Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  And so I went travelling far and wide, walking alone through a wild, uncultivated region, following the edges of a wood. The jubilant songbirds caused me to linger, and I lay back for a little while in a clearing, under a lime tree, listening to the delicious carolling of these birds. The cheerful sounds that came from their throats worked on me, till I drifted off to sleep there.

  A Saturday in July in London. All the windows in her flat were thrown open. She forced herself to watch the evening news. Even at that hour there were sunbathers in the garden in the square. She took a cold shower then sat at her desk by the window with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. It was a week before her voyage to the Greenland Sea. She picked up a piece of paper that had been left in her pigeonhole at the university by her unbalanced Polish colleague, Tomaszewski.

  ‘Thought by national poet Poland Czeslaw Milosz when Berlin Wall fall,’ Tomaszewski had scrawled in a blue biro.

  Then the quote, in block letters:

  What will happen next? The failure of Marx’s vision has created the need for another vision, not for a rejection of all visions. What remains today is the idea of responsibility (when the nineteenth-century idea of progress has died out), which works against the loneliness and indifference of an individual living in the belly of a whale.

  Tomaszewski had underlined the word whale.

  He recounted how they had walked hand in hand in the snow and how Danny had turned to him and explained that there were vast numbers of salp and jellies in the oceans whose vertical migrations were equivalent in scale to the birds lifting up from the dunes into space.

  ‘On a planetary scale, birds crawl,’ she said.

  Utrinque Paratus. Ready for everything. That was the motto of the Parachute Regiment. What was his orientation in space? He had leapt from planes as a paratrooper. He plunged. The air was thin. The land came up quickly. He had never found that inner space which intensified forms.

  She was a mathematician and an oceanographer. She had been educated at St Paul’s Girls School in London and St Andrew’s University in Scotland. There had followed a stint at CalTech in Pasadena, a doctorate and lectureship at ETH, and the professorship at Imperial.

  Her earliest work at ETH had been on a project to track the diving patterns of Cuvier’s beaked whales in the Ligurian Sea. That had been too zoological, too macroscopic. It was the deep itself which interested her. At first, she thought she would work on modelling the conveyors which so massively circulate water between the oceans. That had proved too mechanical. Her interests became biomathematical – concentrated on the estimation of microbial life in the deepest layer, the Hadal deep.

  She was a Londoner. In London, she could lead different lives on the same day. She was a star in the maths department, rich and worldly. With her parents and siblings she led a jet-setting life. Her flat was not far from the university, also in South Kensington. She wore a diving watch, a man’s watch, gold, with a black dial. She liked to think it connected her with the first French Navy aquanauts. Being a woman hadn’t helped her career. Glamour might have done. When she went to a cocktail party, she went to be noticed. She might wear a dress open at the back, diamond earrings, an old pair of Italian flat heels, and her purse would carry an African motif.

  For a time, the abyss could be said to have tormented her. The contrast with what was at the surface and what was below perhaps heightened her natural desire for reversals. She careened between work and self-destruction. At one event at the Royal Geographical Society she noticed a man she had once met in Zurich. They left together. There were many such encounters. She went clubbing alone. It was either maths or she was on her back. When she was made a professor she withdrew, or matured. She stopped taking stimulants. She put bulkheads in her life. She divided her work-friends from her friend-friends. Her lovers were in yet another compartment. When she went to see her nieces and nephews in Holland Park on Sundays anyone amusing might be invited to join, even the broker in bed, as long as he agreed to tea and buns and a trawl of arcades afterwards. But when it was grown-ups only everything was sealed.

