Kamchatka

KAMCHATKA

Marcelo Figueras

Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne

Copyright © 2003 by Marcello Figueras
Translation copyright © 2010 by Frank Wynne

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First published in Spanish in 2003 by Santillana Ediciones Generales, SL.

First published in English in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9555-5

Black Cat
a paperback original imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com

It is not down on any map; true places never are.
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick

KAMCHATKA

Noun
: the study of living organisms.

The last thing papá said to me, the last word from his lips, was ‘Kamchatka'.

He kissed me, his stubble scratching my cheek, then climbed into the Citroën. The car moved off along the undulating ribbon of road, a green bubble bobbing into view with every hill, getting smaller and smaller until I couldn't see it any more. I stood there for a long while, my game of Risk tucked under my arm, until my
abuelo
, my grandpa, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Let's go home'.

And that's all there is.

If you want, I can give you more details. Grandpa used to say God is in the details. He used to say a lot of things, like ‘What Piazzolla plays isn't tango' and ‘It's just as important to wash your hands before you pee as afterwards – you never know what you've been touching', but I don't think those things are relevant.

We said our goodbyes on the forecourt of a petrol station on Route 3, a few kilometres outside Dorrego in the south of Buenos Aires province. The three of us had had breakfast in the station café, croissants and
café con leche
in bowls as big as saucepans, with the petrol company logo on them. Mamá was there too, but she spent the whole time in the toilet. She'd eaten something that had upset her stomach and she couldn't even hold down liquids. And
the Midget, my kid brother, was asleep, sprawled on the back seat of the Citroën. He wriggled his arms, his legs, all the time while he was asleep, as though staking his claim, a king of infinite space.

At this moment, I am ten years old. I look normal enough apart from an unruly tuft of hair that sticks up like an exclamation mark.

It is spring. In the southern hemisphere, October days shimmer with golden light and today is no exception; the morning is a palace. The air is filled with fluttering
panaderos
– dandelion seeds, those daytime stars that in Argentina we call
panaderos
– or little bakers. I catch them in my cupped palms and, with a puff of breath, set them free again, urging them on to fertile ground.

(The Midget would crack up if he heard me say: ‘The air is filled with fluttering
panaderos
'. He'd roll on the ground, clutching his belly, laughing like a lunatic as he imagined tiny men, their brown and white aprons covered in flour, floating like bubbles.)

I can even remember the other people at the petrol station. The petrol pump attendant, a chubby man with a moustache and dark armpits. The driver of the IKA truck, counting a fat wad of banknotes as big as bed sheets on his way to the toilet. (I guess grandpa's maxim about washing your hands before you pee
is
relevant after all.) The backpacker with the messianic beard, crossing the forecourt as he heads for the open road, his billycans clanking, like tolling bells calling to repentance.

The little girl sets down her skipping rope to go and wet her hair under the tap. She wrings it dry as she walks back, water dripping onto the dusty forecourt. The drops that just a moment earlier spelled out Morse code in the dust vanish as the seconds pass. Obedient to the call of gravity, they trickle down into the mineral particles, snaking through the spaces that exist where there seemed to be none, leaving behind some part of their moisture to give life to these particles even as they lose themselves on their journey towards the molten heart of
the planet, the fire where the Earth still looks as it did when it was first formed. (In the end, we always are what we once were.)

Gracefully, the girl in front of me bends down and, for a minute, I think she is bowing. But in fact she's picking up her skipping rope. She starts to skip again, a perfect rhythm, the rope whipping through the air, whup, whup, creating the bubble in which she hovers.

Papá opens the door to the station café and lets me go in; grandpa is already inside, waiting for us. His teaspoon creating a whirlpool in his
café con leche
.

Sometimes there are variations in what I remember. Sometimes mamá doesn't get out of the Citroën until we leave the café because she's busy scribbling something on her pack of Jockey Club cigarettes. Sometimes the numbers on the petrol pump run backwards instead of forwards. Sometimes the backpacker gets there before us and by the time we arrive he's already hitchhiking, as though in a hurry to discover a world he's never seen, the clank of his billycans pealing out the good news. These variations don't worry me. I'm used to them. They mean I'm remembering something I hadn't noticed before; they mean that I'm not exactly the same person I was when last I remembered.

