The Memory Palace (37 page)

My mother sends me a shoe box full of Grandma’s precious cups and saucers, unprotected—no paper, no bubble wrap to stop them from turning into shards. They had endured a great war and had crossed two oceans. What could I do with a box of shattered cups? I write Occupied China cups across the lid and stick the box below my desk, the same place I put my mother’s letters and her charts of future disasters, my own charts of William’s mercurial moods.

The sun finally returns in the middle of Oøøajagemánnu, the Month of the New Year. I run outside mid-January to catch its fleeting light. The sky is on fire just above the blue-white horizon. I turn my face up and feel warmth for the first time since I arrived. But the feeling is brief. After a few minutes the sun is swallowed by darkness. The sky is like William. A month ago his mood would change gradually every other week. Now he’s cheerful
one moment and five minutes later he can go into a rage. Something is very wrong. I saw signs of it before we left—sudden jealous outbursts, his angry pronouncement one day that he refused to have children. His laying down of laws one by one: no alcohol in the house, then no meat, then no travel unless we are together. Is it seasonal affective disorder? Will he get better when the sun comes to stay? I write long lyrical epistolary essays to friends back home and include his beautiful poems about our life on the tundra. Before I send them, William edits out the darker things—hints of my unrest, my small jabs of irony.

One morning, I run into Ristiina at the post office. I tell her that I had just read that Stállu, the Sámi ogre, was a shape-shifter. “Was he the worst of the bad guys?”

“Stállu is pretty bad,” says Ristiina “but he’s also very stupid. The Sámi always outsmart him in stories. I think the worst were the Tchudit. But they were real. The Tchudit were tall black-cloaked invaders from the east who pillaged towns, killing every man, woman, child, and beast in sight. Didn’t matter who was in their way. They destroyed everything and stole what they could find.”

After Ristiina and I part ways, I stop to look at three large figures someone has made out of snow. The giant sculptures are the three Sámi goddesses of childbirth, motherhood, and the home. My favorite is Uksáhkká, who lives in the hearth and protects children and pregnant women. In some ancient stories, she appears as a knot in a rope that, when untied, unleashes a fierce and powerful wind. Some call her the “second mother.” Years before the Sámi were successfully Christianized, they offered sacrifices to her and other deities at sacred sites. They left fish fat, animal bones, antlers, wooden figures, and silver, even trees. They turned the tree upside down and buried its branches in the ground. Sometimes a reindeer was slaughtered and given back to the earth.

The summer before William and I moved to Kautokeino, I had been invited to come and speak at a conference on indigenous education. The day before the conference, I went hiking along the Arctic coast and came across a crevice at the foot of a mountain. I shone my flashlight inside and saw the bottom was littered with hundreds of bones. They seemed to be placed in
some kind of a pattern. Had they been arranged to tell a story or to foretell the future?

Every time I open a letter from my mother I can hear her calling me across the ocean:
Can you help me? Can we all go back home, be together again? Can you help me find the key?
She will ask me that until she dies. While she keeps looking for the keys to her lost home, I keep looking for the meaning of all those bones. Will my future always be determined by someone else’s needs?

In late January, Ristiina invites us to Finland to see her aunt, who she says is a great storyteller. William likes Ristiina a lot and I can tell that he tries really hard to be in a better mood when she is around. She is the reason why we have a washing machine, an oven, and just about everything else. I would never have gotten so deeply involved in Sámi society without her. She sets people at ease so they open up and tell me stories: folktales, stories about the war or supernatural beings, family histories, anything they feel comfortable talking to me about.

When she stops by to pick us up, Ristiina says that we can go to an ice hotel for coffee on our way to Finland if we like. She had taken William and me to one once before. Everything was made of ice—chairs, tables, walls, and bed. But at the last minute, William says he doesn’t want to go. Ristiina goes back out to the car to let us work things out between us. I’ve told her a little about his mood swings.

“Okay,” I say. “Get some good work done and don’t worry about dinner.”

“You’re still going?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“I can’t believe you’d go without me. I just can’t believe it.”

“It’ll be nice for you to have some time alone,” I say.

“Nice for you, you mean.”

“I’ll try to be back by dinnertime, but I can’t promise.”

“You can’t promise anything, can you?”

William follows me to the door. “I wanted to make love this morning but you had gone for a walk. Alone.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

“Well. Now you do.”

I stand on my toes to kiss him but he turns his face so that my mouth kisses air.

In Finland, Ristiina and I sit by the fire while her aunt tells me stories. It’s twilight when we start to drive back from the Finish border. We are quiet for a while, then Ristiina asks, “Is your guoibme okay? I haven’t seen him in town lately. Is he sick?”

“He’s getting more depressed. I’m not sure what’s wrong, to tell you the truth.”

“He’ll cheer up when there’s more light,” says Ristiina.

Suddenly I hear the
la la la lo lo
of a yoik, the chantlike poetry-song of the Sámi, coming from someone walking out on the tundra, but it’s too dark to see a soul. It sounds like a baby crying, somewhere in the thickening fog. It sounds like the little boy we found in the snow. Ristiina slows to a complete stop, turns to me, and whispers, “Gula! Gula!”

“Listen to what?”

“Something bad happened here.”

“Where?”

Ristiina shows me a spot in the landscape that, to me, looks like any other. “That’s where my aunt saw the eahparaš. There.”

