“She was never simple. And probably nothing could ever shock her again. Nothing could be added to her, or taken away.”
“Except you. She came back, saw you fighting for your life, and realized how much she love you.”
Ana neutralized her voice with a calmness bordering on meditation. “Niki, she doesn’t even know me. Probably, she has never loved.”
He gazed at her. “You say she never sacrifice, never pay for what she has. How do you know what her life has been in California?”
Ana looked into the distance. “Maybe you’re right. When she was here, a great sea of what I didn’t know opened up before me. She had been married, then he died. We didn’t really talk about it. One thing I learned: Parts of me are like my mother. Our childhoods were similar, both abandoned in a way, so we both learned to be survivors. We’re both vain. She said women like us don’t possess the ‘sorry’ gene. And, it is hard for us to trust.”
“You have trusted me a little.”
“Only a little. So much about you puzzles me.”
“Da. I understand your fear. Depending on another human creates much expectations, very troubling atmosphere.”
Ana leaned back on her elbows. “We try so hard not to be like our parents. Yet, like my mother, I have gone my own way. Folks have learned to leave me alone. I have my apartment, all the privacy I need. When I want family, I go home to Nanakuli. Maybe I’ll just spend my life observing, taking stock of other humans.”
“This would be a tragic thing.”
“Why? I’m achieving what I set out to achieve. I’ve regained my health. I’ve never felt so balanced in my life.”
“Yes, Ana. You are truly admirable. I think everyone would like to have their lives so under control as you.”
She looked to see if he was joking, but he seemed earnest.
“I had to earn that control, Niki. When they first told me I had cancer, the only relief I found was lying awake at night planning my suicide.”
“Stop, please!” he cried. “Don’t you understand what life is? Just being is a miracle, a gift.”
He pulled her down so they lay side by side, looking at the sky. After a while he began to sing an old Russian song about a broken soldier coming home from war. As he sang, he translated it for her.
“… His family dead. His home blown up. His fields and livestock gone. Everything he love is gone. He is so weary. He puts rifle in his mouth, wanting to end it. Then it begins to rain … He sees something on ground in front of him, one single leaf on dead plant. Then he sees leaf move. Sees it slowly turn its underside up to receive this rain. He puts his rifle down …”
He fell silent, then he sang another song, his voice sounding so sentimental she thought of a picturesque drunk poised, hand to his heart, under a balcony. Still, Ana would recall that day in detail, Niki beside her at her father’s grave, their heads pressed together, the sky going on and on above them until, where the earth curved, the sky touched the tips of Niki’s shoes tied with broken laces. She would recall his voice floating out among the dead, telling them they were remembered.
That night they were so full of emotion, at first they lay still. Then he leaned up in the dark and kissed her shoulder, her breast, and then her scars. He moved down and kissed her belly, and laid his face there as if listening for a code. His face tipped down. His tongue gently probed then slid inside her, moving back and forth, so little satellites exploded in her brain. A radiance ran down her spine.
She moaned, and grasped his head with both hands and he kept probing with his tongue, as if there were something inside her he must find, something that would give him answers. Her moans became protracted until she shouted out. Finally, Niki reared up on his knees, and laid his chest warm on hers, letting their skin experience the static poem of texture, rough and smooth, dark and light, the minor symphony of sound, skin rubbing skin. The miracle of that skin expanding and contracting, fever-flushed, then chilled.
Then Ana reached down and gently wrapped her hand around him, guiding him. The outline of his shoulders hunched in concentration as he lowered himself down farther and, moving gently, found his way. Her legs went up around his chest, she arched her back, then pulled him closer.
“Niki.”
His hands under her buttocks, he moved inside her until he was deep as he could be. They slowed down then, rocking back and forth in rhythm while he crooned softly, memorializing this moment, him and her, and this, and this, and nothing more. His pace changed, quickening, and Ana clung to him, feeling the sudden cataracts, the spasms. Then he was shouting, his words seeming to run ahead of him.
