Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  He nods. “Tomorrow.”

  Checking his watch, he rises to his feet. His faded jeans look too big for him, and there are gold buckles on his shiny black loafers. When I wish him a good day he gives me a fatalistic look.

  “We will see,” he says.

  As I leave the bar a few minutes later, the woman who handed me my key on my first night emerges from the double doors on the far side of the entrance hall. On the spur of the moment I ask if I can change rooms. Move to the front of the building. The woman’s lower lip sticks out, like someone who is sulking or feeling rebellious, and her eyes drift sideways and downwards, fixing once again on the space a child would occupy if I had one with me.

  “No,” she says, then rattles off a couple of sentences in Russian.

  “No?” I say.

  “No.”

  This is such a perfect snapshot of the Russia I have heard about that I can’t help smiling. After all, as we both know, the hotel has three floors and I’m virtually the only guest. But she says nothing else, only pushes past me, into the bar. Climbing the stairs, I feel hard done by. I’d like to be able to look out over the town and watch the snow-covered mountains in the distance change color. Later, though, I realize she was right to turn down my request. For a few moments I forgot why I came to this place, and it was her job to remind me.

  I’m not a tourist.

  I’m not here for the views.

  /

  As I hesitate at the entrance to the hospital, Anatoly appears, wearing a white coat over his faded jeans. There is nobody on duty in reception. I follow him down an empty corridor and into what he calls his “cabinet,” where he has an electric kettle, a sink, and a desk with a phone and a computer.

  He indicates the phone. “Direct line to Moscow.”

  I’m not sure if he’s showing off or trying to be funny.

  “Kharashó,” I say. Very good.

  He walks to the cupboard in the corner and returns with a tray heaped with bunches of keys.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  Like the hotel across the road, the hospital feels recently completed or refurbished. The walls and ceilings have been freshly decorated — eggshell blue, lilac, pale green — and the floors are spotless. But there are no patients, no nurses. The rooms’ only occupants are pieces of furniture and medical equipment, all seemingly brand-new. I suddenly remember somebody in Longyearbyen telling me that Putin visited the settlement not long ago, under pressure from the Norwegian government, and that he was so appalled by the conditions that he promised immediate and substantial investment. What arrived, a few months later, was a shipment of paint.

  On the first floor Anatoly shows me into a room that contains nothing except a large machine, and Klaus Frings comes to mind, Klaus Frings in his luxury apartment. I bear him no grudges. On the contrary, I hope he finds someone who shares his passion for Tchaikovsky and Heinrich Heine, someone whose beauty will not disempower him.

  Anatoly rests a hand on the machine. “For sterilizing clothes. Very expensive. Same price as a car.”

  We leave one empty room and enter another. A desk stands by the window.

  “No chair,” I say.

  Anatoly smiles.

  I’m beginning to feel complicit in a fiction of his own inventing. It’s as if the sole purpose of the tour is to have me authenticate an enterprise that doesn’t actually exist. But then I remember that it was my idea.

  The only time we encounter any people is when he opens a door at the far end of the building. Enveloped in a swirling mist of fumes are two men wielding brushes, rollers, and trays of paint. A third man, dressed in a black fur hat and overalls, sits in a half-built shower, smoking. Russian folk music hammers out of a ghetto blaster wrapped in see-through plastic. The man in the hat looks at me steadily. Nobody speaks.

  “The alcoholic department,” Anatoly says as we back out of the room, and this time it’s clear that he is joking.

  Later, in his “cabinet,” I ask if I’m allowed to use the local sports facilities. I would like to start swimming again, I tell him. He says I’ll need a certificate of health from a doctor.

  “Then I’ve come to the right place.” I give him a bright smile.

  “Yes,” he says, “but you are young. It will not be necessary to examine you — or …” Something about the way he leaves the sentence dangling unnerves me.

  I move past him, to the window. The snow blowing off the hotel roof is fine as smoke.

