House of Many Gods Page 6

  NIKOLAO

  Nikolai

  TWELVE YEARS BEFORE ANA HAD COME INTO THE WORLD, A BOY was born in a place so bleak and cold, his first breath was visible. Years later Nikolai Volenko would swear he could remember the moment of birth—bursting from between his mother’s thighs, his screams creating little clouds of vapor. He would remember a smoke-blackened ice hut, smoldering carcasses, women who smelled like great, wild beasts.

  The ice hut sat in a virgin forest surrounded by the subarctic tundra of north Russia. It was a region called Archangel’sk that faced the White Sea, only ice-capped waves between them and the North Pole. A forsaken place at the edge of the world, as forbidding as Siberia.

  In his first few months of life, the infant, Nikolai, slept inside great greasy pelts of bear and elk sewn together with needles made from bone. He lived pressed against his mother’s breasts, held fast in her arms like ice holding fast to an inlet. Thus, he would always carry the cold of Archangel’sk in his marrow. It paralyzed everything, even thought, so that the women lived mostly in silence, communicating with grunts and gestures.

  Here daylight was weak and fleeting; they huddled close and slept with their nightmares unbroken. And when there was no food, the snows too deep to hunt, they slept for days, unaware of the passage of time. Perhaps out in the world empires were rising and falling, perhaps another world war had started. Here, it only snowed. And then the wind howled. Sometimes his mother roused herself and passed the child around, and women held him like a tender roast.

  “Goloobka. Our little goloobka.” Our dove. For he was life. He gave them hope.

  It would be these women he remembered most indelibly—how they gathered round him, sitting hunched and neckless, their shoulders on a level with their eyes. Great crones in birch-bark boots and leggings tied with animal gut, and ragged Army greatcoats so thickly padded their bodies were spherical. They appeared wrinkled and ancient, with breath rank as wolves, yet some of them were still in their thirties. Life in Archangel’sk had reduced them to creatures of animal cunning with a touch of remembered tenderness.

  As he grew out of infancy, their stench became a comfort to the boy. He learned to clutch the toylike skulls of lynx or fox, and to inhale the lonely madness when a woman screamed. They did not scream often. Rather, when one of them learned that the husband they had followed to this place had perished, they simply stepped out of the hut into shrieking winds and temperatures far below zero, and died frozen into standing blocks of ice.

  Those who survived watched him take his first steps in the hut, and they smiled and patted his footprints, so tiny and lovable. Sitting him close to the fire, they blew warm breath on his naked toes, rubbing them briskly, and sang little hunting chants of the strategy of foxes, the scruples of wolves.

  When temperatures rose a few degrees and daylight endured for an hour or two, they rubbed bear grease on his cheeks and strapped him to their chests inside their padded coats and plunged with snowshoes through the virgin forests of Archangel’sk, through birch and pine and giant fir, while they stalked wildlife, checked the rusty, cold jaws of their traps, and set fish lines in ice holes of a frozen pond. Some days they harvested gray human skulls protruding from the snow.

  Occasionally they took Nikolai when they trudged fifty miles on homemade skis to a wood-pulp mill across the frozen Dvina River. There they traded fish and pelts and even sex for a rifle, bullets, fuel, tobacco, muddy green vodka made from rye, and matches whose wood was tipped with phosphorus and wax. Days later they struggled through snows forever crisscrossed by men in chains back to their ice hut near the perimeters of the lag, the labor camp, of Archangel’sk.

  And as they traveled, the great forests gifted the boy with miracles. Rising from seemingly fathomless snow, the shimmering, golden dome of a gutted church with its shattered, tongueless bell. Redberry bushes like bonfires suddenly bursting through the ice. One night his mother cried out and popped his head from inside her coat, and he saw in the endless expanse of Eurasian skies, fantastic dancing lights.

  “The Northern Aurora!”

  As he grew old enough to venture out in snowshoes, the little boy’s senses grew sharper. He learned how the mute frozen world came alive when he stood still, so that he heard the sigh of a dying crow crucified on iced branches. The bubbling up of blood as deer lay down to a flash of wolves. Following behind the women as they stalked prey, he heard their hunter heartbeats, thundering like drums. He heard glass shattering: ice cracking through the forest, a sound old as time.

