House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  “You know … at first I thought you were naïve. You’re not, you’re very clever. You have a way of boiling things down, so that I end up feeling guilty. For being employed, and healthy, for being … free. Niki, I don’t think I can see you anymore. I feel you resent me. I understand your resentment, but I can’t change who I am. And neither can you.”

  His hands flew to his face, covering his eyes. When he looked up she saw such pain it took her breath.

  “I will change. I am learning.” He gripped her hands desperately. “Ana. Please. Be patient with me.”

  “Why? What is the point?”

  “Because. One day you are going to love me.”

  She inhaled so sharply, the hollows near her collarbones grew steep and filled with shadows. She pulled her hands away, and stood.

  “Are you mad? I don’t even know you. I don’t believe half of what you say is true.”

  He took her hands again, more gently now. “Is true. I swear is true. But, if I told you everything, you would want to shoot me out of kindness.”

  HO‘OHĀMAU, HO‘OLOHE

  To Be Silent, to Listen

  SHE WONDERED HOW THEY’D REACHED THIS POINT SO FAST, A stranger strolling into her life, telling her he might be dying. And that he loved her.

  “It was the way how you held the child that night at campfire. The way how you listened. You look at me and listened. Is years since someone did that for me.”

  They had known each other several months, cautiously easing into each other’s life. In fits and starts, Ana told him about Makali‘i, how she blamed herself for the girl’s death.

  “I didn’t take the time for her, like Rosie did for me.”

  She talked about her dead father, her mother who abandoned her. “Since she left, I hardly think of her. No … that’s not really accurate. What I mean is, as a kid I used to dream that she would come back for me. I’ve learned most dreams don’t come true, we just outgrow them.”

  “Da. Is accurate, but very sad,” Niki said. “And why, I wonder, must we make dreams come true? Is all a dream, no? We need to make our life come true. Need to know are we really living it. Is there more to it than this? There has to be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well … we look closely, we see there is life inside this life. Something wriggling between these spaces. We know is there, but don’t know what to call it, how to reach it.”

  “Are you talking about God?”

  “No. I am Russian after all. My background is mathematics. This the only God.”

  “Hold on,” Ana argued. “I’ve read that there’s a whole area of mathematical propositions that can’t be proven. They’re neither true nor false. Even Einstein was stumped. That means at some point, mathematics fails. It isn’t absolute. So how can math be God? Or vice versa?”

  Niki smiled. “Ana, you don’t see? Answers are there! But even Einstein did not want to see them. And, why? Because if he find all answers, then is no reason for God. He does not want to do this to humanity.”

  “You’re a trickster,” she said. “You say life is entirely a dream. Then you say it’s mathematically absolute.”

  He liked that she challenged him, kept up with him. He tried to kiss her. When she pushed him away, he laughed.

  “Okay. I am patient. I see you are afraid. So unprepared for love you look right through it.”

  “Niki, you use that word too easily. You ‘love’ my apartment, my appliances. You ‘love’ my speed bag …”

  “Then I try to be more discreet. But not give up. How I can convince you of my feelings?”

  She looked at his stained fingernails, his rather worn-out clothes. But his skin was clean and glowing, and he smelled like old, polished leather. Against a slight sunburn, even his teeth seemed whiter. She wanted to ask why, of all the women in the city, he chose her.

  Instead she said, “Slow down. Slow down.”

  Alone at night, her hands cupped her shoulders, then moved down her waist to her thighs. She wondered if other lonely women did that, imagining how their skin felt to a man. It had been over five years. She tried to remember how a man’s hand felt—its weight on her skin, its warmth raising her body temperature.

  Her hand came to rest on her scars. They had healed relatively smoothly, no keloids, but in the dark she felt their whiteness, the stark absence there seeming to signify the absence of many things in her life. Mostly she dreaded telling this man because she did not want the disease to define her. Each time she looked at Niki, Ana did not want to see it in his eyes. Here is a woman who had cancer.

  THE NIGHT THEY FINALLY BECAME LOVERS, AT FIRST THEY LAY TOGETHER fully dressed. Ana gazed at the ceiling.

  “Niki. I need to tell you something.”

  He turned somber, folded his arms across his stomach, and waited.

  “I’ve had surgery. For cancer. They removed my breast. It isn’t pretty.”

  He slowly raised his head and looked at her. “How long ago … the surgery?”

