The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  Yesterday, two scrawny polar bears shambled past. Can there be any more isolated animals than these, who shy away mistrustfully from the ship and lumber off into a vast expanse covering several thousand kilometres? There are no birds in the sky and the seals’ ice-holes are empty. The cracks that the ship’s bow is making in the ice fan out far ahead on both sides of the vessel, taking an unpredictable course into the distance.

  Sometimes, as we approach them, ice floes several metres thick tilt up vertically and plunge down into the black polar sea, while others, blue and weighty, slide under more recently formed plates or butt up against one another like huge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Then water gets pressed through the cracks; it’s full of plankton and occasionally we glimpse a small cod dancing in the light or flapping, exposed, in the gap between the ice blocks.

  At the ship’s bar – a two-metre-long counter in one of the gangways – Julio Iglesias is singing ‘La Paloma’, or rather he’s wallowing through his vibrato, as though he’s having to decide, from line to line, whether he wouldn’t actually prefer to expire.

  The Berliner, the Blocker and the man from Stuttgart are working their way down a line of vodka glasses. I hear the Berliner say: ‘Hmm, tastes like an old woman’s armpit.’ The Stuttgarter has a distracted air about him. His queen of hearts from Sylt suddenly appears.

  ‘Where have you been hiding?’

  ‘I’ve been reading.’

  ‘A person without a head is a cripple his whole life,’ drones the Berliner, but nobody joins in his laughter.

  The friendly wife of a businessman from Dresden chips in: ‘We all read Karl May as children, but to think that we now get to visit all the countries he described! And that we can afford to – it’s just amazing!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ilse,’ the Berliner snaps back. ‘You may think you’re smart but you really haven’t got a clue. Karl May never actually visited the countries in his stories; all he ever did was stick his finger on a map. You’ve truly excelled yourself again!’

  ‘How come?’ replies Ilse, getting the wrong end of the stick again. ‘This trip isn’t costing us anything. It’s just coming off the kids’ inheritance.’

  Everyone laughs. Just then, the joker in our party walks by, and thinks we’re in the middle of telling gags.

  ‘I’ve heard Vladimir Putin likes petunias,’ he quickly chips in. ‘That’s why they’re called putinias here now.’

  ‘God, that one’s a bit laboured, isn’t it?’ says the Berliner, casting an eye over the bar bill.

  The party disperses.

  The variations in the polar landscape continue to be novel and magnificent, but the differences grow more subtle and the formations more similar to one another. Now oval, teardroplike formations predominate. Sometimes, an island of light glistens in the far distance, and sometimes a snowdrift rears up, with a dark shadow of algae on it, and the light incidence keeps opening up new perspectives on the landscape.

  Around 150 kilometres from the North Pole, the ship slows once more and finally comes to a standstill. An hour later, an announcement informs us that there’s been a technical problem, and that the crew are already trying to fix it. Now we’re sitting there motionless, with no engine noise, no cracking of the ice floes to be heard, the silence couldn’t be more complete. This is a time to really savour, where something unforeseen, a minor emergency has intervened, gracing and threatening us at the same time with stasis.

  In these circumstances, our perspective shifts. While we were underway, we were conquerors, becalmed we’re objects. Tiny and defenceless, we pause in a landscape that’s trying to undercut us. The ice presses against the ship’s sides, freezes hard and holds us fast. We are locked in place, and because we can no longer budge, we suddenly start noticing every movement, however slight, in the landscape, even if it’s nothing more major than the moiré effect produced by the wind ruffling the water.

  Then the first passengers start grumbling. This is ‘typically Russian’, with no information forthcoming and no attempts made to appease or reassure us.

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s Gorbachev, Yeltsin or Putin at the helm, they’re all just czars.’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed? The rich Russians on board, they’re all the children of either the nomenklatura or the Mafia. That’s the long and short of it.’

  ‘Same as in China.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Now there are mutterings among the passengers that this is all costing us time – time which, because of the earlier death, we could ill afford anyhow. That had lost us several hours to start with. And now here we are lying idle. Brilliant. Another lecture, another couple of slideshows. Terrific. Maybe a captain’s dinner, or a masked ball to try and placate us… If they’d only offer us something real, like a helicopter flight for instance …’

  ‘But that’s out of the question in this wind.’

  ‘So how come they’ve got two rescue helicopters on board if they can’t be flown?’

