Northernmost

by Peter Geye

  In any case, whatever compulsion kept him at bay had been either forgotten or forsaken, and when I woke on the second to last morning, it was to a perfectly clear view across the distance that separated me from my cache, where the bear was making a breakfast of my remaining venison.

  Oh, he was a picture of aloofness, sitting back on his haunches, gnawing on the meat like he’d been invited to a picnic. I had endowed him with vengeance and rage, given the lead lodged in his shoulder. But even through the wisps of fog—it came every day now—I saw a simpler beast, one who only wanted enough to eat. I was of no more interest to him than I was to the King of Norway. The ice bear knew I sat there studying him. Likely he found my fire curious. He may even have had a notion about the hull of the ancient boat being dismantled and gone from his lifelong view. But until he got hungry again, or unless the seals were all killed, he wouldn’t need my flesh any sooner than I needed his.

  This came as a relief. And that night I quit trying to devise plans to make the wood and meat last. That night, when snow again began to fall, and the heavens darkened and then swirled violently, when I shifted the position of my lean-to to protect me from the wind and lay in the crook of it, my face warm from the fire, I replaced my thoughts of rescue with a long remembrance of my daughter and wife.

  * * *

  —

  Christmas morning of her twelfth year, Thea woke me without waking Inger. Together she and I went to the stove, and while I rekindled it she got water for tea and placed the krumkake she’d filled with sweet cream onto the platter adorned with holly berries. I still don’t know if Inger truly slept through our preparations that morning—it’s hard to believe she did—but when Thea brought her a cup of tea, she at least feigned waking.

  All through Advent, Thea and I had been working on a surprise for her. A song we’d perform. My fiddle, accompanied by Thea’s haunting contralto. She still had a child’s heart, and she loved to sing. At church. While doing her chores. While readying herself for bed as well as first thing in the morning. Earlier that autumn, she told me that as long as she was free to sing, she could be happy. And indeed she was. Despite our beggary, which by then had grown serious. We ate more of the fish I caught, and so had less to sell. Our garden yield that summer was scant. Our clothes getting shabbier despite Inger’s fine sewing ability. And perhaps worst of all, we lost one of our sheep. The winter ahead would be a struggle unlike any we’d known before.

  But on that Christmas morning, as I bowed the simple cords from my hardingfele while Thea sang so beautifully, Inger rose from her slumber on our notes, with joyful tears burnishing her sweet cheeks, and we none of us wanted for anything.

  The song was about a troll living on the rocky shore of Muolkot, who seined little nissefisk from the shallow waters. They were made into delicious soup that filled you right up, but also gave you hope and courage. One day—Christmas Eve, as it turned out—the troll went to his nets and found them empty. Naturally there was much fretting, because the family had planned its holiday feast around those bountiful bowls of creamy broth. Yet they ought not to have fretted, for the soup also nourished their faith and that belief brought them a cornucopia for their Christmas feast. Which of course was topped off with krumkake filled with sweet cream.

  After we finished the performance, Thea made a great show of presenting Inger with the cookies she’d made and together we sat on the bed, laughing as each of us cupped a hand below our mouth to keep crumbs from falling under the eiderdown. Of all the memories of my daughter, this was perhaps the most enduring. I can still see the glint in her eyes, put there by pride and by love. And I can still taste the sweet cream, it being the last I’d had.

  Recalling that scene on the wastes of Spitzbergen—my venison pilfered by the ice bear, the winds shifting around from the north as more snow fell—was enough to buoy me and to give me peace all through the night. What a strange thing, for this one day to resound in me so strongly in that place, removed by so many years and miles. And how strange that each memory holds many others. Like the nesting dolls we gave to Thea on that same Christmas morning.

  I conjured up many such memories that night, basking in the warmth of the fire, fearless and without care, less sleeping than dreaming my life all over again. But always coming back to Thea and Inger, with the eager hope they were thinking of me too. I was readier than ever to pass into the Fonn, and for the next twenty-four hours I braced myself against that north wind, as dead as I was alive.

  And so I might be forgiven for my behavior on the last morning on that island. For thinking that the sails I saw unfurled and moving with the north breeze in the sunlit fog belonged to some vessel from my past. Or for mistaking the clambering bell on her deck for my sjeleringing, and for believing that the pervasive feeling of lightness was last-minute proof of God taking my soul heavenward, and not, as it would turn out, my fever breaking. In the crackling fire, and through the whispers of that cold wind, I heard voices too. And no chorus of angels, either, but a searching and inharmonious gaggle speaking in Russian and Swedish and my own tongue. I rose on an elbow and silently admonished the flames for their clamor, so that I might hear better what was being said over the water: “Zdravstvuyte? Vems eld är det? Er noen I live der borte? Det lukter som brann.” “It is fire,” I whispered back. “Who’s there?” I said, struggling up and waving my arms. “Obrezh’te Parusa. Davayte posmotrim.”

  Though I knew a few Russian words from a fisherman friend from Linhammar, who used to bring his catch to the Hammerfest market, I couldn’t understand that last expression. When things went quiet, I feared they had given up and were continuing on. So I whooped and bawled and stoked the fire with armfuls of wood. By then the boat had moved past me and I could see the broad transom dark as the water against the glowing fog.

