Aki opened the package of goat cheese I had brought from the mews and refilled our cups with wine. Another bowl went around, this one with roasted nuts, the shell charred black, the taste—when I put one in my mouth—buttery sweet. Eventually, Ciba returned to us, bringing a bowl of roasted beets from the fire. The food was simple, but it was a feast to me, a kind of homecoming celebration.
When the fire had burned down, a woman sang, her voice lifting into the still night air. Aki fell back onto the animal skin. Ciba lay by his side and gestured for me to join them, and so I lay next to her, listening to the music.
“That,” Aki said, gesturing so I looked to the ceiling of the grotto, “is our past.”
Above, the rock surface was covered with drawings. I saw the valley that led down to Nevenero. An avalanche falling over a group of people. A man with a spear, and a pack of ibex, their horns curling. Enormous figures standing on the top of mountain peaks. Then, at the far side of the ceiling, there was a representation of the arcade of caves, the stone huts, the pool of mineral water.
“There,” Aki said, pointing to the figures standing on the peaks of the mountains. “We came from this place at the top of the world. Before us, there were no people, only giants made of ice. They were very powerful because they never felt cold. They had ice palaces and ice tools. But they were not happy. They were masters of all they saw, but they were alone. And so they created us from ice. We were tall and pale, like them. But we were not strong or immortal. We felt the winds and the snow. We needed fire and the fur of animals. The giants hated our fires. The heat melted their ice palace, and so they banished us from the top of the world. Since then, we have been here, far from the Ice Giants.” Aki pointed to the very far end of the cave, to a castle in black coal, clouds hanging over it. “Now we are closer to you.”
My gaze fell upon a figure with long white hair and a black dress. Vita. Their protector. The wise woman who brought medicine from another world. Their kryschia.
We sat there together, the three of us side by side, as the woman sang. The fire had died to embers by then, and a freezing wind blew down from the mountaintop. When the fire was gone, and the song faded to silence, the three of us stood and left the grotto together.
Aki and Ciba’s hut was dark when we arrived. We slipped inside and soon Aki had a fire going in the fireplace. It burned weakly, throwing dull light over the bearskins strewn over the stone floor. As the flames grew, I saw that the hut was furnished with a wood-framed bed, a wooden table and chairs, a shelf made of knotted birch logs, some wooden boxes, and a stack of blankets. The walls were bare, and there were no embellishments, but it seemed sturdy and, as the fire warmed the air, and the smell of burning cedar filled the hut, more comfortable than the large, drafty rooms of the castle.
I warmed myself by the fire. Seeing that I was cold, Ciba brought me a wool blanket, and wrapped it over my shoulders. I had eaten well and drank too much wine. Soon, I lay down on the bearskin and fell asleep.
I jolted awake at the sound of voices. Ciba and Aki sat together at the table talking. I tried to sit, and a rush of pain flooded through me. Everything hurt. The pills had worn off, leaving me sore and aching. The sensation began at the base of my skull and spread, warm and fluid as blood, leaving me dizzy. My vision blurred, and so I focused on the table, on Aki and Ciba.
How distant Bert Monte seemed to me then. How far from her I had traveled. It had happened in small steps, each one tiny in itself but—when I looked back at myself from the vantage of how far I had come—staggering in its distance. My old life was gone, burned to ashes, and there was nothing left ahead but these strange people and endless vistas of ice. All the pressure of the past months collected in my chest, heavy as a rock, pressing down, pressing hard, until I could not breathe. Panic, swift and electric, moved through me. My skin moistened with sweat. My breath quickened. The room spun around and around and around. I gasped for air, buried my face in my hands, and sobbed with fear.
I was dimly aware of movement from the table, and then Ciba pressed a jug of water into my hands. I recognized the jug—its pattern was the same as Dolores’s china in the salon, the Bavarian farm scene with roosters painted in French blue, a gift from Vita, like so much else. It was a small thing, but seeing this familiar object, this human object, calmed me. I drank the water, my hands trembling. Ciba was clearly worried and gestured for me to drink more. In the face of her kindness I began to cry.
