We are all laughing, Martin too.
“I can’t,” he says. “Really.”
When we drop him in Nybyen, where he is staying, he thanks us for the lift and hurries towards the entrance to his building. He doesn’t look back.
Natasha stares through the windscreen, both hands on the steering wheel. “He thought we were crazy.”
We’re strangers, Natasha, Klaudija, and I, but our brief acquaintance with a real stranger makes us realize how well we know one another, and how rapidly the understanding has come about. This is the way we’re supposed to live, I think to myself. Adrift and yet together, elated but at peace. Natasha drives us to a club called Huset, and we dance until three in the morning.
/
I board the ship the next day, at midday. Apart from me, there are only seven passengers. Once the guide, Torgrim, has taken us through the safety procedures and the itinerary we cast off. I stay on deck, gripping the thick black lip of the bow. I have bought myself a fur hat with earflaps, and new socks, boots, and gloves. Ugolgrad is basic — there are no shops at all — and it’s vital I should be properly equipped.
Behind us Longyearbyen gradually shrinks, the colorful A-frame houses swallowed by a landscape that is vast and jagged. We pass a gantry left over from the mining days, then the airport with its single runway. We pass a beach where I found pulpy green-gold banners of seaweed and square gray stones as flat as plates. The Isfjord lies ahead of us. The pinched mauve light makes the water look translucent, dense, almost congealed, like vodka when you keep it in the freezer. In the distance, on the western horizon, is a ghostly range of mountains, cloaked in snow. My heart dilates with a pleasure that is pure and undiluted.
We have been under way for at least an hour when a man in a red oil-stained baseball cap approaches me. His skin has a rough, pocked texture, like pebble dash. He is Captain Axelsen, he says. Am I the passenger who is going ashore in Ugolgrad? That’s me, I say. He asks how long I plan to stay.
“I’m hoping to live there,” I tell him.
He reaches beneath his baseball cap and scratches his wiry hair. “You’re hoping to live in Ugolgrad?”
“Yes.”
He stares at me.
“It’s something I’ve been dreaming of,” I say.
“Strange dream.”
“Really?”
“You haven’t been there,” he says. “You don’t know what it’s like.”
“I know enough.”
“After a day or two you’ll want to leave.” He wags a prophetic finger at me.
“No,” I say. “I won’t.”
“Yes,” he says complacently.
The surface of the water is ruffled now. We must be getting closer to the open sea. To the east, the Bird Cliffs tower above us, more than a thousand feet high. Carved into the sheer rock and worn smooth by the harsh climate and the passing centuries are huge repeating shapes that resemble ancient kings or warriors.
“It’s getting cold,” Axelsen says.
I follow him to the bridge, a narrow room with a polished wood floor and a rifle hanging on the wall. Once inside, he picks up where he left off. “Tomorrow,” he says, “or maybe the next day, the phone will ring, and there will be a voice on the other end, a little English voice. Please, the voice will say. Come with your ship. You have to take me away from this place.”
He makes it sound simple, sentimental, like a story for children, and I’m not sure whether to be insulted or amused.
“It won’t be the first time,” he says, “that I have heard those words.”
“So you make a habit of rescuing young women?”
He gives me a sharp look, then adjusts his baseball cap and peers through the window. I watch as he decides to attack the subject from another angle. He’s a stubborn man, and won’t be put off. It’s important to him that I see things his way.
“The weather’s good today,” he says. “Soon it will be much colder, and it will be dark all the time.”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “That’s what I’m looking for. That’s why I came.”
He looks at me again, and his eyes flare. “No, it’s you who do not understand. It’s not like Longyearbyen, where you are going. It’s a sad place. They don’t have money or respect for the environment. Also it’s dangerous, especially at the weekends. The men are always drunk, and fighting. There’s no law. And you, you’re only a girl —”
He breaks off to answer a call on the radio. While he talks in Norwegian, I put my face close to the glass. His depiction of the mining town feels exaggerated, the fruit of prejudice and superstition. He might as well be telling me that Russians eat their offspring or have six fingers on each hand. Directly overhead, the sky is a swirl of brooding black, but a smoky glowing strip of orange in the west has turned the water all around us steel blue. A gull glides past, flush with the horizon.
“We stay in Ugolgrad for an hour and a half,” Axelsen says a few minutes later, when the call is over. “There’s enough time for you to walk around. You can see everything in an hour and a half. Then you can come back, with me.”
Not wanting to upset him, I pretend to be considering his proposition. The rumble of the engines, the dull gleam of the cream paint on the walls …
“It can be a strength,” Axelsen says, “to know when to change your mind.”
That’s probably true, I think to myself.
“I will not think less of you,” he says.
I thank him for his advice and his kind offer, then I tell him I’m going out to get some air.
Standing on the upper deck, I watch the water peel back from the hull, fold after fold. The cold has a weight to it. The cold feels solid. In the far reaches of the fast-encroaching darkness the mountains are dim white shapes. From studying the map I know I’m looking northwest, towards Oscar II Land and the research station at Ny-Ålesund.
Walking over to the other side, I find Torgrim with his hands in his pockets, a knitted wool hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He jerks his chin towards a few scattered lights.
“The airport for Ugolgrad,” he says.
As we round the headland more lights appear. A tall chimney stands close to the shore, dark smoke trailing out across the water. I ask Torgrim what he knows about the town.
“You hear some strange things,” he says. “I don’t know if they’re true.”
“Like what?”
He tells me about a man who was wanted by the Russian Mafia. He fetched up in Ugolgrad. Found work in the mine. It was so far away and so isolated that he thought he would be safe.
“And was he?” I ask.
Torgrim shrugs. “I never heard any more about him.”
Despite my warm clothes I’m shivering. Ugolgrad. It’s hard to believe this is the place I have been making for, hard to believe I have almost reached my destination. Because that’s what it is. My destination. After Ugolgrad there’s nowhere left to go.
/
The shoreline shocks me with its mood of baleful dereliction, and just for a moment I’m tempted to follow Axelsen’s advice and take the boat straight back to Longyearbyen. The buildings on the waterfront have corrugated-iron roofs and broken windows. Rusting containers stand about in the glare of the floodlights, and coal has been dumped in careless heaps, staining the snow. A truck is parked at an angle, a knot of workers gathered at the back. Two or three of them wield shovels. Beyond them, wooden steps zigzag up to the town, which huddles on a ledge about a hundred feet above the sea.
The boat bumps against ridged tractor tires that are held in place by rusting chains, and then a rope is flung through the air and looped round an iron bollard. Torgrim unshackles a metal walkway and lowers it onto the quay. I let the other passengers go first. As I follow with my luggage I hear Axelsen’s voice.