The Weight of Quicksilver

Cold doesn't wake you. The cold was already there, it was there last night and it will still be there when there is no one left to count how many of us there were; what wakes you is the lack of space in your lungs, that pasty sensation of swallowing limestone flour that sticks to your uvula. I open my eyelids and the gloom of the bunker does not move. It smells of kerosene burned three days ago, of stiff linen caked with pus that the sub-zero air has hardened until it is brittle, and of that thick grease they smear on the bolts of the Maxims so the pins won't weld together when the thermometer drops to thirty below. Over our heads, the fir logs supporting the roof do not rest: they creak with a dry, minuscule snap, a molar chewing gravel. It is the permafrost. Four yards of earth and compressed snow pushing downward, millimeter by millimeter, seeking a way to crush the timber and fill the gaps left by the living.

I am nineteen years old and it is All Hallows' Eve at my uncle's inn in Hamar. The kitchen is full of white steam that smells of sweet onion, of bay leaves broken with the fingers, and of the rich broth of sheep's heads boiling in the enameled iron pot. My mother pushes my bangs aside with the back of her hand wet with cold water and does not say, "Careful with the knife, Einar"; she does not say it because I already know that steel cuts when one is thinking of something else. There is rapeseed oil shining on the cutting board, a razor-thin layer that reflects the yellow light of the lamp like a puddle in the dock square.

Fire.

There is no fire. There is only a grimy wick of uniform threads sputtering inside a crushed sardine tin in oil, where a remnant of rancid seal tallow refuses to die. The flame is small as a pinkey nail and dyes the frost on the rafters a greenish yellow, almost bilious. I try to bring my right hand to my throat to scratch the saltpeter crust pulling at the skin of my neck, but my arm won't rise. It weighs a ton. No, it doesn't weigh a ton: it is tethered.

An elastic, sharp tug bites the tender flesh of my wrist. Looking down, I see the piece. It is an old ivory cannula, file-grooved so the hemp thread won't slip, a yellowish tube no longer than a woman's index finger that crosses the open skin of my arm and loses itself under the dirty bandages of the man lying on the adjoining plank cot. The piece vibrates. It has a heartbeat of its own, or rather two: a dull thud coming from my chest and, a fraction of a second later, a faster, rushed echo, like the scurry of a rat across a zinc floor. The blood comes and goes through the polished channel. It feels warm on the outside, almost greasy against skin that has no feeling left.

Beside the unlit brazier, sitting on a camp stool that wobbles because it lacks a rubber tip, is Henrik Braaten. The doctor does not move. His back rests against the dry-stone wall and his head is tilted over his collarbone at an angle no living man can maintain without pain. The sparse beard is covered in a white crust of spit and frozen breath; his hands, tucked inside the sleeves of his regulation greatcoat, look like two dry roots pulled from a swamp. Resting on his rigid knees is a medical report notebook without covers, held down by a violet-lead carpenter's pencil.

I cough; my saliva tastes of old rust, of a copper coin sucked for hours. I raise myself a few inches on my elbows and my shoulder creaks with a wet, disorderly sound, a tangle of tendons that want nothing to do with the freezing air. The wool of the camp blanket scrapes my knuckles like sandpaper. It is a gray blanket, mended at the hem with packing cord, stinking of the sour sweat of three men who haven't taken off their boots since November.

"Braaten," I say. My own voice sounds alien to me, a dry noise that bounces off nothing because the snow covering the embrasure swallows any attempt at an echo. "Braaten, wake up. You've dropped your pencil."

The doctor does not blink. His eyes are half-closed, two slits of an opaque gray, identical to the windows of abandoned houses when the sun hits the dirty glass head-on. In his lap, beneath the pencil that hasn't fallen because stiff fingers have welded it to the paper by a crust of frost, a single line is read, written with a clumsy stroke as if the hand had raced against the loss of heat:

Sharing blood is not a pact of compassion; it is forcing two bodies to take turns at the agony so they do not turn to stone.

And I hate him. Just like that. With a clean rage that does no good to warm my hands.

The man sleeping at the other end of the ivory has his jaw shattered by a mortar shard that tore off half his cheek before the cold sealed the edges with a purple crust. It is Nicolai Voronin. I know that brown cloth coat and flat brass buttons because the artillerymen of Voronin's brigade hammered hill 114 for seven consecutive nights, without rest, with a cadence so regular it looked like the work of a mad blacksmith bending sheets of metal at the bottom of the valley. Now the gunner breathes with a short, broken bellows that whistles between his chapped lips.

I scratch the white scar crossing my left forearm—an old burn from when a ladle of boiling lard tipped over on me at the Tromsø dock—and look at the bone tube. The cannula is held by eight gut-thread stitches; some have torn and the skin around the incisions has the cerulean tone of pork meat left too long at the back of the larder.

"Do you have matches?" I murmur toward the dead man's corner, although I know there is no possible answer. "Braaten. He left the Swedish ones in his vest pocket, for sure. The yellow ones. The ones that strike even when damp."

Silence.

The air enters in the finest needles through a crack in the embrasure's mortar, hissing with that sharp sound old kettles make before coming to a boil. I stretch the numb fingers of my right hand, one by one. The ring finger doesn't fully respond; it stays halfway, curved like a fishhook. With my thumbnail, I scrape a speck of soot stuck to the pine table where a tin spoon with a bent handle rests. I clean it slowly. There is nothing else to do while the foreign heartbeat keeps pushing hot mercury into my veins to keep my heart from stopping.

Voronin moves. It is a minimal spasm, barely a shrinkage of the shoulders under the blanket soaked in urine and saltpeter, but the ivory cannula tightens with a snap that pulls at the insertion point in my flesh. A fine jet of pain, sharp as a hot pin, climbs my tendon to the hollow of my armpit.

The gunner expels a puff of fetid breath, laden with that smell of empty stomach and incipient gangrene that I would recognize in any cellar in Europe, and opens the only eyelid the shrapnel left him whole. It is a yellow, bloodshot eye that takes several seconds to fix on the dying light of the sardine tin before descending, slowly, toward my frayed sleeve.

There, sewn with black thread onto the bottle-green cloth that the frost has not managed to entirely fade, is the rampant reindeer of the 3rd Mountain Jäger. The same target Voronin had been putting inside the reticle of his seventy-six-millimeter piece all week long, until the whole mountain came down upon us.

Something kindles in that eye. Like when you leave a green log on the embers and it seems dead for half an hour, until suddenly it gives a dry snap and spits a drop of boiling resin that stains the ash.