Marcel Theroux - Far North

I didn’t want to be like Pankov, sitting out years like a man in a waiting room, marking time until the fall that killed me, or the accident that left me unable to feed myself. But I could see how I might end up that way. Between the world of my youth, and the world I was in now, was a gap so big I was finding it harder and harder to cross it even in my imagination.

Had I dreamed a world where people flew, and food was plentiful, and we, the settlers in the north, were seen as primitives?

Life in the base gave you all the evidence you needed of men’s beastliness. And yet, looking back on long passages of my life, it felt like it was the solitary parts of it that made the least sense.

WHEN I WAS strong enough, I took my meals in the guards’ mess, where they served meat and some kind of almost-coffee alongside the things they gave the prisoners. The other guards seemed less surprised by Boathwaite’s raising me up than I was.

It wasn’t the paradise the prisoners imagined, but we had better food, and solitude. Strangely, there was a wariness between the guards themselves that I couldn’t fathom. They had a few things: a steam bath, a little store where we could buy stuff with paper tickets. And there was indeed a whorehouse. I never had need of it, and even to look at the women on the stoop in daytime, chattering and brushing their hair out, put me too much in mind of Ping.

We all lived within the base, but there was a higher order of guard who lived in the village. Some of them had taken wives and settled down.

I hadn’t changed my intention of slipping out of that place in the spring. In fact, now it would be easier. I had a greasy old side-arm they’d given me with a couple of bullets in it. And I knew where I could probably steal a horse. But there was something I wanted to attend to first.

*

In February, Boathwaite called a few of us together and told us he was sending a detachment of men to work in the Zone. There would be ten guards escorting them and I would be one of them. The Russian called Tolya who acted as Boathwaite’s deputy at the base was leading the party. He had been to the Zone many times. Of the nine others in the party, four including myself had never been there before, but even among the guards it wasn’t the style to seem too curious or ask too many questions. We acted like it was the most normal thing in the world and we just did what the others did.

At the morning line-up, each of us picked two men from the prisoners in the yard.

The experienced guards went to some trouble to choose the strongest men, feeling through their clothes for muscles and checking their eyes for clearness.

When it was my turn, I went slowly along the line, trying not to dwell on the desperation in the faces of the men in front of me, acting like I was sizing them up. It was strange how different they looked at me now I had some power over them. I havered for a while to make it seem that I was weighing up my choices, then I nodded at Shamsudin and Zulfugar to step out of the line.

*

The prisoners who had been chosen were allowed to fall out and given two minutes to collect their things from the huts. They regrouped in the parade ground and four of us marched them out, all twenty of them, through the central gate of the base, across the clearing around it, and into a low two-storey building that stood on the fringe of the guards’ village. There were two big rooms on the lower floor. One was a refectory where they were served the same food as the guards got, only a little colder because it had to be carried over there. Next to it was a sleeping room with bunks that were sprung and more generous than the ones at the base.

For the next two hours they ate and were allowed to exercise out in the clearing. It was unaccustomed freedom to all of them. Next to being made a guard it was the best that any of them could have hoped for. Most didn’t try to hide their delight at being chosen.

It was unseasonably warm and bright. Just for a moment, the idea that some of us were prisoners and some guards seemed to fade. I was filled with a rare hope. From here to the Zone seemed like an easy step. I had no fixed notion of the future, but I could feel its shape, and for once it seemed like it wasn’t a thing to be dreaded.

Shamsudin stood alone, eyes shut, face into the sun, his shoulders rising and falling with his breathing. At the edge of the clearing, the sunshine had melted the thin snow cover under the trees. Zulfugar squatted down in a mess of fallen oak leaves and dug at something with a stick.

He looked up and saw me watching and waved me over with his free hand. Just as I got to him, he yanked something out of the ground.

In his hand was a warty black ball about the size of a walnut. He held it out to me.

I took it from him. It was hard and somewhat like a nutmeg to touch. Zulfugar motioned me to smell it. ‘ Al-kamat ,’ he said. ‘The Prophet said it is good for the eyes.’ There was a glint of his gold teeth as he smiled.

Suddenly there was a shout behind me and something banged my arm. One of the other guards had charged pa and shouldered Zulfugar to the ground. Zulfugar lay on his back in the leaves looking puzzled. Two other guards had pinned him down with the muzzles of their guns and were shouting, ‘What’s he got?’

‘It’s a mushroom,’ I said, ‘and by the smell of it, a damn good one.’

‘Yes,’ said Zulfugar. ‘Mushroom.’

The guards let him up slowly. He dusted the damp leaves off his pants.

‘For you, Makepeace.’ He walked back shakily to the other prisoners.

*

Around mid-morning, we took them back to their quarters and led them into the upper room. Boathwaite was waiting for us. The prisoners sat on the floor cross-legged like schoolchildren.

‘All first-timers?’ he said to Tolya. Tolya nodded.

‘Now listen up. It’s a privilege to be chosen for the Zone, as you know. I gather that some of you are already getting the idea. You share what you bring out. Those who picked you are entitled to half of your labour.’

A couple of the guards chuckled, understanding him to be making a dig about the mushroom that had almost got Zulfugar killed.

It was beginning to dawn on me how some of them were able to live so well, with houses off the base, and wives. If you had enough workers in the Zone, it could make you a rich man. It was like what Boathwaite was doing, but on a smaller scale.

‘Joking aside, this isn’t easy work,’ Boathwaite went on. ‘I’m not going to bullshit you. Working in the Zone isn’t heavy or backbreaking, and it brings plenty of rewards, but it’s dangerous in other ways. The men who picked you, chose you because they figured you’d have the smarts to use common sense, do what we say, and not get sick.

‘You work a ten-day stretch and then you will be allowed a number of rest days back here. The harder you work, the more rest days you get. And for the best workers, there are privileges.

‘I’m going to let Mr Apofagato explain in detail what those duties involve.’

Mr Apofagato had jet-black hair and wore thick eyeglasses that fastened right round his head like welder’s goggles. I couldn’t place his accent, but I can tell you that he didn’t grow up speaking English.

‘Zone big,’ said Mr Apofagato, slapping his hand on a wall-map. ‘Almost four hundred square kilometres. Right here not Zone. Zone start far side of river. But not all contaminated. Your duties — mine objects. What objects? These.’

He unrolled a handwritten chart and tacked it over the map. It showed about a dozen different objects, all carefully drawn in coloured ink, and rough measurements around them. Some of them were familiar to me — electrical batteries, something like a wireless, but the others looked like nothing I had ever seen.