Far North by Marcel Theroux Page B

sober and thoughtful farewell into a breathless dash for the exit. I practically galloped out of there, with the second horse in tow. It was certainly stimulating, after all those years of caution, to rip out onto the highway.
    That brought me to my senses a little. I’d never once travelled that long straight road alone. Its condition was good enough to surprise me. The gravel was well laid and pretty flat. What I hadn’t expected was how I’d feel standing above the weird straight flatness of it, running from horizon to horizon. The paleness of the gravel and the bend in the earth made it seem like the road floated slightly above the ground. It seemed to roll on for ever, forward and back, and not a soul to be seen either this way or that. And the next settler city lay two hundred miles to the east.

     *

    The laid roads here were built not by machine, but by the gangs of slave-workers who were sent by the commissars.
    Millions died here: starved or frozenworked to death in mines, shot by the guards for trying to escape, shot by the Tungus when they had escaped, killed and eaten when whoever they escaped with had run out of food. Numberless dead. You can look up on an August evening and see the sky throbbing with mosquitoes. Imagine every one with a man’s head, and it’s still too few.
    You wonder if the land itself ever forgets a curse like that.
    There’s an old prison factory at Buktygachak that I visited on horseback as a little girl.
    Buktygachak: even the name has the air of no good about it. The main factory building was still standing, and a block of punishment cells. In summer, the tall grass and the warmth took the sting out of it, but the Tungus guide who took us there slapped the water out of my hand when I filled my canteen from a stream and told me it would make me sick.
    He said so much blood had soaked into the land, the stream was undrinkable. I didn’t know why he was trying to scare me. The Tungus were superstitious about everything.
    My pa let his horse drink, but he didn’t touch it himself. Later he said the prisoners had been digging uranium ore for power stations and bombs and the radiation had leached back underground. I imagined the taste of the water, furring my tongue with iron, or maybe reeking slightly of sulphur, and I felt my stomach turn.
    The truth is that not many people besides us have ever chosen to live here. The Tungus wound up here centuries ago, starting off in Mongolia in colder times and then following the reindeer north. Then some came out from the west, following the fur. Most of the rest were prisoners and exiles. People had to be bribed into coming east, with big wages for working in the mines and wells. And once they had done their time, they usually went home. You could imagine them waking up again in apartments back wherever they had come from, with the noise of an old city around them, and their money in the bank, and this strange, cold, bloodstained empty land just a memory.
    But we settled here out of conviction, as a handful of people had done in the past, because the land was empty and our parents wanted the freedom to create their world new. What an old story that is. You’d think people would be done believing in a fresh start by now, in thinking they can escape their own nature. The proof of it was all around us at Buktygachak: the slave armies that had been building a new dawn, the grim chimney stacks. But no, the godless commissars had had the wrong idea and we had the right one. This time the bright new future was really just around the corner, and with god on our side and a collective determination to do good, we’d put a bunch of New Jerusalems right here in the frozen north. What hooey.
    This world is a scaly old snake. She is a cunning old woman, and I’m growing to be a cunning old woman, and the last human being that draws a breath on this planet will be a cunning old woman, who raises chickens and cabbages, has no illusions, and has outlived all