‘I offered to go out and talk to them, but my father said not to. It was the middle of the night. There was no reasoning with them. They’d have strung me up there and then. While we were arguing about what to do, they set the roof on fire. We grabbed what we could and escaped out the back.
‘It was my nineteenth birthday. I should be bitter about it, but I’m not, because that was the start of all the good things that happened to me.’
He kept stirring, sifting through the contents of the bowl in silence, then he let the spoon drop.
‘We had to set out for Magadan on foot. It was summertime. I don’t know how we stayed alive on that highway. The things I saw made life in Evangeline seem like Sunday school. A couple of times we skipped off the road and travelled in the taiga, getting eaten alive by the insects.
‘We got a ride part of the way with a trader — a Jew from Odessa called Eli Rozenbaum who was on his way back from Polyn. We were lucky to find him. He drove us through the worst of it. You know what a vezdekhod is? He had one of those with its cab piled up to here with weapons — guns and things I’d never seen before. There were roadblocks in those days, but they were built to stop foot traffic. Eli drove at night and whenever he came across one, he’d floor the thing and crash right through it.
‘He helped us on a boat to Providence, but he warned us about going there. We told him we were planning on paying some Chukchi to take us across to Nome. My mother had family in Barrow, if we could get there. Before he left us he gave my father a pistol to protect himself.
‘The voyage took two weeks. You ever been to Providence? It’s a hellhole. There used to be a fleet there, but they’d all been discharged. The town was crawling with hungry sailors, looking for money, looking for a way back west. Ugly, stained buildings. The Chukchi were terrified of the Russians and wouldn’t come near the place. There was one warehouse full of freeze-dried potato that had been rations for the fleet. A gang of sailors selling it off. We paid them a pair of gold earrings for enough to feed four of us.
‘It was stupid of us, but we were desperate. They marked us out as worth robbing. We hunkered down that night in an abandoned apartment. We were asleep when some sailors broke in and started to beat up my father.
‘In the struggle, the pistol rolled out of his pocket and I let off three shots at them. They were home-made shells. The first two killed one of the sailors. The third blew up in the breech and the metal splinters took one of my eyes out.
‘The noise of it scared them out of there. We left town as soon as we could and went on foot to a Chukchi village on the Bering Sea.
‘My father clung on for a few days. My mother gave the Chukchi all we had to take us across to Diomed. You know there are Chukchi on Diomed, like us, neither Russian nor Yankee?
‘We buried my father at sea. Just slipped his body into the water. We felt it was better that way. We didn’t want him to lie in foreign soil. What I would have given to bury him in America. We were near enough Alaska to be able to smell it, but with no way to get there.
‘The Chukchi on Diomed gave us a shack and my mother taught in their school for a while. But it was tough on us. Losing our dad. Losing our home. Stranded among savages — no disrespect to them, they couldn’t have been kinder to us, but we didn’t come to that place to live like that, all the dirt and drunkenness. You know how native people are.
‘The straits were still icing up some winters. I remember my first sight of sea ice on the foreshore, looking out towards Alaska. It looked unreal through my one good eye, flat as a painting, all the mist and sand and grey water. I swore to god that if he could find us a way to get there, I would be his servant in everything. That was the day everything changed.
‘I went back to the shack and who’s there but Eli Rozenbaum. He’d run into some Chukchi fishermen who’d told him about us and he’d come to help.
‘He paid gold for us to get to Nome and found a boat there to take us on to Barrow.
‘Waking up that first morning in Barrow was like coming round from a bad dream. I mean, it wasn’t like it was, but compared to everything we’d seen … Waffles and fruit for breakfast. I never tasted anything so good in my whole life. My aunt said her sourdough starter was a hundred years old. I looked at my mother with my mouth open when she said that. In amazement. As bad as they thought things were, to have that continuity …
‘Through the winter, Eli came back every couple of months to check on us. He was back and forth to Chukhotka and brought us news. Soon, it became pretty obvious to even me that he wasn’t just visiting out of neighbourliness. He’d taken a shine to my mother and was courting.
‘Our relatives weren’t keen about it, with him being a Jew and everything, but my mother was a widow and she didn’t have any better offers.
‘She wouldn’t hear anything against it, and she liked to tell them it wasn’t the first time He’d sent a Jew to save us.
‘They were married in the spring and I went to work with Eli.
‘Eli had a business going up here. He’d take moonshine and bullets and whatnot and pay Tungus to go into the Zone for him and fetch weapons and tools. He’d bring them back to Alaska to sell. Dealers came up in private planes from all over to see him. They had a notion where he was getting it from, and bitched about his prices, but none of them could have done what he did.
‘I started travelling out with him. I know the Far North like you do. I understand the mind of the Tungus. Eli came to depend on me. We were able to clean out whole sections of Polyn and get the stuff back to the States, but every time, it got harder and harder to get labour. The Tungus were getting sick and dying and they’d refuse to go. Each time, we’d have to tap up another village. The Tungus there still hate us for what happened in the early days.
‘We started to think, there must be an easier way to do this. There were all these masses of people dying for food, and there’shurting for workmen. That’s when we stumbled on this place. It was an old garrison. We stocked it with men, and twice a year we send them in to earn their living.
‘I took them myself at first. I never went into the Zone itself, but I liked being near it. Radiation didn’t bother me at all, but that other stuff, that’s fierce. We couldn’t risk that getting out of there. The first couple of times we brought them back to the base. So many people got sick we had to kill everyone and start again.
‘We didn’t like doing it. We didn’t do it lightly. But we can’t get by without what we get from the Zone. It’s as plain as that. It’s not pretty what we do. But I’m not ready to ask my wife and family to live like the Tungus.
‘And if we’re honest about it — most of these prisoners will never see the Zone. There’s old men here who would have been dead years ago without the base. If you take away the years they’ve gained from the years that have been lost, I’d guess it comes out all square.’
He was silent for a while.
‘And how did you lose the other one?’ I asked him.
He shifted in his chair. ‘That one’s a cataract. Too much staring at the sun. But I can see enough in it to know who you were.
‘The thing about the Zone is, over the years, the easy pickings have gone. It’s getting harder and harder to find what we want, yet the best stuff is supposed to be still in there. Things that make the flask you found look like a sling-shot. And medicines. Cases of cells. Daniel’s fire. That’s why I sent Apofagato out. But Boathwaite picked this moment to go soft on me.’
I wondered if, because I was someone from his own past, he felt the need to acquit himself in front of me. I stayed quiet and let him open himself out to the silence in the room.