House of Many Gods (36 page)

“At Archangel’sk, armed guards dragged prisoners to woods where stood great stands of fir and pine. Each day, chained men were forced to chop them down. In time, whole forests disappeared. Men died from starvation, beatings, horrible disease …”

He spoke more slowly now.

“After his sentencing … my poor mother, Vera, she follows my father, Sergeivitch, from war-torn Leningrad to this place, Archangel’sk. Ana … how I can explain such incredible journey? Thousands of war wives—wounded, crippled, tubercular—dragging selves across the land, following condemned husbands. Across
taiga
and
tundra
, through great virgin forests. Through Vytegra, Savinskiy, Novodvinsk. They trudge through ravaged towns, mined fields, till half of them were dead. This journey taking over one, two years.”

Niki recounted how, in time, his mother had found his father in chains, in the forest, chopping trees. How they had made love beneath giant firs, and that was how he was conceived. He never knew his father. What he remembered most indelibly from those years were the women who rubbed bear grease on his cheeks and taught him how to hunt and trap.

“They were like Goths, so fearless! But when they learn their husbands have perished in the camp, they give up … lie down and turn to logs. Or they step out into arctic winds. Some nights I smell these women in my sleep. I hear their hunter heartbeats. I see them frozen into standing blocks of ice.”

While Niki talked, Ana had covered her face with her hands, and shook her head, disbelieving.

“So, Ana, this was my birthplace, and it was my father’s grave. Starving humans dragging their chains. Guard dogs sporting with a corpse. Yet it is where I believe I have never felt so safe, so cherished.”

He fell silent for a while. Then finally, he described the two-year struggle back to Leningrad and how, so young, he watched his mother taken as Stalin purged cities of the wounded and deformed.

“But I was clever. I survived. You see, long before Irini I learned how lies were my salvation.”

T
HAT NIGHT
A
NA LAY SLEEPLESS
. S
HE FELT PHYSICAL PAIN, FELT
slightly beaten-up by Niki’s stories. Her heart hurt for him. She wanted to reach out and somehow heal him, but she was not equipped for such a task. She wondered what a man like this would ultimately ask of life, of a woman who shared his life. He would probably ask too much. He would take her hostage. Knowing he would soon return to Russia, she felt a deep sense of remorse, and yet relief, already imagining her days filled with the quietude his absence would create.

T
HE RADIOLOGIST WAS BALDING, A CENTRAL STRAND OF PEWTER
hair. He held X-rays to the light, trying to be tactful, but seemed handicapped by a congenital brusqueness.

“See these small cavities in his lungs? From toxic invasions. Without proper treatment, he could become susceptible to viruses, bacilli, even pulmonary edema …”

She studied the X-rays. “What else?”

“Well, his liver … typical Russian. Years of oversmoking, overdrinking. And I would say he’s borderline anemic. You want the rest?”

Her heart turned.

“His immune system is weak. White cells aren’t reproducing fast enough. Soon they’ll be too low to fight off infections.”

“Is there any good news?”

“Amazingly, he’s got the constitution of a bull. I’m not saying he’s dying, but he could begin to fail if he’s not looked after.”

He saw the expression on her face. “I’ve seen much worse. Toxic-exposure victims, radiation, people so polluted, or fried, they have no immune system left. Your friend is not that bad. He could recover.”

“What exactly does he need?”

“Rest. Clean air. Diuretics to draw the fluids from his lungs. AZT or Interleukin to build up his white cells. Iron supplements, calcium. Fresh fruits, vegetables. Beef, liver, leeks. And he needs to check in for a complete workup, and to review his medications.”

“He has no medical insurance.”

“It could be done on an outpatient basis. Still, it would be expensive.”

Ana gazed out the window. “He was on a grant here at the university. But his year is up. He has to go back to Russia.”

“
That
would be a death sentence. Tourists are coming back with serious respiratory problems.”

