Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  The flanks of Mount Vuorje appear to be shifting, as if the ground, the vegetation and the patches of snow have grown legs.

  Steeling myself, I stagger towards Arne.

  ‘Listen! Listen carefully!’

  I listen, open-mouthed. The air is filled with rumour, a sound that is hard to describe. The low rumblings of some immense horizontal creature overlying the entire mountainside.

  Peering through the binoculars it’s as if you can hear the animals grazing. Most of them are fawn or brown in colour, but a lot of them are white with tan markings. We take turns with the binoculars to scan the slope for someone herding the animals, but he could be miles away. Gradually the herd bears down on the river.

  ‘The wind is blowing this way,’ Mikkelsen says. ‘So we can get much closer to them if we want.’

  ‘They’re almost as shy as animals in the wild,’ Arne says. ‘The moment they catch our scent they’ll be off.’

  Reindeer. Fabled creatures of Christmas calendars and picture postcards. Deer with felt-lined antlers. Exotic, and reduced to a cliché by a surfeit of celebrity. Not that I’ve ever heard of reindeer producing a constant hum, never read about it in books, wouldn’t have guessed it either.

  I struggle on after the others to get as close to the animals as possible. The low sun casts my shadow ahead of me, elongated tenfold. The terrain now is greatly varied: moss, shrubs, stones, all making different sounds on impact. No other noise but the rush of water. It’s only when I stand still that I can hear the reindeer, the way you only hear your own heartbeat when you’re lying quietly in bed. The animals in the front line are already stepping into the water, and still our presence doesn’t alarm them. We can now hear the bells worn by some of the bucks. But even that sound doesn’t transport us back to civilisation.

  Low clouds, so low as to touch the ground, roll across the water towards us. Swathes of white mist give us a striped appearance. We straggle back to the tents.

  It is one thirty a.m. The clouds are moving faster than we are, blotting out the sunshine. The temperature drops sharply in the space of minutes. We sit down by the dying fire to drink the last of our coffee, after which we all turn in for the night. Reaching his tent Qvigstad twists round to deliver a parting shot:

  ‘Hey! A young naked negress – not talking, just smiling!’

  Arne and I are in our sleeping bags, which we have pulled up to our chins. Things aren’t so bad now, thanks to the coolness brought on by the clouds. But the bugs obviously want to shelter from the coming shower and the top of the pyramid is so thick with them that you can destroy scores at once just by reaching up and clapping your hands.

  We eat raisins, drink some water, smoke another cigarette.

  Arne waxes philosophical.

  ‘Do you remember what we were talking about just before you had your little encounter with the force of gravity?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s strange that nobody really does anything for its own sake. Being thrifty is my way of placating Fate, and then there’s you, thinking your father’s watching you.’

  ‘My father is no more real than your fate, the fate you hope will reward you for your austerity.’

  ‘What about your mother?’ he asks. ‘Your mother is still alive, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It can’t have been easy for her to bring up two small children on her own.’

  ‘No, not easy, but not as hard as you might imagine.’ His remark has struck a chord. Here goes, I think to myself.

  ‘My mother,’ I say, ‘is Holland’s foremost essayist. She became successful not long after my father died, and she kept it up for years. Night after night she’d sit at the table in the living room pounding on a big office typewriter. Which she still does. Starts at eight sharp. Makes coffee at ten, then takes a break until a quarter past. Sometimes she pours me and my sister a cup too, she even did that when we were quite young, after which we were sent to bed. We’d be wide awake, of course, hearing our mother’s typewriter until midnight. Every week she writes two articles for magazines plus half a page for the Saturday supplement of a national daily, and she also contributes to a monthly cultural magazine. Her subject is foreign literature. A total of thirteen articles each month, in which she reviews some thirty books. And she travels all over the country to give talks. She’s an undisputed expert. Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Ionesco, Françoise Sagan, Mickey Spillane or Ian Fleming – anyone wanting to appear cultured simply reads what my mother has written about them and then parrots her opinion without mentioning where they got it from. She’s been awarded the Legion of Honour and an honorary doctorate from the smallest university in Northern Ireland, the name of which escapes me. As you can imagine, there are over thirty books each month for her to write about, sometimes as many as fifty.’

