F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 13

[23-24]

Next morning, Hilma remained in the inner rooms, but in the kitchen old Martta made ready to leave, with a cold expression on her face. When Kustaa noticed her tear-stained eyes, he felt an unpleasant sense of pity for her. This aged and spiteful woman seemed not to be alone, on her side there was something invisible, old and repugnant, against which his mind wanted to rebel, even though his instinct told him that it rested on a foundation laid by generations.

With all the caution of which he was capable, Kustaa inquired about Martta’s terms of hire.

‘Old as I am, never in my life have I been a hired maid, and I do not intend to be one now.’

As he entered the back room where Hilma sat in her Sunday best, Kustaa smiled at this weak gibe – he sensed that victory was his. He had got the better of Martta, but this day was a peculiar mixture of holiday and workday, of happiness and something else. He should have entertained the idea all along that Hilma would move in here to begin her new life — as mistress of the manor. He must take charge entirely of this sweet, childlike girl for whom all oppression of soul was as foreign as sin to an angel; he must get her into these rooms without needing to be afraid of anything, without Martta, without anyone… He had not gone into Hilma’s room in the night… but in all of this there was too much tenderness: it crushed, as it were, with its softness.

The stableman came to ask if it would be possible for him to accompany Miss Martta, since she had asked him to do so, and was waiting ready for the journey. The stableman also looked gruff and dispirited, as if he, too, had some bitter word on his tongue, were he given a chance to come out with it. When a little later Miss Martta and the stableman drove out through the gateway, Kustaa and Hilma stood at the drawing room window and watched, and then Kustaa felt that there was something insolent about what he was causing to take place, and the village girl at his side even more so. The manor was now finally rid of something that had had always been there, but would now never return — something of which Miss Martta had been only a feeble relic. Now it was gone, but an atmosphere of desolation had permanently settled within the walls of the manor.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 12

[22-23]

Martta was sitting silently in the kitchen when Kustaa entered, and made no answer when he asked for something to offer his guest. Kustaa began to see to the task himself, but when Anna, the shed-girl, came in, he asked her to finish dealing with it. Then Martta began to sob angrily about some minor inconvenience. Anna stood stock-still, and stared at Kustaa angrily, too. Kustaa said to her with a smile, but in great earnest: "Will you do it, Anna, please?" Without replying, the girl began peevishly to set about the task.

Kustaa insisted that Hilma should spend the night at the manor. He himself made up a bed in the guest room for her. Hilma smiled her quiet smile, feeling a little shy at the sight of the familiar, elegant surroundings, and also abashed by Kustaa, who presided as the guardian spirit over the whole house, and was therefore in some sense a stranger to her.

Far away in the past was the summer’s day when Hilma had left this place, a sweet memory with a charm and excitement of its own. Now it was a late autumn evening, as she said a slightly awkward “good night” to Kustaa in the doorway of the old, elegant drawing room. She realized perfectly well that Kustaa would not accompany her. Although she did not get much sleep at all, she found it pleasant and tranquil to lie in the dark silence – a silence which seemed to sum up with great objectivity the events that had taken place in this manor, Those events were quite unknown to her, but sweet to behold in nocturnal pictures like this. Towards midnight she even thought for a moment that Kustaa might come in after all, but felt no disappointment when she remained alone until morning.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 11

[22]

Hilma was to him, after all, the very essence of what a wife, good or bad, is to a man, but even so the old, unmarried woman's words made on him the impression they were meant to make… For Hilma could do nothing about the fact that she was unable to draw any closer to her fiancé in this present situation than she was; that she had to content herself with keeping quiet and pretending to reflect. And in this she was obedient. While it was true that she was now Kustaa’s fiancée, in other respects she was simply Hilma, a young and childish village girl who had worked as a maid at Salmelus Manor — and who in her own way had been able to do more than anyone else. She had been able to look into her man’s eyes that summer evening long ago and to sit there calmly as he put the reins behind her on the porch railing. With this action she had come to Kustaa’s side, and remained there. She had reinforced her action even further by the way she had received Kustaa, when after the wedding journey he had arrived in her room. All that happened during that long evening and that was a rising and a strengthening, sufficient to prolong forever what had already begun.

