‘The problem of what to do with unwanted kids.’
And as he continued to whisper into the roaring of the passing lorries as they came round the bend, he slowly began to cough up all the facts: in many cases, girls are simply packed off into the cities to work in kitchens. Often, they’re raped there. And the children that are born as a result only make the problem worse.
I turn around. Those barns there, these three tables under the porch, the towering cliff behind and the view of the Prithvi Highway; this, too, could well be somebody’s home, the vanishing point of a yearning born in a kitchen in the big city. It’s an evil déjà-vu: we regard hardship so reproachfully because it’s so unoriginal. Everywhere the same relationship between poverty and hygiene, everywhere the same squalid housing, the same burden-carriers without a voice, the children longing for a future, the old women in faded clothes that were once gaudy, and the victims trying to wash the misery out of their faces. The neglected members of the masses: you’re like everyone else.
Here, too, there’s housekeeping in the absence of any men. The grandmother is preparing soup for the evening on the fireplace, while the mother pulls a beret made of orange felt onto the head of a young boy with two cataract-blind eyes and gets him ready for his journey. His eyes look like someone has clumsily inserted them into the sockets, the way they squint in different directions. Yet the facial features of this boy, despite being jarringly disturbed, are really quite exquisite. He gazes out at the world through eyes that are like irregular pearls, and the smile he gives as he mounts the pillion seat of a motorbike, squashed between his father and mother, dissipates absently into space. Then he’s gone, as the motorbike threads its way into the stream of traffic.
We eat Dhal-bat from a tin plate, and even this white pilau rice dish can’t escape its liberal sprinkling of ants. That’s all right and proper. After all, this is a poor person’s dish, made from millet, rice or potatoes mixed with curry sauce or any vegetables that happen to be to hand. To accompany it, there’s always a soup made of lentils (dhal), and so the name Dhalbat even gets applied here to what elsewhere would be called a water soup with three lentils floating in it. To finish, the old lady brings some honey that she has detached from the honeycomb using lemon juice. She mimes to us how we should suck up this sticky preparation and spit out the bits of wax. Her Nepalese English sounds like someone chewing puffed rice at the same time as they’re trying to speak. Then comes the tea, which tastes of joss-sticks, with some sugar stirred in that has lots of yellow blotches in its large crystals. Even so, it still looks grey, and the ants continue to burrow through its spoil heaps.
‘Look out,’ the old lady warns us as we silently drink our tea. She looks anxiously at the trickle of pebbles falling off the crag above us: ‘there might be a rockfall!’
But the only thing that’s been hit by a rockfall for miles around is the sign warning people about the danger of rockfalls.
Beneath the heavy cloud layer, on the other side of the road, lies the rubbish-strewn riverbed, with dogs foraging around it, and all the while the jungle drums of the passing traffic never let up. The residue of street life has washed up in our bend in the road. It’s like the bend in a river polluted by industrial waste, full of filth and flotsam. A hundred metres further on, the road curves round an outcrop and then descends to the valley.
Our hunger’s sated now, so we’re curious to learn what awaits us on the far side of that far bend, behind the rocky outcrop. The old woman who prepared the meal for us and who’s been living here since she was a girl, looks at me inscrutably.
‘Tell me: what’s on the other side?’
‘No idea.’
‘But you live here!’
‘I’ve never gone round there, though.’
‘Why not?’
Many years ago, she tells me, she had a dream that warned her never to go round that bend in the road, ‘because of the misfortune that could befall me,’ she explains in her broken English. But didn’t she want to know … wasn’t she at least curious?
‘Not at all,’ she replies. ‘After I’m dead I can always go and check it out.’
But because there’s life before death, and seeing as we’d already chatted to one another for a while undisturbed and quite intimately, I’m finally allowed to hold her hand and so, taking her feather-light old lady’s hand in both of mine, we teeter out of the hut to the edge of the road, and walk across the gravel lay-by covered in puddles, gradually approaching the far bend. But what if something should happen to her, what if the prophecy were to come true after all?
