Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  So what did Scott get to see at the South Pole? The Norwegian flag flying from a ski pole planted in the snow. Note attached: Greetings from Amundsen and good luck to you, sir.

  So he turned back. His companions died one by one. Scott himself slowly froze to death in his tent, in his thermal underwear which hadn’t been dry for months. Unlike Amundsen, he didn’t have jerkins made of turned animal skins. Until the very end he continued to write up his diary. It was found afterwards and published in a special issue of The Earth and Its Peoples, which I read when I was fourteen.

  ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’

  Scott’s words, written at death’s door. I wonder if it ever entered his mind that they might one day be published in a magazine. I expect it did. Maybe not, though, maybe he always wrote in that vein. Most people don’t write down what they’re really thinking. Not: my half-frozen thermal long johns stink to high heaven. Or: at fifty degrees below zero our urine freezes into reeds of yellow glass in the snow.

  That is not the way they write. They keep the flag flying, even if they’re not the first to plant it at the South Pole.

  Poor Scott. If aerial photographs had existed in those days … But they didn’t, not in 1911. They do now. But not everyone has them.

  I stroll along the waterfront, past fishing boats with orange steel balls on deck and hulls painted in primary colours. Screaming gulls swoop over quays strewn with fish offal. It is a quarter to eleven and the sun has fitted me with long, dark shadow-skis.

  Spanning the fjord is a bridge two kilometres long and so high that an ocean liner can easily pass underneath. I make my way up the ramp. It isn’t steep, but it’s a long way and quite tiring.

  A large vessel draws near. Leaning over the side of the bridge, the sun on my face, I lose myself in the ship passing below. Standing at the rail is a figure wearing a hat, who looks remarkably like Arne. I give him a wave, you never know. He waves back, but that doesn’t mean anything, because people on ships always wave back. People using different modes of transport always wave at each other. Besides, it’s an American ship, and there’s no reason why Arne should be arriving by sea at all.

  Reaching the other side I decide to take the cable car to the top of the cliff: fem kroner, takk, tur og retur. I soar right across the tree line, after which the slope is bare. The gondola is filled with peaceably drunk Norwegians. I wish I could tell them how congenial their company is.

  The gondola slides under a projecting roof and shudders to a halt. Upper terminal. All the passengers get off, but they don’t stray far over the rugged surface of forbidding rock.

  Tourists stand huddled together, lifting their faces to the sun. The rounded crags are bald, with here and there a patch of moss. Inky clouds in the distance are tipped with white, making them look like another stretch of mountains, immeasurably higher than where I’m standing now.

  An American woman paces restlessly about, her head covered in a rigid auburn hairdo. Catching sight of me she comes over and starts talking to me as if we have met before.

  ‘I’m going to be stuck here until midnight! We can’t go back down before, because of the midnight sun. His dearest wish is to see the midnight sun in Norway. That’s all he cares about lately, even when it’s raining. Until now there’s always been a cloud sliding over the sun at the very last moment. I can’t understand what he sees in it. We’ve already been to Spitsbergen – hunting cruise, you know, ten days there and back. Arctic safari they call it, two and a half thousand dollars, all in. It was awful, believe you me! D’ you know what they do? There’s no need to leave the ship at all. You just stay on board. The ship goes up to the edge of the ice. The crew shoots a seal and makes a bonfire on the ice. They throw the seal into the fire. Then the polar bears show up, attracted by the smell of burning seal-fat. Those bears are very tame, they go up on their hind legs and paw the side of the ship. And then everyone starts shooting. They call that hunting! Jack wanted to shoot a bear with a bow and arrow! I told him: Jack, you’re crazy. You’re just like Fred Flintstone – you know the one, from the cartoon series on television? So I say to Fred, I mean Jack: You should’ve been born in the Stone Age. A bow and arrow, that’s crazy! But he says: It’s more sporting. More sporting indeed … what a dummy! He shot three arrows, but that didn’t kill the bear, of course. It looked almost human, a great big darling teddy. It sank down on its backside and tried to pull out the arrows with its teeth. I’ve never seen anything more horrible! Can you imagine? The red blood on that white fur. In the end the captain finished him off with a bullet. Crazy old Jack wanted to do it himself, but the captain said, very politely: Just leave it to me, sir. And right he was. You can be sure I won’t be using that bearskin back home. Not in my bedroom, anyway. Which reminds me. I’m forty-one and you, honey, are about twenty-three I guess, and I can see you’re not Italian, or I’d say let’s leave him right here to enjoy his midnight sun, while you and me go down in that cable car and find a hotel.’

