The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  And what about winters here? She tells us about winters when it’s been so cold that you can only stay outside for short spells at a time, and you find yourself having to break even shopping trips into stages. For the seven months that winter lasts here, shelters are even put up on the street so people can warm up quickly. Sure, sometimes far too much vodka is drunk in this season, but with this in mind, policemen are stationed in doorways to come to people’s aid if a drinker turns violent. Even so, violence here isn’t markedly worse than in other big cities; people are far more worried about potential food shortages.

  ‘Allow me to clear my throat,’ gasps the Berliner, and gives a hacking cough. ‘I know what the score is here: it’s a case of raise your glasses and cheers everybody, the management’s sozzled!’ We’re approaching the harbour, which used to be a nuclear exclusion zone. Nowadays, though, it’s like a ships’ graveyard, full of rusting barges, naval patrol boats, tugs and icebreakers. The shore is lined with policemen, who are young and yet still scowl, and in the harbour itself lie several high-legged floating cranes that remind you of insects. They’re a permanent feature of the port. Beneath them cower the hastily welded rumps of new vessels taking shape, looking like metal sculptures by Jean Tinguely.

  The bright red atomic icebreaker Yamal is a real beauty amid the dull-painted naval vessels in Murmansk harbour. On either side of this leviathan’s bows, a grinning set of shark’s teeth has been painted, a childish gag that has transformed this floating nuclear power station into a kind of toy Matchbox steamer. The gangway up to the deck is a walkway that leads diagonally up the side of the hull. At the top, jovial and full-bearded, waits Victor Boyarski, shaking everybody’s hand as they step aboard. When he sees Marga, his expression freezes. Then he extends his long arm and shakes her solemnly by the hand. He’s recognized her all right, but it’s not exactly what you’d call a warm reunion.

  Our sleep that night feels like a midday nap; after all, the sun never even gets close to touching the horizon. The ship smells of salt and diesel. The thick red paintwork of the Yamal has blistered in places, which have then hardened, broken, and been painted over again. The Russian ensign is blatting away on the mast, and the fog is so dense this morning that you can barely see fifty metres ahead. It’s as if we’ve been caught frozen in motion, as there’s no horizon line visible to give us any sense of progress. Not even the tone of the grey surrounding us changes; it simply remains unrelentingly grey between the sky and the sea.

  I have occupied cabin number 39, which at other times is used by researchers, engineers or ship’s officers; it’s a bare, purely functional set of rooms. Any romanticism here is in the names: the fan is called ‘Zephir’, and the hairdryer ‘Scarlett’. I slept on a sofa bed, made up for me by a robust Russian woman, a single mother from Murmansk. By its right-hand corner stands a Formica table, and a fresh, icy wind is blowing in through a small, open porthole. I sit down on a rickety office chair and stare out, happy that we’ve now irrevocably set sail into Nothingness. The feeling of doing something desperate, of not being able to dodge it any longer, that’s the thing above all that gives this trip the flavour of an ‘expedition’. Indeed, the very term ‘research ship’ serves to rein in any expectations of comfort we might have.

  ‘So what?’ Marga says when I chat to her the next morning. She’s quite the old hand, and has seen it all before. She knows all about the cabins and the routines on board ship, and there are even some crew members who acknowledge her with glances. Yet she keeps herself to herself. It’s only me whom she has rather high-handedly shielded from the other passengers, even physically putting herself between me and them, while at mealtimes she searches out a table apart from the others, where she’ll sit and talk quickly and aimlessly about past injustices in her life, and tell me about stupid things our fellow travellers have said or done, and less frequently about the icy landscape that awaits us. Her attention takes on something of a manic air.

  After two days I begin to widen my circle of acquaintances, moving to stand beside other people and switching my dining table. Those who are needy, yearning, and hungry for new images always form the most interesting groupings. At mealtimes now, I mostly sit with Hanni and Victor, two well-travelled Swiss with tattoos from Burma and a Tibetan flag in their luggage, which they plan to raise at the North Pole. They’re content just to stand at the railing and view the scene.

