Far North (14 page)

They mustered us for a head count morning and evening.

That first summer I baled hay in the hot sun all day and in the evening I milked cows in the byre. I hadn’t seen anything on that scale for years. There had to be a couple of thousand acres under cultivation. And the land was the good-looking rich black earth that the Russians used to tell jokes about: if you leave a spoon in the ground, they’d say, it grows into a shovel. Chernozom, I believe they called it.

There was a team that worked in the kitchens. Everyone wanted that. It was considered the softest labour: plenty of food, indoors all day. The jobs in there went to the most senior prisoners. But I never minded being outside. We had food in abundance. And I have to give it its due: the prison bakery made the softest loaf I have ever tasted.

In the first weeks, the new prisoners had that giddy sense of themselves that comes with eating, and a good day in the sun, and the relief that they had arrived at their destination, and it was no worse than this.

We came in from the fields around five for the second head count.

‘My belly aches!’ one said in wonder, as he wiped his dish with a hunk of black bread.

There was a lot of contented snoring in the barracks, and when there were eggs for breakfast, those fools thought they had died and gone to heaven.

If we’re living this soft, they thought, how can it be on the other side, where Boathwaite and his men live?

 *

It was like a busy little village in that barracks at night. Most of the men knew at least one trade and they’d do odd-jobs on the sly for the guards – a little tailoring or woodwork. One man built banjos and sold them. Another, who had a reputation for cooking plov, was dragged out to make it for the guards on birthdays and always reeled back from the celebrations drunk. They would generally be paid in drink, or smokes, or bits of food.

There were rumours of women at the base, but I was the only one I knew of among the prisoners, and I didn’t lay eyes on another for two years.

For those two years I was barely alone for one second. Even in the latrines you couldn’t escape into your private self because there would be others in there constantly. At the same time there was nothing that I could call companionship.

I had hoped to stay friendly with Shamsudin, because I liked him and he seemed a decent man, but my friendships with him and Zulfugar didn’t much outlast the march.

Now and again, I’d have reason to work with one of them and there was a trace of the old warmth, but most of the time they were following a different road. There were other muslim prisoners at the base and they all stuck together for prayers and mealtimes, and fasted together for forty days in the fall. My being a woman made any closeness with them impossible. And of the other prisoners, there were none that I wanted as friends.

 *

The grimness of life at the base had no end. It doesn’t make sense to number all the fistfights and the killings, and the drinking, and the bawdy talk. What struck me though was that, in all that time, we never had a man take his own life, and as for me, who had got so close to taking my own, it never entered my head to end it there.

When Ping and the baby died my life had taken on a kind of looseness. It was a strange feeling for a person like me, who wakes up every day with a belly full of fight. It’s hard to explain how it was. But back then, after she died, between this and that, there seemed to be no kind of meaningful difference. Not in anything. When I threw myself in the lake, I think I was already three-fifths dead, and I just wanted to stop breathing.

And yet when I remembered my life in the cabin from my stinking berth in the rack of bodies at the base, it seemed like the most beautiful part of it that had ever been: all the space, the music of the water, only myself to please. But that was where I had wanted to die. Now here, I woke up each morning raging to live.

All my energy burned on living. How to eat better. How to keep myself strong. How to lay by warm clothes for the winter. When I dug, or baled hay, or humped potato sacks, I did it with the intensity of prayer, and my prayer said: keep my body young, let me outlast this place, let me not die here in the stink of these men.

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Many times I thought of escape. We had the chances. But the guards’ best weapon in keeping order was the prisoners themselves. We lived so on top of one another that you could never have got hold of even the minimum of the things you’d need to survive outside the base without someone turning you in. There was a whole group of snitch prisoners who told tales to the guards to try to get in friendly with them. They would be paid for their tattle, but most of them would have done it for free. An oddity of our prison was that, once in a while, someone you’d got used to seeing in the bunkhouse, or working beside you, would disappear for a week or two, and then turn up again, but this time holding a gun, perhaps on horseback, having been made a guard.

It was cunning on Boathwaite’s part for many reasons. Men need hope. They need something to dream on. For the prisoners, this was better than heaven: they could come back, in this life, with all the rights and pleasures of a guard! That’s one reason why there were so many eager snitches. It also meant that Boathwaite had men under him who knew the mood in the prison so well that any troublemaker could be rooted out and dealt with before he had time to organize. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the process. The prisoners who got the break weren’t especially anything. But they never made into a guard a man who was too keen on prayer – and there were some of them – and they never chose a muslim.

I’d be lying if I said I was miserable every minute. If it were true I couldn’t have lived. I had unfinished business outside there. I hadn’t dreamed that plane.

And, the plane aside, it was still possible to find some joy in each day. I always liked farming, its colours and smells, and the miracle of the soil. We die for ever, but a plant dies back to his root. That was also a kind of comfort to me. Nature favours the small and simple when times are hard.

I never got over the power of that land. We grew so much that each fall we didn’t need to harvest it all. We left some fields to rot, and others we ploughed back under. In August and September we had tomatoes coming out of our ears. Pumpkins, squash, corn, milk, butter. And that was with slaves working it, griping, hating it, gold-bricking on principle, every chance we got – imagine what free men would have made of the place.

None of the prisoners would say such a thing, of course. We had unwritten dos and don’ts that were stricter than the ten commandments. Only the greenest newcomer would let on that he was impressed by the food. The style was to kvetch and complain, to fight your corner fiercely if someone was encroaching on you – maybe even if they weren’t, so long as you could cut a good figure – never to express surprise, or doubt, and never to be curious.

 *

There was a pigsty at the base where they raised pork for the guards. One time Shamsudin and I were sent to lay shingles on part of its roof. It was filthy hot on the roof in midsummer, and as new prisoners we got stuck with the worst jobs. Also, it was the guards’ idea of a joke to have a woman and a muslim working on the pigsty together.

