Afterlands

  AFTERLANDS

  A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

  A Globe and Mail, National Post, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen

  and Vancouver Province Best Book

  “A sophisticated, densely layered fictional exploration of survival, love, betrayal and the personal cost of history. … Heighton is an experienced adventurer in literary form. … A sense of boldness and risk-taking infuses Afterlands. … A novel of big ideas and beautiful language.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Skilfully constructed, beautifully written … Afterlands is a superior example of a rare breed: the literary adventure story.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A triumph of a novel. … To try to contain this savage, beautiful tale in a few paragraphs is to do it an injustice. It is to be savoured. … Steven Heighton has pulled off a masterpiece.”

  —Daily Express (UK)

  “Heighton churns history with a writerly imagination. … [A] terrific go at the Great Arctic Novel.”

  —TIME (Canada)

  “Compulsively readable, in the tradition of so many shipwreck stories, from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “Heighton is a wordsmith and sentence-sculptor of the old school. … [Here] he strikes a match between form and content so apt that the author becomes, in the best of ways, invisible. … It takes a rare combination of discipline and imagination to do such stories full justice, and Afterlands proves beyond any doubt that Heighton has got it.”

  —The Gazette (Montreal)

  “A wonderful, whiteout epic that unpicks the triumph and tragedy of the human spirit.”

  —GQ (UK)

  “Afterlands is up there with the best work in the genre. … This is gripping stuff. … Heighton is a superb stylist … in complete control of the language.”

  —National Post

  “[A] great story. … A numbingly dramatic, visually stunning tour de force.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This novel’s scale, its delight in detail and its psychological insight make it an exceptionally satisfying adventure.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Moving and artfully understated. … For the reader, all [the] pieces fit.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Heighton makes every sentence count… [and his cast] leaps out of history in a way that only the best-rendered characters can.”

  —Vancouver Sun

  “Heighton churns history with a writerly imagination. … [A] terrific go at the Great Arctic Novel.”

  —TIME (Canada)

  “Steven Heighton is one of the finest writers in this country.”

  —Barbara Gowdy, author of The Romantic

  “Afterlands is a gripping read. … It’s the stuff of a great movie but is also full of spellbinding language. …”

  —The Kingston Whig-Standard

  “A major work by any standards, uniting beautiful writing, unforgettable characters, and profound ideas on the lessons afforded by history.”

  —Books in Canada

  “Heighton is a masterful storyteller and one of Canada’s finest writers. … Like Wayne Johnston in The Navigator of New York, his blend of fact and fancy is plausible and … handled with delicacy. … By far the most compelling treatment of the Polaris story.”

  —Kenn Harper, Arctic Book Review

  CONTENTS

  Map

  ONE

  Bury Me at Sea

  TWO

  Versions of Loyalty

  THREE

  Afterlands

  Last Versions

  Author’s Note

  ONE

  BURY ME AT SEA

  But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the line of the equator … go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?

  —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Wanted to shadow the three of you, all scattered by the one storm. Tracked you (or some sediment, cinder of you) to churchyards along the seaboard near Mystic, or indio graveyards above the gaunt gorges of Sinaloa—a search party of one, a mere century-plus late. No, more—with every resource I searched, clue traced, a shade more of your oblivious withdrawal, waning to ash, as I scrawled my course (it seemed) ever nearer, through tiered detritus downward, by the spadeful, a volunteer unwilling to leave the warlike scene—recovering just fragments, fallout, DNA.

  Dawson City, Yukon, September 2001

  Hartford, Connecticut, September 1876

  AN ESQUIMAU PLAYING MENDELSSOHN is a tremendous novelty. The local gentry fill the seats of the Main Street Memorial Hall, whiskery gentlemen in frock coats and wing collars, the ladies in gowns and layer-cake hats trimmed with ribbon and mock flora. Their elegant figures are shored up by trusses or corsets—synthetic exoskeletons fortified with whalebone. If any members of this audience make a connection between their own underclothes and the presence onstage of a child from the Arctic whaling grounds, they don’t let on. They are effusive in their praise of the little Esquimau. She is clearly a prodigy. She is only ten years of age! She has been playing the piano for only three years! How charming she looks in her cream cotton dress with the puffed sleeves, the ends of her braids joined at the small of her back with a red ribbon bow. As they whisper and nod, a lush welling of self-appreciation and security warms their chests.

