The Quality of Silence

  He looked at Yasmin and Ruby, close to him in the aputiak, and then at Captain Grayling. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been silent but thought it was only a few moments and that memories like dreams stretch out as you experience them but objectively last hardly any time at all.

  ‘I left the village early, about six,’ he said. ‘Almost everyone was still asleep. We’d had a party the night before for Akiak, a welcome home bash.’

  ‘Akiak Iqua?’ Grayling asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our records had him working at a well at Prudhoe,’ Captain Grayling said.

  ‘He didn’t tell anyone official he was leaving.’

  Akiak had wanted to leave before Soagil Energy fired him; didn’t want to give the bastards the satisfaction.

  ‘Akiak found out my laptop had broken and gave me his at the party. Said it had been a gift from Soagil Energy in their bribery stage, but now they’d reached threats he didn’t want anything to do with them or their gifts.’

  Matt had taken the MacBook Air but as it didn’t come with a protective cover he’d feared that it might not work outside in the sub-zero cold. Hoping for the best, he’d wrapped it in his old cover, which didn’t fit properly, before putting it in a knapsack for his trip.

  ‘Did you use a snowmobile?’ Captain Grayling asked and Yasmin surmised that he was unsure of any of his facts now.

  ‘No, a sled and huskies.’

  Kaiyuk used his dogs for racing and, like everyone else in the village, thought Matt a little nuts not to use a snowmobile for his expedition, but had offered him the use of the team anyway. Matt had made up some excuse about not wanting to frighten away the snowy owl he hoped to find and everyone was generous enough not to point out that eight huskies were as likely to frighten off a snowy owl as a snowmobile.

  As he’d left the village, he saw Kaiyuk with Akiak, still looking drunkenly cheerful from his party, and both men waved to him. He heard children’s voices as they played in the snow over the sound of the old grumbling generator.

  For four hours, Matt concentrated entirely on guiding the dogs and making sure he stayed steady on the sled. He thought that the lead dog, an intelligent female called Puqik, was simply indulging him in his role as leader of her pack.

  When he’d arrived at Anaktue, his outdoor clothes had come from a specialist internet shop, now he was wearing an atikluk and atigi, with caribou fur on the inside and mukluks instead of snow boots. Nobody had teased him for going native about that.

  The stars and moon were still above him, as they had been when he went to bed last night, and it sometimes felt to him that out here he was living in an endless moment; that in the far north time stretched and grew vast. He thought of the translucent arctic moth, spending up to fourteen winters as a larval caterpillar to emerge fully fledged for just a few days; to the arctic moth each hour in those summer days must last years.

  His head torch picked out only the white of the snow in front of him and the fur of the dogs’ backs; the only sounds were the sled moving and the dogs breathing, intent on pulling. He could have been travelling a thousand years before and he’d have seen the same landscape, worn the same clothes, travelled the same way and this thought put things in perspective, especially himself, which was necessary because he knew that for too long he’d made himself the star player in his life and that was not only weak and egocentric but also out of kilter with the world. In the arctic tundra, it was impossible to feel important but simple to feel connected to something uncircumscribed by time and distance.

  He reached a natural rhythm with the dogs and sled, felt rather than conscious, and could think unhindered about Corazon. He saw that the closeness he had with her was shored up with the intimacy and love he also had with Kaiyuk, her twin; and that it wasn’t romantic feelings, but a deep friendship that bound him to both of them; and perhaps he’d wanted a part of the love they had for each other, but it was exclusive and privileged between them. Corazon had kissed him back, out of friendship he thought, as if she’d felt his need and had attempted to temporarily meet it. She hadn’t wanted anything more and he hoped that if she had, he would have stopped it from going any further. A kiss was betrayal enough.

  And that was surely why he was out here on his own, the true reason for this trip – to man up to himself, to acknowledge properly that he had betrayed his wife.

  He looked out at the huge tundra, ablated by cold, and felt the frozen calmness and thought it was easier to face your own big things calmly here. Above him the sky was immense, flooded with stars.

