Marcel Theroux - Far North

I watched them drift away into the forest. The woman with her baby rode behind the man wearing Tolya’s jacket, and the white girl didn’t give a backward glance.

Soon there were only two of them left in the clearing with their horses, the boy and the man with the knife. The boy patted the flank of his horse, but instead of swinging up into its saddle, he handed me the reins and got up on the other horse behind his friend.

He looked back at me for an instant with the blank face of a stranger. There was no kindness or understanding in his expression. I can’t say what he might have been thinking.

It would be nice to suppose he did me a good turn for the one I did him. But there’s no telling ow grace works. I don’t even know if there’s a word for mercy in Yakut.

The imprint of his empty eyes stayed with me when he turned away. He dipped his head as the two of them rode under a branch which scattered snow down his back. In ten more yards, they had vanished, and the drip of the thaw swallowed the sounds of their hooves.

I thought of the curt way I turned him loose that time by the river bank, and of times out hunting when I just held my shot on a whim, or threw back fish because they were too small. They never lingered to speculate about my motives.

It would be consoling to think there’s a pattern of justice in things, but I’ve seen enough to be sure that there isn’t. My father would point to what the boy did and say it was the redeemable part of his humanity. Maybe — rarer than a tadpole in a hailstone — that’s what it was. But if I killed ten caribou, butchered them for their meat and skins, and then freed a snared rabbit just for the pleasure of watching its fluffy behind vanishing in the bracken, would that make me St Francis? I’d be deceived to think so.

The horse licked my bare hand. My pack and glove lay under the tree where I’d been woken. I found them, swung my stiff body onto the horse and aimed her nose at the sunrise.

I KEPT AWAY from the track we’d come out on in case Boathwaite had sent a party to find where we’d got to. It meant slower going, but I had the whole summer to get home.

At night, I’d see my route in the sky, mapped out in a pattern of stars. The Lena takes a great swerve to the west, but it ends up almost due south of Polyn, right near the base. I was planning to cut out that bend altogether and ride southeast until I struck the commissar’s highway. As long as I kept on roughly in the right direction, I couldn’t miss it. It was a straight line east to west. And once I was on it, there was less than a thousand miles between me and Evangeline. I could be home in six weeks.

Some evenings I’d pull out Shamsudin’s blue flask. It had bumped around in my pack, but nothing could put a scratch on it. Once I fell asleep holding it. I had bad dreams and my forehead and cheeks were sore the next day, as though I’d spent too long in the sun.

*

I stopped to fish one evening, hooked a pike-perch, and then found four duck eggs in a nest. I made a fire and cooked one of them with the fish.

Overhead, there were cranes coming back from their winters in the south. Their long white bodies looked pink in the dying sunlight. They are holy birds to the Tungus. They use their bones as calendars and mark the phases of the moon in notches on them. The shamans say they ride them up to the ninth heaven where the spirits live and make mischief with human souls.

It’s all fairy tales to me, but I did see a shaman heal a sick woman once. She was a Tungus woman who’d had a stillborn child. It had left something awry with her womb.

The shaman had on a heavy coat of skins with jingling metal beads on it. The beads make a map of the stars. Before there were ever books, those coats were an atlas of the skies. He danced around her body for almost an hour, until a weird web of what looked like blood appeared on the skin of his drum.

I couldn’t speak to the shaman myself, but I asked him questions afterwards by way of a half-Tungus guide.

The shaman said he felt himself rise up through the air as he drummed. The air around him became thick and watery. He claimed it was like being lost in fog, and every now and again the fog thinned, and he was aware of the breathing in the hall. Then he rose up through a final bank of cloud and landed in a clearing.

He followed a path along a mountainside, past a skeleton he said was his father’s, towards a lighted tent.

The sick woman’s body was inside it, in the shape of a pile of stones, with a vine growing out of it. The shaman ripped out the tendrils of the vine. The nearer he got to the centre of the plant, the thicker they got — in the middle, they were a couple of inches round, and furry and hot, like the shaft of spring antlers, full of new blood. And at the heart of the plant was a shrivelled-up thing — the miscarried child whose soul had got lost on its way back from earth.

I don’t know if he made this up to fool me, or if he believed himself. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to my mind. But after that dance, I heard the woman was able to conceive.

It seems like wherever it goes, my mind always comes back to dead children. That Tungus girl’s. And Ping’s. And mine.

Mine was born dead after a three-day labour. It was the worst pain I’ve ever known. In the chaos that had been brought to the city, there was not a doctor to be had.

They took him away and buried him somewhere. We never mentioned it again. I was sixteen. I was never close to a man after that, although I think I could have been. It just wasn’t how things were.

*

My looping route towards the highway took me through a village with an old church in it. The houses around were all rotted and overgrown, but the church was solid enough, with a big wooden cupola and a bell still hanging in it.

The door opened and the air inside had a hint of incense and new whitewash.

Someone called up from the cellarage in Russian. I was too amazed to recall any words of it beyond bog , which, crazy as it seems, is what they call god. Then a man clumped up the stairs with an armful of books. He looked taken aback to see me.

I couldn’t have been more surprised to find a chuchunaa, and, come to think of it, he resembled one a little, being tall and having a long white beard.

We didn’t have enough words in common to say much to each other, but we were able to talk in a kind of dumbshow.

He was the priest of the village, and he had a helper, a kind of junior priest called Yuri. Yuri had a beard too, but his was jet black, and he smelled strongly of onions. I’d put his age at fifty and the priest’s at seventy-five.

*

How they’d managed to survive,st the two of them, with Boathwaite on one side and the Tungus on the other, and keep the church in good repair, I don’t know. I guess they’d just clung on there like a pair of limpets.

They lived in a little house in a yard alongside the church. I put my horse in an empty stall in their barn and they fed me.

We had a kind of soup of salted cabbage and some sausage, and I marked out my route to them on the table top.

They rolled their eyes when I showed them where I was going.

It was too bad that we couldn’t say more. I had so many questions.

After dinner, they took me down into the cellarage and showed me all the books they had squirrelled away down there. The old priest kept giving me things to hold, talking about them, and then looking at me closely as if to check I’d understood. Of course, I had no idea, but whatever it was he was talking about, he was proud of it.

Yuri could see I was foxed, and he kept trying to distract him, but the old priest wouldn’t be told. ‘Here it is,’ he seemed to saying, ‘I’ve got it all squared away. Here are my jams, here are my jellies,’ as he dusted off another book, or roll of papers.