Lehman: “He won’t. He’ll tell them to stay away instead.”
I: “Then he will die.”
One morning they didn’t harness reindeer into our sleds. Perhaps they left it up to us to go into the herd and cajole draft deer out, goad them between sleds, tack them in. Perhaps they knew that we had no skills to succeed in it. Either way it was too late when we discovered that we had been shorted. The herd was starting to move, the caravan was leaving. That day we pulled the sleds by hand. Five sleds in the morning, three by nightfall. We couldn’t keep pace with the caravan, at best we could only keep sight of it. Another day of this and we would be dead.
• • •
I follow Darkin to the river, step in step. He walks onto ice, looks around. “Who is this?” he says to the snow mounds. “Come out!”
I step into his view. “Why do you hate us?” I ask.
“God forbid, Alexander Mikhailovich,” he says, “I don’t hate no one. Briton, German—come all, come traipse through, nose around, I’m your friend.” He opens his arms. “Come look down on me, come kick me around. I’m right here, cunt!” He begins to stomp his feet, a kind of dance. I am enraged, I lurch toward him but I can’t move, and as I strain to break out, only terrible crunching and crushing sounds erupt, but I get no closer. “Golly, Alexander Mikhailovich, look at you, you are getting very icy!” He slaps himself on the haunches. “Your mama! Look at that!” He comes close, fingers my nose, breaks it off. “Ho! An icicle!”
“I will pay you,” I say. “I am a nobleman of some consequence, and I will pay you for our safe passage.”
He grins. “You are not going anywhere from here. You are stuck, Your Ass-ship.”
“Then let the others go. I’ll write you a formal obligation, as good as cash. You could show it to the governor and he will honor my debt to you.”
“Liar! I know you have nothing to write on. I burned your notebooks myself.”
“Then I’ll carve the promise into ice. And I’ll make it so that it won’t melt.”
“It already does not melt—without your meddling!” He lifts his arms, lets out a groan as he stretches. “Look around!” The river ice is black and bottomless now—as if we stand on the firmament of the night sky. He stomps his foot and cracks run like lightning bolts in all directions, far into the depths of ice and wide all the way to the shores, now distant. It’s no longer a river, it’s a—lake? An ocean? Cracks snake from one node to the next, connecting points, like thoughts. Zigzagging, heavy cracks for murderous thoughts and finer, meshlike cracks for thoughts of light and hope.
“I got a better idea. I got something to carve on you instead,” he says.
Suddenly I am within this ocean of ice, feeling the cracks running through me, shifting me every time they come and go, scrambling me up. In a thousand years my lips will have changed places with my ears, and my fingers will have spread over several yards. But in the meantime, as I scream, What do you want from me?! he proceeds to chisel into my surface a message I cannot read, only suffer its calligraphic pain: the scalping pain of every loop and arm, the slicing pain of every line and dash, the stabbing pain of every dot and comma.
A message that could be an obscenity or an explanation to my existence, or both. I’ll never know. I’ll ever wonder. Enough, don’t—ketel.
I bolted out of sleep in terror. I cannot let myself be trapped in this ice! Thank God, this one had been a dream.
• • •
We devised a plot. Ivan and Philimon went out and begged Darkin to come see us in our yaranga. He agreed. That’s how safe he felt.
It was night. The camp was falling asleep, yaranga by yaranga. Darkin came in rubbing his face and yawning, breaking in his shoulders, neck. We had a small fire going with what we could spare—some bones, antlers, strips of fur. He cast a glance at us and sat down, satisfied with whatever he gleaned.
His pose was relaxed: cross-legged, arms draped over haunches, coarse hands hung loose.
“Have some tea, Nikolai,” Billings said. Our “tea” was hot water, stained yellowish by a mere memory of generous pinches of tea leaf that used to float in our mugs.
“Na-e-e,” he said. “Thank you though.”
“How much longer to Angarka?” Billings asked.
Darkin scratched his head. “Two weeks, maybe. Depends on the weather. On what the shaman says.” He chuckled, looking down. “No rushing the shaman, right?” A moment passed with no one replying to him and he said, “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? Then I can go now, yes? I’m sleepy.”
