I woke to an odd medley of smells. Bacon was frying, that was certain. Toast, with a top note of stove gas inefficiently combusted. Coffee, scalded and bitter. And above all the rich, earthy, unmistakably putrid odor of pigs.
My guts were famished and unruly. I was lying on a scratched-up sofa in someone’s cluttered, homey living room. Or perhaps it was a dining room. There were more chairs than space to contain them—some wooden and others upholstered, but most in some purgatorial state between the two. A long table was folded against the wall. Through the two small windows the low-angled summer sun was burning a hole in my eye. If it hadn’t been for the decidedly breakfast-like smells, it could have been nine in the morning or four in the afternoon.
Around the corner, pots and pans collided with merry violence. Several voices were talking animatedly and all at once, unconcerned about whether I slept or woke. I didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed or irritated. Then I heard Helga laughing, and a strange woman came into the room. She was tall, with wide cheekbones and ruddy skin. Her eyes were pale green, her wild hair the color of damp sand. Smears of something unspeakable—not food, I wagered—mottled her canvas trousers, but her hands and fingernails were pink and clean. She looked like a Slavic peasant, or so I imagined. I found her exceedingly beautiful.
“He wakes,” she said in glottal but fluent Swedish, smiling wryly.
“Pardon me,” I replied, and checked to make sure that my body was not exposed. “I am in no state to receive a lady. My name is Sven.”
“Ludmilla, Matron of the Pig House,” she said with an exaggerated, ironic curtsy. “Come join us for breakfast when you are suitably composed.”
“How did I get here?”
“Illya brought you, the dear man.”
An image of the ropey miner wafted into my brain. “By himself? Was I dragged?”
“No, you were carried dryfoot. He came with a few trusty lads. They may not like to admit it, but they respect the Yama.”
“And Helga is here? And the baby?”
“All well, all well.” She turned and walked out.
As her back was revealed to me, along with the curved shape beneath her sullied trousers, I was seized with a sudden and profound lust that I had not known—had barely remembered—in years beyond count. My heart stuttered disconcertingly.
In the kitchen, Helga was bouncing Skuld, who appeared none the worse for any of it. “Sleeping late as usual, uncle,” she said.
“How did you find this place?” My voice was the harsh croak of a raven.
Helga nodded to her left, and there was the pale prostitute I had encountered the night before. “This is Svetlana. I met her through the course of her employment. Apparently you met her too, though perhaps you don’t remember. She suggested I lodge here. She reported that you were in good hands, and likely coming here as well. Serendipity! We arrived at close to the same time. My, but you were in a state.”
“All the misfits find us,” Ludmilla said, affectionately.
We made some conversation and I tried to stay out of the way while the breakfast preparations were completed. When we returned to the main room all the furniture had been rearranged, with the long folded table in the middle of the room and a fleet of chairs around it. There stood a man—the architect of the shuffle—and he was a giant, perhaps two meters tall, broad of shoulder, with bright blue eyes and the same cheekbones as Ludmilla, looking more like a Viking raider sprung from his longship than I ever would. He could have been Ludmilla’s brother. I found myself hoping ridiculously that he was.
“This is my husband, Misha,” Ludmilla said.
He gave me his enormous doughy hand, which was equally clean, and smiled sheepishly.
As we were setting the table, someone knocked on the door. Misha opened it to Illya, who looked tired and a little bedraggled. On the threshold, the two men spoke quiet Russian words to each other, but then Illya glanced over Misha’s shoulder at me, and Misha turned around, blushing.
“Excuse us,” he said in passable Swedish. “I don’t mean to be rude.” And he ushered the miner inside, saying, “You are just in time, Illyusha, come in, come in.”
But Illya was rooted by the door. I moved to stand beside him, and we were silent. He seemed awkward, unsure whether the friendship we had so clearly established the night before would be in evidence today, or even recalled. This would not do.
I clapped him on the shoulder and said in English, “Illya, how pleased I am to see you, and how grateful for my safe conveyance.”
Instantly he relaxed. His eyes grew warm and his beard twitched. I believe he had learned to live his life in a defensive posture, always anticipating a slight. He seemed to have utterly failed to develop a callous exterior. He was too sensitive for that.
Reddening, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a small pile of fragments: briar, ebonite, soot. “Alas,” he said, “your pipe was broken to pieces when you fell like a dead man.” Then from a different pocket he pulled a small leather pouch. He opened it carefully. There in his hand lay an elegant little pipe with a straight shank and a forward-canted bowl that flared as it went up. He took my hand and placed the pipe in it. It weighed no more than a tern’s egg. “A Charatan,” Illya said with reverence. “Carved in London, if I am not mistaken, by Mr. Frederick Charatan himself—a Jew, you will note—before he sold the business to his son Reuben, in 1910. See the handiwork.”
“Beautiful,” I said, though I could see no handiwork as such. It looked like something that had been sculpted by the elements, as water shapes stone, or else sprung from the forge of Brokkr and Sindri in Svartalfheim. I realized that I had never studied my own pipe this way, and that it likely would not have borne the scrutiny.
“I bought it off an English commandant in Longyear who knew not what he had. He couldn’t tell a Comoy from a Dunhill.” Illya chuckled to himself. “He probably won it in a game of whist. Britishers are always doing things like that. But my father worked for a tobacconist in Kiev, and he taught me a thing or two.”
“I cannot accept,” I protested. “Besides, what would you use?”
“Oh, I have a few interesting pieces tucked away.”
“But Illya, surely this is a thing beyond value.”
He shrugged. “Material possessions. We must not grasp at them.” His eyes strayed to the pipe and he gazed at it with affection. “Just promise me you will treat this with better care than you did your last. At the very least you must ream out the cake once in a while, and buff the chatter from the bit.”
I gave him my word and we embraced.
Ludmilla had been watching all of this with evident interest. “Enough pipe talk,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
We dined like archdukes. I can’t say how long it had been since I’d sat at a table with so many people, with conversation so free and unaffected. Perhaps never. Several languages were in use, but we came up against no barrier that I could perceive. Illya and I sat next to each other, the only English speakers, and when we exchanged the occasional sardonic observation, we were immediately asked to translate. Apparently Swedish was still the lingua franca in Pyramiden, despite the steady influx of Russians. It would not be for long.
I found that I’d even forgotten my mutilations, as those present addressed me with no apparent disgust or shame. I finished stories that Helga started on my behalf, and it pleased me that she seemed to remember them all and deem them worth the telling. I smiled so many times that my scars itched. And whenever possible, though I knew it was wrong, I stole furtive glances at Ludmilla. Her clavicles ran toward her muscular shoulders in sublime anatomical precision. Her fingers twitched now and then, as though her hands were tired. Her hair tumbled everywhere.
I ate so much that I had to lean back in my chair like an old priest. All the sensations—the warmth, the talk, the farmed meat—were so heady and foreign that I began to feel overwhelmed. I thought with pleasure how fine it would be, after everything was cleaned up, to step into the bracing Arctic air and smoke a pipe with Illya. Perhaps he could tell me more about these new friends of ours.
Helga was in fine spirits, and several times she jostled Svetlana intentionally. Once, her hands busy with eating, she reached her head over and accommodated an itch by rubbing her nose back and forth on the girl’s thin bicep. “Hand me the bacon, my darling courtesan,” she said to Svetlana, who blushed, looking flattered and confused.