The Naked Shore

by Tom Blass

  My first evening on Hooge, knowing no one, I had been contemplating a return to my hostel-like room in a converted farmhouse to read my book and listen to the melancholy night sounds of snuffling ducks and lowing cows. But I received an invitation to an amateur production of a play to be performed wholly in Plattdeutsch. In other circumstances this might not have been so alluring, but as it was I half-ran the two kilometres to Backenswarft, where at 8.30 prompt the curtains opened before an audience of two dozen mostly uncomprehending tourists in the basement of what I took to be the town hall.

  It was unclear as to whether the play was or wasn’t funny. I understood that it was a comic tale of insurrection set in an old people’s home, a point of convergence between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and One Foot in the Grave. But few people laughed very much, perhaps on account of not being able to understand the dialect. The real spectacle came with walking back through the velvet night, and though I was happy with my own company, the expanse of dark fields, scarcely punctured by the intrusion of distant Warften, was achingly lonely. A slender band of sickly crimson interceded between the horizon and heavy dark cloud. The welt of an afterthought of sun hung in the west, and the sky, untrimmed by trees, had the stage to itself.

  It turned out that most of the big personages on Hooge were outsiders one way or another. After the curtains had closed on the play I introduced myself to the middle-aged man who had played the part of a sex-obsessed geriatric. He scrutinised me through professorial half-moon glasses. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘come and visit me at the school tomorrow; it would be my pleasure . . .’

  By the morning I had acquired one of the bicycles that are strewn around Hooge among the geese, and I thought of heading to the church, which sits amid old graves, surrounded by ditches and meadows and cows, and is reputedly the prettiest and oldest in the Halligen and beyond, famed for its painted carved wood panelling and Prussian reds and blues. A clanking bell, admonishing and beckoning, rang out across the fields, turning the ears of a number of appropriately placed sheep and lambs.

  I took a seat near the back. Candles were lit at the aisle end of each row of pews and in a candelabra above the pulpit. The other pews were filled for the most part with families which I guessed from the bright snap of their holiday clothes to be tourists. Presently the pastor arrived replete with pointed beard, black gown and fork-tongued collar. He cast a benevolent gaze at his flock, folded hands across his chest and asked the congregation to say where they had come from: ‘And who is from Berlin?’ (A show of hands.) ‘And who is from Kiel?’ (A smaller show of hands.) In English, he added, ‘I think we even have a visitor from abroad!’ His eyes narrowed and concentrated their Lutheran gravitas upon where I sat at the back of the church.

  It was a long service, during which he accompanied himself enthusiastically on the guitar for the hymns before mounting the colourful pulpit and delivering a sermon, which I felt, though understanding little of it, was hectoring and bullying. He gave meaningful looks to three teenage girls in the row of seats in front of me and said things about Facebook which elicited anxious titters, and proceeded to tell the fable of the fox and the wolf.

  When the service had drawn to a conclusion, for which I was truly thankful, we chatted in the carved doorway, half in and half out of the sun. I asked the pastor about his sermon, and he said that it was about the need to take Jesus into one’s heart, and how the simplicities of Hooge – the sun, wind and sea – should be seen as a parable about good living and the avoidance of temptation and sin. He had taken much longer to make his point while thundering from the pulpit.

  I asked whether many of the congregation were from Hooge. None, it turned out. He himself was visiting from Kiel, where he lectured in theology, and he was not a native Frisian, having come north from Bavaria to take up his position. (‘We have a place on Sylt – only a tiny caravan, of course . . .’) ‘But,’ he insisted, ‘the Church means a great deal to the Hallig people. In their own way they are devout. In the summer it is difficult for them to attend because [and he reiterated a leitmotif that was becoming familiar] they are very busy.’

  We talked a little about the ‘Frisian mentality’. ‘Have you read Storm?’ he asked, and I said that I had read what I could find that had been translated into English. What, I asked, did he take to be the significance of the climax of Schimmelreiter?

