Kolymsky Heights

by Lionel Davidson

  ‘All right, what is it? I’m here.’ The captain went and leaned over the bunk. He saw with dismay the complexion, the glassy rolling eyes, the chattering jaw. The man was gesturing wildly. ‘Send them away, captain! Only you! Only talk you. No one else – send them away!’

  ‘All right,’ the captain said, and told the men to step back.

  ‘And bosun! No bosun. Only you, captain!’

  ‘Very good. Leave us, bosun. What is it?’ the captain said. The man had gripped his arm, and with his other shaking hand was pointing to his face. His teeth were chattering so much, the captain had to bend closer. ‘Bosun marked me, captain. See my face. No leave me with bosun!’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘No with bosun – like Ushiba in heads! No like that, captain. No with bosun. He mark me again – mark me bad!’

  ‘All right. I’ll see to it,’ the captain said, chilled by the man’s extensive knowledge of Ushiba; evidently fore ends’ tattle.

  ‘Promise, captain! Promise you no leave me!’

  ‘I promise. I’ll see to you myself. Rest quietly now. I have to look into some matters.’

  Which he certainly did. He went straight to his cabin and reached for the Mariner’s Medical Dictionary. The ominous symptoms told him nothing new, but he read through them all again most hungrily. The man would be having convulsions soon, and diarrhoea. He couldn’t be left where he was. It was the bunk. Antiseptic was no use against a virus. It might even have activated the virus. Water-borne v … . Whatever had activated it, Sung had now got it. It was the bunk; Ushiba’s bunk. But with Ushiba there had been the convenient haven of Otaru to dump him in. Where in this godforsaken waste of the Arctic was he to dump Sung?

  For a moment the golden idea of dumping Sung in the Arctic glowed in his mind, but died immediately. Fore ends’ tattle … Somewhere in this waste there would be a medical station. He rumbled through his Notices to Mariners for the area. Longitude 170.

  Pevek: sick bay facilities. Well, not there – a military base. He continued west through the consecutive sheets, longitudes 169 to 163, and found nothing – nothing at all to find in this desolate area – and came on 162, and the ultimate irony.

  Tchersky: Hosp. & Isolation wing (Call Green Cape).

  Call Green Cape! Which he had vowed not to call. Which he now would have to call. He looked at his watch, seven o’clock, and decided there was no point in calling them now. They would have closed down for the night. He was still twenty-one hours away. Morning would be time enough; before noon, anyway. That would still give them time to call him. And give him time to work a few things out.

  21

  At 2100 Sung was removed to the after heads, in convulsions but not yet diarrhoeic. He became diarrhoeic shortly after, and the captain hosed him down himself. The mate spelled him on the bridge during the night, which was a restless one, for he looked in on Sung every hour. The man looked bad. His head threshed on the stretcher, his teeth rattled, and he gurgled continuously. Also his deepening pigment seemed to show up the bruises more, which worried the captain. The bosun had volunteered twice to take charge, but the captain kept the key himself.

  At eleven in the morning, still sleepless, he called Green Cape and received a cheery response.

  ‘Suzaku Maru, Suzaku Maru, hello! Good to hear you. Maybe we have something for you.’

  The captain smiled grimly. Playing games after all. For certain they had something for him. And now they’d got him. His Russian was rudimentary but serviceable.

  ‘Green Cape, is good to hear you. I have something for you, too.’

  ‘For us? What for us, captain?’

  ‘I have a sick man aboard. I need assistance.’

  ‘What’s the sickness, captain?’

  ‘I think jaundice, I’m not sure.’

  ‘It’s not a problem. What’s your ETA?’

  ‘My ETA is 1600, repeat 1600.’

  ‘ETA 1600, good. Captain – you want a cargo?’

  ‘What’s the cargo?’

  ‘Maybe fish. Boxed and palleted.’

  ‘Salt or frozen?’

  ‘Maybe both. You want some?’

  ‘How much is there?’

  ‘Maybe not much. It depends.’

  Of course it did. It depended on the rate.

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ the captain said.

  ‘For sure. We’ll see! Okay, captain.’

  ‘And my sick man?’

