House of Many Gods (9 page)

In time, some of the women became like trees. Their ragged coats grew filthy with grease and resin, attracting leaves and dirt which stuck to them. Under layers of
babushki
and rank pelts, their hair and skin became like bark. Mold grew in their ears, in their armpits, and inside their birch-bark boots. They carried this dank smell of rot, and they became the rot. When they died, they fell like trees and they became like logs. Sometimes during a brief thaw, a corpse was found before wolves came. One with berries sprouting in her hair. One whose groin had become a thriving nest of beetles.

Yet, month after month, year after year, each woman waited. Vera still stood outside the prison fence and slingshot messages. Sometimes she even called his name.

“Sergeivitch Volenko!”

One night his blowgun was thrown over the fence. This was how she knew. She lost her mind a little, then she found it.

Nikolai was six years old the year Archangel’sk finally released them. It took Vera two more years to work her way back to Leningrad, dragging her child through the same ravaged villages and blown-up fields of a country that would never quite recover from its wars. They survived by stealing, sleeping in barnyards amongst half-starved sheep for warmth. Or, they slept in wet manure which, as it hardened, became a warm sarcophagus. At dawn they drank from cow’s teats, then sliced tiny cuts in their flanks and drank their blood, so nourishing. Ever after, the boy would have great affection for cows.

I
N
L
ENINGRAD, EVEN BEGGARS STARED, FOR THE MOTHER AND
child looked and smelled like death. But Vera rejoiced, they had survived. As they scavenged for food, they began hearing of new purges
across Russia. Stalin was making clean sweeps through major cities. Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev. Wanting to beautify them again, make them architectural gems. He wanted to show the world that Russia had recovered from World War II, how healthy and handsome the people were, how well they lived. And so he had begun deporting all of the wounded, deformed, and disabled.

He rounded them up in every city, poured them into trucks, freight trains, cattle cars, and sent them south to regions the outside world had never seen, had hardly heard of. Even disabled soldiers were thrown away, to Uzbekistan, Tajikstan, Kyrgzstan. Most deportees froze to death in vasty, empty mountain ranges. The world would not know this for many years. Even Russians would not know, and many of them would not believe. Heroes, whole families, faithful Communists—millions tossed aside.

Vera was still young but the years, and Archangel’sk, had turned her to a crone. Her spine bent to a spider’s hunch, she limped with the pain of arthritis. Her features had always been mismatched, distinctly asymmetrical, a face that frightened strangers. To Nikolai she was beautiful. At night her arms enfolded him, her body smelling of monthly blood, as she forced food between his lips, depriving herself and growing thinner.

For a year they hid, living in drainage pipes outside the city. Dirt kept their skin dark and filthy so flashlights could not find them. He learned to stand so still he melted into walls. Once they pressed their faces against a wall for fourteen hours. In that way he learned that if one looks at a thing long enough, they become that thing. But then, the sound of boots running in formation. Another roundup. He saw the shadow of his mother as it limped beneath a streetlight. The shadow of a soldier’s hand reach out and grab her.

His mother turned and cried, “Run, Niki! Run!”

He could not. They threw her on a truck and he climbed up beside her, as soldiers flashed lights on his face, and up and down his body. A skinny, filthy kid, but not deformed. He could be useful as child labor in the city. They pushed him off the truck. He watched his dear mother’s face grow smaller as they pulled away, her hand still reaching out.

That day consumed his boyhood. Consumed him into manhood. After that he pretended he had lost his tongue, that he was mute. They would deport him south, and he would find his mother. But gnawing hunger betrayed him. During a roundup, soldiers hoisted him onto a truck with dozens of broken children. A soldier studied him, then offered him a candy.

“Hungry?” he asked, holding out the sweet.

Near-starving, foolishly Nikolai answered, “
Da! Pazhalsta
.” Yes. Please.

They threw him off the truck.

Now he lived in typhus-ridden streets, hobbling in shoes of rags and ropes. He slept with gangs of street boys, huddling end to end in straw like corpses. He stole and cheated and lived how he could, depending on his wits. And maybe that was the end of truth for him. That was how Nikolai Volenko learned that, deprived of blood—a mother to protect him—lies were his only salvation.

A
NA HAD BEGUN TO LEARN THAT WHAT OTHER HUMANS HAD
, they kept. It made her sharpen her boundaries, dig deep trenches in order to protect herself. The one person she allowed into her heart fully and with total trust was Rosie, and together they watched as life in the larger world accelerated. The Vietnam War had ended. American and Soviet spacecraft had linked up in outer space, and somewhere in those years, direct long-distance dialing came to the islands.

She discovered she could, simply by dialing a number, hear her mother’s voice. One night she crept into the kitchen and looked at a slip of paper, the number in San Francisco. She picked up the receiver, put it down, picked it up again and dialed. Her heart beating so hard, her hair shook.

“Hello … ?”

She hung up and sank to her haunches on the floor. The voice sounded soft, educated. A woman out there fooling the world. Then she remembered that her mother
was
educated, that she had earned a degree and had a job.

She crawled into bed beside Rosie. “She answered the phone.”

“And you hung up.” Rosie yawned and rubbed her stomach. “You know what that tells her? That she’s still important in your life. You want her to come home so you can forgive her.”

“She doesn’t want forgiveness.”

“
Everybody
wants forgiveness. A chance to wipe the slate, start clean again.”

They lay in half-light, staring at Rosie’s bulging stomach. In the past year she had diligently stopped gorging on food and begun to slim down. Then, a chance encounter, a semi-romance and she grew big again. Just twenty-one now, she announced that she was
hāpai
, and that the child’s father had left the coast. When Aunty Pua heard the news she careened through the house waving her Bible, flicking holy water at the walls.

