Agviq

by Michael Armstrong

  Between heartbeats of the flash she stared down at the orange seal, and then she saw what it was. A pale face stared out from the shadows of the hood, blue eyes, lashes frosted with rime; a thin mustache and short beard, also frosted; long nose, thin lips. A man. She touched the fabric of his survival suit, felt the neoprene fabric yield with the pressure of her fingers. Claudia yanked off her mitten with her teeth, slipped a hand under his hood and to his neck. Cold. His skin burned with cold, but she felt a pulse from his carotid artery.

  “He’s alive,” she said, “but severely hypothermic.”

  “The seal I dreamed of,” Tuttu said. “It was orange. I couldn’t figure out why it was orange.”

  Puvak came up with a mug of hot water. She took it from him, held the cup to the man’s lips and poured it in him. His lips licked at the water, opened for it; a little color seemed to come to his cheeks.

  “We should get him back to Utqiagvik,” Tuttu said.

  Amaguq brought over the sled. He’d taken out a sleeping bag, laid it open on top of all their gear. Puvak held the still-warm pot in his hand, took an empty thermos and poured the rest of the water in it. He put the pot under the bag, next to the collapsed stove. Amaguq and Natchiq lifted the man onto the pulkka. In his survival suit he was too big to fit in the closed bag, so they just wrapped it around him, then lashed him to the pulkka.

  “Who is he?” Puvak asked.

  The men looked at each other, shrugged. Claudia leaned down to tighten the ropes around him, then noticed lettering across the visor of the man’s hood. She spelled out the letters—an “r,” a “p,” a backward “n”—and made no sense of it until she noticed the style of the lettering, and the little red star above the lettering. Cyrillic.

  “Grigoriopol,” Claudia whispered.

  “What?” Puvak asked. “Greg-what?”

  “Grigoriopol,” she said. “A city in the Soviet Union. A—”

  “Russian,” Tuttu said. “A Soviet.”

  The hunters stepped back from the man, and first Natchiq, then Amaguq, pulled their rifles out and pointed them at the Soviet, as if he could spring up and snap their heads off. Natchiq chambered a round and aimed his 30-06 at the man’s throat. The man’s eyes fluttered open, then focused on Natchiq and the rifle. His hand rose up, got tangled in the ropes of the pulkka.

  “Nyet,” he said.

  Claudia stared at Natchiq, watched his eyes, watched him sight down the rifle. His finger pulled back, and she remembered that the Ruger had a hard pull; midway through, at the sound of “no,” Natchiq’s finger relaxed, and slid back through the slit of his mitten and back to warmth. The hunter lowered the rifle.

  “No,” he said. Natchiq turned to his cousin. “I’m sick of this kind of killing.”

  The other hunters looked at Natchiq, at the Soviet, nodded, and put their rifles back into their cases, over their shoulders. Claudia stood, and Puvak handed her her rifle.

  “This man’s cold,” Tuttu said. “Should have brought the CB, to get help.” He turned to Puvak. “Run ahead.” He waved a hand in the direction of the village. “Tell Malgi to fire up the stove, and start boiling water. You hunters” —he jabbed at Claudia and the men with stiff fingers— “you hunters take this man back.” Amaguq reached for the raft and slung a rope from it around his shoulder. “Go.

  “Go!”

  * * *

  Even the inside of the entrance tunnel felt warm, and the air grew warmer as she climbed up to the katak. Tammy stood in the open hatch, coming down the stairs to meet them. Claudia shooed Tammy back out of the open hatch. Natchiq and Amaguq pulled the Soviet into the tunnel. Claudia moved aside as the men swept by her, Natchiq walking backward up the ladder and into the house. Tammy reached down to help him.

  “Who”—she looked down at the Soviet, expecting to see one of the hunters, Claudia guessed; her mouth dropped open at the sight of the orange-suited stranger—“the hell is that? Puvak said someone was hurt, had fallen into the water.”

  Claudia helped Amaguq push the Soviet into the house. Tammy let go of the man, stepped back, looked at Claudia. The Inupiaq woman’s lower lip trembled. The man did look frightening, Claudia agreed: the orange survival suit, the pale face, the eyes.

  “A Russian,” Claudia explained.