The eahparaš are the forgotten ghost babies of the tundra, children abandoned by their parents, due to poverty or some kind of family scandal.

“Their spirits cry because they’re left outside to die,” says Ristiina. “They wander the earth until they are given a proper name.”

Ristiina says a family lived in a farmhouse on the land. The family was happy until the woman’s first husband died, after which she married another man. The man got his stepdaughter pregnant when she was thirteen. After she had the baby, he took the newborn and strangled it. He secretly buried the child in front of their house.

“Nobody knew,” says Ristiina, “until one day when my aunt was out driving. She heard a baby crying. She looked out her rearview mirror and saw a naked infant crawling across the road, disappearing into a bush.”

It was twenty degrees below that night. Ristiina’s aunt knew that it had to be an
eahparaš. “No human baby could survive naked like that in the snow. My aunt, she knew something really bad happened at that place.”

Ristiina tells me that her aunt called the police and they investigated the matter. Should I call the police about the woman upstairs? Sometimes she leaves her children home alone for a day or two at a time. The oldest is only twelve. And when she’s home she has loud parties that go on until morning. William and I can hear the children crying and loud fights. How much should we get involved?

“The stepfather confessed,” says Ristiina. “He took the police to where he had buried the child.” She says the child was hidden in the exact spot where her aunt had seen the apparition. The authorities put the man in prison and the family moved away. If I call the police on the woman upstairs, will they take her children away? Will they split them up? My biggest fear when I was young was that someone would find out about our mother and take me away from my sister. As Ristiina starts the car up to head back home, she says, “My aunt and I hear that baby every time we pass this place.”

When I return home, I don’t invite Ristiina in, which would be the Sámi thing to do. I should offer her coffee, let her warm up a little from our trip, but I say good night and trudge up the walk to our door. Thankfully, I have remembered my key. The last couple weeks, William has been locking our door, which no one does around here. He can’t handle guests, and in this town people drop by uninvited, sometimes late at night.

The apartment is pitch-black. I get that feeling I used to get when I’d come home from school and see my mother, sitting in the dark, the shades drawn, a lit cigarette in her hand. I switch on the living room light and follow a whimpering sound coming from the bedroom. It sounds like the ghost baby Ristiina and I had heard on the road and at first I think it is William, joking around. But then I see him curled up in a fetal position on the bed.

“What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

He starts to moan.

“What’s going on?”

William yanks the covers over his head and tosses frantically beneath them. All of a sudden he
lets out a sharp cry, like an animal that has just been shot. He starts to sob. Upstairs, another party is just getting started. I can feel the stereo’s bass thumping in my bones. Someone throws something heavy on to the floor. A man is laughing, then shouting, something made of glass shatters, a child cries out. William moans again.

“Stop it,” I say. “I can’t stand this.”

He throws off the covers, sits up, and spews a stream of nonsense words and phrases, as if in a trance. William sounds like the patients in my mother’s psych ward. He goes on for several minutes, then, just as suddenly, quiets down. The noise continues upstairs.

“What is going on?” I ask. “Talk to me.”

William says in a flat voice, “I can’t talk about it. I’m not allowed.”

“Not allowed?”

“I can’t tell you what’s wrong. There’s a gag rule.”

“A gag rule? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t say anything. You won’t talk to me.”

“I’m talking to you now.”

“No, you’re not. You’re judging me.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You left me this morning. You met someone. Who was it?”

“Christ, what is your problem?” I say. “I feel like I’m in prison.”

“I am not the oppressor, you are.”

I slam the bedroom door and go into the large closet off the kitchen that serves as my office. I check my calendar. It has been filled with little black dots for weeks where I marked down William’s foul moods. The month before, sixteen days out of thirty had been horrendous, the rest had been like being around Stállu, who can transform into an unbearable dark weight at the bottom of a boat.

I go back to the bedroom. “I’m going out. Don’t wait up.”

“Where? Who are you going to meet? You can’t leave me!”

Who are your associates? Is that sperm on your leg? Did a man touch you there? Does your sister sleep with the mob?

“I am going out,” I say. “Alone. I can’t breathe in here.”

“If you go—if you go I’ll...”

If you go I’ll kill myself! Someone is going to kidnap you out there!

I shut the door and walk out. I wander around outside for an hour or so, then make my way over to Kru’s Pub. It’s way below zero and I’ve forgotten my long johns; my legs are turning numb. Since William and I have been together I have paid for just about everything. I am beginning to wonder if he is seriously ill. What if he won’t get a job when we get back to the States? My sister had warned me that William could be trouble. What if he needs full-time care?

I stare at the red tablecloth, my cup of red hibiscus tea, a piece of cake on a bright red napkin. Everything looks blood-red, the color from my dream last night. I was trying to wash out my blood from my mother’s dress, then her dress transformed into William’s shirt in my hands. No matter how far I go, I spin around at the slightest noise, thinking I will see her there, her hair wild as grass, begging me for the keys. Now I spin around whenever William enters the room.

In February, the aurora borealis swirls above the tundra and town nearly every night. There is electricity in the air, there are sudden snowstorms in the middle of brilliant, clear days. The sun stays longer in the sky and radiant clouds appear out of nowhere, within each cloud a rainbow. I remember what Ristiina said about the light and hope that maybe the sun will help William’s moods. At the post office, a letter my mother wrote in late autumn has finally arrived.