Far North (17 page)

One of the guards had come in with us and stood standing at the desk beside him.

‘Seems you’re determined to work,’ said Boathwaite.

‘Yes, sir,’ I told him, trying to keep him level as the room danced around his head.

&lsuoYou’re sick,’ he said.

‘Nothing too serious,’ I whispered between chattering teeth.

‘Your winter clothes. What happened to them?’

‘Gambling debts.’

Boathwaite winked at the guard. ‘I heard you’re none too good at cards.’ His voice echoed down to me, as though I was listening to him from the bottom of a well. ‘I heard you told the prisoners in the sick ward you got a plane coming for you. You planning to fly out of here?’

I shook my head.

‘You ever even seen a plane, Makepeace?’

‘No sir. I must have been raving.’

I thought then that perhaps my stash of bread had been found, or I’d blabbed about my plan to escape. In that case, they would certainly kill me.

‘You’re from the Far North, aren’t you?’

‘American originally.’

‘Settler family?’

I told him yes.

‘They tell me the settlers in the Far North are tougher than frozen mammoth shit,’ Boathwaite said, and the guard cackled.

I could barely hold my head straight. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said.

‘Seems about right to me. Go get some rest,’ he said, and nodded to the guard.

I was too tired to fight. I barely understood what was happening. They hauled me down to the workshop and broke me out of my chains.

THREE

1

I
T
WAS
A
couple of days before the change in my life began to make sense to me.

For the first time in almost three years I had a room to myself. My new quarters had a cot bed with a stained mattress, a tiny desk with an oil lamp and a window that overlooked the parade ground. There were half a dozen streaks of brown on the ceiling above my head, each of them ending in a squashed mosquito carcass from the summer. There was no heat, but I had a pile of army blankets that stank of naphthalene.

Someone brought me food three times a day, and I sweated out my fever.

Part of me wanted to walk out the door right then, back onto the highway that was all silvered in the moonlight, and that would take me back the way I’d come. Likely as not, my house sat empty, with the pianola sagging to bits inside, and the dusty books and the bed-frames. The garden would have seeded itself from old crops and grown straggly and wild. I had a hankering to be back there, i a place I knew well, among the memories of my loved ones.

But something more than the practical concern about the time of year and the provisioning for the journey kept me from leaving.

Out in the yard, the prisoners were crossing to their bunkhouse.

In the twilight, you might almost think that I was looking out at the old world right here. There was a farm, and these were workers, idling in the cold night air in twos and threes on the other side of my filthy window.

One of them was Shamsudin. I knew him by his gait. None of the prisoners moved with urgency, but Shamsudin went especially slowly nowadays. Lately he’d begun to stoop a little too. He was one of the oldest at the base by now. This was our fourth winter in that place, heading into our fifth summer. We hadn’t exchanged a word with one another for over a year.

The hard life at the base had aged him. I had noticed him working in the fields over the past months, resting on his shovel more often and breathing hard. There was a kind of defiant slowness in the way some of the younger guys worked, as though they were daring you to chivvy them. But the older ones like Shamsudin worked slower because they were weakening, and they needed to conceal it. There was a casualness about the way they moved, but its root was deep fatigue. Sometimes you’d surprise one of the older ones where he wasn’t expecting to be seen, flat on his ass behind a wall, legs splayed in front of him, his face slack with exhaustion and hollowed out like a corpse’s.

There was no one in the base much past fifty. Disease and the foul weather tended to do for them after that. Even on the guards’ side there wasn’t much grey hair.

The oldest prisoners only had two hopes. One was that they would be made a guard, but it got less likely the older they became, and never happened at all if they were a muslim. The other was to find easier work in the Zone.

It was pitiful to see the effort they went to when they heard that a round-up of men was about to happen. They’d shave and comb their hair the night before. Once an old fellow they called Tuvik put on a fresh shirt he’d been saving somehow and pinned a bar of medals to it. He jutted his skinny jaw as the guards’ eyes fell on him. They moved past without choosing him and his adam’s apple bobbed once or twice.

One of the half-Tungus prisoners teased him for it as we walked back to the hut. ‘Where did you steal those medals, Tuvik, you old thief?’

That was too much for Tuvik’s wounded pride. ‘I fought two years in the Pacific war. I lived in a submarine and killed Japs and chinks like you with my bare hands!’

