The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  Come the early afternoon, and I was still hanging around the cathedral, sitting down occasionally on the sun-drenched steps outside the main door to warm up, and scanning the piazza, the steps and the entrances to the alleyways to see if there was anyone keeping an eye out for me from some hidey-hole. Then I went back in again to stand in front of the Last Judgement once more, where the tide of the Damned still hadn’t receded, and a monumental miniature, showing a single couple, began to attract my gaze, ever more insistently.

  It was the pair of figures whom Signorelli had placed immediately over the central axis of the throng of people. The woman is naked, with her blonde hair blowing free, and is being carried on the back of a flying devil. Her anxious gaze lights upon the eyes of the angel standing to the right of her, resplendent in his armour, while the Lucifer-like winged devil who is carrying her through the air flies on unimpeded, horned and cackling, down to the pit of hell. Yet, frozen in motion above the seething mass, with no clear provenance or destination, in this moment the pair still had the potential to be anything; even the monad of an ill-matched pair of lovers who have saved themselves from damnation and taken flight.

  But there was no escape.

  Bernadette did not appear that day at noon, nor did she show in the afternoon, nor in the evening, when the cathedral entrance was closed. In fact, she never came, and yet in her very absence she was actually present in the most appropriate way. I was disappointed and relieved in equal measure, caught the train back to Rome as darkness fell and from there continued my journey back home the next day. There was no news awaiting me there, and when a fat letter in a padded envelope finally arrived a fortnight later, I didn’t bother opening it for several days – out of spite, for sure, but also because, standing in front of the Last Judgement in Orvieto that day, I’d grown tired of this correspondence, and decided to draw a line under it for good.

  But when, in a weak moment, I did open the letter after all, an avalanche of inserts fell out into my lap: the photo of a girl at a prom; an empty packet of ‘Lucky Strikes’; a piece of silver paper; a picture of a sleeping child under an alarm clock; a drawing of a knight beneath a tree and one of a hunted deer; two plasters; a sketch of a screaming woman holding a flower and standing in the middle of a field where all the trees were screaming too; a label reading ‘Kalamata Crown Figs shipped by Jenny’; a photo copy of the address printed on the side of an eraser; a postcard with the logo of the Universal Postal Union; a piece of animal hide; a drawing of a traffic intersection with a level crossing; pictures of packers and flamingos; a colour photo showing exhausted fishermen in a boat; a copy of a painting of Dante by Signorelli; a snapshot of a summer party at a swimming pool set above an ocean; a clipping of a newspaper headline ‘Ex-altar boy steals $15 from plates’; an illustrated copy of the book Little Black Sambo, covered in kids’ scribbling; a white envelope inscribed with the word ‘Bernadette’, and inside it a blank, transparent sheet of white paper; pages torn from an old book on dog training; a list of foreign words and their translations – epigone: descendant, plethora; too full, provenance: foresight; taciturn: silent, élan: vigor; exhume: dig up, zeitgeist: ghost of time, obfuscating: to make obscure, nemesis: goddess of vengeance. The package also contained: a flag with a skull on it; an old card with the legend Volkstracht von Schapbach; sheets from a Chinese calendar; turn-of-the-century photos of children playing on a sandy beach; a drawing of a naked woman embracing a clothed man, and on the reverse a small woman riding on the back of a huge man; the draft of a logo for ‘National Pornographic’ magazine; a photo of Saturn; a skeleton playing the bongos; a picture of a Boeing 737–200; a drawing of a man holding in his arms a naked woman in the posture of the Deposition of Christ; a man and woman in front of an enormous heart; a woman standing screaming between pieces of furniture; a sketch of a rowing shadow beneath smiling stars, on the back of which were two men in a boat, pushing clouds along with the oars; some drawings with crêpe paper stuck over them; biblical quotations; a notebook full of illegible jottings, which on one page had notes under the heading ‘soundless exercises’; a drawing of a cat tearing its fur out because it was being bitten by mice; more lists of foreign words; additional photos of flamingos; more sketches of planets.

