The Rupture
Ophelia’s great-uncle dived into the entrance of a stairway barely lit by safety lamps. With hands deep in her coat and nose in her scarf, Ophelia followed him down. The temperature fell from one step to the next. Her eyes were still full of sunlight and she truly felt as if she were plunging into icy black water.
She jumped when the gruff voice of her great-uncle reverberated from wall to wall: “I can’t get used to the idea that you’re going to leave. The Pole really is the other end of the world!”
He stopped on the stairs to turn to Ophelia. Still not accustomed to the darkness, she bumped right into him. “Say, you’re pretty skilled when it comes to mirror-traveling. Couldn’t you do those little journeys of yours from the Pole to here, every now and then?”
“I’m unable to do that, uncle. Mirror-traveling only works over small distances; covering the void between two arks is unthinkable.”
The great-uncle swore in old dialect and continued down the stairs. Ophelia felt guilty for not being as skilled as he thought. “I’ll try to come and see you often,” she promised in a small voice.
“When are you off, exactly?”
“December, if I can believe the Doyennes.”
The great-uncle swore again. Ophelia was grateful not to understand a word of his dialect.
“And who’ll take over from you at the museum?” he grumbled. “No one else can evaluate antiquities like you!”
To that, Ophelia could find no reply. That she would be wrenched from her family was bad enough, but being torn from her museum, the only place where she felt totally herself, that was tantamount to losing her identity. Reading was all that Ophelia was good at. If that were taken from her, all that would remain of her would be a clumsy lump. She didn’t know how to keep house, or make conversation, or finish a household chore without doing herself an injury. “Apparently, I’m not as irreplaceable as all that,” she muttered into her scarf.
In the first basement, the great-uncle swapped his usual gloves for clean ones. By the light of the electric safety lamps, he slid open his filing cabinets to trawl through the archives that had been deposited, generation after generation, beneath the cold vault of the cellars. He expelled condensation, mid-moustache, with every breath.
“Right, these are the family archives, so don’t expect miracles. I know that one or two of our ancestors did set foot in the Great North, but it was a dashed long time ago.”
Ophelia wiped away a drop hanging from her nose. It couldn’t be more than 40 degrees here. She wondered whether her future husband’s house would be even colder than this archives room. “I’d like to see Augustus,” she said. This was clearly shorthand—Augustus had died long before Ophelia’s birth. “Seeing Augustus” meant looking at his sketches. Augustus had been the great explorer of the family, a legend in his own right. At school, geography was taught based on his travel journals. He had never written a sentence—he didn’t know his alphabet—but his drawings were a mine of information.
Since the great-uncle, deep in his filing cabinets, didn’t reply, Ophelia presumed he hadn’t heard. She tugged at the scarf that was wrapped round his face and repeated in a louder voice: “I’d like to see Augustus.”
“Augustus?” he chomped, without looking at her. “Of no interest. Insignificant. Just old scribbles.”
Ophelia raised her eyebrows. Her great-uncle never denigrated his archives. “Oh,” she blurted, “really that terrifying?”
With a sigh, the great-uncle emerged from the fully extended drawer in front of him. The loupe he’d wedged under his brow made that eye double the size of the other one. “Bay number four, to your left, bottom shelf. Handle with care, please, and put clean gloves on.”
Ophelia moved along the filing cabinets and knelt down at the specified location. There she found all of Augustus’s original sketchbooks, classified by ark. She found three at “Al-Andaloose,” seven at “City,” and around twenty at “Serenissima.” At “Pole” she found only one. Ophelia couldn’t afford to be clumsy with such precious archives. She placed the sketchbook on a consulting lectern and, with the utmost care, turned the pages of drawings.
Pale plains, just above the rock, a fjord imprisoned in ice, forests of great firs, houses encased in snow . . . These landscapes were austere, yes, but less daunting than Ophelia had imagined the Pole to be. She even found them quite beautiful, in a way. She wondered where her fiancé lived, in the midst of all this whiteness. Close to this river edged with pebbles? In this fishing port lost in the night? On this plain invaded by tundra? This ark looked so poor, so wild! How could her fiancé be such a good match?
Ophelia fell on a drawing that she didn’t understand: it looked like a beehive suspended in the sky. Probably the outline of an idea. She turned a few more pages and saw a hunting portrait. A man was posing proudly in front of a huge pile of pelts. Hands on hips, he had rolled up his sleeves to show off his powerfully muscled arms, which were tattooed up to the elbows. His look was hard, his hair fair.
Ophelia’s glasses turned blue when she realized that the pile of pelts behind him was in fact but a single pelt—that of a dead wolf. It was as big as a bear. She turned the page. This time the hunter was standing in the middle of a group. They were posing together in front of a heap of antlers. Elk antlers, no doubt, except that each skull was the size of a man. The hunters all had the same hard look, the same fair hair, the same tattoos on their arms, but not a single weapon between them, as though they had killed the animals with their bare hands.
Ophelia leafed through the sketchbook and found those same hunters posing in front of different carcasses—walruses, mammoths, and bears, all of an unbelievable size. She slowly closed the book and put it back in its place. “Beasts” . . . These animals afflicted with gigantism, she’d already seen them in children’s picture books, but they bore no relation to Augustus’s sketches. Her little museum hadn’t prepared her for that kind of life. What shocked her more than anything was the look in the hunters’ eyes. A look that was brutal, arrogant, accustomed to the sight of blood. Ophelia hoped her fiancé wouldn’t have that look.
“So?” asked her great-uncle as she returned to him.
“I understand your reluctance a bit more now,” she said.
He returned to his research with renewed vigor. “I’m going to find you something else,” he muttered. “Those sketches, they must be a hundred and fifty years old. And they don’t show everything!”
That was precisely what was worrying Ophelia: what Augustus didn’t show. She said nothing, however, merely shrugging her shoulders. Anyone other than her great-uncle would have misread her nonchalance, confusing it with a certain weakness of character. Ophelia seemed so calm, behind her rectangular glasses and half-closed eyelids, that it was almost impossible to imagine that waves of emotion were crashing violently in her chest.