The Story of My Face Read Online Free Page B

fell into a huge void, any question he put forth would be sent away, like a stray boat accidentally hitting the riverside, with precisely the necessary force.
    So Tuomas put up some rough shelves. He fixed a rail to hang his clothes from. He unpacked his possessions from their boxes and bags, considering carefully where each thing should best be placed. He had good writing equipment, and his books included not only theological texts, but also works of scientific speculation, poetry, history – but relative to what he’d have as a pastor today, or to what I’ve brought for a few weeks or months, his other personal possessions were few: two recorders, treble and descant; a silver watch; his pre-ordination clothes – well made in good fabrics. A tiny woollen hat, unworn, knitted in a cream-and-red pattern, made for him, so his Aunt Eeva had said, before his birth, by his real mother. This he hung from one of the four wooden pegs by the door, where I now keep my selection of weather-proof coats.
    The disintegrating leather bag which he unpacked last of all yielded the contents of the bottom drawer of his closet at home: unused stationery, old notebooks and a wooden box – a forgotten, boyhood thing containing six cracked pans of watercolour paint, the blue, black and the green much used. Later, in his Confession , he would describe this box as if it were Pandora’s: ‘It was to take me as far away from God as I have ever been,’ he wrote; ‘it was my Apple, and no sooner was it in my hand than I began to devour it; I was in the desert not even fourteen days, and I acquiesced –
    But I imagine that at the time, it was with a gentle kind of pleasure, half surprise, half déjà vu, , that he opened the wooden box, then felt again inside the leather bag that contained it and discovered there also the small sable brush that exactly fitted the groove cut between the two rows of paints. . . .
    What I think is that if Tuomas had a real mother and father – or just one parent, or even a brother or sister – then, once he had realised that the Pastor of Elojoki did not want him, he would have simply stayed the night and left in the morning. But as things were, the way that Elojoki refused him, and the way that he survived it, were to change Tuomas utterly. And maybe, without knowing it, that’s what he wanted and what he came here for.
    As for me, according to my proposal, I am to write a scholarly biography of the founder of one of the least known but most interesting post-Lutheran Finnish Protestant sects, the kind of book that about ten other academics will read but which will get me a few trips abroad and just possibly, one day, a slightly better job.
    But perhaps what I am really doing, and have been doing ever since the accident happened, is telling the story of my face, in which Tuomas Envall plays a part. Ever since that time I have been putting the story together and taking it apart again, casting and recasting it in a way that is, when you think of it, oddly appropriate to the subject. I’ve been pulling small details out of memory and finding others attached to them. I’ve imagined what I cannot know, I’ve read, adjusted my imaginings, thought events through from other people’s point of view (though clearly, I missed Christina out!). And of course, the story of my face is bound together with other stories: the story of a marriage, of a mother and her son; of the birth of a dream; of the archaeology of an accident. It is also a love story of sorts.
    I have to tell it and I don’t yet know where it ends. But I do know that my part of it begins on a spring afternoon over thirty years ago, when a red-haired girl with a face that was perhaps already extraordinary, but in a quite ordinary way – when I – first saw Barbara Hern.

4

    I’m thirteen. I’m wearing my school uniform and I carry a green duffle-bag, first properly, with the cord