Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  We passed the basking shark; it was wrapped in dustsheets, and stalled in a sort of cave, it looked like a missile in a silo. Then Gordon led me to a different ladder, which led up through a trapdoor and onto the platform above. The platform was made of metal planks, and it ran back under the three biggest baleen whales, the ones nearest the door, the sei and humpback, side by side, then, nudging them along, the immense jaws of the blue whale itself. Beyond, yet to be reached, a crowd of others. In time, as the team worked on, the platform would be moved westward, a slow tide of cleanliness creeping over and through the whales.

  The right whale, in its private space, was a shining destination, the ‘after’ in a colossal before-and-after task. For now, though, climbing that ladder was to enter into a strange lofty rag-and-bone shop, a beanstalk that entered into a kingdom of grime. It wasn’t obvious from the floor just how much grease and dirt lay on the bones’ upper sides. What, seen from below had seemed like the whales’ stoicism, felt now like tremendous fatigue.

  But they were working on it. Standing on either side of the sei whale’s ribcage, as though grooming it, each with a stand of tools, and a vacuum cleaner between them, were Zina Fihl and Marielle Bergh, young women from Denmark and Sweden respectively. Zina pulled off her mask to greet me. Like Marielle, she wore workmen’s clothes. Her blonde hair was tied back; she had a toothbrush poking from her overalls pocket, which made me smile.

  ‘Tell me you’re not cleaning a whale with a toothbrush . . .’

  ‘Very important tool!’ she laughed.

  ‘Toothbrush!’

  ‘Toothpick!’

  ‘Cotton buds!’

  ‘We tried dry ice and lasers, but they didn’t work, so it’s back to the household chemicals. Ammonia and ethanol, and a brush, and water and a sponge.’

  * * *

  I had two days. Zina loaned me some work clothes with padded knees and let me creep amongst the whales’ skeletons. Sometimes we chatted as they worked; at other times I wandered in the gloom of the museum. Sometimes they were kind enough to show me things—for example, when the conversation turned to baleen, these all being baleen whales, Gordon asked me if I’d ever actually seen baleen. Aside from some ancient corset stays of my grandmother’s, I hadn’t, so he went to the store and returned with something which looked exactly like a shred of tyre, the kind of thing you see at the verge of the motorway if a lorry’s had a blowout. It’s made of the same stuff as our fingernails, and this piece was so hard you could knock on it, but in life, when the whale’s mouth is constantly opening to the water, the baleen is soft, and frayed where the whale’s huge tongue licks against it.

  Being up on their platform, in the presence of these whales, allowed you to note differences in their anatomy, gave you a feel for them. It was as though you could imagine—purely by their skeletons hanging from their chains—differences in the characters they had in life. A kind of phrenology, I suppose, and probably meaningless, but the sei was regarded by all as an elegant creature. ‘Feminine,’ Zina called it, as she stroked the long slender ribs with a sponge. ‘Gracile,’ was Gordon’s word. The sei’s ribs were slim, more so than the right whale’s and certainly more slender than the humpback’s. The lowest ribs splayed wide and, though it’s an odd word to use of a whale, they looked spidery; they almost wafted at the air, as if rowing it along.

  Hanging beside the sei, the humpback was more a figure of fun. Thick-set—and filthy. In life humpbacks are characterful. They breach up out of the water, ‘spy-hop’ to see what’s going on in the upper world, raise and slap their flippers—and there was a stocky robustness to this one’s bones, in particular the scapulas. The humpback looked especially dirty, but its turn would come to be cleaned, ‘Oh, he’ll be quick,’ they said. ‘Then we’ll get on to the blue.’ For now, as he waited, the humpback was a useful shortcut. A rat run, you might say. To save bothering with ladders and trapdoors, to get across from one side of their platform to another, the conservators just crawled between the humpback’s ribs into its chest cavity, then came stooping out of its belly, and carried on their way.

