The Story of My Face (3 page)

What about Runar Envall's office? I ask, ‘Do you know where that was?'

‘Oh yes,' Ilsa tells me – her mouth is a little looser now, there is at least a possibility that she might, one day, smile – ‘the office has been preserved as part of the exhibition.' She leaves her station by the window and beckons me on into a panelled room; three windows look out onto the frozen harbour, dark shutters folded tidily between them. By the far wall there is a massive desk, behind it a tub-shaped rotating office chair. By one wall, a low table with a globe, a selection of chairs. Oil paintings on the walls, maritime, a grey marble bust of Napoleon on a pedestal. The room has a smell too –

‘Polish?' Ilsa suggests. Tar, I think, mixed with cologne. I stand still in the room, breathe it in. So, I tell myself, Tuomas, a young man now, but looking roughly as he did in the portrait, came through this door, and perhaps stood exactly here, hesitating before he took one of the smaller wooden chairs. . . .

‘May I?' I ask Ilsa, who inclines her head ever so slightly.

Silently, the chair accepts me. Its narrow arm-rests are at just the right height. Uncle Runar, I imagine, would sit behind his desk to conduct the talk, and surely he was a confident speaker, able enough to pause between or even in the middle of sentences, perhaps to perform some small, unnecessary, physical task that had taken his fancy – arranging his seals in a row, trimming a cigar. . . .

‘You are interested only in the useless and troublesome things of life,' he told Tuomas, ‘in those questions which most of us prefer to ignore until we are absolutely forced to consider them. You have no head for figures; you lack the stomach that seafaring requires. As for the law, you have none of the mental discipline it entails. . . .'

And at this point, I imagine Runar would lean back in his chair, place his hands on a stomach encased in the latest design of waistcoat, lower his chin to his chest and look out from beneath his eyebrows. Not an entirely unfriendly gaze, but one which it would take strength to meet.

‘Well, there is no point in wondering how this has come to be. What can be done with you?'

Tuomas wrote later: ‘It was not to begin with a powerful sense of vocation that took me to my studies, but a sense of it being the only possibility. It became possible for my Uncle and I to agree that of all my unsuitable enthusiasms, the spiritual was most likely to offer a respectable living. I would become a minister of religion. The years of study, six, maybe seven, at Turku, Runar would pay for. . . .'

I imagine them: a solid man, a fragile one, his brother's awkward, left-over son, standing by the window in Runar's study, with the blinds drawn against the light. The pair of them shake hands to celebrate the decision. Runar's solid face cracks briefly into a smile. Then he turns aside, lights a cigar and peers around the edge of the blind. He is waiting for the last ship of the year to come in. French goods. Porcelain, furniture, perhaps even some ladies' clothes.

Then they are gone, and here I am, sitting in the
maakuntamuseo.

‘You may take a photograph, if you wish,' Ilsa offers, despite the prohibitive signs that she knows I can read, and then, timidly, she smiles.

After the tour we have strong, black coffee together in the deserted museum cafeteria, with its rows of tables and sprigs of juniper in tiny vases, more huge windows looking out on to the frozen sea. She tells me about the town where she grew up, where, apparently, it was possible for her mother's generation, when ice-skating on the sea, to see through the ice and the still, chill water below it, right down to the bottom of the harbour, where lay the wrecks of merchant ships scuttled during the Crimean War. Later, they were salvaged, and she herself never had the experience. The story of this, she believes, is what gave her an interest in the past.

It is far too hard – too complicated – to tell Ilsa what has given me mine, so I just thank her and shake her hand when we say goodbye at the top of the stone steps.

The Volvo is already an inch deep in snow. I wipe the windows and switch on, wait for the engine to warm up. Twenty minutes later, I pull clear of the town. I am one of just a few vehicles on an empty, well-made road, going back to Elojoki: straight ahead, then right. . . . I slip on my airport-bought sunglasses against the glare, lean back in my seat.

I am, it strikes me for the first time, setting out for Elojoki at almost exactly the same time of year as Tuomas did. His studies were completed in October 1861, and he set out for his first job, as assistant to the Pastor, on 20 March the next year. Though, of course, he first came from Turku to Pori, to Närpes, to Vaasa and on – I guess it would have taken him over a week, even in a two-horse sleigh. I imagine him to be wiry, as a young man, rather than slight, with light-brown hair and a thin, alert face, clean-shaven, green-eyed. Beneath his fur-lined coat, perhaps he wore the new black robes and short two-tailed tie that marked his profession? He would have added high side-pieces to the sleigh and he'd sit straight-backed on top of one of his boxes of books, holding the reins in gloved hands on his lap. One sheepskin beneath him, another over his knees, more still wrapped around his legs and feet. The road ahead, marked here and there by posts, would be barely distinguishable as a smoother, icier kind of white.

Of course, late March is not the best time to travel, nor quite the worst. The days are lengthening. This, apparently, is a particularly late spring; his was more or less average: the sun shone more often than not and the thaw had begun. Icicles at the edges of roofs dripped themselves to nothing. Sheets of water formed by day over the ice, transforming into low mists at dusk. Perhaps six more weeks would pass before the last of the snow disappeared and the earth's frozen moisture oozed up from below, broke the backs of the roads and flooded them in mud, just as the gleaming ice to his left-hand side became honeycombed with air, soft, treacherous, so that every way of moving around was difficult, if possible at all. It would be two months or more before the sea finally melted clear. Nonetheless, this was the beginning of spring. The sea-ice glowed, opal and milk beneath a vast and cloudless sky. The twigs of the birches were reddening; already on some of them there were catkins and tiny aromatic buds. They would grow redder and redder over the coming weeks, and then, suddenly, be covered in green. By then, the skylark would be calling.

