Polar Star (7 page)

The lead man shouted, slipped and clung to his lifeline. It was a deckhand named Pavel; his eyes had gone white with fright.

From the landing the trawlmaster encouraged him. “You look like a drunk on a dance floor. Maybe you’d like a pair of skates.”

“Karp,” Slava said with admiration.

Karp’s shoulders stretched his sweater. He turned his broad head up to them and grinned, displaying golden dental work. He and his team were taking an extra shift, another reason they were the favorites of the first mate. “Wait until we reach the ice sheet,” he yelled up. “Pavel will do some real skating on the ramp then.”

Arkady remembered the half-mended net he had seen earlier on the trawl deck.

“Did you cut Zina out?” he called down to Karp.

“Yeah.” The gold left the smile. “So?”

“Nothing.” It was simply interesting to Arkady that Karp Korobetz, that exemplar among the trawlmasters, had taken the chance of ruining expensive American mesh rather than pouring the fish out and waiting for her body to emerge.

Below them, Pavel was struggling to untangle the bridle of the net so that his teammate could attach the G-hooks of the messenger cables and relieve the weight on the buoy line. It was one thing for a cable to snap and fly wildly on an open deck; in the close tunnel of the ramp, a broken cable would be a whip in a barrel.

“Were you at the dance?” Arkady called down to Karp.

“No,” Karp yelled. “Hey, Renko, you never answered my question. What did they nail you for?”

Arkady detected the faint imprint of a Moscow accent.

Susan turned around. “Is there a problem?”

Pavel fell again, this time to midway down the net before his lifeline saved him. A wave flowed up the ramp and lifted the net so that it rolled indolently over the fisherman. Arkady had seen men die like this before. The weight of the bag wouldn’t let the lungs breathe, and half the time the bag was in the water. Pavel’s teammate shouted and pulled on the rope, but with Pavel beneath twenty tons of fish and net the line didn’t budge. Yells didn’t help. As another wave broke over the bag it rolled some more, like a walrus crushing a pup. Receding, the wave tried to suck the bag back to the sea, and the lifeline broke.

Karp jumped down from the landing onto the net—what was another hundred kilos compared to tons? With the next wave, he was up to his waist in freezing water, holding on to the net with one hand and with the other dragging Pavel from a kelplike mass of plastic chafing hair. Karp was laughing. As Pavel sputtered and climbed onto the back of the bag, the trawlmaster pulled himself up to the bridle and helped connect the G-hooks. It was all over in a second. What struck Arkady was that Karp had never hesitated; he had moved with such speed that saving another man’s life seemed less an act of courage than a gymnast’s spin around a bar.

The catcher boat swung back into the
Polar Star
’s wake, waiting for the call on the net’s catch—so many tons, so much sole, crabs, mud. Gulls hovered at the mouth of the ramp, watching for any fish slipping through the net.

“Someone from the slime line is the last thing we need here now,” Susan told Slava. “Take him to my cabin.”

As soon as the G-hooks snapped shut, Karp and his deckhands moved quickly up the ramp, hauling themselves in step by step on one lifeline. The net began stirring behind them. The
Polar Star
had a Trip Plan, a quota
of fifty thousand tons of fish. So many frozen fillets, so much fish meal, so much liver oil for a nation starved for protein to build the muscles that were building Communism. Say 10 percent was lost on board to freezer burn, 10 percent spoiled on shore, 10 percent was split between the port manager and the fleet director, 10 percent was spilled on unpaved roads to villages where there might or might not be a working refrigerator to save the last well-traveled fillets. No wonder the net rushed eagerly to the trawl deck.

Slava led Arkady forward past the trawl deck and midships by the white hangar of the machinists’ shop. “Can you believe her accent? It’s so good,” he said. “Susan is a fantastic woman. That she can speak so much better than that Uzbek girl—what’s her name?”

“Dynka.”

“Dynka, right. No one speaks Russian anymore.”

True. Upwardly mobile Russians in particular spoke the increasingly popular “Politburo Ukrainian.” Ever since Khrushchev, the Ukrainian-born leaders of the country had spoken in crude, halting Russian, substituting w’s for v’s, until sooner or later everyone in the Kremlin, whether from Samarkand or Siberia, started sounding like a son of Kiev.

