Inventory, after the first five days spent on the island. The garage: Johannes’s blue Dauphine is still there, and so are the old, persistent smells of sour exhaust fumes, burnt oil and dirty plastic seat covers. On free-standing shelving, ill-assorted engine parts are scattered, loose or in cardboard boxes. Closer to the floor, broader shelves hold petrol and oil cans and rags, all at hand if you wanted to check things under the bonnet. In the cool cellar, the neat log stack almost reaches the ceiling. Fixed wooden shelves are stocked with a variety of tinned foods, including cat food, even though Johannes had not had a cat for years. All this looks orderly and well made; tap the wood and it seems to be solid workmanship. No damp and nothing else that someone considering making an offer for the property could complain about. But all you need is a fleeting, treacherous reflection of light on a window pane for the solidity to slip and vanish. If you lean your hand against a wall or a door frame, you get a sense of something insubstantial, as if the whole house were about to collapse. I fetch the folding ladder from the garage and climb up to undo both clasps on the attic hatch. It drops down on screeching hinges, with a noise like the shriek of a terrified animal. After slapping my arm across my eyes to keep out the chaff that billows out of the attic space, I begin to play the beam of the torch on the exposed rafters and then down over the spongy brick walls. Bit by bit, the light picks out elements of Johannes’s life that I would have preferred to leave there, forgotten. Closest to the hatch, a pair of kneehigh black leather boots lean against the wall, the boots that Johannes boasted about because they were part of the uniform he wore ‘in service’, and hung up on hooks hammered straight into the bricks are the uniform jackets: a black, lined winter jacket and a lighter, more summery grey one. The motorbike is no longer around (in the early fifties, Johannes sold it to a Harley-Davidson enthusiast) but, as a memorial of the good old days, what was left of the Steib sidecar stands almost in the middle of the dirty wooden floor. Johannes managed to haul it up into the attic with blocks and tackle attached to the roof beams, a set of lifting gear he used successfully over the years for winching all sorts of items into the attic, such as the crates of beer delivered regularly from the brewery where he once worked, and chests stuffed with clothes and books, too heavy to lift in any other way, and the cupboard-bed he slept in and the primus stove he used to heat the tinned food he ate. When he withdrew to philosophise, as he described it, he sat in the sidecar with the bottles of beer and spirits on one side of the seat, the gramophone and the chamber pot on the other. Once settled in, he could stay there several days without us noticing any signs of life other than occasional heavy thumps and blows against the ceiling above our heads, sometimes long bursts of screaming, as he fought whatever demons had been aroused by his philosophical inquiries. The older we grew, the more often he retired, and every time he seemed to stay away for longer. It was as if something unfathomable hovered over him always, something that he had to save himself from at any cost, just as a drowning man, once the floods have swept away everything he owns, climbs higher and higher up, until a swaying branch of a tree or a steeply pitched roof is all that remains to cling on to. The books he read in the sidecar are still there, stacked along the bare brick wall on pieces of torn-off cardboard meant to stop the damp from rotting them. Many are so badly affected anyway that their covers have softened until their edges are bending and the internal layers of compressed paper have almost dissolved. Johannes was unwilling to let us into the attic and we were reluctant to go up there (if for no other reason than because of the stench that filled it and also lingered in Johannes’s clothes once he emerged after a few days or maybe a week away), but he was always perfectly willing to share his reading with us. The great classical historians fascinated him in particular. He could spend hours deeply absorbed in the descriptions by Tacitus of the Roman forays northwards to do battle with the Germanic tribes. He loved the writing of great explorers, the travellers’ tales and memoirs, perhaps because he was reminded of his own vagabond years at sea. Before I learnt to read, I used to sit with him, leaning against his shoulder, so that I could look at the illustrations that were glued to some of the pages, often protected by a thin sheet of almost transparent paper. The pictures usually showed strange landscapes like the banks of wide rivers or the edges of desolate steppes where tiny explorers stood with their walking sticks raised to point at something, and it seemed to me (even when I was little) that the travellers were portrayed as so small in order that the wild places would appear all the more grandiose, like the river delta alive with colourful birds or the rocky desert where, in the distance, a mighty volcano rose so high there was a wide rim of snow at the very top of the cone. I remember liking the pale colours, which made earth and sky merge, and the detailed representation of the few objects that, after all, had been allowed into the foreground as if they had positively asked to be examined at close range: a river barge laden with exotic fruit, crewed by brown-skinned natives wearing nothing except generous loincloths, and in the middle of the boat a kind of house that, though made from skilfully woven palm leaves, looked like a real house – like our house. But the passages Johannes chose to read aloud to me had none of the clarity of daylight and dealt only with the mindless struggles of people and animals against the elements, or against each other:
When the burning heat of the day is followed by the coolness of the night, which in these latitudes is always of the same length, even then the horses and cattle cannot enjoy repose. Enormous bats suck their blood like vampires during their sleep, or attach themselves to their backs, causing festering wounds, in which mosquitoes, hippobosces and a host of stinging insects niche themselves. Thus the animals lead a painful life during the season when, under the fierce glow of the sun, the soil is deprived of its moisture.
