The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (11 page)

O
ur sighting is met onboard with unembarrassed enthusiasm. “A polynya! Whale!” Dmitri says like he’s announcing a personal visit from the czar. Eugene turns in slow circles, singing to himself. Yevgeni plants a kiss on Dmitri and earns a punch. Brusilov, all polished buttons, nods smugly and embraces Yerminia Zhdanko. Open water, though we can’t see it, is close: otherwise we would not have seen what we saw. It is only a matter of time before the ice gives.

Pavel cooks the seals we have brought back and we glut on second and third portions. The meat is heavy and full of fat. It’s the food of kings. Batyir dances his impression of a diving whale. We pour tea and toast the ice. We toast Yerminia Zhdanko. We toast the seals. We toast ourselves and our luck.

“You were almost killed today,” Vlad shouts happily at Yevgeni.

Yevgeni pats himself, checking for holes. He raises his glass. “To Piotr: thankfully cross-eyed, the worst shot aboard.”

That night we are all afflicted with shits, but it does nothing to dampen the mood. Vlad, hunched over and loosing himself into the bucket, balances a plate of meat on his knees. “A great movement that feels like no movement,” he says, grinning and shoving cubes into his mouth.

For the first time in months our hearts pump hope and anticipation.

W
e spend the next four weeks readying the ship for passage, refastening planks, refitting the masts. From the crow’s nest more leads are visible, opening up to the south and east. Those working in the rigging report hourly to those of us on deck. The June sun arches higher now and in the morning smears through the now ever-present mist; the temperature is still below freezing, but the feeling is different. Bear tracks are spotted, and after a brief discussion a group of us leave the ship with rifles. We follow his trail for miles until we lose his track in grease ice. As we return, we see that everyone is standing on deck, watching our sluggish progress. When we’re within shouting distance, Dmitri asks what everyone is looking at.

There is no reply at first. Then, a female voice comes over the ice. “Batyir is dead.”

“What do you mean?” Vlad shouts.

“What do you
think
she means?” Dmitri says.

We climb aboard. They’ve brought him up from below and laid him on deck. He’s partially covered by a blanket, as if someone were halfheartedly concerned about his temperature. Dmitri, rifle still on his shoulder, moves to close Batyir’s eyelids, but they’ve frozen open.

“How long has he been out here?” he says.

“Long enough,” is the reply.

Batyir’s skin is the same hue as the ice, a chalky noncolor. His cheeks are sunken and he looks as if he might shatter if mishandled. We stand with the others around the corpse, not sure what’s required of us. It seems like a misunderstanding of some kind.

“How’d he die?” Vlad says.

“He just died,” Eugene says.

“Was he sick?” Dmitri asks Yerminia Zhdanko. Tears have streaked a path from her eyes to her mouth. Her nostrils are pink and raw. She shakes her head. We watch Batyir for movement. His collar flops with the wind but that’s all.

Brusilov comes up from below. “What do you guys do,” he says. “Drag misfortune around with you? Just wait for it to catch up?”

“We’re going to pretend we didn’t hear that,” Pavel says. The fact of Batyir’s death fills us completely. What a waste, we are thinking. What a specific thing. And how ridiculous to be following a bear over the ice while all of it happened.

I
t takes eight of us to lift him from the deck to the gunwale, each trying not to touch or look at him. Brusilov, who has insisted the corpse be brought to water and sunk, stays at a distance, his arm around his niece, and watches as we drop Batyir from the gunwale to the ice. His arms loose themselves from the blanket on his descent and bend at strange angles upon impact. We stand looking down, half expecting this to rouse him. “As if this ship weren’t cursed enough,” Vlad says as we climb over the rail.

On the ice, we strap Batyir to a sledge and the six of us take turns hauling him in twos. With the harness over my shoulder I feel a panic in my chest like I’m being chased. “Pull, damn it,” Vlad says through his teeth. It takes us almost twice as long to reach the polynya with the sledge. Once there, we realize that in order to reach open water someone will have to step off the pack ice and venture, with Batyir, onto grease ice. No one volunteers.

“I am ashamed to be on a ship of cowards,” Pastiov says, when it’s suggested we push Batyir out as far as we can and shoot the ice around him. We shrug, ashamed ourselves. We offer to tie one end of a rope to Pastiov and hold on to the other as insurance. “Ashamed,” he says, knotting the line around his waist.

