Granta 125: After the War

by John Freeman

  If he doubts, she convinces him. That’s how it is and will be.

  And each time he’s reassured, he draws in closer.

  ‘How are you surviving?’

  ‘OK. How about you?’

  They are solicitous in balanced but not identical situations. She asks how he is during illnesses, if political news has upset him, if they have quarrelled. He asks after lovemaking, if she’s tired, if they have quarrelled. They quarrel mainly at great speed, so they can move on to enquiries and holding and being held and can have nothing wrong any more. They lean on the rise and fall of their ribs when the shouting’s done, old trouble in the press of breath. As a rule, they don’t like being scared without each other, not even if each other is what scared them.

  This morning hasn’t been frightening, not quite. They spent it with each other in a lawyer’s office, going through unspilled paperwork so that their lives will be coordinated and tidy from here on in.

  She called it the document instead of the will. This made matters slightly confusing and so she changed to my document and your document and eventually everyone – all three of them – was documenting.

  Afterwards, business over, he kissed her in the street – a grey building at his back with a grubby doorway and so she closed her eyes while they hugged and therefore spared herself the ugliness. He kisses very well. On that occasion, he was particularly fine.

  Such an uncomfortable day, though. She would prefer if it were done.

  But no need for worry.

  No sense in making assumptions or being bleak in advance.

  There’s no way to be certain of when anybody will leave.

  After you.

  That’s what people say.

  That’s what she wants.

  After you.

  Then she’d keep the whole rest of him and miss nothing else.

  But he has to be the gentleman, can’t help it.

  No. After you.

  Which wouldn’t be right.

  But neither is right.

  Someone else having their apple trees, unwatched fires.

  And she isn’t sure she’ll manage, not in the end, doesn’t see how she could, and she wishes she wasn’t carrying this silly paper bag with the fig in it that she won’t eat, can’t eat. She wants to fold her arms or put her hands in her pockets, she isn’t clear which.

  He settles his hand at the small of her back and then lets her swing and face him and see how he is weary and opened and gently and sadly himself. ‘Are you OK, though? Really?’

  She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best.

  POEM | JEAN-PAUL DE DADELSEN

  from Opening Invocation

  They lived with us in the belly of the whale.

  The whale spit them out on the other shore:

  The shy ones.

  The left-handed.

  The one who was albino and stammered.

  The nearsighted. The distrustful, the cunning.

  And that tall boy who was always hungry,

  always sleepy.

  Do they sometimes look over our shoulders?

  Since they’ve gone, we’ve seen no one.

  Are we blind? Or

  ‘spiritualism, that negro religion’, writes,

  in some delightful periodical, a Reverend Father.

  And yet

  if they were looking, sometimes, over our shoulders?

  Or otherwise, leaving the shore of the intermediate sea,

  has it been a while since they’ve gone ahead

  into the interior of lands of the spirit?

  The black sorcerer knows how to call, knows, even when they want

  to depart, how to call back shadows, souls.

  Who among us would know how to call,

  know how to bring back

  the shadow of John,

  of Bernard,

  of Maurice?

  In honour of Monseigneur Saint Maurice

  Roman colonel who commanded the Theban legion,

  martyr, his feast on September 22,

  the abbot of St-Maurice-en-Valais, bishop of Bethlehem

  wears a ribbon of scarlet moiré.

  But Maurice,

  who no longer went to the synagogue, no longer painted flowers,

  painted only a patch of wall, an open door, a bit

  of the studio’s light through a half-open door,

  verticals, the floor’s horizon line,

  Maurice, who deprived himself of green, of blue,

  who among our dead will serve as guide for Maurice?

  Who among our living will know to light a flame for Maurice?

  What will we burn of ourselves

  to feed the spiritual flame that will be able

  to warm, to deliver Maurice?

  (A tradition, do you remember, claims that suicides,

  imprisoned in mental mirrors, suffer at length

  from seeing everything, never able to act, avert, aid.)

  Shadow,

  looking over my shoulder

  what can I do for you?

  There is no shadow here, only

  the effort and the work of living men

  time’s length, the resistance of mere matter.

  But who will say

  if the shadows among us

  are not bent in their turn

  over the same inexhaustible task?

  Shadow, what can I do for you?

  With my short-sighted eyes, my living eyes

  with my stubborn, living hands

  with this body, the time left to me.

  Shadow, do you want me to look

  in your place

  at these faces, these fields?

  do you want me to touch

  in your place

  these flowers, this hair, these things?

  do you want me to try

  with you

  to lift this heavy burden even a little?

  What have you done with your brother Maurice?

  I was somewhere else. I heard nothing.

  I wasn’t listening. I was looking in the mirror.

  I wasn’t the one who turned on the gas.

  I did nothing for my brother Maurice.

  Shadow, what can I offer you?

  What bread?

