NVK

by Temple Drake

  She rested her head against Halgard’s shoulder. “Let’s keep trying,” she murmured. “I’m sure we’ll be blessed before too long.” But she knew she was lying, and that more questions lay ahead, questions she would have no answer to.

  Then disaster struck. Vardø’s small fishing fleet was caught in a summer storm in the waters off Skaldenes, and three of the four boats sank. Halgard survived, but many of his companions were lost. Good men, who would be sorely missed. On Halgard’s return, there was talk of bad luck descending on the community. An evil eye. Netu was an outsider, one of the few who had not been born and raised in the place. During the weeks of mourning that followed the drownings, she became the object of malicious gossip and suspicion, and the fact that her husband had been spared was used as evidence against her. Elsebe redoubled her attacks. Finally, she had the sort of ammunition she had been looking for.

  One evening, while Halgard was out fetching wood, she asked Netu how long she had been in Vardø.

  “You know how long,” Netu said.

  Elsebe’s one eye seemed to gleam, like something that had recently been polished. “Remind me.”

  “Nine years.”

  “And yet you haven’t changed at all.”

  Netu didn’t know how to respond.

  “My son has aged,” Elsebe went on. “Little lines at the edges of his eyes, a few white flecks in his beard. But you—you’re like a freshly minted coin…”

  Again, Netu had no answer.

  By this time, Halgard had returned with the firewood. “Are you saying I look old, Mother?” He wore his usual easy smile.

  But Elsebe was still staring at Netu. “You’re not a Sami by any chance, are you?”

  With Elsebe, no question was ever straightforward, but this, Netu immediately understood, was intended as a calumny, since Sami people were sorcerers who had been known to sell favorable winds to foreign traders arriving by ship. Their spell-casting and enchantments could be lethal, both to people and to animals, and they were often persecuted, or hunted down and killed. She wasn’t about to admit she had Sami blood—and certainly not to someone like Elsebe.

  “Mother,” Halgard was saying, “she’s blonde.”

  “They can be blonde.” Lurching forwards, Elsebe grasped a fistful of Netu’s hair. “So beautiful—like a völva.”

  Netu twisted free. “Völva? What’s that?”

  Elsebe’s good eye glittered. “It means ‘witch.’ ”

  “That’s a slander,” Netu said. “I know nothing of their craft—”

  Once again, the old woman leaned forwards in her chair. This time, she seized Netu’s left hand and pointed at the scar between her thumb and her forefinger. “What’s this, then?”

  “I burned myself—baking the flatbread…”

  Elsebe dropped the hand and sat back with a self-righteous, knowing smile. “The Devil pinched you with his claws.”

  “Mother,” Halgard said.

  “You come out of nowhere with your red mouth and your yellow hair,” Elsebe said. “You cast your spells, and you ensnare my son—”

  “That’s not how it happened,” Netu said.

  “And now some of the finest men in the community are dead, and this whole place is cursed—”

  “What’s that to do with me?”

  “Yes,” the old woman said, still as a snake. “That is the question.”

  Netu turned to Halgard, appealing to him to intervene.

  “Leave her alone, Mother,” Halgard said.

  But his tone was weary and grudging, and there was no force or conviction in his words. He hadn’t taken sides. He was just trying to keep the peace.

  A few days later, while Halgard was out hunting, Elsebe and Netu attended a meeting of the village elders. To Netu’s horror, Elsebe began to speak out against her, castigating her for her beauty and her barrenness. She tried to leave, but two or three of Elsebe’s close friends held her back. She disturbed the heart of any man who saw her, Elsebe was saying. Yet nothing grew in her. She was a girl who would never become a woman. They had been harboring an aberration in their midst. Elsebe’s words were like whips, goading everyone who listened. How was it they hadn’t realized? How could they have been so blind?

  “I, too, was blind.” The old woman’s voice had lifted, and she struck her chest with one closed hand. “I took her in and gave her everything I had—including my son.”

