by James Meek
‘I don’t know how long this life went on. The camp outside was a murmur with shouts and the sound of axes on wood. One of the last pieces to come back to me when I was fully fed was the sense of how far I was from the world, but I was dealing with that by letting myself go a little mad, imagining I was an Arctic explorer, trapped in a ship in the ice, waiting for the relief expedition to come. The whole camp had been mad for years, a deeper madness and getting deeper with the hunger, but I’d forgotten that, otherwise I might have realised that when the sun flashed over the horizon for the first time since November, the light would cut straight to the convicts’ brain stems, crack their nerves like a chisel, and bring the White Garden to an end.
‘On the morning the sun came back, I sat by the window eating bread and cheese and reading Edward Bellamy. Something came through the window, a clenched fist, all bloody torn knuckle and shrivelled veins and tendons, the arm behind trailing rags and freezing air. The skin was alive, blue grey, transparent, covering wasted muscle. The noise of breaking glass and the punch of cold and the sight of the red rips in the grey skin came in a moment, I threw the book away, stood up and stepped back. The human talon closed around the food and snatched, severing an artery in the arm as it pulled back through the jagged hole in the window which I saw because I lifted the sheet and saw the camp outside in the first light for the first time in so long. I saw the man who’d broken the window to snatch my food, the blood dripping out of his sleeve and turning to red ice when it hit the ground, him not noticing and pushing the food into his mouth, which had shrunken over his teeth so there were no lips, only a hole and teeth. The cheeks had shrunk, too, his cheekbones jutted out over his cheeks and the skin had become thin and tight over his forehead, his eyes were dead and deep in dark pits, it was a skull with the unupholstered skin of a dead man sewn onto it. While I was staring at him another convict, another moving skeleton, tried to take the food from him. They fell fighting onto the snow, labouring at killing each other with the last strength they had, going for each other’s eyes with their thumbs, legs pedalling away for advantage though they were hardly thicker than the bones inside them. They didn’t speak or scream while they fought, I could just hear them breathing.
‘About twenty metres from our block, I could see a naked corpse, another skeleton in skin, face down in the snow with hair and blood mangled and frozen together round an axe wound in the head. A guard in a sheepskin coat ran past with his revolver drawn. I heard a whistle, and shooting.
‘I heard raised voices in the other part of our barracks. The other authorities, Matchstick and the Gypsy, Gypsy who’d spread into the niche left when Machinegun was murdered, were after something from the Mohican. Matchstick said: “You’ve got to share. He’s too much for one.” The Gypsy said: “It’s the end, finished. Time to do the town, brother. Just a little piece, a tiny little piece. I’ll have the heart, me. Raw heart, still hot, that’s what I like.”
‘The Mohican says: “It’s the end. What I have I keep. What I keep goes with me. You go do the Prince and his people. They’ve got enough champagne and caviar in there to keep you all high till spring.”
‘And the Gypsy says: “Oh no, brother. That’s not the way. You want to do the Prince, you line up with us and you cross the open ground in front of their lovely Mauserkins, my dear. Ekh, you know his house, concrete walls, that thick! The rats’ve found a good place, and we, what, what are we, sixty dogs too weak to catch them.”
‘And Matchstick says: “You’ve got to share. Where are you going with him? Run in midwinter? You won’t get five miles, you and your pig.”
‘And the Mohican says: “I told you not to use that word here.”
‘“Ah, the beautiful man and his little knife,” says Matchstick.
‘“No need, brothers, eh,” says the Gypsy. “So nobody has to put their knife away without using it, let’s do the fattened-up one, let’s have a drink and some nice meat, do the town a bit, and then we’ll go and have the Prince.”
‘“I’m going to have this one,” says Matchstick. “I’ll cut him like an artist and then I’ll kill him.”
‘“You’ll not be an artist,” says the Mohican. “You haven’t got the imagination.”
‘Listening by the stove, I heard the Gypsy shout. I never heard the sound of the Mohican killing Matchstick. Knives are quiet things, in themselves. I heard the Mohican telling the Gypsy to take the body, and the Gypsy running away, and the Mohican coming to me. He pushed through the screen of blankets, still holding the bloody knife. He said it was time to leave, that they had stopped handing out rations that morning. I asked him what Gypsy and Matchstick had wanted, and he said: “They wanted something I couldn’t give them.”