“I am yours. I am so very yours.”
NOW SHE FELT SELF-CONSCIOUS AND VULNERABLE, AND SO SHE was relieved when he left for the coast to spend time with Gena and Lopaka. They drove him to strategic points from which he shot footage of armed military guards, electrified fences surrounding arsenals in the hills of Lualualei. He went deep into Mākua Valley, dodging military patrols, shooting sites of ancient heiau, sacred land transmogrified into cratered holes in shocked, parched earth. He shot footage of live bombs—unexploded ordnance lying in the woods—waiting to blow up in the hands of scavenging children.
He returned to Honolulu exhausted, and Ana took him home, laundering his clothes while he slept. She bought new laces for his shoes, then changed her mind and bought him new shoes. She reversed a fraying collar on a shirt. When they made love again, she identified what she felt as passion and affection, nothing more.
ANAHOLA
Time in a Glass
NIGHT AUGURING TOWARD DAWN, THE SKY PART FLESH. THE BAY A great kettle seething with fog. It is a view she cherishes, in a city she has come to love. At night, hills round the bay glitter like coals of fiery lava flung into the wind. Then dawn extinguishes the coals, the gray fog lifts. The bay, a prismed diamond.
She always wakes at this hour, an hour that takes solitude to its purest extreme. A dreamlike time where she feels, but does not quite acknowledge, the cold, ethereal strangeness of being palpably alone. She has been alone for years now, has tasted solitude to the dregs. And maybe that will be her fate. Still, she finds joy in her work, and in travel. The going and doing, the convulsive motion, the courage to want to penetrate life—break out of one’s living shell—that is still the challenge.
Sometimes she enters Max’s rooms, each thing untouched, the same. Silk scarves with hand-stitched labels, “A. Sulka, 2 Rue de Castiglione, Paris,” embroidered on them in cursive. Cashmere sweaters retaining the scent of his cologne. She holds a sweater to her face. And it’s all right, it is enough to have been loved so well, and to remember.
Now she wraps her body in an amber-palmed kimono, then brushes her dark hair, the middle part covertly gray. She sits down, inclines her head, and tries to begin a letter. There are nights when she has called her daughter on the phone, but such conversations leave her stranded. She does all the talking, Ana merely listens. She prefers writing letters, letting the blank page before her silently instruct her. She has discovered that certain things remain unknown to her until she writes them down. In that way, she sees what she has chosen to omit. Which is equally revealing.
Sometimes Anahola writes through an entire night. What matter if she misses a night’s sleep? She is alone now, she can do anything she wants. In that sense, she is still who she always was—a rather self-indulgent woman, but one with ambition, a curiosity about the larger world, the knowledge that each moment is her life.
Yet, some shift in attitude has taken place within her. Max’s words keep haunting her. What good are life’s experiences if we don’t pass them on to our children? Now when she writes to Ana, she is someone she has never imagined—a mother, trying to give motherly advice. Sometimes she wonders, is she saying too much? Offering too much? She tries not to sound too candid or too blunt, not wanting to remind the girl, “… you are part of me, like it or not.”
Midsentence she leans back, closes her eyes, and prays. That God will look down on he
r daughter, see that she has paid enough, been tested enough, and will leave her alone. Then she broods over the letter. It is always an exhausting task. Profound exertion in the writing, and rewriting, and then the anguish of wondering how it is received. For they are never answered, not one in over thirty years.