Time is weird. That much is obvious. Sometimes I think everything happens at once, which is anything but obvious and even weirder. I feel sorry for people who brag about ‘living in the moment'; they're like people who come into the cinema after the film has started or people who drink Diet Coke – they're missing out on the best part. I think time is like the dial on a radio. Most people like to settle on a station with a clear signal and no interference. But that doesn't mean you can't listen to two or even three stations at the same time; it doesn't mean synchrony is impossible. Until quite recently, people believed it was impossible for a universe to fit inside two atoms, but it fits. Why dismiss the idea that on time's radio you can listen to the entire history of humanity simultaneously?

Every day, life gives us an intimation of this. We sense that, inside us, every ‘we' we once were (and will be?) coexists: the innocent self-absorbed child, the sensual young man generous to a fault, the adult, feet planted firmly on the ground yet still clinging to his illusions, and finally we are the old man who knows that gold is just another metal; as his eyesight fails he has acquired vision. Sometimes, as I remember, my voice is that of the ten-year-old boy I was then; sometimes the voice of the seventy-year-old man I am yet to be; sometimes it is my voice, at the age I am now … or the age I think I am. Who I have been, who I am, who I will be are all in continual conversation, each influencing the other. That my past and my present together determine my future sounds like a fundamental truth, but I suspect that my future joins forces with the present to do the same thing to my past. Every time I remember, the person I was speaks his lines, performs his actions with increasing confidence, as though with each performance he grows more comfortable with the role, and understands it better.

The numbers on my petrol pump will start to go backwards. I can't stop them.

Grandpa is back in his truck, one foot on the running board, softly singing his favourite tango: ‘
decí por Dios qué me has dao, que estoy tan cambiao, no sé más quien soy
'.

Papá leans down and whispers a last word into my ear. I can feel the warmth of his cheek as I could feel it then. He kisses me, his stubble rasping against my cheek.

‘Kamchatka.'

Kamchatka is not my name, but as he says it, I know he is thinking of me.

‘Kamchatka' is a strange word. My Spanish friends find it unpronounceable. Whenever I say it, they look at me condescendingly, as though they were dealing with some sort of savage. They look at me and they see Queequeg, the tattooed man from Melville's novel, worshipping his little idol of some misshapen god. How interesting
Moby-Dick
would have been narrated by Queequeg. But history is written by the survivors.

I can't remember a time when I did not know about Kamchatka. At first, it was simply one of the territories waiting to be conquered in Risk, my favourite board game, and the epic sweep of the game rubbed off on the place-name, but to my ears, I swear, the name itself sounds like greatness. Is it me, or does the word ‘Kamchatka' sound like the clash of swords?

I am one of those people who always hunger for things remote, like Ishmael in
Moby-Dick.
The magnitude of the adventure is measured by distance: the more distant the peak, the greater the courage needed. In Risk, Argentina – the country where I was born – is on the bottom left of the board, just below the pink lines of the trade winds. In this two-dimensional universe, Kamchatka was the most distant place you could imagine.

At the start of our games, nobody ever fought for Kamchatka. The patriotic coveted South America, the ambitious looked to North America, the cultivated set their sights on Europe and the pragmatic set up camp in Africa and Oceania – easy to conquer and even easier to defend. Kamchatka was in Asia, which was too vast and consequently almost impossible to defend. And as if that wasn't enough, Kamchatka isn't even a real country: it exists as an independent nation only in the curious planisphere of Risk, and who wants to conquer a country that isn't even real?

Kamchatka was left to me; I always had a soft spot for the underdog. To me, Kamchatka boomed like the drums of some secret savage kingdom, calling to make me their king.

At the time I knew nothing about the real Kamchatka, that frozen tongue Russia pokes into the Pacific Ocean, mocking its neighbours. I knew nothing about its eternal snows, its hundred volcanoes; I had never heard of the Mutnovsky glacier or the lakes of acid. I knew nothing of the wild bears, the fumaroles, the gas that bubbles up on the muddy surface of the thermal springs like pustules on a thousand toads. It was enough for me that Kamchatka was shaped like a scimitar and was utterly inaccessible.