Afterlands, page 15
He slides Kruger’s confiscated rifle out of the clanking sleeping bag and swings it round, Lindermann ducking, then slips the proofcatch and cocks the hammer. Krüger! While he holds his aim, the air of the hut almost clears of its fog as all the men except Meyer and the faking Kruger hold their breath. Kruger squints up into the muzzle, an arm’s length away. Anthing’s left eye bulges over the sights. Roland? Kruger shuts his lids totally and for a moment he prays. About God, too, perhaps it’s better to be fooled. At twenty, he lay wounded by the taffrail of the Königsberg with snowflakes falling gravely onto his tongue and his eyelids and there was no pain at all, not yet. And he heard his messmates saying, Rolli’s dead! He heard the stretchermen saying, Well, this one’s dead! He heard the surgeons saying, Another one dead. Even the ship’s chaplain believed he was dead. He began to believe it himself. He had died for his country and it had made him a part of nothing at all. He was perfectly alone. He’d become meat—nothing more than meat.
One’s country was a cannibal with a vast, ceaseless appetite.
Peering out secretly he meets the rifle’s Cyclops stare. Anthing, satisfied, is thumbing down the hammer, propping the rifle against the wall, and Kruger, with the insight of a man facing death alone, sees through him now, this truer threat—the hollow but cunning mediocrity in any group who waits his chance, then springs his putsch and grabs power.
Jackson. Light the lamp and roust Colonel Meyer. Herr Krüger for now we will let sleep.
Feb. 1. The wind still continuing to blow with violence, our “Lotos-Eaters” scarcely show their heads out of their hut. Still, Mr Meyer deems the presence of all the icebergs around us to be further proof that we are close to Greenland; and he promulgates the fantastic opinion that the straits in lat. 66 N. are only eighty miles wide! He would find it a long eighty miles indeed. Still, there seems something rather more tentative about the “Count” today, and his followers also. Perhaps they have at last become convinced that they cannot carry out their project. Their assurance of soon getting to a land of plenty has been the cause, I fear, of many raids upon the provisions, and of more being consumed than even they would have risked had they not been deceived as to the course of our drift; but now they begin to grasp that they did not know as much about these seas as they thought they did.
The Esquimaux inform me that the cracks in the ice where they have been sealing are not limited to the “young ice,” but cut clear through the old—which is an intimation that our floe may split up completely at any time if the wind holds. Also, the huge icebergs are moving rapidly before the wind; and they are heavy enough, if propelled upon our encampment, to crush us to atoms.
On going into Hans’s hut this morning, to visit the ill boy, I was sick at heart, seeing the miserable group of crying children. The mother was trying to pick out a few scraps of “tried-out” blubber from their lamp to feed them. Augustina is naturally a fat, heavy-built girl, but she looks peaked enough now. Tobias was in her lap, or partly so, his head resting on her as she sat on the ground, with a skin drawn over her. She seemed to have a little scrap of something she was chewing on, though I did not see that she swallowed any thing. The little girl, Succi, was crying—that chronic hunger whine—and I could just see the baby’s head in the mother’s capote. All I could do was encourage them a little. I have nothing at all to give them. I was glad, at least, to see that they had some oil left.
Our own hut is scarcely less filthy than Hans’s. It is dark enough in here, but nevertheless I am compelled to shut my eyes on many occasions. We are all permeated with dirt—I have not had these clothes off for over a hundred days, and it sickens me to think of them, saturated as they are with all the vile odors of this hut, of seal’s entrails and greasy blubber. I am trying to recall the pleasant sensation of putting on clean clothing, and how, while whaling, when I got my feet wet and cold, what a comfort it was to get on a clean pair of stockings or socks; yet, perhaps I had only worn the discarded ones a few hours, not months! Alas, we can spare no warmed water for washing. I know it is impossible to be clean, living as we do; but among the Americans Hannah has learned one thing that has been no benefit to her, and which has added many annoyances to our inevitable misery this winter. She observed among white folks that it was the custom for men to support their wives, instead of using them as slaves, as her own people do in their natural condition; and, in order to be as much like a white woman as possible, she has positively declined to do—has at least omitted to do—many things which would have made this hut more tolerable.