  “You have health problems?” he says, almost hopefully.

  “No.”

  Perhaps I was too eager when he first spoke to me. Perhaps he mistook my curiosity about the settlement for an interest in him — and then I asked if I could see the hospital, his hospital.

  He mutters to himself in Russian, then takes a seat in front of the computer. As he clicks and scrolls, he tells me that the water in the pool comes from “the lake.” I should be careful not to swallow it. He prints out a single sheet of paper, signs it, and hands it to me.

  “Soon I will be leaving,” he says.

  This second reference to his imminent departure feels loaded, and his gaze lingers on me, hangdog and oddly ravenous. I thank him for the tour and the certificate, then I return to my hotel. I hoped he would be a source of information, a kind of guide, even perhaps a friend, but from now on it will be difficult to talk to him or learn from him. It might be wiser, in fact, to avoid him altogether. Though he has put me in an awkward position I still feel for him, and will go on feeling for him, even after he has left for Moscow or wherever it is that he’s going, and I know that when I think of him in the weeks and months that lie ahead I will picture him standing beside that machine for sterilizing clothes, as if posing for a photograph, the run-down sickly employee with his red-rimmed eyes and his faded jeans, about to be reassigned, and the expensive, superbly engineered piece of medical equipment, recently installed and still unused.

  /

  October is drawing to a close, and it’s only light between eleven in the morning and three in the afternoon. If the skies are clear, sunrise merges into sunset, the transition so gradual and smooth that it’s hard to tell them apart. On cloudy days there’s a glow that is spectral and diffuse, as if an eclipse is happening. It’s during these elusive dreamlike hours that I map the town — its streets and buildings, its footpaths, its forgotten spaces. I often walk out along the straight paved road that heads due west. Beyond the warehouses, with their hoards of sawdust, tiles, and cement, is a monument that harks back to the Soviet era, a tall, tapering concrete obelisk topped with a faded silver star. Nearby is a sign that says UGOLGRAD, a red line drawn diagonally through the name to indicate that you are leaving. But no one ever leaves, not unless they’re going to the heliport. The road doesn’t lead anywhere else. If you want to go to Longyearbyen — and for years, during the Cold War, the Russians weren’t welcome there — you have to go by boat. Overland, the only option is a snow scooter, but it isn’t advisable until January, when the snow is hard and packed and the darkness begins to ease, and then only with someone who is familiar with the terrain. I lean against the sign, my face turned to the south. Across the water the mountains loom, their flanks a milky lilac white, like yogurt flavored with forest fruits. It looks ethereal over there, difficult to believe in, like an imaginary kingdom.

  With two days to go until Axelsen arrives, I decide to embark on a series of drawings of derelict properties, beginning with the pink house that stands close to the shoreline, to the west of the steps that lead down to the quay. To reach the house I have to climb down off the steps and onto a frail wooden walkway that cuts sideways across the slope and over a gulley. If the walkway gives I will drop three or four meters to the steeply sloping ground below. I could break an ankle, or even a leg, and end up in that creepy hospital, with only Anatoly to care for me. Ignoring the handrail, which looks as though it has rotted clean through, I hurry across the thin buckled planks and step onto the equally fragile moss-encrus
ted veranda. The front door is padlocked. I look around, making sure no one is watching, then climb through an open window at the side. I check my watch. Just after twelve. Three hours of daylight left.

  I choose a small room at the back of the house. The window, half hidden by a threadbare orange curtain, looks back up the slope towards other, grander properties, including the brown-and-white building, which used to be the miners’ canteen. Scattered about on the floor are a number of random objects — among them a bone-handled knife, a single mattress, and a crumpled Pepsi can. On the windowsill are five stubbed-out cigarette butts. Four have brown filters. The other one is white. I imagine a tryst where the man was nervous and smoked more than the woman. The gap between the white filter and the brown ones suggests the couple didn’t quite connect — it seems unlikely they made love on that soiled mattress — and the man left the house frustrated and alone. I draw the cigarette butts, then I draw the knife. This takes a good couple of hours, and I keep myself going with biscuits, chocolate, and bottled water. When I have finished I climb back out of the open window, hoping no one sees me until I’m back on the gray wooden steps.

