by Ramona Koval
Apsley Cherry-Garrard praised the usefulness of modern novels. ‘You often want the book which you read for half an hour before you go to sleep at Winter Quarters to take you into the frivolous fripperies of modern social life which you may not know and may never wish to know, but which it is often pleasant to read about, and never so much so as when its charms are so remote as to be entirely tantalising.’
He admired the books of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Henrik Ibsen for their ability to fire discussions of ideas among the men. He reports that Scott took some Browning poetry on the polar journey, but Cherry-Garrard only saw him reading it once. On the other hand, Scott was glad he’d had the foresight to take Darwin’s The Origin of Species on their first southern journey.
Cherry-Garrard also praised the usefulness of poetry for the expeditioner:
It gave one something to learn by heart and repeat during the blank hours of the daily march, when the idle mind is all too apt to think of food in times of hunger, or possibly of purely imaginary grievances, which may become distorted into real foundations of discord under the abnormal strain of living for months in the unrelieved company of three other men.
Cherry-Garrard reports that when they met their geological group near the beginning of their journey, they were excited about the additional books that they could now share:
Books of reference were constantly in demand to settle disputes. Such books as the Times Atlas, a good encyclopaedia and even a Latin Dictionary are invaluable to such expeditions for this purpose. To them I would add Who’s Who.
From odd corners we unearthed some Contemporary Reviews, the Girls’ Own Paper and the Family Herald, all of ten years ago! We also found encased in ice an incomplete copy of Stanley Weyman’s My Lady Rotha; it was carefully thawed out and read by everybody, and the excitement was increased by the fact that the end of the book was missing.
While the Endurance became trapped and nine months later was crushed by ice and sank beneath the crust, the men had a portion of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (with descriptions of American towns, and complete biographies of every American statesman since George Washington), a few books on Antarctic exploration, Browning’s poems and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
One man had a ‘small penny cookery book’ and ‘from this he would read out one recipe each night, so as to make them last.’ The men were obsessed with puddings (such as spotted dog) and with doughnuts and one of them ‘eulogises Scotch shortbread’.
Travel writer Paul Theroux recommends taking a novel on a journey, one that has nothing to do with the place you are in. He uses fiction to rest his mind, as a way of retreating from the demands of a new place with its unfamiliar ways. He argues that we’re never more sure of the people we’re with than when we’re reading a novel. We know the characters more intimately than our friends, or our family. We might even know them better than we know ourselves.
Theroux told me that if the novel you are reading is set in the country that you’re visiting—let’s say you’re in India, reading A Passage to India by E. M. Forster—then you will be constantly reminded that the story takes place in 1922, creating a cognitive dissonance between the India of the novel and the India that you are experiencing. But if you’re reading Madame Bovary in India then you will be in her world: she is committing adultery, she owes money, she is lying to her husband, she is meeting her lover, and you are imagining all of it.
So what does Theroux recommended we should read?
‘Madame Bovary would be very high on my list,’ he told me, ‘Diary of a Nobody, a Graham Greene novel, could be The Heart of the Matter or Brighton Rock, if you’ve never read Huckleberry Finn I would say that, if it was someone travelling in California I would say Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves, a wonderful book, or Riders in the Chariot, if you’re going to Alaska you should read Riders in the Chariot. You get the picture, none of those books would disappoint a reader.’
Cherry-Garrard’s expeditioners had plenty of books on Arctic and Antarctic travel. But they were reference tools, useful for advice on how to line the tents or work a blubber stove.
I have experimented with both approaches.
Some years ago I walked with one of my daughters along the Thorsborne Trail, on the east side of Hinchinbrook Island in Queensland, around the Atherton tablelands and on to Cape Tribulation. She knew about maps, compasses, which rock to stand on in a fast-flowing stream, how to put up the tent, how to take it down, where to put your Swiss army knife so you could find it again, and how to sensibly pack food and all of life’s comforts for enjoyable hiking.
She said we could take only two books, and I could choose. Why I packed Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth I’m not exactly sure now—perhaps it was sufficiently big to last the entire length of the trip. I also took some short stories by Harold Brodkey and at Mulligan’s Falls we sat on a rock and I read one aloud. It was about a mother who dies young and her son’s efforts to re-create her from snippets of other people’s conversations. We wept at the end—marvelling at the transcendent power of art to move us in this remote place.
Reading like this in a place very different from the subject matter of your book can be refreshing—especially if the beauty or the strangeness of the place is extreme, and reading allows you to rest your eyes and your body through exercising your imagination.
But I took exactly the opposite approach on a trip to Spain. In Granada, looking across to the Alhambra, the fourteenth-century palace and fortress built for the Muslim Nasrid dynasty and sunk into disrepair for centuries after their fall, I relished reading a book by nineteenth-century American writer Washington Irving. His Tales of the Alhambra, published in 1832, described his journey to Granada through rugged and dangerous country, with the risks of bandits at each bend in the road. He took enough money for his expenses, and a ‘little surplus of hard dollars by way of robber purse, to satisfy the gentlemen of the road, should we be assailed. Unlucky is the too wary traveller who, having grudged this precaution, falls into their clutches empty handed: they are apt to give him a sound ribroasting for cheating them out of their dues.’