So that to kill what was conceived that night was more than any poison could accomplish.

Hilma did not come to Salmelus for as long as the old master still lay unburied. Not until the third day after the funeral, when the last guests had already left, did she arrive, a little shy but both entirely sure of herself and not at all afraid of old Martta. A young maiden, who was also already secretly his wife — that was how Kustaa now saw her, here in his old family manor, which again at that moment began to live in the radiance of a powerful, mutual love. Kustaa had not told Hilma to come, she had done so of her own accord, guided by her own sure instinct. This in itself was more precious than the most precious of assurances.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 10

[21-22]

Thus did that day progress from morning on, and during its course it seemed to thicken towards evening. When an aged person dies, it is often linked to a sense of liberation, but that was not the case here. Kustaa had not really talked with his father since he was a child — and his childhood had continued until his mother’s death. Now his father had silently withdrawn, leaving unsaid what he might perhaps have said to a grown man. And he that departs in silence departs as a victor.

That evening Kustaa set off quite early for the forest.

‘What kind of man are you? Your father’s corpse is still warm, and you are off in pursuit of women. Do you know, boy, what killed your father?’

‘I think that Hilma should know what has happened,’ Kusta replied to his aunt.

‘Are you going to bring that person here now, when...’

‘I do not know — after all, it was you who drove her from here.’

‘It was not I who drove her out, but I do not think she should come here until the man who drove her out is buried.’

Even though Kustaa knew exactly how things stood on the matter, this conversation made an unpleasant impression on him. Where his father’s silence had been effective, his father's sister’s words were not without effect, either. Kustaa lacked one ability: he could not be ruthless in the face of evil. This was also the key to his destiny later, when the real, substantial ordeals came. He was susceptible to poison…


translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 9

[20-21]

Late that evening in Hilma’s room he caught the girl’s attention by his eager caresses and his silence. ‘What’s wrong?’ Hilma asked. The man merely looked straight ahead, and his chin trembled. ‘Tell me what it is, it will be easier,’ the girl said again. ‘Father’s so ill now.’ These were Kustaa’s words, and the girl could think of no reply to them except to fall silent and remain immersed in desolate thoughts. Kustaa put his head on the girl’s breast like a weary child leaning against his mother. There he liked to remain, in the place where a child’s repose and a man’s oblivion are at their most profound.

The master’s room was in Salmelus Manor, and Hilma’s was in the cottage. They marked the limits of Kustaa’s life, and now he moved between them with a vague and desolate sense of expectancy. When he arrived at the one, he forgot that the other existed. At home he sometimes noticed that he missed his deceased mother. Then a gentle sadness weighed down the mind of the man into the safe condition of childhood.

Thus the fine days of the Indian summer moved towards their end. The air grew misty, and fires were lit in the drying barns. One morning the master of Salmelus was seen going to one of the barns as usual. He took some logs of firewood from the pile, threw them in at the barn door, took a deep breath and went inside himself. When Martta, his sister, saw Vihtori going into the barn, she continued to stare, in spite of herself. The morning was grey and raw; it was one of those chance moments in life when an energetic but elderly person may suddenly detect with a start the dreadful weight of time. So it was with Martta, and she realized that she had been staring at the barn for a long time, with wide-open eyes. But no smoke was rising from the chimney, nor had Vihtori come out again. There was not a sound or a stirring in the whole of the house. Martta got up and looked around her, the time on the clock seemed oddly late. Where was everyone?