The Tungus boy laughed at him and fended off Tuvik’s reedy forearms as he came to strike him. Tuvik’s hands looked like bird-claws in the boy’s meaty brown fists.

The Tungus boy stole the medals that night and lost them the next day at cards. A week later, Tuvik died in his sleep.

It was the guards as much as anyone that fed our dreams of the Zone. When I was a prisoner, they’d drop casual remarks about what we’d find there. The refrigerators in the guards’ village, the generators, our weapons – all of them were made there, they said. Someone even said they had a picture house.

I was curious to see it myself, but most of all I thought it would be good for Shamsudin to get there.

There was a growing sense of defeat about him. That day on the roof I had a glimpse of the man he might have been. Some of those others slipped into life at the base like they’d known no other – perhaps they hadn’t, or known worse – but Shamsudin still carried about him some dignity, like a fading scent of the world he’d come out of.

It struck me that a man like Shamsudin would be welcomed in the Zone. He might have to do menial work at first, but any place with a little ambition would soon see the value of him – a man who had travelled and knew languages, who knew the name of every muscle in the human body. People like me were ten a penny in that place: practical, tough-minded ones who knew ways to grub in the tundra to stay alive. But Shamsudin had knowledge that could only be got from books. I couldn’t say the use of all of it. Sometimes I know it seemed foolish and a little strange, like a silk tie round the necks of one of those prisoners. But what he knew had been thought precious by people who knew more than we did. What he had in his head had been hoarded up over centuries. It was precious enough for blood to be spilt over it. It took a thousand years of study for him to know the things he did – a thousand years of science and testing and people prepared to die to say the earth went round the sun and not the other way around. And once it was lost, it would take another thousand years to learn it again.

It made me sad to see him weakening. He seemed to go into himself and spend less time with the other muslims. I wished I could take him out of that place somehow. He reminded me of one those books that I used to hide in the armoury. Only a person is always better than a book.

So at the back of my mind was the thought of the good I might be able to do for him. And the good that could be done if I could find a way to link him up with the people in the plane.

The way things looked, he had at most two years to live. Perhaps less. Sooner or later he’d wind up in the clearing where they’d put Tuvik.

Each fall before the ground froze, the guards marched half a dozen prisoners out to the woods to dig a deep hole. Come the thaw, they marched them out again to put the earth back over the fifteen or twenty bodies that had been dumped there over the winter. There was no ceremony to the burials. A couple of guards would slip the body into a sack and haul it out on a cart, toss it in the hole and throw powdered lime on it. It waited there uncovered until the next one.

Weighing it up in my heart, I felt like I had a duty to do right by Shamsudin. There are reasons behind reasons, of course, and if you go into them too deeply you end up tripping over yourself. Looking back at it now, I see I had some kind of feelings for him, since he was the first person to show me an ounce of kindness since Ping. And he had a way about him that reminded me of my father, I think, and I wonder if maybe I was trying to go back and save
him
. But if I search behind that, I come up against a plainer reason. Since Ping died, it felt like I had lost the knack of being alone.

When I was a child, there was an old man in the woods who lived alone, miles from anyone, who we were warned from visiting. He was a Russian called Pankov who did big wooden carvings that he stood in his yard. We would sneak over to spy on him, and he would yell and chase us away if he caught us there. Being children, that wa sport to us. ‘Madder than an outhouse rat,’ my father called him, and he slippered us when Charlo blurted out that we’d been over there.

Pankov died when I was about twelve, and a party of elders from our town buried him in his yard. The hut he’d lived in fell a little more apart each year after that, until it was all flattened, as though something big had sat on it.

I went there once or twice in the years that followed. Pankov had sculpted whole tree trunks into big, busy columns of snakes, and demons, and wriggling, bosomy women that the elders politely ignored when they went to inter him.

Whatever had flattened the house – snow? woodworm? – had scattered its contents around the yard. And amid all the stuff you’d expect – torn bed sheets, candlesticks, mouldy shoes, broken glass – was page upon page of musical scores, piles of them, with their pretty lines and black dots. What must they have meant to him, that he went to the trouble of carrying all that paper out there with him, and keeping it, year after year, where there was no one to share it with, not an instrument, only the silence, and the little creaks and whirrs of his own body failing bit by bit?

