Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  Now the town’s jackdaws are all up in a crowd, revelling in the wind, chack-chacking at each other. And I hear a girl’s voice, one of my daughter’s friends, one of the four girls playing in the garden. She makes a call poised just between play and fear. What are they playing? Hide and seek? No matter. It pleases me that my daughter says they are ‘playing in the garden’, because they’re eleven years old; another year or two and they wouldn’t admit to ‘playing’ at all, and for a while the garden will have no appeal, because everything they want will be elsewhere. For a few years they’ll enter a dark mirror-tunnel whose sides reflect only themselves.

  The girls themselves can’t be seen, obscured by trees and that edgy, breezy light. The year has turned. Filaments and metallic ribbons of wind-blown light, just for an hour, but enough.

  THE HVALSALEN

  BECAUSE OF ITS HILLTOP POSITION, up by the university, the Bergen Natural History Museum overlooks much of the old town. Conversely, it can be seen, with its grand arched windows, from almost everywhere. Steep streets run down directly to the harbours and fish market. It’s a mid-nineteenth-century classical historicist building, set in semi-formal gardens. The façade is painted pale greyish-yellow, with grey mullions round the windows. It hasn’t changed much, outside or in, since it opened in 1865.

  One dull day in March, when Bergen was in thaw and great mounds of gritty snow lay at street corners, I pushed open the intimidating front door, made my way upstairs. The walls of the stairway bristled with the skulls and antlers of deer mounted on boards and, like a kind of doorman, a human skeleton hung in a glass case, but he didn’t ask for my ticket. I wandered through the obligatory displays of stuffed birds, that mainstay of nineteenth-­century museums: a snowy owl eternally offering prey to its fluffy chicks; dull-eyed, long-dead ravens.

  Then came the most prestigious room, the main hall. And there, entering through its double-height, double doors, I was taken aback. The architect must have intended a grand room—big enough to host a sizeable dance, or a city congregation—with thick wooden floors and cream-­ coloured pillars rising toward elaborate capitols, and arches, and arched windows, but the symmetry he intended was confounded because of the whales. The skeletons of the whales. You walk through into the ‘Hvalsalen’ and, immediately above, side by side, like vast oxen yoked together to haul the most terrible plough, are the jaws of two great baleen whales. Not just the jaws—the entire skeletons, the ribcages, the great fans of the scapulas and fin-bones, at the sides, the long receding trains of the spines. The bones are brown with age—and there are not one or two but twenty­four cetacean skeletons crowded under the ceiling. Four and twenty! Whales like sardines! Some faced east, some faced west. And dolphins, too, and, on the floor, raised on something like bed-legs, was a stuffed basking shark, with its terrible gills, and in a corner the skull of a sperm whale—dense, complex convolutions of bone.

  The Hvalsalen. Whale Hall. What else could it be called? They were all there, such a roster of whales—the baleen whales—sei and humpback, right, fin and minke whales—even the blue whale, and the toothed whales too, sperm and bottlenose, narwhal and beluga, and the beaked Sowerby’s whale, and, affixed to the walls, dolphins, almost dainty in comparison; the killer whale and the bottlenose.

  Such bones as I never saw, hanging above my head.

  There were glass cases, too, with sea creatures, sponges, crabs, starfish, but I barely glanced at those, being too enthralled with the skeletons overhead, their stoic majesty.

  Of course, the blue whale was largest of all. I decided to walk under its full length, and count my steps. First, I walked under the smooth horizontal arch of the jaw, and its palate, where the baleen had once hung, sheets of age-browned bone. Then came the solid complications of the skull, now under the barrel of the ribcage, the ribs curving down, enclosing and protecting nothing but air. I kept walking, counting. As I passed the basking shark I surreptitiously touched its cold skin, rough as sandpaper. I passed a dolphin, small and lithe, and making for the door. Still the blue whale went on overhead. Above the basking shark hung a huge sunfish, an eerie-looking object hanging from a wire, more like a black moon with an eye. Still I walked on, counting until the spine ended. Fifty-seven paces. Less an animal, more a narrative. The ancient mariner.

  On a central pillar, neatly painted in Norwegian and English were the words ‘Do not touch the animals’, but it was a bit late for that. The whalers’ harpoons had got them, the flensing iron. Where else could the whales have come from? All, presumably, had met their deaths through violence, in the days of industrial whaling. A combination of nineteenth-century whaling and collecting—someone surely must have sent out commissions to whaling captains—bring me a blue! A beluga! A sperm whale’s head on a plate! There was even a right whale—right for all the wrong reasons, hanging in its own space, cramped against the windows, up where the windows arched.

  In the way of old-fashioned museums, there was next to nothing in the way of explanations or information aside from some handpainted signs dangling from the skeletons: ‘Finnhval 1867. 15.7m.’, ‘Blahval. 24m. Finnmark 1879’.

  But despite the weight of bones, the effect of the Hvalsalen was dreamlike. The vast structures didn’t seem to offer any reproach. Rather, they drew you in. Undisturbed for a century, they had colluded to create a place of silence and memory. A vast statement of fact: ‘Whales is what we were. This is what we are. Spend a little time here and you too feel how it is to be a huge mammal of the seas, to require the sea to hold you, to grow so big at the ocean’s hospitality.’

