House of Many Gods (32 page)

Without plumbing, clean water disappeared, so there was thirst, degrading thirst. He recalled how people died stuck to the ice they were trying to chop from the rivers. The living began to drink their own fluids. And finally, half-crazed, they carved out thighs and buttocks of the dead, then covered them with snow.

“There was this man, with ordinary face, dragging red woolen shawl from building to building, selling unspeakables. One day he stands with my mother, holding out part of large thigh, cursing softly as she bargains. Then he continues on his way, dragging red shawl. My boyhood is telescoped into this moment, the two of them bargaining over human thigh. I have dragged that shawl behind me in my dreams.”

Ana tried to imagine such a childhood where all he knew was lice, hunger, time that lay over him like a frozen coat. Then Niki spoke of his beautiful mother, a once-famous actress, who worked with the Underground.

“Each night she pull me to my knees and we pray for my father, brave officer leading Russian troops against Germans. And you know, these prayers are answered. Germans finally withdrew, they could not take our Leningrad! When war ends, my hero father comes home, reunited with his wife and son.”

In time his parents saw how bright he was, a boy with an affinity for numbers.

“They send me to state school, then university. Very proud. In time I am groomed for Novosibirsk, famous city in Siberia built for scientists, physicists, their families. Very exclusive. But today? A ghost town.”

He explained how he began to grow disillusioned.

“I see they are teaching us only to make weapons that destroy. To make Russia number one. You remember what we did in Poland? Hungary? Czechoslovakia? This is long before we rape Afghanistan. So I shame my parents. I drop out of university. I give up mathematics. Numbers now futile, a search for infinity cheap as religion.”

Finally, he had dropped out completely and ended up a black marketeer, then bodyguard to gangsters.

“Nothing touched me. You understand? I would have shot my best friend for money. Years passed. I don’t remember them.”

Sometimes Nikolai fell silent, as if worn-out by his history. Or, he skipped back and forth in time, omitting years, recalling the mid-1980s when Russia began to splinter.

“Decades of Cold War were a farce. Across Russia, all receptors quivering, H-bombs at the ready, while we stir annihilation into morning
coffee. Was in our milk, you see. In this milk is strontium 90, iodine 131. Food-chain contamination running rampant thirty years. This was the joke. Our bombs could not protect us! Our fields already sown with radioisotopes.”

It would take weeks before he talked about his past again—traveling through Russia, filming its polluted towns and rivers, its devastation. How he had sat listening to the stories of elders.

“You know what I hear? Nostalgia. Human longing for the past—the clean kill of wolf packs. Even of war.”

He showed Ana footage of the faces of Kazakhstan. The young. The old. Eyes that were shell-shocked, completely dead. Bodies so wrecked and poisoned, they seemed devoid of human attributes.

Finally, she shook her head. “I can’t watch anymore.”

He sat back and sighed. “So, Ana. You want to know my life. This was my life.”

“That isn’t all of it.”

“…  is all I can bear just now.”

S
HE HAD BEGUN TO KNOW WHEN HE REACHED THE END OF CONVERSATION
. Something in him turned its back, moved to a corner, and sat alone. Some nights she crawled into bed while he sat looking out the window.

“Sleep very hard. Sometimes it look too much like death.”

They stayed apart till dawn. Then he lay down and gathered Ana to his chest and spoke to her in Russian. Half-asleep, she asked him to translate and he searched the ceiling for the words.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it Pushkin?”

“That is Akhmatova. Now sleep, my Ana. Sleep.”

H
E COUGHED SLIGHTLY, THEN TURNED TO SHAKE HANDS WITH
people entering the room. Some folks looked apprehensive. They had heard a Russian would address them and half expected a great, shaggy bear risen up on its hind legs. As he bent over his notes Ana studied him. A man who slept sitting at a window, one who loved poetry but ate with his mouth open. Sometimes he forgot to change his socks.

Tonight he was wearing a shirt so bright it seemed as though objects could bounce off of it. She saw he was nervous by the veins in his neck, the way his heart made his shirt vibrate. She watched him shake Lopaka’s hand, his overeagerness. Next to the Russian’s big, scarred paws, her cousin’s hands looked new, unused.

Folks had come from up and down the coast, even neighbors from Keola Road. Ana’s family came, the smell of grief still clinging to Rosie, heady and unnatural. She still played dead for days. Some nights she sat with the moon cupped in her palms, her arms enmeshed in darkness. Grief gave her license to withdraw. And silence gave her eloquence; she sat amongst them like a priestess.

Now Gena Mele moved to Ana’s side. “Sly mongoose! Imagine you with a Russian.”

Lopaka stood, scanned the room, then tapped the mike. “Okay, folks. You know who I am. You all know we’re here tonight to support Mālama Mākua, and other groups whose aim is to end military bombing of the valley and its beaches, and to demand return of the valley to the people. This is not just for cultural reasons. We’re fighting for our lives.
And, we’ve also gathered here to show support for people across the Pacific.”

He pointed to half a dozen men and women in the front row.

“Our brothers and sisters from French Polynesia, from Kwajelein and Rongelap in the Marshalls. And our Aborigine brothers from Australia. They want to tell you what has happened to their islands and their people.”

Finally, he acknowledged Niki. “Before I present our guest speakers and get embroiled in debates, I want to introduce Nikolai Volenko, from Russia.”

Niki stood, then confused, sat down.

“Mr. Volenko is a documentary filmmaker. For several years he’s been shooting footage all over the Pacific, of average people like you and me. People sick, their children sick. Today he will show you footage of his
own
country, whole villages of people suffering and dying. Think of what you are going to see as a warning, of what could happen here.”