  ‘We’ll let you know.’

  They’d let him know. At the last minute they’d let him know. It was their way. They certainly wouldn’t let him know before 1400.

  At 1400 they let him know.

  ‘Suzaku Maru, Suzaku Maru! Green Cape here.’

  ‘Hello, Green Cape. Suzaku Maru.’

  ‘Captain, you are to stand off Ambarchik. A medical officer will board you there, okay?’

  ‘Stand off Ambarchik, okay,’ the captain repeated. ‘Where off Ambarchik?’

  ‘A boat will meet you at the point. You follow that boat, captain. We made all the arrangements, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Thank you, Green Cape.’

  He knew Ambarchik well enough. He hadn’t made this passage for three or four years. Another one of the line’s ships had been doing it, the one they’d broken up a few months back. Still, he remembered the place. It stood at the eastern mouth of the river. Several mouths led out of the big messy estuary, but he recalled that this was where they liked to keep the fish, waiting in barges. It was waiting for him there now, he didn’t doubt it: they had ‘made the arrangements’ …

  He now had to make some himself. He went below and let himself into the after heads.

  By 1530 when a voice from the bridge reported they had the boat in sight, Sung was cleaned up and in the captain’s cabin. Rice water had abated the diarrhoea but an arrangement involving towels and a rubber blanket was still necessary. The man was snugly wrapped in blankets and the stretcher was on the cabin floor so the retaining straps were no longer required. He was lightly sedated, his head still moving restlessly, eyes open and glazed, some gurgling coming out of him. The captain had thought it unwise to put him out completely. In the case of Ushiba a fast exit from Japanese waters had been required. In this case the ship would be in Russian waters for days: time enough for them to stop him whenever they wanted. It was common sense to let them find out right away.

  The boat led them round the point, and once they were in the estuary the captain changed places with the mate and took the ship in himself. He saw an old hand from Green Cape watching him through glasses in the boat, remembered him from years back, and returned his wave. And he nodded to himself as he saw where he had to pick up his buoy: half a mile offshore, near the first of the small islands. Four barges were strung together there, all laden. About a hundred tons, the captain estimated. The haggling would begin after they’d taken Sung off.

  It was half an hour before the quarantine boat arrived, and he had the ladder out waiting. The medical officer, a bulky individual hugely wrapped in a dogskin coat and cap, came nimbly enough up the ladder, and the captain went down to meet him. To his surprise it was a woman and he led her down to his cabin, somewhat moody. He knew right away he had got a bad one here, haughty and officious, unlike the jovial rascals he knew from Green Cape. She looked down at Sung while divesting herself of her coat, irritably shaking off the captain’s efforts to help her.

  ‘How long has he been like this?’

  The captain briefly outlined the duration and symptoms of Sung’s illness, omitting all mention of Ushiba.

  ‘Why is his face bruised?’

  ‘Seamen fight.’ The captain shrugged.

  She looked at him sharply, and bent to Sung.

  ‘This is not jaundice,’ she said presently.

  ‘I thought the yellow –’

  ‘Jaundice is present, but this is not all. Have you kept specimens of his faeces?’

  The captain admitted that he hadn’t, and by way of lightening th
e atmosphere remarked mildly that the process was continuous and that she might yet find some.

  She looked sharply at him again.

  ‘The man is very ill. I will need more details. Show me his quarters.’

  A purgatorial half hour began for the captain. The termagant examined not only Sung’s bunk, now bare again, but every inch of the fore ends, the galley and the heads. Fortunately the captain was the only Russian-speaker and he saw to it that nothing compromising came out of the crew.

  But he observed with gloom that the light was going. The haggling over the fish had still to be gone through, by which time it would be too dark to load. He would have to stay overnight.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, back in the cabin. ‘I will take him to the isolation wing at Tchersky. I need his documents. Do you intend waiting for the results?’

  ‘How long – the results?’

  ‘Five days.’

  ‘No,’ the captain said.

  ‘Then I will take his belongings, also. They will need treatment, in any case. What is your destination, captain?’

  ‘Murmansk.’