After about fifteen minutes, the fellows who were supposed to be watching us sloped off somewhere, leaving us alone. The sun was bright overhead, and the smell of tar and shingles took me away from the place and made me think of home.

Shamsudin was working on a patch away to my left. I glanced over at him. He didn’t look up. He was crouched down on the slope of the roof, studying something. I wondered why he was so quiet. It crossed my mind for some reason that he felt guilty about throwing me over as a friend. Then I noticed how slowly he was going. I moved over to him and asked if he was all right. His face was grey and his hammer was shaking.

I was certain he was going to pass out. It was the height that was making him ill. We were twenty feet up. I wasn’t strong enough to hold him if he slipped so I cupped my palms to yell for the guards. Shamsudin laid his hand on my arm and pleaded with his eyes for me not to do it.

Even at ground level, he would have struggled with the job. There was something in Shamsudin of my father. He was out of place in the rough and tumble of the Far North. His hands were more like a woman’s than mine were.

In a decent world, there’s no shame in weakness, but there was nothing decent about life at the base. Failing at his task would mean at the least a week in the punishment cells. At the worst, it would be the kind of small wound to his reputation that would encourage others to tear at him, perhaps fatally. That’s how it was at the base.

I helped him up higher where he could hold on to the peak of the roof and gave him the nails to hold. He felt rigid and unsteady and I knew he was trying not to look down. I said we should talk to keep his mind off the height.

‘What should we talk about?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me how we got into this fix.’ I meant how we got stuck up on the roof, but Shamsudin had a cast of mind that always leaned towards speculation, and he shared the interest of many of the other prisoners who liked nothing more than to talk about the disasters that had befallen us and why they’d come about.

It always seemed to me that nothing revealed the prisoners’ ignorance as much as when they talked of these things. You came across as many explanations as people you asked, and most of them told fairy tales that would shame children: a piece of the moon had fallen into the sea and made a tidal wave; tiny atom machines had eaten up all the sunlight; and so forth.

Of course, I knew what I’d seen: desperate people pitching into and overwhelming our tiny city; and I could guess the things they were running from – failed crops, cities with no light or water, gangs of lawless men – but what lay behind those troubles I couldn’t say.

So as he clung to the shingles with one hand, trying not to look down, and reached me nails from his apron with the other, Shamsudin told me his own idea.

He said the earth was close to five milliard years old. He spoke of seeing it from space, surrounded by a blur of clouds, turning from blue to white and back again as the centuries pass. They were long summers in which the oceans teemed and winters when even sea water froze hard. He said five times in that span of years all life had been wiped from the planet when it grew too dark or too hot. It was one of those times – a big moon that whacked into Mexico from space – that did for the dinosaurs.

It sounded like fairy tales to me, and I asked him if it was written in his Holy Book – he said , and that it was science that said so.

After the fifth time, it was our turn. We crept out of the mud. We peopled the planet, living in every corner, never mind wet or ice or desert, steadily growing wiser and more resourceful.

Around four and half milliard years after it began, the earth started to alter. Looking at it from space, you’d have seen rocket ships and satellites burst out of it like corn from a popper. The earth was in one of its warm times, had been since before we mastered farming – we’d grown accustomed to predictable seasons and good growing weather. But now there were so many of us, all wanting so much, and all armed with the inventions of previous centuries. Once, we’d been so many naked apes, scratching for life on the foreshore of an African ocean. Now we were a vast army, a termite mound of giants, who could shake the planet if we stamped together, who could warm the air just by breathing.

Shamsudin said the planet had heated up. They turned off smokestacks and stopped flying. Some, like my parents, altered the way they lived. Factories were shut down. ‘You asked me about the Koran,’ he said. ‘But I understand it as a doctor. For all our knowledge, things happen that we do not understand. Sometimes, the patient dies not from her illness, but from the medicine.’

As it turned out, the smoke from all the furnaces had been working like a sunshade, keeping the world a few degrees cooler than it would have been otherwise. He said that in trying to do the right thing, we had sawed off the branch we were sitting on. The droughts and storms that came in the years after put in motion all the things that followed.

Life in cities had ended.

I asked him about the world beyond the north, thinking of the plane, but he shrugged.

‘The whole world is a barer and less interesting place,’ he said. ‘Human misery has few varieties: tent camps, forced labour, hunger, violence, men taking food and sex by force. You yourself have seen them all.’

I’d finished the roof before he came to the end of his talk, but we both stayed up there, resting on the peak in the sunshine. His vertigo had passed. We were still up there talking when the guards came and yelled at us to come for the evening head count.

 *

For a while, I passed in the camp as a man. I kept myself to myself, bathed alone, and rounded up the clean rags I needed each month discreetly. But sooner or later I knew the truth would come out. Living the way we did, there was no getting away from it for ever. I was braced for a rough ride when it did. The men in there thrived off each other’s weakness.

I was in the bathhouse when it finally happened. Two yahoos stumbled in and yanked my pants off me as a joke. They were too stunned by what they saw to make anything of it, but when I came in from the fields that night, I could tell by the looks I got that my secret was out.

‘Come and bunk with me, Makepeace,’ said the taller of the two that had found me. ‘I’ve got fourteen inches of kolbasa to share with you.’

I could hear the snap of his trousers as he pulled out his johnson and waved it at me.

It seemed like the whole hut snickered with him.< />

I was mending my work gloves but I looked up when he spoke, and I guess my eyes betrayed the contempt I felt.

‘Better cover her head. I’ve seen prettier faces on moose.’

‘I’ll just turn her around …’

And so it went on. The two of them alternating menace and foolishness, saying how they’d do this and do that to me.