Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  He’s no less tough than Qvigstad, though. Maybe tougher. Maybe Qvigstad wouldn’t be up to hiking in derelict boots or sharing leaky tents with swarms of mosquitoes. Maybe Qvigstad wouldn’t get any sleep at all in those circumstances, whereas Arne is well away and snoring. When the water drips onto his face his eyelid merely twitches.

  The drumming of the rain drowns in the howling wind. It is so dusky in the tent that It’s impossible to tell how far we are into the day.

  29

  The rain persists, and there is no sign of it lifting.

  The four of us sit together in Qvigstad and Mikkelsen’s tent, in the centre of which the primus stove is burning. Arne and I hold our sleeping bags aloft in the vain hope of getting them dry, manoeuvring awkwardly to avoid singeing. To think that Arne insisted I change into dry socks after I slipped in the river the first day. Now both of us are soaked to the skin, and our clothes won’t dry until we get a few days of continuous sunshine. Sopping wet socks and shoes. Sopping wet sleeping bags with the down clotted into lumps of putty. Mikkelsen has a thermometer. He says it’s three degrees Celsius outside.

  Patches of moisture begin to spread around where Arne and I are sitting. Qvigstad and Mikkelsen regard us with dismay, as if we’ re a pair of cats rescued from a well. Their belongings are arranged in meticulous order. Their boots have been placed outside the tent in protective plastic bags, under the projecting eave of the double roof. Their feet are shod in Lapp slippers of soft leather to spare the groundsheet. Stray insects are dispatched with spray the moment they appear, after which their corpses are neatly swept into little heaps.

  We take turns going outside armed with six sheets of toilet paper and the folding spade. It’s the only way.

  With my mac over my head, and the sides held out wide to avoid soiling, I take a shit in the pouring rain – standing. My injured leg is too stiff for me to squat. The surface of the lake looks like beaten pewter. Last night’s reindeer are nowhere to be seen. I listen carefully, but can only make out the sound of the wind and the rain. Where can the animals have gone? There’s nowhere for them to shelter. They’ll be soaked to the skin like me, and I’ ll have to be stoical like them. The mosquitoes attack my buttocks, my thighs. I pull the cotton wool off my forehead and bury it with the rest under sodden moss. When I’ve pulled up my trousers I find I can wring streams of water from my shirt tails. Warm water, heated up by my body.

  Naturally the primus can’t be kept going for ever. Especially not now, because unless the rain lets up soon we’ re going to have to do all our cooking with paraffin. Where would we get paraffin once we’ ve used up what little we have?

  Moreover: even if the weather improves, how long will it be before the dwarf spruces are dry enough to use for firewood?

  For all I know it could rain like this for a week, or a fortnight. I don’t dare ask Qvigstad how much fuel we have left, but it won’t be very much. If we can’t make fires we’ll have to exist on bread, knäckebröd and tinned food. We won’t even be able to make coffee. And how long is our supply of bread supposed to last?

  All these things go through my mind without panic, more with amusement. My only worry is that we might be forced to go all the way back to Skoganvarre to wait for better weather. But that hasn’t even been hinted at. Qvigstad gets to his feet and Mikkelsen turns off the primus. They put on their rainproof clothes, hang their map pockets round their necks, kneel down, unfasten the tent flap, reach for their boots, take them out of their plastic bags, put the dripping bags outside again, and so forth. Everything they do is methodical. Clouds of insects rush in as the pair of them leave. Arne closes the flap behind them. I expect him to reach for the mosquito spray, but the idea doesn’t seem even to enter his head.

  ‘I don’t fancy spending all day in here,’ I say. ‘There’s no point.’

  ‘No, there isn’t.’

  Several mosquitoes have burrowed into my hair and are stinging my scalp.

  ‘Come on, then,’ I say.

  ‘Do you mind if I take a look at your leg?’

  ‘Oh no, please don’t. It’s fine.’

  I roll over onto my stomach and crawl outside dragging my bad leg behind me, which I do with some difficulty.

