The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (10 page)

I try to think of the ice. I tell them I’m not blushing. This makes it worse. “He can
speak,
” someone says.

B
rusilov is sick for weeks, and in his absence, no one steps on deck for watch, no one makes trips on the ice to look vainly for leads. Yuri and I stop checking the hull. “You can bundle up to see nothing if you like,” he says. “I’m not.”

Every night we listen to the
Saint Anna
creak her adjustments. Sleep, when it comes, is sudden and short-lived, constantly interrupted in these close quarters by people coming and going, the shoving for position. We count our supplies. We clean our rifles. We recount supplies. We wait. Conversation has halted except for slurs and insults, which are greeted mostly with shrugs. We have no alternate plan. At least when Brusilov was well enough to make the occasional appearance, our sense that someone was running the ship, no matter how poorly, was intact. Now even that has slipped away, and our time is punctuated only by tremendous, distant thunder cracks, ice sheering itself or gathering together according to some glacial movement we cannot fathom.

Cold, hunger, loneliness, claustrophobia, helplessness, uncertainty, isolation: these sensations crash over us like the memory of waves, and the result for me has been an almost complete eradication of identifiable feeling. I have begun to conjure a dull vision of our time on the ice, and come to understand those of us aboard as less a crew made up of individuals than a singular listless entity, the spin-point on a globe. I feel both inside this ship, and outside of myself. We form a collective pulse; we are contained within the
Saint Anna;
we are far from both land and water, and this has become our home. I have tried to explain this to Yuri, but he won’t listen. No one will listen. At a certain point it all comes to exhaustion. At a certain point you pray for something to happen, just so something does.

“To tell the truth, I’m surprised no one’s dead yet,” Pavel, our cook, says one day to no one.

I
n February, after Brusilov has regained his health, Albanov, our navigator, informs us he is to leave the ship. In April, he will set out on foot over the ice for Franz Josef Land, an archipelago due very far south of our current position. The islands exist but are delineated on our map by a series of dotted lines that, at their best, read as imprecise. Brusilov says he’s free to go as is anyone else. We’re surprised. The thought strikes us as absurd. The islands are hundreds of miles away, even by the most generous estimation. “You can’t just go,” Dmitri says.

“The ice is not going to give,” Albanov says. “But you can have faith in whatever you wish.”

“Islands that may or may not be there?” Dmitri says. “Hundreds of miles of ice on foot? Dragging heavy sledges over snow boulders? Realizing halfway there just how awful of an idea it was to leave the ship? Not at the top of my list. I can wait things out right here.”

Still, the expedition’s announcement has brought some energy back to the crew. We clean our quarters, we are up and about. Within a week, thirteen men have decided to go with Albanov, and with Brusilov’s blessing, they set about fashioning additional sledges and kayaks. Some of them are carpenters by trade, others just handy. Those of us who are neither are instructed to chop extra parrels from the foremast or pull planks from nonstructural parts of the ship. Though there are twelve of us who view their departure as fevered idiocy, no one stops them. We’re happy to have something to do.

The next day, Yevgeni and I follow Yuri down to the ice to survey the contact points. As we check the ship, Yuri finds an indentation in the hull near the stern. There’s a moment of panic—if the ship is crushed, we will all be leaving with Albanov—but after an hour of scraping it becomes clear there is no threat of buckling, what we’d seen had just been an illusion formed from the ice patterns on the hull. Yuri is kneeling beside Yevgeni and me and knocks the ice at his feet with his pike. “We’re not getting to Vladivostok,” he says. “We have nothing in the hold. Why not leave?”

I have no answer. “Because it’s
certain
death,” Yevgeni finally says, and stands.

In the evening over tea the men take turns reading passages from one of the few books aboard: Fridtjof Nansen’s
Furthest North
. Nansen and his ship, the
Fram,
had become frozen in an ice pack after sailing north of Siberia in an attempt to reach the Pole. Undaunted, he set out with dogs and one companion; they reached 86˚ north, 13˚6´ east before the currents pushed them south. Realizing the Pole could not be attained, they turned back for Franz Josef Land, and, having reached the islands, wintered over. In the spring they made their way to Cape Flora, where they were picked up by a passing schooner. Meanwhile, their ship spent a third winter locked in ice and was then disgorged unharmed into the Atlantic, having traversed the entire Arctic Ocean. “A great movement that felt like no movement,” one of the crew said later. Even the dogs lived. We cherish the story.