  I did not prepare the ground, did not plough, did not sow,

  I marked out only paths of dust and

  sometimes my wake on the sea that forgets all passings.

  What bread, but that of darkness and separation?

  What water?

  I did not walk toward refreshing waters,

  I have nothing to offer you to drink.

  And Bernard

  who always slept stretched out full length

  on his belly, one arm extended like a

  swimmer doing the crawl in sleep’s deep waters,

  what have you done with your brother Bernard?

  He did not call out to me.

  When I cannot keep myself

  how can I be my brother’s keeper?

  To what shall I bear witness

  if not my own unjust reprieve?

  Shadow, do you remember? There was a time

  when, like women in labour

  we looked at life and death with the same gaze.

  What does it matter to me if

  the universe is shaped like an egg or

  like a boomerang? Our only country is

  this sparse shore where we’ve been thrown up,

  our only journey is

  the journey in the belly of the whale.

  Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

  GRANTA

  * * *

  ZONE OF ABSOLUTE DISCOMFORT

  Justin Jin

  * * *

  Inside the claustrophobic confines of a shipping container, a group of Russians waits out another day of an Arctic storm. Anton bakes blini. Andrei watches the same horror movie again. Alexei tries to craft a toothpaste holder from an empty tin can. Lisa th
e dog, who finds company among the hundred men in Camp No. 2, curls up in the farthest corner from the draughty door. The engineers gathered on this desolate patch of Russian tundra were hired by a geo-exploration company to look for oil deep below the permafrost. I am waiting out the battering winds with them, documenting the international race to appropriate Arctic resources.

  I made six trips over three years to the Russian Arctic region, a 7,000-kilometre area stretching from Finland to Alaska, which Moscow bureaucrats have named ‘Zone of Absolute Discomfort’. The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tons of resources trapped beneath the ground.

  Here, three different groups of people, representing three contrasting ways of life and three centuries of Russian history, exploit resources amid the world’s harshest conditions: indigenous reindeer herders known as Nenets; descendants of former Soviet prisoners; and energy company men seeking a rich cache of oil and natural gas.

  For hundreds of years, this part of the Russian Arctic was home only to the Nenets. The Soviet government tried to force these nomads into collective farms, and some were resettled in apartment blocks, abruptly altering their way of life. Other Nenets escaped Soviet rule and remained on the tundra, raising reindeer for meat and benefiting from an uptick in the demand for antlers, which are sold as aphrodisiacs in China. I sought my subjects via snowmobile, straining to see the Nenets chums, or tents, and reindeer herds on the bleak horizon. My hosts welcomed me with a bowl of frozen whole reindeer brain, a Nenets delicacy.

  In the Far North’s urban areas, mounted jet aircraft stand sentry over cities used and abused by the Soviet government, and descendants of Stalin’s prisoners populate the streets. Though most of the Arctic labour camps were abandoned in the 1950s, many former inmates chose to stay. The Soviet government built settlements for those who worked in the mines and used high salaries to attract newcomers. The area boomed for a while, but the regime had no regard for nature and sustainability and scarred the once-pristine land. Now, pollutants shock the landscape and its inhabitants; in one town, sulphur rain kills all vegetation within five kilometres of the mine. As I photographed this dying landscape, the secret police followed me day and night, trying to discourage my efforts to document this environmental horror.

  When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian republic neglected the towns and cities of the Arctic Circle. Mines and factories closed, marking an entire generation in the Arctic region with poverty and alcoholism. Many fled to seek a future elsewhere; those who stayed often don’t work, age rapidly and die young.

  In the last decade scientists have discovered billions of tons of oil and gas trapped underneath the tundra. New workers’ outposts rise adjacent to the shells of old Soviet drill sites. Engineers and miners from around the world work short stints in the region. They come with expensive, sophisticated equipment and earn substantial sums for their hardship tour.

  The indigenous herders who survived Soviet collectivization now struggle against this new, menacing foe. Pipelines block Nenets migration routes, while asphalt highways and gated drilling towers interfere with the search for fresh pastures.

  It is the Nenets who must yield, as the Russian government has invested billions in energy exploration and asserted dominance over the region in 2007 by planting a titanium flag into the Arctic seabed. Ice-breaking ships circle the northernmost oil terminal in the world, near the North Pole, where global warming has opened an Arctic sea route in summer months. Within two decades, further warming may create a year-round ice-free route for container ships travelling between Asia and Europe.

  This crucial period in the Far North fascinated me so much that I did much of the groundwork myself, trudging for days in deep snow and pushing my body and my cameras to their limits. The Russian military granted me unprecedented access to photograph the extreme northern oil terminal from the air, but only after I repeatedly appealed to senior government officials and energy company CEO s. Our helicopter flew on the edge of the North Pole region, an area rich with resources prized by countries with an Arctic reach, like the US and Canada, and even nations like China that simply thirst for oil.

