The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

Annie Dillard, “Why I Live Where I Live”

  Oracle Bone

  The room I conjure is made of ice—the walls, chairs, table, and bed. On the table—a fragment of bone and a little snow globe. I shake the globe and a blizzard swirls above an Arctic village. I crawl inside it and look up: a fiery comet, a sapphire sky full of flickering stars. A memory shimmers under a carpet of snow:

  November 1996. My husband, William, and I are flying over the Arctic Ocean toward the northern coast of Norway. I watch the sky turn from red to royal blue to black at two p.m. Below are icy mountains and the sea. Someone on the plane is talking about an avalanche near Tromsø that happened earlier that day. I am moving to a place where you could get killed by snow. Who would bother to follow me here? Not even my mother. I take out my journal but as soon as I put pen to paper, William asks me to take dictation for a poem. “You can write later,” he says. “This is going to be a good one.” What would my mother think of this tall, gaunt man beside me? Never trust a writer, she would say. He looks like a Nazi. Is there a parachute on the plane?

  It’s been almost seven years since I last saw her. She’d be surprised to know I’ve been married for over a year. My husband and I are on our way to Norway because I got a Fulbright to study the cultural history of the Sámi, an indigenous people who used to be known as Lapps. Over the past five years I had gotten tired of writing educational books for children and wanted to work on a project for adults; more specifically, do research in an inaccessible place. To find my new home on a map, my mother would have to place her finger on the North Pole and trace a line through Svalbard and the frigid sea, down to the sixty-ninth parallel to a place called Kautokeino.

  Later, on the two-hour drive from the airport to our new home, I have to pee, so Ristiina, the dark-haired Sámi woman who is driving, stops the car to let me out. William is sleeping in the backseat. A blizzard starts up while I squat, freezing in the darkness, next to a giant snowdrift. A desolate and pristine place engulfs me: dwarf birch trees of ice, an endless white horizon. The moon is a ghostly orb, circled by a ring of red clouds. Within a minute it disappears behind a veil of driving snow. That night, at Ristiina’s house, I learn to pronounce my first Sámi words: mánná, čáhci, monni, áhkku, mánnu—baby, water, egg, grandmother, moon. “Tell us about your family,” they ask. “What are their names?”

  The Sámi call the period from mid-November to mid-January the Dark Time, or Skabma Dálvi—the Beautiful Darkness. Most of the day, the sky is a deep indigo blue, even in the morning. It is so hard to know when to wake up, when to work, when to eat a meal. I think of my mother and wonder how the season affects the mentally ill here. At all hours of day or night I can hear snowmobiles in the distance, an occasional car or shout from a child, and the howling wind. The land disappears into the horizon; the church, looming just beyond the hill, is lit up like a casino. On Heargadievvá Street women pass by on foot sleds, their red Sámi bonnets bobbing up and down in the wind, fur boots with curled-up toes, pushing and sliding their sleds. Some women carry a small child on the sled with them, and fly down the little hill toward town.

  Sometimes, if I’m up early, I watch William sleep. His long pale face is peaceful while he dreams. I try to be quiet so he doesn’t wake. Once he does, who knows if he’ll be happy or sad?

  As snow piles up around our house, my thoughts often drift out to the open tundra where the reindeer search for lichen, and to the hills beyond where the bears are, and the foxes and wolverines. I think about the bears, sleeping in the hills, how people here say the bears sleep till May. I wish William would sleep until May, then wake up refreshed and not angry—or irritated, jealous, or depressed. Ever since we got married, I’ve noticed he follows a cycle of moods that is much too familiar. Three weeks up, one week down, two weeks up, two weeks down. Then it starts all over again. Is it the darkness or something else?

  A woman in town told me about how a man and woman went skiing in the hills once and came across a big hole in the earth. They were tourists from the States, newlyweds, like William and me. They had wanted an Arctic honeymoon: total December darkness, a sled ride at Christmas, the northern lights. The man stuck his ski pole down the hole to see what was there and out came a bear. It mauled the couple to death. People say that there’s really nothing to be afraid of around here, though. The wolves are all gone now, and you’d have to be pretty stupid to wake up a sleeping bear. But if my mother were here, she’d say there is no safe place on earth. She’d probably say what she says in one of her diaries that I find years later: Be careful, wherever you are. Value your own mouth, hate privately, and pray for yourself. When distressed, see if you can remember all the bones in the body. Recite them alphabetically by name. Stay calm and always watch your back.