  He learned how to listen for the panting of the lynx, and to eat snow so the hunted fox could not see his breath. He learned to blink rapidly to keep his eyes from icing shut, but to move slowly and breathe evenly. To move fast would create a sweat under so many layers of fur and cloth. Sweat would freeze, and slow the heart. A sleepiness would come. Then coma.

  Other things he would remember: how frost crystallized on the gray fur of wolves so they seemed to be running in coats of diamonds, silvery green against blue arctic snow. And he would remember how, as light deepened into purple dusk, a freezing mist hovered, then rose from the ground and gave the impression the women were floating like saints as they glided home.

  WHEN HE WAS FOUR YEARS OLD THE FOREST TURNED ON HIM, leaving a hole in his life where his youth should have been. One day, following behind the hunting women, Nikolai heard the sound of barking voices, and then dragging chains. The women grew still and moved behind a grove of firs. From there he saw long lines of men in ragged clothes, so vaporously thin he thought he was imagining them. They semed to hum as they stumbled past, skull-like heads hung with cold, exhaustion. Armed guards in trucks followed alongside them aiming machine guns, and now and then a guard dog leapt. Teeth scraping bone.

  He began to be aware of them in the distance through the trees. The clanging of leg chains as they sawed logs, nearby a campfire where guards played with their dogs, making them beg and roll over. Some guards, half-drunk, shot at prisoners for sport. Each day the sound of shifting gears—trucks fighting for traction on the ice as they hauled a dead man back to camp.

  One night when temperatures rose above zero, Nikolai’s mother walked him down a path of frozen footprints humpbacked with ice and mud. Slowly, laboriously, she hoisted herself up into a tree, high into snow-laden branches, and pulled him up beside her.

  “That’s where your father is.”

  He gazed into the distance at razor-wired fences, above them barriers of rolled barbed wire. Along the fences were guard towers and emplacements holding machine guns. Every few seconds a spotlight from a tower swept the camp. From inside one of the towers a man with a rifle seemed to tilt drunkenly, tossing a bottle to the ground. There appeared to be nothing else to see, but endless boxcars on rusty tracks, and long gray buildings, dismal and decrepit, that seemed to go on for miles.

  His mother whispered, “They pack them on those cattle cars … and run them north … until the tracks run out.”

  Nikolai grew impatient. He was cold and he wanted to take his father home. “Where is Papa?”

  Just then a truck with watery headlights moved across the campgrounds, its lights falling on the form of a man facedown. Guards stepped cursing from the truck, picked up the body by the ankle, and flung it aside. Even with leg chains, it seemed so light, so weightless, it hung in the air like cloth, then appeared to thoughtfully float down. Guard dogs made sport of it, growling and dragging it to and fro, tearing at it till they grew bored. Nikolai started to cry out, then he saw that his mother had sucked her fist into her mouth with such force she seemed to have partially swallowed it.

  After that night he listened more closely when the women talked, hoarding phrases until he began to vaguely understand them.

  “Niki’s father … a hero in the war. But after war, two careless words sentence him to death …”

  Like thousands of wives whose husbands were condemned to labor camps across Russia after World War II, Niki’s mother had followed her
husband from Leningrad to Archangel’sk, a grueling journey that took over a year. They had trudged through war-ravaged towns and mined fields, held each other up in winter snows and summer swamps filled with deadly mosquitoes. Begging their way till half of them were broken, diseased, near-dead.

  It was summer when the women had finally reached Archangel’sk, a brief month or two when temperatures rose above freezing. They dug deep holes in the earth to sleep in and that was how they lived, deep in earth, eating birds and berries. When men came in chains to chop down trees, the women had popped their heads up from the earth, asking for their husbands. And so they made contact.

  In time, camp guards had heard of women hiding in the forests. They aimed rifles down the earth holes and ordered them out, then used them like goats for sex and pushed them back into the earth. Some guards took pity, tracking down a prisoner, and in that way, after many months, Nikolai’s mother, Vera, had found her husband.