“We had no deer for our sleds today,” said Billings.
“Ai-yai. Won’t happen again.”
“Who was behind it?”
“Pranksters, lazy boys. Make mistakes. Won’t happen again. Tomorrow I will oversee.”
There was a pause and Darkin leaned forward as if to stand up.
“We need you to take us to Batahov’s murderers,” Billings said.
“What use of me? You know who they are.”
“By word alone. But you and the rest of the clan know them by face.”
He did not reply.
“We need to speak to them. We need you to translate.”
“What about?”
“You will see.”
“I’ll let the chief know.”
“The chief already knows.”
Darkin was hard to fool. A sixth sense—orphans have it. Even the roomy folds of his fur garb looked tense now, but he stroked his chin and grinned as if at a good joke. “How would he know?”
This vexed Billings. He said, “Nikolai—now is the time to show if you are on the side of the Russian Empire or on the side of one small tribe.”
Again he stroked his chin. “The camp is big, the night is dark. Tomorrow we find them.”
“Not tomorrow. We go now.”
Did Darkin spring up? No, I am not sure if he did. Maybe he just sneaked his hands into the wide cuffs of his sleeves as if something was hidden there. Maybe he merely shifted position. Our bodies reacted as our eyeballs, darting toward sudden motion. I was not the first one. Voronin? Or was it one of the soldiers, Ivan, or Philimon?—fell upon him, pinched his arms, and Darkin dropped face-first into the fire, into the sooty mug with hot water. He screamed and pushed himself up, whoever held him, let go. It was the boiling water, the fire, the burns—that delivered the shock of irreversibility: he was already damaged. I lunged at him, Lehman too, I think. We flipped Darkin on his back. Jon? Or Ivan? Or Philimon? stacked his palms over the red and black of his face, clamped his mouth shut. A wet, noisy breathing pushed through, then a squeal. Someone caught one of Darkin’s thrashing arms and trapped it on his chest. Someone—Billings?—aimed the butt of a rifle between Darkin’s eyes and once or twice hazarded a tap. And I . . . My hands clenched around Darkin’s neck, my trunk pressed him down as I’d done ten times already in my dreams, and I expected him to escape any time now via some trick, some dreamlike twist of fate, but he did not, not when his chest pulled in a hiccup, nor when his stomach gave a shiver, nor when his heart stuttered and stopped. Nor after.
Somebody kept snuffling. I let go of Darkin’s neck. Merck was staring at me. I rose to my feet.
“Dr. Merck, would you please care to check, is he alive?” said Billings.
Merck pulled his mittens off with his teeth. His hands were an all too familiar sight, blackened and swollen. “Allow me.” Lehman stepped in and kneeled. He was thorough. “No,” he said when he was done.
• • •
Ivan and Jon helped me dig. We buried Darkin’s body right there in the yaranga, under a foot of snow, and then lay around the grave through the night. When we took the yaranga down in the morning, it seemed to me that the spot screamed of murder, that anyone who cared to look at the snow’s pockmarked, crumpled, and lacerated surface, would know immediately. That is how it appeared in my dreams ever since: a patch of trampled snow illuminated by the full moon. Lumpy snowflakes are falling all around, but
the spot remains exposed.
• • •
Nothing changed. On the first morning after the chance-medley, as I have heard Billings refer to it, I shadowed the young men in charge of fetching and harnessing the deer. After much running and bumping into antlers—to no gain—I corralled not a beast, but a man who was already in possession of one. That day we had to pull only two sleds with our own hands, not three. The day after that—one. Then all three sleds again. Then none.
On occasion, natives spoke to us, but we could not understand what they were saying. Their words were just another kind of silence. Once, the woman who was Darkin’s wife in the clan came along and trooped next to us for a while. Nikola? Nikola? None of us replied. It was easy to ignore her—my companions were barely putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually, Merck shook his head, spread his hands: qeshem. She hung on for some more, then left us behind.
Merck still talked to me, I remember, but others—I have no memory about others. “You are bare-handed, Alexander Mikhailovich.” Am I? I do, however, remember Ivan and Philimon being with me in the herd as we circled and sieved, our arms open wide.
