Marcel Theroux: Far North

Tears made my eyes go blurry. It was the disappointment of it. After all this. I was the one holding a garbled message. I thought I was a caretaker, shoring up the few things I could against annihilation, trying to be worthy of the traditions of my ancestors. I’d always been so proud that I lived in this world. But I was just like pa. I needed another world to redeem the present.

I’ve looked back at my pages and found I’ve written: I don’t need it to be otherwise .

You know how it is when the most cussed and determined bachelor falls in love, he colours what’s left of his hair and gets his heart broken? Or the total lady who does the flowers in the church, has her first sherry at sixty and dies a drunk?

I’d walked through life like a cat on ice, testing each step before I took it. Now it turned out I’d tiptoed into a beartrap.

It’s something when disaster walks in through an open window. But what could you do? Every life has some of that. But when you barred yourself into a strongbox, rubbed your hands, and spent years telling everyone how safe you are. That’s the trouble I’m talking about. Everyone sees it coming but you. That’s in the nature of a blind spot.

The years stretched off in front of me like a frozen winter road. The hope that I’d fed on, that I’d told in secret like a stash of hidden money, was gone.

How had I lived before Ping or the plane, without the sense that any other life was mortised to mine, or the thought that somewhere children were walking to school and the dead getting buried, and a pianola playing in tune? Sitting in the dark all winter, waiting for the candles to run out. Trying to catch an echo of the life that had been here. Waking in the dark. Cleaning my guns at night. Crunching out to the stable with the saddle over my shoulder.

My life didn’t even count as suffering. It was one long cruel joke that the wind had written on the snow.

THERE WAS AN odd smell in the air which I remarked on to the guards who came to get me towards midday. They said the stills were going full pelt to brew fuel for the plane. It meant the kitchens were short-handed and most of the inmates on half rations.

I questioned the wisdom of that, privately. For all his shortcomings and cruelties, Boathwaite never let the prisoners go hungry. The food was often dull, but it was plentiful. He’d known as well as I did that well-fed people were more biddable.

They escorted me across the parade ground. I knew the way as well as they did, but I guessed they’d been told to keep a close eye on me.

Up in the fields, the men were labouring as slowly as ever, weeding and mending fences, grumbling and moving livestock.

Things looked much like they always had. And yet some odd changes had taken place in my absence. With Boathwaite and Tolya dead, the running of the base had fallen to a man named Purefoy. He was settler stock himself, but a shy man who I’d always felt Boathwaite trusted because he didn’t have the dash and swagger of a natural leader, or carry much weight with the other guards.

Empty bellies, the old boss gone — there was more than the fumes from the stills in the air. I was almost too cast down to smell it, but sure enough, alongside the stink of brewing, and the dirt, and the latrines, was a sharp whiff of mutiny.

They had laid out Boathwaite’s room for a banquet. I didn’t feel like eating any more. Purefoy and a half-dozen of the senior guards were there. They had shaved and put on their best coats and three or four of them had brought their wives. You could see by the way the men bowed and scraped t Eben Callard and his men that they felt themselves to be country cousins.

The women sat by themselves at a separate table, wearing old-fashioned formal clothes. I couldn’t help wondering about Boathwaite’s widow and that little girl of his.

*

There was a place laid for me at the main table. Eben Callard sat at the head of it and there were fourteen or so places set round it. Much of the food had come from the base, but there was plenty there that must have travelled with them on the plane, since we had no way of growing or making it there. There was sweet wine for the women, little heaps of orange salmon eggs, bowls of lump sugar, candy, and canned crab meat, and bottles of cognac with labels on them.

At a signal from one of the guards, we took our seats.

It was a strained and nervy gathering. No one was sure if we were meant to start eating.

Eben Callard rolled a shotglass of cognac between his fingers. ‘We don’t visit often,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to leave a bad impression. Things have had to be done. Some harsh decisions had to be made. But I don’t want to dwell on that now.’

He was speaking of Boathwaite. Even now his body was tanning in the sunshine out in the yard. I wondered what they considered to be his crime. He must have run the base as they asked him: turning the raw prisoners into farmhands and sending gangs of them out to the Zone to scavenge from Polyn. Maybe he’d been a little softer in command than they wanted? Had he failed to bring enough back from the Zone? Or was his fate down to some lingering politics that I had no sight of, like what had seen me imprisoned by Boathwaite’s brother?

I guessed that whatever happened here was a sideshow to the world Eben had flown out of. Maybe his standing there hinged on his adventures here in the north. I knew now that on the other side of the straits something limped on. It hadn’t abandoned us — in fact, it seemed to look to us for its salvation.

My mind was snapped back to the room by his mentioning the Zone.

His white, sightless eyes had fixed on me at the end of the table. ‘The last trip to the Zone threw up some promising things. We’re looking forward to learning more before we leave.’

He proposed a toast and put his glass to his lips. The level in it barely altered, while all around the table the guards emptied theirs. Purefoy proposed a toast in return. People began eating, the drinking became general and loosened the mood in the room.

The guard next to me served me with roasted meat from a tray. I remembered him as a bully. Flushed with drink, he boasted of his young wife and whispered indiscreetly about what I’d missed.

‘They gave him a last chance one year ago. That’s when they sent the Jap out from Alaska.’ He nodded his head at Apofagato, who sat up at the far end of the table.

He’d been to the Zone himself, he said. Trouble was, Boathwaite was too damn soft. A dozen or so prisoners a year would never make a dent in that place. They needed to turn the whole base out, march them into the Zone en masse.

When he said ‘soft,’ I thought of the pile of ies in the snow-melt on the bridge.

‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ he said.

*

The afternoon dragged on. The bottles kept coming. I didn’t drink and nor did Eben Callard. By mid-afternoon, the noise in the room was a roar. Men took turns making outlandish toasts. The guards’ wives were flushed and giggly.

Suddenly Eben Callard’s voice cut through the buzz of drunken laughter. ‘We haven’t heard from Makepeace,’ he said.

I said I didn’t mean to give offence, but I’d drunk as much as I wanted.

The room quietened. He said he hadn’t had a toast in mind. He’d wanted to hear me speak about the Zone and what we’d found there.

So I told them what I’d seen, more or less, leaving out my own visit to the city. I told them about the Tungus boy, and the poison, and how we shot the prisoners on the bridge.

That phrase too soft that the man next to me had used kept coming into my head. I told them about Zulfugar and the soft-nosed bullet that had cored him like an apple.