Polar Star (28 page)

“He’s an angry man,” said Hess.

“That’s how it ends if you’re a Party member,” Arkady said, “but if you’re not a Party member, if you’re just a worker and are caught smuggling videotapes or gems the outcome is five years in a labor camp.”

“Tell me more about Irina,” Susan said. “She sounds interesting; where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Somewhere”—she spread her arms—“out there?”

“Some people are like that,” Arkady said. “You know, there’s a North Pole and a South Pole. There’s another place called the Pole of Inaccessibility. Once it was thought that all the ice in the Arctic Sea turned around one point, a mythical pole surrounded by wheeling floes impossible to cross. I think that’s where she is.” Without a pause he asked, “Was Zina depressed the night of the dance?”

“I didn’t say I talked to her.”

“If you’d warned her off the Americans on the
Polar Star
, then wouldn’t you warn her off the Americans on the
Eagle
?”

“She said she’d found true love. You can’t stop that.”

“What exactly were her words?”

“That no one could stop her.”

“If you’re talking about Mike”—Morgan spoke up—“they only met at a couple of dances. Otherwise all they did was wave at each other. Anyway, all my men were back on my boat, so what does it matter?”

“Unless she was murdered,” Susan said.

Morgan reacted with the thin smile of a man whose patience for the simpleminded was wearing thin. He seemed to find everyone but Hess in that category, Arkady thought.

“I’m out of cigarettes,” Susan said. “There’s a machine in the lobby. Are you allowed to come?” she asked Arkady.

He looked toward Hess, who slowly nodded. Morgan shook his head at Susan, but she ignored him. “We’ll just be a second,” she said.

The machine offered a dozen brands, like flavors. Susan, though, didn’t have the correct change.

“I know you don’t have any.”

“No,” Arkady said.

“I have cigarettes in my room. Come on.”

Susan’s room was on the second floor at the far end of the hall, a gamut of sounds. Each room had a different argument or played a different tape. She touched the walls twice for balance’s sake and Arkady wondered how drunk she was.

She unlocked the door to a room that was not much larger than her cabin on the
Polar Star
but offered twin beds, shower, telephone and, instead of a built-in Soviet radio with two stations, a television on a desk. The bureau held a disarray of scotch, a plastic ice bucket, a gooseneck lamp. The beds were by the window, and
though it was thin and dirty, not even double-paned, Arkady felt bathed in utter luxury.

Outside, the sun was gone and Dutch Harbor drifted in the dark. From above Arkady watched his shipmates emerge from the store and gather on the road, reluctant to walk to the dock even though their arms were weighed down with plastic and string bags stuffed with their purchases. They were used to standing in line for hours to buy a single pineapple or a pair of stockings. This was nothing; this was heaven. Polaroid cameras flashed, capturing a closed rank of friends, blue-white in an American port. Natasha and Dynka. Lidia and Olimpiada. On a hill above the tank farm a fire burned like a beacon. Ridley had said there were fires all the time, kids torching the wooden structures left from the war. Fog had thickened around the hill, turning the flames into a soft furze of light.

Arkady found the light switch and turned it on. “What did you mean when you said that Morgan and I had ‘cooked up’ something together?”

“Captain Morgan is not too careful about the company he keeps.” Susan turned the switch off. “I guess I’m not either.”

“Someone tried to kill me two days ago.”

“On the
Polar Star
?”

“Where else?”

“No more questions.” Her hand was on his mouth. “You seem to be for real,” she said, “but I know you have to be a fake because everything is fake. Remember the poem?”

Her eyes seemed so dark that he wondered how much she’d had to drink. He could smell the dampness in her hair. “Yes.” He knew which one she meant.

“Say it.”

“ ‘Tell me how men kiss you.’ ”

Susan leaned into him and rose at the same time, bringing her face up to his. Strange. A man considers
himself nearly dead, cold, inert; then the right flame appears and he flies into it like a moth.

Her lips opened to his. “If you were real,” she said.

