Winter Sun Eyes (Translation Project)

The beggar

"Kirka has left," Freddie said as he looked focused on the gray-blue water in front of the boat, as if on a road on the way by car, "because the island has taken her the air to breathe. That's the way it is. I also suffer from the same lack of air, but for now I probably have no other choice but to stay here. I'm afraid I won't catch fish as big and as good as I do here."

He looked at Marja, sitting behind him on the stern of the boat, leaning her arm against the green wall of the boat, nodding thoughtlessly while she was actually watching the waves. Even a wave had its story. Even a wave could tell of wonderful events, creatures, worlds, if you only listened carefully. She thought she heard a whisper, a whisper from someone who for so long had unspoken words on his lips that were then swallowed up by the roar of the boat engine.

"I find rowing boats more pleasant," Marja turned to Freddie. He threw her an astonished look over her shoulder. "Oh, yeah? Why's that?" he wanted to know. Marja looked out smiling again at the whispering waves, hoping that her smile was not reminiscent of Kirka's grief the last time she saw her. For then Freddie would be as worried as she was for days.

To answer his question, she just shrugged her shoulders. "You're not so loud. And much more romantic, if I think about it, are they?", she thought.

She heard Freddie laughing. "If you have really given in to the wacky idea of becoming a fisherman, you'll understand why it's sometimes worth giving up romance, sweety," he said.

Give up romance? Who would I be?, Marja thought. Yes, romance was something very beautiful, something that always fascinated and characterized her. Freddie, on the other hand, showed little of the emotions he expressed when he wasn't drunk. Marja felt another stone on her heart. Or maybe it had just always been there, the stone's burden she so much tried to forget. Freddie. When he was at parties, he was in a different world, perhaps not necessarily as quiet and strange as Marja often was, but it was different anyway. And then he turned. Into one of them, into a stranger.

"Here we are. Drop anchor, everybody out, closing time!" He clapped his hands as if Marja was an animal he was trying to chase outside. She giggled and jumped out of the swaying vehicle, but then she left the light-heartedness that Freddie's nonsense was so often able to trigger, and she felt the stones again, all of them, with all their heaviness. Freddie. Her mother. Kirka.

And when Freddie left the boat and stroked his boat's wall with his hand, as he always did, she could no longer hold back and wrapped her arms around him. It was nice to feel him stroking her hair with his hand.

"Where have you been?", Elona rumbled instead of saying hello. Marja, who was prepared to take the trouble of her parents, put off her shoes calmly and grabbed her jacket off her shoulders.

"With Freddie," she said as she hung it up and drove her hand along the soft fur on the hood. "We took his boat."

"And didn't you think it was necessary to ask us first?" Elona shouted in an energetic voice as she stepped out from behind the kitchen counter, approaching her still emotionless daughter. "Your father and I were so worried, weren't we, Kristopher?"

Confused, Marja's father looked up from his tax return, hummed something like an approval and turned away again. Marja saw in her mother's eyes what she would have liked to have said to him: "You are a great help!"

But when she looked back at her, this accusation disappeared and turned into anger, during which Marja had previously always locked herself in the room and hid under the blanket. But meanwhile, she was no longer avoiding such confrontations. She wasn't a little kid anymore.

"I guess I'd better tell Freddie not to let you on his boat in the future," she said. "At least not until he calls me for permission, eh?"

Marja looked at the floor so that she no longer had to look directly at her. The ground was friendlier. "I'm sorry," she muttered.