Snag said, “My feet haven’t hurt this much since the earthquake of ’64.”
“What happened to your feet then?”
“It was just one foot, actually. I was at the bowling alley when the quake hit. A bowling ball fell on my foot. Holy mother of mackerel, did that hurt! I limped outside and all hell and earth were breaking loose. We lost a good portion of the spit that day. Houses floated away. Cars too.”
“I remember. I lived in West Seattle and we felt it, but not like you. The dry cleaners’ windows busted out. We rushed home and the only thing that was broken in the whole house was one saucer in the cupboard. My mother cried relief.”
Snag closed her eyes and let Gilly have her way with Snag’s feet. Gilly’s hands had some kind of miraculous gift. “It was crazy here. I thought the world might end. My friends helped me limp over to the drugstore, who knows why. A Band-aid? I remember the whole town outside smelling like liquor and inside the drugstore smelling like a hundred perfumes.” Snag stopped to take in the memory of that day while Gilly began applying the Neosporin. “Everything toppling onto everything else. I’ve never been suicidal or anything. But I remember that day, feeling like I might die and being okay with that. Knowing it might just be easier than continuing on as the confused wreck I was at twenty-four.”
Gilly looked up from her work on Snag’s feet. “Oh, Eleanor. I can’t say I haven’t felt that way myself a time or two. Now. Your feet can’t take this peppermint oil right now but it will feel like heaven on your calves.” Snag started to protest, but she didn’t have the energy. For the first time since she was a baby, she let someone baby her. Gilly finished patting her blisters and sores with Neosporin, then massaged her calves with the Jafra peppermint balm until Snag oohed and ahhed, and then, before she could stop herself, let out a moan.
“Damn you, Gilly,” she finally said.
“Is it my fault that you wore boots from the last century?”
“No, but you know … You know I spent too much of my life in love with a straight woman.”
Gilly stopped her massaging. “Who says I’m straight?”
Snag opened one eye. “Who says I’m in love with you?”
“Who says I didn’t feel the ground below me shake and shudder the first time I heard that laugh of yours coming from Lettie’s room? Or those sweet lullabies? Not to mention that first time I laid eyes on you and your dimples and every time I’ve seen you since?”
“But—but you’re divorced. I met your daughter.”
“So? You’re not really that naïve, are you Eleanor?” And with that, Gilly set Snag’s feet on the towel, scooted along the couch on her knees up to where Snag rested her hands behind her head, leaned over and kissed her so deeply, so completely, so at once urgently and gently, that Snag felt the tingle all the way down her pepperminted calves, to her tender bleeding Neosporined toes, and lots of other places too.
FORTY-SIX
At first, time seemed to stop its forward trek. Instead it looped around and around this beginning of Kache and Nadia. Nadia would be untangling the fishing net with her hands, but her mind stayed tangled in the sheets with Kache. She would be out in the garden alone, talking to the vegetables as she watered them—out of habit now, rather than loneliness—but her mind was going over all she had told Kache. She didn’t regret telling him. But the hollowness left behind felt unnerving. The hauntings giving way, making room for this … this new and vibrant good thing.
It was a good thing. But she walked around in a type of trance, forgetting the order of her chores, or even if she had done some of them at all.
“Who am I?” she said aloud one day to Kache, as they sat eating breakfast.
“It depends. Is this an existential question? Or a rhetorical one?”
“Everything is changed. I am changing.”
He placed his large hand on her fingers, which were gripping the table, and gently loosened them, then held her hand. “I know. Me too.”
“I am so happy. But, I am sad also. Does that make sense? I think not!”
“No. But I feel that way too. We can both make nonsense together.” He took a sip of his coffee. “It does make sense, though. You’ve been through a lot. I don’t want to rush you. Nadia, if you feel like it’s moving too fast. Or that we shouldn’t be this close, you know, physically?”
She shook her head. “It’s not the problem. I do want this closeness with you. It is just, I don’t know. The old sad things, it is as if they make more noise now that they are saying goodbye? Ack! See? I make no sense.”
“We’ve both been not changing for so long. Now it’s like Mother May I finally said, ‘Nadia, Kache, you can take five giant leaps.’”
“Your mother said this?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you read it in her journal?”
Nadia shook her head.
“I’m kidding. It’s a kids’ game, Mother May I. You didn’t have it in the village?”
“No. We had lots of games, but not this one about mothers. We have Klushki, Lopta, Pognali, Zaets, Shalachkee, Sharovki, Knaz, Jaunza—”
Kache laughed. “Okay, okay, you had a lot of games. Any chance I’ll ever get to play Shalachkee with you?”
“Yes. But I warn you that I am really very good.” This made Kache laugh again. She always felt his laugh turn into a smile inside her.
So time circled for days and then weeks, drawing Kache and Nadia closer and closer, and then when they had caught up with this new love and were again able to take care of the chores and all the rest, time expanded. There seemed to be so much more.
More time, more life, more everything.
