Afterlands (26 page)

Having, by hard work and some luck, got about twenty miles through open seas and reached the pack, we were compelled to hold up on the first piece of good ice we could find. There we spread what few skins we had, set up our tent, and ate our ration of dry bread and pemmican. We were all exhausted—too weary even for argument or complaints. On the morning of the 2d we started again, still pushing to the west; but the wind, with snow-squalls, was against us, and we made but little progress. Hauled up on another piece of ice, and encamped.

April 4
. After a day spent in repairing the boat, and fitting her up with wash-boards of canvas to keep the seas from dashing over the sides, we rigged up and headed west again; and after a desperate struggle, we at last regained the “pack.” We are now encamped on a heavy piece of ice, and I hope out of immediate danger. But there is no ice to be trusted at this time of year. The sun showed himself at noon, but we are again “blessed” with a heavy wind from the north, and snow-squalls. Our tent of course is not as good a protection from the wind as the snow-huts. Joe, with a little help, can build a hut in an hour, if the right kind of snow-blocks can be procured, but on this floe there is little but bare, scraped ice. Still, he intends to try. In the mean time, nineteen souls crowd into our tent, and the noise of the luffing canvas is terrible. If one attempts to rest the body, there is no rest for the mind. One or other of the men will often spring up from their sleep, and make a wild dash forward, as if avoiding some sudden danger.

Blowing a gale from the north-east tonight, and a fearful sea running.

Kruger paces the tiny floe on the last of the night’s one-hour watches, his straddling gait helpful as the ice teeters and wallows over the stricken sea. He feels his marrow congealing in this cold, his nose-hairs frozen, lips swollen as sausage. Now and then the moon slides into view between rags of animated cloud to show the glistering ice-pack for hours westward rippling and seething like … not something alive, but something dead and aswarm with corruption.

Is facing death harder for the lucky or the unlucky? Somebody who has tasted few of life’s blessings, realized few hopes, has little to lose and yet much to regret—a future where those dreams might still be gained. Somebody who has lived fully, who has what he wants, will have little to regret but knows how much he’s losing. (A wife, children, simple work ashore, a small house full of food and books in a peaceful, sunny country; and tobacco, anything now for a plug of it.)

Halt die Leiter
, Jamka blurts in panic from the tent,
damit er das Bild aufhängen kann!

Hold the ladder, so that he can hang the picture!

Kruger passes between the tent—the whaleboat is right beside it—and Ebierbing’s crude little snowhut. From inside, a muffled chorus of breathing in which he tries to distinguish Tukulito’s breathing, her high, clipped cough. The sky is brightening, warm tinges of orchid edging the black tatters of cloud on their disintegrating southward dash. He walks on. In silence a crack zips toward him across the floe—like watching a centipede skitter across a deck. It passes just to the right of his boot and squiggles on under the snowhut. With a dry, tearing sound the crack widens, exposing a stratified cross-section of ice like a bed of shale. In time with the groundswell, black seawater pumps up in the gap, sloshes over onto the ice.
Kommt raus!
he yells, everybody up! He runs to the hut which Ebierbing is already crawling out of, fully dressed, Punnie under his arm like a bundle of furs, and under Punnie’s own arm, her doll. The entrance faces the tent. Kruger scoops the trembling child up in his embrace,
Shh, shh! keine Angst!
and when Ebierbing stands—a wide grin on his strained grey face—he passes her back. Guess I lose another hut eh, Kruger? he says, and one can only think: This is a man. Kruger offers Tukulito his glove as if she is climbing up into a carriage after a ball, absurd gesture in this extremity, and he helps her to her feet, her fatlamp cradled, red eyes assaying him, while Ebierbing hunches and crawls back inside. The rift widens. Tyson is now out of the tent, shouting orders to move everything farther back, toward the new centre of the floe. Ebierbing is backing out of the hut with his rifle and the dripping bedskins as the rift, now too wide to step over, undermines the hut. It buckles like a sand castle in a tide, ruined walls left on either side of the lead as it spreads, white blocks dissolving in the steaming water like sugar cubes in tea. The men, even Anthing and Jamka—barefoot, still limping from his injury—are out and following Tyson’s orders without quibble. He has them loading everything into the boat where Hans and his family have been sleeping.

