East of Desolation Read Free

the door in his face. I tapped him on the shoulder. “On your way, Arnie.”
    “What a woman,” he whispered. “My God, Joe, herbreasts, her thighs—such perfection. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “Yes you have,” I said. “About three thousand and forty-seven times.” I pushed him out into the corridor and slammed the door.
    I returned to the dressing room and pulled on a sweater and an old green kapok-filled parka with a furlined hood. When I went back into the bedroom Ilana Eytan was standing in front of the dressing table mirror combing her hair. She was wearing ski pants, cossack boots and a heavy Norwegian sweater.
    “Arnie thought it was me in there,” I said. “He didn’t mean any harm.”
    “They never do.”
    There was a hip-length sheepskin jacket on the bed beside the open suitcase and as she picked it up and pulled it on, I once again had that strange feeling of familiarity.
    “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” I said, and then the obvious possibility occurred to me. “In pictures maybe?”
    She buttoned up the jacket, examined herself carefully in the mirror and put the comb to her hair again. “I’ve made a couple.”
    “With Jack?” And then I remembered. “Now I’ve got it. You played the Algerian girl in that last film of his. The film about gun-running.”
    “Go to the head of the class,” she said brightly and zipped up her suitcase. “What did you think of it?”
    “Wonderful,” I said. “I don’t know how he keeps it up. After all, he made his first film the year I was born.”
    “You make a poor liar,” she said calmly. “That film was the original bomb. It sank without trace.”
    In spite of her apparent calmness there was a harsh, cutting edge to her voice that left me silent, but in any case she gave me no chance to reply and went out into the corridor leaving me to follow with her suitcase feeling strangely foolish.

TWO
    A s we roared out of the mouth of the Fjord and climbed into the sun, I stamped on the right rudder and swung slowly north, flying parallel to the bold mountainous coast.
    In the distance the ice-cap glinted in the morning sun and Ilana Eytan said, “The only thing I ever knew about Greenland before now was a line in a hymn they used to sing at morning assembly when I was a kid at school. From Greenland’s icy mountains . . . Looking down on that lot I can see what they meant, but it still isn’t quite as back of beyond as I expected. That hotel of yours in Frederiksborg even had central heating.”
    “Things are changing fast here now,” I said. “The population’s risen to sixty thousand since the war and the Danish government is putting a lot of money into development.”
    “Another thing, it isn’t as cold as I thought it would be.”
    “It never is in the summer, particularly in the southwest. There’s a lot of sheep farming down there, but things are still pretty primitive north of the Arctic Circle. Up around Disko you’ll find plenty of Eskimos who still live the way they’ve always done.”
    “And that’s where Jack is?”
    I nodded. “Near the village called Narquassit as I last heard. He’s been looking for polar bear for the past couple of weeks.”
    “That sounds like Jack. How well have you got to know him since he’s been up here?”
    “Well enough.”
    She laughed abruptly, that strange harsh laugh of hers. “You look like the type he likes to tell his troubles to.”
    “And what type would that be?”
    “What he fondly believes to be the rugged man of action. He’s played bush pilot himself so many times in pictures over the years that he imagines he knows the real thing when he sees it.”
    “And I’m not it?”
    “Nobody’s real—not in Jack’s terms. They couldn’t be. He can never see beyond a neatly packaged hour and a half script.” She lit a cigarette and leaned back in her seat. “I used to love the movies when I was a kid and then something happened. I don’t know what it