“Say your name,” Arkady asked.

“Slawa.” Slava eyed Arkady suspiciously. “I don’t know what it is, but you always seem to be getting at something.”

On the dark seam where fog met the horizon was the glow of another catcher boat working a trawl.

Arkady asked, “How many boats do we have with us?”

“We usually have a fleet of four: the
Alaska Miss
, the
Merry Jane
, the
Aurora
and the
Eagle
.”

“They were all at the dance?”

“No. The
Alaska Miss
had a crew change coming and the
Aurora
had a steering-gear problem. Since we’d
stopped fishing for the night and since we’re about to go to Dutch Harbor, they decided to leave for port early. We only had two boats at the dance, the same two we have now.”

“You have a good band?”

Carefully Slava said, “Not the worst.”

The forward deck was divided between a volleyball court on one side and a loading deck, which they walked across. Netting covered the court. Despite this, sometimes a ball escaped into the water; then the captain would turn the
Polar Star
around right to the bobbing dot, a task equivalent to steering a giant sow through heavy mud. Volleyballs were scarce in the Bering Sea.

The Americans on board lived in the forward house, on the deck below the officers’ cabins and the bridge. Susan had yet to arrive, but the three others had assembled in her cabin. Bernie was the freckled boy Arkady had met outside the cafeteria with Volovoi. His friend Day wore steel-rimmed glasses that emphasized a scholar’s doll-like earnestness. Both reps wore jeans and sweaters that were at once shabby and superior to any Russian clothing. Lantz was a National Fisheries observer charged with making sure the
Polar Star
didn’t take fish of an illegal type, sex or size. As he was about to go on duty, he wore oiled coveralls, a plaid shirt with rubber sleeves, a rubber glove on one hand and a surgical one hanging like a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. Acting half asleep, he lounged on the built-in bench, curling up because he was so tall, a cigarette stuck in his mouth. While they waited for Susan, Slava talked with the three of them in Russian with the enthusiastic ease of friends, contemporaries, soulmates.

Susan’s cabin was no great step up from crew quarters. Two bunks instead of four, which she had to herself as the lone American woman. There was a waist-high ZIL refrigerator and the metallic aroma of instant coffee. A typewriter and manuscript boxes on the upper bunk and,
stacked in cartons, books—Pasternak, Nabokov, Blok. Arkady saw Russian-language editions that would have sold in seconds at any Soviet bookstore or for hundreds of rubles on a Moscow back street. It was like coming upon cartons of gold. Susan could read these?

“Explain again, please,” Day asked Slava. “Who is he?”

“Our workers have many talents. Seaman Renko is a worker from the factory, but he has experience with the investigation of accidents.”

“It’s terrible about Zina,” Bernie said. “She was great.”

Lantz blew a ring of smoke and asked lazily in English, “How would you know?”

“What happened to her?” Day asked.

Arkady groaned inwardly as Slava answered, “It seems Zina became ill, went out on deck and perhaps lost her balance.”

“And perhaps came up in the net?” Lantz asked.

“Exactly.”

“Did anyone see her fall over?” Bernie asked.

“No,” Slava said. This was the primal error of first-time investigators, the tendency to answer questions rather than ask them. “It was dark, you know, and foggy after the dance and she was alone. These things happen at sea. This is the information we have so far, but if you know anything …”

Assisting Slava was like following a lemming. The three Americans shrugged and said in unison, “No.”

“We were supposed to wait for Susan, but I don’t think we have any more questions,” Slava told Arkady.

“I don’t have any,” Arkady said, and then switched to English. “I am impressed with your Russian.”

“We’re all graduate students,” Day said. “We signed on to improve our Russian.”

“And I’m struck by how well you knew our crew.”

“Everyone knew Zina,” Bernie said.

Day said, “She was a popular girl.”

Arkady could see Slava mentally translating, trying to keep up.

“She worked in the crew’s galley,” Arkady said to Day. “She served you food?”