‘For a moment, I thought I knew why animals don’t speak – not because they can’t, but because the terror stops them at the very moment they need to beg for their life, the fear and the hopelessness hits them when a two-legged creature comes at them with a sharp shiny blade in its coiled white fingers, and they understand how much they’ve been fed and how slow and weak they are, and how greedy and stupid they’ve been, and how their hooves and paws can’t do what fingers can do, and they’re outclassed, already dead, already meat. For a moment I was an animal. I was a pig, ready to squirm under the butcher’s hands, and squeal, only not to speak. Then I started grabbing words. I said: “Was that something me?” I said: “Am I the pig?”
‘And the Mohican said: “Listen, intellectual. It’s four months till the river melts and we find out which pricks are running the country, and whether they remember there was a place such as this. Four months, and the only food is in the Prince’s bunkhouse. If you stay here, the Prince and his dogs’ll kill you and all the rest to stop them taking what he has. Or else you’ll be taking your chances with the Gypsy and his friends. They’re hungry, and you’re not a fighting man. Now here’s another way. We leave together, this hour, two of us.” He said: “Is it a hard choice, intelligent? You can stay and be shot. You can stay and be eaten. Or we can walk into the wilderness together.”
‘He licked one side of his knife clean and held it out to me. I shook my head. He licked the other side, wiped it on a rag and stowed it in his belt. Gunfire began to clap and patter on the far side of the camp, where the Prince’s house was. I had no choice except to leave with the Mohican, even though I knew there could only be one reason for him to take me. In the White Garden, all I could look forward to was a quick death. Death was most likely in the tundra and the taiga too, but for as long as we moved south, hope was more than a symptom of madness.
‘The Mohican had made preparations. From different hiding places he took sheepskin coats and mittens, fur hats and felt boots. He unwrapped a long black Colt and put it in his coat pocket. Inside his coat he stowed an axe. He produced two bags of food and a bottle of spirits, and told me to take two books. We dressed and left. We walked out of the gate. It was already dark, but there was a moon, and we knew the way down to the river. There were no guards. They were fighting, some with the convicts, some against them according to hierarchies and deals. Even if they hadn’t been, even if keeping us prisoner had any meaning, there was no need for barbed wire and gate-houses and watchtowers. If you escaped, you ran in May. In winter the tundra was wall enough to hold anyone.
‘We passed between the hulls of the boats, down the bank and onto the river ice. The Mohican said we’d have to put ten miles between us and the camp before we could make a fire and rest. I remembered talk at the card table I’d heard while the Mohican had been out of the room and I was lying on my bunk, pretending to sleep. Someone, I think it was Petya, the one they called Fireman because he set fires, asked if I was sleeping, and the Gypsy said “Oh, that one always sleeps, except to eat. He’s a lovely one, lullabies and cakes, that’s all.” Petya said it was a dark business and the Gypsy said “Hush, my dear, darkness is good for business,” and the others laughed, and for a moment all I could hear was old cards slithering and the clinking of s
mall stakes, and then someone said: “Kyesha from Rostov, he was in a work gang north of Baikal, he took a cow with him when he ran, him and a couple of folk he knew. The cow was a young one, knew nothing, soft-skinned. Kyesha and the others killed it even before the rest of their food ran out. They didn’t make a fire for fear they’d be seen; they cut the throat, drank the blood, cut out the kidneys and ate them, still warm.”
