Nikolski (17 page)

Noah kneels down in the trench, rakes the ground with his trowel and collects minute quantities of blackish earth, which he steadily deposits in a plastic bag. Little by little, a constellation of cinders comes to light. A thousand years ago an earthenware jar fell to the ground, toppled perhaps by a restless child. Closing his eyes, Noah could swear he hears an outburst of Paleoinuit curses.

As he notes the position of the cinders in the excavation logbook, Noah hears shouts ringing out by the cairn. He lifts his head above the trench just in time to witness a border skirmish between Howard and Edward. Things are starting to heat up, and soon they’re brandishing weapons. Howard tries to crush Edward’s skull with his trowel, but Edward—who was a fencer in college—dodges the blow and counters with a miniature garden rake, attempting to drive Howard back into his trench. Noah sighs, throws a last handful of earth into the plastic bag and goes up to the
Bunker without paying any attention to the small clicking noises of battle.

As with any self-respecting bunker, one must bow to enter. Inside, the walls have disappeared behind hundreds of white plastic bags filled with earth. The impression one gets is of a World War One shelter, which in fact is what suggested to Thomas Saint-Laurent the affectionate nickname of his headquarters. But here there are no shells or bullets. The plastic bags are shields against the passage of time. Outside, the twentieth century may roar on, but inside the Bunker the atmosphere has been stabilized at
circa
500 BCE.

Amid the disorder, a large trestle table sags under the weight of boxes filled with stones, potsherds and piles of cardboard index cards. Seated before an assortment of arrowheads, Thomas Saint-Laurent is coating his arms with DEET.

“What is that noise outside?”

“The daily homicide attempts.”

Noah takes a felt pen, numbers his bag of humus and adds it to the Bunker’s supporting wall. One more contribution to wartime architecture.

Every night after supper, the work continues by lantern light. They discuss the day’s events while washing the dishes, then rewrite their notes and classify whatever is to hand. Then, overcome by the cold, they go to bed early, each in his own tent.

Trussed up in his army-surplus sleeping bag, with his flashlight wedged under his chin, Noah examines the old map of the Caribbean pinned to the tent wall. This is all that’s left of the Book with No Face, which vanished at the same time as Arizna. Ten months have gone by since Noah saw either one.

He watches the mist rising from his mouth and thinks of Leonard, a classmate who at this very moment is busy stirring the venerable dust of Hydra in the Saronic Gulf. Noah has the feeling he is on the wrong island. He has thought several times of dropping out of university, but without a satisfactory alternative he could not bring himself to face the real world. And yet here he is, stretched out on a bed of lichen, looking at an old map of the Caribbean, shivering.

The beam from his flashlight, which has been waning for some time, blinks and goes out. Noah gives the flashlight a shake, but in vain. Nothing left to do now but try to get some sleep. Turning over on his side, he notices a glimmer through the nylon of the tent. A light is shining in the Bunker. He wriggles out of his sleeping bag, gets dressed and exits his tent. An icy wind is blowing in from the sea. To the east, the Îles Mermettes lighthouse winks at two-second intervals.

The cold inside the Bunker seems even more severe, and Thomas Saint-Laurent, sitting at the work table, is swathed in three woollen sweaters and, over these, an old patched-up quilt. Surrounded by a swarm
of mosquitoes, he is studying the logbook in the hissing light of the butane lamp.

“Well, well,” he exclaims, “another insomniac!”

From under the woolly layers he pulls out a stainless steel flask, and throws it over to Noah. Judging by the smells wafting around the bunker, the flask contains either alcohol or insect repellent. Noah unscrews the cap and sniffs.

“Whisky?”

“Scotch,” Tom Saint-Laurent replies, stretching. “Cutty Sark, to be more exact.”

“The bottle with a sailing ship?”

“The bottle with the
Cutty Sark.
The fastest sailing ship of the nineteenth century. It carried Chinese tea and Australian wool. Now it’s in London, and its holds are full of tourists.”