  Up there, near the bridge, there are always a couple of travellers to be found, bracing themselves and narrowing their eyes as they face into the icy wind. The Berliner raps his knuckles on part of the ship’s superstructure:

  ‘“Want a safe and steady course?/ Then travel on the Iron Horse!” Well, this looks pretty fresh, doesn’t it? All in one piece, and it’s still working fine …’

  Everyone on this ship is visiting a different Arctic. The sailors cultivate stony faces which mask disapproval; after all, we’re encroaching on their living space and indulging in activities that count for nothing here. They’re here to earn a living, and have only contempt for those who think they’re entitled to journey to the ends of the earth in comfort. If the Northwest Passage wasn’t free at this time of year, during the summer, the icebreaker would be deployed there instead of being desecrated by tourism.

  Others are following in Fridtjof Nansen’s footsteps, or attempting to retrace the routes described in Arctic exploration journals from Robert Edwin Peary to Christoph Ransmayr. Yet others are here because they’ve already seen the Antarctic, just because they’re wealthy, because they’ve been everywhere else, or because they’ve always dreamt of coming here … There’s the industrialist, who calls the North Pole ‘something else for a change’, the middle-class traveller, who has been ‘scrimping and saving’ for years to afford this trip, the disinterested thrillseeker, the gobsmacked, the reverentially silent, the unmarried teacher, the survivor from chemotherapy, and then again there’s simply the guy with the damaged larynx, whose speech is barely intelligible and who has to have his food cut up for him with scissors. He’s always cheerful, like he owes us that because we find it so hard to understand him; it takes a dreadful amount of effort on his part to make even a single, whimsical quip.

  At seven in the morning, Viktor Boyarski rouses us with his unremittingly good-natured announcement: ‘Dobre Uta. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, it’s Tuesday the seventh of August and we’re on the correct bearing, it’s getting colder outside. You can tell we’ve left the Gulf Stream behind us now, as it’s quite calm out there. There were some icebergs off to port a few moments ago, and we’re expecting to pass the southern tip of Franz Josef Land, the famous Cape Flora, sometime early this afternoon. Get up in your own time. We’ve got a fantastic day ahead of us.’

  In the Bering Sea, a light northwesterly is blowing. It’s seven degrees above zero, we’ve still got five hundred miles to go and we’re proceeding at a slightly reduced speed of twelve to thirteen knots, because of the fog. The Svalbard island group, which means ‘The Cold Coast’, looms up. The changes in the outside world are minimal. Sometimes the fog bank drifts farther away, then it pushes up close again and swallows us. The icebreaker sends out long, hollow-sounding blasts on its foghorn into the dense bank. Sometimes we catch a brief glimpse of the horizon, then it’s gone again, obscured by the rolling clouds.

  Up on deck, we take part in compulsory drills, practising getting into lifeboats or the helicopter the ship carries. Regulations concerning what we should do in an emergency are painstakingly gone through, and those who are slow on the uptake do their bit by asking obtuse questions, all so that we won’t dwell on how long we’ve been ploughing through the impenetrable fog. The only thing to match the monotony of the aching cold, which polar explorers of the past must have felt acutely, is the monotony of the colour all around us.

  ‘That dried food tastes awful,’ says one of our number, after sampling an emergency ration from a lifeboat.

  ‘If it tasted any good, it wouldn’t last seven days,
’ replies Viktor Boyarski.

  ‘Just like it was in Prussia,’ chips in the man whom we’ve come to know as the ‘Blocker’, the manager of a savings bank branch in Bielefeld, whose friendship with several CDU backbenchers entitles him, he believes, to interrupt any conversation, which he does by laying his hand on the forearm of the person speaking.

  Then we’re sent back to our cabins like schoolchildren, where we wait in our emergency anoraks for the signal for the drill to abandon ship: seven short blasts followed by one long one – man the lifeboats!

  Today, as it happens, we’re all saved. Tannoy announcements inform us: ‘That was satisfactory.’

  It makes it sound as though not only the gaggle of passengers but also the foul weather have obligingly fallen in line with the crew’s instructions.

