A Beauty (36 page)

The two women fell silent. Their concern was obvious and unsettling, and she felt the oddest leaning towards them, looking at their identical frowns, a leaning so strong in her that for a second she had the idea they were going to tell her it was them – or at least it was the mother – who had taken her in and cared for her all those years ago. For a second, she let herself think it could be. But then she realized that of course they were only imagining the toddler she would have been. That was all it was. The look on their faces was for the two-year-old, for any distressed two-year-old. The mother reached up to her daughter’s hair and brushed at it as if it had fallen forward over her brow. The daughter handed Elena a note. It was the name and address of a sauna in Hattula, with a time and date marked on it: four o’clock that afternoon. “My mother says you take sauna today.”

It was absurd to go to Hattula at all, but she had no time for much else; the next day she would return to Helsinki and board a plane for home. So she found herself in the quaint little church, Holy Cross Church, outside the village of Hattula, where every wall and ceiling, every arch and column, was decorated with frescoes. Monks centuries ago had painted them, every one to tell a story. She walked up and down the aisles, alone in the church. The soft colours, warm against the old plaster, and the simple scenes with their flattened perspectives soothed her. There was a patient kind of hope, strange to her, in the bland faces of the angels and devils and the men and women on the walls. There were many women. Her favourite was one with flowing gold hair down to her knees, who held a building in her hands. Probably it was a church, but she held it as if it was the
entire world. She held it like a child holds a dollhouse she still believes in, and looked into its windows with deep, abiding interest.

As she was about to leave, she passed by a set of stocks that rested against the wall near the door. Punishment for misbehaviour in church, she assumed. Not wanting them to be her last impression of the place, she turned back to survey the paintings, to let her eyes sweep over the aqua, green, ochre colours; the awkward grace of the figures; the acceptance on the faces. One scene caught her eye. She stepped up to see it closer. A girl was lying in bed with a pillow under her shoulders and a rumpled green blanket up to her waist. She was holding an open book, and although one of her eyes was focussed on the pages, as if reading, the other was cast down, so you realized she was not seeing the words in front of her; she was thinking – or maybe not thinking, just musing. Yes, something in the book had made her sink away, into her mind. She held the book with one hand; the other hand was clasped protectively around her ribcage. She was unconsciously cradling herself. Three haloed women hovered over her bed. Two of them looked down at her, holding their hands out, ready to go to her aid. Her mother and her sister, Elena thought. The third was praying. Whoever she was, she had already given up hope. The squiggles and arabesques that decorated every otherwise bare surface, and linked the scenes throughout the church, swirled about them like a breeze, or like vines waiting to take over once these humans had played out their time.

Beside the church, on bucolic land leading down to a lake (there were low stone walls, buttercups blooming in calf-high grass), was the cemetery. She wandered for a while, reading names and dates. Not much more was incised on the stones, not many clues were provided to tell who these people had been, and the little
information that had been given had eroded on the older stones and was unreadable. There were many buried here who had died in 1918, as her mother had. She strolled up and down the rows, wondering how she would feel if she found a headstone with that name on it.

The women at the hotel had told her about the battle that had taken place here, and she could see marks on some graves that might well be bullet holes, but it was impossible to imagine how it would have been, to fight here some sunny day like today. Boys and girls – the troops were mostly young, in their teens and twenties – running from one headstone to the next, ducking behind them, shooting from behind them, shooting at one another, the booming of the guns, the panting, the curses, with the lake glimmering in the background and the clouds floating by, oblivious, overhead. The dead below, oblivious. Impossible to feel how it would have been to stand among the graves, afterwards, waiting to be executed. Or to hide behind a headstone and witness what was happening. Perhaps her father had done that, right here, where she was standing; perhaps he’d crouched here, at the outside edge of these old graves, watching. She sank down, herself, her hand on an old stone for balance, and looked out from behind it. She shut her eyes and heard birds chirping, not gunfire, not cries, birds.

She walked down a country lane, alongside the lake, to the traditional smoke sauna, a little wood hut by the water. She reached it at four o’clock and found it ready for her. A note pinned on the door had her name on it and the time and the information that the bill had been paid by the hotel in Hämeenlinna. Inside was a towel and a switch made of birch twigs. More punishment, she thought, recalling the stocks, but she didn’t feel she was being
punished; just the opposite. She felt thankful. She stayed longer than she’d thought she could in the sauna, sweating in the extreme heat so encompassing that it blocked out all thinking.

After the sauna and a cold dip off the little dock, she sat under the trees, enervated. But it suited her to feel weak and tired and cleaned out and at the end of things. The tree branches lifted and fell, the shadows around her lifted and fell, the secretive leaves rustled.
The name means woods or glade
, she remembered. Maybe her father had been here; maybe after the battle in the cemetery, he’d run here and rested. She saw the very place for him to rest, in a hollow between two trees. It was a bright spot, covered in fine, dense, spongy-looking emerald green, dotted with yarrow and buttercups and ferns. She could see him lying there, the whole long length of him.

Her mind went back to the cemetery and she imagined herself standing over a grave marked with a simple cross, down near the lake, imagined it belonged to her mother, that her mother was lying there under the quiet grass. She almost knew how it would have felt to have found it, to get that close to her.

How beautiful this little woods. Above her was the speckled light she thought she remembered from childhood, the sun glinting through the branches of birch trees. Ah yes, they were birches. She sat for a long time at that spot. She thought about the quietness, about being alone. She sat with her hands lightly clasped and it seemed she’d completed the circle of herself.