Nadia grew up following the Julian calendar, thirteen days and several centuries behind most of the world. Her sense of the days and months passing was tightly interwoven with religious observations and rituals. Fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays. More than forty holy days, when school and work were forbidden. Holy days of solemn fasting followed by holy days of feasting and celebration, full of laughter and delicious foods and braga to drink. Even her birthday she never celebrated on the actual date of her birth, but on her designated saint’s day. The days that weren’t designated as holy were days of preparation leading up to the next holy day. Every hour was steeped in faith; even the clock seemed to tick off prayers.
But when she lived alone at the Winkels’ house, she paid closer attention—it became an obsession, really—to the constant changes in nature that marked the hours and the days and the months and the seasons. Route of the sun, cycle of the moon, position of the stars. The lifecycles of the flowers, their subtle routines from dawn until dusk, their journey to full bloom peak, their decline until they withered, hung and spread over the land; a new generation. She felt joy when the moose cows and calves appeared in the spring and a sense of loss when the geese honked their goodbyes, heading south in the fall. With nothing but Elizabeth’s old 1985 calendar and the notches in the root cellar wall, nature provided the only milestones in Nadia’s life.
Yet since Kache had arrived, every day was full of milestones, natural and otherwise. The computer with the bitten apple on its cover, the Internet, Kache’s never-ending bags of products and supplies, their trips to Caboose and Halibut Cove.
And now, all the changing in the space between her and Kache, and the spaces inside them. So much had happened in such little time, Nadia could simply not keep up with it all. The plants and the animals, the weather and the soil moisture, all blended into one big blur somewhere out there; she didn’t feel such an integral part of it, and that was okay. She focused on that which was directly in front of her, usually Kache or the computer screen. So much to know about both of them. He would stomp on the front porch, slip his boots off and burst in, smelling of spruce or fish, carrying eggs or a pail of milk. He had stronger muscles. He smiled more. When he wasn’t working, he played his guitar and sang. His voice, his lyrics, his guitar playing—now she marked the passing of time in how he got better and better each time he picked up h
is guitar, so good now, as if he had been playing all the years he was gone, instead of only keeping track of numbers. She’d heard people in Caboose ask when he would play at the Spit Tune again. They asked him why he hadn’t gone off to become a famous rock and roller. Kache would just shrug and smile, say, “Well, you know how it is.”
Nadia didn’t really understand; she didn’t quite know how it was, but she strove to learn. Every morning, she felt compelled to look up something new.
One morning, she drummed up the courage to look up something old.
“Did you know?” she asked Kache, who had just walked in with an armful of firewood, “That there is actually information on the Old Believers? For anyone to read? Listen:
“The Great Schism, or Raskol, occurred in the mid 1600s when Patriarch Nikon of the Russian Orthodox church decided to implement relatively minor reforms in rituals of worship, such as using three fingers instead of two to make the sign of the cross. Many were deeply offended, but the reforms were adopted, and those who refused to adapt broke off from the church and were persecuted, with persecution intensifying during the Bolshevek Revolution. These Old Believers fled to China, then Brazil, and eventually different parts of the United States, including Alaska. While beliefs and practices do vary between villages, each Old Believer village considers themselves the keepers of the true faith, requiring followers to keep rigorous religious practices and rituals. There is a general tendency to live separately from ‘outsiders’ and eschew modern culture. This is becoming more difficult as the Internet and satellite television encroach on even the most remote locations.”
Nadia stared at Kache with her mouth hanging open.
Kache said, “Things are changing fast. I wouldn’t be shocked if they themselves posted that information for all to see. If you look long enough, you’ll probably find an Old Believer’s Blog.”
“Never.”
“The irony in all this? You have been living isolated from the media, and some of them have satellite dishes on their homes.”
“Never,” she said. “Not in Altai.” Kache didn’t seem to understand that if the Old Believers had not changed during the raskol, or during the revolution, or anytime in the four hundred years since, they certainly weren’t going to change during some little technology revolution. No matter how many people used the Internet, her village would stay outside of it, they would not be like salmon swooped up in the net. They would not.
But she would. Oh, yes, she would.
For so long she had no options. But now! She could do anything if she were brave enough. She could apply to college far away and learn how to make films. She could live in an apartment in a big city and find a job working in a tall glass building. She could become a teacher or a golf pro or a biologist or a doctor. Or she could stay exactly where she was and love Kache, as she had for the last decade, but differently of course, because the boy in her head had materialized, grown into a man who was sitting on that chair, singing his sweet heart out to her, and that was the best change of all.
So many ways to live one life!
Her favorite poem of Elizabeth’s went like this:
Devoured
Oh, to be young and beautiful.
I was young once
But never quite beautiful enough.
Though I felt it on a few occasions.
Usually the color black was involved.
The night of the black opera gloves
And the strapless black evening gown, the black diamond earrings.
The night a black man whispered “Beautiful” in my unadorned ear.
The night you and I swam beneath a black sky in icy black water, hot on my skin.
The night I met a black bear on the path to the cabin.
How it lumbered away, but then turned and stood to watch me
With hunger in its eyes.
If Nadia were to write a similar poem, it might be in reverse, beginning with the woods and the bear. And perhaps, maybe, the last lines would include an evening gown?
