The Faces of Strangers Page 4

  “Looks like we’re all here.” Though she smiled, there was something chilling in her look, as if even though everyone had made it into the Hallström program, she was still constantly assessing and appraising every one of her recruits, to ensure that she had made the right decision.

  “Now,” Barbara said, standing in the front of the room and gripping the chair back in front of her, “let’s reintroduce ourselves to one another, just in case we have forgotten names or faces.” Paavo was secretly glad for this, as he had forgotten everyone’s name except for mawkish Pyotr, who sat sullenly between the girl with the unkempt hair and Nicholas.

  One by one they were reintroduced as partners: Pyotr-Evan, Sabine-Jess, Tomas-Justin, Anika (Unkempt Hair)-Malaysia, Paavo-Nicholas. Each time Malaysia’s name was mentioned, whether it was during a roll call or introductions, Paavo found himself stumbling over the concept of her. Malaysia was a slender black girl, with hair that puffed out around her head like a cloud of spun sugar. Her skin was darker than any Paavo had seen before. He hadn’t encountered anyone quite like her, and not just because black people were few and far between in Estonia. What kind of a name was Malaysia, he wondered. She was clearly not from the country; their people were tawny-skinned with eyes that seemed to screw together at the corners. He had to force himself to stop looking at her; as if she could sense his gaze, Malaysia lifted her head and shifted her body to face the opposite direction.

  Paavo stifled a yawn behind his hand and sat up so that his spine pressed against the back of the seat. It was the only way that he was going to get through this session. He could feel the creep of sleep start behind his eyelids and he twitched his mouth and licked his lips, willing himself to wake up.

  Barbara was warming up. She looked out over her audience as though surveying her kingdom. It appeared that there was something there that just wasn’t right. She honed in on something—someone—seated in the center of the table, and before Paavo knew what was going on, she was walking toward Evan. She held her hand out expectantly and Evan looked up.

  “Give that to me now, Evan,” she said, her voice like stone. Paavo leaned forward. What did the boy have in his possession? A cell phone? Cigarettes? Drugs? How had she even seen what he’d held in his lap? All the students leaned forward and craned their necks to see the contraband in Evan’s hands. He handed over a small book and looked up at Barbara, his eyebrows knitted with confusion. Barbara held it up in front of her chest. It looked like a guidebook. The words Understanding Russian Culture were typed across the front in a firm, Communist font. “This, ladies and gentlemen, will not be tolerated. Do you understand?” Some of the students nodded, though Paavo didn’t understand; perhaps it had a false cover and was hiding something else. But Barbara held the book over her head and marched to the front of the room, shaking it so that the pages flopped from side to side.

  “This is poison,” she said, her voice rising an octave above its normal pitch. “This type of book is what CliffsNotes is to literature. It’s demeaning, it’s degrading and it’s uncalled-for. Hallström is about understanding. It’s about bridging the gap between cultures that have for the past few decades been estranged, unfriendly and misunderstood. It’s about breaking down all the stereotypes that books have printed or movies have compounded. If I see anything like this again, we’re going to have serious words about your future here. Is that understood?”

  There were soft murmurings throughout the classroom. Evan looked down at the ground, as though he were about to crumble into tiny pieces. Even Pyotr looked as though he had softened during Barbara’s speech. Barbara lifted the book into the air again with both her hands, and with one swift motion, the book was torn right down its spine into two halves. She tore the pages from the binding in pieces and chapters and tossed them into the trash bin at the front of the room.

  “I apologize for destroying your property, Evan,” she said. “But that trash doesn’t exist within the Hallström walls. This should mean more than a bolster on your college applications or simply for just a cool experience.” Paavo flinched at the older woman’s use of the word. It seemed forced and neglectful, creating an even wider gap between her and the students.