“Hope’s where you find it,” Albanov says. “Death’s a pale horse. That’s why you can’t see it coming over the ice.”

“What is this, the witching hour?” Yevgeni says from across the hold. Albanov snorts.

Gradually a line is drawn. In the main cabin sleep those who have decided to leave; those of us who are staying sleep in the galley, where we take warmth from the stove. The two groups interact as little as possible, and we have stopped helping Albanov with his preparations. Each group is conscious of what abandonment means: they are leaving us to our death, and we are letting them walk to theirs.

Brusilov is unconcerned. On April first, with the
Saint Anna
still firm in the pack, he feigns surprise to find Albanov still aboard. “I thought you were taking half my crew and leaving to waltz across the ice,” he says.

Albanov spits. “Your insouciance is high comedy,” he says.

“As is your surprise at finding ice in the Arctic,” Brusilov says, before returning to his cabin.

T
en days later, two sledges are loaded with 1,200 pounds of supplies. They take rifles and a shotgun, sleep-sacks, four tents, canned meat and biscuits. Brusilov has kept a log of everything loaned to his former navigator and has made clear that it’s to be returned upon their rescue from Cape Flora. Albanov makes no indication he’s heard.

There is a small gathering on the ice to see them off. Brusilov remains in his cabin. We help them check the sledges and then they take up the harnesses, seven men per sledge, and begin their journey. We help push for the first thirty feet and then wish them well. After ten paces or so, Albanov turns and drops his harness. The speech he’s clearly rehearsed begins like this—“To those of you remaining aboard the
Saint Anna
”—and ends like this: “Never before have I seen such a lazy acceptance of one’s own demise. Russia mourns her sons and how they conduct themselves.”

We’re taken aback. Yevgeni tells him to enjoy being frozen while searching for his islands. Dmitri reminds them to use salt and to think of rabbit when they finally resort to eating each other. We part ways.

Vlad and I stand on deck, watching the fourteen of them make incremental progress to the south. The latest estimation places Franz Josef Land at 235 miles away. The floes stretch like negative space continents on the map. The first night, we can see their tents on the ice from where we stand at the rail, but after three days we see no trace of them. “Lunatics,” Vlad says. “Think of those tents.”

“Think of
this
tent,” Yevgeni says. But we’ve made our choice. We are here, now, aboard the ship, and we will see what comes.

What does come: in May, readings place us farther north than expected. We express our anxiety by burrowing in our sleep-sacks. If there’s nothing to do, we stay put. If there is something to do, we are petty in remembering past work, and refuse to do more than our share. We turn on each other for imagined slights. If asked to move, we grumble about it, or pretend to sleep.

“What’s the matter with you people?” Brusilov says. He’s come into the main cabin, and is holding a stay that’s snapped in the wind. “You going for the If-I-Don’t-See-It-It-Doesn’t-Exist approach?”

“Does anybody else hear something?” Yevgeni says. “I swear I’m hearing something.”

O
n a certain day a little later, Yerminia Zhdanko ventures into the galley to boil water and Pavel is up like a flash, asking why she can’t wait for tea like everyone else. She looks shocked and suddenly ashamed. Dmitri chimes in by telling her to drink as much as possible because who cares. Pavel turns and asks if the tea has Dmitri written on it, at which point Dmitri stands and Yerminia Zhdanko juts her arms between them. “Stop,” she says. “Stop. It’s not for me. It’s for Eugene. He’s sick.”

Pavel stammers a response that gets caught in his throat.

“Pavel, you see what kind of person you are?” Dmitri says, suddenly proud of himself.

Yerminia Zhdanko makes the tea. Those of us near the galley watch for a glimpse of unexpected skin and are once again disappointed. “I’m trying to help,” she says. “He’s sick,” she says again as she carries the tea from the galley, like there is nothing in this world that could make her understand us.

