Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (8 page)

My father began setting the communion table. He took more steps than seemed necessary to bring each object to its proper place. I was unsure whether or not to take communion. I was afraid of being that close to him, of his looking me in the eye as he pressed the wafer into the palm of my hand.
Like a key
. It would be unfortunate if he recognized me. Or worse if he did not.

The first row rose for communion. Trying not to call attention to my departure, I left through the same doors of the church through which I had entered.

Outside, the sky was streaked chartreuse, white-blue, salmon— colors from a freezer opened in a dark room.

I went in search of food. I walked toward the small town on the snowy road—there was no sidewalk—and past the tourist information center, now closed. The posters in the window advertised a trip to Santa Land, a snowmobiling excursion, a vacation in Thailand. A large souvenir shop sold handmade jewelry and dolls wearing traditional black dresses.
SAMI HANDI
-

CRAFTS
, said the sign. Hundreds of reindeer horns and stuffed animals, all huskies, on display in the window. They had probably been there for years, and would remain unsold.

I was born here, I thought, and looked around with pride.

I was born here.
The town was bleak, small, struggling.

I entered a restaurant by the lake, now frozen. I took a seat but couldn’t understand the menu. A waitress came to take my order, and I requested what I hoped was a sandwich.

The wall by my table was lined with gambling machines and old black-and-white photos of men I assumed were locals. Some were wearing Sami outfits; most were wearing hats. None were my father. In the corner, boys who looked no more than twelve were shooting pool. Dire Straits played on the jukebox, and Angela Lansbury was solving a murder on the TV.

Three o’clock. It was possible Eero Valkeapää would be home by now, and if not, I could go back to the church. Everyone else would have left, returned home to their families, to their Sundays. The restaurant was loud, and even if I located a phone, I didn’t want to call from there. I paid the waitress and walked outside.

Near a small supermarket stood a phone booth with a glass door, a Superman phone booth. I took out the number I’d copied from the phone book and called my father.

A man answered the phone.

“Eero?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if I was pronouncing it correctly. I didn’t know how to say my own father’s name.

The man indicated that he was Eero, and then said something else.

“Do you speak English?” I asked. Dumb question. My mother didn’t speak Finnish.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s Clarissa.”

“Clarissa?” he said. “Yes.”

There was a long pause. “Olivia’s daughter?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.
And your daughter
,
too.

“Where are you calling from? California?”

It struck me that he had no idea where my mother went when she left, just as Richard hadn’t had a clue. “I’m . . . I’m here in Inari.”

“Here!”

“Yeah, yes, here. In town.”

“Your mother . . . she has died?” he asked.

Who Sleeps Where in the
Lav
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Eero Valkeapää and I agreed to meet in front of the restaurant at five p.m. I walked along the main road through town, venturing farther than I’d gone before—over the bridge, with its view of snowmobile tracks on the lake, and toward the Sami museum. When the cold had come into my coat, I returned to the restaurant and, along with the old men, watched an episode of a home-improvement show devoted to renovating saunas.

At ten to five, I moved outside. I wiped the snow from a bench, and, before sitting, pulled my jacket down to cover the seat of my pants. A bus stopped in front of me, and I sat up straight, but no one got off; the bus driver had opened the door on my account. The door closed, and the bus continued down the road.

Across the street, a woman with a cane shuffled by and, two minutes later, passed again. She was out exercising. I alone seemed affected by the cold.

As I was checking my watch, I heard a man’s voice. I looked up, and it was my father.

“Olivia’s daughter?” he said. “Yes.”

“Eero,” he said. It rhymed with
hero
. I almost laughed. “Clarissa,” I said. I stood and extended my hand. His gloved

palm enveloped three of my fingers, the way adults hold the hands of small children.

“The car is this way,” he said. “I think we go back to the house and talk?”

He didn’t move until I took a step in the direction he’d pointed. I had to remind myself to walk, to breathe. I felt like I was on a first date with someone I had loved from afar.