  Lines of mutineers start to assemble at the railings and especially on deck below at the bar. In this situation, Viktor Boyarski organises a trip onshore, and at last we really do find ourselves rolling down the gangway, setting our feet in the snow, which when seen close up isn’t actually snow any more, at least not snow as we know it – it doesn’t stick together, its crystals are large and glassy and if you try to form it into a Christmas bauble, it crumbles instantly. People take photos of the ship from a distance. We take a few steps to the right, and to the left, into the great expanse; thank you, and now what? What’s it all about? It all looks the same.

  Back on board, protest tactics are discussed. We’re not going to let ourselves be fobbed off or taken for idiots. Considering all the things we’re not experiencing, we have to assume the worst: the trip’s about to be called off, we’re going to be taken back, and then the whole messy business of demands for compensation will begin.

  The expedition leaders ask us to please be patient.

  There follows an attempt to restart the engine, which in the meantime has undergone running repairs, and to back the ship up a few metres. When that fails, we’re asked to come to the conference room. We’re told that the damage is worse than anticipated, and that our onward journey is now in doubt. Uproar ensues. A blind-drunk Taiwanese man starts yelling warnings, saying that this trip has been blighted by a curse right from the start; he is wrestled to the ground.

  ‘You Asians with your stomach enzymes shouldn’t drink so much,’ someone taunts him. ‘You can’t handle your booze!’

  The German men in the party want to know precisely what the fault is. They demand facts and technical data which, in the first instance, they can scoff at and, secondly, they won’t have a clue how to interpret. Ultimately they’ll offer their views on the ship’s repairability.

  ‘Look, if the gearing mechanism can run at 50 per cent capacity …’ the Stuttgarter begins.

  ‘That’s quite impossible!’ screeches another man, his face white as a sheet ‘They can’t repair it!’

  He is quite beside himself in a way that only children normally are; ‘It can’t be done!’

  Someone calls out: ‘I forgot to feel the snow when I was outside.’

  The Berliner starts banging on about the ‘typically Russian attitude towards information’. We’re being told nothing. It’s like it always is in Russia: everything gets swept under the carpet, so they can pretend nothing’s happened.

  ‘Just look at the Kursk, and at what happened in Chechnya!’

  Others demand their ‘money back’ there and then. The quieter members of the party gradually begin to grow embarrassed by the company they’re in. They sidle out of the room and go and stand at the railings; they’re not going to have their wonder at the extreme nature of this landscape spoiled at any cost. Hanni and Viktor laugh. They spend hours on the upper deck, which, now that the ship is held fast, affords a quite different panoramic view, as though we were finally no longer active agents in thi
s landscape but merely passive beings, here under sufferance.

  Don’t we at least want to lobby to get our money back, a thinlipped man barks at us.

  ‘Oh, listen,’ Hanni says affably, ‘the money for this trip was a bequest. We wanted to use it to realise our dream, and it really has been a dream come true!’

  Her unquenchable enthusiasm sparks moral outrage among some fellow passengers.

  ‘You’ll put up with anything, won’t you?’

  Haven’t we noticed the rust under the red paint, or taken a good look at the state of the ship’s boat? The helicopter didn’t work in any event, and doubtless we’d also failed to notice that Dr So-and-so had been confined to his cabin for two days with a stomach bug. Our laid-back attitude to external circumstances is held up as a character weakness, and if they only could, they’d really like to hold us jointly responsible for the mess we were all in. And yet our only crime is to be stuck in the ice and rather enjoying it.

  Everyone has their own take on the ship’s technological problems, too. That’s all shit, one man reckons, he’s known it right from the start, from the very word go. It’ll never work properly, none of us will ever set eyes on the Pole, not in a million years.

  But first and foremost, the hour of the ‘Blocker’ has now arrived.

  ‘The key thing is that we all speak with one voice,’ he announces, by which he means his own. Saying this, he casts a malevolent look around the room. He’s trying to get the outraged passengers to form a united front against the expedition organisers. His adversaries are the Swiss couple and a group of enthusiasts, who are standing calmly at the rails, relishing the stationary ship and the magnificent panorama out into the great silence. They can’t be torn away from there, they’re wallowing so happily in the richness of monotony.

  Accordingly, they are also the first to spot the polar bear mother and her two cubs, not far from the ship. The captain relays the sighting to the rest of us over the tannoy. Cameras are pointed like at a press conference, and some people who are videoing the scene whisper their commentaries into the mic as they’re filming:

  ‘Right now, a polar bear mother and her two cubs are approaching us from the port side. They’re walking across the ice …’

  Whatever appears in the viewfinder has to be hyped up rhetorically. People have learned this technique from television, but ultimately all you end up doing is capturing a few objects on film that you’ve never actually seen with the naked eye.