  It had been four days since he’d kissed Corazon; two days since he’d spoken to Yasmin. But it wasn’t the phone call that was vivid in the winter quiet around him; instead he remembered the sound of waves and shingles underfoot, his trainers sodden with pooled seawater. He’d looked through her telescope at the seaside night sky and she had shown him galaxies. But in truth he’d been looking at her rather than the stars – a beautiful girl who didn’t trade on her looks, seemed irritated by them, but demanded attention for her intellect; a guerilla knitter who gazed at the stars; gifted, passionate, funny, vulnerable; the astonishing impossibility of her.

  And he had remained in love with her; loved her as much out on the Alaskan tundra as he had that night when she lay in his arms on the beach at Cley. But he thought he had stayed in love with a girl who was no longer there, like one of those dead stars she’d once told him about, whose light we still see not because we are living in the star’s future but because we are looking at the star’s past.

  ‘I kissed her because I missed you.’

  He felt his cowardice in grabbing hold of intimacy with Corazon, and knew that no one could fill the hollow in him that Yasmin had left.

  But he had a duty to Yasmin as the woman she was now, and to Ruby, to make the best of their life together not absent himself from it. However compelling and extraordinary he found Alaska, he needed to return to them. He’d spend three days on this trip, then he’d pack his things in Anaktue and go back home.

  He’d originally planned to spend another eight weeks here filming the birds, as well as animals, that didn’t migrate but stayed and endured the cold. He’d brought his camera, terminal and Akiak’s laptop so he could email photos to his production company, but he left them all in his knapsack; there was no point now.

  He fed the huskies then pitched his tent and lit the qulliq lamp, using arctic cotton for a wick as Kaiyuk had shown him. The heat surprised him; afraid of burning down his tent, he’d put it out.

  He looked out at a wilderness that appeared rugged and immense, but he knew that under the snow the tundra was composed of tiny plants, a fragile ecosystem easily spoiled and impossible to repair. There were still tyre marks in the Russian arctic tundra made by vehicles in World War Two.

  From here, London was frenetic, its streets and houses frantic and shrill, crammed with objects that demanded attention; no one could stand out against such a canvas. In Alaska, people were more clearly defined. But recently the village itself had become louder and less settled, as people argued about how to prevent Soagil Energy’s bid to frack their land. Corazon was co-ordinating the opposition to the company, unifying the villagers. She sometimes used his terminal to access the internet; when he returned to England he’d leave it with her.

  Without a lens separating him from the land, he saw it more clearly and felt its magnetic draw on him more strongly. Untainted by man, this land had its own identity, a soul and a being, and he understood the Inupiaq belief that all things have a spirit.

  Early one morning, the snowy landscape had eyes, looking at him with bright intent. Only when the snow moved did he see that a part of the snow was the feathers of a white ptarmigan, nestling a foot away from him.

  In summer he’d come here and seen fawn-feathered ptarmigans and brown-furred hares and tawny-grey foxes and brindled wolves; now their feathers and fur were white, as if they were made out of the snow itself. On his final evening, he sa
w a snowy owl in flight, its white wings spanning five feet across; it was as if the bird had been cut from the sky.

  The land’s purity and huge aloneness, its balance of details in a larger whole made it feel to him more like a living poem than a place.

  His last night, the sky was cloudless with a full moon lighting the snowy terrain in an opalescent blue light. He remembered Yasmin telling him that the moonlight that reaches Earth is mainly the reflected light from the sun with some starlight and earthlight thrown in. She’d told him that the light wasn’t really blue, it was because of the Purkjnje effect, a flaw in the human eye, that made it so. And he’d thought that what we know is filtered by our flaws, and sometimes turned more beautiful by them.

  He looked at Yasmin in the light of the qulliq and saw the girl he’d loved so much in the past returned to him and the exhausted, extraordinary woman she was now, so courageous in her love for him. He took her face in his hands.

