowing her to cross the boundaries which divided working people. These boundaries served the interests of the ruling classes. She must learn Swedish, and Russian, and later on he’d find a way for her to learn English, which he couldn’t teach her himself. Education would set her free.

  He spoke Russian well, because he had worked in Petersburg for several years long ago, before he married. Like so many Finns, he’d gone where the work was. He hadn’t lived with Finns in Petersburg, even though there was a big Finnish community there. He’d lived with Russians, and learned the language. He had friends there, good friends he still saw. Some of the people who came to the apartment were his Russian friends, and he spoke in Russian with them, translating it into Finnish if there were Finnish comrades there.

  Some days their Russian was a thick fog. She couldn’t find hard words in it, let alone understand them. Other days the fog cleared, and she caught a snatch of meaning. Almost without her noticing it, more and more of the hidden landscape came clear. Her father recited Pushkin to her as often as he recited the Kalevala. Pushkin had been punished by the Tsar, exiled, trapped into the duel that killed him. Nothing was as it seemed on the surface.

  They sat by the stove, her father in his wooden chair, Eeva on her stool at his knee. He stared at the stove without seeming to see it, his face in shadow.

  My talisman, preserve me,

  Preserve me through the days of persecution,

  Through the days of remorse and distress:

  Thou wast given to me on a day of sorrow.

  He repeated the last line, dreamily, reaching out his hand to stroke Eeva’s hair. ‘“Thou wast given to me on a day of sorrow…”’

  ‘Am I your talisman?’ Eeva asked him. He started, and looked down at her.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because of Mum dying when I was born.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The poem’s not about that.’

  Some of her father’s friends couldn’t read. She knew it from the way they would stare respectfully at the pages she was studying and then say, ‘Well, that’s good. That’s the way. You’ll be like your father, you’ll know what’s what.’

  She would sit in the corner while they held their meetings. Her father would put the candle close to her while she studied, even though it left the men in a dimmer light. Sometimes there were women comrades too, but not as often. Their voices rose and sank in the shadows outside Eeva’s pool of light. Sometimes a man who was new to the meetings would pause in what he was saying, and glance at Eeva, and her father would say, ‘It’s all right. She understands. She says nothing.’

  She knew, before she was aware of how she knew it, that what happened in the apartment was never to be mentioned outside it. The knowledge was as vivid in her as the knowledge that fire would burn her. When she was little she didn’t even listen to what was being said. Some of it must have gone into her mind, however, because later she found that she knew the words, they were familiar, and the ideas too. They were like clothes she’d worn before she knew how to put them on herself.

  Preserve me, my talisman,

  Preserve me through the days of persecution.

  He repeated the words over in Russian, then in Finnish. She followed after him, shaping the words in her mouth.

  The doctor would be home soon, she thought. The baby at the sawmill had been born, old Agneta had burst in to tell her so. Agneta liked the excitement of birth.

  ‘Her sheets were soaked in blood!’ she told Eeva happily. ‘Lucky they’d put the old ones on. That’s what to do when the sheets are worn through: keep them for when you have a baby.’ Agneta had no children nor was likely to. She lived with her brother and went from house to house, charring, with her sleeves rolled up to show the muscles in her arms. She was called ‘old Agneta’, although she wasn’t so very old, because her brother’s child had the same name.

  Eeva turned to the stove, where the soup was simmering. He’d told her when she first came that he liked plain food. He was quite happy with a supper of soup and pickled herrings. Afterwards he would eat preserved fruit.

  In summer, he told her, they grew their own vegetables
and salads. Matti showed her the sheltered, southerly part of the garden where the fruit bushes crouched under snow, packed in straw. Matti told her that Dr Eklund sent abroad for seeds that you couldn’t get here. Sometimes they grew, sometimes they didn’t. Matti would rather stick with what he knew, but he had to admit it was interesting when a lettuce came up red or a radish was black-skinned. The doctor was a great one for cloches and cold frames, and he liked to be the first in the season to have his salads on the table. He would send a triumphant bunch of lettuce into town, to Mrs Eriksson. It was a race between them each year, who would be first with the salads, and the doctor liked to win.

