Afterlands (15 page)

And why are you not taking part in the parade, Mr Kruger? Tyson demands.

I seem to be a … a pacifist objector, Lieutenant.

But we are not at
war
here, Mr Kruger.

But I object to parades.

Tyson’s beard compresses around his mouth. Extreme cold thins and hardens all faces, but especially white faces, and these ones are all caving into their eyes, disappearing into their beards.

Well, if you have no further need of your weapon—Tyson nods toward the lone rifle propped against the iglu wall, a few paces behind Kruger—I would ask that you donate it to me and the two hunters who are keeping us alive.

I would like to keep it for now, Lieutenant. I sometimes try to hunt myself.

Sensing Merkut behind her, Tukulito turns her head and hisses in Inuktitut,
You should have kept the children inside!
Merkut blinks, hiding behind an impassive mask and her dialect. The baby bobbles in her hood. Tukulito has not snapped this way since long before the expedition began; her cheeks and nape blaze in mixed fury and shame. Punnie cranes her head back, her inverted little face peering up in astonishment.

There, says Ebierbing, I guess they shoot the guns again. Plenty waste.

Everyone looks toward the floe-edge. Meyer’s men have formed up along the shore, ready to fire a third salute, this time in the direction of the northern lights which undulate like a phantom, windblown drapery. More bullets into the void. The crump of the volley is followed by a second rippling crack—a different, bigger sound. Meyer’s troops begin to yammer. There is a splash. Tyson draws his revolver and leads the group at an arduous trot down to the floe-edge. A lead is steaming, widening between the floe and the crescent-shaped slab that has broken off, the men aboard it. In the sea somebody thrashing with wooden arms, head stiffly upright, eyes round and fixed. Lundquist. Meyer, across the channel, casts quick birdlike glances all around, as if trying to identify a cause and a culprit. His pistol hangs in his hand. Anthing glowers at Tyson. The other crewmen holler in their languages. Ebierbing offers the butt of his rifle to Lundquist, who grabs it and clings. Not a wisp of breath from his gaping mouth. Ebierbing, Hans and Kruger grapple him like a seal onto the ice, where his wheaten hair and few whiskers, then his fur clothing, instantly freeze. In seconds he becomes his own stretcher. Hans and Jackson bear him like a long box of supplies toward the crewmen’s hut.

Save us, sir, cries Herron. Joe, save us!

Ebierbing is scrambling back toward his iglu. I bring the kayak now.

Get the boat for us, Lieutenant! croaks Meyer. Please, if you would …

Anthing turns a narrow look on Meyer.

The boat’s too heavy for us to drag alone, Tyson calls, pushing the pistol into his belt. You must hang on.

Wir sind verloren
, says Jamka, mildly, kneeling and laying his rifle across his knees and making the sign of the cross. Then he hefts the rifle and aims it straight at Tyson. Bring now the boat for us! Or, by Gott, as we drift to our end, we can kill you each by each! Tyson’s mitten moves back toward his pistol, but stops short. He glances back—meets Tukulito’s gaze—takes in the children now arriving on the scene with Merkut. Ah, Christ, he says.

Meyer mutters some order. Jamka lowers his gun. Tukulito widens her eyes in fury at Merkut, who this time does not pretend not to understand. The woman takes Punnie’s and Succi’s hands and briskly leads them back toward her iglu, ordering Tobias and Augustina to follow. The channel, still growing, is perhaps forty paces wide. Ebierbing returns, dragging the jouncing kayak by its painter, a coil of rope and a grapnel over his shoulder where his rifle should be. He launches and drives toward the men with high-armed, deep-digging thrusts of his paddle. He throws the grapnel end of the rope to Herron, turns and paddles back to the floe.

In moments the two parties seem locked in a desperately serious match of tug-of-war. Meyer’s men secure the grapnel well back on the ice, but also kneel along the rope’s length and hang on to it, to be certain, while across the open water Tyson, Kruger, Ebierbing, Tukulito, and Hans lean back and dig in, bracing to pull the new castaways home. At first they make no progress. Then the rope starts coming, an inch or two at a time. And Tukulito hears Kruger, up the rope from her, speaking into Tyson’s ear in a winded murmur.

