Skuld, age seven, 1933. She was unbothered by the long dark. Utterly unmoved. As though that were the natural order of things—the sun lingering tirelessly for half the year, then vanishing—and any other way would be suspect. She was used to immutable fixtures proving themselves otherwise. I studied her for signs of Helga’s illness but found none. She was a serious child, diligent to a fault and occasionally circumspect, but with great flights of wild, unselfconscious merriment. The Norwegian sailors loved her as they loved her mother, though in a different manner, perhaps. Protective for the sake of the young woman who had always been so game, and whom they spoke of with some reverence, as though Helga were dead.
For years I’d waited anxiously for letters to begin arriving from Helga, telling me something—anything—of her new existence, or at the very least her survival, but they had not. Nor had MacIntyre been able to discover anything of her whereabouts. My own life was one of absented people, and yet I never could get used to it. On some level of perception, I always felt flayed.
The best I could do, it seemed, was to keep Helga’s memory alive in Skuld’s mind. I begged my sister for any photograph she could spare, and of course Olga complied, desperate to offer whatever she could to her granddaughter, in the wake of her abandonment. Though the mitigating circumstances had been kept from Olga, she had been deeply distraught by Helga’s disappearance. All the speculation in the world couldn’t bring her daughter back into focus, so she’d turned her restless attention to Skuld and sent nearly every photograph she owned. Deeming it wrong to keep them hidden away in a tin at Raudfjordhytta, trotted out only on sentimental occasions, Skuld and I determined that Helga should be put on display. That way the stories about her might flow more freely. But since we had no frames, the walls of Raudfjordhytta and the Biscay hut were spotted with faded, curling, strange still lifes of Helga doing this or that, ranging from age twelve, when cameras had become more widely available and Arvid had proved himself a dedicated, if not particularly talented, amateur photographer, to age sixteen, when a pregnant Helga had left for Spitsbergen. Therefore she was always young and precocious, often either scowling dramatically or smiling incongruously. This Helga did not seem much like the Helga of my stories, but the prop was better than nothing. And we told them so often, Skuld filling in the details she knew with solemn intimacy, that the telling did not seem like such a weight.
In late September, perhaps a week or two after we returned from our annual pilgrimage to visit MacIntyre in Longyear—Uncle Charlie, she called him, to his immense amusement and satisfaction—a ship tacked into Alicehamna. As they often did, more sailors than were strictly necessary came ashore to visit with Skuld. I stayed indoors, sitting by the window so that I might keep an eye on the proceedings. For years I had harbored a ridiculous fear that one of the sailors might try to abduct her, thinking I was unfit to be her parent. It was almost enough to bring me outside, though not quite. I’d given Skuld the letter to MacIntyre I wished to send and she was off. Now I could hear her chasing the Norwegians back and forth across the beach, the grown men laughing and whooping like schoolchildren. Every so often the scene passed before me and then disappeared again. Craning my neck to see where they’d gone, and wishing to ensure that no ice bear—however unlikely this time of year—was ambling toward them, drawn by the commotion, I noticed that one of the sailors had failed to join in the sport. The man was methodically unloading four large crates from the dinghy. The sailors paid no notice to him, and neither did Skuld. I couldn’t imagine what he was about, as I had ordered no goods, but perhaps MacIntyre had seen fit to send along more books for Skuld’s education.
“Bless and curse the man in equal measures,” I said to no one. “We have no more room in this hut.”
But when the sailors had all taken leave of Skuld and departed, judging by the sudden profound quiet, and I stepped outside to investigate, the lone sailor was still there, to my astonishment, going through the crates with meticulous attention as though cataloging each item. The dinghy was already back with her ship. Skuld stood about twenty careful paces from the man, eyeing him warily. She knew just as well as I did that he was no sailor.
“Your ship is leaving,” I called to him from the doorway. “You had best hail your friends unless you wish to spend the winter in Raudfjorden. They seem to have forgotten you already.”
“Confound whoever stowed this cargo,” he said in a tone of great irritation. “Everything is ahoo.”
“Tapio!” I exclaimed, and stumbled down the beach in my stockings to greet him.
He returned the embrace with weary resignation. It had been yet another four-and-a-half-year interval since I’d seen him, and though I heard tell of his doings periodically from MacIntyre, he and I never communicated directly: Tapio was not epistolary by nature, and he seldom had an address. Our friendship was one of patience and presence, and that was how it endured.
