Midnight Sun

Beyond the Arctic Circle · June 2021 · Told by Yan Ardatovskiy

In the spring of 2021, with half the world still shut, my old friend Kostya rang and said one word: “Fishing.” I have known Kostya since we were both too young to fish legally. He does not waste words on the telephone. “North,” he said. “Beyond the Arctic Circle. Eleven of us. No roads. Bring warm things and something for the sun.” I laughed at the second part. He did not.

We flew north on an ordinary plane, to a town where the road simply stops, as if someone had lost interest halfway through building it. From there the only way on was a helicopter, an Mi-8, big and green and military, with round windows like a submarine and benches along the sides. Our bags, rods and crates were piled in the middle and roped down. The pilot, Valera, chewed gum with great concentration and did not look at any of us. When the rotors started, conversation ended. For an hour and a half eleven grown men sat in a row, shouting nothing, watching the tundra roll out underneath us: brown, silver, brown again, lakes like broken mirrors, not a house, not a track, not a wire.

We landed in snow. It was June, and it was minus two, and eleven men in fleece jackets stood beside a helicopter looking at each other as though someone had made a clerical error. The camp was a handful of small wooden cabins on a bend of the river, a banya, a mess hut with a tin chimney and a generator that coughed like a pensioner. Valera threw our bags out, gave us a thumbs up and flew away. The noise went with him. What was left was the loudest silence I have ever heard, and the river.

That first night I woke at three in the morning, sure I had overslept. The cabin was full of light. I pulled on my boots and went outside, and it was day: bright, white, clean day, the kind you get at noon under high cloud. But there was no sun. It was somewhere behind the hills, circling, refusing either to rise or to set. Birds were busy. A man from the next cabin, Lyonya, was standing on his step in his underwear, smoking and looking up. “What time is it?” he asked me. I told him. He thought about it. “Irrelevant,” he said, and went back inside.

That was the polar day, and it undid all of us. Nobody knew when to sleep. Men fished at midnight and ate breakfast at four in the afternoon. Watches became jewellery. The fishing itself was almost indecent. Every cast, somebody hooked something. Salmon, big and furious, silver as cutlery, and trout that fought like they had a grudge. Stepan, our guide, took us upriver in two aluminium boats with outboard motors, through gorges where the water went black and green and the cliffs came so close you could touch the moss. We released most of what we caught. The rest went to the kitchen.

The kitchen belonged to Arkady, a chef who had cooked in serious restaurants in serious cities and had come to the end of the world on purpose. He never explained why and nobody asked. I did not know, before that week, how many things a man can do to a salmon. Tartare with a drop of something from a bottle he kept hidden. Salmon salted overnight and sliced like paper. Ukha, the clear fisherman's soup, cooked over a fire with a burning log dipped in at the end for the smoke. A pie. Roe on warm blini. Salmon baked in birch bark. By day five I was eating salmon for breakfast and not noticing.

On the third day the weather turned over like a pancake. Plus twenty-seven. The snow vanished in an afternoon, the mosquitoes arrived by the evening, and eleven men who had packed for winter stripped to their T-shirts, then to nothing above the waist. The sun, when it finally showed itself, never went away. We all burned. Lyonya burned in the exact shape of his wader straps and looked, for the rest of the trip, like a man wearing a pale pair of braces. Sunburn above the Arctic Circle: I would not have believed it either.

And every night, while we slept in the light, the bear came. We never saw him. We saw what he left. A crate of bread opened like a present. Tins rolled across the grass and punctured, neatly, as though tested. A smoked fish that Arkady had been saving, gone, and the hook it hung from bent straight. Footprints in the mud by the river the size of a dinner plate. On the fifth morning Gena came out of his cabin and asked, very calmly, who had taken his boots. Nobody had. We found one boot at the edge of the trees, chewed. The other one was never seen again. For the rest of the week Gena wore a pair of Stepan's, two sizes too big, and a theory circulated that somewhere in the forest a bear was walking about in one good boot.

Something happens to men when the night is taken away. You stop counting. There is no end to the day, so the day has no end in it: no tiredness you trust, no moment when you think, enough. We fished, ate, slept for three hours, fished again. We sat round the fire at two in the morning in full daylight, sunburnt, full of salmon, telling the same stories and laughing harder each time. Nobody looked at a phone because there was nothing on it. Nothing from the rest of the world could reach us. Nothing, it felt, could touch us at all.

On the last day we heard it before we saw it: the thud of the rotors coming over the hills. The same green helicopter, the same round windows, the same tail number painted on its side, and Valera still chewing. We loaded the bags and the rods, and Arkady stood on the bank waving a ladle, and somewhere in the trees, presumably, the bear watched us leave in Gena's boot. As we lifted off, the river turned into a silver thread, and I remember thinking that I had never felt so safe in my life. It took a year to find out what that feeling was worth.

What did eleven men feel, under a sun that never set?

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people in these stories. So have some of the stories. Not all of them, and not everything that sounds invented is. Please do not treat it as a fair coin.