Afterlands (5 page)

The bear, bleeding from the groin, rears onto trembling hind legs, searching the air with its snout and eyes as if the bull were not right there, planted a few steps away, as distant as the chain allows, its head stooped and the flayed muscle-hump of its shoulders heaving. Around the animals’ other limbs the knots have loosened. Lanyard knots, Kruger thinks. The rope-ends will soon drop off. Like dazed human fighters they’re holding back, considering. The crowd is muted. The bull chuffs sharply and then, hoofing up blood-sodden dirt, it charges the bear, who moves or stumbles to the side where the bull sticks him with a horn, but the bear wrenches free and grapples onto the bull’s exposed flank. The bull whirls, bellowing. The bear is thrown loose but hangs onto the bull’s hindquarters, wrapping itself over them as if covering a she-bear in a violent mating. It buckles the bull’s dainty hind legs, trying to topple it in stages. But now, as the bull hauls and kicks out with its forelegs to keep upright, the chain wrenches the bear’s back leg and it totters and flails, slamming onto its back in the dust. Laughter teems through the plaza as if at the antics of sideshow buffoons. The bull doesn’t turn on the fallen bear. For a moment it seems to want to flee, or gain room to manoeuvre, its red crescent horns and bloodied shoulders straining toward the gap in the crowds, but, hobbled, it lurches, hops in place, the drag of the bear’s weight too much for its foreleg. Recovering its fury it swivels and catches the bear in the act of righting itself. With a short, concise thrust, it hilts a horn in the bear’s neck. Blood pumps into the air. The bear sits back down with a despairing, human howl.

The ranchero next to Kruger and others around him are yelling and bouncing, particoloured bills fanned in somebody’s waving hand. Others groan and hang their heads. But the bear is still active. With a paw it cuffs the muzzle of the advancing bull and as the bull recoils with a small, stiff jump, like a fired howitzer, there’s a clank and both animals are still. The crowd’s clamour changes—gasps, here and there. The bear turns from the bull and starts waddling away. The chain has snapped at the attachment to the bear’s manacle. The bull stands at a loss, twitching bloodied nostrils, snorting gore.

Leaving in its wake the officer’s trampled hat, rope-ends, a spoor of blood graphic in the sunlight, the bear veers toward the north side of the plaza. A vacuum spreads around Kruger as spectators retreat, falling over each other like a mob fleeing a collapsing building. In a matter of seconds only Kruger remains, feeling nailed to the spot. Across the plaza the crowds also dissolving. In the middle the bull, head erect, trailing the snapped and clanking chain, canters in lame, crazed, tightening circles.

The bear moves in Kruger’s direction, dragging itself with pigeon-toed forelegs. What is it about fear that makes the feared thing so often come about? As if you secretly desire and invite what you think of as deepest aversions.
You … German!
He half turns and there is the ranchero’s sweating face, mouth working, the words nonsense. His friends are trying to drag the man away. They soon do. Kruger is alone. The bear sags to a halt a dozen steps short, its hog-small eyes dully measuring him, the barrel of its snout probing the air, wounds in full flux. From somewhere a shrilled command, then a stippling of flame and the ragged crash of rifles. The bear is blown onto its side; Kruger the last thing it has seen.

S
LEEP ON THE ICE
was protracted but shallow, shredded by jittery dreams and wakings, but that night Kruger and the men in their snowhut must have slept better, the seas below the floe almost placid, because later nobody could say whether the domed roof had caved in and the white bear had found them there exposed, or the bear with black-razored paw had sliced away the peak of the dome, like the top of a boiled egg, meaning to scoop out the insides. Kruger came awake to a Babel of panic, everyone reverting to his own tongue. The bear’s eyes in the lamp’s glow were reptilian and its massive skull outlined with stars, but had it really been slavering and roaring down like a fairy-tale dragon through a castle’s shattered roof? Others would later describe a medley of horrific sounds, but, as Kruger retold it, the bear had gone about its business with a sort of laconic reserve, a demeanour of unhurried and routine competence. If there had been any roaring it had come from the men. The bear’s jaws never opened and its eyes never blinked; its face was thoughtful, roman-nosed. Something almost surgical in its manner as it worked a white-coated arm over the edge of the hole and started probing down at the men trapped on the bed-ledge, their backs flinched up hard against the walls. Count Meyer (he was still addressed as “Mister” then) was trying to pull on his spectacles with one hand while jabbering orders. Who had moved his revolver? He was rummaging in the furs. Kruger and Anthing and Lundquist and Lindermann were all driving their fists into the walls, trying to punch through into the outer cold and feel for the rifles staked butt-down in the snow. This was before the rift between the parties—or the Nations, as the Count was to call them—deepened to the point where the men began keeping their firearms inside with them at night, despite the moisture, and a week after they had roasted the last of the dogs that would have warned them of the bear.

