Siberian Wallpaper

Down in the dining room that night I drank vodka and grapefruit juice with Alexander. The dining service was over, and the waiters, Sergei, Nadjia, Gengrich, and Andrei, sat down with us to eat dinner. I watched them pour ketchup on their lobster tails. Something that might have been “Hey Jude” issued from the electric keyboard out by the bar. Sergei and Nadjia were laughing. They were all looking forward to Murmansk, Alexander told me. They had two weeks of vacation before the next trip. “How will Gorbachev’s changes affect you?” I asked. He rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette.

“It will be worse,” he said, “in the beginning. But it is better for the Ukraine to be separate. I only want freedom. I want to be able to say what I think.”

Sergei said, “I am happy for it.”

“How about you?” I turned to Andrei. He looked down at his plate, and shook his head. He was younger than the others, with a round face and sweet smile.

“I am not going to say bad words against my country,” he told me. “I want to stay and work in my country. I love...” Here he paused, “I love to go fishing there.”

A few minutes later Vladimir, the KGB agent, joined us with a bottle of vodka. He had had a good trip. Mike told me later he’d been selling Communist Party membership cards as souvenirs for $100 a piece.

Rounding the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya, the winds came off the icecap at 30 miles an hour. The sea was streaked with whitecaps and arcs of spray. Up on the bridge I watched the waves drown the enormous bow, and the spray fly all the way to the window where I stood. We had been coming into a new time zone nearly every night; Mike would remind us to turn back our watches for another 25-hour day, until he seemed profligate with time, and the days themselves stretched taut, and myself with them. That night I clung to my bunk, listening to objects break all laws of gravity and etiquette and take short flights around the cabin.

Lying awake I remembered how each fall my grandfather used to set up rows of mist nets on the salt marsh by our house to band migrating birds. In the early morning these thin nets were nearly invisible among the phragmite reeds. I’d watch him untangle the kicking birds, his hands as careful as when he painted. It seemed to me that he knew them all by name, that his love was particular not just to the species but to the individual birds themselves. At the table under a pepperidge tree he fitted the band to the bird’s leg like a bracelet, and after he marked down the number in a spiral notebook he handed me the bird so I could let it go.

I remembered him telling me that American robins look almost nothing like English ones. Now I realized that everything he loved about his adoptive landscape must once have been unfamiliar. He had found himself, by chance, in a strange place of pine barrens and salt marshes, and he had made it his home.

The last place we stopped was Cape Norway in Franz Josef Land. Flying in the helicopter we passed over a polar bear, which turned and loped away across the ice. We came ashore beside a steep rock wall, down the beach from a glacier, less than nine degrees from the pole. Here even the moss was frozen; somehow a few yellow poppies bloomed among the stones. Circles of orange lichen spotted the black rocks. A flock of snow bunting rushed by, the white of their wings flashing like bursts of light. Up the beach a worn marker commemorated the place Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalnor Johansen, the Norwegian explorers, overwintered in a stone hut in 1895-96, after abandoning their boat and trying to reach the North Pole on foot. They lived off of walrus blubber, and slept a great deal.

I looked out at the icebergs floating off shore. To the east the sun streamed through mountains of gray cloud and fell, glowing, on distant islands of rock and ice. I stood where the stone hut had once been, and imagined living there, for months, even years. I remembered a quotation, from the 16th-century merchant Robert Thorne, that my grandfather kept tacked beside his desk at home: “There is no land uninhabitable nor sea unnavigable.” Maybe it was true, I thought. Maybe you could learn to live anywhere: Providenya, Franz Josef Land, Long Island, Michigan. You would come with bright plastic flowers, and rolls of floral wallpaper to line a permafrost hut. And you’d wind up watching the sky.

Carin Clevidence lives on the south shore of Long Island. She is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in Story, Field, and Japan’s Asahi Weekly.