Afterlands Read online

  After the rescue and return, some three years ago, Kruger too was a minor celebrity. Lodged in a small but unembarrassing boardinghouse on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, he was a focus of some pride and comfort for immigrants—Germans, Italians, Irish, Poles—struggling more than ever since the Panic of ’73. A Polaris survivor, the Second Mate, here among us! He was a sort of living exhibit, a popular one, although many found him difficult to class—as he preferred. He was rugged in appearance but reflective in manner. People found him friendly in a somewhat contained, distant way, which they mostly attributed to his ordeal on the ice, although others thought he seemed like a man unhappily in love (and yet surely too philosophical, too ironic for love!). He smiled often enough, though with lips closed on the stem of his pipe. He seldom laughed. He measured his words and he delivered them with a satiric glitter in his blue eyes—though more in self-mockery, it seemed, than in mockery of others. He seemed wholly uncomfortable only around cops, wholly unguarded only with children.

  This is how he struck his fellow immigrants. And in fact he did prefer the company of children, mostly for how their minds hadn’t yet congealed to the point of thinking within borders.

  He knew what it was to be frozen and starved. Like his heroes Voltaire and Goethe he would share whatever food he had in his various pockets (stuffed like the cheeks of small, hoarding animals) with the skeletons haunched down on the stoops of nickel lodginghouses, urchins asleep in shitty areaways, families camped under the awnings of failed shops on Atlantic or Dock Street where he became known as the Chestnut Man, having discovered that filling his pockets with hot chestnuts, a penny the bag, would help fend off the Atlantic’s winter chill. … It was a wonder, many felt, that his ordeal had not made him stingy, but then maybe he’d acquired the ways of those Esquimaux, who were well known to share everything, even their wives.

  Urged enough, he would tell his story. In his version, Tukulito, or “Hannah,” with whom he still exchanged occasional, formal letters, was the heroine. Once embarked he was glad enough to tell it, their story, for much the same reason a person secretly in love will bring up the name of the other in conversation on the thinnest pretext: to invoke a closeness. Actually he was long resigned to the impossibility of his feelings, and the stoic in him, the student of Marcus Aurelius, had come to accept it with a certain grace. Loss was the world’s final law.

  It never struck him that he could lose the very fame that made his love-loss easier to bear. Celebrity, like grief, feels permanent—a verdict, not a passing state—and day after day he did remain a hero, an inspiration to people who felt like starved castaways themselves. They too might someday reach a lardered shore. They too might emerge battered but whole, a kind of success, like this Kruger. …

  All this he found quite gratifying in spite of himself.

  There were no jobs to be had, yet people found him jobs. Unready to return to sea, he would take only the ones on land. He became a lector at the Seamen’s Reading Room at the foot of Atlantic Street. While the literate read in the pine carrels, lips moving in their beards, Kruger read aloud whatever books the unlettered requested. The selection was meagre. There was a little Cooper, Longfellow, and Scott, but no Dickens. The Methodists who ran the Reading Room out of the Seamen’s Bethel next door considered Dickens subversive. They stocked The Pilgrim’s Progress (three copies) but not Gulliver’s Travels. They supplied Carlyle but not Voltaire, and when Kruger was caught translating his own copy of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise to a huddle of scruffy deckhands, he was warned, hero or not, to stop.

  Tired of solo nights and brothels, starting to crave a simple life of hearthside meals and family, even a dog, he was uncertainly courting the daughter of a Dutch minister—a man who never would have stood for his only child’s betrothal to a seaman, and a freethinker into the bargain, had Kruger not been a small-time hero as well.