Stand by for a jump, men.

Aye aye, sir!

Women and children in the boat. Men for now in the tent. And Mr Jamka, for the last time, on with your boots or I’ll reef them onto your feet.

Jackson and Herron are trying to warm water in the tent while men sprawl or hunker on the canvas and try to rest, to steal their way back into interrupted dreams of elsewhere. Kruger stretches out by the lamp, wishing she, her family, were in here, not in the boat. He’s jolted from a doze by a familiar tearing sound, then men’s grunts, rough hands dragging him. The hissing as a tinful of broth meets the seawater fuming in a sudden crack. Herron and Jackson heave him out the door through which men are fleeing with whatever they can hold, Anthing and Lindermann helping the half-blind Count, who looks perplexed and testy. And Jackson: I warned you all, this was sure to happen! His pemmican-tin lamp floats wobbling on the dark water, still alight, but nobody wants to approach the widening gap to retrieve it. Then Jackson and Tyson crawl forward. The gap slams like the steel sides of a steam laundry press, oil sparks shoot up and when the jaws open, the crushed lamp, blubber flaring within, welters on its side, settling in the water, spitting and disappearing.

Oh boys, says Lundquist, we are all goners!

Shut up now Gus, Herron snaps, his voice squeezed thin and tight.

What?

Shut your … g-g-g-Goddamned gob, please!

That’s enough, men, Tyson says. We’ve work enough here.

They watch the pegged tent deflate as the centre pole, unseen, thrusts down into the crack, and now the canvas stretches over the widening lead until it looks taut enough to bridge the weight of a crossing man. For a few seconds the canvas halts the process of splitting, keeps the halves of the floe close. Then on the far side it starts ripping around the eyelets through which the peg-lines run. It snaps free with a whipping sound. The far half of the floe, unmoored and trailing peg-lines, drifts loose and the men scramble to the new edge of their toehold and pull in the canvas hand-over-hand, fishermen hauling home an empty net.

Tyson and Jackson cut ragged new eyelets and, using an oar for a peak pole, with Kruger helping, they pitch the tent again. Tyson grunts as he lashes the Stars and Stripes to the protruding oar handle. His chest is barrelled, fire behind his eyes. And Kruger sees it now—how Tyson takes this all personally, how he feels himself engaged, more or less alone, against forces that badly outrank him, and perhaps has felt this way his entire life. The kind of man who spends his life waiting, or searching, for a moment of supreme testing. He has something to prove to the universe. This makes him invaluable now.

Day passes in a kind of shared delirium … Ebierbing, Tukulito and Punnie join the men in the sodden tent … from its walls a chill, brackish drizzle drips. A mild wind has come up. Then heavy rain. Hans’s family, also finding the boat too wet, squeeze in as well. There is not room for everyone to lie down and Tukulito, with Punnie furled in her lap, sits cross-legged on the edge of that borderless human mass, against the tent wall. Her eyes are closed. Her husband lies on his back alongside her, wheezing. Kruger would offer her a place to stretch out if he had one, if she would accept it, which she would not do, now, he supposes numbly.

It’s salty, Mama … the walls are weeping!

Sleep again,
utarannaakuluk
.

In the night the crew sit propped back to back. It’s opium blue with moonlight and many are feverish. The thin walls of the tent frozen hard as sheeted zinc. He wakes, no idea who is at his back. It’s Anthing, shuddering with cold, grinding his back into Kruger’s for warmth. Tyson and Meyer are likewise twinned—Tyson’s brow knotted in sleep, while from Meyer’s lips a stalactite of frozen drool runs down to his clasped mittens.

Tukulito’s nodding profile is moonlit, terse coughs at times puffing open her lips.

