House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  Niki cleared his throat. “Forgive me if you have been offended. All you have seen is true.”

  Lights came on. Men placed their elbows on their knees and held their heads between their hands. A mother rocked her child and wept.

  Later, a woman named Reiata Huahine rose and talked about her islands of Tahiti and the Tuamotus in French Polynesia, and how the French government’s bomb testing had damaged many of her people. Since the 1960s children as young as ten and twelve had been conscripted to work at test sites and never given protective clothes. When they began to die, their bodies were so contaminated they were buried in lead coffins. Then the coffins disappeared. They were flown to France for research.

  Her voice was deep and strong, like a beautiful wailer. Yet she kept it controlled, her emotions in check.

  “Our lagoons are irradiated, our coral dying, we are afraid to eat our fish, to nurse our children. And France will not even give us back our dead.”

  She was stout, big-hipped and beautiful, with the bronze skin and broad features of Tahitians and Hawaiians. Even the two languages were similar. The earliest settlers to Hawai‘i had migrated north from Tahiti, the Tuamotus, and the Marquesas. These were Ana’s closest Pacific cousins, yet she had never been curious about their customs and their Mother Tongue, so similar to hers. She had never longed to see Tahiti.

  Later, several Aborigines spoke of how their people were still being “monitored” by the British and Australians from the effects of atomic bombs set off at Monte Bello, Western Australia, in 1952, and in the Great Victoria Desert of Australia in 1953.

  “Nobody warned us. They just exploded the bloody bombs. Thousands of our clans were out there living in the desert.”

  Only in 1985 did the British government publicly admit that such tests resulted in radioactive fallout that rained down on them for miles.

  “And how did they apologize? With subsidies, and deep indifference. And still we are forced to live within the hazard zone of nuclear-support facilities. Uranium dug up from our sacred lands is still used in nuclear warheads.”

  By the time the Marshall Islanders got up to speak of the atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini and Eniwetok in the 1940s and ’50s, and how—shifted from island to island—they came to be known as “nuclear nomads,” Ana was overwhelmed with anger and grief.

  Later, she talked to Reiata Huahine, a doctor herself, an internist. She asked about Ana’s practice, why it had taken her so long to start her fellowship in OB-GYN.

  “I was sick for a while. Then … a death in the family. Practicing as general physician allowed me to function by rote.”

  “Sometimes we need such pauses, to catch up with ourselves,” the woman said. “But you will find great fulfillment in your chosen field. Nothing is more mysterious or exhilarating than the machinations of the female anatomy. And nothing is more tragic than when that system fails, or is invaded.”

  Ana spoke of a plan slowly forming in her mind: to one day open a women’s clinic on the coast. “A healing place for birthing and nurturing. I want midwives, licensed doctors, and kahuna la‘au lapa‘au. Ancient and modern medicine. So women will have a choice.”

  AFTER THE CONFERENCE, NIKI MADE PLANS TO RETURN TO TAHITI, wanting footage of demonstrations taking place in Papeete, capital city, as Tahitians challenged France’s plans to resume bomb testing.

  “Please come, Ana! I invite you. You will see how I make film.”

  She wanted to go, she thought she did. “I’m sorry, Niki. I can’t.”

  His voice changed, sounding almost challenging. “Ana. Can it be you are afraid?”

  “Of course not. I flew to Kaua‘i for the hurricane.”

  “And that is the only place you ever been. Only time you stepped off this island. Perhaps you are afraid of newness? Afraid to … expand?”

  Her voice turned ugly and dismissive. “Well, cancer was pretty new. I think I expanded somewhat there.”

  He stood in shock, then turned and left, quietly closing her door.

  WHILE HE WAS GONE, SHE THOUGHT OF HOW, AFTER THE FIRST time they made love, she had felt unscarred, desired, even cherished. She had felt passion. But he was not an average man, not average anything. She saw him as a kind of scavenger, so warped by his past he had no context for normality. What was cancer to this man, a woman’s mutilated chest, after what he had lived through?

