Beyond Sleep

by Willem Frederik Hermans

  Could ‘Hvalbiff’ and Oftedahl be one and the same person?

  I am not going to bother to find out.

  45

  The maid shuts the door behind me as I begin making my way down to the gate. The lushness of the vegetation, the mild weather, the scattering of villas, all this affects me with unreasonable self-reproach at having left Finnmark. When I was there I didn’t experience any longing to be back in the world of buildings and trees, I actually felt more at home among the ice and the abundance of shrubby plants, the birds and the fishes. Having left the rugged upland behind feels like defeat.

  In the meantime I have noticed a signpost nailed to a tree on the other side of the road:

  TROLLHAUGEN

  The name sounds familiar, but there’s something odd about it. I have the feeling I’m on the brink of discovering what it is, as if I have just one page to go before the end of the book containing the answer.

  A large open convertible comes towards me over the quiet road. The driver is a woman. She is hatless, her gleaming auburn hair like a cowl over her head, her eyes hidden by a long fringe. Her immaculately made-up face looks like a parchment copy of a face I have seen before, so who can she be? She looks at me intently and stops at the gate.

  ‘Hey! I knew I’d run into you again,’ she says. ‘How’s it going?’ She has an American accent.

  It is the woman I met in Tromsø, in the light of the midnight sun.

  ‘Got any plans?’ she asks. ‘I’m on my way to Troldhaugen. You know, the home of Edvard Grieg, the famous composer. Why don’t you come along?’

  Grieg!

  I limp around the car and get in beside her.

  She is wearing a very low-cut dress and a multi-strand pearl necklace.

  ‘Such a lot has happened since we last met. I’ve had a face-lift, you know. Left the clinic last week. They did a pretty good job, I think.’

  She puts the car in gear and we spurt off.

  ‘Jack’s on a binge, he’s been drunk now for three days. I tell myself why sit around moping? Might as well spend some time visiting the sights. And what have you been up to?’

  ‘I’ve been in the High North.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Searching for meteorites, but I didn’t find a single one.’

  ‘Is that how you got that limp?’

  ‘I hurt my knee when I fell.’

  ‘And those rubber boots you’re wearing … you look like a plumber on his way home from work.’

  ‘I can’t get into my ordinary shoes.’

  ‘You look a mess! All those blotches on your face – what happened?’

  She tilts the rear-view mirror a fraction towards the wind-screen so she can see me in it.

  ‘That’s the work of mosquitoes and flies up north,’ I reply.

  ‘Good Lord, you poor kid.’

  She pulls up at the entrance to Troldhaugen, which was spelled with a double ‘L’ on the sign. A white house can be glimpsed beyond the trees.

  ‘Why don’t you just stay in the car. Better not strain yourself. I won’t keep you waiting for long, back in no time.’

  She twists round to reach for something on the back seat. Did she get her figure lifted too? It is shapely and gorgeous.

  ‘Too bad,’ she says. ‘But I’m going to go right ahead and do what we Americans are always ridiculed for, or you’ll be sitting here for nothing while I have a look round.’

  The object she reached for is a cine-camera, which she now raises to her eye and swivels round as if she’s mowing the whole place down with a machine gun.

  Indeed, she is back in no time!

  ‘Nothing unusual about the house. Inside there’s a big grand piano, with a whole lot of photos on it. You can’t imagine a single note of Grieg’s music having been written there. But you can go down to the bottom of the garden, where there’s a cottage with another piano. That’s where he did all his composing, in full view of the beautiful lake. Shall we go for a drive?’

  We drive around.

  ‘Grieg,’ she says, ‘Grieg must have been truly great to have written all that music while being obliged to live in a house like everybody else. Perhaps that’s a characteristic shared by great men. The first humans who took it into their heads to live differently from other animals had no idea what an awful adventure they were embarking on in their awful houses. If they hadn’t turned to building, man would have remained a rare species, like the okapi or the bird of paradise.’

  She pulls into a parking area at a promontory jutting out over the fjord, so that we can admire the view.

