from your eye movements that you are intelligent. In that case you must be African. Specimens like you are hard to find. How was your family able to maintain its lineage?”
“Nn. Aw-oh.”
Now Walidah had really been knocked breathless. Not only had this child’s lineage endured untarnished, but his family had kept alive its ancient tongue. Kolya pointed again to the cat, which stepped gingerly up the walk behind Walidah, and passed her on its way into the house. Kolya had taken an early liking to Walidah, and began running back and forth in the living room, as if to entice her inside.
At one glance she could tell that the child had been adopted: there was no order to the decor, no purity in its emphasis. Furthermore, the child’s strange behavior and secretive glances told her it was confused, robbed of its ancestral birthright to be with those of its own kind. She must rescue him from a wretched and spoiling future.
“Come to Walidah, little one. We’ll have to try for better than this.”
She took his hand and he walked happily out the door with her.
“You’ll thank the gods I’ve saved you someday. But go ahead, speak in your own tongue. Let that ancient blood boil up in you, and burn the impurities you’ve been exposed to away.”
“N. Gaw-mmh?”
“I think the first thing we’ll have to do is purify your soul. My chanting will drive those unclean people out of you forever. Tomorrow you’ll be born again, little one, and your people will be singing with me when they find you are coming back to them.”
Soon after arriving at Wynnet’s house, which had been newly renovated by Orlin, Walidah took a seat in the center of the main room with Kolya standing before her, like an acolyte awaiting priestly instructions. He took a quick look around the room and then back to her—but instead of reassuring him with open eyes he found they were closed.
Strange noises flew out at him from her mouth: terrifying low hums and darting high notes. It might be best for him to find his mother.
In an instant he had escaped, without thinking, feeling that he must manage to find the road. He stumbled down a step or two (the frightening woman still emitting noises behind him) and smacked right into another woman’s boot. Kolya peeked up, immediately hypnotized by this woman’s large eyes. She gathered a deep breath and spoke loudly:
“Everything’s all right now. Take my hand. Let’s go back into the house.”
Wynnet, as gleeful as ever, nearly pushed Karyne and Kolya through the doorway. Karyne saw Walidah first; she pointed:
“There she is, Wynn.”
“Not for long. She will no longer have the right of—of—” It sounded as if a wind had made its way down Wynnet’s throat. His windpipe tightened, but he tried to speak again:
“What—who—who—whooooo…,” his last audible word trailed off like a wailing whale.
“What’s the matter? Wynnet! This is no time to be sick. Get a grip on yourself.”
Wynnet revitalized, and announced calmly:
“We must call the police.”
Karyne, still keeping a firm hand on Kolya’s, replied: “Why?”
“My data center has been vandalized. Don’t you see?”
“But Wynnet, there are no police.”
Wynnet stared back at her, puzzled. He had never thought of that.
“Of course not. We are above having police here. I meant that we must act as if there were police to be called. It will put us in the necessary frame of mind to rectify this transgression.”
Walidah finished chanting and looked up. She rose, located Kolya, and walked over to reclaim him, ignoring the others.
Karyne took her by the shoulders.
“Let him go!”
“Oh,” Walidah whispered, then adding with greater volume, “a rare Californian mongrel.”
She turned away from Karyne’s undecided features and led Kolya back to the center of the room. Wynnet, about to speak, was unable: only a whistling stream of air issued from his mouth. Karyne, however, had had enough of this. She took two long strides toward Walidah, and the lights went out.
Not only the lights, but the data-crunching computers, the holograms, the lifeblood of Wynnet, in short, came to a standstill.
“Thank the gods those awful noises have stopped,” Walidah thought aloud, just as Karyne’s foot tripped over hers, and Karyne flew across the room (through several concentric layers of computer hardware).
“There he goes! Wynnet! Grab the little brat.”
Poor Kolya, both agitated and brimming with excitement, found his way out the back door, and thus down Birch Alley. Wynnet had lost every one of his faculties: thought, speech, motor coordination, hearing. He darted around the room as if he would be able to find the cause of this new catastrophe. But when the power returned, he found only that the room was a little less orderly, especially with Karyne and Walidah lying adjacent to one another, glaring like crocodiles at him. Nura left a silver-gray cloud in the air above them, and Kolya continued on a solitary expedition away from everyone.
