by Peter Høeg
2
If you reach the age of thirty-seven in a country like Denmark, and have regular intervals free of pharmaceuticals, haven’t committed suicide, and haven’t completely sold out the tender ideals of your childhood, then you’ve learned a little about facing adversity in life.
In Thule in the seventies we sent equipment up in meteorological balloons to measure supercooled drops of water. They survive for a short time in very high clouds. The area surrounding them is cold but completely still. In a pocket of motionlessness their temperature will drop to —40°F. They ought to freeze, but they don’t; they remain stationary and stable and fluid.
That’s the way I try to face adversity.
The Kronos hasn’t yet settled down. There’s a sense of invisible life and movement. But I can’t wait any longer.
I could have gone through the engine room and across the between decks, if those places hadn’t been associated with so many claustrophobic memories for me. At least I want to be able to see them when they appear.
The quarterdeck is bathed in light. I take a deep breath and walk across the stage. Out of the corner of my eye I see the warping lines go by, and the railing around the base of the mast. Then I reach the aft superstructure and unlock the door. Inside, I stand at the window and look out at the deck.
This is Verlaine’s domain. Even now, when there’s not a soul in sight, his presence is palpable.
I lock the door behind me. My weapons have always been the small details that no one knows about. My identity, my intentions, Jakkelsen’s passkey. They can’t possibly know that I have it. They must think it was an accident, an oversight on their part, that I got into the quarterdeck last time. They were afraid that I was on to something. But they couldn’t know anything about the key.
In the first room I let the beam of my flashlight play over tightly packed and battened-down cans of red lead, primer paint, ship’s lacquer, joint filler, special thinner, crates of face masks, epoxy tar, paintbrushes, and rollers. Everything is stacked up and clean and orderly. Verlaine’s meticulousness.
The second door is the back entrance to a toilet—the one opposite the double shower room. The next leads to the metal shop, where Hansen polishes his knives with Viennese chalk.
The last room is the electrical shop. You could hide a small elephant in the labyrinth of cupboards, shelves, and crates, and it would take me an hour to find it. I don’t have an hour. So I close the door and head below.
The door to the between decks is locked now. And bolted shut. Someone wanted to make sure that no one could get in this way. I turn on my light for only brief moments. I’m probably being overly cautious, since I’m in a windowless darkness, but my nerves can’t take much more.
I stand still and listen. I have to force myself not to panic. I’ve never liked the dark. I’ve never understood the Danish penchant for wandering around at night. Taking a stroll in pitch darkness. Nightingale walks in the woods. Insisting on gazing at the stars. Nighttime orienteering.
You have to respect the dark. Night is the time when space simmers with evil and peril. You can call it superstition. You can call it fear of the dark. But it’s ridiculous to pretend that the night is just like the day, simply without light. Night is the time to huddle together indoors. If you don’t happen to be alone and have other obligations, that is.
Sounds are more tangible than objects in the dark. The sound of water around the propeller somewhere beneath my feet. The muted trilling of the ship’s wake. The engine noise. The ventilation system. The rotation of the propeller shaft on its bearings. A little electric compressor, its location almost impossible to pinpoint. Like trying to figure out which neighbor has the noisy refrigerator in your apartment building.
There’s a refrigerator here, too. I don’t find it by the sound. I find it because the darkness makes me visualize my own sketch. I pace off the corridor. But I already know the results. Sheer nervousness prevented me from noticing it earlier. The corridor is six feet too short. According to Jakkelsen, somewhere behind the wall at the end of the room is the hydraulic rudder system. But that doesn’t explain the missing six feet.
I shine my light on the wall. It has the same veneer as the other walls. That’s why I didn’t see it before. But it’s been recently applied. The veneer has been nailed down. It’s a rather makeshift hiding place, hastily rigged up. But I wouldn’t be able to open it on my own. Even if I had the proper tools.
I open the nearest door.
