The Discovery Of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

  Hood was so much in love with Green Stockings that he had a hard time even managing his hours of guard duty. All day long he thought only of ways to get closer to her and at least touch her little finger. ‘If it goes on this way,’ Back remarked sarcastically, ‘he’ll expire from love. He’s going to simmer away before our eyes; it’s got to be put out in time.’

  Back’s behaviour changed from day to day, and always for the worse. He started to shout at the voyageurs. He talked about Franklin behind his back – Hepburn had hinted at something like that. He believed the Indians were undependable, thievish and mendacious, and declared this more and more openly. Worst of all, he talked in an unbearably obscene way about Green Stockings’s visible and invisible features and how he was going to demonstrate to Hood how to make use of them.

  When John asked him to respect Hood’s feelings for the good of the expedition, Back looked at him insolently. ‘Respect feelings? What kind of advice is that coming from you of all people, sir? Many thanks!’

  Just what I feared, John thought. First he loves me, then he hates me. He knows no boundary between acceptable and unacceptable feelings; this is sad and dangerous. But he knows how to draw. Green Stockings modelled for a portrait, and he painted such a good picture of her that Keskarrah became worried. ‘It’s too beautiful. When the Great White Chief sees this, he will demand her for himself.’

  About Wentzel, Back said, ‘Now that’s a real German. Everywhere in the world you see them standing around brooding about why they can’t get a move on like anyone else. And most of the time they try to prove that the reason is their intelligence, and then they start to teach the rest of mankind.’

  John had long ceased to react to each of Back’s remarks – on the quiet his first choice was now Hepburn. But this time he replied, ‘It’s the problem of slowness, Mr Back. And Wentzel really knows a thing or two.’

  At a lake the Indians called Lake Winter the travellers remained for a few days, built a blockhouse as a base for a possible return trip, and provided themselves with game to salt and even convert into pemmican for the long haul up the Coppermine river. Night frosts became more severe. One morning Akaitcho announced that he opposed continuing northwards in this season. ‘The white chiefs may do so, and some of my young warriors may accompany them so they won’t have to die alone. But as soon as they climb into their canoes, my people will mourn them all as dead.’ Cautiously, John pointed out the discrepancy between these words and other words the chief had spoken at Fort Providence. Akaitcho replied with dignity: ‘I eat my words. Those were words spoken for summer or autumn, but soon it will be winter.’

  Back fumed about the ‘savages’ and their false promises. Even Dr Richardson started to talk again about how Christian culture would do these primitives a world of good. John would have still liked to reach the Coppermine river and perhaps even the sea. He thought it over for a whole night before he said anything. In the morning he knew that Akaitcho was right when he feared a 198 · franklin’s domain · atastrophe in an area so poor in game and wood. Indians had frozen and starved to death before up there – Wentzel told of the death of entire camps. John announced to the chief that he was grateful for his kind and wise counsel. They would spend the winter here. Akaitcho bowed contentedly, as if he had not expected anything else, but he was very glad that John had given in and became downright talkative in his pleasure. John discovered that he was held in great esteem by the Indians because they believed he spoke often with the spirits of the dead: they had observed him when, in thinking about something, he laughed apparently without reason and moved his lips.

  The blockhouse was named Fort Enterprise. It would remain their home for at least eight months; that much was sure. And the officers knew at last why the Indians had called the lake Lake Winter four days earlier.

  Back began to woo Green Stockings in an intentionally crude and insolent way. Apparently, he wanted to prove something again. Meanwhile, Hood had reached the point of holding her hand now and then, and gazing into her eyes; he did not let himself be pushed to adopt a faster pace, even by Back. John suspected that there had been words between Hood and Back, but if so it was without success. Back didn’t stop touching Green Stockings to point out for which details of her person his compliments were intended. Sometimes he made her laugh, but John was almost sure that she rather detested Back.