I didn’t want to be like Pankov, sitting out years like a man in a waiting room, marking time until the fall that killed me, or the accident that left me unable to feed myself. But I could see how I might end up that way. Between the world of my youth, and the world I was in now, was a gap so big I was finding it harder and harder to cross it even in my imagination.

Had I dreamed a world where people flew, and food was plentiful, and we, the settlers in the north, were seen as primitives?

Life in the base gave you all the evidence you needed of men’s beastliness. And yet, looking back on long passages of my life, it felt like it was the solitary parts of it that made the least sense.

2

W
HEN
I
WAS
strong enough, I took my meals in the guards’ mess, where they served meat and some kind of almost-coffee alongside the things they gave the prisoners. The other guards seemed less surprised by Boathwaite’s raising me up than I was.

It wasn’t the paradise the prisoners imagined, but we had better food, and solitude. Strangely, there was a wariness between the guards themselves that I couldn’t fathom. They had a few things: a steam bath, a little store where we could buy stuff with paper tickets. And there was indeed a whorehouse. I never had need of it, and even to look at the women on the stoop in daytime, chattering and brushing their hair out, put me too much in mind of Ping.

We all lived within the base, but there was a higher order of guard who lived in the village. Some of them had taken wives and settled down.

I hadn’t changed my intention of slipping out of that place in the spring. In fact, now it would be easier. I had a greasy old side-arm they’d given me with a couple of bullets in it. And I knew where I could probably steal a horse. But there was something I wanted to attend to first.

 *

In February, Boathwaite called a few of us together and told us he was sending a detachment of men to work in the Zone. There would be ten guards escorting them and I would be one of them. The Russian called Tolya who acted as Boathwaite’s deputy at the base was leading the party. He had been to the Zone many times. Of the nine others in the party, four including myself had never been there before, but even among the guards it wasn’t the style to seem too curious or ask too many questions. We acted like it was the most normal thing in the world and we just did what the others did.

At the morning line-up, each of us picked two men from the prisoners in the yard.

The experienced guards went to some trouble to choose the strongest men, feeling through their clothes for muscles and checking their eyes for clearness.

When it was my turn, I went slowly along the line, trying not to dwell on the desperation in the faces of the men in front of me, acting like I was sizing them up. It was strange how different they looked at me now I had some power over them. I havered for a while to make it seem that I was weighing up my choices, then I nodded at Shamsudin and Zulfugar to step out of the line.

 *

The prisoners who had been chosen were allowed to fall out and given two minutes to collect their things from the huts. They regrouped in the parade ground and four of us marched them out, all twenty of them, through the central gate of the base, across the clearing around it, and into a low two-storey building that stood on the fringe of the guards’ village. There were two big rooms on the lower floor. One was a refectory where they were served the same food as the guards got, only a little colder because it had to be carried over there. Next to it was a sleeping room with bunks that were sprung and more generous than the ones at the base.

For the next two hours they ate and were allowed to exercise out in the clearing. It was unaccustomed freedom to all of them. Next to being made a guard it was the best that any of them could have hoped for. Most didn’t try to hide their delight at being chosen.

It was unseasonably warm and bright. Just for a moment, the idea that some of us were prisoners and some guards seemed to fade. I was filled with a rare hope. From here to the Zone seemed like an easy step. I had no fixed notion of the future, but I could feel its shape, and for once it seemed like it wasn’t a thing to be dreaded.

Shamsudin stood alone, eyes shut, face into the sun, his shoulders rising and falling with his breathing. At the edge of the clearing, the sunshine had melted the thin snow cover under the trees. Zulfugar squatted down in a mess of fallen oak leaves and dug at something with a stick.

He looked up and saw me watching and waved me over with his free hand. Just as I got to him, he yanked something out of the ground.

In his hand was a warty black ball about the size of a walnut. He held it out to me.

I took it from him. It was hard and somewhat like a nutmeg to touch. Zulfugar motioned me to smell it. ‘
Al-kamat
,’ he said. ‘The Prophet said it is good for the eyes.’ There was a glint of his gold teeth as he smiled.

Suddenly there was a shout behind me and something banged my arm. One of the other guards had charged pa and shouldered Zulfugar to the ground. Zulfugar lay on his back in the leaves looking puzzled. Two other guards had pinned him down with the muzzles of their guns and were shouting, ‘What’s he got?’

