Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Author:Esi Edugyan
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

7

SOME DAYS THE WIND HISSED ACROSS THE ICEFIELDS, THE snow blowing in sideways. Mister Peter carved his way out of the camp every morning and returned at nightfall. I imagined it was to the outpost that he was going, but I was not wholly certain. Watching him, I understood him to be a sensitive and intelligent man, quietly pragmatic in his solutions. I could not fathom why he’d elected to surrender his life to the unpredictable whims of Mister Wilde.

Also in the mornings Titch’s father worked at his experiments in the fourth igloo, a space he had devoted to the microscopic study of various kinds of ice. He spoke at length of the tiny creatures he found in the icy waters, and he showed a carefully tagged box of loose bones, describing the monster they had been taken from. A walrus, he called it. He showed me a long, spiralled horn and said it came from a sleek white whale that lived beneath the ice.

One day I sat sketching a specimen. And though I had made many a sketch before, I was suddenly astonished at myself—at what I could create with these thin, tremulous fingers with their nail beds lined always in dirt. The image seemed less a drawing than a haunting, a vision of the specimen’s afterlife, set down in a ghostly lustre of ink. How far I had come these long months; how much I had grown in both art and life.

I sensed a breath at my neck, and turned to find Mister Wilde peering unexpectedly over my shoulder. I jolted, then turned to face the small man, surprised as always to find his face nearly eye to eye with mine, his fish-scented breath rasping in his throat. He bore the same bright green eyes as Titch, but his were smaller, flintier, with odd pinpoints of light in the irises. He stared down at my hands and paper, and it was as though his eyes were finely dissecting every stroke of my sketch.

“Hm,” he said, sounding both surprised and unimpressed. “There is talent there.”

Then he smiled at me, and it was like a flash of violence, all wooden teeth and gums. Seeing it, something shrank in me. I felt both his intense awe and his mockery, as if he were watching some insensible creature perform an unnatural act, as if a hothouse plant had learned to speak.

I left off drawing in the afternoons, and instead would walk with Titch and his father, checking the various small cages and traps Mister Wilde had set around the perimeter. They were, without fail, always empty. One afternoon we came across the deep-set tracks of a polar bear. We followed them for several hours, and when we reached open ice, the trail vanished. Mister Wilde came to himself then; he glanced at the darkening sky and his eyes filled with alarm. We hurried for miles back to the camp, arriving just as everything went black on the horizon.

All this I observed with real interest.

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