The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Outside, the evening round goes on: the hunters head up the road to feed their dogs; blood and scales are scrubbed from the market stalls under fluorescent lights; the glacier calves one more berg into the darkening fjord. Malik’s words caused me a sleepless night. I know tourists want an authentic experience, but he may offer them a little too much insight for comfort.

  I see more of the cracks. There is a desperate energy to Malik’s invention, but he seems unable to overcome the forces stacked against him. When we’re not off on a jaunt on the sled, he does a lot of sleeping. Is he depressed? He seems not really to believe in the website, or the tourists it will bring. The tours Malik and Sarah plan together never take place. The copy I write about barbecues in the mountains and hikes to the turf hut and ice fishing never makes its way online. Back in the UK, I email a few times to ask what else I can do, but he seems unenthusiastic, and so I don’t press him. A few months later, I check the domain. It is empty.

  When I returned to Ilulissat I asked Ole about Malik, and he looked troubled. ‘Oh, so you know Malik? He moved to Nuuk.’ This worries me. Greenland dogs are not permitted to travel below the Arctic Circle. If Malik has moved to Nuuk, he will not have been able to take his dogs. And yet the relationship between a man and his dogs is as binding as any marriage. What could have lured him away?

  ‘He’s going into politics,’ Ole says.

  IV

  SKATERS

  TRACES

  Reagan National Airport, Washington DC, USA

  Kinross Curling Club, Scotland

  And that the serpentine line, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety, if I may be allowed the expression; and which by its twisting so many different ways may be said to inclose (tho’ but a single line) varied contents; and therefore all its variety cannot be expressed on paper by one continued line, without the assistance of the imagination, or the help of a figure . . . that sort of proportioned, winding line . . . will hereafter be called the . . . line of grace . . .

  William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty

  I

  A figure approaches across the ice. Silhouetted against the only light source for miles, half-hidden by a whirling mist of diamond dust, we can’t see his features. He trudges slowly, dramatically through the snow. He peers into the darkness ahead of him, as if he knows we are here. As he comes closer, we see he is dressed in white. He wears a crown of pale antlers; his faded coat is trimmed with the skins of ermines; silver tassels hang down from his sleeves, from the rim of his cap. At first he’s alone. Then others step forward from the shadows. He strikes his staff on the ice sheet, and each beat causes green waves of light to ripple outwards. As the aurora disperses over the ice and appears in the sky, he points the staff at the darkened vaults and creates constellations in the shape of creatures: raven, coyote and bear. The crowd gasps.

  But the shaman’s magic is not all-powerful. Burning comets begin to fall from the stars and cracks ricochet through the ice on which he stands. The sections drift apart, revealing an ocean shimmering with fluorescent life. The shaman and his followers are forced to run, leaping from one ice floe to another to make their way to safety.

  Grethe murmurs her approval. Everyone in Upernavik has been awaiting the ‘Winter Ol’ and she has invited me over to watch the opening ceremony live from Vancouver on their flat-screen TV. I lounge between her daughters on the sofa, eating Polar Ice – cheap, flavourless lollies, their tips dipped in chocolate.

  The backstage is divided from the arena by a walkway half-concealed by iridescent flags of ice, shimmering like selection-box wrappers. As the athletes emerge, they are already waving and smiling. They look astonished. Amazed. Some hold a camcorder to one eye, filming the arena – and in turn, they are being filmed. The camera flashes from a million spectators in the stands add to the sensation of sparkle. The athletes and their audience are the only real thing in this arena on the edge of the Pacific. The shaman is an actor. The ice is a light effect. The giant polar bear, which balloons upwards from the rink, covered in artificial stars, is certainly not real.

