as if she’s finally left a blackened town but then must go back around to it again, and no boat can take her farther.
So much becomes suddenly harsh and afterwards. I must study my Greek, must learn the four tenses of the verb to strike—Must buy new shoes.
The faint watermark—WT—floats on each thin page, then disappears beneath her chestnut ink.
The navigator, Albanov, had visions as he walked: “The sun is a ball of flames. It’s torrid summer. I see a port. People are strolling in the shadows of the high harbor walls. Shop doors are open. Peaches, oranges, apricots, raisins, cloves, and pepper all give off their wonderful scents. The ground steams with heat. Persian merchants are offering their wares.”
“We’re all sleepwalkers.”
On July 5, after walking for nearly three months, he writes in his journal that Nilsen’s dying. “He can hardly move, has lost the power of speech, mumbles only with great difficulty.” Then his attention turns to a huge block of floating ice “on which we spotted two large walruses and one small, about the size of a cow.” Then back to Nilsen: “He’s no longer responding, stares with a glassy look. We construct a makeshift tent out of some sails, wrap him in our only blanket.”
Then: “Sunday July 6, As we expected Nilsen was no more than a corpse this morning. Remarkably he did not display that terrible waxen pallor that makes the face of a corpse so ghastly. His features were calm. We wrapped the body in the blanket and carried it by sledge as far as the next terrace, roughly nine hundred feet. Not one of us wept for this man who had accompanied us for months, shared all our dangers, fatigue, and hardships. What does this say of us? What have I become? Nilsen has disappeared. His hopes and everything he lived for no longer mean a thing.”
Have I headed north not to feel, as Albanov came to believe he couldn’t feel? He mourned this in himself. “What does this say of us?” “What have I become?”
In my sleep I hear Albanov talking to Nilsen though Nilsen isn’t there: “We heard the calls of countless birds winging their way overhead, but our snow-blinded eyes weren’t able to see them.”
For weeks she doesn’t come. My days emptied of her, of anyone. On this map I’ve found: broken land-masses marked by black letters. Mt. Misery Novaya Sibir, White Island, Savina, Black Cove. Two islands called: Existence Doubtful. This world hidden from itself, mysterious even to itself. The blue arrows must indicate the directions of the currents. (Haven’t I sought such arrows in myself?—but little has come clear.) Then cordoned off in a rectangle in the lower right-hand corner:
PHYSICAL CHART OF NORTH POLAR REGIONS 1897.
By J. G. Bartholomew, F.R.S.E.
What did J. G. Bartholomew, F.R.S.E. think as he wrote in Existence Doubtful?—he who most likely never saw a single place he charted.
“Our veiled, damaged eyes,” Albanov wrote.
“Only the darkness helps. Sunlight is too painful.”
“Suddenly I spot some tiny yellow flowers. Imagine, after all these years! When I get closer I see they’re only rocks.”
“The brighter light is giving us violent attacks of snow blindness. Even close objects appear as if seen through muslin. Sometimes we see double.”
(If I could see intervals as well as objects … If intervals are shapes in their own right, then were those shapes around the bushes where I read the contours and forms of my own hiding?)
“The sun blinds us even at night in our tent, coming in through every crack and slit in the canvas.”
In the weeks before Albanov left, Captain Brusilov stared through fevered eyes. “In his delirium he looked like a skeleton covered not with skin but rubber. He would ask whether the horses had been given hay or oats. ‘What horses are you talking about, Georgii Lvovich? We don’t possess a single horse. We’re in the Kara Sea, trapped in ice, aboard the Saint Anna.’ ‘The horses over there,’ he’d reply, ‘the ones nuzzling Nurse Zhdanko.’”
(Claire read of a woman, Eloisa, whose eyes were covered by a veil. Even here, in so remote a place, a security veil of sonar and electric eyes monitors enemy aircraft traversing airspace that’s divided, owned.)
I thought words could train me to see better, but often it seems they just throw a scrim over everything. Even my name shifts around, I call myself Clare, then Clara, then Claire, can’t decide. Still, the banks of the Rhine are very beautiful, the river itself more narrow than