The Memory Palace

by Mira Bartók

  A blizzard is starting and I can’t get a signal unless I stand in the bathtub and hold the phone above my head. I put it on speakerphone and call the police. Outside the door I can hear the woman and her friend breaking things inside our apartment. I am trembling all over. What if no one comes?

  Finally, a policeman shows up. They all know each other; who knows, maybe they were old buddies at school. Small-town life is the same all over. The couple calms down, they say something about how foreigners come here and try to get in their business. The cop gives the man and woman a light warning, then leads them back upstairs. When William returns with a neighbor, our place is quiet and everyone has gone. We push a heavy chair against the door, clean up the mess the couple had made, and go to bed.

  The storm that had been brewing continues throughout the night. William and I fall asleep to the sound of shutters slapping against our windows, as if Stállu were trying to force his way in. The next morning, neither of us can hear a thing, not even the wind. I pull the curtains back to see that we are completely buried in snow. Our house is set low in the ground, so the blizzard had caused giant snowdrifts to press against our windows and door. I had left our shovel outside the day before, so William and I have to dig a hole with our hands through the bedroom window in order to get out. William boosts me up and I crawl through the hole first, then he follows. We stand outside and survey the land. I can’t recognize a thing—not one ski track, or animal or human footprint. The bushes in the backyard have disappeared; everything is changed.

  “Things will turn out okay,” says William. He is almost his old self again, whatever that self is. He puts his arm around me.

  “Will it?” I ask, shivering, his arm a dead weight upon my shoulder.

  He pulls out our shovel from beneath the snow. “I changed my mind. I think I want to go home. It’s just that I don’t know where that is right now.”

  “Neither do I,” I say. “But I know it’s not here.”

  The next day, William and I move out. I feel like I am abandoning the children upstairs. I have been their watchdog and now I’ve given up. But I’m too afraid to stay, and so is William. Ristiina helps us move into a small two-room dormitory apartment at the Sámi College and we never see the blond woman or her children again.

  At the end of April, Gloria, the woman who took care of my grandma, called to tell me that she had died. “She passed in her sleep, honey. She was just sitting up, real peaceful. Don’t worry. She wasn’t in pain. I sure loved Annie. She was like family to me.”

  Gloria told me that she had lost my number, and hadn’t been able to find it until just now, a couple days after my grandma’s death. She didn’t know how to reach my sister. “We just had to go ahead and put her in the ground,” she said. “God rest her soul.”

  There was too much static on the line and I could barely hear her. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said. “Thank you for taking such good care of her all these years.”

  I lay down on the couch, stunned. My grandmother had been ninety-two years old, but I thought she would be there when I got back. I had visited her in Cleveland right before I left. Her Alzheimer’s was so advanced that she didn’t know who I was and just babbled nonsense, pulling threads out of her sweater and flipping through an old checkbook from a decade before. In Sámi stories, the dead walk on the ceiling of a world turned upside down, their feet following the footsteps of the living. I walked in circles in our little dormitory room and imagined my grandfather, father, and grandma walking below, around and around beneath my feet. Who would tell me about my mother, should she pass away? I lay down on the bed and began to cry. William came in from the other room and held me for a while until his face clouded over and his eyes grew distant and mean, and within the space of an hour, Stallú became a dark weight at the bottom of a boat once again.

  The day before we fly home in early May, another letter arrives from my mother:

  Dear Myra,

  If you are in possession of keys to the house or know who is holding them, please send. I have left the Jesus Hotel and am moving from place to place, using the sleeping bag I bought. I’ve suffered some disfigurement, blindness and an injured foot. This is urgent. This is my life story. They are trying to steal my memory. I will keep making posters of their intent. Enclosed is a picture of where the next cyclones will hit. It looks like, from my calculations, that you are still safe in your corner of the world. Please take two days off and come home immediately to help look for the keys. If I have a couch by then you can sleep on it. Mother. P.S. Be careful. The Wolf is in the house.

  My mother has been ending many of her recent letters with the phrase “the wolf is in the house.” When I first arrived in Norway, people told me that there weren’t any wolves left, save for one lone female, passing through on her way back to Russia. They said that no one has really seen her, but everyone knows she is there. A friend in town says she heard the last wolf when she was ten and lost in the woods. Twenty years later, she heard it again. The loss of the wolf is like the loss of a mother. Somewhere she roams in memory, in darkness. Our bond with her is inexplicable, before the beginning of time. She is fierce love; she is sorrow. She is a howling in the wilderness we can never see, calling us home. She is what we fear—and what we long to return to—the heat of the cave and animal closeness, before all civilization and reason. Was it right for me to try to separate the mother from her children upstairs? Should someone have come to take my sister and me away? The wolf is the dark heart of winter. She is the hot breath of life, red eyes searching for her child at twilight in the snow. How long will I wait to hear my mother’s voice? Will I ever hear it again?

  Back in the dormitory, I finish packing for William because he is too depressed to get out of bed. When he finally gets up, I tell him that I’m worried because I’ve just been to the bank and we are almost out of money. But he doesn’t care or even seem know what that means. You will have to get a job when we return, I say. Do you even know what a job is? He throws a book at me from across the room, goes into the bathroom, and slams the door. I remember what the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen once said about being alone in the Arctic: “The country here is one single glacier. To go it alone is pure madness. Two roped together, absolutely necessary.” Maybe Amundsen was wrong.

