by Steve Stern
Almost involuntarily he began to collect the tiny pots of salt from the log canteen, squirreling them away among the fir branches his mattress was stuffed with. Other items he secreted in that lumpy mattress were bought, no questions asked, with hard currency: the mess kit, the tinderbox, a wire noose for snaring game. With gradually increasing histrionics he started to demonstrate the symptoms of derangement that overtook the mine workers as a prelude to total collapse. He spoke aloud to himself in a nonsensical hybrid of Russian and Yiddish, and pretended to read fortunes in the globules of fat he scooped from his gruel on a good day. More than once, though he could barely stand at the end of the working day, he coaxed his toothpick legs into a kind of spontaneous scarecrow gavotte. No one paid him much attention, so accustomed were the other prisoners to the extravagant behavior of convicts on their way out; though Ilya Popov, former editor of the leftist Proletarii, himself stricken with silicosis, saw the method in Muni’s antics and slipped his fellow traveler a clamshell compass with a sundial before he died.
Then it was nearing autumn and the soft ground was hard again; the rivulets from the melted snows that had mired the transport sledges and made the taiga impassable were dried up. That’s when Muni swallowed all the salt he’d been hoarding. The insult to his system brought on a hectic fever that got him transferred to the infirmary, an aboveground facility outside the camp “zone.” Its wards—each guarded by a single sentry seated with a shotgun beside an iron stove—featured every species of real and imaginary affliction. No disease was quarantined: convicts suffering from typhoid lay next to those turned yolk-yellow from jaundice; pneumonia victims rattled their last beside imposters who worried superficial wounds into life-threatening infections. There was little actual treatment, few instruments, and no anesthesia for surgery, and small medication beyond the bottles of alcohol drunk up by the orderlies mustered from among the patients. Nor was there any barbed wire surrounding the infirmary grounds, since who, having gained a berth without shackles in the sick bay, would (even given the strength) want to leave?
Muni lay gibbering on his cot, despite his broken fever, in a self-scripted delirium, raising himself on occasion to perform his St. Vitus rigor. The strategy was intended to get him judged dokhodyag by the skeleton staff: a lost cause convict in the throes of his final agony; and it appeared to work. The stranger his behavior, the more it seemed he was ignored by the population of that raving pesthouse. Moreover, so drowsy was the round-faced sentry that Muni could almost believe that what was left of his topcoat, notwithstanding its clanking from the provisions he’d sewn inside it, served as a cloak of invisibility. Thus emboldened, he contrived, after a week of conspicuous malingering, to sidle by breathless degrees out of the ward, slip along a corridor, and pad down the stairs into the chill October night. He plunged into a stand of larches and paused with a stampeding heart beside a patch of black ice that had survived the previous winter. Though he’d tied the earflaps of his flannel cap tightly under his chin, the cold had already penetrated the several layers of his clothing; his eyes watered, his nostril hairs become bristle-stiff, and frost invaded his lungs. He took the compass from the folds of his coat and tapped its glass face, but the needle would not come unstuck. Neither was he assisted by the stars that glinted metallically through the branches above him, resembling nothing so much as the vaulted ceiling of the mica mine. But there was a pale lavender light in a corner of the sky: that would be the east, and it was away from the light that the fugitive’s steps must tend.
He slept by day, shivering in burrows dug into clay embankments with a sliver of spruce. He ate from his little store of rubbery fish preserved in the stinking oil he’d pilfered along with a bolus of congealed fat; he smeared the fat on the hardtack he rationed himself over the numberless days. He chewed wrinkled berries hard as goat turds sprinkled over a salad of thistles and mushrooms tough as rawhide. Through nights that grew ever longer, he stumbled across the bone-brown steppe and up through sparse timberland, blundering into treacherous ravines. His garments, ragged to begin with, hung from him in shreds, his footcloths working their way out of his galoshes, his hair and beard matted with twigs. He wasted hours building fires, chipping away at the flint from his tinderbox until the sparks ignited the kindling and moss. Often the vicinity of nightfall would threaten to turn the fire into a beacon, and Muni would have to abort his progress; but without the periodic warmth and drying out the fire afforded there would be no progress at all. Shivering in holes lined with ash branches and willow shrubs, he poked his head out to see now a foraging bear, now a party of forced-marching convicts or a patrol perhaps looking for him. Some patrols passed practically under his nose and Muni wondered that they hadn’t sniffed him out in his blind; but the sled dogs were not retrievers and his marginal subsistence left only the slightest of trails.