  The pastor looked uncomfortable. During his lifetime Storm had been a bête noire for the Church. On the one hand he was a paragon not only of literary talent but also, as a highly respected magistrate and lawyer, of probity and ethics. But on the other hand he consistently rejected organised religion, and when his stomach cancer got the better of him shortly after the completion of Schimmelreiter he refused the last rites, much to the chagrin of those who had prayed for a deathbed conversion.

  In the closing stages of the book, when Hauke Haien, who has hitherto disdained the Church, is on the verge of losing his beloved wife to a fever, he calls for divine assistance but is overheard crying to God, ‘I know you cannot change everything that happens, even if you wanted to,’ thus denying God’s omnipotence and provoking his neighbours’ suspicion that he is an atheist or satanist or both. ‘I think,’ said the pastor, ‘that Schimmelreiter proves that Storm was coming to Jesus. The flood is the divine power that Storm had tried so much to reject.’

  Or perhaps, said Uwe Jessel, the flood was just a flood.

  Uwe Jessel was the teacher who had played the Viagra-charged geriatric in the Plattdeutsch play. After leaving the pastor I cycled to the Warft where Jessel had his school. It was Sunday, but he’d be in his classroom attending to chores, he had said, and later two of his pupils – 40 per cent of the total school complement – would be turning up to help. When I found him, he was squinting at a maths workbook, listening to Mozart and brewing a cup of lapsang souchong tea. School, class and home were all one.

  I never found out what brought Uwe Jessel to Hooge. It wasn’t that he was evasive about it so much as that whatever the reason it had long ago dissipated. He and his wife were here and would probably not leave. It was, he said, a unique challenge having a school of five pupils, especially given the diversity of their ages: the youngest was six and the oldest seventeen. And so, he said, far from having it easy, he was very busy ensuring that each of his charges was learning a curriculum suited to their age and ability.

  The classroom was crammed with books, photographs, a fish tank, a stuffed guillemot and things found on the Hallig’s shores. I thought of the old school on Spurn Point, long since disappeared, and about how in between thrashings the teachers would take their charges collecting on the dunes.

  Uwe said the thing about Storm was that his writing could lend itself to so many different interpretations; that was what kept it alive. Often you felt – and I could see exactly what he meant – that he was less presenting a riddle than exploring something dark, encountering shades of light on the way (but as if for the first time), and taking you, the reader, with him. And then of course you needed always to be on guard against over-interpretation. Take the flood. This school where we now were was built in 1968, on the site of the old school which had been utterly destroyed in the flood of 1962, when for the first time in generations the Landunter had been so vicious that it breached the Warft, and many buildings, including the school, needed to be pulled down. In Hamburg dozens had died. He took a sip of lapsang souchong and then, cup poised by his lips as if the thought had just occurred to him, said, ‘That was a flood. Not a metaphor.’

  I asked Uwe what he thought the best and worst things were about attending such a small island school. The worst, he said, was that the oldest child missed the company of his peers – it was ‘sort of embarrassing for him’ to be in a class with a six-year-old. But contrariwise, he said, this meant that the oldest became sensitive to the younger children’s needs and developed a keen sense of empathy, while the younger ones didn’t get lost in the crowd but could each receive as much attention as they
needed.

  Breaking a long silence, two boys knocked on the door and came into the room. The purpose of their extra-curricular visit, Uwe explained, was to renovate an old fish tank in preparation for the arrival of der Axolotl, a curious amphibian from Mexico which a naturalist would be bringing from Bredstedt. The old glass had been taken out of the frame and the putty scraped out, but now the challenge was to squeeze in the new panels, which were a little too big.

  The boys stood by while Uwe pulled and pondered to the accompaniment of a horn concerto. ‘Probably best you leave us to it,’ said Uwe and added, ‘Just think, tomorrow when you step aboard the Hilligenlei just as the other passengers are disembarking, you’ll be crossing paths with the first axolotl to live on Hooge.’

  Uwe Jessel pointed me towards the next but one Warft, from which a strong headwind bowled unimpeded over baize-green fields. It was a struggle to cycle against it – like running up a downward escalator – and I was sweating and breathless when I arrived at the house of the Bürgermeister, Matthias Piepgras. For some minutes after he greeted me I could scarcely speak, but he took sympathetic puffs on a meerschaum and beckoned me indoors. Among his clutter of papers and half-finished projects I felt quite at home – more so hearing something approaching music coming from his sitting room. Leonard Cohen was just grinding to a croaking close (not in Frisian), and the Bürgermeister’s girlfriend Christiane Lenemann was making strong coffee.