I try to avoid looking at Christina's farm as I pass, but can't quite. It's one of the older buildings around, and I'd say it needs some attention. A truck is parked in front of the house. Two young men, her sons perhaps, are talking to the driver.

At the supermarket, small quantities of imported fruit and vegetables, looking oddly alien – too bright – are neatly displayed by the entrance, and everything except yoghurt is very expensive. I pack my basket full all the same, wishing I'd got a trolley instead.

‘The Researcher,' says the plump, thirty-ish woman at the checkout. She wears bright-red lipstick, a big smile. ‘From England. It is a bit cold here, eh? But at least you will not starve!' A label pinned to her overalls says ‘Katrin'. ‘Natalie', I tell her. She nods, still smiling, as she packs the goods into my bag. What else does she know about me? Again, it's something I didn't consider. But she's friendly enough, so I ask whether she knows of anyone who might be interested to talk to me about how things used to be in the village? Katrin thinks for a moment, jots down a couple of names.

‘I'll speak to them. And the school,' she says. ‘You should visit that. It's closing down, thank goodness, so we'll get an ordinary one at last. I've been driving my two chldren forty kilometres twice a day ever since we came here.'

I'm scarcely through the door when the thin trill of my mobile jumps into Tuomas's house, diffident but angry: it is, of course, my mother.

‘I've been worried sick –' she tells me.

‘Sorry. I'm fine. The museum's fantastic,' I tell her. I describe the snow, the sea-ice, the particular colour of the sky. My mother doesn't travel much. Even when younger, she wasn't interested. She was wild, but she had her adventures at home, and then, when everything changed after the accident, I was the perfect excuse to stay there for good. . . . It's a shame: I'd really like her to be able to see this odd, far-flung little place, at least in her mind's eye. But on her part the interest just isn't there:

‘Do you know how long it will take?' she interrupts.

‘I can't say yet. When it's warmer,' I tell her, ‘you could even come over and visit me. You could come by ship. It would be wonderful.'

‘I don't want to,' she says. ‘As far as I'm concerned, they're all just way up the creek. What I want is for you to get on and live your life –'

My mother has always opposed this trip, and she has been against, in a lesser way, many of the steps that preceded it – in the first place, my sudden, seemingly perverse desire to insist on education, though she eventually admitted I was right about that; then the obscure nature of my first degree, the even obscurer thesis. It is as if she was aware, long before I was, where they would lead: here, to Elojoki. I know all this, but it isn't worth going into.

And naturally, I don't tell her about Christina's visit: she'd probably come straight out and drag me home.

‘I
am
living my life,' I tell her, ‘I promise you. There are different ways to do it,' I remind her.

‘Sometimes I think you are doing this to punish me,' she says, coughing violently, making no attempt to muffle it, so as to let me know she is smoking again, because of the stress I'm putting her under. But I won't be blackmailed.

‘No, I'm not,' I tell her.

‘Have you got everything?' she asks, hoarser still. ‘Did you pack enough of your cream?'

‘Absolutely,' I tell her. ‘Please don't worry. You? The flat?'

‘All right.' She blows her nose loudly.

‘Take care,' I say.

‘You too –' and she adds, suddenly mucus-free, utterly perplexed: ‘But Natty, what on earth do you think you are doing there?' She hangs up before I can even try to explain.

3

It's not been the easiest of arrivals, but perhaps that's appropriate, since Tuomas's wasn't either. ‘I knocked on the doors and was sent away,' he says in his
Notes
. ‘But I stayed. The Parish turned its back on me, but still I stayed. I had Work to do here, though I was still far from knowing what it was.'

The pastor's house or
pappila
is basically a large bungalow, though there is a row of tiny windows in the attic, one above each of the larger windows below. Right in the middle of the long side there are steps to a large wooden porch, which has double doors and generous windows to either side of them. This is a kind of extension to the main hall – I haven't been inside yet, but you can see right through. There are low cabinets under each window, symmetrically placed lamps, three doors leading off in the principal directions, a striped rug on the floor. Tuomas must have stood in that hall, with the elderly maid, Ulla.

She told him the pastor was out and took him to the sitting-room, where he waited so long that he fell asleep. He woke to find standing over him a huge man in equally huge black robes, perhaps the oldest man he had ever seen, white-haired, white-eyebrowed, bearded: the pastor. His hands were curled into arthritic fists and his eyes, asymmetrically surrounded by irregular, elephantine folds of skin, seemed to both dissolve and burn at the same time. The pastor said nothing, but reached out and took Tuomas's letter of recommendation from the Bishop, then carried it away into his study and closed the door. Eventually the old woman came back.

‘Tuomas Envall, the Pastor of Elojoki has asked me to tell you – with respect, since he is sure that the mistake is not of your making – that he does not require assistance. He will make this clear to the Bishop. Meanwhile, there is a house in the garden where you can stay. The stove is lit. Your meals will be taken here.'

First, he cleared a path through the compacted snow and ice of the pastor's garden, and each day, after his private prayers and meditations in the little house, he took himself along and into the main house for the first meal of the day, at which he would enquire as to whether there had been word from the Bishop, then repeat his willingness to help in any way, however humble. Day after day, Esko Lehtinen, who clearly had something wrong with his throat (yet did nonetheless manage to make himself understood, in a voice half-whisper, half-shout, to others, and in church), looked past him and said nothing. Likewise, the house servants, the employees of the church, the tenant farmers, those members of the congregation whom Tuomas was able to meet – all of them refused to exchange with him more than the absolutely necessary formalities. . . . The information he gave about himself fell into a huge void, any question he put forth would be sent away, like a stray boat accidentally hitting the riverside, with precisely the necessary force.