Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  I let my eyes wander over this uncluttered landscape, without the seclusion of trees and yet secretive. Bare, but by no means bleak thanks to the subtle shades of the scrubby plants and mosses, the boulders and stretches of soil in between. Not a soul within a huge radius, and none likely to turn up, yet this is not what you’d call a lonely place. Why not? I can’t say. I fall into a strange fantasy: staying right here, not leaving until the snow overtakes me a few months from now, causing me to freeze to death, painlessly.

  Talk of pain. My injured right leg is swollen from ankle to knee, and the skin is so tight that the slightest touch feels like a pin being buried in the flesh as far as it will go.

  Eyes smarting, ears burning, head swimming, I feel more exhausted than I can ever imagine feeling again as long as I live, but never have I felt wider awake. There’s no knowing how much you can take until you’ ve tried everything.

  We pitch the tents and take off most of our drenched clothes to spread them out to dry. Mikkelsen found a reindeer antler earlier on, and hangs on to it like some silly tourist. First he tied it on top of his rucksack so it appeared to be sprouting from his head. Now he sticks the antler in the ground in front of his tent to dry his socks on. Come winter and it’ ll hang over his bed in his student lodgings, I’ve no doubt.

  Qvigstad and Arne move towards the water with the fishing net.

  I take my sleeping bag and try to separate the lumps in the down through the fabric. Perhaps it won’t be ruined after all.

  While I’m busy doing this, my eye falls on Mikkelsen. He is lying stomach down in front of their tent … doing what? Peering through a stereoscope. Laid out on a sheet of plastic before him is a batch of photographs, which he studies two at a time through the instrument. What is in those photos? I can make out pale blotches in the black borders, could be the imprint of drawing pins. But they could also be part of the image – that is, the faces of clocks and altimeters. Aerial photographs!

  I drop my sleeping bag and go over to him.

  My heart leaps into my mouth, almost as if it wants to get out.

  ‘Hey, have you got aerial photographs?’

  Stupid question, I must admit.

  ‘Okay,’ Mikkelsen says, still peering through his stereoscope. I am standing right in front of him, in full view of the top of his skull, which appears to have plumes of greyish dust growing on it instead of hair.

  ‘Have you got photographs of the whole area?’ I persist.

  He lifts his head at last and rolls over onto his side. Leaning on his elbow, he looks up at me.

  ‘Yes. I have pictures of all the places I have to go to.’

  He gestures towards the map lying beside him. It’s the same map I have, the small-scale one, too small for any detail, but there are no better ones.

  I crouch down for a closer look.

  ‘Without these you can’t get anywhere,’ Mikkelsen says. ‘Not in this place. I am very glad I have these air pictures.’

  ‘Aerial photographs,’ I reiterate, by way of correction. This sounds patronising, of course, but I have to get back at him somehow.

  ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘Nummedal gave them to me.’

  ‘Did Nummedal have any others besides these? More copies, I mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. These are from Hvalbiff’s institute. Nummedal borrowed them from Hvalbiff.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do try and remember.’

  He rolls back onto his stomach without comment, slides two fresh photographs under the stereoscope and then, before falling to, gathers the rest into a pile which he turns over face down.

  At this point my hatred of Mikkelsen is so intense that I can hardly breathe. The notion of a monstrous conspiracy ranged against me takes hold.

  It could have gone like this: Sibbelee sent Nummedal a letter telling him about the research I planned to do, at which Nummedal thought: Aha! Now’s my chance to get back at Sibbelee for having contradicted me at that important conference all those years ago.

  Sibbelee needs a favour from Nummedal. It would obviously be bad form for a professor flatly to turn down the request of a colleague, but Nummedal is too crafty for that anyway. More devious. He summons his pupil Mikkelsen and proposes an interesting little research project for him to undertake – my research.

  Which is just fine with Mikkelsen. Why wouldn’t it be? Nummedal gets Hvalbiff to supply him with all the photographs that I might be needing. Then Nummedal sends off his letter to Sibbelee – the very letter I have in my wallet still, saying I wish your pupil a good journey to Oslo, followed by his signature.

