The Age of Ice: A Novel (26 page)

Then I saw Merck. Ghostly white in his underwear, he was on his knees in the snow, one hand affixed to his face, the other clenched into a fist on his chest. I forgot myself. I shouted his name; he did not respond. I clambered over: he was shaking, mumbling in German. He looked up
at me: a void of misunderstanding in his eyes so complete as though the mind behind them had become that of a child. “
Darf ich fragen,
” he whispered, gripping the fabric of my long johns, “
warum?
”

May I ask why?

I urged him off his knees. “Come, Dr. Merck. You’ve been startled out of sleep. ”

“Why am I punished? Why now?” he insisted, clinging. “Because I am seeking a natural explanation? Or because I am questioning you?”

“What nonsense, Dr. Merck!
Nobody
is punished!”

“Yes. Of course.” He kept repeating this while our Kamchadal guides, wise to have slept fully dressed, set out to restore our covers to us. I held Merck upright until I could wrap him in a blanket. He showed astonishment as I did it, then slumped back to the ground. I stayed by him. I feared for him and I pitied and resented him at the same time. I did not know what else to do or what it was that had struck him. But I knew I should not discuss my freeze and thaw with him, ever.

After sunrise the wind ceased and the snow began to melt. In the light of day we could see that the remarkable “gunpowder” that had fallen with the snow was coarse black sand, perhaps granular volcanic ash. We found the horses. Merck’s collection was ruined: bird skins and pelts were wet and coated with mud; papers were scattered; the ink of our scribbles, dissolved.

A couple of weeks later, when we returned to St. Peter and Paul, we learned a
natural
explanation to the “gunpowder” storm: there had been an eruption. The majestic Alaid, a volcano that towered straight out of the sea, must have spewed its ash into a passing storm cloud, and the cloud must have stored this ordnance until it had reached land and happened to be over us. The locals did not remember anything like that ever happening, but I embraced the idea. Whether Merck did—I am no longer sure.

• • •

My memory is like an old, old city, Rome perhaps: old layers of life sink into the ground, new layers are added atop sunken floors, new basements—where attics used to be; sewer lines replace old corridors and sky bridges. No memory ever leaves, it only compounds, belabors, and violates the others. Memories turn into repetitive dreams, and dreams send their conduits into memories and illuminate them in eerie light.

There is a certain place in my memory—in my dreamscape—that
looks like a fair, an amusement park. It’s winter night; red, yellow, and green lanterns sway without wind, snow sparkles falling, and there is jolly music, cotton candy, and hot cider. I am in a toy sailing ship, which is at once a rowboat just like in that famous painting of Virgil and Dante. I sail through toy straits, weave between toy islands. I recognize that I am on an expedition to the Arctic. There are attractions and exhibits around me. Many of them are tableaux of atrocities. Some are merely displays of artifacts, like that one with mammoth and human mummies.

There is a booth where one can pick up a fire-truck hose and jet-spray freezing water onto a row of puppetlike people until they become coated in ice. There is a small stage under a spotlight where a starved girl in rags dances with a huge bear. She looks familiar. Then there is a sealed glass dome, a tropical paradise inside it. Somebody lies there in drugged stupor, stuck in a tub full of ice, and orchids lean over his upturned face, drooling nectar from their cleft palates.
It can’t be me!
These memories are from the future. I turn away from them, into the past.

Like any fairground, mine has a remote back side, away from the lights and people, right on the edge of a dark forest. This is the oldest layer of my memory, a place cluttered with ancient, dismembered artifacts. There are two blighted mirrors there, useless by themselves, but if I make them face each other just right, I can create a likeness of an enfilade of rooms. And though these rooms are filled with snow, I can still see a little boy working his way farther and farther in, calling, “Andrewsha-a-a-a!”

But I can’t linger here, I am dragged away. I am still in the toy boat, and its turns are as abrupt and jerky as they are relentless. The music too jerks and stumbles in unison with the boat. It is powered by the same old crankshaft that moves my boat, and I cannot change the course or pace of either.

Instead of turning right, to the papier-mâché coast of America, my toy boat makes a left, due North, to the Chukchi Peninsula. I know what’s coming. But each time it happens, my breath catches in my throat nonetheless. Each bloody time.

• • •

It was the last year of our expedition, 1791.