She went outside and stood on the kitchen steps. The open doorway of the barn gazed at her, black and immovable, as though it were trying to prolong this strange moment in time. What in the world? It was silly to go into the barn, but she did so anyway. ‘I came to see what was keeping you here,’ she planned to tell Vihtori. Nothing could be heard from the barn, even close to. And when she peeped through the doorway, she saw Vihtori, her brother, lying on his back on the floor, his arms stiff at his sides.


translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 8

[19-20]

Life had been a unity of three; when one was torn away, the other two moved apart and became lifeless. It could not go on as it had done, and even the manor house itself seemed desolate to a man who sensed the nearness of death. All that remained of the mistress was her portrait and her memory, with those solemn features that are invariably mutual to husband and wife, and are only perceived at moments of extreme distress. Little did it matter if he saw the morrow. In a deeper sense, no morrow was going to dawn for him in any case. His defeat was total, though almost no battle had been fought.

After this night had passed, the old master was grimmer than ever, and tight-lipped to the point of silence. While he moved about the place as earlier, he spoke so little that the men sometimes found it hard to guess what tasks they were meant to perform, for Kustaa was often as taciturn as his father. Curiously, although everyone knew what was amiss, not even those close to the events had anything to say about them. Kustaa’s visits to Hilma were common knowledge, but no one was able to summon up anger in their regard.

One day one of the cottage-dwellers broached the matter with the master when Kustaa and some other men were present. The old master said nothing at all, just gave a faint smile and looked at Kustaa. “What are your thoughts on the matter?” Kustaa flushed and smiled back, but as he did so an expression of helpless pain flickered across his face. “What can I say?...” He walked away, almost in tears.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 7

[17-19]

Since then, decades have passed, a sufficiently long time for all that to have been forgotten — especially as only much later did those great events take place which, here as elsewhere, affected the house and its chattels… But that autumn this matter also awoke the interest of those insignificant folk who in their remote little corners and meandering byways were firmly attached to convention. And what made it all so unexpected was its background: the house and its chattels. The old women in their cottages felt almost importuned, as nothing could be said of an affair of this kind. It was a malign, foreboding disturbance that implicitly assailed the unconscious foundations of their lives. If a wild landowner’s son made a pass at a local girl one night and got into her bed, that was an event that enlivened the life of the village. The girl’s family would always be able to obtain upkeep for any child born of such a liaison. In the best case, a landowner would pay very handsomely indeed in order to stop the story spreading very far. But the old women’s intuition told them, with irritating clarity, that where Kustaa was concerned none of this applied.

This phase of Kustaa’s life is now long forgotten. Long ago, one after the other, the talkative old women were taken to the cemetery from their cottages in the forest, and are now completely and utterly forgotten where they lie in the grass-covered rows of graves. While it is possible that someone may still know and say that the former master of Salmelus, now deceased, married a girl from this or that cottage, the story no longer has anyone to tell it who knows what really happened.



That night the old master of Salmelus stayed awake until Kustaa came home. It was after midnight, about two in the morning. The son approached with cheerful steps, and the father needed to see and hear nothing more, for already he knew all.

The man who arrived at the old house in the moonlight probably gave no thought just then to the important changes his father and aunt had wrought in his absence. Of this the old master was well aware. He knew that if his son considered such distant matters at all he would probably be grateful to the two old people. Kustaa could be heard in his room, preparing to retire for the night. Although the sounds of his movements could be heard only faintly, there was something about them that said he was in a happy frame of mind. When the sounds died away, the old man felt that he was now alone and could at last reflect on the clumsy awkwardness of the arrangements he had made. Though not even to himself would he admit that he had bungled them.