The black cases are standing against the wall. They’re labeled GRIMLOT MUSICAL INSTRUMENT FLIGHT CASES. I open the first one. It’s rectangular and looks as if it might hold a medium-sized tweeter.
The manufacturer’s guarantee under the two shiny blue tanks of enameled steel says: “Self-contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.” They’re covered with a rubberized net to protect the paint from impacts.
I open another, smaller case. It contains what look like valves to screw onto the tanks. Bright and shiny. Nestled in custom-shaped foam. An oxygen gauge. But a type I’ve never seen before, which is supposed to be attached to the tanks instead of sitting directly on the mouthpiece.
In the next case there are pressure gauges and wrist compasses. A large suitcase with a handle contains goggles, three pairs of flippers, stainless-steel daggers in rubber sheaths, and two inflatable float collars to attach to the tanks.
In a duffel bag there are two hooded rubber suits with zippers at the wrists and ankles. Wetsuits made of neoprene. At least half an inch thick. Underneath are two Poseidon dry suits. And under them are gloves, socks, two thermal suits, safety lines, and six different kinds of battery-powered lamps, two of which are attached to a helmet.
There’s a case that looks as if it might contain an electric bass, but it’s somewhat longer and deeper. It’s leaning against the bulkhead. Inside it is Jakkelsen.
It wasn’t quite big enough for him, so they had to press his head down against his right shoulder and bend his legs up behind his thighs so that he’s kneeling. His eyes are open. He still has my jacket over him.
I touch his face. He’s still moist and warm. The body temperature of a large animal drops a few degrees per hour after it’s been shot, if it’s lying outdoors in the summer. The numbers are probably about the same for human beings. Jakkelsen is approaching room temperature.
I put my hand in his breast pocket. The syringe is gone. But there’s something else in the pocket. I should have wondered about that before. Metal doesn’t clink all by itself. It clinks against another piece of metal. Very cautiously, with my hand inside his pocket, I grab hold of a little triangle. It’s growing out of his chest.
Rigor mortis spreads from the jaw muscles downward. The same way nervous tension does. He’s stiff all the way to his navel. I can’t turn him over, so I run my hand down along the inside of the case and up behind his back, inside his jacket. Sticking out between his shoulder blades there’s a piece of metal, less than an inch long, flat and no thicker than a nail file. Or the blade of a cold chisel.
The blade was driven in between two ribs and then straight up. It looks as if it went through his heart. Then the handle was removed, but the blade was left in. To prevent bleeding.
On any other person the blade would not have exited through the chest. But Jakkelsen is fashionably slim.
It must have happened right before I reached him. Maybe even while I was on my way across the square.
In Greenland I never had any cavities; now I have twelve fillings. Every year I need another one. I refuse to have novocaine. I’ve developed a strategy for handling the pain. I breathe deeply from my abdomen, and right before the drill pierces the enamel into the dentine of the tooth, I think to myself that now something is happening to me that I have to accept. That’s how I become an involved but not overwhelmed spectator to the pain.
I was present in the parliament, the Landsting, when the Siumut Party proposed that the planned withdrawal of American and Danish forces from Greenland
should be preceded by the establishment of a Greenlandic military. But of course that’s not what they called it. A decentralized coast guard, they said, initially manned by those Greenlanders who had served as constables in the navy during the past three years. And led by A-level officers who would be trained in Denmark.
I thought it was impossible; they’d never agree to it.
It was voted down. “We are surprised by the results of the vote,” said Julius Høeg, Siumut’s foreign-policy spokesman, “considering that this parliament’s committee on national security has recommended a coast guard and established a preliminary work group made up of representatives from the Danish Navy, the Greenland police, the Sirius Patrol, the Ice Service, and other professionals.”
Other professionals. The most important information always comes at the end. As if in passing. In a side letter. In the margin.
