Afterlands (19 page)

A long sepulchral booming and the ice shifts like the deck of a frigate being shelled. He pockets another dollop of blubber to suck on the way back, then carefully reorganizes the cache and seals it, packing the snow down hard with his mittens, his boots. As he hurries south, markedly stronger and less frozen, he glances back to ensure the wind is erasing his tracks.

Punnie has a loose front tooth which of course she will not let alone, always testing it with her finger, just as the lieutenant, looking frail, stern and secretive, sits huddled among his muskox skins, chewing on his lengthening whiskers. At times he sneaks his field-book out from under him, scribbles a few furtive lines, then replaces it among the skins—first carefully squaring it with the wall, then sitting on it. Other times he removes and feels and even sniffs at the interwoven circles of hair, brown and blonde, that he keeps in his breast pocket. His red eyes well up; the right side of his beard twitches.
Pirliliqtuq
, thinks Tukulito. The madness of hunger and the dark months.

The child is happy to have a loose tooth, since Tobias has so many, but Tukulito, whose two born-babies died long before the tooth-losing age, worries that this could also be a first symptom of the scurvy. Again she tells Punnie to leave the tooth alone. This is the time of day when she will speak only English to the child, correcting her responses in a soft voice that now costs her a great effort to maintain.
Pirliliqtuq
. How the mind can churn with violence: a murderous irritation, but also this shame now, and guilt. There are so many customs to transgress. So move slowly, fixedly, from chore to chore. Against terror, only loyalty. On the ship she was teaching Punnie to read using her Bible, but that was left behind, so now for spiritual instruction she must draw on her large mental archive of hymns. Punnie has a good ear, a fine voice, and some of the strain seems to ease from the lieutenant’s face as he sits listening to the two of them sing:
When I can read my title clear … to mansions in the skies … I’ll bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes
.

Punnie sings in the way of small children, misconstruing difficult phrases into curious little poetries:
My Tight All Clear. To Man Shun Sin. Fear End White
. Tonight as they sing together, Tyson joining in, hoarsely, there is a sort of echo, as if off the close walls of their iglu, and after a moment they realize that some of the crewmen are singing too. They seem familiar with the tune but have words in their own language. Their far voices are difficult to pry apart, and Roland Kruger’s she cannot discern—which sharpens another fear—while Anthing, with his warm throaty tenor, seems to lead them.
O take me from the wilderness, and find my soul a home … O let me all my wrongs redress, and to your mansions come
.

High above them a raven or owl, blown off course and scavenging the ice in vain, might hear that small, still hopeful chorus, and looking down see a shrinking flake of ice barely lit by three lamped iglus, a raft of consciousness adrift in the impassive polar night.

Feb. 5
. This evening the wind has hauled to the south; weather now thick and snowing. I can see but a few yards before me. Here in the hut, Joe is oiling his rusting rifle, Hannah mending his seal-skin boots; she will only repair those articles of clothing made from the skins of sea-animals. Yesterday, after we sang together, I asked if she would mend my deer-skin socks, and, when she said it was impossible, I made to do it myself; but in some consternation, she prevented me, explaining that to work on the skins of land-creatures while at sea might bring disaster. When I pressed her for a reason, she explained, with what seemed a sort of embarrassment, that such work might anger the goddess of the sea-animals, a jealous creature, who presides out here; so that Joe would find no game, and our raft might break up. To hear such irrational
tabus
from the mouth of an apparent Christian no longer much surprises me, however disappointing and disturbing it might be. Nevertheless, I had to mend my socks, and did so. Then, this morning, Merkut gave Tobias to Hannah and Joe to care for—apparently another custom, and last recourse for ill children; but for the life of me, I cannot see how we are to fit him in.

Feb. 7
. Esquimaux returned, and we are all rejoicing over another feast of seal-meat! For Hans shot one about noon; but we had some little trouble over it this evening. Hans, if he gets a seal—which is very seldom—wishes to appropriate it all to his family’s use, without considering that
he and his family get their daily allowance of biscuit and pemmican with all the rest
. Of course he must not be allowed to have more than an equal share; and,
had
I allowed it, Mr Meyer, Anthing, Kruger, and the other miscreants would surely have turned violent. Hans is a very selfish Esquimau; he is not a successful hunter, like Joe, nor has he his sense, and is proving a most miserable creature. He has threatened this evening “not to hunt any more.” Well, let him try it! He was hired (and will be paid, if we ever get home) for the very purpose of hunting for the expedition; he will go very hungry if he continues to refuse, for I shall not allow him any thing more out of our stores. Oddly, he showed no fear at this threat, vowing that he will “somehow or the other” get enough to supply himself and his family.

Like the ice itself, it seems, our poor party is splitting into more and more separate parts.

Kruger can’t tell if his plan is sound. He feels confused now, often. He looks back on events of just a day ago, or an hour, as if through a rum-drunk haze. Have the men really trussed Jackson’s wrists and ankles with rope? Jamka and Meyer are terrified that the Darky means to kill and eat them in the night. Or
poison
them! (With what? Jackson objects. If they was any thing poison here, I’d gladly eat it myself.) Was Kruger really stooping over Anthing in the lamplit gloom of a night or two ago (or three, or four?) with cold hands tingling at his sides like an assassin’s? Until he perceived threads of crate-twine emerging from the mouths of the caribou bags, linking the Germans and Madsen and Lundquist by their wrists; Jamka’s tremulous wrist half-exposed. If any are attacked, the rest will waken, armed to the eyelids.

Yet the measure that allows them to sleep harder also frees Kruger to leave the hut more often. His plan is to deplete the men’s cache—because the secret cache is not his own—so that Anthing won’t be able to draw the men with him, well supplied, on a trek to the east, taking the last boat, leaving the rest of the party to die.

