He mentioned his dream one night in the pub to Angelina and Sergio and, of course, they thought that going to the North Pole to find the source of that infernal wind was as reasonable a fantasy as any other.
‘Sounds fair enough to me,’ said Angelina. ‘Each to his own. After all, think of George’s dream. Or Osama’s. What a cave of mirrors.’
As luck would have it, Sergio’s two brothers were both First Officers at sea, working the International Flag Ships, registered for tax purposes in Liberia, but free to roam the world. ‘They’ll take you as near as dammit to the North Pole,’ Sergio told him, ‘though not necessarily by a direct route. It depends on which trade they’re dealing with. One month it’s the Gulf, the next the Baltic, the next Australia. I worked ship myself for a while – peeling the potatoes, naturally – but could never hack it. Always seasick. Tried two voyages – one to Brazil and one up to Iceland, but sick is sick whichever side of the Equator or date line you’re on.’
Sergio meticulously explained how it all worked.
‘Being registered in Liberia, they are free from national industrial laws – and most safety regulations, I warn you – and can pick up and hire crews wherever and whenever they want, on whichever terms they want. That’s why they’re mostly Filipino crews. Dirt cheap. And the officers from the East. Increasingly from China. But they would hire you, especially with a nod from me. You just work your passage. Free travel. Free food – which is wonderful by the way, with these Indian cooks. And half a normal salary at the end of the voyage.’
‘Half a normal salary? What’s wrong with getting the full whack?’
‘Only if you sign on for a full five years. After all, they know they’re basically just taking you to the other side of the globe so as to jump ship. Their attitude is that any illegal immigrant ought to be damn happy with free transportation, free accommodation, free food and a walletful of decent money in return for scrubbing decks all across the Pacific.’
‘But I’m not an illegal immigrant,’ said Archie. The fool.
‘We’re all illegal,’ Sergio laughed.
‘I’ve got a fully paid-up British passport,’ continued Archie. ‘I can’t see any problem with that, even if I need to go through Burma itself to get to the Pole.’
‘Visas, man,’ said Sergio, ‘and passes. Do you think they grow on trees? These can also be provided. And any passport you want. Any citizenship you want. My brother Ludo is the real expert on that. Just let me know what you want to be – American, Canadian, Russian, Faeroese – you name it and I’ll text him right now. It can all be arranged.’
‘I don’t need any of that complicated rigmarole,’ Archie said. ‘I could just fly to the North Pole tomorrow.’ But no one listened. He was only arguing with himself. ‘Why should I get caught up in all these ridiculous scams and slave myself thrice round the globe when I could just get there with one visit to the travel agent’s?’
But would he? Had he learned nothing?
Angelina and Sergio just laughed. ‘What!’ they both shouted together. ‘Do you mean to tell us that you’re really just a little bourgeois shit at heart? That really, at the end of the day, what you want to do is not to discover the source of this north wind at all, but to stand there with a bloody digital camera cawing, “Oh yeah! Look at me, with my big stupid fat smile, standing here at Ice Station Zebra, thanks to Cold Arse Travels. I made it! Amn’t I good! And I’ll have my lasagna supper tonight at the local Holiday Inn!” No way José! Do you think that’s what Robert E. fuckin’ Peary did, whom you’re always going on about? Do you think that’s what Captain Robert Falcon Scott did at the other end of the universe? Discovered the known universe thanks to Cold Arse But Warm Heart Travels?’
They were right, he knew they were. And they knew he knew, and all that stuff. So he asked Sergio to text his brothers, and within twenty minutes the whole deal was done. They were at that moment sailing west from Greece with a cargo of olives and other unnamed fruits, and due at Tilbury docks on the Tuesday morning. If he was ready at Station J at noon on the Wednesday, they would sail that afternoon, with Archie as a Canadian citizen, for Ludo reckoned that was by far the best way, for he’d once heard that there was actually a street in Toronto called North Street, which if you kept following it would eventually bring you out, in a straight line, at the Arctic Circle itself.
5
SO BY WEDNESDAY evening, as the sun set in all its redness to the far west, Able Seaman Archibald Grierson was sailing eastwards, leaving the jangling bells of Westminster in his wake.