  Who knows how things will turn out with William? At the moment, the future is not looking that bright. If my aunt Toda were here, she’d sit me right down and read the tea leaves in the bottom of my cup. I think of the little oracle bone from China. What does my future hold for me? Will I let someone else’s sickness determine how I spend each day? I decide then and there that when we get back, there will be new rules, and that I will set the agenda, not him. If things don’t change soon, I will leave. William will have to see a therapist, get a job, and even take medication if he has to. If he doesn’t, I will hide from him too, just like I hide from my mother. Whatever it takes to be safe.

  As I gather my own things for our trip back to the states, I remember a story about the Tchudit, the legendary marauders Ristiina told me about. One day, the Tchudit came to a nearby river and hid behind some bushes. There was a girl on shore who was going to swim to an island where her family was. As the girl started out at the riverbank, the Tchudit grabbed her and demanded she lead them to her people. She told them to follow her while she swam across to her island home. It was night and she pushed a torch before her. She told them to follow the light. They began swimming after her, deeper into the dark river. “How far?” asked one of the men. “We’re almost there,” said the girl. The Tchudit swam even harder toward the light. As they got closer to the island, the girl let go of the light and let the water carry the torch so the Tchudit would follow it instead of her. They continued to follow the torch, until finally the swift river pulled it and the Tchudit out to sea. By morning, they all had drowned.

  And the girl? Some say she made it back to her island home that night. Her family held a great feast, and they celebrated til
l dawn. But I like to think that she too was carried off to sea—where she can still be found, at the bottom of a canyon, moving the bones into the shape of her future.

  Part III

  Palimpsest

  ... you scrape, and find—simplest of mysteries,

  forgotten all this time, but not quite lost—

  Jared Carter, “Palimpsest”

  I Am Slowly Healing

  The Navajo say that when a person becomes sick he or she has fallen out of harmony with nature. The healer uses a sand painting to cure the sick person. The sick person sits inside the painting to absorb its beauty. Then a part of the painting is poured on the diseased areas of the patient’s body. After they finish, they destroy the painting and bury it so the illness of the person can’t bring evil to others. I made some pictures this year but am not going to destroy them. Especially the ones of the two white goats, the macaque monkey holding a potted plant that is a self portrait and the picture of the five little dress-up trolls with hats. There is a nice one in pastels of a woman and a dog too. I think the woman is my mother but I can’t be sure.

  I am slowly healing.

  15

  ... loving kindness, let me approach you sleeping,

  let me touch your shawl of blindness,

  your hems of breathing and breathing...

  Dara Wier, “If After All Excuses Suddenly There is

  Never Again a Need for Any Afterall”

  In the Palace of Kalachakra

  Natalia and I are driving down Route 68 heading southeast toward the Carry Falls Reservoir, away from her town of Canton, New York. It’s been raining for days. Most of the snow has disappeared but the air still feels damp and cold. I look out the window and all I can see thick brown mud, a blue-gray sky. There’s no one else on the road except for a man lumbering along in a rusty red tractor.

  “You okay?” my sister asks. “Sure you’re up for a hike?”

  “I’m fine. Just a little tired. It’ll pass.”

  The art gallery at my sister’s university has hired me for several weeks to help with an exhibit on Tibetan sacred art. It’s my first time back to work after a two-month rest. At the beginning of the year, I slipped and fell on the ice in Northampton, Massachusetts, where William and I had moved to just before we got divorced. A woman passing by found me lying in the road. I had been unconscious for at least several minutes, and because of that I received priority care in the ER. By March, I still had a few cognitive problems and short-term memory loss but was well on my way to recovery.

  Natalia doesn’t ask me about William and I don’t offer any information. What’s there to say? I see him sometimes in town and when he notices me, he crosses the street and pretends we are strangers. Better that, I think, than him begging me to come back. I had worried that I’d have to hide from him but it appears as if he is trying to hide from me. Not so with my mother, however. In the spring of 1999, she is still trying to track me down.

  Nine years have passed since my sister and I last saw her. In a letter she wrote not long after my fall on the ice, she said that she had moved back to Cleveland and was searching for my drawing Help Is On the Way: I am consumed in getting the White Horse back. Then, when we reach the next plateau, I’ll change my name to Helen R. Keller and go by the name of Rachel. I am also thinking of pronouncing your father’s name HUR from now on, and dropping the sound of HARE. I am tired of using a name that sounds like a rabbit. What do you think? She informed me that she orders my sister’s graduate thesis every few months from interlibrary loan. She makes corrections on Natalia’s book of short stories, then sends it back. She believes that she is communicating with my sister through the book. She sends me copies of some of the pages with her suggestions: Remove first line on page 36 or If you cut the introduction to this manuscript, I believe it will be publishable. I know this would probably upset Natalia, so I don’t mention it. Instead, in the car, I chat about the mundane. “Been raining a lot up here, huh?” “Yep,” she says. “It’s mud season. Hope you brought good boots.”