“No, we eat in the officers’ mess. She worked there at the start of the trip, but then she transferred.”

“We did see Zina on deck—at the stern rail, in fact,” Bernie said.

“Where your station is?”

“Right. There’s always a company rep at the stern when the fish are transferred. Zina would come out and watch with us.”

“Often?”

“Sure.”

“Your station is …?” Arkady turned apologetically to Lantz.

“The trawl deck.”

“You were on watch when the net bearing Zina came on deck?”

Lantz brushed cigarette ash from his sweater and sat up. For such a tall boy he had a small skull and the raked hair of a narcissist. “It was cold. I was inside having some tea. The deckhands know they’re supposed to tell me when a bag is coming up the ramp.”

Even belowdecks in the din of the factory line, Arkady knew when a net was coming aboard by the high whine of the hydraulic winch and the shift in the ship’s engines from half speed to dead slow as the net cleared the water, followed by the return to half speed as it came up the ramp. In his sleep he knew when fish were coming on board. Nobody had needed to call Lantz from a glass of tea.

“You enjoyed the dance?” Arkady asked.

“Terrific dance,” Bernie said.

“Especially Slava’s band,” said Day.

“You danced with Zina?” Arkady asked.

“Zina had more interest in the motorcycle gang,” Lantz said.

“Gang?” Arkady asked.

“Fishermen,” Bernie explained. “American fishermen, not yours.”

“Boy, your English is really good,” said Day. “You’re from the factory?”

“The slime line,” Susan said as she entered and threw her jacket on a bunk. She pulled off a wool cap, releasing thick blond hair cut short. “You started without me,” she told Slava. “I’m the head rep. You know you don’t talk to my boys without me.”

“I’m sorry, Susan.” Slava was contrite.

“As long as it’s clear.”

“Yes.”

Susan had taken command, that was obvious, with the imperious manner small people sometimes have of inserting themselves into the center of a situation. Her eyes darted around the cabin, taking roll call.

“It’s about Zina and the dance,” Bernie said. “This Seaman Renko with Slava said he didn’t have any questions, but I think he does.”

“In English,” she said. “I heard.” She turned to Arkady. “You want to know who danced with Zina? Who knows. It was dark and everyone was bobbing up and down. One second you’re dancing with one person and the next you’re dancing with three. You dance with men or women or both. It’s like water polo without the water. Now, let’s talk about you. Slava told me you have experience with accidents.”

“Comrade Renko served as an investigator for the Moscow prosecutor’s office,” Slava said.

“And what did you investigate?” she asked Arkady.

“Very bad accidents.”

She studied him as if he were auditioning for a part and not doing well. “How convenient that you happened to be cleaning fish on the factory line of this ship. An
investigator all the way from Moscow? Fluent in English? Cleaning fish?”

“Employment is guaranteed in the Soviet Union,” Arkady said.

“Fine,” Susan said. “I would suggest that you save all your other questions for Soviet citizens. Zina is a Soviet problem. If I hear you’ve approached any American stationed on this ship again, I’m going straight to Captain Marchuk.”

“No more questions,” Slava said and pushed Arkady to the door.

“I have a last question,” Arkady said. He asked the men, “You’re looking forward to Dutch Harbor?”

This broke the tension a little.

“Two more days,” Bernie said. “I’m going to the hotel, get the best room, sit in a hot shower and drink an ice-cold six-pack of beer.”

“Soo-san?” Arkady liked saying it that way, making her name Russian.

“Two more days and I’m gone,” she said. “You’ll get a new head rep in Dutch and I’ll be flying out of the fog to California, so you can say good-bye to me now.”

“The rest of us are coming back,” Day assured Slava. “We have two more months of fishing.”

“Just fishing,” Slava promised. “No more questions. We should always keep in mind that we are shipmates and friends.”

Arkady remembered that on the voyage out from Vladivostok the
Polar Star
had staged exercises in camouflage and radiation cleansing. Every Soviet seaman knew that in his captain’s safe was a sealed packet to be opened on receipt of a coded signal of war; inside were instructions on how to avoid enemy submarines, where to make friendly contact, what to do with prisoners.