by Bill Granger
The plane turned again and the motor dropped to an indifferent growl. It was falling now and he still could not see it.
He stopped dancing, stood still, let the cold enfold him. The cold was nothing; it was part of him. The old ones in the settlement became like the whites, they listened to the radio for news of the weather and then they spoke of the weather all the time. It would drive you crazy. The weather comes and it goes and it is enough to know the cold can kill you softly. The old ones became more like the whites as they waited to die.
Then he saw it.
The plane dropped over the crest of the hills at the far end of the lake. The wingtips were mounted with blinking red lights and a powerful headlamp was slung under the motor. The Cessna, wearing water skis, touched the choppy surface of the lake, seemed to hesitate, seemed to rise, and then settled down. The plane made a slow taxi across the water to the edge of the land.
There were no trees, no scale to the darkness or the light.
The cabin door opened and there was a brief stab of light from the plane. A figure formed against the light and descended to the ice along the shore. The slight figure was wrapped in a Seattle-made parka and mukluks. The pilot leaned over and dropped a bag on the ice and pulled the door shut.
The passenger picked up his duffel and trudged across the ice toward Kools. The plane turned at the far end of the lake and waited and then took off fast in a burst of throttle, climbing above the red lamps on the ice. In a moment, there was no sound again and the great silence penetrated them like the cold.
Kools went to the lamps, picked them up, and extinguished the flames. The other man followed his steps back up the ridge to the huts. There were three huts in the village. The cold was utterly silent and without dimension, like the tundra. In the winters, the drifts passed under the cabins built on stilts. None of the huts had more than a single, small window. They all had a winter entryway, a box with a door on it to serve as a weather chamber outside the main door. There was just a thin layer of snow and ice on the ground now, and in a little while, the brown tundra would show through and turn a slow, pale green as the summer waxed.
The hut was very warm. The passenger took off his parka. The warmth was infused with the mingled smells of animal skins, sweat, urine, and the dampness of clothes and bodies turning from utter cold to utter warmth. The parkas were covered with frost already melting on the wooden floor. The kerosene stove made light and heat.
Away from the light was an old man scraping away at the caribou skin. He did not need the light because he was nearly blind. The crescent-shaped knife had caressed the skins of hundreds of caribous in his life and he knew the way.
Skins were piled on a ledge that was both bed and couch. The ledge was by the stove and the light was warm and low in the low, smoky room. Kools moved to the other side of the stove and cut down a piece of meat hanging from a rafter. He chewed the raw meat and looked at the thin white man. And at Narvak, his sister, who made a place for the man on the skins. Kools looked at Noah and his sister snuggling under the furs and knew the white man was touching his sister. Kools knew the places. He had touched her, long ago, in the cold nights when there is only shelter and darkness and the smell of human flesh next to you.
“Noah,” she said, smiling, handing him a cup of warm soup. He looked at her pretty almond eyes while he drank. She waited for Noah, sitting with her hands on her hips, her jeans tight against her thighs, her flannel shirt open at the collar. She always waited for him, to speak or touch her or tell her what had to be done.
Kools finished chewing and belched. He lit a cigarette.
Noah opened the pack and took out the Johnny Walker Black. For the first time, Kools smiled at him.
“For you,” he said, handing the bottle across.
“To share,” Kools said. He squatted, twisted the cap. He drank from the neck. The warm, smoky whiskey taste filled his throat and his nostrils and made his eyes water in the half-light of the room.
There was more. There was always more. They all waited while Noah opened the clear envelope of powder. He passed it to Kools, who put his nose to the envelope and looked at his sister. But Narvak kept her glittering almond eyes on the passenger they called Noah.
“I only had room for two cartons,” Noah said and handed over the mentholated cigarettes. Kools accepted them without acknowledgment; the cigarettes were his great weakness. Acquired from the whites during the two years he had spent in prison at Palmer. The cigarettes were the medium of exchange in prison and the common source of daytime pleasure. The daylight lasted twenty-two hours some months in the prison at Palmer. Palmer was so close, achingly close to the freedom of Anchorage. You could hear the trucks on the highway outside the prison. Everyone had someplace to go except the prisoner. On those hard summer months, without the comfort of darkness, Kools could only think about oblivion. It had been his refuge. He had thought of the cold and how it wrapped itself around your heart and allowed you to sleep. It made your heart still and you dreamed into a new life. The old ones—some of them—thought there was more beyond oblivion. This was the evil brought into the villages by the Baptists. The old would become afraid of life after life. But Kools was not afraid. Oblivion was his belief.
When he had been in prison on the blinding white days of summer, he knew that oblivion was whiteness. It would pluck all the color from him and from the prisoners and the color from the walls of the prison and the color from the warden and the color from the guards and the color from everything in the world and suck it into whiteness. They caught him staring at the sun one afternoon in the exercise yard and put him in the hospital for three months to observe him, to see if he had become mad.
In the hut, the old man had put down his knife and shuffled over to them and got his due. He lit one of the cigarettes and let the blue smoke fill his nose and mouth and lungs. His teeth were nearly gone and his skin was fine, like vellum.
