Naqir’s seen the pictures – glaciers taller than ships, turquoise water lapping pristine white monoliths – icebergs that are islands unto themselves. From inside the six-seater Stationair Cessna, he imagines the glaciers below talking in whispers. Out to the air and at no one or thing in particular, announcing the cricks and cracks it makes as the air warms, or the temperature dips. He knows there are guillemots flying down there, suspended between the landlocked glaciers and the vast icebergs that float in the ocean. Their whistle, he imagines, is a children’s lullaby – a calming soothing chirp to the flock of little ones taking flight for the first time. He pictures auks standing in attention along the lower levels of an iceberg, contemplating a dip into the icy water below. Their monosyllabic call, repeated over and over, each bird telling the other to go ahead, jump. He can’t imagine a person anywhere in the view that he sees below him. He wonders about his choice to come here, feeling that the silence he’s about to encounter might be too much to bear. It’s beautiful, but this is now home? Oh my god, he whispers.
Naqir crosses his legs and kicks the man in the seat beside him. He’s embarrassed. The Cessna only has three passengers but they’re forced to sit together since the last row of seats has been removed to carry cargo.
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“Esmond.” The man offers.
Naqir presents his hand. Esmond’s reach is fumbled and he manages to only grab two of Naqir’s fingers, but manages the perfunctory shake gesture within it’s limits. Their hands are a similar skin tone, but Naqir has smooth schoolteacher fingers and Esmond’s hands have been aged by the sun and the biting winter winds. Esmond is heavy set; Naqir is a tiny wisp of a man.
Esmond wears a parka that reaches mid-thigh with a fur-trimmed hood. Though he has short salt and pepper hair it’s hard to tell his age – the wrinkles that outline his eyes put him at seventy but the smooth taut skin around his lips brings the number down at least a decade. His large, round face is pleasant, but not inviting. After they shake hands Esmond looks in the other direction. Naqir closes his eyes. He’s been travelling for days. He’s not sure what time it is. His body longs for sleep despite the brightness outside the plane’s window. He’s flown Delhi to Dubai, Dubai to London, England where he spent a night with the in-laws. He couldn’t exactly pass through there and not see them. It was after all, a monumental transition – uprooting the family and bringing them across the pond. Their home in Delhi was sold, everything was given away, some items lent long-term to friends and very few things were tucked into storage beyond their furniture. Lydia had suggested subletting their place for the year, but Naqir wanted to be free of it. You never loved this house, Lydia. Why hold onto something that doesn’t make you happy?
Lydia’s parents were warm to Naqir, once the initial shock that their only daughter was abandoning England for a man in Delhi wore off. Brian and Liz Lundstorm came to visit once a year for four weeks over the Christmas holidays. Naqir had a pleasant enough time with them, though Brian was always a bit too inquisitive of his work. Lydia reminded her father repeated that it was a holiday, not time to talk about work, but time to eat, do puzzles, lie around reading and drinking ale.
Naqir did his best to assure the Lundstorms that moving to Nunavut Canada was a great opportunity for everyone – Lydia was keen (not true at all), their son Rami was extremely excited – mountains and snow? He was just like his father and couldn’t wait to explore the new exotic land. Asha? Well, Naqir said, she’d come around. Eventually she’ll see the beauty of being in a new landscape, even without the daily contact with her girlfriends, all fifteen year old girls, who could talk to each other for twenty-three hours a day. Brian grilled him all night long. Is it really that dark there? Really that cold? What do people do in the months of darkness? Surely the depression rate is high. I don’t know Brian, I just don’t know Naqir told him. Let him be, Liz piped, he knows as much about the place as we do right now, just let him be.
Naqir crossed the Atlantic and spent a night in Toronto before heading to Ottawa. His final flight taking him to the cold, under-populated town in Northern Canada for his position at the Arctic Water Resource Lab. Professor Naqir Bennak, Geologist. Lydia and the kids don’t arrive for another two weeks. Two weeks, he thinks as he looks out to the white mass of land below, at Esmond, and the slumped over body of the other male passenger asleep in his seat. Two weeks of solitude, to adjust to the quiet of the north.
Snow blazes past the window.
Fierce.
The air in the plane is crisp; Naqir pulls his cotton-filled coat around him. He spies Esmond’s boots – hikers. His feet are cold in his leather shoes. He leans back into his chair and concentrates on keeping warm by breathing deeply: in through the nose, hold for one, two, three, out through the mouth. The Cessna wobbles and shakes, fighting against the wind. Naqir closes his eyes but it’s no use, the cold makes it impossible to drift off. Esmond reaches into his coat. A faint scent of stale tobacco and soap floats into the air. He unveils two mini bottles of liquor. Drinks one. Nods. Smiles and holds the other out to Naqir.
“No thanks. No.”
Esmond unscrews the lid and drinks the second bottle in one gulp. Whiskey. He nods off with his mouth open, until eventually his head falls onto Naqir’s shoulder. Naqir smells the sour sweetness of liquor that lingers on the tongue.
They sail over glaciers and are now above tundra. He thinks of the guillemots and kittiwakes flying out there. The snow and ice underneath him make his mouth water. He can’t wait to touch it. Fresh crisp, just fallen snow, dirty, lying on the ground for a long time, almost ice snow. He longs to touch it all. For years he’s been creating snow in his laboratory at Andas University by freezing water infused with high concentrations of oxygen, but it was never quite right. Never real.
The plane climbs higher, through clouds, where the snow stops falling. The clouds, great bright bands of cotton, give a rippled distorted view of the world. Like someone’s peeled away a wrapper and behind the backdrop of mountains and blue sky there’s nothing. White Heaven. Naqir gasps. Esmond stirs, but keeps his eyes shut. He must have nodded off. When he looks out the window again, the heavenly view has been replaced by snow capped mountains and tundra. The concrete gray mountains are devoid of life, shades of shadow and darkness, dancing light in the crevasses but no green. Snow on the one right below his window and a dusting of the white stuff on the lower dark ridges in the distance. He sees ridge after ridge of jagged rock and snow.
