The Story of My Face (8 page)

‘That girl isn't anything like any sister of mine would ever be!' he says. ‘Don't be daft!'

Barbara is always bursting into tears. She cries regularly in Service, if the reading is sad, especially if there's anything in it about a child, barrenness, or motherhood. He'll notice her fidgeting in the chair next to him, and force himself not to look at her, though he knows she's groping for her handbag under the chair, in order to find a handkerchief. It's a quiet kind of crying to begin with. Her glasses mist over, her cheeks redden, shine with tears. Then she'll start to gasp and sniff. She won't be able to find the bag and he'll have to do it for her, pull it up into her lap, open the clasp. Later, when she's finished, the faint snap! of her closing the bag will interrupt him all over again.

‘It was God's will. He took her,' he says now. ‘Don't start crying now. Stop, Mum, please –'

When she's gone, apologising, gasping for breath, feeling her way down the stairs, Mark pulls a box of weights out from under his bed. He's charged with a feeling of fight, a desire for violence. He wants to obliterate the interloper; he wants to punish his mother for the mess she's making, but of course it's wrong to even think this way, and anyway, he can't begin to think
how
. He wants to leave school, he wants to fight the Government, all governments, who support the commerce in images, advertising, news, art, billboards, neon, full-page colour spreads, TV sets, and who now have made it impossible for them to attend the summer congregation in Elojoki. . . . He's sick of living like this. And then again, the feeling of wanting to fight has itself to be fought until every joint and bone in his body has pitted itself in stalemate against some other part. He loads five pounds more than the last time, holds the hand weights at shoulder level, lies back on the floor, sits up.

Heat shoots to the surface of the skin. His heart pumps. On and on he goes, up and down, up and down. His face and chest are drenched with sweat, his eyes squeezed shut.
Tell me, please
, he asks, a little scared of doing so:
I want to serve. I'll do anything.
Give me a sign
–

8

WELL NATALIE: IT'S THREE WEEKS NOW. DOES BEING HERE BRING MEMORIES BACK FOR YOU THE WAY IT DOES FOR ME? DO YOU WISH YOU'D NEVER COME? I DO.

Yes. Yes – and also no. There are days the village – its mixture of concrete and dried-blood red buildings under a grey sky – looks to me like the absolute arse of the earth. At other times, when there's a little warmth in the light, or even actual sunshine, the layered views – twigs, treetops, sky – from the windows of Tuomas's tiny house seem all of a sudden infinitely various and beautiful.

Today, however, is definitely an arse of the earth day. The note from Christina jaundices my view and then again my face hurts badly from the freezing, gritty wind. I'm sticking to my resolution to take in as much exercise and daylight as possible. I struggle on along the main road, past the community centre and the supermarket, then turn right, avoiding newly iced puddles and looking up briefly to monitor my progress towards some squat, concrete blocks of flats.

Inside it must be thirty degrees: I have to strip off my cardigan and jumper, unbutton the neck of my blouse. Mrs Lohi, who recently moved from one of the outlying traditionally built houses to a new ground-floor apartment, is, however, well wrapped. She sits in a bright-blue armchair with her back to the triple-glazed sliding doors that lead on to the communal gardens behind – some small birch trees, leafless, of course, a climbing-frame and sand-pit, currently covered by thick ice and a crust of pitted, ageing snow.

Mrs Lohi is over ninety and every part of her face, cheeks, chin, the sides of her nose, is wrinkled, though as recently as last summer, Katrin says, she was still using a bicycle to go to her allotment on the other side of the river.

‘My eyes are not good,' she tells me. ‘I can't see detail any more, just the shape of you against the wall. I am doing this by touch, someone pins it on for me –' She holds up the piece of cloth in her lap, appliqusé work and embroidery, an abstract design in wheat, rust and muddy green.

‘I'm having the cataract operation in June. I'm looking forward to it!'

Coffee cups and bicuits have been set out on a tray in the kitchenette; she sends me to fetch them.

‘Katrin in the supermarket said that you might talk to me,' I remind her some time later. ‘She said she would mention to you that I –'

‘My memory is good,' she says. ‘I know who you are, Natalie,' she adds, quickly. ‘Kirsti Saarinen told me you were here the day you arrived.'

‘What can you tell me?' I ask.

‘I remember what my mother told
me
,' she says, looking, it seems, at the white-painted wall several metres behind where I sit. ‘My mother's older brother, Eino, the carpenter, he was one of the first to leave Elojoki. You know that one of the pastor's jobs was to record those coming to the parish and leaving it, as well as births and deaths? And marriages, of course. It was the pastor who issued a letter confirming your identity, a kind of passport. So you'll find Eino's departure in the register, and all the rest that went, young men, mainly, or couples – a little while after the famine years, 1872 perhaps. You can see all the deaths too. And in the other register, the names of all the strangers who turned up from other places, even worse off than we were. Times were very hard. It was when things began to improve that some people felt they had the strength to go and seek out somewhere new where, they hoped, such things would not happen. No one wanted anyone to go, but at the same time, it couldn't be condemned.

‘So Eino went to see Tuomas Envall for his permit to travel. He came out of there, my mother said, with tears running down his face. There was a service and a parade to see him off. He took work on an English ship. He was aiming for Canada, but the ship stopped at Ipswich and he met a woman, married and settled there. They had four boys and a girl. All five of them kept the faith, and had their own families. Others followed.