“My English is a little rusted. You excuse me?” he said. “You are the woman who comes into church today.”

“Yes.” We were both looking at the ground, making sure we didn’t slip. The snow beneath my feet sparkled like sunlit cement.

He opened the car door for me and got in on his side. When he turned on the engine, the radio came on so loud I jumped in my seat. Eero made no indication that he was going to turn down the volume, so I did.

“Where do you live in America?” he asked. “New York.”

“Oh, New York!” he said.

I asked if he had ever been there.

“No,” he said. “I go to Santa Fe once, and to California?” “With my mother?”

“No. When I was looking for her?” He gave a sideways glance in my direction. I decided I’d ask about that later. I had to pace things.

“How long have you lived here?”

“I am born here?” he said. Kari spoke in accusations, Eero in questions.

We slowed as we turned onto a street lined with one-story A-frame houses. “This is our street,” he said. All the houses but one had a single strand of white Christmas lights border-ing a garage door, or running along a roof.

“Everyone is very upset with that house,” Eero said, gesturing at a house with blue lights outlining the front door. “Those people really took it too far.”

He opened the door, and two dogs rushed to greet me. “Pia and Emma,” he announced.

“Are they huskies?” I said, tentatively petting Pia. “Yes, for hunting elk,” he said.

He took off his boots, and I took off mine. I placed them underneath a bench in the hallway, next to a pair of clogs, the heels of which were drastically worn down.
The woman who replaced my mother.
Based on the heels, I decided she had a funny walk.

“Is your wife home?” I asked.

“No, she directs the choir at the church. She works with them to get ready the Christmas service,” he said.

“She has a beautiful voice,” he said, and I said, “Oh, that’s too bad,” at the same time.

It was already apparent to me what a good home my mother would have had here, what a good husband Eero would have made.

“Would you like coffee?” Eero offered. Now in proximity, and in the light, I could study him. He had two skin tags on his forehead. They were so narrow at their point of attachment, they could have been cut off with a pair of small scissors.

I said I’d have coffee if he was having some, and followed him into the kitchen. I had assumed my father would be short, that his lack of height would explain mine, but Eero was tall, especially for a Sami. Every detail seemed extraordinary. His slow walk, his mended socks, the loop he had missed when threading his belt around his waist.

Eero pulled out a chair for me. “Welcome,” he said. “Thank you.” Dad had had good manners, but he had never

pulled out my chair.

I looked around.
This could have been the house I grew up in.
The kitchen table matched the wood throughout the house. It was blond, the kind that looked fitting in a summer cabin but seemed too light, too unsturdy for winter. The refrigerator was smaller than American refrigerators, with paneling that matched the wood of the floor. The kitchen led into what looked like a study, filled with dark furniture, its leather the color of men’s dress shoes.
Where would my room have been?

Eero moved around the kitchen the way he had when he was setting up the communion table at his church: he was judi-cious, and took more steps than seemed necessary. He opened

a cupboard and returned to the table with a basket lined with a napkin and filled with crisp Wasa bread. Then he went to the refrigerator and came back with butter. Next, he opened the freezer, took out something wrapped in plastic, sliced it up, and approached the table with what looked like brown licorice. “Reindeer meat,” he said, offering me a plate. He sat down across from me.

I picked up a slender slice of reindeer meat and took a small bite. It was salty, the texture like beef jerky. “Delicious,” I said. I exaggerated a smile.

“How is your mother?” Eero said suddenly. He had buttered a piece of Wasa bread, but it lay resting on his plate.

“I don’t know,” I said. “She took off when I was fourteen.” “Took off?” he said.

“Left. She left me and Richard, her husband”—I looked to see if he knew, but his startled expression showed that he hadn’t known she’d remarried—“and my brother, and never came back. This was in New York.”

“Does she pack anything?”

“No.” I was used to this line of questioning. Everyone thought they were a detective. “Did you call the police?” they’d say. “Did you look for a note?”

“I’m sorry for you,” Eero said.

