House of Many Gods (14 page)

He would never look youthful. The years had inscribed on his face the harsh lines of their text. But he was curious, tenacious, more clever than the boys he ran with. At night, half-asleep, he thought of all he had seen that day, the want, and squalor, and sometimes even beauty—old, crumbling Tsarist-era palaces bursting out of the snow in hot Italian palettes of greens and pinks and ochers.

Most boys spoke a street argot with tongue-tying speed but, Nikolai lived mostly in his head, not knowing he was already observing the world, preserving it in images. When he did speak, he never mentioned his childhood in Archangel’sk, afraid words would erase the memory. When asked his name, he gave different names, retreating behind lies, wearing those lies like a lead apron that shielded him from the world.

Some folks thought he was retarded, especially in summer when he seemed to languish, not knowing how to feel, how to behave. Missing the sensation of near freezing, of shivering and seeing his breath made visible, he sought out the city’s parks and sat alone amongst the trees. They were not the giant firs he remembered, but still they comforted him. Sometimes he laid his cheek against their bark, remembering the warm, beastly smell of women who had turned to trees, and then to logs. Remembering the smell of his dear mother. Seasons changed, the schizophrenia of autumn, then winter when Nikolai came alive, kneeling on blocks of ice breaking up in the frozen Neva, flinging his head back like a young wolf and crying out in stellated brightness.

No matter where he roamed in the city, he was always drawn by the abattoir smell of the old Haymarket’s slaughterhouses. The metallic scent of blood and freshly skinned animals tranced him in a moment, transporting him back to a smoke-blackened ice hut. One place specialized in wild game as well as pigs and cattle. Sometimes Nikolai slipped inside and stood dreamily fingering the dripping antlers of an elk, or the white hide of a hare, recalling the bright wonder of red-eyed hares leaping against the snows of Archangel’sk.

When they caught him, slaughterhouse guards hauled him out to the street and beat him. And each time, he cried out how he had grown up hunting wolf and lynx while strapped against his mother’s chest. How he had been teethed on cured strips of bear meat. One day a worker threw him a hairy slab of raw bacon, and in return Nikolai showed him how he could skin a grouse expertly, even with his eyes closed.

He seemed so desperate and eager, the slaughterhouse foreman took pity on him, giving him a few kopecks to sweep bloody sawdust off the floors and keep the outside pavements clean. In time he grew familiar
with the workers—stun-men, and skinners and dyers—huge, virile, bare-chested men swinging sledgehammers and butchering knives. With brute locution they shouted and cursed, scooping out and devouring raw animal organs—still-quivering beef hearts, livers alive with bloodworms. Yet somehow the white rags on their heads tied up in dainty points like cat’s ears made them seem half-playful and endearing to the boy.

On breaks, they stood outside in the cold, smoking cigarettes while wrapped in fresh, bloody cowhides, their steaming torsos flocked with offal.

And they would call to him. “Niki! Come, take a smoke! Be a man!”

He would stand amongst them stupefied, as if surrounded by rampaging Huns.

Some days women and children brought them baskets of lunch, and Nikolai began to understand that these men were fathers. With no sense of it, he drew closer, thinking
This is what a father is
. He studied men on the stun line, and then the skinners—who sliced off hides while the eyes of the cattle still flickered. He studied the sausage makers, skating across floors of salt as he helped squeeze out waste and shit from animal intestines, then hose them clean and fill the casings.

And once, he ventured into a room whose stench was like a judgment. Here were the hide dyers, men bent over huge bubbling vats, lifting and dipping sheets of skins, their chests and arms dyed turquoise blue, canary yellow. These were the foulest-smelling men, for each animal’s death entered their pores with the dye, and lodged deep in their flesh, and in their lungs. It never washed away.

Nikolai went back to the skinning room, the work he seemed best suited for. This, he decided, would be his life. He would labor surrounded by men who were fathers so he could understand what he had lost, what it was he lacked. The workers humored him, explaining that to become a skinner he would first have to apprentice on the stun line. For this it would take years to build up muscles, and he was only ten.

