Siberian Wallpaper

On the days we spent at sea my grandfather and I often stood on the bridge watching for wildlife and talking. The sun shone on the flat sea, and on flocks of birds flying by. My grandfather pointed them out: shearwaters, crested auklets, thick billed murres.

“When you left home and traveled around the world,” I asked one day, continuing my interrogation, “was it at all what you’d expected?”

“No, no, not really. I was so young, you see, with such fantastic ideas. I wanted palm trees, South Sea maidens.” He paused. “My God, Tahiti was beautiful then. I could barely bring myself to leave.” I waited for him to continue, scanning the horizon with the binoculars. “But there was also the malaria, the cockroaches.”

“Cockroaches?”

“Huge ones. In Indonesia. They called them ‘mahogany birds.’ They hid on the boat, in the woodwork. At night they’d come out and eat the callouses off of our feet. When you flicked on a flashlight you’d see dozens of them. We used to set out glasses of rum. In the morning there’d be half a dozen drowned inside.” He laughed. “It did the trick. But it was a dreadful waste of rum.”

Down on the bow the passengers in their red parkas were beginning to head inside for dinner. In the distance flocks of birds drifted above the water like wisps of smoke.

“There was a lot I never could have expected,” my grandfather added after a while. “Once we were becalmed for nearly a week. That was in the Arafura Sea. It got so hot the pitch in the deck seams boiled. Dust floated off the Australian desert and settled on the water, it was that still. The ship looked like she was sitting in an ocean of sand.”

On either side of the dining room was a small lounge, and near the port lounge was the bar. Across the wide hallway from the bar stood an electric keyboard, and one of the Soviet crew members, a small, squinting man, played it after dinner. He knew maybe four songs; mostly he played “El Condor Pasa” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Vladimir, who was rumored to be a KGB agent, lingered in the port lounge doing a brisk business in scrimshawed walrus tusks and lacquer boxes. On the floor Aki, a Japanese man, shared a bottle of fine Japanese brandy with a group of lecturers. Mishiko, his beautiful girlfriend, carried snifters to the people seated at the bar. Aki had been on numerous cruises, and knew most of the staff. Sometimes he brought his wife, one of the photographers told me, sometimes he brought Mishiko.

Deannie, an Australian woman who tended bar, was friends with some of the Soviet crew. After my grandfather had gone to bed, she led me through narrow corridors to a long room that served as the ship’s clinic. Inside, a group of Soviets sat around a table under dim fluorescent lights. I recognized Nadjia, one of the waitresses from the dining room, and Igor Zoltikov, the glaciologist. Igor had a pot belly, gray hair cut close to his head and a bristling beard and mustache. He gave incomprehensible lectures on glacial morphology and wore a blue t-shirt that read REUNITE GONDWANALAND. Beside him sat the ship’s doctor, a young man from the Ukraine named Alexander who spoke a lovely, stilted English and played the guitar. Also there was a helicopter pilot, a fair-haired dentist, and an engineer.

On the table sat liquor bottles and plates of smoked fish and radishes. Deannie had brought pears, cheese, and some petit fours from the galley and she passed these around while Alexander poured out glasses of a clear liquid. When I choked on mine they all grinned, and Deannie thumped me on the back. The stuff was known on board as rocket fuel, and it hurt to drink. I heard later, on good authority, that it was used to take ice off the helicopter blades.

I ate radishes to clear the taste from my mouth, and listened to the Russian mixed with English. Later, Alexander played sad Russian folk songs on the guitar, strumming between verses while he translated: troikas in the moonlight, and someone’s silver hands. The dentist was asleep with his head on his arms. Igor poured the last of the rocket fuel into a saucer and set it on fire. It burned with a blue flame, and lit the face of Alexander singing, “Where are you, my darling?”