House of Orphans

by Helen Dunmore

  But he had done what he could. He had been true to his word to Eeva. He hadn’t seen her again; he hadn’t been able to face it. He had written a short, practical letter, as discreet as her own, and come away from Helsingfors as fast as he could. Fortunately this baby of Ida’s had insisted on arriving almost straight away.

  My God, he thought, if I live, if I’m still capable of doctoring, it’s just possible that one day I’ll deliver Ida’s grandchild.

  We’ll know a little more by then, he continued, as Ida cried out with the strength of a new contraction. Surely, by the time this baby of Ida’s is full-grown, we’ll have learned to do things just a little better?

  Lauri

  In Helsinki the snow had stopped hours ago, and there was a thick crust of ice on the new fall. Light was seeping into the sky, although sunrise was still half an hour away. But it was mid-February, and the worst of the dark was over. The sun would struggle up to the horizon soon after eight, but with this thick, low cloud it probably wouldn’t be seen all day. People hurried to work, heads down, muffled, clinging on to the warmth of home. Trams clanged, and far away a railway whistle cut through the still air.

  Everything was as normal. Schoolchildren hurried to school, shops opened, the smell of roasting coffee made the streets fragrant, and a baker’s window glowed yellow.

  Lauri slowed down. He would stop for a moment to get his breath. Even if you had no money, you could look in the baker’s window. A girl with floury arms was putting loaves onto a wooden tray. Fresh loaves of sweet, sticky black bread. His mouth filled with saliva.

  He must walk on. He must get to Eeva. But the yellow light in the baker’s window danced and dazzled. He knew what to do about that. Put your head down, take a deep breath. Get a grip of yourself. But the dizziness increased. His heart was banging. Weakness, that’s all it was. Get hold of yourself.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The baker’s girl had come out. He could barely see her now. She was dancing and dazzling too, going in and out of blackness. Her voice rang like a bell: Are you all right… all right… all right?

  ‘He’s going off,’ said another voice. Someone took his right arm, someone else his left. He was being steered indoors. He leaned on them, he could not help it although he wanted to spare them his weight. His legs were buckling under him.

  ‘Here, sit on this stool a minute. Put your head down.’

  There were two voices, one young and one old. A hand held out a cup of water, and he tried to sip but couldn’t. He was shivering all over, he couldn’t help it.

  ‘He’s cold.’

  ‘Go on in the back, warm him up a drop of milk and put some sugar in it,’ said the older voice.

  He couldn’t get out of the darkness. He was trying to get somewhere, he knew that.

  ‘Put one of those flour sacks around his shoulders.’

  A blue cup appeared, close to his mouth.

  ‘Drink it up, you’ll feel better.’

  The milk was sweet and warm. He took a sip, and his throat closed up.

  ‘Slowly now.’

  Another sip. Another. The taste of it flowed over his tongue, the warmth of it spread into him, strengthening him. He sipped again and suddenly there he was, drinking a cup of milk just the same as he’d always done. He put out his hand and gripped the cup. His mouth hurt, but he could get the milk down. He could see blue and white checks in front of him. The girl who held the cup to his lips was wearing a blue and white apron.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  Lauri cleared his throat. His voice wasn’t right. His neck was bruised where they’d had him in an arm lock, and he’d lost his top teeth. He tried to smile at the girl, but this didn’t have the effect that his smile had always had before. She stared at him in consternation, taking in his bruised, swollen face with clots of dried blood at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘You have been in the wars, haven’t you?’ said the old woman. ‘Put a bit of that black bread into the milk, Kirsti; he’ll be able to mamble it down.’

  No doubt she thought he’d got into a fight when drunk, and someone had beaten him up.

  ‘I haven’t been drinking,’ said Lauri. ‘You can’t smell drink on me.’