  In fact, Punnie is not playing as well as she did when rehearsing for the recital with her teacher, Mr Chusley, who will be performing after her and before the chief attraction, a master recitalist from Leipzig who is said to have known Mendelssohn personally. This lean and tousled master, seated severely in the front row, will be aware that the girl has committed a few slips. What he doesn’t know is that her playing also lacks its usual earnest, beguiling zest. Punnie is dizzy and has to concentrate to suppress the dry scraping cough that has been gaining on her since April. Throughout the summer holiday she has been practising, as much as four hours a day. There is something unnerving, quietly violent, in her discipline. She’s the sort of only child who lives for the endorsement of adults. More and more these days she coughs while she rehearses. She and her parents, Tukulito and Ebierbing—Hannah and Joe is how they are known to Americans—came down from the Arctic after the rescue over three years ago, but the poor child still carries the Far North in her lungs. So Mr Chusley puts it. He even urges her to practise less.

  Actually Punnie’s cough began not in the Arctic but after their journey south.

  Stiff in the aisle seat of a middle row, Tukulito sees that her daughter is struggling, but the audience is so caught up in the spectacle of this oddly pallid Esquimau child playing one of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words—op. 30, no. 1 in E flat—that they don’t notice. Tukulito’s face has the waxen stillness of somebody watching the last stages of a shipwreck, trying to contain her alarm—a stillness that could be mistaken for calm. This is her usual expression. Only her eyes, sharp with practical understanding and quick sympathy, lend life to her face; enough life for a dozen faces.

  In fact, the child is something of a prodigy. Mr Chusley, a soft little man with sombre brown eyes, rumpled clothes and clove-scented breath (and, unluckily for his dreams, stumpy hands and fingers), has said that he foresees fine fine things for the girl. Very fine indeed. And Tukulito grasps that this is not a man given to flattery. A stutterer, he keeps his utterances short. I’ve never yet tutored a child possessed of such a, such a faculty of silent concentration. Your Punnie seems to me utterly undistractable. Chusley does not then detour into ethnological conjecture, like s
ome of the well-meaning Groton neighbours, on whether this is a specialized trait—a result of the savage’s need for vigilance by the seal’s breathing hole, or his wife’s Oriental patience, acquired in the igloo waiting with the children for her mate’s return. … For some years the life of the Esquimaux has gripped the romantic imagination. They’ve become a staple of polar adventure novels, which emphasize their fortitude, their loyalty, their stealth, their rare inscrutable lapses into cunning and violence. In the 1860s the fascination with Esquimaux even hatched a short-lived fad for duelling with bone harpoons. The Polaris debacle and Lieutenant Tyson’s subsequent drift on the ice with eighteen other castaways have made them even more popular; Tukulito’s husband Ebierbing was in some ways the hero of Tyson’s published account of the drift (as Second Mate Kruger was its villain), and this Esquimau family have been celebrities since settling in the port town of Groton, Connecticut.

  Tukulito still thinks about Mr Kruger but has not heard from him in some time.

  The child is small for her age, no grand piano ever looked huger. She will start a piece straight-backed on the bench but as she plays she will tip gradually forward so that by the last bar her face is just above the keys. (Mr Chusley has tried to correct this.) Her playing is stronger now, op. 67, no. 5 in B minor, “The Shepherd’s Complaint.” Those firm-pacing, stately notes in the minor until, just as the ear is tiring of the solemnity, the tune resolves into major.