  One evening, Hepburn reported that Messrs Back and Hood had agreed to a duel the following dawn. This was no laughing matter. John didn’t doubt that Hood was serious, and Back was sufficiently vain to push the matter to the limit. John ordered Hepburn to use the 12:00-to-6:00 A.M. watch to stuff the primers of the gentlemen’s guns with pemmican. Then he spoke with each of them individually – they promised to be reasonable. Hepburn nevertheless did as he was told, and successfully. The next day at least one partridge owed him its life.

  John Franklin had the excellent idea of sending Back together with Wentzel to Fort Providence to look for the expected delivery of supplies. Sullenly they departed. All at once peace reigned in Fort Enterprise.

  The Indians hunted. The women sewed winter clothes. During the time he did not devote to Green Stockings, Hood built an excellent stove, far more economical with wood than an open fireplace.

  Hood loved this Indian girl more and more intensely. His eyes filled with tears of pleasure when he saw her again after only a few hours of separation, and sometimes no one saw hide nor hair of them for days. Akaitcho and Franklin exchanged not a single word about it – they held the situation to be too unusual to drown it in obvious protests – but they talked of many other things: the compass, the stars, the signals with which whites in one big canoe communicated with those in another, Indian feasts and legends. John wrote down one or another of these. The voyageurs cut down trees and built a second hut. It became cold frighteningly fast. Akaitcho had been right.

  Weeks passed. Now and then John sat in front of the hut, bundled in heavy clothing, looking at an autumn storm sweeping swarms of the last leaves off the branches. John picked out a specific leaf and waited for it to fall. Often this allowed him many hours of aimless and unhurried contemplation. A warrior brought letters from Fort Providence. Back and Wentzel had not found the supplies and had now gone on to Musk Ox Island, where they were supposed to be waiting. There was also a letter from Eleanor: ‘To Lieutenant Franklin, Commander of the Land Expedition to the Arctic Ocean, c/o Hudson’s Bay or Elsewhere.’ Graceful, good Eleanor. John saw her before him, talking constantly to everyone about everything. For her the world was language, and therefore, in her view, there had to be a great deal of talk. Still, Eleanor was always pleasant and without malice; perhaps she was the woman to whom he would best like to be married after all. She could bear years of her husband’s absence well, for she had the Royal Society and her literary circle. Of course, there were also other women – Jane Griffin, for example, Eleanor’s friend, equally curious and well-read but with longer legs – and she didn’t write poetry. When John noticed that his mind wanted to dwell on the legs, he quickly put Jane Griffin out of his head. Need came easily to a man here in the wilderness, and it was not easy to help oneself; the bedstead of reeds and furs made noise at the slightest movement. Everyone except Hood suffered greatly. There remained only stalking game by oneself in the forest. But God and the Indians saw everything. Once, when Hepburn returned from a hunt without spoils and pretended not to have seen any game, old Keskarrah with the bulbous nose said to Saint-Germain with a stolid expression, ‘There was game enough, but perhaps what the white man had in his hand wasn’t a rifle.’ Since tact was not his strength, Saint-Germain passed this on to Hepburn, who was at first annoyed, then in the end had to laugh himself.

  John took up Eleanor’s letter again. She asked him to check whether the pantheism of the Indians could be compared to that of the Earl of Shaftesbury. A paragraph on Shaftesbury’s teachings followed. Then she again returned to the theory of the melting polar ice: the increasingly dry weather of
the last few years spoke for it. Between London Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge, John read, the Thames had dried out completely during the last winter. It was possible to cross it on foot and find hosts of odd things sailors had thrown overboard in the course of centuries for fear of customs inspectors. They included even a silver christening font of very Catholic appearance. Near the end of the letter she wrote: ‘A fortnight ago there was a ball at the Thomsons’. Oh, if only you had been there, dear Lieutenant.’ Eleanor loved to dance quadrilles, and always ‘con amore’. John loved not to dance at all best.