I studied his face. I was unaccustomed to sympathy without judgment, sympathy without condescension. I nodded at Eero. He knew how she did it. He knew it was not a matter of interrogating past lovers or combing a lake.

There was still plenty of bread on the table, but Eero brought out more. “When she leave me she doesn’t say anything, either,” he said, arranging the new bread.

He paused. I could hear a neighbor calling out for their dog or perhaps their child.

“It is not so easy to be the wife of priest, to be the wife of Sami priest, in a town like this,” he said. He gestured around the room, as though indicating that the kitchen was the town, or the town was the kitchen. “Yes,” he said, agreeing with himself. “It is quite difficult.”

“Did my mother pray?”

“Of course,” Eero said. “Doesn’t she raise you with religion?” “No,” I said. “I never saw her pray, either,” I added. I

couldn’t picture her with her eyes closed.

“Your mother has no patience for this life here,” Eero said. “She has her studies and her project.”

“The indigenous peoples thing,” I said, more to myself than to him.

“Indigenous,” he repeated. “I think that’s why daily life here disappoints her. Yes, she is disappointed.”

He tapped the fingers of his left hand on the back of his right.

“She comes here thinking this place will give her wisdom into the Sami, that she helps with their cause. But people here are not aware of this cause of the Sami. We do not think of it

that way back then—things are different now. I think for her research, and for the idea she has in her head, this is disappointing for her.”

“It was disappointing for her,” I said, trying to get him to use the past tense. Speaking about her in the present made me uncomfortable.

“I never forget how I meet her. I come back here from sem-inary school and she comes to church one day. I am filling in for the last pastor, who is sick. He dies that year, and I take his place. After she comes to church service, she asks me why I don’t do all of the service in Sami. I explain that not everyone here speaks Sami, that I want to speak Finnish so more people understand. She is very upset about this. To her it isn’t right. It isn’t . . .”

“It wasn’t authentic?”

“Yes, authentic. It isn’t the authentic experience she is looking for. This is why she is so interested in the Alta Dam.”

“The dam?”

“In Finnmark?” I shook my head.

“You don’t know about the dam?” Eero looked at me quiz-zically. It was a face I myself often made.

“No,” I said. I wanted him to hug me. It seemed ridiculous that after so long, I would have to sit across the table from him, my father. I wanted to leap into him.

I leaned closer to the table; he leaned back in his chair.

In the seventies, he said, the Norwegian government announced plans to build a dam in the north of Norway, in Finnmark, the area where Norwegian and Finnish Lapland came together. The dam would be near the city of Alta, and would, the government claimed, generate not only electricity for southern Norway but hundreds of jobs for the local Sami. There was one hitch: the dam would redirect the flow of the river, and a historic Sami town called Masi would be flooded. Masi had a population of two hundred Sami.

My mother was one of the early protesters in the mid-1970s, and one of the only non-Sami involved. In 1980, when the building of the dam commenced, a large number of Sami chained themselves to each other to create a human roadblock to prevent workers from getting to the construction site. One man, who was trying to use explosives to bring down a bridge that led to the dam, blew off his arm.

In a sense, Eero explained, the Alta Dam protests were extremely important for the Sami. Before the protests, Sami villages hadn’t felt connected to one another, but they banded together to oppose the construction of the dam.

“So what happened?” I asked. “Was the dam built?” Ultimately, Eero said, the dam was built, on a smaller scale,

and the town of Masi was saved.

“So my mother must have been happy,” I said.

“Happy?” Eero said. “No, not this word for her. She leaves

me before the construction of the dam begins. She is very . . . disturbed after what happens in Masi.”

“With the protests?”

“Yes, the protests,” he said, “but also . . .” He paused. Then he moved his coffee cup to the side, as though it was its placement between us that was hindering conversation. “Do you not know, my child? Masi is where you are conceived.”

This seemed like inappropriate information for a priest to be delivering. Or for a father. But he stated it in a factual manner. It was possible that in Sami culture, greater importance was given to the place of conception.