Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

At what point does damage stop and wear begin?

‘Alfred, look! Over there!’

Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are standing shoulder to shoulder, staring intently at the far side of the lake. Mikkelsen is holding a pair of binoculars. I stand up, stare, see nothing, then suddenly realise what they’re looking at.

The flanks of Mount Vuorje appear to be shifting, as if the ground, the vegetation and the patches of snow have grown legs.

Steeling myself, I stagger towards Arne.

‘Listen! Listen carefully!’

I listen, open-mouthed. The air is filled with rumour, a sound that is hard to describe. The low rumblings of some immense horizontal creature overlying the entire mountainside.

Peering through the binoculars it’s as if you can hear the animals grazing. Most of them are fawn or brown in colour, but a lot of them are white with tan markings. We take turns with the binoculars to scan the slope for someone herding the animals, but he could be miles away. Gradually the herd bears down on the river.

‘The wind is blowing this way,’ Mikkelsen says. ‘So we can get much closer to them if we want.’

‘They’re almost as shy as animals in the wild,’ Arne says. ‘The moment they catch our scent they’ll be off.’

Reindeer. Fabled creatures of Christmas calendars and picture postcards. Deer with felt-lined antlers. Exotic, and reduced to a cliché by a surfeit of celebrity. Not that I’ve ever heard of reindeer producing a constant hum, never read about it in books, wouldn’t have guessed it either.

I struggle on after the others to get as close to the animals as possible. The low sun casts my shadow ahead of me, elongated tenfold. The terrain now is greatly varied: moss, shrubs, stones, all making different sounds on impact. No other noise but the rush of water. It’s only when I stand still that I can hear the reindeer, the way you only hear your own heartbeat when you’re lying quietly in bed. The animals in the front line are already stepping into the water, and still our presence doesn’t alarm them. We can now hear the bells worn by some of the bucks. But even that sound doesn’t transport us back to civilisation.

Low clouds, so low as to touch the ground, roll across the water towards us. Swathes of white mist give us a striped appearance. We straggle back to the tents.

It is one thirty a.m. The clouds are moving faster than we are, blotting out the sunshine. The temperature drops sharply in the space of minutes. We sit down by the dying fire to drink the last of our coffee, after which we all turn in for the night. Reaching his tent Qvigstad twists round to deliver a parting shot:

‘Hey! A young naked negress — not talking, just smiling!’

Arne and I are in our sleeping bags, which we have pulled up to our chins. Things aren’t so bad now, thanks to the coolness brought on by the clouds. But the bugs obviously want to shelter from the coming shower and the top of the pyramid is so thick with them that you can destroy scores at once just by reaching up and clapping your hands.

We eat raisins, drink some water, smoke another cigarette.

Arne waxes philosophical.

‘Do you remember what we were talking about just before you had your little encounter with the force of gravity?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s strange that nobody really does anything for its own sake. Being thrifty is my way of placating Fate, and then there’s you, thinking your father’s watching you.’

‘My father is no more real than your fate, the fate you hope will reward you for your austerity.’

‘What about your mother?’ he asks. ‘Your mother is still alive, isn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘It can’t have been easy for her to bring up two small children on her own.’

‘No, not easy, but not as hard as you might imagine.’ His remark has struck a chord. Here goes, I think to myself.

‘My mother,’ I say, ‘is Holland’s foremost essayist. She became successful not long after my father died, and she kept it up for years. Night after night she’d sit at the table in the living room pounding on a big office typewriter. Which she still does. Starts at eight sharp. Makes coffee at ten, then takes a break until a quarter past. Sometimes she pours me and my sister a cup too, she even did that when we were quite young, after which we were sent to bed. We’d be wide awake, of course, hearing our mother’s typewriter until midnight. Every week she writes two articles for magazines plus half a page for the Saturday supplement of a national daily, and she also contributes to a monthly cultural magazine. Her subject is foreign literature. A total of thirteen articles each month, in which she reviews some thirty books. And she travels all over the country to give talks. She’s an undisputed expert. Hemingway, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Sartre, Robbe-Grillet, Beckett, Ionesco, Françoise Sagan, Mickey Spillane or Ian Fleming — anyone wanting to appear cultured simply reads what my mother has written about them and then parrots her opinion without mentioning where they got it from. She’s been awarded the Legion of Honour and an honorary doctorate from the smallest university in Northern Ireland, the name of which escapes me. As you can imagine, there are over thirty books each month for her to write about, sometimes as many as fifty.’

‘And does she read them all?’

‘Not a single one. She doesn’t even open them, to avoid damaging the spine. What she does is copy the titles and the authors’ names onto little cards. Most critics don’t even do that. A second-hand dealer comes round from time to time to collect the brand-new books for a quarter of the retail price.’

‘So how can your mother write all those articles?’

‘We have subscriptions to the Observer , the Times Literary Supplement and the Figaro Litté raire . My mother only bothers with books that have already been reviewed in those papers. Oh, quite openly, mind you! She even quotes them verbatim at times, complete with credits to the Observer or the Figaro , especially on off days when she can’t come up with anything. “ Just a quickie this time,” she’ll say. She’s not alone in this, plenty of reviewers make even less of an effort. But my mother’s a very conscientious person. Busy from morning till night, even works on Sundays. She compiles dossiers on all the authors whose books she reviews. In the living room back home we’ve got a big oak cupboard crammed with folders. She cuts out all the relevant items in the foreign press and files them away. Naturally, it can happen that there’s something on the back of an article that she needs as well. So she has to choose which one to cut up and which to save. Then she goes and makes a neat typewritten copy of the one she cut up.’

Arne smiles faintly.

‘Oh well,’ I say. ‘Maybe you’ll meet her some day. She’s thin and quite short, dark eyes, thin lips, nicotine-stained index and middle fingers. Smokes three packets a day. Goes to bed at two in the morning and gets up at seven, has done for years. My sister and I had a comfortable childhood thanks to her hard work. If my father hadn’t died we wouldn’t have spent as much as we did, because my mother isn’t at all good with money. Always buying us new clothes, you know, nothing was mended because she didn’t have the time. In the time it took her to darn a pair of socks she could make enough money to buy five new pairs, she used to say. We went to restaurants several times a week, because cooking was another waste of time as far as she was concerned. I feel sorry for her sometimes. I stay away from books myself. Whether or not she writes a load of rubbish isn’t my concern. She churns out pretty much the same stuff every time. If the author’s English she’ll say his technique is masterly, that he has a fine sense of humour, that the characters are convincing and the plot well structured. If it’s a French book the author will be intelligent, lucid, erudite, possibly a touch frivolous, and his engagement with the subject will be either impressive or slight. Dear old Mum! I wouldn’t dare ask her whether she herself thinks her reviews amount to anything.’