  In the evenings John talked more and more often with Richardson. The doctor was pious but not a bad fellow. He wanted to know the truth. If he was told the truth he could be tolerant. While he firmly believed that the doubter John would have to be converted some day, he tried it also with questions, and with listening, and that was not a bad route to choose with John, if one had the patience. On Monday evening Richardson asked, ‘Aren’t you afraid of nothingness?’ And John was thoughtfully silent until Tuesday. Then the doctor asked, ‘If there is such a thing as love, doesn’t there have to be a pinnacle, a sum total of love?’ But now John answered yesterday’s question: ‘I’m not afraid because I can only imagine nothingness as rather quiet.’ He remained silent about love for the present. On Wednesday evening they talked for a very long while, this time about eternal life. As Richardson spoke of the prospect of seeing lost people again, John became so much interested in this subject that he entirely forgot his answer to the question about love. Looking at Hood, love seemed to him to end up more in a kind of sickness than in God.

  ‘Some people are engaged in going, others in coming. Whatever comes fast, goes fast. It’s the way things look through a carriage window: nothing and nobody is spared. More I don’t know.’

  ‘But for that we have eternal life.’

  ‘I don’t long for eternal life,’ answered John. ‘But I lack the years between twenty and thirty. If there had been no war, perhaps I would have already discovered a lot by now.’ He said this without bitterness, because the discoveries might still take place.

  As he looked at the shaggy tree and mused, old names and faces occurred to him again, one after the other. Dr Richardson learned a little about Mary Rose, Sherard Lound, Westall, Simmons, Dr Orme. ‘You’ll see them again,’ Dr Richardson consoled him, ‘as sure as parallel lines meet in infinity.’ John contradicted him: ‘Only if one follows them in the right direction, for parallel lines must, of course, lose themselves on the other side.’ At some point he also explained Franklin’s System to the doctor. ‘Well and good,’ answered the other, ‘but it isn’t sufficient to draw strength from slowness. It’s only a method, and God is much more than a method. You, too, will need Him, perhaps even on this journey.’

  John remembered the verse inscribed on the old church bell at St James’s in Spilsby that was broken last year. Not wanting to leave the doctor without a reply, he recited it:

  The glass doth run

  The globe doth go

  Wake up from sin –

  Why sleep you so?

  Why it had entered his head he didn’t know, but when he had told it to the doctor, they both went to sleep at last.

  After four months, Back and Wentzel returned. They had achieved nothing and blamed each other for it. None of the promised supplies had reached Fort Providence, and on Musk Ox Island in the Great Slave Lake they found only a few sacks of flour and sugar, as well as several opened bottles of liquor. They had, however, found the promised Eskimo interpreters there.

  Back had tried in his way to get supplies in Fort Providence. Wentzel, he said, had let him down. ‘He shows greater understanding for the supposedly dire straits of the fur traders than for ours. He didn’t stand up for us.’ Wentzel retorted, ‘Mr Back shouted at the gentlemen in charge. You don’t get anywhere that way.’

  If the Indians exerted themselves and worked hard at hunting, perhaps enough food could be gathered for the journey after all.

  Snow melted more and more. The lake burst and sang. It was May.

  Hood went on loving Green Stockings, who was pregnant. By whom? In addition to Hood’s own understanding there was another version.

  The Eskimo interpreters were flat-nosed, woolly-haired fellows with wiry bodies. Their names were Tattanoeack and Hoeutoerock, meaning something like Belly and Ear. Since no one could pronounce their names, John called them Augustus and Junius. They were not very resourceful hunters, but were excellent anglers. It seemed as though they could almost smell fish through the thickest ice.

  * * *

  By 14 June rivers and lakes were navigable enough to allow John to decide that they should start. Maps and notes were locked in a small side room of the blockhouse. Hepburn nailed a drawing on the door showing a menacing fist raised with a blue, shimmering dagger. Since there in the north everyone was entitled to use a hut – whether Indian or white – the maps had to be protected in some way. Akaitcho agreed that the drawing would be more helpful than a lock.

  It was the first warm day, and it quickly became so hot that they sweated. Swarms of mosquitoes, sandflies and horseflies enveloped them, so that they felt as though they were walking in the shade. Nobody could say where these insects had come from so quickly and how they knew that they could tap humans for blood. Hepburn, slapping his face without catching any of the tormentors, asked furiously, ‘What do they do when no expedition comes through here?’