  The polar bear mother is nervous and starving, and her two young ones follow clumsily in her footsteps. They engage the interest of our party for half an hour. The passengers are almost unwilling to take this rare occurrence – rare north of the 88th Parallel at least – at face value, treating it like some cheesy bit of stage management by the ship’s crew. Sure, lots of photos are taken, but people’s looks say: Fair enough, but don’t think we’ve forgotten that we’ve ground to a halt! People psych themselves up for a fresh round of indignation and new offensives of grim humour. Indeed, the guy from Stuttgart has just come into the bar and played his opening gambit: ‘So, a seventy-year-old woman goes to the gynaecologist and says …’

  Sometime after midnight, I’m standing on the bridge in brilliant sunshine with Hanni and Viktor, marvelling at the brightness and the layer of mist lying over the ice plain, when suddenly and without any prior warning, the ship’s engines kick into life and the vessel starts moving, crunching into the ice pack with its bow like before. We’re not stuck, we’re no longer lying idle, but instead making headway straight to the North Pole. So it sounds like he’s being ironic when Viktor Boyarski starts his morning reveille the following day with the words:

  ‘Dobre Uta and good morning. Once again, the most important virtue that people must have on polar expeditions has proved its worth: patience.’

  We were stopped dead for a total of eleven hours, during which ‘the group’, which we never actually were, comprehensively fell apart, with different factions opposing one another, while others took sides, subordinated themselves or stood apart. Eleven hours in which we learned that all the preparations we’d made for the extremes of an expedition had done little to help us develop the character traits that were called for here.

  We also learned that the sudden and violent stopping manoeuvre which had been executed to try and rescue Marga was the reason why the turbines had been damaged. Now we can’t go full speed ahead any more, but at least we’ll be able to reach the North Pole.

  Over breakfast, those passengers who lost their rag are unwilling to reach a compromise with those who didn’t. One man maintains:

  ‘This whole Pole thing’s a swindle anyhow. In photos it’s always covered in snow, and now just look at the conditions out there: three degrees above zero and raining! And that’s supposed to be the North Pole!’

  This North Pole still lies ahead of us, but it’s shrouded in gloom. The sky, which over the past few days has favoured us with fantastic visibility, has now clouded over completely. Even this morning, there was some light rain, and now the ship is manoeuvring slowly between the algae-smeared, dirty ice crags towards a point of indifference among the pools, the troughs and the fissures. Beneath the towering fragments of ice floes, two to three metres thick, is the inky black sea, down into which the bows push many a sheet of ice before the pack ice can close over it.

  Surrounded on the bridge by amateur photographers who jostle to try and get a well-focussed shot of the needle’s position on the master compass, the captain inches the Yamal forward. When the compass reaches ninety degrees and remains stable at that position for a few seconds, it is greeted with a round of applause and congratulations. Then the unmoved Russian personnel hand round sweet sparkling wine and we all clink glasses, embrace each other and peer over the railings, beyond which the landscape looks exactly the same as it has done for days.

  We’re all groping for the right emotions to fit the moment. You call to mind famous polar explorers of the past, who reached the North Pole amid much cheering and crying, and you think of those who perished and whose bodies are still entombed in the ice, those who set out in vain to conquer the Pole, those who went hopelessly astray, and those who failed. All of us present now, it seems, are experiencing very small-scale emotions in comparison with our predecessors. The sublime mingles with the banal. We’ve reached a point of emptiness that is also an integral part of the North Pole: a sense that we’re not equal to everything that’s here, and that we’re capable of being nothing but onlookers, arriving here but largely against our will, setting foot on this fabled place yet only fleetingly, with our faces already set on our return, our wretched return.

  The captain delivers a brief speech, in which ‘the old dream of reaching the North Pole’ figures prominently.

  ‘You’ve all now realised this dream,’ he tells us.

  We’ve realised nothing, is what we’re all thinking. All we’ve done is board a ship and arrive at our destination.

  Beyond the Pole, though, where the curvature of the earth begins again and the landscape disappears from view, where the ice lies unbroken in front of our hull and nature’s death zone extends forbiddingly in a grand gesture of indifference, we spot a pristine and virgin patch of snow. We’ll never get to walk on it, though. That New Year’s morning in the Eifel comes to mind once more, and the ceiling of the hospital unfolds snow-white, and there’s no sound save the echo of the frontier.