“As real as you.”

He lifted her and carried her to the bed. Through the window he saw that the plaza outside was as bright with camera flashes as a celebration of silent firecrackers, a last wave of picture taking before the happy visitors, his shipmates, decamped for the dock. Out on the road, a camera’s bright flash illuminated Natasha as she posed coquettishly, jacket open to a glass necklace, her head tossed in profile to display crystal earrings. Arkady felt oddly like a traitor seeing her from a hotel window.

He stood poised above the bed, at one of those points that make all the difference in the rest of a lifetime. On the road a blue flash illuminated Gury and Natasha, and incidentally froze Mike, the Aleut, as he was leaving the hotel.

“What’s the matter?” Susan asked.

Another flash bathed a happy Madame Malzeva holding a bolt of satin, and also caught Volovoi rushing in the hotel door.

“I have to go,” Arkady said.

“Why?” Susan asked.

“Volovoi’s here. He’s looking for me.”

“You’re going with him?”

“No.”

“You’re going to run?” She sat up.

“No. I couldn’t on this island even if I wanted to. You depend on us too much. Who else would the fishermen here sell their fish to? Who else comes all this way to buy stereos and shoes? If any Soviet tried to run here, you’d throw him back as fast as you could catch him.”

“Then where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Not back. Not yet.”

20
As he climbed the hill Arkady felt the thick grasses softly yielding, then springing up behind his step. Below him, the hotel lay bathed in electric light, its bright windows banked in midair above the walkway, which was a shaft of still white light. A figure on the walkway seemed to move in slow motion: Volovoi looking right, then left.

The last few Soviets were joining the crowd on the road, and some of them were already moving toward the docks, like the vanguard of a herd. Some of the men lingered while Lantz visited the liquor store. Returning, he distributed pints of vodka, which they stuffed in their pants. Natasha and Lidia lingered too, as if to give the evening a last embrace. America? With so many Soviets in the street it could have been a Russian village, with Russian dogs barking in the yards, Russian grass blanketing the hills. Arkady imagined Kolya off in the dark digging up tender orchids, and Obidin entering the doorway of the church.

He had crossed the road away from the hotel and worked his way through the dumpsters beside the store.
The building had windows only in front, so he had slipped into the shadows in back, then maneuvered between the prefab housing on the ridge, long metal homes with aluminum windows bathed in the shifting colors of television sets. A couple of dogs, black-and-white animals with pale eyes, challenged him, but no owner appeared. The yards had pitfalls, auto parts and suction hoses covered by snow, but he slipped only once before reaching the hill. Mike was well ahead, keeping the beam of the flashlight on a path. So far he hadn’t looked back.

Land was so seductive, dark but firm underfoot. Sometimes Arkady stepped on cushions of waterleaf or moss. Dried lupin brushed his hands. He couldn’t so much see as sense the volcanic mountains rising like walls in the mist. Ahead, a fire lit one peak. Out in the harbor the lights of the ships at anchor were more distinct; the lamps of the
Polar Star
floated on a tilted sheet of black.

What if he did run? There were no trees to hide behind, few houses to beg at. There was an airport on the other side of the island. What could he do, jump onto a wheel as a plane took off?

Hummocks made climbing easy. Snow was cupped into the northern slope; there was just enough light to turn the drifts blue. After ten months at sea, it was like mounting heaven. A cold wind, a harbinger of the winter to come, stirred earthy vapors of berry bushes, parsley and moss. Mike seemed to be enjoying himself, too, following his flashlight at a leisurely pace.

Where the path joined a dirt road the fog grew more intense. At points the ground dropped away on either side, and Arkady could make out the difference between firm footing and air mainly by the sound of the sea breeze as it rushed up the face of the cliff. He knew which way to walk because the fire, though obscured, was closer and brighter, like a beacon.

Then, in a matter of steps, the fog dissipated and fell away. It was as if he had climbed to the surface of a
second ocean and set of mountains. The fog lay heavy, still and foamy white under a night sky as brilliantly clear as deep space. The mountain peaks floated like smaller islands, hideaways of sheer black rock and starlit ice.

