Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  Limping along as fast as I can, I catch up with Arne, who, incidentally, slowed his pace when he saw me coming.

  ‘Oh, come on now, Arne, this is not fair.’

  I swear I said this without a trace of hypocrisy. I can even prove it. I am not so much relieved as worried about him carrying so much and me so little. Won’t he get sick of taking on more than his share, in other words, won’t he get sick of me?

  In the meantime Arne explains to me that, strictly speaking, his load isn’t heavy:

  ‘You seem to have forgotten that I came here on my own in previous years. So I had to carry the whole tent then, didn’t I? The whole lot, canvas, poles and the fishing net as well.’

  I do my best to believe him. That there would be less food to carry if he were on his own doesn’t count, really, given the diminished state of our supplies.

  33

  At three o’clock we are sitting on the brink of the deepest ravine I have ever seen. It’s as if an axe of cosmic dimensions had cleaved the earth’s crust. The sides of the ravine are almost vertical, with massive, jagged outcrops of rock.

  A descent like this, it seems to me, is surely best left to the expert mountaineer with ropes, crampons and a bevy of Sherpas, the kind who will do anything for their sahib, including carrying him on their backs. Or on a stretcher, borne by a foursome of Sherpas. Four Sherpas … twenty Sherpas … two hundred if needs be. Passing their sahib from one to the other, like passing a bucket of water to quench a haystack fire, leaving the sahib free to smoke his pipe, write up his diary, peel a pineapple. Sahib gets his picture in the paper, speeches, medals; Sherpas get a tip.

  So far, my experience on this expedition is that things don’t always go from bad to worse. Ascent is invariably followed by descent, the rain lifts periodically, marshland gives way to dry ground, and even the stones I keep twisting my ankles on are by no means a constant hazard. In short: like everything else in life, the misery sort of evens out. But I haven’t seen anything like the sheer drop confronting us now.

  I glance at Arne, hoping he’ll broach the subject, but all he says is:

  ‘Best to have a bite to eat here first.’

  Best here? Hardly. We both get to our feet to hunt for dry twigs. It takes us a quarter of an hour to gather just a few handfuls of firewood.

  I take three stones of roughly the same size and arrange them carefully into a hearth. Arne sets the frying pan on top, I lie on my stomach and light the first match. The twigs burn for a moment, then the flame goes out, leaving rapidly shrinking embers. Second match. I blow with all my might. Arne has opened a tin of meat and empties it out into the pan. I strike a third match.

  ‘It was easier when we had the primus.’

  ‘The paraffin had run out. Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are going to have to make fires, just like us.’

  Fourth match. Even now, lying stomach down, I can see the yawning ravine. When I pause for a moment between bouts of blowing, my mouth won’t keep still. It’s not hunger making me gulp and swallow and scrape the inside of my lips with my teeth as if they need sharpening, nor is it appetite making my tongue writhe uncontrollably in the cavity it has known for the past twenty-five years.

  Sweet Jesus, I’m scared. Even if I fell into the ravine and got killed, I’d still be mortified, albeit posthumously. Prat that I am, lunatic from the lowlands. Qvigstad and Mikkelsen have had enough of me. I’m a hindrance. Arne is too polite to show it, but what he’s thinking is: I’d be better off on my own, make more headway, wouldn’t be distracted from my work, nor would I have to carry all this stuff. Devil in hell! (this is the Norwegian equivalent of ‘God damn’).

  Right now I can’t imagine anyone being ashamed of anything once they’re dead. Yet never have I felt so passionately that I do not want to die. The idea that my father could have been no more of a climber than me hits me like a blow to the jaw. Could he, too, have had a couple of falls prior to the one that killed him? Did his companions regard him as a liability, a hindrance, a slowcoach? His corpse certainly messed up their plans.

