Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  The tower is situated near the tip of the fjord. You can see nearly all of it from this height, with the sprawl of the city on the left and dark forests on the right.

  ‘Und geben Sie mir jetzt die Karte!’

  I unroll the map. He flips up his extra lenses. Points. Flips the extra lenses down again. Speaks. Taps on the map with the back of a pencil. Points into the distance again. He’s giving a lecture. I dare say he’s been coming here with his students these last sixty years.

  There’s a French saying: not knowing which leg to dance on.

  I don’t know which leg to stand on.

  I lose all grip on my thoughts: like birds fleeing a cage when the door is left ajar, they take wing into the landscape.

  The fjord is deep blue, while the blue of the sky so far north seems almost too timid to call itself blue. Craggy mountains, toy-town houses. A world-famous panorama. Seeing this and dying – by whooshing down the slide made of logs, which stops abruptly above a round lake. In winter the slide is covered in snow, of course, and the lake frozen over. How many times do I whoosh down, ski-less, snowless, while Nummedal pontificates? If only he’d given me the photographs – how happy I’d be to listen to his every word, how enchanted by the wonderful scenery.

  When finally he comes to the end of his lecture I see that the map has been the wrong way up all along.

  6

  We take the same train back. We have been together all afternoon, but he is as remote as ever. Rambles or excursions of this nature usually end with the professor telling jokes, badmouthing colleagues, or telling you about their dogs, cats, children.

  Not so Nummedal. Looking at his watch through his magnifying glass, his mouth turns down in disgruntlement. He has run out of topics of conversation and can’t wait to be rid of me.

  Evening is very long in coming.

  We climb the stairs at the terminal station and find ourselves in the centre of Oslo once more.

  Nummedal flips down his extra glasses.

  He is about to take his leave, because he stands still.

  I thank him very much for putting himself to all that trouble.

  But the pleasure was all his – as if I didn’t know that already.

  ‘Herr Professor!’

  I have to force the words out of my throat as if I’ve choked on a lump of coal: ‘Herr Professor, do forgive me for going on about this, but could we come to some arrangement about the aerial photographs?

  ‘Aerial photographs?’

  ‘The aerial photographs of Finnmark. I realise you can’t lay your hands on them from one moment to the next, but what if I call at your office tomorrow, some time in the morning, perhaps your secretary could …’

  ‘I don’t have any aerial photographs for you. Aerial photographs! Of course we have aerial photographs at my institute! But aerial photographs for you to use in the field – how could you think …? We don’t go out and take those photographs ourselves, you know.’

  ‘But Professor Sibbelee said …’

  ‘What does Professor Sibbelee know! How can Professor Sibbelee make promises about my aerial photographs? If you want aerial photographs, you must go and get them from the Geological Survey in Trondheim, which is where they are kept. It is on your way up north, anyway. Pay a visit to the Geological Survey! Østmarkneset, Trondheim. Direktør Hvalbiff! He will be pleased to see you. They have just moved into a splendid new building, of which he is very proud. He will be delighted to give you a tour and show you everything! Hvalbiff is your man. I will telephone at once and tell him to expect you.’

  Nummedal proffers his hand.

  ‘Goodbye, sir, I wish you the best. Do give my regards to Arne and Qvigstad! And do call at my office after you have finished work in Finnmark. Don’t forget.’

  He flips up the extra lenses.

  ‘I will relieve you of that map, shall I? Goodbye!’

  He steps to the edge of the pavement. With two lenses on his forehead and two before his eyes it’s as if he has armed himself with four headlights.

  He points his white stick into the rush of traffic. Drivers step on their brakes. He crosses to the other side. The street seems to close up behind him.

  Now what?

  It would be remiss of me not to send Sibbelee a postcard.