Jackson, the Negro cook, had dug out his cleaver and was waving it experimentally at the paw. In that cavernlight the blade looked rusted, dull and small. It was a yellowed, plush paw about the size of a young seal. It foraged closer while the men who had guns—all but Madsen and Jamka, who seemed paralyzed—kept reaching outside, arms through to the shoulders like horse doctors feeling for foals, and Kruger as he groped was swearing
Scheisse, scheisse, verdammt nochmal, wo bist du … !
The casual treachery of inanimate things. Now Madsen was yelling for help to Ebierbing and Hans and Tyson in the other snowhuts and Jamka was whimpering, giggling. Somebody sneezing repeatedly. Lundquist leaning back with his Springfield angled up, loading, he must have just pulled it inside, a clump of snow still on the sights, and the bear got its claws on the jerking leg of the steward, Herron, who started poking at it with a penknife. Kruger’s hand outside closed on the freezing stock of his rifle. Lundquist’s rifle, aimed at the bear’s head, clicked coldly, nothing, and Lundquist cocked the hammer again and again nothing. Get me another fucking round, he said hoarsely in Swedish and Kruger understood him but was too busy twisting his own rifle in through the wall butt-first and cracking the breech and fumbling a cartridge into the groove and swinging it round and up and cocking the hammer with the side of his palm because his thumb was too cold. He aimed at the bear’s cool, attentive face, beneath which little Herron was squirming and making farmyard sounds, dagger-like claws barbed in his breeches, dragging him down off the bed-ledge into the centre of the hut, upending the lamp so that it flared up and then died.

The rifle fired in the dark. The brace-plate thumped Kruger in the starved hollow of his gut. He curled on the ledge, both hands gripping his navel with its old scar and renewed pain, while the men around him, on their feet donning their furs, began the celebrations. There’s a pitch of joy, fierce and pure, primordial, unique to the truly desperate. They would butcher the animal now in the middle of the night and they would feast, their beards and teeth and lips lacquered with blood, greedy faces underlit by the refuelled blubber-lamps. A paleolithic scene. Ebierbing and Hans could be heard outside conferring in their clicking tongue, and now Tukulito was there, her composed, melodious voice, the first thing about her Kruger had loved—Are all the men quite well, Mr Meyer?—and then Tyson—I warned you this snowhut would not hold, Mr Meyer!—and two of the Esquimau children, likely Punnie and Succi, crying
Nanuq! Tuavilauritti!
Kruger sat up to receive a mug of foaming blood from a jolly-looking Herron—Herron whose squinty eyes used to vanish into his plump, port-coloured cheeks with every grin. Now his hag-face with gory lips and beard leaned in to kiss Kruger on the nose. A ghoul! In English Kruger asked after his leg and as Herron replied at length—again his garrulous self, though his teeth jittered and his Scouse accent had thickened—Kruger nodded, winced a smile, and drank the blood.

TWO

VERSIONS OF LOYALTY

To understand desire, one has to be, or remember having been, hungry.

—Judith Thurman

The world loves to be fooled.

—Niccolò Machiavelli

The image is an aerial view—night—the round

eroding icefloe glimpsed from the level

of clouds sweeping low and huge like ice—

bergs in the atmosphere. (Clouds that diffuse

the moon’s searchlight beam—we’re in a search plane.)

