The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  ‘Anyhow,’ the Blocker abruptly launches into his monologue, ‘last year we did the Northwest Passage …’

  And so the two feral extreme explorers, with images of their weeks of crossing the pack ice fresh in their mind’s eye, find themselves obliged to put on glazed, affable expressions and listen to what a savings bank branch manager from Bielefeld did on his vacation last summer.

  The sea remains calm. A few chunks of ice drift across its smooth surface. Because the Yamal is currently at anchor, it’s easy for us to see at what a leisurely pace the ice floes float past us on the crystal-clear water. Occasionally, we glimpse the flora of Franz Josef Land poking out above the crest of a bank of cloud. At such times, the travellers are wont to ask:

  ‘Why can’t we go ashore too?’

  Rather than trust the expertise of the polar professionals, they suspect them of showing bad faith. An American woman in Birkenstock sandals says of the explorers:

  ‘Sure, it’s great that they’ve done all these things, but I want to do them too!’

  She compensates for her displeasure by taking pictures of fog banks – with the flash on.

  Then the two men are bade farewell with a round of applause and ferried over to the island in the Zodiac. All that remains behind are icefields, and snow gardens bathed in a floury light.

  ‘Nobody could possibly return unchanged from a journey like the one they’ve been on …’ says Marga.

  I look at her, but I really can’t get a handle on this woman. At times, her conversation is nothing but an incessant stream of small talk, but at others she can suddenly come across as genuinely unconventional. Invariably fast-talking, and with alert, darting eyes, she is needy without wanting to appear so. She’s quick both to take offence and to take an arrogantly condescending or even indignant attitude towards anything and everything, yet in the very next instant she can appear genuinely interested, knowledgeable and enthusiastic in an informed way.

  ‘I’ve got the photos with me that I took three years ago. If you want to come to my cabin to have a look at them …’

  ‘I’ll be sure to do that. In the next couple of days or so.’

  ‘Are you worried about being alone with me in my cabin?’

  ‘Of course I am. You’re a scamp, you are!’

  An uncle of mine always used that expression for unruly children. She threw back her head and laughed, which I found charmingly unrestrained. Then the laugh became something of a grimace and vanished in an instant. It was clearly more a case of her retrieving from memory the muscular contraction necessary for the act of laughing than of genuine laughter. It’s symptomatic of the melancholic mood that’s evidently taken hold of her right now that she starts telling me about a time when things weren’t going so well for her. Three years ago on Franz Josef Land was one such time as well, but she’d managed to shake it off:

  ‘When all’s said and done, the sun rises and the moon sets for me just like everyone else.’

  ‘Not here it doesn’t,’ I said flatly, given that it remained as bright as day even after midnight.

  ‘My mistake,’ she replied. ‘If I seem a bit odd to you, please think nothing of it, it just comes from lack of sleep.’

  She’d said something similar to me on the first day of the cruise, but then it was down to lack of food, and the fact that her blood-sugar levels were low. Even so, today she skipped another meal, and again the following day. She was nowhere to be seen on board. When she reappeared, though, she was very upbeat: sure she’d been out on deck! And of course she’d seen the amazing ice sculptures! She’d just wanted to be on her own for a bit, down on a lower deck.

  And indeed, for half a day, it had been like we were passing through a gallery. Scattered over the dark surface of the water were the forms left behind by melting ice, sculptures modelled by heat, the wind and the current, all as quirky in their own way as Satie’s Gymnopédies. The pallid outgrowths of the Arctic Sea, they bodied forth from its black depths and have been silently shaped by the wind and the waves.

  ‘No,’ Marga announced. She wouldn’t be disembarking. She had a morbid fear of helicopters.

  ‘Stewardess Syndrome, you know,’ she explained.

  No, we didn’t know, but she just shrugged her shoulders like she was surrendering to a stronger power.

  ‘Look,’ she said, trying another tack, ‘you’ve all seen that woman, haven’t you, her over there who gets herself all done up like a tart?’

