Afterlands (13 page)

The eyes close and the face turns away, back into shadow. In moments the couple are back under the layered robes, again transfusing Tyson with their warmth. Her body exuding heat like a woodstove. A strong, exciting smell. Ebierbing starts snoring almost instantly. Tukulito’s breathing slowly deepens. And Tyson lies awake for some time. At length, a weak, weary shudder of his own, mostly silent, but then the spasms turn into sobs and a few muffled ones escape him.

Lieutenant Tyson. … Are you quite all right, sir?

Hannah, you’re not asleep?

I awoke just this moment, sir. When you shivered so.

I am only a little cold.

Then you must press closer, sir. That is the only way.

Tyson hears himself emit a tight, brittle laugh.

When he next wakens he is alone on the bed-ledge, feeling soiled in form and soul, a self-abusing peeping Tom, and there are sounds outside. Morning, presumably, though since the moon is no longer peering directly inside, it’s darker in the hut. A moon that has not set for days. The children are at play close around the hut. It must be milder now. Their sounds make Tyson feel like a dead man in a country churchyard hearing the living above him—children playing tipcat, young men and women courting, spells of larksong. The din of a distant spring.

Rest now, sir! he hears Tukulito calling. She is standing outside the east wall of the hut. Her voice, being raised, has a different character, slightly girlish.

You mustn’t tire yourself so, sir.

Ja …
for the moment I rest.

It’s Kruger.

Come play again, Mr Kruger!
calls Punnie from a ways off,
soon!

Soon! he calls back, panting as he approaches the hut, and Tukulito.

They do love when you play, Mr Kruger—their fathers must hunt all the time now.

Wonderful children, madam. A true refreshment. After some of my colleagues.

“Relief,” sir, that would be the word.

Yes. Thank you. You must correct my English whenever it fails.

His voice is low and raw in a morning way. His English a touch askew.

And you, sir, might teach me some German.

He laughs—a rare sound, husky and pained. Well, as German seems now to be the official language on this ice floe, perhaps I must.

With almost teasing lightness she says, I do find it somewhat harsh of tone, however, sir.

Ah, it depends on the speaker—the words! He clears his throat.
Hast du die Lippen mir wund geküsst, so küsse sie wieder heil
.

This is poetry, is it not?

Ja
, Heinrich Heine.

I think it quite lovely, sir.

You must call me—not sir. My name is Roland.

Will you translate, then, Mr Kruger?

You who bruised my lips with kissing, kiss them well again.

Just silence. Punnie and Succi a ways off, giggling weakly.

He says, I should like to learn similar words in your language.

Perhaps in time, Mr Kruger.

Tyson lies like a large fist under the skins. Is she not playing the coquette with him? Has she already been with him … or with some of the others? Of Merkut he could have believed this all—what he saw last night, what he is hearing now—but not of Hannah …
Tukulito
. She must be reverting. All of them reverting.

None of which makes him want her any less.

She says, I must take Punnie inside, sir. Children always play beyond their strength.

Of course.

Tyson sits up and grabs for his boots. He drapes a muskox skin like a shawl over his shoulders and crawls into the tunnel. He emerges on the other side of the hut from Kruger and Tukulito—who is calling Punnie in. The world is windless. Dim sapphire light. A waxing moon rides low over the pig-shaped hummock that marks the latrine. He stumps toward it. Catlike footfalls pad up behind. He stops and turns, trying to inflate his chest. Ebierbing stands gazing up at him, a long moment, then edges closer. Is this about last night—some question of native honour? The man grins slyly in a way that strikes Tyson as deeply insolent. In shadow, a Colt revolver appears in his bare, black hand.

Joe, what the devil does—

You take this now, Mr Tyson.

Ebierbing glances over his shoulder, then thrusts the weapon toward Tyson. Tyson takes it at once.

But, you refused to give it me before, Joe.