Polite applause as Niki approached the mike. “My English … not so good … forgive me …”

Folks leaned forward, encouraging him, and in that moment, Ana forgot his loud shirt, his worn-out pants. She forgot how he ate with his head over his plate like a hungry dog. In that moment—his voice slightly rattly, his face tense with the effort not to cough—she wanted to stand beside him and take his hand.

His mouth worked furiously as he struggled to articulate.

“We were always poor people. Real Russia is mostly peasants, farmers … not demonstrating Muscovites you see on TV. In hundreds of villages across Russia, they never hear of such a thing as dial tone. Do not know what is a zipper. But! Long ago our forests were
magnificent
, going on for miles … our soil dark and fertile. Great herds of wildlife roamed our lands, we hear their thundering for days. We called our rivers ‘the sea’ because they were so endless, crystal clear and full of fish.”

He paused, looking out at individual faces. His English had improved dramatically. Ana suspected it was because, for Niki, English was a language without memory. It did not hold his past.

“So. I want to show you … what is Russia now. What was done to us. Please, pay attention.”

Lights dimmed. The tape began as he narrated slowly, allowing images to inscribe themselves. Towns where everything was black—people, even sheep. Coal towns, steel towns. Towns where humans resembled something else.

His deep, bass voice resounded. “From Vilnius to Vladivostok, over eight million square miles … now mostly environmental horror. Even seas are poisoned. Even Arctic Ocean. Death is now exceeding births in Russia by over one million each year.”

The camera froze on a sweet-faced boy squatting on his haunches. He was ten or twelve, his gaze off center of the camera.

“Victim of food-chain contamination. Chemicals from river leached into the soil. His sin? Eating produce from his father’s field. Now, retarded. Friends call him ‘firefly’ because at night he glows.”

Niki cleared his throat. “Forgive me if you have been offended. All you have seen is true.”

Lights came on. Men placed their elbows on their knees and held their heads between their hands. A mother rocked her child and wept.

Later, a woman named Reiata Huahine rose and talked about her islands of Tahiti and the Tuamotus in French Polynesia, and how the French government’s bomb testing had damaged many of her people. Since the 1960s children as young as ten and twelve had been conscripted to work at test sites and never given protective clothes. When they began to die, their bodies were so contaminated they were buried in lead coffins. Then the coffins disappeared. They were flown to France for research.

Her voice was deep and strong, like a beautiful wailer. Yet she kept it controlled, her emotions in check.

“Our lagoons are irradiated, our coral dying, we are afraid to eat our fish, to nurse our children. And France will not even give us back our dead.”

She was stout, big-hipped and beautiful, with the bronze skin and broad features of Tahitians and Hawaiians. Even the two languages were similar. The earliest settlers to Hawai‘i had migrated north from Tahiti, the Tuamotus, and the Marquesas. These were Ana’s closest Pacific cousins, yet she had never been curious about their customs and their Mother Tongue, so similar to hers. She had never longed to see Tahiti.

Later, several Aborigines spoke of how their people were still being “monitored” by the British and Australians from the effects of atomic bombs set off at Monte Bello, Western Australia, in 1952, and in the Great Victoria Desert of Australia in 1953.

“Nobody warned us. They just exploded the bloody bombs. Thousands of our clans were out there living in the desert.”

Only in 1985 did the British government publicly admit that such tests resulted in radioactive fallout that rained down on them for miles.

“And how did they apologize? With subsidies, and
deep indifference
. And still we are forced to live within the hazard zone of nuclear-support facilities. Uranium dug up from our sacred lands is still used in nuclear warheads.”

By the time the Marshall Islanders got up to speak of the atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini and Eniwetok in the 1940s and ’50s, and how—shifted from island to island—they came to be known as “nuclear nomads,” Ana was overwhelmed with anger and grief.

Later, she talked to Reiata Huahine, a doctor herself, an internist. She asked about Ana’s practice, why it had taken her so long to start her fellowship in OB-GYN.

“I was sick for a while. Then … a death in the family. Practicing as general physician allowed me to function by rote.”

“Sometimes we need such pauses, to catch up with ourselves,” the woman said. “But you will find great fulfillment in your chosen field. Nothing is more mysterious or exhilarating than the machinations of the female anatomy. And nothing is more tragic than when that system fails, or is invaded.”

Ana spoke of a plan slowly forming in her mind: to one day open a women’s clinic on the coast. “A healing place for birthing and nurturing. I want midwives, licensed doctors, and
kahuna la‘au lapa‘au
. Ancient and modern medicine. So women will have a choice.”

A
FTER THE CONFERENCE
, N
IKI MADE PLANS TO RETURN TO
T
AHITI
, wanting footage of demonstrations taking place in Papeete, capital city, as Tahitians challenged France’s plans to resume bomb testing.

“Please come, Ana! I invite you. You will see how I make film.”

She wanted to go, she thought she did. “I’m sorry, Niki. I can’t.”

His voice changed, sounding almost challenging. “Ana. Can it be you are afraid?”

“Of course not. I flew to Kaua‘i for the hurricane.”

“And that is the only place you ever been. Only time you stepped off this island. Perhaps you are afraid of newness? Afraid to … expand?”

Her voice turned ugly and dismissive. “Well, cancer was pretty new. I think I
expanded
somewhat there.”

He stood in shock, then turned and left, quietly closing her door.

W
HILE HE WAS GONE, SHE THOUGHT OF HOW, AFTER THE FIRST
time they made love, she had felt unscarred, desired, even cherished.
She had felt passion. But he was not an average man, not average anything. She saw him as a kind of scavenger, so warped by his past he had no context for normality. What was cancer to this man, a woman’s mutilated chest, after what he had lived through?