  The publication of a book changed everything. From Lieutenant Tyson’s version of the story another Kruger emerged: a thief, a rebel, a foreign provocateur. Everywhere a sound of slamming doors. The most contagious sound in the world. He’d been embraced as a “German-American,” even a “New American,” but after Harper & Brothers unleashed Arctic Experiences he was soon recatalogued, first to “German immigrant,” then to “German,” then to “Prussian.” Then simply “Squarehead.” Mentally, Kruger—whose sense of the puerility of patriotism and the ways of the herd had been much deepened on the ice—observed this obliteration with grimly amused detachment, but in his guts the blackballing sat with a primitive, sickening weight. Neighbours who’d laurelled and fed him and found him dry work and placed their own daughters in his path now cut him dead in the street. Other Germans who’d deemed him a credit to the pack swiftly disowned him. At the Reading Room he was no longer required. Marijke had broken off the engagement by mail, likely at her father’s insistence, although there was no way to establish the truth because Kruger was not permitted to see her, and she would not, or could not, reply to his letters. For three more Sundays, like a man suffering with piles, he wriggled through Pastor VanHuffel’s rhinocerine services, vainly willing Marijke to turn toward him in the back pews, hoping to speak to her after. On the third Sunday, while the pastor with his glowing pate and bobbing red beard denounced “that Teuton” who with “other foreign crew” of the Polaris had brought down on the heads of all New Americans a fresh wave of contempt, Kruger watched Marijke’s nape and the backs of her tiny ears burn while his armpits prickled and his cheeks blazed: two almost-lovers intimately linked for a last time, although by shame. At the end of the service a delegation of bearded elders had helped Kruger down the steep front steps of the church. Former admirers watched him topple and roll.

  He fled Brooklyn for the Bowery.

  Hoping to clear his name, gain Marijke back and support himself without returning to sea, he began approaching American publishers, starting with Harper & Brothers themselves. None of them expressed interest in the notes he’d hurriedly produced—notes toward a fresh account of the party’s months on the ice. Of course, Tyson himself might be responsible for the Harper & Brothers rejection, but he couldn’t be behind all of them … could he? Kruger pored over the letters he got in prompt response to his inquiries. He soon realized that beyond the local streets there could be no interest in the version of an immigrant seaman already discredited by a native of rank and prestige. And perhaps his written English was not so correct as he believed? In Danzig he had been a talented pupil—if sometimes lazy, stubborn—but after all, he had had to leave school at thirteen, for employment on the docks, where his older brother Armin already worked to sustain the family. 1858: of this he recalled most a forest of mast tips stabbing at the early morning stars, also a lamplit cabin porthole, secure and inviting, seen from the quay where he hunched with Armin cranking the windlass, for hours. How he longed to be aboard and casting off! Papa himself could no longer work. Even if he had been allowed to teach again at the Gymnasium, he was too weak. A Prussian radical, he had written pamphlets and broadsides for the liberal reformers of 1848, and when the movement collapsed he had been exiled to France. In ’52, trying to slip back early, he was caught and imprisoned. He was released after three years but returned to his family ailing and heart-spent. Some vital thing had vacated him and was not coming back. The struggle for democratic reform—that rational yet romantic impulse that had swept across Europe in ’48—was likewise shattered. Papa could no longer bear to look at his shelves. He no longer believed that all men would be brothers one idyllic day as Lessing and Schiller and Goethe had proposed. Roland, this country doesn’t care to be just. This country wants only to be strong.

  Kruger had little sympathy, at the time, for this embittered, gin-doused, disintegrating failure. There were worse things than wanting to be strong. Worse things than not failing! At seventeen, his rage clotting into patriotism in just the way that recruiters have always found convenient, he did the thing best suited to punish Papa for his helplessness: he joine
d the Prussian navy. He soon grew to loathe its strictures but to love the borderless sea, so that later, having fled Prussia for Amerika, he continued to work as a seaman, then as a second and first mate, on packets and coal-steamers out of Brooklyn, up and down the Atlantic seaboard and as far south as Panama. Yet more and more, hearing tales, he conceived a strange longing to see the Arctic.

  In the Bowery, in the Pell Street flophouse where he slept in a bunkroom on a cot, with a deal locker for his effects, Kruger pondered his fall. He could not even return to work at sea—not after what Tyson had said of him. He was still collecting a remittance from the Kaiser’s navy on account of the serious wound he had received in ’64, but the amount would buy little with the current inflation. He became a client of the stale-beer dives, swilling four-cent Choctaw punches of hot rum, benzine, camphor and cocaine dregs. Telling his story to any who would listen.

  Kruger had his story, but Tyson had a Book.