Sure, two gun better for the hunt. Now, better you have one too. Again he glances toward the crewhut, then back at Tyson’s beard. I plenty don’t like how they looking. Too hungry.

The men?

The look out of their eyes, he whispers pointedly, as if to suggest Tyson be quieter too. He adds, If Joe get lost, or vanish, both guns gone. Better you have one too.

Yes, of course.

If Joe get lost, or killed … you watch out for Hannah and Punnie.

Tyson jams the heavy pistol into his belt. Already he feels a good foot taller, pounds heavier.

Don’t worry, Joe. Now I have this—he pats the icy walnut of the grip—you need not worry.

On Tyson’s striding return from the latrine, he digs out his notebook and scratches a few lines, as much as he ever writes now, knowing if their story is ever to be made public he’ll have to rewrite and expand the notes, someday.
Whats becoming of us——God that any be tempted to
that
! ——to become mere
Brutes
, biting & tearing each other to shreds! ——But I have the Peacemaker now——will stop them & regain command
.

Dec. 18
. It is awful to contemplate what we may be becoming. God forbid that any of this company should be tempted to such a crime! If it is God’s will that we should die by starvation, why, let us die like men, not like animals! However, I have the pistol now, and it will go hard with any one who harms even the smallest child on this God-made raft.

Dec. 22
. We have turned the darkest point of our tedious night, and it is somewhat cheering to think that the sun, instead of going away from us, is coming toward us, regaining his power—though he is not yet visible. The shortest and darkest day has gone, and I am thankful; perhaps the worst may yet be averted. Friends at home are now preparing for Christmas, and so are we too. Out of our destitution we have still reserved something with which to keep in remembrance the blessed Christmas-time.

In Voltaire’s
Micromégas—Littlebig
—an extraterrestrial being from Sirius meets another from Saturn and they embark on an expedition through space aboard the tail of a comet. The Sirian is 500,000 feet tall, the Saturnian a mere 15,000. Eventually, of course, they reach a “small and drifting speck” called Earth. In the course of their explorations there, they wade through the Mediterranean, and in the midst of this tepid rain puddle they find a ship returning from the north, after a polar expedition. Aboard the ship, a group of philosophers and scientists. When the Sirian plucks up the ship, places it on his fingernail and examines it with a magnifying device, he is dumbstruck to find “living atoms” aboard. In tiny chirping voices these inform him that they are “Human Beings with Immortal Souls,” that they are “fashioned in the image of the Only God,” and that they and their world are the “very Centre of the Universe.” The bemused Sirian learns that these atoms have chopped up the planet into Countries and Kingdoms and spend their lives squabbling and killing each other over territory not owned by the killers themselves, but by Great Leaders, two of whom are called the Emperor and the Sultan. It seems these leaders “make the wars they do not fight, and the subjects fight the wars they do not make.” The extraterrestrial guests are incredulous. The squeaking mites are insistent: “Why, even as we speak there are 100,000 of our creatures, all wearing helmets, trying to kill an equal number of their creatures, all wearing turbans!” This is war, and it is “Man’s Supreme Glory.”

The Sirian and the Saturnian board their comet and flee back to saner worlds.

Christmas afternoon, the crewmen awaiting dinner. Along with two biscuits each, there will be a small piece of frozen ham (the last of it), a few morsels of dried apple (the last of it), and a half-mug of seal’s blood (the last, the last). Since breakfast the men have been telling stories and singing carols and songs, in a mood of truce even allowing Jackson to sing in English, and then Herron:

Herod the King, in his raging, ordered he hath this day
,
His men of might, in his plain sight, all children young to slay
.

The air is dense with pipe smoke, lamp smoke—a warm and lovely fug. And when Meyer and Anthing crawl outside to discuss their “New Year plans,” the other men urge Kruger to read to them from
Littlebig
, the only book on the island. Sentence by sentence Kruger translates it into German while Herron and Jackson cook around the lamp and the men, supine in their bags, listen with the glassy eyes and slightly open lips of spellbound children.

