The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen

Author:Hanna Pylväinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

14

Willa had been gone now for an entire month, a fact Henrik noticed but that no one else seemed to; or, if others did, they were treating it with the same silence that had surrounded her disappearance. No one spoke of it, or even referred to her, an erasure made all the more complete by the absence of discussing the act of erasure itself. Henrik had seen her skiing off into the twilight, head down, a satchel tied to her back. She’d been walking neither defiantly nor surreptitiously, with the gait of someone with no choices, like each step was preordained. He’d asked Nora later, where did she go, and she’d said, she’s going her own way. The look on her face had made it clear it was not something to be spoken about, so he hadn’t, but it was unnerving—even if Willa had run off with, he presumed, Ivvár, it was another thing entirely to behave as if it hadn’t happened. With Emelie, it had been bad, of course, for awhile he’d been afraid she would be cut off from society completely, but then again they had managed to keep the affair to a rumor, and of course in the end Emelie had not run away with Henrik, nothing of the sort at all. It made him want to write to her, to say something about how he understood her better now, but it would only make things worse, and he had promised her he wouldn’t. But it didn’t matter, that belonged to another life, and he was in this life, where they were all in good moods, because Lorens had lived; Willa had been sacrificed and it was an exchange they could bear.

It wasn’t that Lorens was now some normal, frolicking boy, running up and down the riverbank, but he was alive. His face had the wizened look of a man returned from war but he went outside sometimes, wearing every winter thing that could be fit over him, and he stood and looked at the river as it cracked open, and he stood there later when the ice had split into shards that tapped against each other, ten, twenty little bells pealing softly into the cold spring air. He had the look on him as he stood there of a person cast by a spell, utterly transfixed in a way that worried Lars Levi, like his body had been returned to them but his mind had not. He was quieter now, almost distant, but no one felt they could complain about it, and, besides, there was the awkwardness of the new attention Lorens’s recovery had given to Lars Levi’s ministry—he did not say it himself but everyone else said it: Lorens had recovered through a miracle. God had saved Lorens; Lorens’s recovery was a fruit of Lars Levi’s faith. Lars Levi protested this, insisted of course that they could not know God’s mind, they were subject only to His will, but secretly he cherished the thought. He did feel chosen—after all, Levi had died when Lars Levi himself hadn’t yet been saved.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.