The Brothers K (66 page)

Now, here are just a few of the facts that Everett neglected to mention:

1. No draft-dodgers were ever “traced” to Canada and arrested there. They couldn’t be prosecuted for refusing military induction till they reentered the States: that was why they’d all gone to Canada in the first place!

2. Within days of the letter telling of the risk of shipping the samovar, Everett, without batting an eye, took a ferry clear down to Port Angeles, Washington, where he
could
have been arrested, solely to buy a new amplifier for his stereo, having blown the old one to hell listening to the Stones/Doors/Dead/Who, etc.

3. The “used but exquisite old samovar,” though jumbo-sized and rather ornate, had a broken spigot, was covered with corrosion, dents and creases, had cost him $2.50 at a Nanaimo barn sale, and was originally manufactured in Aunt Poland, not Mother Russia.

4. He had actually bought it three weeks before he mentioned it to Natasha
without even knowing what it was
. His thought at the time was that an extra bucket might come in handy, and that this weird-looking gadget was bigger, sturdier and cheaper. Which explains why

5. he stopped by Redstone’s barn on his way home and paid Jeddy six bits to fire up his blowtorch, burn the top off the samovar, and weld on a galvanized wire handle!

What a romantic!

The story of the Exquisite Old Samovar had an interesting conclusion,
though: Everett had been using it for weeks as a feed bucket for his billy goat, Booger (who he’d told Natasha was named Chekhov!), when, one cold sunny day not long before Christmas, his literary pen pal arrived unannounced at his doorstep …

E
verett had been so amazed to see her that he’d simply gasped, then stood in the doorway in his big rubber boots, gaping with undisguised joy. And I think Natasha was as amazed, and perhaps as pleased, for she could see at once that the old radical cool had vanished, and that his joy at seeing her was just plain joy.

But there was still one small problem:

Though her breath smelled like apples and his like mint tea, though her eyes were a filigree of coppery greens and blues and his a pair of live embers, though their hearts had already begun to fuse and their bodies, without touching, were speaking to one another with eloquence, they both continued to say not a word. Unlike the silences of their past, this one did not grow awkward. What it did do was grow so intense that they began to feel almost reverent, and humbled, and shy. So, simultaneously, they turned—still without having spoken—Everett to watch the pale winter sun, which was setting over the estuary, Natasha to study the silver bendings of the river, the ancient grove of dark spruces, the beautiful lay of the land. Then, far off in a pasture, she noticed the sun flaring dull gold upon some mud-covered wire-handled piece of debris. And so it came to pass that her first tenuous words to my brother were: “In case you haven’t guessed, I loved your letters. I may even be a little drunk from them still—because that thing out in your pasture, from here anyway, looks almost like a samovar!”

Prepared as he was to give this woman his life, loyalty, heart, home, body, soul and many other precious things he did not in fact possess, it was a terrible shock to see her pointing at the one paltry, manure-spattered object he had so far actually bequeathed her. Fortunately the shock temporarily annihilated his mind—leaving him nothing with which to speak but his heart:

“Natasha,” it began. “The way I felt just now when I opened the door. The way I
still
feel. The way you, the way I … No. I’ll just embarrass you. But listen. Before the sun sets, before another minute passes, before anything can happen to screw everything up again, let me tell you a couple of really
stupid
things. Okay?”

Hearing this, it naturally occurred to Natasha that there could be another woman in his life, or in his house at that moment. Or five other
women, for that matter. Or eleven. It also occurred to her that she’d been a complete fool to drive all the way up there, that everything she’d felt up until this panic was sheer delusion, and that she should jump in her car and flee at once with what dignity she still had. But Everett, meanwhile, was pointing into the pasture.

“The first stupid thing,” he announced. “That
is
a samovar. I use it as a feed bucket for Boog-, uh, for my buddy, Chekhov.”

He gave her a moment to take this in. She did so.

