Norma
When I started this last year, I had no way of knowing where it would lead. The first time I picked up this camera, I thought I was only going to document things your grandmother remembered, for you. That wasn’t what happened, though. I ended up on an expedition that took a surprising turn. Hopefully I’ll have enough courage to figure out everything myself. If not, I’ll give you these videos in Bangkok. I can’t deny I’m nervous. I’m so close. It feels like the night before a big holiday.
Her mother was excited. She wasn’t saying goodbye. This wasn’t her final message to Norma, and Norma wasn’t meant to be seeing these videos yet. Norma paused the image. She dimmed the display, but the light still hurt her eyes. She tasted almonds in her mouth and smelled roasting lamb. The strangling feeling had returned, and drinking wine didn’t make it go away. Brushing her hair didn’t bring any relief either. She stared for a moment at the trash can icon. The videos might show her something she didn’t want to know.
As Norma turned over in her hand the flash drive with its backup copies of video files from the memory card, she tried to force an unpleasant premonition from her mind. She moved on to the first file, recorded in May 2012. Only then did she notice how much her mother had aged in the past year: new lines had appeared, and her eyes had sunk into her face. The eyelash extensions Marion had applied were of little help—same with the new gel nails and the hairdo Marion had styled. Norma glanced at the index of videos again. Every file was named “For Norma.” Watching them would take dozens of hours.
Three
When I met Lambert for the first time after all those years, the memories came flooding back. I could see in his expression that the same thing was happening to him. But we acted as if they didn’t exist, as if we had no common past, as if no wrong had been done to Helena, as if Marion hadn’t experienced any loss. It was easier that way, for both of us and for Marion, too. She was so nervous about our meeting. Eva had counseled me to maintain my composure no matter what happened. No one could suspect anything.
May 9, 2012
Grandma’s condition isn’t improving, and her prognosis doesn’t promise any change. She still has moments of clarity when her mind works, which is why I have to talk to her about Eva. I can’t put it off any longer. The first time I tried, she flew into a rage; the second time she only turned cranky and cried. Grandma claimed she didn’t remember any Eva or intentionally confused her with Eeva from next door. Then she began scolding me, for my eyebrows or my hair. The nurse has already warned me about the agitation my visits are causing. I’m not giving up, though.
—
Today I tested whether a picture would help. I went to your grandmother’s nightstand and picked up the family Bible. I took the picture out of it and put it in front of her face and told her this was the woman I meant. Grandma jumped and tried to grab the picture. I wouldn’t give it to her. After that she started sobbing and forgot where we were. She was like a child again and asked me to braid her hair better so her mother wouldn’t get upset.
—
The picture was a black and white postcard from the early 1900s and had been in that Bible as long as I can remember. When I was little, I would sneak looks at it. Once Grandma caught me, and I got a beating and had to spend the night in the shed. Back then I didn’t know who the woman in the picture was. But the picture’s place in the pages of the family Bible meant that she was someone, as did my mother’s reaction. I never brought the woman up again in our house and never dared to ask anyone else about her. I shared my secret only with Helena and always went to look at the picture when no one was around. Her unnaturally long hair made her look more like a fairy-tale creature than a real person. It wasn’t until I learned to read that I understood the words on the card and the name of the woman on it, and I realized that she was related to us. I’d never heard anyone talk about someone named Eva Naakka.
—
After you were born, I went through every possible drug I’d taken and everything I’d eaten during my pregnancy. I worried that I’d traveled somewhere a woman expecting a baby shouldn’t go, accidentally eaten radioactive mushrooms, or visited a farm that used DDT. It was totally irrational for me to have a daughter whose hair grew more than a meter every day. Just as absurd was the idea that this might be a recessive genetic trait, or at least a predisposition to unusual hair growth, but the picture of Eva Naakka pointed that way. If the cascading hair in the picture was genuine, she was the same kind of exception as you, and in that case at least I hadn’t made you the way you were by something I did.
—
I started to search for people like you in books and pictures, and I always came back to the photograph of Eva. Maybe it had some connection to my own mother’s obsession with hair. When I was a child, she braided my hair so tightly it made my eyes squint. I always had to loosen the braids for school—Helena tightened them again before I came home. Grandma disapproved of free-flowing locks, considering them a sign of a loose woman. That had to come from somewhere. Eva’s peculiarity could be enough of an explanation if Grandma knew about it. I suspected there was something else hiding in this, though.
May 10, 2012
According to the postmark, the card was sent from New York City, but the date was smudged. On the back a man named Antero reported finding a familiar-looking face in the window display of a Harlem wig shop: “Isn’t this Eva Naakka in this picture? I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t shining shoes out front,” he wrote.
