The Story of My Face (29 page)

Heikki goes to the door to greet his colleagues; I slip onto the platform. I watch the rows fill up: Mrs Lohi wheeled in by a young woman who might be the granddaughter she mentioned, several other of the older people from her flats; the friendly woman who runs the day-care and chats to me over the fence, Maria and Tuomas, the couple who have just bought a derelict farm to renovate, Katrin from the supermarket, her husband and oldest girl. Christina and Pekka and a small group of hangers-on, an odd mixture of elderly and teenage, come in and sit at the back, and then, to my surprise, the room is over two-thirds full.

‘Just a few words of introduction,' Heikki says. I have the feeling of blushing, though I don't, of course. ‘Many of you here will have met our speaker, Dr Natalie Baron, from the University of Durham, England. She is the author of many articles dealing with interesting aspects of religious history –' So says the man I've pressed myself against, touched all over, let inside of me, cried out to, held. Three times now, but always in the darkest dark we can make, blinds, curtains and eyes closed tight.

‘I believe this is her first proper visit to Finland and it has come about as a result of the generous support from institutions in both countries –'

My head's so light, I could float away.

‘One day will we do this seeing too?' he asked me two days ago, stroking the palm of my hand in the darkness. . . . ‘Why,' I whispered back, ‘why risk spoiling such a very good thing?'

And the kiss that followed was an answer, and also not one, and I fell asleep by accident so that I had to ask him to leave his own bedroom in the morning while I dressed, then follow him into work, fully visible to anyone who looked –

Behind me, someone is fiddling with the blinds. And now Heikki has done with the credits to funders et cetera and is winding down, pointing out that in order to pursue my interests here I have had to get used to Finnish ways and, of course, the climate. . . . There's a polite spattering of applause, as he goes to his front-row seat.

‘The subject of my enquiry here has been the life of Tuomas Envall, a nineteenth-century cleric and the founder of a sect utterly opposed to visual representation of all kinds. More exactly, as most people here already know by now, I have wanted to discover what made Tuomas Envall invent this particular faith, based supposedly on an extreme, over-literal reading of the second commandment, but clearly emanating from some other, deeper place in his psyche or understanding of the world. . . .
Why
did he do it? That is the question which has brought me here to Elojoki, and I will share my answer with you tonight.

‘It should be said first that Envallism is a sect which, against all odds, continues today, albeit now broken into a series of rival factions, some of which bear little resemblance to the original. The First Envallist Church is the most traditional of these. In 1980, they purchased several small islands to the far north-east of Scotland, and most of this group either live or aspire to live on the larger, habitable island, or else on the ‘mainland' nearby, using Middle Skerry as a site of worship. The weather is very harsh and this is a lifestyle not without discomfort and risk. Perhaps surprisingly, this far from liberal church has a growing membership. Their summer meeting attracts a wide variety of people, especially the young. During July, this remote archipelago is, in terms of roads and accommodation, acutely congested. The hardier visitors camp or stay in caravans, and people on the neighbouring islands make a sizeable income from this and from offering bed and breakfast and boat trips to the harbour on Midskerry.

‘As it happens, the First Envallist community owes its Island existence to the initial purchase of the islands by businessman Bob Harris. It could neither have sustained itself nor repaid its debt to him without the revenue brought by visitors. The summer meeting is free; as is admission at any time to the peculiar but splendid modernist church, with its wall of huge, round windows and asymmetrical roof, designed and built, apart from specialist masonry and lead-work, by the community itself. Donations are encouraged, and the fees charged at other times during the year for attendance at courses or retreats are substantial. A copy of one of Envall's essays, just twenty pages long, hand-set and printed on the Island's press, costs nearly twenty pounds.

‘Nonetheless, and largely for reasons they cannot articulate, “looking for something” or “drawn to it, somehow”, a steady stream of people do make long journeys to this obscure and windswept place where images do not exist. Again, why? The answer to that question is a complex one; I will leave you to consider it while I speak. . . .'

