Landfalls (34 page)

“I'm going to enjoy myself even if you won't,” Lesseps called out.

“Is this how French ambassadors represent the interests of their country abroad?” Golikoff growled. He glanced up and met Lesseps's eyes, then looked away, his face smoldering with—was it anger, or some suppressed longing? It struck Lesseps that the soldier might be a virgin. Was that possible?

“Come, Golikoff,” Lesseps said, doffing his jacket and shirt, then helping the round woman undo the buttons of his trousers. “You can insult
me
, but don't insult our hosts.”

Golikoff stood and silently removed his hooded fur coat, the cap beneath that, his fox-fur cravat, and his military jacket, throwing each item with vehemence to the floor. When he was down to his chemise, he undid and dropped his trousers, revealing, to Lesseps's astonishment, an advanced state of arousal. Lesseps's partner had pushed him onto the bearskin that served as his bed and climbed on, but he found himself watching, not the woman quite expertly moving over him, but Golikoff. The soldier was pawing clumsily at the other woman, trying to undress her, but she kept pulling away.

“Don't be a bitch,” he growled.

The woman looked toward the tent entrance—was someone out there, making sure the women complied with the demands of Chukchi hospitality?—then, as if resigned to her role, knelt before Golikoff and took him in her mouth. Golikoff put his hands around her head—it was still hooded—and groaned in pleasure, then looked defiantly at Lesseps. The two men held each other's gaze, neither saying a word, until Lesseps cried out, at which Golikoff did too.

Afterward the women proffered their visitors a clear brown drink. Golikoff sniffed it and set it down. “It's a mushroom liqueur,” he said. “I would advise against drinking it.”

“You still think they're trying to kill us?”

“I don't know, but it smells exactly like something we use at home to get rid of insect infestations.”

Lesseps tasted the drink with the tip of his tongue, then shuddered and set it down as well. “I don't doubt it. Is it effective?”

“Quite.”

“And where's home?”

“Irkutsk.”

“Irkutsk?”

“Yes. That's as far as I travel with you.”

Lesseps sighed. “That's still a long way from here.”

Golikoff sighed too. “It's closer every day.”

*   *   *

Spring arrived like another calamity. It continued to snow, a heavy, wet snow that melted during the day, causing the dogs to sink up to their bellies and the sleds to stall. Lesseps suggested they travel at night, when the snow refroze, but the guides didn't want to travel in the dark. He showed them how, using his compass and timepiece, he could accurately calculate direction and distance. The guides appealed to Golikoff, but the soldier raised his hands in resignation. “Who are we to stand in the way of the Frenchman's superior understanding of these regions in which he has never set foot?” he said.

When they arrived—in the dark, through swirling snow—at the fortified town that was their next destination, the guides were impressed, but Golikoff grunted about bastards who were luckier than they deserved.

Night travel couldn't stave off the warming weather for long, however. Eventually the party prevailed on a group of wandering Koryaks to take some of their dogs and food and rubles in exchange for local guides and reindeer. The reindeer, with their longer legs and wider feet, could still pull through the softening snow.

The new guides didn't want to let Lesseps drive the reindeer himself, but after a day of enduring his smiling, confident importunity, they gave in. Driving a pair of reindeer turned out to be quite different from driving six to eight dogs, however. As soon as he took off, his foot got tangled in the trace of the reindeer on the left. Shouting in pain, he let go of the reins and bent over to extricate himself, but the suddenly loose reins made the reindeer start running. Lesseps was flung from the sled, his left foot still caught in the trace. He was dragged a long way, his head banging against the bottom of the sled and in imminent danger of being sliced open by the runners, before the guides could overtake the reindeer and stop them.

Lesseps came to, feeling liquid warmth on his face and aware that Golikoff was holding him and crying. “You arrogant French fuck,” he cried when Lesseps opened his eyes. “I thought you had died again.”

“Again?”
Lesseps said weakly.

Golikoff clutched him tighter for a moment.

“My dispatches—”

“Your dispatches are fine, damn you.”