  I’d learned from several quarters that the Hvalsalen was a bit of a mystery. There were few records, if any, of how the whales got to Bergen, or how they were prepared, or manoeuvred up the stairs, piece by piece presumably—if indeed they had been brought via the stairs at all—or how they were hoisted aloft, and chained to the ceiling.

  A mystery, and Gordon had made a point to me that I reluctantly had to concede. It was when I’d been admiring the poor bright right whale. He’d said: ‘I love bone, but you know what I also love? These chains.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I love metalwork, too. Archaeological metal, especially iron. And these chains—look at them! It’s part of the thing—it’s like the whales were giants that had to be restrained. They’re all handmade—all hand­forged. We don’t know much about how the whales got here, but there must have been a very good blacksmith on site. And the nails, see? All the metalwork that holds the skeletons together—everything’s handmade. You couldn’t do it now. The way I see it, this Hvalsalen is a monument to the whales—their only monument—but it’s testament to those working men, too.’

  I could see Gordon’s point: they hung in monumental silence now, but each must had been a tremendous job of work, all fire and steam and the clang of the smith’s hammer—dangerous, too. The Hvalsalen wasn’t a big space. A blue whale within its confines was somewhat of a puzzle, like a ship in a bottle. But all the bolts and nails still looked Frankensteinian to me.

  As to how they got there, though the records were scant, certain inferences could be drawn. Terje had said that the signs that hung from one or two whales, giving the dread dates 1867, 1879—dread in whale annals, that is—and the place, Finnmark—coincided with the invention of the exploding harpoon, and the opening of a whaling station there. Before that giant leap for humankind, fin whales had proved too fast to catch. But others may have been strandings. It happens.

  Whether hunted or stranded, there was the nice question of how—or where—the whales had been eviscerated and defleshed. How and where they had been reduced to skeletons. There existed just one photograph, of a small whale laid on a cart outside the museum grounds. The gardens outside, with their pretty lily ponds, did seem the most likely place.

  ‘How would you do it?’

  We were standing next the sei whale, all fifty metres of it, the three conservators engaged in swabbing and brushing it down. Gordon gestured over to the humpback.

  ‘Well, those look . . . archaeological to me. I mean, I think that one was buried. We could take samples; there would be traces of roots or soil, bacteriological signatures. As for the others . . . some might have been boiled.’

  ‘In a huge tank?’

  ‘Yes—they’d have made a tank specially. Cut off most of the flesh, then boiled the rest. And then, somehow, got them indoors and in here.’

  Later, over tea, I asked the conservators if they thought of the objects they were working on as animals, or objects. ‘Animals,’ they said. They were all of a mind. Several times I heard the words ‘waste’ and ‘slaughter’ and ‘holocaust’ and ‘shame’.

  * * *

  Of course, when they said ‘it’s just glorified housework’, the conservators were being disingenuous. How do you go about it? How do you go about cleaning twenty-four whale skeletons that have been hanging from a ceiling for a hundred and thirty years? It’s bad enough spring-­cleaning your bathroom.

  ‘You appraise them. Look for problems, breakages, anything that needs repaired. You reconsider the old repairs and think if it can be done more sympathetically. Clean it all. Look again. Repair anything that needs repaired.’

  Their work requires understanding of organic chemistry—they were pretty sure that some of the old plaster had been painted with lead-based paint, so they knew that would be a problem to remove. The work also requires a craftworker’s feel for materials and knowledge of how
materials respond to different conditions, how they decay and react with air and each other. They used the word ‘sympathetic’, too, as in ‘a sympathetic repair’. They were concerned for the future, about carrying things into the future in a fit state. Sympathy and future concern, up amongst the great dead whales.

  They wouldn’t only work with bone in their careers. At one point Zina was seconded outdoors to advise on a flaky stone lion.

  I could understand the pleasures of the job. The near-forensic task of working out what had happened in the past, and the necessity to consider the future. The things we deem worth keeping, that is, as we seem to be the arbiters of so many fates. There are only 4000 blue whales alive now. At the time of their deliverance, the moratorium of the 1960s, we had slaughtered our way through 350,000.

