Ilija Trojanow - The Lamentations of Zeno

From the sundeck I can see the SOS with the naked eye, using binoculars I can make out individual passengers gazing up at the helicopter, which is making a first loop above them, the light flashes in Dan Quentin’s lens like an explosion, like a visual start signal. The few personnel who were left behind as an emergency crew are standing at the rail, I tell them to lower one of the life rafts and go aboard and make themselves ready. They buy my story that the captain wishes to practice the maneuver in these waters, with the weather as stable as it is. Now all that’s left is for me to convince the stakeholders that they, too, should board the life raft. The drone of the helicopter and the rattling of the crane accompany me into the bowels of the ship.

At last I am alone. On a calm sea and not atop a surge of history, alone on a cruise ship that can be steered with a joystick, as if navigating through the islands of ice were long since nothing but a computer game. Track steering ship control is what this technical miracle is called, one pull of the switch and the ship will follow a preprogrammed route, as Vijay the chief navigator showed me one high-sea day, we were talking about Ladakh and Tibet, storm-free passages make for boring shifts, about Kailash and Gangotri, I entered the open ocean as my destination, the way he showed me, a random point in the wide Atlantic, it seems to be working, the ship is cutting through the water, it will get there without me, too. The bridge has three radar devices (black for sea, yellow for land) and two compasses (one magnetic, one electronic) — I won’t need any of it, no more than I need the Automatic Identification System, which shows third parties the position of the MS Hansen and lets me know what might be approaching. They will catch up with me. I’ve taken the flag off the mast and tossed it in the bin marked Plastic Waste.

It’s going to be a long day.

Someone will find this notebook, someone will read it and decide to publish it or not. One way or the other, I have no need to explain myself further. One human being is an enigma, a few billion human beings organized in a parasitic system are a catastrophe. Under these circumstances I’m just tired of being human. “It would be lovely to walk the streets with a green knife and scream until I die of the cold.” There is an eviscerated bird dangling in front of every human home.

I used to believe I had to fight my insidious misanthropy, today I realize that we have to topple humans off their pedestal in order to save them. What does it matter if a person is blind or deaf, blinkered or benighted? Only big blows are capable of jolting mankind. I am calm and resolute. I pull the master switch, all lights on board go out.

It’s high time.

What consoles me? That we will leave nothing behind except fossilized excrement.

When it gets dark I will go out and I will fly, surrounded by thornfish and sea squirts swimming below me, skates and rays gliding away above me. I will fly until my blood has run to ice.

Those are measurements to die for, copper, you can kiss it goodbye, everyone must be called upon to sacrifice, platinum, no one’s going to question it, now that’s what I call one efficient move, sooner or later our hour will strike, iron, all ravens are black, oil, measurements to die for, we have to be prepared for every contingency, lol, everywhere there are unexplained delays, chromium, we’re doing what we can, his epitaph should read: mistrust the survivors, grit your teeth and get on with it, whoever blinks has lost by half, gold, shit happens, no one’s going to question it except for those who deny it, you can’t do anything about it, of course I want to get home as soon as possible, no, I’m not just standing here looking at pigeons on purpose, what do I know, the way she’s scowling, it’s upsetting, it’s really upsetting, coal, it was programmed wrong, we got off with a black eye, uranium. We searched the ship, there’s no one on board, we’re certain that there’s no one on board, no idea what happened to the hijacker, we found something, some sign of life, next to the steering console on the bridge, a notebook, it’s full of writing, in German if I’m not mistaken, it might help us understand what he did. We fled to the south, where dollars drop from the sky like snowflakes, the business climate and the apparent temperature is trending toward bankruptcy. I was wrong, there’s still someone on board, we discovered her on the monitors, an older woman, she was wandering up and down the passageways, she seems dazed, her eyes are glassed over, she says she was attacked by a penguin, not very believable, she claims not to know anything about the hijacking, I know, she says she was sound asleep because of the powerful antibiotics, we’ll have to question her of course. The overweight will have to weigh things over, morning, evening, and in the fall, prepared for everything, we’re infesting now in our future, the revolution will not be televised, be prepared for everything, the revolution will not be televised, BREAKING NEWS LIGHTS GO OUT TONIGHT FOR FIVE MINUTES BREAKING NEWS LIGHTS GO OUT TONIGHT FOR FIVE MINUTES on and on without end

Thanks to all who generously shared their expertise and who helped me, on land as well as at sea:

Dr. Reinhard Böhm for the lively glacier tutorial

Kristina Dörlitz for the excellent research assistance

Alexandra Föderl-Schmid for the second commission

Petra Glardon for the wonderful iceberg photos

Prof. Dr. Wilfried Haeberli for his edifying encouragement

Christoph Hofbauer for his high-powered advice

Mijnheer Hans Huyssen for the music

Angelika Klammer for her inspired and inspiring editing

Freddy Langer for the friendly press service

Dr. Rudi Mair for the conversation about Alpine climate and Antarctic overwintering

Borrego Pedro Rosa Mendes for the days and nights at the Tejo

Compañero José F. A. Oliver for his empathetic reading of the manuscript

Papa Heinz Renk for showing me the Tyrolean glaciers

Dr. Miguel Rubio-Godoy for the avalanche of calamities

Dr. Christine Scholten for the medical review

Dorothée Stöbener for the first commission

Susann Urban for the gift of the title

Juli Zeh for the wielding the red pen

Hurtigruten Shipping for their double hospitality

The poems cited in the text are by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Klabund and Pablo Neruda

This book is set in Electra, a typeface designed by William Addison Dwiggins for use on Linotype typesetting machines in 1935. Dwiggins, a mildly eccentric book designer, illustrator, calligrapher and creator of marionettes, is credited with coining the term “graphic design”.

Dwiggins’s foray into type design began with a challenge from the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, after he had criticized the dearth of usable san serifs. Electra was Dwiggins’s first type design for book setting and would be one of his most enduring.

While the popular book faces of his time were revivals of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century printing types, Dwiggins sought to create a typeface that reflected the modern environment. As his friend and fellow illustrator Rudolph Ruzicka commented, Electra was “the crystallization of [Dwiggins’s] own calligraphic hand.” Its unbracketed serifs, flat arches, and open counters make for a face mild in pretence but alive in personality. Dwiggins explained, “The weighted top serifs of the straight letters of the lower case: that is a thing that occurs when you are making formal letters with a pen, writing quickly. And the flat way the curves get away from the straight stems: that is a speed product.”