  We all looked over in the direction of a bottle-blonde woman who was travelling on her own and who tended to stay aloof from the rest of the group; she was well turned-out, yet quite unselfconsciously kept primping and preening herself with all the insistence of a guillemot. Marga was convinced she must be a porn star who had retired from the business vowing that she’d never have sex again and that love held no interest for her any more. Now she was standing by the railing dressed as if ready for a film take, in a sable cap, a jumpsuit and a fur bolero jacket and staring sombrely at the monotonous sight of the glacier walls. The woman later turns out to be a widow from the Black Forest.

  Now Marga’s speech is sometimes quite confused. When she begins an anecdote over dinner, she speaks in a loud voice to draw attention to herself. She also wades straight into the story, insisting on everyone’s rapt attention, but then she loses her thread, the story fizzles out without a punchline, it fragments into sub-plots or just runs into the sand, often with the words: ‘Anyway, you know how things go, you plug away at things, and then …’

  One time, four of us were sitting together; two Russian women had joined us. We were laughing a lot, but you could tell the strain it was putting on Marga.

  ‘Which period of history would you most liked to have lived in?’ one of the Russians asked.

  ‘In my period,’ said Marga.

  ‘What, you mean today?’

  ‘Absolutely. What would I have seen a hundred years ago? The beginning of women’s liberation and the health food movement? Nowadays, I’ve got a ringside seat at the end of the world. Now that really will be something worth seeing!’

  Saying this, she gives a rather sinister little laugh and looks at the ice, which at this point in our journey should be a solid frozen sheet, but instead is floating past us in isolated pieces. Marga’s stories have no people in them. There are no bosses, or family members, no friends and no lovers. Only on the middle finger of her left hand does she wear a silver ring depicting two lovers intertwined.

  ‘This ring is from Tel Aviv,’ she tells us, draping her hand over the edge of her diary, which is filled with her large, regular and rather tedious-looking handwriting.

  For the whole of the next day we don’t set eyes on one another. But on the evening of the following day, she appears at dinner dressed all in snow-white and lays claim to a window seat simply by nodding her chin at the chair she wants to occupy. It’s odd, because she says nothing, merely standing between the chair and the radiator and waiting for Viktor, the Swiss, to get up and switch seats. Then, in very fast and whispered tones, she harangues Viktor’s wife Hanni, who only contradicts her once. And even then it’s only a mild objection. But it’s met with a whole dumb pantomime of outrage on Marga’s part, who stares at the rest of us silent onlookers, first imploringly and then furiously, before standing up and leaving the table, her napkin still clutched in her clueless hands.

  ‘What was all that about?’

  Hanni shakes her head. She hadn’t understood much of Marga’s diatribe; most of it had been dialect, and the rest …

  ‘I don’t think we have to spell it out. She sees you as some kind of threat.’

  We stroll out on deck. The clouds aren’t sitting on the horizon line, but seem rather to be dipping below it. Then a dirty cloudsponge wipes across the horizon, leaving behind streaks, while heaps of cumulus swell up and a rainbow makes a sudden appearance. The black banks of cloud, which have developed from what was just a narrow strip, form a striking backdrop to it until they too
dissipate and the rainbow fades and vanishes. The remaining clouds take on new layers of colour before fraying and melting away. New, sharp-edged cloud banks now weigh on the horizon line and dim the light until the wind draws a pink feather boa over them as well. The ship is accompanied by a flight of seagulls in formation, which abruptly drop down en masse and land on the water.

  All of a sudden, the captain’s guttural Russian crackles out of the loudspeakers on deck; its brusque and imperious tone tells even the non-Russians on board that this is no routine announcement but the real thing, a shouted emergency order that is being urgently relayed from one post to the next.

  The icebreaker shudders, and so abruptly are the engines slammed into reverse that the whole bow section shakes. The sea boils up dirtily at the stern, and chunks of ice that have already been broken up are sucked into the undertow of the propellers, while up ahead the bows heel drunkenly to port. The turning manoeuvre is hardly recognizable as such; the vessel has to take so wide a curve and execute its turn over such a wide expanse of sea that it almost seems like it’s trying to take in the horizon, too. And indeed, eventually we really do catch sight of the changed course we’ve steered, a channel filled with smashed ice, far-off to port. But by this stage, nobody’s paying any attention to the exertions of the ship anymore.