The road ended at the fire. Around its glow Arkady saw signs of an abandoned military battery: earthworks turned to grassy knoll, gun plates now rings of rust, a mare’s nest of barbed wire. In the muffled tussling of the flames were boards, bedsprings, oilcans and tires. On the far side of the fire, Mike pulled open a heavy door built into the hill. For the first time, Arkady noticed that he carried a rifle.

The stars were so near. The Little Bear was still chained to Polaris. Orion’s arm reached over the horizon as if tossing stars. In his ten months on the Bering Sea, Arkady had never seen a night so clear, yet they’d always been there, just above the fog.

He walked around the fire to the door. It was iron, set in a concrete frame, an entrance to a wartime bunker. The concrete was chipped and stained with rust, but it had resisted both years and vandals. A new padlock hanging open on the hasp showed that someone had taken ownership, and the door swung easily on oiled hinges.

“Mike!” he yelled.

A kerosene lamp burned on the floor, and in its light Arkady saw that someone had done his best to turn the bunker into a fisherman’s loft. A trawl net billowed artistically from the ceiling. On the walls were shelves of starfish, abalone shells and jawbones of baby sharks. There was a cot and fruit-box bookcases stuffed with paperbacks and magazines, and barrels of salvaged webbing, twisted tow shackles and split corks.

When he saw the rifle on the cot, Arkady relaxed. “Mike?”

On a stand, and filling the entire middle of the bunker, was the largest kayak Arkady had ever seen. It was at least six meters long, low and narrow, with two round
hatches, and although it was only half finished an intrinsic sleekness and grace were evident. Arkady remembered the voice on Zina’s tape describing a native boat, a baidarka, that the speaker would paddle around the
Polar Star
. The more he examined the boat, the more impressed he was. The keel was wood, jointed with bone. The ribs were bent wood, lashed with sinew. He didn’t see a nail in the whole construction. Only the sheath of the craft was a compromise with the modern age: a covering of fiberglass fabric sewn up to the rear-hatch coaming by nylon thread held in place with a hemostat. On a workbench was an assortment of whittling knives and files, sail needles and twine, paintbrushes, gas mask, electric hair dryer and half-gallon cans of epoxy resin. Epoxy was volatile material; pails of sand bracketed the bench, and there was a toxic bite to the air from a sample that had been painted on the skin.

“Come on out,” Arkady called. “I just want to talk.”

The way the bow of the craft split and curled backward, Arkady could easily imagine the baidarka bending, riding lightly on the waves. He could also see why Zina was attracted to Mike. A merman, she had called him, a romantic who dreamed of sailing with her to all the points of the Pacific. How different from himself, who just wanted to stay on land.

The hair dryer meant there had to be power. Arkady found an extension cord on the floor and followed it to a blanket hanging on the end wall, pulled it aside and discovered a second, smaller room. There was a gasoline generator with an exhaust pipe to a duct. A gasoline can lay on its side and a flashlight spilled its own light.

Just inside the doorway, Mike sprawled as if hugging the rough floor. The Aleut’s left eye was open and had the sheen of a dark wet rock. Arkady couldn’t feel any breath or pulse. On the other hand, he didn’t see any blood. Mike had walked into the bunker only steps ahead of him, had lit the kerosene lamp and then gone to the
generator. Young men had heart attacks. He turned the Aleut over, unbuttoned his shirt and hit his chest while Mike watched with one eye.

“Come on,” Arkady urged.

Mike wore a religious medal on a chain of metal beads; it clinked at the back of his neck each time Arkady hit his chest. He was too warm to be dead, too young and strong, with a boat half built. “Mikhail! Come on!”

Arkady opened Mike’s mouth, blew in and inhaled the taste of beer. He beat the chest again as if anyone inside could be roused. The medal clicked as Mike stared with a fading eye.