  Thumbs was the only work-friend to be invited into her family. Her brothers liked him, and not just because he provided an excuse for video gaming. He laughed in a way that drew people in. He was spastic, unable to contain his insecurities. His office was decorated with busty pin-ups on their knees, wet, raven-haired. To her knowledge, he had never had a girlfriend. When she descended into blue obscenities he was left blushing and fidgeting. More than her successful brothers did, Thumbs brought out the sister in her. He was depressive, unwashed, the kind of grown man who turned around Dungeons and Dragons dice in his pocket. He could not abide exercise, except for his bike ride to work, long hair plastered under his helmet, and his summer hikes at her mountain cabin in Liguria, from where he returned leaner, and less pasty. She took meals and wine around to his flat. He provided beer, marijuana and chocolate. She brought in the research money, she had that savvy, but they shared authorship on published papers. They had a corresponding suppleness of mind. They worked together on whiteboards, alternating marker pens. They held similar views on the consilience of knowledge: it was not too grand to say that they felt they were close to a breakthrough that would forever change the understanding of the dimensions of life on earth.

  *

  Routine became important to her. She played in a squash ladder at the university. She swam. She had lunch in the canteen. On Thursdays she often went to the cinema with her colleagues, with dinner at the same restaurant off the Old Brompton Road beforehand. She tried to meet up with her girlfriends every week. They cooked together. There was a book club. They went to galleries and to the ballet. She answered their questions about her work, but never burdened her response with applied complex analysis or non-linear dynamics.

  In love it was an old story. Her body was attracted to men her mind had no particular use for. In her experience, the bankers, especially, had no sense of proportion. One sat on a plane to New York and did not once look down at the ice and the rock over Greenland, over Cape Farewell, Uummannarsuaq, let alone the sea, and gave no consideration to her comments on the headwind, or the amount of oxygen in the air. It was not just the moneymen. It was barristers, once even a historian. They put in a hand, or a foot, and she closed the hatch on them. Perhaps it was just a male thing, the way they all seemed to think in terms of time and power. They had their chronologies – so and so did this to whom when – their instructions and name dropping. She was not unpleasant to them, not at first. It was just … she was charted for another place, which Cape Farewell only hinted at. She was studying life which exceeded all chronologies, which had never been studied before, and which had yet to be named. She could not imagine a career consumed by the moment. She stood in all her allure on the shoulders of giants, who had laid out science and its laws. She knew it and was cocky enough to entertain that she was going to be a giantess at the vanguard of knowledge, whose work would be appreciated for centuries to come.

  It was a small propeller plane and they were buffeted at first by thermals. Ahead of them were towering storm clouds. The land below looked ravaged, like a drained sea. The shadows in the canyons were enormous. The storm dispersed and he fell asleep. When he woke, the pilot was dipping down towards a coastal airstrip. It became very hot in the cabin. They circled to clear the animals before landing. There was dry bush as far as the eye could see and a trim of cultivated land along the shore. The town appeared old and scattered and impoverished. There were palm trees along the beach. The sea was dark blue. There was a white break on the reef. It might have made for good surfing. It was difficult to tell from that height.

  He had taken the head of a Somali charity out for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Nairobi. The proprietor sat by the door in a black shirt buttoned to the collar. Sure enough, the menu was decorated with pictures of Tirana, Tripoli, Asmara and Mogadishu in the time of Il Duce: Africa was like South America in the way it nourished the small dreams of Euro
peans.

  He ate ravioli and drank whisky. He gave the impression that he was a privately contracted water engineer who was determined to push through with his work and needed a trip to the port town of Kismayo in order to secure funding for a project there. Over dinner it was agreed that the charity would be paid a generous consultancy in return for facilitating his visit.

  When he landed in Kismayo, he was taken to a shed that served as the arrivals lounge and informed that the community leader who was to host him had been summarily executed that morning for showing sympathy to Christianity, which was the jihadist way of saying he was spying for Ethiopia. James expressed his regret. He asked to return on the same plane, but was beaten and cast into the darkness.

  It was his fault. He had met with his counterparts from the CIA in the food court of the Village Market shopping centre in Nairobi, not far from the new United States Embassy. He found their comments sweeping, without nuance, or solution. The pair said they had found the hand of a suicide bomber in Mogadishu. ‘We think it’s an Arab hand, don’t we, Bob.’

  He took the risk because he had collected a businessman with ties to the al-Qaeda cells in Somalia. This man had agreed to supply information on foreign fighters in return for British citizenship. A passport was not on the table, but a residency permit and cash were. He had to see for himself whether the information was good.