  Tuttu came in behind them, and Malgi shouted something from by the stove. Natchiq and Tuttu tore their parkas and boots off and were stripping to bare skin. Amaguq threw the damp sleeping bag aside and was yanking at the zipper of the Soviet’s survival suit.

  Masu pushed her way to the man, waving a circular bladed knife, and with the ulu cut the orange suit open. Claudia stared at the blur of activity, then realized what they were doing. She went to her corner of the qaregi and started grabbing sleeping bags: hers, Tammy’s, Rob’s, any bag in sight.

  The Soviet groaned as Masu pulled the survival suit off him, like peeling a shrimp, Claudia thought. His teeth chattered and his arms and legs shook violently. Masu cut away the submariner’s light coverall, pulled off his boots and the rest of his clothes. The two hunters stood buck naked over the stripped Soviet. Claudia threw the bags at them. They lifted the Russian up and into a bag, then climbed in next to him, Inupiaq on either side of the man, four bags wrapped around all three.

  Puvak had gone down into the entrance tunnel, came back in, holding the thermoses from the sled. Malgi took the thermoses from the boy, and went over to the Soviet. Someone had already put a huge log onto the fire and started pots of water boiling. Tammy stood to the side, still shocked. A stranger, Claudia thought, the significance hitting her. Someone totally new to the village. There hadn’t been a stranger in Utqiagvik since the day of the war.

  “A Russian?” Tammy asked.

  “A Soviet,” Claudia said as she moved toward Malgi, and began helping him pour hot water and tea into hot water bottles. “From a ship, Tammy.” She pointed at the ripped orange survival suit, then tried to think how a Soviet sailor could wind up so far from Siberia. “Maybe a submarine.”

  Tammy stared at her, the words starting to make sense. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, shit.”

  The naked Inupiaq men climbed out of the sleeping bag, went to the men’s side of the house and changed into dry, warm clothes. Claudia knelt next to the Soviet, felt his skin. Some more color had come back to him, but he still looked clammy, cold, almost dead. Tammy passed another hot water bottle to her. She laid it against his groin, across his stomach. In a hospital, the thing to do would be to get warm fluids in him, immerse him in warm water, perhaps. Claudia had even heard of blood-warming machines, or respirators snaked down into the lungs blowing hot air into the system. Anything to get heat into the body.

  But they didn’t have that, they just had hot water bottles—another odd bit of salvage from Stuaqpak—and naked men. Masu said something to Tammy, and then the lesbian tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Our turn, Masu says.” Tammy pulled her turtleneck over her head, her jet black hair falling out of the neck like tentacles of an aberrant anemone.

  Claudia stripped, crawled inside with her friend. The Soviet’s cold skin drew goose bumps from her body, made her nipples rise erect. She put an arm around him, hugged him to her. His belly to her belly. Tammy straddled the man’s back, and across his neck grinned at her.

  “A Commie sandwich, huh?” Tammy asked.

  Claudia nodded, grinned. “A submarine sandwich, Tammy,” she said.

  Masu pulled out the cold water bags, replenished them with fresh hot water from the wood stove. The stove creaked as the steel expanded, the pipe pinged as flames roared inside. The old woman picked up Claudia’s damp clothes and hung them from the clothesline strung between posts.

  She felt her body warm from the heat of the stove, from the insulation of the sleeping bags. Tammy’s warmth seeped over to her, and she felt a glow spread through her, not just warmth, but something else. Claudia stared at the sailor’s face, at his eyelids shut and sleeping, at the wheat-blond short hair falling acro
ss his forehead. The stranger. His penis rubbed against her thigh, but she didn’t think of that. It wasn’t that he was a man, not that, Claudia thought. It was that he was not of Barrow, not of the Arctic coast, that he had come from someplace else. He had survived, too.

  Hugging the cold man, feeling her warmth pass from Tammy to her to the Soviet, Claudia wondered what the man would think if he were to wake up suddenly and see her, a naked blond woman—somewhat attractive, she liked to think—pressed against him? What would he think if he turned to see Tammy? What would he think if he woke up between two men? Perhaps he would like that, perhaps not. The smooth touch of the man, the warm touch of Tammy, the heat blazing from the stove as the big log Malgi had tossed in caught . . . Claudia felt the cold of the hunt, finally, and exhaustion from the pure effort to be outside, and then remembered the joy of Puvak’s kill. She fell asleep.

