House of Many Gods (42 page)

She had entered timelessness over New York City, night making it a living jewel. At Kennedy Airport, she had dozed upright until dawn when they boarded Finnair for Helsinki. People began to look distinctly different, long-boned Scandinavians, and others whose bodies had a hefty, rural magnetism. They spoke in Balkan and Slavic tongues, rather guttural and harsh, and wore strange amalgamated clothes that looked as if they’d been assembled by committees. They moved with the lethargy of centuries.

In Helsinki, a tension had settled on the crowd as they lined up at Aeroflot for the hour flight to St. Petersburg. Even the small group from Honolulu grew alert. As their plane approached the “Venice of the North,” Ana saw how St. Petersburg spilled across the banks and islets of the Neva River Delta and into the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea.

“A city of islands,” her neighbor said. “Eight hundred bridges lace it together.”

Niki had said that, too. It was just a collection of islands. She held on to that; it made the city less frightening.

Now she sighed and stretched her arms, then half sat up and leaned her head against the window, peering out again. Great robber forests of fir and pine, deserted little huts bent sideways. Moonlight gave it all a talcumed beauty, a seeming endlessness. They passed little villages where people stood beside the tracks waving lanterns and small torches that, through grimy windows, flickered blue.

Ana waved back, then dozed again, her mind drifting over the week since her arrival in St. Petersburg. Immigration and Customs a blur, her group had huddled close like goslings following their Russian tour guide to a bus, where the driver sat cursing in the dirt, replacing a tire slashed by the “taxi mafia” looking for customers.

The guide had introduced herself as Zora, a small, energetic brunette with blue eyes reminiscent of Byzantine mosaics. Yet there was a tightness in her smile, fatigue in her sloping posture, suggesting that youth had already flown, that her energy came from her will to endure. With childlike candor she tried to divert the group’s attention, describing the city’s excellent restaurants, its grand cathedrals, and Peter itself as “most beautiful city in world.” For hours passengers sulked, their breath stirring up the stagnant time inside the bus, until finally they departed.

The outskirts of Peter had rushed at them—medieval ruins of peasant huts dotting miles of concrete high-rises resembling penal institutions. Crows roamed the skies like bandits, swooping down on fresh roadkills. And in gray fields,
babushki
in fearsome tapestries of rags swung picks at the earth, then paused and blew their noses in their hands. When they looked up Ana saw eyes red and raw, wrinkles deep as saber cuts. Children with dirty faces ran beside the bus, offering bouquets of broken buttercups. Others just ran, holding out their empty hands.

They moved into a city layered in grime—bridges, boulevards, even cars stuck in traffic. It was summer, yet everything looked entombed in a dream of granite and mold. An overriding quality of despair, decay. Then their bus turned a corner and through the shimmer of linden trees, Ana was confronted with the haunting echo of Russia’s past. Gold-domed cathedrals of a size that made people seem antlike. Forty-foot monuments of bronze and marble. A landscape of grandeur frozen in time. With a soft lurching of brakes, they came to a standstill in front of a huge, pistachio-colored wedding cake.

“Mariinsky Theatre,” Zora announced. “Famous for Kirov Ballet … Pavlova, Nijinski. You are fortunate to be seeing a performance there this week, where you will see
nine hundred pounds
of gold in gilded interior walls and façades!”

Ana’s lips parted in wonder as they passed cupola’ed and onion-domed jewels, great baroque and neoclassical palaces still magnificently intact, hints of crimson, blues, and yellows rinsing through the grime. In pearly, northern light, each palace had an eerie, otherworldly beauty.

“Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace … Stroganov Palace … Menshikov Palace … Each set in splendid, private park.”

A sense of melancholy majesty and attending death formed a strange alloy in her head. Fairy-tale palaces and their vast pollarded acreage set midst crumbling decay and poverty gave this dreamlike city a disturbing hybrid quality. Like a deadly poisonous yet alluringly beautiful, fading orchid.

At the end of the main thoroughfare, Nevsky Prospekt, they crossed the Neva River to their hotel. Halfway there, the driver stopped and they looked back across the river at the jewel of St. Petersburg. The Hermitage Museum, which melted into the magnificent Winter Palace. Fronting the river, the Hermitage and Winter Palace were perfectly reflected in its waters—a graceful baroque edifice of soft chartreuse greens. Punctuated by white Doric columns topped with allegorical bronzed statues and window surrounds of gold, it seemed to extend for miles.

