Katherine Carlyle

by Rupert Thomson

  “Yes.”

  His ambiguous response only fuels the mystery and makes me still more determined to see the place. Longyearbyen, Ugolgrad … These, after all, are the names I pored over in the Meridian. Polysyllabic, clumsy, they seem appropriate to me, like numb fingers trying to grasp something in the cold. Ugolgrad is part of Russia, but it’s also nowhere at all, adrift in subzero waters, virtually unreachable during the winter months. In a travel agency near the Radisson I notice a poster issued by the Norwegian Ministry of Tourism. You are welcome to Svalbard, it says, as long as you leave no trace of your visit behind. They are doing their best to protect the pristine environment, of course, but they might be talking directly to me. It’s as if they knew I was coming.

  /

  My hotel is by the docks. Converted from a row of miners’ cabins, it has a wide gateway with antlers arranged along the top. At the back is a conservatory where you can sample Arctic delicacies like smoked whale. On my last night in Longyearbyen I take a seat by the window and write to Oswald. The postcard has a picture of a husky on the front. Not a patch on Josef, I scribble, then sign my name and add two kisses. Later, I start talking to Natasha, the girl with the tongue stud who runs the bar. Within minutes, our conversation becomes intimate, even confessional. She’s from Ukraine, and has been living in town for about nine months. During the day she works in a hairdressing salon. Two years ago she lost her boyfriend in a crash on the outskirts of Kiev. She was in the car at the time, but escaped without a scratch. “He died in my arms,” she says. “On a roundabout, in the rain.” Then she smiles and says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I don’t even know you.”

  While Natasha pours drinks and takes food orders from the tables behind me, I sit at the bar. We keep talking, and halfway through the evening she looks at me sideways and upwards — she is loading dirty glasses into the dishwasher — and asks if I would like to go on an expedition after she has closed up.

  “An expedition?” I say.

  We leave at eleven-thirty with Klaudija, the Latvian girl who works on reception. Klaudija has an ear cuff with an ivory pendant and a silver chain, and her dyed red hair is long on top and shaved at the sides. After spending five years in casinos in Oslo and Stockholm she came to Longyearbyen to be with her boyfriend. She only sees him every other week — he has a job in Svea, a Norwegian mine half an hour away by plane — but he’s the love of her life and she’s hoping to have his baby.

  Natasha fills her car with petrol, then drives east, into the dark. I lean forwards, my head between the two front seats, such an excitement in me that I feel like a child again. In the headlights the unpaved road looks black, as if made from coal, and it is raised like a causeway, with water on both sides. On our right is the town’s reservoir. On our left, the Adventfjord, which becomes more and more shallow until it merges into marshland and tundra.

  Ten kilometers out of town, at the foot of a mountain, is an old trappers’ camp. Natasha parks, but leaves her headlights on high beam. In the foreground stands a tall triangular structure fashioned out of wood, a kind of gibbet. Four huge dead seals hang upside down from the apex, the ground beneath them stained red and black with congealed blood. Along one of the horizontal struts are twenty or thirty glinting cod, also upside down, with nails driven through their tail fins. There are huts with antlers fixed upright above their doors, and rows of metal sledges, and boxes filled with empty bullet casings. Inside a fenced compound are dozens of wooden hutches raised up on legs, each with a husky’s name on it. The nearest — Borneo — sits quietly, his eyes coin-flat in the glare of the headlights.

  Back in the car, we drive up the mountain to Mine 7, which crouches on a steep slope above the valley like a spider in the top corner of a room. Several reindeer graze some distance off, and higher up, on the rounded summit, are two squat telescopes belonging to an observatory. I go over to Natasha, who is standing by herself, looking out over the valley. Far below, Longyearbyen shows as a handful of lights.

  “This is a healing place,” she says. “Here you can just be.”

  We stand quietly, side by side. Green shapes begin to appear above us, faint at first, but gradually increasing in intensity.

  Klaudija joins us. “They say you’re looking at the armor of the gods.”

