For the first time in as long as I can think, I knew a kind of contentment. And for once, the world wasn’t a thing to fight against.
Rain was falling when I reached my city.
I was lucky to have the business end of a long summer ahead of me. I worked like a crazy thing to get some food in the ground and a spare room ready. By the time the first snow came, I was too big for the morning ride.
In fact, I was in the stable when it happened. I stayed on my feet throughout, clutching onto the tack pegs to keep up and terrifying the horses with my screams. It all went quicker than the first time. Just as I was finally doubling up in pain, out popped a fierce-looking little thing with a shock of black hair and the dark face of a Tungus, paddling with its limbs and squalling, and a cry more like a mew than a scream.
9
I COUNTED THE BOOKS I’ve saved the other day. There are 2,075 of them stacked up in the armoury and 177 that I’ve laid by in the house. I also counted sixteen boxes of candles that I’ve stashed in Charlo’s old bedroom. They’re packed a gross to a box, and if you keep the wicks trimmed they burn for just above two hours. Each box is twelve days of constant light. There’s something more than six months’ worth of them altogether.
Of course, you barely need a light all the months of summer. You can read at midnight in June without one. If you read. It gives me a headache at any time of year.
The point about the candles is this: one day soon I’ll have to scavenge more boxes again. I have a good guess where I can find some more for now. But one day, there’ll be no more to be had. One day the candles will all be gone, and the wicks, and all the jars of spirit I have left.
I’ll have to make do with blubber lamps like the Chukchi have, or get used to living in the dark.
There isn’t a life to be had in this city any more.
*
We’re not the last just yet. About a year ago, I saw smoke coming from the chimney of the Velazquez house. It gave me a fright at first, but it turned out to be strangers, a man and a woman with a child of about five months old.
How they got here, I can’t guess and he wasn’t able to tell me. He’s Chinese, or maybe Korean. She looks part-Yakut, part-Russian.
We don’t have dealings with each other, but we nod when we pass. I left some cabbages and tiger balm on their stoop in the fall. And they left some kimchi for me.
Last winter was a fierce one, as bad as the ones in my childhood, but I know they lasted it, because at the end of March I saw him dragging a sled of ice-blocks back from the lake. I haven’t seen her or the child for a while.
If things go well for them, maybe they’ll hunker down, make a life here, have another child or two. But I don’t rate things better than fifty-fifty for them. That’s the way things are.
Since I was fifteen years old, I’ve been watching the world I knew go to hell. The only part of it that behaves how it should is the half-acre of vegetables in back of my house and even those have grown fickle as the seasons have altered.
Time is narrowing on me. I guess I could still leave here if I wanted. Try heading south again, or maybe find a boat to take me to the States. But I don’t expect I will now, knowing what I know. There are so many things that I wish could have turned out different. There’s no way back for me in this lifetime.
That plane I rode in was the last I ever saw.
These years that I’ve written of were the fall of my life. I’m pushing on into my own winter now. This hasn’t changed: old age is as cold as it ever was.
I’m growing old and thin. I’ve had to cinch my gun belt tighter each year to hold what’s left of my hips. I’m frailer too. But I still ride at dawn each day, round the fading circle of what was once this city. And I’m still greedy for whatever’s left to me. I can’t open my eyes soon enough each day to see you, my darling.
*
The road’s been quiet for a long time. The only thing moving on it is dust devils in the summer months. Sometimes I look at it and wonder: what became of all that life?
I expect the base is gone by now. I wonder if the grapple I made still twinkles in a broken-down corner of the grain store.
Those prisoners were bound to rise up sooner or later. You can’t keep your foot on a man’s throat so long without facing the consequence of it. And when they did? What then?
They’d kill the guards, fall out over the women, scatter in the bush, and their offspring — if they managed to have any — would end up like the tabby that I’d seen, miaowing round a cold hearth, flinching at the sight of a stranger.
*
The cranes lurch south each fall. Each year the wilderness reclaims a little more. Each year the taiga riots on another tract of the city. Each month that goes brings closer the time of your departure.
And once you’ve left, I see it going like this: five or ten years after, or maybe sooner if I’m lucky, the horse will throw me on a cold morning, or the stove’ll catch while I’m sleeping, or I’ll just keel over among the cabbages — I won’t have the puff I used to and it’s heavy work chopping those stalks out. Down I’ll go, nose in the dirt, and breathe my last.
There’s not one iota of fear in me about it. I wouldn’t have you stay for anything. But I can’t think too hard about the world I’ve bequeathed to you, or the gulf between your childhood and mine, or I start to feel guilty for it.
Once I thought I would make this for you to read. I planned to give it to you, copied out in a fair hand, with all the spellings checked up against pa’s dictionary. But now I see that the best thing I can leave you is your own blank page. This can stay with the other books I’ve saved, in the way of a memory stone, or one of those Tungus ribbons on a branch at the start of the journey, or the end of one, chalking up a little prayer against annihilation.
When you’re ready to light out of here, take the Winchester and the fastest pair of horses and go. Let it be on a bright day in winter for better travelling. And until the wind fills them, I’ll be able to look down from the tower on the fire-house at the tracks you leave across the snowfields north, and say to myself: Ping’s on her way home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marcel Theroux is the author of three previous novels, A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, and The Paperchase, winner of the 2002 Somerset Mgham Award. He lives in London.