57

The lodging house was bleak.

The proprietor took my money, making little acknowledgment that he understood what I required, and motioned for me to enter silently. “Miners off shift,” he said in a rasp. “Dormitories overflowing, so they sleep.”

“You’re Swedish?” I asked, strangely moved to find a countryman after so long.

But he waved me past as though the question were immaterial.

Inside, rows of bunks stood pressed against the wall, with another row down the middle. All but four were occupied. The air was dense with the reek of men, their unwashed feet, their overworked boots, their grimy skin and hair, their garlicked exhalations. Night sun streamed through the useless threadbare curtain. This was not a house, it was clear, just for transients—many bunks showed the signs of long habitation. No one spoke a greeting. In some ways it was a relief to find everyone asleep. I sat on an empty, crepe-thin mattress and tried to imagine how Helga and Skuld might stay in such a place.

Skuld was fast asleep, having been fed from the last of our supplies as we walked into town. But I hadn’t eaten, and in a room where I didn’t know whether I might be killed for so much as lighting a lamp to read, I had no wish to linger until sleep came, particularly when I was not at all convinced that it would. I had no idea what time it was, though my belly told me past dinner. A deep feeling of loneliness and misery eclipsed the flicker of hope that had arisen when we first entered Pyramiden.

I hoisted Skuld and walked to the canteen. The lodging house man had said there were two but that I would be under strict advisement not to enter one of them. He failed to say why. In fact, he hadn’t even looked up from his logbook, which he studied with the rapt attention of a scholar.

Inside the bar, soot-caked oil lamps hanging from the ceiling shed meager light. Black smoke fell from them and mixed with the tobacco plume, obscuring everything in a yellowish fog, so that the effect was one of being underwater.

Men jostled like cattle. Their voices were loud, their oversized presence stultifying. Most spoke Russian. I looked around at a loss. I was about to turn around and depart, thinking that perhaps I could find an abandoned railcar or derelict ship more comfortable than anything I’d yet seen, when I spotted a few small tables at the back. One was empty. I made for it like a shipwrecked man who sees, between the waves, a rocky spur emerging.

I placed Skuld upon the table, and she continued sleeping amid the din as though it were a lullaby. Exhausted, I sat. The bar was far too daunting for the moment, so I took a book from my pack and tried to focus on the words. I became aware of a man at the table next to ours, sitting and drinking alone. He was stringy and sallow like most of the other miners, with dark hair and a dark beard. Before him on the table sat a bottle and a glass and nothing else. He wore the heavy head of someone dejected. Together we tried emphatically not to look at each other. I pretended to be reading.

“Zdravstvuyte.”

He was looking in my direction, but I couldn’t be sure that this guttural address was directed at me.

“Privyet?”

“I’m sorry,” I said in Swedish, facing him for the first time. His eyes were like caverns. “I’m afraid I don’t understand you. Have you any Swedish or Norwegian?”

“No,” he said with obvious disapproval, and then was silent for a moment. I thought perhaps our interview was over. But then he said, in deeply accented English, “This is my last resort.”

“Ah, I am with you now,” I replied in my own passable version.

He nodded morosely, but did not seem in any particular hurry to continue the discourse. He drank for a while with determination. At last he looked over again and nodded at my ruin of a face with weary recognition. “Miner?” he said. “Or one of society’s castoffs?”

“I suppose both,” I replied, somewhat taken aback by the forthrightness of the question, though it was preferable to the horror or embarrassment I usually encountered. “That is to say, I was a miner, and now I am just a castoff. Or perhaps I was always a castoff.”

The flicker of a smile crossed his face, slightly elevating the corners of his beard. “You have no drink,” he said.

“I have been working up the courage.”

Immediately he gave a sharp high whistle and several heads turned around. My neighbor said something full of consonants, and at once the men said the word yama, and then the bartender uttered another great string of consonants, and yama was repeated several more times. Within a minute or so, a second glass and a clear bottle of vodka with a garish Soviet label were handed back to us. The helpful patrons gave a knowing look to my companion but did not engage with him at all during the transaction. When we were alone again, the man poured out full tumblers for each of us.

“Bud’mo,” he said. “Chin-chin.”

“Skål,” I said, and we drained our glasses.

We repeated this process several more times before either of us was willing to say more. Eventually my curiosity, and the vodka, overcame hesitation.

“I am Sven,” I said. “Originally from Stockholm. This child here is Skuld, the daughter of my niece. I hunt grounds in the north of Haakon Land. Raudfjorden is where I dwell.”

“I do not know it,” he said with a look of profound disinterest.

I pointed in the vague direction of where I thought north to be, and did not elaborate.

“Illya,” he said at last, pointing to himself. “Ukraine.”

“I do not know it.”

“You would not,” he replied, and his eyes narrowed with a sudden rage. “For the great bloated sow, Mother Russia, has swallowed it. Five years ago now.”

“Ah,” I said, trying to recall some of the European history and geography that Tapio had taught me. The vodka was clouding my thoughts. “Forgive me for asking, but is there a reason you drink alone? You dislike Russians?”

“Russians are no worse than many others. But I drink alone because I am not one of them. They do not drink with me; I do not drink with them. We are apart. Always apart.” He seemed resigned to this, but rueful.

“Because you are from Ukraine?”

“Because I am a Jew.” He raised himself up a little in his chair, and his eyes flashed at me with hostility.