  The breath stops in my lungs. Tilting my head back, I stare up into the sky. I think of veils, smoke. Waves breaking. I think of curtains. I think of ghosts. When our necks begin to ache we lie on our backs in the snow. Time has slowed down, or else it has been suspended altogether. There isn’t anything for it to measure. It no longer applies. I feel I’m at the very center of the world, and at the same time I don’t count. I’m everything and nothing, the gap between the two collapsing like the pleats in an accordion.

  Here you can just be.

  Later, as we drive round Longyearbyen, Natasha picks up a tourist who is hitching. His name is Martin, and he comes from Utrecht. We ask if he wants to go dancing. He says he can’t. He has to be up early. He’s climbing Hiortfjellet the next day.

  “Hiortfjellet?” I say.

  He points through the back window, at the mountains on the far side of the fjord.

  “I think you should come with us,” Klaudija says.

  Natasha agrees. “You only live once.”

  “How often does this happen,” I say, “three beautiful women asking you to go out with them?”

  We are all laughing, Martin too.

  “I can’t,” he says. “Really.”

  When we drop him in Nybyen, where he is staying, he thanks us for the lift and hurries towards the entrance to his building. He doesn’t look back.

  Natasha stares through the windscreen, both hands on the steering wheel. “He thought we were crazy.”

  We’re strangers, Natasha, Klaudija, and I, but our brief acquaintance with a real stranger makes us realize how well we know one another, and how rapidly the understanding has come about. This is the way we’re supposed to live, I think to myself. Adrift and yet together, elated but at peace. Natasha drives us to a club called Huset, and we dance until three in the morning.

  /

  I board the ship the next day, at midday. Apart from me, there are only seven passengers. Once the guide, Torgrim, has taken us through the safety procedures and the itinerary we cast off. I stay on deck, gripping the thick black lip of the bow. I have bought myself a fur hat with earflaps, and new socks, boots, and gloves. Ugolgrad is basic — there are no shops at all — and it’s vital I should be properly equipped.

  Behind us Longyearbyen gradually shrinks, the colorful A-frame houses swallowed by a landscape that is vast and jagged. We pass a gantry left over from the mining days, then the airport with its single runway. We pass a beach where I found pulpy green-gold banners of seaweed and square gray stones as flat as plates. The Isfjord lies ahead of us. The pinched mauve light makes the water look translucent, dense, almost congealed, like vodka when you keep it in the freezer. In the distance, on the western horizon, is a ghostly range of mountains, cloaked in snow. My heart dilates with a pleasure that is pure and undiluted.

  We have been under way for at least an hour when a man in a red oil-stained baseball cap approaches me. His skin has a rough, pocked texture, like pebble dash. He is Captain Axelsen, he says. Am I the passenger who is going ashore in Ugolgrad? That’s me, I say. He asks how long I plan to stay.

  “I’m hoping to live there,” I tell him.

  He reaches beneath his baseball cap and scratches his wiry hair. “You’re hoping to live in Ugolgrad?”

  “Yes.”

  He stares at me.

  “It’s something I’ve been dreaming of,” I say.

  “Strange dream.”

  “Really?”

  “You haven’t been there,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “I know enough.”

  “After a day or two you’ll want to leave.” He wags a prophetic finger at me.

  “No
,” I say. “I won’t.”

  “Yes,” he says complacently.

  The surface of the water is ruffled now. We must be getting closer to the open sea. To the east, the Bird Cliffs tower above us, more than a thousand feet high. Carved into the sheer rock and worn smooth by the harsh climate and the passing centuries are huge repeating shapes that resemble ancient kings or warriors.

  “It’s getting cold,” Axelsen says.

  I follow him to the bridge, a narrow room with a polished wood floor and a rifle hanging on the wall. Once inside, he picks up where he left off. “Tomorrow,” he says, “or maybe the next day, the phone will ring, and there will be a voice on the other end, a little English voice. Please, the voice will say. Come with your ship. You have to take me away from this place.”

  He makes it sound simple, sentimental, like a story for children, and I’m not sure whether to be insulted or amused.

  “It won’t be the first time,” he says, “that I have heard those words.”

  “So you make a habit of rescuing young women?”

  He gives me a sharp look, then adjusts his baseball cap and peers through the window. I watch as he decides to attack the subject from another angle. He’s a stubborn man, and won’t be put off. It’s important to him that I see things his way.