  The stakes were high: a Somali jihadist bomb-making unit was operational in the Eastleigh district of Nairobi. It was only a matter of time before they exploded a device in the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport or the United Nations Headquarters. The bigger worry in Legoland was of clean-skin Somalis – young men with nothing on their record to arouse suspicion – making it into the European Union and committing acts of terrorism there. In a confidential report to the Home Office he had recorded that possibility as ‘likely to very likely’.

  He squatted over the pit. He swayed. He picked apart his last trip to Addis Ababa. He had met with Ethiopian intelligence and they had warned him against travelling to Somalia. They did not know, they said, which faction was in charge in Kismayo. It was too dangerous. Why had he not paid attention to them?

  He remembered meeting a standard informant by the pool at the Hilton Hotel. He had negotiated the terms of the arrangement and the secure ways the information should be passed on. They had shaken hands. He had taken a lift to his room on the executive floor. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a slum on the hillside and to the office buildings on Josip Tito Road. Gum trees at the top obscured the old palace. He stood to one side of the curtain and trained his binoculars at the pool. It was built in cruciform in likeness of an Ethiopian cross. The delicate wives of Ethiopia’s most powerful men swam down the cross and across it in the signature crawl of graduates of the Addis Lycée: sharp elbows, hands cupped, chest turned to reveal little breasts. Expatriate families sat at the ice-cream bar enjoying an afterschool sundae. There were Italians, Americans and a North Korean family. The informant was still sitting there. No one approached him. Rain clouds darkened the scene. The wind gusted and only the Russian mechanics who maintained MiG jets for the Ethiopian Air Force stayed in the water. He saw two other Russians sheltering under a cabana. One wore a claret tracksuit. The other was in a white T-shirt and briefs, the better to show off his Spetsnaz thighs. What else?

  He stood up in the unfinished bathroom. He switched off Addis. It was nothing. There was no clue, no mystery, no spy story. It always ended with the two Russians, who had nothing to do with him or with Somalia. Just another pair of Slav intimidators making their way in Africa. Yet they haunted him. Bony, with shaven skulls, cigarettes in mouths, they could be bought by any intelligence service. So why not buy them? Why not gift them national symbols, religious icons and holy water and set them loose? Why not make them Cossacks of neo-conservatism, to be called upon when everything else went wrong? He had no doubt they would kill a young jihadist, then smash his face through a windscreen.

  He accepted there was little chance of escape. Somalia was not Afghanistan, where it was possible to pass as a local by growing out a beard, wearing a shalwar kameez, and speaking a few words of Dari. It was not Kipling. He could not turn his white skin black. He could not imitate the languid walk of a Somali. Even if he spoke the language, it would have been impossible for him to know all the clan histories and feuds over water or grazing for camels, which allow one Somali to pin down the identity of another in a few questions. His only luck was not to get found out: they really believed he was a water engineer.

  His reports had not been read at a ministerial level. Downing Street was interested only in pirates and could not be made to see that piracy was minor. Half of Somalia needed food aid to stay alive. Hundreds of thousands of people had been driven out of the city and were camped in makeshift shelters along the road to Afgooye. Somalia needed help. If a decision was taken to abandon and contain the threat, other African countries would also be abandoned. There was no question about it, Somalia was the future. It was the canary singing for the world to hear, but no one was listening.

  Che Guevara said as a young man his greatest hope had been to play rugby for Argentina. Even as a hero of the revolution, when his plane from Havana to Moscow stopped to refuel at Shannon in Ireland, he insisted on watching Munster play in Limerick, and on getting drunk with the fans. If he had worn the powder-blue and white strip of the Pumas as a scrum half, he would never have become a revolutionary and there would have been another face on the T-shirts.

  When you watch international rugby, you observe movement and collision, spaces opening up and closing. But what you remember of the match, what stays with you, is the flow and clash of primary colours. Red against blue, green against white. It is painterly in that way.