  The icebergs stand in shattered blocks, with glassy splinters at their base, as we drift into the zone of shelf ice, namely the ice masses which for millennia have been ‘flowing’ into the sea from the glaciers along the coast. We are witnessing the last days of shelf ice, a melting process that is exposing huge tracts of the ocean’s surface, which for at least the past 12,000 years have been covered with a 200-metre-thick layer of ice. The life forms that occur here, and which were hitherto inaccessible, form part of one of the best preserved ecosystems on the planet. Here, between siliceous sponges, a whole new fauna developed, teeming with unimagined interactions.

  Localised pockets of turbulence in the sky. In the midst of a vegetation whose morphological diversity is infinite and yet almost invisible, this voyage, which progresses through a narrow colour spectrum and in monotonous motion, is the materialization of a state of emptiness. Ultimately, even the vast vistas of ice are a landscape with no present. You see them approaching from far-off, and you see the world ending in them, and yet you still can’t get enough.

  I spend several hours every day now standing on deck. Nature spreads her silence over us, and before long all that anyone who stands by the rails long enough can hear is the sound of their own breathing. Occasionally someone will come up to you. For instance, a Russian lady approached me and began showing me every other page of a magazine article she was reading, a report on the beaches of the Costa Brava.

  ‘Just like our resort of Sochi!’

  She rummages around in her bag: ‘Thank God, I’m no early bird!’

  She says it like she’s confessing a sin. ‘Thank God!’

  So mischievous. She initiates me into the mysteries of her SIM-card. I don’t get it, as I have no mobile of my own.

  ‘Hey, that’s really old-fashioned of you. I like old-fashioned, mind. My father was a North Pole pilot!’

  Her gaze wanders over the empty sea. The ice drift wreathed in plumes of ice-fragrance. What does the dull eye of the newly hatched eider duck see as, standing on a green patch in the midst of the ice floes, it finds itself obliged to come to terms with this habitat? In this icy environment it has the eyes of a mole, and is born with an expression of self-sacrifice.

  Some years ago Viktor Boyarski and five fellow explorers from five different nations crossed the Arctic on dog sleds. He retains from this trip a physical memory of the state of utter exhaustion, and the boundless respect for those astonishing animals, the sled dogs. They are oblivious to the snow and cold. They can reduce their own body temperature in order to conserve energy, and even allow themselves to get buried in snowdrifts. Then all you need to do is pull them up in their snow holes by their leads once a day to stop them freezing themselves in with their own urine. At the end of the expedition, Viktor embarked on a tour to show off these animal heroes of his polar adventure to the whole world. However, two of the dogs expired at an airport in Cuba because it was too hot for them.

  ‘Now you’re in your mid-fifties, do you think your body would still be in good enough shape to do the same journey?’ I ask him.

  ‘My body would, for sure,’ replied Viktor, ‘but my head couldn’t cope with it now.’

  The Yamal keeps biting deeper and deeper into the polar landscape. Anything resembling nature steadily recedes. Vegetation becomes ever sparser, and most of the birds have disappeared by now. In the main, all that is left are elementary forms: crystalline, polygonal, tetrahedral. That’s another process that’s taking place on this trip: you let yourself be enclosed by the landscape; sit tight, and no sooner have you done so than it begins to gnaw into you, the interloper, searing your eyes, allowing the frost to penetrate, first through your clothes and then through your flesh. Everything that is tissue is transformed into a structure, deep frozen, spreading through living flesh like tetanus.

  The ice offers a grand opportunity to convince yourself how indifferent nature is to man, and when you come across the remains of human habitation, the first thing you find is graves, graves with rusty crosses and sentimental inscriptions. Yet far more moving are the many invisible burial sites somewhere out on the ice that have been blown away and scattered to the four winds. The headlands, where the researchers sited their polar stations, are covered with rusty nails, shellac plates, exposed film stock, crockery, bottles and machined wood. Everything becomes a souvenir for later generations, a memento of the polar region. And all that’s left here are these few objects gathered together by fate.