“Ah,” I said, but could recall no relevant information, from Tapio or any other source. Illya was the first Jew I’d ever met, and to my shame, it surprised me that he looked just like everyone else.

“For the love of God do not tell me I look just like a Christian, or that I am the first Jew you have met.”

“I would not dream of it,” I said. “Do these men call you Yama? Is that a diminutive? A slur?”

“Yama means hole. Abyss. Pit. I believe they intend it kindly. I may have participated in a contest or two. They are impressed by my ability to hold drink. It affords me some level of respect.”

And indeed, though for all I knew he had been drinking for hours before I arrived, Illya seemed entirely unaffected. I, on the other hand, was finding it increasingly difficult to keep the room at some reasonable latitude, and my tongue was very loose.

“Are you always alone and apart?” I said. “Are there no other Jewish miners in Pyramiden?”

“Several,” he replied. “But I am apart from them, too. A fellow castoff, you see?” Briefly his beard crinkled upward again. “Most are devout. Family men. Narrow men.” He drew his hands up flat on either side of his face, palms in, as though peering through a tunnel. “And they disapprove of my politics. I am a proud anarchist.”

“You believe in chaos? Mob rule?”

He slammed his glass onto the table. I was surprised it didn’t break. Several men looked at us, and then turned back around.

“Nonsense!” he said. “It is a carefully organized system of communal self-rule!”

“Please forgive me,” I said, with genuine contrition. “I am ignorant about these things. My political friend instructed me on the various ideologies, but I’m afraid I did not retain all of it. Rather little of it, he would say.”

Illya nodded in grudging acceptance. “Your friend is a fascist?”

“Oh dear me, no. A socialist.”

Illya snorted. “Nearly as bad. Look at these misguided fools. They think the Party will care for them, when it cares only for lining its pockets. They have placed their faith in a system that solely values the output of the man, not the man himself.”

I thought about how Tapio might respond in this situation—I knew he felt that communism as practiced by the Russians was a loathsome corruption of a fundamentally considerate ideology—but I lacked the words to do him justice. So we talked of various other things, and I learned a little about Voltairine de Cleyre, whom Illya revered, and the great Emma Goldman, who was also a Jew, and Mikhail Bakunin, who apparently did not like Jews at all.

When I could stand it no more, I admitted that I was famished and that if I drank one more glass, I might very well die. Illya whistled again and after a few minutes a bowl of some vile Russian stew, with a few chunks of rough brown bread, was passed along to us. While I pushed the inedible beets around and ate every scrap of cabbage, he turned away decorously and was silent.

During this interlude a young woman entered the bar. The jarring incongruity of her presence seemed not to surprise the miners, though they leered at her. She was wan, with lank brown hair. Her skin was blotchy, but her eyes seemed kind and alive. In response to what must have been an untoward proposition, she let forth a tirade in Russian, long and clearly venomous.

“She is no miner,” I said to Illya, through my food.

“No. She tells them that she is only here for a bottle, that she has a paying customer already, and that the men are encouraged to find someone else or pleasure one another tonight.”

And then the woman approached us, bottle in hand. As I made to wipe the grease from my chin, she leaned down conspiratorially and exchanged a few Russian words with Illya. Their discussion, I perceived, had something to do with me.

After a minute or two, Illya nodded in my direction and said, “Sven.”

She inclined her head to me, looking perhaps a touch embarrassed, and said “Svetlana.” Then she turned and left, and I resumed my meal.

I felt somewhat better after eating, and sat back in the chair.

“Tell me you are not billeted at the lodging house,” he said.

“I am billeted at the lodging house. Where else?”

“I know of a place. You must let me make other arrangements.”

“We will be fine,” I said.

He studied my face for what felt like a long time. I was unaccustomed to such open inquiry.

“You look wretched,” he said. “What troubles you?”

I thought this strange coming from a man who appeared so sad himself. I searched, inclined to lie reflexively, but when I opened my mouth, the truth came out. “I recently lost my partner.”

“Your business partner?”

“No. My dog. But not just a dog.”

“Of course,” he said instantly. “Some dogs are not just dogs.”

To my astonishment he clapped his hand over mine and held it there. His face was red and contorted and tears spilled into his beard. I admire those who wear their emotions openly, for I have always concealed mine, and the years of scar tissue and isolation have only served to bury them deeper.

“You know this pain,” I said.

“Oh yes. My beloved Czolgosz. Faithful through all weathers. Except very bad weather. Or any kind of precipitation at all. A light mist and he would become traitorous and seek shelter with whomever. But my shadow. A better, kinder shadow.”

We sat that way for some time, in companionable commiseration. At last I began to feel that the centrifugal forced caused by the room’s rotation was pressing me toward the floor. I stood up, lurched, and shot a hand out to catch myself on a low beam.

Illya rose, steady as a pillar. He picked up Skuld in her bundle with great care, but did not move to hand her over. “Please allow me to accompany you,” he said, careful not to patronize. “You might take a wrong turning.”

“Yes, all right,” I said, and thanked him. I strode toward the door and collapsed at the threshold, insensible.

Illya later told me I was lucky to have fallen sideways and a little backward rather than face-first into the reeking mire outside. That was where the men stood to vacate their water and occasionally the contents of their stomach. I might well have drowned in acrid urea, he said, though due to the nature of the Pyramiden diet, I was just as likely to have choked on a kidney stone.