Made it. I am standing beside Arne. He lifts my camera and map pocket by the straps and hangs them round my neck as if they were medals of office.
21
When I get home at about five and have nothing to do while Eva makes tea, I often take out the hefty MALLINCKRODT MEMORIAL VOLUME OFFERED BY HIS STUDENTS from the cabinet it shares with my father’s other books.
It invariably falls open at the page with the big pasted-in photograph, which unfolds to twice the width of the book.
The picture shows the participants of the Botanical Conference at Lausanne in July 1947.
They are ranged in five rows. The ones in the front, mostly women, are sitting on chairs, those in the second row are standing, with the heads of the third and subsequent rows hovering above them. How this was achieved is unclear; presumably they stood on chairs.
My father’s head is in the last row, almost in the middle, and he is one of the few participants not looking into the lens. He is shown in three-quarter profile, as if he’s saying something – or otherwise listening – to a very old man with a beard diagonally in front of him. Such a mistake! The bearded professor (Von Karbinski, Cracow) isn’t talking to him at all.
How do I know his name is Von Karbinski?
Very simple.
On the facing page is a diagram of the group. It is quite small, and very schematic. All it shows, really, is the pattern in which the heads are arranged. Each head is rendered in outline, and each has a number. The numbers correspond with a list of names. So it’s easy to see who the participants are and where they’re from. That’s how I know that the old man diagonally in front of my father is Von Karbinski from Cracow.
However, there are two heads without numbers, and consequently without names. One belongs to a girl in the far left of the front row. Some secretary, no doubt, who happened to be there when the portrait was taken. But the other head belongs to my father. Not yet famous enough, I suppose, when he accompanied the great Professor Mallinckrodt to the conference in Lausanne in 1947.
A century from now, or two or three, when my mother, sister and I are long dead, anyone who cares to will be able to find out who attended the conference in Lausanne by consulting the MALLINCKRODT MEMORIAL VOLUME. Von Karbinski from Cracow, Stahl from Göttingen, Pelletier (Lyon), James (Oxford) … but when their gaze stops at my father’s face they won’t know who he is.
My mother, Eva and I are the only possessors of the memorial book who know him: one of the youngest men in the picture, black quiff, no spectacles, no old-fashioned wing collar either, no, his attire seems scarcely outdated.
Alfred the First (my grandfather’s name was Paul, my great-grandfather’s Jurriaan, but my most illustrious ancestor was Hendrik, Lutheran dominee at Purmerend and author of Parnassus: A Collection of Peerless Poesy, published in 1735. No-one reads it any more. We don’t even have a copy).
Alfred the First, I mutter, sliding the book in amongst the others on the shelf. Usually I glance in the mirror after that. Died young. Before he had the chance fully to develop his talents.
What is odd is that I do this quite often, several times a week in fact, and it has been going on for years: opening the book while waiting for tea, taking a look at my father, noting the absence of a number in his head, muttering ‘Alfred the First’, and so on.
Not so odd, though, that this ritual should come to mind now. Arne and Qvigstad might well become very famous (Mikkelsen strikes me as too dim). One of the pictures we took in Skoganvarre will be published in a book, duly furnished with names and date. My name has got to be there along with the others. It must be.
22
We have been following this river for quite some time. Flat terrain, I mean no rise and fall. But now our route takes a different turn, and up another slope we trudge.
There is a constant alternation between plains and rises, stony ground and mosses, rock formations and peat. Difficult becomes easier, then easy becomes more difficult. My forebear the Lutheran dominee would have said it was the other way round. The rivers are my main worry – how many more are there? Eight? Nine? And they won’t all be shallow either.
Tough becomes tougher, but there is an upper limit. Climbing brings elevation, steep becomes steeper, but in the end it always eases off again.
The bare stretches are strewn with small stones, not one of which merits pocketing. Here and there a tussocky shrub is covered in tiny pink flowers. I don’t know the first thing about plants, can barely tell the difference between bilberry and bell heather. The Dryas Octopetala with its yellow-and-white flowers is the only one I recognise, thanks to the geological period named after it.