  She made a sturdy slingshot from small birch branches, then traded homemade cigarettes with guards for pencils, rubber bands. She wrote to her husband on bits of rags, balled them up and shot them over the prison fence. How many were received she never knew.

  But one night a slender missile flew back at her. The next night another. Messages signed with his name. Sergeivitch Volenko. He aimed them over the fence with a kind of homemade blowgun, notes rolled up tight as darts, written on paper scraps in lumpy, rusty red. She learned that he had scratched dust from barrack walls to thicken his blood, with which he wrote his messages.

  As winter returned and snows came, the women had built ice huts deep in the forests near the lag, and there they lived like Eskimos. Each day they ran into the woods where prisoners felled trees, men bent and skeletal from disease and near starvation. They hid behind the trees looking for their husbands. And when they found them each man and wife stood dumb, pressing their heads to each other’s shoulders.

  Months passed, then one day Vera saw him. Sergeivitch, just eyes and bone, his filthy skull now bald. At first they stood and stared as prisoners started fistfights to distract the guards. Then Vera ran forward. Her husband hobbling toward her like a child. No words, just cries, and holding on.

  It happened for weeks, their running together, holding each other while trees crashed around them. And in that way, Nikolai was conceived midst the white firs of Archangel’sk. One day they stood braced against a fir tree, making love, Sergei’s leg chains singing against the bark. In that moment they had both looked up, their cheeks stroked by the blind tenderness of snow, frost patterns overlapping their eyes as they created him.

  Months passed before she saw her husband again. She held him while he shuddered, so weak and starved he had no words. She pushed bits of deer liver into his mouth and watched him swallow them whole.

  “I am carrying your child,” she whispered.

  In that moment his eyes had lit up, he found the strength to smile even though his teeth were gone. Vera never saw him again. Week after week she ran through the forest, stood outside the camp fence at night and slingshot messages to him. And finally, the child was born. Still week after week, month after month, she stood outside the fence and waited.

  One day a woman caught her hand in the jaw of a trap and hacked her hand off at the wrist so she would not freeze to death. Her wrist turned black and stank, and then the arm turned black. She kissed Nikolai on the cheek and walked out into the snow. That was how it was for some. When death came for them they did not seem surprised, they did not mind. Their men had already perished here.

  In time, some of the women became like trees. Their ragged coats grew filthy with grease and resin, attracting leaves and dirt which stuck to them. Under layers of babushki and rank pelts, their hair and skin became like bark. Mold grew in their ears, in their armpits, and inside their birch-bark boots. They carried this dank smell of rot, and they became the rot. When they died, they fell like trees and they became like logs. Sometimes during a brief thaw, a corpse was found before wolves came. One with berries sprouting in her hair. One whose groin had become a thriving nest of beetles.

  Yet, month after month, year after year, each woman waited. Vera still stood outside the prison fence and slingshot messages. Sometimes she even called his name.

  “Sergeivitch Volenko!”

  One night his blowgun was thrown over the fence. This was how she knew. She lost her mind a little, then she found it.

  Nikolai was six years old the year Archangel’sk finally released them. It took Vera two more years to work her way back to Leningrad, dragging her child through the same ravaged villages and blown-up fields of a country that would never quite recover from its wars. They survived by stealing, sleeping in barnyards amongst half-starved sheep for warmth. Or, they slept in wet manure which, as it hardened, became a warm sarcophagus. At dawn they drank from cow’s teats, then sliced tiny cuts in their flanks and drank their blood, so nourishing. Ever after, the boy would have great affection for cows.

  IN LENINGRAD, EVEN BEGGARS STARED, FOR THE MOTHER AND child looked and smelled like death. But Vera rejoiced, they had survived. As they scavenged for food, they began hearing of new purges across Russia. Stalin was making clean sweeps through major cities. Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev. Wanting to beautify them again, make them architectural gems. He wanted to show the world that Russia had recovered from World War II, how healthy and handsome the people were, how well they lived. And so he had begun deporting all of the wounded, deformed, and disabled.