“A slut. Just like her mama! We got to pray the devil out of this house of illegitimates.”

The family ignored her, for “illegitimate” was a Western, not a Hawaiian, concept. The next day Pua moved from room to room, slapping the walls with ti leaves, muttering old Hawaiian chants.

From his wheelchair, Tito laughed. “Ey, sistah, make up your mind. You one missionary Bible thumper? Or one
kahuna pule?
”

Week by week, Ana watched Rosie’s body change. Her nipples enlarged and turned brown. A dark line grew upward from the bottom of her abdomen. Another line started down from the top. This was
alawela
, the scorched path, and when these lines met and went into the navel, the baby would be born. Rosie spent restless nights as ancestors entered her dreams, discussing the coming child’s
inoa pō
, its name given in darkness.

Cousins took turns rubbing kukui oil into her breasts and stomach, for strength and lubrication. They walked her down to the sea, where she stood in calm waters, moving her stomach back and forth to loosen the baby so it would not “stick” during birth. Ana stood faithfully beside her, holding her round the waist during the sea bath.

“Do you think our mamas did
‘au ‘au kai
like this for us?”

Rosie nodded. “My mama told me that was when she loved me most, when the ocean took my weight.”

Ana pictured her own mother in the sea, asking it to take her weight. Take it forever. She pictured her mother pounding her stomach with her fists.

A powerful old
kahuna pale keiki
, a midwife, came and laid her hands on Rosie to see if the baby was placed right.

“No more wearing of
lei
,” she said, “or baby could be born with
piko
choking neck.” The
piko
was the umbilical cord.

“No stringing of fish, baby could have rotten breath. No eating mountain apple. Baby might be born with red birthmark.”

Strangely, Rosie had no cravings for salt, or sours. What she craved were fresh hearts of bamboo. Day after day, she woke begging for bamboo.
Uncles drove to the wet side of the island, chopping down bamboo trees for the hearts. They watched her eat them by the bowlsful.

“Not good,” Ben said. “Sharpened bamboo our first weapon before we knew metal. Still symbolic of cutting. Means child will be cruel, unkind.”

The
pale keiki
tranced Rosie, taking away her craving for bamboo. Untranced, she looked around bewildered, and said she wanted squid. Hunks of juicy fried squid, and squid creamed in coconut milk. She craved squid every day and folks sighed out, relieved. It meant the child would be loving and clinging. Ana looked askance at the doings of the midwife.

“Rosie, you believe all this foolishness?”

“
Pēlā paha. ‘A‘ole paha
.” Maybe. Maybe not. “But it is better to believe.”

Then, in the last two months of her pregnancy, Rosie began eating
‘ilima
blossoms and drinking
hau
tree bark tea, lubricants that would help her in the birthing. Some days she lay back planning her child’s future while Ana
lomi’
ed her stomach with kukui oil.

“She’s going to be educated. A prideful woman. Like you.”

“Like me?”

“Yes. I been thinking about you plenty, Ana. Fate cannot shape itself to you. You don’t sit still. You’re going to
choose
your fate, be something in the world. You’re going to finish high school.”

Rosie glanced at their uncles in the next room. “Never used their GI Bills. Can you believe? Could have got high-school diplomas, gone to trade school, university. Even I once dreamed of college, now too late for me. You got to do that, Ana. We got to break the pattern in this family.”

Long before her pregnancy, Rosie had begun to carry herself with extra care, giving her Polynesian beauty and massive size a certain dignity. Since Ava’s death, she had even begun to speak differently, seeming wiser and sure. Folks said her mother’s death had birthed her. She was slowly becoming the link between the generations, the one the family turned to for advice.

Now she patted her stomach. “Put your hand here, on my child’s beating heart.”

Ana gently laid her hand there.

“Now. Swear you’re going get a higher education. You’re going make this family proud.”

She swore, and then she whispered, “I already know what I want to be. But I don’t want to say it.”

“Then swear on my child you going to accomplish it.”

Ana snatched her hand back. “Cannot … not yet.”

She was curious and smart, but seldom volunteered in class, afraid she would stand out, “make ass” of herself as an achiever. And so for a while she ditched classes, got into fistfights and ran on the fringes of a girl gang. It was a matter of pride, of upholding Nanakuli’s toughness, its “country” reputation. Teachers evaluated Ana as bright, but “noncompliant,” one step from becoming delinquent. She looked at her report card. C’s, all C’s. She looked at Rosie’s stomach, remembering her promise.

“I swear, by the time that baby’s born, I’m going to make upper third of my class.”

Perhaps because someone believed in her she began to push herself. With unswerving focus, she rose to the upper third of her class and then pushed on, aiming for Honor Roll. And she began to see how language could give her access to higher learning. One night she made an announcement.

“Today my teacher said we got to learn ‘proper’ English, so we can study things like math and science. Ho, man! Kids got plenty angry. Everybody yelling. ‘How we going talk to parents widdout Pidgin? Pidgin same as English.’ ”

She played with her fork, slightly embarrassed. “I raised my hand and said Pidgin is
not
the same as English. It’s not an inferior kind of English. It’s a
different
language than English. Like French, or Spanish. Like Hawaiian Mother Tongue. My teacher said that was a good point. So now I have to write a paper on it.”

The family sat quiet, not understanding.

“So now … she punishing you?” Ben asked.

“No, Uncle. It’s sort of an honor, and I get extra credit for the paper. She wants me to write about how it’s important that we speak all three languages. Hawaiian, Pidgin, English, so we can keep up with the rest of the world. We going to be what she calls … trilingual.”

A cousin argued. “But, we already know da kine … English.”

Ana shook her head. “We only know it as slang. When we’re happy, or sad, or have to say something important, we always say it in Pidgin.”