Knowing a bit more about the flora would give me something to do in the absence of interesting types of stone. But plants have never interested me. Maybe I was put off by my father having died in pursuit of them. A victim of science – my mother seldom refers to him otherwise at solemn moments.
We are now surrounded by mountains on all sides. It’s like walking on the bottom of a serving dish covered by a lid of black cloud, except that the lid is slightly off centre, creating a slit through which the brassy sunshine pours in.
Arne has been adjusting his pace to mine.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ he asks.
‘Are you?’
‘Ravenous. Cold, too. We must have something to eat soon.’
We each have a piece of dry knäckebröd and a handful of raisins the next time we stop for a rest.
Descending to a stream, scooping water, knocking back four cups in a row while the sweat turns icy on your skin, wading through wetlands, more polar willows, dwarf birches. The ground is no longer cushioned. I need so much air that I barely get the chance to close my mouth and roll my tongue to work up some saliva.
I have to cautiously worm my hand under my head-net to wipe the sweat from my eyebrows. The stink of mosquito oil assaults my eyes. Maybe I have rubbed some into my mucous membranes, despite the dire warning in the instructions.
The terrain becomes ever harder, no more dwarf birches, just scattered rocks with no level ground between them. Tortured muscles form iron cuffs around my ankles, and lugging my rucksack feels like dragging a cartload of flour.
This slope is very long. Longer than the last one?
Arne is the first to reach the top, where he makes a halt, leaning his rump against a rock. He is joined by Mikkelsen and the strong man, both of whom lean back in the same way. Qvigstad, who is just ahead of me, looks round for another conveniently sized rock to lean against. The two of us lean back. He offers me a cigarette. I flip up my head-net to have a smoke. My face is instantly covered in mosquitoes. Once the cigarette is alight I lower the net again, but have to keep it away from my face to avoid burning holes in it. The smoke is trapped underneath and I seize up, coughing. My ears throb and I have never known my heart to make such a deafening noise. My torso feels like plate iron enclosing a gleaming, high-powered engine relentlessly propelling me forward in life.
Qvigstad says something, which I don’t catch.
‘What did you say?’
He raises his voice to a shout:
‘Anna Bella Grey! A beauty with two heads and three tits!’
I want to say who’s she when she’s at home, but decide it is too silly. He doesn’t need encouragement anyway.
‘I saw a picture of her naked,’ Qvigstad roars. ‘Unbelievable. Completely normal from the waist down. See the potential? A tit for each hand and another for your mouth. And that’s not the end of it. What she can do with her two heads, or rather her two mouths … it’s mind-boggling.’
Silence. Then he adds, dropping his voice:
‘I can only get it off with black women, you know.’
‘Oh?’
‘Ever since I went to America. Once a negress always a negress. A tiger that has tasted human flesh …’
‘Is it the same, then?’
‘I reckon. My inborn puritanical nature. Psychiatrists maintain it’s because my mot
her couldn’t possibly have been a negress. You kid yourself that it’s about the beauty of black skin – finer and softer, no blemishes, pimples, blackheads, nervous rashes, no hair in the wrong places. Perfect skin for people who don’t wear clothes. But subconsciously you see the image of your mother in every white woman, and being with your mother makes you impotent, precisely because you started out wanting her and her alone.’
He blows out smoke.
‘Maybe they make too much of it in psychiatry. Personally I think it’s because I was born in Norway, where there aren’t any negresses. So when I was a kid and other kids told me their smutty stories about snogging, I never thought of negresses.’
He flicks his cigarette away, grinds it into the ground with his heel until every trace of it has vanished and walks on without further comment.
I lean forward, and in so doing lift the rucksack off the ledge of rock. I set off, lurching and staggering at first. Even smacking my lips fails to get the saliva running now. Trickles of salt-saturated sweat run down either side of my nose, stinging my cracked lips. Aeneas walked all the way from Troy to Rome carrying his father on his back.