When an old man sits up late in the small hours of the night thinking about such things, it does not bode well for him, especially if he arrives at no clear and firm decision that sets him free from brooding. His hold on life slackens and at the same time he begins to feel death tightening its grip. As he sat there very gravely in the silence of the small hours, the master of Salmelus remembered his deceased wife. Always before had felt that there were two of them to remember her, and that had made it all seem more intimate and easier to bear. But now it had suddenly acquired a different perspective. The left side of his chest jerked so cruelly that his pipe nearly fell from his hand. He quickly set the pipe aside and began to undress as if in a hurry to reach the place where he might have a long night’s sleep ahead of him.


translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 6

[16-17]

When the cottage came into view, he felt almost overwhelmed by life's superabundance. It was a summer weekday, and much had happened of late. It was, moreover, unusual for the only son of Salmelus Manor to be out there walking in his Sunday best. The road and the milestones seemed surprised at their approaching guest, but the face of the mistress revealed a certain joy of expectation: her eyes were as radiant as those of the old woman by the roadside. As luck would have it, Hilma was not at home.

‘I heard that Hilma has left us, and so I have come to see her.’

‘A house may not have two mistresses, that’s for sure.’ Humming quietly, Hilma’s mother made coffee and buns for the guest.

‘Hilma is not at home, then?’

‘No. Perhaps your journey has been in vain.’

‘She’s out in the back,’ the youngest sister said quickly. As he went down the steps to the cottage Kustaa felt as though he were calling on an envious neighbor. With smiling eyes and quiet strides he crossed the courtyard to the back room.

It was a small room, and through its old windows one could see nothing but the hop garden and beyond it the field and the lake. Of the rest of the village and its life there was no sign. In the green semi-darkness of that low-ceilinged retreat he found his Hilma. This was the same girl who had sat on the porch of Salmelus Manor that earlier day — and yet she was not the same. Here she was in her own world, her bosom throbbed unoppressed by fear, and the easy demands of modesty seemed sweet. Their love, which had hitherto known neither word nor deed, that night knew both… Kustaa of Salmelus — later to be Silja’s father — walked with smiling eyes all the ways of his life.


translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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[15-16]

He himself felt well refreshed at the wedding. A sense of good fortune augmented by absence was still there, and now it flooded into his consciousness; and when the return journey began to move towards its final phase he was in the power of the sweetest emotions. Fortune made the journey ever easier, he felt that there were no obstacles before him. And fortune favoured him, too, for at one point along the road an old woman, quite of her own accord, came out of her cottage to the garden fence and, even more of her own accord, prepared to engage Kustaa in conversation. Without asking any questions, he ascertained one thing and another, for after all, on this gentle evening on his way back from a wedding, he was in no hurry. The master’s sister had come to Salmelus in order to manage the household, and at once said that if he was going to stay there he did not need two women in the house; and on the very first day the master had begun a quarrel with Hilma, whereupon he had kindly requested Hilma to seek a new post. So that Hilma was now back home in the wilderness. ‘Indeed, well, goodbye, then.’ ‘Goodbye, goodbye.’

Kustaa gave no thought at all to what he had heard until he lost the cottage from view. To be sure, he did not look back either, and so failed to notice a little girl from the cottage sneak up behind him and then run back home in a hurry again when she saw him take the turning to the forest road. Only there on the road — which led to Hilma’s cottage — did he sit down on the verge to rest and enjoy his mood, which in recent days had improved no end, and now seemed very radiant. Nothing did he see but the trees of the forest, and nothing was further from his mind than the management of any farm, whether in the present or the future. The languor that accompanied his journey to the wedding combined easily with radiant memories of a childhood which had not yet faded from his mind at all. After all, he had known Hilma since her girlhood — and he was really returning home from a longer journey than this wedding trip. The calm, warm weather gave the afternoon a mellow and unhurried tinge. A long time was still to pass until later, at night, he would go to Salmelus, and his own room. As it would to the mind of a child, the time that stretched before him seemed long and wonderful. A young man’s room is dear to him because it so willingly awaits him.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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[14-15]

