Afterlands by Steven Heighton

Author:Steven Heighton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction.Historical
ISBN: 9780676976786
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

One day at dusk Tukulito takes Punnie out to the new latrine, the old one having vanished the night the ice disintegrated. In a year or two, bemused whalers might discover it mysteriously bobbing along on its own tiny floe. The new facility is a too-shallow pit dug behind a hummock, which forms a kind of sloping back wall, with two side walls of rough snow blocks extending out from it to stop the wind. The sea-edge is just a dozen paces off, though in the latest cold snap the leads have all frozen over and the floe and the towering bergs are again part of a solid pack inching southward like a glacier.

As mother and child approach the latrine hand in hand, a low muttering is audible from back of the hummock. German. This although the crewmen have their own latrine.

Tukulito stops and calls, Yes? Who is it?

You know very well whom!

She can’t place the voice: shrill, scolding. Mr Jamka staggers from behind the hummock, crab-eyed, hoisting up his fur trousers with grubby hands. His feet, purple, swollen and hairy, are bare in the snow. He wears no parka, just a sailor’s jumper. Above his matted beard the sharp nose is burgundy against his white, white face. She has not seen him outside in weeks.

You have been looking straight at me! he says with a crafty expression.

But you were in the latrine, Mr Jamka.

Ah! he says triumphantly, and how can you have known such a thing without looking?

And perhaps you are mistaken in the dusk, sir. This is not your latrine.

But it is not at all dark, Madame, look about you!

A sighing crack runs through the new ice and Jamka peers around with rolling, primitive eyes, the whites clear and luminous in the twilight. From beneath the floe comes an enormous gulping, belching sound. When it subsides Jamka looks wily again. The knee-length trousers give him thick furry thighs under a shrunken torso, like a satyr. He still seems not to notice Punnie.

Perhaps all along you knew I was here, he says with a look of pride, delight in his own shrewdness. We know so much about the squaws, mein Gott, ja!

He comes at her, sets hands on her shoulders and draws her to him. Punnie, holding her mother’s hand, is tugged closer too.

Stop this at once, Mr Jamka, we are here because the child needs—

Oh do not speak to me of childrens! Jamka is pressing bearded kisses on her cheeks while trying to topple her back onto the ice. She mashes the heel of her palm into his gluey nose. Scrawny though he is, he dwarfs her in every way. He wrenches her down hard and Punnie, still a ghost to him, tumbles with them. Anaana! the child cries, wriggling out from under his furry thigh and leaping up. He is on top of Tukulito, trying to pin her by the wrists, his long nails gouging her skin, his lower body thrusting at hers through the layers of clothing.

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