  ‘So weird,’ she says, ‘us being here together, now. I can’t believe it. I often think there isn’t really that much difference between living and dreaming. The difference is illusory, because when we’re awake we’re too busy interpreting all the sights around us to see that life’s a dream, too.’

  I lean back with my arms folded across my chest. I’m all ears. She tells me she is a music critic, and that she writes about music for several leading weeklies.

  ‘No-one is more painfully aware of the demise of human culture than the American in Europe. There are plenty of landscapes like this in the States, but all of them are ruined. You wonder why that is. There are buildings here too. The trees are much the same as back home, and they’re sawn into the same kind of planks. But it’s as if Americans keep getting the proportions wrong by about two inches. You can’t imagine how irritating it is to find a big nation like the United States being copied the world over in the silliest of ways. All those cigarette brands with American names, in countries where they don’t speak English. Why? South State Cigarettes. I ask you. What does it mean? It’s the most banal name you could think of. But calling a European packet of cigarettes South State apparently improves the taste. And then all those youngsters getting together in pathetic little jazz bands with crazy English names, singing American songs in crazy accents. Hipsters, beatniks, real gone guys. It’s so incredibly sad to see all those kids busting their guts for the sake of mere imitation. Just as sad as a Texan oil millionaire displaying a fake Picasso in his lounge, no, even sadder, because millionaires don’t deserve any better. Those kids are wasting their energy on a sort of spiritual enslavement, because they’ re trying to become Miles Davis or John Coltrane in ways that’ll never work. And then there are more and more people nowadays writing poems, and even novels, in the most awful broken English. Of course, I can see why Europeans speak English with an accent. I have profound admiration for anyone who knows a second language. But the moment people find out I’m American they start speaking English with a strange throaty accent which they take to be American. It’s the same all over Europe. The other day I was in a restaurant having dinner and there were two Germans at a neighbouring table. I don’t understand much German, but I could clearly hear one of them larding his conversation with the English expression “ so what!” He obviously thought he was very clever. So what!’

  It was not the shortest route back to town by any means. I confided in Wilma that my first ambition was to be a great scientist like my father, and that I had wanted desperately to possess a meteorite from the age of six, but that after my father died I was set on becoming a flautist instead of a scholar – that is, until I was fourteen and discovered I had learnt to play the wrong kind of flute.

  She commiserated. Said I could still become a flautist if I wanted, mentioned great musicians – Americans I’ve never heard of – who turned to music full-time later on in life.

  ‘But it’s hardly a good sign that I didn’t even get out of the car to visit Grieg’s home, now is it?’ I say. She retorts that we’ll go back there as soon as my leg is better.

  What is she thinking of? And isn’t this at odds with her theory about living and dreaming? I can’t imagine chance meetings with the same person happening three times in a dream.

  She occupies a plush suite with a wide balcony on the top floor of the hotel. A waiter comes in bearing a silver platter c
overed by a napkin and an ice bucket containing a bottle of champagne.

  We stand together on the balcony looking out over the town. Here in Bergen you can actually speak of darkness falling. Not black darkness. Blue. Impossible to describe the shade: a blue that is almost incandescent.

  An illuminated cable car rises against a black mountainside.

  Down on the pavement in front of the hotel three Salvation Army soldiers strike up a tune on a tambourine, a guitar and a banjo.

  ‘It’s very hot,’ Wilma says. ‘Hold on a moment.’

  She retreats from the balcony. I wonder what brought those Salvation Army people here. Do they know I am about to start a new life? Did Nummedal send them after me?

  I too go back inside, switch on a small lamp and lie down on the divan. The rumble of traffic, the Salvation Army singers, the shower splashing close by.

  Wilma emerges from the bathroom. She has on a kind of pyjama suit of tea-rose satin. A short top and long narrow pants, low-waisted and with a showy zip-fastening on the front.

  Smiling at me, Wilma goes to the door, turns the key and then crosses to the side table. She uncorks the champagne and fills two glasses.