I comb my hair and beard with the only comb in the encampment—Hannah’s coarse wooden one—and call it my morning wash. Well, but perhaps the waters of Davis Strait will yet wash me clean, so I won’t grumble.
Feb 1st I cannot describe how nasty & dirty it is here. I know it is impossible to be clean living as we do but I must tell the thruth. This Esquimaux Squaw Hannah is the dirtiest most filthy thing I have ever seen. She is filthy for an Esquimaux. I have never seen her equal as a dirty & Lazy Squaw. And this Squaw has been back living with civilized people! How to continue I dont know. soiled to the bone. On my watch they will all die children & parents alike & seamen too & turn cannibal perhaps too & I can do little, beyond kill some.
My skin brown w. grime. God is gone & to die seems good.
In the middle of the night Kruger slips out of his bag. The lamp is out. For a moment he’s tempted again to try stealing a weapon, but the only one he could possibly get would be Meyer’s Colt, and lately the Count’s skull is hardly ever off the foxskin in which it’s wrapped. Kruger has died three times here: before the firing squad, before Tyson, and before his own confiscated rifle. A fourth time will surely finish the job. He fends for himself alone now, like the Gypsies.
He dresses in quick silent movements and crawls into the tunnel through the wolfskin, his parched mouth actually watering at its doggish smell. In the tunnel he grabs the snow trowel and slips it blade-first into his pocket. Outside, under a sky massed with tremulous stars, he steps over one of the tripwires strung around the hut. The four lines lead inside through small holes pierced high in the wall, where they converge on and suspend a tinny bell—an empty mock-turtle soup can with a bullet inside it on a string—that hangs under the peak of the dome. The Count’s latest invention, rigged by Anthing.
He trudges inland, northward, hugging himself against the cold. Every muscle is gripped and held hard against the cold. His hood is drawn tight but through the fur-fringed gap in front of his eyes and nose the gusting wind lances at his face, layering new frostbite over old. His jaw and teeth ache and soon his legs are numb—wooden pegs from the knees down. His breath freezes to ice-crystal clouds that shimmer and fall tinkling at his feet. This is the worst cold yet. He beats his mitts together. Through all of this his mouth will not stop watering.
Scattered along the north horizon, icebergs frozen into the solid pack, molar-shaped, glitter in the starlight. Near Bismarcksee—formerly Lake Polaris—he stops beside a familiar hummock, walks a few paces west, a step east, kneels down out of the wind and digs urgently with the trowel. Soon there’s a layer of ice to crack through. He does it with a savage jab of the blade. The cache, sunk deep in the side of the hummock, is exposed. There’s a canvas sack jammed with biscuit, a half-dozen big tins of pemmican, two tins of powdered chocolate, frozen slabs of sealmeat, blubber, and skin. With the trowel Kruger cracks a biscuit in the snow and stuffs a piece in his mouth, the other shards in his pocket. He slips a fillet of sealmeat into his pocket and then plugs his cheek—the numb jaw still intently chewing—with a glop of blubber. Frozen, there’s no taste, but as his gums begin to thaw the fat, the flavour comes, like a chunk of ice transformed, by pure force of desire, into a rich and oily food. Think of lard blended with dulse. Soft tallow with kelp.
A long sepulchral booming and the ice shifts like the deck of a frigate being shelled. He pockets another dollop of blubber to suck on the way back, then carefully reorganizes the cache and seals it, packing the snow down hard with his mittens, his boots. As he hurries south, markedly stronger and less frozen, he glances back to ensure the wind is erasing his tracks.
Punnie has a loose front tooth which of course she will not let alone, always testing it with her finger, just as the lieutenant, looking frail, stern and secretive, sits huddled among his muskox skins, chewing on his lengthening whiskers. At times he sneaks his field-book out from under him, scribbles a few furtive lines, then replaces it among the skins—first carefully squaring it with the wall, then sitting on it. Other times he removes and feels and even sniffs at the interwoven circles of hair, brown and blonde, that he keeps in his breast pocket. His red eyes well up; the right side of his beard twitches. Pirliliqtuq, thinks Tukulito. The madness of hunger and the dark months.