—
Antero was a stranger to us, but a few years later we caught wind of him in a chance encounter at a funeral. The deceased, Helmi, had lived to ninety years old. Around the coffee table, a conversation started about whether her son Antero was still alive and in America, since he hadn’t shown up to pay his respects. Helena’s aunts began reminiscing about the Civil Guard Crisis and how the freshly appointed commander of the guard, Karl Emil Berg, shot himself under all the pressure. The Communists had been waiting for the situation to reach a head and now saw their opportunity. Helmi had lost a lot of sleep because Antero had a habit of getting mixed up in just that sort of thing.
—
When a card came from Antero after Berg’s suicide, the rock rolled off of Helmi’s chest. The card was evidence that her son was still in America, not involved in the troubles in Finland. As they talked about the card, Helena’s aunts leaned over their saucers and whispered about whether it was that card.
—
The date was easy to figure out. Karl Emil Berg shot himself in 1921. The same year Helmi received the card from Antero. At some point before then, Eva had to have been in Paris where the picture was taken. I didn’t understand that until after I talked to Johansson, the art dealer.
—
My great-grandparents’ portrait fell to the floor one day while it was being dusted, and I was sent to have the frame fixed at the art shop, which was a sort of combination framing and antique shop. While Johansson worked, he handed me a box of old photographs to pass the time. The letters “PC Paris” on Eva’s picture had always bothered me, and now I noticed the same letters on many of the photos in the box. Johansson told me that it referred to a very respected postcard publisher. PC Paris postcards were world famous. The people who modeled for them weren’t just anybody, Johansson said, and began presenting his collection, which mostly consisted of landscapes and women. I saw immediately that Eva was more beautiful than the belles in the pictures, hands down. The collection also included cards in color, like Eva’s. Johansson said the only artists who knew how to add color to pictures that way at the time were in Paris and Belgium. They couldn’t make cards like that in America even of their own film stars, so those were made in the Old World too. “All by hand, of course. Coloring was women’s work, and many of them were poisoned because they would wet the brushes in their mouths,” Johansson whispered.
June 3, 2012
Helena and I spun all sorts of adventures for Eva. We were convinced she’d been in beauty conte
sts and wondered whether that was the reason for her shadowy reputation in the Naakka home. The only sure thing was that she went out into the world and became a star. She was the one from our village who became something. Our Eva in a Parisian studio. That affected the decision Helena and I made: we would leave, too. We didn’t have Eva’s beauty, but we would find another way to make our mark. Helena dreamed of a career as a singer, while I just wanted to see the world. We didn’t have money for a trip to America or Paris, but we could hitchhike to Sweden.
—
When we fled to Gothenburg and started work at the Volvo factory, we added sparkle to our days of punching time cards by continuing to investigate the mystery of Eva. We pored over art and photography books in the library and also took a trip from Gothenburg to Stockholm to check the secondhand bookshops. One of them paid off. Eva was easily recognizable. One of the cards had been sent from Opatija in Croatia to Dinard in France, the other from Brighton to Boston. One was dated 1922, the other 1924. The pictures were very elegant, though they didn’t carry any mention of the studio or photographer: In one, Eva’s locks spread toward steps leading to a fountain. She posed as a gypsy with a mandolin in her lap, despite how white she was. In the other, she flirted coquettishly with a lapdog, her left hand holding a comb, as if about to set it to her hair. An oval mirror was positioned so that it also gave a view of the back of her mass of locks.
—
I asked the shopkeeper about the series numbers—I’d noticed those on most of the cards from the famous French publishers. But they were missing from the PC Paris picture and the ones we had just found. The shopkeeper laughed. Series numbers weren’t required, but the signature of a famous publisher raised the price even though it wasn’t always genuine. This explanation disappointed me. Eva might never have visited Paris. The setback didn’t discourage Helena, though. She wanted to know whether the shopkeeper had any other cards depicting models with unusually long hair. The shopkeeper winked and set a box before us full of French postcards. His own favorite was a picture of an adelita wrapped only in bandoliers and her own hair. These words were new to us, both French postcards and adelitas, the female soldaderas who became symbols of the Mexican Revolution. The card was exceptional because the model was blond and the face had been scraped away. The shopkeeper guessed that the woman wanted to conceal her identity since the picture was so risqué. But there was no way to mistake the hair or the pose. It was obviously Eva: the shape and position of the hands were the same as in the girl with the mandolin. And the same as in the picture at home in the Bible.
—
Later on, I continued tracking pictures of Eva using the Internet. I found only a few new French ones, but there are plenty of copies of the existing pictures out there. People have collected them for decades and used them on confetti boxes, perfume bottles, book covers, advertisements. The name Eva Naakka is never mentioned despite the fact that her blond exoticism had the potential to make her a permanent celebrity at PC Paris, like Miss Fernande. Something or someone must have prevented that from happening.
—
Since I was so far away in Sweden, I finally worked up the courage to make a long-distance call to our parish at home and ask for information about Eva from the church records. Mother found out about my call and brooded over it for years. When I returned home with you after you were born, she finally unleashed her anger. Supposedly I was trying to shame her. Again that shame. But now I thought I knew where it came from and who Eva was. She had been my grandfather Juhani Naakka’s first wife, who left her children, husband, and the Naakka home. Eva was your grandma’s real mother.