‘It’s a mushroom,’ I said, ‘and by the smell of it, a damn good one.’

‘Yes,’ said Zulfugar. ‘Mushroom.’

The guards let him up slowly. He dusted the damp leaves off his pants.

‘For you, Makepeace.’ He walked back shakily to the other prisoners.

 *

Around mid-morning, we took them back to their quarters and led them into the upper room. Boathwaite was waiting for us. The prisoners sat on the floor cross-legged like schoolchildren.

‘All first-timers?’ he said to Tolya. Tolya nodded.

‘Now listen up. It’s a privilege to be chosen for the Zone, as you know. I gather that some of you are already getting the idea. You share what you bring out. Those who picked you are entitled to half of your labour.’

A couple of the guards chuckled, understanding him to be making a dig about the mushroom that had almost got Zulfugar killed.

It was beginning to dawn on me how some of them were able to live so well, with houses off the base, and wives. If you had enough workers in the Zone, it could make you a rich man. It was like what Boathwaite was doing, but on a smaller scale.

‘Joking aside, this isn’t easy work,’ Boathwaite went on. ‘I’m not going to bullshit you. Working in the Zone isn’t heavy or backbreaking, and it brings plenty of rewards, but it’s dangerous in other ways. The men who picked you, chose you because they figured you’d have the smarts to use common sense, do what we say, and not get sick.

‘You work a ten-day stretch and then you will be allowed a number of rest days back here. The harder you work, the more rest days you get. And for the best workers, there are privileges.

‘I’m going to let Mr Apofagato explain in detail what those duties involve.’

Mr Apofagato had jet-black hair and wore thick eyeglasses that fastened right round his head like welder’s goggles. I couldn’t place his accent, but I can tell you that he didn’t grow up speaking English.

‘Zone big,’ said Mr Apofagato, slapping his hand on a wall-map. ‘Almost four hundred square kilometres. Right here not Zone. Zone start far side of river. But not all contaminated. Your duties – mine objects. What objects? These.’

He unrolled a handwritten chart and tacked it over the map. It showed about a dozen different objects, all carefully drawn in coloured ink, and rough measurements around them. Some of them were familiar to me – electrical batteries, something like a wireless, but the others looked like nothing I had ever seen.

The guards around the room handed out sheets of squared paper and pencils.

‘Copy pictures,’ said Mr Apofagato.

They did as they were told. Most of them weren’t much for artwork, and when Mr Apofagato came round to check them, he tutted at their drawings and told them, ‘Write serial numbers, serial numbers important.’

Shamsudin’s surgeon’s fingers made fine copies that were cross-hatched to show shading and got Mr Apofagato clucking with approval.

When the copies had been made, we took away their pencils, and Mr Apofagato unrolled a smaller city map.

‘Many sectors in Zone. This your sector. Mining these locations. Okay? Now copy map. Copy locations.’

When they were done, he scrutinized their work again, then reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a fistful of plastic discs. ‘Now very important. These dosimeters. Very important know your dose. When return Zone, give dosimeters, we calculate dose, can give medicine if high dose. Your health very important to us. You are valuable people.’ This last sentence he said with a weird high laugh as he handed round the plastic discs and supervised pinning them to their dirty lapels. ‘Any questions?’

‘What kind of privileges do we get?’ asked one of the prisoners.

Boathwaite stood up. ‘You get credits that you can exchange for extra food and alcohol.’

Shamsudin raised his hand. ‘How do these dosimeters work?’

‘Reactive film,’ said Mr Apofagato.

Shamsudin raised his hand again. ‘If you know what we’re looking for, and you know where it is, why don’t you get it yourself?’

Mr Apofagato’s face wore a big smile as he answered, ‘Not my duties.’

‘Mr Apofagato is doing valuable work here,’ said Boathwaite. ‘Now, take your notes and your dosimeters, and go to the canteen. You have the rest of the day free. You’ll be leaving for the Zone at first light.’

Shamsudin and Zulfugar seemed uneasy to me, but the others swabbed their plates with hunks of bread, and asked for seconds of meat stew, pointing at their blue dosimeter badges and saying, ‘I am valuable person.’

