Aet studied Inger's face.

"Ask me another, but don't overestimate your strength."

From behind junipers a truck came into view. Perceiving Inger it put on brakes with a jerk but then gunned the engine and raising dust from the road sped off, vanishing between the bushes.

Aet was waving her arms.

"It was Arne! He could have stopped!"

Inger's heart gave a lurch. "Arne who?"

"My brother-in-law, on a scale of one to ten he's twenty-five. If he wasn't my brother-in-law, I'd be head over heels ... In no way has my sister deserved a man of such calibre ... "

Inger willed herself to be calm and asked with just the right amount of curiosity, although her voice tended to get wobbly,

"Why ever doesn't your sister deserve her husband?"

"Yuk, she's as cheery as a wet Monday morning," was the response Aet made looking again into the distance. "She's a zombie. She's never been interested in anything beyond food and clothes. I could never rightly read my sisters and brother, for them everything was very simple ... They just used to make fun of me when I found the going rough. I for one tried as best I could to be helpful and considerate ... They did my pet in while I was at school in town. This dog and me, we had always tended the herd together ... He certainly was old and blind, but he was my only friend, always came to meet me and ... One oughtn't to have done that!"

For Inger the recounted story began to seem odd. As regards Arne's wife she would have been ready to buy anything, but killing a dog without rhyme or reason was a bit thick.

"How did they do him in then?" she asked, carefully hiding her smile.

"Search me. Once when I came again from the bus-stop, the dog wasn't waiting for me at the gate. Afterwards, when I asked where the dog had got to, they jeered unseemly that a wolf had taken him away and exchanged glances. Bad women always get good husbands."

On their way home Inger debated whether she should invite Aet in for a cup of coffee or not, but Aet came to a halt in front of her house and, as if reading Inger's indecision, said,

"No, no! I won't come up for coffee. I won't bother you. I've given up drinking coffee, I'm conducting my life on natural lines now, I only go in for knitting and think of school."

She said goodbye and turned to go, dumpy and somehow defenceless in the bright sunlight.

The grass was green and the sky was blue, Inger was alone with trees, grass and sea, was related to them. And there, in togetherness with trees, grass, sky and sea, she was beautiful.

Her love was like a seedling in a cobbled street, in broken asphalt: vitality told it to sprout and grow braving all dangers. A hopeless love, but love nevertheless. Inger hadn't known that she was able to be happy sans hope.

Now aspcns were green and willows in full leaf. From the sea seagulls came flying and landed on her neighbour's vegetable patch to look for worms and the carrot bed was guarded from the starlings with twigs.

But cars went past as before.

Inger knew for a fact she shouldn't hope. She tried to low herself in a magazine article on the cognizance of world in the light of the quantum theory, but was suffering in the throes of a disgusting jealousy. There, near liverworts, Arne rode past, couldn't even stop. There was something symbolic about it, although Inger didn't believe in omens and aspired to be above them. She finished reading the article and then watched aspen-leaves trembling in the evening breeze. The small aspen was almost motionless, but higher up the breeze was fresher, there the leaves of the big tree were clinking like coins.

A clear, green evening. The tops of the aspens were glowing pink long after the sun itself had become invisible.

Everything was so hopeless, everything.

In no way can I fight jealousy, it can't be helped, it keeps gnawing.

But then came Arne, she told the man how she had planned to have a good cry and had removed her mascara so that it wouldn't get in her eyes, and laughed.

The man smiled fleetingly and hugged her tight.

"We came within an ace of remaining out at sea today. The engine stalled."

Serves you right! You had no business to go to the sea while I was despairing here. None whatever.

"The trip was no great shakes either," Arne went on. "At first the ladies were shrieking but later on they nicely piped down. I told them: you either go silent at once or I'll throw you in. Mine isn't used to boating, it turned her stomach."

"Why d'you drag her along then?" Inger chaffed.

"Haven't the foggiest what had bit her–she wants to go boating! Never before has she longed to go to the sea. Even in early days when I used to invite her sometimes. Cold! And what's the good of huddling beside a bonfire! But today she said: let's go boating. To refuse would have been churlish–it's her birthday ... "

"And how did you slip up here, then? Why aren't you throwing a party at home?"