Like a cell ceaselessly dividing, the floe splits again at dawn. The crack quickly separates the tent and the boat, which were close together—so close, growls Tyson, as if to himself, that a man could scarcely walk between them! He’s hunkered in the tent door, Kruger beside him. The way he shakes his head, knuckles his pouched eyes as the boat recedes, says: If
this
is the precise work of God’s jigsaw, then he is toying with us, cruelly. Tyson perhaps is starting to see his own god as an antagonist—not a tester but a teaser—a trickster. Perhaps disillusionment need not induce apathy, as with Kruger’s father, but could be an active thing, galvanizing.

Tyson’s baffled expression hardens, narrows.

Wake up, all of you! Now where the devil is Meyer?

The tent is so crammed it takes the occupants several seconds to ensure that Meyer is not mislaid somewhere among them. Blank faces turn back to Tyson. A drunk-sounding voice rises over the wind—a tuneless voice, mock-operatic. The words are German but garbled. The men crowd into the door. The smaller floe, with the boat and kayak aboard, is pulling away fast, and Meyer is arranging himself in the boat, sitting with great ceremony on the bow bench, facing the stern, then slowly reclining so the back of his head rests on the prow. His white-blond locks dangle down over the gunwale and the hull. He folds his huge mittens over his bosom.

It’s a Viking burial.

Mein Graf, Graf Meyer!
calls Jamka as if his heart will burst. Meyer is singing softly, eyes closed. His falcon profile beneath the dramatically red skies. The men shout at him but he makes no answer. Without a word Ebierbing and then Hans push out through the tent flap, grab two of the staked oars, trot to the end of the floe and simply leap out into the craze of small ice-pans bobbing in the growing gap between the floe and Meyer. They start to copy across, leaping from one tilting pan to the next, each with an oar held athwart his chest like a high-wire artist with his pole. Tyson says, Two men will never get that boat back alone—to launch it. Who’ll come with me? I, sir, says Kruger. I also, says Anthing. Now the others volunteer as well but Tyson orders them to stay back: Two men is enough. He takes an oar and Anthing and Kruger reach for the last oar at the same time and for a moment they both grip it. They say nothing. Exchange no glances. At last Kruger, seeing Tyson staggering ahead, leaves the oar to Anthing and hurries on.

The slippery wave-washed cakes of ice dip underfoot and teeter and you have to step or hop quickly onto the next, moving steadily to keep from falling, like a goat on a cliffside. Fear revives some of the spring in Kruger’s joints. Ebierbing and Hans are well ahead, but Tyson is right in front of him, so now he has to keep from bounding onto Tyson’s pan before the man jumps onto the next. Arms extended for balance Kruger holds up on a low, broad pan and it settles under him, seawater closing around his ankles, freezing through the sealskin, and then his footing is gone: Anthing has plunged down onto the same piece, jostling him, crying out Hurry, we must catch them! as he leaps onto the next, his oar held high overhead with both hands. Kruger is left flailing on the wobbling pan. He hurls himself in the direction of his fall, onto a smaller chunk a few feet off the men’s path. He lands on his chest and hands as his legs dunk up to the thighs and his boots fill with water. The cold of it almost stops his heart—a slow heavy thud in his ears. Anthing glances back. Are you all right? Hurry! Again he has yelled the words in English. Kruger looks back toward the main floe. Their fragmentary path is diffusing, open water now behind. He crawls upright and tries to follow Anthing, muscles tight with cold, tries to get back the rhythm of it. A seal buoys up between pans and for a moment he meets its intrigued, beagle-like eyes and looks away but feels it watching, revolving its whiskered head in the dark slush as he passes—this awkward, forked being, Roland Kruger—something it could never have imagined and will never see again.

Ebierbing and Hans are on the floe ahead, apparently trying to haul the boat over the edge with the dormant Meyer still aboard. Kruger breaks sweat in his armpits and over his back while his sopping legs freeze. Anthing keeps him going, in pursuit—though when Kruger reaches the floe-edge, Anthing turns and offers his hand and yanks him aboard the ice. I’m sorry, he says softly and quickly in German, but you paused there! I was in step behind you, I couldn’t stop.

Help us try to launch here! Tyson calls hoarsely. Kruger—over there. Anthing—speak to Mr Meyer. Implore him to get out of the boat until we launch.