  By six in the evening I have covered a distance of at least ten kilometres in the rain. You end up not noticing the rain any more than you notice how wet you are when you’ re swimming. The intensity varies, as does the gradient of the terrain, as does everything else. Sometimes It’s as good as dry for periods lasting up to twenty minutes.

  I explored eight small round lakes today. Walked around each one, inspecting the margins for any ridges or ramparts. Most meteor craters are encircled by a low bank of matter thrown up by the stone’s impact. Didn’t see anything note-worthy. Slowing down to a snail’s pace, I became increasingly aware of the raindrops impacting on the water, making it squirt up thickly like ripe tomato juice.

  That is all I saw.

  Picked up a few rocks on the way, though.

  Returning to the tents I catch sight of Arne, who appears to be sketching. Before reaching him – before he has even noticed me, I hope – I discard the rocks. Afraid of him asking: What did you collect those for? I wouldn’t know what to tell him.

  As it is, Arne gives no sign of having seen me. He is sketching. One knee resting on the stony ground and the other raised at right angles, like a chair sliced down the middle. The seat of the chair serves as a prop for his notebook, which is shielded from the rain by a piece of clear plastic. He is drawing with his hand under the plastic.

  Far be it from me to wish to disturb him. Ah! The wonderful solitude of nature study in the Arctic wilderness! How impressive is his dedication! This sounds a bit over the top, I know, but it doesn’t mean to say I think he is ridiculous in any way. On the contrary, I find myself bowing my head as I advance.

  Arne’s eyes go back and forth between his notebook and the view confronting him. He is drawing with a stub of yellow pencil, but the point is perfectly sharpened and on the end is a metal cap. Cheap, but efficient.

  I am now just behind him, a little to one side.

  He sketches with short deft strokes, to very good effect. I couldn’t produce anything half as good as this. I don’t even enjoy drawing, really. More’s the pity.

  Arne uses the right-hand pages of his notebook for illustrations and the left for his notes, which I can’t read because they’ re in Norwegian. But they look very neat and self-assured. Nothing crossed out, no smudges. Clearly numbered, well spaced. Not the kind of illegible jottings that can only be deciphered by the person who made them. These will keep their value even if Arne loses the notebook and it isn’t found again for fifty years. Even if he drops dead.

  Notes befitting a true scientist, travel notes inspired by immediacy: here I am, now. I must observe everything there is to observe, NOW. I must record all my observations in unambiguous terms comprehensible to all, mindful of the fact that any detail I miss or neglect to write down will be lost for ever, because going back for a second look is an impractical luxury.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. ‘You make me jealous, being so good at drawing.’

  ‘Really?’

  He doesn’t look up. His drawing looks like a plate in a textbook.

  ‘Keeping notes is not my forte,’ I flounder on. ‘Fountain pens vanish into thin air, biros dry up the moment I get out in the open. And the points of my pencils keep breaking off, too.’

  ‘You should get one of these,’ he says, indicating the protective cap stuck on the end of his pencil stub. ‘Dirt cheap, and It’s got a little ring you can slide over it to keep it in place.’

  He demonstrates how the ring slides up and down.

  ‘don’t they have them in Holland?’

  ‘No,’ I lie. ‘Never seen one before.’

  ‘Biros,’ Arne says. ‘Another newfangled idea. Invented purely to make people pay more for a complicated version of something that’s served everyone perfectly well for
hundreds of years.’

  I agree with him. But even with pocketfuls of sharp pencils to hand I wouldn’t be able to draw as well as he does.

  I wander off and sit myself down on a stone at some distance away, to let him get on with it.

  When Qvigstad classifies his rock samples, he takes a small notepad and puts a number at the top of the sheet followed by the date of collection and the find-spot. Next he examines the sample through his magnifying glass to establish the geological type, writes that down too and tears off the sheet, which goes into a water-resistant paper bag along with the sample. Some days he comes back with as many as ten samples, each weighing two hundred grams or more. Obviously, he’s accumulating an extra two kilos daily. This doesn’t seem to worry him in the slightest. In fact his rucksack appears to expand by the day to accommodate fresh supplies of stones. I have never heard him grumble, either.