  * * *

  The following morning I found Gordon occupied in the workshop, the ‘Laboratorium for HvalKonservering’. He was grating a lump of cork with a metalworker’s file. Then he scraped the cork dust into a little pot. On the desk lay a Kim’s Game collection of objects: a compass, a pot-scrubber, a ruler and a whale’s rib, four foot long and broken in two.

  He said, ‘I’m trying to find the best material to repair that bone with.’

  ‘You’re making a sort of Polyfilla?’

  ‘But you’d never use Polyfilla—it’s got calcium in it, so you’d never use it with bone. Someone coming along in the future has got to be able to tell what’s original and what’s repair, at a histological level.’ Then he mixed the pot of cork dust he’d made with an adhesive called Paraloid. If it proved durable and flexible enough, he’d make sufficient to fill the cavity in the whale’s rib.

  ‘They’re doing some sort of scientific work with them, the bones, aren’t they? Dr Hufthammer mentioned it.’

  I’d noticed on the sei whale’s jaw that a hole had been bored, recently, as if someone had been at it with an apple-corer.

  ‘Probably hoping to extract DNA samples, from a whale which lived before the “bottleneck”. If they compare that to living whales’ DNA, they can tell how much the gene pool has shrunk.’

  A bottleneck is a biologists’ term for when some catastrophe kills so many of a species of animal that only a few breeding pairs survive to repopulate the future. If they survive at all.

  He mixed the potion with a wooden stick.

  ‘Do they think the whales will ever really recover?’

  Silly question, I suppose. They need clean, quiet, cold food-filled oceans, as well as each other. But you never stop hoping for silly answers. Like, ‘Yes—it will all be fine. All manner of things shall be well.’

  ‘Well, to put it indelicately, they don’t hump much.’ Gordon set aside his mix of cork and adhesive to go off.

  ‘It’s patient work . . .’

  ‘Like all conservation work.’

  * * *

  I discovered that if I sat under the tremendous jaw of the blue whale, as if under an awning, I could watch what was going on across the hall without being in the way. The blue whale’s jaw and the bone sheets of its palate were a source of fascination in themselves. There were many old repairs and interventions up there on the roof of its mouth, brown with age and too high to reach. A battery of tin-tacks marked where the baleen had been, because originally it was displayed, too—these tacks had held it in place—but insects had infested it sometime in the 1930s and it had been removed. There were wires, holding splits of bone together, and nails, and smears of gesso and splints of wood. I tried to concede Gordon’s point about the artesans, but wherever in life there had been soft sinew or muscle or cartilage, now there was metal; what work the ocean had done in holding up the whale’s bulk was done now by chains and rods. No one had gone so far as to carve their initials, but it had that feel, similar to an ancient tree, like everyone who encountered it had been challenged by it, had to leave some mark.

  Two or three times on my visit I sat under the blue whale’s jaw, or even within the cage of its chest, the thick portcullis of its ribs descending around. You got used to the scale, even to holding conversations in these surrounds. To sit within the creature’s ribcage was like being in a very strange taxi, caught in traffic.

  But you could conduct a bit of a thought experiment. You could sit within the blue whale, and look back, following the spine with your eye as it voyaged above the hall, curving very slightly, continuing between the other whales, suspended every few yards by those chains and rods, until it tapered to an end far away. Then, of course, there would have been the tail, too, something the width of a small aircraft. Despite the size, you could, with a minimum of effort, extend your sense of self, and imagine this was your body, moving through the ocean. You could begin to imagine what it might feel like, to be a blue whale.

  I sat there, as the others worked, and wished, as I often do, that I could draw. I’d draw the great sculptural shapes and shadows that arced over me and round, the honed shapes of the ‘spinous process’ marching away. I’d draw scenes like the war artists did, especially the appropriately named Muirhead Bone, whose war drawings show figures up on gantries working on fuselages bigger than themselves. Of course, this was a smaller scale, but to watch the conservation team reaching and kneeling, in workmen’s clothes and masks, moving around the crates of the whales, gave something of the same idea.