The shadows cast by the Vaddasgaissa reach to the bottom of the slope. It is half past three, and as I step out from the shade the sun feels slightly warmer than when we first arrived in the mountains. I squat down by a stream and slurp three cups of water. Where are we?
Mikkelsen is out of sight. Over the next, slightly lower hill. Arne vanishes next. Qvigstad, too, is well ahead of me. But I will catch up. It is not as if I’m dawdling. Now it’s Qvigstad going over the hill, but he doesn’t vanish completely. He’s going up again, getting taller! Two or three more steps and I can see him full length once more. I catch sight of Arne again, too, far away, on yet another slope. Mikkelsen? Same goes for him. He was just hidden from view by an outcrop. The only one still missing is the strong man. Where is he?
23
The strong man is down on his knees blowing a fire. He has improvised a little stove with some stones to prop up a frying pan. The flames crackle. For the rest silence all round. Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are huddled on the other side of the fire. The smoke billows slowly towards me, so to them I am probably looming up from a dense fog. When I am close enough to make out their voices, I hear they are speaking Norwegian.
I unload my rucksack and lie down on my stomach next to Arne.
‘Is this where we’ll be staying?’
‘No, but it’s very near here.’
I drag out my map. Arne points to our current position before I have even started looking. Lake Lievnasjaurre is four centimetres away. Four kilometres.
We eat bread with fried eggs and drink a lot of coffee.
The conversation is mostly in Norwegian, for the strong man’s benefit. There is nothing for me to do but rest. The strong man puts out the fire, cleans the frying pan, packs away all the items he has used, fetches drinking water. If only we could keep him with us! Not enough food? What about Sherpas – don’t they have to eat? Or do they survive on moss and stones? I’ll have to ask Brandel how they manage in the Himalayas. No, needn’t bother, the solution couldn’t be simpler. The ratio is a hundred Sherpas to four sahibs, and twenty-five Sherpas can easily carry all the food they need, plus provisions for one sahib. Just one strong man, however strong, is not enough for the four of us.
I run down the slope towards the next river. That I have got this far with a rucksack heavier than I have ever carried before proves I have nothing to fear. It’s just that I’m out of practice. I’m obviously strong enough. Yes I’m weary, but this weariness is like a headache, a temporary hardship that has nothing to do with lack of energy.
The river I am now approaching is not wide, but the current is fast. Plenty of stepping stones. The secret is not to wait about. No furtive casting around for a stone even closer to the bank, just forging ahead with a step, stride, and jump without thinking what you’re doing any more than when you dash down a flight of stairs.
First step … second … don’t look at the water, keep your eyes on the next stone and your foot will land there automatically …
Oh!
Damn! Damn! Damn!
My right foot is up on the stone, my left in mid-stream! My trousers are about to split at the crotch. Cold water seeps up to my groin. Arne looks round, then turns back to help me. Qvigstad, Mikkelsen and the strong man press on; thank God they’re too far away to notice what’s happened.
‘It’s nothing! It’s nothing!’ I yell, shifting my entire weight onto my right leg, but in doing so my foot slides off the stone and I pitch forward onto my knees.
Nothing matters any more. Splashing more than necessary, I wade the rest of the way.
‘My rucksack is still dry. It’s nothing, really.’
‘No, you can’t go on in this state. You must change into dry socks or you’ll get sores on your feet.’
Arne lowers his rucksack to the ground and takes out a pair of grey socks rolled up in a ball. I sit down meekly and untie my shoes, breaking a nail on the wet laces. There is blood trickling down my shins. I pull up my trouser legs, dab my knees with a handkerchief. Grazed, that’s all, but the pain bites to the marrow.
Arne passes me a towel. I have to accept his help. If I don’t I’ll only cause more delay. I am no match for him, I have no practice, I don’t belong in this country the way he does.
‘Sorry,’ I mutter, ‘I’m so clumsy, I’ve always been very clumsy. I’m doing the best I can, but it doesn’t always work. I’m sorry.’
