The Age of Ice: A Novel (27 page)

Button—
mumkel
.

Voronin, Merck, and Philimon arrived with a rifle. The Chukchi lads reacted as if my companions had come to join the spectacle. They let me get on my feet and pranced back with shouts of pretend warning, as if I were a feisty buck, still capable of lunging. They laughed—approvingly.
“Koos, koos!”
They were entertained.
“Qeshem dobro!”
Merck shouted at them.
“Qeshem
—
”

“Don’t,” I said.

 . . . But I want you to know what the scariest of these memories is: not the scene of the stabbing death of Batahov or of a humiliation of Velitzyn. No, it’s the scene of cheery babble, of
friendly
address these same people met us with the very next day, as if nothing—
nothing
—had happened.

• • •

A yaranga contains a box-shaped inner tent of reindeer skin, some six feet square and four feet tall; that’s where we slept crammed like pickles in a jar. That night I stayed out of it: the thought of its confines revived the panic of being assaulted. I sat in the outer tent by the embers of our cooking fire. I watched it: the last licks of red, then gray snow. I mended my clothes. I listened to the men’s sleep. Hours passed.

Soul, character, anger—all one word in Chukchi,
annyi-na
. Why should soul,
anima,
be so synonymous with anger,
animosity
?

Suddenly I am outside, standing.
You are carnivorous,
I say to ice,
you are no blind saint
.
You are the cruelty of the world
.
I abhor you
.

Shame—
n’eshkel
.

Flurries start and snowflakes seem so alive, like locusts. They land on me, crawl behind my collar, tickle my cheeks. I see someone hovering on the edge of the encampment. Darkin. I follow him to the river, step in step. It is miraculously free of ice, and he hunkers down, takes a handful of crystal-clear water to drink. I fall on him from behind, sling a leather strap around his neck, it catches his hand. I hurl us into the water. I do not feel the cold, but he does, he must. His back is pressed into my abdomen, it flips and strains like a giant larva; I wrap my legs around his hips, he grunts, he breaks wind, we are both underwater now, we should be drowning, if only I can hold him down until he freezes . . . But now I am on the shore, I am a gulping and flipping fish, he grabs me by the head, shoves a thermometer down my throat, and starts tearing off my scales, head to tail—

I woke up standing outside, next to the yaranga. It had been a dream.

To be afraid—
yemghemghae
.

• • •

To deceive—
tin’mae
. Pain—
tehel
.

We were remonstrating with the chief, Darkin was translating.

“Tell him,” Billings said, “if they harm us the white men will come after
them, men with rifles and big cannons will come and take all their reindeer away. Tell him that!”

Darkin said something in Chukchi and the chief grinned and spoke something back. “He says he understands,” Darkin said.

Then why was he smirking?

Later, Billings kept on working on Darkin. “Do
you
understand that this is not right?”

“I do, sir, yes,” he said. “But I am a small fry. I don’t tell no one what to do.”

When he was gone, Lehman said, “He wants to be one of them. To that end, we are his offering.”

Billings denied it. “The Chukchi cannot possibly be serious about harming us. They are going to the Cossack outpost on Angarka, and in doing so they will meet the district ispravnik. So it is simply not possible for them to think that once we are there we will not notify the ispravnik about the abuses we have suffered at their hands and that they will go unpunished. Unless, Darkin, being in their eyes a valid representative of the Russian authority, is confusing the chief into thinking that he’d incur no reprimand.”

I said, “Unless they are not going to Angarka.”

“Nonsense, of course they are going to Angarka! Every man, woman, and child of the clan knows it.”

“Then they are not expecting us to get there alive,” Lehman said.

In the silence that followed, I understood the key to our salvation: we had to make a killing. To kill—
temae
. Horror—
yigeq
. A madman—
lalac
.

• • •

To cut into pieces—
ta-rha-ng
. If I turned into Old Man Frost now, it would be a relief for me. Wouldn’t it? But what would happen to the rest?

Merck was the worst off. He could no longer hold anything in his hands. He may have already lost his fingers to cold, mittens or not. I lifted his mug for him. “You hardly ever sleep, Alexander Mikhailovich,” he whispered between sips. I cut a strip of frozen meat and held it out in front of his mouth. He said, “I am a burden.” I said, “Eat.”