  The twelve-page, densely written letter that came with all this stuff had been franked in the USA. The handwriting was so regular in its messiness I found it as pleasing to look at as the hieroglyphs on an obelisk. Her imagination rummaged through the flotsam of her life, and I kept reading dutifully in the hope that this rambling narrative might ultimately offer some explanation of her failure to appear in Orvieto. But instead she kept talking about her feeling of disorientation whenever she woke from sleep, when her desire was at its height and yet her sense of shame was no less strong. To try and explain her confusion, she gave the name ‘Saturn passing’ to one aspect of this phase, though she also called Saturn ‘the planet of wisdom’.

  She wrote about a boyfriend she’d had at high school, Chester, the next in line of the Unredeemed, the Platonic ones. After he passed his high school leaving exams with flying colours, she decided give herself to him, completely. But then Chester, who waited so patiently, had to go abroad all of a sudden, ‘and I really lost it,’ as Bernadette put it. The letter went on to say that he returned as a ‘spiritual guest’. This time the story ended with her finishing high school, determined to go to Europe and work as an au pair and get herself a real love life under the heathen skies of the Old World. It had proved impossible for her to synchronize living in the USA, going to university and a having a sex life.

  So during the next strong phase of ‘Saturn passing’ she’d set off for Italy and drifted around.

  ‘But when I look back,’ she wrote, ‘all I had left from that whole time was your address. Peter gave me a false telephone number and vanished without trace. So I came up to Florence to look you up, then to Rome, but you weren’t there either, and then on to Orvieto, and Perugia – where on earth could you be? Finally I saw you standing in an oriel window on the road to Assisi. But because I was a hitchhiker travelling in someone else’s car, I couldn’t pull over and stop. So I flew back home with your words ringing in my ears. Had you spoken those words, or had Peter translated them for me, had they resounded in my head, or had I written them down from your thoughts?’

  She didn’t say what those words were, as her handwriting went totally off the rails at this point.

  ‘I surrender. I submit. Daniel was the first man I gave myself to, but he always had more layers of clothes on under his clothes, and I could never really get to him properly. Peter was my sin. Those two had to come first in order to clear the world between you and me. It’s all good. Don’t be angry, because they led me to you, my first true love. I’m ready. Forgive me, it took me all this time to catch my breath. Now I surrender to you and to love and to life.’

  She’d added her name at the bottom, a scribble that tailed off sharply to the right. No further explanation followed, but the presence of a third party was palpable in the lines she’d written. And that was the end of her letter.

  A month later, I turned on my answerphone to hear the harsh voice of a clearly older American woman, who told me in a resolute tone that a ‘travel agent’ who’d been on the ball had fortunately refused to accept Bernadette’s recent flight booking to Rome, because she seemed so distraught and confused. I should take my cue from him. He’d alerted the family, and they had decided to ‘get this young lady into custody’ and ‘put her in professional hands’. At present, then, Bernadette was in an ‘institution’, and in urgent need of psychiatric care. The last thing she needed were my irresponsible letters, which, like last week’s and the one from the week before, were no help at all, but only made things worse. ‘For Bernadette’s own protection,’ she said, ‘if you choose not to desist from such outpourings, we’ll have no choice but to burn your letters. And we also reserve the right to take legal action against you if need be.’

 
; At that point, I hadn’t written a letter to Bernadette for the past eight weeks.

  Years later I received an air mail letter from the States. My address had been printed on the envelope in capital letters, with all the painstaking care of a child clutching a pencil in its fist. The only thing inside was a reproduction of Signorelli’s devil with the broad wings, carrying off a long-haired woman over the struggling crowd and into the fires of hell. A scribbled note below read: ‘Saturn passing’. The angel of salvation in armour off to the right wasn’t in the picture.