The white man who called himself Noah smiled at Narvak. If he had brought her some gift, he would not show it to her now while her brother and the old man watched. Later, under the furs, when she was naked below her waist and opened her legs for him, he would tell her the gift. Kools knew this, knew all about the ways of Noah and Noah’s way with his sister. Noah had small, precise, white teeth, like the teeth of a mink or marten. He had a thin red beard and his pale skin blotched in the cold. When he had been brought to the settlement by Narvak, Kools had distrusted him as he distrusted all whites. This one was no different. Except in the things he did.
Narvak had met an old dark-skinned man in Fairbanks who said he was Ulu. She had been amused by him, by his stories, by his glittering, shrewd eyes. She had asked him why he was Ulu, which was the name of the knife of the native Yup’ik people.
“Where does the ulu begin or end, little honey?” the dark-faced man had said. His teeth were bright and even in that dark face. “That’s what you call a riddle. Like an ulu cuts east to west and back but rests right in the middle. The point is: Where’s the middle?”
Narvak had gone to Fairbanks to work on the excursion trains that went down to Denali Park, where all the tourists took pictures of Mount McKinley and the grizzly bears. She slept with everyone. She was sixteen. She slept with the man who called himself Ulu. And then Ulu had given her this one—they called him Noah—and told her to take Noah back to the settlement with her and to learn from Noah what to do. She had liked sleeping with Noah, even more than the old man.
Noah looked at his black-faced watch. “Twenty-one minutes,” he said.
“Can you be so sure?” Kools said. “The country takes its own time.”
“We have to be precise on this,” Noah said in his soft dry voice. He looked at Kools with that look that made Kools hate him sometimes. It was a white man’s look, like he didn’t stink but you did, or he was smart and you were as dumb as a dog eating shit in the snowhut. Kools opened the whiskey bottle again and drank from the lip.
“Why are you back here?” Kools
said at last. He sat back against a ledge, the fur tickling the back of his neck. “I thought you were waiting for after the Kobuk breaks up, we were going up the Kobuk to do hunting.”
“Things changed,” Noah said. He looked at Narvak and put his hand on her and she moved closer to him, to be within his possession.
“We go back across, one more time,” Noah said.
“Breakup—” Kools began.
“Come on, brother,” Noah said. He smiled at Kools because he thought Kools was a coward about going across. Kools was afraid of Siberia, of the Russian soldiers in their greatcoats, of the crude training quarters. When Noah realized this, he had power over Kools from that day. “We go right across the straits, take a little boat. Hell, we walked across in the winter, that was a lot harder than floating across.”
It was true: The other side frightened Kools the way prison did. He had no fear of ice or cold and the people on the other side were like the people here. But everyone knew the story of the people who had gone across six years ago to visit relatives. They thought nothing of it because the relatives were just people “over there” and not of a country that was different.
The whites on the other side had taken them all away and they were never heard from again.
Kools hated Noah but not the dark-faced man named Ulu, who had come to the settlement twice. Ulu spoke the tongue of the people and this pleased them because even the Baptists had not mastered the careful, clicking sounds of the people’s speech. The dark-faced man showed them magic and they took his magic and were delighted with it. One of the old men asked the dark man questions: Where did he come from? Where was his tribe? What was his name?
North, he replied, which was not possible.
East and West, he replied to the second question. The riddle intrigued the people, even Kools.
Ulu, he replied to the third question.
One old villager understood. The ulu rolls east to west to east, cutting all; its power comes from the handle, which is above the blade, which is the north.
The explanation of the old villager pleased everyone. It even pleased Ulu, who stayed five days with them and told them things and left some magic and went away. The second time he came, he took Narvak aside and told her to take a rifle and do a thing for him and tell no one. But he left magic for the others and Narvak’s eyes had glittered at what he told her.
Some of the magic was in the white powder. Some in the trips to the other side. Some in this thing they were doing now, which Kools did not quite understand. There was money in the magic done and Kools wasn’t a fool. He could love his “brother” if he had to. He had no feeling about his sister Narvak because women were not very important.
At least, the dark-faced visitor who came to the settlement from time to time and said he was Ulu had accepted old ways. This was important, oddly, even to Kools.
He tasted the whiskey again. The people of the other side had vodka and they always seemed drunk.
“Now it comes, do you feel it?” Noah said to Narvak. It was so much later. She placed her hand, long and quite beautiful, on the place between his legs. She rubbed his trousers.
He smiled at her, at the cocaine in his head. At Kools asleep on the floor under the furs. At the light. “Not that, the sound of it, the explosion.”
“Do you think it happened?” Narvak said.
“Of course. Everything happened the way it was supposed to. The way a thing is done.” He reached under the fur and she had removed her jeans. He touched her furry wetness to open her. She groaned.
“Do you think it makes a sound?” he said.
“What?”
“If there’s an explosion and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”
“No,” she said, slipping down on the furs.
She pulled him onto her and opened her lap.
“And what about Narvak?” he said softly in the drug-softened voice. “What did Narvak hear?”