On the contrary, the consequences of that moment extended very far, and from the very first in different directions. It was not long before the old master noticed what was transpiring. He did his best tried to turn a blind eye to it, but a young love of that kind, which has not yet led to any actions, fills all its surroundings with a curious shimmer. It spreads out from the lovers, from their every word and movement, even from their silence. A small and innocent fragment of melody, hummed somewhere, is in this situation like a mighty thunder. But the master of Salmelus found it impossible to think clearly and simply about matters that were alien to him. And so now too his principal thought was of how much had altered in the manor’s everyday life since the mistress’s death, of how much that had been lost would of necessity remain irrecoverable, or would only be recovered in ways that were strange… The master of Salmelus felt uneasy when he realized that his thoughts had fixed upon the most wretched of wretched side-issues: that the girl was a poor hired servant. ‘Not, it is not that, I don’t mean that’ – and it seemed to him that this circumstance even gave the girl a touch of alien superiority. But in these small and ever more frequent actions the old man something else – the first grimaces of fate's approaching mockery. There had been an unobserved deviation from the old, familiar path, and the ground beneath one’s feet was manifestly not to be relied on now. And if this continued, it would be night before the earlier path were found again – if ever it were found.

The old master perceived, all of a sudden, that nothing on the manor had been put in order since the mistress’s death. How had they been able to manage at all in this way? It was even as if they could manage quite well without her, she whom they had buried in the spring. The master sat pondering in his chamber, and at the same time felt something that he did not want to feel: that somewhere, even at this moment, a grimacing natural force was making two hearts beat, two hearts that were really both innocent. This burgeoning doom was made all the harder by the fact that the couple were so innocent. The master pondered as he looked at the dark clumps of alders and fields of clover in August, the harvest month. ‘I must ask Marta to come here. Perhaps she will be able to remedy the change by making another.’

He wrote a letter to his sister and took it to the post office that same evening. At the post office he received a letter that awaited him poste restante, containing an invitation to a wedding that was to be held far away, in the third parish from there. He came home in the dusk and, in allusion to the wedding, said to Kustaa: ‘You will have to go, I do not really feel able to.’

Kustaa agreed, with genuine jubilation. Under the present circumstances, it was very easy for him to embark on a happy journey of this kind. When he left, their eyes exchanged earnest and mutual assurances, and when he arrived there, Kustaa of Salmelus was a radiant and handsome wedding guest.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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[13-14]

Having thus grown up, young Kustaa of Salmelus had to arrange the funeral first of his mother and, very soon after, his father. One spring at the time of the melting ice his mother died, and his father in the autumn of the same year.

As soon as his mother died, Kustaa realized that, for the first time in his presence, life at Salmelus had suffered a nasty jolt, pushed in a new direction from which it would never return. And he could not say whether this change marked a rise or a fall; with the spring’s reviving blossom were mixed the gravity of death and the unexpected alteration of life. He knew only that what had happened was something more than a mere passing-away; the people who remained were not the same, not even in the beautiful light of the sun…

It was a strange summer. Kustaa was returning from taking the horses to pasture. In the midst of the familiar shimmering of the summer evening he gave an unpleasant start: gazing amiably at the house, he had forgotten that his father was alive, he was still alive. It was as if the young man’s loneliness came towards him through the pasture gate like some creature… Hilma, the young kitchen maid, sat by the corner post of the veranda daydreaming, her eyes on the horizon. In this there was nothing unusual: the family ate in the kitchen and the girl sat there in order to be ready to serve them, if something were needed at table. Seen superficially, hundreds of bright summer evenings are as like one another as the dice in a cup. But in one of the dice there is a great prize; imposing and breathtaking, like the threat of thunder at bedtime… Kustaa still had some way to go, straight across the courtyard, in order to reach the place where the girl was sitting. Slowly and very routinely, she could have got up and gone inside. But this she did not do. She continued to sit where she was, allowing her features peacefully to depict her beautiful, melancholy mood, as though with her languorous gaze she were demanding that the young man notice it. The young man, who had just lost his mother, found a great sweetness in the girl’s nature and gaze. He needed to sling the reins over the corner post of the veranda where she sat. He stretched across her shoulder and put them there… There they were that summer evening, Hilma and Kustaa, future companions in fate and parents of the children they would bring into the world together. For them that evening would not pass by being set aside.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