Ciba squatted down onto the fur, the weight of her stomach ready to topple her. She took my head between her hands and looked at me, her large brown eyes warm and reassuring. She wiped the tears from my cheeks and spoke to me. I didn’t know what she said, but her voice was soft, maternal, and while she was younger than me, I was comforted in a way I had not felt since my mother died.
Thirty-Two
For the rest of the spring and into the summer, I remained in Aki and Ciba’s stone hut. Vita, and the castle, felt far away. I slept on the bear fur, warmed by the fire and a thin wool blanket. I ate with them at their makeshift table, walked with them on the trails above the village to gather mushrooms and nuts, worked in their garden, and slowly—over the course of many weeks—became part of their lives.
At the same time each day, Ciba, Aki, and I walked with the others to the hot spring, where we bathed together. They were a ritualistic group, so set in their ways that their patterns never changed. There was not a day without foraging or tending the garden. Never a day without going to the hot spring. Never a day without meeting in the grotto to feast and sing. They lived simply, without the comforts of modern life, but also without its anxieties. If it rained, they faced the tempest without question, their wet bodies tattooed by flashes of lightning. When it was hot, they stripped down, and their pale skin burned to blisters. They faced the sun and the snow and the rain with relentless heartiness, their bodies adapted to survive the brutality of nature.
At the grotto, we roasted whatever had been caught that day—rabbit or deer or ibex or marmot—and ate together before the fire. Over time, the others lost their wariness of me. Jabi stopped glaring at me. The children—three girls and a boy—were no longer afraid to approach me. I cooked with the Icemen and ate with them. I hunted with them and tended the garden with them. Ciba spoke to me in her language as though I understood it and gradually, after weeks of confusion, I began to recognize a word here, a word there, then more and more.
Some nights, I replayed the lineage that connected me to them, moving back in time, from me, to my father, to Giovanni to Vita, Vita to Ambrose, Ambrose to Vittorio, Vittorio to Leopold, and then, like a stream guttering into a river, this tribe. I imagined Leopold sitting with us, Zyana at his side, eating from the communal bowl. I was falling in love with these people as Leopold had fallen in love with them so many generations before.
In those moments of happiness, with my skin hot from the fire and the sky a sheet of stars, I thought of Luca, freezing under this same sky. We were so small, so insignificant, compared to the galaxies shimmering beyond, so powerless to change the realities of nature. And yet, such beauty, such marvelous beauty, was a tonic to our suffering. I hoped that Luca had died with the stars blazing above him, and that their cold beauty had given him comfort at the end.
Most mornings, I worked in the garden. I weeded the plants and carried water in a bucket from a stream and poured it over the rows of carrots and turnips and melons. The soil was rocky, and—at that altitude—the climate less than ideal, with the sun emerging only in spurts of warmth from behind the mountain peaks. And yet, by some feat of adaptation to the elements, these vegetables were coming in by the basketful. When we cooked them in the fire at night, they tasted unlike any vegetables I had ever tasted before. They were varieties that had grown from ancient seeds—roots and tubers and gourds that had adapted to the thin air and cold nights, hard apple-like fruits that tasted tart on my tongue. During the late summer, with so many vegetables, we had no need for meat. We didn’t stop hunt
ing, but with such an abundance of food, we cured and hung the carcasses in a cave near the grotto, in the deepest, coolest recess, where it was to be stored for the winter. I did not plan to be there when the meat was eaten. I told myself I would be gone before winter came, when the ice and wind would be bone-chilling and brutal.