  At last he tried publishers in Germany. The country’s ever more nationalistic public did hanker for an account of the fiasco, especially as some American newsmen had implied that the Germans on the Polaris might have been “secret agents” planted in hopes of usurping the expedition and raising the Black Eagle at the Pole. And in the minds of some Americans, the German doctor, Bessels, remained a suspect in Captain Hall’s mysterious death. Hadn’t Bessels, soon after the burial, attempted to reach the Pole himself? And on the ice-island hadn’t the Germans actually tried to seize power? Germany, now unified and with a growing sense of itself, did want its own rendition of affairs. But evidently not from the ruined Kruger. Still lacking America’s selectively democratic ways, Germany would much prefer to hear from a man of rank, and that would be the ship’s meteorologist, Friedrich Meyer. The Count, as he came to be known on the ice. But the meteorology of the Count’s mind, already so unsettled during their ordeal, had lapsed into chronic storm soon after the rescue. He now resided in a fairly new, well-appointed asylum in the Catskills. So it could never be known for certain if it was only delirium that had once made him whisper to Kruger, But we are agents of the Kaiser, you see. All this was arranged! We are spies!

  Kruger’s numb, kicking feet jam in the slimy rocks of the inshore. He wobbles in through the shallows, hauls himself shuddering onto the pier under the tower. The watchman with his raised storm-lamp squints noncommittally at this wild-eyed amphibian stinking of sewage, then tosses down the stub of a cigar, turns up his collar and saunters off. It seems a night of receding lamps. Kruger picks up the stub and warms his lungs. It’s unexpectedly marvellous, this long and reinflating puff. He finds his briarwood pipe still in the fob, although his book—Voltaire’s Littlebig—is gone. There’s nothing more to lose, it seems. The past few years he has been adrift, swept along on the current of history, part of the race to the Pole and the contest of rising nations, and this is where he has washed up. To hell with history. He will flee south, somewhere warm, Mexico, where his naval remittance will go farther—not face another winter of womanless cold and disgrace.

  Next day at noon, sneezing, clothes still damp under his overcoat, he stumps up Fourth Avenue to the Grand Central Depot to buy a ticket for as far south as he can afford. En route he collects a waddling entourage of scavenger-pigs—the city’s trash disposal system—who seem appetized by the smell of the river still on him. A further odour of disgrace. People glance or stare frankly as his following grows. Hugging his overcoat tighter around him he accelerates, trying not to inhale the food-smells as he passes a child wrapped in a shawl with a pot at her bare feet, calling hoarsely, Hot corn, here’s your nice hot corn!, then a newsboy with a cherub face and town-crier voice blocking his path, walking backward, shaking a Herald up at him as he screams, Sitting Bull and Injuns in full retreat from the army, Mister, you can read it yourself here!

  Thank you, he says, no. He has given the papers a wide berth for some time. Still trailing a wake of pigs he passes Madison Square Garden, where a vast amputation is on outdoor display: the arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty. To get any closer you have to buy a ticket, apparently a way of raising money to finish the enormous plinth and assemble the statue. It looks as if the full statue has been buried in the earth by some disaster, only the arm and torch now showing, five storeys high. Dapper men and women strolling around it.

  The cheapest train ticket is for a week later and can take him as far south as Mobile and leave him a couple of dollars besides. He writes a letter to his brother Armin, in Danzig, though he has not heard from him since after Arctic Experiences appeared—and, of course, he writes Tukulito in Groton, a simple, formal note, telling of his departure and wishing her and her family well. Nothing more, nothing to embarrass her. His first note to her in almost a year.

  In disgrace you feel certain nobody wants to hear from you.

  As ever, I remain your most loyal, and obedient,

  R. K.

  Two days later a letter arrives at the flophouse, the first letter Kruger has had in weeks. It’s postmarked Groton, but the Mr R. Kruger on the envelope is not inked in her stiffly perfect cursive. With his penknife he edges it open, breathing little, as on the morning six years ago when a reply came from his mother’s house in Danzig, but his name and address were not written in her hand.

  Tukulito’s neighbour and American sponsor, Mrs Budington, has written some lines on a piece of vellum cardstock, in a crabbed, shivery script:

  My Dear Mr Kruger,

  “How the Lord doth try our Strength” Punnie is dead, & Hannah inconsolable. O I fear for her as well, truly I do! The Child took ill with Cold but a week ago, & this Cold it went all to her Lungs. Sunday night she passed on Yes, on the Lord’s Own Day He gathered to Him this gentle Lamb of the North. She will be interred this Friday next at Noon at the Starr Burying Ground on Starr Hill. I do hope, as does Hannah, who is indisposed, that you will attend! She & also the Child would speak so fondly of you, & often! Mr Tyson I hope will not attend, tho he may read of the Child’s passing in the Newspapers, & no help for that.