  Quite whale-freighted, I sat on a deep window ledge. Behind, through the little panes, were views of the town, under a cold mist. Above hung the right whale. No one else had entered the hall, I had been quite alone. But then came the high voices of schoolchildren, and quick footsteps. I thought, Now the atmosphere will break, but the kids and their teachers were en route elsewhere; they passed right by, a quick bright shoal darting through the Hvalsalen.

  I left the museum by its great wooden front door, and crossed the cobbled forecourt. What a strange place that had been. The presence of all those whales’ bones—they’d got under my skin, so to speak, so much so I stood there in the cold unsure what to do, where to go next.

  For some reason I glanced back at the building. On its first floor, behind the three central arched windows, was a spectral figure—a long white skeletal hand, lengthways against the window-glass, visible to all the town. It was the pectoral fin of the right whale.

  I thought, To hang with it, turned and went back in.

  * * *

  Maybe too few people are sufficiently keen on whalebones to want to talk about them, because two curators were kind enough to interrupt their day to meet me. Or perhaps they feared they’d be dealing with someone upset or outraged by it all. Either way, I was greeted by a younger man, fit and strong, as so many young Norwegians appear to be, called Terje Lislevand, who was an ornithologist. He accompanied a more senior figure, a petite dark woman called Anne Karin Hufthammer, who was the head of osteology herself. It was her Whale Hall, so to speak. More osteology than you could shake a stick at.

  They led me back upstairs to the Whale Hall, and for half an hour or so I enjoyed a private guided tour. We spoke about whales, and whale relics. They reckoned Bergen’s was probably the world’s largest collection of whale specimens, but it was little known. In fact, the whole museum had been built on whales. That is to say, whale specimens had been exchanged or bartered from here all over the world. They had been sent, for example, to Switzerland. I neglected to ask what Switzerland had offered in return, or whether the landlocked Swiss, when presented with a whale’s rib, would know what they were looking at. Perhaps, like Odysseus’s oar, they’d mistake it for a flail.

  They showed me a rare ‘right-handed’ narwhal, with the tusk growing from its right tooth, rather than the left. They pointed out the great whales’ pelvic bones, which were small and delicate, like paper boats, and
which hung under the immense spines. Dr Hufthammer said these were of special interest to evolutionary biologists and specimens were rare. These were all that remained of the whales’ sojourn on land, millions of years ago, early in their evolutionary history. When the whales, or proto­-whales, took to the seas, they lost their legs and their pelvises shrank away to this.

  Then Dr Hufthammer stopped by a glass case, asking, ‘Have you seen this?’ Within the case was a spherical object, two feet across, dense and mean, like a huge swollen black eye. It was the heart of a killer whale. A deep red and black biological engine, with a sprig of aorta reaching out of it.

  ‘It’s not a model?’

  ‘No, it is real, but we don’t know how it is preserved. We daren’t open it to find out, because of the chemicals.’

  I wanted to tell her I’d seen killer whales, moving at speed in the surf round a Scottish island, so I could imagine that immense heart pounding in action. I wanted to tell about the human shapes and forms I’d become acquainted with in the medical museums in Edinburgh, little rag-tags and bob-tails fixed in their glass jars all with their own meanings, but nothing on this scale.

  If the issue of whaling was at all sensitive, I didn’t know. The Norwegians still hunt minke whales, you could buy whale-meat at the fish market down the hill, but it couldn’t be avoided. I broached it by saying, ‘I presume these whales were all hunted . . . ?’

  ‘Actually, the Hvalsalen is a bit of a mystery. There is no record of how they got here . . . or how they got inside the building . . . how they were prepared.’

  We were moving back toward the door, under the jaws of the humpback, when Terje said, ‘You know the museum is closing . . . ?’

  ‘No! I’d no idea . . . Closing for ever?’

  ‘For four years. It’s being closed for renovation and repair. The building, the exhibits, everything. We are all moving out!’

  After 130 years, the offices and laboratories were packing up and moving to different quarters, to make room for new exhibition space. A bright, modernised Natural History Museum would reopen to the public in due course.

  I’d been lucky to turn up when I had. At the risk of being rude I said, ‘You know, I hope this Whale Hall won’t change. It has such . . . atmosphere.’

  A metaphysical atmosphere, if you like, where you could ponder human attitude to other creatures, their pain and our rapaciousness, and the strange beauty of their forms. That’s what I felt, anyway, but I didn’t want to announce that to two stern-minded Norwegian scientists I’d only just met, and who were, after all, in charge of the place.

  However, they began speaking together and, though it was in Norwegian, I got the impression that the future of the Hvalsalen had been the subject of some debate. Then they laughed, and Anne turned back to me with a smile of satisfaction. It had indeed been discussed, and she had prevailed. She had overcome ‘the minimalisers’, as she called them. The Hvalsalen would not be changed.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘It will be a new, old exhibition!’

  However, she went on, there was unavoidable work to be done.