  Two rows ahead of Tukulito are a pair of gentlemen who arrived late and claimed these last seats in the house. The man on the aisle has black hair of collar length, pomaded and combed straight back to cover a bald patch. The rims of his ears stand well out from the sides of his narrow skull. The other has a shaggy head of white hair and, fuzzing the slabs of his claret cheeks, side-whiskers that Tukulito sees whenever he turns to address his companion. His voice is genial and raspy. The black-haired man doesn’t turn or even move his head when he speaks, but she hears him too: the ponderous baritone of a butler or mortician. Her hearing is the talent not just of a quiet observer used to being discussed, but also of the Arctic’s first professional interpreter, sought after by expeditions for the last twenty years.

  The black-haired one’s accent is difficult to place, though she gathers he is a visitor, from Canada. She swallows her own impulse to cough so that she can keep listening to him as well as to Punnie. He might remark on Punnie’s playing. It matters to her as much as ever that the white people regard her family as something more than a sideshow attraction.

  He says softly, I would agree that the question of the Esquimaux’ nationality is a highly vexed one. But I maintain that the girl must be deemed Canadian, because her home, in Cumberland Bay, is in Canadian territory.

  But that would make her a subject of the British Empire, wouldn’t it?

  Indeed it would, sir.

  The white-haired man chuckles. You can hardly expect us to accept that, Mr Wilt. As you know, the family resides down here in Groton now. And the Polaris expedition was an American enterprise. No, no, Mr Wilt, our claim is thoroughly staked!

  Hush! This from a beard and monocle in the next row.

  For a few moments, they hush.

  Then: Some have declared, sir, that your Polaris expedition was in fact a German one.

  The shaggy bear’s-head shakes wryly. So now you’re claiming the Esquimaux for Germany!

  Wilt gives a formal snort and then, as if conscious of being overheard, he whispers, It must be remembered that her parents enjoyed their first contact with civilization in England. They took tea and dined with the Queen herself! The accent of the mother, I am told, is still English!

  True enough, Wilt, but—

  I understand furthermore that her husband has returned to the Canadian Arctic.

  Returned, Mr Wilt, with another American expedition! And he is expected home within the year. Home, Wilt, to Groton!

  This last phrase, inanely disembodied, hovers in the brief silence as Punnie completes her third of the Songs without Words—the “Cradle Song,” op. 67, no. 6 in E. Its dying trill is deftly executed. She stands under the soaring proscenium arch, buffeted by applause. Her hands dangle at her sides. The tight hard line of her mouth, which always gives her an aspect of stern determination, so adult, now suggests barely contained discomfort. She looks out at the crowd. As if overcome by the response, she brings a hand to her mouth, a fetching gesture, it appears, of bashful pleasure, astonishment at these accolades—but Tukulito understands. Her daughter’s coughing can’t be heard over the ovation. The two patriots surge to their feet with the rest of the house, and while continuing to clap heartily they go on hauling the child back and forth across international borders.

  Some, of course, might submit that they are a nation unto themselves.

  Well, but the Danes have also laid claim to that region, haven’t they?

  It is news to me, sir, but I would be little surprised.

  Tukulito remains seated, sheltered in the dark cavity formed by the people standing around her. The gentlemen’s words are not unamusing; still, shame flares along her collar and prickles her scalp under the hairpinned Brussels cap. After twenty years she is still not hardened to being spoken of as if absent or incapable of understanding. At first, in London, she quietly relished all the curiosity and attention, accepting it as evidence that her people’s faith in their own specialness was not misplaced. The Chosen People is what any nation thinks it is, until history disappoints it; or destroys it. In time her growing knowledge of English allowed her to grasp and forced her to brood on the commentary of onlookers, especially during her and Ebierbing’s tenure as fur-clad “Living Exhibits” at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York, in 1862. By and by her outlook was changed, her pleasure in public life reduced. This shame is familiar. This shame is the trite undertow of her adult life. But now it forms part of a new and hybrid emotion as her corseted chest floods with the heat of her pride, and anxious love. These Sons and Daughters of the Distant North, Ladies and Gentlemen, possess some ninety words for Snow! Yet only a fraction of human feelings are clearly nameable. Most feelings are complex chords, like the ones Punnie plays, minor or major or suspended, each composed of many notes, a current joy, a lingering shame, a hunger, a loss, all sounding together in a pattern never to be revived. In New York during the war her first child, Butterfly, then later up north King William, slipped from the bone-crib of her arms, and Captain Hall, their beloved American sponsor, died up there as well. Punnie, her Punnie, is adopted after the custom of her people. Her Punnie, her pulse, the very spark in her eyes.

