Hardly anyone notices that this is where the world comes to an end, for the simple reason that hardly anyone ventures here, except for a few travelling salesman, who wolf down their ‘continental breakfast’ in the town’s only hotel and don’t know where to go from there. It’s even said that a blonde woman tourist stayed here for weeks without any complaint. After her departure, a local crank rented the room she’d stayed in for one night and was discovered rubbing himself against the shower curtain that must have been clinging, just the day before, to her blonde body. The town’s sole policeman was notified, but he couldn’t find any law relating to this particular misdemeanour.
The town has a post office staffed by women who earn a living from putting the gum on the back of postage stamps. They are very straight-faced and reluctant to connect phone calls through to Europe. ‘Telephone’ in Icelandic is Sími, which literally means ‘wire’, in the same way that ‘television’ is Sjónvarp, literally ‘picture transmitter’. It’s as though modern technology has been translated into the vocabulary of the early days of tool use, though if truth be told, television is less about transmitting pictures than tranches of information. Isafjördur also boasts a small airport. From here you can fly down to Reykjavik, sure, but most of the traffic goes north, to a place that was once romantically and wholly inappropriately ‘the endless realm of ice’, that is, to Greenland, to nothingness.
During the day, Isafjördur is a remarkable little place full of shy individuals who think nothing of walking for miles carrying a garden fork or a plastic bag, who are always on the move, and who take a kindly view of village idiots. In the café, people fortify themselves with slices of layer cake, while the local youths drive their cars up and down the couple of hundred metres of main drag at their disposal, wind the windows down, crank up their car stereos and strut their stuff – but to impress who? If only it was the first week in August, when the annual swamp football tournament takes place!
As evening draws in, the town’s only cinema is showing some film or other from some far-flung country abroad. The sound wafts out onto the street. People living next door even open their windows and lean out, staring at the outside of the building and listening to the movie soundtrack. In summer, by the time the picture’s finished, the sky’s still light, but the streets are deserted.
Even at the weekend, by ten o’clock in the evening a deathly hush reigns over the town. Your gaze is drawn heavenwards; today, it’s an ochre-grey colour. In the cemetery, the children’s graves stand in rows like cots made from wood or stone, neatly enclosed like the little ones were being tucked back into the security of their sleep.
But if you step out onto the street just an hour later, it’s jam-packed and there’s a deafening roar of motorbikes. A fairground ride has even been installed on the square, a Loop-o-plane to be precise, which shakes up the drinks in the stomachs of those riding it into cocktails. Drinking yourself into a state of complete stupefaction is now the order of the day, and it’s only in the cold light of dawn – but when is that, given that it’s half-light here the whole time? – that everyone finally rolls home. Then the place reverts to playing dead once more.
The following day, it’s early afternoon before people open their curtains again, and look out once more into nothingness, to where the snowfields are waiting somewhere on Greenland’s east coast. A picket fence and a flowerbed, and beyond them the jetty and rusty boats exuding a stench that’s a blend of algal bloom and rotting fish. The entire town consists of maybe three rows of houses. Some of them have been clad against the weather with corrugated iron, while others are painted defiantly brightly. But the sea air eats away at everything. Beneath the peeling façades, a few flower borders still brave the elements, but then the place capitulates, and your eye roams out across a natural hollow unbroken by any vegetation or roads, and you catch sight of a crystal-cold strip of water, and beyond it, in silhouette, a range of hills. Hidden in its snowy valleys are animals with white coats, while in the blue waters of the sea lurk blue fish.
The world comes to a definitive end in Isafjördur. Every day here, it draws its last breath and suggests to the visitor that he should make himself scarce. On a permanent basis, mind.
When the dance music in the inn faded away, and a window casement yielded to the wind and flew open, then at last I was able to hear the flag halyard slapping against the pole. The face of the policeman, who was sitting beside me, took on a deeply reflective air. The last murder around these parts had taken place over twenty years ago. But for the boisterous drunks, he’d have nothing to do. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that, a while ago, a polar bear had drifted into the sound on a stray iceberg from Greenland, or for the arrest of the man in the shower curtain, he wouldn’t have had a great deal to talk about. As it was, he spent most of his time just looking out of the window.