Now’s the time to act, Lieutenant. With Meyer so tired. And the men shamed. They’ve lost some faith in him.

For a moment, nothing. Then Tyson whispers back between grunts and gasps: Shamed men are unknowable, Kruger. Sick men more so. Scorbutic, I mean. Meyer has the scurvy, I think. Pull, boys—pull now!

He cannot stand up to you. Not now. Sir. Look at him. Assert your authority, or—

Can’t risk starting a fight, Kruger. If Joe is killed, we’re all of us dead men.

They know it, sir! And if Meyer is let to go on … we are dead anyway.

Heave through now, boys, they’re coming to us!

This may be a last chance. You have no idea what he plans.

A shudder is visible through Tyson’s thin jacket. He says, Only Hans and I have weapons here. And you—are you willing to go fetch your rifle, Kruger? Are you prepared to shoot down your own countrymen if need be?

Kruger is silent, grunting low in his throat as he works.

Just as I thought. You ask me to face them alone. You’re … Tyson fades out and Tukulito instantly interprets the tone of his silence: it has struck him that perhaps Kruger, in the role of Meyer’s unarmed spy, is trying to lure Tyson into a fight—one in which he alone will be killed. For a moment Tukulito wonders if it could be true. But then Kruger adds, in a pained, panting whisper, All right. You’re right. I will get my gun. Meyer must be stopped.

No! says Tyson—perhaps still suspicious—more suspicious? That would be mad. With the children still in range. I am not saving these men so we can shoot them, and they us. I mean to bring them back under my command. All of them. To save them. And I
will
do so, Mr Kruger—here he glares over his shoulder and then yells full in Kruger’s face,
Heave through now, boys, pull them home!
The rope is coming hand over hand. Tukulito feels dizzy and has to keep swallowing coughs. Through the fog of the men’s breathing she sees the crescent with Meyer’s armed skeletons aboard pulled back into place, like a piece of splinted bone.

Bad sign, sir, says Ebierbing. Now the ice it all start shrinking.

The lost men rise from their crouch and stumble back onto the floe. Tyson has his mitten off, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. Meyer, vacant-eyed, nods to him and wanders slowly back toward the crewmen’s iglu. Anthing slings his rifle and marches behind, leaning forward stiffly, glancing neither right nor left. And Herron trails, sheepish and shambling.

I’m sorry, sir. I’m conscripted.

Tukulito lets the rope relax in her mittens. In her heart she had agreed neither with Mr Kruger’s plan nor with the lieutenant’s; for these crewmen are more than ever a threat to Punnie. She will not permit that anything should harm Punnie. Even as she strove to help pull the men to safety, something in her had hoped the line would part and the lot of them drift away into the night.

Stealing would be entirely permissible, says Meyer sociably—in English, so that all can understand—if only the booty would be shared! In fact, that could not even be deemed stealing. We must suspect the natives to be guilty, or the lieutenant himself—but if the thief, or thieves, is among us here, I ask him kindly, Make yourself known!

Anthing’s wet eyes slew from face to face. Kruger coldly meets his stare. Jackson looks up warily, then down again at his work: boring a new hole in his chewed belt with the tip of a strake-nail. Lundquist rests under the heaped furs where he has spent the last week recovering. Since the pilfering has continued—has actually increased—he is no longer a suspect.

The Major Graf Meyer waits an answer, says Anthing.

I shall impose no punishment, Herr Thief, or Thieves, if you come forward now! And Meyer flexes his rotting mouth into the outline of a smile. Steady wind against the walls makes a gnawing sound, like rats in wainscoting.

Jackson looks up and cries, I know you all reckon it’s me!

Everyone turns. With a dangerous softness Anthing says, And is it?

No! Well. A few times, I suppose, I been cooking and I et a extra crumb or two.

Meyer shakes his head tolerantly. That is not what I mean.

Well, but sir, says Herron, as you’re talking in English, you must think it’s myself or Jack?

Possibly … your loyalties are of course suspect.

Never stole a thing in me life, sir.

But, now you need only to confess!

Our stealer I think is here, says Anthing. This one who holds himself always apart.

