Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

“History might bear him out,” Yevgeni says. “I should keep a log. ‘December 15, 1915: Today I drank some tea. Today I choked myself on a biscuit. Today I went above deck and was surprised to see the ice not moving faster.’ ”

“Don’t forget to write down you’re an idiot,” Albanov says. “And that we’re waiting to freeze to death and all you do is complain.”

The temperature outside, when it is clear, is consistently thirty degrees below zero, the kind of cold that fuses teeth together. The wind is cruel and slingshots over the ice like a fury, whistling rigging, snapping stays. From below it sounds like small-arms fire; on deck it’s huge oaks cracking.

We’ve boarded up all hatches and portholes to buffet the cold. We squeeze in, two per sleep-sack, and it doesn’t help much. Some of us move in and out of illness. Others simply refuse to rise from their beds, even when Yerminia Zhdanko pleads with them in warm tones.

“It would be good for you to move,” she says.

“Why?” is the normal, blanket-muffled response.

Her usual diagnosis is homesickness. That and the fact that we have nothing to do all day except think of the ice. “What are you thinking about?” Dmitri asks her from his bed.

We wait for an answer. Dmitri folds his arms. “You can get back to me,” he says.

We’ve put Yerminia Zhdanko’s age at twenty. She has a round face and thin arms. Nice breasts, which are most of the time hidden by heavy woolen shawls. The skin on the inside of her forearm, glimpsed at intervals as she fusses about, taking our temperatures, is the color of milk. The logic of her being aboard escapes everyone.

“Think of her as our nurse,” Brusilov has said. “Or don’t think of her at all.”

“Right,” Vlad said, when he had gone. “Don’t think of her. Easy.”

Topsides, snowdrifts slope gently from the ship’s rail to the ice. Accumulation blankets the deck, deep enough in places to tunnel through. Our bowsprit is an enormous, improbably levered icicle that points north toward more whiteness. Fog hangs like cotton in the air for days at a time.

We joke over biscuits that if there were birds in the sky even they wouldn’t be able to distinguish the Saint Anna from the floes, though with our luck it’s probable they would nonchalantly circle and shit a bull’s-eye.

“How is that different from your life ashore?” Brusilov snaps.

“Ashore,” Dmitri says, “we’d have vodka.” The word itself gets a round of applause.

We flesh out scenarios: the ice will either crush or release us, depending on the current; either we will starve to death or we won’t. Twenty-five minds and that’s about as creative as we get. We’ve been in the floes for a year and a half. How do you reckon with something millennia in the making? We loathe our astounding inertia. We despise the shivering spectacle we’ve become. Every day we drift farther north with the ice pack, but the feeling is not that we’re moving but that the rest of the world, and Russia, have turned and are drifting slowly away.

Waiting for me in a less frozen part of the world, St. Petersburg—a city with its own problems—are my parents and sister. A tiny house in a blackened part of the capitol district. Like many families ours was unlucky. We queued for bread and compared stories: bad food, not enough food, no food. I had five sisters, four of them dead before adolescence. My older brother, a droshky driver, was killed when his horse kicked him in the head, caving his skull in front of the Mariinsky Palace. His fare, whoever it was, left him in the road to find other transportation. No one told us for days. When my mother finally heard she stopped talking and spent a full week at the stove, stirring vegetable broth into whirlpools. My father stayed at work or attended basement meetings through the night. My sister and I entertained ourselves by seeing who could go unnoticed the longest.

I left home because I couldn’t understand the politics that kept my father hopeful. Because he is a Bolshevik I was a Bolshevik, but where had it gotten us? It had gotten us nowhere. He spouted rhetoric and took pride in our immobility. He read Proletarii and nodded in agreement. We are the chosen class. It will be manifest. Just look at our sacrifice! How can that not be rewarded? Meanwhile he was being ground away by labor as the party fought with itself accomplishing nothing.

Of course he didn’t understand why I was leaving. I told him it was because much happens to a man while he’s away. He said: A person like you, a ship will kill you. I knew what he meant. Compared with my brother, I had no personality: no life experience, no opinions about anything, not even two thoughts to rub together. We’ll see, I told him. He told me a real worker would never leave. I shrugged. What was I going to do, point out his haplessness? Even the leaders of the party had the good sense to decamp to hotels in Paris; even they didn’t want to be here. He told me if you don’t stand for something you stand for nothing. I shrugged again. The look he gave me went so far beyond disappointment I considered staying. “You are not your brother,” he said, finally. “Your brother would not have gone.”

“And where is he?” I said, and braced myself.

I left the next morning without saying good-bye.

Ifound the Saint Anna in February. I climbed aboard and was officially added to the ledger. My first two months at sea I managed to fool no one into thinking I belonged. Within an hour of embarking, I saluted the cook twice. I stood in contemplation when told to help the second mate with the foresail halyard. I fouled rigging. One morning, when I was helping Dmitri with the sounding cable, he told me my lack of competence was, at this point, bewildering.

“Wasn’t there some kind of test?” he said.

I mentioned my willingness to learn.

“You mean your willingness to do what you’re told,” he said.

Brusilov had been in such a hurry to disembark he’d all but waved me aboard. “Have you been at sea before?” he’d said. I nodded. “Can you lift that box?” I’d lifted it. “We leave tomorrow.”

The first leg—from St. Petersburg to Aleksandrovsk—took six months, one longer than expected. We ported in August and waited for additional crew to arrive. They never did. Brusilov paced the deck for days until deciding to go on without them. “And she’s staying?” Vlad said, pointing at Yerminia Zhdanko.

“She’s staying,” Brusilov said.

Yevgeni gripped the rail. “I thought she was sightseeing, would eventually tire and leave,” he said when Brusilov was below. “This is bad luck. Women on ships.”

“You think your luck could get worse?” Dmitri said.

We finally left for Vladivostok on August 28, 1914, so late in the summer it was almost guaranteed we’d get locked in ice. Within two months the leads became too narrow to navigate and we stopped sending men to the crow’s nest to freeze in the wind. Gazing out at the frozen Kara Sea, Brusilov absentmindedly chipped ice from the gunwale and proclaimed that this was as expected, and that we would be disgorged without doubt in the April thaw to continue our journey. The important thing, he said, was to have faith. The sea freezes, it thaws. The trick is patience. At this point, we could still see the Yamal Peninsula, rising darkly over the ice in the distance. Not an inviting piece of land, but it was there, so we had patience.

As we drifted north with the polar currents, we watched the peninsula recede until finally we saw nothing but white in all directions. In December, the leads disappeared as if stitched together, and we watched as floes grew into ranges, mountains proclaiming our solitude. It’s one thing to know you’re at the mercy of something larger than yourself. It’s another to see it. Brusilov greeted our looks with a nod, as if to say Yes, but what can you do? Yerminia Zhdanko, on deck, clung to him like a life preserver and took in her surroundings. The ice. Us.