"Girl, you're looking for trouble."

"And what if I do! But I'm her junior by seven years I'm so glad that in seven years she can still give me seven years."

"Today I told my wife I'd go to sea. She was astonished and asked why I wasn't happy with the life I had. I said I hadn't been happy for a long time now and wanted to go away. I'd send her money every month regularly, but me she'd see very seldom, once in many months. She didn't like it at all who would ... I told her if she wasn't game I'd leave her for good."

"And then?"

"And then I'll move in with you."

"But your boys?"

I'll take my boys with me." He sighed and added. "But she won't let me have them. She won't give me either of them. Those boys are the crux of the matter ... Maybe I'm daft, but I can't leave the children behind."

Inger knew it, she knew Arne that much.

That's why I love you, because you are the way you arc. That's why I feel so safe and secure when I'm beside you, you're like a juniper, your roots firmly in the earth. I knew it from the very beginning. I knew in what coin I'd pay for my happiness.

"Can you forgive me, girl, for giving you such a disappointment?"

Had Inger hoped for something more, then?

Yes, sometimes, In secret. Only in secret, privately, face to face with herself.

But what was the disappointment Arne was speaking about? He wanted to make her go without something she had no right to, that wasn't hers. He hadn't taken anything from her, had only given. He, so dear.

Inger put down her hoe and stooped to pull out the underground stem of a couch grass. As yet she hadn't enough know-how to make so bold as to wield the razor-sharp hoe and cut the stein through right beside the pine seedling with no fear of damaging it. It was purely accidental that she had the day free and Soova had sent her in charge of the fifth form to the seedling nursery to weed the pine seedlings. The seedling nursery was in a glade in the middle of a forest. The day was warm and thick. The warden had shown them what to do. The children were fooling and shrieking between the seedling beds. Vello Kuusmaa was stabbing at the girls with stinging nettles, the girls were running and shrieking, trying to escape. Inger called the boy aside.

During their lunch-hour they sat down in the young fresh grass at the edge of the glade and unwrapped their sandwiches. The warden, a kind and obliging man, brought a can of milk and some mugs from home.

Inger lay down in the grass, forearms crossed to support the nape of her neck, and watched clouds drifting across the sky. Nearby the young foliage of a birch was shushing soothingly.

"Teacher, must we start working at once?"

Inger looked at her watch. "You may still have a respite, say half an hour. Only mind you don't get lost in the woods!"

With a cheery hullabaloo the children scattered between the trees.

When work started again, Vello boasted in a loud voice that he had had time to climb a tree and had found a bird's nest there. At work he wasn't worth his salt, the girls were faster. Inger was about to start hoeing her own bed when she saw that two of the girls were missing.

"Where are Reet and Kersti?"

The children shrugged their shoulders.

Maybe they're late? They both were quiet girls who kept to themselves, never naughty.

But when after a while they were still missing Inger asked with already obvious unease where the girls could be. Nobody knew.

They had wanted to spend a penny and had gone into shrubbery, one said, had been afraid of Vello who'd been jumping about and sneering.

"I didn't do anything," Vello cut in.

"Have they got a watch?"

They had, the children were positive.

"You start working. I'll go and see where they are."

Inger took a girl along to show her where the girl had last seen Reet and Kersti. They walked about between bushes in a tussocky paddock and called, but there was no answer. Only a couple of frightened grouse took to wing, whirring up.

Inger left her guide with the other children and went to the warden's.

"Two children are missing."

"How come? Maybe it's a prank of sorts?"

Inger shrugged her shoulders. Prank or not, they were missing and that was a fact; they cooced in the woods but there was no answer.

The warden came along.

"There's no quagmire or hole hereabouts they could have fallen into, I know the place as a beggar knows his bag."

The children had stopped working and were waiting in agitation. Again all of them went in search of the girls.

"Don't you dare to go far from each other or you'll get lost, too," Inger admonished, herself flustered.

No, we'll be all together, they chirped. And Vello declared, "I won't get lost, not ever, I'll climb the tallest tree and check the direction we should take."

Continued in Part XXXI...