  They needed somebody to blame for the loss of their menfolk. They were looking for a murderer.

  “Look no further,” Elsebe cried.

  Later that day, the people of the village put her in a cart that was like a cage and drove her towards Vardøhus Castle. Though it was still light, they carried torches soaked in seal fat, the smoke soiling a sky that was the luminous gray white of a pearl. She was in no doubt as to what they had in mind. The new district governor, a Scotsman by the name of Cunningham, had moved into the castle, and he had made it his business to cleanse the land of witches. Apparently, he thought of little else. She would be taken before him and required to confess. If she failed to cooperate, she would be tortured. She already knew what instruments he favored. Arm chains, heated sulfur on the skin. The rack. Later, she would be bound hand and foot and dropped in deep water. If she sank, she would be considered innocent. If she floated, she would be found guilty and burned to a cinder at the stake. Either way, she was done for. In those days, in Finnmark, that passed for justice.

  As the cart jolted along the shore, the jeering faces of Vardø women all around her, she squatted behind the bars. She began to talk to herself, her voice pitched low. She was calling on the spirits of those who had come before her. Her ancestors. If I exert myself, let five exert themselves. For I am alone. Did the words come from inside her or from somewhere beyond? She couldn’t have said. When she first left her parents’ house, she would, at any given moment, name what surrounded her—the plants, the rocks, the trees, the animals, the water. If you describe something, you have a chance of controlling it. Whatever is well-disposed towards you can be enlisted. Whatever is hostile can be disarmed. There is great power in naming. Crouching on the cart’s unsteady floor, words came to her unpremeditated, as though rising from some dark place where they had been waiting. If I appear with five, let ten rise up to side with me, for I have no one. Let them stand before me and behind me, and deliver me from harm.

  When they were just a mile from Cunningham’s headquarters, a miracle took place. Mist stole in off the sea, growing thicker as it passed over the land. The women were swallowed up. Snuffed out. Their faces, their torches. Even their harsh voices. The mist came up close and wrapped itself around her as she shivered in the rocking prison of the cart. She seemed to become one with it, made of something other than blood and bone, made of soft gray air. Though the gaps between the wooden staves that held her were no wider than a hand’s span, she slipped clean through, and off she went, across the burnt-orange, furze-like grass, not walking, not flying, somewhere between the two. She didn’t worry that she might lose her way, spill off the edge of the world. She had been delivered. There were cries of She’s escaped! and Where the devil is she? There was a distant howl of rage. Her mother-in-law, perhaps. No one would ever know what became of her. She would be a story that was told to children. A cautionary tale. A fable.

  Sometime later, she found herself on the white dirt road that led southwest, and after several days of traveling she reached a small town on the river Tana. She would like to have said goodbye to Halgard. She would like to have explained, if such a thing were possible. In her absence, she assumed he would take sides against her. He would have no choice. It saddened her to think he might lose that easy grin. That he might turn bitter, like his mother. Given the way things had gone, she viewed her infertility as a necessity, or even as a blessing. How could she have children when she might be forced to disappear at a moment’s
notice, never to return? Leaving a husband was one thing. Leaving a child would be something else entirely.

  After Vardø, a time of wandering…

  She climbed the mountain at Koli, its rounded slopes once used for human sacrifice, and still haunted, so people told her, by the spirits of the dead. She spent a spring and summer on the island of Läpisyöksy, where the north wind blew through the holes in the rocks, making them moan and wail like organ pipes. Years passed. Decades. Decades she shouldn’t have had. Somehow she didn’t question it. She would sink her teeth into the soft skin of her arm—or sometimes she would use a knife. She was comforting herself, and also punishing herself, perhaps. She was paying homage to her family. It was a sacrament. A kind of mass.