  ‘And does she read them all?’

  ‘Not a single one. She doesn’t even open them, to avoid damaging the spine. What she does is copy the titles and the authors’ names onto little cards. Most critics don’t even do that. A second-hand dealer comes round from time to time to collect the brand-new books for a quarter of the retail price.’

  ‘So how can your mother write all those articles?’

  ‘We have subscriptions to the Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the Figaro Litté raire. My mother only bothers with books that have already been reviewed in those papers. Oh, quite openly, mind you! She even quotes them verbatim at times, complete with credits to the Observer or the Figaro, especially on off days when she can’t come up with anything. “ Just a quickie this time,” she’ll say. She’s not alone in this, plenty of reviewers make even less of an effort. But my mother’s a very conscientious person. Busy from morning till night, even works on Sundays. She compiles dossiers on all the authors whose books she reviews. In the living room back home we’ve got a big oak cupboard crammed with folders. She cuts out all the relevant items in the foreign press and files them away. Naturally, it can happen that there’s something on the back of an article that she needs as well. So she has to choose which one to cut up and which to save. Then she goes and makes a neat typewritten copy of the one she cut up.’

  Arne smiles faintly.

  ‘Oh well,’ I say. ‘Maybe you’ll meet her some day. She’s thin and quite short, dark eyes, thin lips, nicotine-stained index and middle fingers. Smokes three packets a day. Goes to bed at two in the morning and gets up at seven, has done for years. My sister and I had a comfortable childhood thanks to her hard work. If my father hadn’t died we wouldn’t have spent as much as we did, because my mother isn’t at all good with money. Always buying us new clothes, you know, nothing was mended because she didn’t have the time. In the time it took her to darn a pair of socks she could make enough money to buy five new pairs, she used to say. We went to restaurants several times a week, because cooking was another waste of time as far as she was concerned. I feel sorry for her sometimes. I stay away from books myself. Whether or not she writes a load of rubbish isn’t my concern. She churns out pretty much the same stuff every time. If the author’s English she’ll say his technique is masterly, that he has a fine sense of humour, that the characters are convincing and the plot well structured. If it’s a French book the author will be intelligent, lucid, erudite, possibly a touch frivolous, and his engagement with the subject will be either impressive or slight. Dear old Mum! I wouldn’t dare ask her whether she herself thinks her reviews amount to anything.’

  ‘But even if she doesn’t, she can still say: I did it for the sake of my children.’

  ‘So can a burglar.’

  ‘Who can honestly say they have always made a living off their own wits? Take Sauerbruch, the famous surgeon. Lost it completely when he got old, but that didn’t stop people from flocking to his door. Everyone wanted to be operated on by the celebrated Sauerbruch, even though he was no better than a quack by then. His assistants had their own reasons fo
r keeping quiet. That’s how we all end up in the long run: party to some deception or other. Bakers sell inferior bread to raise their profits, the motor industry makes sure your car breaks down in five years, garages charge you for repairs they never made, clockmakers charge fifty kroner for cleaning your watch by blowing into the casework. Daylight robbery all round.

  ‘I often think about the people who write those books my mother reviews. People who don’t feel loved enough by their friends to be able to confide their innermost thoughts in them, so they think: Why don’t I write a book instead? Thousands of copies will get printed and with any luck there’ll be one or two readers who love me. So they spend two or three years writing, and then what do they get? They get the kind of ready-made drivel produced by my mother and her colleagues. Unless they get insulted, which happens a lot in their line of business. It’s almost the norm, even.’

  ‘What about all those people getting paid for writing stuff anyone could think up? That’s stealing, too. Like when they write a thousand pages on a subject they could cover in a hundred?’

  ‘All the same, it must be a great feeling if you can say: Here I am, I’ve achieved success and it’s all my own work, I didn’t have to lie or cheat to get there.’