  From a revolving metal display I select one with care: a colour postcard of the ski tower. I head back to my hotel, holding the card by a corner, flapping it absently from time to time as I ponder what to write on the back. Nothing appropriate comes to mind, because all I can think of is what I really think: … your note introducing me to Nummedal hasn’t been much help. He’s old, nearly blind and possibly not fully aware of what’s expected of him. He kept me busy all afternoon, but not before airing his low opinion of Holland.

  For you, my estimable mentor, he has little regard. Apparently you took issue with him in your youth, for which it seems he is still seeking revenge. After some carefully worded comments slighting your scientific achievements, he took me under his wing and talked of nothing but his own exploits. None of this had anything to do with the purpose of my mission, but I listened patiently. To the end he treated me as if I were an admirer come to pay homage. But all that time he must have known the only reason I called on him was to collect the photographs. I …

  Where is my hotel? Shouldn’t I have reached it by now? My surroundings are completely unfamiliar to me. Nothing remotely like where I’m staying. There aren’t even any shops around here. Dead to the world, this neighbourhood, an unlikely place for a hotel. From my inside pocket I take the small street map I found in my room last night.

  I’ve been going in the wrong direction! I always get lost, always. How many times haven’t I lost my way in foreign cities?

  It takes me another hour to locate my hotel, and still it isn’t dark. Back in my room, I order a whisky. Sorry, sir, not allowed. As a last resort I drain a large glass of water, sit down at the small bureau and, with my mouth opening and shutting like a fish out of water, I scrawl on the back of the ski tower postcard:

  Dear Professor Sibbelee, a quick greeting from the North, although not yet the High North. I met Professor Nummedal this morning; he asked me to convey his best regards to you.

  I am very grateful for this valuable introduction. Professor Nummedal gave me a warm welcome and took the trouble to take me on an instructive tour of the environs of Oslo!

  For the aerial photographs he directed me to the Geological Survey in Trondheim.

  Alfred I.

  The only space left for my signature is in the bottom left-hand corner, and I consider it a lucky twist of fate that there is no room for the rest of my surname.

  7

  Scandinavian countries have numerous qualities to recommend them, one of them being the strength of their sanitary installations.

  The shower is a bristle brush of water. I stay under it for a long time, as if I could slough off the entire wasted day. Start all over again. But when finally I turn off the taps, I ask myself: Was it really a wasted day? Maybe Nummedal’s intentions were good. Maybe he genuinely tried to obtain the aerial photographs for me, without success, and simply wanted to make up for it by taking me on that tour. Maybe telling me to go to Trondheim was the best advice. Maybe his gruffness was due to embarrassment at not keeping his promise to Sibbelee.

  I return to the bedroom dripping wet, twiddle the knobs on my transistor radio. I can actually receive a Dutch station here. Let me see. There’s someone talking into a microphone.

  It’s a professor of physics, giving a lecture. Fascinating Facts from the World of Science and Technology – in terms comprehensible to the layman.

  Sounding a note on the flute, he says, requires an air speed of a hundred and twenty-five kilometres per hour.

  *

  What was that? A hundred and twenty-five kilometres per hour? That’s hurricane force. I have that kind of figure on tap, promising young scientist that I am.

  You need to blast the air wit
h your mouth at a speed of a hundred and twenty-five kilometres per hour for the flute to produce a sound.

  I never realised that, and yet I played a fair number of flutes between the ages of seven and fourteen.

  My first flute was a plain celluloid instrument. I could play the national anthem on my flute, but one day I held a magnifying glass to it to find out whether it would burn. It caught fire, I dropped it on the floor, the flames went out for lack of fuel, but my mother was deeply shocked. She gave me a recorder made of ebony. Not long afterwards I found out that the flutes they played in real orchestras were of the transverse type. My mother said transverse flutes were very expensive, too expensive. That was long after my father died, but my grandfather was still alive, and he gave me a flute he had played himself as a boy. A big transverse flute with six openings and eight valves. It was made up of four segments screwed together end to end, with rings of ivory marking the joins.

  First we’ll see how you get on by yourself, then I’ll decide if it’s worth your having flute lessons.

