Blind Thaw

I keep my eyes fixed on the joint. The piece of walrus ivory—yellowish, striated like the handle of a poorly washed carving knife—pulses between our wrists with a ridiculous tremor, a faint hiccup climbing up my forearm. It is Nicolai’s blood coming to fetch mine, or the other way around. I no longer even know whose pulse it is. His wrist is swollen, bruised at the edges where the hemp thread sinks into the flesh; mine looks like a piece of rancid lard forgotten on a cold ledge. I reach out my left thumb to touch the skin around the cannula and find it doughy, lacking that elastic bounce living bodies have when you squeeze them. God, it is freezing. It cools from the inside out, like a thick soup you leave on the window and that breeds a grey skin before you realize no one is going to swallow it anymore.

The bunker reeks. It smells of burnt kerosene with dirty wicks, of rancid rifle grease, and that heavy dampness of wool soaked in saltpetre that never quite dries out. Of old pus too. Henrik is sitting on an empty ammunition crate, knees pressed to his chest and hands tucked into his armpits to keep from losing his fingers. He does nothing. He breathes with a damp whistle in his lungs, a gurgle I know well: his chest full of frozen phlegm. Every two or three minutes he clears his throat, spits a blackened ball onto the packed snow of the floor, and wipes the corner of his mouth with the sleeve of his frayed greatcoat.

I know he's dead. I've known for two nights, since he sat down in his corner with the notebook on his knees and never got up again. But at this hour, with the wick about to drown and the air thick as tallow, the doctor comes back to his crate and his cough, and I no longer have the strength to argue with my head about what it sees.

"Braaten," I say, and my voice comes out cracked, dry sandpaper against the palate. "Give me the dirty kerosene rag. This Russian is stiffening up on me again."

"Leave him," the doctor mutters without looking at me, rubbing his red, peeled nose with the back of his mitten. "If he dies, he dies. We'll save the air. Besides, there's no petroleum left even to strike a match."

"I didn't say strike it. I said give me the rag to rub his fingers. His nails are black, Henrik. Black as coal."

"I lost a nail yesterday afternoon," Henrik says, showing me his right thumb covered in a dirty scab, totally indifferent to the war, the cold, and us. "It peeled right off while I was scratching my shin. Didn't even bleed. A dry scrap of skin and that's that."

I look at the floor. There is an oval tin of King Oscar sardines on the crate; the tin bent at one corner serves to hold a strip of linen burning with a dwarf flame, bluish, drowning in its own melted tallow. The wick sputters. It makes that small, petty noise old frying pans make when you throw in an un-dried garlic clove.

Hunger.

I am nine years old and Aunt Solveig is cutting lard on the long kitchen table. Always in the present, because when I close my eyes I am still there, smelling the dry dill hanging from the beams and the doughy heat of the wood-fired oven warming the floor bricks. She doesn't use a board; she rests the white bacon on her left thumb and the knife comes down fast, toc, toc, toc, grazing the skin without ever cutting it. The steam from the pot rises in thick whorls and fogs her spectacle lenses, but she doesn't take them off; she laughs, tosses me a piece of fried crackling that is still burning, and tells me to chew slowly, that if I swallow in a hurry I'll get a knot in my gut. Eat, Einar, eat, it's raining outside.

I open my eyes. There is no lard. There is no rain.

There is only the ash-grey face of Nicolai Voronin half a meter from mine, glassy eyes fixed on a crack in the planked ceiling. His mustache hangs full of yellowish frost from his own snot. Suddenly he moves his lips, but neither Russian nor anything else comes out; just a snap of thick saliva, like two boots pulling away from the mud.

"Shut your mouth, animal," I murmur, but I run my frozen knuckles over his cheek to brush away a bit of snow. "Save your bellows."

"He doesn't understand you, Einar"—Henrik barely moves his jaw; his teeth chatter with a dry, rigid rattle—"and it doesn't matter. Let him burn out." The old man coughs, doubling over toward his knees, his hands still jammed in his armpits, and spits a thick glob that trembles on the floor. "Smells like carrion already. He's passing his rot to your arm, boy. He's going to rot you too."

I look at his greasy neck.

I have the Mauser on the blanket, within arm's reach. I think about picking it up, about smashing his mouth with the butt so he'll shut up for good, but moving my fingers takes an eternity and my groin aches from not changing position. A thick nausea rises in my throat. At him, at the Russian, at everything.

The crash gives no warning.

It isn't a fine crack or the moan trees make when the blizzard bends them in the forest; it is a dull, brutal blow, an underground thunder that shakes the teeth inside my gums. Above, the master pine crossbeam—a thirty-centimeter-thick log holding up the entire northern roof—bursts down the middle with a dry artillery snap. The weight of thousands of tons of permafrost and fossilized snow comes down on us like a mass of molten lead. The roof gives forty centimeters all at once. A shower of frozen black earth, splinters sharp as bayonets, and blocks of compacted ice collapses over the embrasure, crushing the zinc frame and sealing the only hole where the whistle of the outside wind got in.