On another day Merck and I saw the Chukchi unload frozen salmon, big logs of them. Merck waddled over with an outstretched hand, saying qemi—to eat. They watched him and bantered. I came and grabbed a salmon that one of them held. He didn’t let go; I forced my fingers under the frozen, crunching gill-covers and yanked hard. I wrestled and twisted the salmon free of his hands and tossed it Merck’s way, then pulled my parka off and hurled it at my opponent’s feet. I roared at him like a sea lion, like a rearing bear. I bellowed so my throat seized with razor-sharp pain. “I want to be Old Man Frost!”
“Alexander Mikhailovich. Please let’s go.” Merck was behind me, shaking.
• • •
On another day the clan had a big celebration, with beating on tambours, shamanic dances, incantations, raging fire, reindeer sacrifice. I foraged in the crowd and robbed the revelers of their treats of boiled meat. Enough to keep us going for a while longer.
I lost count as the days passed. It was a surprise when one evening we saw smoking chimneys, fences, log cabins, the ispravnik.
• • •
To thaw.
There were rye bread and red-hot embers in a stove, a ceiling and a floor, timber walls, benches and beds, alcohol. I learned that we reached the outpost two weeks and four days after we’d killed Darkin. I remember soaking a whole chunk of dried bread in a mug of pungent and weedy tea or brown rotgut Astrakhan brandy, folding the chunk into my mouth, chewing slowly, carefully, trying to discern the taste. I remember sitting back against a wall and weeping, my mouth full of bread. And sitting in a steamy bathhouse with my head hung low, staring at my bluish-yellow, long-nailed toes, and feeling as if a vise was tightening around my abdomen, as if a weight was growing inside, as if all that frozen flesh that I’d consumed in the six months of our peregrination—whale, salmon, reindeer—stayed as it was—my own personal permafrost.
I wrote letters. I wrote a report to Loginov, wringing my memory of what little it held on the subjects of distances and directions, terrain and weather. I took a masochistic pleasure in omission. I kept writing out the phrase we suffered countless hardships until I could do it without a quiver in my fingers, until the few facts I chose to put on paper were reduced to loops and spikes of practiced penmanship and betrayed no emotion whatsoever. Then I tried to write a letter to Anna. My beloved friend—my dearest—your forever loving—no matter how I wrote it, loops and spikes were all that came out.
After the first night at the outpost, with its celebratory meal, hugs, tears, and jubilations, we all but avoided each other, preferring the company of strangers. When each took his long, slow journey west—eventually—it was with separate parties, via different routes, on different dates. No one ever said it, but every one of us knew: we were done, finished. Nothing else we could do, not anywhere in Siberia.
We made no complaints against the Chukchi to the ispravnik. The chance-medley, as far as I know, never ever made way into any official reports. Batahov—he died of the elements. And our overland march? It amounted to exactly nothing. We never got to see the coast of the presumed Northeast Passage, much less map it.
This was February 1792. Revolutionary France was about to declare war on Austria and Prussia.
• • •
I reached Irkutsk in early 1793, after a journey that, thank God, lasted long enough to let me if not recover then at least scab up while I rode—or not, waiting out the seasonal calamities: the spring thaw, the mosquito-infested height of summer, the chaos of autumn before frosts.
My “reintegration” into civilization began with the news of the execution of Louis XVI, the king of France. On February 8, Empress Ekaterine imposed an embargo on France. All travel to and from France was forbidden. All French newspapers and books—banned. All French subjects residing in the Russian Empire, with the exception of those of noble rank, were to be deported. The French common folk could receive asylum, but only if they denounced their seditious country and, moreover, were vouchsafed by “French princes,” the titled nobility, that is. The same month, February, France declared war on Britain. I had returned to a different world.