  With the room shocked into silence, Barbara segued into a long lecture about social and cultural anthropology, about the strength of unique comprehension across borders. She reviewed the scheduled outings, check-ins, protocol for what to do in certain situations, difficulty in school, financial issues. Although each of the students had read all this in their course packets, she rehashed etiquette from both host and guest point of view, and though she stressed constantly that neither of them were to think of themselves as hosts and guests, she didn’t change her choice of verbiage, either. What to do in a cultural conflict, what to do when someone wasn’t understanding you, what to do when you had a problem only your parents could solve but they weren’t there, what to do if you needed something your host brother or sister couldn’t help you with. Barbara drawled on and on, her shiny hair reflecting the fluorescent lights over their heads.

  It was when Barbara addressed bullying that Paavo felt all the air rush out of him. Pyotr had been sneering all morning; whether it was at Paavo or whether that was just the general look on his face, Paavo couldn’t tell. But it reminded him of the gang at home. It made him remember things like the raised scab on his right knee. Things like the memory of the trash cans behind the Kadriorg market, and how the boys had threatened to stuff him into one of them and seal the lid shut. They’d seemed friendly enough at first, surrounding him on his walk home from the bus stop on the last day of school, bumping into his sides good-naturedly so that passersby didn’t suspect that he was being walked against his will. In fact, it looked as if the pack of them were all walking together, toward a unified destination and that Paavo was happy to be right in the middle, the most popular boy of all. The gang was thickly cut, each of them like great slabs of black rye bread, and their identical brush cuts made them indistinguishable from one another. They were cartoons of themselves with their soldier-like severity and their fierce blue eyes stabbing into him with each glance.

  But as soon as they cleared the busy stretch of Narva maantee, the boys flanked him on all sides in a most unfriendly manner, pulling at his knapsack, tugging at his collar. Russian Rabbit, one of them hissed in his ear. Half-breed. He flinched as a stubby finger traced figures into the back of his skull. Know what that says? another asked. Paavo shook his head. Eighty-eight. A lucky number, the boy said. Next time, I’ll ask you why. As they reached Toompuiestee, the pack of boys shrugged him off like a scratchy sweater. Paavo had kept his head down to the ground the entire time, looking where his feet were stepping rather than the direction he was going. When he lifted his eyes once all the boys were gone, he realized that he was going the right way. They had steered him to the start of his street, which was a blessing and curse. They knew where he lived.

  Once, just after he had returned home from school without incident, he’d happened to glance out the window to see one of the boys across the street. The boy looked harmless as he leaned against the gate of a garage, smoking a cigarette nonchalantly. He didn’t tap the end of his cigarette for a long time, waiting for the ash to collect and when he did release it, he caught it in his cupped palm and turned toward the garage gate, his back to the street. Paavo couldn’t make out what he was doing and he waited hours until the boy had left to make sure that he was truly gone before opening his door and approaching the gate. The number fourteen had been written in cigarette ash. Another number. Paavo felt as though he were being numbered, like a cow in anticipation for slaughter. A chill ran down the back of his neck as though someone were watching him. He didn’t know what the number meant, but he ran back into the house and cried in the kitchen, not because he was scared, but because he was a coward.

  The next morning, on the first day of summer vacation before his Hallström year, Paavo found that he cou
ldn’t leave the house. He loitered around the living room, toeing the carpet in his football cleats until his mother asked him to remove them lest he tear up the floor or go down to the pitch once and for all and stop floating around like a specter. He went into the den, the room that would become the exchange student’s in a few months, and dragged his fingers across the books lined up like soldiers on the shelf. Leo’s deep obsession with rummage sales and secondhand shops had resulted in an overflow of cheap, dog-eared books that no one would ever read. Perhaps this was the summer to change that. Paavo selected the first three from the top shelf and sat down at the bottom of the case. How to Code, Computer Programming Made Easy, The Software Inside Hardware.

  He spent the summer inside or on the back porch as snowy feathers floated through the air from the neighbor’s chicken coop next door, his face buried in a book. His naturally pale skin grew even more luminescent. The house had been his; Mari had spent most of her time in studios, returning home late at night from photography shoots, her face caked with makeup and her toes throbbing from being jammed into sky-high stilettos. Reading was the guise; he knew his parents wouldn’t challenge him to go outside or find a summer job, and even Leo stopped his refrain of telling him to go down to the football pitch and play a game or two when he recognized that his son was studying without being told to do so. It wasn’t that Paavo was a particularly keen student in general, and certainly hadn’t professed any passions about anything much.

