by Jean McNeil
He would wait four years before anyone would ask him the question, before the woman journalist or historian or writer – whatever she was – would come to base and ask him why? Not why had the crash happened, the question posed by everyone else in the interim, by HQ, the Chief Pilot, the Coroner, the FCO man. But why had he left Nara at Berkner alone for four hours; not long, but long enough perhaps to provoke some sort of breakdown.
His favourite moment is when the wheels leave the ground; that precise moment when thrust and lift collude against gravity, the moment when he is uplifted. And what of the people left behind? The woman writer would ask this: he could tell she was a friend of the underdog, of the person left behind by history, of the person standing on the runway in the snow and the sudden bitter wind, watching the plane depart.
Now that he is ready to leave the Antarctic forever, he can admit it. He wanted Nara only as a secret. If they had been lovers, he might have become bored with her, then spurned her. It took three years for the thought to occur to him: might Nara have understood that would be the outcome, and knowing she could not bear it, would not go near him at all?
And his love for the ice desert, what has happened to it? The white vortex of passion he had once felt was muted to ordinary awe now: awe at its frigid glamour. You couldn’t call that love.
The Antarctic, that half-invented desert. Could it exist? But he saw it, every day, passing beneath his plane. He, more than any of them, knew it was real.
The rescue team searched for Nara for ten hours, until they too were in danger of becoming trapped on the sea ice. The inquest, held the following year in the Falklands, concluded that she had very likely been concussed in the crash. On regaining consciouness she had become confused and disoriented. Nara had probably headed off in the direction of base; she knew how close they were to home. If she had been thinking straight she would have known to stay with the plane rather than take the risk of walking across twenty kilometres of disintegrating sea ice. But no one would know for certain what choices Nara made, because her body was never found.
The one who comes looking for you is the one who loves you. Only this person can rescue you from your own loss. Of all the people who pored over Nara’s death – the base commander, the coroner, Nara’s parents, lawyers, insurers, distant officials in distant rooms lined with green leather furniture and bound volumes of legal tomes, even David himself, looking for legalities, loopholes, exclusion clauses – only Helen would accept that Nara may have walked away over the ice not for rescue, but to embrace death. Only Helen would think about how it takes so much cold and fright to pluck a body out of the world, even one as slight as Nara’s, or might be awestruck at how long she survived, and at how much she missed him, the man in the plane, only two, three kilometres from where she stood now, but there was no going back, because the ice had broken up behind her, and what had been a puzzle of pancake floes was now open water, and she was drifting on the ice, out to the Bellingshausen.
Helen would come to know that people who have not been to the Antarctic do not understand. No ships will rescue you, no helicopter will swoop low. Here there is only a violent, intimate solitude, and the white sweep of time on the horizon. This place so ravaged and Spartan and raw that it might actually be holy.
On base, during one of their late-night conversations that winter, David would tell Helen, ‘I never thought about Nara’s death. I never considered what she endured. It was just an accident, and incident. A story.’
As an FCO official he countersigned the Falkland Island coroner’s verdict of death by misadventure. Her body was never found. No one knew how she died; whether her abandonment of the plane was deliberate, or whether she was concussed and disoriented. She may have tried to swim for it. She may have been killed by a leopard seal, or a killer whale, the nemesis of the old explorers. Or perhaps she stayed on the ice, in the hope that it would deliver her to land.
In any case, the area was vast, the tide could have taken her anywhere. Men (and until Nara they had always been men – she was the first woman to die this way in the Antarctic) lost on sea ice were almost never found, although mariners on early explorations had spoken of being haunted by men’s faces looking up from the icy waters, or staring at them from within an iceberg. The body must be somewhere, the old mariners reasoned, entombed either in the icy depths, or ground through the ice sheets. But the continent rarely gave up its dead. It ate people whole. They disappeared without a trace.
As he told her all this, Helen said nothing, only looked out the window. She saw a dark night, a glacier shining silver in the moonlight. A cold place.
3
The glassy air of early morning was unzipped by flares. It was ten-thirty and still dark. To the northeast, the sky plumed with light – the glimmer of the short-lived Antarctic day.
The ship pulled away and the flares were flames of red burn igniting darkness. Water frothed where the thrusters worked, and the red was reflected in its inky silk. The metallic groan increased, and the ship turned on its haunches, spinning delicately around to face Adélie Island.
Their enforced winter had ended two weeks before, with the news of the lifting of travel restrictions. Thermometers dropped into the waters of the bay from RIBs showed a surface temperature of –1.5 degrees; the sea froze at two degrees below zero. A decision was taken, to send in the Navy icebreaker, because the supply ship, the Astrolabe, was only ice-strenghtened and not an icebreaker, and if the ice locked around the continent sudden and hard, as it often did in the beginning of winter, the ship would be stuck.
Satellite images showed the pack ice moving north from Pine Island Bay. For a week they had stayed tuned to the internet site which showed the icebreaker’s progress, expecting to hear at any moment that the pack had drifted north, encircling the Navy ship, and they would not be going home. But one night in June a giant arrived in their midst; it heaved and hurled itself against the wharf on a suddenly powerful swell called the Bellingshausen gyre, a current that picked up speed when the ice was near.