  When I think about those bears, it reminds me of what Ristiina told me about the war. “People had to leave in a hurry,” she said. “The Germans were coming.” She said that when the Nazis retreated from northern Norway, families had to flee their homes because soldiers were burning everything to the ground. The Nazis told the Sámi to evacuate and take all their reindeer to a place called Helig Skøg, Holy Wood, where the soldiers planned to slaughter all the animals for their troops. The Nazis didn’t know that there were two Helig Skøgen, one in the west and one in the east. There was no way that the Sámi were going to let anyone tell them what to do with their herds. Ristiina said that when the Germans gave the orders to go east, her grandfather loaded up their sleds and the family set off for the west. From a distance Ristiina’s family could see their house go up in flames. They traveled all day long until the winds became too strong. There were no trees for protection, but the winds were so fierce they had to set up their lávvú on the tundra. In the morning Ristiina’s family awoke, buried alive in snow. The wind had entered their tent during the night and had ripped the entrance flap wide open. It took nearly all day for them to dig out their own bodies, their sleds and belongings.

  Ristiina’s mother, who was a young woman at the time, told her, “I am seventy-five years old but only have fifty-five years of memory.” She said she doesn’t remember anything that happened before the night she was buried in snow; she said the snow erased her memory. In her letters to me, my mother says something erased her memory too—Nazis sending in gas, aliens taking on the form of people she loved. She says that evildoers never really die, they just metal horse themselves into another costume. She writes: It is very much out in the open now that I have a formidable enemy. At that hospital in 1990 they stole my teeth, my house, my memory. Presently, I draw only when I feel very acutely my muteness. Nobody hears a mute but I hear myself. Of my life at the piano, I shall say nothing for the time being. Enclosed you will find a picture I drew of two little goats. I also made a chart of nuclear power plants in the U.S. I hope it proves helpful to you in your endeavors, wherever you are. Love, Mom.

  And William, who, every few days, only seems happy in sleep—what to do about him? I have taken to making my own charts, a hidden log of his moods. I store it with my mother’s charts, the ones that predict hurricanes and earthquakes, and nuclear plants built along unsteady faults.

  When I’m out with Ristiina, who is my helpful and good-natured guide and cultural “informant,” I feel happy and excited about my research, especially if William stays home to write. Ristiina drives me around to visit her family and friends, helping me collect stories from elders. Sometimes, though, it’s difficult to drive with all the reindeer in the road. By late December, the town is surrounded by the large herds the Sámi had followed down from the coast. “For us, the reindeer was the alpha and the omega,” said Ristiina one day, while we sat in her car, waiting for a female reindeer to move. “Less than thirty years ago, when I was a kid, we had no cars, no roads in winter. We didn’t even use money. If people wanted milk from my family, I’d give them some from our cow, then make a mark on the bottom of a bucket. That way I knew how much reindeer meat they owed us, or how many skins.”

 
; Ristiina’s headlights illumined some reindeer near the road, the front of their bodies buried deep in snow as they tried to dig for lichen. Food is very scarce in winter, and difficult to reach. Ristiina went on, “The reindeer was the center of our lives—our identity, our clothing and transportation, our food. We wore reindeer clothes; reindeer pulled our sledges. And distance meant much more than it does now. People got around on foot or skis or sled. Everything and everyone was far away. And back then,” Ristiina added, “there were wolves. So if you walked a long way by yourself, you had better be prepared.”

  When I returned home, William was pleasant and cheerful. He had dinner waiting for me, and fresh-baked bread. I secretly marked a smiley face on my little chart hidden beneath my desk. Later, after dinner, William and I took a walk through a snowy field. Halfway through, the snow got so deep it came up to William’s knees. December snow is soft in the Arctic; it can trap you and make you sink. William trudged ahead while I tried to follow in his big footsteps. When we stopped to rest I noticed strange wisps of clouds moving rapidly across the sky.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “What’s what?”

