Tropic of Night (22 page)

Later, Lulu and Cleo grab me in the file warrens, mad to know what the fuss was about. I tell them a version of the truth, that I don’t want to wander the halls because there’s a man I’m avoiding, someone who’s annoying me. They stare at me in amazement, and a look passes between them. A man ? Dolores?

Later in the car thinking, Yes, drive to some anonymous city. Dayton. Boise. Indianapolis. Get a place to live and a meaningless job moving paper or electrons from one box to another, raise Luz, each day scratch another line on the wall, like the bearded prisoners in cartoons.

There are long shallow steps leading to the day-care center, and on one of these sits Luz in close conversation with a little blonde. She flickers a hand at me as I approach but doesn’t move. Their perfect cheeks are close together, dark as bread crust, pale as milk. I have a moment of faintness. A little unstuck in time for a moment there: I was thinking of my husband’s brown hand moving over my body, how happy I felt there at the beginning. Oh, it was love, true, but it was also a certain self-satisfaction, the world convulsed with the hallucination of race, and little Jane had beat it, gone beyond. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands and summon up a ghastly smile. But they are not watching me.

The blonde is Amanda, the new best friend, the subject of continuous commentary recently, a Talmud in pink sneakers. Luz has been to Amanda’s house, on Trapp Avenue in the good white Grove, the earthly paradise, and desperately does she want Amanda to come to her house. I had not anticipated this, I confess. I thought she would be as I am now, a solitary, the two of us for ourselves and no one else. But no, she is now a regular little kid, the insanity of her first four years has been put out with the trash, and now she wants Barbies and My Little Pony and pals.

A thin, elegant woman gets out of a silver Audi and comes over to the girls and me. She has big sunglasses pushed up on her hair, which is beautifully cut and a few shades darker than her daughter’s. She is wearing a fawn suit, and a peach silk blouse. She is something with an airline. The mister is a big-time lawyer. Julia Pettigrew is her name. Amanda runs to her and asks if she can go home with Luz, and Luz does the same to me. Mrs. Pettigrew looks at me kindly, the sort of patronizing look Dolores Tuoey deserves, the look saying of course I don’t mind if my precious goes in your horrible dangerous junker and visits your half-caste kid in your white-trash household, and I am far too liberal, and proud of it, to ever by word or deed imply that there is any objection to the association between our children. And in response I sort of shuffle and begin to shake my head negatively, so that Mrs. Pettigrew rescues me, as I knew she would, by saying, “Girls! Why don’t we go to Cocowalk and get an ice cream!” Cries of delight, the bribe effective, and “I’ll bring her back in a couple of hours.”

A couple of hours, good, that will give me enough time to pack my little box and my ugly clothes, and write a note, please take care of my little girl, and by the time they get there I can be in Vero Beach. The transmission will get me to Jacksonville and then I can take a bus. I can travel faster alone, dumb in the first place to take the kid. The ogga, grasping at the controls.

Later I sit in the car in my driveway listening to it tick. We are both troubled by transmission problems; like my Buick, I can’t get into gear. This happened after I left Marcel, too. It is hard to leave the Chenka. Impossible to find them if they don’t want to be found, but leaving is no simple thing either, especially in the spring, when everything turns to bog. I went with Marcel and a party of Chenka on their semiannual shopping trip to Ust-Sugoy. Kmart has not come to Ust-Sugoy yet, but you can buy salt there and tools and cloth if you have wool to trade. Marcel put me on the weekly boat that runs up the Kolyma River to the roadhead at Seymchan. My eyes slid off his face, there was a repulsion there, where once there had been attraction. He volunteered to leave his work and come with me, but I flatly refused, I think I even got angry with him, accused him of treating me like a child, of wanting to continue his control. Being a good modern girl I had reinterpreted the cosmic evisceration I had just gone through as personal growth ! I need my freedom?I actually said that to him. Freedom, the one pathetic virtue of the Americans, that and honesty. I was disappointed in him, I said, being honest. I didn’t cry when the greasy old boat pulled away, but, now that I recall it, he did, the slow embarrassing tears running down his face.