  She thought of his dark, haunted eyes. Of all she did not know about him. The scars he never talked about. She thought of his laughter in unguarded moments. Deep belly laughs like a child, and how in sleep he enfolded her, like a fragile teacup in his big hands.

  She tossed back and forth, remembering a day they had toured downtown Honolulu, and how they found themselves in front of the police station. Standing there, she had told him again of her young father dying in the line of duty. Then, abruptly, on a busy street, Ana broke down.

  “My father. I don’t even know where he’s buried.”

  She had cried so hard, protracted sobs shook her body. Niki surrounded her with his arms, holding her head against his chest, whispering in Russian.

  “… fortushka … fortushka …” a word sounding soulful and extravagant.

  Then, almost desperately, he had guided her to a small park, sat her on the grass, and rocked her back and forth.

  “Cry, Ana. Cry. It is a way of honoring your father. We will find his grave. We will take flowers.”

  He had whispered that word again in Russian and as she calmed down, he slipped back into English, trying to distract her, talking with his head, his hands. Unfolding a tissue, he carefully wiped her nose, then dug deep into her shoulder bag.

  “Let us see. Let us see.”

  Finally he had pulled out her hairbrush with a wide, blue, plastic handle. He held the handle to his eyes.

  “Look, Ana. Such magic! All becomes Monet. Yellow street sign is melting green. Clouds now are violet. How beautiful it is.”

  He put the plastic handle to her eyes and it was like seeing the world through a rainbow lens, everything washed in pastels. She looked at trees, a passing car, a little wild-haired man in slippers. Through the plastic handle, refracted light was broken so that palm trees looked like exploding blue cigars, the car a purple tuna floating by. The little man approached, a bouncing gingerroot of pinks and greens.

  Niki had twisted the handle, further distorting things. The gingerroot man waved as he passed by; through the blue handle his hair became green flames. Ana laughed out loud. They had sat like that for hours, holding the handle to each other’s eyes, exclaiming like children at a world eclipsed into a fabulous lunacy.

  Walking home at dusk, Niki had kept his arm round her shoulder protectively. “Remember, Ana. Even when grief tears us apart so we want to die, there is always something left that soldiers on. Some human rag of hope, of heart, imagination. Look. Today a hairbrush made us happy!”

  Her hand inside her bag held tight to the blue handle. “Tell me, what does that word … fortushka mean?”

  “It is pastry filled with chocolate. Very sweet.”

  Then he stood still. “Forgive me. That is a lie. In Russia, farmers huddle in houses through long Arctic winters, very little air. No one dare open window or door. Outside, humans freeze to death in fifteen seconds. So, tiny, trap windows are built, only one inch square, through which people can breathe fresh air. The little window, that is fortushka.”

  “But why did you say it to me?”

  He glanced away, embarrassed. “You were suffering. I want to take away the pain. Make you breathe, feel life again. I want to be your … fortushka.”

  Now she lay sleepless, thinking of this man wandering the Pacific. Perhaps he had always been a wanderer because he had no notion of what it was to come to rest. Later, she got up in the dark and rummaged in her bag, and fell asleep holding the brush with the blue handle.

  ONE NIGHT SHE WATCHED NIKI’S TAPES ON THE FALL OF THE SOviet Union. An old survivor of the gulags talked about Russia�
�s history, how for centuries they were serfs, then with Bolshevism they were freed, to be murdered in the tens of millions. Those not executed in the lags had rarely survived Siberian winters.

  “How can outsiders know what we have suffered? How can they know what is mass famine in country this size? And so you call us backwards. Cynical and fatalistic. You laugh because we still eat with our hands …”

  She watched soldiers on Soviet tanks moving into Moscow, prepared to shoot down Russians fighting for democracy. Then, as if in slow motion, the soldiers lowered their rifles, handing them over to the crowds. She watched as they helped old babushki climb up on the tanks and ride them down boulevards into Red Square. Standing beside the young soldiers, while huge crowds cheered, the babushki did not cry or wave triumphantly. In their leathery faces there was only exhaustion, resolve, a final calm that surpassed all understanding.

