Ilija Trojanow - The Lamentations of Zeno

“Gets on your nerves?”

“You might say that. Maybe he’ll relax a bit once his boss arrives. When is Quentin supposed to join us?”

“King George Island, they’re flying him in.”

“He who would achieve much has little time,” I say in an exaggeratedly nasal voice, but the Captain is immune to all irony. Even when he does speak he looks off in the distance somewhere beyond your shoulder, where some more urgent task seems to await him.

“We’re supposed to give him all the help he needs.”

“I take it we’re supposed to do it out of love.”

“Will you manage?”

“Do you expect complications?”

“It involves a lot of people.”

“We can limit the number of participants.”

“He wants to make the biggest SOS he can.”

“But to do that he’ll need our passengers.”

“The biggest SOS in history.”

“I assume that he’s been informed of the restrictions.”

“We’re turning a blind eye to that.”

“Are we?”

“If anyone inquires, the whole thing was an emergency preparedness exercise.”

“The passengers will have to agree.”

“That’s your task.”

“I’ll tell them tomorrow about Mr. Quentin’s installation.”

“We’ll discuss the rest another time.”

After Helene moved out, when relocating to the house in Solln failed to achieve its therapeutic goal, the pictures on the walls faded into strange reminiscences. Whenever I looked at them I had the feeling I was looking through the window at some random life stored in the building across the street. I took them down one by one as I imbibed the red wine Helene’s father had bequeathed to us: the old man had squirreled away these excellent bottles so that one far-off day they might help his son-in-law cope with the separation from his daughter. The pictures had left annoying outlines on the wall. Why is it that everything we do leaves an imprint (it takes a hundred years for a footprint in the Antarctic to disappear), why can’t we simply glide through moments without a trace, like birds through the air? I didn’t want to repaint all those walls, it was unclear how long I’d last inside them anyway. So I went into town and bought a large A3-size sketchpad and some watercolors, and started painting single letters of the alphabet onto individual sheets, after spending a long time deliberating which color to use for each. For A I chose a richly darkened yellow, like an aged Riesling, and for Z a garnet red pinot. O came out in a gray so soft it was indiscernible from more than a couple inches away. I painted one letter per day, and as soon as the paint dried I tacked the finished artwork to the wall. When at last the entire alphabet was adorning my walls I felt better in this house that I would never call “my house.” The letters allowed me to believe in a new beginning, and they beckoned to me from the walls, enticing me to read. On a trip to Ladakh I’d heard of a man who had become a reading recluse and withdrawn into a single book. Twice a week he visits a sandalwood dealer who lives in a wooden house on a stone base near the Indus River, and whoever wants to hear him read can find him there. The man reads one line from his book and then takes his listeners on an exegetical journey through all possible nuances. I felt tempted to adopt the same procedure. At random I selected a book out of a faux-antiqued series devoted to ancient philosophers and began reading line by line, paragraph by paragraph, with the same concentration as the guru in Ladakh, after which I took three sips and laid the book aside. Then I stretched my legs and returned and wrote down everything I could remember of the reading. Little by little all my initial flippancy evaporated and my supply of red wine dwindled but I sipped away until I had practically memorized the entire book. According to my informants in Ladakh it takes the word-fasting guru twenty years to guide his students through that one book, whereupon he starts all over again with a new batch of followers. Despite my admiration there was something about the whole procedure that bothered me, something didn’t seem to make sense. How can people consider a book holy unless they’ve rewritten it for their own purposes? Is it even possible for two people to mean the same thing when they say “God” or when they talk about love? At first I underlined individual words or sentences, often two or three times, I circled them, boxed them in, filling the small spaces between the lines with my observations until I realized there was no reason not to use the margins. I didn’t set the book aside until it was covered with my scribbling. After that I bought this leather-bound notebook. I declined the seller’s offer to have my name engraved.

And at the end of a long day on the open sea, when darkness has blackened everything, the stars grow dull, the wind breathes its last, our ship sails on into the last refuge of abundance. There is only one Terra Nullius left on Earth, and that’s where we are headed, “whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white” the language shrinks back from the miracle, the silence awaits us beyond the mist, where “glimmered the white Moon-shine.”