‘You see, we’re really doing it,’ I say.
She nods, her face beaming with self-confidence, and now her hand is gripping mine really tightly. We’re walking along in step; limping slightly, but still basically in step. But just as we reach the brow of the road when the bend begins, the old woman suddenly stops dead in her tracks. She laughs, like she can only do so standing still, disengages her hand from mine, slaps me heartily on the back and cackles:
‘You didn’t really think I’d spent my whole life on this side of the bend only to have you come and lead me round it now, did you?’
So we turn round and she can’t stop laughing, even while she’s walking along now, safe in the knowledge that her super-stition is far stronger than the arrogant rationality of some transient European, a now shamefaced passer-through, who can keep the far side of the bend as far as she’s concerned, the side with the unknown dangers, those things that threaten the life of an old woman.
And so when we do finally leave, with the old woman’s hand shooing us away more than waving us goodbye, when we actually do round that bend, the first thing we come across is a white buffalo heaving its enormous bulk from one side of the road to the other.
‘Buffaloes are every bit as stubborn and single-minded as camels,’ says Monika, who founded aid organizations in Africa before coming to Nepal.
We’ve barely been underway twenty minutes when our car is brought to a grinding halt. There’s a crowd of people blocking the road; a social conflagration: in the centre of this hubbub is a bride-groom sporting a thin moustache and a skullcap, and with his eyebrows and lashes blackened with kohl. Behind him, swaying on her mother’s arm, comes the bride, her young head bowed deep into the shade of a pink umbrella to stop her from seeing her husband. But this isn’t the real reason why we’ve all come to a standstill. Further on, up the road, ‘something’ must have happened.
Immediately, the first rains start to fall: at first, droplets that scarcely brush the twigs of the trees and merge into the earth as soon as they hit the ground; you almost expect to see a time-lapse sequence, where the seed becomes a panicle, which becomes a twig and which once more reaches out to drink up the rain. The line of vehicles hasn’t just stopped, everyone’s turned off their engines as well. In little melodic phrases the birdsong in the lessening rain begins to assert itself. The road winds into the distance; no one knows beyond how many curves they’ll encounter a roadblock or a serious accident. Someone is dispatched to scout out the situation. Those who are left behind climb up to the rise overlooking the valley and exchange awkward platitudes about the view.
We go and sit on the crossbar of a gate overlooking the plain, which looks like a landscape painted by a Flemish old master. Someone starts telling a story about a man and his love for cheese sticks. But I can’t stop thinking about the family of the old woman back on the other side of this range. If this traffic jam continues to build, it’ll stretch back to the bend where we stopped, and the old lady will say: You see, no good comes to people up on that road. But our driver Rajiv is worried that it’s not the Maoists this time, but rather yet another accident that’s caused the road to be closed.
‘I had four dead people in the car one time,’ says Monika. ‘Rajiv was holding a woman in his lap and stroking her head, but she was long since dead. I told him to worry about the ones who were still alive, as there was this one young woman who was still b
reathing.’
But even she hadn’t made it, as it turned out.
The densest of the fogs down in the valley begin to lift, and clouds and rivers appear. Monika’s colleague from the aid agency is still recounting his story:
‘… anyway, we just gave him a glass of wine and some cheese sticks, and he was as happy as Larry.’
The mist wafts up, and the chit-chat abates. There’s a major accident somewhere at the head of this queue. A short while later, and a towering bank of fog has settled over the road. We can look down and see the people on the national highway disappearing into this wall, and all the while, cloud after cloud of fog keeps billowing up from the valley. At first, the mist takes away the contrast between things, then it softens the contours, then it dulls the whole image, and finally it makes everything look opaque, as if seen through frosted glass or creates an atmosphere that is as dense as soup. Grimacing, the people who ventured into the fog emerge out of the uniform grey of the precipice, carrying pieces of luggage, canisters, or rolls of cloth in their hands. One man keeps shaking his head, with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand pressed into the inner corners of his eyes like he’s trying to concentrate, while in his left he’s clutching an orange beret.
