“Wonderful!” I cried, trying to turn the matter into a joke. “Well, go on!”
“Well, and madam said that you loved the baroness terribly, sir, so terribly that, well, you’d do yourself in if you didn’t get her. And you didn’t, because miss went to another man, a German of course. And that’s why the two of us, madam and I, had to save your life, sir. Because madam said that if you’re unhappily in love, sir, and starting to starve as well, then you’ll definitely do yourself in. But that’s shameful, when a young Estonian gentleman kills himself over a German lass, she said. And since you wouldn’t accept food from the lady’s own hands, sir, she taught me how to come and talk, and what to do to make you accept food. If nothing else helped, I was supposed to say or give you to understand that I love you, sir, and therefore want to feed you, because if you love someone, then you want to feed them, as birds feed their young. And when you started talking of that love today, sir, I couldn’t bear the lying and cheating any more. Of course you can’t love me or anyone else, sir, if you love that beautiful baroness. So it’s all a lie, what I’ve been telling you here, all of it, everything, everything. I haven’t stolen anything or lied, I only said what the lady told me to, and I brought you what the lady put on the plate. She even made me put on a black apron while I was bringing it, because then you’d believe me more easily, sir, she said. I had to be very stupid and dirty, for then you’d accept the most food, sir. That’s what our landlady is like. And so when I started to cry, it was only because I had to lie. I had to say that my stomach can’t take fatty food. But that’s a complete lie, because I have a good stomach and good health: I could even eat wooden pegs and granite, and still my stomach would be fine. And the kind of chops that I was bringing you, sir, I could easily put away two of them, and it wouldn’t do me any harm. At Easter sometimes at home I’d eat six or seven hard-boiled eggs at a sitting, that was nothing for me. That’s the kind of good stomach and health I have.”
“But you know, Loona,” I said, “you may have a good stomach and health, but you’re the same sort of bitch as the lady is. To lie like that, to pull my leg, that’s damn nasty work!”
“Yes sir, you’re quite right about that, it is damn nasty work,” agreed the girl. “But madam said to me, ‘Loona, I’ve made a person out of you and I’ll make you a better person, in the end I’ll introduce you to a good husband, if you help me save the life of the young gentleman you love.’ That’s what she said: you love, as if she was going to introduce me to you, sir.”
“But that’s enough now, dear Loona,” I said, “go, so I don’t see or hear you ever again!”
“Yes, but what about the food? I can bring it tomorrow, because now, when…”
“Now, when everything’s settled – go to hell, you and your madam!” I thundered. “I don’t want to hear or see you ever again, do you understand for once?”
“Then I’ll have to leave this job and go away,” said the girl, starting to cry again.
“Good riddance!” I shouted, “So the air will be clean again!”
“So why must I lose my job just because you lost yours, sir, and your girlfriend left you,” whined the girl, “because if there hadn’t been the two big misfortunes, madam wouldn’t have forced me to lie so terribly. Who will feed my old mother, if I’m without a job? And it’s certain that I will be, because madam told me that if I dared to even breathe a word about this to you, sir, she’d beat me within an inch of my life, kick me out the door and give me such a reference for other landladies that they wouldn’t even want to spit on me.”
“Then go and die with your mother!” I said with the same brutality, and yet I was starting to feel sorry for the girl, because obviously she wasn’t guilty of anything, or only insofar as she obeyed the lady’s commands and believed her dire predictions.
“Anyway, what’s wrong with gentlefolk,” the girl concluded, drying her tears, as if she had already submitted to her fate, “is that one forces you to lie and cheat, another stuffs his belly with all the best stuff, but a poor servant has to suffer. For when I say that you won’t accept food any more, it’s clear straight away to her that I’ve blurted it out to you. What’s more, she’s bound to believe that I’ve done it out of love – for what other reason could there be – and then it’ll all be over, a noose around my neck. I believed everything, but I didn’t believe that you, sir, were like this.”
“So what do you think I’m really like?” I asked.
“One who won’t accept food any more,” said the girl.
“And you think that after you’ve told me everything…”
“Sir, now it will be easier to carry on eating, because there’s no more lying and cheating, or if there is, then it is for us in front of madam, but not for me and madam in front of you.”
“Who knows, you wretch, if as soon as you get downstairs, you’ll tell madam everything we’ve been saying here,” I said.
“I’d sooner have my tongue shrivel in my mouth than breathe about this to madam!” yelled the girl. “For the sake of my own skin, I can’t. Besides, I’ve been on your side from the start, and I told madam that if your girlfriend let you down…”
“She wasn’t my girlfriend,” I pointed out.
“Oh, really, wasn’t she?” queried the girl. “So that’s a lie too! It’s all a lie! But madam assured me that she was, and that’s why you couldn’t stand the sight of miss’s face. On the other hand I liked her a lot and I’d have liked so much for you, sir, to have a girlfriend like her. But she shouldn’t have let you down. And when she did let you down, I said to madam that when a girlfriend cheats, what are we doing it for, we aren’t girlfriends and we don’t love anyone else. But madam said that cheating must have been involved, because you weren’t eating, sir, and if you don’t eat, that’s the end. ‘Loona,’ she said, ‘she cheated because she didn’t love him, so we have to cheat because we do love him,’ because we were loving when we wanted to save your life, sir.”
“I think that’s a lie too,” I said. “You didn’t even feel a whiff of love for me, you only wanted to feed me your chops and cutlets, come what may, and when you couldn’t do it otherwise, you used lies and trickery to help you, madam first and then you. But would you please tell me why you’ve come to tell me this to my face? Do you really think I’m going to carry on eating now?”
“Yes, I really thought that you would, once you knew everything,” replied the girl. “And I had nothing more to lose, when you said you wouldn’t eat any more. Because madam said, when you accepted the first portion from me, you remember, when I cried and begged – that’s when she said to me in the kitchen, ‘So, Loona, now things are all right, but just bear in mind, girl, that if the young gentleman doesn’t eat any more, it will be your fault, because you’ve blabbed or let it be understood by him, then I’ll box your ears and drive you by the tail out the door, because shitbags like you are for me to kick out.’ Well, when you suddenly said today, sir, that you wouldn’t eat any more, it was clear to me at once: now they’ll kick me out. And then I thought at the last extreme, that maybe it would help somehow if I talked it all out nicely, how your girlfriend cheated you, madam cheated you and I cheated you. But if that doesn’t help either, then my heart’s clear of the filth anyway, I thought, because I’m an honest girl, I don’t steal, lie or cheat. And now it’s up to you, sir, whether madam kicks me out as a shitbag or not.”
At these last words the girl started crying again. I sat thinking, reasoning out the whole thing. Now everything appeared in a new light. Even the landlady’s lectures at the lunch table contained a new substance and a kernel of truth. But how could she know it all so well? Were the sparrows on the roof also chirruping about lovers? Did she read our secrets in our behaviour, words, looks, smiles, blushes, clumsiness and even silences? Or was there something behind it when the girl talked about a girlfriend who cheated? Or was that really just a ruse? I didn’t want to believe it, but I was starting to, and at the same time I felt infinitely naive and stupid. “Men are big children,” I recalled the landlady’s favourite expression.