Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

Nummedal, Oftedahl, Hvalbiff and the whole Geological Service — they can stuff their aerial photographs.

Snag is, I don’t have a helicopter.

*

I remember vividly Sibbelee’s reaction when it dawned on him that I would be needing aerial photographs.

Sibbelee displays certain symptoms when about to make a pronouncement he is unsure of. Bluffing is signalled by a thrust of his underdeveloped chin. But an underdeveloped chin does not lend itself to thrusting. What happens is merely that the skin is stretched taut from chin to Adam’s apple while the head is thrown back.

‘Aerial photographs,’ he said, displaying all the said symptoms of bluffing, ‘of course you need aerial photographs. They are a must in modern research. You can’t get away from that.’

As if I had any intention of getting away from it!

‘But how can I obtain them, Professor?’

‘I shall send a note to Nummedal. Nummedal is an old friend of mine, so that should be no problem.’

My expression must have been one of relief, joy and admiration, because Sibbelee’s usual self-congratulatory smile spread across his face as his bluff went uncalled. A smile which at first you take to mean: aren’t I wonderful and famous and in the know, but which you realise later meant: managed to avoid dropping myself in it, thank God.

Either way, at the time I thought it was perfectly normal that Sibbelee should ask his old friend in Norway to supply me with aerial photographs.

And it is normal, surely. The fact that I still do not have them could easily be due simply to a succession of failed connections.

It must have slipped Nummedal’s mind that I was coming. He’s an old man, after all.

As for Hvalbiff, he knew he couldn’t get me the photographs, because they were in transit from Oslo to Trondheim, but what could he have done about it? I had probably left already, and anyway Hvalbiff wouldn’t have had my address, and so had no way of letting me know they were not in his possession.

And Oftedahl? Oftedahl had nothing to do with it, being the head of a different department. Still, he put himself out for me. I can’t reproach him for anything, he was very obliging … as far as I know …

The seaplane tilts sideways at such a steep angle that my porthole is almost parallel to the ground. The same goes for me, with my face against the glass. Alta slides past under my eyes: small houses dotted along a huge bay. Trees in the low-lying areas, bald heights. As if the treeline were the result of a gigantic hand reaching down to sweep the vegetation off the slopes and batten it down in the valleys.

The plane rights itself again, the water now is very close. The floats seem poised to seize the surface, like the talons of a bird of prey.

Landing on water. I hadn’t noticed how odd that sounds before. The engine stops. All the noise, the throbbing, dies away. Like waking from a dream: one moment you’re flying, the next you find yourself floating on a vast expanse of water.

The pilot emerges from the cockpit and opens the hatch.

The silence gives way to the low chugging of a motorboat. There’s not even a jetty here in Alta, unlike in Tromsø. The boatman throws a rope to the pilot, who is waiting on one of the landing floats.

I step out of the cabin onto the float and from there into the motorboat. My rucksack and suitcase are passed down.

At this distance from the shore I can’t see whether anyone has come to meet us. Arne?

Behind me the seaplane splutters to life again with a succession of loud bangs.

I look back and watch as the plane gathers speed, the floats generating great waves surging towards our motorboat. Tossing on this man-made swell, we head for the shore.

Arne? Yes, Arne. He is waving his hat. He looks like the man I mistook for him in Tromsø, except that he is waving his hat much more slowly than the other person did.

People in thinly populated countries favour the slow manner of greeting. I don’t have a hat, so all I can wave is my hand.

The seaplane swerves and banks in an avalanche of noise. I follow it with my eyes until it disappears and then look back to the shore.

Some way up from the water’s edge a road follows the contour of the bay.

The man is still waving his hat. He is not Arne. He stops waving. He is accompanied by a woman and three children, all wearing trousers and tall boots.

They move away without waiting for me to come ashore. They must have been mistaken, like me, thinking or hoping I was someone they knew. Or they just stopped out of curiosity.

I am harrowed with uncertainty. Was I right after all, yesterday in Tromsø, when I thought the person waving at me from the ship was Arne? Because it’s quite possible that Arne had already left the ship by the time I got there, and that the person I saw later wasn’t the one (i.e. Arne) who’d waved at me in the first place.

The motorboat pulls up to the beach, the engine is cut, the bottom scrapes over pebbles. I step ashore.

A sharp sting sets my left eyelid twitching. I clap my hand to my face and my fingers come away smeared with splattered mosquito. My head is wreathed in mosquitoes. They settle on my forehead, my nose, the backs of my hands. I have to take charge of my luggage, so am powerless to fend them off.

The boat is left behind, deserted.

So this is it. Where do I go from here? There is a wooden staircase leading up from the beach to the road, which has a low boundary wall of stones.

I load my rucksack, grab my suitcase and have just started climbing the stairs when I catch sight of someone on the road trotting in my direction. I can only see his top half. No hat of any kind. He vaults over the boundary wall and runs down the slope. I am struck by how thin his legs are, but also by his agility and sure-footedness. I stop and wait. All the time he looks straight at me, smiling, but not waving.

Arne is wearing tall boots and an anorak. The strings of his down-turned hood dangle on his chest.

‘Hello!’

‘Hello, Arne!’

Arne immediately takes hold of my suitcase and goes up the stairs ahead of me.

‘The plane is usually an hour late,’ he says when we are up on the road, walking side by side. ‘I still had some shopping to do, I did not expect it to be on time today.’

He speaks a cautious form of English, picking his words carefully, keeping things simple.

‘We will leave the suitcase at the house. You can change there. The bus leaves at three o’ clock. Plenty of time. Okay?’

*

Arne is about a head taller than me. His hair is very fair and quite long. It is already thinning at the back and greying at the temples. Everything about him seems old, although he is only a year older than me: twenty-six. His clothes are decidedly old, with patches on his trousers as well as on the elbows of his anorak. I saw him glancing at his watch when he said the bus would be leaving at three. It is not a proper wristwatch but an old pocket watch mounted on a leather strap, the way they were sold ages ago when wristwatches first came into fashion.

‘A long journey, isn’t it, all the way from Amsterdam?’

The platitudes I offer in return (How is he? When did he arrive in Alta?) do nothing to convey my relief at our meeting having gone to plan.

It suddenly comes to me that I live in constant fear of having to survive in a world where everyone is out to fool everyone else. Intent aside, though, there’s no reason why Arne couldn’t have had an accident half an hour before my arrival. Run down by a car. Or a heart attack — how strange, the family would think, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his heart. So young, too! Or he could have had a fall. Lost his footing on an apparently innocuous rise and come crashing down, possibly slamming his head against a crag.