We stayed in Pyramiden for two months. It was a peculiarly happy time. Most of it I spent with Ludmilla. If I wasn’t alone with her, in work or otherwise, we were with Misha and Helga, preparing and eating great feasts of pork and canned Russian goods that were enigmatic even to the Russians. Svetlana was a regular guest, and it was a joy to watch her unfurl as she felt safer and safer among us. We saw Illya often, either at the Pig House or abroad on long day treks to the interior, but mostly, on his rare days off, he and I spent many hours toiling at the strange observatory that preoccupied him. He called it an observatory, but I’m not sure why, for it seemed ill-positioned to observe much at all. I couldn’t get a clear answer. It was a single-room hut of a bit more than a hundred square meters, made entirely of mortar and empty vodka bottles. Progress was slow, for Illya had established a rule that our building materials must be drained by the builders and no one else, and on that score I never could keep pace with the yama. Sometimes Helga came to help, and Skuld wandered among the red stones. As the vodka hut stood that fall, open to the elements, and so close to the Pyramid herself that we were in her shadow half the time, it might have been a fair observatory. But Illya had plans to roof it in the same fashion. He said he would do a great deal of observation then.
When Helga proposed in early October that we claim a berth on the next ship to Longyear, I protested. “Several more ships will leave Isfjorden before the freeze,” I said. “Why be in haste?”
“Because, uncle, it’s likely to freeze in the north before it freezes here. I assume you don’t wish to take the overland route to Raudfjorden?”
Raudfjorden. I hadn’t thought of my hunting grounds in weeks. It was pleasant to forget my responsibilities for a while. But they were always there. They lay in wait. And MacIntyre would wish to spend a little time with us before we vanished for the winter.
Briefly—very briefly—I entertained the idea of staying in Pyramiden. Perhaps I would resume my life as a miner. It might almost be worth it, I thought, if I could stay with Ludmilla. But I knew just how ridiculous that would be, and what a fool I would become in my dependence and misery.
So we made ready, and our parting was like dottle, the last tarry clump of tobacco in a pipe—harsh and bitter, and yet rich with the memory of everything that came before. Ludmilla and I exchanged no promises, no words of particular intimacy. But I was quite sure I loved her.