I would miss the children most of all. There was Oryni, a boy of around seven years old, and three girls: Xyra, of a similar age to Oryni, and Laya and Saba, girls of about five or six. They sought me out, and I played games with them—hot potato with rocks, hide-and-seek, rock-paper-scissors. I spoke to them in English, and their minds were quick, so that by the end of the summer they spoke well enough to communicate with me. They gathered around me when I was in the garden, and sat near me in the hot spring, and squatted nearby as the fire blazed in the grotto. I told them stories about the world beyond the mountains, about cars and planes and ships. They wanted to know how my kind lived, and I would describe what I had done each day, when I lived in New York. My house was a wonder to them. My jobs. My school. We would sit talking for hours and hours. I would feed them and wash them and comb their hair. I would pick wild berries from the bushes above the village and carry them to the children in my hands. I would mend their clothes, cut their fingernails, remove ticks from folds of skin. When I didn’t know a word in their language, they taught me.
I never knew which of the Icemen were their parents. The community raised them together, as Leopold’s notes had described. The children belonged to everyone. I felt they belonged to me.
One afternoon, as I left the hut, I saw Oryni playing near the stream. He wore a bright-green T-shirt with a cartoon on the front, something manufactured that had come from my world. I walked to the stream to get a closer look. It was not only a cartoon, but a T-shirt advertising a children’s festival. I read the German printed across the top of the shirt: kindertheaterfestival 2012.
I caught my breath. There were many manufactured objects in the village. The medicines and plastic boxes in Uma’s hut, for example, had all been made below, in a factory, by human hands. The sturdy boots that Aki wore hunting, his bow and arrow, the sharp butcher knife he used to slaughter his kill—these objects had been gifts from the castle, too. But this T-shirt could not have been brought in with our supplies. It was from a local festival in Germany in 2012. The year Greta had come to Montebianco Castle with her son, Joseph.
I complimented Oryni on the shirt. He ran his hand over it, smiling with pride. His teeth were decayed, crooked, in need of major dental care, but all I could see was the T-shirt. The character was a green dragon with batlike wings and a huge grin. The word “Tabaluga” was written across the dragon’s body. “Where did you get this?” I asked in his language. He gestured for me to follow him, and we walked along the stream, past the garden, past Uma’s hut, to the stone structure where the children slept.
Inside, there were four beds, one for each child. Oryni took a wooden box from under his bed. There was a pair of blue tennis shoes, a winter jacket, a yellow knitted hat, some gloves. I turned the clothes in my hands. They were all about the same size. The labels were written in German. I knew without a doubt that they had belonged to Joseph. My heart sunk as I realized that all the hope Greta had held for her son had been for nothing. Joseph had been here. And he had never returned.
By the end of the summer, Ciba was my constant companion. It was the last month of her pregnancy, or so I guessed. She didn’t know when she had become pregnant, and Uma did not keep a record of the weeks that had passed. But it was clear that a shift had taken place—Ciba’s legs had swollen and she had trouble walking up the path to the hot spring. She struggled to do simple things, like wash her clothes in the stream or make tea on the fire, and she was tired most of the time. She would curl up on the bed in the hut, her hair twisted over her body, and fall asleep for hours at a time.
Ciba’s skin had become even more pale, if that was possible, dark circles forming under her eyes. I suspected she had become anemic. With all the medicine in Uma’s hut, there were no vitamins, no iron pills, nothing to ensure she had proper nutrition. To make matters worse, she was too tired to walk far from the hut and was beginning to lose her appetite. Aki and I brought her a bowl of food from the grotto each night. She would eat a few bites and smile with gratitude, before turning over and falling asleep.
I was skeptical of Uma’s ability to care for Ciba. The entire scope of the Icemen’s prenatal care involved herbal teas, bathing in the hot spring, and extra food. I explained the kind of care a woman would receive below, the vitamins, the sonograms, the blood work to check for iron deficiency, the tests for high blood pressure, but Aki and Ciba had no idea what I was talking about.
