“Maybe it was from his mother, maybe from some other woman. Stories multiply and disperse in a village like that.
“His father was an exile — or so the story goes. They said his father murdered a soldier. No one knew what kind of soldier, only that he had a uniform and a rifle. A guard? Or was he military? His father — my grandfather — was maybe a Yakut, but maybe not; everyone my father spoke to was hazy on this. Some villagers described his father’s hair as black like night; others thought it was blond; some said he was a Jew, or Ukrainian; still others shook their heads no and said, Turk! or something else. He could have been anyone’s son from anywhere, and yet he knew, whoever he was, that there had been ice and water and earth and blood all around him.
“Both his mother and his father were dead and gone before my father reached the age of three. Both shot dead in some kind of Raid, the story goes. Both buried in ground near the village, near enough sometimes that he could still hear their bones singing in the wind. Or he thought he could.
“The village raised him. People who’d been exiled or forgotten, indigenous Yakut people mixed with Siberians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Albanians, Turks, Russian Jews — even an American or two whose wits had atrophied. He still knew some people in the village who knew more Yakut words than he ever would, so when this woman arrived to study the languages, he offered to help her.
“That woman was my mother.
“Svajonė came from Lithuania. In her case, there was no question of who she was or where she came from. She came with a real story — an important lineage. Her grandfather had been a famous book smuggler, a knygnešys during the Lithuanian language and press ban instigated by the empire. Her father had continued the tradition later by opening a bookstore in Panėvežys. It is thought to this day that, had the knygnešiai never existed, the Lithuanian language itself would have slipped away forever.
“Language slips away sometimes, like objects, like peoples.
“Svajonė became a linguist in order to study what happens to languages under siege. She understood profoundly how power could drive individuals underground and reshape them into a new species capable of a kind of resistance and resilience no one had dreamed of. When her grandfather was caught delivering books to a secret transport on its way to America, he was shot on the spot. Her grandmother swallowed a wail larger than a country as she stood unmoving next to his body on the ground. All she had were her eyes locking eyes with the murderer as he spit on the ground, laughed, and walked away. My mother’s grandmother and mother raised money to send her away from her country of origin to receive an education, away from the violence of a family narrative. But the violence never left her body.
“Stories have a way of burying themselves underneath skin.
“Svajonė was the most beautiful woman Aster had ever seen. According to my father, she looked nothing like him or anyone. She looked like she’d been spun from moon and water — her skin alabaster, her eyes a clear blue, her auburn hair falling down her shoulders in unkempt tendrils. She had tiny lyrical lines around her eyes and mouth — lines that looked like writing, he said, like a poem trying to write itself on her face when she smiled. The first time she spoke to him, my father wanted to touch her face. This continued for the rest of his life. He wanted to leave everything he’d ever known to enter the world of this woman, who knew more words in his so-called ancestral language than he did. Did he even have an ancestral language? From whose mouth?
“I don’t know if this was love or not, but if what he felt about her was love, it was love-unto-death from the very beginning.
“Everyone and everything there loved her. In a desolate place, she was life — a woman giving meaning to what seemed like a dead environment, dead animals, dead vegetables, dead people, dead hearts. It was the power of her desire to learn that brought them all back to life.
“He loved to listen to her mind race. The fascinating thing is, ‘rain’ in Mohawk is ayokeanore. In Turkish, the word is yaghmur. Can you hear it? The Turkish word for ‘five,’ besh, is also the Cayuga word wish and the Mohawk wisk. The Mohawk negative yagh is the Turkish yok. Waktare, an Iroquois word — well, I shouldn’t say Iroquois, because that’s an idiotic French colonizers’ word for the Haudenosaunee people, I should say People of the Longhouse — anyway, waktare means ‘to speak,’ and the Yakut word is ittare. ‘To hide’ in Haudenosaunee is kasethai and kistya in Yakut. The word ‘three’ is ahsen in Mohawk, ahse in Tuscarora, uch in Turkish, ush in Yakut… Do you see how exciting?
“My father would stare at her and smile, as contented as a child listening to a fairy tale. But he did not see. He just wanted her to keep narrating sounds and languages to him for the rest of his life.
“I believe that this itself was a kind of love…”
The girl stopped for a moment, staring into space or maybe time. I considered offering some comment or question, but then she looked at me and her eyes seemed to hold me silent. Do not enter this story. Do not reroute its meaning. She continued.
“What did she think of him, my mother who fell into love with him, who agreed to take the most dangerous journey with him across water so much bigger than the hubris of a man? Why did she agree to go to North America with him? For what? Because he could not stop the rush of fever dreams telling him to go? To leave forever this forsaken place? To protect his family? Or for some dreamstory about America? Or for some even smaller reason? Because a man needs work to have worth, or a violence grows inside him?
“When the permafrost began to thaw in their area, the tusks of ancient mammoths began to rise from the mud like giant bony fingers. The past was not so dead, as it turns out, though the smell of death was everywhere. Of course, as always happens, some people made themselves rich by recovering the ivory.
“Yakutia had once been rich in farmland. But the melting of the permafrost turned the farmland into swamps or lakes; whole fields just caved in until they pulled down the ground and whole villages sank. Rivers around villages ran so fast that they swept neighborhoods away.
“My father worked for a while as a reindeer herder, but the pasturelands gave way to the rotten stench of plant and animal life that had been frozen for thousands of years, their decomposition coming back to life, an invisible stream of carbon dioxide and gas pluming into the atmosphere.
“They’d heard of massive craters popping open on the Yamal Peninsula, created during the eruptions of methane gas that happened as the permafrost thawed. They were all waiting for the ground under their feet to explode.
“One of the last times my father herded reindeer, he found a she-calf stuck in a mud lake. One of its eyes had been gouged somehow. My father pulled the calf free and took it home. He thought about slaughtering and eating it, but Svajonė wouldn’t let him. Instead, she sewed its eye shut, nursed it with a bottle, and brought it back to health. When I was a baby, my father told me, I sometimes took naps curled up on a blanket next to the reindeer’s stomach. The reindeer protected me, or so Svajonė believed.
“When my father was just a person living on the edges of wanting to be alive at all, nothing really mattered to him. Who he was — if he lived or died — didn’t matter in this place no one knew existed. After Svajonė, everything mattered so acutely that he almost couldn’t breathe. One night, he broke down and told her he was afraid. Afraid for her. Afraid for me and my unborn brother. He knew she was happy, but he begged her to leave. He told her he knew someone who could find him work in America, or what was left of it.