  But behind the geopolitics are the individuals who eke out a life in this unforgiving desert. Back in the shipping container, Andrei and Alexei grow restless, and talk about their next opportunity to ‘strike gold’ out on the ice. When the wind stills for a moment, they grab towels and bolt for the makeshift sauna a few containers down the road. It is powered by pure Arctic diesel.

  ZONE OF ABSOLUTE DISCOMFORT

  Justin Jin

  1. Chums shield herders from temperatures of -45 degrees Celsius in the Nenets Autonomous Region.

  2. A herder rounds up his reindeer.

  3. A herder undergoing alcoholism treatment in Naryan-Mar.

  4. A reindeer dehorned for China’s aphrodisiac market.

  5. Filip, 70, and his wife, Angelina, 68, butcher a reindeer.

  6. Monument to the armed forces above Murmansk, a strategic city during the Cold War.

  7. Trees killed by acid rain near the nickel-processing facility at Nikel.

  8. Sulphur dioxide emitted from the facility at Nikel.

  9. In Zapolyarny, Murmansk province, where the groundwater is acidified by the nickel plant (top right corner).

  10. Sergei and Masha at polar midnight in Zapolyarny.

  11. Lights shine from the last occupied flat in an apartment block in Yor Shor, Vorkuta.

  12. An empty boarding house in downtown Vorkuta, a labour camp under Stalin.

  13. Alexander, 35, in Revda.

  14. Valery kisses Lena in front of his friend, in Vorkuta.

  15. A prostitute solicits clients in Murmansk.

  16. A bay in Teriberka, a once-prosperous fish-processing community.

  It is slated for redevelopment after the discovery of the Shtokman field, the world’s largest natural gas field.

  17. Miners smoke under a no-smoking sign at the Severny coal pit near Vorkuta.

  18. A driver repairs his truck at a camp set up by the Siesmorevzedka oil and gas prospecting company.

  19. Snowstorm at a Siesmorevzedka company camp.

  20. Andrei, a snow-tank driver.

  21. A man rubs himself with snow outside a sauna at a Siesmorevzedka company camp.

  22. The world’s most northerly oil terminal, operated by Lukoil.

  23. Workers from Bashneft oil and gas company battle a snowstorm while building a drilling site.

  24. Bashneft workers in the smoking room.

  25. Workers construct a gas-drilling well for the Polar Lights Company.

  26. A Lukoil worker repairs a leaking pipe in the Komi district.

  27. Lukoil workers repair a drilling well.

  28. Workers prepare to drill into the permafrost at a well in Novy Urengoy.

  GRANTA

  * * *

  ALWAYS THE SAME SNOW AND ALWAYS THE SAME UNCLE

  Herta Müller

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY GEOFFREY MULLIGAN

  * * *

  Seen from behind, the women’s hairdos were sitting cats. Why do I have to say sitting cats to describe hair?

  Everything always became something else. At first unobtrusively something else, if you just happened to look at it. But then demonstrably something else when you had to find the right words to describe it. If you want to be precise in your description, you have to find something completely different within the sentence to allow you to be precise.

  Every woman in the village had a long, thick plait. The plait was folded back on itself and directed vertically upwards, and a rounded horn comb kept it standing proud above the middle of the head. The teeth of the horn comb vanished into the hair, and only the corners of its curved edge peeked out like small, pointed ears. With those ears and the thick plait, the back of the women’s heads looked like a cat sitting bolt upright.

  These vagabond qualities that turned one object into
another were unpredictable. They distorted one’s perception in the blink of an eye, made of it what they wished. Every thin branch swimming in the water resembled a water snake. Because of my constant fear of snakes I have been afraid of water. Not out of fear of drowning, but out of fear of snake wood, I never learned to swim for fear of scrawny, swimming branches. The imagined snakes had a more powerful effect than real ones could have, they were in my thoughts whenever I saw the river.

  And whenever funerals approached the cemetery the bell was sounded. One long tug on the rope followed by the small bell with its rapid, urgent ringing – for me that was the cemetery snake that lured people towards death with its saccharine tongue, and the dead towards the caress of the grave. And those caresses soothed the dead, you could sense it from the breath of wind in the cemetery. What soothed the dead revolted me. The more it revolted me, the more I had to think about it. For there was always a breeze, always some cool or warm and dry wind. I was distressed by it. But instead of hurrying, only my breath came in a rush, and I carried the water slowly, watered the flowers slowly, lingered. Those imagined objects in my head with their vagabond qualities may have been an addiction. I was constantly looking for them, so they came looking for me. They ran after me like a mob, as if my fear could feed them. But they probably fed me, gave an image to my fear. And images, above all threatening ones, don’t have to console, and therefore they don’t have to disappoint, and therefore they never shatter. You can conjure up the same image again and again in your head. Thoroughly familiar, it becomes a support. The repetition made it new every time, and took care of me.