—
According to the parish records, Eva Kuppari and Juhani Naakka were married in 1917. Two children were born to the family. One was my mother, Elli Naakka, and the other my uncle, Erik, who died in the Winter War. The marriage was annulled in the late 1920s because Eva Naakka hadn’t lived with her husband for years and her location was unknown. Between the lines of the record book, the word America had been penciled in with a question mark after it.
—
Juhani Naakka later remarried, and Anna Heikkinen bore a whole swarm of children for him. I’d grown up under the impression that Anna was my grandmother. She was the one standing next to Juhani in the family portrait I took to Johansson’s shop to be fixed. I called a few of my living aunts, but none of them had heard of Eva or their father’s previous marriage, or so they claimed. It was understandable—the decline of the family’s fortunes had begun with Juhani’s worsening alcoholism, which I realized coincided with the early days of his second marriage.
—
Now I understood why Eva’s picture was hidden in the pages of the family Bible. How it ended up there, I didn’t know. But I guessed that Mother stole it from Helmi. Or that Helmi had given it to her, thinking the picture belonged to Eva’s daughter more than it did to her.
June 16, 2012
Over the years my ideas about Eva’s fate varied. The Finns who left for America tended to be poor, hirelings, younger children from landed families—people whose opportunities in Finland were limited. But Eva was the mistress of the large and wealthy Naakka home. When I was young, I thought she must have met the love of her life outside her marriage and left her family. That would explain my mother’s reaction: Eva was a woman of sin.
—
After your birth, I understood Eva’s choice even less. She’d been lucky enough to give birth to two healthy children, and the stench of scandal in her wake seemed to have to do with the immorality of leaving, not her hair. So if her secret was never found out, why did she abandon such a good life?
—
I also wondered why she’d agreed to model for a photographer. In an earlier time, someone like you could have made a safe living for herself as a muse because artists’ lithographs and paintings didn’t make models instantly recognizable. But photographic postcards changed the situation entirely. Collecting them became a fashionable hobby for every class of society. Even the poor could afford them because developments in technology had lowered the price of the cards so much. Suddenly the entire population began focusing on models—people began emulating their gestures and expressions, and one model complained in an interview that complete strangers would touch her hair on the street. Eva was wise to keep her face out of the erotic shots, but I recognized her even without her face, and the person who took the pictures knew who she was. What had she received in return? What did she want so much that she would take a risk like that?
—
I came to hate Eva. She’d been the heroine of my childhood, the most beautiful and courageous woman from our village. But in reality she was something entirely different, and I felt betrayed. I also understood my mother’s rage toward Eva. My mother was tainted by scandal. She’d been abandoned, and no one ever told her why. The basis for my anger was different, though: I gave birth to you without knowing anything about the risks, which was Eva’s fault. It was a miracle that Grandma succeeded in having two healthy daughters. I started to wonder whether the small number of children in our family line had something to do with this. As I understood it, my mother had a few miscarriages, as did Margit. When the first one happened, I mourned with my sister. But when Margit became pregnant again—after you were born—I began to hope that she wouldn’t go to term. And that’s what happened. As she grew older, she lamented her lost opportunity, but I felt only relief. I’d lived in constant fear that the same thing would happen to her as to me.
Four
For a long time, I didn’t want to think about Eva at all. Then I understood that the only way to leave you a history of your own would be to tell her story. You have a right to know what kind of life a person like you can have, and you have a right to know all the dangers associated with it. I wasn’t going to repeat Eva’s mistakes.
Ophelia and Regina Cordium, Norma’s mother’s favorite paintings, still hung in the entryway. Snatching them off the wall, Norma inspected the b
ack of each. No picture, no Eva. She removed the glass from the frames. Nothing. Of course not. Her mother couldn’t have known that Norma would forget to put her favorite paintings in the casket. She definitely would have wanted them with her if she’d decided to end her life voluntarily, even though that was seeming less likely all the time.
Her mother had always hunted for women who might be like Norma, and her home was plastered with images of various Rapunzels. The shelves sagged under the weight of their stories. She had wanted to assure Norma, who often felt down because of her hair, that the beauty of women who looked like this had been admired and immortalized. The apartment was a mausoleum to the Goldilockses of times past, which is why it made little sense that her mother had concealed Eva’s existence. Her mother had continued her search even after Norma made peace with her hair and refused to keep sitting in her mother’s private hair school. But her mother still wanted a solution, an answer that could help them understand what was going on—that was why she couldn’t end her hunt. She continued sharing information with Norma whether Norma wanted it or not. So why hadn’t her mother told her about Eva face-to-face? Why only in a video? Why hadn’t she hung pictures of Eva on her walls? The idea that there had been another woman like Norma in their family was earth-shattering.