Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  Koch and Wegener worked on their data, becoming famous although now they’re forgotten; at the time the scientific world was open to the results of such studies, open to endeavor, open to sacrifices, open to Captain Koch and Dr. Wegener; the world was open to dead horses, open to fleas on a fox Vigfús shot, open to a snow bunting following them across the glacier all winter, the world was open to 20,000 kilos of luggage, the world was open to Vigfús who received 100 photographs from the trip on glass plates as a gift from Wegener and who lectured throughout Iceland and was always called Vigfús the Greenland Adventurer. Across the White Wilderness is a tragedy about animals on a glacier, said Bernharður, how they are sacrificed in the interests of science, how the Icelandic horses dwindled in number one by one; it is the story of the equipment, the story of the clothing, the story of the baggage, the story of those twenty tons, the story of frost; the scientific work itself Captain Koch leaves for a second report, published in scientific journals. Across the White Wilderness is a travel narrative, a tragedy of poor little Glói who was taken and eaten in the end when it was unnecessary. No one could go on this expedition nowadays as they did then. They went across unknown lands, but unknown lands no longer exist, except perhaps underwater and subglacial (for now). As they traveled across the zone of accumulation, the upper glacier, they gave the places names, nothing vain like Koch Peak or Wegener Heath and Vigfús Rock or the like, but modest and practical, The Point, Touchstone, Cold Ridge, features along the way that they agreed upon and could reference as they explored the land and ferried stuff to a new camp. Captain Koch likely acquired this way of thinking about place names in Öræfi when he was surveying there, a place where men are reasonable and practical, on Öræfajökull many of the places are named after Koch’s expedition, like Hermannaskarð and Tjaldskarð, although the soldiers passed through and the tents were set up there in the middle of Öræfajökull for no longer than 1903, even if several people have stayed there before and after. Captain Koch’s expedition was in the service of science, unlike most other expeditions which are in the service of vanity or nothing at all. Science for its own sake, Koch wrote in Across the White Wilderness, Bernharður said, science for its own sake does not have utility as its goal, but is instead concerned with ethical values.

  The Alpiner Bernharður Fingurbjörg was born in Vienna on November 2nd, 1975, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, on the so-called Day of the Dead, the Mass of All-Souls; what’s more, his father was a well-educated diplomat in the Foreign Service in Sweden, Nikulás Fingurbjörg, an Icelandic man of high birth, tall and with light brown hair. His mother was of Swiss parentage, Marie Luce Geist, a stout woman with an agile face who became subdued later in life. She studied in Vienna and got a good job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the city immediately after graduating from the law department at the University the year Bernharður was born. Bernharður said that his father studied in Málmey (Swedish: Malmö) and was a successful, bright, and well-respected student. He had a family there, a wife and five children, siblings Bernharður has never met. My mother was an elegant, single twenty-something woman, an important person in the Ministry, Bernharður said; she worked on various in-house tasks and in 1973 my father was there for a cocktail party held by the European Free Trade Association; he met my mother, was immediately attracted to her, as she was to him, even though he was much older, and they slept together that night in his hotel room. That’s how my older brother was conceived, Tómas. They didn’t meet again until two years later, at an EFTA conference in Brussels in early 1975; they became infatuated with each other that night. “EFTA love,” was the way my mother described it to me some time later, it was an EFTA love night when you were conceived, my dear son, said my father, after which he returned to his family in Sweden and probably told his wife the conference had been successful. That fall, I came into the world. My parents continued to meet several times a year at conferences across European cities; enthusiasm, love, and respect burrowed deeper into their hearts, paralleling the way the EFTA agreement was taking hold in Europe, a valid counterweight to the European Union. But Marie Luce had less and less patience for this double life while Nikulás constantly tried to do his bit and end the duplicity; each year my father promised her everything. Finally, in 1979, he decided to divorce his boring spouse and leave their boring children in Sweden, as he called them sometimes, wrapped in the comforter late in the evening at a conference at the Hotel Plaza, and start living with his mountain goat, as he called Marie Luce. My father was fifty when he started his life over again in a new place; he always said he hated Malmö but loved Vienna, he often did so in Icelandic to Tómas and I, and I tried to imagine the ghost-family he’d left, but I never conjured up a mental image. These people were paternal shadows, Bernharður said, Dr. Lassi wrote. Up to their necks in amor, Nikulás Fingurbjörg and Marie Luce Geist decided to settle in Vienna, having married in a small church near Lake Vierwaldstättersee, a ceremony attended only by the Geist family. Marie Luce had a decent position in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. so they could afford a large and beautiful home at Freyung 7 in Vienna, above the famous Kräuterhaus, an herbalist store which has plied its trade there for 200 years; the home had enormous cabinets and numerous drawers, beautiful interiors, a good energy, sweet aromas; it fulfilled