  ‘I know that,’ said the old woman. ‘You think I’d have had you in here if you were a drunk? Don’t use up your strength talking. Swallow that bread and milk now it’s nice and soft and then you can be on your way. You’ve got somewhere to go?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lauri. ‘I’ve got my girl to go to.’

  ‘You’re lucky, then. But she’s going to get a shock when she sees you. You’re no oil painting this morning, I can tell you.’

  ‘She won’t mind about that.’

  The old woman’s face cracked into a smile.

  ‘You’re lucky twice, then.’

  Why they had let him out he could not guess. Everything happened at random. You were beaten up or yelled at or locked in the dark or given a bowl of soup or interviewed by a soft-voiced man who seemed to have got into the police by mistake. You could make no connections. One minute they didn’t seem to know anything, or have any reason for arresting you. The next they put their mouths to your ear and screamed that you were a conspirator against the Tsar, an assassin with links to international terrorism. But no one mentioned Bobrikov. All the time, Lauri had the feeling that they were whipping themselves up to it, that the frenzy wasn’t real and they didn’t really believe in it. It was all a strange sort of play-acting. And yet the kicks were real. His teeth lying in the straw were real. The ringing in his ears was real.

  Maybe they were playing cat-and-mouse. He was part of a huge game and he didn’t know the rules. They’d released him so they could watch where he would take them, and find out what was going to happen next.

  There would be no next, he knew that now. Not for him. Whatever it took to make a people’s martyr, he hadn’t got it. They had shown him photographs of a row of dangling men. But when he looked closer there were women as well. They had their skirts tied at the ankles, for decency.

  He would go away, with Eeva. They did not have to stay here. He had never thought he would really leave his country for ever, but then he’d never felt like this before. It seemed to him that the sun had stopped shining on his life here. He was living in an eclipse. If he stayed, nothing lay ahead of him but weariness and risk and a long blunder through darkness towards a goal that he wasn’t even sure he wanted to reach.

  Thousands and thousands had gone already, on the emigrant ships, making new lives from which threads of marvellous news reached back to home. We have built our own house now. Olli bought six fine milkers at last month’s market.

  It wouldn’t be paradise, he knew that. The ones who didn’t write home had their own tales of hardship and disappointment to tell, no doubt. But whatever happened, they were out of all this. There was no Tsar in America, and even the Okhrana’s long arm didn’t stretch across the Atlantic. There, he’d be just a man like any other.

  Why wait, why try to play this game when other people had made the rules long before you were born? He had never chosen to play it. If they hung him up on a gibbet he would be the fool who didn’t really know what he was dying for. His card was marked here, for sure. Maybe they’d try to stop him leaving, but he’d find a way, through Sweden, or down through Germany. As long as Eeva would come with him, nothing else mattered.

  And if she wouldn’t, then there was no more to be done, and nothing to fight for anyway. He’d stay here and take what came.

  But surely she would come with him. Surely there would be somewhere in the world they could go, where they could make a life that belonged to them.

  He swallowed the last of the black bread soaked in milk. He could feel it giving him strength. The girl was busy again, piling up loaves behind the counter while customers went in and out. Some of them glanced curiously at him.

  He handed the empty cup back to the old woman.
>
  ‘Here a minute,’ she said. One dry, work-worn old hand tipped up his chin. In the other hand she held a soft, clean rag, dampened with water. With firm, sure movements she cleaned the dried blood from his face.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘You look more respectable now. Get on home quick. You don’t want to get into any more trouble than what you’ve already been in.’

  She knew. He could tell from her face that she knew.

  ‘The way things are these days,’ she went on very quietly, ‘you can get arrested only for looking too cheerful when they think you ought to be looking sad. You get along quick to that girl of yours.’

  He put his hand over hers. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He got up from the stool, and crossed to the shop door. He looked right and left up the street. Nothing but ordinary people, thinking of their own business. He stepped out, and melted into the crowd.

  Sasha

  Sasha had remembered to put on his overcoat, but not his sheepskin boots. Instead, he wore the light polished shoes he kept for special occasions. ‘Sasha’s dancing shoes’, Lauri called them.