‘I followed in the steps the Mohican made in the snow on the river. The wind had driven the snow up against the bank and out on the ice it was a few inches deep, a foot at most. The moonlight showed us the sweep of the river flat through the frozen boglands of the tundra. I knew no-one had ever escaped from the White Garden and I knew no-one ever would in midwinter, when it was a good ten or twenty days’ walk to the beginnings of a tree line, and much further to human habitation; at this time even the Tungus pitched their chumas with their herds far to the south. I knew it, and I knew that having fattened me up the Mohican intended to kill me, butcher me and carry me onwards as meat, dropping my bones days apart in the wilderness. But I could still hear shooting in the camp behind us, and to be moving again and shortening the distance to the warmer side of the Arctic circle was almost like finding a sanctuary in itself. It was no colder than twenty degrees of frost, and marching in the sheepskin and felt boots only my face felt the cold. No matter how long it was, for the first hours the river seemed like a glorious road home, generous and easy, half a mile wide, the snow blown into ripples with sharp edges that stood out black under the moon. The Mohican hardly spoke, but when I watched his feet drawing their mark across the untouched wasteland, and put my feet in the hollows after him, my fear of him and my trust in him went their separate ways. There was terror, the thought of waking up to find him with one hand gripping my chin and the other pulling a blade across my throat, and at the same time there was love, a son’s love for a father who shows the way, who can lead him out of a place of death towards the world of the living.
‘We made our ten miles. The Mohican’s first good intelligence was a place where a boat from an early expedition had run aground. It had been stripped and most of what was left was embedded in ice but there was enough wood for a fire with half of my Bellamy for kindling. We ate and lay together to sleep in a close embrace against the cold. I could hear his breathing in my ear and I said we could fish, or hunt, when the food ran out. He didn’t answer for a long time and I thought he was asleep. Then he said: “When the food runs out, intellectual, I’ll show you what to do. And now you sleep.”
‘When we woke in the dark we were frozen together, my mittens to his back, his to mine, sealed at the chest and the legs, the hairs of our beards twisted into one. We pulled ourselves apart, piled wood on the embers of the fire, squatted down on either side with our toes in the ashes, leaning so close to the flames that we almost fell in. We ate and moved on upriver.
‘The second day was colder than the first. It got light but the sky and the earth were a grey enclosure, the riverbanks were smudged with haze, the rocks and ice and horizon and all the lines of the hardest things were dissolving in air as harsh as acid. My hands and feet burned and then the burning began to fade. All the ecstasy of movement away from the White Garden died, and all the fear of the Mohican, and I only wanted to lie down in the soft foggy snow. The sound of our footfalls was a lullaby and my breathing was troubling me, keeping me awake. I watched the banks, picking out a hummock or rocks, hauling myself onward with the reward of seeing them approached, passed and left behind me, meaning I was still moving. That became an effort and I watched the back of the Mohican, learning by heart the patterns in the rime marking the stiff folds of the sack over his shoulder. After a time that was too much and I lowered my head to watch the footprints in the snow in front of me, white within white, the only substantial colour in the mist. The footprints didn’t change, a perfect white oval, a face blind of features, serene, happy, without nose or ears or mouth. I stared at the face, and heard the sound of my breathing and the lullaby of footfalls fade away, and decided I would kiss the face, and I would lose all sensations too. I was lying in the snow, face down, nuzzling the footprint, and dying, savouring the joy of sleep.
‘The Mohican brought me back from death by cold. I opened my eyes and saw a tree. It was very beautiful. I hadn’t seen a tree for more than two years. It was a pitiful larch, there were a few of them somehow hunched in a sheltered inlet far above the tree line, but the trunk and branches seemed like living gold to me. The Mohican had carried me there, put down a lattice of branches to lie on, built a fire and made a shelter. I screamed from the pain when the feeling came back to my hands and feet. I don’t know why I didn’t lose fingers. The Mohican sprinkled snow on bread, held it up to the fire so the snow melted and put pieces of it into my mouth. He said: “You need to want to live more than you do.”
‘I asked him why. Was it so he could have a hot meal?
‘He said: “Intellectual. You use your imagination too much. When a thief meets a civilian, the thief always wins, because the civilian can only imagine what his throat’ll be like after it’s been cut, and while he’s busy doing that, the thief is cutting his throat. Think less, intellectual, breathe more. Breathe. Your heart has to beat harder. The blood has to circulate. Winter. Frost. That’s what wants to eat you this minute.”