  I wanted to be a flautist, a professional flautist in a big orchestra. My mother didn’t like to say no, but she was not pleased with my chosen career.

  It was six months before I was able to get any sound out of the big transverse flute. At the market I bought an old book of flute studies. By the age of fourteen I was playing quite well, but then I made a fatal discovery. The flutes they played in real orchestras were quite different from the one I had. They were so-called Böhm flutes, a variety invented by one Theobald Böhm, and they didn’t have six openings and eight valves like mine. The technique was quite different, too. My flute wasn’t even good enough for the school orchestra. I asked my mother, who seldom refused me anything, to buy me a proper Böhm flute. But my mother said: ‘Do you know you’ll have to start again from scratch? And I hope you realise that people don’t become world famous for playing the flute. The violin, yes, or the piano. Flautists mostly play the accompaniment in big orchestras. It’s the best they can hope for, and even then all they get to do is perform music they didn’t compose themselves.’

  Her last point tipped the balance. I took to collecting rocks, because becoming a biologist like my father did not appeal to me. Instead of a flautist I would be a scientist.

  And, yet, in all those years playing the flute I never stopped to consider the speed of the air passing through it, let alone how that speed might be measured.

  Water in my ears, a towel over my hands, I stand there, shamefaced. An enquiring mind seeks to measure and count.

  I have even made a habit of counting my paces, in imitation of Buys Ballot, who formulated Buys Ballot’s law. (If a person stands with his back to the wind in the northern hemisphere, the area of low pressure is found to his left.)

  Wind … but it was someone else who had the idea of measuring the wind passing through a flute. Not me.

  Just as I’m about to change the station on the transistor, the professor observes that the speed of the air current in whistles was calculated by Christiaan Huygens – all of three hundred years ago.

  I switch off the radio and climb into bed. I can’t get to sleep. At this extreme northern latitude the sun doesn’t go down far enough. The windows are blacked out with curtains, but It’s impossible to forget the daylight outside.

  At half past four I’m still awake. The bus from the S.A.S. office to the airport leaves at eight. If I fall asleep now, I may not wake up in time. But I don’t fall asleep.

  At five I give up and get out of bed, open the curtains and take another shower. By the end I feel drowsier than before, but there isn’t much point in lying down again. Naked, I sit on my bed and consider. I decide I might as well pack my suitcase now, and go over the contents of my rucksack again.

  Hiking shoes, hammer, sleeping bag, water flask, mug, new notebook, camera, films, the geological compass Eva gave me in my first year at university. It’s quite large, with a rectangular base, precision degree scale, sights, clinometer, spirit level and mirror.

  I snap it open and peer at my reflection. Eva had said the mirror made it a funny sort of present. She had said: ‘I didn’t know geology was a science that makes you look in the mirror all the time.’

  She was twelve at the time, my little sister.

  Not only was she the first person in my experience to define geology thus, she was quite right where I was concerned.

  Over the years I must have taken the compass from its case ten times more often for a quick glance in the mirror than for taking measurements.

  The mirror is so small that when I can see my nose and eyes in it, my ears are invisible. And when I look at my chin I can’t see my eyes. Even holding it at arm’s length doesn’t allow me to see my entire face.

  But I would hate to part with the little mirror.

  If you ask me, the history of mankind falls into three significant stages.

  In the first, man didn’t recognise his own reflection, any more than an animal does. Show a cat a mirror and it reckons It’s a window with another cat beyond. It hisses, prowls around the mirror. Loses interest eventually; some cats ignore their reflected image altogether.

  Man was no different to start with. One hundred per cent subjective. An ‘I’ that could question a ‘self’ did not exist.