Kruger discovered the cache just after the new year. Out trying to hunt—mainly to escape the hand-me-down air and sentiments of the hut, and in hopes of encountering Tukulito—he noticed a splotch of blood on the moonlit snow by a hummock, where the ice was disturbed. Brushing it, he exposed a hatchwork of crescent cuts, as from a trowel blade or the heel of a very large boot. And he dug there. But within a few days of his discovery Anthing confiscated his rifle, and he has been able to return only a few times, always careful to slip things inconspicuously from the back of the growing hoard, then reseal it with care. It must be Meyer’s and Anthing’s, he thinks—but if it is, why would Meyer have made his speech asking if the thief were any of them? Think. Simply to retain their faith in his probity until such time as they grow too desperate to care? Hard to follow any line of thought for more than a few seconds. But clearly Meyer, too ill even to groom himself, is not supplementing his own rations. Could the cache be Anthing’s alone? He has kept stronger. Is now slowly assuming command. Think. Anthing, who knows he may never get another stab at power.

Of course by raiding his supplies Kruger makes it more likely that Anthing will have to resort to other sources of food. Yet for now he can see no other plan.

Cold not only slurs the tongue, it also muffles the mind.

He must get some food to the others. Tukulito, the children. Slipping any to Herron or Jackson seems impossible, for now. So give some to her directly. But when? He has only managed to encounter her once in the last few weeks, and he can hardly invite her, a married woman, outside. Leave some just inside the tunnel of her hut. No. They would think Poison. Especially if Tyson found it.
Ein Gift
. And he would confront the men and ask where it came from, and then Anthing would know Kruger was raiding his cache—
if
the cache is Anthing’s—and if, if, if. Maybe Anthing thinks Kruger is raiding the storehouse on his own and has made a
separate
cache.
Which is why I am not trussed up like Jackson. So they can follow me there!
As his torpid brain works to triage the possibilities he hears Punnie and Augustina outside and it comes to him, another plan. The men seem to be napping. Jackson can do little else now. In a trance of apathy Herron is warming water. After some minutes, saying nothing, Kruger slips outside. In early dusk under a sky as low as a coffin lid the girls, one large and broad, the other tiny and frail, are tracing wide, slow figure-eights around their parents’ huts, hand in hand. Hunger has stolen all the jump from their voices; they converse in a flat drawl, like weary adults.

He staggers away toward the cache. Easy to see why men in this state will fear they’re being poisoned. He feels poisoned. There’s a scuffling behind him—big Lindermann following, eyes to the ice, stepping with lumbering care over the tripwire, hunger’s drunkard. Kruger climbs over a hummock and behind it he lowers his fox-fur breeches and squats, left hand cupping his genitals for warmth. After what seems a long time Lindermann peers over the top, puffing. The muzzle of his rifle beside his blistered face. His oddly small head has shrunken further and weathered darkly, like the trophy of a cannibal tribe.

Guten Tag
, says Kruger.

Lindermann nods sheepishly, then lowers the rifle.

I wish I could join you in that, he says. I’m also in some pain.

So, is that why you’ve followed me?

I can see why you wouldn’t want to use the old latrine shelter.

Actually, for a short time I considered living in it. Did Anthing send you?

Lindermann looks down, as if hurt. I am sorry you’ve been made to suffer so by the others.

Kruger stares at him pointedly.

Damn it, Roland, my heart is not with them! But they give the orders, Meyer, and Matthias—

So now you’ve tied up Jackson like a slave on a ship.

You should have organized us to resist them at the beginning! The men respected you …

But they revered the Count of Disko.

… but you always want to stand
alone
, Roland, that’s why!

This stops Kruger. He wonders, in sudden pain, if his old messmate could be right. Still squatting over his dropped breeches, Sage of the Latrine, he murmurs: I thought it was obvious, no one can think freely in the middle of a shouting crowd. I’ve thought so for years. There’s no glamour in sanity, Willi, but I believed in it. And now … now I can’t get my head to think at all.

Lindermann says, The men—they don’t really want to try for Disko—they now believe the lieutenant may be right. But they’re terrified to disobey. And Roland, you must be careful!

His lower lip quivers. Big Lindermann, the mild giant, their strongman. And then it hits Kruger—this must be a trap. It might be a trap. His meatless knees are trembling and his hindparts are on fire with the frost. In a cool, neutral tone, he says, Thank you, Willi. I’ll keep your words in mind. I may still be some time here.

Lindermann nods in a discouraged, heavy way, then sinks behind the hummock. After a few moments Kruger scrabbles to the top and peers over. With a weight on his heart he watches Lindermann slump back toward the crewhut. No way to know anything for certain now. Kruger turns and lurches on through the “Alps” to the cache.

On his return, Punnie, Augustina, and now Succi, all hand in hand, are heading around the back of Hans’s hut. Kruger kneels in the aqua gloom and inters biscuits and sealmeat in the snow twenty paces behind Tukulito’s hut, off the figure-eight trail the children are deepening. He marks the mound with a P. Then he staggers on, intercepting the children as they round Hans’s hut. Punnie looks sad and pale, but at the sight of Kruger she grins: a lower front tooth missing.

Mister Kruger! Mother says they make you stay in your iglu now. She’s worried!

Speak softly, Punnie.

Augustina, who has no English, stares at him vaguely, in her eyes the same torpor that Kruger feels behind his own.

Kruger holds Punnie lightly by the arm and tells her that she will have a treasure hunt. But the treasures must be shared with the other children, in secret. After her walking game is over she must look for her initial, beside her iglu, and promise to tell nobody of their talk. This prospect seems to delight her. Her mother is with Toby, she says glumly, and will hardly play with her at all.