"How so? ... In what way?" he mumbled, aghast. "Elementary, dear Watson! We'll raffle you!" Inger laughed out loud.

It was gallows humour. A revenge for his lack of understanding. For the ruthless way he was twisting a knife in their wound. At any rate, that blew the coals.

Riina sprang to her feet. "Ha! We're going to tear Kiur to three pieces and caper in a war dance round him. Here, give me a pencil and some paper!"

Aet ran to her desk and began rummaging in a drawer. Her fingers were all thumbs. Again and again she hit upon old picture postcards, balls of yarn, pieces of cloth.

Paper, paper!

At last she tracked down a pad and managed to tear out a sheet adorned with a green vane.

With impatient hands Riina folded the sheet in three and was already about to tear it in strips when Aet managed to check her thrusting a pair of scissors into her hand–even lottery-tickets had to be made properly.

"It's a game. For this reason I'm asking the participants not to take offence," said Inger, herself as keyed up as the others. Three names were written down.

The trainee was sitting on thorns, his smile anything but bright. A game, certainly, only a game, but there's more to every game than catches the eye. Against his will Kiur was beginning to see the raffle as an omen. Wasn't it just! It resembled an orienteering competition–what direction does the arrow on the tree trunk point to?

"We need a hat! Find a hat!;" Riina sang out.

'The new hitch in the proceedings lent fuel to the fire. Like a small panther Aet leapt across the room to the wardrobe to rout and hunt there among dresses, coats and gloves. A hat! Without a hat the whole ritual will flop.

Finally she happened upon her own fawn velour hat and with it she rushed to the table. Her friends were too busy to notice that it was brand-new, the latest in hats, broad-rimmed, with "feelers"–just the hat they all had been hankering for.

It took Riina unusually long to stir the three crumpled paper balls in the hat. Aet and Inger kept their eyes glued to the hat, their nostrils wide open like those of wild horses.

Kiur's long fingers were trembling, his face solemn, almost ecstatic, when he thrust his hand into the hat. Even though it wasn't meant seriously and all was a game, a party game, he didn't feel at ease. But who was to blame? Hadn't it been he himself who, just minutes ago, had blurted out: I'll do anything for you? Vain words, and now he was hoist with his own petard.

He gulped audibly, held his breath and balked, his hand in the fawn "feeler"-trimmed hat Riina was holding in front of her with both hands. The student tried to hold back the time, to freeze the moment, to postpone the decision. All's chance, nothing but chance, he thought puckering his face. And still it's an omen that might prove to be fatal. A moment that enslaves me. Later you can't rescind anything–not a single move, word nor the afterglow flooding through the window. All these signs are nailing me to the time, and I'll be fixed for ever.

"The others won't surely resent it if ... " said Aet and then, at a loss, fell silent. She was all but ready to apologize to her friends in case it was her name Kiur took out.

Jerkily Kiur snatched one piece of paper, crushing it in his hand. His choice was made, Chance's heart set at rest, he had opened the door, chosen his road. Slowly he unfolded the slip.

The girls were all of a twitter, Aet even on tiptoe to have a better view.

"Inger," read Kiur, his mouth growing dry.

The general stir fizzled out like a kettle going off the boil. Aet was hard put to it to hide her disappointment, she that never was envious of anybody. At no cost was she willing to admit it to herself that the raffle had hit her hard.

Riina put the raffle-hat on the table, resettled into the rocking chair, and asked with just enough interest in her voice,

"Aet, where did you get that classy hat from? Those feelers are really something. Just like some insect's ... "

"A friend from Tallinn brought it."

"What do you say, could they bring one like this to me, too?"

"Don't know," Aet was abashed. "But I can ask them."

She picked the hat from the table, twirled it in her hand and then put it on her friend's head, saying, "You may keep it if you like. Actually fawn is your colour, it compliments your brown eyes."