  ‘They are all are very dirty. Perhaps dangerous—maybe they will fall! Look—’

  She led me to the arched windows, and pointed up to the right whale, the one I’d seen from the street, the one who’d made me come back in again. The poor right whales: they had taken the worst of it. Now, under her direction, I could see cracks in the ribs, fractures, bits fallen off . . .

  ‘There is much damage. Also, you see up here . . .’

  Now Anne pointed up to the last few tapering yards of the fin whale’s spine. The vertebrae deepened in colour as they reduced in size, until the last were treacle-brown and sticky-looking.

  ‘And here, too, on this one—this brown colour? It’s oil. The oil is still coming, the dirt sticks to the oil . . .’

  ‘ Still? ’

  Poor whales, didn’t they know when to stop? The same whale oil that greased the machines and lit the streets and parlours, the oil of soap and margarine. All that oil! Here they were, dead for a century, still giving out oil.

  So that’s how it was. Very soon, the Hvalsalen’s doors would close to the public. An international team of specialist conservationists had been hired and would shortly arrive, and for two years they’d work on the great whales. All the grime and oil and dust of a long century would be carefully cleaned away. They’d make sure the skeletons had been hung correctly, anatomically speaking. They would take the chance to learn what more they could about the collection. Everything would be examined: the bones themselves, but also the chains and fixings that bore the tremendous weight, so there would be no danger of a whale jaw crashing down on someone’s head.

  ‘Will you lower them down?’

  ‘No. It’s not possible. They would collapse.’

  Instead the conservation team would build scaffold and platforms, and spend their working days up amongst the whales themselves.

  ‘What an extraordinary project—the cleansing of the whales!’

  Terje said that if I wished to return later in the year, when the conservation team was here and it was all under way, that would be fine. In fact, they’d probably be glad of a visitor.

  * * *

  Five months later, in the closing days of August, when a hint of autumn was already in the Bergen air, I climbed through a hatch, crept out onto a plywood floor, and found myself standing high in the Hvalsalen windows, next to the freshly cleaned right whale. It was astonishingly light—it seemed to radiate such a thick yellow light. The word that came to mind was ‘buttery’. The bones, I mean.

  Beside me, project director Gordon Turner Walker stood with his arms folded, as though awaiting a verdict.

  Buttery. The whole whale, suspended from its chains, there in front of us, all the smoothed and honed bones, seemed to emit a yellowish light.

  ‘It’s so bright!’ I said.

  ‘It’s bleached underneath—I think that’s been light reflected off snow that’s done that. But yes, two kilogrammes of dust came off it. That’s how sad we are—we weighed the dust! Conservation, though—once you’ve established the protocol, it’s just glorified housework.’

  I went nearer. A silence, an aura, call it what you will, emanated from the skeleton too, as though the bones recalled their flesh. You could kneel and look into the ribcage, like a huge sprung barrel; you could accompany the spine as it journeyed shoulder height across the room, broad as the toppled trunk of an old tree, vertebra after vertebra. Between each vertebra were cork spacers where in life there had been cartilage.

  ‘These are fantastic shapes . . .’ I said, stroking the spinous process, ‘. . . like plumes on helmets—it’s like a single file of Romans marching by.’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Gordon, laughingly. ‘Don’t get me started! I love bone.’

  I looked a little longer—and began to realise there was a smell, too, when you got close. Warm and slight, not unpleasant, it seemed to be seeping from within the bones, as though cleaning them had released it from a long imprisonment. It was the smell of something from,—oh—a long time ago, early days at primary school.

  The vertebrae in front of me felt grainy, not quite cold, and very slightly waxy.

  ‘Wax crayons! That’s the smell! The thick ones—“chubby stumps”, we called them.’

  ‘Probably made of whale oil,’ Gordon said. ‘Most things were.’

  We paused.

  He said, ‘You know why they were called right whales, don’t you?’

  I nodded. The skeleton seemed to emit a nineteenth­century glow. You could imagine the kind of light a whale-oil lamp would have cast, on the corner of some Victorian street.

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘A million whales up in smoke, and this is all we’ve got to show for it.’

  * * *

  Gordon was a Yorkshireman who had spent years in Norway, a specialist conservator with, he’d soon told me, a love of bone. That was his speciality. Archaeological bone. �
��Bone is my passion, a beautiful material, a wonderful material . . .’

  We were much the same age, late forties, and he was dressed all in black, black jeans, black T-shirt, black beanie hat against the grime. I don’t know if he and the team were glad of a visitor, but their work was on schedule, and they were generous enough to indulge me for a couple of days.

  We left the right whale hanging, in its sunlit window, and descended. The window space had been partitioned off to form a temporary workshop, a ‘Laboratorium for HvalKonservering’, which we passed through, then entered the Hvalsalen proper.

  Without the natural light, the hall under the whale team’s occupation was darker and more mysterious than before. It had taken on the temporary feel of a stage set. The glass display cases were shuttered with plywood; light from arc lamps glanced off scaffolding poles and caused the whales above to cast spooky shadows on the ceiling. About fifteen foot off the floor, a metal platform ran under the first three skeletons. From up there came voices, music, the sound of a vacuum cleaner being switched on, then off.