Marcel Theroux: Far North

‘The Chukchi on Diomed gave us a shack and my mother taught in their school for a while. But it was tough on us. Losing our dad. Losing our home. Stranded among savages — no disrespect to them, they couldn’t have been kinder to us, but we didn’t come to that place to live like that, all the dirt and drunkenness. You know how native people are.

‘The straits were still icing up some winters. I remember my first sight of sea ice on the foreshore, looking out towards Alaska. It looked unreal through my one good eye, flat as a painting, all the mist and sand and grey water. I swore to god that if he could find us a way to get there, I would be his servant in everything. That was the day everything changed.

‘I went back to the shack and who’s there but Eli Rozenbaum. He’d run into some Chukchi fishermen who’d told him about us and he’d come to help.

‘He paid gold for us to get to Nome and found a boat there to take us on to Barrow.

‘Waking up that first morning in Barrow was like coming round from a bad dream. I mean, it wasn’t like it was , but compared to everything we’d seen … Waffles and fruit for breakfast. I never tasted anything so good in my whole life. My aunt said her sourdough starter was a hundred years old. I looked at my mother with my mouth open when she said that. In amazement. As bad as they thought things were, to have that continuity …

‘Through the winter, Eli came back every couple of months to check on us. He was back and forth to Chukhotka and brought us news. Soon, it became pretty obvious to even me that he wasn’t just visiting out of neighbourliness. He’d taken a shine to my mother and was courting.

‘Our relatives weren’t keen about it, with him being a Jew and everything, but my mother was a widow and she didn’t have any better offers.

‘She wouldn’t hear anything against it, and she liked to tell them it wasn’t the first time He’d sent a Jew to save us.

‘They were married in the spring and I went to work with Eli.

‘Eli had a business going up here. He’d take moonshine and bullets and whatnot and pay Tungus to go into the Zone for him and fetch weapons and tools. He’d bring them back to Alaska to sell. Dealers came up in private planes from all over to see him. They had a notion where he was getting it from, and bitched about his prices, but none of them could have done what he did.

‘I started travelling out with him. I know the Far North like you do. I understand the mind of the Tungus. Eli came to depend on me. We were able to clean out whole sections of Polyn and get the stuff back to the States, but every time, it got harder and harder to get labour. The Tungus were getting sick and dying and they’d refuse to go. Each time, we’d have to tap up another village. The Tungus there still hate us for what happened in the early days.

‘We started to think, there must be an easier way to do this. There were all these masses of people dying for food, and there’shurting for workmen. That’s when we stumbled on this place. It was an old garrison. We stocked it with men, and twice a year we send them in to earn their living.

‘I took them myself at first. I never went into the Zone itself, but I liked being near it. Radiation didn’t bother me at all, but that other stuff, that’s fierce. We couldn’t risk that getting out of there. The first couple of times we brought them back to the base. So many people got sick we had to kill everyone and start again.

‘We didn’t like doing it. We didn’t do it lightly. But we can’t get by without what we get from the Zone. It’s as plain as that. It’s not pretty what we do. But I’m not ready to ask my wife and family to live like the Tungus.

‘And if we’re honest about it — most of these prisoners will never see the Zone. There’s old men here who would have been dead years ago without the base. If you take away the years they’ve gained from the years that have been lost, I’d guess it comes out all square.’

He was silent for a while.

‘And how did you lose the other one?’ I asked him.

He shifted in his chair. ‘That one’s a cataract. Too much staring at the sun. But I can see enough in it to know who you were.

‘The thing about the Zone is, over the years, the easy pickings have gone. It’s getting harder and harder to find what we want, yet the best stuff is supposed to be still in there. Things that make the flask you found look like a sling-shot. And medicines. Cases of cells. Daniel’s fire. That’s why I sent Apofagato out. But Boathwaite picked this moment to go soft on me.’

I wondered if, because I was someone from his own past, he felt the need to acquit himself in front of me. I stayed quiet and let him open himself out to the silence in the room.

‘He wanted to wind it up. Marriage and having kids made me more of a fighter. I need to be out here, laying my skinny ass on the line so they can live like they ought to. But it made Boathwaite soft. Marriage for him meant sitting in his garden with his wife and daughter, eating ice cream.’

For a second, Eben seemed to hear a voice in his head accusing him of cruelty — some echo of his conscience stirring — and he flashed angrily at it. ‘I don’t say I like it, but I do it, and I go home, and my wife don’t know, and nor will my kids. I do it so they won’t have to. It’s not a choice between good and bad. It’s a choice between what is and what might be.

‘It’s easy to look smart, less easy to do good. You can only live in the world you find yourself in. These prisoners are fed because of me. There’s cities with a future across the water because of what I’ve done.’

That seemed to satisfy his conscience. I remembered his changeable moods. Suddenly, he was reflective.

‘You wonder: where does the time go? It seems like suddenly you’re old and the years are driving on. Merciless.

‘I can’t pretend the world we have is a match for what was. We live very simple. Don’t get the wrong idea from the planes.

‘There’s things we don’t know any more. Things we don’t have. Things we can’t make. Our settler parents, what they did was easy. But out of the chaos they left us, I’m trying to make something. It’s an awful duty, you know, taking care of the future. Who on earth thought it would fall to me ?’

‘Don’t be so bashful,’ I told him. ‘I can’t think of anybody better. This world has your handprints all over it.’

So far I had heard him out in silence. All that ancient history between us meant nothing to me. I knew thousands of people had stories worse than his.

But he wasn’t dumb. He could hear the hatred in my voice.

‘I never laid a finger on you, Makepeace,’ he said. ‘I’ve done some ugly things — I’m the first to own it. But I’m innocent of that.’ He fixed me with the blown bulbs of his eyes. ‘It wasn’t me. But I don’t blame you for believing it was, because the truth is uglier than you can imagine.’

Suddenly my old tired body ached from all its rough usage and I wished I had something stronger than soup to drink.

‘Remember Rudi Velazquez?’ Eben went on. ‘About five years ago, he showed up in Alaska and looked me up at my office. I hadn’t heard from him for years, but I recognized his name and I had him shown in. There were a few niceties, this and that, how’s so and so, you know how it is, but I’m a busy fellow so I asked him what was his reason for wanting to see me. He told me he was sick. I’d known that as soon as I’d heard his voice. It was old and papery, and shaking his hand was like holding a fistful of sticks. Now as it happens, I know a good doctor in Barrow, and I was pleased it was this, because generally speaking what people want is to borrow money from me, or for me to find me work for them. I’d told him I’d be happy to help and was ready to have him seen out, when he said it wasn’t that he was after and he’d like to have word with me in private.