Sloan Wilson - Ice Brothers

He knew two things: that duty required him to spend his nights aboard his ship in a place like this, and that he would spend the night with Brit anyway. The fear that men would die when he finally closed with the Germans and that he would have to force himself to be brave enough to disregard his own personal safety and run more risks than any of them was building in him. The commanding officer of a ship can’t go dodging behind things, assign a safe spot for himself or just lie down when the gunfire starts. He’d been tempted to hug the deck during his one brief experience at being under fire, but he hadn’t let himself and it had been only luck that the bullets which had hit Blake and Sparks, who also had been too brave to seek cover, had missed him. The death rate for lieutenants, and especially for young commanding officers, is almost always higher than for the enlisted men or senior officers.

So … if he was about to die, it would of course be folly to spend this moonlit night alone. That wouldn’t sound like much of an excuse if he made it before a board of investigation which would look into the sinking of the Arluk if something went wrong, but it sounded right to him. No one aboard the ship had worked harder than he had ever since he’d come aboard, he deserved to take any reasonable break he could get—

“Stop making excuses for yourself,” she said. “You know you’re going to do it. Just say yes.”

“You already know me too well. You’re right. I’ve made my excuses and I’m all yours. Let’s get on with it, for God’s sake.”

After they’d climbed onto the wharf, Paul told the men to go back to the ship and get him in the morning.

“Better make it afternoon,” she said. “I’m going to get the Eskimos together for you.”

“Come at about fourteen hundred,” he said. “I have an important meeting.”

Neither Stevens nor Krater made any jokes about official business and neither smiled as Krater saluted, said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and gunned the boat away.

When they got in the cabin of the ketch, Brit turned up the fire in the range, took off her Eskimo clothes and pulled on her reindeer sweater. The fact that that seemed to be almost the only good garment she had suddenly seemed endearing and he kissed her.

“I don’t think you love me anymore,” she said.

“What gives you that impression?”

“The whole time I was aboard your ship, you were looking at me as though you thought I was crazy.”

“I was glad to see you were so impressed by my fishboat.”

“If you’d been in Denmark when the Germans marched in, you’d know why. Oh, we had a few ships, all right, before we gave them up, but we didn’t have men like yours. We were so weak that we were afraid even to hate the Germans too much. Can you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“You’re afraid to hate people if they have too much power over you. You have to keep imagining that there must be something good about them.”

Paul remembered how hard he had resisted hating Mowrey.

“In Denmark, just before we left, a friend of my husband told us a kind of joke, if you can call it that. He said that when the war was finally all over and Hitler had been captured, the Russians and Americans tied him to a stake in Berlin. They surrounded him with dried branches sprinkled with gunpowder and they led a train of gunpowder all the way through Europe, winding across Russia, coming back through every country all the way to Norway. Have you heard this story?”

“No.”

“Way up at the northern tip of Norway they lit that long train of gunpowder and all the people of Europe lined up on both sides to watch it go sputtering toward Hitler’s stake. It was announced everywhere that any person, anyone in all Europe who didn’t want Hitler burned at the stake could put his foot on those sputtering sparks and put them out. The sparks traveled through every country and no one tried to put them out. Everyone cheered them on until the sparks were only ten feet from the brush around Hitler’s stake. Then one old Polish woman stepped forward and put them out. ‘Let’s do it again,’ she said.”

Paul laughed.

“But my point is that when I first heard it, I was afraid to laugh — the Germans might get me for it. And I was afraid of the hate in that story. I felt that hate as intense as that could only result in death for everyone.”

“I wish they would really burn him at a stake, but not the English way. That was really quite a quick death. Our Indians did it better. They built a ring of fire around the stake just close enough to sting a little, and they gradually closed it in. That way they could keep a man screaming for about three days.”

“Isn’t it nice that no one is going to report you for saying that? Even when I got here, I was afraid to let hate all out. If the Germans won the war, after all, Greenland like everything else would be theirs. I didn’t know they were at Supportup, but I admit there have been rumors that they’ve been up and down the coast. Swan kept saying that after all, they’re just human beings and it’s wrong to hate anyone. So I bottled up my hate the way I used to bottle up my sex when I was a child.”

“And now you can release it?”

“Yes. You’ve made me feel safe enough to hate them. Since they’ve taken my country and my family, I would say it’s about time. I’ll do everything I can to get the natives to help you. A lot of them are halfbreeds, not Eskimos, and they don’t have any mystique about refusing to fight men.”

“Guns and I will train them.”

“Train the women too. Some of them are stronger than the men.”

“We’ll teach them what we can.”

“So how about me? Will you teach me to shoot a gun?”

“If you really want.”

“If you are going to take the Eskimos to fight the Germans, you’ll need an interpreter. I’ve studied their language for a year. I’m writing a book on it — that’s how I keep myself busy here. I’m the best interpreter you can get. It’s your damn duty to take me along.”

“If you can take the training, you can come.”

“Now you’re really making my ultimate fantasy come true, a dream I was even afraid to remember when I woke up in the morning for two years. I will kill Germans. I will cover the ground with their goddamn blood.”

Brit’s passionate desire to kill Germans was somehow connected to her desire to make love, and he soon discovered that whenever she started talking fiercely, she soon pulled him into a bunk. On this night of her release, as she called it, he wondered if she would leave him any energy for so mundane a pursuit as fighting. When he thought he was too tired ever to rise from her bunk again, she insisted on showing him a sauna which was the pride of the settlement. It was a small wing which had been added to Swanson’s house, but it had a separate entrance, and Brit assured Paul that it was for the use of anyone in the settlement, though the Eskimos appeared to believe that only Danes were crazy enough to sit in fire and allow themselves to be boiled alive.

There was a tiny vestibule in which they waited while she fired up the coal stove, a dressingroom with two shower stalls and the sauna itself, a cubicle with three tiers of benches and birch paneling which had been imported from Denmark. While it heated up, they took showers. The water was only lukewarm and the stone-paved floor of the dressingroom was icy. The sauna itself was deliciously steamy when they finally entered it. At first Brit wore a towel like a skirt and he did the same. Although that was all they wore, there was something peculiarly unsexy about the sauna with its hard wooden benches, the bright electric light set in the ceiling and the heat, which almost immediately became oppressive to Paul. Spreading her towel on the second tier, Brit stretched out on her back and sighed contentedly. Her slender body was already glistening with sweat. Even in the harsh light, it had the perfection of grace and strength, though there was no hint of voluptuousness as she lay with her breasts flattened out. Without an ounce of surplus flesh but with no bones showing, she looked like a young athlete, except for a row of stretch marks across her narrow waist.