The security personnel on the Greenland Star were Greenlanders. Only now that it’s behind us do I remember this fact. We no longer notice things that have become commonplace. It has become common to see armed Greenlanders in uniform. Common for us to wage war.
For me, too. The only other thing I have left is my ability to distance myself.
This is happening to me; the pain is mine, but it doesn’t completely absorb me. Part of me remains a spectator.
I crawl into the dumbwaiter. It hasn’t gotten any easier since yesterday. I’m not getting any younger, after all.
Now I’m glad that there’s no safety device. This dangerous system allows me to press the Up button myself.
The rush of fear during the ascent up the shaft is still the same. As is the silence at the top. And the empty kitchen.
The moon is shining through the skylight. On my way to the door I have a vision of myself as I must look from outside. Clad in black, but as pale as a white-faced clown.
There are the same sounds in the corridor. The engines, the toilets, a woman’s breathing. It’s as if time has stopped.
The moonlight streaming into the salon is blue and palpably cold, like a liquid against my skin. The rolling of the ship on the waves makes the silhouettes of the window ledges stretch out like living shadows across the walls.
I head for the books first.
The Greenlandic Pilot, the Geodetic Institute’s mapbook of Greenland, the admiralty’s sea charts of Davis Strait, reduced 4:1 and collected in a single volume. Colbeck’s Dynamics of Snow and Ice Masses, on the movements of ice. Buchwald’s Meteorites in three volumes. Issues of Naturens Verden and Varv. The Review of Medical Microbiology by Jawetz and Melnick. Rintek Madsen’s Parasitology —A Handbook. Dion R. Bell’s Lecture Notes on Tropical Medicine.
I put the latter two volumes on the floor and leaf through them with my right hand, holding my flashlight in my left. Under the heading Dracunculus so many passages are highlighted in yellow that it looks as if the paper has changed color. I put the books back in place.
Out in the hallway I listen intently at each door. By sheer accident I locate Tørk’s cabin on the first try. I open the door a crack. Moonlight is shining through the porthole and across the bunk. It’s cold in the room, but he has pushed the comforter aside. His torso looks like blue-tinged marble. He’s sleeping heavily. I step inside and close the door behind me. What complicates life is having to make choices. The person who is pushed forward lives simply.
Everything takes care of itself. He had been working at the desk. The writing implements were put away, since on a ship everything that might roll around has to be stowed. But his papers are still lying there. A stack of them, but not too big for me to carry.
I stand there for a moment, looking at him. Like so many times before, ever since my childhood, I marvel at the chaste vulnerability of human beings in sleep. I could bend over him. I could kiss him. I could feel his heartbeat. I could slit his throat.
I suddenly realize that in my life I am often awake while other people sleep. I’ve been through many late nights and many early mornings. I didn’t plan it that way. But that’s how it turned out.
I take the stack of papers out to the salon. There won’t be time to take them along when I leave.
I sit there for a moment without turning on the light. A sense of solemnity has come over the room. As if the moonlight had encapsulated everything in bluish-gray glass.
Everyone dreams of finding the key to oneself and one’s future. The religious classes at Sunday school in Qaanaaq were taught by a catechist from the Moravian mission, an introverted and brutal Belgian mathematician who didn’t know one word of the Thule dialect. The lessons were given in a grotesque hodgepodge of English, West Greenlandic, and Danish. He scared us but also fascinated us. We were brought up to respect the profundity that is sometimes found in madness. Sunday after Sunday he would dwell on two things: the newly discovered Nag Hammadi canon’s commandment to know thyself and the idea that our days are numbered, that there is a divine arithmetic in the universe. We were all between five and nine years old. We didn’t understand a word. Yet I still remembered various things later on. I especially thought that I’d like to see the cosmic calculation for my own life.
Every once in a while it feels as if that moment has arrived. Just like now. As if this stack of papers in front of me has something vital to tell me about my future.
My mother’s forefathers would have been astounded that the key to the universe for one of their descendants would turn out to be in written form.
