The Memory Palace (39 page)

My mother has been ending many of her recent letters with the phrase “the wolf is in the house.” When I first arrived in Norway, people told me that there weren’t any wolves left, save for one lone female, passing through on her way back to Russia. They said that no one has really seen her, but everyone knows she is there. A friend in town says she heard the last wolf when she was ten and lost in the woods. Twenty years later, she heard it again. The loss of the wolf is like the loss of a mother. Somewhere she roams in memory, in darkness. Our bond with her is inexplicable, before the beginning of time. She is fierce love; she is sorrow. She is a howling in the wilderness we can never see, calling us home. She is what we fear—and what we long to return to—the heat of the cave and animal closeness, before all civilization and reason. Was it right for me to try to separate the mother from her children upstairs? Should someone have come to take my sister and me away? The wolf is the dark heart of winter. She is the hot breath of life, red eyes searching for her child at twilight in the snow. How long will I wait to hear my mother’s voice? Will I ever hear it again?

Back in the dormitory, I finish packing for William because he is too depressed to get out of bed. When he finally gets up, I tell him that I’m worried because I’ve just been to the bank and we are almost out of money. But he doesn’t care or even seem know what that means. You will have to get a job when we return, I say. Do you even know what a job is? He throws a book at me from across the room, goes into the bathroom, and slams the door. I remember what the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen once said about being alone in the Arctic: “The country here is one single glacier. To go it alone is pure madness. Two roped together, absolutely necessary.” Maybe Amundsen was wrong.

Who knows how things will turn out with William? At the moment, the future is not looking that bright. If my aunt Toda were here, she’d sit me right down and read the tea leaves in the bottom of my cup. I think of the little oracle bone from China. What does my future hold for me? Will I let someone
else’s sickness determine how I spend each day? I decide then and there that when we get back, there will be new rules, and that I will set the agenda, not him. If things don’t change soon, I will leave. William will have to see a therapist, get a job, and even take medication if he has to. If he doesn’t, I will hide from him too, just like I hide from my mother. Whatever it takes to be safe.

As I gather my own things for our trip back to the states, I remember a story about the Tchudit, the legendary marauders Ristiina told me about. One day, the Tchudit came to a nearby river and hid behind some bushes. There was a girl on shore who was going to swim to an island where her family was. As the girl started out at the riverbank, the Tchudit grabbed her and demanded she lead them to her people. She told them to follow her while she swam across to her island home. It was night and she pushed a torch before her. She told them to follow the light. They began swimming after her, deeper into the dark river. “How far?” asked one of the men. “We’re almost there,” said the girl. The Tchudit swam even harder toward the light. As they got closer to the island, the girl let go of the light and let the water carry the torch so the Tchudit would follow it instead of her. They continued to follow the torch, until finally the swift river pulled it and the Tchudit out to sea. By morning, they all had drowned.

And the girl? Some say she made it back to her island home that night. Her family held a great feast, and they celebrated till dawn. But I like to think that she too was carried off to sea—where she can still be found, at the bottom of a canyon, moving the bones into the shape of her future.

Palimpsest

... you scrape, and find—simplest of mysteries,
forgotten all this time, but not quite lost—

Jared Carter, “Palimpsest”

I Am Slowly Healing

The Navajo say that when a person becomes sick he or she has fallen out of harmony with nature. The healer uses a sand painting to cure the sick person. The sick person sits inside the painting to absorb its beauty. Then a part of the painting is poured on the diseased areas of the patient’s body. After they finish, they destroy the painting and bury it so the illness of the person can’t bring evil to others. I made some pictures this year but am not going to destroy them. Especially the ones of the two white goats, the macaque monkey holding a potted plant that is a self portrait and the picture of the five little dress-up trolls with hats. There is a nice one in pastels of a woman and a dog too. I think the woman is my mother but I can’t be sure.

I am slowly healing.

... loving kindness, let me approach you sleeping,
let me touch your shawl of blindness,
your hems of breathing and breathing...

Dara Wier, “If After All Excuses Suddenly There is
Never Again a Need for Any Afterall”

Natalia and I are driving down Route 68 heading southeast toward the Carry Falls Reservoir, away from her town of Canton, New York. It’s been raining for days. Most of the snow has disappeared but the air still feels damp and cold. I look out the window and all I can see thick brown mud, a blue-gray sky. There’s no one else on the road except for a man lumbering along in a rusty red tractor.

