The Story of My Face Read Online Free

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜I’ve been worried sick –’ she tells me.
    â€˜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:
    â€˜Do you know how long it will take?’ she interrupts.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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