  What she did became a reflex, a habit. A ritual. She would break the circle in her body, the loop of her own blood, and then she would repair it. The feeling was like a sigh, but also like a rush. A slowing down, a speeding up. The pleasure chasing the pain. But people began to notice what was happening to her. Elsebe was the first. Later, there were others. She was like a clock in a catastrophe. Her hands had stuck. Her face no longer told the time. While everyone around her grew older, she held on to her youth. People who knew her became intrigued, and then suspicious. They began to ask questions. Always the same questions. How is it that you never change? What’s your secret?

  Tell me your story.

  She realized she couldn’t stay in one place for too long. Ten years. Fifteen at the most. After that, she would have to leave, and when she left the break would have to be decisive, absolute. The person she turned into could have no contact with the person she had been before. Nothing could be allowed to compromise the new life she was embarking on. At first, she kept her name, and chose not to venture beyond the borders of her own land. In time, that became unsustainable. She moved farther afield, setting her course for the ends of the earth. She acquired new languages, new customs. She altered her appearance. Short hair, long hair, black hair, red hair—no hair at all. Once or twice, she masqueraded as a boy, but it was more of an experiment than anything else, and it carried its own inherent dangers. There were times when she couldn’t have said if she was alive or dead. All she knew was that she didn’t age. Was it because she drank her own blood? Was she an auto-vampire, if such a thing might be said to exist? Or was it fueled by rage at what her family had suffered? Was it a weird, unexpected by-product of violent emotion? She had no idea. And there was no one she could ask either—though there had been years when she searched the world for somebody who might be qualified to speculate. But in the end it was probably better not to know. Thinking about it only made her squeamish. It was like being too acutely aware of the heart beating in your chest. Why not just accept it and be grateful? After all, most people dreamed of living forever, and she often had to pinch herself when she considered all the possibilities that lay before her. There was nowhere she couldn’t go, nothing she couldn’t do…Elation doesn’t last, though. You can have too much of a good thing. The feeling that crept up on her in the wake of all that euphoria was like a hollowness. A kind of dread. She began to feel trapped in something endless. Immortality is claustrophobic.

  At some point in her travels, it occurred to her that she could circle back and live where she had lived before, since all those who might have recognized her would now be dead. It was such a relief to be able to return—not to a person she had loved, admittedly, but to a place. She would revisit North Karelia, sometimes spending months there, sometimes years. Or she would pass through, on her way to somewhere else. She needed the green trees and the blue water. She needed the earth. What an uncanny feeling it was to walk among the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people she had known! By then, she had become accustomed to departure. Adept at it. That was the lesson she had learned. She had also resolved that there would be one aspect of herself that she would not renounce, one element that all her many lives would have in common. Her initials. NVK. There had to be something to hold on to, some faint trace of continuity, or she would fall apart.

  And now, in Shanghai, it was happening again…

  She sat on the floor of her apartment, facing the window, the light from the street arranged in orange blocks in front of her, and she began to speak. Her voice was as it always was, monotonous yet also musical, like plainsong, but the language she was using was new language. You think you know what I am. You have no idea. I’m not in any of your books. You try to catch me. Your hands grasp empty air. I’m not a story you can tell. My blood leaves my body. My blood returns. Like breath. I am between two deaths. The day goes dark. I walk over your grave.

  WHILE ZHANG WAS ON HIS WAY BACK to the office after lunch at Mad Dog’s house, he received a call from Johnny Yu.

  “I’ve got what you need,” Johnny said.

  Something in Zhang’s mind tightened a notch. “Can you meet me at six?” He gave Johnny the address of the Bamboo Lounge, the cocktail bar he had visited a few nights earlier.

  When he walked into the bar that evening, the same girl was working, only this time she was wearing a green dress, and her hair was pinned up in a chignon. The place wasn’t empty, but business was slow. She smiled at Zhang as he approached. He ordered a whiskey, then asked if she would like a Malibu.

  “Not tonight,” she said. “The owner’s here.” She tilted her head in the direction of two men sitting in the corner. “But thank you.”