  The problem was that the smooth leather soles didn’t grip on snow and ice. He had scored a criss-cross pattern on them with a knife, months ago, one night when he really was going dancing. But on these icy paths he might as well have been wearing slippers made of glass.

  He had thought of going to the railway. He’d heard the sound of a train’s whistle, and for a while he’d walked in that direction, thinking to find the track. But he veered off-course somehow, away from streets and houses, and now he was in among frozen trees and sheets of snow.

  He wasn’t even sure where he was any more. Everywhere he peered, there were black tree trunks, branches, snow-covered boulders. Perhaps he was in a park. One of the pleasure parks where people sprawled on the grass in summer. Or perhaps he’d walked farther than he knew and he was right out of Helsinki altogether, in the forest. Or he’d walked over the sea and now he was on a little island in the middle of the Baltic… But he knew that wasn’t really possible. How could he have walked so far in these shoes? If he was sober, he’d know where he was.

  It was getting light. Nobody anywhere. He was going so slowly, barely moving at all. He’d had some idea of finding the railway track and making a pillow out of it for his head. But it wouldn’t work like that. The rails would be icy cold and they would hurt him. It might take a very long time before a train came.

  How he’d ended up here he could not begin to imagine, but it seemed that there wasn’t a way back. There were a lot of things he could not afford to think about. They lay in his mind, jumpy as shadows, but he wasn’t going to let them rise.

  He would keep them down. He would recite a poem; that would do it. He had many poems by heart. He hadn’t had much use for them lately – no, not for years.

  When I am locked alone in foreign lands,

  When my only nurse is tedium,

  Blessed deceit, star of the sea,

  Preserve me.

  No, that wasn’t it. His memory was shot, like everything else. But he remembered the ending:

  No memory, no, no memory to salt the wounds

  That have cut my heart.

  Was that right?

  Farewell, hope…

  Sasha laughed. Farewell, hope. If only it was so easy. That was the trouble with human beings, they never stopped hoping for better things. What idiots they were.

  Farewell, hope, sleep, desire…

  That bit was all right. He knew what he was talking about there. Not to sleep, that was the worst of all. You had a drink, and then another drink, and it sent you off, but you woke up half an hour later with the whole black night in front of you, and your head teeming.

  The wounds…

  What wounds? Why make such a fuss? Everybody has them. Strip the cover off any man and you’ll find the scars. Don’t think about them. Don’t let those wounds open their lips and talk to you again.

  Suddenly he knew where he was. He’d come all the way down to Kaivopuisto. No wonder everything was so quiet. Trees and boulders and trees and boulders. It was dead as a dog in the depth of winter. There was the frozen water. There were the frozen islands, sticking out lumpily from the frozen sea. He must have crossed Puistokatu without realizing it. Time kept jumping. You shouldn’t be in one place and then in another, without knowing how you got there. He had to keep a hold of time. If he had a drink he’d feel better.

  But of course he did know how he’d got here. He knew every step of the way. There they were, all his footprints, going in one direction and then another, doubling back on themselves. He had planted his feet in just those places.

  He should never have come to this cursed city. It was a pissy little village compared to Petersburg. He should have stayed in Petersburg. Now there wasn’t anything for him here, and there wasn’t anything for him there. He’d been too clever by half, that’s what they would say. So clever that he wasn’t any good to anyone any longer. And when you’re no more use to anyone, then what’s the next thing that happens to you? You get got rid of, that’s what. You get got rid of, and nobody misses you. But waiting for that to happen is not so pleasant.