So pick up your phone and dial right now for your chance to win, the first three callers will receive a free blow job, I’m not what you’d call happy-go-fucky, Charlie don’t start without me, I’ve kissed the girls of Naples, as they say the pitcher will keep going to the well until it breaks, you can’t afford to give things away either, Charlie, wait she’s not just yours you know, do your looting while supplies last. The matter will be looked into at once, I’m afraid you’re going to have to fly right back, you better eat something while the machine’s being refueled, this is no longer a photo shoot, it’s an emergency. They’re pretty as can be, that comes from putting off the necessary repairs, the street is closed due to construction, please follow the detour, oceangoing tankers are kept in use until they break apart, see-lonce, see-lonce, watchin’ the ships roll in, legs well worth the look let me tell you, where there’s a middle class there will be banksters, you slave away for thirty years scrimping and saving every penny never going on vacation and then something like this happens, imao, do you have any idea what’s at stake here? we’re looking at a maritime emergency with international complications, all ships in the area, the Urd , the Verdandi and the Skuld are headed for Gerlache Strait to rescue the passengers, we have to be prepared for every contingency. You want to know the problem with the indigenous people, I’ll tell you, they’re too docile, we need to infect them with our greed, otherwise there’ll never be any peace between them and us, the overweight will have to weigh things over. The first ship should be there in roughly two hours, the captain of the Urd has taken command of the operation, water doesn’t get any colder. Then I watch them roll away again, you should snatch that up, the weather changes every minute and so does the business climate, and I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay, the atmospheric depressions return every thirty-six hours, watchin’ the tide roll away, in the course of a single day we experience all four seasons, I’m just sittin’ on the dock of the bay BREAKING NEWS HOPE FOR SURVIVORS BREAKING NEWS HOPE FOR SURVIVORS wastin’ time

A DAY WHEN clouds look like mountains and mountains like clouds. Alpine peaks spring up in the middle of the ocean, a tear in the sloping cloudbank exposes rocky cliffs and glaciers looming over patches of pasture, where reindeer introduced by homesick Norwegians chomp away at the vegetation. Trees have never set down their roots. The water inside the pot cove is rich in oxygen and krill and takes on a greenish tint. Here Creation appears with unfamiliar clarity, as though all cataracts have been removed and our collective vision was suddenly unclouded. We put into Grytviken, an old whaling station that was abandoned overnight and left to rot and ruin. The passengers stroll from the cemetery to the flensing plan to the mudhole where the elephant seals wallow motionless except when yawning. Our dock isn’t far from the graveyard which offers a small but very choice selection. The names are etched in white stone, on calm days we pay our respects to Sir Ernest Shackleton with a champagne toast. The diesel tanks are lined up as neatly as the graves — a reminder of how much blubber was processed in this cove. Inside the factory humans once dismembered whales, now time is dismantling the factory. Silence weighs on the dilapidated halls, the skuas fly in other skies. The whale oil tanks still exude a stench, so it seems to me: it’s hard to breathe in the middle of the rusting slaughter-works. Here and there a roof slants downward between the clouds and the tin floor, red signs mark off an area infested with asbestos. In front of the bone-rendering plant three figures clamp their hands around an iron chain and lean back as though in a tug-of-war with long dead whalers. The wind carries a sound of giggling, the Filipinos enjoy playing hide-and-seek in the ruins. But how am I supposed to distance myself from this flensing deck, this place synonymous with death? The snow-covered mountains are mere backdrops, distant and detached. So well hidden are the fur seals that you have to pay close attention not to step on one by accident. The younger seals scamper into the water, twisting in middive, then give themselves a vigorous shake as soon as they crawl ashore. A stand of gentoo penguins keeps watch between an anchor and some ship’s propellers (which, uncoupled from their purpose, are nothing more than grotesque jetsam), mocking glances behind red beaks. And by the jetty the Albatros has listed ostentatiously for decades, its harpoon gun long turned landward.