  My first day at work, before the tour groups arrive, I watch two Tibetan monks in maroon and yellow robes, one thin and solemn, the other round and robust, circle a white platform in the middle of the main gallery. The two men bow and chant in deep overtones. After their prayers, they sit across from one another on a large blue square on top of the platform, lean in, and start their work. They are building the Palace of Kalachakra, the most sacred of all Tibetan mandalas, made from colored sand. They believe it has the power to create healing and peace.

  The Kalachakra mandala is a symbolic depiction of a five-story palace where an incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion is believed to reside. As part of a Tibetan monk’s training, he must learn three thousand different mandala designs by heart, but Kalachakra is said to be the most complex of them all. They say that if a monk can complete this one, the rest will seem easy. In Sanskrit, Kalachakra means “Wheel of Time”; some call it the Subterranean World, the same term Athanasius Kircher used to describe his underground world of caves. The story goes that the historical Buddha entrusted the Kalachakra tantra, the sacred teachings, to the King of Shambhala, who took the tantra with him to his subterranean kingdom where all beings live in harmony without sickness or death.

  In one of my mother’s recent letters, she wrote: Well, I’m not doing too bad, considering. I guess as long as one doesn’t have cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, tuberculosis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis, shingles, malnutrition or AIDS, they are doing pretty well. How’s your health, by the way? I hadn’t told her about my fall on the ice. I still struggle with a few things, including concentration and memory, but other than that, I am on the mend, so why upset her? I wrote back: My health is great. I rarely even get a cold. But thanks for asking.

  From the center of the square, the monks draw white lines with chalk to map out their design. Afterward, they begin sprinkling tiny pieces of crushed colored stone from chakpus, long metal cones they rub together to control the flow of sand. The sound of chakpus echoes like a pealing bell throughout the room. The monks work slowly, meticulously guiding the threads of sand from memory. In the next three weeks, they will build a great palace, filled with dharma wheels and elephants, lions and lotus flowers, protective deities, wind horses, and shells.

  I approach to the white velvet rope surrounding the platform. The monks are deep in concentration. They wear surgical masks as they work; just one sneeze could send a hundred deities flying. The chubbier monk looks up and smiles. “I’m Tenzin,” he says. He comes out from behind the rope to greet me. He bows, then nods toward his colleague. “He’s Tenzin too. You can tell us apart because I’m the fat one.” The other monk keeps working, chakpus ringing in his graceful and patient hands.

  “Not so fat,” I say.

  He laughs. “What do they call you?”

  “Mira,” I say.

  “Tashi delek, Mira,” he says. “Maybe we can have tea together soon.”

  Over the next week, after leading tours all day, I hang around the gallery until closing in case community members or students want to ask me, or the monks, any questions. Although I’ve read up on Tibetan sacred art, I feel like an imposter. It’s not like when I worked at the Field Museum and could answer questions about the origin of some ceremonial mask. Here people ask what path they should be on, as if I were some kind of spiritual guide. A middle-aged woman with a toddler asks me if I think there is life after death; an unemployed Vietnam vet pulls me aside and wants to know if the mandala will help with his depression. The exhibit is drawing in people who have never been in the gallery before—unemployed factory workers, disabled vets, North Country women with sad, weathered faces. They approach me with a lost look in their eyes. At the heart of the Kalachakra is the lesson of compassion. I want to tell them, What do I know about compassion? I abandoned my mother to the streets. Instead, I invite them to hear the monks.

  Each morning, the two Tenzins lead a sitting me
ditation. Afterward, they give a brief talk about Buddhism’s “Four Noble Truths”: First, one must come to understand that he causes much of his own suffering. That’s easy enough to digest, except maybe when it comes to my mother. She suffers from biology, from crossed wires, from too many voices in her head. I have always known deep down there is great love and sweetness inside her, her true self she had at birth, but schizophrenia devours it every day. The second Noble Truth is that one must look for the cause of one’s pain. Where to begin with that one? Third, the looking brings confidence to end one’s own misery, and finally, the monks tell us, a wish arises to find a path to peace.

  I go every day to hear them. As a rule, I’m not one to join a spiritual group, or any group, for that matter. I’m suspicious of the crowd that gathers, suspicious of gurus or spiritual guides. But the Tenzins are humble and remind those of us who come to listen that they have no answers, only suggestions on how to find some kind of inner peace. The Tenzins always end by talking about compassion and how we must try to eliminate the suffering of all sentient beings. And what of my mother? In her letters, she says she is trying to figure out what part of her suffering is caused by “outside” influences and what is caused from within. She writes: I am bleeding from below, I can’t control my bladder, I am blind and have lost all of my teeth. Sometimes I can’t tell if it is night or day. Well, as they say, everyone is guaranteed the right to be deprived of the pursuit of happiness. What does Buddhism have to say about a schizophrenic woman who sleeps at the airport and covers her face in zinc oxide at night to ward off gamma rays from another planet? And how can I help her, be compassionate to her, but not put myself in harm’s way? I’d like to ask the monks—Should I see her again? What can I do? Is there any hope for her, or does hope just bite the tail of fear?