House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘Who knew all the mushrooms?’

  ‘My father. It was him I was talking about. I didn’t like it when I was stuck out in the forest all the time – where I was before – but there’s nothing better than a day out to pick mushrooms and berries.’

  ‘Maybe I am wasteful,’ said Magda, frowning slightly as she did when she addressed a political question.

  ‘You are because you can be,’ said Eeva.

  ‘I’m on a tight budget, you know, Eeva.’

  ‘Maybe. But it’s not –’ She broke off, because she didn’t want to offend Magda. Maybe, although it was possible to talk to Magda about everything from childbirth to women’s suffrage, it wasn’t possible to discuss the difference between what Magda called ‘being hard-up’ and being poor. ‘Being hard-up’ meant that although you lived in a modest room in a modest apartment building, and made your clothes last, you always had just enough for concert tickets or for a quiet hour in a cafe, talking, talking…

  What had poverty to do with being hard-up like that? No one who was poor looked out at the world as Magda did. It wasn’t just having the money to buy concert tickets, it was having the confidence to believe that concert tickets rightly belonged to you. But Magda was kind. Maybe that was more important than anything.

  ‘Winter’s long enough,’ said Eeva at last. ‘You need everything you can get hold of, to keep you stocked up until spring.’

  And now they’d picked all they could carry, eaten their bread and cheese, and were lying on their backs on a piece of mackintosh with their faces up to the sun. Its light was yellow. Beautiful warm, soft light. Make the most of it, squeeze every drop of light and warmth out of these days before winter comes, because once it comes, it stays so long. Eeva sighed, and closed her eyes. There was a rosy fuzz inside her eyelids. Her calf muscles ached, pleasantly, from cycling. Not only had Magda got a bike of her own, but she’d borrowed another from a friend, for Eeva. They’d skimmed the dusty roads, calling and laughing, then bumped along the forest track until it got too rough and they had to dismount and push their bikes.

  ‘Tired?’ Magda asked.

  ‘No. Not a bit.’

  She still couldn’t believe that it was going to go on like this. That she was allowed to get up, wash and dress leisurely (she didn’t have to be at the shop until just before eight), drink her coffee, take the tram, do work that wasn’t tiring at all, compared to what she was used to – that was, in fact, quite pleasant. And then she could go to the park in her lunchtime and eat the sandwich she’d made that morning, even buy herself a cup of coffee or a newspaper from a kiosk if she felt like it. There wasn’t much money, but for the first time in her life there was a little more than she needed for the raw business of living.

  Her share of the rent was small. Magda said she’d been paying the rent for the room anyway, so whatever Eeva could contribute was all bonus. Magda was a bit embarrassed, hurrying over her words, but you could tell she meant them. And it didn’t cost any more to heat a stove for one person than for two. In return, Eeva kept the room clean, and bargained hard in the market. Magda was so soft that all the stall-keepers took advantage of her.

  ‘It’s best if I do the shopping,’ she said to Magda, without offering an explanation.

  Occasionally she met Magda at lunchtime, but more often she didn’t and would sit quietly, watching a sparrow bathe in the dust or a child learning to push a wooden truck. She liked to be alone. It was enough to sit there, while the sky glowed with light and the leaves shook in the breeze.

  Sometimes she would be consumed with happiness. Not only was she back in Helsinki, but she had a life here, an adult life which belonged to her. Everything had turned out so much better than she’d dared imagine. Somewhere to live, somewhere to work, enough to eat, the green dress, and, if she saved hard, a proper winter coat this year rather than a cloak like a country girl. She didn’t want ever to look like a country girl again, scurrying the city streets as if she didn’t belong in them. She belonged here.

  But the happiness was like sunshine in days of gathering cloud. More often, doubt swept over her, shadowing her. She felt as if she were acting in a play of her own life, dressed in someone else’s clothes. One minute she was in the doctor’s kitchen, the next she was in Helsinki, part of the expanding city, at the centre of a snaking web of new roads and railways that grew more complex every year.