Helen was shocked – they were all shocked – by how quickly their winter sentence had been commuted. She felt the strange dread of an unexpected imminent release. She realised that in facing an Antarctic winter she had been committed to time in a way that was new for her. Not unlike facing the pregnancy she had never had, nine months in the Antarctic would be a time to be faced down, a task. Now an empty space yawed in front of her.
They watched the ship arrive. The winterers, those who were committed to stay in any case, watched it for a while, then straggled off. Helen and the thirty-two other people who had been detained in the Antarctic stayed on the rocky outcrop, rivetted despite the wind and the cold, watching the ship pick its way among the icebergs, as if its progress depended on their gaze.
Helen had put herself down for the mooring team and she left the monument to walk down to the wharf. She stood behind three men, a rope in her hands, anchoring the slack end as the men hurled the rope onto the bow. The bar on the satellite tower swung round and round. She heard the creaking as the swell tossed it against the wharf. She watched it rise and sink, rise and sink.
There was a figure beside her, dressed in an orange boiler suit. In the darkness it took her a moment to recognise David.
‘It doesn’t look real, does it?’ he said.
That night they all went aboard the ship for a party in the bar. The shock of strangers, after having been with the same fifty-six people for nearly five months, was immense. They were eager for news of the outside world. Everything was normal in the Falklands, the Navy sailors assured them. Or as normal as it gets, in the Falklands, someone said. Then laughter, and the sound of forty men laughing in the same space entered her head like an explosion.
Suddenly their gear was on the ship, their cabins assigned, and she had no time to think, barely time even to return her library books, which she did at the last minute, only two hours before shore leave expired.
She went to see Gerry, th
e base commander, to return the books.
‘That’s quite a reading pile you’ve got there,’ he said, eyeing the covers. The Return of the Native, The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Magic Mountain.
‘I was going to take them with me,’ she said. ‘But then I figured you could use them.’
He took the books. She was about to say goodbye when he spoke.
‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what happened that year. I wasn’t on base that summer, I spent it out in the field in a couple of tents down in the Dry Valleys. But the next year I came back and I noticed that no one would speak about it. Reports were filed, but I don’t know…people are superstitious. They don’t like to talk about accidents or death here. They’re too much of a possibility, even now.’ His gaze drifted to her pile of books. ‘That novel The Magic Mountain, it’s about people shut away in a sanatorium, isn’t it? They stay there because they’re sick.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s just what we’re doing here, isn’t it? The world is sick, and we’re staying here because it’s safe.’
‘You’re staying here because you signed a contract.’
He shook his head. ‘I thought you would all be here, through the winter. Now that you’re all leaving, I don’t know why I’m staying here.’
‘The world’s not safe, Gerry,’ she said. ‘Think of that. We’re going back to a terrible situation. People are dying.’
‘But it’s the real world, isn’t it?’ Gerry looked unhappy, confused, but also elated.
He said, ‘I hope you found what you were looking for here.’ He pointed to the clock. ‘You’d better go, the ship’s due to sail in the morning. I’m surprised they even let you off. Navy, you know, do things by the book and all that stuff.’
‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘And good luck.’
‘Good luck yourself, out there in the cruel world.’
Leaving the Antarctic was like leaving nowhere else on earth. The winterers stood on the wharf, holding flares to keep the darknesss at bay. The leavers lined up on the deck of a ship, sailing north, into daylight, into life. Two tribes, both joined in a fraternity of loneliness. For a while, as the ship pulled away, only a few metres of water separated them and they shouted and called and gestured to each other.
But then the ship seemed to wrench itself free, and shift gear. They pulled away quickly now, turned around, and sailed out of the bay. Helen had heard it said that in the Antarctic, the departure of the ship at the beginning of winter was never a mere leave-taking, but the closing of a door called winter. Only time would prise it open.
Once clear of the sheltered peninsula waters, the seas worsened. The Navy ship had a peculiar grinding motion; like a fairground ride, it pitched, crashed, then turned around on its haunches – the ship’s crew called it ‘corkscrewing’. The crew told Helen the ship was technically too small for the seas of the Drake Passage, where rogue waves were on the increase. These were waves the height of ten-storey buildings. Earlier in the season a rogue wave smashed the bridge windows out of a giant cruiseliner, and it had to be towed into port in Punta Arenas.
For the first two days everyone was seasick, apart from Helen and the crew. She wandered the ghost ship, bumping into the Bosu’n, or the chief engineer.
‘Why aren’t you in your cabin throwing up?’ the engineer asked.
‘I’m trying my best, but it looks like I don’t get seasick.’
‘We’ll put you to work, then.’
Of course – she remembered she had joined the Army. She’d better find a boiler suit that fit.
The following day David appeared. He looked wan. ‘I guess you found your sealegs.’
‘I didn’t need to look for them in the first place.’ In fact she’d been out on the back deck that morning, helping the Bosu’n secure cargo containers which had shifted during the night in heavy seas. When she’d finished that she’d taken an inventory of the food in the freezer for the purser. ‘A hard worker,’ the crew had said, with approval, and offered her extra helpings of hot custard with dessert that night.