“You okay?” my sister asks. “Sure you’re up for a hike?”

“I’m fine. Just a little tired. It’ll pass.”

The art gallery at my sister’s university has hired me for several weeks to help with an exhibit on Tibetan sacred art. It’s my first time back to work after a two-month rest. At the beginning of the year, I slipped and fell on the ice in Northampton, Massachusetts, where William and I had moved to just before we got divorced. A woman passing by found me lying in the road. I had been unconscious for at least several minutes, and because of that I received priority care in the ER. By March, I still had a few cognitive problems and short-term memory loss but was well on my way to recovery.

Natalia doesn’t ask me about William and I don’t offer any information. What’s there to say? I see him sometimes in town and when he notices me, he crosses the street and pretends we are strangers. Better that, I think, than him begging me to come back. I had worried that I’d have to hide from him but it appears as if he is trying to hide from me. Not so with my mother, however. In the spring of 1999, she is still trying to track me down.

Nine years have passed since my sister and I last saw her. In a letter she wrote not long after my fall on the ice, she said that she had moved back to Cleveland and was searching for my drawing Help Is On the Way: I am consumed in getting the White Horse back. Then, when we reach the next plateau, I’ll change my name to Helen R. Keller and go by the name of Rachel. I am also thinking of pronouncing your father’s name HUR from now on, and dropping the sound of HARE. I am tired of using a name that sounds like a rabbit. What do you think? She informed me that she orders my sister’s graduate thesis every few months from interlibrary loan. She makes corrections on Natalia’s book of short stories, then sends it back. She believes that she is communicating with my sister through the book. She sends me copies of some of the pages with her suggestions: Remove first line on page 36 or If you cut the introduction to this manuscript, I believe it will be publishable. I know this would probably upset Natalia, so I don’t mention it. Instead, in the car, I chat about the mundane. “Been raining a lot up here, huh?” “Yep,” she says. “It’s mud season. Hope you brought good boots.”

My first day at work, before the tour groups arrive, I watch two Tibetan monks in maroon and yellow robes, one thin and solemn, the other round and robust, circle a white platform in the middle of the main gallery. The two men bow and chant in deep overtones. After their prayers, they sit across from one another on a large blue square on top of the platform, lean in, and start their work. They are building the Palace of Kalachakra, the most sacred of all Tibetan mandalas, made from colored sand. They believe it has the power to create healing and peace.

The Kalachakra mandala is a symbolic depiction of a five-story palace where an incarnation of the Buddha of Compassion is believed to reside.
As part of a Tibetan monk’s training, he must learn three thousand different mandala designs by heart, but Kalachakra is said to be the most complex of them all. They say that if a monk can complete this one, the rest will seem easy. In Sanskrit, Kalachakra means “Wheel of Time”; some call it the Subterranean World, the same term Athanasius Kircher used to describe his underground world of caves. The story goes that the historical Buddha entrusted the Kalachakra tantra, the sacred teachings, to the King of Shambhala, who took the tantra with him to his subterranean kingdom where all beings live in harmony without sickness or death.

In one of my mother’s recent letters, she wrote: Well, I’m not doing too bad, considering. I guess as long as one doesn’t have cancer, heart disease, kidney disease, tuberculosis, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis, shingles, malnutrition or AIDS, they are doing pretty well. How’s your health, by the way? I hadn’t told her about my fall on the ice. I still struggle with a few things, including concentration and memory, but other than that, I am on the mend, so why upset her? I wrote back: My health is great. I rarely even get a cold. But thanks for asking.

From the center of the square, the monks draw white lines with chalk to map out their design. Afterward, they begin sprinkling tiny pieces of crushed colored stone from chakpus, long metal cones they rub together to control the flow of sand. The sound of chakpus echoes like a pealing bell throughout the room. The monks work slowly, meticulously guiding the threads of sand from memory. In the next three weeks, they will build a great palace, filled with dharma wheels and elephants, lions and lotus flowers, protective deities, wind horses, and shells.

I approach to the white velvet rope surrounding the platform. The monks are deep in concentration. They wear surgical masks as they work; just one sneeze could send a hundred deities flying. The chubbier monk looks up and smiles. “I’m Tenzin,” he says. He comes out from behind the rope to greet me. He bows, then nods toward his colleague. “He’s Tenzin too. You can tell us apart because I’m the fat one.” The other monk keeps working, chakpus ringing in his graceful and patient hands.