The paper rustles in my hand as I move the first sheet from left to right on the lectern. I force myself to take a couple of deep breaths.

‘To return to Tuomas: the only remaining likeness of Tuomas Envall, painted when he was fourteen or fifteen, can be seen in the Maakuntamuseo. It shows a thin, dreamy boy: rather wistful, not very strong, you'd say, and looking at it you would never guess that within a decade he would be inciting the residents of Elojoki to pile their most treasured possessions in a heap and set them alight. . . .'

And of course, I'm thinking as I speak
, You'd never have
guessed, from a portrait of me as I was at the beginning of that summer
of
1969
, what I would be like by the end of it
. This is the oddest thing: I'm realising, literally as I speak, that I've come, in an oblique sort of way and on the very slightest of grounds, to identify with the man I set out to vilify.

‘Of course, biography is not a science,' I tell them as I think all this. ‘Imagination is a part of the process as much as research is. . . .'

I tell them about Tuomas's conversation with Runar in the study. I tell them about Tuomas's arrival in Elojoki, where the minister was dying but refusing to admit it; how he wasn't wanted but refused to go away. I tell them how he found his paints at the bottom of his bag. How the bishop ignored him. How he painted for some of every day and then for most of every day, and so time passed until summer began, though the old pastor, gaunt and pale, still wore scarves wound around his neck. It's a story, more than a paper, but then this is a community hall, and not a university.

‘By now,' I continue, ‘it was high summer. Like now. The air was filled with every kind of sound, birdsong, the whispering of leaves, the whine of mosquitoes. Night hardly existed. . . .' For two months it had all been brown, but now that was forgotten and everything was green. The tendrils of garden cucumbers wound themselves almost visibly around the sticks and strings that supported them.

Tuomas had made a log-and-plank table and an easel so that he could work outside. He read virtually nothing, just worked continuously at his pictures. Now, he could give a sense of depth to objects, a feeling of weight. He could match colours, or create the sense of them, show how the light fell. He could paint a picture of a forest that you might almost walk into by mistake, but as soon as it was achieved this lost its satisfaction. He found himself wanting to depict things he could only just see, moments of extraordinary harmony that vanished before he could mix the first colour, colours that existed only while things moved, the vibrations of light, the unseen essence beneath the appearance. . . . “So far had I gone away from Him,” he wrote long afterwards in his
Confessions
, “that had the pastor at that point come to the door while I was engaged in this pursuit, and called for my help in God's work, I would have been angry with him for taking me away from what I did. . . .” His hair grew long and his eyes were wide with looking. Although he always went to the
pappila
in the morning, sometimes he forgot to go during the day, and sometimes he was awake all night, painting or seeing what he might paint in his mind's eye. . . .'

I drink a little from my glass of water, setting it carefully back on the table with no trace of a shake. I look around quickly: the audience seems attentive enough, their faces slack, their eyes alert, though one of Christina's elderly companions, I notice, has fallen asleep.

I tell them about the portrait: a well-known story, but always lacking in certain crucial details, which I supply:

‘It must have been mid-August,' I tell them. ‘The nights would be returning. Let's imagine Tuomas wore a jacket when he sat outside at his table in the evenings. One evening, when he's returned to the small house to get a pair of fingerless gloves as well, he looks up from his work and sees Jaakko, the boy who sometimes helps the housekeeper Ulla with heavier work at the
pappila
, standing there on the path, looking straight at him. It's a look, not a stare, not hostile. The boy doesn't stop when Tuomas sees him.

‘Remember,' I tell them, ‘that Tuomas hasn't heard a friendly word since he arrived in the place. . . . “It's late, Jaakko,” Tuomas says, when the boy comes a few steps closer, and puts the small cloth-wrapped parcel he's carrying carefully on the table. “Are you making a picture?” he asks, edging round.

‘Tuomas gestures at the board propped in front of him, the mess of green, the thin but inky blue. Several nights in a row he's been trying to capture the quality of summer light at dusk, the way the colours and the simple shapes of trees sing together in flat but plangent voices, those long moments when the shadows lose their edge, dissolve. It's an impossible project; he half hates and half loves it, can't stop, finishes and dismisses each effort with increasing speed.