  “No! No! Come back! I’m here! Please!” It’s no noble thing to beg, but I certainly did. And though in my mind I recall a thousand shouts, it must’ve only been a few, because the next shift in the image of that boat was a darkening around the masts as the sails lowered and the boat came about. The last thing I heard from the Pobeg was her engines turning on and the call “Du er i live! God Gud, du er i live…” Behind that voice I saw a man, his hand raised as though we were old friends.

  After stepping off the dinghy and scrambling up the landkall, he introduced himself as Vladamir Doltskavich. He wore a coat of ice bear pelage with buttons of yellow teeth. Any beast with lesser fur would not have covered him, for here stood a man taller even than Svene Solvang, his beaverskin hat festooned with the feathers of a hundred different birds. As he righted himself before me, the tip of my nose was hardly above the belt on his coat.

  “Which one are you?” he asked in clear Norwegian.

  “What?”

  “Mikkelsen or Eide?”

  “I’m Odd Einar Eide. Of Hammerfest. I last served Svene Solvang on the sealing vessel Sindigstjerna. This is my fourteenth day alone in the Fonn.”

  “What the fuck is the Fonn? You’re wandering Spitzbergen, my friend. And lucky not to be dead four different times and ways.” He turned back to his boat, some twenty yards offshore, cupped his hands round his mouth, and shouted, “Butter up some bread and brew some coffee.” He turned back to me, took off his mitten, and laid his massive hand on my shoulder. “Was it Mikkelsen’s legs, then? And those his boots?” He pointed down at the komagers on my feet.

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head and gripped my shoulder tightly. “No doubt you’ve got some stories to tell. But first, what say we get you off this fucking wasteland?”

  Can you imagine fortunes so shifted by the wind’s direction? For that, I would learn, is what happened. About the time the ice bear looted my stocks, and on the night I lay down to die while those north winds brought such a bitter chill, they also cleared the Krossfjorden of ice, or at least enough of it that Vladamir Doltskavich was able to sail win
dward from his weather station on the Kongsfjorden to find me on the Kross.

  I gathered my few belongings and was taken on board the Pobeg, which was little more than a yawl outfitted for polar climes that Doltskavich used to sail along the west coast between Danskøya and Hotellneset. He’d been based on the Krossfjorden for a year, I learned, filling his days with the mundane tasks of reading instruments and measuring temperatures and precipitation for a purpose he was not quite clear about but that was deemed urgent under the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. Mostly, as it happened, he spent his time fishing and hunting and playing chess with the Norwegian trapper who’d pulled me aboard the Pobeg and now was cooking seal meat for his Swedish assistant, a man named Ludvig Bokløv, who was as diminutive as Doltskavich was imposing.

  It turns out that Solvang had steered the Sindigstjerna for Doltskavich’s weather station before motoring south for Vardø to bring the seals to market. Solvang told his old friend about the two men he’d lost to the ice bear on the Kross, their dismembered and disappeared bodies, and that he would telegraph their next of kin when he reached Norway. Doltskavich, impressed by the gruesome details, was determined to sail up the middle finger of the Kross before the deep freeze set in, should the ice permit. For a while those prospects looked grim, but that night—the second of northerly winds—showed bright the ice coming down from the Krossfjorden and on out the Kongsfjorden, and with little forethought Doltskavich summoned his assistant and the two of them embarked to the trapper’s cabin on Kapp Mitra, where he’d lived for some ten years, winter and summer both.

  On his deck, I asked what force had sent him to me, and he replied casually that something about Solvang’s story left him uneasy. When he went on to say he’d scried a disturbance on his island, he added that, ice permitting, he’d go and have a look. The wind changed directions, the ice blew down the fjord, and he raised his sails to find my fire on the shore. He explained all this as if it were the most natural occurrence.

  “What will happen to me now?” I asked. We still hadn’t even gone belowdecks, though I could smell the strong coffee brewing.

  “I’ll bring you to Hotellneset. I was hoping to make one more trip for supplies, and anyway, my trapper friend Fredrik offered me a krone to bring him down and back. From there you’d best hope for a whaler or sealer to be making one last run. But for now I’ll get you that coffee and bread, then we’ll hoist our sails and catch this tailing breeze down Forlandsundet.”

  All of this happened before the fire still burning on shore receded from my view. I had been rescued from that place as swiftly and unexpectedly as I’d been stranded there. Two weeks earlier I had watched our killing boat drift down the Krossfjorden laden with seal meat, ferrying my hopes of survival. And yet, here I was, in the company of an eccentric Russian, bound for the place my Spitzbergen trial began: Hotellneset. In the worst-case scenario, I would need to winter there and await the first ships of spring. But I was saved, that much was clear, and as Fredrik brought a pot of warm coffee on deck, I saw the final wisp of my fire burn behind me.

  I turned to Doltskavich and said, “I should thank you, but before I do I must say I haven’t an øre to give you, much less a krone.”

