Ilija Trojanow - The Lamentations of Zeno

He’ll have to hell to pay that’s for sure, I’ve also kissed some French girls, what kind of crazy choreography is that, who come from Paree. All told we’re talking about 220 passengers, English, Germans, Americans, Dutch, Swiss. Oh, you must have taken a wrong turn at the big intersection, now you’ll have to go back the whole way. Norwegians, Brazilians, Canadians, New Zealanders, Austrians. We know enough but we understand little, the last spasms, not the faintest idea, to cum in the mouth costs double, the conditions there are unimaginably extreme, it’s snowing pornflakes, we’re infesting now in our future. Go ahead Foxtrot Two Niner, over. I can see people, dozens of them, standing in little groups, over. Have you tried to establish contact, over. Yes, a few are waving their arms, over. What is their condition, over. I can’t tell, over. Any signs of panic, over. No signs of panic. One group is very close together, it looks like they’ve formed a chain, over. No, cows aren’t holy, sheep goats and cattle aren’t holy and wild animals aren’t holy either, nor are the birds of the sky or the fish in the sea, pigs aren’t holy and neither are chickens, not even the lamb is holy. Foxtrot Two Niner Foxtrot Two Niner, go ahead, over. They’ve formed a circle, over. A circle? over. Something like a big zero, over. Descend as you can and fly a few 360s to calm the people, over. Wilco. Out. The experts are disputing this prognosis, today the fixed price for lithium was announced on time, thrushes are dropping dead from the sky, and so this planet Earth spins around its own axis and never stops moving. Email the passenger manifest, on top of that there are 78 crew members, we have to find out as much as we can about the experts on board, we’ll look for every missing person BREAKING NEWS RESCUE OPERATION IN EFFECT BREAKING NEWS RESCUE OPERATION IN EFFECT nothing else matters

WHENEVER I WAKE up early I run sixty laps around the weather deck at a fast pace in the sleepy gray light. I’m wide awake, the waters of the Antarctic are running alongside me, flowing around me, clockwise, accompanying me on my laps just like Hölbl did decades ago when we circled the sacred temples of Ladakh early in the morning, before the workday began. It just seemed like the right thing to do, although some people accused us of trying to ingratiate ourselves with the locals — people eager to dismiss sincere interest in broadening horizons as some kind of smarmy xenophilia. Hölbl dubbed the venerable Lama “Maestro Boltzmann” and His Holiness took a mischievous pleasure in the nickname, sensing that the unfamiliar sounds contained a certain prestige, and he wasn’t wrong. The water creaks and groans, the waves are only a few meters high, our crossing is relatively calm, the Drake Passage is usually good for at least one storm before letting a ship into the eye of the hurricane, into the paradisiacal tranquility of Terra Nullius. I perform my rotations in sync with the Circumpolar Current that every moment spins one hundred fifty million tons of water, birds glide through the twilight, their sharp wings slice through the cold air as they loop through the sky in perfect figure-eights, white albatrosses soar in steep arcs, storm petrels dive like rash decisions and disappear behind glimmering crests, plunging into the feed troughs between the waves, and I circle on, with each of my steps the ship recedes into oblivion right under my feet. I would be perfectly content with this solitary round dance of self-forgetting and nothing more if duty wasn’t calling: I have another lecture coming up in just a little while and I have yet to update the announcements about our upcoming landings. Every day at 7:30 PM I can be found at the radio coordinating plans with the other expedition leaders. Some of the voices I recognize right away, and some have accents that leave no doubt as to their countries of origin (Beate claims this is entirely natural, even whale songs show regional differences, underwater dialects). At the moment there are eight ships in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula, just among ourselves we divvy up the mooring places that were booked months earlier, we trade sites and help each other out to make up for cancellations due to weather. And we stay out of each other’s way, after all we don’t want the sight of another ship to ruin the illusion that we’re all on our own here in the Antarctic, far removed from any regulated traffic, alone at the end of the world.

No one in the institute had any illusion that I might consider changing my object of inquiry (the very phrase makes me think of an ingrown toenail), not at an age when my beard is straggling toward retirement. Nonetheless I couldn’t continue as I was, the Alps had become unbearable, what was there to be gained by accompanying one more glacier to its death? And to go on giving lectures undeterred seemed as grotesque as teaching veterinary medicine to paleontologists. No, there was no alternative but to bow out. Two colleagues invited me to join them in the High Caucasus Mountains. They didn’t want to see me leave the institute, and for that most sentimental of all reasons: they were used to my being there. You can cook for us in base camp, they joked. Actually I was considered an exceptionally gifted chef, a reputation that rested solely on the large pot of Jamaican fish tea soup I always brought to our summer parties. The first time I made it they were all dumbfounded, no one expected a dish like that (with that name, those ingredients, that taste) from me, a man who considers the tropics anathema in general, the Caribbean a steam pit in particular, and the idea of serving frutti di mare in the foothills of the Alps the epitome of decadence. And I would have no idea about the soup if a certain Jamaican who grew up in England hadn’t fallen in love with a young woman from Munich. He made ends meet teaching advanced conversational English at the Münchener Volkshochschule, where we discussed ska lyrics by Madness and read excerpts from George Mikes’ How to Be an Alien . At the end of the semester he invited the whole class over, gathered us in his kitchen, and then with the flourish of a circus director he opened the lid of a pot with a diameter as big as an oak’s and let out aromas that could spawn legends, fantasies of lazy afternoons rocking on boats with straw roofs or of diving into scallop beds. I took the course again the following year, even though my English was in good shape — not least thanks to an intensive exchange with colleagues from the University of East Anglia and the Jawaharlal Nehru University — just to get another taste of this soup and some idea how to make it. The recipe is incredibly elaborate, this Jamaican Fish Tea contains all the treasures of the sea, the ingredients are difficult to obtain (requiring the combined forces of the Viktualienmarkt, Dallmayr and Käfer), the preparation has to be planned well in advance and started at least one day before the feast. I spent weeks looking forward to this day, a day that knocked on my door with a tattooed hand. In the Caucasus, though, I’m not exactly in my culinary element, as I told my colleagues, and besides I can no longer bear the sight of living glaciers. That was a lie and they knew it, I still loved ice, but my perspective had changed, when I used to look at a glacier I saw history and change, abundance and endurance, the face I now encountered was grotesque, the remaining ice had become a mirror of our own neglect. From here on out no matter what I might see, I would never be able to recover my earlier acceptance of things. It seemed to me as though only now did I perceive their essence. Behind all the cornices and all the stucco I saw nothing but prisons. The people crowding the shops in the pedestrian zone struck me as display mannequins, pushed and pulled hither and yon by random jerks and jolts. You don’t need someone like me on your team, I said, and no one contradicted. That year saw the last pot of my Jamaican fish tea soup.