  ‘I’ll contact them. Of course, if this is what I think, they won’t let you in. You understand that?’

  ‘Won’t let me in?’ the captain said.

  ‘It’s a highly infectious fever. You would be well advised to stay here until we can identify it.’

  ‘But the sea will freeze!’

  ‘Then go on, if you want. I can’t stop you. Or turn back.’

  ‘I have a ship full of cargo! I have to pick up more cargo here. For Murmansk.’

  ‘What cargo?’

  ‘Fish. Tons of it, out there in the barges.’

  ‘That’s quite impossible. I can’t allow it. You have fever on this ship.’

  The captain felt himself unhingeing. He couldn’t pick up the fish. He couldn’t stay here for five days; he’d never get out at the other end. He couldn’t go back to Japan with a shipload of cargo for Murmansk. And they might not let him in to Murmansk.

  ‘Well, decide for yourself, captain. I have no power to prevent you, but I definitely prohibit the loading of any fish. Meanwhile, the first thing is to get this man off the ship.’

  And this was the first thing that happened. Sung was loaded into the quarantine boat and taken upriver to Tchersky. And the captain, after frantic cogitation, arrived at a decision, and took it, fast.

  1820. Ambarchik. Weighed & left. Speed 13 knots.

  General direction, Murmansk.

  22

  Tchersky, four kilometres south of the river port of Green Cape, was the administrative capital for the Kolymsky district of north-east Siberia. Though small (population under 10,000) it had a sizeable hospital, the only fully equipped one for, an area the size of Holland and Denmark combined. The isolation wing was in use mainly during the brief mosquito-ridden summer, and it was empty when Porter was admitted on 23 September.

  The hospital’s doctors were all specialists. General physicians, rare anywhere in the Russian Federation, were unknown in Siberia, and their function was supplied by a corps of feldshers – experienced paramedics. The senior ones, graded as medical officers, were each responsible for a particular area; and Medical Officer Komarova, who brought Porter to Tchersky, was responsible for the lower Kolyma including Ambarchik and the coastal strip.

  At the hospital she registered her patient as a suspected case of yellow fever and he was assigned to Dr P. M. Gavrilov, a young specialist from St Petersburg. Dr Gavrilov had not before encountered a case of yellow fever but was soon aware, from his observation of the symptoms, that this might be the rare Java variety. This excited him. Very little existed in the literature on this form and he instituted a series of careful tests, meticulously noting the results.

  Porter knew nothing about any of this. As the only occupant of the wing he was left to be ill in peace. Drip-fed, bed-bathed, and sedated as necessary, he was aware of very little for the first two days. But waking from a sound sleep on the third he found a woman doctor examining him.

  ‘Do you speak Russian?’ she said.

  Her face was vaguely familiar.

  ‘little Russian,’ he said. ‘Little.’

  ‘I have no Korean or Japanese.’

  ‘Little Russian.’

  ‘You are in hospital. I brought you. You understand?’

  ‘Yes. Hospital,’ he said.

  She looked him over for a while. A face mask was hanging loose round the neck of her white hospital coat. She felt his head, and he was aware that his pigtail was now up in a bun on top of it.

  ‘How you feel?’ she said, smiling suddenly.

  It took him a moment to realise she had said it in English.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and closed his eyes at once.

  He must have babbled. He had tried to train himself in advance not to do this. He wondered what he had babbled.

  ‘You ill. Maybe you little better now.’ Again English.

  He decided to keep his eyes shut and presently she went away. He thought about the English, but soon drifted off.

  A male doctor came to see him. This man he didn’t recollect at all. The man also spoke to him in English, quite fluently.

  ‘I am Dr Gavrilov. How do you feel now?’

  ‘I don’t know how I feel. What happen here?’

  ‘You were brought in with a fever. This is Tchersky hospital. You don’t remember anything?’

  ‘Just – sick. How long I’m here?’

  ‘Three days now. I think you have been ill maybe four days, perhaps a little more. We can talk of it later. Is it hard for you, speaking English?’

  ‘When I speak English?’

  ‘A few words, in delirium. I couldn’t understand the Korean,’ Dr Gavrilov said, smiling.

