House of Many Gods

by Kiana Davenport

  She motioned the woman over. “This is Sonia. She flies to Helsinki with you.”

  Up close the woman seemed smaller, and dainty, somewhere in her forties. “Hello, Ana. We will sit together on the flight. Don’t be afraid. I have done this many times.”

  She looked from one to the other. “Can you just tell me, is Niki at the airport? Is he safe?”

  “Ana. You promised. No questions.”

  “Then, where is Eric Dancer?”

  “They are together.”

  For a moment, she almost lost control. “But I’ve had no contact, no proof! I haven’t even heard Niki’s voice.”

  Katya handed her an envelope and a slender ribboned box. “Read note later. Now you open box.”

  She slowly undid the ribbon. Inside, wrapped in tissue was a new hairbrush with a blue, transparent handle. She pressed it to her chest.

  “He said when you see this, you are understanding. You know what he’s remembering.”

  Ana embraced her one last time. “Me ke aloha, Katya. You are my sister now.”

  “Good. Now I have family. And now is time for old Russian custom. Silence before journey.”

  For a moment they held hands and stood silent like good children. Then Katya pushed her gently toward the bus.

  “Da svidanya, Ana. Udachi vam!” Good-bye. Good luck.

  As she turned to board, Sonia fell in line behind her, utterly composed, her English perfect.

  “It’s okay. I am acquainted with your guide and driver.”

  As they pulled out onto Marx Prospekt, she turned to Sonia, wanting to ask a dozen things. The woman patted her hand.

  “Be calm. That’s all you have to do. I am beside you at all times.”

  “Can you just tell me, will they be on our flight?”

  “Is better you know nothing.”

  The woman saw her struggle, saw how hard it was for her.

  “I understand you are physician, used to giving orders. But sometimes it’s good to be helpless, to not be in control. Then we are forced to trust other humans. Why don’t you read Niki’s note?”

  She reached into her bag, and opened the envelope.

  Sonia leaned closer. “A few words only to assure you. He had no more time.”

  Ana,

  You have my whole heart. Do everything they say.

  N.

  ———

  THE TWO-HOUR FLIGHT TO HELSINKI SEEMED LIKE DAYS. SHE WOULD remember nothing but a flight attendant whose face was slightly green from years of wearing lead-based makeup.

  “Remember,” Sonia said. “We will not officially enter Finland. We are only in transit at the airport. Until you are over the Atlantic, anything could happen.”

  Ana grew calm. She had never been so calm. They landed, gathered their things, and moved down the aisle.

  Sonia checked something in her flight bag. “There is a restaurant. We can relax.”

  They entered a stylish café overlooking the concourse below where tour groups milled in duty-free boutiques. Ana sat down jittery with fatigue. They ordered sandwiches and Scandinavian beers while Sonia pressed buttons on her cell phone, shook it, and tried again. Then she excused herself and went to a phone in the corner. She talked for several minutes and came back looking tense. Ana stared at her, expectantly.

  “Everything … will be fine,” Sonia said.

  She unfolded her napkin and delicately bit into her sandwich. She sipped her beer. “Drink a little. Beer is nourishing. Taste your sandwich, very tender ham.”

  Ana picked at the sandwich.

  “Now, listen closely. I’m sorry to tell you, Ana, you will have to miss your flight. You understand?”

  “… No.”

  “You will not be getting on your plane.”

  “But Niki …”

  “He was not on the plane. It was already full. To bump passengers would have drawn too much attention.”

  “He was not on our flight?”

  “No.”

  “So, he is still in Moscow.”

  “Yes.”

  After a while she looked up. “Did you know this when we left?”

  “I knew they were trying. We have not lied to you. We have tried to do what is safe for him. Had you known he could not get on that flight, you might have tried to stay behind. You might have caused a scene.”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I would have.”

  “Everything is in place. Only they have to find two available seats without drawing attention. Planes are crowded. Tourist season.”

  “Will he get out today?”

  “All we can do is wait. I will remain with you however long it takes.”