Up there in the attic, sounds from the outside penetrated much more distinctly than elsewhere in the house: the metallic clatter of the aeroplanes that were flying just above us or the long summer rains that pattered against the roof tiles, causing a peculiar rustle that wrapped itself like cotton wool around Johannes’s reading voice, which was quiet but deep and had an insistent, rhythmic quality. If he reached a section that he was especially keen on, he would often read it several times, as if to take in the flavour of every word. Sometimes, he read for a while to us after supper, remaining in the kitchen, where the window stood open to the warm, still summer evening. Outside, the cock pheasants patrolled the garden, letting out their hoarse two-tone screams. The pheasants always screamed like mad things when a storm closed in. Before the thunder arrived, the brow of the forest along the far side of the field would be crisply lit by the setting sun, and stand out against the bruised-looking, swollen sky above it. Johannes would not let the storm disturb him and carried on reading even when the lightning flashed so incessantly it seemed the house could go up in flames any minute, and, somehow, the words he read built a bridge over my fears. The way they arrayed themselves calmly in the right order and every sentence reached its completion made me trust that nothing was final: another sentence would always follow the one Johannes had already read, and yet another event would always come after the account we had just heard. I felt the same about the book he was reading from. Behind all the terrible things the writer told us of, like the saw-toothed crocodiles floating in the shallows of the murky river and the bloodthirsty bats clinging to the flanks of the cattle, there seemed to be another narrator, a sober, thoughtful person able to put the formless in its proper place and explain the incomprehensible. Eventually, the storm would pass, the birds started singing again in the garden, where everything was moist after the rain, and an uncanny white mist, a combination of light and damp, made the pale, paper-thin sky shimmer and drifted in through the open window. Johannes would have put the book away and be gazing absently, with empty eyes, as if he were in a place beyond all story-telling where words were no longer necessary because everything had already been identified and described: a place like this one, silent, full of rai
n-soaked sunlight. Perhaps this was why Johannes always sought the solitude he found in the attic: because the state of contemplation, spoken of by the classical philosophers whom he admired so much, is not a once-and-forever attainment but an acquisition that can be yours only through a constant, unconditional inner struggle, concealed from the eyes of others. (‘You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength’ was a quotation from Marcus Aurelius that he loved to repeat. It sounds like an excuse for avoiding all responsibility, but perhaps Johannes’s mind was such that he could exert power only if he withdrew from all that might bewilder and beguile him.) Next to the bookshelf where Johannes kept his own books there is another, larger one filled with Jan-Heinz Kaufmann’s old library, a big collection of volumes that Sigrid Kaufmann had asked Johannes to look after when, after the war, her husband was taken to court, accused of having betrayed his country. She explained that if she continued to have these books at home, she would fear for her own as well as her daughter’s life. I wonder if Johannes ever considered what risks he ran himself by undertaking to hold on to Kaufmann’s books, or if he simply handled the issue in the same way that he dealt with all tricky or uncomfortable matters that turned up: that is, he shifted it into some place out of sight and pretended to understand none of it. And here they are, all the diaries, starting at the time Kaufmann first began to run farms on the Inner Islands, with entries in which he accounted for most things in no particular order, from purchases and inventories to notes on his various diplomatic tasks and journeys, and that were as abbreviated as telegrams in the beginning but gradually became less formal. The writings that Kaufmann had published himself stood on the bottom shelf and included a set of the leaflets under the general title On the Nutritional Requirements of Nature and of Mankind, the little handbooks that he gave away to everyone who joined the first colony, and then, lying on top of these books, a large volume in octavo format seemingly placed there almost as an afterthought; it was bound in moss-green speckled leather with Kaufmann’s monogram (the letters JHK) set inside a beautiful frame of garlands on the front cover and the title inscribed on the yellowing title page:
NOTES ON THE SUBJECT OF
PLANT DISTRIBUTION ON THE INNER ISLANDS
by Jan-Heinz Kaufmann,
Doctor of Agronomy