  Then there is Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen collects grit and sand in little bags, but isn’t above picking up the odd stone – quite big ones occasionally – which he then takes back and displays on top of the clothes in his rucksack as souvenirs.

  I watch them coming over the hill towards me in single file, fishing rods over their shoulders.

  Qvigstad has made another catch. The fish is very big this time; he can’t remember what It’s called in English, but naturally knows the Norwegian name: Harr.

  Harr. I enter the name in my notebook. They check to see if I’ve got the spelling right.

  We go inside the green tent and Mikkelsen lights the primus.

  Arne joins us a moment later.

  ‘Starving,’ he says.

  ‘Starving,’ Qvigstad echoes. ‘That reminds me, I ran into [unintelligible] the other day. Just back from India, for some United Nations welfare programme, I believe. He said that seeing the effects of famine over there doesn’t stop European travellers from going to the local Hilton hotel for dinner. I said to him: If you really were cast from a different mould than Hitler or Himmler, you wouldn’t have been capable of doing that. You had your eight thousand kroner or thereabouts for travel expenses. You could have shared out that money among four thousand starving people. It could have been used to fill the stomachs of four thousand people. A drop in the ocean, true, but for people who’ ve gone hungry most of their lives getting enough to eat for once must be an unforgettable feast. That done, you’d have to make for the nearest airport, of course, on foot or with money borrowed from some consul. Not much fun, that bit, I grant you. Tail between your legs. But how bad is that compared to the suffering of four thousand starving people?’

  ‘What did [unintelligible] say to that?’

  ‘He said: Of course I’d have been glad to do as you suggest. But I wasn’t supplied with funds so that I could give them away. I was supposed to write a report about the Social Science Relief Programme.’

  ‘We all have duties to fulfil.’

  ‘The guards at Auschwitz had families to feed, and crocodiles can’t go without food either. Christ, what a smell in here.’

  The tent is filled with blue smoke, but the fish tastes good. The bread we eat with it is soggy. Whose fault is that? Not mine!

  ‘Nuclear disarmament under international supervision,’ Qvigstad says. ‘D’ you know what that means? It’s a bit like having a wound on the back of your left hand and using the same hand to stick a plaster on it.’

  He glances at Mikkelsen, who strikes me as someone who’d be familiar with this type of problem, but Mikkelsen doesn’t respond.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind being an inventor,’ Qvigstad goes on, ‘of the cancan, say. It would be great to have invented the cancan, but It’s been done already. I can’t think of any other invention I’d care to take credit for.’

  Arne says something to him in Norwegian. The conversation continues in Norwegian for a spell, at the end of which all three put on their waterproof clothing. I follow suit. Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are going fishing again, I take it, and It’s probably time Arne and I headed back to our tent, since this one is too small for the four of us to sleep in.

  Not until I am outside does it dawn on me that we are striking camp.

  I don’t ask any questions. I retrieve my rucksack and help Arne to dismantle the dripping tent and fold it up.

  ‘Very bad for the tent,’ he mutters. ‘Folding it up when it is wet is very bad.’

  No, not good for his precious tent, I can see that.

  What is worse, though, is that the tent weighs a great deal more when wet. How much more? Three kilos? Four?

  Add to that the water absorbed by the sleeping bag … I could try wringing it out (the ruin of even the finest down sleeping bag, according to the instructions), but it would still hold litres of water

  I am past caring; It’s too late to do anything about it anyway. I keep telling myself I’m a soggy reindeer, or a swimmer.

  *

  Arne and I finish our packing before Qvigstad and Mikkelsen. The rain is lifting again, turning first into drizzle, then into wet vapour.

  I load the rucksack onto my wet back. How much heavier has it got since the day before yesterday? Hard to tell. I’m glad It’s my turn to carry the wooden theodolite, it gives me a sense of security.