  The North Pole

  Contemplation

  This July, the city has all the trappings of November. A halfhearted, chilly drizzle descends over Moscow, and beneath the pallid, swinish sky, even the colourful modern estates in the affluent suburbs, with their apartment blocks banked up like amphitheatres and the geode-like jerry-built highrises on the city outskirts – indeed, the whole human anthill that is the Russian capital – take on a uniform greyness. But in the interstices between buildings, the billboards advertising liquor and mobile phones sit up on high like Vestal Virgins and reign supreme.

  On the streets beneath them, the careworn, even brutalized faces of both the new and the old proletariat – those who can still remember a time when politics claimed to speak in their name – are milling about. Back in the old days it was seen as a mark of distinction to have a face like this, a haggard, exhausted mien. In the meantime, impoverishment can be seen in people’s clothes and beards. Every car contains a small family. In every bus window, you see a drinker with a boxer’s nose. And in the gaps between the vehicles buildings with their ribs showing.

  The first time we set eyes on one another – we little group of travellers who variously call our impending trip together an ‘extreme holiday’, an ‘expedition’, an ‘adventure’, an ‘annual vacation’ or a ‘dream journey’ – is in a nameless Russian hotel. I leave the breakfast room and go to drink my coffee at a window table in the anteroom. A wiry blonde woman of about sixty, but who looks somewhat younger, joins me, lights up a cigarette and, drawing on it with a pained expression, remarks:

  ‘You and I should stick together.’

  ‘Yes we should,’ I reply, ‘the thing is, though, I’m a non-smoker.’

  ‘Well, get a load of that!’ she chuckles. I haven’t heard that expression in years.

  To get to the airport, we choose the bus with an English commentary, sit together, queue behind one another at the desk, and take adjoining seats on the Tupolev to Murmansk, commenting on what we see out of the windows, and in the pauses between looking out, regaling one another with selected excerpts from our lives. Marga is Austrian and was formerly a flight attendant; she quit the airline she worked for on bad terms, but got a handsome pay-off and now helps out in a dance club. She’s unmarried and childless and this is already her second trip to the polar regions. Before, she got as far as Franz Josef Land. That was three summers ago. The expedition leader on that occasion was Victor Boyarski, the most experienced of all Arctic explorers, a man who once reached the Pole on a dogsled, and sub-sequently was received by presidents and fêted by the world at large. He’ll also be heading up our trip.

  ‘You’ll like him. He’s waiting in Murmansk for us. Let’s see if he remembers me!’

  Seen from the outside, the Tupolev is as sleek as a paper aeroplane. But inside, the cabin smells of smoke, all the springs in the seats have collapsed and my tray has lost its clip and only stays in position against the seat back in front of me because the vomit that a previous passenger deposited on it has spread over its surface and gained adhesion as it dried, holding it in place. When I finally manage to unstick the tray, the dried, congealed mass shatters into shards and tumbles into my lap. The seats themselves have seen better days, too. Where there should be upholstery, there’s now bare metal, and the foam rubber filling has either crumbled away or been wrapped with black insulation tape to keep it from deteriorating further. In fact, only the heavily made-up air hostesses in their vivid blue uniforms and their aubergine-coloured wraps look so wholesome and fresh that they could have been imported from some other hygiene zone. The carpet under their feet is heavily patterned with Persian motifs, but is badly stained.

  Marga looks out of the window.

  ‘“As the crow flies” really does mean just that over deserts and Arctic tundra.’

  Our fellow travellers, some of whom are clearly seasoned tourism snobs, chat occasionally to one another, putting on airs like they’re God Almighty:

  ‘Then we did the South Pole, then went through the Northwest Passage, and after that it was Patagonia, and two years back we climbed Kilimanjaro …’

  You can hear the conquistadors in their conversation, and picture a hand sticking little flags all over a map, but the tales only have value in so far as they relate to the person telling them, and people like this invariably take one bit of their story from the television, and characterize another as either ‘indescribable’ or ‘unbelievable’. Evidently, several of the people here, finding themselves in extreme places, felt extremists themselves, and so neglected to answer the basic question all travellers should pose themselves: Where was I?