It’s alive.
He knows there are great stories in the igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock below him. Thousands of years of history he can’t wait to run his hand along. On the ground he’ll find the finest layers of moss and the most resilient lichens. Alpine arnica and purple saxifrage. He anticipates his first sighting of the glorious caribou he hopes to see roaming the valleys. Beyond the mountains, beyond the clouds, the sky and ocean are almost one, a thin line of horizon visible between the ridges.
His eyes are wet.
Clarity, like pure oxygen trickling into his lungs. He’s awake now.
In Delhi he’d never complain of the heat. It’s in his blood. Every day he woke with hair pressed against his neck. He lectured, his cotton shirt dotted with perspiration by mid-morning. After school he’d shower and slip into a new T-shirt before dinner. When they made love, sweat pooled between Lydia and him. His nose dripped beads of sweat on her face. Lydia wiped them away as though they were nothing now but when they first started dating and she squinted her nose and turned away from the droplets.
The cold arctic air is different. It’s clean. It makes his chest hurt. The refreshing oxygen makes him giddy. He laughs, and Esmond’s head, still resting on his shoulder in sleep, falls back into his own seat.
The descent is quick, and soon they’re circling toward a bright yellow air tower. Naqir undoes his seatbelt and stands.
“This is not your stop,” the pilot says.
“We’re going farther north?” Naqir asks.
“Not so much north, but west,” says the pilot. “We’re dropping cargo here on the island before we head to Kugalali. Come out and stretch if you want.”
It’s not parka weather at all. He smiles and squints at the bright sun hitting the yellow airport tower. Old icy snow piles run along the edge of the tarmac pushed into the corners safely out of the way of the planes landing stripe. Ice and snow have remained on rooftops and in small piles along the road past the airport, but that’s it. The light snow that falls, swirls on the tarmac and the road but doesn’t seem to be lasting.
“That’s really bright,” he says to Esmond, who smokes.
“For the pilots.”
“Of course,” Naqir says. “Easy visibility.”
A cold wind picks up. Esmond lifts his hood and turns his back to it. As the air changes to a bitter cold the pilots move quickly at loading the navy pick-up with the cargo that filled the back of the plane. They unload flat screen televisions, iPads, computers, tools, kitchen appliances, and boxed Ikea furniture. Naqir rubs his hands together, blows his hot breath on them. As quickly as the wind moved in, it leaves and Naqir shrugs his shoulders down, puts his hands in his pant pockets. Esmond stamps out his smoke and climbs back on the plane as Naqir watches the only other passenger from Flight 540, the small man who slept the whole ride up here, climb into the passenger seat of the fully loaded flatbed, fixed with a flashing amber light and get whisked away.
“Go ahead,” the pilot says. Naqir climbs back into the plane and takes the same seat as before. “We’ve one more stop.” After a short fast acceleration on the runway, they’re in the air and Naqir watches the bright yellow building disappear. They fly over tall snow-capped mountains separated by open tundra and what looks like a river, but Naqir can’t be certain. He can make out a lone Canadian flag flying down along the tundra. There’s nothing else there.
They’re not in the air for long, maybe half an hour or so.
“Researcher?” Esmond asks him.
“Geologist, yes.” Naqir says.
“Everyone says geology or biology but it’s always about the water these days isn’t it.” It’s not a question, the way Esmond says it.
“Algae.” Naqir says. “My interest lies in algae in snow.”
“Snow. Water.” Esmond smiles.
Before Naqir can explain his research, they’re already beginning their decent. “I suppose you’re right. I’ve wanted to be in snow, to study the base of glaciers all my life.”
On the ground the pilot and co-pilot go through the same unloading routine, with another Navy pick up. When Naqir disembarks, he walks toward the back of the runway. Just on the other side of the tarmac, along a road that leads to where he sees a handful of houses, he sees a group dogs running and barking. He notices two children, a boy and a girl around eight years old, playing in the dirt. The young boy waves a stick in his hand and the girl picks up then throws down a handful of rocks into an outlined circled-off area. The boy shakes the stick above the rocks just as a dog runs past, and the stick is suddenly in the girl’s face, possibly an eye by the shrill noise that comes out of her. She covers her eye with her hands and falls over, rolling in the dirt as she wails. Naqir starts towards them, looks back at the pilots who are busy offloading. He doesn’t run but it doesn’t take long for him to get to them. The girl is wailing. Hey, Naqir starts, reaching out to her. The boy throws the stick and then stones angrily in the direction of the dog that is on the other end of the houses now, completely unaware of the attack. Hey now, Naqir says. The girl wails loudly. She keeps her left eye covered, grabs the boy with her free hand and wrestles him to the ground. Whoa, Naqir says, reaching out in an attempt to pull her off him. She kicks up dirt – at the boy, at Naqir, a mad stomping that kicks up a cloud of dust. The co-pilot yells for Naqir, they’re ready to go. He shakes his head and backs away from the kids. Stop it, he says, though he does so quietly, defeated by the girl’s anger – they will clearly resolve the accident with a fight. Backing away from the kid’s he smells the dirt and then gas. On their first stop, and on this one too, he noticed no particular odor in the air. His first experience of the north had been scentless, unlike the streets of Delhi and London, both having the scent of dirt and grime, grease and food. He wants the pilot to cut the engine so it can go back to the scent of nothing. He can’t wait to explain this to Lydia, to the kids – that their new temporary home will be the cleanest place they’ve ever imagined living.