On top there is a copy of the Cryolite Corporation of Denmark’s report on the 1991 expedition to Gela Alta. The last six pages are not copies. They are the original, slightly blurry, and technically flawed aerial photos of the Barren Glacier. It lives up to its reputation: arid, cold, white, worn, windblown, and abandoned even by the birds.
Then there are a couple of dozen handwritten pages with figures and small pencil sketches that are incomprehensible.
Twelve photographs are reprints of X-rays. They might be the same people I once looked at on the light box in Moritz’s consultation room. They might be anything at all.
There are more photos. These might have been taken by X-ray, too. But the images are not of the human body. Straight black and gray lines have been drawn across the pictures, as if made with a ruler.
The last pages are numbered from 1 to 50 and are all part of a single report.
The text is sparse, the numerous pen-and-ink drawings are sketchy; calculations have been added by hand in several places when the typewriter couldn’t supply the proper symbols.
It’s a compilation of data pertaining to the transport of large objects across ice. With sketches of the procedures and brief, illustrative equations regarding the mechanical specifications.
There’s a summary about the use of heavy sleds on expeditions to the North Pole. A series of drawings demonstrate the way ships were pulled across the ice to avoid being frozen solid in it.
Several sections of the report have short titles such as: “Ahnighito, Dog, Savik 1, Agpalilik.” They concern the transport of the largest-known fragments of meteorites from the Cape York site, Peary’s difficult salvage operations and voyage on the schooner Kite, Knud Rasmussen’s logbook, and Buchwald’s legendary transport of the 30-ton Ahnighito in 1965.
This last section contains copies of Buchwald’s own photographs. I’ve seen them many times before; they’ve been included in every article on the subject for the past twenty years. And yet it still seems as if I’m seeing them for the first time. The chutes made from railroad ties. The winches. The crudely welded sleds made of train tracks. The photocopies make the contrast too extreme and blur the details. And yet it’s all so obvious. The Kronos is carrying a duplicate of Buchwald’s equipment in the aft cargo hold. The meteorite that he transported to Denmark weighed 30.88 tons.
The last part of the report deals with the joint Danish, American, and Soviet plan for a drilling platform on the ice. The Pylot Report on the bearing capacity of ice is mentioned in the list of references. My name is in
the list of authors.
At the bottom of the stack of papers there are six color photos. They were taken with a flash in some kind of stalactite cave. Every student of geology has seen similar pictures. The salt mines in Austria, the blue grottoes on Sardinia, the lava caves on the Canary Islands.
But these are different. The light of the flash has been thrown back toward the lens in blinding reflections. As if it were a picture of a thousand small explosions. The photograph was taken in an ice cave.
The ice caves that I’ve seen have all had an extremely short lifetime, lasting only until the break in the glacier or the crevasse closed, or they were filled up by underground rivers of thawing ice. This one is not like anything I’ve ever seen before. Long, glittering stalactites hang from the ceiling everywhere, a colossal system of icicles that must have been formed over a long period of time.
In the middle of the cave is what looks like a lake. There’s something in the lake. It could be anything. It’s impossible to tell from the photo.
The only reason it’s possible to imagine the scale of things is that a man is sitting in the foreground. He’s sitting on one of the mounds that the dripping water and the cold have made rise up from the floor of the cave. He’s laughing triumphantly at the camera. This time he’s wearing down pants. But he still has kamiks on. It’s Isaiah’s father.
When I lift up the stack of paper, the last sheet stays on the table because it’s thinner than the photographs. It’s a sheet of writing paper with the rough draft of a letter. Only a few lines, written in pencil and crossed out in several places, then placed at the bottom of the stack. Like when you’ve written a diary, or a will, and you don’t really want to acknowledge it. You don’t feel that it should lie around, shouting your confessions to the wind. But you still want to have it close at hand. Maybe because it still needs some work.