  I sit bolt upright, my left hand clamped round my left calf and my right holding a slice of bread with a chunk of lukewarm meat on top, which I keep in position with my index finger. As I raise the bread to my mouth my attention is caught by the artery pulsating on the inside of my wrist. Monstrous – what a monstrous reminder of one’s animal nature. Bestial. Doesn’t my vein look remarkably like a worm? A worm wriggling to get out – there, there, you poor little thing, you’ll be free sooner than you think, and it’s going to be a huge disappointment. Because you can’t do without me any more than a clam can do without its shell.

  I bite into the bread and find myself grinning.

  I have a sudden vision of pious little Eva consoling my mother: ‘Don’t cry, Mummy, Alfred’s with Daddy now!’

  She points skyward with a perfectly varnished fingernail. Then takes her compact from her handbag to repair the tear-smudged powder on her cheek. All her girlfriends lavish care on their nails, too. They’re not very bright either, and they believe in God, like Eva. With me gone there won’t be anyone left in the family to vindicate my father’s death. It remains to be seen whether Eva will pass her exams next year, and there’s clearly no hope of her ever contributing weekly pieces to seven Dutch publications with reports on what the Observer and the Figaro Litté raire have to say about twenty-odd foreign novels. Wittering on about God is what she’s good at. I’ve stopped trying to un-convert her, and when I tell her she’s obviously too dim to understand that the word ‘God’ is meaningless, she counters with: ‘Let’s see how far your brains will get you, shall we?’

  I can scarcely swallow the food for helpless mirth. My ambition, anybody’s ambition, is enough to make you choke with laughter, once you think in terms of having to prove to some silly girl that you’re right and she’s wrong. I’ll show them how far my brains will get me! Because if I come to grief she’ll just point a manicured finger to heaven saying: He’s with Daddy now.

  My mother might even believe her, who knows? She’d have the excuse of her age compounded by the shock of losing her son.

  I get to my feet and the ravine yawns even deeper. The far side is dusty black, a sombre cliff where the sun never reaches. There’s a smallish glacier on the cliff side. Streams of water run off it in deep gulleys, and yet the size isn’t affected.

  I hoist my rucksack and wait for Arne to take the lead. Where will he start his descent? Or will we walk along the precipice first for a bit, until we find somewhere less steep? I don’t say a word. Arne kicks the hearth-stones away and stamps on the dying embers and half-burnt twigs. A fjelljo flies overhead, alights, becomes invisible thanks to its camouflage, gives three sharp cries: Morse code for the letter S, the first letter of SOS.

  My situation is precarious for more reasons than I can keep track of, but it comes to me now that on top of everything else I feel trapped. I am afraid of what Eva will say if I fall to my death. On the other hand, if I reach the bottom alive, the terror I have experienced will be too laughable to relate to anyone, ever. And I can’t very well ask Arne to consider taking another route – now that Qvigstad and Mikkelsen have decamped and my suspicions have been raised.

  Never have I been so certain that what I’m going through is utterly futile and impossible to recount: me, following Arne down the side of the ravine with the depths rising up to engulf me like some invisible tidal wave in reverse: whatever I do, whatever happens to me, it will not be of my own volition.

  A secret consciousness reveals itself.

  The veil of mystery shrouding life in its entirety lifts momentarily and I know that at all times and in everything I do I am defenceless and powerless, as replaceable as an atom, and that all my resolve, hopes and fears are nothing but manifestations of the mechanism governing the movements of human molecules in the fathomless vapour of cosmic matter.

  Arne’s descent is nigh vertical as he slithers down a little way, perches on a rock, springs dow
n to the next faster and faster, until he appears almost to be falling, with only his feet to slow him down. The drop becomes so sheer that it seems the only thing stopping him from plummeting to the bottom is an invisible parachute. I note that he keeps changing direction, zigzagging along an imaginary horizontal plane, scraping his shoulders against the cliff face.

  In the deep lies the bright green bed of the ravine, threaded with lazy streams. The water looks as if it was spilt, but glitters like molten steel.

