sample from the novel „Beinahe Alaska“, published 2020 by mare, Hamburg
foreign rights: Literarische Agentur Kossack
‘Enthusiasm for the arctic is a fever which, after periods of indifference, returns like an epidemic.’
(from a US-American magazine, 1893)
There will be
There will be no murder, no bodies, no monster, no accident, no frostbitten noses or toes. Nobody will become snow blind, nobody will drown, freeze to the spot, break a leg or suffer a seizure, although there will be a certain loss of blood caused by vocarious Labradorean horseflies. Nobody will spot a walrus or a narwhal, although a polar bear will appear far away. Nobody will mistake the Aurora Borealis for death lights of the departed. No shamans will sing, no gold will be found, no mammoth will rise from the permafrost, and no polar worm either. There will be no ‘man overboard’ (and no woman either), it won’t be cramped and tight, just cold and occasionally a little evil. The darkness will remain inside us, although it can be sensed. It will be all about ordinary life. Life, where people talk a little and lie a little, where they seem strange, weird and ugly, then again warm and friendly. Life, that feels lonely – because it is. There will be a view, an emptiness, from which nothing can arise – or everything. The polar sun will shine, and we will breathe the dry Arctic air, poor in ozone, that makes everything so crystal clear and give the edges their sharpness. There will be no month-long darkness, no howling winter storms, no glacier will burst. The sea won’t tear land off the coast, but the permafrost will melt, rain will fall onto moss, onto graves, onto deserted houses on a deserted beach on the world’s largest uninhabited island. There will be poetic trees and ghastly firs. The world’s oldest stones will look down cragged fjords, and behind them shamans will appear (finally) and drift off into the netherworld. Tourists in orange jackets will walk on islands and the dead. Fog will wait greedily for us to look elsewhere. Elves, made of glass, hanging in windows, will see evil. We will laugh to ward off monsters. We will eat and lose our appetite. We will ignore, stare, scrutinize, complain and demand. People will rant, prattle, annoy, they will smile, forgive and exhale. They will look out the windows, into their books – and stare at the sea. They will be on a ship and look out at the sea.
Eismitte
Was that the sky? I looked down at a massive expanse of white. I´d never seen a white like this. It was unreal, bright, blinding. It glowed from within, stretching far to the horizon where the plateau started to bend so you could see the Earth’s curvature. I reached for my camera, then put it away; it was impossible to shoot or film. Loneliness, I thought, perhaps this was what loneliness looked like.
We were flying over the glaciers of Greenland, the largest continuous ice sheet on Earth. If it melted, it would raise sea levels by six metres, that´s how vast it was. It sat atop the Greenlandic continent like a scoop of ice cream inside a very shallow, very wide bowl. Slowly the noise receded into the background, the chatter of the people, the humming of the engine. Down there the scientist Alfred Wegener had frozen to death. In 1930 he and his assistant had left his research station ‘Eismitte’ because their supplies would not have lasted the winter. They were caught in early winter storms and vanished.
Wegener had proven that the continents once used to be one single landmass. More and more I felt like his Ur-continent – as if I’d broken into pieces and slowly but irrevocably bits of me were drifting apart.
A noise. I looked outside and saw tiny scratch-marks in the window, as if the clouds had been clawing at them with sharp fingernails from outside. I reached for my sketch book but couldn’t tear my eyes from the white. The ice shone right into the farthest recesses of my mind and exposed my life as it was.
There was nobody waiting for me down there. I had lost my parents, I had lost my child, although “lost” is the wrong word; it sounds as if you accidentally drop something, misplace it, as if it falls out of a bag or slips through a hole in your coat pocket. “Lost” sounds as if you’d bet on the wrong number playing roulette. My parents were gone. There, that sounded better. My child never happened to me. That, too, sounded better. Something I could live with.
A few years ago my mother died a painful death. Before her, others had vanished from my life. A father, a true love and a few relatives I would have liked to meet as an adult. I know, I shouldn’t think like that. I must look forwards, take the next step, always turn my face to the wind so that the storm can clean my mind from old sticky thoughts, from spider webs and dust, so that no residues remain. Small knots inside your body can grow into an ulcer that will eventually kill you. That’s why you have to look forwards.
My job allowed me to do that all the time. I was a photographer and ilustrator and my job was to bring back pictures of the Arctic. Photographs, sketches, drawings, no matter what, as long as they captured the atmosphere. ‘What’s it like there?’ my publisher had asked into the air between us. ‘What do you see? How does it feel?’ And now here I was, on a plane, assuming a forwards-looking attitude, flying over Greenland’s ice-cap with a clear, unattached and dusted mind.