  He rounded them up in every city, poured them into trucks, freight trains, cattle cars, and sent them south to regions the outside world had never seen, had hardly heard of. Even disabled soldiers were thrown away, to Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgzstan. Most deportees froze to death in vasty, empty mountain ranges. The world would not know this for many years. Even Russians would not know, and many of them would not believe. Heroes, whole families, faithful Communists—millions tossed aside.

  Vera was still young but the years, and Archangel’sk, had turned her to a crone. Her spine bent to a spider’s hunch, she limped with the pain of arthritis. Her features had always been mismatched, distinctly asymmetrical, a face that frightened strangers. To Nikolai she was beautiful. At night her arms enfolded him, her body smelling of monthly blood, as she forced food between his lips, depriving herself and growing thinner.

  For a year they hid, living in drainage pipes outside the city. Dirt kept their skin dark and filthy so flashlights could not find them. He learned to stand so still he melted into walls. Once they pressed their faces against a wall for fourteen hours. In that way he learned that if one looks at a thing long enough, they become that thing. But then, the sound of boots running in formation. Another roundup. He saw the shadow of his mother as it limped beneath a streetlight. The shadow of a soldier’s hand reach out and grab her.

  His mother turned and cried, “Run, Niki! Run!”

  He could not. They threw her on a truck and he climbed up beside her, as soldiers flashed lights on his face, and up and down his body. A skinny, filthy kid, but not deformed. He could be useful as child labor in the city. They pushed him off the truck. He watched his dear mother’s face grow smaller as they pulled away, her hand still reaching out.

  That day consumed his boyhood. Consumed him into manhood. After that he pretended he had lost his tongue, that he was mute. They would deport him south, and he would find his mother. But gnawing hunger betrayed him. During a roundup, soldiers hoisted him onto a truck with dozens of broken children. A soldier studied him, then offered him a candy.

  “Hungry?” he asked, holding out the sweet.

  Near-starving, foolishly Nikolai answered, “Da! Pazhalsta.” Yes. Please.

  They threw him off the truck.

  Now he lived in typhus-ridden streets, hobbling in shoes of rags and ropes. He slept with gangs of street boys, huddling end to end in straw like corpses. He stole and cheated and lived how he could, depending on his wits. And maybe that was the end of truth
for him. That was how Nikolai Volenko learned that, deprived of blood—a mother to protect him—lies were his only salvation.

  NOI NO KA ‘ĪEWE

  Request for the Placenta

  ANA HAD BEGUN TO LEARN THAT WHAT OTHER HUMANS HAD, they kept. It made her sharpen her boundaries, dig deep trenches in order to protect herself. The one person she allowed into her heart fully and with total trust was Rosie, and together they watched as life in the larger world accelerated. The Vietnam War had ended. American and Soviet spacecraft had linked up in outer space, and somewhere in those years, direct long-distance dialing came to the islands.

  She discovered she could, simply by dialing a number, hear her mother’s voice. One night she crept into the kitchen and looked at a slip of paper, the number in San Francisco. She picked up the receiver, put it down, picked it up again and dialed. Her heart beating so hard, her hair shook.

  “Hello … ?”

  She hung up and sank to her haunches on the floor. The voice sounded soft, educated. A woman out there fooling the world. Then she remembered that her mother was educated, that she had earned a degree and had a job.

  She crawled into bed beside Rosie. “She answered the phone.”

  “And you hung up.” Rosie yawned and rubbed her stomach. “You know what that tells her? That she’s still important in your life. You want her to come home so you can forgive her.”

  “She doesn’t want forgiveness.”

  “Everybody wants forgiveness. A chance to wipe the slate, start clean again.”

  They lay in half-light, staring at Rosie’s bulging stomach. In the past year she had diligently stopped gorging on food and begun to slim down. Then, a chance encounter, a semi-romance and she grew big again. Just twenty-one now, she announced that she was hāpai, and that the child’s father had left the coast. When Aunty Pua heard the news she careened through the house waving her Bible, flicking holy water at the walls.