  Each team of athletes is preceded by a standard bearer who carries the name of their nation on a sliver of artificial ice in the form of a split pennant, as if announcing medieval jousters. The teams of the XXI Olympic Winter Games march behind them: Georgia, Ghana, Greece . . . Greenland’s red-and-white flag is absent – the nation still competes under Denmark’s colours. The athletes parade around the arena and up into the stands, keeping to an orderly arc by following a faint path of footsteps projected from above. Like atoms in constant motion, a troupe of dancers in white quilted jackets and woolly hats bop at the rinkside, cheering the athletes on and guiding onlookers in the use of drums, torches and other props.

  The next act in the spectacle is a gorgeous fantasia on the landscapes of Canada. The arena is a screen onto which anything can be projected. Sea ice becomes wheat fields becomes forest becomes mountains, but between acts, the rink asserts itself. Dancers somersault on zip wires above it. Enormous totems that seem to be carved, not from wood, but from ice, rise from the surface, and as the leaders of the Lil’wat, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples intone words of welcome, dancers representing all First Nations peoples, including Inuit, whirl onto the ice. The lights in the whole arena dim, until just one spotlight covers the performers in the centre, and while the audience is distracted by their whirling ceremonial regalia, the totems disappear. When the lights come up again a pop star in a white suit stands on top of a two-tier cylinder as it rises from the rink, and tiny candle flames are projected onto the ice. She begins to sing a torch song. At the final chorus, the golden flames transform into doves and flutter up into the roof, leaving the arena dark. But the fire will come back again, in the form of the Olympic flame.

  I step into the night and look down towards the harbour, trying to identify the position of my cabin. I may be experiencing a sugar rush from the Polar Ice. Where is a snowboard when I need it? It would be the perfect vehicle for this slope.

  The moon is hidden by clouds and much of the island is in darkness, but I can make out a few houses where a candle is burning on a windowsill behind a lace curtain, or where eaves are delineated by fairy lights. An occasional streetlamp with its companion red bulb tinges the falling snow pink. Washing still hangs outside Grethe’s neighbour’s house, arranged by colour: on one line a hunter’s black polo necks and underpants, on another lace table runners and striped Babygros. There’s a pram parked in the driveway, full of snow as if it’s been unused for days, or even abandoned, and the plastic sledge of an older child overturned beside it.

  I hear a snuffle, then the clank of a chain. A dog disturbed from sleep hobbles after me a little way, without threat or even much interest, until the chain links pull taut, and it limps back to its dirty circle of snow.

  A new fall of snow is blowing in sideways. The flakes cling to the drifts piled up by the roadside, nestling in the slim hollows of the cladding on the buildings, blanketing the handles of tools leaning against balconies. I am used to snow being so transient that even its arrival is instilled with anticipatory nostalgia – the expectation of its melting. But here the cold preserves what’s fallen, and all human life is recorded on it. The thin line of blood that trails through the snow the morning after a hunter’s return; a knot of tiny footprints near the school gates; tyre tracks stopping at the end of the pier and then doubling back over themselves: all these can be decoded. On a small island the residents know each other’s business, and snow is the medium for the gossip that runs between them.

  The snow on the roads has been polished by the weight of a winter of tyres in snow chains. (Although the roads are few, their existence singles the island out from the land surrounding it. The only links between one town and the next along the coast are less material routes, signalled by plane contrails, ferry wakes or dog-sled trails.) I totter on. Even with hiking bo
ots, the road is too icy to walk on, the snow banked beside it too deep to wade through. When you are in an unfamiliar habitat, it is best to follow others’ tracks. After falling several times on the ice, I stumble across a snowy expanse between two houses and sink up to my waist.

  My evenings on Upernavik are more usually solitary. When I can no longer move words around on the page, I turn on the box – a far cry from Grethe’s flat-screen – for a dose of Winter Ol. I suspect this machine dates from when TV first arrived on the island, with the installation of a radio mast in the 1980s. It would have been a treasure then; it is treasure to me now. When I press the power button it makes a dull click and static appears on the screen for a few seconds. Gradually, images align, but never completely come into focus. Tonight the picture is so fuzzy, ‘snowy’ even, that the broadcast seems unreal; this is exacerbated by the fact that biathlon is repetitive, even in real time: over and over a small figure slaloms around a bend in the course, unstraps its rifle and aims it at the target. The Danish commentator sounds excited. The sport is my only distraction from work, so I watch faithfully – although the indistinct landscape, so similar to the ice fields which surround me, makes for an odd kind of escapism. I have been hindered by the ice: my excursions limited by its reach; my dignity compromised by falls. There is a vicarious pleasure to be gained from watching skiers and skaters, travelling with speed and grace.

