House of Many Gods (8 page)

Tommy left. She sat with Noah in the dark.

“I know we have to take what comes. To forget, and then move on. But sometimes I wonder … where does all this forgetting lead? I mean, when we’re older, what’s left when we look back at this thing that was our life?”

Noah hung his head. She was too young to ask such questions. Too young to sound so old.

“I wonder if I would understand things better if I had had a mother.”

He tried to respond. But just now he had no words for her. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette, trying to introduce order to his mind.

… here’s a match, here’s a ashtray on da sill. Careful, careful. Yesterday, knocked it out da window, butts all over chili pepper plant
 … auwē!
Little chili pepper shriveled. Hosed it down … picked up butts … threw dem to da goat. Same goat used to faint when Ana screamed, tied up to da clothesline … Cannot be! How old dat damn goat now? … Here’s her hand, soft and warm in mine … here’s her sweet face crying in da Kleenex
 …

He wanted to whisper “Ana! Live!” He wanted to tell her it did not matter if folks went away. That she was richer because other humans had loved her, even hurt her. And that those humans were enriched by her. He had come back from a horrible place, but that place had let him live. He wanted to tell her how life was a miracle. Each moment of living, each living thing, a miracle. He had so much to tell her. He did not know how.

T
WELVE YEARS BEFORE
A
NA HAD COME INTO THE WORLD, A BOY
was born in a place so bleak and cold, his first breath was visible. Years later Nikolai Volenko would swear he could remember the moment of birth—bursting from between his mother’s thighs, his screams creating little clouds of vapor. He would remember a smoke-blackened ice hut, smoldering carcasses, women who smelled like great, wild beasts.

The ice hut sat in a virgin forest surrounded by the subarctic tundra of north Russia. It was a region called Archangel’sk that faced the White Sea, only ice-capped waves between them and the North Pole. A forsaken place at the edge of the world, as forbidding as Siberia.

In his first few months of life, the infant, Nikolai, slept inside great greasy pelts of bear and elk sewn together with needles made from bone. He lived pressed against his mother’s breasts, held fast in her arms like ice holding fast to an inlet. Thus, he would always carry the cold of Archangel’sk in his marrow. It paralyzed everything, even thought, so that the women lived mostly in silence, communicating with grunts and gestures.

Here daylight was weak and fleeting; they huddled close and slept with their nightmares unbroken. And when there was no food, the snows too deep to hunt, they slept for days, unaware of the passage of time. Perhaps out in the world empires were rising and falling, perhaps another world war had started. Here, it only snowed. And then the wind howled. Sometimes his mother roused herself and passed the child around, and women held him like a tender roast.

“Goloobka. Our little goloobka.”
Our dove. For he was life. He gave them hope.

It would be these women he remembered most indelibly—how they gathered round him, sitting hunched and neckless, their shoulders on a level with their eyes. Great crones in birch-bark boots and leggings tied with animal gut, and ragged Army greatcoats so thickly padded their bodies were spherical. They appeared wrinkled and ancient, with breath rank as wolves, yet some of them were still in their thirties. Life in Archangel’sk had reduced them to creatures of animal cunning with a touch of remembered tenderness.

As he grew out of infancy, their stench became a comfort to the boy. He learned to clutch the toylike skulls of lynx or fox, and to inhale the lonely madness when a woman screamed. They did not scream often. Rather, when one of them learned that the husband they had followed to this place had perished, they simply stepped out of the hut into shrieking winds and temperatures far below zero, and died frozen into standing blocks of ice.

Those who survived watched him take his first steps in the hut, and they smiled and patted his footprints, so tiny and lovable. Sitting him close to the fire, they blew warm breath on his naked toes, rubbing them briskly, and sang little hunting chants of the strategy of foxes, the scruples of wolves.

When temperatures rose a few degrees and daylight endured for an hour or two, they rubbed bear grease on his cheeks and strapped him to their chests inside their padded coats and plunged with snowshoes through the virgin forests of Archangel’sk, through birch and pine and giant fir, while they stalked wildlife, checked the rusty, cold jaws of their traps, and set fish lines in ice holes of a frozen pond. Some days they harvested gray human skulls protruding from the snow.

Occasionally they took Nikolai when they trudged fifty miles on homemade skis to a wood-pulp mill across the frozen Dvina River. There they traded fish and pelts and even sex for a rifle, bullets, fuel, tobacco, muddy green vodka made from rye, and matches whose wood was tipped with phosphorus and wax. Days later they struggled through snows forever crisscrossed by men in chains back to their ice hut near the perimeters of the
lag
, the labor camp, of Archangel’sk.

And as they traveled, the great forests gifted the boy with miracles. Rising from seemingly fathomless snow, the shimmering, golden dome of a gutted church with its shattered, tongueless bell. Redberry bushes like bonfires suddenly bursting through the ice. One night his mother cried
out and popped his head from inside her coat, and he saw in the endless expanse of Eurasian skies, fantastic dancing lights.

“The Northern Aurora!”

As he grew old enough to venture out in snowshoes, the little boy’s senses grew sharper. He learned how the mute frozen world came alive when he stood still, so that he heard the sigh of a dying crow crucified on iced branches. The bubbling up of blood as deer lay down to a flash of wolves. Following behind the women as they stalked prey, he heard their hunter heartbeats, thundering like drums. He heard glass shattering: ice cracking through the forest, a sound old as time.

He learned how to listen for the panting of the lynx, and to eat snow so the hunted fox could not see his breath. He learned to blink rapidly to keep his eyes from icing shut, but to move slowly and breathe evenly. To move fast would create a sweat under so many layers of fur and cloth. Sweat would freeze, and slow the heart. A sleepiness would come. Then coma.