I have seen that book many times. Or rather: Johannes would take it out to show it to us on certain important occasions, almost as if it were a sacrament. In an introductory section, the Inner Islands are discussed, in the first instance in geological or, more accurately, palaeological terms; the second section consists of drawings, in which a double-page spread is devoted to each plant that grows or has grown here. On the left-hand page, the reader is given a detailed description of the particular plant, its distribution and time of flowering, as well as how to identify and understand its seed pods, root systems and other such essentials; the right-hand page presents one of the author’s botanical drawings, a hand-coloured and graphically precise illustration of its sepals and its petal arrays, with the number of the image shown in the right-hand corner and, below, a series of letter and number combinations that categorise every described aspect of the plant. The book contains 120 such sets of text and image, and ends with an extensive index. But it is the dedication on the inside front cover that matters most, inscribed by Kaufmann in his characteristic hand with its tall, upright and clearly delineated capital letters: To my most highly esteemed Johannes from his Friend, the Author of this Work – JHK. When Johannes showed us The Book, he would also draw our attention to the photograph of a team of harvest workers that was kept inside it. The note on the back states that the photo was taken in a field belonging to the Söderängen farm on a day in August 1927, by which time the first colony was in existence. The photo is pale with age and marked by having been folded on the far right and then in half. On it, a dozen or so men and women are grouped around a cart loaded with a gigantic pile of hay. The women are wearing short-sleeved cotton dresses with wide skirts, and the men baggy trousers and collarless shirts or tunics. On the far left, I can just make out Mr Carsten, since his face is in one of the fold lines and it is really only his leg, stretched out stiffly in front of his body, which gives a clue to who he is. In the centre of the picture, Jan-Heinz Kaufmann sits perched on the edge of the cart, just in front of the hillock of hay; he leans forward, his arms held straight with his hands on his knees and one booted foot resting on Johannes’s right shoulder, while Johannes stands immediately below him, the grin on his face looking almost identical to his master’s broad smile. Kaufmann’s booted foot on Johannes’s shoulder: it tells you practically all about the nature of the relationship between them, and explains why Johannes was so proud of the image that his fingers trembled when he showed it to us.
It is raining again. I stand at the edge of the forest, listening out for an aeroplane that I can hear in the distance as it approaches the island. Because the sound fuses with its echo there is no spatial definition, and it is impossible to make out from where it is coming. You sense it only as a strangely metallic bulging of the air. Then it gradually grows stronger and heightens into a dark roar that encloses the entire landscape in a cage of sound. Inside it, the birds rise from the forest canopy and climb frenetically upwards until the plane breaks through the horizon above the trees, as unexpectedly as always but hovering, moving slowly at such a low height that the extended wheels seem about to touch the tops of the trees. By now, the engine sound is a deafening, needle-sharp whine and then it is followed by a massive crash like a thunderclap that somehow compresses the air into big blocks while the heavy body of the plane, oddly independent of the sounds it creates, flies low above the lake, its wing tips rocking as if in its own sea of noise. Two boys of about twelve, maybe thirteen, stand astride their ludicrously overpriced mountain bikes to scan the plane before turning to look at me and, when they notice me watching them, they suddenly turn away. It is a sham manoeuvre, as there are in fact no tracks to the lake in that direction, not even paths, only a few landmarks to go by: one has to know before coming here just where the forest grows thin enough to make your way through. The route I have chosen opens into a narrow gully some five hundred metres behind the village school. They are building two new villas here, identical to the rest that have erupted like a rash along the island’s coastline: oversized wooden monstrosities that come complete with detached garages, large enough to hold a whole fleet of vehicles. Presumably, the boys live in one of these villas. I watch as they jump on their bicycles when they reach King’s Road. On this side of the island, the road runs very close to the banks of the fjord, but the building sites do not reach all the way up to the edge of the forest. The area at the back of them is a nature reserve and must not be interfered with, which means that I can move a quarter of a century back in time by taking only a few paces towards the forest. At the far end of the narrow gully, the maple that branches just a couple of metres above the ground is the very tree that Minna and I would climb as children. A little further downhill towards the lake, where the path is as overgrown with ferns as ever, I spot the now rusteaten remains of the plough that was once used to scrape the surface of the lake free of snow before they started to cut blocks of ice. The rowing boat hauled up on the shore is the same one that has always been moored here, secured to a cut lakeside alder by a rusting chain that has no lock, so that it has to be lifted clear of the stump. A little higher up, a board is fixed to two sturdy wooden posts that have been hammered into the ground: it says NATURE RESERVE at the top, and then Established with the support of the Sigrid Kaufmann Memorial Trust. Below, there is a list of rules: keep your dog on a lead, observe the bans on fishing and starting fires, and so forth. That sign, or a similar one with the same admonitions, has been here for as long as I can remember. But the poster next to it is new. It is a simple map of the lake and its surroundings, with walking routes picked out in red and blue. There is some information about the history of the