  ‘In a world where everyone’s forever cheating everyone else? A world where practically nothing is known for certain? Don’t give me that.’

  ‘But that’s my point. Not cheating is one thing, being first is another.’

  ‘Who’s to say? No-one knows how many cheats honestly believe they’ve always been straight.’

  ‘In a way I hate my mother and everything she stands for. It’s as if she sets a terrible example, forever saying: Look at me! As long as you get your share of awards, honorary doctorates and special funding, you’ll have nothing to reproach yourself for. Whenever I’m with her I feel I’m making things far more complicated than they need to be. Like insisting on paying with gold in a country of paper currency.’

  ‘We are all under pressure from those around us – family, friends, acquaintances, people at work. They’re the only people to whom we mean anything, let’s face it. If you want that to change you need to become world famous, and who gets to be world famous?’

  ‘If my mother were genuinely talented she’d be setting a better example, putting a different kind of pressure on me.’

  ‘Do you really think children are better off with a genius for a parent? It’s always the same old story: they take to drink, get thrown into prison, commit suicide. Why? Because the son of a genius seldom turns out to be a genius himself – for the simple reason that not enough of them are born. So what can he do? Becoming a genius like his father is not on, whereas that’s all that counts in his world. So the children of geniuses often opt out in the end. They vanish.’

  ‘I know it’s difficult. If you want to keep your integrity and your independence, you need to think of something worth making sacrifices for.’

  ‘But then there’s no way of keeping your integrity unless you discover something new – unless you count the integrity of Don Quixote, that is.’

  ‘And then there’s Galileo, the enviable ease with which he confessed he was wrong when he knew he was right. In the face of incontrovertible truth, personal integrity is just a bagatelle.’

  ‘Precisely, and don’t you forget it. That’s why scientists are on the whole such an unprincipled lot. And for the most part their discoveries can’t hold a candle to Galileo’s truth, either.’

  28

  Flying insects patter against the canvas, inside and out. Arne snores. At least the sun doesn’t shine. All four planes of the pyramid are dingy in equal measure, and shutting my eyes actually keeps out most of the light. I must get some sleep. I am not suffocating in my sleeping bag, my legs hardly hurt provided I keep still, the hardness of the ground doesn’t bother me, and although my head is throbbing I haven’t got a headache. The wad of cotton wool is very hot, though. Must get rid of it in the morning. Treat the flies to some dried blood. The theory is that the wounds of animals heal quickly because they’re kept clean by flies – clean flies, of course, flies that don’t transmit dirt. There is no dirt around here to speak of, so the flies are presumably clean.

  The pattering grows louder and also faster and more regular. Could be rain. A cold drop falls on my face. Have I been asleep? I prop myself up on my elbows and cast my eyes in every direction. The tent is leaking all over. Arne carries on snoring. There’s water dripping onto my sleeping bag, making dark stains on the pale yellow silk.

  Puddles are forming on the sheets of plastic we’re lying on. What can I do? It is not a major problem, of course, just a little water. But in the care instructions of my down sleeping bag it says that contact with water ‘can cause irreversible damage to the insulation capacity’. As if being stuck without aerial photographs and falling off that rock weren’t bad enough.

  I give Arne’s arm a shake. He opens his eyes, mumbles. I crawl out of my sleeping bag. Arne motions me to get off my plastic sheet. I roll up my bag and retreat to a corner of the tent. Cold water trickles down my back. Arne tips the water off the sheet and turns it over before replacing it on the ground. Even his boots and my shoes are full of water. I turn them over. Then we stow all the gear that mustn’t get wet into our rucksacks, put our clothes on and lie down in our macs under a drum roll of rain.

  Arne proffers the carton of raisins.

  ‘Poor us,’ he says. ‘Poor, poor us. Creative labour is perceived by some philosophers to be on a higher, more interesting plane than the drudgery of bus conductors, charwomen, factory workers and navvies. And yet the contributions made by creative minds, completely free of charge, aren’t even mentioned by cultural historians.’