  I focus all my attention on my feet, breathlessly picking my way while the blood pounds in my throat. I grab hold of the shrubs sprouting from cracks in the rock face, as if they could save me should I lose my footing. Ridiculous! Most of the time they come loose at the first touch. What if I slip …? Will I crack my head against a jutting rock, or will I fall into a cleft and be wedged there with collapsed rib cage and broken bones? Sick with anxiety, I see that Arne has reached a wide tongue of loose shale, a fan of debris leading down to the bottom of the ravine like a gangway. An arrested avalanche of stone. Arne’s feet are buried up to his ankles, but he’s out of danger. Oh to be down there with him, for that is where my suffering ends!

  With a surge of confidence I propel myself forward from crag to crag. No more hanging on to plants. My bruised knee is so painful I could scream, but my descent feels no less flowing and nimble than Arne’s. Like flying down a stair-case without thinking. I hardly look where I put my feet, while glimpses of the green depths alternate with the pale expanse of glacier across the way. My headlong flight is abruptly smothered in the spill of shale. I pitch forward, straighten up again, then run freely and fearlessly to the bottom.

  My ears fill with the sound of water. The mosquitoes have stuck by me, and swarm around my head like electrons circling round an atom. Cold air wafts from the glacier towards me. I have to tilt my head back as far as it will go to catch a glimpse of sky: a blue serrated stripe. My shoes squelch through the green: peat and polar willows. I reach the water, bend down and drain two cups in quick succession. It is so shallow we have no need to go across barefoot. Anxiously scanning the cliff for the most suitable place to climb out of the ravine, I follow Arne in the assumption that he knows what he is doing. Are we to go across the glacier? No, that is a dead end: it abuts on a perpendicular amphitheatre of rock.

  Reaching the other side of the stream I have a sense of sinking deeper into the moss with each step I take. The moss gives way to black mud. I am entrenched among polar willows that come to my waist. Arne’s already climbing up the other side. How did he get there? My shoes fill up with water. I have to raise my legs higher and higher to make any headway in the bog, which is knee-deep. I can feel the seat of my trousers getting wet. But what can I do? My camera and map pocket, which I’m wearing round my neck, must not get wet so I hold them aloft, but then I have to drop them again as I need both arms to steady myself. I have to speed up, raise my legs even higher now, because staying in the same place for even a second means sinking an extra ten centimetres. My upper body is drenched too, not with water but with sweat. The mosquitoes attack my face, get into my eyes. I am panting so heavily that they get sucked into my mouth; I can feel them on my tongue, on my epiglottis. I don’t shout for help because there isn’t any. As a last resort I let myself flop forwards, across a thicket of willows. They bend under my weight, forming a web. Slowly I extract my left foot, manage to place it on three flattened willows, then pull the right foot loose and stand up straight.

  Water pours from my rucksack, windproof jacket and trousers when I find myself on dry land again. Did Arne notice the difficulty I was in? I don’t think so. Guided by luck or experience, he made his crossing in places where the peat was less thick or the ground-ice deeper down. He has no idea of what I’m going through. I start up the side of the ravine in an elongated zigzag, angling my feet against the gradient.

  The glacier makes a rumbling noise like a hundred tubs brimming over in a vast bath house. The ice has the dingy colour of sheets that haven’t been laundered for months, and is so thickly encrusted with dust and grit that there’s no white left. The shards of slate crackle underfoot like glass.

  After descent, ascent comes as a relief. Going down is like falling in slow motion. Not like climbing. Sometimes, pausing halfway up a slope for a breather, you look down and are gripped with fear.

  You’d like to turn back, but at the same time you know that turning back is just as risky as pressing on, so you press on.

  34

  I still can’t believe I made it, didn’t fall, hardly slipped even. Arne has given me one of his cigarettes. Mine are sopping wet. We are sitting side by side on a ledge of rock, right above the glacier. Arne hasn’t commented on my wet clothes, he must have noticed how wretched such mishaps make me feel.

  I take off my shoes, tip out the water.

  Me:

  ‘Isn’t it strange, all those billions of things that have happened or are happening on earth, just vanishing without a trace?’

  Him:

  ‘It would be just as strange if records had been kept of everything.’