  “The weather’s good today,” he says. “Soon it will be much colder, and it will be dark all the time.”

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “That’s what I’m looking for. That’s why I came.”

  He looks at me again, and his eyes flare. “No, it’s you who do not understand. It’s not like Longyearbyen, where you are going. It’s a sad place. They don’t have money or respect for the environment. Also it’s dangerous, especially at the weekends. The men are always drunk, and fighting. There’s no law. And you, you’re only a girl —”

  He breaks off to answer a call on the radio. While he talks in Norwegian, I put my face close to the glass. His depiction of the mining town feels exaggerated, the fruit of prejudice and superstition. He might as well be telling me that Russians eat their offspring or have six fingers on each hand. Directly overhead, the sky is a swirl of brooding black, but a smoky glowing strip of orange in the west has turned the water all around us steel blue. A gull glides past, flush with the horizon.

  “We stay in Ugolgrad for an hour and a half,” Axelsen says a few minutes later, when the call is over. “There’s enough time for you to walk around. You can see everything in an hour and a half. Then you can come back, with me.”

  Not wanting to upset him, I pretend to be considering his proposition. The rumble of the engines, the dull gleam of the cream paint on the walls …

  “It can be a strength,” Axelsen says, “to know when to change your mind.”

  That’s probably true, I think to myself.

  “I will not think less of you,” he says.

  I thank him for his advice and his kind offer, then I tell him I’m going out to get some air.

  Standing on the upper deck, I watch the water peel back from the hull, fold after fold. The cold has a weight to it. The cold feels solid. In the far reaches of the fast-encroaching darkness the mountains are dim white shapes. From studying the map I know I’m looking northwest, towards Oscar II Land and the research station at Ny-Ålesund.

  Walking over to the other side, I find Torgrim with his hands in his pockets, a knitted wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He jerks his chin towards a few scattered lights.

  “The airport for Ugolgrad,” he says.

  As we round the headland more lights appear. A tall chimney stands close to the shore, dark smoke trailing out across the water. I ask Torgrim what he knows about the town.

  “You hear some strange things,” he says. “I don’t know if they’re true.”

  “Like what?”

  He tells me about a man who was wanted by the Russian Mafia. He fetched up in Ugolgrad. Found work in the mine. It was so far away and so isolated that he thought he would be safe.

  “And was he?” I ask.

  Torgrim shrugs. “I never heard any more about him.”

  Despite my warm clothes I’m shivering. Ugolgrad. It’s hard to believe this is the place I have been making for, hard to believe I have almost reached my destination. Because that’s what it is. My destination. After Ugolgrad there’s nowhere left to go.

  /

  The shoreline shocks me with its mood of baleful dereliction, and just for a moment I’m tempted to follow Axelsen’s advice and take the boat straight back to Longyearbyen. The buildings on the waterfront have corrugated-iron roofs and broken windows. Rusting containers stand about in the glare of the floodlights, and coal has been dumped in careless heaps, staining the snow. A truck is parked at an angle, a knot of workers gathered at the back. Two or three of them wield shovels. Beyond them, wooden steps zigzag up to the town, which huddles on a ledge about a hundred feet above the sea.

  The boat bumps against ridged tractor tires that are held in place by rusting chains, and then a rope is flung through the air and looped round an iron bollard. Torgrim unshackles a metal walkway and lowers it onto the quay. I let the other passengers go first. As I follow with my luggage I hear Axelsen’s voice.

  “Something I forgot to say,” he shouts down from the bridge. “There’s only one hotel, and it’s full of rats.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I shout back.

  Though combative, he’s honest and reliable, made of the same durable material all the way through. He would fiercely defend anything he loves. He would make a good father.

  I approach the workers, who are patching up a hole in the quay with old car tires, smashed-up bits of concrete, and shovelfuls of coal.

  “Gastinitsa?” I say. Hotel?

  A bearded man moves his hand in the air to show me which way I should go. It seems straightforward enough. I thank him in Russian and set off for the steps.