24
Flat-topped mountains with steep, rugged flanks. Like shards of broken pottery magnified to gigantic proportions. This is what an ant sees when making its way between the jagged edges of a broken tile. This is how I see the mountains, but I only lift my head briefly now and then, just to check which way the others are going. The rucksack puts such a strain on my neck that if it weren’t for my shoulder blades my back would be wrapped around my spine, in which case the straps would slide right down my arms … nothing to hold them up … Crazy imaginings. Dark stains spread along the straps, my sweat having seeped through layers of clothing. That much is true. As if the moisture is being squeezed from my body by the leather straps.
Am I tired? I don’t care. Would I prefer to stop right here and call it a day? Not at all. But it does come to me that there is an immense disproportion between the physical and the intellectual exertions demanded of me. I’m like the man who invented the electric motor a hundred and fifty years ago, in the days when insulated copper wire didn’t exist, when it wasn’t on sale all over the place as it is now, in any shop selling light bulbs. He couldn’t afford raw silk, so he was reduced to tearing up his wife’s wedding dress to have something to insulate the copper wire with. For months he did nothing but the most mind-numbing labour imaginable: winding shreds of silk around lengths of fine copper wire. Compared to the time he spent doing that, the actual invention was achieved in a flash.
Ah! Never in all my years at university have I been required to get down to such basic activities as now – and no-one will ever notice. When my thesis is finished there won’t be any mention of blistered shoulders, grazed knees, splitting headaches, or of mosquitoes and carnivorous flies. I wouldn’t dream of telling anyone about those things. Not about those things nor about what lies ahead … perhaps.
My thoughts turn to all those geologists, thousands of them who, like me, never breathe a word about such annoyances as being in debt, going without food, suffering sunstroke, undertaking long expeditions to no purpose, people working against you, underhand behaviour.
I feel an irresistible urge to conjure up the worst possible scenario: that all my effort will have been wasted. Think of those occasional boulders you see on the moors in eastern Holland – who’s to say they weren’t dragged there by some primitive man, slaving away year in year out to advance half a metre a day, sleeping beside his boulder at night …
No horses in those days. Let’
s hope primitive man was aware of the possibility of using tree trunks as levers. He grew old. People aged much more rapidly in those days. My barrow-builder, grizzled by the age of thirty! Fell ill and had to give up long before his boulder was close enough to another one for us, his descendants, to think: Hey! A barrow for the dead!
There is no trace of anyone having devoted his entire life to getting that particular boulder to budge. It looks no different from the others dotted about the moors, and no archaeologist would give it a second thought. It’s pathetic, and what’s even worse is that when we do recognise a boulder as being part of a barrow, we still have no idea who the architects were, let alone what they were called. Their names will never be known. There’s no-one in the whole universe who knows. And if, a thousand years from now, they find some way of tracing those identities it won’t make any difference to me. I’ll die without ever knowing the answer, like Christiaan Huygens, who died not knowing that one day people would be sitting in The Hague watching gunfights between rebels and soldiers in San Domingo, or Julius Caesar, who died unaware of the existence of America. The Aztecs performed human sacrifices on a nightly basis, to ensure that the sun would rise in the morning. They had done so since time immemorial, the way we wind up our clocks before going to bed. Not a murmur from anyone, not a soul who dared suggest it might be worth finding out what would happen if they skipped the ceremony for once.
Was there ever an Aztec who raised his voice to protest: ‘What we’re doing is insane!’
In a world where so many sacrifices have already been made without any effect at all, how can anyone believe there are still sacrifices worth making?
My eye is caught by a stone that looks slightly different from the others. I stoop. The rucksack pitches forward against the nape of my neck. I flail my left arm to keep my balance. I pick up the stone.
Not particularly heavy. A piece of gneiss, scattered here by the million. Having taken the trouble to pick it up, I slip it in my pocket.
Beyond Sleep Page 11