  ‘Do you want to know a joke about agents?’ Sasha asked a tree. ‘All right, then. First agent says to second agent: “Are you a secret agent?” Second agent says to first agent, “No, I’m a double agent. Are you?” “No,” says the first agent. “In fact I’m a double double agent.” “A double double agent? Very good. But I have to inform you that in fact I’m a double double double agent,” says the second agent. “Well then, since we’re exchanging confidences like this, I’m a double double double double agent,” says the first agent. “But I’ve never heard of a double double double double agent.” “Exactly!” says the first agent. “Our cover is so deep that no one knows we exist at all.” “Aha!” says the second agent. “But as you know, a true agent never discusses his status with anyone.’”

  The tree laughed. Sasha laughed.

  It was getting much too light. He didn’t like the look of it at all. Fortunately these bushes had their branches so weighed down with frozen snow that they had made themselves into a little tent. He crawled inside. Not so light there. Quite comfortable, in fact. The twigs and branches made a criss-cross pattern when he looked out through them.

  He sat down and began to pull off his dancing shoes, and then the black silk socks that went with them. His feet were a very strange colour. He put them in the snow and they were exactly the shade of beef sausages.

  If only he had found the railway line. It would have taken him with it, carrying him along like a silver snake. In eight hours it would have taken him back to Petersburg. But of course he didn’t want to go there. Anyway trains made a noise he didn’t like. And de dah de dah de dah de dah.

  Sasha took off his overcoat and folded it carefully. It would make an excellent pillow. Vodka is the best overcoat, and overcoats are the best pillows. Fancy discovering such useful things so late in life, and having no one to tell them to.

  Now to lie down. He had thought of taking off all his clothes, but when it came to it he couldn’t be bothered. Yes, the coat was warm. There were spiky little bird marks in the snow.

  It wasn’t really cold at all. His feet had gone to sleep. Little house, little cosy house all around him. The new day’s light was making the snow pink. In the distance he could hear the large confused noises of the city, like blood moving.

  A brief historical context to House of Orphans

  House of Orphans is set in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland, and the main action of the novel takes place between the late winter of 1902 and the late winter of 1904. Finland had been part of the Russian Empire since 1809, but had enjoyed a relatively significant level of autonomy Finland kept its own currency, police force and border controls, for example. However, during the period in which this novel is set a policy called ‘Russification’ had been instigated, wth the aim of forcing Finland into closer integration
with Russia. The ‘February Manifesto’ of 1899 was a key statement of Tsar Nicholas II’s intent to extend Russian autocracy into Finland, and to violate the Finnish Constitution. It aroused fierce anger and resistance. Within a month, half a million Finns had signed a petition to the Tsar asking him to uphold the Finnish Constitution. The Tsar would not do so.

  The Governor-General of Finland at this time was General Nikolai Bobrikov, a former soldier and politician, and a much-hated figure in Finland. He drove the policy of Russification, and was assassinated on 17 June 1904 in the Council of State building in Helsinki, by a twenty-eight-year-old Swedish Finn, Eugen Schauman. Eugen Schauman then turned his gun on himself.

  Eugen Schauman is said to have acted alone. House of Orphans deals with the forces that propelled young people to commit what were variously described either as terrorist acts or as heroic acts of martyrdom and patriotism. It also concerns the activity of revolutionary groups in both Finland and Russia, and the efforts of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, to penetrate these groups using double agents.

  In the year following the assassination of Bobrikov, political unrest and the disastrous outcome of the Russo‘Japanese War led to a wave of strikes throughout the Russian Empire, and took Russia close to complete revolution. As a result of this turmoil, and the Finnish National Strike in autumn 1905, the Tsar was forced to make huge concessions in Finland. These included the establishment of a unicameral parliament, and universal suffrage.

  However, Finland had still to endure a bitter and bloody civil war between Red and White forces in 1918, following the Russian Revolution in 1917. About 30,000 Finns, or approximately one per cent of the population, died as a result of battle, execution or imprisonment in camps.

  The impact on Finland of its ‘Great Neighbour’ cannot be overestimated. The most remarkable feature of Finland’s history is not that it suffered so much oppression, but that it won so much liberty.