  The North took her last baby, let the South preserve this one. She rises to join the ovation but is too short to see her daughter on the stage.

  New York City, November 1876

  SUICIDE IS ONE OF THE FEW WAYS for a ruined immigrant to go home.

  The East River seems to be exhaling cold, and how Kruger hates that. Hatless and coatless, shivering, he leans on the taffrail of the South Ferry crossing toward Brooklyn, the Atlantic Street pier. Big rawhide hands gripping the top rail. One battered boot up on the lower rail, as if on the rung of a ladder he is hesitating to climb. This aft deck is lit by a single lantern. Alone, he watches the skyline of Manhattan recede. It’s apt that a suicide be looking backward in the moment before action.

  The skyline is low except for the west tower of the unfinished Brooklyn Bridge, which now in the dark resembles the Gothic facade of the Marienkirche, in Danzig, where Roland Kruger was raised. He’s solid, middle height, a trimmed black beard, dark escarpment of standing hair, high forehead carved with horizontal lines. Heavy brows like lintels over blue eyes that in his weathered, fighter’s face seem transplanted from a more schooled and studious one. His bluchers, though battered, are polished. A small book bulges in his vest pocket. Even now there’s a jut to his chin, an inclination of profile that suggests someone who was once of another class. Or, who has made a habit of defiance.

  Kruger was intending
to climb the scaffolding around that granite tower, and from there—within sight of the Harper’s building—throw himself away, as scores of others had done since the Panic of ’73. The authorities, however, had begun posting night watchmen at the fenced perimeter of the worksite. Not wanting to loiter by the fence for several years until the bridge was finished and he could hurl himself off, Kruger decided to bury himself at sea.

  He takes a final draw on his pipe and jams it into his waistcoat fob. He swings his left leg over the top rail, then his right, perches on a middle rung, hesitates, then leaps, trying to clear the eddy of curdled water above the steam-prop ten feet below him; still selective. He slaps through the river’s dark membrane. After a spell of surrender—making no effort but to empty his lungs of air—he is thrashing, pulling at the icy water white with froth, clawing his way upward. Partly it’s the cold, a bitter smack to the face, reviving the instinct of resistance that kept driving him through half a year on the ice. Partly it’s how his memory of the ice summons Tukulito’s face back to him: her expression near the end, while he and the others braced the lifeboat on what remained of their “island” and the night’s giant swells lunged over them. Seemingly calm, even then, blessing him with her stamina, she’d ruddered and renewed him.

  He thrusts through the surface and gulps air. The ferry’s taffrail lamp is surprisingly far off, leaving him to his own resources much as the Polaris had, withdrawing into the night and stranding him and Tukulito, Tyson, and the others. The icy water clamps his throat and lungs so he can only suck in partial breaths. He dunks under the rolling wake and tries to undo his bluchers. His fingers, swarming the laces, appear worm-like in the gloom. They’re too stiff with cold to make headway but he’s a strong swimmer and the eroded boots weigh little. He aims for the gothic monolith of the tower. Starboard lamps of the Montague and Fulton ferries in mid-crossing cast wobbling spikes of light on the river. He can see his hands churning but not feel them—not feel whether his boots are still on or have worked themselves off.

  Over the tower the moon is a paring short of full. A sky of fathomless depth, of dreadful neutrality. He can see her wide face there, lunar; and the face of her husband, to whom she’ll always be loyal.