"We'd see the New Year in together. We've room enough and to spare at home, I'd be able to accommodate you in style. The people asked round to our house are always very interesting, too. By the way, one or other of them could help you to fix a super job in the capital why be sunk in the doldrums here? Only send a telegram and. I'll meet you off the plane. I can even book your return ticket so that you won't be late."

"But what if your people prove to be too interesting by half?" Inger ribbed.

"Too interesting?" Kiur shrugged his shoulders, thwarted. "But if it appeals to you more, we could be, only the two of us, together. I'll bring a tiny fir tree into my room ... "

"And then?"

"Then?" All of a sudden the trainee lost his shirt. How on earth could that girl he so daft? "Don't you really know? I've hinted you in words of one syllable that I want you."

Inger looked at him taken by surprise.

"But we're nothing to each other. Haven't been and aren't."

"Think so?" Kiur gave a jump. "What about that draw?"

"It was a game."

"It was a divination! You told me yourself I'd better cling to you like glue."

Inger had no comeback to that one.

"Or don't I count with you at all? Don't read me wrong, Inger, but you can't hold out much hope. Only one unmarried male intellectual on the whole island." Kiur stood up. "But for all that there is something attractive about you, alluring. I'd even say."

Aet was sitting at the table in the living room, cutting discs out of some red glossy paper.

"What are you going to do with them? Inger inquired.

"I'll stick them on exemplary exercise books. When exercise books are being distributed, one can see with half an eye whose work was well done. Exercise book rating a good mark will get one disc and those rating an excellent mark will get two. Children are greedy for this sort of things."

"And you'll stick black discs on messy exercise books," Inger chortled.

"Think so?" Aet asked eagerly. But having taken in Inger's merry eyes, her face became miserable and distrustful. 'Mocking? In your eves this cutting of discs is vain work–and so it is, to be sure."

For a moment Inger was about to argue, but kept quiet. Would there have been any point in it? Lately Aet wasn't talkable-to at all, she read hidden mockery, lack of consideration and double-dealing into every single word.

Again there was a pained look in her eyes.

This constant veiled reproachfulness made Inger's hackles rise, for a long time now she couldn't feel at ease in her friend's company.

"Don't look at me like that, it hurts me," Aet said. "There's a striving to understand me in your eyes although it's actually aversion that you feel. I mustn't tell anything to anyone or expect anyone to understand me. No, I am not blaming you. I blame no one if not myself for not being able to be simple and sincere. And instead of yelling: that's a lie! I turn tail and run like a real funk. I can't help it, I'm in fear of insults, they hurt me, they gnaw at me. I'm a veritable washout, a thorn in everyone's side. The greatest favour I could possibly do to my friends and acquaintances is to flee and vanish. Out of this world, into another time and space where I reside anyway."

"That's not true!" Inger cried, her irritation barely under control.

"Think so?" Aet replied calmly, staring at the table. "All the chit-chat you're handing me out about steadfastness and overcoming hardships is a negative information input for my brain." With a small push she scattered her discs and started to stack them anew, "Maybe I managed to get everything into a greater muddle than before, but you can rest assured: never again shall I try to make myself understood. I mustn't listen to anybody, deal with any problem."

"But you do!"

"That's my daily task and nothing more. Actually what I need is your mirth and sorrow, I need friendship, not a thing more."

They were back to square one again. Whatever it was they were talking about, starting from whatever point–weather, poetry or staff meeting–this was the point they invariably reached. And although they avoided calling a spade a spade it hovered behind and inside everything like some spook.

"I seem to exist in some other time and space where there's nothing but some shrill, tiresome, nerve-racking canned music." Aet spoke cheerlessly and slowly as if explaining to children all over again how to write a pretty capital A. "Have you, Inger, any idea what it is like?"

No, Inger hadn't. She wanted to listen to violin music and sometimes she did hear it–in the street, on the beach or in a room. With all her force she tried to project herself into Aet's horrible discordant world, but couldn't get rid of the feeling that it was Aet herself who had locked herself in there, herself had nailed up all the doors and wasn't making any effort to overcome the discordancy, to somehow gain an advantage over it.

It was alien to Inger's entire perception of life. In your shoes I'd seek out the best specialists, leave no avenue unexplored, and I'd come to terms with the situation only when really no help could be found, she had fervently told Aet, trying to invigorate her friend with vitality and stubbornness at any cost. Aet, however, only shook her head submissively: no, she, had already adjusted herself to her fate, had taken the inevitability in her stride, had mustered calm at least as far as it concerned her state of health. The only thing she needed and considered herself capable of feeling was Inger's friendship. "Allow me to understand and help you so that through you I could understand and help myself," she kept harping on.

However much Inger sympathized with her friend over her misfortune, of late it did consume all her energy and time. Friendship and help, or to be exact, an endless gabber of friendship and attitude to life began to bore Inger and made her temper fray around the edges, all the more so as her advice was of no avail. Aet neither did anything nor intended to, the only thing she did want was to talk away and even more was she pleased by letting Inger do the talking: the latter's voice seemed to have a soothing effect on her. Besides she would concentrate on Inger's expression, jumping to half-baked conclusions–for the most part not in her favour. She followed her friend's every step and change of mood and kept count of the days Inger hadn't had time to come and talk to her. Bells ringing in her head, Inger sat at her friend's with a cup of coffee, at home the pile of not yet marked exercise books growing, books and magazines waiting to be read, firewood not brought in and her room unheated. No inflaming, no intellectual pleasures, only a numb, gnawing irritation!