  “Look up.”

  The clouds had changed from white to shimmering green in an instant, then to twisting ribbons of magenta light swirling around the stars.

  “It’s the northern lights.”

  We stood, half buried in snow, holding each other’s mittened hand, trying to balance against the wind. My hand slipped out of his and I let myself fall back into the snow. William fell too, laughing. We stayed like that for a long time, watching the sky. Things aren’t so bad all the time, I thought. Maybe I should stop keeping that stupid little chart.

  “Now I know why people believed the aurora borealis were gods,” I said.

  “Can you believe we live here?” said William. “We can’t forget this day, in the snow, lying here like this.”

  “We won’t forget.” William and I huddled closer together, my head upon his puffy-down-coated chest. “You know what the Sámi say about talking when the northern lights are out?” I said.

  “What?”

  “If you speak when they’re above you, they will think you’re talking to them. It’s bad luck. They scoop you up and take you into the sky and you never return.”

  “We better be quiet, then,” said William.

  “I could stay here all night.”

  “Shh,” said William. “Watch out or they’ll take you away.”

  That night, about one in the morning, we awoke to the sound of crying. At first I thought it was an injured dog. We got on our coats and went out to investigate. Our entrance was in the back of the duplex; a single mother with three kids lived upstairs in the front. Standing outside her door was the woman’s youngest child, a boy of around seven. He had a pile of snow on his head three inches high. How long had he been out there? He was shaking from the cold. “Hvor er din mor?” I asked in Norwegian, then asked him again in Sámi. He didn’t say a word. I asked if he wanted to come inside our house but he just kept crying. Then, a few moments later, his mother drove up with the boy’s older brother and sister.

  A blond woman stumbled out of the car, drunk. When William and I asked why her boy was standing in the snow at that hour, she laughed and said she just forgot him. The woman staggered inside; the children followed her in, eyes to the ground. I said to William, “Let’s keep an eye on her. With a mother like that, you could freeze to death and no one would know.”

  Friends from Chicago write to tell me that there have been sightings of my mother in the city. She’s been visiting my old haunts and asking about me—at the women’s clinic I went to for checkups, the gallery where I had my first show, museums where I worked. A friend in New York now manages my post office box but rarely checks it for mail. The first letter I get in Kautokeino arrives three months late:

  Dear Myra,

  We are now in autumn, under the sign of Virgo. One may think an enemy has passed, but how can one be sure? The newspapers daily tell of fabrications—there are many underhanded activities going on. Yesterday an arsonist burned a chair in my room. They come in while I’m sleeping. My eye condition is worsening and even if they are there, I can’t see them. When I wake up my furniture is on fire. Please help me. I am very desirous of getting back in my house. But I need the keys. Do you have them? If you don’t, do you know who does? Please respond ASAP. Mother. P.S. Although I am not of the Christian persuasion, I have been reading the Bible as of late, especially Revelation. I have recently read that the voice of the turtle is heard in the land. But if that is true, who wants to hear the turtle?

  Some mornings I walk in darkness to the post office and wait my turn in line, longing for news from home, longing and dreading it. Can she find me? How could she? But if she did, could she come this far? Is her coat warm enough? Does she have enough to eat? My mother writes me about her “Jesus Freak landlords” who run the subsidized apartment building she lives in, as she says, only for the short term, when she’s not sleeping at the bus station or on the train. They’re not too bad. They leave you alone if you don’t want to talk. She sometimes ends her letters with: If you give me your address, I’ll give you mine, trying to strike up a deal. At the start of the New Year, in 1997, my mother is still living in Chicago, but sometimes she takes the bus back to Cleveland and spends a couple nights sleeping outside in her old backyard. My mother, who once was terrified that a backpack could strangle me to death, now uses one, with a sleeping bag and a canteen. Does the current owner realize she’s there? Or is the house vacant now? I picture her buried in snow beneath the magnolia tree I used to climb; I imagine someone finding her in spring, the way dead mice are discovered after the first warm thaw, or little voles, or the runt from a litter of foxes.