Noah takes a swig and sends the flask back to Thomas Saint-Laurent, who in turn takes a drink.

“I thought all boats ended up sinking.”

“Not that one.”

The temperature in the Bunker rises a notch. Thomas Saint-Laurent rests his feet on the corner of the table, on top of a stack of forms from the Ministry of Culture.

“So, can’t get to sleep?”

“I have nightmares. I spend my nights digging holes with a teaspoon.”

Noah looks at the hundreds of bags surrounding
them. At the end of the summer, they will have to sift scrupulously through all that earth and retrieve the slightest potsherd that may have escaped their attention, then methodically bury the site while respecting the strata. In September the ground surface will display a few irregularities at most. Next year the lichen will start growing again. In two years, there will be no sign of their passage on Stevenson Island.

“Yup,” Tom Saint-Laurent sighs. “Sometimes archaeological digs lack romanticism. And to think that at this moment I could be trout-fishing in the Laurentians …”

“Let me remind you that last summer you interrupted your fishing trip to do some digging in the library recycling bins.”

“You’re right. It’s just a convenient image to convey the serenity of summer. A lake, the trout, the mosquitoes.”

“You never travel?”

“I don’t like to travel alone.”

“I thought you were married,” Noah says, surprised.

“Divorced, naturally. No one but a divorced man or a crazy bachelor would come out to a deserted island on the Lower North Shore to scratch at the ground. What about you—do you have a girlfriend?”

“No girlfriend. No family either. My mother lives in a trailer. She never stops in the same place for more than two weeks. At this time of year, she must be in Banff. Or Whitehorse.”

“No sisters or brothers?”

“None that I’m aware of.”

“And your father?”

“My father? Worse than my mother. He used to work on freighters. Couldn’t sit still. Last time we had any news, he was living in Alaska. I think he settled on a small Aleutian island.”

“Strange place to settle down.”

“No worse than Stevenson Island.”

There’s a moment of silence permeated by the buzzing of mosquitoes. The two archaeologists become lost in their thoughts. After a while, Thomas Saint-Laurent takes a gulp of whisky and tosses the bottle over to Noah.

“I know what you’re thinking. You wanted to do your master’s on garbage dumps, and now you regret having changed your mind.”

“I didn’t change my mind. You refused to support my project.”

“True,” he admits apologetically. “I wanted to spare you the disillusionment. I could have let you draft your project. The admissions committee would have rejected it, and you would have wasted three months on a dead-end road.”

“It’s okay,” Noah answers quietly, as he takes another swallow. “I don’t blame you for anything.”

Saint-Laurent signals that he’d like to have the Scotch back. He takes a drink.

“I know just how you feel. I’ve been feeling I’m in the wrong place too. I find this almost as boring as a fishing trip. I’d prefer to spend the summer at the Miron dump. Now, there’s a challenge! Have you ever applied for a permit to excavate a dump? It’s a real obstacle course. Civil servants mistrust archaeologists. They prefer treasure hunters.”

“Treasure hunters?”

“Companies that deal in luxury garbage. Most of them take apart old computers and salvage the metal. They call it waste management.”

He sighs, takes a small gulp of whisky and lobs the flask to Noah.

“The fact is that computer recycling is at an impasse. One ton of printed circuits yields a few ounces of gold, so to make a profit you have to handle large volumes of raw material. You have to separate the circuits, the processors, the wiring, the hard drives, the cases. You end up with tons of toxic waste on your hands. It’s not easy to make a profit. Too many steps in the process, too much hazardous residue to manage. So you turn a blind eye to the Basel Convention and you export your electronic garbage to Asia.”

“The Basel Convention—what’s that?”

“Didn’t you take my Archaeology and International Politics course?”

“It’s been awhile.”

“The Basel Convention regulates the transportation and processing of waste. Theoretically, it prevents the industrialized countries from exporting their trash to the Third World. The treaty was inaugurated in 1989, not long before the Berlin Wall came down. Conditions were ripe. As soon as the Iron Curtain fell, Western Europe started to export its surplus waste to Poland, Bulgaria, the Ukraine.”