He’d lived long enough near the sea to know that if the sun was setting behind you and you were moving away from it, you must be heading east, and had also been long enough in school to know that Canada, unless of course you were sailing by China way, lay west of Britain.
He also knew very well that to go west sometimes you certainly needed to go directly east first, but nevertheless he raised the issue with First Officer Ludo, who just told him to keep his head down, remain calm and keep scrubbing the decks.
‘You have absolutely nothing to worry about,’ he said, patting his breast pocket from where the false Canadian passport had emerged with a flourish earlier on. ‘We’re picking up cargo in Marseilles first, then we’ll see where we go from there.’
The days were cold and windy going through the Channel, though that didn’t stop the Head Bosun – a Russian called Bronowskielchev whom they all called Brawn – from driving them out on to the decks to scrape and clean and paint and tie and untie and shackle and unshackle all kinds of ropes and irons and doors and hatches and ladders. ‘You see, as long as the outside looks all clean and neat and new and tidy they can get away with anything,’ the crew muttered, knowing the whole truth of the thing, or at least their own part in the lie of it.
So when the sun burst through the clouds on the morning of the third day as they turned left – yes, the crew knew fine that was called port – and entered the Mediterranean, the ship sparkled white in the dazzling sun and you could see the tourists standing up high with their binoculars on the Rock of Gibraltar, peering down on the fine ship as she steamed by. Some even waved flags, in the forlorn hope that someone of importance – maybe even royalty – was on board.
Ludo played to the galleries by dressing up in his full officer’s outfit, all white epaulettes with gold braid and a sparkling peaked hat fringed with royal blue flashing in the Mediterranean sun. He even saluted as he passed the crowds, and all that was needed was a twenty-one-gun salute to finish off the entire charade.
Most of the crew went to the brothels in Marseilles after unloading, though Archie just stayed on board. Not for any moral reason, nor because he wouldn’t fancy a rough whore as much as the next sailor, but simply because he feared that the French police (as if they didn’t have anything better to do) might nab him and take his false passport away. ‘To tell you the truth, the Marseilles police don’t give a shit what kind of passport you have, if you have one at all,’ Brawn said to him, but still Archie stayed aboard.
Instead, he hid his passport deep inside his kit-bag and sat on it on deck during his hours off, watching the tour-boats go backwards and forwards between the dock and Château d’If in search of the ghost of Edmund Dantès. The only other person who remained on board was Brawn, who sat opposite him on the capstan smoking – you’ve guessed it – Capstan cigarettes.
‘Only get them in Russia,’ Brawn said, ‘this kind. In Vladivostok. Gregoria make them special for me. Twice-strength. Afraid of going fuck fuck?’
‘No,’ said Archie. ‘Just that I don’t want to go ashore. I’m happier safe here.’
‘You never safe,’ Brawn said, inhaling. ‘No one ever safe.’ He lit another cigarette while still inhaling the first one. ‘This not safe,’ he said. ‘I’ll die of this. Kaput. But if not this, then something else.’
‘Sometimes it’s safe,’ Archie said. ‘John Goblin used to smoke. One hundred a day. Lived till he was eighty!’
; ‘John Goblin?’ asked Brawn. ‘Who’s he?’
‘Another Russian,’ lied Archie. ‘A big man. Strong. Able. Heroic. Like you. Live forever.’
This time Brawn laughed. ‘No one live forever. Not even Ambromovitch despite his oil and football.’ He smoked the two cigarettes together. ‘Two two make four,’ he said, blowing huge smoke-rings out of his mouth, both nostrils and his ears. ‘From arse too. But you not see that,’ said Brawn, though Archie could swear he saw huge smoke rings emerge from up Brawn’s trousers. ‘You know song?’ Brawn asked.
‘What song?’ Archie asked.
‘Smoke Song’, Brawn said and began singing in a beautiful baritone voice,
‘Thus must I from the smoke
Into the smother
From tyrant Duke
unto a tyrant brother.’
He blew the inevitable rings from all quarters. ‘I can blow smoke any time,’ he said. ‘Just like Monsieur Pompadour.
