House of Many Gods (15 page)

When he had enough rubles saved, he stopped. He shot without film; subjects seemed irrelevant. For, what was left to record of a country that was dying after centuries of war, revolution, genocide? Outside “modern” cities like Leningrad and Moscow, life was medieval, people roving the countryside in droves, eating roots and soil. Millions were starving to death, but this was an old story in Russia. The only thing new was industrial gloom, terrible pollution.

He began traveling the countryside, shooting footage of rivers of sludge, bent-over coal-miners lined up each day to breathe through oxygen masks. A town just south of Moscow was so toxic with industrial emissions, 90 percent of the children were born missing an arm. Officials hid them from the press, but a sympathetic doctor allowed Niki to film them.

As the years passed, he learned to assemble his films into rather crude documentaries, and he showed them to old university friends, some of whom smuggled them out of the country to Sweden, and Germany, where they were eventually aired. He was invited to a film congress in Stockholm, where he was asked to address issues of “future global toxicity.”

In that way he learned how easy it was to enter the world by embellishing one’s background. Moderators introduced him as a “noted mathematics scholar” who had dropped out to become an environmentalist-filmmaker. Small audiences welcomed him as symbolic of the “new Russia” with a conscience. He bluffed his way through everything—interviews, speeches. Then he began to realize he was not bluffing.

“I shoot conditions in my Russia many years,” he told reporters. “I am expert on what I speak of.”

He drifted through Europe for months and he was welcomed. People now seemed to love Russians, though Nikolai knew that deep down they pitied them. He shot everything he saw, though often his camera was just an excuse to study Europeans, to try to fathom them, why they seemed so different, so superior to Russians. Why Russians did not assimilate well into their countries.

A French girl he slept with tried to explain. “Europe is composed of small, tight countries, side by side, keeping each other in check. We coexist by being polite, diplomatic. But Russia! It is too big, too wild.”

“
Da
,” Nikolai agreed. “Eleven different time zones, spanning one-third of the earth—vast, empty, godless. Many cultures, many different tongues. Not even Tsars could watch us all the time. Not even Stalin. We were allowed to be insane.”

When his visa ran out, he always returned to Russia. With the country increasingly in chaos, it was easy for him to go back to the life of hijacking and “roofing.” And when he had enough rubles, and yearned to travel again, he bought new passports and visas on the flourishing black market. And he drifted—eventually to Asia, Australia—always armed with his camera. A man recording a world that did not seem to touch him.

F
OR YEARS THERE HAS BEEN ONLY
M
AX
. N
OW HE LIES BESIDE HER IN
the dark and tells her that his illness is progressing, that he might not recover. His words so soft, so evanescent, they almost pass for air. At first she feels disbelief, then fear, confusing it with anger, all the little impermeables between them switching places. And he cries out, weeping from the heart, for all the unlived days and mortal indecisions still stored up inside him
.

Anahola touches his long, hollow cheeks, and finally, after all these years, begins to grasp the depth of her love for him, that she has always loved him. A love he earned by slow industrious kindness, and the stern will of human nobility. She gathers him close and tells him they will fight this, they will overcome it. In her resolve, she feels a powerful quality of goodness, an untouched grace
.

And so the sleepless nights begin as she learns to eavesdrop on his body, the meditative lisp and growl of organs. Some days there is no rattle when he breathes, and some days there is pain, a watery impulse in his inhalations. In conversations his words come unmoored, his syllables lengthened to slow tides
 …

T
HE DAY
M
AX WENT IN FOR SURGERY HE WAS VERY CALM, AS IF HE
were having a tooth pulled. She sat beside him in recovery.

A little high on drugs, he smiled. “Not to worry, Ana. One can live with a single lung.”

She told him a story then. “After I found out who my real father was, they told me he had lost a lung in World War II. A German sniper. Doctors
removed several ribs to get to his lung, and he inscribed them and sent them home to my mother. That’s how he courted her.”

“Yet she never married him. Even though she loved him.”

“He was dark-skinned, pure-blood Hawaiian. Even though she had had his child while he was overseas, she thought she wanted to marry ‘up,’ a
haole
.”

“Still, they ended up together.”

“Yes.”

“Well, perhaps I should offer you my ribs, as I would most definitely like to marry you. Today would be a good day. You look splendid.”

Through the years she had re-created herself, slimming down somewhat, wearing her wild hair slicked back in a French twist, her clothes always simple and expensive. Now she was wearing a new suit, smart high heels, a Chanel handbag with the signature shoulder chain. Later the chain slipped off her shoulder as she stood in the hallway talking to Max’s surgeon.

The man was cold, noncommittal, and Ana tried to see herself through his eyes.
Brown-skinned. Ambitious. Squeezing her older, white-skinned lover for all she could get
. She felt like compounding his disdain, telling him that her best friend was a Mexican, their cook. That together they ran Max’s house, even balanced his checkbooks. And that sometimes she cooked dinner for the cook.

“There’s also a small tumor on his shoulder,” she said. “Can you tell me why that was not removed?”

He fidgeted, clicking a ballpoint pen. “There are higher priorities presenting themselves …”

“In other words, the cancer is metastasizing.”

He nodded, staring at the floor. “Unfortunately, that’s what these cells do. Run amok. Divide and conquer.”

“You know he once worked at Los Alamos, that he was exposed …”

“Of course. A lot of those physicists got sick. Occupational hazard. Like chimney sweeps.”

She moved closer. “I’m sorry. Like what?”

The surgeon looked out the window. “In the eighteenth century there was a high incidence of scrotum cancer in chimney sweeps. From carcinogens, hydrocarbons in the soot. Of course, back then who knew?”

