Ilija Trojanow - The Lamentations of Zeno

STANDING BRACED ON the weather deck of a pitching cruise ship, taking in the gale, the storm, face lashed by wind and spray, having the breath knocked out of the lungs, at the mercy of the elements and frozen through after only a few minutes no matter how many layers of high-end high-tech material — passengers can enjoy a brief taste of the deprivations of a bygone era, just one door removed from the warm cabin from where they can witness nature unleash its force through a glass pane as though they were watching a prizewinning documentary. Almost everyone chooses the comfortable front-row view. Alone at the bow I lean over the railing, the spray spits in my face, I claw myself into the wood, the wind slaps my cheeks, it has every right to punish me for my comfort, for the deadly sin of a civilization bent on denying the basic principle of life, because whatever lives must strive to climb the energy gradient. Petrels dance among the gusts, the ecstasy of their soaring and diving is my own yearning taken wing, I rock in the air as if I, too, had been granted such ability, the engines burble away in the maw of the howling storm, how ridiculous am I to be impressed by the obvious. We cannot read the flight of birds, says El Albatros, merely misunderstand it. In the half-visibility I sense the outline of a mighty object, an iceberg is floating our way, it’s larger than our ship, flat on top as though brushed smooth, as if an entire province had detached from the shelf ice and was damned to orbit the South Pole or drift north and expire, bequeathing to the hemisphere the purest air, and to the ocean the cleanest water, laden with healing powers that enable the phytoplankton to grow, as well as the zooplankton that sustain the small shrimp-like krill that nurture birds and whales (Beate claims that within her lifetime the krill population has declined by four fifths, there’s no arguing about it). The ice has been punched with oval holes, mighty vulvas pushing deep inside the berg. Melting mating calls. Behind a curtain of mist the sun flares unexpectedly, a measure of mortality. The glow withstands a few more waves before it disappears again and the storm rages on in the twilight.

Could this be calm? A commodity precious enough to be marketed with enormous success, guarded in protected areas, sheltered in reserves. But these ecological niches are shrinking as the pulse of our age thuds on ahead in four-quarter time.

One day some years back, just after the church bells rang vespers, I said I had no desire to go out and eat in some pub where they drench the roast venison in an earsplitting sauce.

“Does that mean you’re not going to the doctor because they play Radio Bavaria in the waiting room?” Helene asked full of spite. “And what about the dentist and all his spherical sounds straight from the Buddha?”

She snatched the car keys from the ceramic dish and rushed off to her sister, who was well inclined toward me because she didn’t have the patience for Helene’s continuous loop of complaint. I sat down on the chair in the hallway, closed my eyes and stayed there a long time. How did it happen that words like “quiet” and “standstill” have turned into something pejorative? Even on hiking trails I hear the numbing bass notes of music junkies who can no longer bear the sound of nature. If they at least just listened to their own voices, but no, they have to smear a layer of stale noise over every single thing. Admittedly I also put on a pair of headphones now and then in the S-Bahn on the way to the university, Thomas Tallis did a lot to help mask the ugliness of the utility buildings along the way, but it would have been unthinkable to listen to his music in the woods or on the mountain or when I was with people I knew. The Hansen doesn’t have a public address system (unlike other ships in other latitudes, where according to Paulina jingles screech and fanfares boom). Recently they held a rock concert on King George Island, soon the glacial faces will come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho. In our cabin the only perceptible sound is Paulina’s tender singing (in contrast to many of her compatriots she isn’t glued to her iPhone); she mixes evergreen hits from the ’70s with Filipino folk tunes. In fact it was her singing that cast me in a spell on the last evening of my first trip, I had hardly noticed her before that, her unobtrusive politeness blended in with the ready friendliness of all the other Filipinos. But at the farewell concert — the passengers had given the crew a chance to amuse themselves — she metamorphosed into a confident chanteuse, a bundle of energy inside a cone of light, she crossed her legs and let her right shoe slide down her foot so only the silver buckle was looped over her toe, the shoe dangled and swayed and all desires were fixed on her as she sang the old hits to a plucked accompaniment with an intensity that let me draw a curtain shutting the two of us off from the rest of the world. Later my feverish fantasy made me self-conscious as we stood next to each other at the after-party in the cafeteria, I was certain she could sense me looking at her with different eyes, my desire mixed with a strong dose of insecurity, my tongue my best enemy, and nevertheless a few hours later she lay next to me, just like now, with her head on my shoulder and one hand on my chest, and as so often on our days on the open sea, when one or the other of us is granted a free hour, she has asked me to read something out loud to her. I am happy to comply, for me it is a gesture of intimacy, I read a passage from the reports of the so-called Explorers because of her charming compassion for the hardships and suffering they faced, though in my anger I see them less as pioneers and more as avaricious parvenus seeking to take possession of the Antarctic as if she were a virgin who after the first night was theirs by right for all other nights, and so they despised all competitors as thieving rivals, while they themselves sought to conceal their own lust so as not to endanger their spotless reputation as impeccable gentlemen.

“It only seems that way to you,” says Paulina after a pause that she occasionally asks for so she can keep up with the story, “because that’s how you read it, your anger is seeping into their words, but you’re really just like they are, you want to determine what happens to the Antarctic.”

My voice flares up. “If you mean I don’t want any people or fuel oil in the Antarctic, then you’re right, I do want to determine what happens here. But I don’t want to possess the place, that’s the difference, I don’t want to have any part of it named after me, I just want it to be left in peace.”

Paulina pouts and wrinkles her nose. “You get so loud. You know, sometimes you can be a very loud person.” She hardly seems vulnerable and in need of protection when she challenges me like that, when she puts me in my place with simple sentences that make my replies seem inappropriately exaggerated. And that just makes me madder, the fact that I have a hard time explaining what I perceive and fear and despise, even to her. It’s plain as day, our profit-driven turpitude, why is it so hard for me to express the obvious to those who don’t see it? Just look at the picture, do you see a beautiful young woman or a wrinkled old woman? And once you’ve seen the wrinkled old woman will you ever be able to make out the beautiful young one? I turn away from Paulina, pompously wallowing in my anger like an elephant seal in his mudhole, until I’ve calmed down again. “My dear Paulina,” I whisper to her in sorrow and distress, “you are as much a mystery to me as the world itself,” and she beams, presumably because of the my dear Paulina, her smile lingers, a little happiness goes a long way with her, she consumes her blessings sparingly, while others need a new ration every day. I can’t imagine that any real lasting strife might come between us and settle in the narrow space of our cabin, she senses intuitively where I am reconcilable, the first time it happened unexpectedly, I was frightened, she took my rage inside her mouth and cooled it off so that we both grew silent. Later I stroked her little belly and said, “This makes you complete,” and she answered, “You make me complete”—a sentence I would never let her get away with if her laughter didn’t start to boil over again and seethe. Her quaking stomach arouses me, she takes the book from my hands and sets it down where moments later I toss her underwear, I forgive every sentence, and in order not to say any more wrong things I silence my voice with an eager tongue, my hands placed on her breasts, even when the ship’s rolling nearly knocks me down, my tongue circles on, stoking her passion, so that it doesn’t fade, the sea swells set the rhythm and in my mind she tastes of salt while drifting through my brain amid all the moaning is the question of whether we will ever be able to understand each other. What she wants is for us to simply be, while I seek deliverance in some more absolute silence.