She looked down and sighed.

“He needs real supervision, Ana. Someone to pay his bills. A big responsibility.”

Later, she stood in her apartment, everything tasteful, but bought secondhand. Even her car was secondhand. Most of her paychecks went back to Nanakuli, young cousins—their education, clothes. She helped the family buy a van when all the trucks broke down. She had no more room for responsibility.

W
HEN SHE TOOK HIM IN FOR HIS LAB RESULTS, SHE FELT PART OF
herself step back.

The radiologist spoke softly, asking Niki to sit down. They hunched forward eye to eye like two men at a chessboard, discussing his X-rays, his blood count.

“You need rest, Niki. And stronger medication.”

“
Da
. Perhaps in Russia …”

The man half laughed. “My friend, Russia will kill you.”

Something surfaced then, long-buried and resentful.

“Kill me? My own country kill me?” He rose to his feet and spoke softly. “This is what you think of Russia only? That all is death? That we don’t dream of little houses, rose gardens? Is true, when you look at Russian, you do not see a rose. But we are not cliché. Russia is not cliché. We are not all dying. We have hope. And dreams.”

In the silence, he felt Ana’s acute embarrassment and clasped his hands.

“Sorry! I am dramatic. I sometimes abash myself. But look. It is not so bleak. Soon I return to Moscow to finish important footage for my film. We have national health, hospitals are free. I will get proper medication … life will be good.”

The radiologist shook his head. “Just breathing that polluted air again …”

“Not problem. Not problem.” He shook the man’s hand. “
Spasibo!
Thank you. Thank you.”

As they walked down the street, she allowed him to talk to cover her embarrassment, the fact that she was letting him go.

“Don’t be sad, Ana. Russians are like
wolves
, takes more than dirty air to kill us. I will go back, finish film, get well. You will see.”

Taking his arm, she spoke halfheartedly. “Niki. You won’t get well. Stay here. We’ll fix your visa. We’ll raise money for your medical expenses.”

He turned away, insulted. “Please. Like you, I have learned to survive alone. But most importantly, I must go back. There is final footage I must shoot. It will define entire documentary.”

“More victims?”

“The scientists themselves. Many are dying. Leukemia. Bone cancer. They want to finally speak the truth, of what ungodliness they created. Such a coup if I can pull it off.”

“How can you? Such interviews will be admitting to the world that your leaders self-destructed.”

Niki laughed. “All over Russia, bigwigs selling their confessions. And, these scientists not so important now. They have been erased as serious cases of mediocrity.”

“But how would you get such tapes out of the country?”

“Same as before. Make copies, friends acting as ‘mules’ smuggle them out. Besides, today anyone at Customs, Immigrations can be bought.”

She saw that he was really leaving. And she began to draw back, so that their nights were nights of tempered passion. They became more like friends lying side by side trying to talk, but with a confused sense of not being able to understand each other.

Finally, he took her in his arms. “Ana. Don’t despair. You are strong and true. You have taught me to be true. To embrace
pamyat
, memory, instead of lies. With you, I finally honored my mother and father by telling their true story. And I have honored my dead wife, Irini.”

“I wish I could give you more,” she said.

“You have given me riches. You have shared your childhood, and your dreams.”

“I mean … I wish I could end your suffering. I wish I could offer you some kind of future.”

His voice turned soft, trying to hide his sadness. “One day when you are ready, you will find a man deserving. I know it would not be me. But you have saved me for a while. And maybe now and then you will think of me. Maybe that is the reason we exist at all … to be remembered.”

Now he moved through her apartment carefully, his hands lightly
touching objects, memorizing them. Ana watched, suspecting that in some far-off time these moments would be recalled as exquisite, barely capturable. How he clasped his elbows when he stood silent, like a boy with a chill. How he smiled down at a glass of pure, clear water just before he sipped it. How tenderly he held a bar of soap, marveling at its scent.