  In shared Sorrow, & in sincere hope of Welcoming you soon,

  For Hannah,’ & for ‘Joe,’

  I am your truly faithful and trusting Servant,

  Mrs Sydney Budington

  Starr Burying Ground, Groton, Connecticut, 23 November 1876

  THE SMALL CEDAR COFFIN has been eaten by the earth. But the gullet of lead-coloured clay remains open, as if hungry still. On the lip of the grave, see Tukulito in her black veil dropping in her handful of dirt. She does not direct it, just lets it slide through limp fingers. Her sobs turn to coughs while she stands swaying, as if to the slow bass of an inward dirge—unable to turn from the hole and walk away. Easier maybe just to topple forward, to follow the dirt now spattered over the bed-like lid of the coffin, homeward. Down there it’s always the Arctic. Her face veiled, a doll in the crook of her arm and standing barely five feet tall, Tukulito could be a schoolgirl playing at grief.

  The afternoon is unseasonably warm and so still that the straws of hair poking from the Reverend Cowan’s bald scalp do not stir. The Ground is on the eastern face of Starr Hill so that the light of the sun foundering into the stripped hardwoods on the hill’s crest skims downhill, level with the slope. Shadows of mourners and monuments are fantastically elongated. The beams ignite little bonfires of colour amid leaf-drifts that gales have piled against the west-facing stones.

  Beside the Reverend Cowan, the piano teacher Mr Chusley stands dabbing at his nose with a handkerchief. Next, there’s Kruger, in his tight-buttoned black seaman’s overcoat despite the weather, his derby in his hands, mussed hair upright like breaking surf. A rumpled skeptic, but his eyes are red. Beside him Miss Crombie, the schoolma’am, glares upward with a look of perplexity and something like indignation: the look of someone whose beliefs are in tumult, maybe about to change. A handful of the child’s white classmates are clumped around her. The largest set of mourners is the Budingtons: Sydney, who captained the Polaris and, alth
ough not present on the ice, was also accused in Tyson’s book and disgraced, his wife Sarah, and the Budingtons’ many grown children. For years the Budingtons have been “Hannah and Joe’s” hosts in the South, and after the rescue assisted them in buying their own house, close by. But Joe—Ebierbing—is now absent. After two years’ settled work as a carpenter, farmhand, and fisherman, he grew restless and returned to the Arctic with another expedition.

  To think he knows nothing of this, muses Tyson, who’s stationed apart, stiffly squared, as if policing the event, in the dress uniform he has just received as captain of a ship taking yet another expedition north next spring. His tight, guarded eyes like isinglass in his florid face. Greying mutton-chop whiskers. He’s brawny, looks like a man of few sympathies, and yet. Think of poor Joe peacefully digesting his dinner, picking his teeth with a fishbone, smoking his pipe … my God! Feeling himself watched, Tyson glances over, again receives from Kruger that fixed, incriminating stare. He looks away past the grave to where the goat-bearded sexton stands by a young elm, hands folded atop the long spade handle, chin propped on his knuckles. He’s humming softly. One soiled boot rests on the blade-back as if on a tavern foot-rail. When he sees Tyson glaring, he straightens up fast.

  Tyson is the sort of man who has to be testing his power all the time. He never can resist a test. If none arises, he will find ways of engineering one. Without constant proofs of strength and competence he feels himself fading, shrivelling into something less than himself—less than solid. He must keep ramming himself up against the world to make sure he is all there. He still longs to perform one grand, strenuous feat that will make his name, imprint it on the upper zones of all maps, win him a respect he will no longer have to prove himself worthy of, day in day out—his own misgivings like wind-driven snow filling in the tracks. In leading the floe-party to rescue, then publishing a book on the ordeal, it might seem he has succeeded perfectly. But Arctic Experiences has not done especially well. Worse, certain newsmen have doubted elements of his account. And at the naval inquiry after the rescue, Kruger, among others, while praising his courage and resourcefulness, had also embarrassed him. Yes, on board I saw the Lieutenant when he was drunk like old mischief. I saw him when he could scarcely move along. (There wasn’t much of this talk, but it’s what Tyson recalls best.) In the battle of narratives that followed, Tyson’s own did prevail, and he is widely revered as a hero, but not in the unassailable way he desires.