  Second stage: Narcissus discovers the mirror image. The greatest sage of Antiquity was not Prometheus, who gave fire to man, but Narcissus. Henceforth the ‘I’ sees a ‘self’. There was no demand for psychological insight at this stage, for man was to himself what he was, namely his mirror image. Whether or not he liked what he saw, his self did not betray him. I and self were symmetrical, each other’s mirror image, no more than that. We lie and our reflection lies with us. Only in the third stage were we dealt the blow of truth.

  The third stage begins with the invention of photography. How often do we think our passport photos do us justice? Hardly ever! In former times, when people had their portraits painted and they didn’t like the result, they blamed the artist. But the camera can’t lie, as we all know. So it is revealed to you over the years through countless photographs that you aren’t really yourself most of the time, that you and your self are not symmetrical, indeed that you exist in a variety of strange incarnations for which you would refuse all responsibility if you could.

  The fear that other people will see him as he appears in the portraits he disapproves of, that they might never see him the way he likes to see himself in the mirror, has caused the human individual to fragment into a general plus a band of mutinous soldiers. An I seeking to assert itself amid the constant clamour of alter egos. This is the third stage, in which self-doubt, previously a rare state of mind, flared into consternation.

  Roll on psychology.

  At least my compass assures me of one soldier I can rely on, one who’ll stick with me through thick and thin, who’ll write my thesis for me cum laude and who’ll gain a professorship one day. When the newspapers ask for his picture I’ll go on taking his portrait until I’ve got one that’s just right. But this morning he’s red-eyed for lack of sleep – and I have such trouble sleeping as it is. His chin is stubbled, because I haven’t shaved yet.

  I have my shave and get dressed. I pack my rucksack and suitcase with deliberation. The items I will leave behind in Alta can go in the suitcase: white shirts, electric razor, etc. Into the rucksack go my notebook, thick socks, ballpoint, pencils, hammer, ever-useful polythene bags, hiking shoes, sleeping bag, transistor radio. Steel measuring tape? can’t find it anywhere. May have left it at home. I make a note in my diary to buy one in Trondheim. Steel measuring tape I write beneath Østmarkneset, where the Geological Survey is situated.

  Before going down to breakfast I give the bathroom a last once-over, as well as the wardrobe, the bureau and the bedside table. No, nothing lying around. I even check the drawers and cupboards I didn’t use, just in case. I can’t stand hitches of any kind. Leaving things lying around, landing in situations unprepared, being t
ongue-tied – what could be worse? I will not accidentally fall to my death in a mountain chasm like my father, and if I do fall I will have to be prepared. Losing my footing will not take me unawares. I will manage to hang on to something, or else to break my fall.

  I have already put my suitcase and rucksack out in the corridor, and just as I make to shut the door behind me, what do I see?

  Something on top of the coat rack. It is the postcard I wrote to Sibbelee last night.

  Discovered in the nick of time!

  8

  At the first call for the flight to Trondheim I make my way calmly to the aircraft and board with a friendly greeting to the stewardess.

  I stow my mac and camera in the overhead luggage net, sit down and yawn. For the next hour or so there is nothing for me to do other than doze, and I let my eyelids droop. Not heavy enough – they lift again.

  The seat next to mine is vacant. I am by the window, looking out on to a wing, so there is nothing much to see.

  The stewardess walks past with an armful of newspapers. I pick one at random and leaf through it.

  Almost involuntarily, I begin to read.

  DUTCH EXPEDITION RELIES ON SHERPA CELEBRITIES

  It’s a report about that Himalayan expedition – the one Brandel is on.

  We make our first camp beside the airfield of Pokhara, close to such Himalaya giants as Annapurna (8078 m), Machhapuchhare (6997 m) and Lamjung Himal (6985 m), whose ice-capped summits dominate the entire region …

  All we have to do now is wait for Wongdhi the Sherpa-sirdar who left Kathmandu eight days ago with a team of a hundred porters.

  The term ‘Sherpa’ is generally taken to mean a high-altitude bearer or mountain guide, no doubt due to the name Sherpas have made for themselves on previous Himalayan expeditions, but in reality it refers to a specific tribe.