We were going to approach the Northeast Passage from the east, and sail over the peninsula toward Kolyma. It was in all likelihood our last attempt to traverse through the Icy Sea, it was now or never. But it was already late July when we arrived at St. Lawrence Bay. We’d been too slow,
the season was winding down, and the possibility of a sea passage was dwindling.

We made contact with the Chukchi clan in which our man, Nikolai Darkin, had dwelt since our Kolyma misadventure. He had prepared the Chukchi—famous for their warlike spirit—for our arrival. Billings announced that we had no choice other than to scout the Northeast Passage from land. A small party of us would join the clan and their reindeer on their westward migration along the coast. Our stock of precious trade items—silver medals, copper coins, needles, earrings, glass beads—as well as tobacco, iron, and brandy—would ensure the clan’s cooperation. Besides, Nikolai Darkin would have our back—a Chukchi captured as a child and raised among Russians, he was perfectly suited to be a go-between.

Billings named the ones who would go with him: Batahov the shipmaster; Voronin the draftsman; Dr. Merck; Lehman the surgeon’s assistant; two soldiers, Ivan and Philimon; and I. I did not want to go. I had a bad feeling about this land march. But I could not refuse—our commander had finally decided to risk everything for a cause. Sawyer, on the contrary, begged to go but the captain rejected him. The official reason: Sawyer had just picked a fight, a brawl, vicious fisticuffs with a young Chukchi warrior over nothing—over a
button
.

Sawyer and the rest were sent to winter on Oonalaska. Our party stayed behind.

• • •

It took me a while to realize that we were dragged away from the coastline that we were after. Klyuchevskoy Bay was the last of the coastal markers we saw and from then on we were led deeper and deeper inland. The mythical Chayoon Bay we had looked forward to never materialized, contrary to the chief’s assurances, as translated by Darkin. The summer was over. We had lost the remaining weeks of warmth traveling only three miles per day, and then taking days-long breaks, during which the Chukchi sacrificed reindeer and read the entrails for omens.

How did it start? Was it something we did? Did we betray a weakness by doing women’s chores, say, beating the frost off and folding our tent skins, boiling our own water? At a certain point on our trajectory, the sled train with our portmanteaus was no longer off-limits to the natives. The thieves were often women and children. They acted with the self-assertion of wolves besieging a bear who hoards a deer carcass all for
himself. A bear can growl and lunge, but the moment he turns his back, they approach and take a bite.

Days later, we saw our items displayed on our keepers as trophies of conquest.

Captain Billings was traveling with the chief, the chief’s family, and their reindeer, far ahead of our horde. He had his own
yaranga
(a kind of two-part yurt), which they pitched for him close to the chief’s cluster; he had his valet Jon and Salt the water spaniel and he had five sleds of baggage—filled with his tea service and other necessities. We wouldn’t see him for days. When we would get to see him, we’d complain. He’d promise to remonstrate with the chief. Nothing would change.

It became my obsession to pick up the Chukchi language. If we spoke it, we would be treated better. When Darkin was around—which was rare because he stayed close to Billings—I extracted words out of him. When he was not—I approached the clansmen and pointed to things or drew on snow for them to put a name on. Salmon—
gajkeghae
? Wolf—
ing-nae
? Whale—
junju
? There weren’t even letters in the Russian or the English alphabet to transcribe the words; no letters for the stutters of glottal constriction without which the words cannot be understood.

Darkin was impatient and monosyllabic with me. I asked him for Chukchi words for
good
and
bad.
He said there were none. I did not believe him.

One day all our equipment (astronomical, land-surveying, compasses, thermometers, measuring lines) went missing. The sleigh that we’d packed it in that morning was empty by nightfall. I attempted to backtrack and gave up when, in a growing storm, I ran out of tracks to follow. For several days we couldn’t locate Billings to tell him about the offense. When we did, all chance of redress was long gone.

We had rifles but we could not turn them on the Chukchi even to spook them. In our minds a show of force would get us ejected and we would perish. We had no food other than what they gave us. We had no idea where we were and no means of establishing it without our charts, our bearings. We were outnumbered.

It was probably December by then. Our rations kept shrinking.