‘“Trees,” Jaakko tells him.

‘“Well done!” Both their faces break into smiles. Now the boy is at Tuomas's side. He smells of sweat, smoke, milk. His clothes are dark, his face, forearms, hands and unshod feet glow cleanly in the dusk.

‘“It's no good,” Tuomas says. The boy appears indifferent or to reserve his judgement.

‘“Can you do a cow?” he asks.

‘Tuomas leans back in his chair, stretches. Five months of unspoken words inside him shift and loosen, ready to slither and rush out of his mouth all at once. He braces himself carefully against this. He knows he is half mad with loneliness; he doesn't want to scare the boy away. Jaakko is twelve, thirteen at the most. Since March, he has grown so that now his trouser hems float around his calves. Is there perhaps a bit of a shadow on his jaw? Hard to tell.

‘“Can you? Or a heron?” Jaakko is asking. “An owl?”

‘“Why, yes, I can.” Tuomas's eyes are bright. “Even a fish.”

‘“Me?” Jaakko's hand briefly grips Tuomas's arm, his face is split by an enormous grin – “Paint me!”

‘“It's night,” Tuomas says, “Run on back now, say your prayers and get what sleep you can –” But of course Tuomas longs to do such a thing, to paint not the hugeness of God's creation but a small part of His humanity, this part, who speaks to him like this, stands close and makes him feel warm, who, so long as he painted, would not go away –

‘“Please –”

‘“I turned back to the board,” Tuomas says – again, it's right there, in the published
Confessions
– “and seeing that it had failed so completely that nothing could spoil it, I darkened the sky, put above the trees the blob of a moon that did not exist, and painted on in the last moments of the light, a man possessed, trying to make a likeness of the figure leaning against the trunk of a tree.”

‘That, in the
Confessions
, is all he says about the painting. But the brush strokes, I'd guess, were sometimes free and fast, sometimes intimate, lingering, and not so much thought about as felt, each one a response to a particular glance at Jaakko, who stood as still as he could, and was disappointed to be told that the picture was not finished, that he would have to come back another time –'

‘What is it that you are suggesting?' someone in the back row of the audience calls out.

‘Please,' I say, ‘let me go on.'

‘Questions will be at the end,' Heikki booms out from the front row.

‘It was the very next morning,' I tell them, ‘that the old pastor finally knocked on Tuomas's door, and gestured back to the
pappila
. They went together into the study, and the pastor, his huge, swollen neck wrapped in cloths smelling of juniper oil, his voice finally gone, handed Tuomas a sheaf of papers: the sermon he had planned to deliver that very day.

‘Tuomas stood in the lidded box with his hands shaking, the minister in the front row, staring, grimacing, straining forwards, as if by sheer effort of will he could make clear what he had meant by the blotted, thick-nibbed script which Tuomas was struggling to decipher – as if he could make what he heard inside his head come out of someone else's mouth. It was a mockery and a humiliation, but Tuomas was discovering in himself all over again a capacity – almost a desire – to bear something unpleasant until it ended, and he continued sound by sound and word by word, as a child might read a primer, while the pastor banged his fist on the seat next to him, making the faintest of thudding sounds, and now and then mouthed words with absolutely no noise coming out, and the congregation made of it whatever they could, and then hurried away.

‘Afterwards, Tuomas led the minister slowly along the short stretch of road to his house. It was hot. Some of the birches were beginning, just, to turn yellow, and small gusts of wind blew up fine dust on the road. He felt the minister leaning increasingly on him, so that by the time they reached the house it was clear that he should pick him up and carry him in, through the dining-room and to his room at the back of the house, calling for Ulla as he did so.

‘The old man was easy to carry. He revived slightly once he was lying down and was able to suck at the wet cloth Ulla provided. He still did not want a doctor. He indicated that Tuomas should stay with him, and now his eyes were fixed on the younger man seated by his bed just as they had been in church, though the task now was more difficult still.