The Story of My Face (30 page)

‘“In silence?” Tuomas asked, “or should I speak? Are you afraid? Is your soul quiet? Do any sins trouble you? For you know that repentance is the dew that comes in the morning and forgiveness the sun that dries it up. Prayer is as the air we breathe; we will pray –” and he began to do so, in a low, gentle voice, beginning with the familiar and appropriate, and moving on from these to things half remembered and words he was not sure if he had invented. As important as the words, he felt, was touch, to take the cold hands of the man who was no longer a minister in his own hands as he spoke the words that tradition and intuition gave to him, and to look back into the eyes that were looking into his. He knew that he must keep looking until the other man could no longer see him, and when, with a slow shudder, the old man allowed the last of life to escape him, Tuomas knew the exact moment of its passing, for the eyes he was looking into suddenly stilled, as water does before it knits into ice. Tuomas stood, and made the sign of the cross. He felt that something had taken place between himself and the old man, and he felt as if something divine, “a kind of white heat that did not burn”, had passed through him, leaving an immense aching calm in its wake. But it was impossible to know – even as it happened, and even more so afterwards – what the old man's experience had been.

‘Ulla was not in the kitchen, but he found her, to his surprise, in the sitting-room, waiting with her hands, raw-looking, too large for the rest of her, in the lap of her skirt. They returned together to the room, and looked for a few moments, unspeaking. The old man's white hair was flung about his head, his jaw had dropped, his cheeks sunken. His shirt was unbuttoned, but his neck was still bandaged, a misshapen bridge between body and head. It was hard now to imagine that he had so recently lived.

‘Then, as Tuomas was about to offer prayer, Ulla said: “Leave me with him.”

‘And Tuomas asked, his voice quiet but bright as he began to understand that here was a story of some kind of earthly love, guilt, betrayal: “Did you want to be with him before?”

‘“Yes,” she told him, “had the former minister also wanted it.”

‘Walking out into the hall, Tuomas felt Elojoki, two hundred souls, all this time impervious to him, begin to open and melt, revealing itself as the land had after snow. He walked out into it, found the churchwarden and his son, sent the boy, Jaakko, to the bishop with the news, suggested that the wife go to help Ulla. By then, the light was failing, and he returned to his own house.

‘The table outside was as he had left it the night before, and he sat at it a moment and looked at what he had painted. There, roughly done, but oh so clear, was the boy he had just been looking at, leant against the tree, his hips at an angle, his shoulders back, his eyes looking straight at Tuomas and wearing an expression they had never worn at the time, insolent, inviting – “I saw it was a terrible thing, full of awful desires, which I had not felt in me until I had painted it and then looked at what I had painted, and these were not things which God intended to exist but rather –”

‘Tuomas says that he took the brush he had used, broke it, then went inside and knelt for hours in the dark with his elbows on his bed, as he used to when he was a child. When he had finished praying, he began straight away to write the document that became his first sermon and then the essay,
Close The Devil's Window
(1870). Here he coined the phrase that has come to sum Envallism up: “An image is a window for the devil to climb through.”

‘The passage continues:

From then onwards I began to truly see that ‘the heavens, even the heavens are the Lord's, but the earth hath he given to the children of men': we are being told here that the making of what exists and its ways of being is God's work and our work is to live on the earth as best we can. The beginning of which, clearly, is to accept the Glory of Creation, and not to substitute for it devious imitations of our own making.

Of images and idols the psalmist says: ‘They have hands but they handle not, feet but they walk not, neither speak they through their throats. They that make them are like unto them, so is everyone that trusteth in them. . . .'

Imitations bring to our minds that which no longer exists or that which was never created, when it is God's will that it does not exist or was not made, was not meant to be. They lead to a contemplation of ourselves and our own powers which estranges us from the Divine. They open up a space for sinful thoughts and actions to enter in, the Devil's window, which we must close tight. . . .'

‘Well,' I tell them, ‘there he sits at his table in the small house where I have been staying, a young man of his time and place, who has just given the last rites for the first time, adrift in a sea of trees. . . .'

It's at this point that I decide to stop, even though a couple of pages elaborating and justifying my theory remain. I have come to love Tuomas Envall and I have finished with him at the same time. As far as I'm concerned, you could say it's all over and done with, just like my love affair with Armstong, Aldrin and Collins all those years ago.

‘Thank you,' I say, as I step away from the lectern and look up at my audience.

Most of them are looking back at me, or at the light streaming through the blinds behind me. Perhaps, indeed, they can't see me very well? Quite a few moments pass. No one claps. I sit down, and let myself look at Heikki, who smiles broadly back.

In silence, I pick up my water glass, drink what's left of it. Then I fill it up again. While I'm doing this, two of the pastors in the front row get up, nod in my direction, and hurry out, leaving one remaining. He studies his fingernails; the academics lean into each other and murmur inaudible observations. But at the same time, they are all still looking at me. I finish my second glass of water, put down the glass.

Heikki clears his throat and says:

‘Are there some questions?' and still no one speaks. Perhaps the problem is that those who don't know about 1969 will be thinking:
But what happened to you?
While at the same time, those who do know will be wanting to know:
What was it like?

