The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
I nodded.
“How long?”
“Almost three years.”
He grunted and raised his eyebrows. A pudgy, flat-faced woman whom I
took to be his wife looked up from the fur-lined boots she was repairing and
clicked her tongue sympathetically at me. “Not bad,” said the man. “Last one
through here had been in fifteen years. He died before we could reach my
tent, but he was mostly corpse a long time before that.” He collected what I
had spilled and handed it to me. “Bread. My wife made it.” He nodded to the
round woman, who smiled sadly at me. “And reindeer meat. Healthy.”
“Also tea,” called a rough-voiced woman from across the tent. She sat next
to a similarly aged man; both of them looked so old, so weathered, and so
inscrutable that they seemed to be carved from wood. “Drink tea,” she said,
emphasizing the word “tea” as though I were a foreigner (which, I suppose, I
was). “Warm in winter. Good for bones. Good, too, for thinking,” she said,
tapping her head for emphasis.
“Tea, Mother. Bring the guest some tea,” said my savior. “Eat up, now; it’ll
keep you warm. You smoke?”
I shook my head.
“First prisoner I ever met who didn’t smoke.”
“I could buy more with cigarettes if I never smoked them.”
“Clever. You Russian?”
“Estonian.”
He said something to the two older people, who nodded inscrutably and
in eerie unison. “My parents,” he explained. “And those three little ones are
mine, too,” he said, gesturing to three young girls who eyed me warily from
the far corner of the tent. “Fourth one coming.” He winked. “Snoring fatso
over there is my wife’s good-for-nothing brother. But family’s family. You
going home to someone?”
“A wife. I have a wife.” In prison I had learned to suppress all thoughts of
her; now, warmed by the possibility of return, in my mind she thawed, first
slowly and then uncontrollably. As I remembered her hands, her voice, her
smell, I began shaking and bawling right there in front of a strange family. I
132