The Story of My Face

By Kathy Page

Natalie Baron is a neglected teenager adrift in the world when she attaches herself to Barbara Hern and her family, followers of Envallism, an extreme Protestant sect. Their new relationship fulfills unmet needs for both women—and leads to a devastating series of events that forever changes the course of their lives. Years later, Natalie, now a well-respected academic, travels to Finland in an attempt to understand the origins of Envallism as well as her own past. The Story of My Face is both a gripping psychological thriller and the archaeology of an accident which shaped a life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Aug 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771962964

Kathy Page

Kathy Page is the author of eight novels, including Dear Evelyn, winner of the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Award for Fiction and the Butler Book Prize. Her short fiction collections, Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016), were both nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Book preview

1

I look up from the map and see a tall woman in a padded coat, standing about two metres from the car, staring at me. Her shopping bags are on the ground, but her arms hang straight down at her sides as if she were still carrying something heavy. She stares hard. I don’t like it, but the fact is I am a complete stranger in this unpronounceable speck of a place, Elojoki, that seems to have been dropped in the middle of flat and freezing nowhere, roughly 200 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. There are four shops, one road, a scattering of low-rise buildings, high winds, ice and conifers for miles. It would be odd if I didn’t attract attention. Besides, I have spent the last twenty-five years learning how to cope with stares. I can catch a stare lightly and turn it into a smile or the beginning of a conversation; also, I can push it back hard enough to hurt—

But this woman goes on and on staring even when she sees I am looking straight back at her and it’s clear to me now that this is not a simple, curious stare. It’s as if she is trying to do something to me, to make something happen, just by looking. Her jaw is slack and the whole of her face has gathered around her eyes. I could just drive on, but something makes me want to break the stare before I go. So I wind down my window, smile, point ahead and ask, even though I already know:

‘Is the church this way?’ My voice is bright and ordinary, slow, but competent in its handling of the foreign sounds; my breath billows and sinks heavily in the air between us. The woman neither replies nor moves. I abandon Finnish, try Swedish. Finally, I shrug, open my hands, and set off on the last few hundred metres of my journey. The woman, I see in the mirror, has turned around and is still watching me.

Elojoki has a history. That’s why I’m here, so I’m going to need to make allowances. But right now I’m just too tired to do so. A delayed flight, the drive—the last hour of it the worst: mile after mile of narrow, icy road hugging the course of a frozen river—the trees to either side a green so dark they might as well be black. And now the staring woman. Right now, the whole trip, which I’ve worked towards for years, seems ludicrous: a woman of forty-four, not married, nor even attached, searching for a long-dead man. In Elojoki.

Yet here I am. Just to the other side of the bridge is the church, set on boulder-strewn ground a few feet higher than the rest. It is squat, wood-built and ship-lapped, painted grey-blue with a shingled roof and a small spire. Seeing it—its foreignness, the fact that it has survived—lifts my mood a little. Beyond it is a bell tower, the cemetery. To the right, behind a thicket of leafless birch trees, is the pappila, the long, atticked house that came with the pastor’s job. It’s empty now. Somewhere behind that, I guess, is the smaller guest house where Tuomas Envall lived when he first arrived here, and where, by sheer luck in the timing of my application, I am going to live too. All I have to do in return is give a public lecture on my findings before I depart.

Heikki Seppä, a tall man with a slight stoop, emerges from a Jeep parked outside the pappila. His official title is Local Officer for the National Board of Antiquities, Department of Historic Buildings and Sites, but since we met last year when the arrangements were being made, there is, mercifully, no need for introductions. A quick handshake, then he takes the rucksack and book-box and leads the way, warning of slippery patches on the path.

The house is just one room, lined and floored in wood. There’s an old-fashioned wood-burning stove. Triple-glazed windows look out in three directions. A large table sits in the middle of the space. There is also a rather short-looking wooden bed, a rug and a cupboard and dresser, both old. The kitchen area and sink are under the east-facing window; a table-top fridge, a microwave and a vast, white plastic and glass coffee-maker have been brought in. Plumbing, new windows, background heating and electricity, along with the bathroom extension at the back, Heikki explains, were added quite recently. The Envallist rift with the official church was widening, and funds to update the pappila were not forthcoming, so the pastor moved in here just before he left altogether. Next year, when restoration begins, these modernizations will all be stripped out, and the corrugated roof will be replaced with authentic shingles. ‘So you are just in time!’ he tells me.

It is very important for me not to attempt to use the stove and not to smoke in this house, nor allow anyone else to—he speaks in English, slowly, almost perfectly, making the sentences first in his head. As he speaks, he opens and shuts the doors of the cupboards, fridge, microwave, glancing inside each, then closing them again, seeming pleased at their emptiness. He takes me in with small, easily bearable glances.

I tell him I don’t smoke and certainly won’t let anyone else do so.

He hopes I will be warm enough, and not too lonely in a quiet, out-of-the-way place such as this.

‘The house is perfect,’ I tell him. ‘I am so very grateful for the opportunity to be here, to read the records and talk to contemporary villagers about the stories and memories handed down to them, to study their beliefs, that even if there were discomfort involved, it wouldn’t bother me at all. As it is, I could not ask for more—’

‘Good,’ he says, running his hand over grey-blond hair that is thinning and cut short, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ He makes for the door, remembering at the last moment to give me the key.

When we shake hands again—this time without our gloves—I notice how large his are and that the little finger on his left is missing, which I didn’t notice before. A tiny connection between us, a physical similarity. A good sign, perhaps.

Later, showered, wearing my dressing-gown and slippers, I make coffee, sit down at the spruce table (which is contemporaneous with Tuomas Envall, but, according to Heikki Seppä, not original) and stare out through the north-facing window. The evening is somehow bluer than at home.

I think in an idle, disconnected way of the years of work that have brought me here. First the languages, acquired night after night in the language lab, progressing rather as does a climber on sheer rock, inching up with crampons and ropes. Then research, contacts, grant applications, the sabbatical year, the laptop, maps. I have a brief, vivid picture of my office as it was before I packed—the books on the shelves, the maroon chairs with foam sticking out from the cushion seams, the sun coming in through broken Venetian blinds—and then I think of my least and most favourite students. After all, it’s only three days since I cleared out my papers and books. That afternoon, I had my party, with colleagues and their partners and a fulsome speech from the Dean. Daffodils were in bloom, the grass was bright green.

Now, I’m thoroughly elsewhere, and I don’t think I shall miss getting my slides in order or holding forth about Religion and Society, The Idea of God, The Paradoxes of Belief and so on. I turn off the desk lamp, switch on another by the bed, and close the three pairs of plaid curtains. The bed is just my length, and agreeably soft. I stretch out on top to begin with, aware that I promised to phone my mother and also that I should clean my teeth before I let myself sleep. The blue between the trees drifts into black, and silence sings around me. Perhaps half an hour later I’m still there, staring at the ceiling in a pleasant state of suspended animation, when there’s knocking at the door—tentative, but still quite loud enough to make me jump out of my skin. Then it grows louder and urgent. I find myself standing behind the door (which doesn’t have a chain), my heart racing as I watch it shake in the frame.

I’m more or less paralyzed, completely unable to find the right words in either language—

‘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, breathable 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 ponytail—

‘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 apologize. 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 am 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 farther 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, feel 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 first through 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 matte-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’s 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