‘So, you’re a lonely person,’ I said, feeling it was the right moment to get personal.
‘Why should I be lonely?’
‘Because you’re too smart not to be.’
He looked at me without really seeing me. His eyes filled with tears, which was a shame because it instantly made him withdraw inside his hard shell.
‘Alone,’ he answered, ‘did you know it comes from “all one”?’ And saying this, he swigged down the dregs of his beer, tottered in a quite un-policeman-like way onto the stage and began belting out a rumbustious version of ‘C’est la vie, c’est la vie’. I closed the window so the sound of the halyards wouldn’t put him off his singing.
God’s Window
The Final Curtain
How should things conclude? What kind of landscape should this continent come to an end in? When you’ve traversed it, from North to South, undaunted by the continent’s brooding, its unstable serenity and its inertia, and its susceptibility to emergencies – where do you then fetch up? It’s perfectly possible to cross this continent from top to bottom in such a way that all you’ve ultimately done is endure it. But it can’t just end. You cannot conceive of any chord on which it might finish, or of any crescendo or finale it might rise to. So all it can do is come to a diminuendo and just fade away.
At some indefinable point before you get to Cape Town, Africa recedes and turns into some cosmopolitan region, a neat and toothsome place full of street sweepers and wine growers, leisure activities and golf courses. And out of this decidedly Swiss ambience, Cape Town arises, with its ‘served apartments’ and ‘guarded communities’, its beachfront strip with bistros and cappuccino bars, surfers crossing the road carrying their boards, and white widows sipping colourful cocktails. Viewed from Cape Town, Africa is as far away as India.
‘Keep the Cape in Shape’, posters urge. Women doing Pilates exercises bend and stretch on the lawns, watched by groups of workmen in high-vis vests holed up in their trench in the road or sitting on two garbage dumpsters they’ve pushed together to create a makeshift seat. Their attention is split between this spectacle and the beach, which is like one big shop window, with all its tempting goods on show.
The tourists strike poses like the goddess Aurora with the sun star, reaching up and arching their backs into a hollow and stretching both arms up to the sun, as naked as the sun worshipper Fidus doing his nudist physical jerks in the open air. Look, the female tourist’s psyche whispers to her, I’m free to go native here too, while the almost totally naked athlete next to her stretches himself in the heavenly, all-embracing light.
Nowadays, the whites are well-versed in carefully regulated and well-covered-up bouts of defensive sunbathing. The sun has become more hostile and people have become more pragmatic. Now the sole purpose for the sun shining is so that designers can come up with sunglasses to protect against it, chemists can develop a sun cream with a high anti-UV factor, and sunbathers can slap on an ointment to guard against allergens.
By contrast, in old photos sunbathers can be seen sprawled-out invitingly, soaking up the sunlight; indeed, their utter devotion to it has something almos
t obscene about it, like they were positively urging the sun to ‘take’ them. It was all such a lustful business back in the old days of sunbathing. All that leg-spreading, stretching out, all that complete self-abandonment! And even now young people show their willingness and are spendthrift with their nakedness, while the old people spend their time cowering and shying away from the light. They lie there like flotsam; sometimes even a brief spell in the sun is too much for them, and they go all limp at first before getting irritable.
The black workmen on the dumpsters sit and stare at the beach like anthropologists. The white man is inherently comic, and even more so when he’s a sun worshipper. A human spatula, a gourmet sublimating himself into a delicacy by lying, turning and grilling himself in the sun, all the while promising himself beneficial effects from it.
The ‘Miner’s Convention’ is meeting in the city.
‘Is that good for business, then?’ I ask the taxi driver.
‘The Diabetes Symposium was better,’ he replies.