At Seymchan, while one waits for one’s bus, one stays at the exclusive Gulag Hilton, a two-story structure in cracked and rusty concrete, where the rooms are little boxes without TVs, mini-bars, or windows. You get an iron bedstead and a mattress stuffed with felt and vermin and a twenty-watt bulb that turns off all by itself at ten. You can get kvass at the bar, though, and pepper vodka, which I did in some quantity. From Seymchan, it is a two-hundred-mile bus ride through the lovely Commie death camp district to Magadan, stopping for the evening at romantic Myakit. There was a hotel in Myakit, too, but it had burned down while I was in the field, and so we all stayed the night in the bus terminal. My fellow passengers were all Siberians and so the temperature in the cement-block building?maybe ten degrees of frost?did not trouble them. There was a red-hot stove going, and a boiling samovar, and there was ample vodka traveling around in a jolly enough manner.

I fell in with a Yakut family named Turgaliy, a man, his wife, and three children, two girls and a little boy. They had some bread, sausage, and tea, which they kindly shared with me, and I passed on a Bic lighter for Mr. T., and for Mrs. T. an almost-full purse spray of L’Air du Temps (oh, yes, I actually brought it along for my romantic idyll among the Chenka), and push-button ball pens for the kids. They also had a bottle of unbranded local vodka, which stood by me during much of the evening. We drank from little silver cups. I learned some doleful, droning Yakut songs and passed out singing.

And awoke in my sleeping bag, into which the Turgaliys had stuffed me, at dawn, to find myself in the middle of what appeared to be a nervous breakdown. The tiny little lady in the control room was baffled. The body refused to move. The vital levers and switches had been taken over by an ogga, a sad and frightened spirit, who thought that the best thing to do was to lie here in this cozy sleeping bag, zipped up over the head, until death intervened or the entropic curtain descended upon a universe grown terminally stale. I could see through my eyehole the Turgaliys moving about gathering their things. The children peered in, grinning, clicking their ballpoints like microcastanets. I heard the bus arrive, the worried pleading of the Turgaliys. They shook me, they attempted to uncocoon me, but I rolled into a ball and wept until they left. The bus pulled out, farting gaily. Silence. I had to pee. I staggered to the smelly hole provided, then back to the bag. It’s just the bag I’m in, I said to myself, or rather that is what the ogga said to the tiny little lady, and thought it very witty, a stopper. That’s just the bag I’m in, an old Fred Neil song it appears to know. I was clutching my notebook like a holy relic.

Some days passed. The daily bus pulled in and out. Someone went through my backpack, removing all valuables, then someone else removed the backpack itself. I stopped going to the hole to pee, but there was not much pee to pee anymore, since I had stopped eating and drinking.

Time went by. A shadow fell over my little blowhole. I opened my eye and there was Josiah Mount, my half brother. This was such a shock that for a moment, I regained control. I licked my cracked lips and formed the obvious “What are you doing here?” He said, “Don’t you know that if you stay in the bus station in Myakit long enough, everyone you ever knew in your life will walk by?” Always a kidder, Josey.

Marcel, through some unknown, but probably nonsorcerous, means, had caused an e-mail message to appear in my brother’s office describing my route and suggesting I might be in some serious trouble. My brother immediately chartered an airplane. He can do things like that because he made a remarkable amount of money in the telephone business; he claims to have invented the annoying dinnertime phone call asking if you want to switch your long-distance carrier.

He picked me up, stinking sleeping bag and all, and placed me in the bed of a truck parked outside. The truck roared and started. He washed my face with water from a plastic bottle and dribbled some into my mouth. Then black. Then an oatmeal sky, too bright. I was out of the sleeping bag and didn’t stink anymore. I was lying flat, being carried on a stretcher by two squat Asians in brown uniform into a pale blue jet aircraft that smelled of kerosene and hot plastic. The engines made a shrill sigh. My brother’s face, smiling; he stroked my hair from my eyes. A slight sticking pain. More black.

I rejoined the relatively living in a hospital room, hooked to tubes and monitors. A woman in white came into the room and said something in Japanese, another Altaic language, but one I do not speak. She took my temp and smiled and left. After a few minutes, my brother came into the room.

I get out of the Buick, enter my apartment, and replace some of the water I have sweated away with a glass of water from the tap. I get my big suction cup, wet it in the sink, and then kneel over the secret place. I pull up the tile and look down.

My brother took me north, to Yoshioda, in the hills above Sendai. It was spring then, and I could stand on the terrace behind our dojo and watch the paddies turn from black to heartbreaking green, and the slow white surf of the peach and cherry blossoms move up the mountain. Our dojo was a two-story building made of pine and cedar in the country style. My brother had built it for Mr. Omura. Josey had been studying aikido for five years at a big dojo in Tokyo and had heard about Mr. Omura and came to see him and stayed for a year, occupying a string bed in a cubbyhole behind the Omura noodle shop. My brother thought Mr. Omura was the best aikido sensei in the world.