  * * *

  A great steel whale ripped through the sea, bending like a serpent, thrashing the ocean behind it into froth with its flukes. It spat harpoons back out at whalers, roared fire from its mouth, and whipping glass hung from its upper jaw, rows and rows of shining swords. The whale came to her, its eyes gleaming red, a beacon flashing from the steel whale’s skull. She floated in the ocean, naked and trembling. As the whale came to her, jaws open, as it came to her and bit down on her, a great light flashed across the sea, and Claudia woke up.

  A log caught fire in the wood stove. Flames shot up the glass window of the stove, heat expanding the iron. Yellow-white light flickered out a crack of the door where asbestos sealing had rubbed away. Water steamed from a pot on the wood stove, a chunk of blue ice sizzling into its primal form.

  She rose. Tammy lay on the other side of the Soviet, an arm across his shoulder and his face nuzzled into her hair. Claudia slipped out of the sleeping bag, shivered in the slightly colder air of the qaregi, and looked up at Masu sitting on a bench sewing, and watching over them. The old woman’s fingers fell and rose, fell and rose as she quickly pushed a needle through a pair of pale blue coveralls. Masu nodded as Claudia caught her eye, then jerked her chin at Claudia’s underwear and socks hanging from the clothesline.

  A light bulb glowed from the rafter above Masu, two wires twining around each other to a big black 12-volt battery on the floor. Claudia remembered vaguely some idea of Natchiq’s to rig up a light for the old woman, to recharge the batteries using a DC generator on a windmill. The rest of the house was in darkness, and from the side of the room where the men slept, someone snored.

  The polypro underwear felt dry and warm as she pulled it down from the line, but it stank of her sweat. It scratched against her skin, the plastic fibers snagging on the hairs of her legs. Dimly Claudia remembered a day when she had cared about smooth legs, when the feel of nylons felt sexy against her thighs, in some place and time where it made sense to walk in skirts under a sun that burned and in air that did not chill. She pulled the long johns over her cotton briefs; her ears crackled with static as she slipped her head through a turtleneck and shook out her hair. The blond strands fell in her eyes and she swept it back over her shoulders.

  “We saved you some seal,” Masu said. She pointed with the tip of her needle at the stove.

  Claudia buttoned up her wool pants, slipped a sweater over her head, happy and warm and rested. On the back of the stove was another pot, lid closed tight. She lifted it up and stared down at a lumpy hard mass of brown meat.

  “Liver,” said Masu. “From that seal Puvak got. The men ate but Tuttu said to save some for their hunting partner.”

  She smiled at that, glad that Tuttu and the others had remembered her help. Too bad they hadn’t gotten a seal this time. Claudia tried to think how the meat would be divided if the partners had come from other houses, but the point was academic: they all lived in the same qaregi and would share together.

  Dipping her fingers into the warm meat, Claudia snagged a hunk and lifted it, steaming still, to her lips. She thought of the first time she’d had seal years ago, had liver, and had almost gagged on the smell. She still almost gagged when they’d feasted the day before, but her stomach won out then as it did now, reminding her how long it had been since she’d had a filling meal. Too long, too many days of subsisting on old cans of tuna, stale Pilot bread, or greasy spam. A great spoonful of peanut butter would taste best, she thought, but Tuttu had hidden the last jar, saving it, he said, “for something worth celebrating.”

  She chewed on the strong meat, greasy from the seal oil it had floated in in the pot. The oil slid down her throat like crankcase oil, a strong flavor, yes, but satisfying. Claudia ground the meat down hungrily, and reached for another piece. The oil seemed to catch fire in her stomach, fuel for her fat-famished body. Masu poured her a cup of tea from a thermos by her feet.

  “Good,” Claudia mumbled from around the meat.

  Masu smiled. “Good seal. The boy did well.”

  He had, Claudia thought. She looked over at the men sleeping, noticed Puvak sleeping soundly next to his father, his father’s arm across his son’s chest.

  The Soviet stirred. Claudia looked down at him. His color seemed to be back in his cheeks, and his lips were no longer pale pink but red. The orange survival suit had been hung from a nail from a post, one end ragged where Masu had cut the suit open. Other than the reflective tape and the ship’s name across the breast, there were no other markings, no other insignia on the suit.