A month passes with no change. We’ve augered in. The days wash over us, we care without caring, but then: leads are spotted, breaks in the ice, some distance to the east. It’s Vlad who sees them, and sends word below. We are up in a hurry. Dmitri jogs the gangway, his eyes on the horizon. Yevgeni hogs the telescope. We jostle for the best view.

“Are they anywhere else?” someone says.

We crane around. “No, just to the east,” Dmitri says. “But there they are.”

Relief is palpable. “Are you wetting yourself yet?” Vlad asks Pavel.

“It’s within the realm of possibility,” Pavel says.

Ignore a problem long enough and it solves itself. Hole up in the wind and the storm will blow over you. I think of Yuri, somewhere out there, on foot in the frigid expanse, hulking his sledge up one ridge and then down another, his goggles frozen, fingers black and dying. We were right to stay. In all likelihood, everyone who left the ship has perished. It is early for hunting—the polar bear are still in hibernation—but it’s agreed that, if there are seals, it would do everyone well to have some fresh meat. Dmitri and I elect to go, along with Vlad, Pavel, Batyir, and Yevgeni; it will be a hunting party of six, half the remaining crew.

We set off the next morning on skis, rifles slung over our backs, empty sledge in tow. I am, unsurprisingly, the slowest. Dmitri, at first, waits for me but soon tires of it and moves ahead to join the others.

The leads are farther away than they appeared, and we cannot see them from the ice. At noon there is still no sight of them and there is talk of returning, but we press on, due east, following the compass. The
Saint Anna
recedes until only her two masts are visible, dark against the sky. Then they disappear from sight. Eventually we find a lead and track it east. After two miles it opens into a polynya, a wide hole in the ice through which we can spot the sea. We keep going until the solid ice gives way to grease ice, which won’t support our weight, and stop.

After a year it is overwhelming to see water, and there is the sudden realization that it is everywhere under us. “I had, I think, forgotten,” Dmitri says. No one responds. The polynya is roughly half-a-mile around. The water is black against the ice, and calm. We stand still long enough to notice a small swell, the seawater lapping gently against the surface ice around the perimeter. It sounds like sand being raked. We had come to understand the ice as an immovable fact of our lives—something that could not be negotiated with, whose endlessness would prove our undoing. But in fact here we were, at its end.

We take off our skis. There are no seals anywhere in sight. “But who cares for seals?” Batyir says. “Look at this miracle.” We look at the miracle. The polynya will open wider and wider, fattening the leads until the floes drift apart and we’re released to drift in the current, catch the wind, and return home. We remain at the edge of the polynya for an hour without talking until Vlad checks the sun and it’s decided we should return to the ship. And it’s when we’re restrapping our skis that the surface of the water suddenly churns in disarray. We swivel in time to see seals beating it out of the water onto the grease ice. There must be hundreds of them; the sound of their emergence is deafening. A number of them are pups. “Miracle number two,” Dmitri says.

In my haste to ready my rifle I forget that one ski is firmly attached to my foot and fall backward, releasing a shot that tufts the ice less than a foot away from Yevgeni.

There is a stunned silence. Everything is halted by the report, even the seals, who seem to forget momentarily what they were doing in the first place. I mumble something about a faulty trigger and force a chuckle. Yevgeni looks murderous. But before his rage can summon any coherence he’s interrupted by an even greater disturbance in the polynya, and we watch in astonishment as a great, dark mass slowly breaks the surface of the water, reveals itself, and with a violent hiss, expels a torrent of air. I know it to be a whale, I have seen the creatures from a distance, but up close is something entirely different. The slow beast rolls himself back under, and then the surface is broken by others, an entire pod. The size of each animal is impossible to comprehend. In the air is the smell of their bodies, a fetid warmth; an aliveness that cuts through my head scarf, engulfs my lungs, and brings me to the brink of tears. It’s a magnificent spectacle. We count seventeen. Yevgeni, without warning, sends a bullet into the tremendous back of one of the creatures. Its impact is audible, but that is all. “That was less than pointless,” Dmitri says. Yevgeni shrugs.

After twenty minutes, the water is still. We regain ourselves and begin to fire at the seals. We’re giddy and trigger-happy. It’s like shooting balloons tied to a fence. If one is too far out on the grease ice to retrieve, we shoot anyway and leave it.