The navigator, Albanov, spent years pleading with Admiral Kolchak to launch a search expedition for his ship, the Saint Anna. Then suddenly, in 1919, he disappeared.
On a paper scrap he’d written, “But where could my ship be? Always this cold … That polar bear I saw dragged itself for miles on its front paws alone, both hind legs broken, spinal cord injured. I found twelve bullets in its flesh. If the ship is still intact somewhere, but what supplies would they have had?—six pounds of meat powder, two of dried apples, three tins of condensed milk. How long could they have lived on that? I find the word lost very painful.”
For years he seemed to have simply disappeared. But he’d been blown apart in a munitions explosion at a train station on the way to see Admiral Kolchak; the body was eventually identified from a briefcase and a severed leg.
“Can you define for me what a human being is?” the Goddess of Consolation asked Boethius. “Your eyes are clouded with the cataracts of the human world.” “Would you waste away in your own mind?”
I think of her questions as I watch Claire’s hand holding her papers to the flames, and as I see in my mind’s eye Albanov’s words, the ones that pained him, and his briefcase, still locked, beside the torn body.
Fanny,
When the letter arrived I opened it as Trelawny had instructed. It was from Roberts, informing him two bodies had washed up on the shore. Shelley and Edward Williams. Mary and Jane in the other room, still waiting. (… all those weeks Allegra was dead I didn’t know she was dead … this thin lock of her hair, this stilted miniature portrait I hold … Trelawny said I must watch for any letter that might come—open it and read it.)
it’s festa tonight. There’s dancing and singing from the village—
How can I walk into that room, how can I tell them?
And the Goddess(no) her robes were torn(no) her robes didn’t exist
XXXXX
Dear Mr. Hunt,
I assure you I cannot break it to them, nor is my spirit capable of giving them consolation, or protecting them from the first burst of their despair. Give me some counsel, or arrange some method by which they may know it. Their case is desperate in every respect.
Ever your sincere friend,
Clare
These are the never-returned:
John Franklin, who vanished with his two ships and all his crew in 1845 while trying to find the Northwest Passage.
Ross G. Marvin, who traveled with Peary to the Pole but died on the trip coming back. Some say he fell into an open lead, others that he was murdered.
George W. De Long, whose ship, the Jeanette, was sunk by ice in the Bering Strait. He and his crew escaped in three smaller boats, traveling the Lena River, but one boat was lost, and De Long and the remaining crew starved and froze to death after reaching land.
James B. Lockwood, who assisted on the Lady Franklin Bay expedition. After reaching the highest altitude recorded at that time, he died of starvation.
Charles Francis Hall, who went out in search of Franklin, and mysteriously collapsed on his last journey.
Henry Hudson, whose men mutinied and lowered him and his son into a lifeboat to drift out into the icy sea.
And so many others, their names lost or bundled together into the general category of “crew.”
Fanny,
The watery surface so blank now. It’s July, but I feel ice in me moving and breaking. Shelley walked with a warming fire in his hands. Last August on the morning of his birthday, we rowed out into the harbor. He said to me (but I cant recall why we were speaking of such things): “If I’ve erred it’s on behalf of the weak, not in conjunction with the powerful.” There were seabirds diving here and there, the sun just up and rising.
6 towels Mary. Those marked x—S has read also:
2 neck cloth x Letters from Norway
3 Tablecloth x Mary, a Fiction
2 pillow cases x Political Justice
1 flan pett x The Monk—by Lewis—
x Sorcerer. a novel.
x Thaliba Emilia Galotti
x Barrow’s Embassy to China
Fanny,
It seems so much of what makes us who we are comes not firsthand, not seen with our own eyes, but from a distance—events learned about, heard of, and we hold them in our minds in silence (as I hold you). Alter them, construct them, break them down. Turn them over and over alone. Distance laying claim to whole tracts of who