  But the computer books had whetted Paavo’s interest. At breakfast a few weeks before, Leo had been complaining about the government-funded computer initiatives that were being put in place in order to compensate for a lack of physical infrastructure and a workforce with limited education.

  “They’re giving our jobs to machines,” Leo thundered, pounding at the newspaper on the table so that his teacup jumped. “They’re making a mockery out of hard work.” But Paavo had always believed in knowing your enemy. So he read everything he could about computers, including the endowments that had been granted at the Tallinn Institute of Technology.

  After he’d exhausted reading the computer books at home, he ventured out to the Tallinn Central Library on a few furtive and brazen occasions to learn more about the information age. He collected a stack of books on programming, wiring and hacking, stowed them in his bag and headed toward the World War II section of the library. He had some research to do, namely on numbers. Eighty-eight was comprised of the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which when doubled, stands for Heil Hitler. Fourteen: the number of words that create the doctrine established by David Lane, a white supremacist who had become one of the voices of the contemporary Nazi party.

  “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” Paavo whispered the words out loud to himself in the cool stacks of the library over and over before shaking his head as if to release them from his entire being, replacing the slim volume in its place on the shelf and slipping onto a bus back home to Kadriorg.

  Across the conference table in the orientation, Pyotr blew air out of his mouth, which was still curled in its perpetual sneer. Pyotr’s hulking frame, his hunched shoulders, his Cro-Magnon brow—they were all too reminiscent of the gang back home. How had Pyotr made it into this program with his belligerent face and his uninterested countenance? Paavo lowered his head down between his knees and took deep breaths.

  “Are you okay?” Nicholas whispered.

  “Fine,” Paavo said, without looking up.

  “Do you need some air? We should probably ask for a break.” Nicholas glanced up toward Barbara, who had just dimmed the lights and was pulling up a PowerPoint presentation on the screen.

  “Just taking everything in. Probably should have had some more breakfast.” Paavo raised his head and grabbed a handful of pretzels from a nearby bowl. The saltiness seemed to calm something in him as he crunched and tried his best to concentrate.

  At the afternoon’s first set of icebreakers, the students had to share something about themselves that no one else knew. He watched the intensity in Sabine’s eyes as she searched for something interesting to share with the group, how Pyotr chewed on his bottom lip and scowled in thought. Paavo wondered what might happen if he divulged the truth: “I’m Paavo from Tallinn. I am happy to get some distance from home because I am being harassed and bullied by a group of neo-Nazis who want me to join their gang.”

  He could only imagine the drama that would ensue after that admission. His parents would be called; they might force him into that all-American practice of going to therapy, lying vulnerably prone while a man or woman analyzed every word out of his mouth. He would be monitored carefully for the rest of the program in case there were signs of weakness or breakdown. That was the last thing he wanted, so he kept his mouth shut and said the following: “I’m Paavo. I’m from Tallinn and I really like riddles.”

  Halfway through the session, Paavo had to use the bathroom. He slipped out of his chair and found the men’s room down the hall at the curve of a corridor. He stared at himself in the mirror. His face appeared wan and washed-out, as though he hadn’t slept in days. He rubbed his eyes, and pinched his cheeks, coaxing the blood to flow through his veins. The toilet flushed, and Paavo flinched. He hadn’t realized someone else was in the bathroom with him. Pyotr opened the door to a stall, zipping his fly and grinning—or was it sneering—at Paavo.

  “Pathetic,” Pyotr said, as he stood in front of the sink alongside him, wiping something off his face. His eyes met Paavo’s in the mirror.

  “Excuse me?” Paavo felt his voice squeak, and Pyotr turned to face him.

  “I said, ‘pathetic,’” Pyotr said again, wiping his hands against his thick trunk-like thighs. “This whole thing is just pathetic. As if we don’t know how to behave. Adults never give us enough credit.”