The people emerging from the fog gesture to others to keep away.
‘Don’t go in there!’
‘Oh God, no, the motorbike …’
The people who run into the fog grow colourless, and then become two-dimensional, turning into mere silhouettes, disappearing into the wall of fog like some flat template. And now people are even beginning to look like they’d been formed out of fog themselves, losing all their three-dimensionality, and sinking back into the realm of shadows. The relief of their bodies is flattened out, the colours all fade, and the silhouettes find their entranceway into the wall of fog and pass through. Ultimately, they are nothing but a dark recess in the breath of the night, and step through this into oblivion. Ahead of us lies the afterlife, and behind us the forbidden bend, and at our backs are the intimidating Himalayas. We who have been spared cower between these steep rock faces. The only spot of colour to be seen far and wide, so luminous that it seems to be the only thing to have resisted the effect of the fog, is the boy’s bright orange beret, still dangling from the messenger’s hand.
Isafjördur
The Blind Spot
The only sound still audible at night is the slapping of the hal-yards against the flagpoles. That’s how it all began: a noise in my head, and a mood to match. Inspired by the urge to hear it, I set off. The landmark I longed to experience, then, was a noise, dispersed in a wind that carried the taste of snow. Add to this my predilection for unlovely things, and for the clammy feeling you get when gusty squalls buffet your body. Even the summer on Iceland is still overshadowed by the long winter, and by the demands of having to doggedly fill the time somehow in a general state of torpor. People’s temperaments seem in the process of thawing, but outside of Reykjavik no one’s going around freaking out just because the sun’s getting stronger by the day.
Beyond the capital, the solitude of life forms is maintained in the desolate landscape. These are contemplative places that invite you to disappear, places that have also been shaped by the concessions that we grant to nature, to its spirit and spirits, as compared to civilization. Icelandic villages squat in this landscape like so many micro-organisms which blossom only briefly after a long period of dormancy.
Living on the outskirts of Reykjavik as I was, I couldn’t hear the halyards smacking on the flagpoles. But among the people around me, I could hear how words fluttered away into the gaps between associations. Among their vocabulary, I found as few imports as I did among the goods on the island, though the antique shops had portraits of National Socialist bigwigs hanging on their walls and their shelves full of the Nazi book collections of former Party members. Many of them had once fled here, to the land of the old Icelandic epic, the Edda. Occasionally, I’d run across eccentric forms of amusement, for instance, really obscure board games I’d never seen or silent children’s charades. Here, then, I was confronted with a country of barely a million inhabitants, but which had its own trade journal for national show requisites, a country that preserved its own individuality by venturing into the realms of the whimsical, and which had once been governed by a woman president who began her term of office with the words: ‘The hand that rocks the cradle can rock the system.’
Here I encountered people who were still unpolished by any basic social conventions: relationships began with them staring fixedly, literally gazing at you without batting their eyelids even once; this was accompanied by a bare minimum of gesticulation or facial animation. Only on meeting someone for a second time did you begin to establish connections, born of recognition and a recollection of the dumb-show that had gone before. Only the children tended to remain stand-offish.
Before the world ends, it will heave a sigh and emit a blue burp. Tourists call the first of these ‘seismic activity’ and the second a ‘geyser’. They stare in awe at the spectacle, wallowing in sulphurous pools and expecting the water to act like some fount of eternal youth.
The best thing you can do is leave them lying there and get away from the central massif of Iceland; dispense with your travel guidebooks, too, where there’s no mention of the end of the world. In the rear-view mirror of the 4×4, you can still see how the land soars up to a high mountain range in the southeast or bunches itself up into little towns, before the road goes snaking off across the narrow orchid-neck of the isthmus that lies in the northwest of the island, heading for Westfjords, that desolate region that has been blighted by rural depopulation but which was once supposedly viable farming land. Nowadays, nowhere else on Iceland do you see so many abandoned farmhouses as in these hills. The first port of call for those migrating from the countryside was the provincial capital Isafjördur, but before long most of them preferred to head off to Reykjavik or out into the wide world beyond.