  Plain food. A supper of soup and pickled herring with preserved red cabbage, and she’d stewed some of the dried apple rings from the storeroom. The soup seemed to be asleep in its pot. She stirred it and a bubble broke the surface. Ham and barley soup, rich and glistening. There’d been plenty of meat on the ham bone. People who lived in houses like this might consider it plain food.

  She knew there’d been fancy cooking here once, from the range of kitchen equipment on shelves and hooks. Ranks of thick-bottomed copper pans in all sizes, sieves and colanders and slotted spoons and steamers and fish kettles and baking tins. There were things she didn’t even know the use of, spiked implements that looked as if you could brain a man with them, probes and tweezers that resembled the medical instruments in the doctor’s bag. There were measuring cups and jugs, rolling-pins and spoons. Row after row of knives, some of them big and wicked, some of them so slender they looked as if they could cut out your heart without you noticing it. And serving dishes. Some wide enough for a roast swan, others which wouldn’t hold more than two spoonfuls of caviar.

  The silver was in the dresser’s deep oak drawers. It wasn’t fancy but it was heavy. The knives were wrapped in felt rolls which smelled of knife powder. A knife man would come in to polish them, the doctor said. She was to leave them alone.

  There were shelves of beautiful china in glass-fronted cabinets, but he said not to bother with any of it. She was to use the everyday china.

  One day, Eeva had taken down a plate from one of the cabinets. She held it up to the light and the light showed through it, because the china was so fine and hard. Not like the everyday china, and even that was quite different from the clumsy pots they used at the House of Orphans.

  She examined the plate closely. Figures painted in pure, deep blue gestured at each other. One seemed to be a shepherdess, because a fat lamb lay at her feet. A man in tight stockings was bowed over in front of her, one arm around his stomach and the other stuck out behind him to one side, the fingers stretched and exposed. Trees waved above them, and a stream looped across the plate.

  She brought it closer. More detail appeared. A knot of ribbon on the shepherdess’s straw bonnet. A similar knot – but not quite the same – on the man’s shoes. The shoe-ribbon was coming undone, and one end trailed on the grass. He would fall over, when he straightened up from his bow and began to walk.

  If the plate dropped to the bare kitchen floor it would shatter. She balanced it between her index fingers. Only their bare pressure prevented it. She stared at the plate, trying to make it choose. Would it slip, or would it stay?

  No, she thought. It was her choice. She could make things happen. She nodded at the tiny, gesticulating painted figures, and then she laid the plate on the table, wiped it with a clean cloth, and replaced it in the glass cabinet. The painted man stayed as he was, bowed over, fingers flourishing. He would never trip over the loose ribbon of his shoe.

  ‘You’ll never go anywhere,’ Eeva said to him. Maybe he would rather be smashed. Maybe he’d rather fly into a thousand pieces, and be free.

  *

  The doctor was home. She heard the front door open, and then his tread. She lifted the lid of the soup pot and a cloud of steam blew in her face, making her eyes water. Ham, split peas, onions, barley, carrots and a flavouring of dried sage. She stirred the soup.

  Here I am in the middle of nowhere, she thought. Trees everywhere, moving their branches and murmuring day and night, or thrashing when the wind caught them. Beyond the town there was the lake, frozen over, stretching out white until it met the white sky. The lake went on for miles and where the ice was cleared of snow people were skating like spiders. It made her dizzy to think of the miles between her and Helsinki. But if she had to, she could walk home. It would take many days, maybe a month or more, but in the end she would get there. And she wasn’t without friends in Helsinki. No, her life was there, her real life that stirred her and wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Anna-Liisa said you had to forget your old life. Start again, away from bad influences. Eeva knew what Anna-Liisa meant. She was talking about the company they’d taken Eeva away from. Anna-Liisa knew nothing about it but lies that people from Helsinki had told her when they brought Eeva to the House of Orphans. Eeva didn’t think Anna-Liisa even knew Lauri’s name. But she’d been told the story. Doughy, snobbish Anna-Liisa had swallowed it whole.

  Those little talks she liked to have with the older girls, on Sundays after the little ones had gone to bed. All about temptation, and purity, and the way men couldn’t help themselves, they were made like that, but it was up to the girl to put a stop to it. She leaned forward and told them solemnly that they had to be on their guard. Men had urges which couldn’t be controlled, once they were roused.