‘Where you from anyway?’ he asked Archie. ‘Not that passport-from,’ he added. ‘Real-from.’
‘Oh,’ said Archie, ‘from far away.’
Brawn laughed. ‘Of course. We all from far away,’ and continued singing,
‘But the majestic river
Floated on out of the mist
and hum of that low land
Into the frosty starlight.’
‘Where you going to?’ he then asked.
‘North of North Pole,’ said Archie. He could see Brawn really enjoyed the answer.
His eyes smiled.
‘Hah! Where we’re all going. North of the North Pole. You’re very funny. Your name isn’t Stalin?’ And he suddenly darkened, like one of those quick stormy days from way back home. ‘Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili killed the whole world,’ he said. ‘That’s why I smoke.’ And he blew ten enormous rings of smoke right out of the back of his trousers. They rose one after the other in loops into the air. ‘I’ll get him yet,’ he said, and sang,
‘Like as the armèd knight
Appointed to the field
With this world will I fight
And faith shall be my shield.’
‘You’re a great singer,’ Archie said. ‘You should be touring the world.’
‘Am touring the world,’ said Brawn. ‘Round and round and round and round.’
‘Were you a professional singer? An opera singer? The Bolshoi…?’
Brawn smiled again. ‘I like you, boy. An opera singer! The Bolshoi! Do you want me to do a ballet or something? Like Nureyev? To keep your Russia alive for you? Next thing, you’ll be speaking of Dostoevsky. Or the great dreamer himself, Count Leo.’ And, fulfilling all expectations, he released a whole series of ballet figures out of all the orifices and sent them dancing and swirling and pirouetting all over the blue bay to Château d’If.
He suddenly went quiet again, and clear and still and pure, just as the skies would go after the storm and said in clear English, ‘I was a university professor. Professor of Music at the Moscow Conservatoire. Youngest Professor of Music in the whole world. Just nineteen years of age. But I wrote this symphony – I jokingly called it Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. It was all about Stalin and the purges, of course. In the symphony everyone was blind in the mist and smoke.’
Right at that moment, they heard the sound of the returning taxis, the horns all hooting, and the sailors – or at least those of them who’d returned – leaping out of them and running up the gangway like kids after playtime.
Brawn stood up and for the first time Archie recognised how old he was. It was all perfectly possible. History is not all that old. As Gobhlachan used to say, just a minute’s worth.
‘Do you know,’ Gobhlachan would say as the sun was sinking, ‘that the sun is made new every morning? You know yourself it melts every night it enters into the water. But over on the other side, behind the mountain, a new one is made out of the fragments of all these shooting stars that fall from the sky all night.’
Archie once dared to ask him who gathered the fragments up and turns them into a new sun but Gobhlachan just laughed and told him, ‘God, of course. Who else could gather up the fragments of the firmament?’
Within an hour they were sailing out of Marseilles, again heading east.
‘Istanbul,’ Ludo said. ‘These things we picked up here in Marseilles have to be dropped off there. We pick up a different cargo there and make for Cairo. We’ve nothing booked from there but something will turn up. Likely we’ll head down the Gulf to pick up some crude oil to take down to Australia.’
‘Italy,’ someone said to Archie, vaguely indicating to the left where a long strip of whitish land shimmered in the haze. Once, he’d seen porpoises fill the entire Minch, their tails fanned out all the way to Vatersay. ‘If you sit on one,’ his father had said, ‘it will take you all the way to America.’
They were all back at their duties, scraping paint, lashing chains, polishing bulbs, repairing ladders. ‘Like the good old days,’ someone would mutter now and again.
‘Ten years before the mast!’
‘Lashed to the deck!’
‘Land ahoy!’
‘Convict ships!’
What Archie found remarkable was how predictable the whole unpredictable voyage became. Each morning, as if their lives were scripted, they would all return to their daily liturgy, scraping and painting and tying and unravelling and fixing. Each had his own curses, moans and hopes which he repeated daily as the ship travelled right across the globe, from Marseilles to Istanbul to Cairo to Aden to Muscat to Bombay to Sumatra to Freemantle to Wellington, right across the gorgeous hot Pacific to Panama, up through the Bahamas and at last to Toronto across the Great Lakes, where Archie finally left ship.
