The switch had been arranged that same night; during a fire alarm that had also been arranged. The new shift, of night staff and night physician, had not been surprised at the brain death shown on the monitors, and no autopsy had been required for the bandaged man — only his removal to the hospital’s morgue, where he remained for two months until the coroner’s final release. But the man in the morgue, so unceremoniously buried, was not Porter. Porter himself had been swiftly transported, doctors in attendance, to the air base, where he stayed on a life support machine until he could be flown farther south, to another military hospital, of Langley’s nomination.
‘Can he receive proper care up in that Indian village?’ Hendricks asked.
‘All he needs. There’s a health service in Kispiox, and district visitors. It’s what he wanted − he’s sick of hospitals. They’ve got some sight back in that right eye and it’s supposed to improve, though he’s got it covered now. His legs are wired up and there’s a lot of new parts in his body. He’ll be in that chair for some time. But he still has a lung — and a sense of humour. He calls himself bionic man.’
‘He’s talking now, is he?’
‘Not really — not yet. He can write a bit, but of course he can’t see and it’s just a scrawl. There was a big stack of mail for him there. The postmaster will be answering for him — I told him what to write.’
The letters were from colleagues and students at McGill and Victoria. Both universities had been informed of the accident — of the nonstop truck that had hit him as he stepped out of Quebec woods. From both establishments he was now on sick leave.
‘Another thing,’ Walters said. ‘I saw his mother up there. A strange old woman — wailing. She said she’d warned him years ago against going to college — that though he’d bring light to the world, he’d the in the dark, and it would all end in tears.’
‘Well. He didn’t die,’ Hendricks said. ‘And as yet it hasn’t ended — in tears or otherwise.’
‘The light, though … A strange remark, wasn’t it?’
‘Sure. And about that she could be right.’
‘Was it any use, that disk of his?’
‘Apparently. Harmonics theory is brand new. And fibre optics is an advancing field. The Russians always led in those fields — very unconventional, their science. It’s possible to make a start, even with what he brought. A cure for blindness … We certainly never foresaw this. It wasn’t in vain, you know, his journey.’
‘Did anything new come up on the eyrie?’
‘It isn’t there.’
In the spring gales many of the eyries were no longer there on the east-facing cliff of Greater Diomede island. There had been landfalls, erosion, the usual seasonal changes on this heap of granite. But the position of Porter’s was well-marked: a clear fix had been taken of its location. Whether the eyrie remained or not, the data disk would remain, deep in the cliffs back wall, secure in its crevice; perfectly recoverable when time and chance offered. On the tape, Porter had been quite clear on that.
It was not the only thing he had been clear on. He had been concerned about an addition he wanted made to a forthcoming book. It had been edited for him by a young woman in Prince George. He had spelt out the addition and Walters had passed it on. This he mentioned now.
‘That other young woman, eh?’ Hendricks smiled. ‘Well, he had no shortage of them. He was very attractive to women. He was married to an Indian girl once, you know — she was blind.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Walters said, staring. ‘I didn’t know that at all. We were together for weeks in camp, and talked a lot. I never understood that.’
‘No. Well. There’s a lot not understood about him. I doubt if anybody understood him,’ Hendricks said, and closed the file. ‘He had no real attachments, you know,’
But there had been an attachment.
Medical Officer Komarova was now sick of the Kolymsky region.
From the Chief of Militia she heard that the villain was likely dead. Not certain — Irkutsk hadn’t yet deigned to tell him — but there were rumours, and it was likely.
Through the winter she had observed her mother failing. And from the Evenks she knew that Tcherny Vodi’s Director (so a grieving Stepanka said) had failed; her beloved Misha-Bisha. Soon only unhappy memories would remain in this place, and she thought it well to look for another.
In June, barely spring at Tchersky, she flew west and found summer. The Karelskaya region needed a medical officer, district of Lake Ladoga; interview St Petersburg. She had trained in Petersburg, knew the remote area where services were required. It had many attractions, chief among them distance — 6000 kilometres of distance — from the Kolymsky region.
A room had been booked for her, and in it she took out her ring. She hadn’t worn it in Tchersky, and now she examined it again.
As our love the circle has no end …
She tried it on her third finger but it was too small and she slipped it on the little one and slept with it.
In the morning she was out early, before seven, restless in the big city. Her interview wasn’t until eleven, and she walked for hours.
In the Nevsky Prospekt, still only a quarter past ten, she looked, into a bookshop and wandered round it and was in the foreign section; and suddenly, almost fainting, she saw him. Saw his face. On the back of a book. She picked it up.
J-B PORTER. The Inuit: Life & Legend.
The book was new, there were three copies, face down, somewhat dusty from unpacking, and an irritable assistant snatched the one from her hand, and pencilled a price inside, and in the other two, and wiped them, and left them right way up.
There was nowhere to sit and she could hardly stand. She leaned against a wall and looked at the book again. The flyleaf said it was the author’s latest and most significant contribution to a field already illuminated by his powerful …
The English words blurred before her eyes but she read on.
In his completion of earlier studies Dr Porter had provided the definitive account … his text supplying in particular all known versions of the reverse-narrative technique of this supposedly unsophisticated people …
And not only the text, she saw, turning a page. There was a one-line dedication: To ahsib ahsim & aynap aynat.
She stopped twisting her ring and wiped her eyes, and tried it again. Right to left. Yes. Yes. But the price of the book, rouble-pencilled, was astronomically beyond her and she left, stumbling out into daylight.
And three months later, her mother at last laid to rest in the small cemetery at Panarovka, she left the Kolymsky region for good; her new posting noted by all relevant medical authorities; and also by Langley.
Three months more, settled but melancholy in the Karelskaya region, she returned one day from a trip, and looked briefly through the mail that lay open on her desk. One envelope was not opened, and she paused over it. A long business envelope, the address handwritten. And unopened, evidently, because it was marked Private. The postmark read St Petersburg. She knew few people in Petersburg, and didn’t recognise this hand at all. She opened the envelope, and at first could make no sense of the contents. A slim sheaf, bearing the logo Aeroflot. A flight ticket. She had booked no flight ticket. A mistake, obviously. But stapled to the cover of the ticket, an immigration department slip; and on the slip her name and passport number, all correct. Inside, the ticket was undated, an open flight: the destination, Montreal. No note came with the ticket, no explanation at all. She opened the envelope wider, and at the bottom saw it, a tiny slip of cigarette paper. A single line of writing was on it, somewhat irregular, but the Russian quite legible: As our love the circle has no end.