  He carried his whiskey to a table by the window. Parting the wooden blinds, he peered out. Since the bar was on the second floor, he had a good view of the street. The yellow light seeping from a neon sign on the restaurant below slid over the cars that passed. He sipped his drink. The whiskey burned a line of glowing gold down the middle of his body.

  Taking out his phone, he called his wife, Xuan Xuan. She picked up, but told him that she couldn’t talk as she was about to leave the house. Her best friend was taking her to a spa. He asked if he could have a word with his son. There was a muted discussion on the other end, most of which he couldn’t hear. Hai Long was in the middle of doing his homework, she said at last. He didn’t want to be interrupted. Zhang told her that he would ring back another time, when it was more convenient, then he ended the call.

  Johnny arrived ten minutes later, with his chin lowered and his hat brim pulled down at the front, as if he was a celebrity, and was afraid he might be recognized. He was wearing a bronze-colored suit and a black shirt. He shook hands with Zhang and sat down opposite. When the waitress came over, he ordered a beer. His eyes traveled up and down her body as she took his order, and he kept looking at her as she moved away.

  “I playfully sniff and finger the plum blossom,” he said, “and there, at the branch tip, is all the fullness of Spring!” He turned to Zhang with a sly grin. “Author unknown.”

  Zhang sighed. “What have you got for me?”

  Johnny took out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to Zhang. “Everything you asked for—and more.”

  Zhang began to read.

  Her name was Naemi Vieno Kuusela, and she had been born on September 19, 1979. He smiled. All those nines. In China, it was considered a good omen, since the word for “nine” sounded like the word for “everlasting.” But she had lied about her age—or rather, she had allowed him to think she was twenty-four when in fact she was already in her early thirties. She worked for Art Island, a prestigious gallery housed in the complex on Moganshan Road, where her principal role was artist liaison. She lived alone on the seventh floor of the Embankment Building on Suzhou North Road. Apartment 710. Zhang knew the place. It was popular with foreigners, especially those who were looking for history and atmosphere. The monthly rent on a decent-sized apartment with a view of downtown would be somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 RMB. Either Naemi was being paid a generous salary or she had money of her own. Included with her home address and the address of the gallery were two e-mail addresses and a phone number. As
Zhang scanned the sheet of paper for a second time, he was aware of the girl bringing Johnny his beer and Johnny staring at her, as before.

  “Anything missing?” Johnny spoke with the cockiness of someone who already knows the answer to his question.

  “Not a thing,” Zhang said, folding the sheet of paper and slipping it into his pocket, “though I can’t say I’m entirely happy.”

  Johnny’s beer bottle hung in the air, halfway to his mouth. His smirk was gone.

  “You were seen,” Zhang said, “in your green suit. You were seen twice.”

  Johnny put down his drink. Eyes lowered, he seemed to be peering into the neck of the bottle. “I did the job,” he muttered. “I got results.”

  “She saw you, Johnny.”

  “There’s no way she could connect us.”

  “Why in that case would she mention it to me? Why would she ask if I was spying on her?”

  “I’m sorry, boss.”

  Zhang took out an envelope and placed it on the table between them. “Be more careful in future, otherwise I won’t be able to use you.”

  Eyeing the envelope, Johnny nodded.

  “And don’t get any ideas about the waitress,” Zhang added.

  Johnny looked at him. “I didn’t know you were—”

  “I’m not.”

  “So what’s it to you if I take a crack at her?”

  “She deserves better.”

  “She’s only a bar girl.”

  “Get out of here,” Zhang said, “before I lose my patience.”

  Apologizing again, Johnny picked up the envelope and tucked it into his jacket pocket, each movement deliberate, almost labored, as if to counter the impression that he was being summarily dismissed, then he stood up and drained his bottle of beer. After sending one swift, hunted look in the girl’s direction, he turned and left the bar. She watched him go with blank, uninterested eyes.