  ‘Look, there’s someone in the water!’ someone shouts out, and someone else yells: ‘Man overboard!’ which is then passed on in several languages.

  Groups of passengers, their faces and body language frozen in shock, gather at the railings on both sides of the ship. Their exaggerated slowness, their literal petrification, reveals how they’ve been seized, gripped by a shock wave that has its crystallization point out there at some unidentifiable spot on the ice.

  Sailors rush down the gangways, asking questions in Russian and shoving the rubberneckers back into their cabins. When Victor Boyarski dashes past, asking ‘Who? Who is it?’ I call out that he should check in Marga’s cabin first. He nods at this, sober and self-controlled.

  A quarter of an hour later the rescue boat has been lowered. Standing in its bows, two sailors have endeavoured to catch hold of Marga’s blouse with boathooks, and are now busy manoeuvring her body between the large ice floes towards the boat. She’s dressed in the outfit she had on at dinner; her white jeans with a white blouse over them. As she’s dragged aboard with a large boathook, her arms are spread out like a Christ figure. This is how her body is recovered. Right up to the last, her face has centred on a point just above the root of her nose.

  So here we are, in the middle of the Arctic ice with a dead body on board. The authorities in Murmansk are notified. But we’re only allowed to proceed on our way once the captain has testified that the dead woman’s cabin door was locked from the inside, and therefore that nobody on board could have thrown her overboard into the ice.

  The remaining travellers stand on deck and sweep together the shards of their shattered memories of Marga. With hindsight, all those things she said which sounded merely whimsical at the time, just like bees in her bonnet, are now clearly identifiable as a direct path toward her self-destruction. Marga’s life can only be given some semblance of order from its endpoint, posthumously. All the little manifestations of incomprehensibility and distractedness were stations on a headlong trajectory of someone who was beyond help, and whose ‘odd’ propensity for standing by the railing and gazing down at the water people noticed repeatedly. Days are reconstructed on which not a soul saw anything of Marga, on which she must have been just sitting in her cabin … and doing what? Maybe working up the courage to end it all?

  But what are we to make of her gentler, unguarded moments? There was that naked couple cast in silver on her ring, for instance. When she’d told me about Tel Aviv, where she claimed to have acquired it, the look in her eyes told me it was a gift, and as she was talking, she kept stroking the ring and smiling. Another time we were standing at the railing. She was trying and failing to capture the view on her little camera; eventually she put the camera aside and said:

  ‘The ends of the earth really don’t work in portrait format.’

  I’d wanted to know whether she still found travelling as easy as she always had. Her answer surprised me: she claimed travelling had got more difficult for her because she now had real trouble deciding where she’d be welcome and who she should revisit. That was the first time any other people had featured in her reply and, even then, they were only mentioned in this questionable context.

  The passengers tell one another how shaken up they are. A British woman can’t stop sobbing, and incessantly keeps saying ‘Not again … not again …’ We ultimately learn that this is now the third time she’s been on a ship where another passenger has died. Another woman is furious at Marga’s selfishness for not considering how her suicide would affect her fellow passengers’ holidays:

  ‘Some people have saved up for years to come on this trip, and then this!’

  Another traveller philosophises:

  ‘Only this afternoon, we met two men who risked their lives at the Pole. They were so full of vigour, so adventurous and so life-affirming, and a few hours later one of us ends up dead under the ice.’

  A fourth says, without emotion: ‘People just don’t do that.’

  A fifth confesses:

  ‘I know this is going to sound dreadful, but for me this is the first highlight of the trip.’

  A sixth says it is now our duty as citizens not to let this incident ruin our trip, and tries to move seamlessly on to routine matters:

  ‘Look, I can understand anyone being in shock right now. But, guys, whatever you do don’t forget to apply sunscreen – that’d be another way of committing suicide.’

  Two fellow travellers come up to me and silently console me.

  A French woman takes a new tack, claiming that Marga had now found her salvation, her suffering was over, and we didn’t need to mourn her any more.

