Our time in Pyramiden was short and yet restorative. I resided at the Pig House with Ludmilla, seldom leaving unless to work on the vodka observatory. Illya was a regular guest, staying late into the night as we spoke of politics and history and tobacco, and often falling asleep in an easy chair with his eyes open, a trick that delighted the two-year-old Skuld when she was awake to witness it. Her care fell mostly to Misha, who was lax in his bedtime rules, as he was with anything concerning Skuld. He adored her, and she him. If she asked for permission to ride a twenty-eight-stone sow around the farrowing pen, he granted it. Helga, for her part, came and went, doing her share of carousing at the canteen and winning the admiration and hearts of many Russian miners but spending nearly all her time—and a great deal of our money in order to do so without inviting scrutiny or punishment from the madam—with dear Svetlana.
The relationships we all had forged the previous summer were renewed as though little or no time had passed, and even strengthened. I felt, in truth, that we had a place there. It caused me to wonder whether a person wandering in and out of my life, my fjord, might have the same odd conviction that I dwelt apart from time, as the people in Pyramiden seemed to do. Of course, the missing tips of two of my fingers were more than enough for time to have marked me.
Ludmilla was fond of prodding the pink skin, so soft and oddly printless, where I had pulled loose flesh over the amputations. “Can you feel this?” she would say, pinching the end of a finger between two nails.
“No.”
“Alas, you are a stranger even to yourself.”
We returned to our fjord after only a month away, for the ice was said to be forming early that year, and we lingered a week with MacIntyre en route. He had become quite grandfatherly, and the role suited him. He was particularly concerned for Skuld’s welfare, a charge he assumed with gravity, and was a great deal more sanguine about our prospects since Tapio had returned to Raudfjorden. As was I.
When at last we drew into the safe harbor of Alicehamna and were rowed ashore, heavily laden with stores and various inessential things that MacIntyre insisted we take for our cultural betterment, Sixten came leaping toward me, writhing and twisting in his excitement, and urinated on my boot.
“I give up,” said Tapio, walking down the beach to greet us. “He cannot be trained.”
Raudfjordhytta, now in its third and final iteration, was complete. As befitted Tapio’s sensibilities, it was built upon exactly the same footprint, and with identical layout, as its original. For all I knew he had been building huts just like this for his entire life. One might find them scattered throughout the polar regions if one only knew where to look.
But I perceived almost instantly that something was not right with him. We sat at table that first evening, Skuld on the floor tormenting Sixten with a greasy lump of seal fat, all three of us puffing smoke. Helga’s pipe was made of unvarnished beechwood, a material that neither Tapio nor Illya approved of for that purpose, but which Helga preferred nonetheless. She liked its peculiar lightness, for she never had any use for a pipe that couldn’t be clenched between the teeth at all times. The bowl did indeed get hot, but Helga insisted this was not a problem if you puffed away at your ease instead of perpetually feeding it like a stoker on a steam engine. She had calloused fingers anyway and did not mind the heat.
Tapio’s pipe was as straight and rigid as his peculiar morality, its only concession to style being an oddly stacked bowl like a little chimney. When he smoked, the bowl was tall enough to obscure one eye. The other eye was troubled. It lacked its usual imperturbable authority. I knew that any attempt at interrogation would be unwelcome and come to nothing, so I kept silent. But I wondered whether he had in fact resented our absence, and whether the many duties that he invariably set for himself, now compounded, had grown sour in his mouth while we were away. Had he encouraged our departure as a martyr takes on suffering? I didn’t think so. That would not have been his way. But I was twisted up with guilt all the same.
As fall proceeded into winter, the dynamic did not improve. A change had clearly come over Tapio. Whereas his relationship with Helga had always been one of kindness and open communication, he now clearly avoided taking her along on any hunting journey. Within the confines of the cabin, he often would not meet her eye. I know Helga was as disconcerted as I. She told me as much, feeling that perhaps she had said something to offend him. I tried to reassure her but my words had little effect, for it was obvious that neither one of us understood the problem.
In December, without more than a few words, Tapio left for Basque Hook. He said he thought he might improve significantly upon our winter haul, for the pack ice was closing in fast, creeping into every little harbor, and there might be a slew of ice bears to hunt. I offered to accompany him, but he declined, indicating that I should stay in case the baby required urgent help. He would make his way east along the shoreline, for he did not think he would be able to return the skiff if he took it now. It was an uncomfortable parting. Helga and I stood outside the hut, despondent, and watched him go. And yet there was relief—his heavy, brooding presence had begun to feel like a burden, and though neither of us wanted to say it, such a state of mind is dangerous in tight quarters, in the long night.
