Marcel Theroux - Far North

Even after years of standing empty, there was something sweet in the air of that room: some faint smell of dried roses behind the mustiness and the rat and roach poison that had been so conscientiously laid around the skirting boards.

I found the girl’s diary in the second drawer of the dressing table. It was all in Russian, but I knew what it said without having to read it. I could tell that it warned off snoopers with threats and spells. It rated the boys in her class for their promise as lovers and husbands. It charted the monthly cycles that were the first proofs of her womanhood, and it looked forward impatiently to a future that was already dust. I knew because I’d had one just like it.

In the story of Goldilocks, the little girl sneaks into a bearden, eats the animals’ food, and finds a place to sleep. That night, I felt I was that story in reverse: a stinking, scarred bear, reeking of blood and gun-smoke, turning up in a world of clean sheets and flowers.

Sitting on that bed, I felt some part of me emerge the way a snail does, soft and flinching, reaching up to the sunlight with its tender horns.

So little of my life was human — at least, not human in the way the girl who had once lived here would understand it.

I thought about Ping, and if her baby had lived: maybe I could have made her a room like this one, and lost myself in the turning years, knowing I’d dug my patch, and fixed my house, and loved the people I was supposed to.

The bronze head in the square spoke of a race with grand notions, but my bet is that all most people ever wanted was this.

In the drawer where the diary had been stood a jar of cold cream, the cream inside all stiff and waxy with age. I smeared a finger-full on my wind-burned lips. The taste of it numbed my tongue the way soap does.

I put the jar and the diary back and slid the drawer shut. It stuck, and as I jerked it free, I heard something rattle at the back. I drew it out: a perfect oval, flat and heavy, that sat in my hand like a turkey egg. It was so cool on my palm I took it for a paperweight at first, until the fading sunlight showed the etched shapes on its upper side that told me it was a memory stone.

*

Around three that morning it started to snow again. It can’t have been the sound that woke me up, because there was none. Maybe it was the change of light in the room. It poured out of the sky like feathers from a split pillow — big warm-weather flakes.

It seemed to double the starlight as it whirred down past the glass of the bedroom window. I came to consciousness on that girl’s bed, watching it fall, and I felt a kind of peace in me. It made me glad that this scaly old world still has so many pretty things in it.

I must have drifted off again. Next thing I knew, the horse was hollering, and I was halfway down the stairs shouting at whoever it was to get gone, with my gun cocked and my eyes still barely open.

There was a mess of snow in the hallway and someone had tried to unfasten the horse’s bridle. They had fled at the sound of me yelling.

I swung myself into the saddle and chased out after them.

It turned out there was only one. I followed the tracks he had left as he laboured through the snow with his chain on. I’ve hunted down some men in my time, but this one didn’t take much catching. He was all broken with the weather and the short rations. The best he seemed able to do was to huddle in a shadowy alleyway and pray I mistook him for something else in the darkness.

He waited and waited, hoping I’d pass along. Thinking of the plague and the withered man in the apartment, I didn’t want to get too close to him, but I had no intention of leaving him be, either, so that he could make more trouble.

After what seemed like a foolishly long time, I shouted out to him that if he didn’t show his face, I’d kill him as a stranger, and sleep no worse for it, and then I broke and closed the breech of my gun with a snap so there was no mistaking my intention.

He shuffled forward out of the darkness on his knees and begged me not shoot. When he looked up at me, the first flush of dawn in the sky behind me lit up his face. It was Shamsudin.

He squinted up at me and said my name as though it was a question. His voice was croaky and thick with thirst.

Telling him to wait where he was, I went and fetched one of my pails of water for him. He clutched it in his arms and put his face in the bucket to drink. Between gulps he raised his head and sat with his eyes closed, panting with relief and fatigue. The water dripped off his beard and back into the pail. When he offered the bucket back to me, I told him he could keep it.

I guess I was pleased to see him alive, though I had no desire to let him near to me. It could have been Charlo or my own pa in that place and I still would have kept upwind of him and ten yards between us. I didn’t believe that the guards would have killed those for nothing, or go to all that trouble with their masks and suits because they felt like it. Tolya knew more about the Zone than I did and he didn’t trust to luck to stay healthy.

Shamsudin asked me about the others.

I said the guards were waiting on the other side of the river and as far as I knew all the prisoners but him were dead.

That seemed to surprise him less than I expected, then I saw that he had fallen asleep. His face looked old and hollow and the skin of it hung in baggy folds.

I whistled him out of his slumber. It was cold enough that he would never come round if he slept there.

He stumbled after me groggily. I led him to the stairwell and covered him with a heap of bedclothes from the apartment.

*

At dawn, I went up to the roof to watch the sun come up over the city. It lit the glass in the distant windows of the second city — gold and bronze, and some the greenish-blue of cut ice.

I took the memory stone up with me and laid it down so it could drink in the sunshine for a few hours and come to life. It looked even prettier in the daylight, bright and shiny as a knife-blade. It had an ebony screen. There was some tiny writing on the front in Russian and a row of buttons marked with symbols that I couldn’t recognize. They moved with a faint click at the lightest touch. On the back were written the only words I could understand: Made in China.

*

The guards struck their camp and headed off an hour or so after sunrise. They moved slowly along the eastern bank of the river. I lay on my belly and followed them with the glass. They had just enough animals for the journey back. The sleds were loaded up with the things that had been brought out of the Zone.

All the bodies had been left where they had fallen. The one that had died on his knees had keeled over in the night. The others lay piled under the fresh snow too far away for me to count them, even with the glass.

I put some kibble in a pillowcase for Shamsudin to eat when he woke up.

It was a nuisance keeping him in this half-assed quarantine, but I didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t certain that he was a danger to me, but I couldn’t risk it. I thought it was best not to touch him, or anything he handled or ate, and not breathe the same air.

He came around towards mid-morning. I watched from higher up the stairwell as he munched the food I’d left him.

The sleep and water seemed to do him some good. He looked less deathly and he had some of his old poise back.

I said to him that the guards had gone and we were free to go.

‘Free to go where?’ he asked.

I shrugged and told him he could go where he liked. As for me, I was headed home.

He gave me a mistrusting look. I sensed that business in the woods still hung over him. I said I wasn’t minded to pay him back for thinking of killing me. I found it easy enough to forgive him. I m