  /

  The day before Axelsen is due, I enter the building that houses the museum. On the second floor is a library. When I walk in, a young woman is sitting at a desk, sorting through slips of paper. Her dark hair is cut straight across, stopping just short of her eyebrows, and a close-fitting black sweater shows off her slender arms. Her movements are slow, as if she’s sedated.

  “Can I help you?” The woman speaks English in a low, slurred voice I feel I could have predicted.

  “I thought the doctor was the only person who spoke English,” I say.

  “You know the doctor?”

  “He eats breakfast in the hotel.”

  She nods, then gathers up the paper slips and puts them in a drawer.

  “You have a great voice,” I tell her. “Do you sing?”

  “Only when I drink too much.”

  I smile. “How did you know I was English?”

  “Somebody tell me an English girl arrive. Everything is news here. Small town.”

  “Do people read a lot?”

  “Not so much. But we have one or two people, they like books. The winter is very long.”

  Later, when I have walked round the library, which seems to specialize in technical literature — books on geology and engineering predominate — I ask the woman about herself. Her name is Zhenya. She came to Ugolgrad with her husband on a two-year contract. Her husband works for the mining company. She sighs, then adds, Like everybody else. They left their six-year-old son in Donetsk with his grandparents. It was a difficult decision, and there’s hardly a moment when she doesn’t think of him, but it isn’t for much longer. They plan to return to Ukraine in the summer, and it will have been worth it. You make good money here, she says. More than back home, at least.

  “And there’s nothing to spend it on,” I say.

  “Phone calls,” she says, “and vodka.”

  I’m smiling again.

  “You’re curious about our town?” she asks. “You are — how to say it? — a voyeur?”

  “Not at all. No. A voyeur is a person who is on the outside, looking in. I want to become part of the place. I want to live here.”

  “You want to live here?”

  “Yes.”

  Zhenya’s deep-set eyes and the dry way in which she expresses herself give her a haughty condescending air, and yet she seems happy to talk. It’s possible she is grateful for the company. I imagine her days must pass in silence — unless one of the few people who reads books happens to appear. An idea occurs to me, and I decide to try it out on her.

  “Perhaps I could work here,” I say, “in the library.”

  “I don’t think so.” Zhenya looks past me, towards the curtained doorway, with that distant gaze of hers. “There is not enough even for me to do.”

  “Not as a librarian. I could clean. With books, there’s always dust.”

  She looks straight at me, and her eyes are focused suddenly, and clear. “Strange you say that.”

  She tells me that Mrs. Kovalenka, the cleaner, has recently been taken ill. The poor woman had a stroke, and was airlifted to the mainland.

  A scene from The Passenger comes back to me. Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider are having drinks on the terrace of a hotel that appears to be in the south of Spain — the décor is flamboyant, Moorish — and they’re both smoking, their glasses of rosé offset by the pale green of the tablecloth. He’s curious to know whether she believes in coincidence. She says, I never asked myself. Then she smiles, but only with her eyes, which are mischievous and smudged. I never used to notice it, he says in his slightly nasal drawl. Now I see it all around.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. “But I could fill in for her, perhaps — until she returns.”

  “She’s old,” Zhenya tells me. “I don’t think she will return.”

  My heart speeding up, I wait to see what she says next.

  “We don’t pay so much — not what you are used to.” She smiles faintly. “This is not England.”

  “I only need enough to live,” I tell her.

  “I will talk to the authorities.”

  “Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.”

  “No” — and she glances at the papers on her desk, her eyebrows raised. “I do not know.”