At some point Muni realized that the search parties no longer seemed to be in pursuit, and guessed that the time allotted for hunting the runaway had elapsed. Or had he actually wandered beyond their range? Muni waited to feel the relief that never came. He grieved that he had no way to measure his transit, no program for reaching Irkutsk, which was the terminus of the Trans-Siberian railroad some five hundred kilometers west of the mines. He was a speck in a vast mapless terrain, and after so many detours around crags and unfordable torrents he was unsure that he was even traveling in the right direction. Still, the nearly continuous gloom of winter had not yet set in, and the sun, however shrouded, still gave some faint indication of which side of the earth it rose upon.
He nibbled roots, ate a scallopy fungus that he sometimes vomited up, sometimes evacuated in a helpless diarrhea. It hadn’t occurred to him that hunger and exhaustion could so far exceed what he’d already been accustomed to. Then the snows had commenced, submerging the landscape in a polar desert, burying as well the dying flora that provided Muni with occasional nourishment. Wildlife was scarce and entirely unavailable to one who lacked the skill to lay traps. Once or twice, spotting a hedgehog or guinea fowl, he chased it, expending energy he could no longer spare; he found the carcass of a musk deer and cooked what remained of its fetid meat, which he choked down and instantly threw up. In the chill mouth of a cave, where the elements had preserved it, he came upon the corpse of a man. It wore the vestiges of a sheepskin burnoose and bore on a creased blue cheek the Cyrillic tattoo that marked it as an escapee from an earlier era. Muni wondered if his own corpse would age as well. He chewed bark, sucked icicles, and began effectively to starve. Sometimes he remembered the currency tucked in his galosh and had to snicker over the cruel joke his unknown uncle had played on him. Intermittently snow-blind, he wondered if the nothing that wasn’t there was equivalent to the nothing that was. In this way the fugitive’s own logic confounded him.
Though the number that had replaced his name in the camp had faded from his mind, his own given name had little more sonority. Words had become so remote that Muni would occasionally pronounce some phrase aloud (“Administer to the prisoner one hundred flagellum pletes!”) just to ensure that he still had a voice, though he frightened himself by the shattered silence. He exhaled a powdery moisture that stiffened his beard and fell to the ground in a shower of crystals, with a sound the convicts called “the whistling of stars.” Now that the ground had grown too hard to dig, he burrowed in snowdrifts and told himself the snow was fleece. He woke to find the exposed parts of his body distended and without sensation, then stamped his feet and beat his arms with his fists until the stinging began and feeling started to return.
After a storm, while treading a shallow defile where the snow concealed a thin skin of ice over a spring-fed stream, he fell through. By the time Muni had managed to scramble back onto the bank, the water had sheathed his trousers in ice. Unable to feel his extremities, he had the disoriented impression of being unconnected to the earth; he was desperate for a fire but the ice inhibited his movements like a suit of armor. Still he managed to squat and strike sparks with the flint we
dged between his gelid mittens. He succeeded in igniting a scrap of birch bark, which he dropped in some nearby underbrush, but no sooner had he fanned the brush into flame than an overhead bough released its burden of snow on top of him, snuffing out the fire. Half-buried himself, he was a stranger to his hands and feet, which he endeavored to locate with filmy eyes. The numbness that swiftly invaded his limbs would soon engulf his heart and still its stammering, and anticipating that moment Muni let go a voluptuous sigh, relinquishing the small affection he had left for the world.