Not that Nadia hadn’t explored the back of Elizabeth’s closet and tried on the same black strapless gown and long black gloves she’d written about. Ten years came with a lot of evenings to fill. It turned out that Nadia filled the dress perfectly. But no one had ever seen her wearing an evening gown, besides Leo. She had never had an occasion to wear one. A long dress, yes—she’d grown up wearing a sarafan every day. It was interesting how the same length of fabric might be used to thwart as easily as it might be used to seduce.
Apparently, she didn’t need an evening gown in order to seduce Kache. Because it was then, while she wore his rolled-up jeans and old T-shirt, that he closed the top of the computer so that the upside down apple with the bite out of it stared up at her. He took the computer from her lap and rested his dark curly head there, so now it was Kache staring up at her. She leaned down and kissed him and kept kissing him until they squirmed out of their jeans, shirts, socks and underwear, and her naked lap was on top of his naked lap—a whole different version of a laptop, she told him, and he laughed. He touched her with a knowing ease and intensity, as if she were the guitar in his hands. His fingers kept making new songs inside her. He pulled on the condom and slid into her and she was amazed once again how good this sex felt, that what she and Vladimir did was also called sex, but that it felt nothing like this, it felt the opposite of this. Sex, long dresses. She needed to learn more words, or create them, as Shakespeare had. Kache ran his tongue around her nipple. There weren’t enough words. A sarafan was nothing like an evening gown.
PART THREE
The Fall
2005
FORTY-SEVEN
The fall came on quickly. Suddenly the pink fireweed was gone, its leaves turned dark red. Kache remembered how summer never lingered, it just up and left. But even the crisping air felt hopeful to him. Nothing but bright gold leaves hung in the birch groves, glowing with exaggerated promise, as if the hillside had flipped open to reveal layers and layers of shimmering treasure.
Why not be hopeful?
Today his hope lay in a couple of specific things: He’d planned a weekend in Anchorage and wanted to talk Nadia into going with him. He needed to be careful; it would be overwhelming for her to be in a city. Anchorage wasn’t a big city, but it was the biggest they had, and if you were used to talking to only one person and a few vegetables, magpies and moose, it was big enough.
Because she had gone to Caboose several times, this trip would be the logical next step. It might in fact be easier, because in Anchorage she wouldn’t have to look over her shoulder for Old Believers. As soon as Nadia told him about Vladimir, Kache had started asking around to see if anyone knew him. His mechanic, Greg Barrow, a guy he’d gone to school with, had a lot of Old Believer customers and said he’d never heard of him but he’d look into it. But Old Believers didn’t hang out in the city, stay at the Hilton, shop at Nordstrom or eat at high end restaurants, which were all part of Kache’s plan.
He had bought Nadia a gift, and so he was also hopeful that she would like it and that it might help persuade her to go to Anchorage with him. A small video camera. She’d expressed an interest in learning how to film and he thought it might help provide a filter so that she wouldn’t be bombarded with everything at once. Through the camera, she could pick and choose what to see.
She sat at the table, watching video clips on YouTube. He held the camera behind his back.
“How would you like to be able to film things like that?”
“Like this?” She shut the computer. “Ach. That was only people playing mean jokes on each other. I would like to do something much better.”
“If only you had a camera?”
“Well, yes, but these cost a great deal of money, I believe.”
“Not that much,” he said and set the camera down on the table.
“This is a video camera?” Her hands fluttered around it. “It is so small!”
“It’s really easy to use.”
“Of course. It’s yours. And please, no more talks about money. It’s a gift. I want you to have this.”
Her smile spread across her face and she jumped up and swung her arms around his neck, kissing him.
“Come to Anchorage with me,” he said.
She let go of him. “When?”
“Today is good.”
“Is this bribery that you are doing?”
“Maybe a little.” He laughed. “But no. You don’t have to go. But it would be good for us to get away for a couple of days. One night.”
“What about Leo?”
“He’ll be fine. That’s why I’ve been having him sleep in the barn the last few nights, so he could get used to it. And he was fine both times when we went to Caboose. It’s just one night. We’ll feed him before we go and bring him home a treat.”
“I do not know. The city?”
“Far, far away from Altai or Ural.”
“And Leo will be fine you think?”
“I do.”
“Yes.”
“Are you agreeing with me or agreeing to go?”
“Both. I will pack.”
Kache stood there, hands on hips, while she ran upstairs, taking them two at a time. Well, he thought. That was easy.
As they stood on a street corner, waiting for the light to change, Nadia tilted her head back, staring through the camera at one of Anchorage’s few tall buildings, her mouth gaping. She had recently gotten her hair cut again, and another piercing. She now wore a tiny diamond on the side of her perfect nose. (After many discussions, Kache had insisted he pay for these things, finally promising he would deduct the amount from the caretaking backpay he felt the family owed her.) She wore the earplugs to guard her sensitive hearing against the traffic, so she talked a little louder than usual. “Were the Twin Towers that high?”
Kache shook his head. “They were much, much higher. These wouldn’t even be considered skyscrapers.”
“Like mountains?”
The House of Frozen Dreams Page 19