  The Dutch pupil has a good journey to Oslo and calls at the appointed hour. In the meantime Nummedal has issued instructions. There won’t have been many – none at all, in fact. He just doesn’t tell the porter he’s expecting a visitor. What could be simpler. Despite the porter’s not being informed of my visit, I get into the building. Nummedal hears me coming up the stairs. He ensconces himself behind his desk. Acts the innocent. Aerial photographs? Of course we have photographs here! And all along he knows exactly which photographs I’ ll be needing and also exactly where they are. All those hours of pontificating back in Oslo, acting the Great Master imparting knowledge that was useless to me – he knew full well that I was wasting my time.

  The mould-infested hulk lying at my feet has got hold of my aerial photographs. The hulk has no English, so I can’t explain to him what’s in my head. Loathsome runt. Strange, when I address a few words to him my own English comes out sounding runty. Murder comes to mind … I look around me, no sign of Arne and Qvigstad. At the same time I know I’m not really going to kick Mikkelsen’s head in. I walk around him, panting. Nothing escapes me now. I know that going round him in circles acts as a surrogate for kicking him to death, which I could easily do.

  Is there anything worse than being obsessed with a plan you know you’ ll never carry out, the kind of plan that would only succeed in a dream-world in which you’ re omnipotent? Such as kicking Mikkelsen to death, not even touching him with my hands, no, not even with my left foot. Just kicking and kicking my right foot into his face. No resistance from him except that he goes into spasms, letting out a hoarse grunt with each fresh blow. Then he chokes, after which he stops moving altogether save for the jolts caused by the final thrusts of my shoe.

  I leave him lying there, stuff the photographs in my map pocket and stride away, indefatigable, straddling rivers on winged feet, knowing exactly where to go – because I spotted half a dozen or more meteor craters on those photographs of Mikkelsen’ s. Seven small ones and a large one in the middle. What is that I see? My attention is caught by a couple of shiny, glazed potatoes lying on the ground. I pick one up and am struck by its weight: seven times that of an ordinary potato, three times that of a normal stone of that size.

  They are meteorites.

  31

  ‘Training for the hop, skip and jump, are we?’

  Starting awake from my reverie, I notice Qvigstad and Arne standing by my side. Arne grins at me.

  ‘How d’ you mean?’ I ask, and hear with shame an edge of hostility to my voice.

  ‘You seem to have made a good recovery.’

  I am racked with pain. My left calf muscle is seized with cramp, I can scarcely stay upright. I feel as if knitting needles are being poked through the marrow of my bones.

  ‘He’s got the aerial photographs,’ I mutter.

  ‘I didn’t hear, what did you say?’

  ‘He’s got my aerial photographs,’ I repeat, hardly raising my voice.

  ‘Your aerial photographs? What do you mean?’

  ‘I spent an extra day in Oslo,’ I say, with my eyes fixed on Qvigstad, ‘for the sole purpose of collecting the aerial photographs Nummedal had promised me. But when I got there Nummedal said he knew nothing about them. He told me I should go to Trondheim and apply to Direktør Hvalbiff. So I went to Trondheim. No luck th
ere either, because the Trondheim people had long ago passed the photographs to Nummedal. Nummedal was just pretending. He knew perfectly well that Mikkelsen had those aerial photographs.’

  *

  I have never seen Qvigstad look at me with so much interest. Arne is standing just behind him, a little to one side.

  ‘Arne,’ I say, ‘remember what I told you when you asked me if I had any aerial photographs?’

  ‘Did I ask you that?’

  ‘Yes, you did. You know, those aerial photographs that were impossible to get hold of. Searched the whole Institute in Trondheim, with the help of Direktør Oftedahl.’

  ‘Oftedhal? I don’t remember. And the director’s name was Hvalbiff, you say? Strange, that is not a Norwegian name.’

  ‘Yes, Hvalbiff. But Hvalbiff wasn’t there.’

  ‘Shame you missed him,’ Qvigstad says. ‘He sounds good enough to eat.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say dully. ‘I didn’t know Mr Qvigstad went in for cannibal humour. But that’s what the name sounded like to me.’