Golikoff demonstrated once more his skill with bandaging. Lesseps spent that day and the next strapped down in the sled like a piece of cargo while enduring the worst, most nauseating headache of his life.

*   *   *

On the west coast of the Okhotsk Sea, they were obliged to say goodbye to the Koryaks and their reindeer and revert to using dogs despite the still-warming temperatures. They traveled only at night now, taking advantage of the still-frozen waterways to avoid the more difficult land road. But before long they had to abandon this recourse as well. One fog-shrouded night they crossed a bay whose ice cracked and boomed ominously around them. The guides complained that they could feel the ice moving beneath them.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Lesseps called from his sled, urging them onward.

“I feel it too,
barin
,” Golikoff said.

“It's because you can't see,” Lesseps insisted. “You're associating the sounds with movement.”

“No, I'm ‘associating'
movement
with movement,” Golikoff protested, mimicking Lesseps's accent.

When dawn came, they saw with horror that the sea ahead of them had broken up into giant undulating ice sheets, their edges glinting in the sunlight. The beauty of the sight would have astonished them if it hadn't signaled mortal danger. The party quickly took refuge on a small stony beach hemmed in by steep promontories while Golikoff and one of the guides scouted a path ahead. They came back and reported that the only way forward was a narrow ledge along the cliff wall, a ledge that was broken in places and suspended over the melting bay, but led to a larger beach and, beyond, a path into the woods.

“You and your box first,” Golikoff said to Lesseps.

When they got to the ledge, Lesseps recoiled. “This isn't a
ledge
, Golikoff,” he said. “It's a crust of ice adhering to the cliff face. It could shear off any moment.”

Golikoff took the box from Lesseps and stepped out onto the ice. “We have no choice. Follow me.”

Lesseps minced his way forward, terrified of slipping, praying the ledge would hold their combined weight. At times they were obliged to turn sideways, facing the cliff and proceeding crabwise with no handholds till the “ledge” widened. There were gaps in the ice, and Lesseps watched with mounting anxiety as Golikoff stepped over them. Then they came to a gap that had to be leaped across. Stashing the box in a cleft in the rock wall, Golikoff jumped over, then motioned for Lesseps to toss the box across before jumping over himself.

Lesseps studied the turbulent, ice-filled water below them. “If it falls in, I'm following it,” he said.

“Shut up and throw the box,” Golikoff called.

He threw the box, crying out in anticipatory anguish, but Golikoff caught it. Steeling himself against the shaking in his legs, Lesseps followed. When they finally reached the end of the ledge and the wide, rock-strewn beach that led into a wood, Lesseps fell to his knees, too tired and too desolated by the prospect of what could have happened to cry or give thanks or even feel relief.

Golikoff immediately went back for the others. It took seven hours to unpack the sleds, carry all the cargo to safety, unharness the dogs, drag the sleds across (one skate hanging off the edge), then cajole the reluctant animals through. By the end of the ordeal, the ledge had grown narrower and many of the gaps wider. One dog fell into the icy bay after misjudging a jump. They could do nothing to save it.

They hadn't slept since the previous day, and the entire party collapsed into exhausted slumber on the beach. But every time he eased toward sleep, Lesseps would start awake remembering the dog that drowned, who sometimes looked like his friends who died in Alaska, or imagining that he himself was falling from the ledge, or—most horribly—that he was watching his dispatch box drop away into the sea. Then Golikoff was at his side, offering a flask of brandy.

“I don't like brandy,” Lesseps protested.

“But when you don't sleep,
I
don't sleep.”

“So why don't
you
drink it?”

Golikoff grunted in annoyance. “Very well,” he said.

Later, kept awake by the soldier's low snoring, Lesseps crept out from under his bedding and found the flask by Golikoff's head. He tipped it to his mouth, hoping for a few drops, but there was nothing left. He felt like Romeo left at his lover's bier without a drop of poison for relief. Or was that Juliet?