Dinner is served and bolted in minutes. But the men are determined to prolong the feast. One by one they offer their ideal Christmas menus, and these become the main course after the brief appetizer of the meal. Herron’s bill of fare, translated by Kruger, is heavy in roast fowl and beef, baked cod and herring, pheasant pies, black pudding, bread pudding, fig pudding, marzipan cream custard, mulled ale and Madeira and heavy port and hot gin punches. (The colours all dark and rich, like blood.) Eyes and cheeks shining he describes his table as a kind of busy harbour crowded with ship-like serving dishes, gravy boats, tall cruets of sauces, little varied bowls of walnuts, hazelnuts, prunes and raisins, all these like ferries or dories constantly on the move between plates. Jackson misses plainer stuff, like the beans and fatback he used to serve up as cook in the Federal Army during the war, but then he pictures the welcome-back from his own folks, now in Brooklyn: a pork roast, sweet potatoes glazed with molasses and then pickled okra and peas in vinegar and turnip greens and sweetened grits and hoecake and corn pudding and watermelon pickle and applejack. Lundquist and Madsen festoon their different tables with so many candles that it’s no easy task to find room for the feast, but room is soon cleared for the roast goose or suckling pig and stuffed eels, the alebread or the
pytt i panna
, the platters of old cheeses, rye breads, balls of butter, bottles of apple brandy, urns of black coffee, cherry or lingonberry preserves and candied fruit heaped like soft gems in great glass bowls. Anthing, who before emigration lived near the Russian border, his long-dead mother a Russian, stocks his
Festtafel
with a steamed pork
pirog
, roast sturgeon, a great beet and cabbage soup made with beef stock and sweetened with thick cream, black bread, dishes of cherry and gooseberry jam … these along with the roasts, the
wursts
pan-fried and awash in hot fat, the platters of mashed potatoes with
senf
and butter, the stewed sauerkraut, the hefty fennel bread and pear and plum and apple cakes and
Glühwein
and
Kümmel
that the rest of the outcast Germans also include. … Yes, and as Kruger, mouth watering, renders this riveting list into English for a rapt Herron and Jackson, he yearns for his boyhood home with an intense monopolizing ache, like hunger, but throughout his body, a hunger in the cells and blood, and again he feels something like love for his countrymen, even Anthing, who sings the ancient carols so richly. The man is singing again now, in his effortless tenor, leading the others. He was an orphan choirboy, of all things, in Memel. Easy to see the boy in him anyway.
Es ist ein Ros’entsprungen
. Kruger is no singer, but he joins in. Not for the first time he reflects, How sweet, just to yield to sentiment and slip back among the mob, the Clan!

Out here where there’s so little to tempt one, temptations are that much stronger. Yesterday the lieutenant informed Meyer that raids on the storehouse are continuing, and he believes “parties” in the crewhut to be responsible. Meyer himself blames the natives. Kruger knows this to be unlikely. Aboard the
Polaris
Tukulito once explained to him and Herron some of her people’s taboos; to steal the food of others, or to refuse to share one’s food, would bring about failure in the hunt, for the mistress of animals under the sea would no longer send the hunters any game.

But if the Esquimaux are not the thieves, and not Tyson, who looks increasingly thin, then who? Meyer has ready access to the storehouse, but if he has been taking extra food it hasn’t stuck to his bones. Likewise Herron. Madsen always was girlishly slender and now is morbidly so—a skull with red lips and large, woeful blue eyes. He hardly ever goes out. Jamka is close to nervous collapse, alarmed by the slightest noise from the noisy ice, terrified of bears, so he too seldom emerges, except to rush to the latrine with the hunger-flux, gripping a few sheets of Tyson’s spare notebook (that much, at least, the men have openly filched). Which leaves the less decrepit men: Anthing, Lindermann, Lundquist, Jackson, and Kruger himself.