  My favourite programme is the weather forecast. I have no difficulty interpreting the icons of snowflakes or clouds hovering over Greenland’s coast. Europe, North America, the rest of the world are off the map, beyond the edges of the screen – out of sight, out of mind.

  II

  A traveller who walks through Terminal B of Reagan National Airport in Washington DC, in not too much of a hurry, might notice the mural of an ice rink that hangs above Delta’s and Air Canada’s check-in desks. Larger than life skaters tower over the constantly changing crowds below. These figures sweep across the ice, watched by spectators at the edge of the rink, ringed by the flags of many nations. The mural offers the traveller a view beyond the clinical space of the terminal into a mirror world, one filled with the possibility of more light-hearted, impetuous motion.

  The artist Bill Jacklin RA is a connoisseur of the movement of people, the swirling currents of energy which we generate. His own life story is far from static: he relocated from London to New York in 1985, his first years in the city marked by a notorious crime wave. Jacklin discovered that his own marginal profession, that of committing images to paper, could be concealed in the action of crowds: among voyeurs and performers he was able to observe without being observed. He sketched New Yorkers on parade, at the beach, in the park. He drew labourers in the diners near his studio on West 14th Street. He drew in Frank’s, the steakhouse in the meat market, and Florent, where pop art icon Roy Lichtenstein ate lunch with his studio assistants. At night he sketched travellers in the Great Hall of Grand Central Station and rough sleepers on the benches; at dawn he drew chain-gangs of prisoners in police stations. ‘I always thought of New York as an arena,’ he says. ‘The light shining down, my spotlight.’ He directed his own drama on the canvas, and his ultimate stage was the outdoor ice rink in Central Park.

  Bill Jacklin tells me that he visited the rink often in winter, taking his sketchbook and later working up paintings in his studio. As he watched the skaters they seemed to form a vortex of shapes moving like ice crystals in a storm, a means for the artist to examine not just the people sweeping past him but ‘the flow of forms and the play of light’. In London during the 1970s he had made his reputation as an abstract painter, a minimalist juggling squares and dots, but now people were his patterns. They provided an asymmetric motif that offered endless variation: the skaters’ silhouettes, the light on the surface of the ice rink, the relationship between bodies.

  Bill and I meet up at the beginning of June at the Royal Academy on Piccadilly. It’s Varnishing Day, when the Academy welcomes artists whose work has been selected for the Summer Exhibition. Traditionally, the day was set aside to accommodate artists who might change their minds about their work – adding a dab of red or painting out a face, a last chance to alter their composition before the application of a coat of varnish. It’s rumoured that Turner once submitted an empty canvas and painted the whole work on Varnishing Day. In some of the galleries, the presence of a scissor lift betrays a last-minute installation, but these days the works are not restricted to paintings, and few could be easily altered at the last minute – so the occasion is devoted to networking and drinking. (Any actual varnishing would probably be discreetly discouraged.) When I arrive at noon the galleries are already full of artists and the champagne is flowing.

  Some of Bill’s recent paintings are on the walls, including – of course – one depicting the subject for which he is famous. Search online using only the words ‘Jacklin’ and ‘skaters’ and thumbnails tumble into view from all over the web: some from prestigious auction houses and others from the Instagram accounts of fans. I stand before City Skaters considering the inexhaustible possibilities of figures on ice. Whereas in the airport mural the rink fills the whole frame, allowing the viewer to imagine it as being anywhere in the world, this painting unequivocally depicts Central Park: the perspective is pulled back to include a view of the Manhattan skyline, its skyscrapers brushed by cumulus clouds. A long shadow from one of the World Trade Center’s towers falls across the nearest section of the rink, a shadow through which the skaters are moving, undaunted. You can tell from the streaks of paint raking the sky that it is a breezy day. The skaters seem birdlike – even fragile. One torso is just a splash of bright orange, with the leg a faint brushstroke that leaves the canvas before it describes the foot. On another afternoon the rink would be completely transformed: different people, different light, different tracings on the ice.

