I’m so proud you got that grant, Alfred, and I’m sure you’ll come up with a brilliant thesis. If only your father had lived to see this!
In his day it wasn’t nearly as easy to obtain funds for research abroad.
Thinking of you, I’m often reminded of the career your father might have had if he hadn’t died so young. To me it’s like a vindication against Fate: that you will carry on where he left off. Oh goodness, I remember so clearly that when it happened you were going through a phase of asking everybody if they could get you a ‘meteor’. We had no idea where you picked up that word, but you knew exactly what it meant! That’s when Daddy knew you had a talent for science. It’s such a comfort to me to think that when he passed away, he did so fully confident of your talents, dearest Alfred. I’m so glad you have always set yourself the highest standards, because that’s the only way to achieve anything. The more you look the more people you’ll find who haven’t stayed the course for one reason or another.
(Ignore these blotches – [arrow] – just a few tears shed by yours truly.)
Did I ever tell you about that time your father put an advertisement in the newspaper for a meteoric stone? For weeks he’d been racking his brains to find some way of getting hold of one. He was set on giving you a meteoric stone for your seventh birthday, but as you know he was no longer with us when the day arrived.
It’s amazing, but now that you have done so well in your studies I have to admit that, sometimes at least, things do turn out the way one had always hoped they would. Shame is that things don’t take a turn for the better until after they have taken a turn for the worse.
I’ll stop wittering on now, I promise.
. . . . . . .
There is a postscript from Eva at the bottom:
Mum stop wittering on? That’ll be the day. You know, Alfred, if only she could let go a bit more she wouldn’t be so nervous.
… Your loving sister
Let go a bit more!
It’s a miracle she didn’t say let go of what! And it’s not true that my mother witters on. I’d sooner call her uncommunicative. Widowed mothers who talk about the past all the time can’t keep secrets from their grown-up sons. As for my father putting a wanted ad in the paper for a meteoric stone to give me on my seventh birthday – this is the first I’ve heard of it. The same goes for my wish to possess one: I haven’t the dimmest memory of any such thing. A meteor ite! Imagine wishing that at six years of age. And still wishing it! If my father had lived I might never have wanted flute lessons. Not that I got my way. She probably refused me out of a sense of fear. Fear that I’d grow up to be a flautist instead of taking on my father’s career and carrying on where he left off.
Three o’clock. I fold up the letter, blowing away some mosquitoes, squashing others. I crawl back into my sleeping bag, pull it tight around my neck. I am drenched in sweat, but set on keeping absolutely still. I am so hot I feel as if I have a raging fever. Maybe the heat has a narcotic effect. Time stops, and the next thing I know my head is thumping.
The ache is so bad that I heave myself into an upright position. My watch tells me it is a quarter to twelve, and Arne has gone. The sun lances into the porch, trapping the heat inside. There’s a fetid smell of sweat and mould. Feeling bruised and battered, I reach for my socks and shoes. Arne’s vacant sleeping bag gives shape to his absence.
My left eyelid, inflamed by a mosquito bite, will only open halfway. I lace up my shoes, get up and step outside.
The flap of the green tent is now open. On the ground nearby lie clothes, also sleeping bags turned inside out, but Qvigstad is nowhere to be seen.
Not one sleeping bag – two.
I just stand there. Light a cigarette, scratch my left arm with my right hand and my right arm with my left hand. Small black gadflies alight on my skin soundlessly and painlessly, but still leave fat drops of blood behind when I brush them off, even if I haven’t killed them. The blood is my own.
‘Alfred!’
Arne emerges from behind the house with two other people, one of whom is Qvigstad, although I barely recognise him. Qvigstad waves at me with his free hand; he is holding a long fishing rod with the other. The third figure is also equipped with a casting rod.
Qvigstad stops two metres short of me and makes a little bow.
‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’
We laugh and shake hands. Qvigstad has sprouted a ginger beard since I last saw him. The beard combined with the thatch of ginger hair, the high forehead and the steely blue eyes, staring as if nothing will escape them, reminds me of someone. Who? Vincent van Gogh.