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F.E. Sillanpää: Silja - 2

I

[12-13]

The Father

The death that summer morning of the lonely servant girl Silja, forgotten and left alone, was thus really the ending of that longer story whose beginning can be seen thirty years earlier, when Silja’s father Kustaa took possession of the hereditary manor of Salmelus. It was not a large manor, but the same family had held it for as long as anyone could remember, and at least since the year 1749, from which the oldest parish registers dated: that much was known. The reputation of the manor’s older masters was of course by then forgotten, but it seems that they were on the whole the best men of their small locality. The family’s finest strength reached its summit during Kustaa’s father’s tenure. It grew naturally; no one could point to any particular actions, good or bad, but the expression of an ever prouder dignity spoke from the gable windows of Salmelus Manor to those who toiled on the lower levels. There was even a peculiar dignity in the fact that at this time there was only one heir to the manor, who seemed to be thriving, however. Throughout his youth he was able to live as he wished. For him the whole manor was one large playground, which he explored, humming and smiling, all the way to adulthood. ‘The young master of Salmelus’ and many other things that were said him, caressed his ear and mind, but he did not meditate greatly upon their substance. His parents’ equable dignity brought him up without anyone noticing it; hardly anyone ever saw master or mistress counsel him, let alone punish him. In this way he grew up into a tall, smiling young man, who from his father had inherited a slight hump on his nose and from his mother the colour and look of his hair and eyes.

The parents probably nurtured many quiet hopes in respect of their son, but the same could not be said of the boy himself. Sometimes, when they happened to be talking about some other aspect of the world, his mother would try to present to him some of her opinions, but these attempts invariably ended in a mutual gentle bickering and joking in which the strong bonds of natural love could suddenly be glimpsed. The mother had a sense that her son was like herself, and when he saw this, the father felt a secret warmth of affection. Within the boy’s mind formed two fixed points between which the features of his character arched: on the one hand, a kind of unconscious decency and honesty, whose name he was not accustomed to hear spoken, and on the other, a strong feeling that Salmelus Manor was something that endured eternally and was independent of those who lived there, a place where all the events of life were as natural as breathing; a place which ruled people, and was not ruled by them.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff

Silja

Silja

Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888-1964) was one of Finland's best-known 20th century classic authors. In 1939 he received the Nobel Prize for "a profound understanding of the country people of his land, and the charming artistry with which he portrayed their way of life and their relation to nature."

In the world of Sillanpää's novels, man is only a part of the universe: nature is equally important, if not more so, and forms a unity with human beings under the energy-releasing force and guidance of the sun. Among authors whom Sillanpää read and learned from were Tolstoy, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Hamsun and Spengler, and he was deeply influenced by the racial and polygenist biological theories of the German naturalist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel.

Although his political sympathies in the Finnish Civil War of 1918 were with the victorious White side, Sillanpää was also acutely conscious of the suffering and horrors that the war had brought to Finland. By the late 1930s he had become a voice of cultural liberalism, and his former right-wing supporters turned against him. He was however, also viewed with suspicion by most of the Finnish left, who saw him as unreliable and reactionary. The award of the Nobel in 1939 was widely seen in the West as a gesture designed to give backing to General Mannerheim's stand against Stalin's Soviet Union in the same year, but in Nazi Germany the translations of Sillanpää's books were removed from sale in German stores when the author published a "Christmas Letter to the Dictators" Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, which was critical of all of them.

After Finland's defeat in the Second World War, Sillanpää turned to radio broadcasting. His regular radio talks had a large audience in Finland, and his Christmas sermons became a national institution.