Through rifts in the gale, a gunblue fragment

lies coldly lit, adrift in black waters
,

and the notion comes of remoter views:

blue planet in the deeper night of interplanetary

seas, with stars of white shards
,

faint sheddings, an image caught by satellite
.

Now lampglow through the domes of separate

snowhuts seems the flicker of burning cities

glimpsed from space, by stationed personnel

served sudden notice of a deeper exile

at the start of some vast squabble of tribes
.

T
HE VOICE IS BOTH MUFFLED
and urgent in tone, like the voices of rescuers digging down to you. Tukulito works her face out from under the snow-covered pelts. Still dark, the morning sky has cleared and air of a searing coldness funnels down out of the high, dazzling altitudes of the Milky Way. On all sides, dimly visible, a pale and stately escort of icebergs drifts with the floe.

At the sea’s edge, not far off, Lieutenant Tyson stands in his cap and cotton jacket, mumbling phrases of a song through chattering teeth, pulling at a tin flask of something, humming some more. Now passionately he bursts out,
O drill, drill, ye tarriers!—
then stops himself, glances around. Tukulito has never understood that line of the song, which the lieutenant and some of the other men would sing often aboard the
Polaris
. Since Captain Hall’s death the officers have spent much of the expedition drunk. Many of Dr Bessels’ prize specimens—a skua hatchling, three lemming embryos, the fist-sized testicles of a muskox—were left to spoil in their jars as the officers, and sometimes the men, helped themselves to gallons of taxidermic alcohol. Drunk, Captain Budington was the sort to turn sentimental, a devotee of table and song, hearth and all humanity, while Tyson grew more tight-lipped and flint-eyed by the dram. After Hall’s death Budington was for sailing home, Tyson for slogging on to the Pole.

Somebody is moving under the pelts beside Tukulito and she feels for Punnie’s head and slips her hand into the child’s hood, resting it on her warm brow: Punnie is asleep, her breath slow and moist on Tukulito’s wrist. It’s Ebierbing who is stirring, not the child. His firm hand on Tukulito’s backside, moving. Now, just a few body lengths away, Mr Kruger’s hood pokes up out of this human snowdrift—the castaways lying together for warmth. He tugs back the hood with a white chuff of breath. His rumpled hair stands stiffly. He doesn’t look toward her, he is watching Tyson, who is still searching out across the open water, sipping and humming. Kruger’s mouth opens as if he will speak, but then he waits, apparently giving the lieutenant time to slip the flask back into his jacket. Kruger’s beard tightens around his mouth and Tukulito senses his irony, his temptation to deliver some irreverent remark. She has heard him do so often enough. He is kind to the children, he is respectful to her, but she very much dislikes this irony. It makes it impossible to know what he really thinks about things. Usually with white people it is easy to know (their overt expressions, their spilling words)—essential to know! Kruger clears his throat and with untypical earnestness calls out, Sir? Allow that I take the watch now. Come in and take shelter, sir.

Tyson twitches, wheels around. By the time he is fully turned—that fast—he has pulled himself together. He always seems to gain inches of height and pounds of solidity whenever he feels himself under observation. Ebierbing’s other hand squeezes the good fat of her belly and tugs downward, commandingly. Being freshly adrift, jammed here in a midden of sleepers, is nothing new to him, no sexual deterrent. He has never been as discreet as she would like. She pushes the hand away; she needs to observe this exchange. Lieutenant Tyson is now in command and much depends on him. Twice crushed by the loss of a son, Tukulito means to ensure her daughter’s safety one way or another.

Ah, Kruger! says Tyson, as if clearing his throat with the name.

Come in and find shelter, sir. Room can be found.

I mean to scout a little yet. Go back to sleep, Kruger.

Giving up on sheer force, her husband is easing down her caribou pants, stroking between her thighs. She swats at his hand. He grips her hand and tugs.

Any sign of the
Polaris?
Kruger asks hoarsely. Again no trace of irony. In fact, fresh from sleep like a child, he looks dazed and anxious.

Nothing! By God, when I lay hands on Budington again, he’ll …

You’re shivering, sir.