  Again, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I can’t imagine how much you’ve paid already.” He took the coffee from Fredrik and handed it to me. “Drink this. If you like, you can go down into the cabin for some rest and a bite to eat. Or you can stand beside me. With this wind, we’re a day from Hotellneset. You’ll be warm tonight. I’ll have Bokløv find you a dry shirt and coat.” He took a deep swig of his own cup of coffee and wiped his lips on his bearskin sleeve. “But for fucksakes, don’t worry about a krone.”

  So I stood beside Doltskavich drinking hot coffee, eating buttered bread and sardines, and watching that great northern silence recede. It was interrupted only once, half an hour into our sail, when all the fog lifted and a krykkje alighted from the brume above onto the masthead. It cocked its head and called three times and then lifted off again.

  * * *

  —

  “This was how I was brought to Hotellneset, where, after one day, I boarded that season’s last downbound ship,” I told Marius.

  “Your fourth bit of fortune.”

  “If being made to shovel coal for three days with hardly a sip of water can be called fortune, then yes. But that sounds bitter. It was good fortune indeed. For here I am now. With Inger awaiting me for one more supper at the Grand Hotel.”

  “Before you go, I’ll have you sit for a portrait that we’ll print beside your story. I’ll have other drawings made, too. Normally, I’d have a subject approve such pictures, but your descriptions of that place leave me quite certain of the images we’ll include. I might say, we’ll run the story in six parts, to equal the number of days you’ve spent here in Tromsø.”

  “A portrait?” I asked.

  “Naturally. So the world can see the man. It won’t take long. An hour, at most. We can even do it before lunch. I can have Herr Rudd summon our portraitist now, in fact, and he’ll be finished before we’re done.”

  And thus a man arrived to sketch me. He sat at Marius’s shoulder with paper and charcoals and explained that he would make the sketch into an engraving, which would then be used in the newspaper.

  “There’s been some talk of making your story into a book, Odd Einar,” Granerud interrupted. “Of course, should that come to pass, we’ll send you a copy when it’s printed. You’ll have to let me know where you land when up in Hammerfest. I mean, to what address I might send such a thing.”

  To learn, in the space of two off-the-cuff comments, that I and my story would be memorialized in a portrait as well as a book seemed an awful lot to take for granted, but what did I know anymore?

  In that last half hour, Marius confirmed details for the record. Matters of dates and time, weather, landscape, materials, grief, despair, belief. He had a list and went down it as though quizzing me on my own life. I’d already found reason to suspect a few things I’d told him that seemed, even according to my own sensibilities, to be refutable or even impossible. But as I sat there answering his questions, I realized this was how memory worked. And so, I cast aside my doubts as I had once cast aside my hope.

  The portraitist finished and gathered his materials and left without a goodbye. Then Marius took a last look at his list of questions and said he had one more. “Is there anything you have not told me that you wish to?”

  I considered the realization that had just crossed my mind, and almost admitted it. But in answer simply shook my head.

  He stood and pressed the small of his back with both of his hands, a look of sincere fondness on his face. I stood there across his desk.

  “Then our time together is drawing to a close.”

  “I’ll miss your company, Marius.”

  The sound of his name on my voice brought a smile to his face. “For now, Odd Einar. Only for now. Indeed, our paths will cross again. Of this I’ll make certain. I hope you’d look forward to that as well?”

  “This goes without saying.”

  “Excellent,” he said, then came around to my side of the desk and offered his hand. “I promise to do my damnedest by you and your story.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I hope it’s not too much to say, but from now on please count me among your friends and admirers. If there’s anything I can ever do to help, simply send word.”

  “Thank you, I will. And once Inger and I find a new home, I’ll let you know the address.”

  “Very good.”

  I let go of his hand and stepped to the door, where I put on my coat and buttoned it up. “I never meant for any of this to happen, you know? I only wanted to provide for Inger. Only wanted our happiness back. I went to work for that.”

  “Any man would do the same.”

  “I guess I mean
to say thank you. Just as Doltskavich rescued me from that island, you have rescued me from my drudgery. I intend to honor you by staying above it.”

  “I’ve no doubt you will,” he said.

  I shook his hand once more before turning to leave. But after one step I paused and turned back for a final look about his office. “Make sure you put in your story how much I love my daughter. Would you do that for me?”

  “It’s already a part of it. There’ll be no mistaking that.”

  * * *

  —

  That evening Inger and I stood on the deck watching as Tromsø grew distant behind us. Our boat would stop first at Skjervø and then Alta before docking in Hammerfest, and we watched intently and for a long while with the night fair and waters smooth all around us. The boat passed the town’s outskirts and then the first farms until all that stood before us was a distant landscape.

  Inger hadn’t said much, but she’d hooked her hand in my arm while the boat was still tied to the wharf and hadn’t let go since. Her hair smelled of lavender, her breath of sugar. Twenty minutes up the sound, she nudged me and said, “We’ll be all right, won’t we, Odd Einar?”

  “As long as we’re together,” I said.

  I could feel her body slackening beside me, and her grip tightening on my arm. “I love you.”

  I turned to face her. “You are all I’ve ever loved. You and Thea.”

  She sighed and turned back to look out over the water. “I’ll miss the Grand Hotel.”