There was a point where they got rid of our pencils, quills, and paper, save for whatever happened to be pocketed on our bodies. It happened on the march, during a brief break. Bottles of frozen ink, field journals fell by the wayside. “For God’s sake,” Voronin lamented, scurrying around the sled, picking up his drawings, losing
them to a tribesman’s hands, picking them up as they were thrown, and loosing them again until they were torn up and all the ink lines were bleeding.

If only I could gain those words for
good
and
bad
. I heard them use the Russian word
dobro
—good—as fair, that is, a fair measure of exchange in bartering. But above and beyond bartering?

At one point, Batahov was stabbed. He was protecting his steel and flint kit from theft, he said. He came into our yaranga barely cognizant of his wound. He felt a puncture, any one of such and such and such—the three fellows who’d accosted him could have done it. The wound under his rib cage seemed like nothing, a small peephole into his flesh. He expired painfully over a course of four days—the last of which he spent strapped to a sled, where he froze.

Via Billings, we petitioned the chief—repeatedly—to bring those who assailed Batahov to justice. The chief never refused. Always nodded. What looked like orders were given in our presence, minions sent out, ostensibly to fetch the murderers this very moment. Each and every time it did seem that they would be delivered, assuredly, positively so, and it never happened, never. This was the point when Billings and his servant Jon fell back to our group. They came in dragging one sled of belongings between them. Salt was missing. The captain never said much, not a word of what had happened, but we could form a good guess. At night he opened his knapsack, took out a bundle made out of a cotton undershirt and from it—a blue china teacup so fine it glowed through in the light of our cookfire, a cup with yellow tea stains on the inside and sooty smears on the outside. He set it on the snow, digging in its dainty peduncle of a bottom, among the queue of our mugs awaiting tea. Days later Jon told us there had been a plot on their lives. They would have been killed in their sleep if not for Salt’s bark. They lived, Salt didn’t. That’s all.

Extreme cold—
aeq
. Fire—
yin
. To starve—
get’hae
.

• • •

Words for
good
and
bad
. On the march, during a brief stop: I was pacing back and forth, my companions dropped down to rest. Huddled back to back in snow, they watched me—half-closed eyes, blackening noses, scabbed lips, frozen mats of beards. “Will you stop please, Mr. Velitzyn?” said Lehman, hoarsely. I said, “If I were to say
not good, not fair—qeshem dobro—
will they understand me?” Lehman looked away.

“I am told we are two weeks’ journey away from the Angarka River,” said Billings.

Angarka reportedly had a Cossack outpost. Some days ago Billings had said we would go no farther than that. We had not seen the coast, we couldn’t take bearings, why drag on till Kolyma? Read: Angarka is where we would be saved. What’s left of us. Voronin said, “It is two weeks to it today, and tomorrow it will be a month.”

Billings said, “If one asks enough times, the truth will shake out.” He still believed in the laws of averages. Still gathered firewood, precious in this barren land. He and his Jon would pick every twig they ran across and tuck it into our sleds. I suppose Merck was right in saying that it was alien to the Chukchi to make campfires at every opportunity, but that did not justify taking away our firewood or denying us embers from their fires.
“Wai-wai!”
and a strip of frozen whale meat would be tossed our way.
Wai-wai
—here, take it.

When I asked Darkin, “How long to Angarka?” he said,
“Kaa,”
expelling the sound from the pit of his throat like a raven’s caw. “What did you say?”—“It means
I don’t know,
” he said.

There was a point where we no longer let each other out of sight, even when one of us hunkered down to empty his bowels. It was not safe to be alone. Yet Voronin’s presence did not help me when I found myself cased by a gang of young males while attending to a private need. They snickered and nudged each other. I finished in haste and tried to retreat. The hustle seemed half serious, a game, they were laughing, clicking their tongues,
“Hau! Hau!”
Voronin and I clambered over snow mounds, scraping our way out to our yaranga, the safe haven glowing from the inside with our little fire. But I stumbled and fell, and four of them pounced on me and held me down, another two shooed Voronin away as if he were an insignificant, scavenging fox. I kicked and swung my fists but there were too many of them. They yanked my parka up over my head, smothering me and binding my arms, one bore down on my face, they worked through the layer of native garment, the reindeer-skin coat and pants, they got to my European clothing, the nankeen shirt, the trousers, and they sawed off each and every button from my writhing, flapping body in less time than it took Voronin to run for help.