  Craggy but not austere, Piepgras was immediately likeable. Like Uwe, he wasn’t a son of the Hallig, but had been a ‘teacher for slower children’ on the mainland before he had had a ‘life crisis’ and felt a desperate need to be somewhere like Hooge, surrounded by nothing but the balm of sea and fields and clouds, where he could recover his confidence and strength.

  Christiane came in with the coffee, and steam and pipe smoke curled around each other in the sharp light thrown by the dusty windows.

  Being mayor, he said, had neither been thrust upon him, nor had he actively sought it. ‘But things were run so badly, they needed a . . . how do you say?’

  ‘Outside perspective?’ I ventured.

  ‘Yes! Genau! Exactly!’ And so, he said, he had interfered so much and made so much noise that he found he had acquired the job.

  Christiane was not a Halliger either, although I guessed that she had endeared herself to most of the locals when she gave me a copy of her book Halligluud, a large red tome with photographs that I’d seen for sale at every possible outlet on the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. I told them that I had met a Bürgermeister before, Frank Botter on Heligoland.

  ‘Ha!!’ said Matthias. ‘Botter! Yes, big man, like a bull! Nice guy. I met him one year at the Schleswig-Holstein Island Bürgermeister Annual Conference.’ For some reason to meet someone who had also met Botter struck me as hilarious. I told Matthias that I couldn’t imagine Botter listening to Leonard Cohen. ‘Yes, maybe not,’ he said. And then I remembered all the things he had said about being a ‘real’ Heligolander. Did Matthias encounter issues on account of not being native?

  A quick exchange of nervous glances flicked between him and Christiane, and he tamped his pipe before explaining that on a place as small as Hooge there were bound to be issues. Were he to be the Bürgermeister of, say, Husum or Bredstedt, his life would be easier. As it was, there was so much to do and he had only a skeleton staff, so he was arguing for more money with the government of Schleswig-Holstein and taking responsibility for decisions made in the interests of Hooge which sometimes clashed with the individual desires of its inhabitants.

  ‘Let’s put it like this,’ he said, ‘I have my political enemies.’

  I asked jokingly whether he felt in physical danger.

  ‘Not yet. But three of my cars have been destroyed outside my house.’

  ‘Did you ever expect when you were teaching special needs on the mainland that you would become the Bürgermeister of an island of ninety souls?’

  ‘No. That I never expected. I never expected that at all. Not at all.’

  I was embarrassed that our conversation had taken on an interrogational slant and sensed that despite his amiability Matthias was wary of me being there, and wanted to be left alone with Christiane (which I could understand), Leonard Cohen and his pipe. And, thinking about his cars, for a few spiky moments I saw how of a night you might feel exposed on the Warft. You might be safe from lightning, I thought, but were vulnerable to flood, unwelcome thoughts and memories, and hooliganism. And I thought about the fate that had claimed Hauke Haien, which led me, irrationally perhaps by dint of too much coffee and exertion on the pedals, to fear a little for Matthias Piepgras.

  When I left the sun still shone but disobligingly the wind had performed a volte-face, and no matter how hard I cycled, my destination – coffee with Fiede – seemed resolutely distant. I tried to remember the words to ‘Suzanne’, and by the time I had remembered half of them, I’d arrived.

  The next day I woke early to catch the ferry back to Schlüttsiel, where I had been staying on a farm in what as far as I could tell was a barn converted to take school parties. The institutional odour of cheap cleaning products and clipboards pervaded its cluttered corridors and showers. I’d seen my hostess fleetingly, but Patricia, the wan, anxious-looking, friendly ‘help’ from Krakow, was more visible and engaging.

  She said that with the exception of her employer she had scarcely spoken to a single Hooge native since arriving three months before. She wasn’t too lonely because there was another Pole, Peter, who also worked on the farm, helping out with the cows and the bicycle rental business. But didn’t that seem surprising given that everyone was squeezed together on the Warft? She didn’t mind so much, she said.