  Although she’d been away less than three years, plenty had changed. Helsinki was growing so fast. They were tearing down old wooden houses and putting up stone buildings, they were sweeping away people’s little vegetable gardens, straightening roads, putting in gas lamps, enlarging the cemeteries. Lauri said there were twice as many people living here now as there had been when he was born. More ships in the harbour, more trains arriving and departing, more people streaming along the streets, new shops, new laundries and saunas and dairies, a new theatre – new everything.

  They were straightening the roads into the city, too, widening them to carry the weight of traffic. It was all happening so fast it made him feel like an old man, Lauri said jokingly one day. His past was being swept away around him. Places he used to go and play now had factories growing on them instead of trees. He found himself talking about what Helsinki was like when he was a kid, as if that was fifty years ago.

  Eeva was finding her way along different streets these days, in different quarters. Magda and she walked around the university, climbed the cathedral steps and looked out as if they owned everything. Or at least, as if Magda owned everything. Eeva’s eyes ached from the magnificence. She ought to have been proud of it: it was her city But even Magda, who was German, seemed more at home than Eeva. She knew her way around, she was nonchalant and possessive as she explained the architecture to Eeva.

  ‘This part of town always reminds me of Petersburg,’ said Magda. ‘But I prefer the work that Engel did here. The architecture knits together so beautifully, doesn’t it? A perfect ensemble. It’s full of the loftiness of human ideals, but the scale isn’t designed to crush the individual.’

  ‘My father used to say that you felt like an ant crossing a desert, when you walked across one of those Petersburg squares.’

  ‘Did he? Engel was from Berlin, you know.’

  Magda spoke as if she owned Engel, and Berlin, and Helsinki, too.

  Eeva remembered how her father always added, with grim humour, ‘First make people feel like ants, then stamp on them. That’s the way of the Tsars.’

  ‘We’ll go there together one day,’ said Magda. ‘To Petersburg.’

  ‘My father lived in Petersburg for years. Lauri, too.’

  ‘You would like it,’ said Magda. ‘You would appreciate it.’

  ‘But would I be able to find a job?’ asked Eeva drily.

  And then back they went, to stroll where women with parasols picked their way across the cobbles, along the quay. Men walked very upright, breathing deeply and swinging their canes. They too were at home. Only Eeva was not at home. Not yet, not now, if she ever would be. Helsinki wasn’t the city she remembered, the one she’d belonged to without ever needing to think about it. Maybe it was only the difference between leaving as a child and coming back as a woman. But the changes were real too, as Lauri said. Life ran so much faster. People and goods whirled about everywhere. The wheels of carts and wagons and carriages rumbled until the ground shook under them. Trams clanged, horses plunged forward and sometimes there was a terrible scream and a horse would be down in its traces, its hooves smashing the air.

  She would hurry on, always with the feeling there was somewhere she had to get to, but she couldn’t quite remember where it was. Men glanced at her face as she passed, and then ran their eyes slyly down her body. Shops glowed with goods that she was sure she had never seen before. She both wanted them and didn’t want them. A pineapple sitting on top of a heap of oranges! Surely it must be made of wax?

  But she also saw the same faces as she’d seen in her childhood. The hollow
faces of kids who had TB, or whose parents had TB. The pinched, stretched look of the skin over shallow cheeks. The long stare that expected nothing. Magda said that in spite of the increase in population, people were still emigrating faster than ever.

  Magda was kind, there was no question of that. She wanted to know all about Eeva’s life. She listened intently when Eeva told her things she’d never thought she’d tell anyone. She told Magda what life was like in the House of Orphans, things that she’d thought she’d have to keep sealed inside her for ever. When bad things happen to you, they shame you, as if somehow you must have done something to deserve it. You want to squirm with the humiliation of it, as if you’re naked in a public place and trying to hide yourself.

  She told Magda about the way rags were counted out to the big girls when they had their periods, and how they had to wash out the blood in front of everyone. As if they had no feelings. And they’d be told off if there were too many rags, too much blood, as if they were dirty.