We tip the sledge and bore holes through the bottom to insure its sinking. Pastiov pushes the sledge out on the thin ice, with Dmitri and Vlad holding the rope. It’s not easy going. At each of Pastiov’s tender steps we expect the ice to open and swallow them both. Finally within reach of the water’s edge, Pastiov stands tall. He regards Batyir for a moment, then looks over his shoulder at us. Then he leans down, and with a final shove, sends the sledge over the lip of ice and into the polynya.

Batyir floats.

“For fuck’s sake,” Dmitri, his hands on the rope, says.

Pastiov turns and nimbly makes his way back to where we’re standing. By the time he joins us, Batyir’s almost in the center of the polynya, turning in slow circles on the sledge like a signal buoy.

“What is he doing?” Vlad says.

Batyir’s arms have come loose again. Then, slowly, he begins to sink. The water laps quietly over his feet, then his chest, then his head. He hovers below the surface for a few seconds, warped and barely visible, a smear of dull color set against the blue-black water. Then he vanishes.

T
wo months pass, but the leads, if anything, shrink. We watch in disbelief. It’s late July, and we’ve been on the ice for almost two years. Brusilov blames the polar currents. His refrain has lost all meaning. There’s no explanation for what’s happening to us except that it’s happening.

In the spirit of conservation the only source of light below deck comes from a single smudge-pot, powered by a combination of seal fat and engine oil. The smoke and odor it gives off are enough to make us prefer darkness. I smother the pot and Vlad says, “Yevgeni, imagine my relief I can see you no longer.”

Yevgeni has four teeth and is shy about his looks. “Imagine mine,” he says.

Our food will be gone in four months. Yuri paces the cabin, pounding his fists into the beams. Dmitri hits Pavel after an argument and breaks a rib. He apologizes only after it’s pointed out they were arguing the same side. We consider the sledges but a reading puts us 389 miles off of Franz Josef Land. “We missed our chance,” Pavel says, holding his sternum.

Out of everyone, Yerminia Zhdanko spends the most time on deck. She stands facing Russia, for hours at a time, like a widow waiting for some lost ship to return. “You understand, of course, that
we
are the lost ship?” Vlad tells her as she makes her way to her quarters. She doesn’t answer.

We wonder about Albanov and his group of explorers. We compile a list of notoriously bad captains and post it in the galley. We check our supplies and wonder how we didn’t see this coming. Brusilov has stopped writing in his log. “Not many men,” he says one day, “have been this far north.”

Vlad crumbles a biscuit onto the table. “Why don’t you plant a flag,” he says without looking up. “And send word to St. Petersburg.”

At this Brusilov spits into a handkerchief, folds it, and places it neatly in his pocket. “If you’d left, you all would’ve died,” he says. “You would’ve been cut in two by this cold. You would’ve done nothing. Look at you. What have you ever done? We are very far north. I am alive. You are alive. We will disgorge, and we will map the passage. The last thing anyone needs is more dead peasants.” He inhales, and fiddles with his belt. Then he says, “You can thank me for your lives at your leisure.”

“
Lives?
” Pavel says.

T
en days later, Alexei takes sick. Two days after that, so does Bogdan. They complain of nausea. Their gums turn black and recede. They run fevers, hallucinate, and describe the unpleasantness of what they see. Readings place us at 82˚51´ latitude, well above Franz Josef Land, or any other known islands for that matter. We take another, which places us even farther north, and Vlad throws the sextant over starboard. It clatters on the ice but doesn’t break. Dmitri climbs over the gunwale, picks it up, and brings it back aboard. He hands it to Vlad, who throws it again. Still, it doesn’t break.

A few days later, Alexei dies without a word. His hands are clasped so tightly together it takes two of us to pull them apart. We wrap him in extra sailcloth and drop him over the rail. We scrape at the ice until we have enough snow to cover most of his body and then leave him. It takes Bogdan another day and then he too is wrapped like a mummy and dropped onto the ice. Soon enough he is covered as well. On deck we stand with our hands in our armpits, leaning against the rail, staring down at the two white bumps. It is Vlad who says that after he dies we are under no circumstances to bury him out there on the ice; stuff him in the bow, tuck him aft, but his body is to remain on board until either the ice breaks and he can be given a proper burial or until everyone dies, and then who cares. There is in us a sudden welling of grief. It’s like an anchor breaking its cleat. It comes unexpectedly.

The ice remains ice. The wind tugs at our coats and beats at the hatches. We trudge topsides, only to return below with a new gust of despair. These floes, they are older than anything we can imagine. They were never going to open, and we know now, with certainty, that we will die aboard this ship.