Later they sat alone in the mess, a bottle of wine between them, which he was not quite well enough to drink.
‘Ships are lonely places, don’t you think?’
David nodded. ‘I’ve often thought that.’
‘I like you more when you agree with me. I try not to, of course.’
He smiled, an open, honest smile, in which she could see the shadow of his relief.
The journey back is mostly in darkness. On their trip into the Antarctic nearly seven months before, they had run past the edge of night into a perpetual daylight. Now, in June, there is only a day-long dusky light. Some people never appear from their bunks. The Navy doctor makes cabin visits, accompanied by a saline drip. Slowly, Helen and David are joined by one or two seasickness survivors. But by then they are used to having the ship to themselves, it has become their ship.
All night they talk, or sit on the bridge together, watching as snow is driven against the windows, marvelling at how it looks like fireworks, lit from underneath by the ship’s powerful searchlights. Growlers scrape against the hull, the seas mount and slacken.
Helen tells David what she has learned in the Antarctic about the rules of vision. There are twenty-four basic geometric shapes. The easiest shapes for the human eye to perceive are those that are closed, such as circles and squares. The more basic the shape, the easier it is to perceive, she tells him; we see circles first then squares, then rectangles. We need to look at complicated shapes longer. The brain assembles these shapes into patterns, and compares them with patterns it has seen before; mostly these are stored in long-term memory. If you have grown up with trees, then the mind wanders across the white plain, looking for them.
In the Antarctic, during a whiteout, the human eye sees a visual field without any shapes or contours. Visible light is distributed perfectly evenly. Caught in this field of vision, the human starts to lose balance and coordination almost immediately. Quickly – within fifteen minutes – blindness, although temporary, follows.
In this white blindness the hallucinations begin. The brain begins to fabricate something to see: shapes, rectangles, circles, trees, a horizon – anything will do. Then vertigo arrives. Then, the only thing to do is close your eyes and imagine yourself upright in this white diffuse maelstrom of directionless light.
Outside the panoramic windows on the bridge a hostile sea roils into being – mountains of steel water, horizontal snow. Cape petrels dart on updrafts, hunting for krill in the wake. David spends hours looking out at the sea, which is too stern to be beautiful, but yet it is.
He wonders if everyone has an obstacle in their lives, so immovable and permanent, even after it has been dislodged. For Helen, it is the death of her husband – or not quite his death, but how he died, under what circumstances. For his great-grandfather, it was those days on Elephant Island. He wonders if you could call these obstacles destiny.
Kate cannot have children. His particular branch of his great-grandfather’s survival genes stop with him. Not that this is the reason for his distress, for the mounting grind within his heart, so painful that sometimes he fears he will have a heart attack.
He practices saying it to himself, out loud: I might have to leave you. Then, I will leave you. Thank God for the Antarctic, for its dangerous seas and even more dangerous interior. He thinks, no one who has not been here can understand its bizarre allure. I am leaving you. Blue, white, blue, white. Unlit rows and rows of the ice desert. Chunks, loaves gone wrong. A white current. Cloud. The moon sweeping the icefield, a silver glaze. The mistakes he has made, errors of judgement and the heart. All those talks he has attended, and conferences, and meetings, on the future and destiny of the polar regions at the Royal Society, the Geographical Society. Long, learned faces in the audience, he cannot imagine any of these people laughing, shouting, clapping, hugging each other, having sex. All his life, he has been fascinated by cold, and there has been so little
warmth. He wants to live, before it is too late. This is all he wants.
In the narrow cabin bed Helen runs her hands through David’s hair.
To the south, near the Pine Island glacier, the ice is fastening. Soon its scrawl will interlock, and rebuff the sun once more.
There are so many kinds of ice that exist in the world: ice clouds, ice vapour. Icebergs, ice mountains, ice plateaus. Then the sea ice: ice floes, pack ice, pancake ice, grease ice, undersea ice, rotten ice, ice ridges, ice hummocks. An ice planet, in the process of melting. What will it be like, to live in a world without ice? The white warp gone, the mirror gone. The earth and its hot oceans, dense with methane. The conversation between the ice and the sun is both an acknowledgement, and a rebuff. But soon the conversation may be over.
4
In a good ice year, the sea ice freezes to the thickness of a man’s torso. Sealed in this winter cauldron live killer whales, seals, the giant sea-sponges and starfish Nara studied that year on base. Not only could these creatures survive in the near-frozen water of the Antarctic, they flourished. But the water was warming rapidly, and the animals were dying.
On the horizon she sees the strain of night and fire. Cities burning, far away on desert shores, torched by Romans, or some dead army. A dream within a dream.
Where the cold river of wind meets warmer seas, snowspouts – miniature ice tornadoes, also called Ice Devils – and sea fog, also known as sea-smoke, form. A haze hangs on the rim of her senses.
She is puzzled, wary, cold. The wind has died in the place where the wind is born. A bluish silence billows in and out of the ice, borne on this frozen wind.