‘The Summer Congregations began in 1880. I can even remember Eino myself, because he used to come back when he could, and then, of course, his children and grandchildren visited too. Somewhere I have a spoon that he carved for me. I watched him do it. I can find it for another time, if you are interested. It means nothing to my grandchildren. I'm thinking that I'll give it to the museum they are going to set up here. . . .

‘My mother always said that when Tuomas Envall looked into your eyes and you met his gaze, the feeling was of a kind of warmth beginning in your heart and spreading out to your very fingertips and the ends of your hair. She believed that we were all living in an earthly paradise, here in Elojoki. That's how she felt. She believed that until the day she died.'

‘And you?' I ask, when the silence has begun to stretch a little. ‘What do you believe, or think?'

Mrs Lohi's hands, big-knuckled, crab-like, have fallen still in her lap. She takes her time to consider the question.

‘I too have been very happy here,' she says eventually. ‘I observe the faith and I still go to Service when I can. The prohibition has never troubled me. Of course, it may simply be my nature to be happy, wherever I am . . . well, I don't care which.'

She smiles, raises her hands. There's the faintest glint of gold, lost in the rolled flesh of her ring finger. She will be interested to know what conclusions I come to, she tells me, waiting on her walking-frame while I re-layer my clothes in the hall. She will let me know if she finds the spoon.

So, Christina, the fact is that at times I'm very glad to be here. Sometimes, oddly, I feel almost as if I
belong
here. I'd like to know what it is that you hope to achieve by all this. Surely you realise by now that I won't –

Each time a letter comes I'm tempted to really reply to it, rather than just frame a few sentences in my head. If I think of her as she was when we were children and compare it to what I've experienced of her now, then it is clear that, while back then she seized on others' transgressions and took pleasure in having an outsider to blame, now it's far deeper than that, a matter of desperate need. Exactly what loss or hurt does hating me like this protect her from? When driving past her house, especially last Sunday, when I saw other cars turn in and park neatly in the muddy forecourt, I've found myself thinking it might be best to stop, go in and – well, what? Have a look around. See where she's ended up. Talk? But I do know that that would just draw me further in, and I don't want that. So our conversation must be indirect and unspoken.

I do not need Christina's warning not to ‘do the same thing again'. Let alone the physical damage, it's not as if I don't have my own regrets: the dishonesty of my means, for example. None of it would have happened as it did without that. Though saying that, I trip myself up, because if none of it had happened, where would I be now?

9

It is the Sunday following the arrival of the Home Office letter and my second visit to the Hern family. The Suffolk Congregation – over thirty people – gather in the beamed front room of the Thorns' farmhouse. They sit on sofas and chairs gathered from all over the house – ladder-backed dining chairs, carvers, oak benches from the kitchen, a mismatched pair of Windsors, assorted painted Lloyd Looms from the bedrooms and landings, two nameless things with rush seats, some round three-legged stools. At the last minute a set of folding picnic seats in aluminium are brought in from the Thorns' caravan. Even these are not enough, so all six Gardner children make do with cushions on the floor.

Mr Thorn settles himself, facing the congregation, in an armchair just to the side of the cloth-covered trestle table that serves as an altar. He looks carefully around the room. His big, bony hands lie on his knees like sleeping dogs; the two huge vases of delphiniums on the table burn blue behind him. There's a fat candle with an invisible flame. At his feet, a square of light is cast from one of the windows.

‘First, we will wait in silence before the Lord,' he announces.

Silence, according to Tuomas Envall in his
Meditations
, is ‘a substance, an absence, a place, a thing, a liquid in which God can be found by willing and observant seekers.' It can be a steady flow of small, perfect droplets counting out the minutes. Sometimes, it sparkles. Sometimes it swallows everything up – a winter lake darker than the sky. Sometimes it starts shallow, hardly there, and drop by drop, ends up deep. . . . Mostly the Silence at the beginning of the Envallist Service lasts an entire half hour, but occasionally, if interrupted by inspired speech, it can be very brief indeed. Once, Mark remembers, Joanna Weston spoke for the entire half hour of her response to the passion of Christ, which she had called ‘a lesson in the inner and inimitable experience of the flesh, proof of its worthiness, however sin-drenched.' The words tumbled from her mouth, like acrobats across a stage, dazzling with their motion, their cleverness, the years of meditation and thought that had gone into making them. Afterwards, it was the feeling of them you remembered, rather than exactly what she had said.

Today, the Silence is saturated, heavy, and it is in part to escape from it that Mark's eyes begin to feel their way around the room. This is a place he has visited once every six weeks or so since he can remember: the low ceiling, the panel-work on the walls, the small-paned windows set behind foot-deep sills, through which he can see the flat fields of cereal crops and bright-green beet. Spurts and sighs of wind part and flatten the wheat, then evaporate, leaving it momentarily intact.

Inside, it is still. From the back row, next to his father, Mark can see only the backs of heads, some erect, some bent low, hair in shades of brown and blonde, cut or tied this way and that. Older heads show a gleam of scalp or are dulled by oncoming grey. Anna Herrick's thick hair, gathered into two loose plaits and then coiled and pinned to the back of her head, is completely white and has been as long as Mark can remember. He took free piano lessons from her when he was small, but he wasn't one of the few that she chose to take on to higher grades. Back then her seriousness about music had frightened him, but now that her face has come to fit her hair, he's curious rather than scared.