Their eyes find Kruger. He looks around. Herron and Jackson are too frightened now to meet his stare, to acknowledge any link with him—not with Anthing there like an unburied mine. Kruger is growing frightened too. He does have a secret. But he says coolly, Gentlemen, as there seems to be no one else left to accuse, except perhaps our leaders, I believe I’ll go out hunting again. I understand we’re running short of food.

He reaches for his unloaded rifle. Anthing’s hand rests lightly on the butt of his Colt. He blinks his heavy lids, then looks toward the Count.

Be careful, whispers Meyer.

Next morning when Kruger wakes—having seen and shot nothing again; having failed, again, to meet Tukulito by chance—his rifle is gone. The snowhut seems warm. He sits up in his bag. Meyer is still asleep on the private ledge, Jackson and Herron pounding biscuit. By the lamp, a thinly smiling Anthing presides, arms crossed over his chest, the others around him in sweaters and drawers toasting their hands over the remnants of Voltaire’s
Littlebig
.

Jan. 9
. The west land still in sight, just visible in the noon twilight, about eighty miles off. It keeps very cold, ranging from 20 to 36 below zero. For several days the ice has been firmly closed, and no water anywhere; so we drift with the pack. No water means no seals, nor the bears that hunt them, nor the foxes that follow the bears and scavenge their leavings; but at least the light is slowly returning.

The provisions are disappearing very fast. I would set a watch if it was possible for us to stand outside in the nights, but in our badly reduced condition of flesh it would be fatal; and my own clothing is too wretchedly thin to think of it. Meyer tried posting a “sentry,” apparently, with a result of serious frost-bite to Jamka. Meanwhile Kruger—who I believe is a kind of “emissary” for Meyer—“warns” me that the men are still determined to cross the ice to land, and mean to go next month. (Kruger seems to feel that his issuing “warnings,” or, to use the proper word, “threats,” is a favour to us in this hut; but he is a German, after all, and I know his true loyalty must be to the “Count.”) If they do set out, the poor wretches will go to the east, misled by false advice, thinking they can reach Disko, when we are all the time drifting to the western shore. If they were only risking their own lives it would be bad enough; but by divided counsels and divided action, the safety of the whole is imperilled, especially as they seem determined to take our last boat. I am more and more alone here; no one to assist me. Hannah seems changed by our struggles, in a number of ways. I fear even loyal Joe may be thinking of striking out for land, for in a few more weeks, by my reckoning, we will be at the latitude of Cumberland Sound—near his and Hannah’s home settlement—perhaps about fifty miles off-shore.

Much as it goes against my temper, I must try and conciliate the men, and turn them from their purpose. There is some little time yet to operate; for they dare not start in January.

Jan. 15
. A strong gale has sprung up from the westward, and is now blowing very heavy, with a thick snow-drift. We are compelled to keep in our snow-burrows. I am greatly in hope that this gale will open the ice, so that we can get a few seals. We have only enough blubber left to warm our little food for two or three days more. Now Hannah is pounding the biscuit, preparing our pemmican tea. We pound it fine, then take salt-water ice and melt it in a pemmican tin over the lamp (the time occupied in heating five quarts of water is from two to three hours); then we put in the pounded biscuit and pemmican, and, when all is warm, call it “tea.” As Joe says, “Any thing is good that don’t poison you.”

Jan. 16, morning
. The gale has abated; the wind has carried off most of the snow, leaving only enough to lend our little settlement a more cleanly appearance. The Esquimaux went off early looking for seals, which I hope in God they may find. The ice now is pushing and grinding, which will surely open cracks, as well as fracture more pieces off the edge of our “island.” It seems strange to think of watching and waiting with impatience for your foundations to break beneath you; but such is the case. In our circumstances food is what we most want. Hans’s little boy, Tobias, is sick, and from Succi one hears a constant hunger whine. Punnie will often say, when she speaks in English, “Oh, I am
so
hungry!” She looks every bit as thin and ragged as her sad little doll; no one who has been a parent could look upon her without feeling the most heart-rending pity, and foreboding. Joe and Hans say that they have often suffered before for the want of food, but they have never been obliged to endure any thing like their present experience. Considering that they are out of the huts so much more than the rest, walking and hunting, they really ought to have a larger allowance of food. I would gladly give it to them, but I fear it would cause outright mutiny among the men! This at least I must prevent. Notwithstanding my dark and dirty shelter, my bed of wet and musty skins, fireless and cheerless and hungry, without one companion who appreciates the situation, I shall be well content if I can keep this party—worthy and worthless—together without loss of life until April, when I hope for deliverance.