Never mind that. You rest now, with the others. At dawn I’ll call you—all of you. And he strides off along the floe’s edge, as if on a morning’s brisk constitutional in a city park. Lunar rounds of breath rise and dissolve above him. Ebierbing’s caresses are diligent and Tukulito is beginning to sag down to him, into the stuffy warmth under the pelts; Kruger turns, noticing her face, and stares for a long second. She stares back while Ebierbing’s hand smoothly continues. Kruger nods, says stiffly
Madam
, then ducks back down into the snowdrift, as if in some children’s game.

She is back in her husband’s silent, barely moving embrace.

Above, massed stars droop and arc down to the horizon where the calm sea-leads around the floe are slick and milky with mirrored light. The floe seems to slide not over the sea but through the heavens. One of the men moans and babbles in German, the sounds muted through this huddle of bodies buried in the night’s snow. They will never again sleep, or think, as a single group like this; for now they all believe that the
Polaris
must return for them at any time. It’s silent. Snow cloaks the sleepers like quicklime over a mass grave.

TYSON, FROM
ARCTIC EXPERIENCES

Oct. 16, 1872
. Blowing a strong gale from the north-west. We are adrift on the ice, and the
Polaris
is nowhere visible.

I think it must have been about 6 P.M., last night, when the vessel was nipped with the ice. The pressure was very great. She did not lift to it much; she was not broad enough—not built flaring, as the whalers call it; had she been built so she would have risen to the ice, and the pressure would not have affected her so much. But, considering all, she bore it nobly.

In the commencement of these events, I came out of my cabin, which was on the starboard side, and looked over the rail, and saw that the ice was pressing heavily. I then walked over to the port side. Most of the crew were at this time gathered in the waist, looking over at the huge floe to which we were fastened. I saw that the ship rose somewhat to the pressure, and then immediately came down again on the ice, breaking it, and riding it under her. The ice was very heavy, and the vessel groaned and creaked in every timber.

At this time the engineer, Schuman, came running from below, among the startled crew, saying that “the vessel has started a leak aft, and the water is gaining on the pumps.” The vessel had been leaking before like this, and they were already pumping—Anthing and Esquimau Joe, I think, with the small pump in the starboard alley-way. I then walked over toward my cabin. Behind the galley I saw Captain Budington—who appeared again to have been drinking—and told him what the engineer said. The trembling wretch stood there apparently oblivious to everything but his own coward thoughts. Then, he threw up his arms and yelled out to “throw every thing on the ice!” Instantly all was confusion, the men seizing every thing indiscriminately, and throwing it overboard. These things had previously been placed upon the deck in anticipation of such a catastrophe; but as the vessel, by its rising and falling motion, was constantly breaking the ice, and as no care was being taken how or where the things were thrown, I got overboard, calling some of the men to help me, and tried to move what I could away from the ship, so things should not all be crushed and lost; and also called out to the men on board to stop throwing things till we could get what was already endangered out of the way. But still much ran under the ship.

It was a terrible night. It was snowing and drifting; the wind was exceedingly heavy, blowing strong from the south-east, and it was fearfully dark, and so bad was the snow and sleet that one could not even look to windward. High seas were striking the ship and the floe, and the air was filled with freezing spray, like hail, so that I could scarcely see the unloaded stuff—whether it was on the ice or in the water. Now and then the full moon cut through the clouds, but for a moment only, enough to show the great bergs bearing down on us, with the current and against the wind.

We worked for three or four hours, I sometimes on the ice and sometimes on the ship. On the ice Hannah was working beside me; and we worked till we could scarcely stand. They were throwing things constantly over to us. Then at last I went aboard—where I found that the engineer’s statement about the leak was a false alarm! I asked Budington “how much water is the vessel making?” and he told me “he feared now that we had been mistaken.” The vessel, it seemed, was mostly sound, but when the ice had nipped her and she had heeled, the little water in the hold was thrown over, and it made a rush, and Schuman thought a new leak had been sprung. Budington and I went below decks to check one more time. Finding she was making no more water, I returned to the ice to try and save the provisions. While we were so engaged, the ice commenced cracking; I warned Budington of it, he meantime calling out to “get every thing back as far as possible from the ship.” We did not know who was on the floe or who on the
Polaris;
but I knew some of the children were with us, for at that moment I spied a little heap of muskox skins, lying across a widening crack in the ice, and as I pulled them toward me to save them, I saw that there were
two or three of Hans’s children rolled up in one of the skins!

