Stephen Burke: The Reluctant Contact

Next, he tried the chest of drawers. Assorted clothes, socks, T-shirts. On top was a wallet, which he opened. There were several hundred rubles and a photo of a woman in her sixties, presumably Semyon’s mother. Yuri could see the family resemblance. Beside the wallet was a half-full bottle of red wine. He inspected the label. Georgian. He was tempted to take it, but then he noticed a scrap of paper stuck to the bottom of the bottle. He pulled it off and saw that the handwriting on it was the same as the notes in the engineering manuals.

‘8 o’clock. The whaling house.’

The note did not say what day the rendezvous was to be. Yuri wondered if it could mean a day that had yet to come. The rest of the apartment revealed no treasure, and Yuri slipped back out the door as silently as he could.

IN THE MORNING, the bruises on his abdomen had progressed to a tender and angry, multicoloured mess. Yuri self-prescribed ice, which he plucked from his windowsill. Given that several people were now connecting him with Semyon’s death, he decided against reporting to the hospital with extensive, violent bruising.

Since they were virtually imprisoned for the winter, the decision was made to bury Semyon in Pyramiden’s graveyard. If he had relatives who wanted him reinterred back home, they would face that issue in spring. Any request would most likely be denied anyway. He was not important enough to warrant the hassle of digging him up and getting his corpse home. A steel coffin was prepared in the mine workshop. Steel because the permafrost, which was three hundred feet deep, had an ugly habit of splitting wooden coffins and pushing them back up through the surface, with the deceased occupier on full view. Yuri had seen one of these before, an Albanian miner who had died of a heart attack. When his body reappeared above ground for an encore in this life, it was so well preserved the man looked as though he were sleeping.

Grigory put Yuri in charge of organising Semyon’s burial since he was the man’s superior. The truth was that no one else wanted to do it. Yuri reluctantly agreed, but doing it made him feel bad for other reasons. He had not done this much for his own brother. Nothing in fact. His brother’s neighbours had made all the arrangements for his funeral. Yuri’s single contribution had been to turn up at the appointed time. This he had managed to do. At the service, the neighbours had asked if he would like to say a few words, but he had declined. The audience was a small group of men and women he had never met before, and would not see again, so what was the point. Wherever he was, his brother would not be able to hear him. There was also the fact that he had not laid eyes on his younger sibling for years. Everyone else in the room knew him better than he did.

The Arctic topsoil was frozen so hard that a mechanical digger had to be used to prepare the hole, ten feet deep. The bottom kept filling with sludge but there was not much they could do about that. Yuri ordered the usual simple headstone, crowned with a red metal Soviet star. If Semyon had a personal religion, it would not be officially recognised on his burial plot. The state expected its people to be both communist and atheist.

The graveyard was thirty minutes’ walk from the settlement. A compromise distance between not too close to town and not too far out in the wilderness. There was no electricity here, so they worked under the digger’s headlights and an outdoor tungsten lamp connected to a noisy portable generator. Yuri moved upwind from the generator to avoid the noxious fumes billowing out of it. He looked around at the other graves, half-expecting the dead to wake with all the racket the digger was making. Happily, the deceased Albanian miner had stayed firmly interred the second time around.

When they had finished preparing the grave, Grigory came to inspect their work.

‘All right?’ shouted Yuri, over the generator’s din.

‘It’s a good hole, yes,’ said Grigory. ‘It’ll do the job.’

The party man looked around the barren graveyard. It was surrounded on all sides by a knee-high wooden picket fence, an unsuccessful attempt at giving the impression that this resting place for the dead was in some way protected from the elements.

Beyond the fence, the ice on the frozen fjord reflected the starlight in the dark sky above. Behind them, in the distance, lines of amber street lights glowed in town. Yuri checked his watch. It was two in the afternoon. Silence was restored as the digger driver switched off the generator. The man started to pack everything into the bucket of his digger for the journey back to town.

‘Do me a favour,’ said Grigory. ‘If anything should happen to me, make sure they don’t bury me here.’

‘Will do,’ agreed Yuri. ‘In that case, try and take your last breath in spring or summer if you can manage it. We can put you on the boat while you’re still warm.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ replied Grigory, with a smile. ‘What about you?’

‘Do what you like with me,’ said Yuri. ‘I’ll be dead so what does it matter.’

Grigory sighed and shook his head.

‘What?’ asked Yuri.

‘Sometimes I wonder if you actually do care about anything.’

‘Sure I do,’ said Yuri. ‘While I’m still alive, I want to stay here.’

Grigory frowned. ‘Why? There’s nothing here except snow and coal. It’s a desert with ice.’

‘Exactly,’ Yuri replied. ‘I like it that way. I’m a simple man with simple needs.’

Grigory threw his hands in the air.

Behind them, the driver had finished loading up.

‘You two want a lift?’ the man shouted.

‘Yes, we do,’ said Yuri.

‘You’ll say a few words at the funeral,’ said Grigory, as he climbed up into the digger’s cab.

‘Oh no,’ said Yuri. ‘You’re not roping me in to that.’

Grigory stopped and turned to face him. He said the same words again, in the same tone, making it clear this was not a request. ‘You will say a few words at the funeral.’

‘Come on. I hardly knew the guy,’ Yuri protested. ‘I didn’t like him and he hated me. He would turn in his grave if he knew. You’re the expert speech-maker around here. Can’t you do it? It would be better coming from you.’

‘It’ll be expected from you. And make an effort. I’ll give you a few pointers.’

‘Thanks,’ said Yuri, not bothering to hide his displeasure. ‘That makes me feel a whole lot better.’

When they arrived back in town, Yuri parted company with the two men and decided to make another trip. He borrowed the keys to one of the snowmobiles. Then, wearing goggles and gloves, he headed out again for a ten-minute drive along the western shoreline. He brought his rifle along strapped to his back, just in case. Only pregnant female polar bears went into their dens for the winter. Hungry adult males were a year-round danger. He was also unsure of what might await him at his destination.

He kept to a slow and steady pace, as the headlights of the snowmobile provided little illumination.

The whaling house was a simple wooden hut erected by whalers who had worked these waters in the last century. It was hard to believe that men had once gutted whales, right here, on the shores of this bay. The water’s edge must have been turned red with blood.

If anyone in Pyramiden in modern times wanted a high degree of privacy for a meeting, this would be the ideal place. It was long abandoned and no one went there from one end of the year to the other. Yuri parked the snowmobile to one side and turned off the engine. He had a quick look around the outside. There was not much to see. Everything was hidden under a thick blanket of snow. The hut had accumulated banks of snow halfway up its exterior walls. But he noticed that the doorway had been cleared recently, with just a foot of snow in front of it.