Other things he would remember: how frost crystallized on the gray fur of wolves so they seemed to be running in coats of diamonds, silvery green against blue arctic snow. And he would remember how, as light deepened into purple dusk, a freezing mist hovered, then rose from the ground and gave the impression the women were floating like saints as they glided home.

W
HEN HE WAS FOUR YEARS OLD THE FOREST TURNED ON HIM
, leaving a hole in his life where his youth should have been. One day, following behind the hunting women, Nikolai heard the sound of barking voices, and then dragging chains. The women grew still and moved behind a grove of firs. From there he saw long lines of men in ragged clothes, so vaporously thin he thought he was imagining them. They semed to hum as they stumbled past, skull-like heads hung with cold, exhaustion. Armed guards in trucks followed alongside them aiming machine guns, and now and then a guard dog leapt. Teeth scraping bone.

He began to be aware of them in the distance through the trees. The clanging of leg chains as they sawed logs, nearby a campfire where guards played with their dogs, making them beg and roll over. Some guards, half-drunk, shot at prisoners for sport. Each day the sound of shifting gears—trucks fighting for traction on the ice as they hauled a dead man back to camp.

One night when temperatures rose above zero, Nikolai’s mother
walked him down a path of frozen footprints humpbacked with ice and mud. Slowly, laboriously, she hoisted herself up into a tree, high into snow-laden branches, and pulled him up beside her.

“That’s where your father is.”

He gazed into the distance at razor-wired fences, above them barriers of rolled barbed wire. Along the fences were guard towers and emplacements holding machine guns. Every few seconds a spotlight from a tower swept the camp. From inside one of the towers a man with a rifle seemed to tilt drunkenly, tossing a bottle to the ground. There appeared to be nothing else to see, but endless boxcars on rusty tracks, and long gray buildings, dismal and decrepit, that seemed to go on for miles.

His mother whispered, “They pack them on those cattle cars … and run them north … until the tracks run out.”

Nikolai grew impatient. He was cold and he wanted to take his father home. “Where is Papa?”

Just then a truck with watery headlights moved across the campgrounds, its lights falling on the form of a man facedown. Guards stepped cursing from the truck, picked up the body by the ankle, and flung it aside. Even with leg chains, it seemed so light, so weightless, it hung in the air like cloth, then appeared to thoughtfully float down. Guard dogs made sport of it, growling and dragging it to and fro, tearing at it till they grew bored. Nikolai started to cry out, then he saw that his mother had sucked her fist into her mouth with such force she seemed to have partially swallowed it.

After that night he listened more closely when the women talked, hoarding phrases until he began to vaguely understand them.

“Niki’s father … a hero in the war. But after war, two careless words sentence him to death …”

Like thousands of wives whose husbands were condemned to labor camps across Russia after World War II, Niki’s mother had followed her husband from Leningrad to Archangel’sk, a grueling journey that took over a year. They had trudged through war-ravaged towns and mined fields, held each other up in winter snows and summer swamps filled with deadly mosquitoes. Begging their way till half of them were broken, diseased, near-dead.

It was summer when the women had finally reached Archangel’sk, a brief month or two when temperatures rose above freezing. They dug deep holes in the earth to sleep in and that was how they lived, deep in earth, eating birds and berries. When men came in chains to chop down
trees, the women had popped their heads up from the earth, asking for their husbands. And so they made contact.

In time, camp guards had heard of women hiding in the forests. They aimed rifles down the earth holes and ordered them out, then used them like goats for sex and pushed them back into the earth. Some guards took pity, tracking down a prisoner, and in that way, after many months, Nikolai’s mother, Vera, had found her husband.

She made a sturdy slingshot from small birch branches, then traded homemade cigarettes with guards for pencils, rubber bands. She wrote to her husband on bits of rags, balled them up and shot them over the prison fence. How many were received she never knew.

But one night a slender missile flew back at her. The next night another. Messages signed with his name. Sergeivitch Volenko. He aimed them over the fence with a kind of homemade blowgun, notes rolled up tight as darts, written on paper scraps in lumpy, rusty red. She learned that he had scratched dust from barrack walls to thicken his blood, with which he wrote his messages.

As winter returned and snows came, the women had built ice huts deep in the forests near the
lag
, and there they lived like Eskimos. Each day they ran into the woods where prisoners felled trees, men bent and skeletal from disease and near starvation. They hid behind the trees looking for their husbands. And when they found them each man and wife stood dumb, pressing their heads to each other’s shoulders.

Months passed, then one day Vera saw him. Sergeivitch, just eyes and bone, his filthy skull now bald. At first they stood and stared as prisoners started fistfights to distract the guards. Then Vera ran forward. Her husband hobbling toward her like a child. No words, just cries, and holding on.

It happened for weeks, their running together, holding each other while trees crashed around them. And in that way, Nikolai was conceived midst the white firs of Archangel’sk. One day they stood braced against a fir tree, making love, Sergei’s leg chains singing against the bark. In that moment they had both looked up, their cheeks stroked by the blind tenderness of snow, frost patterns overlapping their eyes as they created him.

Months passed before she saw her husband again. She held him while he shuddered, so weak and starved he had no words. She pushed bits of deer liver into his mouth and watched him swallow them whole.

“I am carrying your child,” she whispered.

In that moment his eyes had lit up, he found the strength to smile even though his teeth were gone. Vera never saw him again. Week after week she ran through the forest, stood outside the camp fence at night and slingshot messages to him. And finally, the child was born. Still week after week, month after month, she stood outside the fence and waited.

One day a woman caught her hand in the jaw of a trap and hacked her hand off at the wrist so she would not freeze to death. Her wrist turned black and stank, and then the arm turned black. She kissed Nikolai on the cheek and walked out into the snow. That was how it was for some. When death came for them they did not seem surprised, they did not mind. Their men had already perished here.