  Anna-Liisa was in the Guild of Temperance. She would tell them of families kept together by a woman who banished strong drink from the house. Women who had poured vodka on the grass, even though their husbands had knocked them to the ground for it. But these same men had come to repentance.

  The girls stared back, their eyes flat with knowledge which Anna-Liisa would never possess. They said nothing.

  ‘Some of you may marry, if this is God’s plan for you. But whatever happens, your duty is to work hard in the place to which God has called you. To show your gratitude to God and to those who have given you a home here, and your training. We send you out to good places, girls, and we expect you to do us credit.’

  She looked around at their faces. She believes it, thought Eeva. She really thinks she’s doing Kirsti a favour by sending her off to a farm where they’ll have her out in the fields picking potatoes, as well as taking care of three kids and scrubbing the house from top to bottom. And all for the lowest wages they can get away with, with a third paid direct to the House of Orphans in return for her training. She really is stupid enough to think such slavery will stop Kirsti going the way of her mother. But Kirsti’s bound to run off the first chance she gets, back to Turku, down to the harbour, and that’ll be that. When Anna-Liisa gets to hear of it she’ll apologize to the farm people and say that sometimes you can’t overcome these ‘inherited tendencies’.

  When the little talk was over, Anna-Liisa read to them from the Bible. She read slowly, with breathy pauses, and her voice droned until you felt yourself folding on your stool, your head jagging with tiredness. Anna-Liisa liked to read them the story of Martha and Mary. They were Marthas, beavering away behind the scenes, keeping the house clean for Our Lord and making sure he had a hot meal to keep his strength up.

  Eeva’s fingers tightened on the handles of the soup pot. It was too hot but she still held on. The handles were no hotter than the stove where her father had sat. She wouldn’t let go. They’d taken her away and tried to make her into an orphan, but it hadn’t worked. She was still Eeva. Inside her, where the jewel of her father’s anger burned, she was Eevi.

  5

  She was shocked out of her sleep. A sound somewhere. A footstep. She listened, taut and strained, for the sound to come again. Darkness and silence tiptoed around her bed, coming closer, closer…

  Eeva sat upright, soaked with sweat, her hands braced on the pillow behind her. The acrid smell of her own skin clung to her. She pushed back clumps of damp, tangled hair.

  She’d had a dream, that was all. It happened sometimes. Kirsti would thump
her for it. Their beds were close and Kirsti could lunge over and thump her. ‘Shut up yelling, Eeva!’ Eeva didn’t mind, even when Kirsti bruised her. She was glad to be woken.

  But she was at the doctor’s. There was no Kirsti. She huddled her nightdress close, shivering. Someone had been walking in her dream, to and fro. Every house makes its own sounds, she thought, it’s just that I don’t know all the sounds this house can make. It’s fine in daytime but at night I forget where I am.

  Eeva hugged her knees. She was cold, clammy cold with sweat. She hugged herself tighter. Suddenly she pulled up her nightdress and licked the bare skin of her knees. It tasted salty and comforting. She was the same as ever. She hadn’t gone away from herself and she never would. She belonged to herself.

  No, she wouldn’t stay here in the dark, even though she wasn’t frightened of it. She would get up. If she went downstairs very quietly she could find something to eat in the kitchen. She ought to keep a crust of bread and a lump of cheese in her room, along with the candle stubs, but she was afraid of rats. With food in her stomach she’d be able to settle.

  Eeva lit her candle, and picked up yesterday’s underwear from the floor. It was good to drop things and crumple them, kick them aside if you needed to. No one came up here, not even Agneta. In the House of Orphans, boots had to be side by side under the chair. On the chair clothes had to be folded precisely, with underwear hidden at the bottom of the pile, out of sight.

  Eeva pulled on her skirt, calico blouse and grey woollen house-jacket. She was thirsty, so she scooped water out of the jug she kept for her morning wash, and drank it out of her hands. She bundled her hair into a knot. She wouldn’t go back to bed once she’d had something to eat, in case the dream came back. She would read in the warmth of the kitchen. You mustn’t sleep again after a dream like that, she thought.