Granta 125: After the War (10 page)

If he doubts, she convinces him. That’s how it is and will be.

And each time he’s reassured, he draws in closer.

‘How are you surviving?’

‘OK. How about you?’

They are solicitous in balanced but not identical situations. She asks how he is during illnesses, if political news has upset him, if they have quarrelled. He asks after lovemaking, if she’s tired, if they have quarrelled. They quarrel mainly at great speed, so they can move on to enquiries and holding and being held and can have nothing wrong any more. They lean on the rise and fall of their ribs when the shouting’s done, old trouble in the press of breath. As a rule, they don’t like being scared without each other, not even if each other is what scared them.

This morning hasn’t been frightening, not quite. They spent it with each other in a lawyer’s office, going through unspilled paperwork so that their lives will be coordinated and tidy from here on in.

She called it
the document
instead of
the will
. This made matters slightly confusing and so she changed to
my document
and
your document
and eventually everyone – all three of them – was
document
ing.

Afterwards, business over, he kissed her in the street – a grey building at his back with a grubby doorway and so she closed her eyes while they hugged and therefore spared herself the ugliness. He kisses very well. On that occasion, he was particularly fine.

Such an uncomfortable day, though. She would prefer if it were done.

But no need for worry.

No sense in making assumptions or being bleak in advance.

There’s no way to be certain of when anybody will leave.

After you.

That’s what people say.

That’s what she wants.

After you.

Then she’d keep the whole rest of him and miss nothing else.

But he has to be the gentleman, can’t help it.

No. After you.

Which wouldn’t be right.

But neither is right.

Someone else having their apple trees, unwatched fires.

And she isn’t sure she’ll manage, not in the end, doesn’t see how she could, and she wishes she wasn’t carrying this silly paper bag with the fig in it that she won’t eat, can’t eat. She wants to fold her arms or put her hands in her pockets, she isn’t clear which.

He settles his hand at the small of her back and then lets her swing and face him and see how he is weary and opened and gently and sadly himself. ‘Are you OK, though? Really?’

She doesn’t ever lie to him unless it’s for the best.

I
nside the claustrophobic confines of a shipping container, a group of Russians waits out another day of an Arctic storm. Anton bakes blini. Andrei watches the same horror movie again. Alexei tries to craft a toothpaste holder from an empty tin can. Lisa the dog, who finds company among the hundred men in Camp No. 2, curls up in the farthest corner from the draughty door. The engineers gathered on this desolate patch of Russian tundra were hired by a geo-exploration company to look for oil deep below the permafrost. I am waiting out the battering winds with them, documenting the international race to appropriate Arctic resources.

I made six trips over three years to the Russian Arctic region, a 7,000-kilometre area stretching from Finland to Alaska, which Moscow bureaucrats have named ‘Zone of Absolute Discomfort’. The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tons of resources trapped beneath the ground.

Here, three different groups of people, representing three contrasting ways of life and three centuries of Russian history, exploit
resources amid the world’s harshest conditions: indigenous reindeer herders known as Nenets; descendants of former Soviet prisoners; and energy company men seeking a rich cache of oil and natural gas.

For hundreds of years, this part of the Russian Arctic was home only to the Nenets. The Soviet government tried to force these nomads into collective farms, and some were resettled in apartment blocks, abruptly altering their way of life. Other Nenets escaped Soviet rule and remained on the tundra, raising reindeer for meat and benefiting from an uptick in the demand for antlers, which are sold as aphrodisiacs in China. I sought my subjects via snowmobile, straining to see the Nenets
chums
, or tents, and reindeer herds on the bleak horizon. My hosts welcomed me with a bowl of frozen whole reindeer brain, a Nenets delicacy.

In the Far North’s urban areas, mounted jet aircraft stand sentry over cities used and abused by the Soviet government, and descendants of Stalin’s prisoners populate the streets. Though most of the Arctic labour camps were abandoned in the 1950s, many former inmates chose to stay. The Soviet government built settlements for those who worked in the mines and used high salaries to attract newcomers. The area boomed for a while, but the regime had no regard for nature and sustainability and scarred the once-pristine land. Now, pollutants shock the landscape and its inhabitants; in one town, sulphur rain kills all vegetation within five kilometres of the mine. As I photographed this dying landscape, the secret police followed me day and night, trying to discourage my efforts to document this environmental horror.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian republic neglected the towns and cities of the Arctic Circle. Mines and factories closed, marking an entire generation in the Arctic region with poverty and alcoholism. Many fled to seek a future elsewhere; those who stayed often don’t work, age rapidly and die young.

In the last decade scientists have discovered billions of tons of oil and gas trapped underneath the tundra. New workers’ outposts rise adjacent to the shells of old Soviet drill sites. Engineers and miners
from around the world work short stints in the region. They come with expensive, sophisticated equipment and earn substantial sums for their hardship tour.

The indigenous herders who survived Soviet collectivization now struggle against this new, menacing foe. Pipelines block Nenets migration routes, while asphalt highways and gated drilling towers interfere with the search for fresh pastures.

It is the Nenets who must yield, as the Russian government has invested billions in energy exploration and asserted dominance over the region in 2007 by planting a titanium flag into the Arctic seabed. Ice-breaking ships circle the northernmost oil terminal in the world, near the North Pole, where global warming has opened an Arctic sea route in summer months. Within two decades, further warming may create a year-round ice-free route for container ships travelling between Asia and Europe.

This crucial period in the Far North fascinated me so much that I did much of the groundwork myself, trudging for days in deep snow and pushing my body and my cameras to their limits. The Russian military granted me unprecedented access to photograph the extreme northern oil terminal from the air, but only after I repeatedly appealed to senior government officials and energy company CEO s. Our helicopter flew on the edge of the North Pole region, an area rich with resources prized by countries with an Arctic reach, like the US and Canada, and even nations like China that simply thirst for oil.

But behind the geopolitics are the individuals who eke out a life in this unforgiving desert. Back in the shipping container, Andrei and Alexei grow restless, and talk about their next opportunity to ‘strike gold’ out on the ice. When the wind stills for a moment, they grab towels and bolt for the makeshift sauna a few containers down the road. It is powered by pure Arctic diesel.