He wandered in and out of consciousness, vaguely aware of being attended by creatures whose fur-trimmed hoods framed shadows where their faces should have been. That was in the forest where he was jounced on an inclined litter pulled by beasts with branched menorahs protruding from their heads. Later on he perceived in more lucid moments that, now that their hoods were thrown back, the creatures did have faces of a sort, though the faces seemed to be missing essential features. There were open wounds in place of noses, eyes drooling onto collapsed cheeks like traveling snails. Their chamois-mittened hands, which pummeled him in an effort to restore sensation to his deadened limbs, were not mittens at all but nubs bearing only the stumps of absent fingers. Satisfied that he was either dead or dreaming, Muni drifted until the nerves in his fingers and toes began to send howling dispatches throughout his spent anatomy. Then he woke up to the realization that he was not in hell but on a pallet in an octagonal wooden structure, smoke curling from stoked embers through a hole in the roof. Rather than abducted by a tribe of gargoyles, he had been rescued by the inhabitants of a far-flung colony of the mutilated and misbegotten. They were survivors, the burned-out offscourings of a disease that had run its ruinous course. But while the malady was no longer communicable, it occurred to Muni as he began to recover that leprous deformation might be just the disguise for an absconded brodyag, a fugitive such as he.
His emotions still deep-frozen, Muni felt neither gratitude nor revulsion toward his hosts, as they applied their poultices to his frostbite and pried a revolting broth between his crusted lips. For their part the colony’s population neither ostracized nor made to absorb their guest, but once they’d restored him to reasonable health simply tolerated Muni’s presence. He observed no discernible order to their society, no special roles assigned: those capable of doing did while the rest endured. They raised enough beets and marrows during the short growing season to see them through most of the winter. Occasionally they slaughtered a reindeer from their cadaverous herd, using its hide for the clothing they seldom changed. They caught trout in a nearby stream, which they salted and froze and pounded into a meal mixed with moss to make flapjacks. Once in a while they might procure from an itinerant prospector a horsehead, which they would boil and feast on for days. They slept together in clumps for warmth in their slapdash yurts and the crouched lodge—stinking of sour milk and gangrene—where Muni was housed. The noises they made in the night alternately terrified and fascinated their guest, who was unable to distinguish between their unchaste baying and cries of anguish from the pain of their strangled nerves.
Once he was on his feet again, though still shaky, Muni did try to make himself useful: when he was strong enough, he began to accompany the village’s hunting and fishing parties, attempting the basics of setting snares and drilling holes through the ice with an outsized corkscrew—operations for which he showed little aptitude. Though wary of the fugitive—for they were under no illusion that he was anything else—the natives were not unfriendly. Some, like Fyfka the Reptile, so-called for his crocodilian skin, and Grigory Popp, with his warty lesions and saddle nose, made companionable overtures. Grigory had himself been a hard-labor convict, turned out of a camp lest he contaminate others, and so was well disposed to sympathize with Muni’s plight. Then there was Esma, a Buryat girl with a blacksnake braid, who kept her burnt-almond face kerchiefed like a bandit to hide the rictus of her mouth and ulcerous jaw. She, it seemed, had conceived a particular fondness for the fugitive, which she demonstrated in moderately aggressive gestures. The most conspicuous of these was her habit of rubbing against him at every opportunity, a development that Muni found especially disquieting at night, when he lay for warmth among the others in a squeamish intimacy. Then he might feel her spare hips pressing against his backside, her lobster claw teasing his spine.
It was enough to make him think better of lingering longer in their community, but the season of snowstorms was upon them and it would have been suicide to continue his journey before spring. Besides, the villagers would have been obligated by their code of hospitality to hinder his premature departure. So Muni stayed on, gathering strength, while the brutal weather forced the colony into a period of hibernation.