A tragicomic circumstance forced me to recall that I was a nobleman. In the household of the Irkutsk governor, the deportation edict came as a blow to the chef of uncounted years, a pillow-cheeked fellow named Didier Vassour, who, in the governor’s family, went by the name Diadya Vasya (i.e., Uncle Vasya). Diadya Vasya had no desire to return to France, but he knew no French prince who could vouch for him. The governor was terrified of getting blacklisted as a harborer of the French, but Madame Governor could not imagine life without Diadya Vasya’s brioches. (The cook claimed they were of the same recipe as the one used in the Versailles kitchens; as a result I’ve since considered Marie Antoinette’s famously ill-timed “Qu’ils manget de la brioche,” a sign of appreciation of Diadya Vasya’s baking skills.) Before long, I, as Prince Velitzyn, was writing to St. Petersburg in support of the French subject Vassour, winning for myself the patronage of Madame Governor, and a standing invitation to Diadya Vasya’s catering.
• • •
Toward the end of winter Merck arrived and a month later he surprised me mightily: he asked me to be his groomsman. The wedding was delayed till Merck’s hands healed—he had a few digits amputated on both, but on August 14, 1793, I found myself standing in a Russian Orthodox church, where our shy Carl Heinrich, a Lutheran hastily rebaptized, was entering into a union with a girl named Nadya, a redhead with almond eyes, and lips that always seemed on the verge of a smile. She was a daughter of the Irkutsk hospital’s superintendent and his Yakuti wife. Even more remarkable was the fact that they had met before Merck had joined the expedition! She could hardly have been more than a child back then. Could any one of us ever have conceived that he had a bonny girl waiting for him for eight years?
The priest put the wedding ring on Merck’s right hand, Russian-style, where Merck had a stump for it. Then the bride and groom exchanged their rings, as customary, three times, and the bride did it with such reverent tenderness and Dr. Merck blushed so raw, a Young Werther, no less, that I, now a hardened fifty-two-year-old man full of dead-weight permafrost and bad memories—I barely held back tears and was screaming on the inside, envious to the bone, aching about the loss of things I never had. I yearned to be a thirty-year-old, handsome, wounded hero of the Arctic; and longed to stand by the altar, next to the purest, gentlest girl, Marie and Anna at once, and watch her touch her lips to the Virgin Mary’s icon and be crowned unto marriage—with me, for me.
There was a grandiose wedding banquet. The courses were courtesy of the governor, and the grateful Diadya Vasya exceeded himself, not just in the opinion of my feral palate, but in the unanimous opinion of all the sponsors and benefactors of the Irkutsk hospital. The Confit d’Oie was heavenly. The Selle de Veau boggled the mind. The Glace au
Pain d’Epices was like a new love springing where no love, you thought, could spring again. Ah, Dr. Merck, two years ago, could we imagine ourselves in a scene like this? Could we ever . . .
• • •
In January 1794 we reunited with Sawyer, Robeck, Sarychev, and the rest; all alive if not entirely well (they’d been fighting scurvy wintering on Oonalaska while we marched across the Chukchi Peninsula). There was much jubilation. After a dinner for all and subsequent libation with my bosom-friends, when Robeck was already snoring in my bed and the only ones left sitting were myself and Sawyer, the latter betraying considerable inebriation by his droopy eyelids—at that opportune moment Sawyer said, “Alexander Michaelovich, what happened on the Chukchi Peninsula, if you don’t mind my asking?” to which I answered, “It was very hard on us. That’s all.”
“Voronin said that”—he suppressed a hiccup—“if not for you, none would’ve survived. That you pulled them out, in a manner of speaking—and fact—with a sled harness on your shoulder.”
My stomach—no, what I now thought of as my permafrost, heaved. “Everyone pulled, in a manner of fact. Voronin is being modest.”
Sawyer’s gaze remained unfocused, lost in memories. But now it seemed he saw something worrisome there. His brow fluttered. “But he also said . . . he said you were—strange?—toward the end. He said he was afraid of you. I don’t know what he meant.”
Permafrost, rising from beneath, pushing at my dangling heart. Said I, “I don’t know either. I may have had Arctic hysteria, a disease,” and repeated what I’d heard about it from Merck.
“Oh, blimey. There is one like that?” Sawyer yawned. “Good Lord, what a . . . It’s time to go home, isn’t it? Rascally Merck married without us. Couldn’t wait, could he? I can’t wait either. I am leaving. It’s OVER.”
The Age of Ice: A Novel Page 21