One night he took her to dinner at a nice hotel. A band played, and after their meal they watched couples on the floor. During a fox-trot he asked her to dance.

Ana looked astonished. “I didn’t know you knew how …”

Niki laughed. “Does a Russian dance? Is the pope
Cathol
 … ic?”

He danced beautifully, daringly, holding her like something rare. Then he asked the band to play a tango and swept her down the floor, turning her hip to his hip, the two of them gliding in profile. When she stumbled, he lifted her, carrying her over the misstep, so that their movements were unbroken, even seamless, bodies melting and molding, their rhythm sheer. Couples stopped dancing and watched. How they fit. How they moved as one.

Ana felt immense calm descend on her, wanting to stay like that forever, in that rhythm, in that time. She glanced up at his face, almost stern in pitiful decorum. He seemed to have stripped himself of everything, as if he were naked, offering her all he had, all he was. At the end, she felt so weak and vulnerable she abruptly let go of him and walked off the dance floor. She saw how the gesture shocked him, how it hurt him. This would be the hardest thing to remember. This moment.

That night as they fell asleep, he whispered, “You have been my guide, my companion. But finally, we are each alone. We are all paupers in the end.”

At the East-West Center, he gave his final lecture on his “book in progress,” attended farewell dinners, got thoroughly drunk with colleagues. The morning he left Honolulu he was wearing a shirt that smelled so clean, Ana wanted to bury her face there. She could not take him to the airport, could not bear to, and so she had scheduled early appointments. Gena and Lopaka waited downstairs in their car.

She suddenly felt desperate. “Niki. You’ll write, won’t you? And you’ll come back. We will always want you to come back.”

“Of course. When I am well. When I have means. One day I will come back and show my film.”

Gently, he took her by her shoulders and spoke to her in Russian. “That was a poem to your shoulders. You wear them with such pride. Oh,
Ana. You must give all you have to life. Work to exhaustion. Think to exhaustion. And one day you will love to exhaustion.”

She stood dumb, afraid to speak, then walked him to Lopaka’s car and finally embraced him.

His hand was still waving as the car pulled into traffic.

N
OW, THE SLOW RAIN OF DAYS
. T
HE LONGING FOR SO MUCH THAT
was incomprehensible. Some nights she woke alarmed.
I must have been crying. My cheekbones ache. Was I crying? Well, it will pass
.

Some days she worked double shifts, but it was just her body. She was somewhere else. She started driving the freeway very late when there was little traffic, wanting the sensation of moving past things with velocity. Some nights she swung onto off-ramps and swerved down roads, looking for streets without lights where she entered a void, leaving the world, her conscience, behind.

She looked for stoplights, a sudden red eye, through which she sped, uncaring. She drove for hours, fingers nimble on the wheel, the radio dial, the gearshift, as if they were separate from her, small intelligent aliens working as a team. One night she pressed the accelerator to the floor, blood drumming in her head, which seemed to match the tires drumming on the road.

Eighty miles an hour, eighty-five. She pressed down harder; the car had nothing more to give. It started shimmying, the steering wheel seemed ready to come loose. She stared at her bare foot on the gas, feeling her particles rearrange. Life would soon be over. Her chest ached, the sole of her foot began to burn. She did not have the nerve.

She drove the freeway till dawn then, with a kind of homing instinct, headed to her coast. As the freeway became a two-lane highway, the tin-roofed houses began, the run-down stores. She pulled into a parking lot and dozed. When she woke, she saw what looked like a corpse under a car, an exhaust pipe in its mouth. Then sunlight shifted and the body crawled into the shade.

School kids passed, sword-fighting with broken car antennas. “Park boys” swaggered by, spectacularly tattooed, scored with pins and studs, their girls cosmetically pierced, some bruised with using. They glanced at Ana, eyes glinting with hate, then seeing she was local, they relaxed. Finally, she started the engine and headed up Keola Road.