Dogs and reindeer shared the crowded shelters, compounding their noxious atmosphere. No one ventured outside except to fetch wood or relieve themselves, and a stranger approaching the village would have observed few signs of human habitation. All that was visible above the snow were enameled mounds, black plumes coiling from the smokeholes like tassels on a Tartar’s helmet. In the absence of the sun in its midwinter retreat the inhabitants led a troll-like existence, which is not to say they were idle: their long naps were often an excuse for indiscriminate sporting in the dark. Collectively afflicted with tapeworm, they gorged themselves on their bilge-like bouillon and the gamy venison rissoles with kneaded roe; they drank measureless cups of tea laced with monkshood schnapps. They told tales of werewolves and flesh-eating Baba Yagas by the light of the fish oil lamps. And there was music, when the leonine Attila broke out his concertina and accompanied a windup victrola playing polkas and scratchy quadrilles. Then those with feet would dance despite the cramped space, music and drink having whipped them into a bacchic frenzy.
Throughout the weeks the eager, drop-footed Esma continued to moon over Muni. But the trinkets with which she embellished her frowzy garments and the immodest glimpses she allowed of her scaly flesh did little to promote her suit. Still she persisted in her indiscreet advances, which the fugitive was compelled to eschew in a manner that could only be interpreted as rejection. So disconsolate had Esma become that Fyfka the Reptile, in his capacity as unofficial starosta or elder, felt obliged to intervene. “Why you don’t give to the girl a tumble,” he urged in some polyglot tongue near enough to Russian for the guest to compehend. When Muni replied that he would rather not, Fyfka assumed he was being coy, which was at least part of the truth. For even had the girl resembled his own species, the fugitive would have had scruples; he had after all never known a woman, and (Hebraic taboos aside) had yet to recover enough of himself to feel equal to such an occasion.
Muni tried to plead diplomatically that the girl was just not his type, but the elder put it to him that the situation was urgent: she was wasting away for want of the young man who could boast all his digits and toes.
“How can you tell?” blurted Muni, who immediately wished to retract his thoughtlessness. But the damage was done and from that moment on his welcome—as borne out by the entire community—was officially outworn.
In the meantime a thin band of sea-green light had appeared on the horizon promising the return of the sun: it danced, the light, inside the ice cake that served as a windowpane like a filament in a glass bulb. A speckled snow bunting was seen to perch on a frozen midden, at which sign Grigory Popp and Grinka Spivak, jowls hung with nodules like bunches of grapes, began helping to provision Muni by way of expediting his departure. Having no need of it, the untouchables returned to him the money they’d held in safekeeping, which astonished the fugitive, who’d never missed it. When he offered them compensation, the gesture was viewed as an insult.
They saw him off in a purga, a blizzard, with the assurance that spring was just around the corner. There was no special ceremony to mark his parting, though he was escorted by Fyfka the Reptile and some of the others (leaning on crutches, paddling in wooden crates on runners) past the boundaries of their village. In fact, he wa
s led far enough beyond the belt of mixed forest and steppe surrounding the settlement that Muni couldn’t have found his way back even if he’d wanted to. Somewhat resentful of his abrupt send-off, once he was alone again amid the limitless Siberian barrens, he began terribly to miss his unclean hosts.
They had equipped him well, outfitting him in a fur-trimmed parka, trousers with a white fox lining, and moccasins with reindeer-hoof soles. They’d furnished him with a cedar sledge, lashed to which were a tent and animal snares plus several weeks’ worth of foodstuffs. There was a flask of vodka tasting of turpentine, a brick of black tea, and a sleeping sack made from muskrat pelts. They gave him as well a partial map of the territory, insisting it was all he needed, since by the time he’d traveled beyond its edge he would either have crossed the frontier or expired. They cautioned him to follow the sun (what sun?) due west, but owing to the irregularities of the region it was difficult to maintain an undeviating direction, and often he had the sense that he was traveling in circles. The snowflakes battered him like hailstones, though after his first frightful nights in the wild the squalls began to abate. Muni knew that haste was essential: with spring the swollen streams and mudslides would make the distance to Lake Baikal impassable. Moreover, the lake itself, practically an inland sea, must be frozen solid during his passage or else he would have to traverse the hundreds of miles around it. But he was hard pressed to summon the necessary urgency; his destination—Memphis, America, home of the deliverer to whom he owed (he supposed) some recompense—evoked in him no feeling of any kind. The mindless impulse to cover ground, to put one foot doggedly in front of the other, was all that now characterized his trek.