And so he remained a sweeper and a waterboy, waiting for his body to grow muscular and hard. Some days he idled round the foreman’s desk, listening to exchanges with tradesmen who hauled off carcasses for butcher shops. The endless transactions in rubles and vodka, the arguments over profit and loss. And in that way he learned how to add and to subtract, and in time to tally up purchases faster than with an abacus. Eventually he could do figures in his head without pencil or paper and slowly, painstakingly, he learned to divide and multiply.

Perhaps it was the alchemy of fate and luck: the foreman detected in
the boy a yearning beyond curiosity. A driving need to know. He encouraged him to study the newsprint used to wrap offal, and began to teach him the rudimentaries of reading, and of writing, astonished at how fast he learned. In time, Nikolai could repeat headlines, whole paragraphs, though not quite sure of their meaning. Workers began to bring him old, cast-off books from their children, some with words accompanied by pictures. These he studied at night under streetlights.

Still, it was numbers that fascinated him. He amused stun-men and skinners by strolling through hanging carcasses of marbled beef, using them as punching bags while he multiplied columns of figures they called out, dividing and subdividing them in his head and shouting the answers within seconds.

Month after month, the foreman watched him, and then one day he made a call. An officious-looking man showed up and sat with Nikolai, asking questions. So many young people had died in the war, so many superior minds sacrificed, that the Party was now scouring the country, even testing farm children—tearing them from their parents’ arms—in an attempt to fill schools with the brightest and most promising.

And so he was sent away to state school. The slaughterhouse workers cheered him when he left because he had been rescued from their life, but somehow he felt captured.

F
OR A WHILE HE WAS IGNORED, ESPECIALLY BY HIS SCHOOLMATES
. He did not possess the natural ease of discourse, and so they looked right through him. When asked about his earlier life he lied; each history he offered hid other histories he would not tell. He seemed to reek of indifference, so that at first even his teachers ignored him.

Then he began to flourish, to excel at math, his progress so accelerated, teachers walked in circles around him, giving him their full attention. While most youngsters struggled over written examinations, Nikolai worked out equations in his head, then impatiently stood, shouting out the answers. Officials came and probed his mind, this strange quiet boy with an affinity for numbers. They sat for days, challenging him with seemingly insoluble mathematical problems, many of which he solved. But no one engaged him in real conversation. No one asked if he was lonely, if he wished for a friend to talk to.

By the time he arrived at Moscow University, he had learned that people could be kind or cruel, tactful or blundering, and that most humans
possessed both qualities, which made them unpredictable, never to be trusted. He avoided making eye contact, keeping his eyes slightly out of focus with the effort to look confident, at ease. He learned to think that way, too, sizing up situations quickly, seeing what his advantage could be, or backing off altogether.

He passed himself in crowds—loners, eccentrics—whatever the term the world had bestowed on him. He dressed in gray, head to insole, hoping to blend, but he never quite did. He had grown into a wiry young man with taut skin and muscles, a body tense, never at ease. His dark, probing eyes ever restless. Each passing year seemed to prove to him that things other humans thought crucial—hoped-for pleasures, accomplishments, even grievances—did not mark his life. Only his earliest years came at him with clarity and boldness.

He found Moscow an ugly place, lacking the faded, haunting beauty of old Leningrad. Rather, it was a city of menacing and clumsy façades housing offices, bureaucrats, the Kremlin. What was left of its people had been boiled down. Their gray faces invaded him—people alone, in crowds, staring out of subways. Faces pained, without vision, as if life were over.

And yet in those university years, there were times when Moscow spoke to him. In winter Nikolai stood near fires in empty lots with other humans congregating for warmth and conversation, even songs. Men played violins with icicled brows. He watched people hunched over, padding through the shadows of snow-sculpted buildings that seemed to be floating astride Moskva River. The river itself spread like a sheet. He liked how blizzards paralyzed everything, erasing the acoustics of the city. This was when he most felt Moscow’s heart, the pulse of the ancient, invading Tartar.

