The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller

Author:Nathaniel Ian Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

40

I was alone—almost entirely—for the next four years. Not quite four, but close. The first was an eternity. Of the years that followed after it, I remember little.

By the time Tapio left, in June, he had composed a list of tasks he thought I should perform. It was as heavy, and the pages as numerous, as a miner’s contract. Duties ranged from the obvious and essential (e.g., prepare winter stores, keep traps clean and oiled) to those that were maybe less so (e.g., lay in wood and furs for at least three years in case the supply should drop, scout traplines for future winters so no region is exhausted, maintain proper hygiene). To this day I am not certain whether he expected me to accomplish all of these things, or whether he simply wished to ensure that I kept busy for the sake of body and mind. He said I ought to have time for the first half that summer, and the second that winter, at which point I could make a new list. I laughed ruefully. He did not.

A squirrelly sort of panic gripped me when Tapio took ship, as well as a heaviness I could not shake for some days. Eberhard seemed depressed as well, though his views could be hard to interpret. I did a great deal of talking out loud to him, and when I did so he would look away, as though it were impertinent for me to address him directly.

But Tapio was correct, of course, and I found my way out of the darkest hole by engaging in difficult tasks. Distraction was not hard to come by. Summer in Raudfjorden is unparalleled in sheer beauty. One invariably forgets that green things can grow in a moonscape, and so the presence of any vegetation at all can make the place feel like a verdant woodland. The north and east of the archipelago are true Arctic, if one may permit so subjective a term. Along the west coast, in thrall to the West Spitsbergen Current, there are many places that look not unlike northern Sweden in summer—fields of grass, ferns, wildflowers, and willow. In the north one may find such thorough greenery only under bird cliffs, where the barren rock has been shat upon for millennia. The rest is sparsely vegetated even at the height of summer, for there are no warm Atlantic currents to quell the relentless polar excoriation, and ice damage is severe. Mountain avens grow in clumpy tussocks. In Reinsdyrflya one will find—for the reindeer have found it—semi-protected tundras with polar foxtail grass or, more commonly, the dun Arctic wood rush. They must eat something, after all. But even in Raudfjorden, there are fleeting moments of grace, for color erupts suddenly from isolated communities of alpine bistort, sulphur buttercup, white Arctic bell heather and purple saxifrage. Then a person may find some forgetfulness.

So I passed my first solitary summer in bittersweet reflection and frantic industry. The perpetual light would see me laboring (in

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