The Story of My Face (6 page)

We are under the last street-lamp. Ahead of us is a good stretch where the lights are broken.

‘Do you like girls?' I ask him. The orange light deepens the colour of my hair, paints my skin mottled gold.

‘It depends on the individual,' he says.

‘What about
me
?' I persist.

‘I don't know you,' he says.

‘Do you want to see me again?'

He'd like to say something so terrible it would make me vanish, but he's been brought up to be polite –

‘No, actually, I don't want to,' he manages to say.
Don't ever
come back
, he's thinking.
Leave us alone
–

I run straight across the road without looking first, disappear into the stretch of gloom on the other side, reappear at the next working street-lamp, making for the lightless corner house with a broken gate. I stand by the door for a while, as I always do, listening. Then, when I know it's empty, I let myself in. Feeling my way in the dark, I go straight up and into Sandra's room and look back down into the street. Mark has stayed put, waiting for a light to come on, for something to happen, for some sign that I'm really in the house. But I won't give it to him. I watch, invisible, until he gives up and turns back down the street. Then I go downstairs and turn on the TV.

This is how it begins. This is the afternoon that brings me, half a life later, here, to a one-roomed wooden house a stone's throw from Tuomas Envall's church.

6

Something woke me – a sound of some kind. I lie in the darkness for quite a while before realising that it isn't darkness at all. Light is pushing bravely through the four sets of plaid curtains, those to my left – which I think is south – in particular. Outside it will be bluish and cold, but the curtain fabric warms it up, and I'd be quite happy to stay this way for an hour or so. However, my watch, when I find it in my dressing-gown pocket, says it is almost midday. So there's no option.

It's on my way to the shower-room that I see the envelope pushed under the draught excluder at the bottom of the door. My name is type-written in capitals, underlined, with a full stop after.

Inside, the letter starts without any kind of salutation, and the capitals continue:

I'M SORRY IF I SCARED YOU, BUT I'M SAYING PLEASE THINK. I WANT TO TELL YOU THAT I KNOW YOU HAVE SUFFERED, BUT THAT'S BECAUSE YOU RESIST THE LORD, AND THE FACT IS YOUR SUFFERING CAN BE A PEARL WITHOUT A PRICE IF YOU OPEN YOUR EYES. AND PLEASE, PLEASE DON'T COME HERE AND DO THE SAME THING ALL OVER AGAIN. LOOK WHERE IT GOT YOU LAST TIME – REMEMBER THAT. WELL, THEY WANT TO TURN EVERYTHING INTO A MUSEUM AND THEY HAVE ALREADY TAKEN OUR CHURCH AWAY HERE, BUT IT IS NOT THE ONLY ONE NOW AND WE DO STILL HOLD SERVICE HERE IN MY HOUSE EVERY WEEK. IT IS THE WAY. COME TO IT AND YOU WILL SEE. FORGIVENESS IS MINE, SAID THE LORD, AND IT CAN FALL ON ALL OF US LIKE MORNING DEW.

She doesn't sign her name either. My first reaction is that the whole illogical business about suffering drives me wild – but at the same time, something about the letter makes me want to take her two hands in mine and cry. Then I read it again and my blood runs cold. It's the lines in the middle:
LOOK
WHERE IT GOT YOU LAST TIME. REMEMBER
THAT
. Well, I'm scarcely liable to forget. So is she making a threat? It depends entirely on the tone of voice I use when I read it in my head. But the fact is, I'm sitting here, on my own, in what amounts to a wooden hut, and I still don't know who I should call if anything goes wrong.

Then, all of a sudden I'm back there, in the field. ‘
Sinner!
Sinner!
' Christina is calling out, not in the sing-song voice kids usually use to insult each other with, but fast and hard, as if she were literally goading me with something sharp. Her fat face is angry-white, her brown eyes glitter, bird-like. I can still feel the surge of anger that pushed itself through me back then. She's certainly not going to stop me doing my work – but how can I make myself safe? Should I go to the police? Would they understand? I just don't know, and I push the letter back in its envelope and then can't even decide where to put it. More than anything, I realise with a shock, I would like to burn it, but that won't get me far, and in any case it would set off the smoke alarm. So in the end I have to rush my shower and go out with wet hair; I'm almost late for my tour of the church.

Because of weakened structural timbers, special permission has had to be given for my visit, and I, having made a signed declaration that I will not hold anyone responsible for injury to my person, have to be accompanied by both Heikki and the pastor of the next parish, who currently covers this one as well. The pastor is already waiting by the gate, a thin, brisk man, Swedish-speaking, not given to conversation. We have to wait for Heikki before anything can begin. He removes the handwritten poster, stuck with masking-tape across the join of the big double doors.
The Faith is still alive! Give us back our Church!
it says.

Heikki moves it carefully to one side and attaches it again with the same pieces of tape.

Everything, even the roof and the outside, which looks like large blocks of painted stone, is wooden. Inside, there's no electricity but light pours in through huge, clear, glass windows.

The whole thing seems too big for such a small place, but I have to remember that people would set out the day before and travel for miles to worship. There's seating for four or five hundred people, including a gallery, painted in two subtly different shades of pale green. There's an organ, and accommodation for the choir. The roofed pulpit is reached by a small staircase of twelve steps. Between Tuomas' arrival in Elojoki and his climbing those twelve steps to preach his first sermon, were six hard months, during which time his perfectly ordinary Lutheran faith became a new sect, Envallism. Those months are the main object of my research here: what exactly led Tuomas to write that first sermon,
The Forgotten Commandment
?