3

W
E
MUSTERED
AT
dawn by the gates. There were a dozen horses, and several sleds for bringing back what we found. They gave me an old rifle, some shells for it, a decent fur hat, and another set of clothes. It was army-issue gear, never worn, stiff and stale with the smell of potatoes. The gun wasn’t much to speak of, either, but in a pinch I could probably club somebody with it.

One of the prisoners was called Felix and he had a fine singing voice. His voice rang like a bell on the high notes as we rode through the thin light of daybreak.

My horse was the slowest of the bunch, so I ended up at the back, with Zulfugar and Samsudin.

They seemed glum to me, in spite of the good food and the mood of hopefulness among the other prisoners.

At one of the water stops I took the two of them aside and asked what was bothering them. Zulfugar wouldn’t say.

‘He opened his badge,’ said Shamsudin. ‘There was nothing inside it. Just plastic. All that talk of privileges and rest days was just lies to make us drink poison.’

I asked Zulfugar if it was true. In answer, he yanked off his badge, smashed it under his heel, and showed me the innards, empty as a bad nut.

We were talking in low voices. I guess we all thought that if he had rumbled some deception, he would most likely be shot for it.

‘Let me get you another of those,’ I said, and I called to Tolya that one of the prisoners had lost his magic badge.

His reaction confirmed their fears. He rode over to us and instead of slapping Zulfugar’s head, or punishing him for losing it, he reached into his pack, pulled out another, and made a great play of pinning it on him. It was like watching a magic trick you’ve sussed out. Try as he might to misdirect you, the magician can’t shake your eyes off the card that he’s palmed, or the rabbit twitching in the false bottom of his hat.

Zulfugar thanked him, but as we moved off once more, his eyes reproached me and he spat into the snow.

 *

I had misgivings about the lies. It made me wonder where on earth we were headed. I was worried for Shamsudin and Zulfugar. And yet the movement itself felt good to me.

The road to the Zone was the old highway to Yakutsk, bearing due north until it met the Lena river and petered out in a splash of rutted gravel. From then on it was a winter road. In the old days, the winter roads were prepared and smoothed as the cold set in, but nowadays we had to take them as we found them. They could be treacherous going and in places sometimes they didn’t freeze properly – because of hot springs near them, or the general warming, or in sections where the river narrowed, and the water surged too fast to be held by the cold.

For days at a time, we had to turn off the Lena and make our way through the taiga. Then it was slow travelling, working our way through snow, until the ice on the river was strong enough to carry us again.

As we drew closer to the arctic circle, the ice on the river thinned once more and we had to turn back into the taiga for the last push north.

We shared rations with the prisoners and kept an easy pace. It was the closest thing to fraternal I’d seen in my days at the base. All the same, there was something that grew heavy and joyless in the mood of the prisoners as we made our progress north.

Usually you couldn’t stop those fellows chatting. Now there seemed to be hours of silence, broken only by the clink of chains and bridles and the crunch of snow.

Every time we stopped to make camp, Tolya pulled a cerberus from his saddle-bag and pointed it around the place. He had brought two of them. Once or twice he gave me one to use on the firewood before we lh the tat to make sure it was clean.

I’d never held one before. It was about the size of a sidearm but dense and top-heavy, with a dial in the top of it and a couple of wires sticking out the back. I got a thrill from using it, but it spooked the prisoners, especially when it gave out a noise.

Most of the trees were clean and safe to use, but there were copses of them that made the cerberus chirrup. It was the same as at Buktygachak: poison had got into the fibre of things. Radiation had blown this way across the land. The trees had leached it up from the soil. It was locked into them, for now, but breathing their smoke would burn your throat and bray the inside of your lungs to mush. Whatever grew out the soil there would harm you if you ate it. And any creatures that fed there would be poisoned too. One day, that place will be clean again, but it will be long after my lifetime.

 *

Two nights after we left the Lena, we were woken by the smell of smoke and the crackle of woods blazing. We’d camped in the lee of a stand of trees.

That night there had been long discussions between Tolya and one of the other guards, a man named Victor. It seemed that one of them wasn’t too keen on the place. We camped there anyway, but we gathered the firewood from further away.

When he saw the flames in the darkness, Tolya straight out panicked. His cerberus was going crazy from the smoke, howling and wailing like a beast in a trap.