House of Many Gods (31 page)

Two days later they went over his X-rays and blood tests, the results of which necessitated further tests. By then she had called Lopaka, asking about this Nikolai Volenko. Her cousin had known him only two months but said he was a filmmaker of integrity. He had rented a room near Chinatown, and one day Ana met him there for lunch.

“Lopaka is very respectful of your work. I’d like to see one of your films.”

He hung his head modestly. “Thank you, Ana. For such interest. In two days I leave to shoot more footage in Moruroa, Tahiti, where France continues testing bombs. When I return, two weeks, I show you film.”

S
HE ASSUMED SHE WOULD NEVER SEE HIM AGAIN
. B
UT ONE NIGHT
when Ana glanced outside, he was standing in the rain with a bouquet of flowers, looking up at her window. She met him at the door with a towel.

“How wonderful to watch,” he said. “So happy at your punching bag, content to be alone. I did not want disturb you.”

He was soaked from head to toe; his cheap shoes squeaked across her floor. She made him shower while she hung his clothes, and when he came out wrapped in her oversized robe, perhaps for the first time Ana saw him clearly. The body of a laborer, not muscular, but naturally wiry and strong. As he padded round the room she noticed again his scarred legs and feet, even scars on the back of his neck.

His hair was like black paint slicked against his head, only a few strands of gray. His big straight nose seemed to balance his full lips. She saw his skin was large-pored and rough, the skin of someone who had lived out in the weather. He struck her as not handsome, but rather someone who had once been handsome. Now he just looked weary.

She heated stew and poured them wine. He started to tell her about his trip, then fell upon the food, ravenous. He ate so fast, Ana wondered if he understood food; he seemed to regard it merely as fuel. Over lunch in Chinatown, she had noticed that when he finished eating he took his pulse. Now he took his pulse again, feeling his heartbeat in his wrist, its accelerated pounding. She had seen this before, the habit of people who had known extreme hunger.

The rains had stopped and Nikolai hung his head out the window, inhaling deeply. “Such air! So pure it hurts.”

He helped her with the dishes, explaining his initial fear of Honolulu. “At first, air here was terrifying. So invisible, so subtle and subversive. From Russia, I only trust air I could see. And water. Here, it tastes like
water
. Very suspicious.”

She folded a dish towel. “Tell me, Nikolai …”

“Niki. Please.”

“…  is anything real to you?”

He refolded the towel and hung it carefully. “Only silence is real. And, no such thing as silence. Listen!”

Gently, he cupped both of her ears with his hands. “Minute worlds exploding. So how you can imagine human language, human mind—so infant to old universe—can begin knowing what is
real?
”

Ana backed up, laughing. “You know, you’re like a deck of cards. You come up different every time.”

“I promise you,” he said. “I am real. I have eked out everything I am.”

He left again, trying to raise more funding for his project. Each time he returned he seemed more relaxed, his English slightly improved. Some nights he followed Ana through the apartment like a child, playing with her TV, the appliances in her kitchen.

He opened her freezer and stared dreamily inside. “Makes me very nostalgic. You see, I was born inside ice.”

He asked about the cost of her furniture, her clothes, the cost of her groceries. He asked about her work, her income, then turned her answers back on her, making her question her values. One night, Ana sat him down.

“You know … at first I thought you were naïve. You’re not, you’re very clever. You have a way of boiling things down, so that I end up feeling guilty. For being employed, and healthy, for being … free. Niki, I don’t think I can see you anymore. I feel you resent me. I understand your resentment, but I can’t change who I am. And neither can you.”

His hands flew to his face, covering his eyes. When he looked up she saw such pain it took her breath.

“I will change. I am learning.” He gripped her hands desperately. “Ana. Please. Be patient with me.”

“Why? What is the point?”

“Because. One day you are going to love me.”

She inhaled so sharply, the hollows near her collarbones grew steep and filled with shadows. She pulled her hands away, and stood.

“Are you mad? I don’t even know you. I don’t believe half of what you say is true.”

He took her hands again, more gently now. “Is true. I swear is true. But, if I told you everything, you would want to shoot me out of kindness.”

S
HE WONDERED HOW THEY’D REACHED THIS POINT SO FAST, A
stranger strolling into her life, telling her he might be dying. And that he loved her.

“It was the way how you held the child that night at campfire. The way how you listened. You look at me and listened. Is years since someone did that for me.”

They had known each other several months, cautiously easing into each other’s life. In fits and starts, Ana told him about Makali‘i, how she blamed herself for the girl’s death.

“I didn’t take the time for her, like Rosie did for me.”

She talked about her dead father, her mother who abandoned her. “Since she left, I hardly think of her. No … that’s not really accurate. What I mean is, as a kid I used to dream that she would come back for me. I’ve learned most dreams don’t come true, we just outgrow them.”

“
Da
. Is accurate, but very sad,” Niki said. “And why, I wonder, must we make dreams come true? Is
all
a dream, no? We need to make our
life
come true. Need to know are we really living it. Is there more to it than this? There has to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well … we look closely, we see there is life inside this life. Something wriggling between these spaces. We know is there, but don’t know what to call it, how to reach it.”

“Are you talking about God?”

“No. I am Russian after all. My background is mathematics. This the only God.”

“Hold on,” Ana argued. “I’ve read that there’s a whole area of mathematical propositions that can’t be proven. They’re neither true nor false. Even Einstein was stumped. That means at some point, mathematics fails. It isn’t absolute. So how can math be God? Or vice versa?”

Niki smiled. “Ana, you don’t see? Answers are there! But even Einstein did not want to see them. And, why? Because if he find all answers, then is no reason for God. He does not want to do this to humanity.”