Moments later, the ice seemed to explode under our feet, fracturing in many places, and stern ice-anchors broke loose. I saw the steward, John Herron, trying to leap from a pan of ice and grab the ship’s loose hawser, but it swung away from him too fast. “Good-bye,
Polaris!
” he called, as the ship broke away in the darkness, and we lost sight of her in a moment.

Much, perhaps most, of the goods were lost in the floe’s breaking, and now some of the men were on separate pieces of ice, all crying out for help. They could scarcely be heard over the storm. I took the “little donkey”—a small scow—and went for them; but the scow was almost instantly swamped. Then I shoved off one of the whaleboats, and took off Herron, Jamka, and Mr Meyer, while Kruger, Lindermann, and the coloured cook took the other whale-boat and helped their companions back; so that we were all on firm ice at last.

We did not dare to move about much after that, for we could not see the size of the floe we were on, on account of the storm and darkness. Fortunately we had the two whale-boats with us. The men had also saved their firearms and ammunition—a fact at which I was initially pleased—as well as their clothes bags. I had only the light clothing I had been wearing aboard the ship: my old sealskin breeches, an undershirt, wool shirt, cotton jumper, and “Russian cap.” And now all the rest, the men, women, and children, sought what shelter they could from the storm by wrapping themselves in musk-ox skins, and so lay down to rest, huddled together. The dogs slept curled in the snow nearby. I walked the floe all night, keeping watch.

Around three in the morning the gale and snow abated, and by the light of the full moon’s setting I could see all. This was a nearly circular piece of ice, about four miles in circumference. It was not level, but was full of hillocks, and also ponds, or small lakes, which had been formed by ice-melt during the short summer. The ice was of various thicknesses. Some of the mounds, or hills, were probably thirty feet thick, and the flat parts not more than ten. It was very rough; the hillocks were covered with snow; indeed, the surface was all snow from the last night’s storm. Those who lay down on the ice were all snowed under—but that helped to keep them warm. Perhaps I should have lain down too, if I had had any thing to lie on; but the others had taken all the skins, and I would not disturb them to ask for one.

I should think the ship would soon be coming to look for us. Why does not the
Polaris
come to our rescue? This is the thought that now fills every heart, and has mine ever since the first dawn of light this morning. At that time, I scanned the horizon but could see nothing of the vessel; but from a large hummock, the floe’s highest point, I saw a lead of water which led to the land. The sea had become almost calm. I looked around at the company with me upon the ice, and then at the provisions which we had with us. Besides myself there were eighteen persons, namely:

Frederick Meyer, meteorologist (German); John Herron, steward (English); William Jackson, cook (Negro)—
Seamen:
R.W. Kruger (German); Fred. Jamka (German); William Lindermann (German); Matthias Anthing (German-Russian); Gus. Lundquist (Swedish); Soren Madsen (Danish).—
Esquimaux:
Joe; Hannah; Punnie (child); Hans Christian; Merkut or Christiana (Hans’s wife); Augustina, Tobias, Succi (children); Charlie Polaris, new baby of Hans’s; and there were as well six Esquimau dogs.

Now, to feed all these, I saw that we had but fourteen large cans of pemmican, eleven and a half bags of ship’s biscuit, one can of dried apples, and fourteen hams; and if the ship did not come for us, we might have to support ourselves all winter, or die of starvation. Fortunately, we had the boats. As soon as I could see to do so, I walked across the floe to find where was the best lead, so that we could get to shore; and in the mean time I ordered the men to get the boats ready, for I was determined to make a start and try and get to the land, from which I thought we might find the ship, or at least, if we did not find her, we might meet with Esquimaux to assist us.