The True Deceiver Read Online Free PDF Page B

children’s caricature – the paper they had covered with numbers and driven into the snow woman’s heart on a wooden stake. It was, after all, a token of respect from the village. The children listened to their parents’ talk and knew she was good at maths. They knew her heart was riddled with numbers.
    For years, people had come to Katri and asked her to help them with sums they couldn’t do themselves. She handled difficult calculations and percentages with complete ease, and the answers fell into place and were always correct. It began while Katri was doing the storekeeper ’s ordering and paying his bills. It was then she acquired a reputation for being shrewd, penetrating and good with figures – she discovered that several merchants in town were cheating. Later, she found the storekeeper in the village doing the same thing, but no one knew about that. Katri Kling also had an unerring sense for how sums should be justly allocated and for unambiguous solutions to knotty problems requiring a different kind of arithmetic. The villagers began coming to her with their tax declarations or to talk about bills of sale, wills and property lines. There was a lawyer in town, of course, but they had more faith in her, and why throw money away on a lawyer?
    “Give them the meadow,” Katri said. “You can’t do anything with it anyway; it isn’t even good pasture. But put in a clause that says it can’t be developed, or sooner or later you’ll have them living next door. And you don’t like them.”
    Then she told the opposing party that the meadow was worthless, but they could use it for peace of mind by putting up a fence and a ‘No Trespassing’ sign so they wouldn’t constantly have to hear the neighbours’ kids. Katri’s advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the assumption that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbours. But people’s sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair. Take the case of two families that had been looking sideways at each other for years. Katri helped both save face, but she also articulated their hostility and so fixed it in place for all time. She also helped people to see that they’d been cheated. Everyone was highly amused by Katri’s decision in the case of Emil from Husholm. He’d contracted severe septicaemia that had cost him a lot of money and kept him from working for quite some time, and Katri said it was a job-related accident and called for workman’s compensation. His employer would have to apply to the employment office on his behalf.
    “Well, not really,” Emil objected. “It didn’t happen while I was building a boat. I was just cleaning some cod.”
    And Katri said, “When will you learn? Work is work. A cod or a crowbar – it’s all the same. Your father was a fisherman, wasn’t he? And he worked for the fishery, didn’t he? How many times did he injure himself at work?”
    “Now and then.”
    “Of course. And he got no compensation. The government cheated him more times than he knew, so this makes it even.”
    People could cite many examples of Katri Kling’s perspicacity. She seemed to make all the pieces fit together. If people doubted her, they could always have their important papers checked by the lawyer in town. But so far he had never questioned Katri’s judgment. “What kind of wise old witch do you have out there? Where did she learn all this?”
    In the beginning, people wanted to pay Katri for her services, but when that met a frosty reception, they stopped mentioning compensation. It seemed odd that a person who understood so much about other people’s difficulties with out-of-the-ordinary situations should have been so unable to deal with the people themselves. Katri’s silence made everyone uncomfortable. She responded to