I was amused that the same warnings were current nearly two hundred years later, at the time of the Spanish debt and unemployment crisis. His descriptions of the inside of the palace were a pleasure to read with my own memories of the same rooms in mind.
Later, in Barcelona, I finally read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and imagined the vicious battles in the streets of that city between the leftist groups that were supposed to be fighting fascism together.
In Southern France I read a history of the Cathars, whose fortress castles lie in ruins on peaks you can see from the charming villages below. Their long battles with the Catholic crusaders from the north, the tortures they suffered through the Inquisitions, their crazy theories that the world was created by the Devil, and their strictures against eating meat or milk, procreating and marriage, whirled around my mind. One night when the village celebrated 14 Juillet, I was woken by churchbells, loud techno music, mad dogs howling and local hoons fighting. For a moment I imagined the villagers as an angry thirteenth-century mob, torches aflame, out for blood.
I lived in Berlin for three months in 2001 to do some research and to learn German. I spent weekdays between 8.30 a.m. and 1.00 p.m. in the hothouse of my language class, with students from Japan, Korea, China, Uzbekistan and Croatia. Our fledgling German was the only lingua franca. Our teacher was brilliant, and in exemplary German fashion allowed no noodling around in the class. She choreographed every moment to gain the best possible result. It was truly marvellous and truly exhausting.
I spent my afternoons riding trains and getting the food shopping done. After I returned to the flat I was living in, ate and did my homework, it was an absolute relief to settle down with Alexandra Richie’s Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin, and swim in the rich past of the city I was living in.
‘Like Faust,’ she writes
, ‘Berlin can be said to have two spirits in the same breast; it is both a terrible and a wonderful city, and a place which has created and destroyed and whose name is both acclaimed and blackened.’
How different it is for the reader coming from Australia to comprehend the long history of a city like Berlin. How many hundreds of years it has taken for the place to get its shape, subject to the geographies of politics.
I lived on the old border between East and West Berlin, on the same street where the publishing magnate Axel Springer built a gleaming golden building in order to show the easterners looking over the wall the nature of western success, and so cause maximum irritation to the GDR authorities.
At the corner of Kommandant Strasse and Zimmerstrasse, there was a line of cobblestones in the street marking where the Berlin Wall used to run. Every morning, on my way to the U-Bahn station at Spittelmarkt, I hopped over the stones, imagining I was leaping between 1961 and 1989. Hitler’s bunker was around the corner and the Museum of the Topography of Terror further along. I had passed it one day, but was on my way home to eat the delicious herring I had bought, so couldn’t stop. I read Richie’s book each day, and the next day walked the streets with an enlarged idea of the layers of meaning all around me.
A few weeks into my stay, I read in Richie about Klosterstrasse, now the U-Bahn station you emerged from if you were going to listen to some cool new music performer. But centuries ago, after the 1349 outbreak of plague, Berliners began to blame the Jews for poisoning the wells. Jews were violently attacked and moved for a time to a protected alley near the present Klosterstrasse, which was closed off at night by a huge iron gate. After this many fled to Poland. I was sure that these people helped to form the Jewish-Polish communities from which my parents came. Reading Faust’s Metropolis in Berlin made the experience richer, deeper, ghostly and chilling.
Even a boat ride on the Spree—advertised as a literature tour of Berlin—was complicated. It had rained the whole day and I sat at the prow with an umbrella held low, listening to the tour guides perform Brecht readings and Kurt Weil songs. We passed by the bridge where the Polish-born German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was thrown in the Landwehr Canal. There was talk of naming it Rosa Luxemburg Brücke but naming a bridge after a communist seemed impossible in the post-Berlin Wall climate.
When I flew back to Australia I went to my Faber Book of Reportage again and found this entry from Rosa Luxemburg’s account of her term in Breslau Prison two years before she died:
Here I am lying in a dark cell upon a mattress hard as stone; the building has its usual churchyard quiet, so that one might as well be already entombed; through the window there falls across the bed a glint of light from the lamp which burns all night in front of the prison. At intervals I can hear faintly in the distance the noise of a passing train or close at hand the dry cough of the prison guard as in his heavy boots, he takes a few slow strides to stretch his limbs. The gride of the gravel beneath his feet has so hopeless a sound that all the weariness and futility of existence seems to be radiated thereby into the damp and gloomy night. I lie here alone and in silence, enveloped in the manifold black wrappings of darkness, tedium, unfreedom and winter—and yet my heart beats with an immeasurable and incomprehensible inner joy, just as if I were moving in the brilliant sunshine across a flowery mead. And in the darkness I smile at life, as if I were the possessor of a charm which would enable me to transform all that is evil and tragical into serenity and happiness. But when I search my mind for the cause of this joy, I find there is no cause, and can only laugh at myself—I believe that the key to the riddle is simply life itself, this deep darkness of night is soft and beautiful as velvet, if only one looks at it in the right way. The gride of the damp gravel beneath the slow and heavy tread of the prison guard is likewise a lovely little song of life—for one who has ears to hear.