From the front of the bus Zora spoke. “You are feeling awe, no? In monumental scale, in architectural beauty, in quality and encyclopedic display of culture and art, Hermitage is rivaled in world only by Louvre and British Museum. But we have something more …”

She threw up her hands in a gesture of wonder so that her breasts stood out.

“Hermitage was also Imperial Residence! Winter Palace for Peter the Great. Later Catherine the Great. Alexander II was dying here of assassin’s wounds. Russian history is walking these corridors. You will be feeling emotional charge of Imperial past when you are entering it tomorrow. Only several rooms to take all day.”

Ana stared. As in a dream, she saw them.

 … There is the nurse with the strange, uneven features, outrunning the bombs, bringing them bread and candles … And there is the carpenter with bad feet, building crates in the catacombs to hide priceless paintings
 …

•   •   •

She imagined the nurse and carpenter meeting.

 … The two of them making forays to the haunted galleries upstairs, hammering plywood over shell holes, sweeping out piles of shattered glass … They stand before an empty wall, imagining the portrait that had hung there
. The Return of the Prodigal Son.
The nurse traces with her finger the Rembrandt’s shadow on the wall
 …

Ana shook herself, suspecting that this was how she would experience the city—borne to her through the memories of Niki. She would find him by listening to the cellos of the past.

T
HE
H
OTEL
O
KHTINSKAYA WAS NONDESCRIPT AND HUGE
. A
RMED
guards were posted at the entrance and scattered round the lobby—big, scarred men with the restless gaze of wildlife that had not tamed their focus down to meet the human eye. They took her passport, gave her an entry pass and key. At the desk, she asked if there were any messages for her. The receptionist stared at her, then shook her head. On her floor, in a kiosk that sold magazines and vodka, two husky women sat knitting.

“Dobraye utra,”
they said. Hello.

Big-breasted sentries, they watched her progress down the hall, then listened as she struggled with her key. Her room was small and musty, the bedspread retaining the sorrowful smell of sleepless humans in transit. The closet door hung by one hinge. Her window looked out on a treeless park eight floors below where people carefully side-stepped manure and ran their scruffy dogs.

Ana sat down and tried to call Niki. Static, then voices shouting back and forth. A phone rang, then it stopped; the operator said the phone was out of order.

“Then … is there any other listing for a Nikolai Volenko?”

The woman laughed and spoke in fearless English. “Is very common Russian name! Maybe two hundred of this name in Moscow.”

She lay back feeling helpless, then showered and went down to dinner, where she found the cavernous dining room closed. They had run out of “tourist” food. A guard pointed her to a market half a block away and, cautiously crossing the dog park seeded with broken glass, the staggering swoon of couples, Ana entered a crowd of wild-looking men and women.

She was in a
gastronom
, a people’s market, not meant for tourists, gamey with the odor of stale meat, humans reeking of sausage and unwashed flesh. Valkyries in steely white hairnets and bloodstained white coats stood behind low counters, hacking at chicken parts. They flourished their knives, shouting abuse at unruly crowds as people waved chits, grabbing up greenish bottles of kefir and small knots of potatoes.

Ana turned back to the entrance door, but in the frenzy of the crowds—expressions mean, determined—she was thrown against a counter. Her cheek slid down the belly of a hanging hare, its peltless corpse flayed blue and red. She screamed but in the general shouting no one heard. Then, in the swelter of bodies, a white-coated woman leaned over a counter and hacked at a huge, singed pig, a sunflower protruding from the moldy star of its anus. In his desperate grab for a slice of pig, a man knocked Ana down, then someone knocked him down. She lay stunned in a chaos of muddy boots.

But in the obtuse violence of the crowd someone took pity on her. One of the Valkyries mounted a box and shouted, waving her knife over her head as if preparing to aim and throw it. The crowd fell back, someone helped Ana to her feet. The white-coated woman laid down her knife and leaned over the counter, offering Ana a yogurt cup.

“Eat! Be strong like Russians!” Then she stepped back, still yelling at the crowd, and slapped a big cream cheese into shape.

