Mari Saat - The Saviour of Lasnamäe

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…

“If I could earn as much as that I’d be round there four times a week, perhaps every day,” she said – and calculated that if she visited perhaps every day for a couple of hours she’d still have time to study late in the evening… And she wouldn’t be such a burden on her mum! If she spent half of the money and put half of it aside, that would be five hundred kroons a month. She could gradually pay back the cost of the braces… When summer came, she thought, she’d definitely try and find a chance to earn some money as a paper girl. Some of them were even younger than she was – perhaps ten years old. Or might she get some gardening work?

“Yeah, wealth isn’t shared equally in this world,” said Rael, not in jest or with any irony, but as if giving the matter some consideration – whether of the injustice in the world or of the possibility of finding a way out was not clear. “I could give you half, but you mustn’t let on – I’m always short of money…”

“What?” exclaimed Sofia, astonished. “That’s not what I was thinking at all. I was only thinking that it would be a cushy number – not that I wanted to do it. I was just thinking that it’d still leave time for studying,” and she was embarrassed that Rael might now think that she envied Rael her wealth, and the one in a million opportunity that Rael had… She felt so small and hateful. She felt so beggarly…

“That’s not what I was thinking either,” said Rael, “I was just wondering whether there might be room for us to go halves. We could visit together and you could read the paper and I’d do something else – I could make the tea for us all maybe… It’s just that I’d have to go too, they wouldn’t agree to me not going… You see, I’m my grandma’s heir, or that’s what they tell me at least, that it’s my name that’s in her will, and that I’ll get her flat as soon as I’m eighteen… Or when grandma dies anyway. But by then it’ll be high time to move out, when I’m eighteen I mean, because my parents are pretty much impossible to live with as it is… But if you did the reading I could at least put my headphones on and listen to something. The time wouldn’t go to waste… although going halves would make things a bit tight moneywise…”

Even so, Rael approached Sofia the next day and said, “Hey, I reckon we should give it a try – let’s go together and I’ll say that I’ve got a sore throat and you’ll be doing the reading – and I can put my headphones on and if she asks me something, you can just give me a nudge… that way I can ease you into her good books and then we can split the money!”