The Story of My Face (22 page)

‘What's that?'

Heikki shrugs, pushes his hands down in his pockets. ‘Your story would be more interesting, I'm sure,' he says, pretending to study the rows of books.

‘Not an adjective I'd choose.'

‘I don't mean to be clumsy,' he says. ‘You know –' he turns suddenly round to face me, puts both hands on my little desk, more or less obliging me to look up. ‘I mean that I would like to know about you, and what I really want to say is that speaking as a man, it doesn't bother me, the way your face is doesn't –'

It's not you that it's here to bother!
I almost say.
It's me that has
it, the memories, the feeling of it from inside.
But I do manage to swallow that back, and I stand up because I feel at a disadvantage sitting down.

‘Actually, I like it,' he says, and that's really too much – ‘That's extremely good of you, Mr Seppä,' I say, and I make a little mock-solemn bow. I can't stop myself; he ends up leaving his own office, I watch him drive off and then I sit there until I've finished what I came to do. Then, seeing as he didn't ask for the keys to be returned, I make my way back to the
pappila
. It's the place, these days, where I prefer to be.

In Tuomas's panelled and shuttered back room, I have found not only that first notebook but getting on for twenty other personal writings, fragments, mainly on single sheets of paper slipped between the pages of his books, or in one case pushed behind them on the shelves. ‘Suppose I had done otherwise. How can one sin be weighed against another? Have I made things better or worse?' he was asking himself, in a private moment in January 1900. ‘Perhaps this is the measure. But I cannot judge –' He was always asking, Tuomas, and never quite telling. But at the time, of course, no one knew that he had the slightest doubt. He went on saying the same things (no doubt cowardice came into this, but also a kind of altruism) and so his followers passed on what he had said, across the generations, like runners in a relay race. . . .

I no longer pursue Tuomas. I've got so used to the hugeness of his desk, the gentle dappled light from the window at the side. I like working here, or sitting here to think. I sit in his office with my notebook and pens. It sounds crazy, but sometimes I feel as if I am being visited. At any rate, I am waiting for Tuomas – for his story – to come to me, and I know that in the end it will.

When bodily discomforts finally get the better of me, I take the little path home. There's a young man in a plaid shirt sitting on the doorstep. Although he introduces himself straight away, I think I would have guessed who he was, not so much from his face, half-hidden as it is in thick brown stubble, as from the expression on it – that particular, suddenly shifting mixture of resentment and need. Perhaps it's a combination that is slightly more attractive in a man, and a young one at that, but it's still not my favourite thing. My own face being so very stuck, I tend to think: if you have a choice, use it. But then perhaps we don't.

‘I am Pekka, the son of Kirsti Saarinen,' he says. He doesn't get up, just stays there sitting on the door-step.

‘She says you are angry with her, so she can't come here herself.' He speaks slowly, but with a heaviness to the vowels and a laziness about the consonants that makes him harder than usual to understand. I shrug, shift my stance to accommodate the laptop and briefcase slung over one shoulder, wait for what might follow. There's a long pause.

‘My mother wants to know, what's your business in the
pappila
?' So when I've felt the hair rise on my skin, or found myself suddenly alert, when moments before I was drifting off, it was not the ghost of Tuomas, but one of them, him probably, looking in at me through the window, then slipping away before I saw. Well, maybe that's a relief. I smile at him.

‘Research,' I tell him. ‘Reading Tuomas Envall's papers and so on. I am trying to decide what made him invent Envallism.'

‘It was God's idea, I dare say.'

‘So he said, of course. But I'm not convinced. And the
pappila
doesn't have a toilet that works. So I need to get in now if you don't mind. And after that –' He doesn't move.

‘My mother has had a hard life,' he says, looking at the toe of his boot. ‘Even when my father was here it was hard, harder even, in a different way. I'm the one that looks after her. The others take after him, and are bad-tempered and selfish.'

‘Well, I'm sorry,' I say, ‘but right now, I do need to get in –'

‘May I see what you have in your bag?' he asks.

‘No,' I tell him, ‘of course you can't.' Actually, I haven't found anything new for almost a week, so there is nothing there he could object to, but that's only luck. When I do find something, I carry it down to the community centre that same day, label it, make a photocopy for myself, and leave the original in a locked drawer of Heikki's filing cabinet. I've no idea who the papers actually belong to or what the legal position might be, and if I think about the rights and wrongs, the various claims on this story that I call the truth about Tuomas Envall, then they are indeed complex and contradictory – but all the same, nothing will stop me doing this. I lean past Christina's son and put the key into my lock.

‘What are you finding out?' he asks as I push past. ‘Give me something to tell her.'

As I guessed, he is still there, a few metres from the door, when I come out again, with my two brown-glass bottles of beer; he knocks the cap off his while I'm still fiddling with the opener attached to my key-ring. How to say to her, via him, that I do not pursue Tuomas any more? That I no longer want to undo him, but want, more than anything, to understand. . . .

‘Tell her to come to the lecture,' I say, taking possession of my back step and rolling up my sleeves – the evenings are just warm enough for this now. ‘It's on the second Saturday in June. Tell her,' I say, ‘that I like Tuomas Envall far more than I expected to.'

Pekka puts the empty bottle beside me on the step, implying his thanks with a tilt of the head. He would like, I feel, not to have to speak at all, to communicate with expressions, gestures, the odd grunt here and there.

I wait until he has gone, and then I call Heikki Seppä at his home.

‘I don't feel that was fair!' he tells me.

‘Probably not,' I say.

‘What would be the right way?' he asks.

‘There probably isn't one,' I admit. ‘Shall we have a drink together?'

This, I think, is a date. I am on a date.