“Always returning unlooked-for,” I said, “and always a thousand times welcome.”
“Better to surprise than disappoint,” he said, and I could see by his eyes that he was pleased.
“Where is Sixten?” I said, half to myself. “He will be delighted to find you here.”
“Oh, he greeted me twenty minutes ago. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you failed to notice. There he is way up the hill, rolling in something.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Helga is gone. She left three years ago this past spring.”
“I heard,” he said. “I’m here to begin Skuld’s training. And continue yours.”
“I have already begun her training,” I said with a knowing look.
He snorted.
So began the era of Uncle Tapio. I was “Papa” to Skuld—despite my ritual reminders that I was nothing of the kind, it seemed to her the most appropriate honorific—and this made Tapio my brother. She took to his mentorship with a readiness and a natural talent that surprised even him. Within a year she knew more than I ever would about the migratory patterns of caribou and eider duck, the fourteen different ways to stalk seal, the proper order in which to butcher a bear, the signs of approaching pack ice, how to prepare greasy eggs so they were palatable, and everything else that mattered to a Spitsbergen hunter. She never lorded it over me—her rapidly advancing knowledge and skill—but inspired me to do better. Well, that is not entirely true. At times her enthusiasm inspired me to do less, because my efforts were increasingly unnecessary. In Skuld, Tapio finally found the apprentice he had been seeking, someone with whom he could share a lifetime’s accumulation of experience.
To my immense pride, and her pleasure, he showed his approval openly. “The skill of moving silently through the landscape is like music,” he told her. “Almost you make me feel less a teacher and more a musician.”
Each evening, after Skuld had gone to sleep, we would sit at the table, alternately working in silence or speaking quietly across a wide range of subjects. It was as though no time has passed between then and our first days together in Camp Morton. He would always be the same Tapio, and it was reassuring to be in the proximity of someone as constant as a stone who also, somehow, possessed an inexhaustible well of curiosity about the larger world. He had opinions on all things, of course, many of them entrenched, but he was fundamentally curious.
We spoke of the murders in Pyramiden. Tapio knew the outline from MacIntyre, but due to his own experience with homicide, he was far less moved by the act itself than he was by the tale of Helga’s agony. And I talked about Ludmilla, to whom I deemed it too risky to write, and for whom I’d pined wretchedly until realizing, at last, that if Skuld and I were to survive, I had to bury my despair. Now it lay dormant like an old burn, ready to inflame if abraded, or if the long night grew too quiet. In any case, MacIntyre had written to convey a rumor that Ludmilla and Misha had abandoned the Pig House, or been relieved of their duties, and returned to Mother Russia. She was beyond my reach. For his part, Tapio seemed to have gained a greater understanding of the heart’s vicissitudes, but he nonetheless approved of repression as an effective coping mechanism.
He and I also discussed Illya, whose life seemed shrouded. Illya and I had written steadfastly for a year following the incident in Pyramiden. He was perhaps the only correspondent, including MacIntyre, to whom I’d ever been so devoted. As it happened, he had indeed returned to Ukraine, and was working part-time for a tailor in Kiev. He was also publishing, he said, some opinion pieces for a local newspaper, along with a few tracts and pamphlets. Most were political in nature. He was, as ever, wholly unguarded.
“The poor soul,” Tapio said. “Anarchists are a well-meaning sort. But they place an inordinate amount of trust in human nature. It is audacious, I’ll grant you, to assume that people in small groups will cooperate and do what needs to be done. Don’t they ever need to travel on roads? Or go to university? Or seek medical attention?”
“I’m certain that were he here, Illya would say that socialists have even greater faith in humanity, for they trust a small group to govern in the interests of everyone else.”
“A valid point,” Tapio said.
As far as I knew, Tapio had never conceded a point in his life, and though it may technically have been Illya’s point, I was elated.
Illya had also been writing to MacIntyre, and the two of them sent tobacco to each other, comparing notes about the condimental application of Latakia, and the right ratio of Oriental leaf to sweet Virginia. I could scarcely keep up and left such intricacies to them. At a certain point, Illya’s father, Leon, entered the conversation, for he disagreed with many of the finer points and, having worked for a tobacconist for many years, had some legitimate authority on the subject. He, too, began a lively correspondence with MacIntyre, so now Illya’s envelopes contained multigenerational treatises on the proper methods of curing Black Cavendish.
