“Why do you always go around with that glum look on your face?” asked Rael.
Rael was the type of girl who always came right out with what she was thinking, and sometimes spoke even more bluntly than that. That was why everyone – pupils and teachers alike – thought her nosey. But Sofia had learned to answer her by paying no heed – as if she hadn’t noticed that she could have taken offence at Rael’s questions. In her view she could talk to Rael freely if she ignored her argumentative manner. She had discovered for herself that Rael was often quite happy to say and ask things that other people shied away from, as if she were picking a fight, but if Sofia ignored it, Rael was completely normal again.
“What do you mean a glum look?” Sofia asked.
“Well, the kind of look that says you’re three months pregnant, as if you’re about to faint – it’s plastered all over your face the whole time… Sucking pieces of bread doesn’t appeal to me at all – could it be perhaps that you just don’t have anything else to eat?”
“So what if I haven’t?” Sofia asked in reply, unexpectedly bristling.
For the first time she had doubts whether it was always right to answer Rael directly. She realised only too well that Rael was scornfully asking, “Got nothing else to eat, have you?” But she was tired – she was tired of the pussyfooting around – about why she wouldn’t ever go anywhere, anywhere that had any hint of money about it, whether it was the disco, or the school supplies shop, because she dreaded the others buying anything, albeit the smallest cheapest thing… how would she… what could she say to explain why this or that wasn’t to her liking?
“I have nothing else to eat,” she said and now suddenly, abruptly and brusquely, she felt as if she’d cast all the bitterness of the last few months into that one sentence, and it surprised her how much of it there was and how it dissipated. “Mum was laid off, she was sacked because there’s a crisis in electronics – over half of them there were laid off and she hasn’t found another proper job, and now we’re living like they did in the Leningrad Blockade or in the Great Northern War – Estonians went hungry in the Great Northern War. They ate moss because there wasn’t even any bread!”
There were no words to express the pleasure she felt as she peevishly unburdened herself to Rael in bitter, accusing tones.
But Rael was neither cowed nor offended. Her eyes widened in bewilderment and she said slowly, “Hell, there’s no way I could do that… I tried to go on a diet once, but the next day I stuffed myself so much I threw up… And I don’t want bulimia, thank you… But there’s no way I could do that…”
“What would you do then,” asked Sofia, as caustically as before, “if you just didn’t have any money at all?”
“I don’t know… I guess I’d steal…”
“Get caught and they’d throw you in jail.”
“Well let them. At least you get fed in jail. The food budget for jails is bigger than the one for us in school. It was on TV once. Compared to jails the schools budget is mingy… So what are you living on then?”
“Oh well, things aren’t as bad as they were,” said Sofia.
She’d calmed down now all of a sudden, perhaps because Rael wasn’t making fun or mocking her. Instead she was putting herself in Sofia’s shoes, imagining what it would be like to go hungry, as if she felt a genuine practical interest. Sofia even felt embarrassed because she’d overdramatised her current situation. She explained that actually, things weren’t so bad any more because Mum had found something “on the hush-hush”. She was nursing someone and got home late in the evening when the patient’s family came home from work, but they got home very late, they must have the type of job where they had to work late and at the weekends, and because of it Mum had to work the weekends and late into the evenings too, so when she got home she did nothing but mumble and moan, wouldn’t talk about anything, it was as if she were fit to drop… Could nursing a sick person really have that effect on you? She hadn’t been able to tell anyone about it, and now she suddenly felt as if Rael was her only friend and advisor.
“And how,” exclaimed Rael, “that’s something I do know first-hand!”
It now transpired that although Rael’s parents were prosperous, or enormously well off compared to Sofia’s mother, or at least should have been judging by how Rael dressed or the hints she dropped about the places she’d been to, and the time she spent puzzling over the ones she hadn’t visited yet… and the type of music player she owned and even her mobile – only three people in their class had mobile phones, for goodness’ sake… and she apparently even had a computer at home. There was no need for her to queue to use the class computer; she could sit in front of one as long as she wanted. She explained that she had to nurse a sick patient twice a week. It definitely wasn’t as bad as Sofia’s mum’s job, because firstly the patient wasn’t a stranger, but her own grandma who was very old because she’d had Rael’s dad so late – when she was past forty, and he was her only child, so she had no grandchildren other than Rael. And that was a real drag… a real nurse actually visited her separately anyway, every day, and grandma wasn’t bedridden, she could move about under her own steam indoors and Rael didn’t really have to do much more than visit twice a week for around an hour at a time and read the newspaper to her, sometimes make a pot of tea and wash a few cups up. Occasionally the nurse had just left and had already read her the morning paper. She couldn’t read it herself because she was almost completely blind… She was more or less all there upstairs, but deadly dull and got right on her nerves. But she had to go twice a week and mind her manners while she was at it. So Rael understood Sofia’s mother very well. She had no choice because her parents said her grandma loved her such a lot and she was the only one, and because she got a grand a month for visiting and she wouldn’t be able to manage without the money as she always needed so much stuff…
“Do you reckon that’s an honest thing to do?” she asked Sofia. “They pay me a grand a month so I’ll go round, but I mustn’t tell her that that’s why I’m going, instead I have to say that I go because I want to – because I love grandma so much.”
“I don’t know,” said Sofia, unable at that moment to think about such a complex question because her head was reeling at the very thought of the possibility – a grand a month – two lovely pinkish-grey five-hundred-kroon notes just for reading the newspaper to your grandma twice a week. Why didn’t she have a grandma? Actually she had had one, somewhere in faraway Siberia, but she’d been dead for several years and even if she were alive it was highly unlikely that anyone would have paid Sofia to read her the newspaper – you needed to have rich parents for a start. Several factors had to coincide: you had to be an only grandchild with rich parents and a half-blind grandma…
“It’s not that it’s a complete lie, because I do love her a lot, it’s just that I’d love her better from a distance… Apparently I have nothing to do, whereas they think that they’re busy the entire time and that I’ve nothing better to do but mooch about and read the paper… And everything she says I’ve heard before. She just has to open her mouth and I know what the next word is going to be. It’s like I’ve downloaded all her stories a hundred times and my hard drive’s full.”
Sofia was still unable to follow her complaint fully and empathise with her…