  Captain Grayling watched Matt sign to Yasmin. He’d been surprised by their clear and deep love for one another. He’d found Matt’s wedding ring amongst the charred remains of Anaktue and he’d thought the marriage it symbolised was over. He found their closeness moving and painful. He and his wife had separated, quietly and desperately a year after their son died. He saw that the little girl had turned away from her father’s hands, giving them privacy, but he needed to know the rest of Matt’s story.

  ‘What happened then?’ he asked Matt.

  Matt turned to him. ‘On Friday morning there was an ice storm. I waited for it to finish before heading back to Anaktue.’

  The rain had frozen onto everything it touched, covering the dogs’ harnesses and lead lines and his tent with ice. He’d chipped it off, then set out, looking forward to seeing his friends, the chat and banter at dinner that night. He would tell them that he was going back to England but was pretty sure most of them were surprised he’d come out here for the winter months at all. He’d enjoy telling Kaiyuk about the husky team, being a little boastful about how well he’d managed them.

  Before he’d left, Corazon and he had swiftly reverted back to their easy close friendship with little awkwardness. She’d given him a snow knife for his mad sledding trip, not an antique but a modern one, like her, she’d said. He’d have to admit that he didn’t use it. And own up to using a tent and arctic sleeping bag. He was no Inupiaq hunter with skill at surviving the wilderness. She’d laugh at him, he imagined.

  ‘It was midday when I got back to Anaktue,’ Matt said.

  As he’d neared the village, one of the huskies had tried to tug away and he’d had to make the dog continue on.

  ‘There were no lights and no sound. I thought it was the middle of the night and my watch must have broken.’

  There were stars above him and it was dark but that was the same day or night. Time here was like the snow-covered treeless tundra with no distinguishing marks with which to orientate yourself.

  But surely it couldn’t be midday because there would be lights on and voices and doors opening and cooking sounds coming from inside into the frozen air.

  He strained to listen. But there was nothing. It was never silent here. Even in the middle of the night the diesel-fuelled generator would make its mechanical buzzing and grumbling. If it went out, people realized quickly and someone would come and restart it. Temperatures dropped too fast in late November for no one to notice.

  In the beam of his torch, Anaktue shone. The ice storm had hit Ankatue too, glazing the village in an unbroken sheet of ice, encasing each of the houses and cabins as if in glass. The snow on the ground was glazed over. But surely someone would have walked on the ice, opened a door or a window and cracked it. It was like a village under an enchantment or curse.

  Breaking an ice-sealed door, he went into the first cabin, where his friend Hiti and his family lived. Despite the biting cold inside, the cabin smelled of diarrhoea and faintly of garlic. He shone his torch around the cabin.

  Hiti was lying on the floor of the kitchen, his arms around his twelve-year-old son. Hiti’s hands were stained blue, as if he’d dipped them in ink. The child’s face was hidden by a blanket. A few feet away was his wife, holding their younger child, also wrapped in a blanket, his face covered. Matt thought that their children had died first and the parents had wrapped them before they too had died. He heard a noise in the silence and turned, startled. A large bird was in the cabin, it must have followed him in, its frenzied movements making it a blur of black; then it flew past him and back outside.

  He ran into cabin after cabin. The same smell. No one alive. Only Kaiyuk and Akiak unaccounted for. Both fit and young, he hoped they’d managed to escape whatever had happened here. He found them fifty or so metres away from the village. They must have been trying to go for help.

  Corazon was in her elderly neighbour’s cabin, and he thought she had gone to look after him. Like the others, her hands were coloured blue, diarrhoea staining the floor.

  Adrenaline had coursed through him, making him run not walk, his body taut, his mind racing with desperate urgency. Then his torch shone on a black bird dead on the white snow. A raven. He’d been abruptly stilled. The urgency to help them was before they’d died. There was nothing he could do for them; nothing he could ever do for them. His sense that time here expanded into an endless vast moment was horrifyingly true of death and remorse.