The rooms at Yoshioda were cedar-paneled three-mat affairs containing only a futon and a chest. It was like living in a cigar box, but very pleasant. I don’t know what arrangement my brother had made with Omura-sensei, but no one bothered me or tried to make me do anything. Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home. I strolled, I looked. After a while, I picked up a broom and started to sweep the dojo. Omura-sensei and the other students would bow and smile when they saw me, and I would bow and smile back. I wore a faded blue short kimono and white drawstring pants and straw sandals.

After a while I started to help the housekeeper with her tasks. In the evenings I read over my Chenka notes and began drafting my dissertation, or as much of it as I could without access to a library. Kinship and Property in a Siberian Nomad Tribe. Also very restful.

One day I was wielding my broom in the dojo, and Omura-sensei called me over. Mr. Omite, who was usually Mr. Katanabe’s partner, was out sick. Would I take ukemi with Mr. Katanabe? Taking ukemi means giving the attack and receiving the throw. So I did, and so I became, by easy stages, an aikidoka . I fell easily, and learned to go along, in the true spirit of the art. When I did it wrong, my hands and feet were guided until I did it right. Then I became a regular, without much ceremony; I wore the gi and hakama and learned the katas .

There is considerable magic in aikido. The little sensei kneels on the mat and four men and a young woman cannot move him. The sensei chuckles, the students heave. It is like pushing on a fire hydrant. Also, since its founder was deep into traditional Japanese religion, there are levels of aikido that your average dojo nut does not encounter, not just the spiritual part, but concerning relations with kami. The spirits. Omura-sensei would occasionally advert to these levels in his little talks, and sometimes I thought he was looking particularly at me when he did so, but I did not rise to the bait. No, I learned the physical side, to move in circles, to control with tiny pushes, to breathe properly, to feel and control the ki. I learned how to decide whether to do nothing, fight, or run away, all useful lessons. I learned enough, as it turned out, to kill a fat, drunken woman, but not enough to not kill her. Thus I am a failure at aikido too. Was it only a fault in technique? No, it was some deficiency in spirit, as Omura-sensei would have gently said. I didn’t care, I couldn’t stand the torture of the girl, I let my ki out of control and my passions ruled, and I am thus doomed to mourn that unfortunate woman every time I look into my daughter’s face.

I draw out my box from the hole in the floor. It is a twenty-two-inch cube, made of the same gauge aluminum used in the fuselages of airliners, cornered with steel, closed with heavy steel snaps on three sides. It is dented and scarred and covered with the paper scabs of ripped-off stickers. Still visible are the Air France logo and a blue Pan Am globe. I bought it for forty-five hundred CFA in the Petit Marché in Bamako. At one time, it must have held a camera or other valuable equipment for a French film crew; it had a shaped hollow made of fiberglass and foam within it, which I had to remove. My box, my box, I never travel without my box, as Balthazar sings in Amahl and the Night Visitors . My dad made us watch the damned thing every Christmas until we drove him off with our heathenish jibes.

I bring the box to the kitchen table and open it. A moldy wood smell emerges, with notes of spice and dust. There is Dolores’s stuff in its envelope on top. I set it aside and extract a cloth bag, like a small haversack. It is richly embroidered in gold and green thread, and the flap is hung with small cowries. I reach inside and pull out a squat covered bowl a little larger in diameter than a dinner plate, made of acacia wood. It is a divining bowl, an opon igede. The lid doubles as a divining tray, an opon Ifa, and is carved to provide a shallow concavity in the center and a raised border about two inches wide around the edge.

Stop for a minute here. My heart is beating hard, I can feel it knocking in my chest, and there is a fine cold sweat on my lips and forehead and the backs of my hands. Is there any way around this? Pocatello? Waukegan? No. I’ll probably die in any case, but this path looks like the best way to save the little girl. In fact, I don’t know what to do, and there’s no one around to ask, except Ifa. I hate it, this opening to the gods, divination, throwing Ifa as they call it in West Africa; I do, I do, although I recall loving it when I thought it was just an intellectual game?figuring out the silly natives?before it was pressed home to me that it’s real. My husband loved it, too, not divination, which, of course, as a witch he may not do, but the other stuff, the power. And it turns out that, for my sins, I’m very good at it. Uluné was amazed and pleased. Ifa loves me, apparently.