His companion is scruffy-looking and fair-haired. He is chewing on a straw. I have to ask him to repeat his name (it is Mikkelsen), after which he mumbles:
‘I talk very bad English. Sorry.’
Standing with his legs apart, he angles his feet outward a couple of times. Then he spits out the straw and crawls into the green tent.
Qvigstad has spent a year in America on a grant, he speaks excellent English, much faster than Arne, but then that may just be the way he always speaks.
‘Had a good journey?’ he asks. ‘Come by plane, did you? The benzin didn’t run out then?’
I shake my head, wondering at his use of the Norwegian word for fuel.
‘Anything’s possible in Norway. You never can tell. People don’t know the simplest things. For instance – do you know where the word benzin comes from?’
‘Benzin? …’
‘From Benz. Mercedes-Benz, don’t you know. Let’s get into the tent. Have some breakfast.’
The Livingstone quip is ancient, but I’ve never heard the one about benzin.
Their tent has an extra triangle of netting to close off the entrance. Once I am inside Qvigstad zips it up, after which Mikkelsen kills all the insects with a spray can.
Arne and Qvigstad begin chatting in Norwegian. Mikkelsen lights a primus stove in the middle of the tent and puts on a small pan of water to boil. There is nothing for me to do but listen to the mosquitoes and flies tapping against the canvas overhead. It sounds as if it’s raining. It takes ages for the water to boil. Mikkelsen stirs in the powdered milk, oats, sugar and raisins. My ears are filled with the hiss of the primus and the patter of insects. It is a fine tent, fairly new, with aluminium poles. All their gear seems to me to be first-rate.
Arne and Qvigstad unfold a map, while Mikkelsen stirs the porridge. I wish there was something I could do, but what? Qvigstad takes a curvometer out of a flat case, measures something on the map, confers with Arne, then taps the map with the back of the instrument to emphasise his point.
Should I wash and shave? Nobody else seems to have bothered, nor does the idea appeal to me either.
*
Three Norwegians walking abreast on the road, with me at their side. The heat is oppressive, not a cloud in the sky and yet the atmosphere is hazy.
I am not sure what we will be doing today apart from the final preparations for the expedition, such as buying food. There has been no more talk of hiring a horse.
A small general goods store.
A grey woman hands over eight loaves of brown bread, a dozen eggs in a carton, honey in tubes, margarine, tins, a cheese with an orange rind, Sunmaid raisins and three packets of coffee beans. No ground coffee available. Now what?
The woman has the answer: she goes to the back and returns with a coffee grinder, of a kind I have never seen before: it looks like a tin music box painted red.
I almost snatch the utensil from her hands.
‘Let me do the grinding!’
‘Fine! You do it.’
Outside, sitting on a large stone, I proceed to grind the coffee.
The mill is not very good. It’s as if the beans get crushed instead of ground, and it takes an inordinate number of turns of the handle to crush just a small quantity of beans. Fending off mosquitoes with one hand, I turn the handle with the other. I throw the crushed beans back into the mill, but that has
no effect: they trickle down almost at once, as through a funnel.
Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen have now come to sit with me. We take turns with the mill, each of us whizzing the handle round until our arms get tired. It takes an hour and a half to grind all three packets of coffee beans.
With the provisions in a box of corrugated cardboard (how many kilos?), we make our way back to the tent. Mikkelsen boils some water in an aluminium kettle, to which he adds a spoonful of ground coffee. We eat bread with sardines and drink coffee, which tastes horribly bland. Sherpa Danu would not have served this to his sahibs.
‘Sherpa Danu,’ I say aloud, and I tell them what I read in the newspaper.
Qvigstad says:
‘It’s only the expeditions to Mount Everest you get to read about in the papers – never any others. People have no idea how many researchers are out there without it ever being reported in the press. They’re nameless, and though their expeditions may be less spectacular, that’s not to say they’re less dangerous.’