“The second stupid thing.” He pointed into his own face. “I’m an idiot, Natasha. Because what I did was describe the gift I
wanted
to give you instead of the one I’d actually found. And it was inexcusable to lie like that. I don’t consider what I’m about to say an excuse. But it
is
the truth, so I hope you’ll listen. The reason I thought it didn’t matter, the reason I thought you’d never see the samovar you’re seeing right now, is that the way my life has gone, Natasha—this isn’t self-pity, it’s just the way it’s gone—is that all the things I’ve really wanted, the things I’ve truly
longed
to have happen, have just never happened. Ever. So I never thought, I never
dreamed
I’d ever see you standing right where you’re standing.”

Afraid of her silence, afraid to read her face, Everett turned once again toward the sunset. It looked brown. For the second time in his life she’d turned him into a man-shaped pile of dust awaiting the broom of her rejection. “I’ll go stay at the Muskrat,” he mumbled into the brownness, “or sleep in my car while you’re here. If you even want to stay. And I’ll eat and drink whatever’s inside that samovar if it’d help convince you. Because, hell, you at least ought to check out Shyashyakook, and meet Yulie, and maybe take a beach walk, and a row in the boat. Though if you want to leave now I don’t, I won’t, I’ll fill your thermos for you, and pay your gas and hotel and ferry, ’cause of the samovar I mean, and drive you to Victoria if you’re tired, where we could pick up a samovar, by the way, or clear to Seattle maybe, with my mouth shut, I promise. Or maybe you’d prefer to just—”

Once again Everett didn’t see the lips slipping in through the dust cloud to bequeath him a kiss which, he swears, was only his second.

But this time it was the dust that vanished. The lips remained.

Dear Kade,

I dreamed last night that I was watching TV—a hockey game, boring and violent as hell, bodies all over the ice, no subtlety, where’s some baseball I’m thinking—when the broadcast was interrupted and a newscaster came on to say that an entire continent had just been discovered. Not an iceberg that turned out to be land. Not some upstart volcanic island down in the South Pacific. This was the sudden correction of one
major
long-term geographic oversight. This was the whole fuckin’ nation waking up from its Buick ads and hockey pucks one TV evening to hear that THAR SHE BLOWS! A whole flipping continent! It blew my mind, Kade. Even my dream mind.

What sounds even stranger (though it seemed “normal” in the dream) was that the new continent was located
inside
North America—right between the United States and Canada. It had been there all along apparently, though no one had ever seen it, and somehow it had finally just appeared, had become accessible to us, right there where it had always been. Crazy as that might sound, the dream was incredibly vivid, full of TV and radio reports, pompous statements of welcome by heads of state, gorgeous aerial footage of all the new coastlines, mountains, deserts, plains and river valleys, man-on-the-street interviews showing everyone’s confusion and shock and joy over the discovery. The new continent was quite modern, as it turned out, populated with people very like us—they were even English-speakers, most of them. And beautiful though it was, there was plenty of corruption and pollution and crime and havoc and so on—and I liked this, or was relieved by it, because I felt it safeguarded the place from being overrun and exploited by the ruthless likes of ourselves. The eighth continent was almost a parallel North America, really. Yet familiarity bred no contempt: the places, names of places, cities and small towns, mountain ranges and natural wonders, regional quirks and dialects and on and on were utterly fresh and new. So even though the place had problems like ours, it seemed pristine. Somehow even its problems seemed pristine. And in some haunting, thrilling way I could feel the new continent calling to me, could feel its enormous beauty and complexity drawing me into it in a way that the U.S. and Canada have never drawn me in. I felt that, problems and all, this land was
crying out to be lovingly explored and compassionately lived in. And I planned on setting out to do just that, the moment I woke up.