At ten in the morning a breathless Tyson calls the men out to help take the kayak to Joe, who has seen seals. The healthier men—Lindermann, Kruger, Herron, and Jackson—grope for their parkas. Meyer sits up and orders them not to move until he or Lieutenant Anthing gives the order. After a moment Meyer gives it, but tells Jackson to stay in and finish preparing breakfast. Anthing snaps open the cylinder of his Colt to check the load, then spins and clicks it back with a flourish.
Kommen Sie
heraus!
He kneels and starts toward the tunnel. Kruger notes that the man now
crawls
with a kind of rolling strut in his wide hips and his shoulders.

Beside Ebierbing’s hut, the crewmen form up around the kayak. Tukulito emerges with Punnie and sends her to Hans’s hut. She flicks a loose strand of hair from her eyes. When it falls back again, she ignores it. She acknowledges Kruger with a tight-lipped smile. All this in the near-dark. She takes the bow, Tyson the stern, and two crewmen take either side of the hull. There’s no question of dragging it, there’s far too much rough ice in the direction they must go, across the Central Alps and to the far side of New Heligoland. With its skin covering and wood-and-bone frame the kayak is not heavy, yet after a few hundred steps it becomes a test to carry it. For six adults.

Anthing gasps at Herron, Come, Herry, hold up your side!

You and Lindy are the big men, says Herron, in too much pain to be careful. Feels like you ain’t even there.

Krüger! Kannst du nicht mehr tragen?

Tyson: Enough, all of you! And he slips a hand off the stern to feel for his pistol. His eyes widen. In his excitement and hurry he must have left it behind.

Tukulito is next to Kruger, a little ahead. By her breaths, he knows she is working hard.

Are you all right, madam?

Thank you, sir.

The others begin to argue about who is or isn’t slacking. Tyson is involved too. The cloudy green ice is awkwardly grooved and stippled. Under cover of the noise Kruger leans forward and murmurs, I may have to flee my hut. Would Joe help me build one of my own?

You cannot live alone, sir. One would freeze in a night.

But surely there’s not room in your hut, or Hans’s?

Not in his. And I fear the lieutenant would not have you in ours.

Kruger eyes the balding grey peak of her hood. Her aura of blue-white breaths.

He does not trust you, sir.

No.

Could you live with the steward, and the cook? Three would be enough.

They’ll never let the cook or steward leave.

What’s that you’re saying, Kru?

Then you must stay where you are, sir.

Nothing! Kruger tells Herron.

Be careful, please, Mr Kruger.

They stumble to the shore and collapse there gasping and Ebierbing launches the kayak and easily retrieves the one beautiful grey seal he has killed. They retrace their steps like different beings, peaceably silent, bearing the triumphal kayak with fresh strength, as if they’ve already eaten some of the animal now shunting over the ice ahead of them, towed by Ebierbing, drawing them on. Its oily savour of beef and seaweed. And how different the camp looks as they approach in the twilight! The three glowing huts and the storehut seem to make a comfortable town or city after the featureless desolation they’ve been struggling through. But as they near and the two flags resolve into clarity—the makeshift Eagle over the crewhut and the Stars and Stripes now fluttering over Tyson’s—the sense is more of two customs posts straddling a border in some mountain pass. It now strikes Kruger that there will be trouble, and it isn’t slow to come.

Everyone but Hans, who is off hunting, spills out of the huts. They gather closely around the dark body lying in the snow, on the border. Jamka in his joy fires his Springfield into the air. Succi crawls in and touches the seal’s stiffening flank. Tyson tells Ebierbing to take it into their hut, to be butchered and divided.