32

I slept on, serene in the pink and green room. Mark woke, suddenly alert, just after midnight. There was something in the air, a faint, dirty tang. He pulled his curtain open, and even though the window faced onto the road, it was obvious that something was wrong: it wasn't dark and it wasn't daytime but he could see every leaf on the Avenue trees, glowing gold. He clambered over Barbara to reach the window at the back, shouted her awake: ‘Fire! The house is burning down!'

The door handle burned his hand. The whole house side of the caravan was buckling, the air hot and rough with smoke, hard to breathe. The fire roared, spat, pulled everything good in towards it. Through the open front door they could see the banisters igniting one by one. The living-room glowed, filled wall to wall with flame.

John Hern was standing on the lawn.

‘Have you phoned the fire brigade?' Mark shouted at him. But his father, the tang of petrol in his nose, didn't reply, wouldn't take his eyes from the fire.

‘I hope it's gone,' he told Barbara.

‘What do you mean?' she asked him, as if her memory had been vaporised by the heat of the fire.

‘The image!' he yelled at her, as if, likewise, he had forgotten that they were at war, ‘I just couldn't find it!'

By the time Mark returned from the next-door phone the stairs were a sheet of flame. As he watched, the strings of the blinds in his parents' bedroom exploded briefly into rows of tiny lights. Neighbours gathered, handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths, just outside the front fence. Sirens screamed up the hill, the engine, larger than life, disgorged men who landed at a run. ‘Anyone in there?' the leader called out. ‘Any pets? Count your blessings –' They dragged fat hoses over flower-beds, set two up at the front. Water arched up in orange plumes, thickening the existing smell with steam, laying a fierce hiss over the cracking and stumbling of the burning house, the roar of the fire itself. Two firemen broke through the side gate, the key to which must have been glowing, red hot in the flaming kitchen drawers –

Imagine – or rather, don't, just don't imagine what it is like to come to, choking, and think
Where am I?
, then see the flames at the end of the bed of that pretty green and pink room. I can't move. Then I am crammed onto the window-sill without knowing how I've got there. The far window is open already, air rushing in – good to breathe but also fodder for the blaze. Flames behind me, an immense heat pushing up from below, I grip the upright of the window-frame. I see the fire crew rush into the garden, and then for some reason – pure folly, blind fate, damned curiosity – I turn back to have one last look at what I am about to escape from. As I do this – the only thing in my entire life that I will wish I had not done – as I turn, the paraffin heater goes up. There is the crack of an explosion, right in front of my face, inside my head, and in an instant I am blinded, consumed, flayed and welded to the sill. Then, somehow, I jump –

33

My first question: it's from the thin man who interrupted me ages ago. He's someone I've passed in the street once or twice, sitting now towards the end of Christina's row:

‘So – you are saying that Tuomas Envall lusted after a young boy?'

‘Yes,' I tell him. ‘That particular boy, who like everyone I've mentioned, did exist and was very probably the one. But on the other hand, I don't think he ever did anything about these feelings, and certainly we do know that Tuomas went on to marry and have a family. What I think Tuomas did was to create another sin, in order to avoid even naming what he had felt that night –'

‘Yet nowhere does it say so, categorically –'

‘The
Confessions
mention only “a figure”. But among the fragments I have discovered during my research are some remarks that must relate to the same incident. For example: Fragment 18, found on the fly-leaf of a Bible which was given to Tuomas by the congregation in Helsinki, in 1898: “Even now, that youth can appear before me as he did then, standing not as he actually did, but as the devil made him seem to me –”'

‘And where is this fragment?'

‘I have handed all my discoveries over to the safe keeping of the NBA. I understand they'll form part of a special archive, when the museum is built –' At this, there's a murmur of mingled dissent and disbelief from the back row. ‘Whose past is this?' someone asks. But, to my surprise, Christina, appearing very calm and collected, silences her followers. She gets to her feet and says:

‘Natalie Baron, I'm afraid I have to say that I believe you.' She smiles, and then bursts into tears at the same time. Pekka, next to her, puts his arm around her shoulder and whispers something in her ear, but she shrugs him off, and sits, the tears more or less under control, her eyes glued to my face. It is no longer as if she could burn me up by looking, but as if I could somehow say something now that would pull her clear of her entire past life and set her on a different course. But of course, I can't. And I only ever wanted a hearing, not belief. So I nod briefly, say ‘Thank you,' and then look past Christina and say, smiling and nodding in a general kind of way: ‘I must say it has been wonderful to have such an open-minded and attentive audience. And I must say that I am surprised no one has put all this together before –' All the while, I'm thinking:
Will someone
please ask me something else?
and I have to be rescued by Heikki.

‘Would it be right to say that you seem very sympathetic to your subject, this rather misguided Reverend Envall?'

‘Oh, I do like him a lot,' I say. ‘Far more than I expected to.'

‘But,' Heikki continues, ‘according to your theory, he led people badly astray –' A woman in the middle row interrupts: ‘What bothers me more is that this is a man who had feelings towards children which no one can condone –'