The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories by Ethan Rutherford

Author:Ethan Rutherford [Rutherford, Ethan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

It is January now, 1916. A New Year’s celebration—Brusilov’s idea—was subdued. We boiled tea with dried cherries and toasted our continuing good fortune. Someone hoisted a cup and requested that we be forever locked together. Vlad explained to him that there are things you can kid about, and things you can’t.

It has fallen to me and Yuri to check the contact points where the ice meets the hull. Every day we lower ourselves down from the rail to make our inspection. We look for fissures. We measure drift. Where we can see wood we check alignment. We submit our daily report to Brusilov in writing, which for the last three months has consisted of one word: same.

“What’s the point?” Yuri said one day when handing it over.

Brusilov didn’t look up from his desk. “The point is I told you to do it.”

“Bureaucrat,” Yuri hissed as we left the cabin.

We’ve moved through every possible state of mind. Patience was supplanted with panic, which was replaced by a dull boredom that has mitigated the fear. Yevgeni whittles figurines and arranges them on the bulkhead. Vlad practices knots. We’ve played poker until everyone but Yuri is in unimaginable debt. There are moments of dread. Regret. Listless fatalism. But only Albanov, our navigator, is constantly riled up, telling us we don’t deserve to be locked in ice. His murmuring has grown louder over the last few weeks. We are huddled in the galley when he starts in again, in a low whisper, making it known that he’s never seen such idiocy aboard a ship, and that someone needs to be blamed and punished. That Brusilov’s thorough incompetence needs to be folded back on him.

“What good would that do?” Dmitri says. “Tell me what that would change. Once we’re in charge of the ship the ice will just open up?”

“So you’re just going to allow this to happen to you?” Albanov says. “You’re going to let him take you quietly to your death? We’ve drifted two thousand miles.”

Vlad’s near the stove, boiling tea. “Your point?” he says.

Those of us listening shift uncomfortably. It’s a familiar conversation. “The happy ignorance of the indifferent,” Albanov says to us. “Have you always been like this?” We shrug. “Happy?” someone says.

In early January Brusilov takes sick and retreats to his cabin with his niece. She tends to him, boiling tea and bringing him meals. She towels his forehead and locks herself in. None of us have touched a woman since embarking, and we watch the cabin door with an envy that borders on insanity.

“Why lock the door?” Yevgeni says.

“Wouldn’t you?” Dmitri says. There’s laughter.

“Look at little Piotr,” Yuri says. “He’s blushing.”

Everyone looks. “Keep your hands where we can see them,” Vlad says. “Just because she can’t see you . . .”

I try to think of the ice. I tell them I’m not blushing. This makes it worse. “He can speak,” someone says.

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