  He could see under the door the saturated colours of a television in a darkened room. It was like a line of lipstick. He thought of Osama bin Laden watching news in a cave, long before the mansion in Abbottabad. Somewhere primitive, elevated, in the mountains – with snow on the ground even in the summer. Osama making a point to his retinue about the news item of the day, lifting a finger, sometimes smiling, never ironic, and never able to sit through the sports report without reaching for the remote.

  She liked to run in Hyde Park before work, with sweetness in the spring, laundered in the autumn with the unpolluted damp of fallen leaves, and with women going by on horseback, up and down in the saddle.

  She cooked for herself in her large kitchen and enjoyed concertos or comedy quizzes on the radio while she ate. She worked until late. She sipped a glass of Australian wine while she worked, always Australian, to please her father. She smoked cigarettes, which she held away from her in the French way, as if they were leaden.

  The ceilings in her flat were high, the doors were original, heavy and exact. This was her life, there was solidity to it, although with a window open to the garden and all of South Ken going softly, softly into the night, it was possible to imagine Peter Pan alighting there.

  There was a bookshelf on one side of her study on which she had placed and spot-lit several Sumerian antiquities: a signet ring, a clay tablet and a pot for bringing up water from a well. On rare occasions she would take the ring out of its glass box and turn it over in her hand.

  She had become fascinated with the Sumerians because the Sumerians were fascinated with the ocean. They had invented the city-state, representative government, and writing (because their heralds were heavy of mouth). Greek and Roman law were rooted in Sumerian law. It was the Sumerians who called into being the religion of the divine word, in which a god says it is so and it is so. Why were these farmers of the fertile and landlocked lands between the Euphrates and the Tigris so interested in seawater? Why was this first urban civilisation, characterised by its ability to shape land, to plough it, to build on it, so diverted by the Hadal deep?

  Six millennia ago, the air god Enlil and the sea god Enki settled themselves in the pantheon of Sumerian deities. The Sumerian
s believed the world was something like a snow globe. Enlil kept the air in the world together with lil, a mingling atmosphere that also lent luminosity to the sun and stars embellished on the inside of the snow globe. Behind the firmament was a deep sea, and Enki’s house was on the sea floor – a place called Abzu. It was a house made of colours which could not be seen, tiles of lapis lazuli, and encrustations of gems, most especially ruby and cornelian, that could not be crushed at those depths. The bowed cedar doors were hammered right with gold no brine could corrode. In this house Enki created a man. He mixed clay over the volcanic furnace, shaped it with heavy water, and swam it to the world. He breathed air into it there. The man failed. His body was weak. So was his spirit. According to the translation of Samuel Kramer of the University of Pennsylvania, the man was offered a piece of bread: ‘He does not reach out for it. He can neither sit nor stand nor bend his knees.’

  What is the lesson? That a man-creature created in the deep should stay there: in a house without light, without a hearth.

  His family had been enriched by whaling, and when he dwelled on confinement he came back to the story of his forebear, Captain John More, who as a young man served William Scoresby in the Greenland Sea aboard the whaler Resolution. John was a living Jonah. This is not to say he sucked down the storm with him until the ship was becalmed, or that the good captain was a prophet punished by God. He in no way brought bad luck on his crew, but made them a fortune with his judicious mix of sober fellowship and new industrial methods. The bad luck John More had was his alone and it made him famous in his day. In the austral summer of 1828, John’s whaler, Silver Star, chased a sperm whale through a tempest off Patagonia’s Isle of Desolation. The whale entered a bay from which there was no escape. John jumped down into a whaleboat with his harpooner and two others. Just like in Moby-Dick, though years earlier, the whale rose up and smashed the whaleboat, throwing John and his men into the sea. The men were found. John was lost, presumed drowned. The whale was killed and brought alongside the Silver Star, where it floated for a day and a night as the crew mourned their captain. It was only when the whale’s stomach was hoisted above the deck that one of the flensers saw it pulse. They cut it open and found John wide-eyed and coughing in the gastric juices. The whale had swallowed him. There was mucus over his body and his hands. One of his feet was partly digested where the stocking had come off. He was otherwise physically unharmed.