Once, when Ciba was particularly weak, I told Aki we should bring Ciba down the mountain, to the castle. Greta would take care of her, and I could get her proper medical care, bring a doctor to look at her. I could get her vitamins and iron supplements at the very least. Aki only looked at me with his large, cool gaze, a gaze that contained the history of suffering and isolation his people had endured, and I knew that it was impossible. Ciba could not be seen by anyone below. Bringing her to my world would compromise her life. It would compromise all of them. This was the true dilemma of the Icemen. Not the harsh conditions of the mountain, not the lack of technology or medicine, not even their dwindling population. There was no place for them below. My kind had made sure of that. To survive, they must hide.
On evenings when Ciba felt strong, we ate together in the hut. Aki did not alter his routine and ate with the others in the grotto, often returning after we slept. And so we laid out bowls of food by the fire, sat on the bearskin, and did our best to communicate, speaking in fragments of her language I had picked up from the children. We spoke with gestures and laughter, and while there was much that was lost, I felt close to her even in the absence of understanding. We would drink herbal tea Uma had brought to soothe Ciba’s discomfort, and I would tell her about my life before I had come to their village. My parents. My town. My school. She wanted to know more about Luca—had I loved him? Did we have a child? Did I want a child? For the first time, I expressed how bereft my inability to have a child had left me, how I wanted to hold a baby in my arms and see life flash in its eyes. Ciba put her arms around me, comforting me, heartbroken by my loss, as if it were her own.
Uma came every day to check on Ciba. She would sit with us and translate when we couldn’t understand each other. It was on one of Uma’s visits, a night when the air buzzed with the sound of birds and mosquitoes outside the window, that I tried to tell Ciba that we were related by blood. We sat at the table, the three of us, drinking tea and eating purple radishes Uma had brought from the garden. I told Ciba that Leopold and Zyana had had two children together, one of whom went down the mountain and another who stayed in the village.
“I am the descendant of the first child,” I said, biting into a radish. “And you are a descendant of the second child.”
After a full minute of silence, Uma said, “Why does this matter?”
I was totally unprepared for the question. My relationship to the people who came before me—to my parents, to my grandparents—had always seemed so important. “Because it connects us,” I said weakly. “By blood.”
“Leopold spoke to our ancestors about this connection,” Uma said. “He taught us the importance of blood. But we do not care about the blood between us. We are one tribe.”
I pointed to Ciba’s eyes. “You see her brown eyes? They are the same as Leopold’s. She is his descendant. She is connected to him, whether she wants to be or not. And so am I. This inheritance connects us. It makes us family.”
Ciba and Uma discussed this. Finally, Uma said, “This is not our way. Who is born here is family. Who we feed and care for is family. There was an elder who taught me when I was very young. His name was Gregor and he was not born to our tribe, but he lived with us and became my teacher. My mother and father created me, but I am not
my mother and father. I am not my grandparents. I am Uma, part of our tribe. And you, who are different from us, are part of this tribe, too.”
I sat with them, trying to imagine Gregor, Nonna Sophia’s brother, living among them. It didn’t matter that he had been different; he was part of their tribe. Everything that had brought me to Nevenero, everything that had taken me to the Icemen, seemed suddenly secondary to this simple truth. Those who came before us, with their family names and genetic legacies, with their physical peculiarities, whether it be albino skin or brown eyes—none of this mattered. Family was who we loved and who we protected. Family was the tribe we created here and now.
Thirty-Three
I was working in the garden when Aki and Jabi brought the new child to the village. They slid through the narrow crack in the mountain and carried her to the huts. The child was crying, and the others must have heard her voice, too. They gathered around her, just as they had months before when I had arrived. I followed them, joining the others to see who Aki and Jabi had found.
It was a girl, perhaps seven or eight years old. Aki held her in his arms, carrying her close. It was clear that she was terrified. She trembled, her face pressed to Aki’s chest. He hoisted her up, showing her to all who had gathered at the entrance, as if she were some kind of trophy, and I saw she had been injured. Her arm hung limp. Her jeans were soaked with blood.
The Ancestor Page 27