  ‘Where my ship?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. You’re very weak. Rest now.’

  Next day he was off the drips and on light food, and the woman doctor came again.

  ‘Good. You’re much better,’ she told him in Russian.

  ‘What fever I have, doctor?’

  ‘We thought yellow fever, but it isn’t. Some other kind of virus.’

  ‘I can go?’

  ‘When you’re stronger. You’ve been very ill.’

  ‘But they wait for me on ship!’

  ‘The ship went.’

  ‘It went? All my things there!’

  ‘No, they’re here. We have them.’

  ‘Well – what happen to me?’

  It was a good question, and it was to exercise the hospital authorities all that day and the next. The seaman was the first foreigner ever to be admitted as an in-patient to a hospital in the Kolymsky district. Normal patients, on recovery, went home. This one’s home was in Korea, some thousands of miles away. The Kolymsky district, which was anyway a restricted district, had no procedure for dealing with such a case. Presumably he could be flown to Vladivostok, or more likely Nakhodka which had a shipping service to Japan. Nakhodka would then have the problem of getting him home. But even getting him to Nakhodka was a problem.

  Tchersky could not deal directly with Nakhodka, which was in another autonomous region. The matter would have to go through Yakutsk, the capital of Yakutia, which was Tchersky’s autonomous republic. Dealing with Yakutsk was a major headache at any time, but after a preliminary talk with the hospital’s director the medical officer was given to understand that an even bigger one was looming. In whisking the seaman off his ship, she had omitted to get a guarantee for his upkeep and future transportation. The matter had never arisen before. But Polar Aviation would want paying for taking him to Yakutsk, and Aeroflot for taking him to Nakhodka. At Nakhodka, they would want to know who was picking up the bill to Japan.

  Obviously, the man’s employers were liable for all bills. But between liability and payment there was a hiatus; which Yakutsk would want closing before doing anything. This could take weeks. And meanwhile the man was causing the hospital grave problems. Although
recovered he could not be moved out of the isolation wing. The area was banned to foreigners and it was impermissible for him to be placed in a general ward with other patients. He couldn’t be allowed the run of the hospital, and he couldn’t be allowed outside it.

  In his frustration he was also creating considerable uproar himself. While ill his pigtail had been unpicked and disinfected. He wanted it regreased and replaited. He also wanted his moustache groomed. Above all he wanted to get out. And since, in his fury, he had lost what meagre command he had of Russian and English he had taken to bawling loudly at the staff in Korean; and when they didn’t answer, even more loudly in Japanese. The hospital director tried to explain that everything possible was being done to get him out; but it still took time to make him understand that they were trying to get him out to Japan. At this he almost went out of his mind.

  ‘No Japan! Ship! Ship!’

  ‘The ship has gone.’

  ‘Job on ship! Money. No Japan. Ship!’

  ‘But it isn’t here. The ship went.’

  ‘My job ship. Ship wait me.’

  ‘The ship didn’t wait for you. It went.’

  ‘Yes, went. Where he went?’

  ‘To Murmansk. It’s gone.’

  ‘Murmansk no gone! Wait. My job ship.’

  Amid the gibberish the hospital director at last discerned the drift. the man seemed to think the ship would wait for him in Murmansk. But the ship had now been gone five days and would have left Murmansk. He didn’t bother explaining this. The medical officer, whose patient he was, seemed to have a better time with him so he thought she could explain it. But before informing her he checked on the ship himself. A call to Green Cape revealed that the Korean might not after all be out of his mind. The ship was a slow tramp whose upper speed would not have got it to Murmansk yet. A few minutes later the port called him back to say that the ship was still three days out of Murmansk.

  He hung up with considerable elation. This put a new complexion on things. If the ship’s captain signed the bills, there was no need to worry about Yakutsk, Polar Aviation, Aeroflot or Nakhodka. And the captain would have to sign the bills, or he wouldn’t get out of Murmansk. A single call to the militia or the security service would fix everything. Then Komarova, who had signed the seaman in, could sign him out, the isolation wing could be closed down, the Korean would stop shouting at everyone in Korean, and they would be rid of him.