‘And no help from Sherpas,’ Arne says. ‘They have to carry all their own gear.’
In the late afternoon we set off along the lake until we come to the river, which we follow upstream until it is sufficiently narrow to cross by jumping from one stone to the next.
Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are wearing knee-high rubber boots, I am the only one with ordinary leather hiking shoes. Just one wrong move and my feet will be sopping wet for the rest of the day.
Without bothering with a run-up, I manage to land on the first stone. Made it! Concentrating hard I leap onto the next, and then to the others, pausing on each stone to get my breath back; when landing I can’t help giving the occasional yelp as I struggle to keep my balance.
Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen don’t even jump, they just progress smoothly from one stone to the next as if the whole river didn’t exist. At last I am on the other side, with dry feet. A prodigious achievement by my standards, and my heart pounds in my throat. I catch up with the others at a trot. The road peters out into a footpath leading to the lake. The path comes to an end at a lakeside hut made of sods of turf. To the side of the hut lie two wooden sleds which look very much like small boats, and moored to a post driven into the bank is a long boat like a dugout with an outboard motor.
Qvigstad, Arne and Mikkelsen come to a halt. So do I. Qvigstad calls to someone inside the hut. A swarthy little man emerges on bandy legs, wearing a red-and-green check shirt, corduroy trousers and rubber boots. His nose is flat, his eyes slant and his black hair sticks up like a clothes brush. Laughing the shy laugh typical of Lapps, he shakes his head by way of greeting. From his belt dangles the awesome knife in its sheath with the curved tip. Qvigstad says something to him. He goes back into the hut and reappears with an empty rucksack. They confer. Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen seat themselves on the ground. I follow suit. The man squats down, facing us. He unsheathes his awesome knife, slices a twig off a bush and sets about whittling the tip into a point. Mosquitoes crawl familiarly over his ill-shaven cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. He says something from time to time, and when he listens his jaw sags. The twig in his left hand dwindles steadily.
And so we remain for a good half hour. When finally we say goodbye, the empty rucksack is swinging from Qvigstad’s hand.
18
By seven, the green tent has been struck and packed up. All our possessions are now spread out in little piles around us.
Arne inspects the rucksack belonging to the swarthy little man.
‘It’s a small one,’ he says, ‘I wonder if that’s deliberate.’
‘Small rucksacks can take heavy loads,’ Qvigstad offers.
‘He says he is very, very strong,’ Mikkelsen says.
We divide all our gear over the five rucksacks. Into the strong man’s rucksack go the two tents, primus stove, theodolite, paraffin container and all the tinned food. We tie the eight loaves on top with a piece of string. We? In reality it is Arne and Qvigstad doing practically everything, leaving me idle. Each time I venture to help they beat me to it, or snatch away whatever I pick up.
The only contribution I get to make is lining up the rucksacks on the shore of the lake, as there are five of them. I take the rucksack intended for the strong man and can barely lift it with both hands.
‘Arne, are you sure this isn’t going to be too heavy?’
‘That man’s as strong as a Sherpa!’
‘Hold on,’ Qvigstad says. ‘We’ll give him the eggs as well. If he breaks them, I hope for his sake he’s as strong as he thinks!’
‘How long will he stay with us?’
‘For the first twenty-five kilometres, then he’ll go back. Otherwise there won’t be enough food left for us.’
In other words: after the first twenty-five kilometres the contents of the five rucksacks will have to be divided over four, which we will have to carry the rest of the way ourselves.
If only I had done more sport! If only this wasn’t my first visit to Norway, then I wouldn’t be so worried about having to cross raging rivers using stepping stones, with thirty kilos on my back. Even in the Pyrenees last summer, with Diederik Geelhoed, there was the village for us to return to at night. We didn’t do much carrying at all. Just sandwiches, and on the way home a couple of rock samples. I think back on the salted meat and runner beans with oil, our daily fare in Setcases.
The sun glitters crimson in the water, pushing light and heat towards us like a bulldozer. My head still aches and my eyes sting.