This part should not be rushed, but I can think of no other way to say it, and it must be accounted for. It is an afternoon like all the rest when we, the four of us, Vlad, Dmitri, Yevgeni, and myself, open Yerminia Zhdanko’s cabin door and pass through together. It’s a ceremony, a funeral procession, symbolic of something. At first we are tender, or we tell her we would like to be tender, but then it becomes something else. Dmitri, holding Yerminia Zhdanko’s milky wrists, will not look me in the eye, as I did for him. Her tears move sideways off her face and onto the mattress.

We can hear her through the door after we allow her to close it. Low-pitched, guttural sobs. They float through the ship and enfold us. They are beautiful to hear. We listen, exhilarated by the purity of the sound. “This is too much,” Pavel says, with his head in his hands. No one answers. Brusilov, wheezing, threatens to shoot Yevgeni. “You will have to shoot all of us,” Yevgeni says quietly, an invitation, knowing Brusilov won’t.

Two days later we wake to find Yerminia Zhdanko gone. Tracks run north in a perfectly skied line away from the
Saint Anna
. It is amazing how clear they are.

“You’ve killed her,” Brusilov says, barely able to support himself. “She did nothing to you.”

“We’ve been dead for months,” Vlad says. “We are at the end of the world. She brought us to life.”

What he means is this: we finally have something that is ours. We’ve given shape to our time on the ice, and if the floes crush us now, at least it’s what we’ve always deserved.

A
fter this there are no days. The
Saint Anna
groans in the ice for who knows how long. The feeling is that time itself has become unmoored. At night I dream I’m a large whale of some kind, swimming in great dives below the ice. In the water I move through slanted columns of light. Above me is the keel of the
Saint Anna,
like a boulder wedged in a snowdrift. Below is an infinite blue darkness. I have reached an understanding with myself: whatever a person is, whatever he possesses that makes him real, after my time on this ship I am the absence of that. I am not specific; I am the opposite of specific. Everything streams through me. I can hear myself yelling, and it is like screaming into a pillow. I have killed a young girl, and I have not been punished for it. Nothing matters. The ice is pushing heavenward, raising up our bow while the stern remains fixed. Our hull timbers are giving. One or two weeks later Vlad dies quietly in his sleep. Yevgeni checks for a pulse, finds none, and proclaims him lucky. Then he stands, and without a word, walks to where Brusilov is sleeping, and kicks him awake. Driving with his knees, he drops his full weight onto Brusilov’s chest. We are not far behind. We fall on him and let gravity bring our blows to his body. He limply objects. We stuff a sock in his throat. When my hand connects with his stomach it’s like punching water.

We pack a day’s worth of biscuits in a knapsack and tell him to walk. We stuff a map into his embroidered trousers, which are loose on his frame. When he is one hundred yards from our now noticeably listing ship Yevgeni shoulders a rifle and squeezes off a shot in his general direction. The sound reverberates off nothing, a bullet fired into cotton. Brusilov takes a few more stumbling steps, and then collapses. We congratulate Yevgeni on his marksmanship.

We tie Vlad to a sledge and lower him to the ice. We are delicate and sincere. We trudge a half-mile south, stop, and lay a pair of skis in a cross on his chest.

It is only on our way back to the
Saint Anna
that we allow ourselves to comment on the fact that around our ship the floes have pressed themselves into jagged ridges, and our masts are pointing well aft. The sun, having witnessed the burial, shines and reflects brilliantly off the encrusted rime on our stays. Our ship, the fixed point in a frozen gyre; collapsing now under the incredible pressure of the ice. We see that the
Saint Anna
will be splintered and swallowed; we see what will happen a month before it does.

And what of us? If we had courage at all, we would wrap ourselves in blankets and meet the weather with fateful and furrowed expressions. Instead, we methodically empty the hold of all remaining food and fuel. We empty the ship and lay everything on the ice. It takes us two weeks to prepare for our journey. The mapping equipment we leave. The personal effects, we leave. The rifles, tents, biscuits, dried fruit, sleep-sacks, and everything else, we pack into a single sledge that can be pulled across the ice by the six of us, hitching in turns. The
Saint Anna
stands now almost perpendicular to the ice, as if she herself were some great frozen beast breaking the surface of the ocean, lurching up from the deep. Her masts have cracked. Her portholes are frozen shut. We tell ourselves that when stretched so thin, men will shame kindness and become unforgiving. That survival itself is a form of grace. We tell ourselves that just beyond that ridge, south, will be an open channel, an island; that we will be rescued; that lives begin and end every day, and that we, having passed through more than most, are simply about to embark on another.