  Marga complains that the springs in her seat are digging into her buttocks. The steward gives her a sullen look as he listens to her complaint, sensing an imminent attack on Aeroflot or on the Russian Empire as a whole. Then he shoots her a fleeting look of concern and shrugs his shoulders, a mere two centimetres up at most, by way of apology.

  ‘What an apparatchik!’ groans Marga and, advancing as the crow flies between two clichés, adds: ‘the next moment he’ll start crying, you wait and see.’

  But she isn’t really very worked up, or at least can’t be bothered to take the matter any further. She far prefers spying out her fellow travellers from her inwardly superior standpoint and concerning herself with what they might be saying or thinking. From this vantage point she also casts her gaze on us:

  ‘They’ll probably be saying that I’ve hooked myself a toy-boy,’ she whispers, briefly resting her slim hand on my forearm. ‘I just know it. All you’ve got to be is unmarried and have no children, and the gossiping starts. I can hear them at it right now.’ At Murmansk airport, we are once more divided between two tour buses. The area around where we’ve landed is barren and undeveloped, and the airport terminal is not much larger than a filling station. But the broad, sweeping bay with its scrubland and bright silver-birch woods and meadows spreads out generously below us around inlets of the Arctic Ocean. From here, only the town itself comes across as grey and pragmatic, unaffected by a sense of idealism, a defrosted organism that swallows the light between its walls – in other words an individual of a city, original in its unloveliness. No sooner has the bus started up than a Russian travel guide stands up from the front seat and greets us:

  ‘Dear friends. As we drive into town, I’ll point out one or two of our notable places of interest.’

  ‘Places of interest!’ scoffs a cocky Berlin voice from the back seat of the bus. ‘Can’t wait to see those!’

  In the absence of anything attractive about the city itself, the travel guide imbues every word she utters with the utmost charm. In fact, her words are more enticing than what they’re meant to describe, and so it’s her that ends up being the real feature of interest.

  ‘On the right here you can see a town house with its garden. Then comes a dacha. And next door to it you have an example of standard bureaucratic architecture.’

  She pronounces everything likes she’s reading fluently from the works of Gorky, Gogol or Chekhov, only then to take any shine off her pronouncements by saying: ‘You won’t see anything special on the way into town. We grow normal vegetables here. In the city, you’ll also notice one or two Norwegian filling stations.’

  ‘The old dear’s talking such a heap of shit,’ the Berliner announces.

  Beaming, the guide turns to her left and waves her hand in the direction of a scrubby hollow the bus
is passing, an empty aisle of nothingness running between industrial complexes and high-rise blocks.

  ‘Here you can see the Valley of Contentment, as we call it, where our athletes train for the Olympic Games.’

  This calls forth a ripple of laughter in the bus. Valley of Contentment, indeed! A clump of birch trees on a patch of worn grass is the only remotely homely-looking thing about the place.

  ‘Contentment! Now I’ve heard everything!’

  ‘And this,’ the guide continues tirelessly at the next roundabout, ‘is the Square of Five Corners. But, my friends, you won’t find five corners here.’

  Today, a circus has set up its big top on this square, a circus that specializes in singing sea mammals.

  ‘You can have seals kiss you!’

  ‘I’d just as soon kiss the old dear,’ the Berliner chimes in, still casting around for accomplices. His companion grins at this splendidly vulgar alpha male and seems ready to become a disciple.

  ‘Now we’re entering the city’s northern district, which isn’t so attractive …’

  ‘Just like you,’ the Berliner shouts.

  He goes on, gazing from afar out of the bus, to declare the place ‘uninhabitable’. But the travel guide looks serious. She tells us how many people have left the city in recent years, and how hard it’s becoming for those who remain:

  ‘But then it’s not always easy for you in the West, either!’

  ‘Oh, she’s priceless!’ the Berliner calls out to the bus in general, then turning to the front, quips: ‘People in glasnost houses shouldn’t throw stones!’

  He then pronounces everything that takes place within these walls to be a life not worth living. At the top of his voice; he couldn’t care less if she hears him.