"In ten years' time I must be as young and strong as I'm now." With great care Arne poured the water he had brought from the spring from the pail into a jug.

"Why?"

"To be as young then as your wife is now."

"What for?"

Arne placed the pail in the grass, picked the coffee-tin from the ground and passed it over to Inger. All of a sudden his busy and businesslike manner set her nerves on edge. She's speaking of such an essential thing, the man, however, only fusses with water and coffee.

"We did decide to find a third way, however long it would take us," she said a little gruffly.

"Yes, we did, but it takes patience."

Inger rolled the tin between her palms and ground coffee rustled in it, the greenish-gray letters on the tin read: Fruit Drops.

"Will yours last out?"

Arne didn't respond at once, in the meanwhile the kettle had begun to boil, he lifted it from the fire with his bare hand and put down on a stone nearby. Inger spooned ground coffee into the boiling water. Hissing the foam rose over the rim and shoved its homey fragrance on the air.

Arne fetched two plastic mugs from the tent–one was pale blue, the other one creamy. Bare-handed as before he lifted the hot kettle, poured the coffee into the mugs and placed them on their saucers on the stone. He entered the tent once more and Inger heard him fumble in his green rucksack mumbling under his breath. When he finally emerged from the tent he said spreading his hands in disappointment.

"I've left the teaspoons behind."

Inger was still waiting for his answer.

Arne took his knife out of his trouser pocket, cut two short sticks off a twig of birch, peeled them and passed one over to Inger. Inger sighed, peeled paper off a lump of sugar and put it into her mug, it hissed and one could see through the plastic how the lump began to melt giving off bubbles. She used the stick to stir it and began to drink.

It was almost mid-morning, the sun was high up in the sky warming her back. They faced each other over the stone.

"The coffee's as good as any I've ever tasted," Inger observed. "Not so bad. Here, let me give you a refill."

Inger sipped her coffee and regarded Arne. The man sat, huddled up and somehow pitiful. She put down her mug, went around the stone, sat down at Arne's side and rested her head on his shoulder.

"Just come out with it, you'll feel much better, don't try to spare me." She felt the man jump. "Something's very wrong with you. I can sense it, it makes me ache. Something's not as it should be. Lately everything we say is only a kind of surface conversation, unfinished, undecided. We are drifting apart. Trust is all we've ever had and if that is destroyed, nothing will ever bind us. Spill your heart to your girl, will you?"

For a moment or two Inger kept silent, the sun warming her throat. Then she asked in a low voice, all worked up,

"Or has something happened in your home? Your wife isn't seriously ill, is she?"

"Not, she isn't. Never before have I been at such a deadlock."

"My heart's already aching and when I think ... " Inger got stuck.

"There, there, girl ... " Pensively, Arne stroked Inger's hair. "No one knows when we can get a chance to come to the islet together again. It's so beautiful here ... Let's keep it the way it is. For the present."

"For the present? As you say–for the present."

Let it last for a moment more, let them have that beautiful day of the smoky beclouded sun, a kind of Dream Time. She is lying in the grass, watching a ladybird climb a stalk in order to spread its wings, slowly and clumsily. She follows its flight with her eyes, gazes at the juniper berries and is blossoming like a dog-rose. For the present.

Towards the evening they struck the tent, folded and packed it into its case, picked up the pegs and hid them carefully in a bush. Their roof was no more withal, had ceased to exist. Arne carried the tent to the boat, the blanket and his rucksack as well. Inger tied her clothes in a bundle. The beautiful weekend on the islet was over.

Inger clambered into the boat, Arne shoved the boat off and noisily jerked the engine on.

For the soft grey time of night oars were the thing, they added to it something patriarchal, old-world: the engine belonged to the daylight. Oars were for the dark, the engine for the light.

The same as last year Arne took the tiller and Inger, facing him, trailed her hand in the water. Only Kiur and Riina were missing and the mood, too, was different.

At sea, offshore, Arne cut the motor and began to up his nets. The haul wasn't big, there were only a few pike tossing in the bottom of the net. The man tossed them into the fish well and, pointing at the biggest pike, said,

"Look, what a nice fish. Want it?"

The corner of Inger's mouth twitched.

"No, but thanks, anyhow," she said shortly.

"Do take it, I've got enough."

The motor chug-chugged measuredly. The islet became smaller and smaller. Now at the horizon, on the surface of the sea, there was only a line fading away into the haze to mark its location. An island of their own which they had sung of and strived towards from a child. A dreamed-of place, a patch in the sun where all is bright and of fairyland quality, which has been sought after and waited for, generation after generation, from love to love.

And the way the islet was receding before their eyes, they themselves were drifting apart too. Its beginning was there stealthy, subconscious, inexplicable like a disease whose incubation period is long.

In dismay Inger felt that aft, face to face with her, hand on tiller, was a perfect stranger, brown all over, she knew nothing about him, he had never kissed her, had never hugged her, had never gone on his knees to her, had never belonged to her. Was estrangement always lurking behind love?

"Do you remember how last year, at the close of summer, we were standing in the storm on that other islet?" Inger said. "How the sunset was blazing ominously and a dried-up branchy oak stood sinister against the afterglow. How you came with an armload of straw and I was thinking of the plague. I thought it was in just that kind of weather that the plague, Black Death, come ashore, a laddie in a small boat, and there wouldn't be anybody able to catch him, fight him, he would make a clean sweep it was preordained. I waited for that plague half the winter, until you came."

