Arne shot her a look and went on with his narration.

"Well. I dug myself out. It took me the best part of three quarters of an hour. That taught me to take a short cut! Then I arrived at the icetrack. And did I have a letdown! The boys were lowering the bar, saying: no more driving today, there's a blizzard. I can see myself that there's a blizzard, but I must reach the island. If I'd made it earlier, I could have followed the snow-plough ... Too had! I told the boys my love and life were at stake, the boys gave me up as hopeless and let me pass."

The man was suddenly abashed and ran out of words as if to his mind his story had had shades of showing off.

"That's neither here nor there, of course, when one's driving anything can crop up. So what's new?–Piece of cake."

But these words embarrassed him even more.

Inger took the afghan from the couch and wrapped it round her shoulders, despite heating it was rather cool in the room.

Arne stood up and went to the window, placed his open hand on the window sill and said, "There's a draught here," then he put his hand under the window sill and said, "It's even stronger here."

He turned his eyes towards the ceiling, contemplating it with such an air as if he had a mind to start repairs the very next day and rapped with his knuckles at the wall.

"It's a hutch of a house! Here, under the roof, there's only a thin board. Only a thick layer of fibreboard could be the answer." He squatted down and touched the floor.

"The floor's also cold," he stated regretfully. "It should be covered with fibreboard as well. Cracks should be filled with putty and Finnish fibreboard nailed on."

Once more he took in the room and then said,

"And no stove at all. One'd have one's hands full here"

And then he added as if he had read lager's mind, "No, certainly not. I didn't mean you, this here is no kind of task for a little girl! But, on the whole ... One should put much work in here."

He sighed. He might have liked to turn his hand to this himself, but couldn't. But maybe he was simply sorry for Inger who had to live in such a bleak room. His eves seemed somehow drawn into the girl's.

But now, at any rate, it was time for him to push off, he had sat, had had coffee and a chat. The callas were in the vase on the table, straight, white and proud, cold as a snowdrift and the night they had come from.

Inger didn't try to hold the man back. When his stomping, footsteps had descended, the door below had banged shut and the whirling, flying snow had wiped away the last trace of Arne, she was still sitting in the armchair, the afghan round her shoulders, thinking of the flimsy walls of her room the man's eyes had measured. Outside, the blizzard was whipping snow into a froth, gale force winds slating in at her room and making it chilly. Inger was used to the cold, it didn't frighten her, it was the man himself she was thinking about and his strange brownness. Why had he remembered Inger now, in midwinter, at the coldest time when ringing frost was reigning outside, blizzards were hissing and soughing, now that everybody was sitting at home by a warm stove?

Why?

But he had said he'd thought of her very often, all the time.

In the middle of the lesson Inger suddenly stopped, a piece of chalk in her hand, new words and phrases on the blackboard, and looked out of the window. Pure morning light flooded the trees in the park and the houses in the town; pink clouds were drifting on the eastern horizon. There, on the far horizon, somewhere on the mainland, morning was just coming up. An edge of the disc had already crept above the horizon like the red arch of a bridge, glowing lack-lustre red.

This bridge is for me. This bridge takes to a fairy tale. This bridge takes me to everything that is good in this world. It links me up with myself.

The thought got blocked out Inger was engrossed in her feelings. She wasn't in a position yet to sort them out. The world was composed of a thousand colourful rays. She stood in front of the class, her heart easy and light.

And the sun was climbing higher, beginning to pour bright, cheerful light over the town, trees and the beginning world. The sun was rising in the sky and in Inger. The gloomy north country winter was over, indigo-blue shadows were quivering on the snow, filling one's heart with a pure, painful brightness.

This delicate, frail and hardly perceptible seed, not having perished in winter night, in its hibernation, kept germinating and sprouting and filled the young teacher's heart with rustling shoots. By glance and gesture it forced its way out, this green message which had remained unchanged from the beginning of the world, always the same, unaltered and stubborn like sunrise.

The class was quiet. For a moment some distant light flashed across the children's faces still holding the remnants of morning sleep and habitual boredom.

"Switch off the light," said Inger.

She would have liked to reveal her joy, to express it and pass it on. But how? How can you pass on an idea of beauty? One will need some different structure, a poem, some music. Again beauty began to harass Inger.

Beauty, perfection of beauty, pain of beauty–longing. It was hard to draw a line between them, to divide them into boxes, to tell one from the other. And that was not what Inger wanted, she was longing for the perfection of life and beauty, everything they encompassed. Actually it denoted only the full application of her personality.

With what zeal had she made plans in autumn! The new academic year would be of utmost intensity, her personal life would be led extra vigorously, in full swing, beautifully, with heart and mind at full load. But then there had been grey weeks, dark months, empty and dismal times not unlike a wintry highway and little by little Inger's drive had died down, leaden clouds of dullness had hung low over lambent stretches of soul. But the chance to find beauty hadn't been eradicated. It smouldered tenaciously in the bosom of lack-lustre days, sometimes flashing like a fragment of a stained-glass panel, a bright blue break in the clouds of care, concern and lonely evenings.