So we weathered the rest of the winter together, not so much worrying about Tapio as wondering. In any case, we had each other and ourselves to worry about. In the Arctic, that is enough. We began looking for Tapio as soon as the sun showed itself, in late February, but he didn’t come. The ice was still thick and humped against the northern limits of Raudfjorden, so we knew that hunting was likely good in Biscayarhuken.
He did not return until April. We saw him from a long way off, laboring under a load. He was bent low to the ground. Fearing some grievous injury, I gathered a few supplies, and Sixten and I set out to meet him. About an hour later, we met.
“My friend!” I called when he was within shouting distance. “All well?”
He looked up suddenly—it was a rare thing to catch Tapio unawares—and he smiled. I thought how strange it looked on his face. He was hauling a sled he had fashioned out of old hut timbers and driftwood. It was heavily laden with bearskins, and though the runners were greased with fat, snow had been light that winter, and they grated against dirt and stone. I joined him in the traces and together we made much better time, returning to Bruceneset at dusk. We spoke little.
That night, warming before the fire, Skuld on his lap, Tapio looked at each of us in turn and though he was clearly far from comfortable, I could tell that he had changed once again. The fever had broken. “My friends, I have reached a resolution,” he said. “The hunting was good this winter. In fact, I have another sled’s worth of skins still sweating at Basque Hook. Helga, if you will permit me, I thought I might borrow the skiff and bring them back that way. It would be much faster.”
“Of course, Tapio,” she said.
“Thank you. As for the sale, each of us shall receive one-third of the proceeds—”
“But you did all the work,” I interjected.
“I will brook no argument. These are your grounds, and you should get your share of it. Anything else is poor business. I may detest capitalism, but I know how it can work for or against you. Now, I’m leaving just as soon as the ice breaks up and I can get the rest of the stores from Biscay. I’ll bring the skins personally to Charles, who will serve as our agent. I don’t trust a crew of Norwegian sailors with inventory of this value.”
His manner was so chilly and authoritative that I hardly knew how to respond. “Leaving?” I said at last. And the question hung in the air.
Tapio regarded Helga for a minute, and then quickly turned away. His face was pale. Clearly he was grappling with something. It looked as though whatever it was had gotten lodged in his esophagus.
“I am in love with Helga,” he said, his voice hoarse and overly loud. “I’m sorry to say it. I tried to stifle it in every way conceivable. I tried to deny it and burn it out of me. It crept up on me like a specter. When you three were gone in Pyramiden, I looked up from my work, and it was upon me. Like a disease. Like a gale. It seized me with such force and intensity that I…” He drifted off, speechless for a few long moments. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He stared miserably at Helga.
I was torn between great pity, embarrassment, and revulsion to see Tapio so reduced. The image of his back to me, heaving with sobs, after learning of his family’s ruin in the Finnish Civil War, came clear into my mind. What did a crack in one’s glacial face feel like when it had lain dormant for so long? It took a ruinous blow to rend stone.
“I know my love is unrequited. I know you will never reciprocate. I know you cannot. But my flesh is riddled with it.”
There was silence in Raudfjordhytta. Sixten, sensing some metaphysical unease, whined and put his head between my legs.
Helga cleared her throat. “Uncle,” she said, “will you excuse us for a moment?”
I rose and left with Sixten, but a malevolent spring blizzard had picked up, and I’d forgotten my heavy fur coat. I wished to give them privacy, but if I wandered far I might lose my way and die, leaving those two poor souls with each other. So I crouched against the siding, wrapping my arms around Sixten for our mutual warmth. His body trembled. We heard the whole conversation.
“My dear Tapio,” Helga said, and her voice, though muffled and subdued, was particularly kind. “I have only the greatest respect and fondness for you. That will never change. But you must forgive me if I ever led you to believe that such a thing was possible.”
“You did not,” he said. “You did not.”
“Then don’t despise me, my friend, and for God’s sake, don’t despise yourself.”
“Agreed,” he said. “And please. Don’t pity me.”
“You have my word. But why must you leave? Can’t we move past this? Why not stay for a month more in Biscayarhuken collecting yourself? Surely that place is far enough from the source of your discomfort. Uncle Sven needs your help. We both do. And I am still your friend, Tapio. Is friendship such a painful compromise?”
“Never mind that,” he said. “It’s my burden to carry, not yours.”
As I listened, I marveled at what it must have taken for Tapio to reveal his true self, what cruel mental wounds he must have endured these many months. And I thought with a flush of admiration how my niece, not yet twenty years old, had within her wells of empathy so deep as could never be exhausted by life’s dry-mouthed indifference.
Tapio left us in May.