“Don’t you remember how, when we last met on the street, you expressed a wish to come walking one more time together on the Avenue of Lies?” she interjected, as if wanting to stop my words.
“Did I ever call this pathway the Avenue of Lies?” I asked in surprise.
“That is what you called it, and that’s why I did too in my letter…” she explained, trailing off.
I was confused. All the time I had believed that she invented that name; she thought I did. Which of us was wrong? Or were we both wrong?
“I’d completely forgotten that,” I said at length.
“I hadn’t,” she said. “Your wish stayed in my mind all the time. And since I’ll now have to leave town for a long time, I wanted to fulfil your wish before that.”
“Are you going to the country, if I may ask?”
“To the country,” she said softly, as if she didn’t want to speak of it. So I said, “I went to the country too.”
“Was it nice?” she asked.
“Snow, nothing but snow,” I replied. “Everywhere was white. And do you know what it reminded me of? Someone who was white all over.”
“Do you mean my mother?” she asked, as if alarmed.
“Yes, her,” I affirmed. “In the middle of the snowy plain I even thought I saw her, as you once described her, but there was no red rose, there was nowhere to take one.”
We both suddenly fell silent, as if afraid to make a sound. Only a while later did she say, “It’s terrible, you telling me that today.”
“Why so terrible?” I asked.
“My mother is dead,” she said.
“She was already dead when you talked about her,” I said.
“Things were different then, quite different,” she responded. “Now I’ve come here to fulfil your last wish before I go away.”
She said this as if she had appeared by my deathbed, or so it seemed to me. Now suddenly I had the feeling that something white was moving among the trees ahead of us, creeping closer and closer, until it stood unnoticed between us.
“Because I’m leaving, I’m in a terrible rush today,” she continued, arousing me from my daydreaming. “No one knows that I’m here. I didn’t even tell grandfather. I was visiting a relative and took a short detour; that’s why I came from the other direction. If it weren’t for that visit, I wouldn’t have been able to come. That’s what I was afraid of when I wrote that letter, but I’ve managed it as luck would have it.”
“So do you have to go straight away?” I asked. “You don’t have any more time at all?”
“I should have been gone already,” she replied.
I didn’t know what to do or say, for such a rapid departure made every word senseless, every action futile. She too stood in perplexed silence, as if some dumb white being really stood between us. Finally she extended her hand and said, almost in a whisper, “So, live well, and many thanks…”
Her words were broken off, for I had grasped her hand, pressed it to my lips and fallen to my knees in the snow. And when she withdrew her hand in fright, I grabbed madly at her clothes, and in the next moment, around her legs, pressing my face against her knees, which tried to escape or turn aside, but stayed on the spot.
I had suddenly been overtaken by an instinctive terror that I could lose her forever, which would mean losing myself. I was ready to do anything and swear any oath, if only she would stay. At that moment I could have given up my own sister and brother, father and mother, land and nation, language and faith – of which I had none anyway – if she had wanted it. A single word from her mouth and I would have even left my corporation, with its colours, which I had once venerated so much, and “become that real Estonian man”, as her grandfather put it, although my father and mother, sister and brother, relatives and friends, even the whole Estonian nation, would have opposed it. At that moment I wouldn’t have cared about anyone or anything that came to mind, if she had asked it of me. But she didn’t ask anything of me, she just stood there, with me down on the ground, clutching her knees as if terrified of death. She stood and tried to disengage herself, without really knowing how to do it. I felt her hand touching my hair once, for my cap had fallen into the snow, but momentarily she drew back, as if scorched, and uttered these words of pleading: “You ought to have mercy on me, for just think what would happen if my fiancé got to know that you had held me like that.”
That had an effect – more of an effect than who knows what else. My hands dropped loosely into the snow and she took a couple of steps backwards. She was silent. At least I don’t remember hearing a word or a sound from her. I got up, seeking support from a nearby tree, which seemed terribly big and black to me.
“Your cap is on the ground,” she said finally and made to go and fetch it, but I got there first.
We were silent. Then she said, “Forgive me that I had to tell you that, but I couldn’t have done otherwise, I didn’t know how, believe me.”
“You forgive me too, for what I did,” I replied, “but I too couldn’t have done otherwise, believe me.”
I felt those words coming from my heart, from the depths of my soul.
She hesitated about what to do. Finally, though, she stretched out her hand to me again, which I held for a moment in both of mine, without daring to raise it to my lips again. Then she went, leaving at a run along the Avenue of Lies toward the castle, as if her home were there. I watched her leave without averting my eyes once, until there was nothing left of her to see or hear. And as I stood there, black myself amid the bright white snow and the black trunks, it seemed to me for a moment that there had been nothing, only illusions in a yearning heart, chimeras in a scorching soul. Ah, if only one could take an aching heart, if one could catch a pining soul, and send them to their natural home – the land of illusions!
I sat down in the snow, resting my back against the tree that had at first seemed so terribly big and black to me, and started to cry. I did that quite simply and pragmatically, as if I wanted to be myself for once.
That was the end of my love, and that was how I wanted to end my book, for I am not making it up, I am only describing facts. But he whose face is at once birth and death, love and oblivion, did not want my book to have an ending like that, so I’ve no choice but to continue writing. The following lines have little to do with my love, and in that sense they add nothing to my book, and I could have left them unwritten. Instead they tell of her love – the love of the woman who invited my heart and soul into the land of illusions.
The fact that I really intended to end my book with the foregoing passage is demonstrated to myself and others by my having carefully read through what I had written, corrected it in places where I found deviations from the truth, rewritten several parts of some pages, made interpolations which belong to another time than that of the actual event described, and even submitted it to a couple of publishers, without receiving a reply. One day, however, I read a death announcement in the newspaper, which read: Erika V., née K. I hadn’t known her married name, for it had never interested me, but I do remember her maiden name, and that was the one in the death announcement. Likewise it showed the age of the deceased, the name of the home that was mourning her. Thus there was no doubt – Erika was dead! There was no more Erika! The world had become a poor and empty place! The world had become an absolute void, where no organic being could live! That is what my heart cried out. What would I have given now, sacrificed, for that announcement to be an illusion, a mere sickly ghost, a deception!