Then, in the spring of 1932, MacIntyre had received a letter with U.S.S.R. postage that was lighter than usual. It contained only one brief letter from Leon. He said that Illya had been snatched up. Apparently Illya had been warned several times to cease publication of his political tracts or else change his tune, and true to himself as always he ignored these warnings. One day, Leon came home from work to find his son gone. All of his things were still there—even his pipe. He never came back. Soviet citizens were beginning to vanish left and right at the merest hint of political dissatisfaction, and there were whispers of prisons and labor camps in far eastern Siberia, so Leon assumed that Illya had been spirited off to such an inhuman place. The grieving father had no recourse. He feared for his own safety, and that of his other children and grandchildren, if he spoke out of turn. That was the last we heard of Illya.
In January, midway through a winter of moderate tribulation, Tapio took leave to spend some time at Biscayarhuken and, from there, to rehabilitate the hut in Reinsdyrflya, near Welcome Point, where I had seldom gone. He thought the pack ice might have brought bears to the far northern coast. Skuld begged to go with him, but I explained that every grown person needs some time alone—Tapio, perhaps, more than most.
“What about you, Papa?” she said. “You get no time alone.”
“That is true, my dear, and I have no choice.”
Tapio made the trip back and forth several times. Once, he did bring Skuld, and she returned with tales that made Basque Hook and Reindeerland sound like the living heart of Faerie. She could find nothing that displeased her in Spitsbergen.
After another expedition north, Tapio said he’d met one of our neighbors, a man named Ritter, who was overwintering with his wife in Grey Hook, a dreary place with unceasing cloud cover on the other side of Woodfjorden. Apparently Ritter had been caught out in a particularly unpleasant blizzard and sought shelter at Biscayarhuken. Tapio would not turn away another hunter in need, though he did feel that the man had perhaps overstayed his welcome by two or three days.
“Germans,” Tapio said.
“Oh dear. I seem to remember that you don’t approve of them.”
“It’s possible they’re Austrians. Little difference in any case—they speak the same ghastly tongue. The man was a boor. He talked of his wife as one would a servant. He hadn’t even taught her to hunt and trap yet. How else will she survive in the likely event that he dies? At least they have a competent Norwegian with them, by the sound of it. Otherwise they would surely perish. All his wife does is cook and sew.”
“We do our fair share of cooking and sewing,” I said.
“Don’t be obtuse.”
The peculiar element of Tapio’s story was that, to his wonder and amusement, the Ritters knew of me. Somehow, by virtue of my hermetic lifestyle, a certain fascination—and a host of wild untruths—had risen up about my doings. Apparently I had become, in Spitsbergen at least, somewhat famous. But few even knew what I looked like, let alone how I lived. So when Tapio refused to give his name, or to concede, over the course of his four days cloistered with Ritter, that he spoke more than three words of Norwegian, the man naturally assumed that Tapio was Stockholm Sven. Tapio allowed the misapprehension to continue, partly because he had no desire to make Ritter’s proper acquaintance, and partly because he imagined that his friend Hilmar Nøis—an old trapper who would travel halfway across the archipelago on his dogsled just to deliver a piece of mail and tell a few lies—would find the conflation deeply hilarious.
“So what did you do the whole time, if you didn’t speak?”
“I cleaned. I baked a great deal. The bread will store well for a spring excursion to Reinsdyrflya.”
“Now they’ll say I’m a compulsive cleaner and baker.”
“There are worse rumors.”
Tapio sent Ritter away with some onions, for they were languishing in Grey Hook, and indicated that the man could bring his wife to Reindeer Land so that she, too, might have a chance to meet “the most northerly Swede in the world.” But spring came, and the Ritters must have had difficulty crossing the treacherous broken ice of Woodfjorden, for they did not arrive when Tapio was still at the hut in Reinsdyrflya. With the intention of adding some perplexing details to the mystery that enshrouded me, Tapio set the table for them. He left a veritable feast of dark cornmeal bread. He even went so far as pouring sugar and powdered milk into their coffee. It would freeze hard and, once thawed by the heat of the woodstove, be ready to drink. The Ritters would marvel at Stockholm Sven’s fevered monasticism. Hilmar Nøis could fill in the gaps.