Nikolski Read Online Free PDF Page A

snatched the postcard from the man’s fingers and darted toward the exit.
    Sarah caught up with him on the stairs of the post office, where he sat in the dust contemplating their thirty-five-cent miracle. The picture on the postcard showed a humpback whale in full flight, huge fins spread wide, a thirty-ton bird striving in vain to break loose from its element. In one corner of the photo, the graphic designer had added
I Love Alaska
in red italics. On the reverse side, Jonas had scrawled three rambling sentences that Noah tried unsuccessfully to decode— mainly because he was as yet incapable of reading anything except the words printed on a road map. Instead, he fell back on the stamp, which bore a seashell striped with the post office seal.
    He cast a questioning glance at Sarah: “Nikolski?”
    They eagerly opened the map of Alaska on
Grampa’s
scorching hood. Noah’s finger slid down the index, found the coordinates for Nikolski—E5—traced a long diagonal across the map and stopped on the island of Umnak, a remote chunk of land in the endless vertebral column of the Aleutians, far off in the Bering Sea.
    He circled in blue ink the tiny village of Nikolski, at the western tip of the island, and then stepped back to survey the map in its entirety.
    The nearest road ended at Homer, eight hundred nautical miles to the east.
    “What on earth is Jonas doing there?!” Noah exclaimed, raising his arms skyward.
    Sarah shrugged. They folded the map and went on their way without saying anything more.
    After Nikolski they received no more postcards from Jonas. Sarah continued to write regardless, believing this was merely a turn of bad luck, but the months passed, the post offices filed by and the radio silence persisted.
    There were a number of hypothetical explanations for Jonas’s silence, the most plausible being that the fragile miracle of their correspondence had run its course and that each letter exchanged throughout the years amounted to an intolerable loophole in the immutable laws of chance, which had quite simply regained their sovereignty.
    But Noah had the stubborn personality of a six-year-old nomad, and couldn’t be bothered with the immutable laws of this or that. Fixing his gaze on the horizon, he mulled over many kilometres of grim thoughts, trying to imagine what in the world Jonas might be concocting in Nikolski. He must have become infatuated with an Aleutian girl and was trying to start a new life by obliterating all his previous endeavours. Noah imagined a flock of slant-eyed half-brothers and half-sisters, grubby little village-dwellers who might be monopolizing his father’s attention.
    He repeatedly proposed to Sarah that they pay Jonas a surprise visit and catch him red-handed. Rather than returning yet again to Medicine Hat, why not go up the Alaska Highway all the way to Anchorage, and from there take the ferry to Nikolski?
    Sarah evasively dismissed the idea. When pressed to explain why, she claimed that Jonas had already left Nikolski. Sometimes she went so far as to specify that he had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks. Usually, however, she said nothing and turned up the radio, pretending not to hear him.
    Noah, who was not lacking in insight, suspected this was a bad case of cold feet—a chronic inability to go near the ocean. He was able to confirm his diagnosis through expert interrogation.
    Had she ever been to Vancouver?
    Pout of indifference.
    Had she ever happened to leave the middle of the country?
    She had never seen the point.
    Didn’t she feel like seeing what there was on the far side of the Rockies?
    Sarah’s uninspired response was that it made no sense to go see for themselves, since they had several road maps allowing them to answer that question, which was of no interest anyway. Noah, who had long ago exhausted the possibilities of the glove compartment, decided to put the question directly:
    “You’ve never had the urge to see