Working her way back through the mob, Ana made it to the door, where someone grabbed her yogurt and thrust several
kopecks
in her hand. She staggered out into the sodium halo of a streetlight. She had been frightened but not mortally so, for there was something palpably alive in that crowd. Something that wanted life, not death. An enormous strength that stemmed perhaps from the memory of want.

Dizzy with hunger and fatigue, she wandered down the street and entered Last Kiss Before the Revolution Café. A dark vestibule, a cavernous dance floor, and a bar. It was empty except for a couple with shaven heads. The waitress wore exaggerated platform heels that sounded a clunky staccato as she crossed the floor. She was dark and pretty like a young, Greek boy, but when she bent close, Ana smelled the fruity breath of a diabetic.

Seeing three words on the menu she understood, she pointed and ordered.

“Borscht, shashlik, I chashka chaya.”
Cabbage soup, shish kebab, and tea.

“
Da
.” The waitress nodded vigorously and disappeared through beaded drapes into a small, dark coffin of a kitchen.

The shaven-headed couple seemed to be licking each other’s faces. The barman studied his profile in a mirror, left, then right.

It seemed only a matter of minutes before the waitress gently nudged her.
“Uzhin!”
Dinner.

Ana looked down at a dingy glass of beer, a tomato from which it appeared a bite had been taken. And what looked vaguely like a plate of dog ears, long mustard-colored petals covered with singed fur.

She shook her head. “
Nyet
. Not what I ordered.”

“
Da
,” the waitress insisted.
“Da!”

In that moment, she remembered Niki’s words. “In Russia, logic does not apply. Only the improbable is real.”

She sighed, picked up her fork and speared one of the furred things, hoping it was some kind of vegetable. It was like chewing rubber covered with singed fur. She gagged into her napkin, ate the tomato, slowly drank the beer, and left
rubles
on the table.

Walking back to her hotel, she saw a solitary window lit up in the dark and, midst a white meringue of curtains, an old pressed flower of a face. It smiled, then waved its hand, a tiny envelope of bones. Ana waved, then crossed the dog park, trying vainly to grasp this mysterious, timeless heartache of a city.

Exhausted, she undressed and sank into a sleep that seemed a series of interrupted naps. Russia was in its “White Nights” of summer when, for a week or so, the sun barely set. Night was a pinkish dusk that lasted several hours before the sun rose again. She woke and dozed fitfully, Niki’s face appearing and dissolving.

B
Y THE NEXT DAY
P
ETER BEGAN TO OVERWHELM HER
. A
CITY OF
too much exhausted beauty, too much history. She could absorb it only in sidelong glances, little sips, finding similarities to her islands.

Zora explained how rough-hewn Peter the Great had envisioned his city as a “window on Europe,” and how his successors had followed him. Aristocrats of early St. Petersburg had learned French and English, and married their children off to European nobles, hoping to absorb their dress and manners. Studying the portraits of Russian “noblemen,” Ana recalled the history of Hawaiian kings and queens, how they had copied the British to the point of adulation.

In 1882 when Kalakaua had completed construction of ‘Iolani Palace in Honolulu, he had even crowned himself king with a full coronation ceremony. His successor and cousin, Queen Liliu‘okalani, a friend
of England’s Queen Victoria, had dressed exactly like the queen. And like England’s queen, Liliu‘okalani had been a noble and imperious ruler, so threatening to Americans they had dethroned and imprisoned her.

As they progressed through the Hermitage, Zora expanded on Russia’s history.

“Please understand opposing forces of our geography. Always we are being pulled two different ways. Pull of Europe on western borders. Pull of Asia on eastern borders. This is making us always a little what you are calling … schizophrenic.”

Ana thought how Hawaiians, too, had been pulled in different directions. Set in the heart of the Pacific, they had always felt the ancient pull of Asia, and after being colonialized, the massive influence of the United States.

That evening at their hotel, Ana quietly took Zora aside.

“I’m trying to reach a friend in Moscow. The hotel operator says the phone is out of order. But I heard it ring! Could you please make the call for me again? Perhaps, since you speak Russian …”

The woman stared at her until her silence seemed extreme. “Sorry. I am guide only. I do not tamper in such things.”