Far North by Marcel Theroux Page A

years, there was a sense of promise about the place, and a sense of mission and hopefulness around what the people were doing.
    When war broke out, the government demanded oaths of loyalty from us. The many Quakers among us were barred by their faith from swearing to anything. The best they could do was an affirmation – but the government took it ill. And when we told them our young men wouldn’t serve in their army either, they withdrew the little they’d granted us: cheap fuel, medicines, the teachers who had travelled here to school us in our new mother tongue. But we’d come here to be left alone. There was nothing they had that we wanted. If anything, it bound us together a little more.

     *
    I took a sliver of blackened wing from the wreckage and made a keepsake out of it, working it into a tiny cross and wearing it on a string round my neck. From the depth of my sadness about Ping arose a new hope in the shape of that plane.
    The more I thought of it, the more it seemed right: out had gone the plane, from one of the sister cities, or some scratched-out dirt airstrip on the Bering Sea. There would be some broken hearts when it didn’t return. I knew how that felt: days spent waiting for a key to turn in the front door, or to hear a familiar voice in the courtyard. But these ones weren’t coming back. And when they didn’t, what then? Would they send another plane? Did they have one?

    Whatever their loss, I reasoned that any place with the know-how to put together and fly a plane was in better shape than I was. I imagined even their grieving would have an orderliness to it.

     *
    Right here in front of me is the world of the real. The pencil in my hand. The old exercise books I’m filling. The plumblack pinch on my thumbnail I put there hanging a birdfeeder. The backs of my hands, more wrinkled-looking than they were the last time I checked. I see it pretty clearly, because I don’t need things to be otherwise. Just like when I’m tracking game, I don’t go after what I hope to find, but only what’s there.
    But when it came to that plane, and the lives I imagined behind it, I let go of my reason too. Everything I needed to believe about the world came between me and a clear sight of reality. I clung onto the few facts that fit with my preferred way of looking at things, and the rest I kicked under the rug.
    Careening out of my grief in any case, I wasn’t in my right wits. A kind of frenzy took hold of me. The world, which had seemed so desolate after Ping’s death, now seemed so full of possibilities that I was fidgety with hope and couldn’t sleep. After so many years in the Far North, I should have recognized the signs. The arctic year is nine months of cold and three of living hell-for-leather. Grief and the change from the long dark months of winter could bounce anyone into lunacy.

     *
    It took the best part of a month to get back to town and close up the house to my satisfaction.
    I shuttered every window and barred them across the inside with wooden braces. I fastened the door with three different locks and buried the keys in a waxed bag at the foot of the pear tree in the garden. My father had grown it from a cutting he brought with him at the time of the first settlement from America. It grew small and stunted, like the willow in the tundra, but it grew all the same. And once in a while it fruited – tiny, thick-skinned pears, that appeared so rarely they seemed more like talismans than food. Try as he might, my father was never able to coax more than a couple of fruits a year off that spindly tree: he cropped it, fertilized its roots with potash, dabbed pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush. But if he was disappointed that his hard work yielded such meagre harvests, year after year, he never showed it.
    As I buried the keys, it crossed my mind that I might never be coming back, but my zeal for the journey, and the twisted hold I’d got on the facts, turned what might have been a