She opened her almond eyes and smiled at his blue eyes and the softness above her, around her, floating like a dream. “Nothing,” she said.
And he penetrated her.
She made another sound.
“What did Narvak hear?”
She saw it as her gift to him. Smiled and kissed him. “Two shots only.” Smiled wider and wider in the darkness, beneath the furs. “Whip-cracks on the dogs. Crack. Crack.” She was thinking of the rifle and the thing that Ulu had sent her to do. Noah did not understand.
“It was done,” he said, stopping a moment.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes.” Noah had been told; the dark man called Ulu had told Noah and it was so good that he should know it, know her power.
“How did you leave him?”
“It was a week ago. I followed him on his traplines and he never saw me until I wanted him to see me. Crack, crack! He sat down, he stared at me, he looked puzzled. He was dead all right but he was sitting there, staring at me. He didn’t believe it. He did not believe I had killed him. His name was Henry McGee.” She lifted her belly. “Deeper,” she said. She moaned.
She had killed the old trapper a week before. She saw the death and felt him in her. She liked the mingling of the thought and what she did now.
“Do you hear it?” Noah said.
Yes, she thought. Yes, I can hear and feel it exploding in me, around me, collapsing on me. Yes, yes, she said in the sounds that were not words.
At that moment, 487 miles east and one degree north of the settlement of three huts on the nameless lake in the land north of Kotzebue Sound, twenty-one pounds of plastic explosive blew a gaping sixteen-foot-wide hole in the pipeline below pump station three. The warm oil spilled out like black blood on the frozen tundra.
Twelve minutes later, the oil flow ceased. The line had been shut down.
Sixteen minutes after that, the helicopter blades broke the silence again. They were coming down from Point Barrow, following the pipeline to the rupture. The pipeline would be shut down for less than two hours before the go-around line kicked in. The sabotage had been cunning, sophisticated, and futile; the public information officer on duty saw to it that not a word of the minor disaster was reported.
He had called former Senator Malcolm Crowder, who had arranged the media silence that followed the explosion. He made telephone calls to his friends and the secret was kept. The line was too important to call attention to itself. The line carried the black oil down the spine of Alaska from the Arctic sea to the warm port at Valdez, where it was shipped out in tankers throughout the world. The line had brought riches to Alaska, even greater riches to all the companies and suppliers along the line. Senator Malcolm Crowder was an important man because he knew the value of silences and secrets and not one word of the explosion got out. Not this explosion, not the other explosions.
He was one of the few men in the world who knew that the pipeline had been under continuous terrorist harassment for sixteen months.
5
DENISOV
Denisov dreamed of Moscow still.
He expected the dreams every night of his life but he never knew when they would come.
The dreams were set pieces, full of commonplaces, almost without stories. But they made him very sad when he finally awoke to the foggy chill morning of Santa Barbara and recalled the restless night spent dreaming.
In the old life, he had not dreamed of Moscow, even when he lived in other places in the world. He felt glad to be out of Moscow in the old life; perhaps because he could always return there. He had been part of the rigid operation that is the Committee for State Security, the KGB. Like his compatriots in the field, he had found his way around the rigid regulations and the constant watch on his movements.
Now he was living in California. Every six or seven or eight weeks—they notified him by postcard—the man from R Section came to see him. They would sit for an afternoon and talk of the world. Sometimes, they would look at photographs and Denisov would be expected to make some comment on them into the t
ape recorder. Sometimes they played If. The man from the government who came six or seven times a year was his only reminder of imprisonment and exile.
Once a month, like the old-age pensioners, he got a green check printed on rigid paper from the United States government.
When the Moscow dreams came on him, they always focused on the little cluttered apartment they had shared off the Lenin Prospekt. In the best—yet most poignant—of the dreams, the apartment would be empty and it would be afternoon. His wife would be gone to the shops, and his son to skate and drink in Gorky Park. He would be alone, listening to the music of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas on the records he had smuggled in by courier from London.
On sad mornings in Santa Barbara, the white fog came down from the tree-lined hills above the town. It filled the streets and lay over the red tiles of the houses and it gradually fell down the hillside to the harbor. The white fog made streaks in the water and surrounded each of the oil-drilling platforms offshore. The long beach was empty this early in the morning and even the stream of traffic along Highway 101 was muted. The fog made everything silent. Sometimes Denisov broke the silence by singing in his deep, flat voice. He sang the songs of The Mikado as he bathed.
The words were sad and he sang them in a sad voice. He sang the song of the minstrel with great tenderness and none of the irony Gilbert intended.
A wandering minstrel, I
A thing of shreds and patches,
Of ballads, songs and snatches
Of dreamy lullabies.…
Once a day, he walked down through the town along Pacific Street or Figueroa to the sea. It was a long walk down the gentle hillside of the pretty town. He always had to wait at the stoplights where Highway 101 slashed a wide scar of roadway through the middle of the city. Highway 101 was a river of cars and trucks night and day, flowing between Los Angeles and San Francisco, impervious to the delicate beauty of the city or the soft hills above the bay. Except that every six minutes, a thin picket of red lights parted the river and the walkers continued across from the upper town to the lower.