*   *   *

They reached the port of Okhotsk the first week of May. Built illogically on a long, flat spit of land at the mouth of a treacherous river and its fickle harbor, the town had an air of decline about it, as if it had been born of an old and expired necessity. Nevertheless, it was the first town of any size since Petropavlovsk, and with a return to something that resembled society, the French diplomat's son and his soldier escort went their separate ways, Golikoff lodging with the local garrison while Lesseps took his letter of introduction to the house of the governor-general. This was the same governor whose homes in Petropavlovsk and Bolsheretsk had already hosted Lesseps, but this was the man's real residence, a large, European-style dwelling that was almost grand. The governor was still in Kamchatka, but his very pretty, very upright French-speaking wife and three-year-old daughter, Tasha, were delighted to take him in.

That first night Lesseps nearly wept with the pleasure of sleeping quite alone in a real bed. The next day, free to converse in his native language, he talked more than he had in months, regaling the governor's wife and daughter with stories from his travels. But the morning after he woke late and remembered with dismay how the commander had said,
If some mischance should overtake us.
Oh, what if they had, indeed, come to grief? He still had so far to go before delivering the dispatches. He announced his intention to leave within the week.

“But you just arrived,” the governor's wife said.

“It's raining,” Tasha said.

Indeed, it had not stopped raining since his arrival. The piles of snow outside grew dirtier and smaller each day. Tasha called him to the window, where they watched a coachman struggle to free his carriage from the mud.

“The roads will be impassable,” Golikoff said when Lesseps found him at the garrison.

“We've come all this way on ‘impassable' roads,” Lesseps said. “I'm leaving on the tenth, with or without you.”

At sunset on the appointed day, Golikoff showed up at the governor's house with their old sleds, a complement of dogs, and a Yakut guide. Lesseps bade farewell to Tasha, who was crying, and the governor's wife, who was trying not to.

“Don't be sad, madame,” Golikoff called as he helped Lesseps into his sled. “We'll be back.”

“Why are you telling them that?” Lesseps said, shrugging off his help. “None of your nay-saying has ever come to pass.”

But this time it did. They were back four days later, the dogs caked with mud, the sleds damaged, the guide angry, Golikoff bedraggled and vindicated, and Lesseps bedraggled and depressed. Tasha jumped up and down with glee. The governor's wife invited Golikoff to stay with her as well instead of returning to the garrison while they waited for the spring rains to abate.

“That's really not necessary,” Lesseps said.

“But it is,” she insisted.

Over dinner—in Russian now, so as to include Golikoff—the governor's wife tried to cheer Lesseps by praising his intrepidity. “Remember how you found that ledge to carry your party past the melting bay,” she said.

Golikoff's watchful eyes flicked toward Lesseps, but his expression never faltered. “Indeed,
barin
,” he said, raising a glass. “If not for you, we would never have found that ledge.”

Lesseps felt his face grow warm. He raised his own glass and drained it. He really should have insisted that Golikoff return to the barracks, he thought.

Smoking in the drawing room after their hostess had gone to bed, Golikoff said, “I knew about Daria.”

“Who?”

“Daria, the Cossack's wife in Bolsheretsk.”

Lesseps's hand stole to his neck, where he still wore the sable fur. He could no longer remember her face or any of the Kamchadal words she'd taught him. The interminability of the trip was crowding out even the memory of pleasure.

*   *   *

He had no interest in seeing the spring breakup of the Okhota River ice. “The thaw is why we're stuck here,” he said. “Why would I find it diverting to watch?”

“Because a future ambassador should be interested in the customs of the country to which he's appointed,” Golikoff said. “And because your gloomy refusal to leave the house is becoming a burden to the governor's family.”

The two men set off and joined townspeople and soldiers and native traders gathered at the eastern extremity of the town, where the Okhota River met the sea. Some years, they learned, the thaw happened so suddenly and with such force that it flooded the town and drowned people. But this year the river seemed more gently inclined. Enormous white sheets floated past, shearing along straight lines whenever they struck one another or something onshore before heading out to sea, a silent, frozen flotilla.