Free The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson Page B

Anna, what an exciting idea! You simply know what you want and go after it – just like that!”
    * * *
     
    Mats and Anna went up the stairs to the second floor. He said, “Can you believe it, Miss? I’ve never had my own room before.”
    “Haven’t you? How remarkable. Now, what I thought was that if Katri took the pink room, you could have the blue. It was very popular in its day.”
    They stood in the door and looked. Mats said nothing.
    Finally Anna said, “Don’t you like it?”
    “It’s awfully nice. But you know, Miss, it’s too big.”
    “How so, too big?”
    “I mean, for one person. I’m not used to such a big room.”
    Anna was distressed. She explained that there weren’t any smaller ones.
    “Are you sure, Miss? When people build such big houses, they usually have some cubby-holes left over. They figure wrong and wind up with extra spaces under the roof.”
    Anna thought for a moment and said, “Well, we have the maid’s room. But it’s full of stuff, and it’s always been too cold.”
    They went to the maid’s room, and it really was very cold. Furniture, objects, things that had once been objects, odds and ends – all of it piled randomly up towards the angled ceiling, a chaotic jumble broken by a shaft of winter light from the window at the far end of the long, narrow room.
    “This will be fine,” Mats said. “Excellent. Where can I put all this stuff?”
    “I don’t really know... Are you sure you’d like to live in here?”
    “Positive. But where shall I put all the stuff?”
    “Wherever you like. Anywhere... I think I’ll go lie down for a little while.” The room had frightened Anna; it seemed threatening to her and tremendously melancholy . She went away, but the room followed. Very early images wandered through her head, images of the maid, Beda, who had been with them since she was a girl and had always lived in the dreadful room upstairs. Beda, who gradually became large and sleepy and who slept whenever she was free, just pulled up the covers and slept. How ghastly, Anna thought. I remember, they’d send me up when they needed her and every time she was just sleeping. What happened to her? Did she move away? Was she sick? I can’t remember. And all that furniture: where did we have it? I didn’t recognize it, but it must have been somewhere, it must have mattered. It must have been important to someone at some time...
    Anna lay in her bed and stared at the ceiling. There was a little wreath of plaster roses around the light fixture on the ceiling, repeated in a long ribbon around the bedroom. She listened. Heavy objects were being dragged around upstairs and then dropped with a thud. Steps came and went, and silences that strained her hearing to the utmost. Now, again, something being dragged and dropped, everything up there changing places; all the past, which had rested above Anna Aemelin’s bedroom as distant and undisturbed as the innocent dome of heaven, was in a state of violent transformation. All the same, Anna thought to herself, everyone has to have things the way they want them, and now I’m going to sleep. She pulled the pillow over her head, but sleep didn’t come.
    * * *
     
    “But where is everything? How did you find the space?”
    “We didn’t,” Katri said. “We carried a lot of it out on the ice, and Liljeberg took the rest of it to the auction house in town. He’ll bring you the money if they can sell it. Though it probably won’t be much.”
    “Miss Kling,” said Anna, “are you sure you haven’t acted a bit high-handedly?”
    “Could be,” Katri said. “But think about it, Miss Aemelin. What if we had presented you with every piece of discarded furniture, every single one of those sad objects, all those meaningless things? You would have stood there and tried to decide what should be saved or thrown out or sold. Now everything’s decided and settled. Isn’t that good?”
    Anna was silent. “Probably,” she said, finally.