The True Deceiver Read Online Free PDF Page A

fearful that things might begin to smell. You put them away and forget them and they start to smell and you start worrying that they’ll go bad and have to be thrown out… “And you can’t throw out food, the way the world is today…”
    “I understand,” said Katri. “You hide things, and then they start to smell. Why don’t you stop buying things that can start to smell? If you loathe organ meats, then say so. Why do you order liver?”
    “It wasn’t me, it was him! He was nice enough to put some aside…”
    “The storekeeper,” said Katri slowly, “the storekeeper – remember this – is not a nice man. He is a very malicious person. He knows you’re afraid of liver.”
    Outside in the back yard, Katri lit a cigarette. Darkness was coming on quickly.
    Anna Aemelin hurried to the veranda window and watched her guest go down the hill, a tall dark shape, and down on the road there were two silhouettes, as if a big wolf had come out of the twilight to join her. Side by side they walked back towards the village. Anna stayed at the window in irresolute anxiety. Maybe a cup of coffee would be nice… but suddenly she didn’t want one. It was a small but definite insight. She didn’t like coffee. In fact, she never had.

Chapter Three
     
     
    W HEN K ATRI GOT HOME , she sat down on the bed with her coat on. She was very tired. What had been won? How much had been lost? The first meeting was so terribly important. Katri closed her eyes and tried to get a clear picture of what had happened, but she couldn’t manage it. The picture kept slipping away, as soft and diffuse as Anna Aemelin herself, and her shaded lamps and impersonal, well-tuned room and the tentative way they had spoken to one another. But the liver on the kitchen counter, that was tangible, a reality. Did I take it with me for her sake? No. Was it for my own sake, to win points? No, no, I don’t think so. It was a purely practical act; there was this bloody thing that frightened her, and it had to go. I wasn’t being underhand or dishonest. But you never know, you can never really be sure, never completely certain that you haven’t tried to ingratiate yourself in some hateful way – flattery, empty adjectives, the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want; maybe an advantage, or not even that, mostly just because it’s the way it’s done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook… No, I don’t think I made myself especially agreeable. I lost this opportunity. But at least I played an honourable game.
    Mats had done some new drawings. They lay out on the table as usual. He never talked about his boat designs, but he wanted Katri to see them. The drawings were always on the same blue-squared paper that made it easier to figure scale, and the boat was the same: quite large, with an inboard motor and a cabin. Katri noticed that he had altered the curve of the hull. And the cabin was lower. She went carefully through his notes – cost of lumber, motor, labour – facts she would need to check to make sure he wasn’t cheated. The drawings were beautifully done. And they weren’t just boyish dreams of a boat; they were competent work. Katri knew that they represented long and patient observation, the love and care a person devotes to a single thing, a single overarching idea.
    Katri had borrowed books for Mats in town, everything the library had on boats and boat construction and stories of great adventures at sea, mostly boys’ books. And at the same time, almost apologetically, Katri had tried to get him to read what she called literature.
    “I read them, I do,” Mats said, “but I don’t get anything out of them. Nothing much happens. I understand they’re very good, but they just make me sad. They’re almost always about people with problems.”
    “But your seamen, your shipwrecked seamen? Don’t they have problems?”
    Mats shook