  Since the heavily laden canoes still had to be dragged on runners over snow and ice, the expedition got no farther than five miles on the first day. At night it was so cold that nobody could sleep. Shaken by frost, Hepburn shouted into the dark, ‘The beasts won’t survive this!’ In that he was mistaken, however.

  Green Stockings did not come. She stayed behind with the tribe. One of Akaitcho’s warriors stayed behind, too – for her. Everyone except Hood knew this. Even John.

  Hood talked of returning at the end of the journey to live with Green Stockings in Fort Providence, or wherever. They all nodded and remained silent. Even Back kept his mouth shut.

  John Franklin was admired by the Indians for not killing a single fly. When one of them stung him while he was adjusting the sextant he gently blew it off the back of his hand, saying, ‘There’s enough room in the world for both of us.’ Akaitcho asked Wentzel, ‘Why does he do it?’ and Wentzel asked John. The answer: ‘I can neither eat it nor conquer it.’ ‘That’s right,’ Back whispered behind John’s back. ‘He’d never catch a mosquito.’

  Wentzel heard this remark and passed it on to John. Conversely, John was equally sure that Back would pass on to him-everything that Wentzel secretly told him as well, and that neither of them would ever understand how little this interested him.

  Nothing escaped Akaitcho – not John’s disappointment over the fur-trading companies and Back’s foolishness or the tensions within the group. One day he said, ‘Wolves are different. They love each other, touch each other’s noses, and feed each other.’ Adam translated.

  John became slightly unsure. He could hardly answer Akaitcho without talking more or less about his companions. So at first he merely bowed his head and kept silent. By evening he had an answer: ‘I’ve thought a great deal about the wolves. They have the advantage of not being able to talk about each other.’

  Now Akaitcho bowed.

  After four weeks they had almost reached the mouth of the Coppermine river. From here on they might at any time meet up with Eskimos getting copper from the riverbank. Akaitcho thought it best to wander south with his tribe. He was probably unsure just how his warriors would deal with the Eskimos. ‘They say about us that we’re half man and half dog. They themselves drink raw blood, and eat maggots and dried mice. We’d better urn back. From now on you’ll have to feed yourselves.’

  It was agreed that Wentzel would go with them and stock Fort Enterprise with food and ammunition in case the expedition failed and they didn’t reach Parry’s ship.

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p; Hood wanted to know from Akaitcho where the tribe would be next spring. With an inscrutable face Akaitcho explained that they would be in the region south of the Great Bear Lake. Keskarrah held out his hand and said, ‘When you’re starving, drink a lot or you’ll die.’

  Here it was again, the good wrinkled elephant hide of the sea! Soon East Indiamen would glide through here in long columns, as well as ships bound for Australia, San Francisco, Panama or the Sandwich Islands. But actually – of what interest were passenger ships to John? He had to laugh. He was in fine spirits.

  It was quiet here on the hill. From the moss-covered knoll the men peered beyond the estuary of the Coppermine river to the sea. In the distance, two flat, snow-covered islands were marked off against a pale pink sky – or was it ice this soon? The air felt like a void. Of insects not a trace. Except for the rustling of their clothes and the cracking of their ankles, they heard not a sound.

  Before John’s eyes lay unknown land, quiet and limitless like his father’s garden decades ago. And the sea was indestructible. A thousand fleets had not left a trace. The sea looked different every day and remained the same, till all eternity. As long as there was the sea, the world was not wretched.

  John’s reverie was suddenly interrupted, for the voyageurs came up to him and declared, with great determination, their unwillingness to go on the ocean in their fragile canoes. Back told them it was not at all dangerous. Hood thought it might be beautiful. Richardson knew with certainty that a hand above us protects us all. Hepburn grumbled, ‘Are you men or aren’t you?’

  John heard it all with only half an ear. Since he respected the voyageurs, they waited only for what he had to say. He looked far away while arranging his sentences. Then he turned and looked at Solomon Bélanger, and said, ‘This isn’t just a walk. But greater dangers lie behind us than lie ahead.’ He looked again at the sea, then spoke into the silence as though he spoke to himself: ‘Else what we started can’t be continued. It’s part of our expedition.’