  Halfway to the top, my heart pounding from the climb, I stop to rest. I seem to hear the crunch of my footsteps on the shallow crust of snow, as if my brain is lagging, out of kilter. I glance back down. The dockside swamped in silver light, the boat the size of a toy. Darkness all around. No stars, no moon.

  I pass several houses with planks nailed over their windows, and then a large brown-and-white building, also boarded up, that has the word STOLOVAYA above the entrance, and come out into a sort of square. There are park benches and streetlamps, and the side of one of the buildings is covered with a mural of a forest. Birch trees with speckled trunks. Green grass. There is nobody about. Still walking uphill, I cross the square and turn into a street paved with uneven slabs. Yellow spotlights shine down from the rooftops. The rumble of my suitcase fills the silence. In between the buildings are areas of wasteground, bits of buckled metal fencing, and warped lengths of wooden boardwalk. I’ve never seen — or even imagined — a place like this.

  The hotel is a four-story block raised off the ground on concrete piles. I climb a flight of steps to the front door and suddenly I’m at the end of my strength. It’s partly all the traveling — the journey, which has always felt driven and yet open-ended, has taken it out of me — but it’s also the conversation I had with the captain. There’s nothing more exhausting than having to listen to people who think they know what’s best for you.

  Once through the entrance I stand in a hall that is small, brightly lit, and deserted. A glowing sign above the glass-paneled double doors to my left says BAR. To my right is another set of doors, also with glass panels, a dim yellow corridor beyond. When a woman walks up the corridor towards me, her presence feels supernatural, since she appears suddenly, from nowhere, like a jump cut in a film, and her approach is silent, the sound of her footsteps deadened by the doors that stand between us. She offers me a key, then says something about “dinner” and “seven o’clock.” Her eyes keep slanting downwards and to my left, as if I have a child with me.

  I climb the stairs to the third floor. In a corridor that is br
ight as the entrance hall and just as empty I put down my case and look around. There’s a strong smell of paint. With its gray doors and its imitation parquet floor the building reminds me of a show house — somewhere no one has ever actually lived. I stand quite still and listen hard, but can’t hear any sounds. No TVs, no voices of any kind. No running water. I unlock the door to my room, switch on the light. The twin beds have shiny blue covers, and the pale wooden furniture looks new, unused. Above the desk is a photo of an iceberg-studded sea, as if the management felt guests needed reminding of their whereabouts. A vent near the ceiling breathes warm, slightly musty air into the room.

  I part the curtains. My view is of a rugged snow-encrusted hillside that lifts from right beneath my window, a number of heavily lagged pipes snaking up the slope to the top of the ridge. Like the hotel — like the room — I feel new. I’m a blank slate. A gamble. Axelsen told me there will be one last boat before the season ends. He said that when he returns, in a week’s time, he expects to find me waiting on the quayside with my case. He’s sure I will have had enough by then. I’m already looking forward to seeing his face when he hears that I’m staying.

  That evening, at seven, I go down to the bar. A woman in a royal-blue tunic emerges from the kitchen and shows me into the far room through doors whose glass panels are engraved with polar bears and crossed pickaxes. There are maroon tablecloths and walls of lacquered pine. The TV is switched off. Only one table has been laid, and dinner is already waiting. A scoop of Russian salad, some sliced white bread. A jug of processed apple juice. No sooner have I sat down than two more dishes are put in front of me, a bowl of hot clear soup with globules of fat floating on top and a small plate containing a thin piece of meat and a spoonful of plain rice.

  I eat in silence, and alone. My vision blurs. A disco ball spins wearily. Its rails of silver light make the matte-black walls look dusty. A girl in high heels and a sparkly thong climbs awkwardly onto a low stage and begins to dance. Her solid, surgically enhanced breasts only serve to emphasize how thin she is; the tendons stand out in her neck and behind her knees. This is the dive Cheadle chose for his confrontation with my father, but Cheadle is long gone. My father sits with his head lowered, ignoring the tacky eighties music and the gyrating girl. He’s trying to process the information Cheadle has just given him. Cherepovets, Arkhangel’sk … But what if Cheadle never wrote to my father? What if he never summoned my father to that dingy club? Is there any other way my father could learn of his existence?