Silence.

The sardine tin goes out, crushed under a piece of beam. We are left in darkness; not a gloom, but the black, blind nothing that crushes your eyelids. In less than five seconds, the air changes: the scant draft cuts out entirely, replaced by a bitter dust that clings to the lips and a warm vapor reeking of confinement, stale sweat, and churned earth.

"Henrik!" I shout, but the suspended dust fills my mouth with bitter grit and makes me double over in two with a violent heave.

No one answers. I only hear the continuous creaking of the timbers still splintering millimeter by millimeter under the monstrous pressure of the outside ice. Where the ammo crate stood there is no crate and no corner anymore: half a meter of rubble over the body that had spent two nights freezing there. If he ever spoke to me, he won't again.

Darkness strips you of shame and strips you of your head. I grope for the log wall with my left hand, scratching the rough bark until a splinter drives under the nail of my ring finger. It doesn't even hurt. My fingers are so numb the pain takes half a minute to climb my wrist, but the tug I feel in my right arm brings me back to reality with a jolt: Nicolai is convulsing on the floor.

The Russian has woken from the blow or the suffocation. He writhes like an eel at the bottom of a boat, kicking blindly against the fallen planks. His dead weight drags me toward the frozen floor.

"Still!" I roar in the blackness, trying to plant my knees on the unstable floor. "Nicolai, still, damn it, we're going to snap an arm!"

He pays no attention. Panic has entered his blood. He pulls me with a savage force, an animal strength I don't know where he gets with that half-starved body. I feel his bony fingers scratch the collar of my greatcoat, seeking purchase on my shoulder to heave himself up in the dark. The ivory conduit between our wrists stretches like a bowstring. The hemp holding the ligature bites into my raw skin.

"Vintyr!" he yells, mangling my surname with a hoarse voice that seems to come from the bottom of a muddy well. "Dyshish'... I can't... air!"

"The chimney, idiot! Toward the back ventilation!" I scream at him, giving him a sharp yank that almost rolls us both onto the debris. "Get up, move upward!"

We crawl on all fours in the pitch blackness. Lack of oxygen strikes the back of my neck with a dull hammering; my temples throb with a violence that clouds my judgment. The back ventilation chimney—the only vertical sheet-metal flue rising toward the rocky slope—is still open, I know because I feel an infinitesimal thread of cutting air coming down the pipe, thin as a sewing needle. But Nicolai stumbles over Henrik's buried body or a broken timber, takes an agonizing misstep, and falls backward with all his tonnage.

The yank is dry, implacable. There is no time to loosen anything.

The striated ivory cannula is ripped straight out of my flesh and his in a wet, dreadful snap, breaking or tearing the sutures all at once. The pain doesn't arrive immediately; warmth comes first, a boiling, thick, brazen jet of arterial blood that splatters our faces and hands alike in the middle of the shadow. It smells of raw iron, of a slaughterhouse in winter. I feel my own blood spilling in gushes onto the frozen floor, mixing with his in a warm puddle that freezes at the edges in a matter of seconds.

"Aaaaah!" Nicolai howls like a wolf caught in an iron trap, clutching his torn wrist to his chest.

I grip my right wrist with my left hand with all the strength I have left, plunging my fingers directly into the warm tear. If I don't reach the air in two minutes, I'll bleed out right here or my heart will burst from the vacuum. Or both. I don't care.

"Up!" I yell at him, kicking his side clumsily to make him react. "Up the damn sheet metal, Nicolai! Up!"

We crawl to the narrow threshold of the metal chimney. The tube is barely sixty centimeters wide; it is a vertical throat of rusted iron rising three meters toward the snow surface. The blizzard howls up there with a sharp whistle, but the bunker walls at our back continue to yield: the pine props creak with a dry, continuous snap. The final collapse comes down, implacable, pushing tons of stone and frozen mud.

I reach the base of the metal shaft. My bloodied fingers slide against the frozen zinc, leaving a red, sticky crust that the cold fixes instantly like lacquer. Nicolai props himself beside me, panting with his mouth open, bathed in my blood and his.

We look at each other blindly, guessing our silhouettes in the minimal reflection of the snow falling down the pipe.

The gap is ridiculously narrow. Two men cannot fit. There is no room to climb together, and the sheet-metal footholds will give way at the first double attempt. For one to get out to the blizzard and break the outer ice crust, the other has to stay below, hunch his back, put his shoulders as a step, and push him toward the light before the roof collapses definitively and buries this hole forever.

Only one.

I look at the blood escaping in gushes between my knuckles. I look at the Russian, who tries to steady himself with trembling knees against the cold metal. There is no time to think. Either I put my shoulders and push him up, or we both die crushed in the mire before the minute is up.