  Last year she had worked in Madrid – which she’d loved – and before that in Toronto, which was excellent, and she had chosen to come to Hooge because she was intrigued by a place so remote and quiet. ‘I can’t complain really,’ she said. ‘And in August I’m leaving Germany to work in a care home in Surrey, near London. Do you know Surrey? I’m really looking forward to it. Will it be good, do you think?’

  I gave a dissembling reply and felt sad anger for Patricia’s plight and at the Hooge inhabitants’ truculent lack of interest in her presence on their island. Across from the Fething, I watched a handful of farmers manoeuvring a cow into a stall. They were big men in blue overalls with Old Testament beards, and I could have been looking across a chasm of centuries, not just a duck pond – and perhaps they couldn’t look back. I remembered something that Arend Maris had said about islanders not really believing the rest of the world existed even when it stared them in the face.

  The morning, its all-too-fitting drizzle beneath which both sea and meadows sulked, was ripe for lugubrious thoughts. I’d been on Hooge and Langeness long enough to want to leave and not to. The world of buildings three storeys tall and more, and ordinary high streets with their promises and compromises was already intimidating. Silence was impossible in the Halligen, banished by the wind, lisping sea, clamouring birds. But the sense of apartness that Matthias Piepgras had perhaps discovered before he became entrenched in the affairs of Hooge’s good or not-so-good inhabitants had bitten deep. Maybe if you stayed too long it resulted in a sternness of soul, a tendency to scowl and suspect that singing was tantamount to levity.

  The Hilligenlei picked its way towards where I and a handful of others stood shivering on the quay; the swallows and terns, oblivious to the change in the weather, continued their aerobatics unabated. Soon there would be coffee and frankfurter soup and apple cake, note-writing and wondering what and where was next. Quite without warning I played host to an abrupt and violent sensation that the pastor was wrong about the Schimmelreiter, that the bursting of the dam, Hauke galloping along the dyke as it collapses, the terrible tragedy that unfolds, stands not for a dying man’s plea for forgiveness but as a broadside against pettiness and piety – even, I thought, against the low burble of soft rock music that seemed to fill every pub
lic space in Germany, even aboard a ferry.

  I drank my coffee and ate the soup and the cake. Had I passed a man with an axolotl? It was hard to know, but I knew that strange Mexican amphibian manqué, thriving as it does on adaptation not confrontation, would find a home on a half-island where the natives are kind to strangers – at least most of the time.

  12

  Where Two Seas Meet

  The streets are lined with ropes, behind which are small potato plots or patches of corn, espaliers of dried fish outside the houses, ship’s timbers used for these, here and there a little shed, the roof of which is the hull of a boat. The street deep in sand, the town infinitely long, with dunes, potato plots and corn fields, and children asleep in the sand.

  Hans Christian Andersen, Diary entry, 18 August 1859

  I came to Skagen for the reason that the Danes come to Skagen: Skagen (the ‘g’ is silent – the name rhymes with ‘Dane’) carries a kind of aura of wonder with it, conjuring a golden age of artistic brilliance, one long summer stretching into an ethereal twilight. It lies at the very northern tip of Jutland, or Jylland, where the North Sea meets the Baltic amid wild beaches and dunes. It is also the epitome, for the Danes, of all that is best about their country: unkempt and evocative shores, stylish design and cinnamon buns.

  One painting above all others captures the reputation of Skagen: two young women are strolling arm in arm along the foreshore. In long white dresses belted by pale sashes, heads turned conspiratorially towards each other, they’re deep in a long-lost conversation. Artist and viewer tail the couple from a dozen yards behind – not directly but offset a little. The sun has gone, and dark lapis sea and sky have merged, as they do in the first minutes of twilight. But the women themselves, and the beach upon which they walk, glow in the residual light. It is the most valuable Danish painting ever, and has borne the weight of countless reproductions and homages. (Arguably too many. Were they less commonplace the keen sense of nostalgia it evokes might be sharpened. Less saccharine but more piquant.)