Afterlands (9 page)

Crawl into the new and larger snowhut that the crewmen have just built, fifty paces north of the other huts. The men lie jammed on the bed-ledge in caribou bags and muskox hides. For the sake of warmth and space they lie head to foot, head to foot, Madsen and Lindermann closest, as always, like duelling pistols in a lined case. The air is rife with a humid, heady stench. In the pemmican-tin lamp a few embers still glow, projecting a dim aurora over the dome of the raggedly built hut. The storm scouring the walls outside sounds like a waterfall. The men see and hear none of this, all asleep, some maybe dreaming in their several languages of differently dressed women, different cuisines. Differently undressed women.

Sailors, the professionally homeless.

The sounds wake Kruger first. A low grunting along with a moan of wind, then a blast of icy air. In the flickery womb-light an immense grey wolf, bunched flat to the floor, is creeping in through the entry tunnel. Kruger’s scalp and forearms freeze and then the vision reforms: Ebierbing in his parka has just crawled inside, pushing through the grey wolfskin that blocks the tunnel. He stands, props his rifle on the canvas floor and peels back his hood, the hair plastered flat on his forehead. Looking around the hut he grins, a master stoneworker tickled by a child’s ambitious house of blocks.

Gott steh mir bei!
Jamka hisses, sitting up. He wakes anxious with every warlike crack or boom in the ice, and they’re constant; and he doesn’t hide his fear that the natives may intend to slaughter them and feed on their raw flesh. (Raw, not cooked—somehow it is worse.) He has a long face, long black beard, tiny lobster eyes set too close together. Others are waking now. Anthing’s eyes pop open in the gloom. He digs in his sea-bag for his revolver; the unloaded rifles are all staked outside, on Ebierbing’s strong advice, to prevent damage from the moisture.

Good evening, boys! Ebierbing says thickly. Excuse me, but you boys will all please come and help.

Is it morning, Kru? asks Herron, next to Kruger.

Well, it’s early.

Night still, says Ebierbing. Hans Christian is lost. It’s many hours now since. I look and look everywhere, but nothing. You boys now please come and help.

The awake ones seem unable to meet each other’s eyes. The others, far from being disturbed by Ebierbing’s intrusion, seem soothed by it into deeper states of repose, nestled in their bags with a sort of mortuary stillness. Herron recedes deeper into his bag. Only a tousle of his hair shows. As Kruger watches, others do the same—oddly furred, larval creatures in the grip of some obscure tropism. From inside his bag, Madsen’s cough asserts itself with tubercular urgency. Jackson decides to see to the lamp. Ebierbing is no longer grinning, yet neither is he frowning. His steady gaze and posture suggest that he’s merely waiting, as if for a seal to surface, and will remain that way until somebody does.

All right then, Kruger says gruffly, sloughing himself out of his bag in his woollens. Small amends. He grips the mouth of Herron’s bag and shakes it, saying Johnny, come on now! But Herron retracts further, disappearing.

Outside, Ebierbing takes Kruger’s mitten firmly in his own and they push into the white-out, hand in hand like schoolchildren lost in a forest. Kruger blushes; as if anyone can see them out here. In fact, nothing can be seen, even a few paces ahead. Rifles across their backs they lean steeply into the storm as if climbing a gangplank. Snow burns into Kruger’s eyes like whipped sand on a beach, then freezes on his lashes, sealing them shut. He staggers blindly, still pulled by Ebierbing. After a moment the healing pressure of a warm, bare palm over his eyes, patiently thawing them open. As the hand withdraws he passes from a dark sort of blindness to a white one. A face leans in close to his own: Ebierbing yelling, a mittened hand shielding his mouth.
Head more down, Mr Kruger, like this!
Kruger opens his mouth to reply and is gagged by the snow-sharpened wind.

They crouch behind a hummock and Ebierbing tries to explain what became of Hans. They were hunting in the twilight of midday when Hans, hoping to find seal-holes on a large floe that was bumping into theirs, crossed a narrow lead, promising to return soon. But Ebierbing may not have understood; Hans’s Greenland dialect often gives him trouble. Hours later Ebierbing returned empty-handed to the camp, expecting to find Hans there, but was disappointed, and so had gone straight out again into the rising gale and spent some hours searching. At last he came to the crewmen to ask for help.

Kruger realizes that Ebierbing has been out walking the ice for over fifteen hours.