Inger was drooping. Whatever for did she have to go and think of this monkey business when now neither she nor the others knew where to go from here. A void had crept into the game, a gap. They didn't have rules any longer. Something had gone wrong, something playful and mischievous lay in smithereens. She couldn't put her finger on it, but something in the evening had gone sour. In a brown study Kiur was fingering the piece of paper, all his social graces suddenly gone. With the flat of her hand Aet was gently stroking the soft surface of the hat on Riina's head as if bidding it farewell. Managing to plaster a smile on her lips, she addressed Inger,

"Ha-ha, your name came out!"

"This is where I throw in the towel," Inger said abruptly, snatching up her handbag from the couch.

The girls were gaping at her when she went out hastily, without taking leave.

Aet ran after her into the street.

"What's the rush? Look here, wait a little, I'm making some more coffee. Riina's still here ... And Kiur's waiting. It was a game."

Inger made her way down to the shore, crossing a meadow wooded with sparse alders. Under her feet second-growth grass was rustling, caraway scenting the air. Now, late in the evening, neither man nor beast was in view here, the entire beach was her domain alone. Only a long way off, from the town came the barking of a dog.

Whenever I come down to the beach, somewhere in the night a dog is barking, far away, deep and toneless.

Soft and warm harvest-time stars were aglitter over the sea. Inger went down to the edge of the water, left her sandals on the grass and, stepping from boulder to boulder, walked a long way into the sea.

She looked back from the last boulder. A flame-yellow full moon rode the sky over the park, its light, however, not reaching the sea. Only if you went on, farther into the sea, would the perspective change and the moon throw its beams in a glittering path on the water. And then you could swim along that silvery swath back to the shore.

It was emblazoned in Inger's memory how once in summer, at sundown, swimming she began to follow the sun, but when she turned back towards the shore, it was suddenly very dark, the water black and ominous and she was filled with fear lest someone, maybe the water itself, should want to tug her irresistibly to the bottom, although as a swimmer she wasn't half bad.

She lowered herself on the boulder, her back to the land, and dangled her legs knee-deep in the water, looking out to sea.

Ahead, on her right, the two halves of a vessel sunk in the war loomed black, clear-cut and sombre, not unlike two separate rocks in the sea. Still farther, beyond the wreck, a light was glinting on the horizon–there a ship was passing.

Beach was the place to find peace and fortitude at, here Inger was as free as the wind, away from it all, face to face with the primordial sky and water, their grey eternity. Here everything seemed timeless and spaceless, natural and unrestricted, exuding loneliness and a tremendous melancholy. But for all that it didn't depress Inger, it sooner cleansed and cured her.

The quiet was heavy and mellow, prayer-minded.

Across the bay and the dim shoreline a lighthouse began blinking. The lighthouse itself was a long way off, on the northernmost tip of the island, but its light was thrown here and reminded Inger of Jaak, a real seaman who had spoken about beacons, too, although Inger failed to remember what it had been.

Actually they knew very little about each other, almost nothing having met only once when the girls had again been at Inger's reading Under. Outside the May night had been light and the bird-cherry tree beneath her window had been in bloom, inside a green-shaded lamp had illuminated her room. It was then that two seamen had come up to them like moths upon a light. The taller one, with flaxen sun-bleached hair, had apologized, had taken a seat opposite to Inger, had ogled at her with his blue, somewhat cruel eyes and had amazed the whole company by saying, "That's the end. The sailor's hooked." The other man had come up with stories about storms and fishing. but Jaak had told him to shut up and had said he hadn't read a line of poetry in all his life, had never been a one for them, but now wanted to listen, wouldn't they kindly read some more. What could have taken place in that clumsy machinist? "Sailor wants to listen to poetry," he had repeated doggedly when Inger had hung back, in two minds whether to take the stranger's request as it read or not. It was absolutely unconventional, outright unthinkable in respectable society that unknown men came, nay, forced their way into a quiet on-their-own evening. Nevertheless, there had been something exceptional, robust and rough about Jaak that for a landlubber like herself had personified craving after sea. His hands, however, had been horny and calloused, his nails broken with work at sea, and with all his heart he had bemoaned the lack of his tape recorder, robbing him of the chance to take Inger's voice with him. "Why do you want to take my voice along to the sea?" Inger had asked, warm colour reddening her cheeks. "A voice is like a person. When the voice is aboard, sailor will feel that the owner of the voice is aboard, too." And the loaded glance Jaak had given her was quickening her heart beats even now, a long time after the event.