  I was lurking in the blue whale’s chest on my second afternoon. Marielle and Zina were at their stations at the sei whale, when Gordon, released from a meeting, came up the ladder and passed by, but as he did, something caught his attention.

  ‘Look, there’s a fracture!’ he said, and entered into the creature’s belly, and ran his hand down a rib on the whale’s left. The rib thickened at a place two-thirds down, then thinned again. ‘That’s been broken there, and healed.’

  ‘Wonder what did that.’

  ‘Who knows. Perhaps they fight. Maybe it hit a ship.’

  ‘It would take a lot to break a whale’s rib, wouldn’t it?’ I said. ‘I mean, inside all the blubber?’

  ‘But it would deliver a shockwave . . . and look at this side—see these scrapes on this rib here? This one’s been flensed . . .’

  * * *

  Of course it became ridiculous only to watch others and ask questions. Housework? I could do that.

  Marielle and Zina, voices muffled by the masks they were wearing against the ammonia, were still at work on the sei whale—as they would be for some time yet.

  I called over. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘We thought you’d never ask! Come on—let’s get you a mask.’

  I crawled through the humpback’s ribs toward them, and found Marielle sitting under the humpback’s spine with a sei rib across her lap. They’d undone some bolt or other and taken it off, the better to clean it. There was another waiting attention, too. So I sat beside her, cross­ legged with a sei whale rib arcing my lap too, a piece of evolutionary work curved and honed, with a slight kink to it, and a club-like thickness at the end.

  Marielle showed me what to do. First, you spray your rib with ammonia from a plastic bottle, then you take a brush, the kind you’d use for the washing-up, and work the ammonia onto the rib, working into the grain. Then you wipe it down with a sponge, simple, and at once a layer of dark dirt comes away. The bone emerges lighter and brighter. This is gratifying.

  Marielle, her long red hair tied back, with her rib; me with mine. Zina standing on the far side of the whale, occasionally switching on and off a vacuum cleaner, played it along the spine.

  It was the quiet lull of mid-afternoon. We talked a little. Marielle was writing her university master’s dissertation on the collection. She was the one poring over the old museum records and daybooks, trying to put together something of the history of the Hvalsalen. She cleaned bones by day and in the evenings sought clues as to how they got there.

  ‘They’re in Norwegian, aren’t they, the records?’

  ‘Yes, but I can read them, aside for a few words.’

&nbs
p; She had worked in museums in London, and told me her dream job would be to go to the Antarctic, to help conserve Scott’s hut.

  I suppose we could have been housemaids, set to polish the silverware in some mansion, except for being high above the floor, with a whale crowd around us. It was quite absorbing. We worked into the stubborn parts of our respective bones and, indeed, toothpicks were provided, to winkle out hardened little deposits of gunk. Soon, it would be the humpback’s turn, then the blue whale’s.

  The blue whale, awaiting the attention of the toothpick. Then, they’d have taken everything we could throw at them. The full gamut of human attention—from the exploding harpoon and flensing iron, to the soft sponge and the toothpick.

  Gordon came up the ladder, said was pleased with his reconstituted cork. It would be flexible enough and strong enough to fill the cavities in the right whale’s broken rib.

  The sound of the young women’s voices and the brushes. The whales’ otherworldly presence.

  ‘Ever seen a whale?’ I asked Marielle. ‘Alive, I mean?’

  ‘No! None of us has. We were talking about this just the other day. We really should try; we spend all day with them here . . .’

  ‘You get such a feel for them, don’t you think? All their differences. Different species, different characters?’

  ‘I would love to see a whale . . .’

  ‘We should go together,’ said Zina. ‘Whale-Team­building!’

  ‘Oh, you should!’ I said. ‘Really—find a way. Of course, all you see is a blow, a back, a fin or tail. To have to imagine all this . . .’

  I watched as she turned the rib in her gloved hand, appraising it.

  ‘That’s coming up nicely.’ There is some old magic to do with cleaning bones. Something ancient and fairy story. Something prehistoric, maybe. All those chambered cairns piled with clean bones.