But now listen, Kade, because here’s the great part: no sooner did I think this than I
did
wake up. And as I opened my eyes and found Natasha lying up against me and a new day dawning gray and wet and glorious outside, it dawned on me that my dream was no dream at all. It was perfectly real. That continent was
this
continent. I was, I
am
suddenly living in that gigantic, glorious, wounded place! Why I, of all the unworthy oafs, have been allowed to enter is a mystery. How Tasha, or our joined love, unlocks an entire continent is another mystery. There is little about this that isn’t mysterious, nothing about it that I can control, and I know we’ve entered no fairyland, that pain, cruelty, fear, greed, and ignorance, especially my own, are still as real as real. I also know I’m in love in the worst way, and that it’s making me effusive as hell. But I’ll never have a better excuse for my effusions, so look out, Kade, here comes another one:
I
love
you
too
, little brother. It’s tacky to say a thing that has to be felt, not just said. But from you I
have
felt it. For years now you’ve been amazingly patient and brotherly, therapeutic punches included, toward a version of me I hope we never meet again. It’s high time I thanked you for it.

Come visit our continent soon.

Love,

Everett

Suffering is above, not below.
And everyone thinks that suffering is below.
And everyone wants to rise
.

—Antonio Porchia

P
eter’s life, from the time he left for college, took place in a world so far removed from the rest of us that it soon bore no relation to anything the rest of us were going through. On the Chance family stage Peter was, for five years, a blank. He chose to forget us, and to be forgotten, and this choice was intelligently made. So we did little to bridge his carefully maintained distance. But in late 1970 the pattern of his life picked up a bright new thread which I feel compelled to describe simply because, though none of us yet knew it, this thread would eventually lead him back home:

Midway through his master’s program, Peter won a Fulbright grant
that would enable him, beginning in August 1970, to spend a full year in India. For the majority of his stay he would be traveling extensively—a lifelong dream. His aim, without going into scholarly detail, was to study, to copy (on microfilm), and in some cases to translate a number of manuscripts by or about some of the more obscure medieval Bhakti poets of the Deccan Plateau.

Having read, while still in high school, English translations of the Vedas and Puranas, the
Mahabharata
and
Ramayana
, Sankaracharya, Manu, Kabir, Mira Bai, Tulsi Das, Bhanu Das, Eknath, Nanak, Bulleh Shah, Tukaram and every other major Sikh, Sufi or Bhakti poet-saint or metaphysician he could get his hands on, Peter had come to feel that his heart and mind had, in a sense, been dwelling in the Orient all his life, and that it was only a matter of time before his body would join them. And after five years at the Harvard School of Comparative Religion, where he learned to read and write Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi and systematically studied the works, cultures and traditions of these same saints and sages, he felt doubly certain that, spiritually, he was a displaced Indian seeking an honorable return passage to the East, that in the Fulbright he had received that passage, and that when he finally set foot in Mother India his exterior life would begin to reflect his deepest nature more powerfully and accurately than ever before.

He did not come home to Camas before leaving for India. He hadn’t been home since Christmas 1969, but money was always short and the lucrative summer jobs had always seemed to be in New England. So we weren’t much surprised when, even upon this milestone departure, Peter settled for sending postcards to each of us, sharing his news in various ways. He told Mama not to worry, and little else. He told Bet and Freddy he wouldn’t be far off, “just straight through the planet, on the opposite side there.” He told Papa that the Fulbright was a life’s dream come true, that he wished it came at a happier time for our family, but that at any rate it felt, to him, like being called up to the Bigs, and he was deeply honored to be going. To me he admitted that a number of traveling scholars and professors had warned him about culture shock and that he took the warnings seriously, but since he planned to be spending much, if not most, of his adult life in India, he said he had no real choice but “to set about transcending, or at least crucifying, my Americanness as quickly and unceremoniously as possible.”

I
t’s incredible to me how blithely even intelligent people sometimes toss around terms like “transcendence” and “crucifixion.” The words move us
on paper. They feel noble upon the tongue. But when they cease to be sounds and begin to caress the flesh and bones, when they leave the page and get physical, there is little that even the best of us wouldn’t do to escape them. (Matthew 26:39: Jesus “went a little further, and fell on his face …”)