In the cold air he found rest from unfamiliar faces, and solace in the lighted snow. Darkness had taken most of the sky’s light away, and now light only came up from the ground to show him the way back to his mother.
Elsa had gone to Omar’s cottage, the snow tripping and blocking her like quicksand. It seemed that the faster she ran, the longer she had to go. Time had changed again for her: the familiar way of knowing steps, of hours and days, was now gone. Now every step jarred her into thinking Kolya, Kolya, Kolya. Now every moment would last forever, and she would never again forget that time had passed, until she found him.
Omar, in his study, could not find his latest project: elevations of the American Rocky Mountains. Maps curled precisely on top of one another: newly-inhabited Tibet, prehistoric Tibet, Tibet during the European Middle Ages, modern Tibet, contemporary Tibet. But he did not want Tibet. Neither did he want the window open, though a strong wind kept pushing it back to him as he tried to close it. He wanted only to continue his work, but there was a feeling inside him that did not want it to continue. He had never felt this way before about his work.
Exhausted, Elsa arrived at Omar’s to tell him what had happened. But Omar was not there; he was on his way to Elsa’s, in the middle of a workday, to make love to her. He had only done this once before. The cold wind was now on his back, pushing him along. He did not see Kolya playing in a mound of snow behind a little birch grove. When Omar arrived at Elsa’s, finding the door open and neither Elsa nor Kolya there, he stood stock-still on the entry rug and listened to all the small sounds he had never noticed there before: the air forcing through window frames, floor boards shifting, mice shuffling through the walls; and then, very lightly, the thin voices of children at play. Kolya’s voice was not among them, and their dialect was not one he could fully understand. He heard the wheels of a wooden truck squeak, the flat notes of a carved flute; and he envisioned them playing in the main room with their antique toys, in their antique clothes.
“Omar?”
Elsa, only just returned, touched his shoulders.
“He’s gone,” she whispered, nearly breathless.
Omar knew she was there, and understood what she said, but could not help hearing those little voices.
23.
Kolya had seen his father’s maps, and they had rendered themselves in his young mind. Without trying, he could arrange toy ground vehicles into Himalayan mountain ranges, plastic blocks into cities and plains, or eating utensils into rivers and streams.
Yes, the maps that had left the strongest impression on him were the maps of Tibet, his birthplace. And now, alone on a snowbank behind the birch grove, Kolya set his hands into the cold white powder and sculpted, quite freely, the landscape that had first shed light on his eyes. He might just as easily have wet his diaper, or chewed a cookie. When finished, Kolya moved on, leaving the landscape relief to freeze over and persist through the rest of the winter: an icon for anyone willing to see.
But
the inhabitants of Novosibirsk seldom strayed from the path—a tendency that had its beginnings in late 20th-century America, typically California. The birch trees were lovely enough to behold; one needn’t touch them, or find out what was nestled among them, or beyond them.
So it was with Walidah, who passed by as Omar had, and Wynnet, and Todd, with seldom a glance in the direction of the trees, where Kolya’s tiny Tibet glistened, and little tracks led away through the snow.
“Now listen everybody,” Zofiya insisted. “We can’t let him run around on his own for long. Our mission is to save him from…”
“You’re forgetting what we can do, Grandma,” Nura chimed. “He’ll come to no harm. Some of them are more receptive to us than others, and those can easily be connected to our plan.”
Zofiya conceded.
“Alexei!” Nura continued. “Why be present if you are not reading our thoughts?”
“But I am, dear Nura. I am. So far they haven’t brought me new light. I am preoccupied, too, with that Alpha-Omega chap down there. He is acting, while we hang here scheming. It’s as if he were being directed by an unfamiliar spirit, one not of our coordinates.”
Zofiya and Nura stopped to reflect, each feeling that the unforgettable presence they had once encountered could be the one directing the latest events in their beloved town. It was enough that the place had been overrun by intellectuals, let alone ghosts of a distant and nearly prehistoric breed. A foreign