The Story of My Face (2 page)

‘Who is it?' I manage eventually to say in my own.

‘Let me in,' the person outside replies, also in English. A native speaker, or as good as. A woman. Then the knocking stops, as if she knows I'm going to obey.

It's very dark. All the same, I can see that this woman outside is the one who stared at me in the village, now wearing a ski jacket and a hat with flaps over the ears. A white blob of a face, not young, no make-up. She's breathing hard. Either she's in trouble, I think, or she
is
trouble . . . In my handbag, on the table behind me, I have my mobile. But I wouldn't know who to call.

‘Who are you, please?' I ask again as a gust of freezing air pushes between my skin and the dressing-gown, then past me into the warm room behind. ‘Is something the matter?'

‘Let me in,' she repeats in a low, flat voice that's almost familiar. And what else can I do? Chase her away?

So she walks past me into the room, a tall woman, heavily built, smelling faintly sour. She pulls off her hat, sets to work noisily on the fastenings of her jacket – a waterproof, breatheable affair – which she throws over the back of one of the two chairs. Underneath she's wearing a dark-purple jumper, too-tight jeans, fur-trimmed boots. She sits down, one hand on each large knee, and looks up at me, her brown-black eyes burning beneath prominent brows. And suddenly, even after all that's happened in more than thirty years, I know who she is.

‘Christina!' For a brief moment I'm lost in the sheer pleasure of recognition. Of course! Look – she even has her hair parted the same way, straight down the middle, though now it's cut in a jaw-length bob, and then it was pulled back tight in a pony-tail –

‘Why have you come here?' she asks, as I too sit down.

‘I've come to research the life of Tuomas Envall,' I say.

‘Weren't you satisfied with what you did to us last time?' Her voice breaks up as she speaks, and then she is sobbing, still staring at me, her face all blotched, red and wet, her hands fisted on her knees –

‘You've come to destroy us,' she says.

I can't believe this is happening. I certainly can't believe what she's saying, or that she's saying it to
me
. I can't begin to work out what to say back nor what I could hope to achieve by saying it. If I wanted to convince her, I'd have to start at the beginning and explain everything from then to now, and even then . . . In the end, it's a gesture that comes. I point, using my bad hand, at my patchwork, asymmetrical face, a blotched parody of everyone else's, which was the absolute best that could be done back then. I ask:

‘Isn't this enough for you?'

And then I tug the lapels of my dressing-gown wide open, so that she can see the rest.

‘Christina,
look
–' I say. ‘I am the one who was destroyed.' And she does look. I can see the small movements of her eyes as she takes it all in. Yet somehow, it seems, she manages not to see, because when her eyes return to my face she can still meet my eyes and say:

‘You deserved everything you got. Only God Himself knows why He had mercy on you.' This statement, so extraordinary, so utterly crazy-wrong, makes me want, almost, to laugh. At the same time, my heart is galloping, my mouth is dry, I'm terrified – it's like blinking and finding, when your eyes open, that you're on another planet entirely. ‘You blew us apart,' she says, ‘scattered us. Families were broken. And now you've come to take our past away too. Why? Why won't you leave us alone?'

The last I remember of Christina, we were girls of thirteen. Her mother was on her side and Barbara was on mine. Now, of course, we're alone.

I close my dressing-gown.

Neither of us says anything for quite a while. Her eyes are bloodshot, her skin waxy. She doesn't look well at all.

Maybe she's remembering too. On one of Christina's upper arms – the right one, I think – there may still be a small roughly circular mark, which I made with my teeth. I remember biting hard, her screams, the salty taste of her, and I remember standing, later on, in the field, high as a kite on the entire situation, and refusing to apologise. But that was
nothing
, in the scheme of things. And it was way back then,
before
.

Maybe – surely – she didn't mean what she just said. Could it be something she heard someone say years ago, frozen inside her and releasing itself now?

Should I offer her a drink?

I don't.

‘Christina,' I begin eventually, my voice oddly steady but fragile at the same time, ‘I can't touch what you believe, even if I wanted to. But I am most certainly allowed to think about it, to explain it to myself, and to write about it too' – and then my own rage leaps out, and I conclude my appeal to reason with ‘any fucking way I want!' and slap my hand so hard on the table that everything in the drawer jumps, and her too –

Well, now she's looking. Now she sees.

She puts her elbows on the table, her forehead in her hands, thrusts her fingers through her lank brown hair, pulls at it, and makes small, odd noises in her throat. It goes on for a long time. I sit and watch.

How come I find myself feeling stupidly sorry for her? Sorry enough to say:

‘You really shouldn't worry. It was a long time ago. Is there someone I can call for you?' She shakes her head without looking up. Well, pity is one thing, but also I think
this is my
moment
and I must make the most of it: right now, I can move her on. If I don't, she could be here all night.

‘I'll drive you back, then,' I tell her, throwing off the dressing-gown, pulling a sweater on, then trousers, boots, coat, hat, gloves, the lot. I help her into her things. She's gone limp and quiet. I put my arm around her and guide her to the car, as I would with someone physically infirm. I drive with exaggerated care and smoothness, in silence, so as to preserve things in the state they are. We pass through the centre of the village, and continue on for several kilometres – the farms are getting further apart and I'm beginning to feel uneasy when at last she tells me to stop. There's a gate, a yard, a cluster of lumpy buildings, a light burning still in one of them. I lean right over her to open the car door, but she doesn't get out.

