She opened the door, which swung on a hinge made of caribou gut, and saw the old Inuit woman, short and squat, stirring a pot with a long ivory spoon. In the yellow glow of the fire, several children — their black eyes filled with grief — gathered around the old woman like bear cubs keeping close to their mother.
When Nika said, “Thank God some of you are still alive,” they all turned and stared at her as if she were a messenger from a foreign planet. Stone benches lined the walls, and the ceiling was hung with antlers and ornamental figures carved from whale baleen and walrus tusks. A totem pole, identical to the one in the center of Port Orlov, stood proud and tall as a mast at the far end of the lodge. Looking at its vivid colors and erect carriage, Nika was reminded of all that it represented, and felt a wave of shame. If she were given the chance, she resolved to do what she should have done long before.
“Nikaluk,” the old woman said in a weak but tender voice, “I knew you would come.” She had high, Asiatic cheekbones and her few remaining teeth were worn down to yellow nubs. “I knew it.”
If only Nika herself had been so sure. The flu had burned through her as it had burned through nearly everyone else, but somehow, she — like the children and the old people, whose frail bodies could not mount such an overwhelming, and self-destructive, resistance — had lived through it. Her chest, which had once felt like it was filled with smoldering coals, was cooler now. Her throat was no longer choked with a rising tide of her own blood. Her eyes, which had burned like shining pebbles on the beach, felt as if they had been bathed in a stream.
The old woman came toward her, the children clinging to her ragged skirts, and said, “You will save us.”
“Yes, yes,” Nika said, remembering her mission and slinging the knapsack off her shoulders. Quickly kneeling to undo the straps, she dug inside for the ampoules of serum … but to her horror they weren’t there. She dug deeper, but all she found inside was icicles, clattering like glass. How could she have been so deceived?
She had failed. At this, the most critical time, she had failed her people, and the shame, even greater now than it had been when she first saw the totem pole as it should have been, made her almost unable to look up into the old woman’s eyes.
But then she felt a hand on her head, like a benediction, and when she did look up, the old woman said, “You will save us,” and pressed something into Nika’s palm.
It was small and smooth, a piece of ivory, simply carved. In the flickering firelight, Nika saw that it was an owl, a guardian spirit of the Inuit people. Nika wasn’t sure if she should accept it — perhaps it was the only thing of value the old woman possessed — but she knew it would give offense if she tried to refuse it.
The old woman stroked Nika’s hair and smiled. A smile that reminded her of her own grandmother. Or, could it be … her own great-grandmother?
In that instant, Nika suddenly understood that she had not come to this place to give at all. She had come there to receive.
Bowing her head, she said, “I will try … I will try.”
But then, as if from the end of a long tunnel, she heard her name.
“Nika?”
This was not the old woman’s voice anymore, nor did she feel her hand on her hair. A white light suffused the room, a light too bright for her eyes, and a different hand — in a cool glove — was smoothing her brow.
“I will try,” she said one last time, before the old woman faded away, along with the children, the campfire, and the ancestral carvings hanging from the beams of the qarqui. The last thing to disappear was the grinning otter on the totem pole.
“Nika,” she heard again, and cracked her eyes open enough to see Frank, perched beside her bedside, surrounded by blinking screens and softly beeping monitors. “Nika,” he said, pulling off his visor and tossing it aside.
His cheeks, she could see, were wet with tears.
“You’re all right now,” he said, though somehow she knew that already. “You’re going to be all right.”
He lifted her hand off the blanket and pressed his lips against it, and she could tell that she was holding something tight. When she opened her palm, she saw the ivory bilikin that she had once given him. It seemed like ages ago.
But the little owl had done its job, she thought … guiding her through the darkness, through the other world that she had just left, and back into the land of the living. She would never forget its help, nor the sacred trust she now knew that it signified.
“I was so afraid,” Frank said. “I thought I might have missed my chance.”
“Your chance?” Nika said, her throat as dry as parchment. Frank looked haggard and drawn, and it was plain that he hadn’t shaved in days.
“To tell you that I love you.”
If Nika had not already been lying down, and drained of all energy, she knew she would have reacted quite differently. All she could do now was squeeze his hand with what strength she had, and say, “That’s a relief.”
Frank, taken aback, straightened up in his chair and laughed. “A relief?”
“I didn’t want to be in this thing alone,” she said.
Chapter 64
The next morning, the deacon was not awake to ring the church bell. At dinner, he hadn’t had much of an appetite for the fish he’d caught, and he’d complained of a headache and chills. When Anastasia was shown to his cabin, she warned the others not to enter and went in by herself.
Although it was well past breakfast time, the sun had not yet risen. By the light of the oil lamp flickering beside his bed, Ana could see that the deacon had contracted the flu. His white-blond hair was damp and stringy, spread across his pillow, and his brow was beaded with sweat. His pale eyes were wandering distractedly around the room, and there were gobbets of dried blood on his blanket. She had seen soldiers like this in the hospital wards … and she had heard their bodies, shrouded in sheets, trundling down the grain chute and into the waiting wagons.
Stepping outside, where several of the colonists were waiting apprehensively for word, she called for hot water and broth, extra blankets, firewood, and brandy if they had it. She tried to remember what Dr. Botkin had prescribed and guess what he would have done, but in her heart she knew that it was all in God’s hands already. The Spanish flu took whomever it wanted — the strongest, first — and most of the time it took them fast.
For the rest of the day, Anastasia stayed by the deacon’s side, administering to him, trying in vain to get him to take some sustenance, mopping his brow and wiping the flecks of blood from his lips after he had been racked by a coughing fit. Occasionally, he muttered the name Father Grigori, and it was clear to Anastasia that he was speaking to him as if he were there. Several times, the conversation seemed so real that Ana turned in her chair, or went to the door and peeked outside, but each time all she saw gathered in the gloom were a handful of colonists, tolling their beads, clutching and kissing holy icons, and murmuring prayers for the deacon’s recovery. So many of them focused on the emerald cross she wore around her neck that she eventually grew self-conscious about it, and tucked it away. Whatever powers they thought it possessed were proving useless against the onslaught of the flu.
Once or twice, she heard muffled coughing among them, which only exacerbated the dread in her heart.
By the following dawn, the deacon was dead.
Anastasia cleaned him as best she could, then took his black cassock, with the sleeves lined in scarlet silk, and put it on him. She crossed his hands across his chest, then sat down at the wooden table that served as his desk. On it, there were writing materials, loose pages from his sermons, and an icon of the Virgin Mary, adorned with three white diamonds. Something so valuable could only have come from the hand of Rasputin himself. Using a scrap of paper from one of his sermons, she wrote a prayer for the soul of Deacon Stefan, curled it up, and slipped it into one of his lifeless hands, then, in the other, she placed the icon. He was as ready to meet his Maker as anyone would ever be.