place and a survey of the animal and plant life in the protected area. Even though it is obviously out of order here, as elsewhere on the island, to mention Jan-Heinz Kaufmann by name, the poster text has actually been lifted word for word from his great work on the flora of the island. The locations of particular plants are exactly described after an introduction to the island’s rare mix of slate, limestone and sandstone rocks, all created in the Ordovician and Silurian periods from the skeletons of sea crustaceans. Johannes was right: before, everything here was covered by the sea. This is the explanation for why the rocks crumble easily. The very presence of the lake is due to the rocks giving way and folding, which encouraged water and soil to collect, creating an unusually rich growing ground for trees and plants that otherwise would not have survived this far north. Below this, there is a list of protected plant species, illustrated by Kaufmann’s own drawings. I look out over the lake, standing next to the beached boat, and think about the day when Johannes and I said our final goodbyes to Minna. It was a late morning in November and, like today, steeped in a pearly grey mist of light rain. The beach had disappeared after twenty or so strokes of the oars. I might have been out on the open sea despite the presence of the forest, the twittering of the birds and the noises of guillemots and divers from the reed beds around the cape that almost reaches the middle of the lake. I pulled the oars on board, undid the knot on the string and pulled off the wrapping paper provided by the funeral directors. Then I asked Johannes if he wanted to do it, but he shook his head and looked away, so I unscrewed the lid of the urn and scattered the ashes on the water. I intended to move decisively, strongly, but overdid it and almost fell out of the boat when it suddenly rocked beneath us. All the same, the ashes kept floating in the air for quite a while, glinting in the light like the white butterflies Minna had been telling me about the night she came into my room, sweating, with the smell of lake mud and forest on her hair and skin, and whispered: I have seen him, and then I: who do you mean? And she: Kaufmann, he’s alive! And then (as if the thoughts followed each other naturally): you must kill him! This happened sometime in the early seventies, and Kaufmann was of course no longer a prisoner (originally he was jailed for twenty-one years, though, as far as I know, he served only a fraction of the sentence), but there had been few sightings of him on the island. The rumour that he harboured secret plans to start a third colony circulated but was just idle talk. In the post-war years, material changes happened with increasing speed on the Main Island: more and larger areas of land were scheduled for building, the old dirt roads were tarmacked, the school was extended with a brand-new nursery and the shopping centre now had a doctors’ practice and a post office. Kaufmann alone did not change and perhaps his island, too, stayed much the same as it had been: at least, along the still untouched lake, quiet paths remained discernible only to him, and there he might be seen rambling, carrying his vasculum and butterfly net, and so it was the day Minna saw him. Or, anyway, it is what she said in the night when she came running into my room and threw herself on my bed, not upset so much as strangely agitated, as if she could hardly wait to voice all the things that were on her mind. It was June, the time of year when the night never comes, and the bog myrtle and wild sorrel on the dank water meadows fill the moist air with their astringent yet overwhelmingly powerful scent. She never told me why she had gone down to the lake at that time of night, only that she had been trying to find her way across dark, sodden ground under branches heavy with leaves, when suddenly something white rose right in front of her feet. Looking up, she saw a cloud of fluttering white wings as a swarm of butterflies lifted from the grass and whirled away over the lake, whose surface glittered with reflected light. And then he appeared on the path ahead of her, his white shirt almost emitting its own light between the black lines of his braces. Do you like the butterflies? he had asked with gentle curiosity. I’ve created them, you know! She had hardly recovered from the sight of him, so unexpected was it here among the massed shadows of the trees, where the air was dense and mellow with bird song. She must have laughed. He had bent over her and asked if she liked the butterflies. And, if she did, then what did she make of the island foxes? Are there foxes on the island? she had asked, because once Johannes had told us that lack of foxes was the reason why there were so many pheasants everywhere. In the past, Johannes had said, the fox would cross the strait in the winter when he was hungry and food was scarce, but nowadays it is seldom cold enough for the water to freeze over. But of course Master Fox is around, Kaufmann says unhesitatingly, though he is tremendously wary! If you like, he says, I can show you his lair. It is only now that she tries to distinguish him from the flickering backdrop of light and darkness that surrounds him on the path. He is considerably taller than how she had imagined him, and so thin, his body still almost boyish-looking despite his age. His head is long and narrow, his forehead high and his chin also long and protruding. His build and features make his round, steel-rimmed glasses seem like some kind of equipment that he has stuck on his face to examine her more closely. And so he does: inquisitively and intently. If you’d like to? he says, and smiles again. His voice sounds slightly old-fashioned, the tone dry and precise but not at all unkind. I’ll show you where they are if you come here early tomorrow morning, he said. But you must promise not to tell anyone. She promised. And then he went on his way, nearly dancing, old and frail as he was.
The Tempest Page 7