  With a glass in each hand she says:

  ‘The zip’s pretty neat, don’t you think? Men usually find this sort of thing very sexy.’

  ‘Because it doesn’t …’ I mumble

  She perches at the end of the divan.

  ‘Sköl,’ she says, and drinks.

  I find her beautiful, like an exotic doll.

  She says:

  ‘I know exactly what you were going to say. A zip fly on a woman’s pants is just decoration, because it doesn’t serve the same purpose as for men.’

  I laugh, realising that she amuses me and, unknowingly, comforts me too.

  Wilma says:

  ‘But the real explanation lies elsewhere. I’m sure the designer of these pants sought advice from a psychoanalyst. You know why?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about psychoanalysis.’

  My eyes linger on her thighs in the slinky skin-tight trousers with tiny, almost invisible creases in the side seams. The straining fabric is even sexier to me than her fly fastening, but what would be the psychoanalytical explanation for that?

  It’s too complicated to ask her.

  Wilma says:

  ‘A thinker with a simplistic outlook once told me it’s because a fly fastening on a woman’s pants resembles what’s underneath. Gross, don’t you think? And not very psychoanalytical either. It’s the actual fastening that it’s all about. We must think in terms of repressed homosexual components in the psyche of the normal, heterosexual male.’

  ‘Must we?’

  ‘Let me explain. Heterosexual men are sent into a panic by the mere thought of opening another man’s flies. That’s what defines them as heterosexual. That sense of panic. The sight of any zip fly immediately rouses unconscious fears in them, which are promptly allayed by their consciousness when they realise that the fastening in question belongs to a woman. What it comes down to, you understand, is that a woman appeals more fully to the male heterosexual psyche in pants like these than in a skirt – more even than if she’s completely naked. Because it’s not only the heterosexual component in his psyche that is prevailed upon, it’s also his repressed homosexuality. Therefore the stimulus is far greater.’

  ‘Rather complicated, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not at all. What does a normal man think? That other people’s flies are taboo. Taboos invite breaking. What happens if the man breaks the taboo when it’s a woman wearing the pants? Not the dreaded forbidden fruit is his reward, but the garden of paradise. It’s as simple as that.’

  She takes my hand and strokes the inside of my wrist with the tips of her fingers. She settles back on the divan, folds one leg beneath her and stretches the other in a long slanting line down to her varnished toenails.

  ‘So now you know. A detail on a woman’s clothing that appears to be merely decorative can turn out to serve a purpose that is, to some extent, rationally evident.’

  I want to touch her, anywhere, but I’m not thinking straight. I find her beautiful, like a precious Egyptian mummy.

  ‘I just remembered something about Grieg,’ she says.

  ‘I forgot to mention it earlier. He was buried in his own garden. His tomb was sealed into the sheer cliff overhanging the path, with a simple slab engraved with his name to mark the spot.’

  She jumps to her feet, goes over to the side table and takes up the silver platter.

  ‘Know what this is?’

  She folds the napkin back and holds the platter out to me.

  ‘Looks like smoked salmon.’

  ‘Yes it does, but that’s not what it is. It’s gravlachs.’

  Gravlachs! The delicacy Nummedal made such a fuss about back in Oslo, saying it was so hard to find!

  ‘You know what gravlachs is? It’s very special. Raw salmon, which is buried in the ground for some time – I don’t know how long – and then dug up again. The taste is very refined. Go on, try some.’

  At that very moment there’s a great thud against the door and a deep, hoarse voice roaring ‘Wilma, Wilma! Open this door!’

  He hammers his fists on the door, kicks it violently, then hurls himself against it.

  Fred Flintstone!

  It is exactly like the cartoon: the door bends forward in the middle, causing great gaps to appear on either side, after which it springs back into the frame.

  ‘Yes, Jack, I’m coming!’ Her voice sounds unconcerned, languid, as if she has been asleep. He goes on pounding the door.