I am so moved by this wisdom, by the spark of life that was hers to illuminate both her dark cell and our own lives, far removed in time and space. That’s what is so precious in reading this way—you can plumb the depths of another’s experience while sitting still with a book in your hands. Books that recount ordeals are precious because an ordeal is what we most fear, and the stories that tell us how to survive them reassure us about what a human being is capable of, as we survive our own lives every day, our own mysterious journeys.
CHAPTER 14
A fine ash like snow
While we were still living in our flat across the road from St Kilda beach a set of old books came into our home. They had dark-brown calfskin covers and gold leaf on the edges of every page. A couple still had two clasps holding the covers together and were inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
They were Jewish Prayer books, for the different feasts of the year—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover (this one is also called a ‘Haggadah’), and the lesser known festivals of Shavuot and Sukkot. Our neighbour Lillian had been given them by her father. As her husband Tom (my comic-strip-reading companion) wasn’t Jewish and she had ceased to practise her religion (her grown-up son George, although technically Jewish, had not had a bar mitzvah) she gave the books to my mother, who she said would have more use for them.
George was an actor and my mother took me to see him in Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana, in which he took the starring role of Reverend Shannon, a failed cleric having a breakdown in Mexico. She took me backstage and I saw the dressing rooms where the men and women changed in front of each other. When I expressed surprise Mama said that the men weren’t interested in the women anyway. I had no idea what she meant.
Now I can google George and see that he spent his early years in the Murray River town of Nangiloc, a sister town to Colignan (Nangiloc spelt backwards). These were both soldier-settlement towns that were established after World War One, but the land had been divided into blocks too small to be viable and most settlers had left by the 1930s. These five books must have spent time in Nangiloc before lying for twenty years on my mother’s shelves, and for more than thirty on my own.
We read the Haggadah on the two nights of Passover. My father rushed through the prayers and the expositions so that we could start eating. Passover made my parents sad, as they remembered all their family Passovers with relatives who were later murdered.
I had a complex relationship with the five books from Lillian. They were old and musty. On facing pages was first the mysterious Hebrew text then an arcane English translation of equally mysterious goings-on in biblical times, and the commentaries of generations of rabbis since. I looked at the books and imagined them being printed long before the Holocaust, and staying together on the shelf in rural Australia and in St Kilda throughout the war, before arriving here on my parents’ Passover table, silent and seemingly without the power to comfort those who dutifully recited their words or served the soup and matzo balls.
And now, another religious text stands next to these books on my shelf—this too a Haggadah covered in brown leather, but a facsimile of a medieval codex, printed in Yugoslavia in 1988. I bought it on a trip to the city of Sarajevo in 2001.
The story of how it came into my life is a strange and magical tale about a journey longer and more dramatic than that which took Lillian’s five prayer books from Vienna, where they were first published, to London, where she was born, to Nangiloc and then to Melbourne.
There were very few relatives around when I grew up—and the Passover Seders were populated by my mother, my father, my sister and me. My mother had some third cousins in Australia, but a rift over something that was not explained to me had stopped them inviting us to their homes for Sunday afternoon teas. I had a crush on one of them. His name was Jaque, because he was born in transit in Paris and his Russian mother couldn’t spell Jacques. He was two years my senior. Occasionally I saw him on campus at university; he was a man about town by then and ignored his younger cousin. Later I heard that he had joined the diplomatic service and then the UN and had a posting in Europe, so I contacted him durin
g my time in Berlin.
We met for dinner, along with his boss, Ambassador Jacques Paul Klein, Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the UN mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After a long meal at which Jaque and Jacques Paul urged me to taste many kinds of vodka with bison grass, rye or other elements I can’t fully remember, they told me about a medieval codex, the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which had been created in Spain in the fourteenth century, then smuggled across Europe, hidden, rescued, hidden again, until, in 2001, just before the World Trade Center attacks, it was lying deep in a vault in a commercial bank in Sarajevo.
Late in the evening my hosts suggested that, if I could get myself to Sarajevo, they’d arrange a viewing of the manuscript for me. I was working as a journalist and thought it would make a great radio program. Who could resist?
I tried to find out as much as I could beforehand. It seemed that, in the early fourteenth century, a beautiful Haggadah was created in Barcelona, possibly as a wedding present for two young people from important Sephardi Jewish families.
It was an unusual document. Despite an interpretation of the Old Testament warning against idolatry, this Haggadah began (reading from right to left) with thirty-four full-page miniatures, starting with the creation of the world and finishing with the death of Moses, and continued with an illuminated text and hymns and Torah readings. Until the Sarajevo Haggadah was discovered it was believed that there were no illustrations at all in Jewish texts.
It was transported from Spain, most probably in 1492 with the expulsion of the Jews during the Inquisition, and found its way to Italy. There the sale of the book is recorded in 1510. Another note on the book, dated 1609 by the Roman Censor Vistorini, declares that there is nothing objectionable in it from the standpoint of the Catholic Church.