  /

  At three o’clock the following afternoon I pull on my parka, my fur hat, and my gloves and I leave the hotel. It’s light outside, but only just. A gray sky blankets the town, and flakes of snow stick to my clothing as I hurry down to the dock. The temperature is dropping every day. Though I haven’t seen a thermometer I can tell it’s below freezing, and October isn’t even over yet.

  I descend the two hundred-odd steps, passing the viewing platform and the house whose interior I have begun to document. The ship from Longyearbyen has already docked, its black hull flush against the quay. I shield my eyes and peer through the rapidly darkening air. Axelsen is in the cabin on the bridge, his head and body framed in the side window, the light a murky aquarium green.

  Once the tourists have disembarked — there’s only a small group, all wrapped in waterproofs — I say hello to Torgrim, then I climb on board and pass through the door that leads to the bridge. The smell is the same as before. Oil, metal. Brine.

  When Axelsen sees me, he adjusts the peak of his baseball cap, then folds his arms and leans against the wall, partially obscuring a chart showing various species of whales. Next to him are three pairs of binoculars in upright brackets.

  “No suitcase,” he says.

  “No.”

  “So I was wrong.”

  I go to the window. The floodlights are on, and snowflakes whirl and jostle in the brittle sodium glare. Beyond, there is nothing but grayness, impenetrable, chaotic, all-enveloping. “I’m going to stay for a while. It suits me here.”

  When he doesn’t say anything I face him again. I sense him repeating the words to himself, testing them for authenticity.

  “I found a job,” I tell him.

  That morning the humorless woman from the bar handed me a note from Zhenya asking if she could see me. After breakfast, when I called in at the library, she told me I had been hired as a cleaner. We went through the paperwork together. Later, she walked me round to the mining company’s main office, where there were more forms to fill in. While in the office, I learned that Mrs. Kovalenka’s family have contacted the company to say there are medical complications, and that she won’t be coming back. Zhenya has suggested I move into Mrs. Kovalenka’s apartment. It will cost much less than the hotel.

  “You will work as a cleaner?” Axelsen’s voice lifts in disbelief.

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “You don’t look like a cleaner.”

  “You think I don’t know how to clean?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’ll see. Next t
ime you come —” I break off, thinking. “When is the next time?”

  He picks up a manual and slowly flips through pages that are thin as onionskin. “I will be back in April.”

  “Five months.”

  He nods. “And even then the winter will not be over. The winters are very long up here.”

  “So everybody keeps saying. But that’s why I came — for the winter.”

  He seems to lose patience, letting his breath out fast and turning towards the window, then he checks himself and looks at me steadily, sideways-on. “There are things you can’t tell me.”

  Startled, I’m reminded of Adefemi, and how he used to talk sometimes. Somewhere there’s another version of us that got married, and had children, and lived together for the rest of our lives, he told me on the night we agreed to separate. He would say things that were so perceptive, so right, that I would gaze at him with eyes that felt wide and liquid, like a Manga girl, but he never seemed to appreciate the significance or value of his words, and he wouldn’t be able to remember them afterwards, nor would he have any idea of the effect they had on me. They were involuntary and obvious — to him, at least — and it was in his nature to allow them to pass through him. He was thriftless in that way. Axelsen, also, doesn’t seem to be entirely in control of what he’s saying. It’s as if he knows something he should not know. As if he momentarily became a medium. He even looks slightly dazed, like someone waking from a trance.

  “I brought you something.” He opens a cupboard, takes out a flat package, and hands it to me. The wrapping paper has Santas on it.

  I smile. “Christmas is early this year.”

  “It was the only paper I could find.”

  I tear off the wrapping. Inside is a red hot-water bottle, just like the one my mother used to put in my bed when I was little. I feel tears coming.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Axelsen asks.

  “No, no. It’s all right.” I sniff, then wipe my eyes. “I haven’t seen one of these for years.”

  “Just something for the winter.”