  Ana replayed that footage again and again, wondering how she could even begin to understand such a country, its history, what its people had endured. How could she compare her tiny islands to such vastness? If she could not comprehend the country, how could she ever understand the man?

  AIA NO I KE KO A KE AU

  Time Will Tell

  HE DID NOT CALL WHEN HE RETURNED FROM PAPEETE.

  “He feels you need breathing space,” Lopaka said, then laughed. “Also, he needs to do his laundry. I said we have a washer, but Niki said, ‘A‘ole pilikia. Not problem! Not problem!’ ”

  He had no phone and so she went to Chinatown to his hotel. The deskman showed her the stairway to the laundry room. Down a long basement corridor of cement blocks she saw him, a slouched-over man wearing a sleeveless undershirt and rumpled pants, framed by a lavender-painted doorway. A naked bulb shone down on his shoulders, making his ears look translucent and vulnerable.

  The iron was chained through its handle to the wall, the chain just long enough to allow its movements back and forth across the ironing board. As Ana watched, Niki took a mouthful of water from a glass, bent and spat the water out in a spray across a shirt, then pointed the iron carefully and slid it back and forth.

  She didn’t move. She couldn’t. It was like a scene from a penal colony. Naked cement walls, a bare bulb hanging, a man’s movements restricted by a chain connected to a wall. And there was something heartbreaking in the caring way he ironed, inspecting each crease. Something touchingly maternal in the way he held the shirt up to the light, then carefully arranged it on a hanger.

  She backed up slowly, afraid he would look up and see her watching him. She left a note at the desk, asking him to call her. Ana did not know what she felt. She knew you could miss someone without loving them. You could miss their conversation and humor, or just the animal comfort of being with another human. You could feel affection for someone because they needed to be rescued, or needed to be healed. She did not think that constituted deep abiding love between a woman and a man.

  They sat in a Japanese restaurant and he struggled with his chopsticks, poked at a slice of squid, then bent and wolfed it down. They drank sake, and as it slid down her throat and warmed her ribs, she felt herself relax. Niki’s trip had left him looking thinner. But he smelled fresh and clean and his shirt was meticulous, so starched it looked as if it could stand up by itself. He sat back and smiled, in that moment he was almost handsome.

  “Ana. It is so good to see you. I have much to tell you. But, slowly. I will build it up in increments.”

  She played with her napkin. “Look, before anything, I want to apologize. I was rude the day you left. I’m sorry.”

  He waved his hand. “No, no. I was the rude one. Who am I to tell you how to live?”

  “But you were right. I am afraid to travel, to expand. I hide behind my work and get so tense I almost choked a patient.”

  He looked concerned. “But now? You are all right?”

  “In a support group. For anger management.”

  “Good. Good. A doctor’s life is stressful. You need to decompose.”

  She thought he meant decompress.

  “I watched some of your tapes, Niki. I was stunned. You have such an important film here. A real indictment. I think it should be shown in every country in the world.”

  He looked down, touched. “Yes … I hope. Only, there is one more segment, very important. Then I start final editing. My God, it’s long. It will have to be shown in several segments.”

  He coughed slightly and shook his head. “You have no idea what I have gathered … almost two thousand still photographs, one thousand pieces of archival footage, several hundred interviews … doctors, scientists, environmentalists. Even military personnel. Plus, there is narration, voice-overs to be read by professionals. God knows, we cannot use my voice. It will be exhausting work. Could take one year. Three years … depends on funding.”

  “How can I help you? What can I do?”

  “Just to talk with you is good. Soon I need to bear down, really focus. As long as health holds out …”

  “Tell me, how are you feeling?”

  He shrugged. “No appetite this trip. Now look, is huge! Soon I will lick my plate, then reach for yours.”

  “Listen, I want you to come back in for tests. Have you had any colds?”