  For his latest rink, Bill has scaled down to the size of a passport: using the restrictions of etching – the tones inherent in the black ink, the smaller frame – to create a highly charged atmosphere. The elegant skater tracing lines on the ice could be a metaphor for the artist himself, his lightness of touch matched with formidable skill. The blades score the ice as deliberately as the artist’s hand passes the burin over the etching plate, leaving a channel which will hold the ink. The whole plate is inked up, then areas are wiped away with scrim, so that ice is suggested by the colour of the paper in the unmarked area of the plate. Plates and skates: thin sheets of metal, one placed down on blank paper, the other slicing across the ice. It dawns on me that the printmaker’s editioning of an image, his pursuit of uniformity, is not unlike a skater tracing figures over and over again. The print run is over when, in one brutal gesture, the printer scores a line across the plate to signal the end of the edition.

  Bill has flown in from the United States to help curate the Summer Exhibition, and he appears slightly tousled by the turbulence in the gallery. His mid-Atlantic accent reminds me that this city is his home too. He grew up in London during the Blitz; the first planes that he remembers seeing flying overhead were the Luftwaffe. We escape to the relative calm of the Academician’s Room, and over coffee I ask him about the Washington airport commission. He relaxes, leaning back in the generous blue velvet armchair, and begins to reminisce. ‘Well, César Pelli – you do know Pelli, don’t you? The famous architect – got in touch when he was invited to update the airport building.’ He explains that Pelli’s design included a vast window overlooking the runways and the Washington DC skyline, turning arrivals and departures into a spectacle. ‘When the airport was first built in the 1930s, artists had been asked to provide work for the main hall, and so when Pelli came to fill the space in the nineties, he commissioned new artworks as an echo of the original scheme.’ Bill was one of thirty invited artists and, while many works referred to flight, none but Bill’s depicted ice.

  Ice is rarely a positive element in aeronautics. If it accumulates on a plane’s fuselage it will affect the ae
rodynamics of the craft, lending more drag and less lift, with dire consequences. Yet there’s a connection between travel over ice and through the sky: humans have to develop wings or blades to achieve take-off. Bill’s work makes me think of the flight of Icarus: how it required Daedalus the craftsman to make the wings and the boldness of a youth to use them. It is no wonder that skating attracted the attention of Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched out a design for a speed-skate in 1448, before moving on to consider the possibility of human flight.

  At 24 feet wide, Rink was the largest commission Bill had ever worked on. He was provided with six separate panels, which would be connected on site to make the interior fabric of the airport. He had to rent a bigger studio on West 26th and tenth in Chelsea to accommodate them, since they were over 6 feet high and far broader than they were tall. At first glance, the skaters’ movement across the mural might appear chaotic, but the composition is cleverly controlled. Character is suggested through position and posture only; the faces are hidden. The viewer’s eye is drawn here and there, as figures skate into, and out of, focus. Specific characters seem to repeat across the canvas, creating a narrative: here’s a cautious figure in a three-quarter-length coat, emerging from the shadows and shuffling onto the ice. This couple can’t decide whether they are doing the tango or a waltz. There’s a woman in a red dress whose skates are carrying her forward too fast – she’s leaning back and trying to slow down, just off-centre of the canvas which adds to the sense of drag – and there she is again, to the left: down on the ice, feet in the air, disrupting the skaters around her. Rink considers the sense of being on the cusp of a significant moment, as when the wheels of a plane rise from or make contact again with the ground.