The child is happy to have a loose tooth, since Tobias has so many, but Tukulito, whose two born-babies died long before the tooth-losing age, worries that this could also be a first symptom of the scurvy. Again she tells Punnie to leave the tooth alone. This is the time of day when she will speak only English to the child, correcting her responses in a soft voice that now costs her a great effort to maintain. Pirliliqtuq. How the mind can churn with violence: a murderous irritation, but also this shame now, and guilt. There are so many customs to transgress. So move slowly, fixedly, from chore to chore. Against terror, only loyalty. On the ship she was teaching Punnie to read using her Bible, but that was left behind, so now for spiritual instruction she must draw on her large mental archive of hymns. Punnie has a good ear, a fine voice, and some of the strain seems to ease from the lieutenant’s face as he sits listening to the two of them sing: When I can read my title clear … to mansions in the skies … I’ll bid farewell to every fear, and wipe my weeping eyes.
Punnie sings in the way of small children, misconstruing difficult phrases into curious little poetries: My Tight All Clear. To Man Shun Sin. Fear End White. Tonight as they sing together, Tyson joining in, hoarsely, there is a sort of echo, as if off the close walls of their iglu, and after a moment they realize that some of the crewmen are singing too. They seem familiar with the tune but have words in their own language. Their far voices are difficult to pry apart, and Roland Kruger’s she cannot discern—which sharpens another fear—while Anthing, with his warm throaty tenor, seems to lead them. O take me from the wilderness, and find my soul a home … O let me all my wrongs redress, and to your mansions come.
High above them a raven or owl, blown off course and scavenging the ice in vain, might hear that small, still hopeful chorus, and looking down see a shrinking flake of ice barely lit by three lamped iglus, a raft of consciousness adrift in the impassive polar night.
Feb. 5. This evening the wind has hauled to the south; weather now thick and snowing. I can see but a few yards before me. Here in the hut, Joe is oiling his rusting rifle, Hannah mending his sealskin boots; she will only repair those articles of clothing made from the skins of sea-animals. Yesterday, after we sang together, I asked if she would mend my deer-skin socks, and, when she said it was impossible, I made to do it myself; but in some consternation, she prevented me, explaining that to work on the skins of land-creatures while at sea might bring disaster. When I pressed her for a reason, she explained, with what seemed a sort of embarrassment, that such work might anger the goddess of the sea-animals, a jealous creature, who presides out here; so that Joe would find no game, and our raft might break up. To hear such irrational tabus from the mouth of an apparent Christian no longer much surprises me, however disappointing and disturbing it might be. Nevertheless, I had to mend my socks, and did so. Then, this morning, Merkut gave Tobias to Hannah and Joe to care for—apparently another custom, and last recourse for ill children; but for the life of me, I cannot see how we are to fit him in.
Feb. 7. Esquimaux returned, and we are all rejoicing over another feast of sealmeat! For Hans shot one about noon; but we had some little trouble over it this evening. Hans, if he gets a seal—which is very seldom—wishes to appropriate it all to his family’s use, without considering that he and his family get their daily allowance of biscuit and pemmican with all the rest. Of course he must not be allowed to have more than an equal share; and, had I allowed it, Mr Meyer, Anthing, Kruger, and the other miscreants would surely have turned violent. Hans is a very selfish Esquimau; he is not a successful hunter, like Joe, nor has he his sense, and is proving a most miserable creature. He has threatened this evening “not to hunt any more.” Well, let him try it! He was hired (and will be paid, if we ever get home) for the very purpose of hunting for the expedition; he will go very hungry if he continues to refuse, for I shall not allow him any thing more out of our stores. Oddly, he showed no fear at this threat, vowing that he will “somehow or the other” get enough to supply himself and his family.
Like the ice itself, it seems, our poor party is splitting into more and more separate parts.
Kruger can’t tell if his plan is sound. He feels confused now, often. He looks back on events of just a day ago, or an hour, as if through a rum-drunk haze. Have the men really trussed Jackson’s wrists and ankles with rope? Jamka and Meyer are terrified that the Darky means to kill and eat them in the night. Or poison them! (With what? Jackson objects. If they was any thing poison here, I’d gladly eat it myself.) Was Kruger really stooping over Anthing in the lamplit gloom of a night or two ago (or three, or four?) with cold hands tingling at his sides like an assassin’s? Until he perceived threads of crate-twine emerging from the mouths of the caribou bags, linking the Germans and Madsen and Lundquist by their wrists; Jamka’s tremulous wrist half-exposed. If any are attacked, the rest will waken, armed to the eyelids.
