Sixty Degrees North (26 page)

Maria told me the story of one such recruit, Jacob Johan Knagg, who was born at Fagervik, close to Ekenäs, in 1796. By the time he came of age, Finland was under Russian control, and with his mother dead and his father remarried, Knagg decided to go abroad. He left Finland first for Estonia, on a trading ship owned by the local ironworks, but at some stage – probably around the end of the 1820s – he must have joined the Russian American Company.

In 1842, Knagg was working on a cattle farm on Kodiak Island along with his wife, whom he probably met in Alaska. Six years later he applied for colonial citizenship – an application that was ultimately successful. By that time, he was reaching retirement age, and as was customary he was discharged with enough food to last for a year, plus the equipment and supplies he would need to build a home. The Knagg family were then sent to the newest Russian settlement in Alaska. Which is where, in the summer of 1851, Jacob Johan Knagg died, leaving behind his wife and seven children. That settlement was Ninilchik.

Every so often, Eva or Maria would search for something to help illustrate the story. They brought out files, lists of names and family trees. According to Maria, as many as a third of ‘Russians' in Alaska were not Russian at all; they were Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Danes and Poles. There was a deliberate attempt, she said, to minimise and even deny
this fact, because it didn't fit with Russia's official, patriotic story. Historians in North America too were reluctant to accept her research, Maria explained. They had, she told me, been ‘blinded by politics'. Much of her work now was an attempt to prove what she already believed: that a significant number of Finnish migrants arrived in Alaska decades before the great waves of European migration swept westward across the Atlantic. Together with their descendants still living in the state, she was tracing the stories of men and women such as the Knaggs, and drawing new lines in the process, between here and there, between now and then.

At half-past six, when the talk had come to a natural pause, the pair insisted we should eat. ‘We will be having … stuff,' Eva said. ‘Picnic style.' She put her coat on and headed for the door. ‘We have lots of things to eat, but I will just go out and get some dessert.'

Half an hour later, we sat down together at a little table in the hallway, strewn with food. We ate chicken legs, salad, fruit and bread rolls, and drank cranberry juice to wash it down. Then we returned to the office and to the conversation.

In that room, filled with fragments of the past, time seemed to tighten and turn back on itself. The space was crammed with stories of those who had left their homes, reluctantly or by choice, for a life elsewhere. It was crammed, too, with the stories of those, here and around the world, who were trying to learn something of their family's past. Eva and Maria took great pleasure in bringing those pasts back to people, telling them who their ancestors had been, where they had gone and how they had lived.

At half past nine, six hours after I had arrived, Eva and Maria sent me back out into the evening, wishing me well on my travels. In my hands I clutched the twin tokens of their generosity: a bag of files and papers in one, a bag of bananas in the other.

SWEDEN and NORWAY

last lands

Like many university towns, Uppsala has the feel of somewhere both ancient and youthful at once. A centre of learning since the fifteenth century, and of religion for at least a thousand years before that, this has long been the intellectual and spiritual heart of Sweden. The city's skyline is dominated by two historic landmarks: the Gothic, red-brick cathedral – the tallest in all the Nordic countries – and the rosy pink castle that sits on higher ground, just a few hundred yards away. In the centre, a third building stands out: the Gustavianum, whose unmistakable cupola of oxidised green, topped by a globe, was built by Olof Rudbeck in the 1660s. Inside that space, high above the streets, the illustrious professor – who began his career by discovering the lymphatic system and ended it by claiming that Swedish was the language of Eden and Uppsala the site of Atlantis – pioneered dissection techniques under the gaze of his students. The bodies of hanged criminals would be brought in to the steep-sided anatomical theatre and laid upon a table. There they would be taken apart, to better understand the pieces that, together, make up a life.

In the shadow of these and the city's many other grand buildings are 24,000 students, who make up a significant proportion of the population. And on the cobbled streets that shatter outward from the River Fyris, there is no escaping them. Young, beautiful people gather in the bars and cafés that punctuate the city; they shiver arm-in-arm along the pavements, and pose for photographs in their black and
white ‘Uppsala caps'. Everywhere, their bikes carve runnels through the slush, and sputter filthy arcs into the air behind. Like Oxford, like Prague, like Copenhagen, this is a very youthful old city.

On my first morning in Sweden, I stopped beside the river, where a narrow fish ladder – built for migratory asp – bypasses the weir. There, a dipper was perched upon one of the ladder boards, ducking and bobbing like a tiny boxer. Again and again the bird would bow its head under the flowing water, then submerge itself completely. Up it would come, with a flicker and fluster, then down again, its white throat and breast winking in the grey air. Around me, the snow was falling in fat lumps, all puffy and swollen, yet with crystals as clear as if they were caught beneath a magnifying glass. I stood watching the bird as the flakes settled on my shoulders, cheeks and eyelashes, until I could ignore the cold no longer.

Inside the cathedral, a few moments' walk away, I closed the door and a kind of stillness descended. The place was almost silent and almost empty. The only other person I could see was a hunched cleaner, mopping and polishing the flagstone floor. As she moved back and forth with her eyes to the ground, I stood looking the other way, the great pillars dragging my eyes upwards, towards a sky that was just beyond seeing.