At first his university colleagues found him clever and intriguing, then they found him rude, and they began to understand they could not grasp or trust him. He stood in the homes of professors, stuffing silverware into his pockets, his narratives of childhood scalded into outrageous lies.

“You’ve a superior mind,” a professor said. “You could go far. Why do you do have to steal and lie?”

Nikolai did not know how to answer. He suspected that he would never be completely at home here—not in this city, and not in the rigid academic life where the Party dictated what was truth and what was perceived as lies. He had come from a place where people died with their
lungs slashed naked to the wind, their frozen hearts slung down their backs. If that was truth, reality, then what was fantasy? What constituted a lie?

And so he responded to the question. “Perhaps lies are merely a form of longing out loud. It’s how we survive.”

He continued to be shunned, a social pariah, though he was favored academically. Finally, an official took him aside.

“Is tragic, that you have no manners, Niki. Nonetheless, we are grooming you to go to Novosibirsk, Siberia. Huge honor! New city built exclusively for scientists, physicists, their families. Country clubs, motorboats! Only for cream of Russia.”

By then he had begun to see how their young minds were being warped, primed to make weapons of extinction. The stink of Russian invasions still hung in the air. Poland. Hungary. Czechoslovakia. He began to see his government as depraved, run by idiots and sadists. And slowly he stepped back. One day he walked away from Moscow University. He simply gave up mathematics. Numbers now seemed futile to him.

With no one to live for, nothing to hold him back, he dropped out of life completely, inventing a new name every week.
I absolve myself of all sense of morality, a word lost in my inner ear
. He went back to the streets, became all things to survive. Black marketeer. Thief. Bodyguard to gangsters. He paid for women and never asked their names. And nothing touched him.

I
N AN ALLEY HE GLANCED AT A REFLECTION IN A SLAB OF GLASS
. Himself, dagger-sideburned, wielding a gun, a man hulked and brutal. By then he had joined up with protection rackets, becoming a “roofer,” thugs who preyed on shopkeepers and street vendors, taking a percentage of their profits for “protection.” Those who held back were viciously beaten. The country was becoming so corrupt, even policemen worked as “roofers.” Even Army officers.

Several times in self-defense he had to kill. After that Nikolai stepped back, he even thought of suicide, but then it seemed that all of Russia was committing suicide. In time he stumbled back to math, to the contemplation of numbers, the only thing he loved. He tried to explain it to a prostitute.

“It’s like morphine. Mathematics deadens pain.”

He would sit up all night, struggling with equations, old propositions
he had never solved. He liked how the logic of numbers led
away
from words, remembering how numbers turned into words became deadly.

This saved him for a while, then he grew restless and went back to the streets. One night outside Moscow, he helped hijack a truck transporting computer terminals and cameras. A box fell open at his feet, revealing a video camera recorder. Examining it, he felt an odd sensation, as if nothing were real but the weight of this camera.

Nikolai went home and slept and woke still holding it, marveling at how well it fit the shape of his hand. As if he and the camera were invented for each other. He taught himself how to use it, liking how he did not have to speak when he stood in crowds. He could be an observer, enter rooms and no one would get hurt.

He started walking the streets, pointing the thing. He was armed and people left him alone. He shot quietly, unobtrusively, not sure what he was doing, not knowing that he was registering events. He photographed the young, the old, even the sick and dying—always admiring how they were so very much themselves. He did not see what he was doing as bizarre, but rather a retreat, a way to keep life out of range when it was too much for him, allowing him to step out of the frame.

He walked through cemeteries, shooting epitaphs. He edged close to funeral crowds, shooting solitary mourners. People allowed him because they thought he knew what he was doing. For a long time, he didn’t. Then, he did. When he needed money, he shot corpses boxed in satin for their families. The newly dead for medical researchers. He shot honeymooners.

And he saw how subjects became trusting and vulnerable, taking directions like a child. Sometimes he felt a warmth for them. He began to see people in a different way, because usually while he shot them, out of nervousness they would talk about their lives—their jobs, their dreams, their childhoods. The whippings and the scars. Nikolai never saw them again. They had confessed: They had found a place to leave their burdens.