The crimson arch rose higher and higher. Maybe now it was already too high for the arch of a bridge, and even if it could take one somewhere, one would have lots of trouble climbing up on one side and down again on the other.

And still the bridge is for me. It links me up with myself.

The children kept silent and watched the sunrise with grave, thoughtful faces. Even Vello Kuusmaa was sitting still, his chin cupped in his hand his eves on the solar disc, until it changed from a high arch into an ordinary round ball.

Was this then the beauty, the inkling of the perfection of the world which Inger Uunvald was incapable of putting into words?

"The sun is rising. The sun rises every day. We are looking at the sun."

Inger took care to change the water in the calla lilies' vase and wondered why formerly she had disliked these flowers. The flowers in the vase were proud and cold, but one could as easily consider them chaste', at any rate to they were grand. She stroked a bloom with the tip of her finger, it was smooth and waxy. In a day or two Arne came again. Inger felt he'd come, had to come.

The man stopped in the middle of the kitchen, grinned with joy, a bit helplessly, and said,

"My truck was playing up, the engine died."

And he fell silent as though it had sounded a bit thick even to himself, utterly unheard-of that his truck would conk out just in front of Inger's house.

He said.

"I came to see you."

And. fell silent again, these words, too, were strangely superfluous.

But Inger didn't take the visit as something improper, far from it. She was just glad. She seated the man in the other room and herself, sat down in the armchair facing him, her hands on her lap.

"How are things at school then?"

Same as ever," Inger replied. "We're already knee-deep in the preparations for the One-Hundred-Days' Ball,"

"What's this?"

"That's to say that there's about a hundred days till school-leaving exams and then a joint ball for the school-leavers of all the islands will be given, each school showing what they're capable of. Actually the devising of the programme and rehearsals are fun. Today too, we were splitting our sides with laughter for almost five hours."

"So it's you who's running the show."

"Well, there's my own class, too ... They've got used to my being in on everything. To tell the truth. I'm fond of being busy with pupils. Sometimes, then, I'd have the same feeling had being still at school myself. We used to lay on all sorts of-parties and put on plays. One of them was even written by me ... "

Suddenly Inger fell silent, she had let her tongue run away with her.

"This wouldn't sit well with me, not on your life," the man admitted. "I'm clumsy, I've been clumsy all my life, I can't even dance properly." Brownish-yellow flecks in his eves kindled. "Nevertheless, I did do folk dancing once. Can't say how they managed to make a bear like me skip and hop. Well, my wife, that is my bride-to-be, dragged me along ... Afterwards, when we got married and the family started to come along, she stopped going herself and didn't let me go either."

Arne fell silent, he was grave again.

Inger couldn't help smiling, it wasn't easy to picture the Arne she knew dancing. Although he looked presentable enough in a white shirt, a chequered tie, a leather jacket with knit sleeves, his hair carefully trimmed.

Ah, so his truck had conked out in front of her house!

"What are you laughing, girl?" Arne asked.

"I wondered how you'd get your truck started again. What if it has broken down?"

"She isn't. And even if she has, I'll get her fixed."

"You know how to repair a car?" Inger inquired eagerly. Now it was the man's turn to look amused.

"I get by."

"And you know how to steer a boat, too ... And to cook chowder ... "

"And that about closes the list for a dimwit like me," the man said jokingly, but still there was something akin to a sound of regret in his voice. Words of comfort sprang to Inger's lips,

"That's adequate to survive on an uninhabited island ... How did you manage to save the boat we had left waterlogged'?"

"Oh, that! At the weekend other men came with me to bring it in. The sea had gone down, the boat was nearly high and dry. We scooped it dry and the engine came to life at first try."

"So we needn't have joined the men on the fixed-net boat and go and spend the night with those strangers?"

"So it seems," the man agreed. "I bet you won't be overly eager to go to the sea a second time, will you? I did think: city girls though they are, however, they certainly have pluck, but deep down where it counts they must be cursing and reviling both the sea and the boating."

"No. Why? It's something beautiful to look back on."

"It is?" said Arne and looked the girl straight in the eye. "Me, too. That's occupied my mind all the time."

"It has?"

Had, perhaps. the same thing occupied Inger's mind, too, without actually her being aware of it?

That strange afterglow in the evening skies they had watched together seemed to have left last year and come here to warm them and to bring them together again. Some invisible binding threads were extending thence into this very day and Inger felt that the boating trip Kiur had arranged wasn't really such a long way off and over the hills as she had felt at some odd moment of loneliness.

"The scene that comes back to me most clearly is our trip to that other islet by the rescue boat. You swung me up into your arms from the boat and I thought: will he really put me down in the water? I was the only one who by some miracle had managed to stay dry. But you didn't."

The man looked at her attentively, shifted in his chair and said warmly...

Continued in Part XXII...

Christopher Marquet

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