Each of us stands up in turn, positions his camera, cocks the self-timer and hurries back to pose with the others. Click. Arne is the only one to take a photo without himself in it, because he hasn’t got a delayed-action timer.
‘What’s keeping the strong man?’
‘I saw a monument for a strong man in Tromsø. Carried a stone weighing three hundred and seventy-one kilos, apparently.’
‘A monument?’ Qvigstad asks.
‘Yes, the actual stone. It’s still there, with a bronze plaque on top.’
‘I expect they left it there because he didn’t have the strength to take it away.’
Mikkelsen and I laugh. Arne stands up, peers through his fists binocular-wise and says:
‘There he is.’
The V-shaped ripples drawn by the long boat with the outboard spread over the entire lake.
There’s only room for Qvigstad on board, and we hand him all five rucksacks plus the tripod. The boat, which is no wider than a tree trunk, can’t take more than two people. Arne, Mikkelsen and I are to walk around the lake and then some distance along a river, up to an agreed spot where Qvigstad and the strong man will be waiting. Then we will continue on foot, straight across the watershed. Over the Vaddasgaissa range and then to a lake. Lake Lievnasjaurre.
I follow Mikkelsen and Arne across the river as before, leaping from stone to stone. I wish I could stop having these sombre visions of what will happen if I lose my footing.
What if the moulded rubber soles of my hiking shoes lose their grip all of a sudden? In the meantime I am keeping count: it is six paces across the river, over five half-submerged stepping stones.
Made it, once again.
Now for the higher ground. The slope is studded with mounds of greensward harbouring a core of ice. My ankles buckle with every step.
We have left the last of the trees behind. Nothing but black crowberry, knee-high polar willows, and dwarf beeches no taller than heather, apart from which they are exactly like ordinary beeches: same trunks though no thicker than a twig, same leaves though no bigger than toenails. They could be scale models for a mock-up landscape.
It is now seven thirty, and marginally less hot than it has been all day; the wind has dropped.
I take a colour photograph now and then, just as a souvenir. Something to show my mother and Eva later on. What was that girlfriend of Eva’s called, the one she brought home with her the day before I left? She confused me so much I didn’t catch her name. She
wasn’t in the house more than ten minutes. Pretty young, eighteen I’d say. Oh well. I could show her the photos some time and tell her about my trip. Might even be someone I could marry, two years from now, say, when I’ve finished my thesis. We could get engaged on the day I receive my PhD. That would be a banal thing to do, in Diederik Geelhoed’s opinion. But what do I care if hundreds or indeed thousands of other people have done it before – it’s hardly the sort of occasion that calls for anything inventive.
Some people can be so boring about those things. Including Diederik Geelhoed. The kind who go around in sandals instead of shoes, just to be different. I think it’s sad when people can’t channel their energy into areas where being different really makes a difference. I wouldn’t go around with Diederik if he weren’t so easy to talk to. There’s no-one I can open up to as much as to Diederik. Which is strange. Or is it? Maybe it’s just the feeling that there are certain issues you can only raise with someone you think will know what you’re talking about. But there are also things I wouldn’t for the life of me share with Diederik. There’s a limit to what you can give away about yourself to even the closest of friends. Everything beyond that limit is forbidden territory, and is best not even hinted at. Which is why you say: ‘Right you are, Diederik, marry in haste repent at leisure. The faculty is a business venture run by comedians, and the professors wear black academic robes to disguise their intellectual conmanship. Enemies of the Working Class to a man!’
Never will I let on to Diederik there are only two or three things I want so desperately that failing to achieve them would mean my life was not worth living. One is finding a meteor crater, another obtaining a cum laude for my PhD thesis, and then there’s marrying Eva’s girlfriend, becoming a university professor …
Qvigstad and the strong man are waiting for us at the prearranged spot along the river, where the bank is steep and slippery. The boat is moored to a rock. The five rucksacks are lined up in readiness along with the wooden tripod.
Beyond Sleep Page 9