  I send my mother gifts from Norway via my friend in New York—warm Sámi mittens, a red and white hat, and a scarf I knitted with thick Norwegian wool. Where are you? she writes back. You don’t tell me anything of your life. Do you write your own letters or does someone write them for you? My mother sends me clothes she buys at the Salvation Army, smelling of cigarettes and mold. She keeps making her charts of earthquakes and all the nuclear power plants in the world. One day a children’s book about trees arrives. It has pictures of fat squirrels and smiling boys wearing red plaid shirts, like something out of the 1950s. There are chubby robins building nests. In every picture the sun shines down upon life in the canopy. This becomes a great source of hope for me, the fact that my mother is thinking about trees.

  Another week, a box of broken teacups arrives. These were your grandmother’s, she writes. They are of no use to me. They were the cups and saucers my grandma collected from the time China was occupied by Japan. She liked to take them out of the glass case and show the little pearlescent cups to me, turn them over in her hand. At the bottom of each one was the Chinese symbol for longevity and a special ideogram that meant “Occupied China.” She had a passion for things that survived a war: photographs, teacups, jewelry smuggled abroad.

  My mother sends me a shoe box full of Grandma’s precious cups and saucers, unprotected—no paper, no bubble wrap to stop them from turning into shards. They had endured a great war and had crossed two oceans. What could I do with a box of shattered cups? I write Occupied China cups across the lid and stick the box below my desk, the same place I put my mother’s letters and her charts of future disasters, my own charts of William’s mercurial moods.

  The sun finally returns in the middle of Oøøajagemánnu, the Month of the New Year. I run outside mid-January to catch its fleeting light. The sky is on fire just above the blue-white horizon. I turn my face up and feel warmth for the first time since I arrived. But the feeling is brief. After a few minutes the sun is swallowed by darkness. The sky is like William. A month ago his mood would change gradually every other week. Now he’s cheerful one moment and five minutes later he can go into a rage. Something is very wrong. I saw signs of it before we left—sudden j
ealous outbursts, his angry pronouncement one day that he refused to have children. His laying down of laws one by one: no alcohol in the house, then no meat, then no travel unless we are together. Is it seasonal affective disorder? Will he get better when the sun comes to stay? I write long lyrical epistolary essays to friends back home and include his beautiful poems about our life on the tundra. Before I send them, William edits out the darker things—hints of my unrest, my small jabs of irony.

  One morning, I run into Ristiina at the post office. I tell her that I had just read that Stállu, the Sámi ogre, was a shape-shifter. “Was he the worst of the bad guys?”

  “Stállu is pretty bad,” says Ristiina “but he’s also very stupid. The Sámi always outsmart him in stories. I think the worst were the Tchudit. But they were real. The Tchudit were tall black-cloaked invaders from the east who pillaged towns, killing every man, woman, child, and beast in sight. Didn’t matter who was in their way. They destroyed everything and stole what they could find.”

  After Ristiina and I part ways, I stop to look at three large figures someone has made out of snow. The giant sculptures are the three Sámi goddesses of childbirth, motherhood, and the home. My favorite is Uksáhkká, who lives in the hearth and protects children and pregnant women. In some ancient stories, she appears as a knot in a rope that, when untied, unleashes a fierce and powerful wind. Some call her the “second mother.” Years before the Sámi were successfully Christianized, they offered sacrifices to her and other deities at sacred sites. They left fish fat, animal bones, antlers, wooden figures, and silver, even trees. They turned the tree upside down and buried its branches in the ground. Sometimes a reindeer was slaughtered and given back to the earth.

  The summer before William and I moved to Kautokeino, I had been invited to come and speak at a conference on indigenous education. The day before the conference, I went hiking along the Arctic coast and came across a crevice at the foot of a mountain. I shone my flashlight inside and saw the bottom was littered with hundreds of bones. They seemed to be placed in some kind of a pattern. Had they been arranged to tell a story or to foretell the future?