I’m afraid we cannot permit this, Lieutenant, says Meyer, drawing his pistol. Lindermann nods with a glazed look. Jamka reloads his rifle. Anthing steps toward the seal and puts his boot on the glossy head. A trickle of bloody snow is pressed from its mouth, or nostrils. Ebierbing’s eyes widen, narrow, as if shocked and then gravely offended on the creature’s behalf.

We will take and butcher this seal in
our
hut, says Anthing.

But Joe killed this seal! says Tyson.

Kruger can’t take his eyes off the animal. The idea of its being butchered out of sight, in Tyson’s hut, is hard to bear, although it has happened before—yet now Kruger is suspicious even of Tyson. How will he and Ebierbing—and even Tukulito—resist taking more than their share? His own thoughts amaze him. He’s salivating so badly he has to spit before he can speak:

Let the seal be butchered here, then. In the open. So all can see.

The words bring sharp looks from the whole party. Tyson and Meyer both glowering. Tukulito eyeing him with a new mistrust—or simply returning his own mistrust?—or resenting his mistrust? Meyer holds up a partially unscrolled piece of paper and prods it with the long barrel of his Colt.

As this map does show, Lieutenant, the seal was captured off the German part of this island, and is therefore our property to dispense of as we wish.

Never! says Tyson and stamps his foot and looks around at all of them.

Nevertheless, says Meyer. Still, we intend to be fully fair in our allotment of the flesh—perhaps fairer than you yourself intended!

Jamka, Anthing, and Lundquist are not quite pointing their weapons at Tyson, but they’re loaded and held ready, aimed at the middle ground. Tyson’s drained face churns with emotion. He’s trembling, though perhaps from the cold as much as from anger, or fear. Throughout this standoff, Kruger’s mouth will not stop watering.

We can butcher this animal fairly right here, he says. Now.

A thick oyster of spittle lands an inch from Kruger’s toes. Anthing. In German: Any more interfering, Kruger, and you’ll be laid out beside the seal.

Let me have a look at that chart of yours, Mr Meyer, Tyson says at last. Meyer approaches stiffly and hands it over. Tyson makes a pretence of examining the map, then begins to grin. Finally he laughs. He can’t seem to help himself. He looks up, his eyes red, laughing harder, a bitter grin in his matted beard. The
German
part of this island! he says with a sort of desperate mirth. You’re losing territory to the sea every night, Count Meyer! How do you mean to fight the sea? And he tears the map to pieces and flings the shreds down over the corpse of the seal.

Take the Goddamned seal, then, and bring us our share.

He turns and marches away. Anthing grabs the animal by a back flipper and hauls it in the other direction. Ebierbing doesn’t move. His gaze is fixed on the pink-stained shadow where the seal’s body was. His eyes wider and stiller than Kruger has ever seen. Kruger tries to catch Tukulito’s eyes again, to be sure she doesn’t blame him for this crime, but she’s already turning away without a word, shepherding the crying children back to their huts. I’m sorry, Joe, says Kruger. Ebierbing doesn’t seem to hear. And already Kruger is turning from him, helpless—helplessly lured by the aroma of seal’s blood and the thrilled mutterings of the crewmen pulling and shoving the meat down into their tunnel.

He wakes from a dream of stooped strangers thin as kindling, cowled and shod in dark rags, hurriedly roaming the streets of a city whose vacant, high houses and shops and Gothic cathedrals are all constructed of ice. Wartime. These figures—the demised, as the dream calls them—are solitary, their paths uncannily straight and intercrossing. Yet somehow no two of them collide. None stops to comfort or confer. They are foraging for supplies. But on the snowy, level ground, under the low and sombre clouds, nothing remains to salvage or to steal.

In childhood when you wake in the night it’s often to fear; in adolescence it’s to the engorging ache of lust. In adulthood, in the small hours, even a happy man or woman wakes troubled, and at first, before the full return of identity and causation, the feeling is sourceless and absorbing, as if part of a cosmic sadness every adult sleeper taps into.
Wo bin ich?
Where am I. … Waking on the ice, Kruger can never quite believe the answer. And then: How can he be who he is, this one swarming mind and this random name trapped inside
this
body,
here?
And trapped
now
, on the forward-moving edge of the raft of time—now, out of all the ages?