  Me:

  ‘Those records would have to cover every single thing going on in the world from one second to the next: a wave crashing against a pier, raindrops falling, everything three billion people do or think, every flower that blooms and wilts – complete with dimensions, geographical longitude, latitude, colour and weight.’

  ‘Why only in our world? The exact history of the universe would have to be recorded, too. And an inventory of that magnitude would become a universe in its own right, a duplicate of ours.’

  Me:

  ‘Two universes wouldn’t be enough. Because the history of record keeping would have to be recorded, too, in a third inventory: yet another universe. And so forth. An infinite number of universes, and there wouldn’t be any point to them. They wouldn’t explain anything.’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t. Wittgenstein said: Facts are internal to the question, not to the answer. The mystery is not how the world is constituted, but that the world is the case.’

  ‘Ah! So you’ve read Wittgenstein?’

  ‘He’ll be read by more and more people as time goes on. Did you know he lived in Norway for several years?’

  He props his notebook on his knee and starts sketching. I look over his shoulder. He draws the way other people write. Describes what he sees without using words. How I envy him!

  I will get the hang of climbing rocks and crossing rivers eventually, I suppose, but not of drawing. I tried hard since early childhood, but it never amounted to anything. I could never stand all those psychologists theorising about the naive creative urge in the very young, claiming that kids draw cars with square wheels because they live in a world of their own!

  The world I live in has never been a world of my own, it existed long before I came into it and I do not recall ever thinking cars had square wheels, not even when I was five and drawing them like that.

  At five years of age I knew that my pictures were nothing like as good as the pictures in the newspaper, and after hours of scribbling I would tear up my drawing and burst into tears.

  All things considered, I have not been overly blessed with the kind of qualities that come in handy for a geologist. Poor memory, to the point of losing my way in places I know very well. Poor fitness, for lack of exercise. Illegible handwriting. Badly executed drawings.

  What a mess! I go in for all this only because I set my mind to it, not because it is second nature. All I have is my ability to endure. That, and an ability quickly to distil meaning from books, which explains why I have always done well in exams.

  Arne is better equipped for success than I am, and yet he begrudges himself all extravagance in case he fails to perform some great deed of science. Let’s hope his defeatism won’t rub off on me. My compass is better than his, and I’ll show him I know how to use it.

  Just sitting here idle is getting to me, and I fall to untying the cords of my rucksack.
There is still water dripping from the bottom, inasmuch as the moisture hasn’t been absorbed by my sleeping bag, which is turning from yellow to dark brown.

  My notebook is soggy. I wave it gently in the air with my left hand in the hope of speeding up the drying process, meanwhile tapping my teeth with the pencil in my right hand.

  Writing is out of the question. The pencil doesn’t leave a trace on the damp paper, and pressing harder would only make holes in it.

  This ravine is by far the most impressive phenomenon I’ve seen until now, but I’m incapable of making notes. What to do? Could take a couple of photographs, I suppose.

  I take my camera out of its case, hold it up to eye level, press the shutter. That is one picture, but I need some more. I twist the knob to advance the film. It’s stuck! Some water must have got in, dissolving the gelatine coating and jamming the mechanism. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t open the camera, as I’d lose the whole film. It’s not going to get dark here for weeks, and if I don’t open the camera I’ll never get rid of the moisture.

  Arne has finished his sketch. He shuts his notebook, takes a picture with his Leica, shakes his head.

  ‘Perhaps …’

  With a feeling that the utmost discretion is called for, I slip my camera back into its case. Then I pull my maps out of their pocket – likewise soaked. I spread them out on the warm ground and study the route we will be taking.

  We are in the upland now. Hilly terrain. ‘Bumpy’would be a better word. Like a mock-up of a dune landscape, with mounds of sand, loam and stones, and very little vegetation. It is ten kilometres south-west from here to the lake where we plan to pitch our tent. On the map it looks as if you can get there almost in a straight line, no obstacles of any significance.

  I take out my compass to determine south-west.

  Arne looks at his own map and stands up.