‘Let me tell you,' it begins, ‘about Salvation –' It's a text full of poetry and passion, extremist, absolute. It's as different as can be from the run-of-the mill dissertation that Tuomas completed two years before. I've read it many times, searching in vain for clues as to what might have happened in the intervening time. Now, standing in his church, I can imagine the way the light fell through the window and lit him as he stood at the lectern. I can hear him, his voice warm and slow as he sounded each word out, giving it its due. I can see his eyes, the opal green of sea-ice, shining the same way.

‘In this most fundamental of alterations,' he said, everything remained outwardly the same, yet was transformed inside. A flame burned inside the saved person, and its warmth could be felt ‘with every breath and every step taken'. Did they, he asked the villagers of Elojoki, want to be saved? And if so, did they obey the Lord's Commandments as they should?

He read from the big Bible, Exodus 20:4: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. . . .' He asked the congregation to look about them in the church, and to think of what was in their homes: it was clear how far and how deeply all of them, including and especially himself – he was not leaving out himself – had sunk in this respect. But God in his mercy had shown Tuomas Envall the error; he would show them.

An image, Tuomas told his parishioners, was ‘a window through which the devil might climb', and what they must do to prepare themselves for Salvation, to ‘open the way', was to remove from their lives all visual representations of any kind. By this he meant not only images of religious subjects, but images of anything at all: it was a small sacrifice, when compared to the ecstasy of Salvation, but it must be done thoroughly and whole-heartedly. God, he told them, required of the villagers of Elojoki that they rub down and paint over the flowers painted on their chests and trinket boxes, their spinning wheels and clocks, their cribs and chairs and cupboards; that they smash and bury their painted foreign crockery, however much it had cost; that they tear down any wallpapers patterned with flowers, leaves, fruit, ships and other such things and burn them, along with any paintings, prints and drawings they might possess; that they collect any carvings, including children's toys, that they might have in their homes; that they search books for illustrations and remove them, also to be burned; that they sift through their closets for items of clothing or other fabrics which, unlike the traditional village plaids and stripes, might have imitations embroidered or printed or woven upon them – these, however, need not be burned but could be shredded into thin strips and made into rugs – The congregation, stirred, bewildered, stepped out into yellow autumn light, the first fallen leaves blowing about their feet, the sky achingly blue. Perhaps they were still undecided. But in the morning, the cherubim, crown and sun were sawn from the pulpit, and the poor-man statue from outside the door of the church. A party of men set to work in the vicarage itself. They made a great pile of papers and wood in the garden, to which Tuomas added his oil paintings and water-colour sketches and the illustrations from his many books. People came to watch, then one by one, went home to build up their own fires.

It was observed that the rich had more imagery in their lives than the poor, that many of the things to be destroyed were of foreign origin, and that imagery was not only a Popish but also a Russian thing. By the end of the week the repainting and repapering was done and the windows hung with new curtains in plain colours, traditional plaids and stripes. Tuomas, elected almost unanimously as the new pastor of Elojoki, took possession of the vicarage. In the weeks and months ahead, forgotten images would of course keep turning up and have to be individually destroyed, but in essence they were now ready, Tuomas said, to begin God's work, which he called
The Work
of Love.

The wood of the pulpit is warm to the touch.

‘Look,' I call out, ‘you can see the saw marks. And over there – what's missing from there?'

‘It would have been a coat of arms,' Heikki informs me promptly. ‘And there, on that wall behind the altar was once a huge painting of the crucifixion, commissioned from Holland especially by a local landowner, not long before Tuomas Envall arrived. You can see where it was fixed.'

‘What I'm after,' I tell him, ‘is what made him think of it. What
exactly
gave him the idea –'

The pastor waits for us by the door, as if genuinely in fear of the weakened roof. When pressed, he says that he believes, given the recent split from the official church, that the building should be restored to the condition that existed prior to Envall's arrival. The Envallists, of course, do not.

‘I am what you call a pig in the middle,' Heikki says as we close the door behind us.

We go back to the community centre afterwards. Maps and plans of the area and its buildings cover an entire wall of Heikki's office. His large, blond, wooden desk, on the other hand, is polished and paperless. There is a computer, a pair of gloves and some car-keys, a framed photograph with its back to me, plus the inevitable coffee cup and saucer: a filter machine sits on top of a filing cabinet in the corner, and I accept his offer of a cup for myself.

‘There's a woman here from England,' I tell him. ‘Someone I knew a long time ago. Christina. Her second name used to be Gardner but –'

‘Kirsti Saarinen,' he tells me. He leans over the desk to top up my cup. ‘I don't suppose you could take her back with you? That woman is a thorn in all our sides. Her sons too. She and her followers camped outside the church, singing, to try and stop it being closed. They object to everything – the restoration, the idea of the museum, the new parish boundaries. Naturally, they don't like the school closing. They complain about this new community hall, even as they book it for their weddings –'

So I tell him about Christina's visit. I say that she came at night and made wild accusations. I don't tell him what they are. I say she's sent me a threatening letter, but I don't show it to him.

‘I had no idea she would be here,' I say. ‘Do you think I should inform the police, in case she bothers me again?'

Heikki leans back in his chair.

‘It is difficult for me to judge,' he says – and of course, I have told him so very little: it's either that or the whole lot, the Story of my Face, and likewise, it would be a problem if I did inform the police.

‘She wants me to abandon my research,' I tell him.

‘I expect that makes you want to do it even more!' Heikki says as he writes down the number of the nearest police station on a compliments slip and hands it to me.

‘But most likely,' he adds, ‘she is just unstable. Spring is the season for depression. You pull yourself through winter, and then, for a while, it just gets worse. The mud, the slush, still not much light – you'll see. I really can't tell you what to do about her. But with more important things,' he adds, ‘I can help.' Next, he'll show me the parish records, take me around the main house properly –