The local paper, the Weekend Argus, concurs with him. ’12,000 diabetics in one place’ runs the headline, ‘– that’s a real goldmine!’ Likewise, a former Miss South Africa, who now spends her time organizing charity dinners with Nelson Mandela as the star guest, rhapsodizes about the diabetics in terms that are normally reserved for political party donors in the USA. We are sitting in a large circle at a waterfront restaurant. Africa is nowhere to be seen; our field of vision is restricted to a coastal road, and we’re drinking, by turns, latte macchiato and white wines from all over the world, as well as some pretty run-of-the-mill plonk.
But if you stroll along the shore a piece, you come across a row of brightly painted bathing huts lining the beach for ‘Blacks’ or ‘Coloureds’, who are all just lumped together as ‘Africans’ here-abouts. Here they keep themselves to themselves in a kind of beach reservation, standing around for ages in the surf before decamping to little family groups huddled around a towel, where they spend their time chucking balls to one another.
I’m walking through the receding tide when a square scrap of grey paper washes up at my feet. Unfolding it, I see it’s the bleached-out passbook of a South African man born in 1981, whose stamped photo makes him look like someone who’s just been caught red-handed. Who might he be – someone who fell overboard from a ship? Perhaps it was stolen from him. Or maybe he drowned. Someone who has departed this life, either voluntarily or forcibly. Your imagination can’t help but be stimulated when the Atlantic washes up an identity card as jetsam. Later, I sit down in an internet café and try to trace the man on the highways and byways of the web. But no one of this name appears; his life remains an unsolved puzzle, a mere anecdote whose only remarkable feature is that there should be anyone in this day and age who has left behind no trace of himself and, what’s more, someone who has lost his identity in the ocean.
At the end of the street there’s an antiques shop. Among the revue photos, stuffed animals and the autobiography of a professional bird photographer entitled I Walked Into the Woods, I come across the handwritten diary of a mountaineer. Tucked inside the book is the photo of a woman, hugging the two men standing either side of her energetically, like she’s effecting a reconciliation – a kind of mountaineering Jules et Jim. I purchase the diary and start to decipher it that evening under the glare of the bedside lamp. Wouldn’t it be nice, sixty years after their climbing exploits, to pick up the trail of this trio once more? But I’m thwarted by the fact that the diary entries name not a single person; instead, the climber expended all his energy on describing his exertions, the climbs themselves, and the flora he saw en route. In these gruelling conditions, though, all individuals obey the same diktat: they become ciphers and speak in platitudes, even if those platitudes are extreme ones. But the three people in the snapshot hail from a quite different life that lies invisibly beyond the realm of exertion. So I put their photo with the passbook of the unknown South African.
The thought subsequently occurs to me that these photographic testimonials do indeed attest to something: despite leaving no footprints beyond the confines of the picture, they are still snapshots from the lives of people, and at the same time contain both life and nothingness. Strictly speaking, the first thing that strikes the observer in these frozen instants is generally a feeling of nothingness and how all-embracing it is: I glance up, for example, into the face of the South African television newsreader, and instantly what she’s talking about becomes empty and meaningless; no, rather, it’s she herself who is hollowed out and, for the duration of her appearance on the screen, is filled with non-existence, a total absence of meaning even. The same thing can recur in any given context, no matter where: a waitress balances a tray on her hand, but she’s asleep on the job; a building signifies no particular style, no expression, it may well not bespeak any great passion behind it; the voice of the pilot, the train manager, the guy sitting next to you, all of them are of such a consummate unintentionality, as if they wanted to say: Please disregard me. I’ve no desire to importune you with my presence.
Later that evening, I return to the restaurant. My friends are still sitting there, perched above a rock in the sea on which two sea lions are flapping their flippers and giving themselves over to the business of procreation. On the next table, the waxenfaced old squire with the complexion of a miso soup and a patrician mien has finally made up his mind; today, he is full of the joys of life. By contrast, his gay friend beside him is struggling to maintain a youthful front. Inevitable really, because you can see from around his eyes how old age has penetrated through them into his very being, and is making him wilt from the inside. Soon, he’ll give up bleaching his hair blond, stop tinting his long sideburns, and take off the native-chic bracelets he’s wearing. The old man bends down to his friend’s hairy ear and whispers:
‘Cheer up, Prince Grumpychops!’