They push on for some time and reach open water, black and steaming in the dark, small whitecaps clipping across it. The edge of the map. They turn around and trek inland with the wind, driven at a run among the Central Alps, and now with the wind behind them they call out for Hans, puny syllables swiftly absorbed:
Hans Christian! Hans Christian!
Twice, at a slight lull in the storm, Ebierbing fires his rifle into the invisible sky and pauses to listen.

On the shores of Lake Polaris they hear something. Turning back to windward they peer into the swarming snow. A little less dense than before. Ebierbing signals Kruger and they bunch down behind a small hummock. The hunter, his moustaches glazed silver, levels his rifle and cocks the hammer and Kruger does the same with his Springfield, now seeing what Ebierbing must see—a white bear clambering down over a hummock on the far shore of the pond and crossing the ice toward them, reared up on its hind legs to attack. In the flying snow it’s impossible to say if this is a small bear very close, or a huge one farther off. It comes on swiftly with the wind at its tail. Kruger squints against the snow and waits, his heart jolting up into his throat, for Ebierbing to fire. The bear is almost on them. Ebierbing lowers his Spencer and jams the tip of his mitten under the hammer of Kruger’s rifle and then begins chuckling,
laughing
, a sound almost stifled by the wind. This laughter clears Kruger’s eyes. They have come within a trigger’s breadth of shooting Hans Christian. There he stands tottering, his fur clothing and hood impastoed with snow, completely white. Ebierbing rises and shouts something at him and then continues laughing hard, his eyes glistening and welling with tears which freeze on his cheeks, while Hans himself, who has been lost in the storm for a dozen hours and has just barely escaped being shot dead, merrily joins in.

Ebierbing leads them back to Hallburgh, apparently navigating by the wind and the contours of the ice. Hans crawls immediately into his own hut. The squat silhouette of Merkut seated before her fatlamp appears to them as if on the wall of a magic lantern. For a moment Ebierbing studies Kruger obliquely, then invites him into his own bright snowhut, for tea and food. They enter on all fours. How difficult it must be, Kruger thinks, for a native to put on airs, or to play the returning hero, when nobody can barge or strut into a room. Everybody crawls.

In parka and fur pants Tukulito sits cross-legged before her fatlamp, her long braids swinging around the flame but never touching it. The neat and smooth-domed hut is filled with the aromas of tea and burning blubber—a smell like rancid cod-oil, but Kruger would gladly guzzle every hot, stinking drop of it. Ebierbing mutters something to Tukulito in their tongue, seeming to nod toward Hans’s snowhut, then toward Kruger. At her husband’s safe return she is coolly formal, not openly relieved; maybe on account of an outsider’s presence. She will not meet Kruger’s eye. Well, she must wish her family to herself, at this hour. Or is she simply exhausted? Broad, brown Esquimau faces don’t betray fatigue the way white faces do.

Good evening, Mr Kruger. She is carefully pouring tea into tin mugs.

Must be near morning now, he says weakly.

So it is, sir. Good morning, sir. She passes him and Ebierbing mugs of pemmican tea and chunks of biscuit. The men fall on their meal, Ebierbing’s strong jaws working noisily at his slab, Kruger impatiently dunking his in the tea to soften it. How wonderful the tea steam feels on his cheeks! How warm and bright and orderly the hut, compared to the jammed barracks of the crewhut! Little Punnie lies among ox furs on the bed-ledge, only her face and the yarn-haired scalp of her doll’s head showing. She sleeps with her eyes half open, flickering with lamplight, the way Kruger’s baby sister Elke used to sleep in her cradle beside the coalstove. The heat, the food and the cozy closeness and the sight of the child sleeping and the strain of this night overcome Kruger and he brings a hand to his face and fills it with a number of hard, fierce sobs.

Heim. Heimat
.

When he has mastered himself, he looks out at Ebierbing, Tukulito.

Forgive me.

With averted eyes they nod.

And thank you for this.

I believe you will need more in a minute, sir. Perhaps some meat.

Thank you.

I know that you crewmen have excellent appetites.

He looks up at her. Her liquid eyes, calm and clear, are fixed on his.

After a moment he says quickly, I hoped my going with Joe tonight could make some small apology for my … weakness of the other night. Apparently it does not. Of course it’s not enough. I’m ashamed, and I offer you both my truest apologies.

Another studious pause, then she says, To the contrary, sir. It is more than enough. Your help may have saved Hans Christian. And she smiles, fleetingly, an astonishing sight—a small but explosive release.