  We walk in line towards the Lievnasjokka river, which flows from Lievnasjaurre lake. The river is a good hundred metres across, and fairly deep too, it seems. There are several jutting rocks, but none close enough together to serve as stepping stones. We walk along the riverbank for some time without coming across any rocks suitably spaced for getting to the other side.

  This does not surprise Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen. Qvigstad points to a section of the river without any stones at all, and Mikkelsen and Arne nod their heads in agreement.

  They sit down and pull off their boots. We are going to wade across.

  ‘Better keep your socks on,’ Arne says, ‘They’ll stop you from slipping on the bottom.’

  The entire riverbed consists of rounded stones.

  I tie my laces together and hang my shoes around my neck. I plant the tripod in front of me in the river, then cling to it for support while trying to step firmly on the stones, not in the cracks. The cold bores into my feet like a dentist’s drill.

  The tripod isn’t much use. Having to pull it out and then plant it further ahead means standing still for too long. The pain in the soles of my feet is unbearable, and my ankles ache from the sheer effort of keeping my balance. So I tuck the tripod under my arm and forge ahead, eyes popping from the strain of looking where to put my feet amid the splashes and foam.

  Missed! My right foot slides out of control, I keel over and break my fall with my right hand, thereby briefly forming a triangle with my right arm submerged up to the elbow and the icy water lapping my groin. My left arm is raised to keep my wristwatch dry, my map pocket is dangling in the water. The tripod floats away, but thankfully gets caught on something almost at once. A sense of slow, obdurate calm comes over me. Taking my time, I drag my splayed right leg back into position, and with my feet together I finally manage to stand upright.

  Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are on the far bank, watching my antics. Arne has turned back and is now wading towards me. I make a lunge for the tripod and seize it just before Arne gets there. My confidence restored, I take a plastic cup from my trouser pocket, scoop up some water and gulp it down.

  Qvigstad and Mikkelsen turn and walk away, the way people walk away from a quayside incident after watching a skipper rescue his youngest offspring from drowning with his boathook.

  30

  The terrain now is fairly flat, and so stony that there is no vegetation to speak of and consequently no sogginess, despite the persistent rain. The topsoil is composed of yellow schistose debris. Anyone unfamiliar with the term will have to look it up in the dictionary, or take it on trust. One of the reasons why the range of subjects dealt with in novels is so limited is that authors want everybody to be able to follow exactly what is going on. Technical terms put readers off. Ent
ire classes of trades and professions never make it into novels simply because it would be impossible to describe the reality without the use of technical jargon. Such occupations as do occur – policeman, doctor, cowboy, sailor, spy – are no more than caricatures in response to the delusional expectations of the intended lay readership.

  In this open plain we come across several holes filled with water, which is so clear as to look almost black. Their sizes vary, but most of them are indeed circular in shape, or at least oval. Dead-ice holes? No tell-tale ridges thrown up by the impact of a meteorite. I pick up random samples of rock, and drop them again, disappointed. Who will ever know how much effort it takes to bend over in my dripping, leaden clothing, with forty kilos on my back, camera and map pocket swinging from my neck and a bulky wooden tripod in one hand? Even if I do find a meteorite – the prize, the great prize – all I will be able to say about it in my thesis is where and when I made my discovery, the find-spot being marked with a cross on a small map of the area. No-one will know what I went through. In the unlikely event that my data would move anyone to consider the human effort involved, they would merely think: this person spent an interesting summer trekking in the High North; while he was there his eye was caught by an unusual stone, and in picking it up he made a momentous discovery.

  He picked up stones and had to drop them again.

  Mount Vuorje, which is near the lake we have left behind, is still clearly visible thanks to the rapidly dispersing clouds. It is the only high mountain in the region.

  Our new camp is midway between two smallish lakes fringed with green marshland.

  The green is streaked with watercourses, sometimes at right angles to each other like ditches dug for peat. The sky is black, deep blue and dark red, swirls of pigment running together without blending. The sun comes out periodically, spreading some warmth when it does.