The formations in the skies are echoed on the ground, behind the humps of the female or the male mountains, as they are designated here, in the igneous rocks and the beds of moss. Now a stiff wind is blowing the spray back up the waterfall, and people are peering out of their windows with faces as white as snow, or bleached by the long nights. Here, too, the drowsiness of a hard winter lies heavily across the summer landscape.
If you walk into an inn round here, a few of these ice-bound faces will be raised from strange games to look at you, and everyone falls silent for a moment. Then a waitress swings by, her legs clad in thick woollen socks, and thumps down an album with four hundred Polaroids in front of you:
‘So, here you can see how a building site became the guesthouse you’re in today.’
I really must see this. At least, that’s what she solemnly tells me, quite unaware of how grating such forced chumminess is. So there’s nothing for it but to knuckle down to earnestly studying the photographic record of the build, like you’re reading the small print on the leaflet that comes with a medicine. You dutifully express surprise at the right junctures while you eat your hard-boiled egg and leave those present to their fond memories. No sooner have you disappeared than you become one such memory yourself.
The road obeys the wilfulness of the fjords, which have eaten impractically deep into the coastline. It’s a long drive to get anywhere. Sometimes, a sheep appears round a corner, sometimes there’s not a soul in sight. Nature lays claim to older rights than civilization, which as a result still strikes a defensive posture. Unhurriedly, you move back down the evolutionary scale, to a state where everything still consisted of ice, fire, ash, sand and magma. Harbour installations stand rusting in the inlets, with plaster flaking off the walls and children staring out at empty streets.
Isafjördur is situated at the end of all the roads, and all the fjords. This isn’t a town; it’s a deposition of things that the icy sea has washed up. This settlement even has the fjord in its name, which means ‘ice fjord’
. It’s been built in the form of a semicircle on a sandbank, which has constantly had to be raised and now juts far out into the fjord. In the ninth century, the town’s founder, a man called Helgi, supposedly found a harpoon here, which he named ‘Skutull’. Apart from that, he hadn’t done much, it seems. He was followed by traders from other regions of Iceland, as well as Norway and Denmark, and, later still, merchants from Germany and England also established commercial settlements in this area.
What was life like here back then? The town records for the year 1656 note that one Jón Jónsson Jr. was burned at the stake in Isafjördur, alongside his father, for possessing books of witchcraft and also because the younger man had allegedly used magic symbols in order to make a girl break wind.
There’s no doubt that a state of isolation makes you susceptible to messages from the ‘other side’. For two whole months in winter, the sun skulks dejectedly below the level of the mountain ridge that surrounds the town, which lies in a basin, on three sides. The town’s streets are often covered in snowdrifts and are impassable, while even journeys across country, along the numerous gravel tracks that meander along the shores of the fjords, become extremely arduous. There are guardian spirits who help ward off the challenges of cosmic and human nature, and who hover above the hospital, the school, playgrounds and the old people’s home, and you can also follow footpaths leading to the realms of the fairies and the elves on maps specially produced for the purpose.
Today, this centre of the Westfjorde has fewer than 4,000 inhabitants. From the eighteenth century on, this region, which was rich in cod stocks, grew relatively prosperous on the profits of drying and curing the fish. Isafjördur was also formerly the site of Iceland’s largest shrimp processing plant. But over time this factory switched to producing deep-frozen sushi, and because fishing became subject to restrictive quotas from the 1980s on, people started leaving the town and life here isn’t like it used to be. As a rule, Icelanders aren’t keen on working in local industries anymore, so their place has been filled by immigrants from around forty different countries, who eke out a living hereabouts. Here you can find workers from the Balkans and Poland, but also from Asia and Africa, and the first of April even witnesses celebrations for the Thai New Year.
The Ends of the Earth Page 6