  “First two weeks, I wheezed. Very damp in Tahiti. But those medications you gave me, very good. And now to see you again … I feel much better. I missed you, Ana. We have much in common.”

  She played with her chopsticks, not knowing what to say.

  “It’s okay. I don’t expect … I know you are meant for more than some crazy Russky with camera.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just, we’re very different. I watched that tape on the week Communism fell. Those babushki riding on the tanks. I watched interviews with survivors of the lags. It was devastating. I wonder why you feel we have so much in common. My people have suffered yes, but our islands are so small. Our biggest struggle is to remain visible. Your Motherland is huge. Your suffering was massive. Tens of millions starved, and murdered. There’s no comparison.”

  He clasped his hands on the table, straining for near-perfect English.

  “Ana, Russia is made up of many languages and states, many different cultures. As your Pacific Ocean is made up of different island tongues and cultures. Each is important to the human race. So. Each culture that dies affects each of us.”

  She started to respond but he put up his hand, explaining how such cultural deaths began with the breakdown of families when they were forced apart, leaving their fields, their homelands, to find work. Then, the taking away of their language. And then their land.

  “Fourth, maybe most important,” Niki said, “is the taking of religion from the people. Missionaries took your ancient gods, and loaned—not gave—you their gods.”

  He talked about how Stalin closed all churches, turned them into factories, garages. How thousands of Russia’s monks and priests were murdered, or starved to death in hiding.

  “In late 1980s, priests and monks begin returning to their villages. Churches slowly opened. Icons brought out of hiding. Now people openly worshipping again. Yes, we still starve, but at last we know what hope is. Bell-ringing is now revived in churches and cathedrals. This signifies human freedom. They can never again stop bells across Russia. Never! Even if they stop the bells, our people have heard them ringing. They will move forward, remembering the echo of those bells.”

  He leaned across the table.

  “Ana. Your people are struggling so they will not be wiped out of history. People have also struggled in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, many Russian states. What does it matter whether is one small island, one region, or huge continent? Extermination of each unique culture is another death of human conscience.”

  He took her hand with such force she felt pain.

  “This is what you and I have in common. This struggle. Look. Who would have thought Communism could be shattered? As long as your people fight back, each step forward is small victory. Hawai
ians, too, have heard the bells.”

  In that moment, so much inside her responded to him she could not speak. She watched him sit back, his face flushed with emotion, and wondered what it would be like to utterly let go, let this big, tender, damaged beast take over and consume her. She thought she might be happy for a while. But what would come after?

  ONE DAY HE LEAPT FROM THE SEA LIKE A BOY, THEN DIVED BACK IN and came up shouting, “Hit me! Hit me!”

  Waves pounded his chest then dragged him under, and threw him back onto the beach where he lay laughing and exhausted.

  “The undertow … so strong it pulled me out, but then I thought, ‘I cannot drown. Today we have a mission.’ We go to visit your father’s grave.”

  On his own, he had researched in library archives, old newspapers, even police records. “You see, Ana, he was buried with great honor. There are even photographs.”

  He showed her blurred copies of a parade of uniformed police, someone standing at a podium, women with their faces in their hands. One of them could have been her mother.

  Later that day, they stood over her father’s headstone at Diamond Head Memorial Park. John Ing Keahi. She followed the letters with her fingers.

  “Ben says he was handsome. After his death his folks moved far away.”

  “Come.” Niki pulled her down beside the grave.

  She didn’t cry. Instead, she thought of her mother. “I think she loved him. Or, maybe he was her way of paying back her parents. As I told you, they waited sixteen years to tell her who she was. Whose child she was. All that time, she thought her mother was her sister.”

  Niki shrugged. “Sixteen is not so late. Look how interesting her life became, made deeper by truths it did not have before.”

  “I don’t think she saw it that way. She saw cruelty and lies. She turned her back on them, had me, then ran away.”

  “Imagine. A simple girl, taking off across the sea. How scared she must have been.”