  She tried to distract Ana. “They’ll hold your luggage in New York City. People miss flights all the time. He will arrive here, and you will both take a later flight. It is desirable that you enter the United States together. He is your fiancé, father of your child. Eric will be with you both through all U.S. formalities.”

  “Is it possible he won’t get out at all?”

  “… In his condition, he should never have come back. Many people have worked to get him out again. Even people here in Helsinki. The tapes are important, people everywhere must see what human damage has been done. He will have to leave those tapes behind. Friends will destroy them. You have copies, so nothing has been lost …”

  “Sonia! Please. Is it possible he won’t get out at all?”

  She tapped her cell phone. “Yes. It is possible he won’t get out.”

  Ana stood up. “I think … I don’t feel very well.”

  They found a restroom where she bent over in a stall. Afterwards, she rinsed her mouth and splashed her face.

  “Come,” Sonia said. “There is a place to rest. A private place.”

  She steered Ana down the concourse to an EMERGENCY ONLY door. It was locked and she pulled out a key. They went down two flights of stairs and unlocked another door. MAINTENANCE SUPPLIES. Inside, leather-jacketed men sat in front of monitors behind a thick glass wall. They waved, and pushed a button. The glass wall slid apart.

  “Sonia! You are well?”

  “Yes. Busy.”

  She shook their hands, introducing them to Ana, then guided her through another door into an elegantly furnished lounge. Deep chairs and couches in soft browns and grays, colors meant to soothe. Racks of magazines, a fireplace. In the corner a stocked bar and buffet, apparently just set out.

  “There are beds in the next room, showers. Whatever you need.”

  Ana sat down trying to get her bearings. “Is this sort of a … safe house, for people on the run?”

  “Something like that, though not so dramatic.”

  “How long will we be here?”

  “Until they get him out. It could be hours. Days.”

  Without warning, Ana began to cry. “I’m sorry. I must be very tired.”

  After a while, when she was calm, Sonia moved to a window and opened the blinds.

  “Look. Across the way … something special. A sort of giant ‘greenhouse.’ Palm trees. Streams.”

  Ana was startled to see an atrium, like a small rain forest surrounded by glass.

  Sonia took her hand. “Come and see.”

  They passed through two doors, then a kind of tunnel and came out at the entrance to the atrium, the glass surrounding it so virtually invisible one had the impression of being outdoors.

  “Usually it’s open to the public. But some days, like today, it’s closed ‘for renovation.’ ”

  Another leather-jacketed man stood casually at the entrance, greeting Sonia as they passed inside. Ana breathed in deeply. She could have been in the rain forests of Hawai‘i. Even the sounds were those of home. Whispering bamboo, dripping ferns. Birds chortling amongst the leaves. It seemed to extend forty feet or so in either direction, dense enough for several people to sit or stroll in private without encountering each other.

  “Climatically controlled,” Sonia said. “Just like the tropics. Now, I leave you to your t
houghts.”

  Ana strolled a gravel path, feeling nature sigh and breathe. Hanging vines brushed her cheeks. A drop of water slid down a leaf, then clung, reflecting light. She bent and scooped up soil and brought it to her nose, recalling the smell of fields back home, the balm of clean, warm seas. Another hour passed. Sonia came and joined her for a while, then checked her watch and stretched.

  “Over there is a fishpond. A hammock somewhere in the trees. Now I will go and make more calls.”

  Behind lush, giant ferns, Ana found the hammock slung between two palms. She slid off her shoes, sank down and closed her eyes, wondering what she would do if Sonia came and told her Niki had been detained, that he could not get out of Russia. She would keep coming back until she found him. Even after their child was born, she would continue coming back. She did not think about his health. How it would deteriorate. She did not allow herself such thoughts.

  Time passed. A man drifted in the background through the trees, then moved close to check on her. Sonia came again, and went away.

  ĪNANA HOU

  To Come to Life Again

  ANA SAT UP WITH A JOLT. HER WATCH SAID ALMOST MIDNIGHT. IT seemed barely dusk, the sky a swirl of purple/pink, as dark as it would get. She leaned forward, listening. Nothing moved. Even the birds were still. She got to her feet, then sat down again, feeling apprehensive. From somewhere, the soft click of a door opening and closing.