‘I was lying on my side, facing the fire. The Mohican lay behind me and pressed his body close. He told me the story of the Alaska raid, how he’d planned it with a group of Eskimo outlaws from Russia and America, how they’d crossed the straits from Chukotka by boat, laid up for months in a cabin on the American side while the weather turned and the straits froze over, then walked into a gold town on Christmas Day, blown a hole in the wall of the bank, blown the safe inside, chalked “GELLO AMERIKA” on the wall, stuffed their furs with plunder, and crossed back across the ice on dog teams.
‘When I woke the moon was up, full. The fire had burned down to embers. The Mohican was locked around my body, his chest hard against my back, his legs against mine, arms crossing over my chest. The feeling in my hands and feet was fading again. I was shivering. The landscape had altered. We were more protected by trees than when we lay down, but in the trees there was watching and wakefulness. On the far side of the fire was a stump, which hadn’t been there before, crowned by tangled strands of frost that reflected the moon back at it. And the stump blinked! It was a Tungus boy with white hair and cracked lips, wrapped in deerskin and a bear pelt, staring at us over the last glow of the fire.
‘I shouted and pulled free of the Mohican with the strength of all my fear. The albino ran behind the trees, away from the river. He ran through the snow like a bear, using his arms like a second pair of legs. The snow was knee deep. I tried to run and fell and got up with wads of snow falling from my coat and face. I knew the Mohican was behind me. I was his beast, his stray lamb, needing to be brought back and tended till slaughter. One hour he’d stun me with a stave, lay me out on a rock, cut my throat, bleed me into a vessel, drink it, and butcher me, without any hurry or hating, sawing off my head, cutting me open from neck to navel, gutting me, setting the heart and lungs and kidneys aside, eating the liver while it was still warm, jointing the legs and arms at the knees and elbows and hips and shoulders, jointing the rest of the carcass into chops and bagging the meat, frozen, for his journey to the railhead. I saw myself made food and my head naked in the snow, one eye and one ear and half a mouth and nose and half a raw neck stump poking above it. I felt so sorry for my head, left over by a man maneater in the Arctic, left alone in the dark, with nothing to cover it. I saw the albino’s trail after he was out of sight, weird shallow marks, as if he trod the snow like waterfowl tread the waves in the first moments of flight. I couldn’t move so lightly and the eviscerator was behind me. I raised my legs with the power that the soon to be eaten have just before slaughter and made a kind of prancing freakish canter and saw a light ahead. It was a yellow light in the opening of a chuma. I ran tow
ards it. There were reindeer tethered outside, two big riding does and pack animals. I looked over my shoulder. I couldn’t see the Mohican behind me. I passed inside the tent.
‘There were skins spread on the snow and an oil lamp with a steady flame hung from the roof poles. The albino sat cross-legged on a grubby fox pelt. Opposite him was a shaman with iron horses sewn to his deerskins and an eye tattooed on a lump on his forehead. This is the unfortunate man whom you all know and whom, I believe, was the Mohican’s first victim in this town last night.
‘Around them they had deerskin panniers and horn tools and bunches of bark and grasses and ivory divining sticks and deer bridles and an old empty bottle of Church wine and a drum. It stank but it was as warm as summer in there and I was glad enough to cry out loud. I squatted down close to the lamp and asked them if they spoke Russian.
‘The shaman asked: “Do you have the avakhi drink?” I told him I didn’t. ‘Avakhi’ is the Tungus word for ‘demon’, which is everyone who isn’t Tungus. The shaman asked if I came from the White Garden, and whether they had strong drink there. I told him it wasn’t safe to go, that men were killing each other for food. The shaman said: “I’ve seen it. First the old get eaten by the weak, then the weak get eaten by the strong, and then the strong get eaten by the clever.”’
Samarin stopped speaking. A bad human sound was coming from outside the room, a mixture of sobbing and retching. Mutz stepped over and opened the small frosted glass window which looked out to the rear of the shtab. The people in the courtroom could hear him having a murmured conversation with someone outside. He turned back into the room. His first attempt at words was unsuccessful; his mouth was dry. He ran his tongue around his gums and tried again. He said: ‘It’s Racansky. He was looking for Lieutenant Kliment. He found him. Kliment is dead. He appears to have been killed. Murdered, I mean. I … he isn’t very far away. I suppose we should … adjourn.’