"You're fed up with my yammer, but if I kept my silence you'd think I was simply going through the motions."

Aet began stacking her red discs again.

This sentence rang a bell–at some time or other she must have uttered it herself. It had happened before that she heard from Aet's mouth her own ideas, sometimes even whole trains of thought–almost verbatim. Aet, however, would use them arbitrarily and be unhappy to boot when, in different context, they became absolutely nonsensical and irrelevant.

Inger had in mind to go home, she had been sitting here for three hours now, holding a confab. But departure, too, wasn't pleasing and called forth pangs of conscience. Invariably she was obliged to find some blind and it was so mean. Only once had she told her friend: we've had our chat, let's call it a day–and she remembered the upshot to this very day!

No honestly, something was basically wrong with Aet. Whatever way you talked, she was affronted all the same.

"l'm on my way ... You've got your work only half clone."

"I'm not too keen to get it done at one go, I shan't have anything to do when you are away ... " Aet complained.

As if Inger were about to vanish into thin air instead of going some hundreds of metres across the square to her home where she had to iron her washing, cook and work out a programme for the school carnival.

What could she do for Aet? Only try and stir a little the bees in her bonnet. Sometimes she strived to think of the borderline beyond which her friend's worries and soul-searchings were hers and decide how deeply she herself should be involved, but she never succeeded, the demarcation line was as vague as ever and thus it was simply a matter of her conscience.

Aet, however, acknowledged neither borders nor lines, crossed them and penetrated into alien domains and proclaimed them hers.

To be sure, in no time at all she was at Inger's.

"Why did you leave so early?" she demanded, hanging her coat on a hook. "I haven't seen you for ages. You're always in a hurry, you come and go and never stop to ask what I think or feel. Every day I'm waiting for you. When you go to the mainland for a week, I say to myself: you'll be gone for a whole month. Or else I couldn't cope with the waiting. I'm always eager to see you even if you are sad."

Whence must I gain strength to grin and bear it? And it's getting worse and worse. She claims everything I've got–my time and thoughts; she's trying to build a nest in my guts and settle herself there.

Aet's ability to notice everything riled her most, her uncanny knack to read Inger's mind. As if she stood stark naked before Aet.

"You don't begin to know how much you mean to me! Under your influence I've changed a lot ... I've given up even the idea to buy a telly, although mother and I have already put by enough–only because you said: I won't let that box into my life."

"Aet please, don't take my words as gospel. I do let my tongue run away with me. I'm not you and you're not me." Aet's eyes drilled into her with suspicion.

"It would have been better if I had taken those pills,"

"Don't talk like that."

"But it can be fixed. If I lose one more litre of blood, it'll be the end ... I'm like a little grey mouse in the refuge of loneliness. There's no hope."

"You try and gnaw a hole into the wall of your refuge."

"It's easy for you to talk."

"Have you been to any doctor at all, recently?"

"Humph! ... Why on earth did I open my big mouth? I'm mortified! Now you, too, are eating your heart out for me."

"I want to help you."

"I'm beyond help. The doctors said that hypnosis might be of help, but there aren't any specialists of this kind here."

"I'll help you to find one."

"You can't help me. Nobody can. You can only be my friend, so that I can stop by, so that you trust me, so that you look me in the eye while talking."

"Wouldn't it be inadequate?" Inger asked, taut with nerves. They had conic full circle. This magic circle of friendship walled her in all round, circled her without a break.

"That's enough for me," Aet stated again in her usual manner. "I'd help you to bear your joys and your sorrows. Friendship's enough for me."

"But for me it isn't. It isn't! Why don't you ask me about that? You haven't given that a thought. I can't share everything with you. Can't share love ... Or sorrows. There are lots of things I must live through myself, by myself, in myself!"

"If I'm intruding on you, I'll leave. For good! All it takes is to step into snow in my bare feet ... Whenever there's some kind of trouble, I lose much blood in a single day. And if I start losing it by the pints. I shan't last long ... "

"For God's sake, Aet, will you stop all this! This isn't funny. Go to a doctor ... Stop handing out threats ... "

"I'm neither kidding ... nor threatening."

Aet shrugged on her coat and went away.

Inger listened to her receding footsteps. In the garden wind sighed through the bare limbs of trees, the schoolhouse with its country red wooden walls and lit windows wasn't obscured anymore. It had turned cold in the room, a fire in the range was a must.

Inger came to her feet and went into the kitchen.

But the fire, too, wouldn't get started, paper burned up and the flame went out. Inger fetched some more newspapers from the other room and, irritated, stuffed them into the firebox.

Riina came in the evening.

Still in the doorway, she made it known,

"We've just taken Aet to the hospital. Haemorrhage! I dropped in Aet was stretched on the couch, face ashen a horrendous picture! I said, let's call the ambulance, she, however went on arguing for all she's worth. Nothing's worthwhile, she can't take it, it's all the same to her, she wants to be left alone."

Continued in Part XVIII...

Christopher Marquet

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