  How they were always hungry, and how they snatched food from one another. Hunger doesn’t make you good, she told Magda, for Magda could be sentimental about things she had never experienced. Not having things doesn’t make you generous. You should have seen the way the stronger girls would barge the weaker ones away from the soup pot.

  How they were all watched for signs of ‘immorality’. Little girls who didn’t know what the word meant, standing dazed with sleep, weeping because they’d been caught snuggled up in bed together to try to keep warm. They had to learn better. But they were like puppies or kittens, Eeva thought, they only wanted to roll up together. The rooms were big and bare and the little ones were scared of the dark. Pity we weren’t kittens or puppies. But then, if we hadn’t been human they’d have drowned us in a bucket.

  Chilblains and whitlows and warts and impetigo, blisters and boils and weeping sores. Yes, the doctor treated them, when he came. But he didn’t know what went on between his visits.

  One little girl had a piece of rag, this big, with a hem on it that she would rub against her lips until she slept. She hid it day after day in different places. And someone got hold of it and handed the rag over to one of the big girls. It got put in the stove. The cry she gave, you would think it was her own flesh burning. The little girl started wetting the bed and then you’d see her toiling over big wet sheets she could hardly lift, out in the yard, her hands blue, Sirkka watching her with that stupid smile.

  How they went to church in a long line, and the preacher looked at them with special meaning whenever sin was mentioned. How they went out into service on remote farms where they’d be worked like dogs, beaten, or raped by the farmer when his wife was pregnant. And a place in service was the sum of all success. Anna-Liisa’s duty was done and they were settled in life. No more could be hoped for.

  But the worst thing was the way their families were made worthless. They had to be grateful for everything, after their mothers and fathers had failed them by dying, or being too poor to keep them. They came from bad homes. They had to be watched, or they’d take bad ways.

  Magda listened. Her eyes were wide, drinking in what Eeva said as if in a way this was what she had wanted to hear, because it confirmed all her beliefs. Eeva felt a pang of doubt. Had she said too much, and betrayed herself? But at same time it was a relief to talk. Like telling someone the symptoms of an illness that you’ve kept to yourself, not daring to admit them, hoping that one morning you’ll wake up and find the illness has dissolved.

  Magda said, ‘So they took you to church twice each Sunday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Magda’s smile was somehow a little too knowing. ‘It’s curious, how much they talk about prostitution in the Bible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged and her smile grew deeper. ‘But it fascinates them, you can see that. Those holy old men can’t get away from the subject. Why, you must have been meat and drink to them, all you little orphans.’

  Eeva frowned. Suddenly it felt as if she had given her past to Magda, for Magda to make use of it.

  ‘Some of us were not so little,’ she said, rather coldly.

  Magda was different from any woman Eeva had known. She didn’t care what people thought of her. Being foreign, of course, gave her an advantage, because people didn’t know quite what to expect. She’d lived in Helsinki for eight years. You could hear the German in her voice, but she was one of the rare foreigners who had mastered not only Swedish but also Finnish.

  She was thirty but she looked much younger. It was something about her eyes; they had a way of opening wide which usually belongs only to children or very young women. Magda had given up working in the bookshop a few months ago, and now earned her living as a journalist, writing pieces mainly for German newspapers. It wasn’t a good living, she said, but it was adequate. She showed Eeva pieces she had written, carefully cut out and pasted into scrapbooks.

  She must have been doing all right, Eeva thought. Magda bought her clothes new, her stockings were always without holes, and she went to cafés with friends quite regularly. Most of her articles were published in the German press, but she wrote on the Finnish Question, too, and she knew Alexandra Kollontai. Not well, but she knew her. When she first told Eeva that, Eeva hadn’t a clue who Alexandra Kollontai was, but she knew enough to look impressed. She remembered all that business from her father’s house: certain names were spoken in low, significant voices, and you showed your understanding by an answering, equally significant nod.

