Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Northern Cross

2023; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/thr.2023.a903943

1939-9774

Sofia Ezdina,

Canadian Identity and History

Northern Cross Sofia Ezdina (bio) I found a dead sparrow at the kindergarten doors when I was five. The bird froze to death. I dug it up from the snow and tried to warm it in my hands. I brought the corpse home, wrapped it in blankets, put it on the radiator, and waited. That evening, we buried the bird in the yard. North comes with a vengeance. The first snow swiftly takes the city captive, paralyzing the traffic, hiding the silhouettes of passersby, and eroding the boundaries of buildings. It has become dark earlier every day as the night squeezes the city into her stout embrace. I hate January in Siberia. With the sound of scud outside, nausea overtakes you faster than a bird beating to a window leaf. The boras tear at your hair, strip away your skin. When the clouds are so thin, the sun transparent, the roofs and smoke of the city visible for many kilometers, the stars piercing—tyk-tyk, tyk-tyk—and it all seems flooded with glass, we grow lean and pale, hair ashens and eyes darken. “There are shamans still in the taiga,” my grandfather says. He’s an Evenk, uncouth, 80 summers drying on his chin. “There are wooden reindeer with saddles and heads of sacrificed harts and sky burials. We kindle fire and we treat spirits; we break the tobacco upon the graves, and sing. It’s not an orison, though we know North and its fads and ways. It’s a lullaby and, with it, a memory.” We sit and watch: shivering teeth, every breath exhaled turns into a vapor that hangs in the air, lukewarm snowflakes discolor the ground. We can sit like that until the Northern Cross breaks out in the southern part of the sky. This means we can sit so forever. I ask if he misses it. He says, not winters. I ask, does he think the spirits would talk to me. He says no. I was his reckoning for marrying a Russian woman. My grandfather, a cold narcissist, like the North itself. I remember when I first heard an Evenk lullaby. I understood nothing: Grandfather never bothered to teach me the language. But ever since, I weep to Indigenous lullabies. Listening to them, I feel like an infant taken to the forest to die. Somewhere in the middle of the yard, the bird was buried. [End Page 145] ________ From my lungs, I release a deferred cry, which has been long disowned but never truly gone, to the far North and, looking down from the mountain’s head, it feels like letting go of the hot fat pigeon—not with tears, but with warm, raw breath. “Be careful,” says the forester, an old taiga dweller, a sable hunter. He sniffs the air. “Though North is calm tonight.” Another one shakes his head. “North is always angry.” Going through the winter wilds (whoever is a little more vulgar calls it wandering, and whoever is simpler—walking) is just trampling homelessness down, from the heart to the legs. It is a decoction of loneliness, like the slept sheet is decocted in the boiling water, so all the grayness goes into the flood, and you’re left with a white canvas, which at first seems newer, more memoryless, more innocent than before. The water will sink to the stained ground, and you’ll take away your laundered solitude, dried in the morning cold, crackling, brittle, proud. You will hide it in the cupboard—so you can spread it out before your next love, like for the first time. It’s a place with a long memory. The trees in the mountains never stop screaming. But taiga tales belong to themselves, uncharted and thick. Mounds that once were thickets do not forget. Neither do Evenks’ camps, long left, made of sod and driftwood. Or lonely timbered huts, manholes instead of doors, or lean-tos on high props that animals could not reach, with smokestacks, painted the color of bone and windows covered with the film. That’s where the foresters come to stow their prey and where the lost can take shelter in winter: sacks of flour and...