After I’d had about thirty-six hours of sleep and recovery, MacIntyre pressed me mildly to make my rounds of the village. One could not quite say that Longyear was booming, but it had changed in the nine months of my absence, and could now, with some self-respect, call itself a small town instead of a camp. But for reasons I did not care to examine and MacIntyre did not press me to articulate, I refused to leave the cabin, and he mailed my letters to Stockholm.
There was a practical side to my monasticism. I had grown used to the bizarre and sometimes openly hostile company of Kalle, Tapio and Sigurd. They were familiar with the topographic eccentricities of my face; perhaps, to them, it was no longer a nauseous curiosity. For Kalle, it was still a source of comic material, but I was accustomed to this as well. With anyone else—anyone who had not grown numb to superficial horrors—there would be a strain, a distraction in every sentence, every glance. As though I wore the head of a walrus. Which is, in truth, how I often felt. I might wish to communicate something innocuous, or simply to be ignored, but there was the problem of my bulbous walleyes, my coarse nest of whiskers, my garish tusks. Which part of me should another person address? How to look engaged, and yet not look? How to look away?
So I stayed cloistered, and MacIntyre did much the same. Tapio was absent. He had declined MacIntyre’s offer of lodging, saying he had business to manage, and hadn’t come around since. (The two of them had, it turned out, been friends for many years, a detail I learned only upon arriving in Longyear, having neglected to pry it from Tapio earlier.) But this holiday had stretched unexpectedly into five restorative weeks, so I did not fret over Tapio’s whereabouts or seek to remind him of our return schedule.
One late evening in May, as the sun beat ever on and the day crawled into something that we could only refer to, skeptically, as night, MacIntyre and I sat discussing music and warfare.
“Do you not fear for your family?” I asked him. “Surely you have friends and relatives in the trenches of Europe?”
“I fear for humanity,” he countered. He meditated for a few moments, and then cleared his throat, seemingly wishing to change course, but not quite able to do so. “There is a storied, sordid history of Scots fighting wars of one kind or another for the British. Their best fighters, you know. Must be a terrible thing for the enemy to behold, a regiment of Scotsmen bearing down upon you, the flash of their claymores in hand, the groan and screech of the pipes like the battle cry of some dripping bog creature. Of course, now it’s all rifles and tin hats. And oh, at such a cost. How many times must Scotland empty her towns and villages for her oppressor, perhaps never to fill them again? You see how I grow elegiac and morose. It is characteristic of my people. No, dear Sven, most of the people I consider family live above the seventy-fifth. Or just below it—have I told you of the great luthier I know in Tromsø?”
At this, there was a respectful but urgent tapping at the door. An anxious voice said something in Norwegian that I failed to understand, but I heard the name “Tapio.” MacIntyre shouted that he would be with them presently and began throwing on his heavy woolens.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Is Tapio all right?”
“He always is,” MacIntyre said. “Stay here and keep the fire banked high. I’ll only be a moment.”
After about twenty minutes I began to grow concerned. I peered out the door but could neither hear nor see anything remarkable, so I sat by the window, periodically attempting, in vain, to scrape away the ice with my fingernail. I was beginning to feel that perhaps I should stomach the indignities and go in search, when I heard voices nearby and a noise as of something being dragged. Opening the door, I found two men, one of them MacIntyre, supporting a dead body. But suddenly the corpse gave a great jerk and a gurgling moan, and barked something incomprehensible in Finnish that managed to sound at once slurred and officious. Tapio.
With a look of pure disgust, the upright man who wasn’t MacIntyre dropped his half of the burden. MacIntyre slumped under the weight and I ran out in my stockings to help. The other man, speaking Norwegian, began to berate MacIntyre—and Tapio, presumably—in a string of idiomatic curses that I could barely follow. MacIntyre’s demeanor, generally one of unflappable goodwill, transformed into something I’d never seen. His jaw turned to stone, his eyes narrowed, and hardly opening his mouth, he let fly with his own string of Norwegian oaths. I can only assume it was a dressing-down of terrible potency and wrath, because the other man held out both hands in a supplicating gesture and, with his head bowed, apologized to MacIntyre and Tapio in turn. He shuffled away muttering.
Together we dragged Tapio’s limp form across the threshold and deposited him on the floor. The fumes of alcohol that came off him in waves were stultifying in the overheated little cabin. I had never seen him like this. It was a bit crushing, as when a boy realizes his father is fallible.
“Shouldn’t we place him on the settee?” I asked.
“No,” said Charles, whose face, still a deep crimson, made me uneasy. “The man is liable to be sick. We shall make him up a bed on the floor.”
With substantial effort, we were able to remove Tapio’s boots and greatcoat and roll him onto some blankets. He was already snoring deeply.
“I’m afraid if I sleep near him I shall become drunk,” I said, trying to lance the prevailing air of gloom.
MacIntyre ignored me, busying himself with this and that, and eventually he went to the couch with two glasses of whisky. He invited me to join him, handed one of the glasses to me, and lit his pipe, staring meditatively at nothing. “My God, it’s lucky the man did not get himself killed,” he said at last.
When I asked what had happened, he told me there had been some kind of terrible row at the canteen, though he could scarcely imagine what had caused it. “I have known Tapio these many years,” he said, “and he has a temper, as no doubt you have observed, but never have I seen him like this. When he wakes up tomorrow, perhaps we will ask him, but let us proceed gently. I do not like the devastated look on his face.”
Tapio did wake the next day after a fitful night in which, I think, none of us slept particularly well. In the morning he pulled himself up from the floor, fighting gravity like some wounded beast who will not, cannot, submit to his fate, whereupon he stepped out the door, vomited discreetly into an icy ditch, and came back inside. He sat next to me on the couch and hung his face in his hands for a few moments, looking dejected and sick. His skin was gray, his eyes rheumatic and squinty. MacIntyre watched from the table, where he was having breakfast.
“Charles,” Tapio began, seeming to take no notice of me. “I must beg you to forgive me—”
“Nonsense,” MacIntyre interrupted. “May I offer you coffee and perhaps a moderately palatable biscuit?”
Twenty minutes later, after a small cup of coffee and no biscuit, Tapio was out the door. He had given no explanations, and I had not presumed to ask.
“Well, well,” said MacIntyre, raising one eyebrow at me. “I daresay he has a rather unpleasant day ahead of him.”