Once they’d unloaded the cars from Marseilles and loaded the spices and rugs from Turkey and Afghanistan, the same thing happened in Istanbul as in Marseilles: everyone on board, except for Brawn and Archie, departed for the whorehouses, and while they were all gone the two of them sat on deck, this time under the shade of an awning of washed shirts.
‘Some heat in that sun,’ said Brawn, again expelling cigarette smoke all over the place. ‘Do you think,’ Archie began, ‘that the sun gets wet when she sinks into the water?’
‘No,’ said Brawn. ‘The sun is far too clever to drown herself.
‘The ocean is just as wise,’ he continued. ‘She just divides, as the Red Sea once did, and lets the sun safely though to the other side.’
Explosions went off in the distance. The sun glinted on the church domes and on the mosque minarets.
‘Brass or gold?’ Archie asked.
‘Oh – gold,’ said Brawn, ‘as in heaven itself. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘are you going to the North Pole?’
The question was so direct and simple that it frightened Archie. So he replied equally simply.
‘To find the hole. The hole where the wind comes from.’
‘The hole of death,’ Brawn said. ‘That’s what you’re trying to block up. And it’s worth trying. Oh, it most surely is.’ And he resumed the conversation broken the other day by the returning sailors in Marseilles. ‘Do you know, they had killed everyone by that time anyway. My parents and my two sisters. Not that another four made much difference amongst the fifty-four million. The hole was so big that it could have swallowed the whole world, and still you wouldn’t see the bottom. They didn’t like the music anyway, and so sent me north. North! Hah!’ he laughed. ‘And by the time I came back, everywhere was north.’ He paused, drawing breath. ‘But it’s worth it. Even though the hole was so deep that they couldn’t fill it, they had to stop eventually. And do you know why?’ Archie didn’t say anything. ‘Because the man with the spade finally fell in himself. The hole swallowed him too. Even though he left his spade.’
He lit another cigarette.
‘Do you know they used to make cigarette papers out of the prisoners’ skins? My smoke rings are only rings of remembrance. Dealing with grief through black humour. Famous as we are fo
r our black cigarettes. There were so many of them. It’s like living at the bottom of a well, but unable to drown. Like the sun itself.’ He spat. ‘Bloody metaphors. As if they were any use. Though they’re all we have.’ He stood up, the sun glinting on his bald head. ‘I’ll be seventy-nine next month, but feel as strong as when I was nineteen. Stronger, in fact. I’ve swallowed so much water. My heart is now made of liquid. I think I am condemned to live forever.’ He laughed. ‘There was an old man in my village when I was small. It was snowing. Everyone was starving. And do you know what he did? Climbed the highest mountain nearby, made a snowball and rolled it down the hill. It caught one hundred and one rabbits on the way down, which kept the whole village alive that winter.’ He smiled. ‘No point in telling a lie for the sake of a single rabbit.’
And there, under the hot Istanbul sun, Archie wanted to gather up the fragments of the stars and create a new sun.
‘But your music,’ he said. ‘And all this.’ As if he could restore Brawn’s life with words. Or any of the other millions. As if by shouting ‘Hurrah for Kintail’ or ‘Abracadabra’ or rolling a snowball Brawn would stand once more on the orchestra podium, baton in hand, waiting for the graves to open. With a small pebble and a sling, David killed the Philistine.
The sun was setting and Istanbul was ablaze with its glory, the golden domes and minarets now all red. What better place for Brawn to settle down than here in this cradle of civilisation, amongst these Byzantine glories? But this was like every other port; this too was no country for old men: down in the tourist cafes in the squares Archie and Brawn could even then see the young in one another’s arms.
‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,’ Brawn recalled, ‘a tattered coat upon a stick.’ And because English wasn’t his mother tongue, it came out all broken and tattered, and ragged. Brawn looked out over the blazing city and said: ‘Istanbul, Constantinople. Constantinople, Istanbul.’ And releasing four perfect smoke circles from every orifice, said, ‘Byzantium.’ The rings rose into the evening sky like diminishing sacrifices.
Archie and the North Wind Page 8