  Her voice sounded childlike as she called out, “Sonia. Is that you?”

  She heard footsteps moving on the path. Then she looked up, and gasped. A man was standing there, misshapen and grotesque. Huge shoulders. Arms extra-long like an ape. His head was large and bald, a heavy beard. He wore thick glasses.

  “Ana …”

  She blinked, then stood up slowly in bare feet.

  “Forgive me … for disguise. The baggy clothes. They even shaved my head. But it is me … it’s Niki.”

  She leaned forward slightly, then moved one foot in front of the other, approaching him.

  “How you have waited, and waited. How you came for me … Brave Ana! And our child has traveled with you … our miracle. Already she is making journeys.”

  She stood before him with her hands out. She stroked the baldness of his head. Then lowering her hands, she pressed them to his cheeks.

  “Yes, Ana … it is me.”

  She kept touching him and stroking him, holding his cheeks between her hands. She whispered his name over and over, as he gathered her to him.

  “Oh, Ana. It has hurt very much to be alone. It was most hard in the mornings when my mind was clear. I thought of you and wondered how I could forget you. Now I loved you more for not knowing how to keep you. Then you came. You came.”

  She turned him slightly so she could see his face more clearly in the light. His beautiful, dark eyes. She studied his oversized hands as if to make sure they were his. One of them held a ring he had pulled from his pocket, an old, shiny band of wood.

  “Marry me, Ana. Marry me. Wear this, my mother’s ring. Carved for her by my father when they were lovers in Archangel’sk. Worn by my mother when I was born. Worn until she pulled it from her finger, when they threw her on the truck. All I possess of my mother and my father. Now, for you.”

  He slid it on her finger. The ring was large and heavy, as if weighted down with years of human oils. Tears sat in the wrinkles of his cheeks. His large hands smoothed her curly hair.

  “Oh, Ana! Everything that went before was just a dream. Illness, and loneliness. Now we will laugh at the past, carry it like a white rose in our teeth. We will bite into life like a radish! We have not even begun to be young yet. Our lives are starting now.”

  Very tenderly he put his big hand on her stomach, then bent down and whispered. “Hello, little one. My goloobka! I am your father. You are going to teach me many things.”

  Ana looked up at him and smiled. She opened his coat and lay her head against his chest, smelling his dear, familiar smell.

  “Take me home, Niki. Stay beside me always.”

  He held her for a while, as if he would never let her out of the circle of his arms. Then he stepped back and ceremoniously took her arm. Ahead, she saw Eric Dancer and Sonia smiling through the glass.

  “Come,” Niki said. “Now we must try to live very well, to carry on in the most splendid way. One day our child will be remembering us, retelling our stories. We must leave her fantastic tales, rich and full of detail, for her children and their children.”

  Ana held tight to his arm, matching his steps as they moved forward.

  “Look! Already we are making legends. Who will believe how we met in the wreckage of a hurricane? How we loved, and lost, each other? How you journeyed. And how this crazy Russian, this headstrong Hawaiian, found each other again, in a rain forest … in Helsinki.”

  ‘ĪLOLI

  Deep Emotions of Gestation

  IT IS TRUE THAT A HIGHWAY RUNS ALONG THE WAI‘ANAE COAST, but it is not the lifeblood of that coast. That is to be found in the quirky, dusty roads branching off the highway, heading deep into the valleys and up into the hills. Here are found the people who give life to the land, who watch the centuries shamble in and out, and never start on time. Yet in that summer, of the last half of the last decade of the century, folks began to feel that good things might be possible, even on their finite coast.

  Some people talked of revolution, of taking Mākua Valley back with weapons and guerrilla war. But men like Lopaka knew that the way to win back their valley was not to try to defeat the military, but to win them over to the people’s side. To choose the war of nerves instead.

  “We must not only liberate our lands, but liberate the military from fear of us.”