“You’re a trickster,” she said. “You say life is entirely a dream. Then you say it’s mathematically absolute.”

He liked that she challenged him, kept up with him. He tried to kiss her. When she pushed him away, he laughed.

“Okay. I am patient. I see you are afraid. So unprepared for love you look right through it.”

“Niki, you use that word too easily. You ‘love’ my apartment, my appliances. You ‘love’ my speed bag …”

“Then I try to be more discreet. But not give up. How I can convince you of my feelings?”

She looked at his stained fingernails, his rather worn-out clothes. But his skin was clean and glowing, and he smelled like old, polished leather. Against a slight sunburn, even his teeth seemed whiter. She wanted to ask why, of all the women in the city, he chose her.

Instead she said, “Slow down. Slow down.”

Alone at night, her hands cupped her shoulders, then moved down her waist to her thighs. She wondered if other lonely women did that, imagining how their skin felt to a man. It had been over five years. She tried to remember how a man’s hand felt—its weight on her skin, its warmth raising her body temperature.

Her hand came to rest on her scars. They had healed relatively smoothly, no keloids, but in the dark she
felt
their whiteness, the stark absence there seeming to signify the absence of many things in her life. Mostly she dreaded telling this man because she did not want the disease to define her. Each time she looked at Niki, Ana did not want to see it in his eyes.
Here is a woman who had cancer
.

T
HE NIGHT THEY FINALLY BECAME LOVERS, AT FIRST THEY LAY TOGETHER
fully dressed. Ana gazed at the ceiling.

“Niki. I need to tell you something.”

He turned somber, folded his arms across his stomach, and waited.

“I’ve had surgery. For cancer. They removed my breast. It isn’t pretty.”

He slowly raised his head and looked at her. “How long ago … the surgery?”

“Almost six years now.”

He turned on his side, facing her.

Now he will be very kind, because I have ceased to interest him
.

His eyes were riveted to hers, his face near brute with feeling. He took her in his arms.

“Thank you! Oh, Ana. Thank you … for surviving.”

When they were finally undressed, she turned her head away. He studied her chest, then very tenderly followed the lines of the scars with his lips.

“Heal, little ones. Heal. Grow strong above your beating heart.”

There was no feinting and no barter. He kissed her scars, and remained erect. In time, she would relax, not look away when he touched her there, but on that first night she was stunned. At first she felt like a woman in a fairy tale captured by a beast with massive paws. Yet his big, scarred hands were gentle, his movement endearingly shy and courtly. As if he planned to worship her, to lay down at her feet as an offering his entire history.

But then, in the deepest throes of passion, he became a primate. Screaming. Leaping. Caterwauling like something being slaughtered. He even lifted her by the shoulders, shaking them, as if to make sure she was paying attention. Finally, he was a thoughtful lover, considerate of her pleasure, slowing when he saw where she liked being touched. But then he grew wild again, leaping and shouting, even sobbing when he came.

Exhausted and spent, she watched him blow his nose, still weeping with emotion. “My God. Is that how Russians make love?”

He drew her to him. “Forgive me. I have been with many women, but only once before did I love. We acted out emotions. She was deaf.”

“…  What happened to her?”

He turned his head. “Another time. Not now.”

D
AYS PASSED, THEN WEEKS
. A
S THEIR FEELINGS SLOWLY DEEPENED
, he expanded on his impressions of her that night at the campfire. At first he had found her intimidating—big-boned, proud, her hair dark and wild with a life of its own. When she had looked at him, she squinted like a woman sighting down the barrel of a rifle. And even when she had
relaxed, there was an edge, a visible hardness in her gaze. But when she held the child, her features had grown soft and lovely.

Then, as Niki had told his Russian tales—how people drank human blood in the famines under Stalin, how in Arctic cold, his
babushka
chopped off her hand when it froze to a rabbit trap, how wolves still ran in the streets of that old Tartar town, Moscow—he had watched how the fire did strange things to Ana’s face. Her eyes going pale to dark as she listened, her native blood drumming to the surface so her cheekbones glowed.

“You looked scary. Maybe even beautiful, but scary. Then slowly I see how good you listened. Your lips apart, expression softening as interest grew. So. I left that night thinking, ‘maybe I find her again.’ Then I think, ‘Why her? Why life is throwing someone like that at me, a drifter, bouncing off life so many years?’ But I keep thinking, ‘Ana.’ ”

While he talked, he pressed her hand against his cheek.

“When I get back to Honolulu I decide, ‘Okay. I take a stab. I look for her. See if I can be normal again. Laugh discreetly, walk in step. Learn to be like other humans, not scare her away.’ I don’t know, maybe was time. I’m bloody tired. Tired makes man humble, maybe more sincere.”

And finally, Ana admitted how, at first glance, she had disliked him.

“That leather getup. Your slangy accents—Russian, Australian, American. Nothing about you seemed plausible. I’ve seen men like you from all over the world pass through our islands. They take our hospitality, our energy, and give nothing back. The type of men I would walk through.”

She hesitated, feeling shy.

“Then you began to tell those tragic stories. You told them so movingly, so humanely, I didn’t care if they were true or not …”

“
Da
. Is very Russian thing. We live to story-tell.”

E
VENTUALLY, WITH HER PRODDING, HE BEGAN TO TALK ABOUT HIS
life, giving her a new version, a fable. He told how he was born in a city almost frozen to extinction. This was Leningrad, under siege by the Germans for nine hundred days during World War II. His earliest memories, he said, were of campfires burning inside gutted buildings, so that each building seemed to resonate and breathe.

“…  I remember coffins being trundled down streets on sleds, until even sleds were used for fires. Then coffins used. Corpses formed blue pyramids along these streets.”