Yet the measure that allows them to sleep harder also frees Kruger to leave the hut more often. His plan is to deplete the men’s cache—because the secret cache is not his own—so that Anthing won’t be able to draw the men with him, well supplied, on a trek to the east, taking the last boat, leaving the rest of the party to die.
Kruger discovered the cache just after the new year. Out trying to hunt—mainly to escape the hand-me-down air and sentiments of the hut, and in hopes of encountering Tukulito—he noticed a splotch of blood on the moonlit snow by a hummock, where the ice was disturbed. Brushing it, he exposed a hatchwork of crescent cuts, as from a trowel blade or the heel of a very large boot. And he dug there. But within a few days of his discovery Anthing confiscated his rifle, and he has been able to return only a few times, always careful to slip things inconspicuously from the back of the growing hoard, then reseal it with care. It must be Meyer’s and Anthing’s, he thinks—but if it is, why would Meyer have made his speech asking if the thief were any of them? Think. Simply to retain their faith in his probity until such time as they grow too desperate to care? Hard to follow any line of thought for more than a few seconds. But clearly Meyer, too ill even to groom himself, is not supplementing his own rations. Could the cache be Anthing’s alone? He has kept stronger. Is now slowly assuming command. Think. Anthing, who knows he may never get another stab at power.
Of course by raiding his supplies Kruger makes it more likely that Anthing will have to resort to other sources of food. Yet for now he can see no other plan.
Cold not only slurs the tongue, it also muffles the mind.
He must get some food to the others. Tukulito, the children. Slipping any to Herron or Jackson seems impossible, for now. So give some to her directly. But when? He has only managed to encounter her once in the last few weeks, and he can hardly invite her, a married woman, outside. Leave some just inside the tunnel of her hut. No. They would think Poison. Especially if Tyson found it. Ein Gift. And he would confront the men and ask where it came from, and then Anthing would know Kruger was raiding his cache—if the cache is Anthing’s—and if, if, if. Maybe Anthing thinks Kruger is raiding the storehouse on his own and has made a separate cache. Which is why I am not trussed up like Jackson. So they can follow me there! As his torpid brain works to triage the possibilities he hears Punnie and Augustina outside and it comes to him, another plan. The men seem to be napping. Jackson can do little else now. In a trance of apathy Herron is warming water. After some minutes, saying nothing, Kruger slips outside. In early dusk under a sky as low as a coffin lid the girls, one large and broad, the other tiny and frail, are tracing wide, slow figure-eights around their parents’ huts, hand in hand. Hunger has stolen all the jump from their voices; they converse in a flat drawl, like weary adults.
He staggers away toward the cache. Easy to see why men in this state will fear they’re being poisoned. He feels poisoned. There’s a scuffling behind him—big Lindermann following, eyes to the ice, stepping with lumbering care over the tripwire, hunger’s drunkard. Kruger climbs over a hummock and behind it he lowers his fox-fur breeches and squats, left hand cupping his genitals for warmth. After what seems a long time Lindermann peers over the top, puffing. The muzzle of his rifle beside his blistered face. His oddly small head has shrunken further and weathered darkly, like the trophy of a cannibal tribe.
Guten Tag, says Kruger.
Lindermann nods sheepishly, then lowers the rifle.
I wish I could join you in that, he says. I’m also in some pain.
So, is that why you’ve followed me?
I can see why you wouldn’t want to use the old latrine shelter.
Actually, for a short time I considered living in it. Did Anthing send you?
Lindermann looks down, as if hurt. I am sorry you’ve been made to suffer so by the others.
Kruger stares at him pointedly.
Damn it, Roland, my heart is not with them! But they give the orders, Meyer, and Matthias—
So now you’ve tied up Jackson like a slave on a ship.
You should have organized us to resist them at the beginning! The men respected you …
But they revered the Count of Disko.