In the daytime, among her summer-accumulated mail, she had found a letter written in an unknown hand. As if dreading something, she had extracted it from the pile of other mail and stuffed in her handbag. To tell the truth, she couldn't believe her eyes, she hadn't been prepared for it. The sailor had talked only of taking her voice with him, not a word had he breathed of letter-writing, had just left her the number of his ship.

Inger studied the envelope on both sides in the moonlight. The address was written in green ballpoint with the number of the fisherman and Atlantic Ocean on the lower edge of the envelope. In the picture beside the address on the background of a mauve cluster of lilac blossoms was a nightingale, toes clutching at a twig, beak turned toward the post-mark and opened as wide as it went, trilling greetings from the sea.

Even now Inger wasn't in a hurry to open the letter, frightened it might hold something hostile, disillusioning, some thought capable of causing pain with its unexpected triteness. Perhaps attributing to the unopened letter all kinds of beautiful and delightful things was simpler than reading about humdrum happenings on board, scrawled alongside a diesel engine in wildly tipsy lines. Their crossing of paths had been outlandish enough to cause something likewise indefinable to cling to the letter. Through this letter she wanted to retain something fragile and unattainable for the time of Stygian evenings with tedious rain or hard dark blizzard pelting her window.

She slipped the letter into her bag. From now on it would be her talisman, her good guardian.

Suddenly she conjured up a picture of the sailor in the role of the nightingale printed on the envelope, trilling desperately in the lilac bush, and burst into a peal of laughter. It was positively hilarious, but not at all unnatural, for a sailor was a bird, too, a seabird, Jaak had said at the time Inger was reading Under.

Where is he sailing now, how do his diesel engines run, does he think about her, Inger, when he has time for it?

Far away the lighthouse was blinking like a twinkling star, waves were lapping softly.

But even here–on the outskirts of the town, on the seashore, in the dead of night, in moonlight, far away from her flatlet, school, friends and weekday chores–she wasn't let alone for long to muse and put on her thinking cap.

"Tell me my sea, dear, why here must I be ... " somebody was all of a sudden humming behind her.

Bothered, Inger turned round.

Kiur was standing on the boulder, his shirt gleaming white in the moonlight.

"We tried to find you. You left us so abruptly."

Of course I did, and will do again if need be, thought Inger defiantly. I'd as lief go right away, anywhere, if they're like that.

"Girls were eaten up with worry. We were at your place. The window was dark, the door locked. Then Riina thought you might be on the beach. Allowing that you've got a leaning to such strange whims ... "

"What whims?"

"Aet had fears about you. She thought something might have happened."

"Barring this, you wouldn't have come, would you?"

"Probably not ... "

"How come? It was my name you drew."

The trainee went silent.

"Right-oh. You were to go round with Aet. I don't fit in the picture, right? If I did, you'd cling to me like glue."

"But it was a game ... "

"All the more so."

"It is, is it?"

"Don't you know the ropes then?"

"I'm a trainee," said Kiur in a low voice and with such curious sincerity that Inger was loath to tease him.

It was late, the town already dark, the moon over the sea. Inger let herself slip off the boulder into the water, and, treading along the soft bottom, began to wade back to the shore.

The trainee made his way carefully from boulder to boulder.

Continued in Part III...

Christopher Marquet

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