The Memory Palace (38 page)

Dear Daughter,

No, the burnt chair was not caused by smoking. That was arson. Enough said. Some people would love to sell my birthright but I tell you this: The Wolf is in my house. No disclosures as yet. Offhand, I can’t think of anyone in the world to trust. It appears to be a new ballgame. A little bird told me they even bid on stolen letters. On a brighter note, I have started to look at art again. I thought of you on a recent visit to the Cleveland Museum of Art. I had never noticed before the feet of “The Thinker” were blown off and there was blood in the bed of a famous nude lady. I am still going blind. A white cane means blindness. I sweat it out but can wait no longer. I
need my keys. Please come home immediately. They still send up gas from below, but I now possess information that can incriminate them.

Mother

When I return to the house, William is peacefully writing at his desk. He smiles when I come in and gets up to hug me. We’ve been getting along for five days in a row and I’m starting to think that maybe things aren’t so bad. We’ve been talking again about creative projects we want to do together when we get back to the States. Maybe I’ve been too harsh. The extremities of this place would be hard on anyone. During early polar expeditions, didn’t icebound crews get “wind sickness”? Go crazy from the eternal days of night?

“We need to do something about the kids upstairs,” he says. “I think she hits the kids. While you were gone, there was a big fight up there. I think we should report her to social services and let them check it out.”

We spend the rest of the morning at a social services office in town, filing a report and talking to a social worker. I can’t wait to get out of there. Here I am, four thousand miles from home, and once again I’m back in a social worker’s office. I wonder if the system is any better over here. The man is nice but seems vague and reticent when we ask him what he intends to do. William and I leave feeling dissatisfied and wary. “Well,” I say, “what more can we do? We reported her. It’s up to the authorities now.”

The next day, the air is bitterly cold when William and I set out for the Sámi Museum, where I do some of my research. William’s mood has shifted once again. We are both on edge. The night before, the children’s sobbing had woken us up. The mother showed up at our doorstep early that morning, drunk and surly. Someone must have told her that we had reported her to the authorities. She shouted obscenities at us and said we’d be sorry for what we did.

When we arrive at the museum, the door is open and the place empty. It’s like that here—people leave doors open, offices empty and unguarded. “I hope that man doesn’t show up,” says William, referring to the museum director, a balding man in
his fifties. When he’s like this, William is jealous of anyone, even Ristiina. William wipes his fogged-up glasses clean with the special lens cloth he keeps folded neatly in his breast pocket. Before we left Boston, I bought him his glasses. I bought his coat, his boots, his gloves, his hat and socks, his plane ticket to Norway. What was I thinking, that he was a child? He tucks his lens cloth back into his pocket and takes out a notebook and pen.

“I’m going to draw in the other room,” I say. I feel my neck tightening. Does he have to follow me wherever I go? William finds a spot in a corner to write. I go to a different room and sit on the floor in front of a glass case filled with reindeer shoes from the last three hundred years. Finally I relax. With my pencil, I follow the contour of an eighteenth century shoe of a child. Who wore this little boot? The boy we found in the snow wore shoes just like this one. I remember a Sámi word: ruw’ga, the cry of a reindeer calf when it’s separated from its mother. The shoe makes me think of another artifact taken from a small child. In the fall, right before we moved to Kautokeino, William and I flew to England to see my sister and her husband for a few days. Natalia was on sabbatical while her husband ran their school’s London program.

One day, when William was sick in bed with the flu, I decided to go draw in a museum. William begged me to stay and take care of him but I pretended I couldn’t hear him and hurried out the door. I took the train to the British Library and began my journey in a room of illuminated manuscripts. Looking up at all those ancient books, I felt at peace, like I was on the shore of a vast and beautiful sea. In another room I found my mother’s favorite book: Alice in Wonderland propped open to the White Rabbit and Alice in a tête-ø-tête, their figures surrounded by Lilliputian waves of hand-printed words. I wandered through the galleries until finally, exhausted, I spied a bench in front of a case of artifacts and sat down.

I closed my eyes a minute to rest. When I opened them, I noticed a small bone, nestled on a piece of faded red velvet. The label said that it was an oracle bone made from human remains, used for divination in China during the twelfth century. After all its years of use predicting births, deaths, wars, famine, and prosperity, and its second life as a sleeping relic, the bone still glowed white like a
pearl. When I took a closer look, I noticed a faint inscription carved into the bone. Later, in a catalogue, I discovered it was the ancient Chinese character for “child.” Had the bone been used to foretell the birth of a child or had someone taken it from a child, offered up as a sacrifice so someone else’s future could be told?

“I’m ready to go,” says William. I gasp and spin around. I look up at this stranger, my husband, towering above.

“I just started drawing.”

“People will come back soon,” says William. “I don’t want to be around when they do.”

Something is brooding beneath his face. His eyes have that faraway flat look, the kind my mother used to get before an episode. I wonder if, in another time, the Sámi would say that William’s real self had been kidnapped by the Uldat, the hidden people below the earth, and replaced with an evil changeling. The ancient Sámi would have said I needed a magic silver knife, the help of a shaman, and a large herd of reindeer to use as a bargaining chip.

“I’ll pack up my things,” I say. “I guess I’ll finish this another time.”

When we get home, there is dog excrement smeared all over our door. In front of our entrance, in the snow, someone has dribbled Americans Go Home in urine. “It’s her,” I say. “We have to report this.”

“I know,” says William, his face softer now. “This has to stop.”

In March, the month the Sámi call Njucčkamánnu, the Month of the Swans, we find out that although we have made several calls to social services, they still have not paid the woman upstairs a visit. But somehow she knows about our reports. News travels fast in this town. One afternoon we forget to lock the door and she barges into our apartment drunk and screaming. We finally get her out and head down to the social worker’s office once again. He apologizes for the delay. They will certainly look into the matter soon. “If you don’t,” William warns, “something really bad is going to happen and you’ll be responsible.”

In April, the Month of Hard Snow, Cčuokamánnu, it is even more difficult for the reindeer to
find food. The surface of the snow is too frozen to dig through in many places. Things are hard for humans as well—the light in April is blinding, bouncing off the bright white ground. Neither William nor I can sleep. And the woman upstairs stays up all night partying. Her parties spill out into the streets, even though the temperature rarely gets above fifteen degrees. As the woman’s behavior worsens, William’s does as well. He spends more and more time locked up inside. If I say something to him he snaps back. If I get a letter from a male friend, he throws it in my face, saying, “Why don’t you just go fuck the guy when you get back home?” I try to skip out of the house early in the morning before he wakes up.

One day he announces, “I don’t want to go back to America. I want us to find a cabin somewhere on the tundra and stay.”

“I thought you hated it here. And, besides, who’s going to fund your idea? My money runs out in May.”

“I don’t get it. All you care about is money.”

“What’s not to get? It’s simple. You refuse to work and I pay for everything.”

“I’m a poet! How dare you?”

“Even Walt Whitman had to eat.”

We don’t talk for two days, but then one night his mood shifts and I find him in the kitchen, cheerfully making pizza. He tells me he wants to go out to Kru’s afterward for dessert. But during dinner, we hear someone pounding on our door. I crack the door open, thinking maybe it’s the police. The blond woman and a dark-haired heavyset man with a knife burst in. Both are drunk. Apparently, social services had finally come to call. From her garbled shouting I realize that she has to appear in court the next month. I grab my cell phone, run to the bathroom, and lock myself in, while William pushes past the two intruders to go next door for help. It’s January 1990 all over again.

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.