Willem Hermans - Beyond Sleep

I want to touch her, anywhere, but I’m not thinking straight. I find her beautiful, like a precious Egyptian mummy.

‘I just remembered something about Grieg,’ she says.

‘I forgot to mention it earlier. He was buried in his own garden. His tomb was sealed into the sheer cliff overhanging the path, with a simple slab engraved with his name to mark the spot.’

She jumps to her feet, goes over to the side table and takes up the silver platter.

‘Know what this is?’

She folds the napkin back and holds the platter out to me.

‘Looks like smoked salmon.’

‘Yes it does, but that’s not what it is. It’s gravlachs.’

Gravlachs! The delicacy Nummedal made such a fuss about back in Oslo, saying it was so hard to find!

‘You know what gravlachs is? It’s very special. Raw salmon, which is buried in the ground for some time — I don’t know how long — and then dug up again. The taste is very refined. Go on, try some.’

At that very moment there’s a great thud against the door and a deep, hoarse voice roaring ‘Wilma, Wilma! Open this door!’

He hammers his fists on the door, kicks it violently, then hurls himself against it.

Fred Flintstone!

It is exactly like the cartoon: the door bends forward in the middle, causing great gaps to appear on either side, after which it springs back into the frame.

‘Yes, Jack, I’m coming!’ Her voice sounds unconcerned, languid, as if she has been asleep. He goes on pounding the door.

She replaces the platter on the table, takes the napkin in one hand and removes the champagne from the ice bucket, then tips the contents of the bucket onto the napkin. The ice cubes remain in a heap, the water drips down to the floor. Holding the ice cubes wrapped in the napkin, she goes to the door and turns the key.

I have got up from the divan.

Flintstone staggers into the room, groaning. His mouth is so turned down at the corners that he must have spent the last couple of hours with a dinosaur bone clamped between his jaws.

The look in his eyes is both helpless and menacing. He snorts, splutters, sprays vaporised aquavit.

Inaudible in my soft rubber boots, I manage to slip past him towards the door, which he left open. In the corridor I glance over my shoulder.

Flintstone lolls on the divan. Wilma, in a shaft of light from the corridor, dabs at his head with the ice-pack as though extinguishing a fire in a wastepaper basket. Her free hand is raised to me. She opens and closes it a few times, gives me a rueful smile and says:

‘Bye-bye!’

The stewardess comes past with the basket containing duty-free spirits. I buy a half bottle of whisky. The newspaper I have just been reading slides off my lap. There is a brief item in it about a bright glow in the sky followed by a loud bang, reported in the vicinity of Karasjok. The Geophysical Survey dispatched a reconnaissance aircraft to measure the magnitude of the magnetic field, and a strong magnetic deviation was indeed recorded locally. This may have been caused by a meteor striking the earth. A team of geologists is on its way to Karasjok to investigate.

I immediately open the whisky and have a few swigs.

Meteorites, pieces of broken-up planets. So will the earth break into pieces at some stage — and I don’t care. It could happen any time, it seems to me, as I stare out of the window at a few tiny islands set in a wrinkly sea far below, so far away that I can’t even seen the wrinkles move. This is how God sees the earth, and also how my father sees the earth, if Eva is to be believed. So they don’t care any more than I do. God looks down from heaven and views the world as an aerial photograph. And Nummedal, Lord of aerial photography, is blind.

I do not have aerial photographs, I am not God, and I can’t even get a clear view of my surroundings after I have reached the top of a mountain after a tremendous struggle.

The bottle is empty by the time the plane reduces speed and prepares for landing at Schiphol airport.

The cosmos is a gigantic brain and the earth a tumour within the mass of grey matter. That just about sums it up, I tell myself. Pity I can’t tell Qvigstad. No smoking, fasten seatbelts.

I leave the empty bottle on the plane.

Eva waves, but my mother holds a handkerchief to her mouth as I limp towards them, suitcase in one hand, rucksack in the other. It drags over the floor, but I didn’t think it worth hoisting it onto my back for the short distance to the exit, which I estimate at thirty-two paces.

It was by counting my paces — which I have done since I was a boy, in imitation of Buys Ballot — that I was able to find my way without a compass. How’s that for success? How’s that for the ultimate achievement I’ve been living towards all my life? Finding the corpse of my friend and finding the way home. Nothing else. But it’s no good trying to explain that to my mother. She hasn’t a clue about my studies, anyway. She’s sobbing with emotion at her clever boy’s homecoming. I cannot, must not disappoint her.

I almost lose my balance when my mother throws her arms around me.

In the taxi I sit next to her. Eva sits facing us on the folding seat.

My mother’s sobbing intensifies.

‘Oh, Alfred, you gave me such a dreadful shock, I’m sorry, never mind me.’

‘What was it that shocked you?’

‘Seeing you limp like that.’

‘But I’ll be fine in a week or two. I just hurt my knee, that’s all.’

‘That’s not the point,’ my mother says.

‘The things is, Alfred,’ Eva says, ‘she didn’t sleep for three nights after she read the news about Brandel.’

‘Brandel?’

‘Yes, Brandel. Haven’t you heard? He and his team reached the summit of Nilgiri, but he came back with frozen feet. Ghastly, isn’t it? I saw his picture in the paper last week. In a wheelchair, next to the plane. And then Mummy got it into her head …’

My mother and Eva have lovingly installed me in the largest armchair in the house, with my injured leg propped up on a footstool.

‘Tell me, Alfred,’ Eva asked a moment ago, ‘what happened to my compass?’ To which I replied: ‘Dumped it, because it indicated the wrong direction.’

The lamp is lit over the round table bearing my mother’s typewriter. But she is not working. After enquiring in detail as to the circumstances of Arne’s death, she heaves a deep sigh and offers her personal summary of the events:

‘A terrible accident, but at least you are safe. I am proud of you.’

Outside it is dark, really dark. For the first time in weeks I can be assured of the light of day being relieved by darkness, the pitch darkness of night, during which sleep is possible — unless you’re tormented by thoughts of having to catch up on all the things you didn’t do during the day and better your ways.

I wonder if Arne’s funeral has already taken place. There was no point in my attending it, as I’ve never met his family. His father presses a handkerchief to his eyes, laments to an aunt or uncle: ‘He wouldn’t take anything from me! He was so hard on himself. Never touched the money I sent him, just kept it in the bank. I told him a hundred times to get himself a new pair of boots.’ The aunt or uncle just think: ‘That wouldn’t have done any good. What he needed was seven-league boots to keep up with your success.’

I also wonder if Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are still trekking through Finnmark, unaware of Arne’s death and my departure. Strange that I will probably never see them again, any more than I will see Arne again.

Brandel comes to mind. Two years ago the pair of us took part in an excursion to Lake Rissajaurre in Swedish Lapland. The Swedish geologist in charge had told us the lake was forty metres deep and the water so clear than you could see the bottom when you swam in it.