“My dear Ana,
I recently heard from Rosie that you have passed the six-year mark and remain cancer-free. I cannot describe how happy this news makes me …
I am doubly grateful for your recovery because you have so much to do in life. Important tasks to accomplish that will give dignity to our people. Rosie writes me of your plans to one day open a women’s clinic on the coast. I am so very proud of you. I will help you in any way I can …
I’m sorry we could not see each other on my recent trip to Honolulu. I understand how busy you are. You may have heard that I returned for my mother, Malia’s, funeral. I had not seen her or my father since before you were born. It seems my mother died out of vanity. Her teeth were old and stained. She wanted a perfect smile, perfect dentures, and so she had all of her teeth pulled, a drastic step for a woman her age. Something went wrong. She bled to death in her sleep …
At the funeral, my father did not know me. Then he did. What’s left is just a sad old man. He’s almost eighty now, still big but stooped. He said he tried to visit you at Uncle Ben’s when you were growing up, but you would not see him. Probably you were afraid. Of course, my mother never tried to see you. While we talked my father cried …
I believe he always loved me. But he was weak, deferred to her, and let me go. And now he asks my forgiveness—this old man who seems a child. As if I have become the parent. This is how life tricks us. This is how we become kind. Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m telling you these things. Because he is your kupuna kane, your grandfather. And he would like to know you, know all that you have become. And, though this knowledge comes so late, I would like you to know whose grandchild you are …
Ana, you are now outpacing me, experiencing things in life that I may never know. I have little left to offer you, except the knowledge that there are stories we must tell and years when we must tell them. And there are years when we must listen. I know you blame yourself for Makali‘i’s death. Perhaps you are part guilty, as we all are. As I was guilty of leaving you. In trying to survive, we make mistakes. Yet, I believe each human is worth more than their worst act. Each life is part tragedy, part riddle …
For now I will tell you three things I have learned. One, is that we must never get too nostalgic for childhood, because usually it’s the childhood we never had. Secondly, I believe the most important thing you can ever accomplish is to know who you are. What you want. The world will always step aside for a woman who knows where she’s going …
Lastly, I repeat what I said at the airport the last time I saw you. Live, Ana. Let love in. Let it all in before it’s gone, because each thing in our lives is stolen gradually and silently. It is the natural course of things. Please remember I am here for you. I will always be here, offering my love.
Your mother, Anahola
Ana glanced at the handwriting on the envelope. In the past few years, the letters began to arrive more frequently. The woman had no husband now, maybe she wrote these letters in order to exist more convincingly.
Through the years she had tried but could never not read her mother’s letters, could never entirely turn her back on her, perhaps out of curiosity mingled with awe. She still wrote on thick, expensive stationery on which her perfume lingered and haunted. Five thousand miles away, and she still announced her presence.
Ana skimmed over the letter, then got up and made a drink, remembering the adolescent years when she had hated the woman. When she had hate to burn. What happened to that hate? Perhaps she had come to see her mother as a free pass: no one could judge Ana too harshly because she had been abandoned as a child. In return, her hate had matured into a wariness and deep resentment.
She read the letter again, more carefully, picturing Anahola approaching her father, whom she had not seen in over thirty years. Ana felt she was looking in on such a private moment, she closed her eyes imagining her mother as a young girl, unloved, and banished to an arid coast. What would it be like to be so reduced? To have so little left?
For years she had wondered, by what genetic predisposition, what skid marks on her DNA, her mother had been able to abandon her in return, to exempt herself from moral responsibility. But then Ana thought how, through the years, each letter served to remind her that she had never actually felt the absence of the woman’s love, only of her presence. She would never quite understand her, would always be somewhat intimidated by her. Still, this woman had a claim on her. She’s in my blood. She is my blood.
Ana folded the letter, and sighed. In the dark, a soft breeze buffeted her shoulders and her cheeks. Tides in her body shifted. Something accumulated in her veins and in her nerves. She thought of her mother’s recent visit and how Ana had scrupulously avoided her. Avoided introducing her to Niki. She imagined how her mother would have silently appraised him—his shabby clothes, imperfect English—with inscrutable reserve. How, with a glance, she would have diminished him.
Which, somehow, would diminish me.
NĀ MEAHUNA O KA PU‘UWAI PŌLOLI
Secrets of the Hungry Heart
NOW THERE WERE NIGHTS WHEN HE SAT UP FIGHTING FOR BREATH, a distinct rattle in his inhalations. On such nights she gathered him to her like a child, wanting to drag him into her lungs and breathe for him. Wanting to rescue him, and heal him. One night they sat like that till dawn. And, feeling the profound beneficence of her arms, Niki began to talk.
