Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

‘Before my departure Professor Sibbelee told me about certain ideas he had. Suppositions he wanted me to verify.’

‘They must have been very interesting suppositions!’ Haltingly, I reply:

‘I didn’t find anything to substantiate them.’

‘But my dear fellow! There’s nothing unusual about that! What would the world be coming to otherwise? You seem not to have the faintest idea of the number of suppositions people work on.’

I make an attempt at polite laughter, but fail to produce the proper sound.

Nummedal doesn’t laugh either.

‘After the holidays,’ he says, ‘I will not be returning to Oslo University. My successor has not yet been named.’

Holding Arne’s notebook in my hand, I go up to him and say:

‘Here is the notebook. It might be interesting to know how far Arne progressed with his research. Maybe you have another pupil who could continue his work. I would like to have kept it as a souvenir, but then I don’t know Norwegian. Besides, the information might be useful to someone.’

Nummedal reaches out to take the notebook, but his hand gropes wide of the mark. He is totally blind! I have to take his hand and press the book into it. Then I say:

‘I’m awfully sorry that you will be leaving the university.’

‘Did you ever get those aerial photographs from Direktør Hvalbiff?

Yes, that’s what he said, I heard it clearly.

‘I didn’t get the photographs, and I discovered later that your student Mikkelsen had them. That was another setback, but I’m not blaming anyone. I realise that I was an outsider, there was no way I was going to belong. Which is why I want to study in Oslo. I want to start a new life.’

‘Start a new life, you say?’

He gets up from his chair with great difficulty. He doesn’t seem able to tell where I am by ear, either. Addressing the palm tree more than me, he continues:

‘There were no aerial photographs at my institute. Hvalbiff has them, Geological Survey in Trondheim, as I told you. The Geological Survey, that is the place to go for aerial photographs. Direktør Hvalbiff. But that man has been getting in my way ever since his appointment there! You should be grateful you don’t live in this country! Such a big country and fewer than four million inhabitants. But all they do is quarrel! Start a new life? Here in Norway? Starting a new life is always a continuation of the old life! I challenge the whole Salvation Army to prove that I am wrong! I suggest you think about that long and hard before you take up residence in this country!’

Clutching Arne’s notebook, he gestures in the direction of the potted palm. As if it were me standing there, me pressed up against the ceiling!

Why did Arne ever make me jealous? He was such a good draughtsman, his notes were so meticulous, he could climb the steepest slopes without effort and cross rivers without getting his feet wet. Now his work, unfinished, is in the hands of a blind man.

Hvalbiff, was what Nummedal said. No doubt about it.

Nummedal hates the man. Blind hatred — surprise, surprise.

Damn! It could just be a nickname Nummedal invented for the director of the Geological Survey. How they must have laughed behind my back … Hvalbiff. That means whale meat, Arne had said. Funny eh, Qvigstad had said, not a trace of fat in it, just like beef.

Like a crash of thunder, it comes to me: the pink, fleshy face of the man I spoke to in Trondheim and who, when I asked for Direktør Hvalbiff, introduced himself as a geophysicist by the name of Direktør Oftedahl.

Could ‘Hvalbiff’ and Oftedahl be one and the same person?

I am not going to bother to find out.

The maid shuts the door behind me as I begin making my way down to the gate. The lushness of the vegetation, the mild weather, the scattering of villas, all this affects me with unreasonable self-reproach at having left Finnmark. When I was there I didn’t experience any longing to be back in the world of buildings and trees, I actually felt more at home among the ice and the abundance of shrubby plants, the birds and the fishes. Having left the rugged upland behind feels like defeat.

In the meantime I have noticed a signpost nailed to a tree on the other side of the road:

TROLLHAUGEN

The name sounds familiar, but there’s something odd about it. I have the feeling I’m on the brink of discovering what it is, as if I have just one page to go before the end of the book containing the answer.

A large open convertible comes towards me over the quiet road. The driver is a woman. She is hatless, her gleaming auburn hair like a cowl over her head, her eyes hidden by a long fringe. Her immaculately made-up face looks like a parchment copy of a face I have seen before, so who can she be? She looks at me intently and stops at the gate.

‘Hey! I knew I’d run into you again,’ she says. ‘How’s it going?’ She has an American accent.

It is the woman I met in Tromsø, in the light of the midnight sun.

‘Got any plans?’ she asks. ‘I’m on my way to Troldhaugen. You know, the home of Edvard Grieg, the famous composer. Why don’t you come along?’

Grieg!

I limp around the car and get in beside her.

She is wearing a very low-cut dress and a multi-strand pearl necklace.

‘Such a lot has happened since we last met. I’ve had a face-lift, you know. Left the clinic last week. They did a pretty good job, I think.’

She puts the car in gear and we spurt off.

‘Jack’s on a binge, he’s been drunk now for three days. I tell myself why sit around moping? Might as well spend some time visiting the sights. And what have you been up to?’

‘I’ve been in the High North.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Searching for meteorites, but I didn’t find a single one.’

‘Is that how you got that limp?’

‘I hurt my knee when I fell.’

‘And those rubber boots you’re wearing … you look like a plumber on his way home from work.’

‘I can’t get into my ordinary shoes.’

‘You look a mess! All those blotches on your face — what happened?’

She tilts the rear-view mirror a fraction towards the wind-screen so she can see me in it.

‘That’s the work of mosquitoes and flies up north,’ I reply.

‘Good Lord, you poor kid.’

She pulls up at the entrance to Troldhaugen, which was spelled with a double ‘L’ on the sign. A white house can be glimpsed beyond the trees.

‘Why don’t you just stay in the car. Better not strain yourself. I won’t keep you waiting for long, back in no time.’

She twists round to reach for something on the back seat. Did she get her figure lifted too? It is shapely and gorgeous.

‘Too bad,’ she says. ‘But I’m going to go right ahead and do what we Americans are always ridiculed for, or you’ll be sitting here for nothing while I have a look round.’

The object she reached for is a cine-camera, which she now raises to her eye and swivels round as if she’s mowing the whole place down with a machine gun.

Indeed, she is back in no time!

‘Nothing unusual about the house. Inside there’s a big grand piano, with a whole lot of photos on it. You can’t imagine a single note of Grieg’s music having been written there. But you can go down to the bottom of the garden, where there’s a cottage with another piano. That’s where he did all his composing, in full view of the beautiful lake. Shall we go for a drive?’

We drive around.

‘Grieg,’ she says, ‘Grieg must have been truly great to have written all that music while being obliged to live in a house like everybody else. Perhaps that’s a characteristic shared by great men. The first humans who took it into their heads to live differently from other animals had no idea what an awful adventure they were embarking on in their awful houses. If they hadn’t turned to building, man would have remained a rare species, like the okapi or the bird of paradise.’