  With stealth and slow persistence, the people began to impose their will, appealing to the United Nations, asking them to review the circumstances of Mākua Valley, still under bombardment in military war maneuvers. The U.N. responded, sending representatives to view the ravaged land and the hazardous wastes thereof. Petitions were drafted demanding environmental-impact studies of the valley. Eventually, experts were brought in, and their in-depth evaluations of the land began.

  The media followed, and the eyes of the outside world slowly turned its gaze upon Mākua. Under mounting pressure, a federal judge decreed that, for the duration of the studies—a process that would take years—the Army cease its bombing of Mākua Valley and its beaches. On that day folks stood along the highway, cheering.

  “But even so,” Lopaka said, “our beach waters are lifeless. No fish do you see here, and very little limu. Dolphins and whales long ago left these waters. It will take decades to bring them back. And for the valley, we must never turn our backs. We must be kahu o ka ‘āina. Guardians of the land.”

  That island-autumn was a slowed-down time when silence walked the coast. The burned and ravaged land stopped crying out. Some nights in brindled moonlight, sounds issued from the valleys and mountains of Mākua. The sound of humming, the ‘āina humming to Herself. A healing sound. Folks looked up and they began to hum, but then they shook themselves clear-sighted, knowing victory was illusory, that truths merged into untruths. And so they left a kind of innocence behind. Henceforth, they would always be vigilant and wary.

  LIFE PLODDED ON DEEP IN THE VALLEYS; GRAFFITIED QUONSET huts still warned of gangster turf. There were still shootings, dead bodies found. But there were more police sweeps now, and parents paid more attention. On weekends people rallied at the false kamani tree at Mākua Beach. It was open once again for spiritual gatherings and cleansings, for swimming and gathering pōhaku, and the cleaning out of weeds and refuse to help reopen streambeds.

  Each day Gena and Lopaka sat in the sea up to their waists. And she felt her womb respond, felt the sea’s healing minerals strengthen her vessels and her organs. One day they would hold her husband’s seed. Now she watched waves wash his bad leg side to side, like a shell lulled on the ocean floor.

  “You been depending on tha
t brace too long. Time you start walking without that thing. Become the man you are in bed.”

  His eyes momentarily turned to slits, ready for a fight. Gena threw back her head and laughed, her lovely breasts bobbing in the water.

  “Don’t give me the stink-eye!”

  Lopaka smiled. He felt his leg bones humming, the warm sea softening his scars. He reached out and grabbed her hand, their locked fingers dancing in the broth of waves.

  ———

  UP ON KEOLA ROAD, IN FRONT OF THE MAKIKI HOUSE TWO HAWAIIAN flags flew. Inez had finally given birth to twins. Panama Chang still fought with his Italian wife, arguing for more rice nights. And old Uncle Noah still leaned at his window, the windowsill grown shiny through the decades of his forearms.

  At night their shipwreck of a house seemed to palpitate, made tremulous by the flickering blue tube of a TV in front of which old Ben slept, and by candles lit in various rooms. Niki liked reading by candlelight, it took him back to student days in Russia. Adoring young cousins mimicked him, doing their homework by candlelight. Sometimes Aunty Pua tottered over, slipped a linty, dried plum from her pocket and pressed it to his lips. He slid his arm around her waist.

  “How is my little babushka?”

  “Oh you!” she cried. “Put your eyes back in that book. By and by, you going be one excellent teacher, when you pau making your important film.”

  She still read the Bible every night, though she would never reach the end. Old Uncle Tito had begun using the thin pages of her Bible for rolling his tobacco. She was reading Chronicles, he was smoking Deuteronomy.

  Autumn turned to island-winter, making the ocean rage. White waves stood erect like giant hares. Some days there was only fog, so thick the world outside their windows disappeared. At night they lay staring at the ceiling from which termite dust filtered down, feathering small hairs on the ridges of their ears, and on their cheeks. They watched it sift through candlelight.

  “After our child comes,” Niki said, “I will resuscitate the house, one room at a time. I am good carpenter, you know. It is your house, and you must honor it.”