“I have said that if I told you everything, you would want to shoot me out of kindness. But now, whatever happens, I want you to know who is this man who loves you … I did not tell you about Irini, my first love. A circus girl from the region of Kazakhstan. She came from one of the villages I filmed and, like many of these children, she was born deaf. Even now I wonder how can aerialist be deaf? Hearing controls our balance.”
He described how he had first seen Irini at the Moscow Circus, a small, exquisite creature glittering above the crowds.
“It may be she relied on something else for balance. Maybe molecules in the air. Maybe ancient gods, for she soared like an angel.”
“How long were you together?” Ana asked.
“One moment. Forever. Who can measure such things? Irini was my wife. Now, I will tell you how she died. Come close. Put your head here on my chest and close your eyes.”
His voice low, Niki recounted in great detail how they had fallen in love and married. And how he gave up his life of “roofing” and filming so Irini could continue traveling with the circus, soaring above the crowds who loved her. How he had worked odd jobs, even as a clown, to be with her. He spoke of their passion together—life lived in pantomine. And how they had dreamed and hoped—a child, one day a little house.
“Now I understand that those dear moments of wishing, planning, hoping … that is the happiness.”
He described her cough, how she had miscarried their child, and how in time they were forced to leave the circus. Sawdust had infected her weak lungs. He recounted the night of the honeybees, the “little winged prophets,” how they flew in through a window and settled in Irini’s hair.
“I remember their glittering wings, her hair full of tiny stars of midnight blue. I knew then, she would die. In one cloud, they flew away and took her soul.”
In the stillness Ana heard herself swallow.
“One winter day she could no more eat, no more breathe. So thin, she seems transparent. Such pain, she beg me take her life, and make it mine.”
He explained about hospitals in Russia then, live patients disappearing, the human-organ ghouls. He would not let this happen to Irini. And so he had carried her to a field blanketed in snow. He had undressed her and laid her naked there.
“I kneel and sing old circus songs to her. For t
his she smiles, then very slowly she turns blue. My tears drop down, turn to crystals on her chest. Then I build a fire. I carry Irini there and gently feed her childlike limbs to flames. And I watch over her, a day, a night, until she is just smoke and wind that soars. She will always soar …”
He turned to Ana, his face devoid of emotion.
“Maybe then I died. I do not know. But after many months, I decide to live again. To look at life again, try to record it. So I have continued. For her. For you. For some kind of human future.”
For days Ana moved in a kind of stupor, images of the girl, Irini, haunting her. She wondered how Niki had survived such loss, how he had carried on.
SHE BEGAN TO BE AWARE OF TIME. HIS YEAR AT THE EAST-WEST Center would soon end. He would have to return to Russia. He grew less active, more reflective. One night he sat her down again.
“Forgive me if my story made you sad. Time blunts pain. We live again, learn to feel again. I have given this much thought. And what I think is this: Each of us has one love in our life that haunts us. One love that died, or one that walked away, because love was not possible. I used to wonder, what is the good of this? Why have emotions at all if we are crushed so terribly? Now I think there is good reason for this love that breaks us. It teaches us humility, makes us better humans, preparing us for who comes next.”
She sat quiet, thinking of Lopaka.
“Why I am saying this? Because Irini’s death prepared me for you. It taught me deep humility, I see that now. So, Ana, whatever happens, there is something more I need to tell you.”
She took him by the shoulders. “Niki. Nothing is going to happen. You’re going to get well and live. What are you making this film for, if not for your future. For all our futures.”
“But just in case … I need to tell you something more.”
“What more?”
“I need to confess that … I am serious liar. Very Russian thing. We lie in order to survive. For us, this is an art. After Irini, I became pathological liar. Was thrilling! Bending reality to implausible extremes. Each day new life, new name. Was better than old days of gangsterhood.”
House of Many Gods Page 25