Ethan Rutherford - The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

“Bundle up,” Vlad said.

April came and we failed to disgorge.

It is January now, 1916. A New Year’s celebration—Brusilov’s idea—was subdued. We boiled tea with dried cherries and toasted our continuing good fortune. Someone hoisted a cup and requested that we be forever locked together. Vlad explained to him that there are things you can kid about, and things you can’t.

It has fallen to me and Yuri to check the contact points where the ice meets the hull. Every day we lower ourselves down from the rail to make our inspection. We look for fissures. We measure drift. Where we can see wood we check alignment. We submit our daily report to Brusilov in writing, which for the last three months has consisted of one word: same .

“What’s the point?” Yuri said one day when handing it over.

Brusilov didn’t look up from his desk. “The point is I told you to do it.”

“Bureaucrat,” Yuri hissed as we left the cabin.

We’ve moved through every possible state of mind. Patience was supplanted with panic, which was replaced by a dull boredom that has mitigated the fear. Yevgeni whittles figurines and arranges them on the bulkhead. Vlad practices knots. We’ve played poker until everyone but Yuri is in unimaginable debt. There are moments of dread. Regret. Listless fatalism. But only Albanov, our navigator, is constantly riled up, telling us we don’t deserve to be locked in ice. His murmuring has grown louder over the last few weeks. We are huddled in the galley when he starts in again, in a low whisper, making it known that he’s never seen such idiocy aboard a ship, and that someone needs to be blamed and punished. That Brusilov’s thorough incompetence needs to be folded back on him.

“What good would that do?” Dmitri says. “Tell me what that would change. Once we’re in charge of the ship the ice will just open up?”

“So you’re just going to allow this to happen to you?” Albanov says. “You’re going to let him take you quietly to your death? We’ve drifted two thousand miles.”

Vlad’s near the stove, boiling tea. “Your point?” he says.

Those of us listening shift uncomfortably. It’s a familiar conversation. “The happy ignorance of the indifferent,” Albanov says to us. “Have you always been like this?” We shrug. “ Happy? ” someone says.

In early January Brusilov takes sick and retreats to his cabin with his niece. She tends to him, boiling tea and bringing him meals. She towels his forehead and locks herself in. None of us have touched a woman since embarking, and we watch the cabin door with an envy that borders on insanity.

“Why lock the door?” Yevgeni says.

“Wouldn’t you?” Dmitri says. There’s laughter.

“Look at little Piotr,” Yuri says. “He’s blushing.”

Everyone looks. “Keep your hands where we can see them,” Vlad says. “Just because she can’t see you . . .”

I try to think of the ice. I tell them I’m not blushing. This makes it worse. “He can speak, ” someone says.

Brusilov is sick for weeks, and in his absence, no one steps on deck for watch, no one makes trips on the ice to look vainly for leads. Yuri and I stop checking the hull. “You can bundle up to see nothing if you like,” he says. “I’m not.”

Every night we listen to the Saint Anna creak her adjustments. Sleep, when it comes, is sudden and short-lived, constantly interrupted in these close quarters by people coming and going, the shoving for position. We count our supplies. We clean our rifles. We recount supplies. We wait. Conversation has halted except for slurs and insults, which are greeted mostly with shrugs. We have no alternate plan. At least when Brusilov was well enough to make the occasional appearance, our sense that someone was running the ship, no matter how poorly, was intact. Now even that has slipped away, and our time is punctuated only by tremendous, distant thunder cracks, ice sheering itself or gathering together according to some glacial movement we cannot fathom.

Cold, hunger, loneliness, claustrophobia, helplessness, uncertainty, isolation: these sensations crash over us like the memory of waves, and the result for me has been an almost complete eradication of identifiable feeling. I have begun to conjure a dull vision of our time on the ice, and come to understand those of us aboard as less a crew made up of individuals than a singular listless entity, the spin-point on a globe. I feel both inside this ship, and outside of myself. We form a collective pulse; we are contained within the Saint Anna; we are far from both land and water, and this has become our home. I have tried to explain this to Yuri, but he won’t listen. No one will listen. At a certain point it all comes to exhaustion. At a certain point you pray for something to happen, just so something does.

“To tell the truth, I’m surprised no one’s dead yet,” Pavel, our cook, says one day to no one.

In February, after Brusilov has regained his health, Albanov, our navigator, informs us he is to leave the ship. In April, he will set out on foot over the ice for Franz Josef Land, an archipelago due very far south of our current position. The islands exist but are delineated on our map by a series of dotted lines that, at their best, read as imprecise. Brusilov says he’s free to go as is anyone else. We’re surprised. The thought strikes us as absurd. The islands are hundreds of miles away, even by the most generous estimation. “You can’t just go,” Dmitri says.

“The ice is not going to give,” Albanov says. “But you can have faith in whatever you wish.”

“Islands that may or may not be there?” Dmitri says. “Hundreds of miles of ice on foot? Dragging heavy sledges over snow boulders? Realizing halfway there just how awful of an idea it was to leave the ship? Not at the top of my list. I can wait things out right here.”

Still, the expedition’s announcement has brought some energy back to the crew. We clean our quarters, we are up and about. Within a week, thirteen men have decided to go with Albanov, and with Brusilov’s blessing, they set about fashioning additional sledges and kayaks. Some of them are carpenters by trade, others just handy. Those of us who are neither are instructed to chop extra parrels from the foremast or pull planks from nonstructural parts of the ship. Though there are twelve of us who view their departure as fevered idiocy, no one stops them. We’re happy to have something to do.

The next day, Yevgeni and I follow Yuri down to the ice to survey the contact points. As we check the ship, Yuri finds an indentation in the hull near the stern. There’s a moment of panic—if the ship is crushed, we will all be leaving with Albanov—but after an hour of scraping it becomes clear there is no threat of buckling, what we’d seen had just been an illusion formed from the ice patterns on the hull. Yuri is kneeling beside Yevgeni and me and knocks the ice at his feet with his pike. “We’re not getting to Vladivostok,” he says. “We have nothing in the hold. Why not leave?”

I have no answer. “Because it’s certain death,” Yevgeni finally says, and stands.

In the evening over tea the men take turns reading passages from one of the few books aboard: Fridtjof Nansen’s Furthest North . Nansen and his ship, the Fram, had become frozen in an ice pack after sailing north of Siberia in an attempt to reach the Pole. Undaunted, he set out with dogs and one companion; they reached 86˚ north, 13˚6´ east before the currents pushed them south. Realizing the Pole could not be attained, they turned back for Franz Josef Land, and, having reached the islands, wintered over. In the spring they made their way to Cape Flora, where they were picked up by a passing schooner. Meanwhile, their ship spent a third winter locked in ice and was then disgorged unharmed into the Atlantic, having traversed the entire Arctic Ocean. “A great movement that felt like no movement,” one of the crew said later. Even the dogs lived. We cherish the story.