Afterlands (18 page)

Morning in a place where morning doesn’t mean light: the lamp has gone out, so the various smells aren’t overpowering, though neither are they comforting, as they can also be. And the hut is so quiet. Kruger lies alert, as always now, though there is nowhere to run to except the open ice. A raw, scraping hunger and the sear of thirst help to keep him awake. Also thoughts of gooseberries in custard-yellow cream, the steaming white fat beneath the parchment skin of a roast goose. Just to run your tongue over a palate slick and coated with fat! Meyer and Anthing have put him on half-rations. Half of next to nothing, that’s what that is. It brings a deeper hunger that all but keeps his thoughts from turning, for reprieve, to Hannah.

The other men all seem adrift in their polar coma. He trusts none of them now, nobody. He is his own small country. At Valmy, Goethe had rejoiced as he watched the volunteers of the French Revolution repel the reactionary invaders, though the invaders were more or less his own people, Germans. How fine, to be a “patriot only to truth”! But Kruger is feeling beaten. Perhaps it’s better to belong after all.

Ich hab’ dein Fleisch gegessen
, whimpers Jamka.

What’s that, then? Herron speaks with something of his old lightness, clearly relieved to find somebody else awake. Eaten
my
flesh?

Jamka rises off his back, props himself on his elbows.
Es war ein Traum
, he says. A dream. So! he says, alert now, you understand German?
Oberst Graf Meyer—bitte! John Herron kann—

Shhh! says Herron. Not to worry, Yam—I get nowt but the easy stuff. If I’m not allowed to speak my speech, it’d be a wonder if I hadn’t gleaned a bit of yours, wouldn’t it?

After a moment Jamka nods his scabbed, blotchy face. Meyer goes on wheezing. In a confidential undertone Jamka says,
Und so
, have you dreamed any such dreams, John Herron?

What—of eating human flesh?

Ja
.

There’s a prolonged, ruminating silence.

Well … perhaps the odd one.

In
my
dreams, Lindermann’s voice jumps in, it tastes rather like pork.

But the children, Jamka says lovingly—they are more like lamb!

Well, I’ve et nothing but adults so far, says Herron. Big ones.

The tops of heads are poking one by one out of sleeping bags.

Bear meat, murmurs Anthing in a rapt voice. Very much like bear, I think.

Bear
is
rather like pork, however, says Lindermann.

Ja, ja, das ist wahr … und du, Kamerad?

Ja
, says Lundquist. I too have such dreams. There is no taste but the taste of fat.

Und du, Kamerad
?

Nein
, says Soren Madsen,
nimmer!

Jackson now says, Guess I’ve had a dream or two like that myself.

The lamp! Anthing orders him, it’s out again!

You mean, says Lindermann, you have dreamed of eating the flesh of
white
men?

All eyes, wide and peering over the lips of sleeping bags, are fixed on Jackson.

Well, it was only meat. I don’t recall it had any particular colour.

Meyer sleeps on like a giant foetus on his bed-ledge, withered knees sticking sharply over the edge, one eye squashed into the foxskin rolled around his pistol. Nobody consults Kruger about his dreams. From his exile a few feet away in the northwest corner he continues to watch things through tightly slitted eyes. Anthing wriggles out of his armoury of a sleeping bag and works into a sitting posture. He looks across at Kruger, who continues to feign sleep. Anthing says in hushed, rapid German, Of course it would be a very good thing to take some fresh provisions with us. When we set out for Disko.

Jackson and Herron lie still, rigid as hares in the snow. They can’t possibly understand the words, though they look as if they get the drift of them.

But
Oberleutnant
, Lindermann says carefully, some of us are beginning to wonder now if … perhaps Disko really is farther off from New Heligoland than would be …

Nonsense, says Anthing.

It cannot be! says Jamka.

Sir, says Madsen … I am afraid I no longer have any real mittens to wear.

Have you lost them?

Well—not as such, sir.

Anthing’s reddening face looks like it’s being inflated with a pump.

You have eaten them, haven’t you?

Little by little, sir. In the night.