  “Almost six years now.”

  He turned on his side, facing her.

  Now he will be very kind, because I have ceased to interest him.

  His eyes were riveted to hers, his face near brute with feeling. He took her in his arms.

  “Thank you! Oh, Ana. Thank you … for surviving.”

  When they were finally undressed, she turned her head away. He studied her chest, then very tenderly followed the lines of the scars with his lips.

  “Heal, little ones. Heal. Grow strong above your beating heart.”

  There was no feinting and no barter. He kissed her scars, and remained erect. In time, she would relax, not look away when he touched her there, but on that first night she was stunned. At first she felt like a woman in a fairy tale captured by a beast with massive paws. Yet his big, scarred hands were gentle, his movement endearingly shy and courtly. As if he planned to worship her, to lay down at her feet as an offering his entire history.

  But then, in the deepest throes of passion, he became a primate. Screaming. Leaping. Caterwauling like something being slaughtered. He even lifted her by the shoulders, shaking them, as if to make sure she was paying attention. Finally, he was a thoughtful lover, considerate of her pleasure, slowing when he saw where she liked being touched. But then he grew wild again, leaping and shouting, even sobbing when he came.

  Exhausted and spent, she watched him blow his nose, still weeping with emotion. “My God. Is that how Russians make love?”

  He drew her to him. “Forgive me. I have been with many women, but only once before did I love. We acted out emotions. She was deaf.”

  “… What happened to her?”

  He turned his head. “Another time. Not now.”

  DAYS PASSED, THEN WEEKS. AS THEIR FEELINGS SLOWLY DEEPENED, he expanded on his impressions of her that night at the campfire. At first he had found her intimidating—big-boned, proud, her hair dark and wild with a life of its own. When she had looked at him, she squinted like a woman sighting down the barrel of a rifle. And even when she had relaxed, there was an edge, a visible hardness in her gaze. But when she held the child, her features had grown soft and lovely.

  Then, as Niki had told his Russian tales—how people drank human blood in the famines under Stalin, how in Arctic cold, his babushka chopped off her hand when it froze to a rabbit trap, how wolves still ran in the streets of that old Tartar town, Moscow—he had watched how the fire did strange things to Ana’s face. Her eyes going pale to dark as she listened, her native blood drumming to the surface so her cheekbones glowed.

  “You looked scary. Maybe even beautiful, but scary. Then slowly I see how good you listened. Your lips apart, expression softening as interest grew. So. I left that night thinking, ‘maybe I find her again.’ Then I think, ‘Why her? Why life is throwing someone like that at me, a drifter, bouncing off life so many years?’ But I keep thinking, ‘Ana.’ ”

  While he talked, he pressed her hand against his cheek.

&
nbsp; “When I get back to Honolulu I decide, ‘Okay. I take a stab. I look for her. See if I can be normal again. Laugh discreetly, walk in step. Learn to be like other humans, not scare her away.’ I don’t know, maybe was time. I’m bloody tired. Tired makes man humble, maybe more sincere.”

  And finally, Ana admitted how, at first glance, she had disliked him.

  “That leather getup. Your slangy accents—Russian, Australian, American. Nothing about you seemed plausible. I’ve seen men like you from all over the world pass through our islands. They take our hospitality, our energy, and give nothing back. The type of men I would walk through.”

  She hesitated, feeling shy.

  “Then you began to tell those tragic stories. You told them so movingly, so humanely, I didn’t care if they were true or not …”

  “Da. Is very Russian thing. We live to story-tell.”

  EVENTUALLY, WITH HER PRODDING, HE BEGAN TO TALK ABOUT HIS life, giving her a new version, a fable. He told how he was born in a city almost frozen to extinction. This was Leningrad, under siege by the Germans for nine hundred days during World War II. His earliest memories, he said, were of campfires burning inside gutted buildings, so that each building seemed to resonate and breathe.

  “… I remember coffins being trundled down streets on sleds, until even sleds were used for fires. Then coffins used. Corpses formed blue pyramids along these streets.”

  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.”

  SHE 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.

  “… We don’t know how to say good-bye/ We wander on, shoulder to shoulder …

  Let us sit in the graveyard on trampled snow, sighing to each other.

  This stick in your hand is tracing mansions in which we will always be together …”

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

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

  PALAI

  To Turn Away in Confusion

  HE 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.”