  Paavo watched him as he smoothed down his sweater, and rubbed at the tattoo on the back of his neck. Those certainly seemed like numbers printed at the base of his skull.

  “Did you hear me? I’m talking to you,” Pyotr said. “Hello?” The set of Pyotr’s jaw was all too familiar. He even had a crooked smile like the gang leader. Paavo could feel his stomach start to fall. He put his hands up in front of him for mercy, and began backing away, his desire to use the bathroom long forgotten.

  “Yes, yes,” Paavo said. “I’m just... I’ll see you back in there.” But Paavo’s foot caught on a cleaning mop that leaned against the wall, and he fell backward. The last thing he saw before his head hit a stall door was Pyotr’s face. Then everything had gone dark.

  NORA

  New York City

  September 2002

  This was what life after the accident felt like to Nora, as though a switch had been flipped and the spotlight on her life had been turned off. She constantly felt as though she were wandering around in the dark, groping for answers, reading faces, trying to make sense of what had happened in her brain. She’d certainly made sense of her feelings in the year since the accident, and she could communicate how frustrated and helpless she felt. Perhaps she would do well in the support group after all; these things always tried to get you to connect with your feelings. But would acknowledging the feelings help them go away?

  After her brother left for the airport, Nora spent a long time lying on her back in her bedroom, clutching her black notebook and staring at her wall of quotes. It had been about a month after the accident that she had first starting writing directly on the wall in permanent marker. She’d done it out of pure rage at first, scribbling angsty snippets from whiny bands that all her friends listened to, and then graduating to more philosophical lines. Words of wisdom from Shakespeare and Sonic Youth each bore equal presence on the wall. It would be another six months before she would abandon the wall altogether and whitewash over it in another fit of frustration, but for now the wall was her own personal therapy.

 
Her mother had told her not to be late for the group, but she dawdled, opening her notebook and flipping through the pages. She hated overhearing her parents talk about her as though she wasn’t right there. They discussed her at length—out of concern, she had to admit—but it was still humiliating. She had already started living away from them in college. She’d already staked her independence. But after the diagnosis, she found she couldn’t return. She’d been intimidated by the prospects of all those faces: her suitemates, her professors, her thesis advisor. At the end of the summer, once her arm had fully healed and her skin had grafted itself back into her own cells, she called the registrar and told them she was taking the year off. It would be a setback, and it would certainly be embarrassing, Nora knew, but it wouldn’t be as tragic as returning to a campus filled with people who called out to her but whom she couldn’t greet back.

  Her stay in the hospital had been over a year ago, but it still felt as if she had just returned. From time to time, her leg pulsed as a cruel reminder of the accident. As if she could forget. In the first few days of her stay at St. Paul’s General, doctors had all tried their luck at diagnosis. They asked her to recall the specifics of the accident.

  “I was crossing the street at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Fourth Street and a car barreled into me. I remember flipping over onto the hood but not much else after that.”

  They asked her to recall what she had been doing, where she had been going.

  “I’m home from college on spring break. I have to go to Myrtle Beach with my friends. We’re leaving. They’re going to leave without me.” She had attempted to rise out of the bed, but her wrists and ankles had been tethered there beneath the blankets. They asked her to recall her name—“Nora,” she’d scoffed. They asked her to recall the names of the people standing in front of her. “Dr. Li, Dr. Charles, Dr. Kelly.” They asked her to name the couple sitting on either side of her bed, each holding one of her hands. She rolled her eyes. But when the request was repeated, she stared into each face with determination and focus for what felt like hours before she turned her head, slumped back into the pillows and said that the exercise was stupid. The woman had broken down then, biting her hand so as to contain her tears, and the man had come over from his side of the bed to comfort her. Nora had watched all this, as she had watched Doctors Li, Charles and Kelly exchange glances and purse their lips before they scribbled copious notes into their individual ledgers. One of them picked up the phone in her room to make a page, and in moments, a flurry of men and women in white coats descended upon the room.