Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

I sit bolt upright, my left hand clamped round my left calf and my right holding a slice of bread with a chunk of lukewarm meat on top, which I keep in position with my index finger. As I raise the bread to my mouth my attention is caught by the artery pulsating on the inside of my wrist. Monstrous — what a monstrous reminder of one’s animal nature. Bestial. Doesn’t my vein look remarkably like a worm? A worm wriggling to get out — there, there, you poor little thing, you’ll be free sooner than you think, and it’s going to be a huge disappointment. Because you can’t do without me any more than a clam can do without its shell.

I bite into the bread and find myself grinning.

I have a sudden vision of pious little Eva consoling my mother: ‘Don’t cry, Mummy, Alfred’s with Daddy now!’

She points skyward with a perfectly varnished fingernail. Then takes her compact from her handbag to repair the tear-smudged powder on her cheek. All her girlfriends lavish care on their nails, too. They’re not very bright either, and they believe in God, like Eva. With me gone there won’t be anyone left in the family to vindicate my father’s death. It remains to be seen whether Eva will pass her exams next year, and there’s clearly no hope of her ever contributing weekly pieces to seven Dutch publications with reports on what the Observer and the Figaro Litté raire have to say about twenty-odd foreign novels. Wittering on about God is what she’s good at. I’ve stopped trying to un-convert her, and when I tell her she’s obviously too dim to understand that the word ‘God’ is meaningless, she counters with: ‘Let’s see how far your brains will get you, shall we?’

I can scarcely swallow the food for helpless mirth. My ambition, anybody’s ambition, is enough to make you choke with laughter, once you think in terms of having to prove to some silly girl that you’re right and she’s wrong. I’ll show them how far my brains will get me! Because if I come to grief she’ll just point a manicured finger to heaven saying: He’s with Daddy now.

My mother might even believe her, who knows? She’d have the excuse of her age compounded by the shock of losing her son.

I get to my feet and the ravine yawns even deeper. The far side is dusty black, a sombre cliff where the sun never reaches. There’s a smallish glacier on the cliff side. Streams of water run off it in deep gulleys, and yet the size isn’t affected.

I hoist my rucksack and wait for Arne to take the lead. Where will he start his descent? Or will we walk along the precipice first for a bit, until we find somewhere less steep? I don’t say a word. Arne kicks the hearth-stones away and stamps on the dying embers and half-burnt twigs. A fjelljo flies overhead, alights, becomes invisible thanks to its camouflage, gives three sharp cries: Morse code for the letter S, the first letter of SOS.

My situation is precarious for more reasons than I can keep track of, but it comes to me now that on top of everything else I feel trapped. I am afraid of what Eva will say if I fall to my death. On the other hand, if I reach the bottom alive, the terror I have experienced will be too laughable to relate to anyone, ever. And I can’t very well ask Arne to consider taking another route — now that Qvigstad and Mikkelsen have decamped and my suspicions have been raised.

Never have I been so certain that what I’m going through is utterly futile and impossible to recount: me, following Arne down the side of the ravine with the depths rising up to engulf me like some invisible tidal wave in reverse: whatever I do, whatever happens to me, it will not be of my own volition.

A secret consciousness reveals itself.

The veil of mystery shrouding life in its entirety lifts momentarily and I know that at all times and in everything I do I am defenceless and powerless, as replaceable as an atom, and that all my resolve, hopes and fears are nothing but manifestations of the mechanism governing the movements of human molecules in the fathomless vapour of cosmic matter.

Arne’s descent is nigh vertical as he slithers down a little way, perches on a rock, springs down to the next faster and faster, until he appears almost to be falling, with only his feet to slow him down. The drop becomes so sheer that it seems the only thing stopping him from plummeting to the bottom is an invisible parachute. I note that he keeps changing direction, zigzagging along an imaginary horizontal plane, scraping his shoulders against the cliff face.

In the deep lies the bright green bed of the ravine, threaded with lazy streams. The water looks as if it was spilt, but glitters like molten steel.

I focus all my attention on my feet, breathlessly picking my way while the blood pounds in my throat. I grab hold of the shrubs sprouting from cracks in the rock face, as if they could save me should I lose my footing. Ridiculous! Most of the time they come loose at the first touch. What if I slip …? Will I crack my head against a jutting rock, or will I fall into a cleft and be wedged there with collapsed rib cage and broken bones? Sick with anxiety, I see that Arne has reached a wide tongue of loose shale, a fan of debris leading down to the bottom of the ravine like a gangway. An arrested avalanche of stone. Arne’s feet are buried up to his ankles, but he’s out of danger. Oh to be down there with him, for that is where my suffering ends!

With a surge of confidence I propel myself forward from crag to crag. No more hanging on to plants. My bruised knee is so painful I could scream, but my descent feels no less flowing and nimble than Arne’s. Like flying down a stair-case without thinking. I hardly look where I put my feet, while glimpses of the green depths alternate with the pale expanse of glacier across the way. My headlong flight is abruptly smothered in the spill of shale. I pitch forward, straighten up again, then run freely and fearlessly to the bottom.

My ears fill with the sound of water. The mosquitoes have stuck by me, and swarm around my head like electrons circling round an atom. Cold air wafts from the glacier towards me. I have to tilt my head back as far as it will go to catch a glimpse of sky: a blue serrated stripe. My shoes squelch through the green: peat and polar willows. I reach the water, bend down and drain two cups in quick succession. It is so shallow we have no need to go across barefoot. Anxiously scanning the cliff for the most suitable place to climb out of the ravine, I follow Arne in the assumption that he knows what he is doing. Are we to go across the glacier? No, that is a dead end: it abuts on a perpendicular amphitheatre of rock.

Reaching the other side of the stream I have a sense of sinking deeper into the moss with each step I take. The moss gives way to black mud. I am entrenched among polar willows that come to my waist. Arne’s already climbing up the other side. How did he get there? My shoes fill up with water. I have to raise my legs higher and higher to make any headway in the bog, which is knee-deep. I can feel the seat of my trousers getting wet. But what can I do? My camera and map pocket, which I’m wearing round my neck, must not get wet so I hold them aloft, but then I have to drop them again as I need both arms to steady myself. I have to speed up, raise my legs even higher now, because staying in the same place for even a second means sinking an extra ten centimetres. My upper body is drenched too, not with water but with sweat. The mosquitoes attack my face, get into my eyes. I am panting so heavily that they get sucked into my mouth; I can feel them on my tongue, on my epiglottis. I don’t shout for help because there isn’t any. As a last resort I let myself flop forwards, across a thicket of willows. They bend under my weight, forming a web. Slowly I extract my left foot, manage to place it on three flattened willows, then pull the right foot loose and stand up straight.