Her face flushed hot. He was so chatty, so contemptuously nonchalant, she felt like wrapping the chain of her handbag round his neck.

“Doctor. Is there any chance he’ll beat this? Any hope?”

He seemed to address the floor again. “There is always hope …”

Ana grabbed his arm and shook it like a child’s. “Oh, be a man! Pick up your face and look me in the eye. Is … he … dying?”

He looked up, unflinching. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”

“How much time does he …”

“That I honestly cannot tell you. Six months. Two years. This is where God steps in. And chemotherapy.”

She sat down in his room and took his hand. “The news is not good. But you know that.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Max said. “Thing I can’t figure out is why it isn’t in my bones yet. Strontium 90 is a bone-seeker.” He half laughed. “Maybe I’m already dead and don’t know it.”

Ana leaned forward, desperate. “Max, we’re not quitters. We’re going to fight this all the way.”

Postsurgery treatments left him weak but he recovered. He seemed to recover. He put on weight. His face grew fuller and less lined. When they made love he was as ardent as a young man.

“I remember flowers in the desert after the bomb tests. They sprang up like giants overnight.”

“Then what happened to them?” Ana asked.

“They thrived. For a while.”

A year passed with no recurrence, no signs of new tumors. The lump in his shoulder grew smaller. Each night Ana went to the bathroom and locked the door and got down on her knees. She prayed while walking down the street. She prayed while they made love.

S
HE SPENT HOURS PORING OVER MAPS, RECALLING CITIES THEY
had visited, Munich, Madrid, even cities she had never heard of as a girl. Oslo, and Minsk. For over a decade they had traveled to conferences, wherever Max was invited to lecture on immunology and physics. In years to come, when she looked at a map of Europe, her eyes would always be drawn to the ancient city of old Prague. It was there that Max began to die.

Folks said Prague was most beautiful in spring. That was when chestnuts blossomed pink and white, and palace courtyards were fragrant with lilacs. Most beautiful in spring. But they had come in March when Gothic spires and red-tiled roofs were covered with snow so the medieval city seemed a dream.

Max bought her an old-fashioned fur muff, and for hours they walked cobblestoned streets lit by gas lamps. They stood on a fourteenth-century
bridge over the Vltava River, a bridge graced with thirty giant statues of saints that seemed to be floating toward them in the snow. Then the entire bridge seemed to be floating, carrying them over the gilded city.

She would always remember this moment of timelessness beside him. She would remember the chill of his lips pressed to hers. Ice on the rim of his hat, the tips of his eyebrows. She would remember the warmth of his hand shoved down inside her pocket. The roughness of his coat against her cheek. The scent of his cologne, the softness of his skin, even as she imagined his blood, his marrow, his white cells, his T-cells. His cells that were running amok.

Afraid she would break down, she dashed away from him, scooped up snow and threw it at a gull. They walked off the bridge backwards for, according to legend, if one turned their back on them, the giant statues followed them home.

It was dusk when, full of dark beer, they stood outside a ballroom, formerly a convent for Ursuline nuns. Through tall mullioned windows, they watched couples in suits and long dresses dance mazurkas, the czardas, the waltz. Seeing their faces pressed against the panes, the small orchestra threw open the windows and played for them. Schubert, Brahms, Kricka. And as they played, flakes began to fall again, big and fat as petals.

“I want to waltz out in the snow.”

She had never waltzed, but now she followed Max and they were flawless, moving like skaters leaning into the wind, circling the edges of a courtyard. Spinning in his arms, for a moment Ana felt that all sins were forgiven, all wounds healed, the world was in balance, and they would grow old together.

The next morning she sat in a lecture hall, listening to talks on Prague’s enfeebled stonework, its precious, deteriorating buildings. Coal and coke, the main fuels for heating and cooking, were largely to blame, producing sulfurous exhalations that penetrated and corroded. Officials promised that within twenty years Prague would be heating with gas. But corrosive exhalations would still come from cars burning gas and diesel oil.

An official beside her explained. “You see, we sit in a valley. When there’s high pressure, there’s inversion. For weeks no fresh air comes, especially now in winter. Don’t you feel it? The fog is like a pillow pushed against your face.”

It was true. Ana had begun to feel she was breathing through a cloth.

“When rains come, it cannot wash the soot away. Streets turn to blackest goo. This is why we need a nuclear reactor.”

That afternoon when talks resumed she noticed three men with their heads together who suddenly stood and rushed up the aisle. Max had just been asked how much low-level radiation from a nuclear reactor was safe. His voice grew loud as he responded.

“My opinion is … 
no
radiation level is harmless. There is no safe level of exposure. Your question should
not
be, ‘Is there a risk for low-level exposure?’ Or, ‘What is a safe level of exposure?’ The question
should
be ‘How great is this risk?’ ”

He paused as if breathless. “Most of you know my background. I was a nuclear physicist. Our work on bombs paved the way for these reactors. You’ve seen what bombs can do. So can reactors when they break down. I’m dead set against them. There is no safety in this industry because there is no such thing as a peaceful atom. We are simply not ready for atomically produced energy. Now, maybe I’m out of step, a barking watchdog with no teeth. But if …”

A man in the audience stood, his accent Dutch, or German. “Has anyone heard the news? There has been an accident in the United States. One of those reactors has had a close-to-total meltdown. There are reports … large quantities of radioactive isotopes pouring into the air and water of that region …”

People jumped up from their seats. A man crossed the stage and took the mike. “If you please. We have an update. The nuclear station is called Three Mile Island, located in central Pennsylvania. They are evacuating in the thousands.”

A woman stood, clutching her briefcase. “Are we in danger of winds from this accident?”