  ‘Creative minds never get much of a mention. It’s warlords, politicians and other confidence tricksters who get talked about all the time, not people with creative minds.’

  ‘Not to mention the creative minds that fizzle out,’ he says. ‘Because how much difference is there really between a factory worker and an intellectual? I have always hated the idea of becoming a teacher. Going over the same ground year after year for half a century. Wishing you could tell them something new, yet having nothing to say.’

  ‘And it can be worse,’ I say. ‘What about being stuck in a rut where there isn’t anything left to discover? Even more ghastly is having a talent that no-one really has any use for. Like a talent for Greek. In a grammar school with five hundred pupils you won’t come across more than one with a genuine interest in learning ancient Greek, and perhaps two or three others who’ll be grateful later on for having had a stab at it. The rest of them leave school barely able to make sense of Homer because they did as little studying as they could. Through no fault of his own, the classics teacher is faced with educating generation upon generation to a poor level of Greek. To learn it properly takes time, and there is no time because no-one really needs ancient Greek. How can he keep his self-respect in those circumstances?’

  ‘By doing his duty, the incomprehensible duty imposed on him by his incomprehensible existence in an incomprehensible world. The same goes for the rest of us.’

  ‘That’s the penalty for being incapable of doing truly creative work.’

  ‘You’re an optimist! Do you think the difference is really that big? Every intellectual profession consists for the most part in making laborious preparations to carry out operations that are quintessentially simple. Like frying an egg on top of Mount Everest.’

  ‘You reckon? The telescope was invented by someone who looked through two magnifying glasses, one held to his eye and the other at arm’s length. And it was a spectacular invention!’

  ‘But in those days you couldn’t go out and buy a magnifying glass from the local optician. You had to begin by grinding your own lenses. There’s the rub.’

  There’s the rub indeed, and I help myself to another handful of raisins.

  *

  ‘Being a student,’ Arne says, ‘
means labouring under a gross delusion. You feel you’re making progress. Read one book after another. Sit for exams. Obtain diplomas. Intellectual advance, you think. The certificates are there for you to take home and show around. Parties are thrown to celebrate your success. Everything and everyone tells you you’re making progress as long as you pass exams. I knew a student once who framed his certificates and hung them on the wall. And then what do you do? Once you’ve got the degree? It’s back to doing your own lens-grinding. Or lugging a forty-kilo rucksack around for days on end. Or sleeping on wet ground in wet clothes. I’m sorry about that. It’s all my fault. I should have bought a new tent. Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are high and dry, no leaks in their tent. But, believe me, setting out with a brand new tent and then returning without a major discovery – I don’t think I could stand it. I do apologise. It’s not fair on you. Just a silly notion of mine. All the same, if it all turns out to have been for nothing, if you don’t find what you’re looking for, at least you’ll be able to say: I made the effort, I did my best, it isn’t as if I didn’t try. Forgive me. I’m terribly sorry.’

  He mutters ‘terribly sorry’ a few more times, lies back with his arm under his head and begins to snore again.

  It’s as if he hasn’t been fully awake. An instance of sleepwalking, or rather sleep-talking. But now he is undeniably sound asleep.

  I wish I could sleep too.

  Instead, I’m wide awake with fear. Imagine going home at the end of the summer having achieved nothing! Nothing but the satisfaction of having made the effort and done my best.

  What could Arne have meant by what he said just now? With the rain pouring down and him talking in his sleep, didn’t it sound as if he was telling my future, complete with offers of consolation, absolution even?

  Bad omen? Arne’s the only one I feel at all close to. It would have been worse coming from Qvigstad.

  Qvigstad bites into the world with big white teeth. Swings his hammer like a god. Leaps across rivers unhampered by the heaviest of loads. When he stops to take in the views all around It’s as if he’s surveying his own property. Fish rise to the bait the moment he casts his line. I have yet to see Arne catch an edible fish with his aluminium saucepan wrapped round with nylon fishing line.