Anthing juts his bloody beard toward Kruger. You’ll just have to take his.

But now Lindermann, Lundquist, Madsen all speak together, pointing out that it’s difficult to stay outside for more than a few minutes, let alone days, or weeks.

A good supply of fresh meat, says Anthing. That’s the answer.

But surely we’re not going to, to slaughter the children?

We go as soon as the weather improves, he says and Kruger can see how he’s feeding off Meyer’s decline, how it plumps and colours his bully-boy cheeks, sharpens the glint in his eye.

And no, we need not harm the Esquimaux. Not at first. Not the filthy parents, at any rate. I have another idea.

He slides Kruger’s confiscated rifle out of the clanking sleeping bag and swings it round, Lindermann ducking, then slips the proofcatch and cocks the hammer. Krüger! While he holds his aim, the air of the hut almost clears of its fog as all the men except Meyer and the faking Kruger hold their breath. Kruger squints up into the muzzle, an arm’s length away. Anthing’s left eye bulges over the sights.
Roland?
Kruger shuts his lids totally and for a moment he prays. About God, too, perhaps it’s better to be fooled. At twenty, he lay wounded by the taffrail of the
Königsberg
with snowflakes falling gravely onto his tongue and his eyelids and there was no pain at all, not yet. And he heard his messmates saying, Rolli’s dead! He heard the stretchermen saying, Well, this one’s dead! He heard the surgeons saying, Another one dead. Even the ship’s chaplain believed he was dead. He began to believe it himself. He had died for his country and it had made him a part of nothing at all. He was perfectly alone. He’d become meat—nothing more than meat.

One’s country was a cannibal with a vast, ceaseless appetite.

Peering out secretly he meets the rifle’s Cyclops stare. Anthing, satisfied, is thumbing down the hammer, propping the rifle against the wall, and Kruger, with the insight of a man facing death alone, sees through him now, this truer threat—the hollow but cunning mediocrity in any group who waits his chance, then springs his putsch and grabs power.

Jackson. Light the lamp and roust Colonel Meyer. Herr Krüger for now we will let sleep.

Feb. 1
. The wind still continuing to blow with violence, our “Lotos-Eaters” scarcely show their heads out of their hut. Still, Mr Meyer deems the presence of all the icebergs around us to be further proof that we are close to Greenland;
and
he promulgates the fantastic opinion that the straits in lat. 66 N. are only eighty miles wide! He would find it a long eighty miles indeed. Still, there seems something rather more tentative about the “Count” today, and his followers also. Perhaps they have at last become convinced that they cannot carry out their project. Their assurance of soon getting to a land of plenty has been the cause, I fear, of many raids upon the provisions, and of more being consumed than even they would have risked had they not been deceived as to the course of our drift; but now they begin to grasp that they did not know as much about these seas as they thought they did.

The Esquimaux inform me that the cracks in the ice where they have been sealing are not limited to the “young ice,” but cut clear through the old—which is an intimation that our floe may split up completely at any time if the wind holds. Also, the huge ice-bergs are moving rapidly before the wind; and they are heavy enough, if propelled upon our encampment, to crush us to atoms.

On going into Hans’s hut this morning, to visit the ill boy, I was sick at heart, seeing the miserable group of crying children. The mother was trying to pick out a few scraps of “tried-out” blubber from their lamp to feed them. Augustina is naturally a fat, heavy-built girl, but she looks peaked enough now. Tobias was in her lap, or partly so, his head resting on her as she sat on the ground, with a skin drawn over her. She seemed to have a little scrap of something she was chewing on, though I did not see that she swallowed any thing. The little girl, Succi, was crying—that chronic hunger whine—and I could just see the baby’s head in the mother’s capote. All I could do was encourage them a little. I have nothing at all to give them. I was glad, at least, to see that they had some oil left.