  She laughs. No, she wasn’t a beauty when she was young either, although she’s quite slim and shapely. If she hadn’t made that remark about me not being Italian, then I …

  ‘Is it twelve yet?’ she asks. ‘I haven’t got a watch.’

  I push up my left cuff and show her the time: five minutes to go.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she says. ‘Oh well, maybe a bit of staring at the midnight sun will do him good. He hasn’t had much sunshine in the night, I have to say. Know what I mean? But he’s only got himself to blame, you know, too eager for his own good … Boy, oh boy!’

  She swings round towards a cluster of tourists.

  ‘Jack, Jack, it’s midnight now!’

  I consider telling her that although my watch indicates twelve, that doesn’t mean it’s twelve o’ clock solar time. But then I realise that I don’t know the exact geographical longitude of Tromsø, so I won’t be able to tell her at what time the sun will in fact reach its lowest point. Telling her she’s got it wrong and not knowing the right answer myself – perish the thought.

  So I mutter:

  ‘There’s a gondola leaving in a moment, and there won’t be another one for half an hour. I can’t wait that long. The sun is the sun, also before midnight.’

  And I take my leave from her at three minutes to twelve.

  I go down in the cable car and head back to the bridge.

  Making my way across I keep my eyes on the American ship I watched earlier as it passed beneath the bridge. It is now docking. City of Chicago, Chicago, it says on the stern.

  For the next twenty minutes – the time it takes me to cross to the mainland – my eyes don’t leave the ship. Passengers with luggage swarm over the decks.

  The nagging doubt at the back of my mind swells into a conviction so strong that I can’t help acting on it. I continue down the ramp quaking at the knees. Drawing level with the ship, I have a full view of the decks. A gangway has been lowered to the pier. People are disembarking.

  The man I waved to earlier could very well have been Arne! There could have been a change of plan, some hitch, happens all the time. It’s due to a succession of hitches that I haven’t got my aerial photographs, so why couldn’t something have gone wrong with my appointment with Arne?

  We were supposed to meet up in Alta, but who knows what has happened: he could have sent a message which I never received, suggesting another meeting place. Such as here in Tromsø. I must get to that ship as quickly as possible.

  The bridge forces me to make a frustrating detour. Being so high in the middle, it extends a long way over land before reaching ground level. I have no choice but to follow it to the very end, and all this time passengers are leaving the ship.

  Arne could easily have disembarked by now. Where will he go looking for me? There aren’t many hotels in Tromsø … The least I can do is find out if he’s on the passenger list.

  Having reached the end of the bridge at last, I double back towards the pier. I come across a straggl
e of passengers, the last to leave the ship.

  No Arne. My next thought is that maybe they aren’t passengers at all, just people taking a stroll.

  I run up the gangway, looking left and right for a crew member to direct me to the purser’s office. No-one tries to stop me. I enter the first unlocked door I come across and find myself in a narrow passage leading to the foredeck.

  The man I took for Arne is standing there with his hands in his pockets and his foot propped on a winch, talking to a sailor. The sailor’s jersey has horizontal stripes that ripple when he slips his hand beneath it to scratch his chest.

  The man does not look in the least like Arne. Nor would he if he stopped screwing up his eyes against the sun. The midnight sun, for all I know.

  I leave the ship without having spoken to anyone.

  It is still too early for bed, so I keep walking. After a bit I’m back on the square with the statue of Amundsen.