  ‘It’s what she would have wanted’, she says. But in truth, none of us really know what Marga would have wanted.

  Before dinner, the captain gives a short speech:

  ‘Good evening, everybody.’

  He goes on to say that he’s sorry to have to inform us that the crew could do nothing except recover the body of ‘Margarethe’. The insurance company will decide where her final resting place should be. For the present, her body would be flown by helicopter to a storage facility on Franz Josef Land.

  ‘Good evening.’

  Later, a piano and violin duo play a selection of old classical, movie and swing favourites, and below decks an Austrian expert delivers a lecture on the topic: ‘How Animals and Plants Survive Arctic Conditions.’

  Our sense of unease lends all these proceedings an air of moral ambiguity, given that the yardsticks of piety have not yet been defined: Is it too soon to start laughing again? Then again, the common wisdom is that the show must go on.

  Viktor Boyarski tells me that Marga tried to jump into the ice on the expedition three years ago. On that occasion, she was saved. He’d only recalled this incident when he welcomed her on board this time. What’s more, in the interim, she’d clearly done her homework on the properties of Arctic ice, since the place she’d jumped in was precisely where the ice floes were packed sufficiently densely to make a successful rescue unlikely.

  When we dock again in Murmansk, the authorities will want to question me and a couple of the other passengers, but particularly me, since according to witnesses I was Marga’s friend. I’ll be required to sit in the captain’s cabin and provide answers to various subtle questions, which will find their laborious way via an interpreter into the official report and hours later will need to be signed off by me as an accurate account of events. The crew will be exonerated of any negligence in the matter, and the finding reached that Marga, acting of her own volition, could not reasonably have been prevented from taking her own life.

  The morning after her death, it is still very early when I h
ear the approaching helicopter. The day is suitably grey, and the ship is entering a debris field of scattered ice sculptures, glassy formations in white, algal green and blue, but occasionally also yellow or brown from the guano of seabirds – the black-footed kittiwake, the northern fulmar, the thick-billed murre and also the skuas, whose speciality it is to harass other birds and force them to regurgitate their food so that they can then feed on it.

  The wag from Berlin is standing alone at the railings. He greets me with the words: ‘The early bird catches the worm!’ but in the next instant his eye is caught by his Stuttgart drinking buddy from the evening before:

  ‘Oho, there’s a sight for sore eyes!’

  The light today sometimes spreads out in brilliant sheets, and sometimes in frosted-glass reflections. On the still-unfrozen water, the wind leaves a succession of new textures, on which the crystalline chunks float, embedded in frozen frost-magma. This morning, I open my porthole, and an ice floe floats by, with a man’s footprint clearly visible on it, the fragment of a sequence of steps that disappeared somewhere in time. We navigate the landscape in which the tracks of so many well-known and unknown people have vanished. How many famous deaths there have been here, but also how many trawlermen or deckhands from whalers have drifted away on ice floes? At best, their disappearance was only noted in a commercial shipping register.

  ‘She clearly planned it all out in advance,’ says Viktor, who wants to understand my relationship with Marga a bit better. ‘Did you know she had a twin sister? Do you want to know the first thing she said when we told her what happened here? She said it didn’t surprise her one bit.’

  This is the sister who, months later, I’ll walk up to on a station platform and be struck dumb by the sight of this revenant, this living-dead spitting image of Marga, who approaches me with her hands in her pockets and just says: ‘So?’

  It’s one degree below zero and the wind is blowing harder now. But visibility is good, and there’s a diffuse light over this lake region. A strip of pale yellow sun glows on the horizon like light shining through a crack under a door then is promptly extinguished. We pass monumental, tectonically layered plates of ice; black pools; whimsical formations of hard-packed snow, covered with grated ice splinters; panicles of ice spliced into fibrous bundles; miniature mountains; slumped table mountains; and in between whiles, these extensive black lake areas open up, over which the ship glides quietly and the gentlest of bow-waves lap against the distant snow coasts. These pools and basins are dotted about like the patches on a cow’s hide; sometimes, as they’re picked out by a flash of sunlight, they’ll shimmer briefly and then fade once more.