Ebierbing looks at her in puzzlement, as if awaiting a translation.

This is the one place on this island, Kruger says, moved, where I see no weakness.

In the eyes of God we are all equally weak, sir.

Weak, we eat more, says Ebierbing, taking two of the grey strips Tukulito has set to warm on the rim of the fatlamp. One of these he hands to Kruger with a cordial grunt. Kruger hesitates. Presumably this is a leftover fillet of either Sambo or Poodle, and so far the men have declined to eat such meat—another small “justification” for the other night’s open theft. But before long they may have to accept whatever comes; Tyson has said that since the “secret pilfering” is occurring almost every night, he may soon be forced to tighten the ration.

The strip tastes a little like stringy, dried-out pork.

Hans Christian is a barrel-bodied little man with a benevolent gnome-like face—large snouty features inherited from the Danish grandfather he proudly cites. His chin and cheeks are as hairless as a girl’s. Seen from behind, he has the stubbed, bandy legs of a terrier. In noon’s blue twilight, a few stars twinkling, Kruger watches him kick and drag Spike by his salt-and-pepper scruff away from the camp. The dog gives a few shrunken barks and whimpers but is too starved to do more. For a moment Spike seems to hold Kruger’s gaze—
Help me, you!
—and Kruger can only look away from those hazel, human eyes. The remaining dogs sit clumped together by Hans’s snowhut, howling as they watch, and the Esquimau children cluster nearby. The crewmen by their own hut watch intently. Meyer stands with them. Ebierbing is off hunting seal, the lieutenant is indisposed. Meyer has told Kruger—whom he seems to see as a kind of subaltern—that his cabin-mate has been feeling poorly since finishing the “liquid provisions” to which he had grown accustomed on the ship. When Meyer adds that he, Meyer, has decided to move in with the men, perhaps tomorrow, Kruger guesses that while Meyer has been willing to share a bit of Tyson’s drink, he’s not prepared to share a small hut with a man in the throes of withdrawal.

The air is frigid and still. Human and animal exhalations rise in pale, fading verticals. This is the third day running that Hans has slaughtered a dog. The crewmen now eagerly partake of the meat. The men seem ready to eat almost anything. When Kruger told them how close he and Joe had come to gunning down Hans, a brief, ambiguous silence had followed, and Kruger had felt, had known, with a sort of tribal intuition, that some men were pondering what would have been done with the remains. What they’d have been willing to do with them.

Hans draws a gutting knife from his belt and with the hand that grips Spike’s scruff he tries to upend the dog and expose his throat. With a whiplash twist of the body Spike breaks free and, lips peeled back, leaps snapping at Hans, who recoils, falls. In silence Spike turns and hobbles quickly away, favouring the left front paw. Without a word Hans gets up and starts after him at a plodding lope. Hurry! cries Herron. Jamka lifts his rifle and Anthing his long-barrelled revolver and they fire on the dog, but miss.

Kruger joins Hans in pursuing Spike, now well ahead but slowing as he limps over a steep hummock of rafted ice. Both men are winded—just standing up winds them all these days—and Kruger feels as if he is running on stilts, way above the ice, numb and tottery, as in a sickbed dream. They reach the hummock and scramble up and then slide and stutter-step down the backslope. Two starved men chasing a crippled dog on a doomed ice floe. Spike stops and glances back at them: the white mask of his face, the ears pricked. He has reached the eastern rim of the floe, the very shore of the world. A blood and emerald aurora billows faintly. In the dimpled gloom the men slowly approach. They make soothing sounds. Kruger trembles from head to toe. Spike checks them over his shoulder, his backside to them, scrawny haunches tensed, his anus seeming to watch them like an eye from under the erect tail. He leaps. The white corona of a splash in the black sea.
If only I had my rifle, and Hans his kayak!
Spike has been his favourite among the dogs, but now he thinks only of that gristly, life-giving flesh.

They run to the edge as Spike scratches up onto a teetering cake of ice barely large enough to hold him. He turns and faces them: a rug of matted fur draped over a rack of ribs. When he shakes himself, droplets fling around him and tick down, beads of ice by now, on the darkly smoking sea. The lead between Great Hall Island and the ice cake widens as the island drifts on to the south, and the ice cake, amid other pans and patches of grey frazil, recedes westward, pushed by the side-wake of the floe. Shivering on his flake of ice, staring with limpid eyes as a breeze riffles the tufts frozen between his ears, Spike watches the men in silence as he drifts out of sight.