my parents’ dream of living in Innere Stadt, year after year they’d dreamed of it, lying in each other’s embrace in hotel rooms all over Europe after having made love, I want to live in Innere Stadt, my father is supposed to have said, in Innere Stadt where all the old, fashionable people in Vienna lived, but now there are only tourists, the gentry has fled; my parents were tourists in the world of aristocracy, my father wanted them to become aristocrats, but my mother said it wasn’t possible, it doesn’t happen that way, Nikulás my dear, nobility is inherited, not learned, you should know that, we’ll never be anything but imitation aristocrats in a tourist world in Innere Stadt, my mother said despondently; when they moved to Freyung in 1980 all the aristocrats were moving away or dying, strange things happen when tourism increases, and even more astounding was the lack of interest philosophers showed in the changes happening in moral standards, the way everything was becoming desolate: cities, nature, human beings, stories, Innere Stadt had emptied out, perhaps there aren’t any philosophers any longer, the city’s heart had hollowed out, the tourists were getting an education, were maturing, but the inhabitants had become uneducated and immature, everything was standardized and empty, people had been tossed aside, visitors paid their hosts no heed, not knowing who they were, and then they weren’t there, the guests ate cakes and left their plates lying about … I grew up in a large apartment above the herbalists on Freyung 7, a large neoclassical building from around 1700, near the historic square in the old town where there are several old palaces and where there has always been a thriving market atmosphere; the area formerly belonging to the monks, street artists and aristocrats of the square, and that’s the way it still was in my childhood. I was planning to either become a monk, a street artist, or an aristocrat—or all of them. The tourists came to Freyung to see the monks, street artists, and the aristocracy, but only saw other tourists looking for monks, street artists, and aristocrats. When my parents sacrificed their lives for the apartment they thought that their position would be secure among old aristocratic families, but it takes more than an apartment to climb the social ladder, even if an apartment can guarantee a family a financial safety net. All those living in the building were respectable citizens with PhDs in law or other profitable areas, highly-esteemed in society. Out the window on the other side of the street was Batthyany Palace itself, and there on the ground floor my friend Norbert had his antique store, I was a fixture there, a gray cat in and around the ancient books and maps and old-city photos. Next to the palace is the Constitutional Law Court, a rather dull building that it is elegant in the ancient Greek style, the way courthouses in general are; stretching off from the square is the beautiful Fountain of Austria; a female statue r
ises out of it, a symbol for the Austrian State, Austria, a figure for Hapsburg rule. Directly on the other side of the square is the passage to the palace market, where we knew all the traders. Today there’s an organic market at Freyung Square on weekends and you always sees the same people, the last people left in the neighborhood, older people from all walks of life gathered in the afternoon to drink organic beer or organic pear schnapps or organic white wine or organic wine or organic juice; these are the last aristocrats with their high moral fiber and their inner lamentations about the workers and the high-end winos; there you’ll find organic cheeses and organic sausages, vegetables, spices, oils, honey, olives, even organic toys. People from the neighborhood meet in the square to talk about old times, about a world gone by, and to buy rural wares. Occasionally hooves can be heard clicking along the cobbled streets with rich tourists trying to look natural in the faux-imperial chariots the horses pull; the tourists end up looking awkward and helpless. On Saturdays I would sit there and drink pear schnapps and eat Tyrolean gröstl, a potato dish my mother often made when I was little, with bacon, sauerkraut, juniper berries, and caraway, and then I would feel at home on Freyung with its aroma of herbs, with its watering posts where dogs and horses can get a drink on a hot day, where the clock chime in the basilica, also known as the Scottish Church or the Scottish Cloister; it was attached to our house, and we attended church every Sunday morning before taking coffee with the Church board afterward: it was of the utmost importance to know the priest, to be in good standing, as it should be: that contributes to one’s ability to feel at ease, respected in society, at one with other good citizens, having found a foothold in civilization—but such ease is fleeting, as all ease is. I never missed a church visit because along with the coffee you always got moist cake, which I guess is why I’ve become a real cake fiend. The Scottish Church beside our house was originally a monastery, founded by Scottish monks of the order of St. Columbcille more than a thousand years ago; my mother said I was baptized after the holy Bernharður who was bishop of Vienna in the Middle Ages. Bishop Bernharður went out into the wide world as a young man and fought in the army of Charlemagne, the father of Europe, said my mother, Charlemagne conquered countries and baptized people. St. Bernharður later lost his appetite for war after his parents died, and so he joined the monastery. He is the patron of those who till the ground, or so my mother said on Sundays, when there was a certain sanctity at home I liked, calm, peace, space, learning. I have always loved Sundays, the way I feel secure with my mother. I was going to become a monk, says Bernharður, a monk, an itinerant, and aristocrat, because I easily tired of this tumbling world.