  Masu held up the coveralls she was mending, checked her stitching. Claudia glanced over, noticed the Cyrillic letter on the breast pocket. She turned to Masu, reached up and looked over the coveralls. Strips of Velcro had been sewn over the right pocket of the coveralls and on both sleeves, but they were only the backing, the burr side of Velcro. The Soviets had picked up a trick or two from us, she thought. The Velcro had probably held insignia and a name, but those had been ripped away to keep the man from being identified. The only marking was the word GRIGORIOPOL again. Why would they leave the name but not anything else? Old-fashioned Commie disinformation? It didn’t figure.

  Masu inspected her sewing, nodded, turned the coveralls over to work on a tear on the back. “Had to cut it away from him,” she said. “I thought he might need it.”

  The Soviet stirred, and the movement caught her eye. He rolled over, pushing Tammy away, and his right arm shot into the air, pushing something back. He sat straight up, one sleeping bag falling in a heap off of him, and then his eyes blinked open, and he screamed.

  The scream broke the subdued quiet of the house, startling Claudia with its violence. She knew that scream, had heard screams like that before. She remembered the scream of her sister’s nightmares, the nightmares Susanne had every now and then after her rape. The sailor’s scream was the same kind of animal scream, a scream that rose from the lungs and came forth from the back of the throat, tongue flat against lips and teeth bared back.

  Tammy rolled over at the sound, away from the sound, and pushed at the man with her left arm. He fell back, rose up, Tammy pushed him back, and he rose up again. Tammy woke up then, Claudia at the sailor’s side, and the two women held the man until his screaming stopped and he quit shuddering.

  * * *

  “Who is he?” Tammy asked.

  “Grigoriopol,” Claudia said.

  She looked at the Soviet, dressed in his coveralls, a borrowed sweater over them. At the name, the man looked up, shyly staring over a cup of steaming tea. He smiled at Claudia, sipped more tea. Masu had given him a plate of the seal liver, and the way the man tore into the meat—not flinching at the smell, smiling, even—told her that he was no stranger to the Arctic. A tanik, yes, a gussik, Yupik Eskimos would call him. Gussik. Cossack. It wouldn’t be the first time a Russian had come to these shores. White, blue-eyed, sandy-haired, yes, but the Soviet knew Native food.

  “Ask him who he is, where he comes from,” Tuttu said. The Soviet’s screams had woken the house, and now everyone sat around looking at him, curious at this alien.


  “My Russian’s lousy,” Claudia said.

  “Ask.”

  “Tovarisch,” she said. Was that the right word? Comrade? Friend? “Gde vy zivete?”

  “Grigoriopol,” he said. He smiled, sipped his tea again.

  Shit, Claudia thought. Has she asked the wrong question—where do you live? She thought again. “Kak imja?” What is your name?

  “Ah,” he said, smiling. “Grigor.”

  She shook her head, sighed, then smiled. Why not? It would be a common enough name, Grigor. The coincidence wasn’t that odd. Grigoriopol. If that’s what he said . . .

  “Grigor, then.”

  “Does he speak English?” Puvak asked quietly. Amaguq moved to admonish his son, then laughed. No one had asked the Soviet. “Well?”

  “Vy govorite angliyskaya?” Claudia asked.

  “Da,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

  He spoke English with an accent that was flat, neutral, with little trace of the Slavic twang native Russian speakers had. The accent was American, maybe Midwest. Claudia felt that chill she’d felt on the ice. Even during the Gorbachev era, not just anyone could go to America and learn to speak English with a Midwest accent. He had to have been someone . . . special. She glanced at Tuttu, caught his eye, and shook her head slightly.

  “Ah,” Tuttu sighed. “That makes things easier. Your name is Grigor?” The man nodded. “And your ship, it was named Grigoriopol?” He nodded once more. “What kind of ship? An icebreaker? A destroyer?”

  “A submarine,” Claudia said, thinking of her guess. He had to have come on a submarine.

  “Yes,” Grigor said. “A submarine.”

  “A submarine?” Tuttu glanced at Claudia. “Okay. A sub. Where is it now?”

  Grigor shrugged, sipped some more tea. “I do not know. The crew threw me overboard.”

  “Why did the crew throw you overboard?” Tuttu asked.