Unlike Merck, when I ate I could no longer melt frozen food in my mouth, nor taste it, nor feel the bite of its frost on my palate. Since my assault, my sleep felt more like a waking hallucination. I spent my nights in the outer enclosure of the yaranga, sitting or lying on my side, curled up. At times, the mere sounds of emissions of six sleeping men and the
waves of pungent heat they produced would exasperate me.
Anger is my soul. Do I not want to become Old Man Frost? Ought I not leave this place, find peace, freeze, get trapped in ice again? This time for good, because these men are in no shape to go looking for me.

They were in no shape to survive, much less search.

I focused instead on the tasks at hand: taking down the yaranga in the morning, loading the sleds. Pulling the sleds to a makeshift corral where the Chukchi would harness draft reindeer to them. Unloading the sleds in the evening, pitching the yaranga. Making fire. Staring at the fire, to keep my memory, my mind tethered lest I lose it to ice. Preparing wicks for the oil lamp that my companions would use in the sleeping tent. The lamp was a stone slate where a wick—a strip of leather, or thin splinters of wood, or sponges of moss—sat in a pool of seal oil. Somebody had to cut those wicks. Somebody with fingers that worked.

Merck spoke of a strange disease among the Chukchi that Darkin had mentioned—an
Arctic hysteria
. It was when men fell into sudden fits of rage and committed violence. It reminded me of Old Man Frost. I told Merck not to believe it. He agreed. “A phantasm, no doubt. Darkin’s credibility is suspect. He also told me the natives eat the worm parasites that live under the skin of the reindeer calves. Squeeze them out through skin and devour them! Not a notion to swallow without disbelief.”

I chuckled.

• • •

Did I or did I not want Old Man Frost to come and overtake me? Why wouldn’t he? Or had he done so already? Was it not Arctic hysteria that moved me when I said to my companions, “The only way to show authority here is to punish. If we are capable of punishing, this means we are strong and our wishes should be respected. Darkin should tell the three who knifed Batahov that they are indebted to us. That if they do not serve us they will die. He should bring them to us.”

Lehman: “He won’t. He’ll tell them to stay away instead.”

I: “Then
he
will die.”

One morning they didn’t harness reindeer into our sleds. Perhaps they left it up to us to go into the herd and cajole draft deer out, goad them between sleds, tack them in. Perhaps they knew that we had no skills to succeed in it. Either way it was too late when we discovered that we had been shorted. The herd was starting to move, the caravan was leaving. That day we pulled the sleds by hand. Five sleds in the morning, three by
nightfall. We couldn’t keep pace with the caravan, at best we could only keep sight of it. Another day of this and we would be dead.

• • •

I follow Darkin to the river, step in step. He walks onto ice, looks around. “Who is this?” he says to the snow mounds. “Come out!”

I step into his view. “Why do you hate us?” I ask.

“God forbid, Alexander Mikhailovich,” he says, “I don’t hate no one. Briton, German—come all, come traipse through, nose around, I’m your friend.” He opens his arms. “Come look down on me, come kick me around. I’m right here, cunt!” He begins to stomp his feet, a kind of dance. I am enraged, I lurch toward him but I can’t move, and as I strain to break out, only terrible crunching and crushing sounds erupt, but I get no closer. “Golly, Alexander Mikhailovich, look at you, you are getting very icy!” He slaps himself on the haunches. “Your mama! Look at that!” He comes close, fingers my nose, breaks it off. “Ho! An icicle!”

“I will pay you,” I say. “I am a nobleman of some consequence, and I will pay you for our safe passage.”

He grins. “You are not going anywhere from here. You are stuck, Your Ass-ship.”

“Then let the others go. I’ll write you a formal obligation, as good as cash. You could show it to the governor and he will honor my debt to you.”

“Liar! I know you have nothing to write on. I burned your notebooks myself.”

“Then I’ll carve the promise into ice. And I’ll make it so that it won’t melt.”

“It already does not melt—without your meddling!” He lifts his arms, lets out a groan as he stretches. “Look around!” The river ice is black and bottomless now—as if we stand on the firmament of the night sky. He stomps his foot and cracks run like lightning bolts in all directions, far into the depths of ice and wide all the way to the shores, now distant. It’s no longer a river, it’s a—lake? An ocean? Cracks snake from one node to the next, connecting points, like thoughts. Zigzagging, heavy cracks for murderous thoughts and finer, meshlike cracks for thoughts of light and hope.