  Magda had the physical self-confidence of a cat. She pulled off her clothes at night and stood naked in the middle of the room, yawning. She had one of those strong, dark, smooth bodies that somehow look clothed in themselves. On hot nights she didn’t bother with a nightdress. She manicured her nails perfectly, brushed her dark hair until it crackled, and would not dream of wearing a corset.

  ‘Why should I? I want to breathe.’

  Magda’s underwear was very plain. But when I have enough money saved, Eeva thought, I’ll buy a camisole trimmed with lace. When I have money I’ll never again wear anything against my skin that someone else has worn before.

  Eeva rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow. Magda was half smiling, perhaps asleep. But she must have felt Eeva stir.

  ‘Ready to go back to town?’ she asked, without opening her eyes.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Nor me. It’s nice here.’

  Magda pillowed her head on her arms, and appeared to sink back into a dream. But suddenly she asked, ‘What do you think of Sasha?’

  Eeva considered. She didn’t really know what she thought of Sasha, but she was sure life would be better if he was not there.

  ‘There’s something strange about him,’ Magda went on in her cool, confident voice. ‘I can’t work him out.’

  ‘Maybe…’ said Eeva, thinking, but she didn’t go on.

  ‘Oh Eeva, you don’t need to be so cagey, not with me.’

  ‘I’m not being cagey.’

  Magda opened her eyes. They were beautiful eyes, so wide that a little rim of white showed all around the iris. ‘I’m sorry, Eeva. You’ve every right to be cautious, if you want. I mean, after what you’ve gone through –’

  And again Eeva felt uneasy, that Magda should talk about her life like that, in the same way as she walked around Helsinki – as if she knew it, almost as if she possessed it.

  ‘No,’ continued Magda, ‘everything about Sasha sounds right and looks right, but it doesn’t feel right.’

  ‘I don’t like him,’ said Eeva, discovering that this was the case.

  ‘Nor do I. I shouldn’t think many people do, would you?’

  ‘Lauri does.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Magda, with a slight, dismissive gesture. ‘But I’m not just talking about personal feelings. It’s the way Sasha is – don’t you agree?’

  ‘He’s Lauri’s friend.’ He certainly was, so much so that he might have been performing in a play w
here he had been given the part of Lauri’s friend. You could never forget about him, or his friendship with Lauri. He doesn’t want you to forget him. And all the time he’s really waiting for you to leave, so he can be alone with Lauri.

  ‘Yes, he’s that all right,’ Magda said. ‘I don’t know why Lauri likes him so much, when they’re so completely different.’

  ‘In what way different?’

  ‘Oh well, you know. Sasha’s not exactly an intellectual but he’s in the vanguard of political theory all the same.’

  ‘And Lauri isn’t?’

  ‘He doesn’t need to be, does he?’ said Magda lightly. ‘After all, he’s the real thing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well – Lauri’s one of the workers, isn’t he?’ Magda sounded embarrassed, as if this was so obvious it shouldn’t need to be said.

  So Lauri is one of the workers, and I’m a little orphan, and that takes care of both of us, thought Eeva, but she said nothing.

  ‘We shouldn’t stay here too long,’ said Magda. ‘It’s a long ride back.’

  But they still didn’t move. There wouldn’t be many more days like this, and they knew it in their bones. They were fine-tuned to the coming cold. Already summer was closing down, and the touch of chill in the air would grow stronger every day. The frost would come and the last mushrooms would vanish into the earth. The sun would slip down onto the horizon and stay there, red and weak, giving no heat and little light.

  But at least she’d be in Helsinki this winter, Eeva thought, not out there in country silence, watching branches bow down under their load of snow, and split, and break with no one to see them. The pavements would be swept, the shop windows would be bright. There’d be braziers flaming on street corners, trams charging down polished rails, smells of roasting coffee beans and morning bread curling out of shop doorways…

  Yes, she’d escaped.

  ‘Maybe it’s something to do with him being Russian,’ she offered, going back to the subject of Sasha.