"So that's what you were thinking about, but I thought the storm was scaring you to death. You were standing there, so small, hair flying wild in the storm and the weather was beastly ... "

"Teacher, can we have one more coaching today?" asked Toomas.

"Today? Whatever for?" Inger was surprised and closed the textbook. "There won't be any cramming today. What you've mastered, you've mastered and what you haven't will be seen tomorrow morning at nine o'clock when you get your question cards. Now you'd better go for a walk, take a rest so that in the morning you can use your brains."

"Well," drawled Toomas disappointedly. "But ... "

Other faces showed disappointment, too.

"But what if by the evening it strikes us, something we don't know, and there won't be anybody to turn to," Juta pointed out.

Inger spread her hands in astonishment.

"It would really be safer if we met once again," muttered Urmas.

"What to do about you? When even the pick of the crop is getting cold feet ... All right, whoever thinks of anything to ask can come and thrash it out tonight at eight."

In the evening everybody was present. To tell the truth, they had nothing to ask, they simply sat on the floor talking casually.

"Teacher, this is our last exam, you know," they said and Inger understood why, suddenly, they wanted to be together.

"But when the exam is over, it'll be even worse. Then there is such an odd, empty feeling," said Juta. "Teacher, have you ever felt like that, too?"

There they sat and chattered, and it was good and easy to be with them. And today they needed their form teacher only to talk with.

But what should she do with Arne, how to talk with him? How to help him in his heartache?

How can Inger help him? I'm at such a deadlock the man had said. Don't walk out on me.

How to untangle it?

I can't hold my own against the ten years they have lived together. I knew it. Marriage survives everything, the spirit of togetherness seeps everywhere–into the air, wallpaper, things.

Should she tell Arne to keep away? Eventually time would begin its healing process and even if a flaw remained somewhere, time would glaze it, too.

But she? Who'd shelter and hold her?

As soon as that thought went through her head, the female in her began to show stubborn fight. The idea of the man's not coming didn't appeal to her. She didn't want to be all alone again in her isolation, in stuffiness where everything tended to become meaningless. Let that woman win Arne back, let her fight, but she won't give him up for nothing. She was certainly waiting for Arne, all of her, she loved and wanted to love.

She had run into the man in front of the department store wearing sunglasses.

Inger thought he might come at night. She waited, in vain. In the end she was face down on the floor, sobbing her heart out.

If only pride came to her rescue and she wouldn't wait any more!

But what was the use of pride compared to togetherness?

The band was playing a march and Inger, side by side with the form teacher of the other eleventh form, mounted the stairs carpeted with a red runner with festive and excited school-leavers on their heels. The school hadn't got such a runner, it must have been borrowed from the Party Headquarters or the Club House or somewhere, and it hid the chipped, worn and creaking wooden stairs. Even now, at the solemn moment, under the cover of the noisy march, one could hear a low creaking–or it might not be heard, but Inger knew the stairs were creaking. Sometimes the treads were so well-waxed and polished that one could easily tumble down. Soova had said that the nicks in the treads had been left there by the heels of the previous teacher of English. In the meanwhile fashions had changed and Inger was wearing wedge-heeled sandals which wouldn't leave any marks on the treads. The red deep-pile runner was, of course. Soova's initiative: the Head was an authority on ceremonies, too, and it was he who kept the ball rolling.

Inger was hard put to it to keep her emotions in check by thinking of the stairs, the runner and Soova and finally of the three together, but still her eyes tended to mist over when they reached the door to the birch-scented assembly hall and all the audience came to their feet.

This emotion didn't leave her even when Soova was uttering his topical solemn words and began to deliver the certificates. These were stacked in alphabetical order on a table side by side with a pile of books intended as gifts.

Yesterday Inger and Soova had written out the certificates in Soova's office, facing each other at Soova's desk, under the owl's watchful eye. First of all the Head had had Inger write out a trial copy and had found her handwriting fit for such an important task as was the writing out of secondary education certificates in Estonian and Russian languages. "The task involves utmost responsibility," Soova had stressed, taking out the school-leavers' passports and a bottle of Indian ink from his desk drawer. "Take care not to mess up anything. These covers are numbered, and if something is botched the covers must be written off by an official statement. I don't have any spare covers for you to make a mess of." This kind of lecture on responsibility got Inger all worked up and when she sat down at the desk, opened the first covers and dipped the pen into the bottle of black Indian ink, her hands were clammy and shaking.

Soova handed over the certificates, shook hands with the blushing, school-leavers, the band played a flourish and girls from the tenth form pinned a lily-of-the-valley on each breast.

The school-leavers' parents, friends and teachers sat in the hall, faces solemn, handkerchiefs–just in case–at hand, flowers ready, waiting for the moment when Soova would give the word and they could hand them over to the school-leavers. This part was to come at the very end, or so Soova had said at the beginning.

The girls from the tenth came and pinned a flower on Inger's breast and one on that of the other form teacher. This was to say it was time for Inger to make her speech.

"My dear friends, now it is up to you how you will come to grips with life," she began, gulping.

Continued in Part XXXV...

Christopher Marquet

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