“I can’t believe they export garbage!”

“The dumps are overflowing. Are you familiar with Fresh Kills?”

“It’s a dump in New York, right?”

“The
main
dump of New York. Twelve square kilometres, a yearly increase of over 4 million tons of trash, daily emissions of 2,600 tons of methane. In 1990, William Rathje wanted to do some drilling in Fresh Kills. He rented a drill and cored the garbage. At one hundred feet below the surface the flow of time slows down. No oxygen, no bacteria, no biodegradation. His team brought up a perfectly preserved head of lettuce dating back to 1984. It looked as if it had been thrown in the trash a few days before.”

Noah tosses back the whisky. Unaffected by their game of liquid table tennis, Tom Saint-Laurent continues.

“To travel back in time as far as that head of lettuce, Rathje had to get excavation permits, a core-drilling machine, specialized machine operators, different logistical vehicles, and assistants to sort through the
artifacts. For the Ministry of Culture, there’s no way to make that head of lettuce cost-effective. It’s a vegetable with low political potential.”

He pauses and grimly inspects the bottom of the flask.

“Empty,” he grumbles.

He reaches toward a crate and pulls out a brand new bottle of Cutty Sark. He sets about filling the flask, but the repeated swigs have made his hand unsteady. He frowns.

“I know better than anyone that we look like a bunch of nerds with our plastic bags full of humus. But the truth is, we’re ahead of our time. Archaeology is the discipline of the future. Every time an old IBM finds its way to the dump, it becomes an artifact. Artifacts are the main products of our civilization. When all the computer experts are unemployed, we’ll still have millions of years of work ahead of us. That is the fundamental paradox of archaeology. Our discipline will reach its peak at the end of the world.”

Thomas Saint-Laurent has miraculously completed the transfer from bottle to flask without spilling a single drop of the precious Scotch. He screws the bottle shut, returns it to its niche, and addresses Noah with the flask raised in the air.

“In the meantime, the best remedy is patience.”

OF ALL THE FISH THAT JOYCE SEES
coming through Shanahan’s—from the diminutive capelin to the blue mackerel, winter skate and swordfish, right through to the majestic Northern bluefin tuna—her favourite is the plaice.

This undistinguished
pleuronectida,
neither formidable nor athletic, is matchless in the art of mimicry. Its flattened silhouette and complex epidermal pigmentation allow it to completely blend in with the sea bottom. When immobile, it vanishes. When swimming, it resembles a mere puff of sand stirred up by the current.

The young plaice has an eye on either side of its head. As it grows, its left eye migrates northward and goes to meet the right eye. Thereafter blind on the murky side of its existence, it no longer directs its gaze anywhere but up, as if assuming there must be a surface and, above the surface, another world, the sky, the clouds, the stars.

Joyce is absorbed in her consideration of a plaice when two RCMP officers abruptly enter the fish store.

As soon as she sets eyes on these two hammerheads, Joyce feels her pulse accelerate. The heftier of the two removes his sunglasses and looks around as though he were the store owner.

“Are you still open?”

“I was about to close up,” Joyce answers, smiling like a model student. “How can I help you?”

“Do you have any trout?”

“As it happens, the fillets are on special.”

“I’ll take three.”

Joyce wraps the fillets, weighs the package and marks the price on the label. The officer pays, puts his dark glasses back on and goes out. His partner follows without a word, like a pilot fish.

Standing by the window, she watches them climb into their car, parked right in the middle of the loading zone. She flashes a thin smile. Only a slight quiver in her lower lip betrays the pressure she feels inside.

Joyce turns off the lights, puts away the merchandise and rinses the counters with large sloshes of water. A final pass with the mop, and the fish store is ready for the next day. Then she prints out that day’s sales on the cash register and, while the paper roll plays itself out, sorts the receipts.