Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

Back in the winter, when the plane deposited Wyndham and me and the construction crew on T-6, we had somehow contrived in that polar darkness to assemble the prefabricated structure of the mess hall in such a way that it ended up with an extra stub of a room, a kind of alcove. I had dragged one of the more comfortable chairs into it and stacked some of my books around it. I liked to sit there at night and read.

Rebecca (this was weeks later) was doing a crossword in the mess. Of all of us, Rebecca was the one most able to keep to a regular schedule despite the unending twilight. When she was finished recording and sorting her data for the day, she devoted her evenings to crosswords, board games or reading. I was in my alcove, from where I could see Wyndham but not Rebecca. He was tinkering with his laptop, trying to improve the insulation pack around his jerry-rigged car battery. We weren’t supposed to do such things in the mess, but Wyndham always did.

I don’t know which of them started it—probably Wyndham, who was always good for a philosophical ramble—but they were talking about different kinds of cold. For some reason their easy conversation put me in a sneering mood and I couldn’t focus on my book. Rebecca told a story about a young monk who travelled thousands of miles to study under a great Zen master.

Rebecca’s voice in the twilight:

The master told the student to sit still and meditate. Told him to meditate every day. Told him to meditate his every waking hour, to ignore everything else in the world except for the demands of nourishment and sleep.

I couldn’t see her, but I pictured her face, her mouth. Full lips forming the words.

So the student meditated for months on end—until he was exhausted, wasting away. Time and again he would go to the master and say, Why have I not attained enlightenment? I have done everything you say. The master grew angry and told him not to come bothering him with any more complaints. Not to come to him at all until he attained enlightenment.

I know how this ends, I thought. I was half tempted to heckle.

The student went away and managed to stick with it for another month. Then he climbed up the hill to the master once more, and all he wanted to ask was, Am I nearly there? Am I making any progress at all? Is there the slightest hope? But the moment he began to speak, the master pulled out his sword. With a single motion—it flashed just once in the sunlight—he cut off the student’s finger.

Stunned, howling, the student staggered back from the master, turned and stumbled down the hill. He hadn’t gone far when the master shouted his name. The student stopped, clutching his bleeding knuckle, and looked back up the hill. The master slowly raised his hand and, with a smile of utter bliss on his face, wagged his own index finger.

Rebecca paused, and I knew she was demonstrating to Wyndham. Wyndham looking up from his task to see her imperturbable face. Beautiful slender finger wagging at him.

And at that moment, she said, the student attained enlightenment.

Ah, yes, said Wyndham, a very different kind of cold.

My regard for religion, any religion, has always been low, but Zen Buddhism—perhaps because it is fashionable in those urban enclaves where fashion is everything—seemed to me particularly bogus, precious, its masters the spiritual equivalent of mimes. As for sub-zero pedagogy, the High Arctic is the coldest teacher of them all—I have lost far more than a finger under its instruction—but I have yet to attain even a modicum of wisdom, let alone enlightenment, for all its fabulous array of blades.

Not like Vostok, Wyndham added.

Rebecca’s laugh, brief, throaty. Not like Vostok at all.

Oh, smug! Oh, Annex! I thought, my sneering still at full roar when it was blown from me as if by a sudden blast, a shock wave that rolled outward from their easy concord. It had been stupid of me to imagine Rebecca and I sharing the warmth of that unspoken contra mundum attitude that seems to envelop certain couples.

A few days later, I changed my mind yet again. We had a globe at Arcosaur, quite a big one. Close to the poles, there’s nothing like a globe to give a proper sense of geographical relationships. But I had another globe of my own that I kept on display in my area of the lab. It was a scruffy, disreputable-looking thing I had picked up at a flea market. (I am a frequenter of such places when in a big city, not because I have any expertise or love for antiques, but because I have a certain affection for things that survive, especially if they survive for no apparent reason.) The market stall had two globes on display, high school models of the same vintage. One of them was the familiar blue and white sphere interrupted by nations of less natural shape and colour, many with vanished names. Siam. Yugoslavia. The GDR.

Someone had painted the other globe, an identical high school model, matte black.

How much is that? I said to the vendor. It looks like something they’d use in a TV version of Hamlet.

He looked at the black sphere and back at me. Three bucks.

My black Earth went with me on all my travels after that. Whenever people would ask me about it, and they invariably did, I would give them different answers.

What is that? Rebecca was standing behind me in the lab. I could smell the faint cucumbery scent of her hand lotion.

My mother, I said.

It’s like something from Hamlet, she said. If it had been written for television.