Our own hut is scarcely less filthy than Hans’s. It is dark enough in here, but nevertheless I am compelled to shut my eyes on many occasions. We are all permeated with dirt—I have not had these clothes off
for over a hundred days
, and it sickens me to think of them, saturated as they are with all the vile odors of this hut, of seal’s entrails and greasy blubber. I am trying to recall the pleasant sensation of putting on clean clothing, and how, while whaling, when I got my feet wet and cold, what a comfort it was to get on a clean pair of stockings or socks; yet, perhaps I had only worn the discarded ones a few hours, not months! Alas, we can spare no warmed water for washing. I know it is impossible to be clean, living as we do; but among the Americans Hannah has learned one thing that has been no benefit to her, and which has added many annoyances to our inevitable misery this winter. She observed among white folks that it was the custom for men to support their wives, instead of using them as slaves, as her own people do in their natural condition; and, in order to be as much like a white woman as possible, she has positively declined to do—has at least omitted to do—many things which would have made this hut more tolerable.

I comb my hair and beard with the only comb in the encampment—Hannah’s coarse wooden one—and call it my morning wash. Well, but perhaps the waters of Davis Strait will yet wash me clean, so I won’t grumble.

Feb 1st I cannot describe how nasty & dirty it is here. I know it is impossible to be clean living as we do but I must tell the thruth. This Esquimaux Squaw Hannah is the dirtiest most filthy thing I have ever seen. She is filthy for an Esquimaux. I have never seen her equal as a dirty & Lazy Squaw. And this Squaw has been back living with
civilized people
! How to continue I dont know. soiled to the bone. On my watch they will all die children & parents alike & seamen too & turn cannibal perhaps too & I can do little, beyond kill some
.

My skin brown w. grime. God is gone & to die seems good
.

In the middle of the night Kruger slips out of his bag. The lamp is out. For a moment he’s tempted again to try stealing a weapon, but the only one he could possibly get would be Meyer’s Colt, and lately the Count’s skull is hardly ever off the foxskin in which it’s wrapped. Kruger has died three times here: before the firing squad, before Tyson, and before his own confiscated rifle. A fourth time will surely finish the job. He fends for himself alone now, like the Gypsies.

He dresses in quick silent movements and crawls into the tunnel through the wolfskin, his parched mouth actually watering at its doggish smell. In the tunnel he grabs the snow trowel and slips it blade-first into his pocket. Outside, under a sky massed with tremulous stars, he steps over one of the tripwires strung around the hut. The four lines lead inside through small holes pierced high in the wall, where they converge on and suspend a tinny bell—an empty mock-turtle soup can with a bullet inside it on a string—that hangs under the peak of the dome. The Count’s latest invention, rigged by Anthing.

He trudges inland, northward, hugging himself against the cold. Every muscle is gripped and held hard against the cold. His hood is drawn tight but through the fur-fringed gap in front of his eyes and nose the gusting wind lances at his face, layering new frostbite over old. His jaw and teeth ache and soon his legs are numb—wooden pegs from the knees down. His breath freezes to ice-crystal clouds that shimmer and fall tinkling at his feet. This is the worst cold yet. He beats his mitts together. Through all of this his mouth will not stop watering.

Scattered along the north horizon, icebergs frozen into the solid pack, molar-shaped, glitter in the starlight. Near Bismarcksee—formerly Lake Polaris—he stops beside a familiar hummock, walks a few paces west, a step east, kneels down out of the wind and digs urgently with the trowel. Soon there’s a layer of ice to crack through. He does it with a savage jab of the blade. The cache, sunk deep in the side of the hummock, is exposed. There’s a canvas sack jammed with biscuit, a half-dozen big tins of pemmican, two tins of powdered chocolate, frozen slabs of sealmeat, blubber, and skin. With the trowel Kruger cracks a biscuit in the snow and stuffs a piece in his mouth, the other shards in his pocket. He slips a fillet of sealmeat into his pocket and then plugs his cheek—the numb jaw still intently chewing—with a glop of blubber. Frozen, there’s no taste, but as his gums begin to thaw the fat, the flavour comes, like a chunk of ice transformed, by pure force of desire, into a rich and oily food. Think of lard blended with dulse. Soft tallow with kelp.