“I got a better idea. I got something to carve on you instead,” he says.

Suddenly I am within this ocean of ice, feeling the cracks running through me, shifting me every time they come and go, scrambling me up. In a thousand years my lips will have changed places with my ears, and my fingers will have spread over several yards. But in the meantime, as I
scream,
What do you want from me?!
he proceeds to chisel into my surface a message I cannot read, only suffer its calligraphic pain: the scalping pain of every loop and arm, the slicing pain of every line and dash, the stabbing pain of every dot and comma.

A message that could be an obscenity or an explanation to my existence, or both. I’ll never know. I’ll ever wonder. Enough, don’t—
ketel
.

I bolted out of sleep in terror.
I cannot let myself be trapped in this ice!
Thank God, this one had been a dream.

• • •

We devised a plot. Ivan and Philimon went out and begged Darkin to come see us in our yaranga. He agreed. That’s how safe he felt.

It was night. The camp was falling asleep, yaranga by yaranga. Darkin came in rubbing his face and yawning, breaking in his shoulders, neck. We had a small fire going with what we could spare—some bones, antlers, strips of fur. He cast a glance at us and sat down, satisfied with whatever he gleaned.

His pose was relaxed: cross-legged, arms draped over haunches, coarse hands hung loose.

“Have some tea, Nikolai,” Billings said. Our “tea” was hot water, stained yellowish by a mere memory of generous pinches of tea leaf that used to float in our mugs.

“Na-e-e,” he said. “Thank you though.”

“How much longer to Angarka?” Billings asked.

Darkin scratched his head. “Two weeks, maybe. Depends on the weather. On what the shaman says.” He chuckled, looking down. “No rushing the shaman, right?” A moment passed with no one replying to him and he said, “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? Then I can go now, yes? I’m sleepy.”

“We had no deer for our sleds today,” said Billings.

“Ai-yai. Won’t happen again.”

“Who was behind it?”

“Pranksters, lazy boys. Make mistakes. Won’t happen again. Tomorrow I will oversee.”

There was a pause and Darkin leaned forward as if to stand up.

“We need you to take us to Batahov’s murderers,” Billings said.

“What use of me? You know who they are.”

“By word alone. But you and the rest of the clan know them by face.”

He did not reply.

“We need to speak to them. We need you to translate.”

“What about?”

“You will see.”

“I’ll let the chief know.”

“The chief already knows.”

Darkin was hard to fool. A sixth sense—orphans have it. Even the roomy folds of his fur garb looked tense now, but he stroked his chin and grinned as if at a good joke. “How
would
he know?”

This vexed Billings. He said, “Nikolai—now is the time to show if you are on the side of the Russian Empire or on the side of one small tribe.”

Again he stroked his chin. “The camp is big, the night is dark. Tomorrow we find them.”

“Not tomorrow. We go now.”

Did Darkin spring up? No, I am not sure if he did. Maybe he just sneaked his hands into the wide cuffs of his sleeves as if something was hidden there. Maybe he merely shifted position. Our bodies reacted as our eyeballs, darting toward sudden motion. I was not the first one. Voronin? Or was it one of the soldiers, Ivan, or Philimon?—fell upon him, pinched his arms, and Darkin dropped face-first into the fire, into the sooty mug with hot water. He screamed and pushed himself up, whoever held him, let go. It was the boiling water, the fire, the burns—that delivered the shock of irreversibility: he was already damaged. I lunged at him, Lehman too, I think. We flipped Darkin on his back. Jon? Or Ivan? Or Philimon? stacked his palms over the red and black of his face, clamped his mouth shut. A wet, noisy breathing pushed through, then a squeal. Someone caught one of Darkin’s thrashing arms and trapped it on his chest. Someone—Billings?—aimed the butt of a rifle between Darkin’s eyes and once or twice hazarded a tap. And I . . . My hands clenched around Darkin’s neck, my trunk pressed him down as I’d done ten times already in my dreams, and I expected him to escape any time now via some trick, some dreamlike twist of fate, but he did not, not when his chest pulled in a hiccup, nor when his stomach gave a shiver, nor when his heart stuttered and stopped. Nor after.