  We swap stories about the expedition of 1912, when just three out of the original party of ten came back, one of whom had gone mad. We argue about Amundsen and Peary and the question of who really reached the Pole first, and what significance should be ascribed to the shadow on Peary’s ‘proof photo’. Even Payer and Weyprecht’s Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872–74 is a familiar topic to those who have made the North Pole their special subject of study. And it’s true; this is a landscape replete with the words of those who lost their minds. Late summer stands as proud here as if it were winter, bestriding the land, ready at any moment to turn violent, and the mountains soar into the opalescent light of the sky, as bare and flayed as if they’d undergone radiotherapy.

  Over dinner, Marga tells me about a cruise she once went on. At night, pale little boys in white tailcoats would appear; they had pitch-black eyes, never smiled, and only ever cleared dishes away, never serving them. If the passengers hadn’t been distracted by dancing, they’d have been quite spooked. Also, according to Marga, these boys kept growing in number until the moment when the music stopped and all you could hear was the thumping of the ship’s engines.

  ‘When reality is usurped by the surreal.’

  She stares at me with her large, blue, youthful eyes: ‘Quite so.’

  The first thing I do next morning is wrench open the little porthole; the sea air streams in like it’s a liquid, and every morning it grows colder. The rapid changes in the sky ensure that every period spent out on deck is full of variety. The ship makes a soft bubbling noise, and it shudders like it’s got convulsions, trembling and rocking. Sometimes it feels like we’re living inside a sleeping dog.

  Lying dormant in each and every one of us travellers is the desire, for once in our lives, to be the first to achieve something. With mountains, it’s customarily the first blind person, the first one-legged person, the first without oxygen or the first from any particular country to climb this or that peak. Here, en route to the North Pole, one can still be a pioneer of mass tourism or instead a latecomer in the ranks of those who called this the ‘Endless Ice’ because they knew no better.

  Outside the window of my cabin, the ice floes appear green or blue, sliced apart by the prow of the ship and pitched up vertically before they sink into the black water, get pushed under the ice pack and disappear.

  The following day, the Zodiac inflatable ferries two polar explorers, a Norwegian and a Swiss, over to our ship. They’d set off on the first of May from the North Pole to retrace the route that Fridtjof Nansen took. After three and a half months, a few days ahead of schedule, they reached Cape Flora, where they’re now waiting for a Norwegian ship to pick them up and take them home. On their journey, their rubber b
oat was buffeted from time to time by walruses, and when polar bears threatened to attack their bivouac, the two men had to drive them off with pepper spray. And now here they stand, looking rather embarrassed, on the podium of the Yamal’s conference room below decks, engagingly lost for words. The Swiss explorer’s German is halting, and he’s taught the Norwegian no more than a few phrases of the language. This is the first time they’ve seen any other people since May, and here we are, gawping at them like they’re noble savages.

  ‘Have you got any questions?’

  When they go to sit down, both of them nestle approvingly in the soft chairs; they haven’t felt so comfortable in a long while. Yes, they already undertook another expedition together before, taking fifty-four days to cross the pack ice off Patagonia, so they know what’s in store for them when they finally get back to civilization. A TV camera will be waiting, lights will be trained on them, photos taken, and they’ll be called upon to answer questions, which they’ll be quite happy to do so and, always the consummate professionals, they’ll point to a forthcoming report, a log of their journey, and eventually the questioners will move on.

  They tell us about the landfast ice that they encountered, of the rise in temperature due to global warming and its effect on Arctic wildlife, especially the polar bears, which never used to venture as far as the North Pole. A tenacity that is as unforced as it is insistent shines forth from the eyes of both speakers. This is how people with a rich internal life look out at the world, men with an abundance of inner reserves. Some of the audience start to drift away. Now all the adventurers need to do is take a shower, pick up some provisions, and then go back and wait for the ship to fetch them from Cape Flora.

  Just as they’re leaving the stage, though, a small knot of passengers crowd round the men:

  ‘How did you protect yourselves against the bears at night?’

  ‘We set up tripwires around the tent, attached to fireworks …’