At our table, Pierre, the South African golf pro, is busy recounting the remarkable spectacle of two elephants mating, which he’d witnessed on a visit to Kruger National Park.
‘It looked like one cathedral mounting another.’
‘Oh, you saw elephants,’ chips in the charity beauty queen, ‘elephants for me are like Wow!’
Suddenly there’s a shriek, high-pitched and affected like someone ostentatiously hooting at a joke. But on the table next to us, a spirit lamp has tipped over and sent a tongue of flame shooting across the table straight onto the polyester shirt of the mutton-dressed-as-lamb homosexual, and he’s screaming like someone who’s put on an exaggerated falsetto to mimic a gay man. By now, his shirt’s completely ablaze and he’s struggling to tear it off, and no sooner has he succeeded in plunging his hands into the flames and dragging it over his head than his chest hair catches fire too. The blaze licks inexorably upwards. At first it smells foul, then acrid, and his neck’s thrashing around in a ruff of flames.
Then someone appears and rips the remaining tatters of burning polyester off his chest. A lesbian giantess at a neighbouring table had been planning to use this evening to introduce her girlfriend to her parents, but hadn’t yet summoned up the courage to kiss her in the full public gaze. Now, showing great presence of mind, she rushes up and smothers the burning man in a tablecloth. For a moment he’s enveloped in the linen, a pall of smoke, and the arms of his helpers, whilst still emitting a piercing wail, but then all of a sudden he rears up, erect and pallid-skinned, from his tablecloth swaddling and stands there in his gaudy underpants, slightly askew and looking for all the world like Edvard Munch’s painting Scream. A strong smell of burning pervades the restaurant, mingled with artificial perfumes wafting in from the entranceway. A man sitting nearby leans forward to get a better view, as the victim is led away and the ashen-faced head waiter starts dashing round from table to table, desperately explaining how the accident could have happened. Meanwhile, some diners fall to speculating that this could see the place closed down for good, as the ensuing court case would be unwinnable.
F
rom the toilets, we can still hear the burned man whimpering as he kneels on the floor having his neck doused with cold water and dusted with flour, which someone has recommended as a remedy for burns, while someone else offers the opinion that ‘it’s the worst thing, I repeat absolutely the worst thing, that you could do in this case.’ Stunned, the manageress appears at our table as she goes round collecting up all the spirit lamps; as she does so, she formulates the following statement in the little-used future perfect tense:
‘This will have been a black day for us.’
Soon after, we hear the wailing of the ambulance siren, and as everyone’s gaze is drawn to the door, the lesbian giantess takes the opportunity to kiss her nonplussed girlfriend, like she’s ambushing her, and a man at the next-door table attempts a witticism: ‘Seems they even flambé the guests here.’
Some people start talking, like dogs lifting their legs.
The following day, we set off finally for the Cape, a self-evident – too self-evident – endpoint of the world. The terrain leading up to it is like Heligoland, sparse and shrouded in mist, and finally we run up against a locked gate, which according to the information on an adjacent notice board, should have been open from early morning. So is it going to be open today at all? We hang around for a while, but there’s nothing doing, so we give up.
Later that evening, returning from our excursion to the wine-growing regions, we pitch up at the farthest extremity of the Cape once more. The landscape is still timelessly covered in fog, but this time the gate’s open. A board in front of it informs us that this is the entrance to the southernmost tip of the continent. A bus full of Japanese tourists pulls up and does its utmost to fulfil every cliché in the book. Fully kitted out with umbrellas and hats, its occupants stream out, take snaps of the sign and then board the bus again straight away without going in. We, on the other hand, are keen to push on to the farthest point of the Cape. But the warden in the hut next to the barrier points at his watch.
The Ends of the Earth Page 7