Fellow Travelers by James Cook Page B

crone, a seeress, who recounted what had happened that day less than four years before, talking as if the event had transpired a century ago and she was the remaining witness.
    The tsar and his family had fled there for safety, but the forces of justice finally caught up with them and a few months later they were killed in a room in the basement of the house. There were chair rails along the walls and wire grills over the windows, but the room was otherwise empty. You could still see the bullet holes in the walls, the broken plaster, the blood stains. The floorboards were scratched and scarred from the bayonets that finished what the rifles had failed to accomplish, and if you let your imagination run riot you could sense the terror in the room, the sweat, the trembling, the cries of despair as the rifles rang out, the dark shapes on the floor, the bayonets, the riflebutts, the blood, the bone, the silence.
    They shunted our train onto a branch line, and we headed north, a hundred miles to Alapayevsk, the asbestos capital, and then two hundred more beyond that to Platinumgrad, where I would spend the next eight months of my life. It was a godforsaken place, a hodgepodge of huts and shanties beneath the towering snow-capped peaks of the Urals. I renamed it Nekudagrad the first time I saw it, Nowheresville, the city at the end of the world.
    ii
    At daybreak, the mountaintops always looked as if they had caught fire. A rim of gold would break along the edges of the peaks, spread and deepen across the snowfields beneath them, and suddenly burst into flame, sometimes in great streaks and streams of fire, flashing and flaring against the morning like the manes of maddened horses. The winds caught the snow on the mountaintops, I suppose, and sent it whirling into the rising sun. I always thought the dawn of creation must have been like this—when the world was new, when life was just beginning to stir in the primeval ooze, and all things still seemed possible.
    Below the mountains, the world was still gritty with night. You could see it beginning to emerge from the dark, the steeps and drifts of the mountains, the cliffs, the jumbled buildings of the town, the fences, the standing animals, the road that climbed to the mine. In the winter, it grew light around eight and by then the workers had trudged up the slope to the mine, and I was already at my desk. The temperature was still forty degrees below zero or lower. The winds roared out of the Arctic north, and when you went outside you froze; your face, your nose, the very fluid of your eyes ached; and you covered yourself in wool, skins, and furs. You hid your face, hands, and feet, hurrying to get inside again. Even indoors you never really got warm.
    I sometimes had nightmares about the mountains that towered over the town. Waking nightmares, that is, that would overcome me like a chill when I trudged down the road to the mine office or turned up the wick on the oil lantern on my desk. I had the sense that their immensity was beginning to avalanche down upon us all, obliterating the town, myself, and all humankind, not necessarily as weight and momentum, but with the power of darkness, extinguishing the universe it encompassed and all the creatures within it, sucking the life from your throat with your breath.
    We lived in a big two-story white house fronted on either side by second-floor balconies. It was the only house in the village with central heating, but that wasn’t enough. I sometimes thought I would go mad that winter with the cold, the unceasing noise of the wind, the howling wolves in the woods or on the hilltops, the snow trailing like smoke across the ground. There were four of us living there, the mine superintendent, his deputy, and the deputy’s wife, but our quarters were separate, and I saw less of them than I thought I wanted to until I actually spent some time with them, as I did maybe one night a week over dinner. The mine superintendent was a