Sillanpää's most famous work is Ihmiset suviyössa (People in the Summer Night, 1934). The excerpts that follow (there will be a series of posts) are from the opening pages of another book written a few years earlier and published in 1931, the novel Silja, nuorena nukkunut eli vanhan sukupuun viimeinen vihanta (Silja. Fallen Asleep While Young, or the Last Green on an Old Family Tree). Page numbers are from Volume 5 of Kootut teokset (1988).



[9-11]

The life of Silja, a young and beautiful country girl, came to an end about a week after the days of St. John’s, while the summer was still in its younger half. Considering her position in society, she had a comparatively respectable death. Although she was a fatherless and motherless servant girl with no other relations who might secure her existence, and although for a time she had to be looked after by others, she had no need at all to resort to charity. Thus, her life, too, was saved from a rather innocent trace of ugliness. At Kierikka Manor, where she was serving at that time, there was a sauna room. There she was allowed to lodge, and there she was given her meals, the meagre size of which was perfectly justified, as she never finished them. This humane treatment in no way stemmed from any special love of humanity on the part of the master and mistress of Kierikka, but rather from a kind of carelessness; the house was on the whole rather badly run. It is possible, too, that Silja’s savings were also a factor that played a role. At any rate, she had good clothes, and they would of course be passed on to whoever looked after her. The mistress had already tried to borrow Silja’s clothes on occasion.

Silja took after her father in being extremely tidy by nature; she made that miserable hovel of a room a very pretty place. From there her feeble coughing could be heard through the ramshackle window all the way to the lawn in the courtyard, where Kierikka’s sallow-faced children spent their time and planned their games. It was one of the small details which, together with the grass and the flowers, formed a part of the life of the Kierikka courtyard that summer.

There, in the last of the time that remained to her, the girl was also able to experience the incomparable charm of solitude. Since, as is often the case with consumptives, her mood remained quite radiant until the end, the solitude of this early summer was an excellent remedy for her slightly excitable amorous feelings. She was lonely only with regard to human beings; sympathetic company - wordless, it is true, but all the more devoted for it - she had in abundance. The relative sunniness of the box-like room and the twittering of the swallows that nested in the entrance to the sauna gave her finer instincts excellent material for the creation of radiant and happy mental pictures. The terrible phantasms of death kept their distance until the end, and she hardly realized it was the death she had often heard about in life that was now coming to her. The arrival of death itself took place at a moment when the wordless charms of her surroundings were at their keenest and most powerful. It happened as the hour of five in the morning was approaching, the sovereign time of the sun and the swallows. Moreover, the rising day was a Sunday, and no detail of the surrounding world had yet disturbed it at that hour.

The life of man, viewed from the moment of death, is like a brief vision stopped in its tracks; it is a kind of symbol that awakens longing. And so that maiden lived for twenty-two years; she was born up there, some three leagues to the north, and during her life she logically moved down here to the south. From that incorporeal image which a death, once it has taken place, invariably conjures up as if into the air that surrounds it, from that image all the inessential features invariably fall away, so that that it might almost be said that in the illumination of that moment the images of all individual human fortunes are to some extent of equal value. In the image of that maiden – an image which at that moment on an early Sunday morning no one was really there to receive into consciousness – there was not much to fall away. From its secret, timeless beginning, throughout the days of her life the whole of her being had grown beautifully into place. Within resilient surfaces a pure, unbroken skin contained its own darkness, near which the inclining ear of one in love had heard the beating of a heart and his questing eye had seen the reflection of his gaze. The girl had not yet lived long enough to be much more than a person who smilingly carried out her fate. Everything that concerns Silja, who fell asleep in death in the sauna room of Kierikka, is now for the most part quite unimportant.

To be sure, from the distant moment of the girl’s birth there gleams a series of events in which natural destiny moves with a firmer grasp, as it had to arrange the fortunes of this dying family branch on a different basis for its final span of life. For Silja was the last person in her family. The dyings-out of families of this social rank do indeed pass unnoticed by anyone, but in them are repeated the same sorrowful outlines that characterize the more exalted cases.

translated from Finnish by David McDuff