  True, he had the advantage of those inside-out animals skins, but he didn’t have Sherpas: loyal, tea-serving, sahib-venerating Sherpas for whom loads of thirty kilos are the norm and loads of sixty no exception. How heavy was that crate again? – the one the young Sherpa carried two hundred metres uphill? A hundred kilos? A hundred and fifty?

  The stuff they print in the newspapers!

  Sitting on the base of Amundsen’s statue there are now three boys with their arms around three girls. The grass surround is dotted with crocuses, a sign of early spring at home. The air is filled with the cold screech of gulls.

  I notice to my surprise that there is another monument on this square, which I evidently missed earlier on. It is not very big, hence easily overlooked, and headless. Just a rough chunk of red granite, with a bronze plaque fixed to the top.

  I spell out the inscription. I am so intrigued that I write it down in my pocket diary:

  Eidis Hansen labukt Balsfjord 1777–1870 bar denne steinen frå fjaera her og omlag hit. Steinen veg 371 kg.

  Although I don’t speak a word of Norwegian, the meaning is quite clear. I needn’t have bothered to copy it out – I would have remembered anyway. Eidis Hansen. Carried 371 kilos. And he (possibly she?!) lived to the age of 93.

  12

  The weight of my assorted belongings adds up to just under thirty kilos.

  This is confirmed when my suitcase and rucksack are weighed at the airport, which is just a small wooden building with a very long, narrow jetty protruding into the water. That is all.

  There are six other passengers wandering about, idly helping themselves to leaflets from the counter and then putting them back. Two of them are men in waders carrying bundles of fishing rods. There is also a woman with three little girls, all of them wearing ski-pants. We wander in and out of the building.

  The sky is bright, though sunless.

  But then, just as the green seaplane touches down, the sun bursts forth, as if the aircraft had ripped open the lid of clouds. Walking to the end of the jetty, I suddenly think my trip is going to be a great success.

  There are ten seats on the plane, five down each side, each with its own little porthole.

  The net on the back of the seat in front of me contains the regulation sick bags as well as a route map mounted on cardboard showing the coast and the mountains in meticulous detail. A couple of post office sacks are tossed aboard, after which the hatch is slammed shut.

  *

  This is flying the way our great-grandparents must have dreamt of it. The wings of the aircraft extend from above the portholes, so my view is unobstructed.

  The seaplane cruises at an altitude of roughly 300 metres. The coast and the mountains look like scale models. It is easy to recognise the map in the landscape: coastline, bays, islets, glaciers, rivers, barren heights. A pity we are not flying over the terrain I will be exploring for my thesis.

  My thesis! I have been poring over the names on the cardboard map for some time, but now my concentration vanishes. My failure to obtain the aerial photographs washes over me like a wave of toothache. My imagination shifts into overdrive. Those photos nobody would give me – I wouldn’t even need them if I could get hold of a helicopter … But how? … Maybe a sports plane, then … No, a helicopter might be better after all … An army helicopter? Or one belonging to the Topographical Service?

  I’d be able to survey the terrain from any altitude I liked! I’d be able to take my own photographs! And the moment I spotted something interesting I’d bring the helicopter down to collect a sample. Is this the latter half of the twentieth century or what? What else are helicopters for? If I were studying medicine I wouldn’t be deprived of X-rays or cardiograms, would I? It’s like being a kid in craft class having to saw away with a little handsaw instead of a mechanical one. Or expecting an apprentice chef to prepare a cordon bleu meal on a wood fire or a single burner.

  Nummedal, Oftedahl, Hvalbiff and the whole Geological Service – they can stuff their aerial photographs.

  Snag is, I don’t have a helicopter.

  *

  I remember vividly Sibbelee’s reaction when it dawned on him that I would be needing aerial photographs.

  Sibbelee displays certain symptoms when about to make a pronouncement he is unsure of. Bluffing is signalled by a thrust of his underdeveloped chin. But an underdeveloped chin does not lend itself to thrusting. What happens is merely that the skin is stretched taut from chin to Adam’s apple while the head is thrown back.