The last of the sun warms our faces as Heikki and I sit with our beers by the thawing river, a sawmill screaming in the background, green, actual or reflected, as far as the eye can see. We're in a small bar in a tiny town of pastel-painted wooden houses, half-way between Elojoki and his home.

I have dressed for the occasion in a white blouse and chinos – almost-summery things – but Heikki is wearing track bottoms and one of his traditional patterned jumpers, which looks far too thick for the time of year.

‘I think Tuomas Envall was gay,' I tell him.

Heikki begins to laugh. ‘No one will believe you,' he says.

I shrug: it really doesn't bother me.

‘But if they do,' he says, laughing more, ‘you will be even less popular than I am!'

The mill at the other side of the inlet falls momentarily quiet. Light dances on the water. Any minute, night will fall.

‘I can't work you out,' Heikki says.

You can
, I think.
I want you to
.

‘He did believe in what he said himself, I think,' I tell Heikki, ‘until almost the end. And it has to be said, there's no question that many people got something out of it, and they still do. Actually, the avoidance of imagery is a practice with precedent in both the Judaeo-Christian and the Islamic traditions, not to mention . . .'

I go on and on, drunk on one and a half beers.

‘Natalie, would you like to see where I live?' he asks, when I run out of words.

22

I was well past the farm before Mark caught up with me.

‘Come back,' he said.

‘Why should I? I don't want to.'

‘That's the thing about you, isn't it?' he said. ‘You don't much think about anyone else.'

I ignored him again, turned left at the top of the lane and went on walking, along the narrow road, onwards from where we had turned off in the car two days ago. He walked sometimes next to me, sometimes behind.

‘Where are you going?' he asked. ‘You don't know, do you?' he said. A while later, we came to a crossroads, and I stopped to study the names on the sign. He waited too, a few paces away. It was very hot. Despite Barbara's applications of sun cream, the tops of my forearms were going pink, the freckles on them darkening and merging together. I could feel the sweat under my hair, and him looking, the way he always did.

The sign meant nothing to me. I could hardly put the letters together, let alone make them into a sound in my head.

‘I want to find the sea,' I told him.

‘We're going to the beach on Wednesday,' he said, ‘it's miles.'

‘Which way is it?'

‘Straight over,' he said. I could tell he was guessing as much as I was, but I set off again. On the other side of the crossroads, he stopped and looked back, so that he'd know the place again. We needed to keep the sun to our right, or behind us, he said.

The road, smaller than the last, rose steeply. There was a large, empty-looking stone house, and then nothing. We kept going for half a mile or so, not speaking. The road began to curve insistently in the wrong direction. ‘It's this way,' he told me, indicating a left that seemed to cut straight on up a slow hill. ‘But it's a long way.'

The air was thick with the rasp of crickets and the busying of flies and bees. The hedge rolled itself alongside us, a kaleidoscope of small shapes, eruptions of colour. We went on and on, ignoring a fork left. I remember a single car passed, suitcase strapped to the roof, buckets and spades on the back shelf. Some time after that, we waited at a gap in the cutting for the lights to turn at a level crossing, watched the train rush past. Then we crossed and kept on going the same way.

We came to a small village, stone cottages and modern bungalows mixed together. A smell of roasting meat hung about the place.

Mark waited outside while I went into the tiny shop. I bought some Tizer, and asked the faded, fat woman who served me the time and the way to the sea.

‘It's two o'clock. I've got a pie too,' I told Mark, omitting to say that I hadn't paid for it. ‘We'll have it when we get there. We go left, right and then there's a path to the cliffs.'

A stile led into a field of coarse, trampled grass that rose gently towards a fence – wooden posts and wire – at the far side. There was no clear path, but when we were almost at the fence, the sea suddenly came into view, quite distinct from the faded, even blue of the sky at the horizon. Vast and glittering, it moved all the time in small ways, and yet at the same time it seemed still; it seemed to me that it could have been the skin of some enormous, sleeping beast.

We pushed down the wires, holding them for each other in turn, and climbed through. The thin tract of land ahead was dotted with small bushes. Orange and brown butterflies rose as we passed, settled again after us. ‘Do not walk near the cliff edge or on the bankings' warned a peeling white-painted notice-board nailed to a stake. But we went on until we could see right over the edge. There were no waves to speak of, just a kind of rhythmical spilling over of the sea, a gentle rustling sound. The cliff stretched in both directions. To the right, occasional jerry-built chalets with asphalt roofs, shingled or pebbled wall panels and brightly painted windows, nestled in the hollows of the cliff approach and, further away, we could see the white roofs of what looked like several hundred caravans which were arranged in neat, street-like rows in a field far larger than ours. To the left we could see the pastel colours of a sea-front, darker buildings covering the hills behind.

Grass grew right up to the cliff edge. The cliffs themselves were perhaps twenty feet high where we were standing, more elsewhere, and made of a soft-looking rock, almost like soil, browny orange in colour, with a paler band towards the top. They slumped rather than stood, and the beach below was strewn with large, fallen lumps, a muddle of small pebbles and the occasional huge, round boulder. Beyond this, the brownish sand itself was smooth and wet.

‘The sea's coming in,' Mark said. It was another guess, of course. We didn't have a watch. It was impossible to know how long we'd been away, how long it would take to get back. Our legs ached.

‘We had better stop here,' he said, ‘we can't stay long.'

I sat down on the grass, took the small cellophane-wrapped pork pie from my pocket and placed it on the grass between us. I removed my flip-flops and examined my feet. They were filthy, brown from the dust of the roads and fields, rubbed raw between the big and next toe. I pulled the big toe away, and blew on the sore patch. Then I loosened the top on the bottle of Tizer, carefully so it didn't fizz over and waste.