  He returned to Hiti’s cabin and carefully replaced the blanket over his son’s face. He saw the boy’s prized caribou hide hung on the wall of the cabin, it was his anjungaun; a young hunter’s first game.

  The boy had shot the caribou with Hiti in September and had confided in Matt that he’d cried when he’d killed it; that he’d felt like a monster. But then his father and he had cut the animal’s windpipe to release its spirit. They’d butchered it together and his mother had frozen the meat into different cuts and pieces for stewing that they’d be eating through this long winter until springtime, and the fat would be used to light their qulliq and the hide would be used for bedding or clothes. But as it was his anjungaun, they had displayed it on the wall; in the summer he would be allowed to go on an overnight hunting trip and he’d take it with him and use it in an aputiak. His father said one day he would surely be an Isiqsuruk, a strong and enduring hunter. The boy said that because they’d released the animal’s spirit, and not wasted a single part of its body, he was proud of his first hunt.

  Matt took the caribou hide off the wall and held it as he wept.

  Chapter 22

  In the quiet aputiak, Matt remembered the noise of the dogs, Kaiyuk’s dogs, howling at the black sky, the stars shrouded in clouds; the dogs’ sound a violent keening.

  Yasmin was holding his hand tightly in hers, as if she’d been going into the cabins with him. He wasn’t signing these details to Ruby, he didn’t want her to have these images in her head, and didn’t want her to know how he’d failed his friends.

  ‘They had no way of getting help,’ he said. ‘I’d taken the satellite terminal with me. I didn’t even use it.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Yasmin said. ‘Matt, listen to me, please. It wasn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing.’

  Captain Grayling’s face appeared slackened by the horror of what Matt was telling him.

  ‘Do you think they died painfully?’ he asked and Matt was taken aback by the humanity of the state trooper’s question.

  ‘Yes. But I didn’t know it then.’

  ‘You found them five days ago?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The police thought everyone died in a fire,’ Yasmin said to him.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There was a terrible fire,’ Captain Grayling said. ‘Burned everything to the ground. There was no way of knowing that they died before.’

  ‘Someone set fire to the village?’ Matt asked, appalled.

  ‘It could have been an accident,’ Grayling said, as if he wanted to believe it. ‘Maybe a
heater was left on when they died, or a cooker, that could have caused the initial fire that spread.’

  Yasmin remembered Captain Grayling had led the search party at Anaktue; it must have been a brutal scene. She understood why he didn’t want the fire to be deliberate; because it would be as if someone had killed them twice over.

  ‘I thought the police would find them,’ Matt said. ‘Not for a few days, maybe, but I was sure they’d be found.’

  The villagers had friends and relatives outside of Anaktue. It was remote but not totally cut off. People visited by taxi plane and the villagers left the same way. He’d assumed that someone was bound to find them and tell the police.

  Yasmin turned to Captain Grayling. ‘If you’d found them before the fire you’d have known Matt was alive. You would have seen there wasn’t a Westerner’s body among the dead.’

  Captain Grayling nodded. He took a few moments as if to collect himself.

  ‘We will find out about the fire,’ he said to Matt. ‘But I’d like to know what really happened at Anaktue, before the fire. And I think you can help me?’

  Dad’s taken off his special boots, and his feet are bleeding and some of his toes are black, like someone has put shoe polish on.

  I tell Dad that I want to know what happened too, so I’ll lip-read what he says. I don’t want him to sign too because he looks so tired. I say that I’ll look away if something’s too horrible. I put my sleeping bag over his poor feet to try and warm them up, and when I do that, he smiles at me, just like old Dad again.

  ‘Outside one of the houses, I saw the dead raven again,’ Dad says with his mouth-voice and in sign as well even though I said he didn’t need to.

  Had he told them about the raven? Or just remembered it so vividly himself that he thought he must have done.

  It had started snowing, the white flakes landing on the black bird.