  ‘Hvalbiff means whale meat,’ Arne explains.

  ‘Tastes exactly like beef, but much more tender,’ Qvigstad continues. ‘And the funny thing is that there isn’t a trace of fat, which is not what you’d expect from a whale.’

  ‘Hvalbiff, or however you pronounce it, wasn’t there,’ I tell them. ‘I ran into a geophysicist by the name of Oftedahl. He knew nothing about the photographs, but he did know who I meant when I said I was looking for Direktør Hvalbiff.’

  ‘Oh, come on now,’ Qvigstad says. ‘But let’s sit down, shall we?’

  He sounds concerned. What is the matter with me? They’ re treating me like a frustrated child, but my eyes are pricking from dryness, not tears.

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Let’s sit down.’

  *

  Arne sits down and so do I. Qvigstad goes over to his tent and comes back with the brandy bottle.

  The three of us sit in a row.

  ‘The thing is,’ I say, ‘that Mikkelsen’s got the photographs, the same ones I was supposed to pick up in Oslo. Nummedal must have known Mikkelsen had them. An application was put in for them long ago. Nummedal could have replied saying he didn’t have them. Or he could have ordered extra copies. But no, he did neither. He made me go all the way to Oslo for nothing, then sent me on a wild goose chase to Trondheim.’

  ‘Easy now,’ Arne says. ‘Aren’t you jumping to conclusions? It’s just come back to me that you did mention this. But It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that Nummedal believed you could get them in Trondheim.’

  ‘Right,’ Qvigstad says. ‘Unless of course it slipped Nummedal’s mind, what with him being pretty old, and practically blind too. He’s always been a bit of a crackpot, anyway. Does he still have the deaf and dumb porter?’

  ‘The porter – deaf and dumb? Blind, you mean.’

  ‘The blind scientist with the blind porter! How about that!’

  Qvigstad lays his hand on my shoulder and pours a generous shot of brandy into my plastic cup.

  I take a sip, then say slowly:

  ‘The porter was blind.’

  ‘How did you know he was blind?’

  ‘He was disfigured and wore dark glasses …’

  ‘In that vestibule where the sun never shines?’

  ‘… and he ran his fingers over the dial of his wristwatch to tell the time.’

  ‘A watch for the blind,’ Arne says.

  ‘Braille watches,’ Qvigstad says. ‘There’s a brisk trade in them after every war. People never learn, do they? Blind! And yet none the wiser!’

  He stands up and goes over to the green tent, where Mikkelsen is still poring over his stereoscope.

  He returns a moment later with Mikkelsen in tow, holding the instrument in one hand and the batch of photographs in the other.

  ‘Of course,’ says Mikkelsen, ‘you may look at ze pictures if you like. Eet ees my pleasure.’

  He deposits the stereoscope and the photographs on the ground beside me and moves away.

  I lie down on my stomach the way Mikkelsen was lying a moment ago, position the stereoscope beneath my face and reach for the photographs. Did Mikkelsen leave them in the wrong order on purpose? Because they belong in pairs, with partially overlapping views. Without my asking, Arne helps me to match them up. Soon he is doing practically all the work: being so much more familiar with the terrain than I am, he can identify the pictures at a glance and show me the corresponding locations on the map without any trouble.

  I look.

  It is not the locations I am interested in. It is the holes. Pools or lakes that could possibly be meteor craters. Possibly?

  My eyes sweep across the images systematically from left to right, top to bottom, as if they’ re using a soft paintbrush. The brush has to pick up on any holes partially encircled by a low ridge, like the imprint of a horse’s hoof in a sandy track. See for yourself: throw a ball or a stone into dry sand. The missile will make a dent and the sand from the dent will throw up a ridge.

  Big meteorites fall in a similar way. The matter they consist of breaks up into fragments which become deeply embedded in the ground – but not always. Sometimes they bounce up and land a little way off with no more impact than if they had been dropped by a human hand. Those are the kind of meteoric stones people collect. Sometimes the meteor dissipates completely during an enormous explosion, due to the heat generated on impact. In such cases the only evidence of our planet having been enriched by a chip of some long-gone other planet is a hole with a circular ridge.