M
y daughter wanted to talk to me about our visitor. It was the evening of the day I walked to the railway tracks with my mother, and I wasn’t at my most patient. We were doing the dishes together, so the conversation took place alongside the clacking of plates as she dried two at a time and the clinking of glasses as she shot them into their rows in the cupboard shelves. She wanted me to give Elena a label of some kind, call her strange or extraordinary, pin her down in some way that would put her in her place as neatly as the knives and forks in the silverware drawer. She didn’t know that’s what she wanted. She searched for the questions to ask, the ones that would lead me to define Elena for her, and in doing that define me, which would in turn supposedly tell her something about herself.

“She’s not like anyone I ever met,” Valerie said.

I nodded as if that had been my observation too, as if I’d always thought there was no one like Elena Huhtala.

“I wonder where she is now.”

I wondered, too, where Elena was now, if she would have reached Trevna yet, if she would make it home. I had never been to
that part of the province, but I could imagine the countryside; it wouldn’t be much different from here, a long gravel road between unremarkable fields and then the driveway, the huddled farm buildings, and Mr. Huhtala waiting there. Or maybe not waiting there. It had been a few months since I’d heard from him, and he had talked about dying in his last letter, not in the roundabout way most people do, but right out, because it was on his mind.

Standing at the sink, I had my back to the table where Elena had sat the day before. I could feel her presence, still, in the room. “I did something wrong,” I said.

Valerie stopped with a mixing bowl midair and looked at me over her shoulder. It was a somewhat unusual admission, I suppose. That was what the expression on her face said.

“I’ve been writing to her father for years and I had a letter from him only a few months ago. I should have told her that. I don’t know why I didn’t. I should have.”

“It was a secret. You kept it even from us. I mean, you never talked about him.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. It seemed a pointless thing to have done. I didn’t think I’d done it deliberately.

“It’s okay, Mum,” Valerie said.

“He was alone. All these years.” I leaned against the sink. “I just thought it would be good for him to have someone keep in touch. I liked him very much, you know. I mean, I like him. He writes good letters; it’s as if he’s thinking out loud. Last time I heard from him he reminded me about something he told me long ago, about Finns who think they can predict their own demise. That’s how he puts it – demise. The thing is, they predict it so far in advance, it’s more … more inevitable than clairvoyant. But I think … well, it’s been hard for him.” I remembered Elena had said that.
His life was hard
. I hadn’t wanted to believe
her that he’d let her think he’d killed himself, but now I thought anything could happen; you could never tell what someone would do.

“Do you think she will go home?”

“I hope so.”

We worked away quietly for a bit, the old routine taking over. I started thinking once again about my phone call to Bill that morning, worrying about meddling in somebody else’s life, and reminding myself how unknowable Elena really was.

“I hope things turn out okay for her,” Val said finally. She’d stopped drying and was watching my face for any telltale thoughts.

“It would be hard to know what okay would be, for her,” I said. I don’t think I meant it quite the way it came out. I’m afraid, since Valerie grinned so conspiratorially afterwards, it must have sounded sardonic. I remember it clearly, that moment – the intimate, approving smile, and how briskly she hung up her tea towel and turned to me.

“She’ll get what she deserves, I guess,” she said. As blithe as can be.

I have to say I was startled. For one thing, it wasn’t how we talked about people; it wasn’t what we believed, that people got what they deserved, or that they should, and I thought we would have to have a talk about the complicated feelings a person like Elena could evoke. But at the same time it made me happy, her saying that. She was so obviously – if a little wickedly – on my side.

She grinned again and gave me a little shove, her preferred method of showing affection lately, and then she was flying out the door, leaving me staring after her. Gone, I thought. I was still staring at the empty space in the screened window that had held her just a second before. The sun had set by then; beyond the door it was the time of evening called the gloaming in poetry and
songs, not quite dark, a shadowy time, just right for thinking about people being gone.

Driving home on the old back road after leaving my mother that afternoon, I’d known I was going to stop at the Gilroy townsite again. I parked on the bit of intersection that remained, as I always did. I got down from the truck and walked the few feet to the ditch. The wind had picked up and Ted Evans’s wheat came towards me in waves. It was quiet but for the usual sounds of the usual insects and the odd bird twittering the way they do, making it seem quieter than ever after they stop. I think I knew there was nothing for me there, but I stood for a few minutes watching the wheat heave like the ocean.

After that I drove home fast, conscious of being late and having groceries to unload and supper to get ready. By the time I pulled into the driveway, the sun was getting low, and I hurried to do all that. Now I stopped tidying my kitchen and imagined myself stepping out of the truck and standing a minute with my hand on the open door, looking at our house the way Elena did the day she showed up, as if I had all the time in the world. I didn’t really see the house or the yard or the fields or the sky beyond, all of which would have been in the picture. I saw myself in the doorway with my daughter at my side. I saw it the way Elena would have seen it.

N
ow she was driving on a road she knew, a road she’d walked along many times as a girl. It hadn’t been paved, and much of the gravel had worn away; the packed dirt surface had been gouged into tire tracks. Her car was coated with satiny dust. Some of the land on the south side had been irrigated and was growing a vegetable crop she couldn’t identify; some of the fields were just pasture, divided from the ditches by sagging barbed wire. A green smell came in her open windows and she thought about the years when there had been no green, when the sparse grass had bleached to the colour of the hard clay underneath it, when the dried-out ground had split in long, deep cracks. She passed the Gustafsons’ farm, if it was still the Gustafsons’ farm, and remembered riding into Trevna with them, in their wagon. They’d had a little girl and a son; she’d sat in the back of the wagon, between them, not knowing she was on her way out of here.

She pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. Her father’s land was just ahead, to the right. The house looked the same, the barn and outbuildings, the long driveway. The windbreak
poplars had grown taller and some fir trees had been planted. The dugout was full of water that looked blue from this distance.