‘I came here over twenty years ago,' she says, quite calm now. ‘Married young: wanted a fresh start, I suppose. We had five children in ten years. Then Jukka died. Well, of course, half of my family are on the Island, and the rest of them are all over the place – I don't even know where two of my brothers are, and anyway, I can't uproot the boys. . . .Well, you know where to find me,' she concludes. Then, at last, she climbs out and pushes the passenger door to without closing it properly.

My hands are shaking as I check the locks on the door and windows of my little house. She's crazy, I tell myself, but it doesn't really help. I still can't believe what was said to me, and I can't believe what I did.

‘You certainly deserve
this
,' I tell myself as I pull the bottle of Finlandia from the fridge and pour a good half-tumbler of the thick liquid – far more than I'll be able to stomach and at the same time not enough to stop my mind running over and over what's just taken place.

I could have – should have – guessed that someone from back then and there might be here, now. I just didn't think. And it is the oddest feeling to know, after all this time, how I appeared to one of them back then: to know what Christina felt I was doing, rather than what I remember as happening to me. To think that someone whom I would have said was only on the farthest edge of what took place, feels herself to have been so changed by it, by me – what am I to make of it?

This is not what I expected. But all the same, I've travelled this far and can't turn back. There's no choice but to stay, here, in the very same room where Tuomas Envall must have unpacked his trunks and sealskin-wrapped parcels: I can almost see him trying to light the stove, rubbing his hands together, singing softly to himself. And yes, Christina has also sat at the table over there. There's grit from her boots on the floor.

The vodka is thinner now and I take it in bigger sips, feeling it cast me adrift. I climb into bed, set the alarm and turn out the light.

2

By ten the next day, having driven south for three hours in semi-darkness through first mist and then falling snow, I am following the curator of the Regional Museum, Ilsa Numminen, past a vast floor-to-ceiling window (through which can be seen more snow blowing into clots, and beyond it the sea, frozen in shades of pewter and white), on and down a broad set of stone stairs. Ilsa is a slender woman in her late twenties: flawless pale skin, thick, blonde hair cut short, eyes huge and unexpectedly brown. Her nails are manicured and polished, a thin gold ring with a chip of diamond sits on the third finger of her left hand. Well, she'll do anything but meet my eye. I can't blame her. Normally, when meeting someone for the first time, I make things easier for them by naming, right at the start, what stands between us. I'll say something simple like, ‘I expect you're wondering about my face? I was in an accident.' Here, I missed the chance when the director was so lengthily introducing me and my project. Also, the encounter with Christina is having its effect. So all in all, it feels too much of an effort, and I leave her to struggle with the problem as best she can –

She stops at the bottom of the stairs to explain that this, the main building – stone-built, harbour-fronted – is where Tuomas Envall grew up as a ward of his Uncle Runar and Aunt Eeva. The door to our right leads to the regional archives, which contain a few documents pertaining to Runar's business, his wife's housekeeping and so on; I can inspect these later on. Now, if I am ready, we will view the collection. Her voice, high with nerves, echoes in the stairwell above us.

On Wednesdays, the museum is not open to the public until the afternoon. The polished boards creak and shift secretively around us as we move through empty, dim rooms, past the collections of labelled artefacts and documents: baby bottles made from horn and leather, painted chairs and wardrobes, a life-size model of a tarpit, hanks of berry-dyed wool, bales of plaid cloth, tiny-looking clothes, fish-hooks. There's a room full of several hundred brightly painted chairs, another full of clocks, a whole boat with life-sized models of seal hunters.

Ilsa pauses at a glass stand to gesture at a photograph of a family: eight children, arranged in order of height and dressed entirely in black. It's not of direct interest, but what does fascinate me is the sheer number of tiny white buttons on the black clothes, the fact that none is missing and every single one of them is done up. Well, Ilsa says, she is not sure exactly what these particular people believed, but it would be repressive, certainly. There were many revivalist sects at this time. . . . There was Lars Laestadius, of course. There was Paavo Ruotsalainen and the Awakenings. People had visions, spoke in tongues, were desperate for salvation. In her opinion, such extremes arose because of social insecurities related to the nationalist struggle, the decline of the shipbuilding industry and so on.

She herself is against all rules and regulations, if I don't mind her saying so –

‘Not at all,' I tell her. ‘Please don't assume,' I add, feeling that the borrowed language makes me more formal than I would otherwise be, ‘that a person who studies such things, or is even fascinated by them, also believes in them. Certainly not in my case.'

Our eyes meet briefly and she colours a little, then gestures that we should move on, past wood-turning lathes, a reconstructed one-room cottage (no chimney, a hole in the roof), a vast collection of matt-black earthenware. All this, I think, tucked away
here
. Walking or driving through, you would never guess; the cold, I suppose, drives the past so much indoors.

Upstairs is a contrast: prosperous urban rooms, stuffed with porcelain, gilt and upholstery. In the large room called ‘Nineteenth Century', Ilsa raises one of the blinds and points across the room at a family portrait.

‘There is Tuomas.'

‘I had no idea there was such a thing!'

He is perhaps fourteen or fifteen, posed standing behind his seated Uncle and Aunt. His guardians are both robust and substantial figures. While Runar bursts out from his tightly buttoned waistcoat, ruddy and whiskered, Tuomas' face is as white as his shirt, his gaze inward, absent. You would never guess what he had gone on to do, how much suffering, both physical and mental, he caused.

‘As a young man,' Tuomas wrote in his posthumously published
Notes
(an incomplete account of the discovery and development of his faith which, along with everything else he wrote, I have read and brought with me), ‘As a young man, I was beset by enthusiasms and notions of all kinds. My Uncle considered high and low what might be done with me. He called me frequently to his office to discuss the matter –'