  The photographs are ten thousand times smaller than the landscape they portray. Seen through the stereoscope they become three-dimensional. The mountains look higher than they are in reality, and the difference between plant cover and bare ground is clearly visible. Streams, rivers and lakes are recognisable by their inky blackness. Thus water is the most distinctive feature, and all the holes are filled with it. I scrutinise each hole, each lake, trying to gauge the circumference and the gradient of the sides. Lying flat on my stomach like this feels rather like lying on the floor of an aeroplane, gazing through a telescope at a world of black and grey.

  Arne intones a string of names, but I am barely listening. Now and then I raise my head from the stereoscope in a show of interest in the details he points out on the map.

  I can never concentrate when people start explaining things to me. My feeling is that if It’s something I really want to know I can do my own explaining. I don’t need anyone’s help. Not even Arne’s.

  Dear, oh dear, how very sad. He doesn’t hold with Sibbelee’s theory. And There’s no reason why he should, considering he’s a student of Nummedal’s. I can’t expect any help from him in satisfying my only need: a meteor crater.

  I have inspected all the photos. Plenty of black areas indicating pools and lakes, but they all look very similar. There is nothing in the pictures to raise my hopes of making my major discovery. I might as well call it a day.

  Arne is his good-natured, obliging self, still busy sorting the photographs, pointing out discrepancies between the images and the corresponding locations on the map, and so on. I want to leap to my feet and shout: Oh just leave it! There’s no need! I’ve seen enough! I’m not going to find a single thing here that will earn me any credit whatsoever, nothing to vindicate my father’s accident! I’m going back! I’m wasting my time! I’m not cut out for this kind of monkish labour, I’m not some sort of bookkeeper in the field, I don’t want to report, I want to discover! Everything you can find here has already been found and reported on elsewhere in the world. I’m not interested in lists, I’m not an archivist like ninety-nine out of a hundred researchers! I want to find something spectacular! But There’s nothing here that hasn’t been found before!

  I don’t say a word. I am putting up a front, playing for time like a schoolboy being bullied. What else can I do?

  Not finding a meteor crater doesn’t mean to say that I won’t have found anythi
ng at all, even if what I do find has nothing to do with geology, or even remotely with earth science or cosmology. Not with any science at all, for that matter. This reminds me of a case described by Wittgenstein, in which the process whereby someone achieves understanding becomes subsumed into that understanding. Like saying: I understood after I’d had some black coffee. But the coffee had nothing to do with it.

  Because It’s beginning to dawn on me how the world works – my world, at any rate, the world in which I have a huge task to fulfil, the world in which I must succeed.

  I realise now – and it is inconceivably stupid of me not to have thought of it before – that I should have got hold of the aerial photographs before I came here. Long before. I should have had them back in Amsterdam. I should have told Sibbelee: There’s no point in going up north without seeing the aerial photographs first.

  But this isn’t the most important thing I’ve realised.

  Even more important is that I’m having serious doubts about Sibbelee. After all, he’s the one with experience in these matters.

  I’m thirty years younger and still only a student, really, and off I went on a trip just because my mentor advised it. An ill-considered action maybe, but an excusable one. Because It’s up to Sibbelee to decide whether or not I’m a brilliant student, and whether or not I’ ll succeed in my career. I couldn’t afford to get on the wrong side of him.

  Excusable or not, what I find incomprehensible is that Sibbelee let me go off without the photographs in the first place. What he should have said is: I’ve written to Nummedal requesting those aerial surveys you need, but he’s not responding. So I would advise you to choose another subject for your research. Aerial photography is such a highly efficient, modern instrument of orientation that it would be absurd to take pot luck and rush off into the wilds without photographs. As absurd as putting out to sea in a modern liner without a compass, radio or radar.

  Sibbelee is no fool. It is inconceivable that these considerations did not enter his mind. But he kept his mouth shut.