  ‘Aerial photographs,’ he said, displaying all the said symptoms of bluffing, ‘of course you need aerial photographs. They are a must in modern research. You can’t get away from that.’

  As if I had any intention of getting away from it!

  ‘But how can I obtain them, Professor?’

  ‘I shall send a note to Nummedal. Nummedal is an old friend of mine, so that should be no problem.’

  My expression must have been one of relief, joy and admiration, because Sibbelee’s usual self-congratulatory smile spread across his face as his bluff went uncalled. A smile which at first you take to mean: aren’t I wonderful and famous and in the know, but which you realise later meant: managed to avoid dropping myself in it, thank God.

  Either way, at the time I thought it was perfectly normal that Sibbelee should ask his old friend in Norway to supply me with aerial photographs.

  And it is normal, surely. The fact that I still do not have them could easily be due simply to a succession of failed connections.

  It must have slipped Nummedal’s mind that I was coming. He’s an old man, after all.

  As for Hvalbiff, he knew he couldn’t get me the photographs, because they were in transit from Oslo to Trondheim, but what could he have done about it? I had probably left already, and anyway Hvalbiff wouldn’t have had my address, and so had no way of letting me know they were not in his possession.

  And Oftedahl? Oftedahl had nothing to do with it, being the head of a different department. Still, he put himself out for me. I can’t reproach him for anything, he was very obliging … as far as I know …

  13

  The seaplane tilts sideways at such a steep angle that my porthole is almost parallel to the ground. The same goes for me, with my face against the glass. Alta slides past under my eyes: small houses dotted along a huge bay. Trees in the low-lying areas, bald heights. As if the treeline were the result of a gigantic hand reaching down to sweep the vegetation off the slopes and batten it down in the valleys.

  The plane rights itself again, the water now is very close. The floats seem poised to seize the surface, like the talons of a bird of prey.

  Landing on water. I hadn’t noticed how odd that sounds before. The engine stops. All the noise, the throbbing, dies away. Like waking from a dream: one moment you’re flying, the next you find yourself floating on a vast expanse of water.

  The pilot emerges from the cockpit and opens the hatch.

  The silence gives way to the low chugging of a motorboat. There’s not even a jetty here in Alta, unlike in Tr
omsø. The boatman throws a rope to the pilot, who is waiting on one of the landing floats.

  I step out of the cabin onto the float and from there into the motorboat. My rucksack and suitcase are passed down.

  At this distance from the shore I can’t see whether anyone has come to meet us. Arne?

  Behind me the seaplane splutters to life again with a succession of loud bangs.

  I look back and watch as the plane gathers speed, the floats generating great waves surging towards our motorboat. Tossing on this man-made swell, we head for the shore.

  Arne? Yes, Arne. He is waving his hat. He looks like the man I mistook for him in Tromsø, except that he is waving his hat much more slowly than the other person did.

  People in thinly populated countries favour the slow manner of greeting. I don’t have a hat, so all I can wave is my hand.

  The seaplane swerves and banks in an avalanche of noise. I follow it with my eyes until it disappears and then look back to the shore.

  Some way up from the water’s edge a road follows the contour of the bay.

  The man is still waving his hat. He is not Arne. He stops waving. He is accompanied by a woman and three children, all wearing trousers and tall boots.

  They move away without waiting for me to come ashore. They must have been mistaken, like me, thinking or hoping I was someone they knew. Or they just stopped out of curiosity.

  I am harrowed with uncertainty. Was I right after all, yesterday in Tromsø, when I thought the person waving at me from the ship was Arne? Because it’s quite possible that Arne had already left the ship by the time I got there, and that the person I saw later wasn’t the one (i.e. Arne) who’d waved at me in the first place.

  The motorboat pulls up to the beach, the engine is cut, the bottom scrapes over pebbles. I step ashore.

  A sharp sting sets my left eyelid twitching. I clap my hand to my face and my fingers come away smeared with splattered mosquito. My head is wreathed in mosquitoes. They settle on my forehead, my nose, the backs of my hands. I have to take charge of my luggage, so am powerless to fend them off.