I’m in my mother’s Alfa Romeo, racing up the slip road that leads off the autostrada. Bright sunlight flashes through the inside of the car like something splintering. A petrol station, the grating of cicadas. My mother’s eyes behind dark glasses. Blue-gray irises, black lashes. I know what she wants me to say, so I say it. Are we there yet?
She smiles. Nearly, my darling. Nearly there.
FOUR
Wedged into a narrow river valley between two mountain ridges, and sloping gently down to a fjord, Longyearbyen has a magnetic quality I can feel in my bones. People tell me I could find a job — in a hotel, or a restaurant — but I stick to my original plan and after three days I hear about a tourist ship that can drop me in Ugolgrad, the Russian mining settlement Elena mentioned. The man who sells me the ticket works out of a large-scale Nissan hut on the waterfront. I’m lucky, he says. The season is almost over. It’s likely to be the last boat of the year. The skin around his eyes is wrinkled, a pattern of miniature diamond shapes, but the eyes themselves are a clear washed pale blue. The voyage will take three hours, he tells me. Though daylight is limited, I might glimpse a ringed seal — even, perhaps, a whale. I’m curious to know how long he has lived in the town. Twenty years, he says. Everyone in Longyearbyen has a story, he goes on. Either they’ve run away from something or they’re looking for something. He studies me for a moment, as if wondering how I might fit into the equation. I ask him about Ugolgrad, and there’s a subtle shift in his face that reminds me of a gust of wind moving across a lake.
“It’s interesting,” he says.
“When English people use that word,” I say, “it often has a negative meaning.”
“Yes.”
His ambiguous response only fuels the mystery and makes me still more determined to see the place. Longyearbyen, Ugolgrad … These, after all, are the names I pored over in the Meridian. Polysyllabic, clumsy, they seem appropriate to me, like numb fingers trying to grasp something in the cold. Ugolgrad is part of Russia, but it’s also nowhere at all, adrift in subzero waters, virtually unreachable during the winter months. In a travel agency near the Radisson I notice a poster issued by the Norwegian Ministry of Tourism. You are welcome to Svalbard, it says, as long as you leave no trace of your visit behind. They are doing their best to protect the pristine environment, of course, but they might be talking directly to me. It’s as if they knew I was coming.
/
My hotel is by the docks. Converted from a row of miners’ cabins, it has a wide gateway with antlers arranged along the top. At the back is a conservatory where you can sample Arctic delicacies like smoked whale. On my last night in Longyearbyen I take a seat by the window and write to Oswald. The postcard has a picture of a husky on the front. Not a patch on Josef, I scribble, then sign my name and add two kisses. Later, I start talking to Natasha, the girl with the tongue stud who runs the bar. Within minutes, our conversation becomes intimate, even confessional. She’s from Ukraine, and has been living in town for about nine months. During the day she works in a hairdressing salon. Two years ago she lost her boyfriend in a crash on the outskirts of Kiev. She was in the car at the time, but escaped without a scratch. “He died in my arms,” she says. “On a roundabout, in the rain.” Then she smiles and says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. I don’t even know you.”
While Natasha pours drinks and takes food orders from the tables behind me, I sit at the bar. We keep talking, and halfway through the evening she looks at me sideways and upwards — she is loading dirty glasses into the dishwasher — and asks if I would like to go on an expedition after she has closed up.
“An expedition?” I say.
We leave at eleven-thirty with Klaudija, the Latvian girl who works on reception. Klaudija has an ear cuff with an ivory pendant and a silver chain, and her dyed red hair is long on top and shaved at the sides. After spending five years in casinos in Oslo and Stockholm she came to Longyearbyen to be with her boyfriend. She only sees him every other week — he has a job in Svea, a Norwegian mine half an hour away by plane — but he’s the love of her life and she’s hoping to have his baby.
Natasha fills her car with petrol, then drives east, into the dark. I lean forwards, my head between the two front seats, such an excitement in me that I feel like a child again. In the headlights the unpaved road looks black, as if made from coal, and it is raised like a causeway, with water on both sides. On our right is the town’s reservoir. On our left, the Adventfjord, which becomes more and more shallow until it merges into marshland and tundra.
Ten kilometers out of town, at the foot of a mountain, is an old trappers’ camp. Natasha parks, but leaves her headlights on high beam. In the foreground stands a tall triangular structure fashioned out of wood, a kind of gibbet. Four huge dead seals hang upside down from the apex, the ground beneath them stained red and black with congealed blood. Along one of the horizontal struts are twenty or thirty glinting cod, also upside down, with nails driven through their tail fins. There are huts with antlers fixed upright above their doors, and rows of metal sledges, and boxes filled with empty bullet casings. Inside a fenced compound are dozens of wooden hutches raised up on legs, each with a husky’s name on it. The nearest — Borneo — sits quietly, his eyes coin-flat in the glare of the headlights.
Back in the car, we drive up the mountain to Mine 7, which crouches on a steep slope above the valley like a spider in the top corner of a room. Several reindeer graze some distance off, and higher up, on the rounded summit, are two squat telescopes belonging to an observatory. I go over to Natasha, who is standing by herself, looking out over the valley. Far below, Longyearbyen shows as a handful of lights.
“This is a healing place,” she says. “Here you can just be.”
We stand quietly, side by side. Green shapes begin to appear above us, faint at first, but gradually increasing in intensity.
Klaudija joins us. “They say you’re looking at the armor of the gods.”
The breath stops in my lungs. Tilting my head back, I stare up into the sky. I think of veils, smoke. Waves breaking. I think of curtains. I think of ghosts. When our necks begin to ache we lie on our backs in the snow. Time has slowed down, or else it has been suspended altogether. There isn’t anything for it to measure. It no longer applies. I feel I’m at the very center of the world, and at the same time I don’t count. I’m everything and nothing, the gap between the two collapsing like the pleats in an accordion.
Here you can just be.
Later, as we drive round Longyearbyen, Natasha picks up a tourist who is hitching. His name is Martin, and he comes from Utrecht. We ask if he wants to go dancing. He says he can’t. He has to be up early. He’s climbing Hiortfjellet the next day.
“Hiortfjellet?” I say.
He points through the back window, at the mountains on the far side of the fjord.
“I think you should come with us,” Klaudija says.
Natasha agrees. “You only live once.”
“How often does this happen,” I say, “three beautiful women asking you to go out with them?”