  She replaces the platter on the table, takes the napkin in one hand and removes the champagne from the ice bucket, then tips the contents of the bucket onto the napkin. The ice cubes remain in a heap, the water drips down to the floor. Holding the ice cubes wrapped in the napkin, she goes to the door and turns the key.

  I have got up from the divan.

  Flintstone staggers into the room, groaning. His mouth is so turned down at the corners that he must have spent the last couple of hours with a dinosaur bone clamped between his jaws.

  The look in his eyes is both helpless and menacing. He snorts, splutters, sprays vaporised aquavit.

  Inaudible in my soft rubber boots, I manage to slip past him towards the door, which he left open. In the corridor I glance over my shoulder.

  Flintstone lolls on the divan. Wilma, in a shaft of light from the corridor, dabs at his head with the ice-pack as though extinguishing a fire in a wastepaper basket. Her free hand is raised to me. She opens and closes it a few times, gives me a rueful smile and says:

  ‘Bye-bye!’

  46

  The stewardess comes past with the basket containing duty-free spirits. I buy a half bottle of whisky. The newspaper I have just been reading slides off my lap. There is a brief item in it about a bright glow in the sky followed by a loud bang, reported in the vicinity of Karasjok. The Geophysical Survey dispatched a reconnaissance aircraft to measure the magnitude of the magnetic field, and a strong magnetic deviation was indeed recorded locally. This may have been caused by a meteor striking the earth. A team of geologists is on its way to Karasjok to investigate.

  I immediately open the whisky and have a few swigs.

  Meteorites, pieces of broken-up planets. So will the earth break into pieces at some stage – and I don’t care. It could happen any time, it seems to me, as I stare out of the window at a few tiny islands set in a wrinkly sea far below, so far away that I can’t even seen the wrinkles move. This is how God sees the earth, and also how my father sees the earth, if Eva is to be believed. So they don’t care any more than I do. God looks down from heaven and views the world as an aerial photograph. And Nummedal, Lord of aerial photography, is blind.

  I do not have aerial photographs, I am not God, and I can’t even get a clear view of my surroundings after I have reached the top of a mountain after a tremendous struggle.

  Th
e bottle is empty by the time the plane reduces speed and prepares for landing at Schiphol airport.

  The cosmos is a gigantic brain and the earth a tumour within the mass of grey matter. That just about sums it up, I tell myself. Pity I can’t tell Qvigstad. No smoking, fasten seatbelts.

  I leave the empty bottle on the plane.

  Eva waves, but my mother holds a handkerchief to her mouth as I limp towards them, suitcase in one hand, rucksack in the other. It drags over the floor, but I didn’t think it worth hoisting it onto my back for the short distance to the exit, which I estimate at thirty-two paces.

  It was by counting my paces – which I have done since I was a boy, in imitation of Buys Ballot – that I was able to find my way without a compass. How’s that for success? How’s that for the ultimate achievement I’ve been living towards all my life? Finding the corpse of my friend and finding the way home. Nothing else. But it’s no good trying to explain that to my mother. She hasn’t a clue about my studies, anyway. She’s sobbing with emotion at her clever boy’s homecoming. I cannot, must not disappoint her.

  I almost lose my balance when my mother throws her arms around me.

  In the taxi I sit next to her. Eva sits facing us on the folding seat.

  My mother’s sobbing intensifies.

  ‘Oh, Alfred, you gave me such a dreadful shock, I’m sorry, never mind me.’

  ‘What was it that shocked you?’

  ‘Seeing you limp like that.’

  ‘But I’ll be fine in a week or two. I just hurt my knee, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ my mother says.

  ‘The things is, Alfred,’ Eva says, ‘she didn’t sleep for three nights after she read the news about Brandel.’

  ‘Brandel?’

  ‘Yes, Brandel. Haven’t you heard? He and his team reached the summit of Nilgiri, but he came back with frozen feet. Ghastly, isn’t it? I saw his picture in the paper last week. In a wheelchair, next to the plane. And then Mummy got it into her head …’