Inside this cathedral are buried some of the city's most famous former inhabitants. In the Lady Chapel at the far end lies King Gustav Vasa. The walls of that chapel are adorned with murals depicting scenes from the king's life; the star-studded ceiling, a glorious eggshell blue, hangs like a pardon over the extravagant sarcophagus. Elsewhere in the cathedral are the relics of Saint Erik, an earlier king, as well as those of Bridget, the country's patron saint. The scientist and philosopher Emmanuel Swedenborg lies in the Salsta Chapel, and Olof Rudbeck is buried beside the central altar.

Close to the entranceway, a plain, unadorned stone marks the grave of Carl von Linne, or Linneaus, who died in 1778. Physician, botanist and biologist, he was the creator of modern taxonomy. Under his system, each species of animal and plant was part of a kingdom, class, order, family and genus. It was Linneaus who finally separated the whales from the fish, and it was Linneaus who brought human beings together with the apes. His system, like Rudbeck's dissections, both divided and connected the world.

In those first few months after my return from Prague to Shetland, as I worked and walked and wrote, reacquainting myself with the home that finally felt like home, I thought I had reached a point at which I could stop. For years I had felt like a moth, drawn in by lights that were no use to me, and held back by panes of glass I could neither see nor comprehend. I had blustered this way and that, confused and lost. But now I was back – back where I had been, years earlier, only this time by choice. This time the direction had been my own. In those first few months I didn't imagine that this return would be temporary, that within a year I would have moved again. In those first few months, I didn't account for love.

I fell in love with Fair Isle the moment I arrived there. Or perhaps it was earlier still, on the ferry, as we approached the island and it grew from an indistinct shape on the horizon into something both complete and completing, something that felt as though it was already a part of me, and had always been so. It was as intense and surprising a feeling as that which had struck me in Kamchatka – more so, in fact. Only this time the feeling was directed somewhere closer, more attainable.

That first trip to Fair Isle lasted only two days, but its impact on me was enormous, and in the year that I came back
to Shetland I began to visit every fortnight. My brother was working at the bird observatory there that summer, which gave me both opportunity and excuse. And then I met a girl. She had grown up on the island, and through her I came to know it better. Each time I made that journey, by boat or by plane, I felt a kind of relief, as though I were going back to a place in which I felt more fully myself. And when the opportunity arose for that girl and I to move to the island, I didn't hesitate. There seemed nothing more natural and more logical to me at that moment than to go. And so Fair Isle, three miles long by one and a half miles wide, and separated from Shetland by twenty-five miles of water, became my home.

It is impossible to untangle attraction. We are drawn in our various directions for reasons both inexplicable and inexpressible. We desire what others find repellent; we cling on to what others do not want; we are magnets with unpredictable poles. What I found in Fair Isle was a place that was both new and familiar at once, both nearby and far away. Like Fort Smith, it was a place, too, that was utterly central to itself. Though it is in theory the most remote inhabited island in Britain, and though on many days of the year one can look out and see no other land at all, it never felt remote to me. In Fair Isle, it was other places that were far away. The island itself was exactly where it ought to be. That feeling of deep centredness and settledness suited me. Here was somewhere I did not feel torn or pulled in opposing directions. Here was somewhere I could just be.

Most of all, though, it was Fair Isle's community that drew me in. It was the connections that people had with each other and with their place – connections that were obvious to even the briefest of visitors. To live in Fair Isle was unlike living anywhere that I had known before. It was to become a member of something bigger and more important than any individual. It was to belong to a community that was greater than the sum of its parts, independent from and yet
dependent upon each member. On that island, among those people, I came to understand and to experience a sense of attachment that was stronger, more intricate and yet somehow simpler than any I had felt before. Fair Isle was the first place in which my desire to be at home felt welcomed and reciprocated. It was the first place in which that desire that had dogged me for most of my life truly identified itself. An unanswerable longing took shape, then, and that shape became its own answer.

I moved to Fair Isle with no particular idea of how I might survive financially. With a population of less than seventy, there are just two or three full-time jobs on the island; everyone else has several part-time roles that, together, constitute a living. Every service that elsewhere is taken for granted, there must be carried out by the same few people. Every role must be filled, or the whole cannot work. I began my time on the island by joining the knitwear co-operative and learning how to operate a knitting machine. It was a process for which I had no particular aptitude. In my first winter, I made hats and scarves, a couple of jumpers and a cardigan, which were sold to visitors the following summer, and are probably still in use somewhere in the world. But I didn't stick to the knitting for long once other opportunities arose. I became a road worker next – digging ditches, filling potholes, pouring tar, shovelling grit in the winter – and I worked a few hours each week as a classroom assistant in the primary school. At the end of my first year, I began editing a magazine in Shetland, which I could do from home and fit in around my other roles. I kept a couple of dozen sheep among the communal herd on the hill; I joined the coast-guard cliff rescue team; and towards the end of my three years on the island I worked as an occasional deckhand on the ferry,
Good Shepherd IV
. Almost every day I could wake up and do something different from the day before. It suited me better than I ever could have imagined.