I had read. About polar drift, about iceblink and the magnetic north pole. About heavy fuel and the permafrost, about the Inuit and Nilas ice, about John Franklin and the Labrador duck, which was extinct, just like the Great Auk and the Dodo.
I had stocked up. Warm socks, a thick jacket, gloves, a new hat, a new and better lens for my old Nikon, warm underwear and more socks, because you never know.
I had said goodbye. My friends in Berlin were demonstrating against climate change. I was going to sail a route that only global warming had made possible: The Northwest Passage.
The ship would sail north from the southernmost tip of Greenland towards Disko Bay, then westwards across the Atlantic, along Canada’s coastline through Lancaster Sound into the Arctic labyrinth all the way to Alaska. The journey was scheduled to take two and a half weeks. It was a cruise ship but a relatively small one, a former car ferry, re-designed for only one hundred passengers. The shipping company had sold the trip as an ‘expedition-cruise, which meant: no musical shows, no Casinos, instead lectures, excursions, charts and large panoramic windows. The ship had a small hybrid engine, it allegedly sailed without heavy crude oil but the whole trip was – and that`s where my friends were not quite wrong – an ecological vulgarity.
But it wasn’t my carbon footprint that they minded; a flight to Thailand would not have shocked them. They were criticalm because the Artic was, where you got a close up of how quick the world was going to hell. The Arctic, the last unspoiled place on Earth, inaccessible, inhospitable and barren, was now within our grasp. The last white whale on the hook.
I looked forwards. The blue was no less clear than the white.
Nassau Sucks
Narsarsuaq, Greenland
‘Welcome to Nassau Sucks,’ the pilot had said after we had landed. At least that’s how he had pronounced Narsarsuaq. Population: 102. Counting me and the other passengers: 202.
I walked behind two women who were talking animatedly. We marched past grey wet rocks and slopes covered in silvery grey vegetation towards the harbour. The women were dressed like outdoor models: bulky hiking boots, backpacks, windbreakers and these trousers that you can wear as shorts or long pants. Behind us, another couple spoke German. The sky was powder blue.
When you travel alone you stand out. You are someone who is without. Without a partner, without a conversation, without purpose. But perhaps that was only my perception. Perhaps people didn’t see it this way. Perhaps I was invisible. A standalone invisibility.
Actually, why standalone? Why not walkalone or liealone or runalone? As if one was just standing around all the time, all alone. You wouldn’t call a couple standtogether, would you?
Any standalone entity was a static matter, a pause, waiting for something to begin.
The residents of Nassau Sucks were invisible, too, at least I couldn’t see anyone out on the streets. Snowmobiles and cars were parked in front of dark red wooden houses that were built into the rock, on stilts. There were no gardens, only stones in all shapes and forms: gravel, pebbles, rocks and sand. What kind of work did people do here? Was there a supermarket? In fact, were there any people at all?
I could stay here. I could rent one of those dark red houses, one with a view onto the turquoise, milky water surrounded by high mountains – next to the ice cap that was waiting to disappear. Nobody would notice my disappearance. In the future, I could be sitting in one of those houses, drinking tea and looking out at the water. From time to time, passengers would walk past my window, on the way to their ship, they would be chatting, would look around, perhaps one of them would see my house and think: wouldn’t it be nice if I could live there?
I saw the other passengers walking in front of me, men with backpacks and white hair, women in parkas; at least I am young, I thought, at least I am not like them. But was I that – young? Was I not like them?
During the past weeks, the shipping company had been sending out emails, so regularly it had been obtrusive. They informed the passengers about the ice-conditions, because even though the glaciers were melting, that didn’t mean that routes that had previously been impassable could simply be traversed now. It all had to do with atmospheric humidity, volume of rainfall, low pressure zones and the polar drift, a phenomenon that remained a mystery even to oceanographers.
Thus, anyone, who felt so inclined could become a specialist in all things ice before setting out on this journey. We had read ice-charts – colourful pictures that looked as if somebody had failed to finish a ‘painting by numbers’ template. Red dots in the chaos of lines and round shapes marked areas that were ninety to one hundred per cent covered by ice as thick and old as glacial ice. Dark green was used for sea ice that was more than two years old. Red meant perennial ice. Our ship was able to push through one-year old ice up to fifty centimetres thick – the light green and yellow patches, but there were not enough of those on our route. On top of that, there were several areas where wind or currents might push vast quantities of ice into our path at any moment.
The MS Svalbard had a red stripe around its black hull. It was the size of a house big enough for three families. My first thought was: this was supposed to be big enough for all of us? This small thing was supposed to protect us from ice and storms? From the pier it looked like a toy boat left behind by a giant. A forklift was setting down pallets next to an open loading hatch. A bulky man in a white uniform was walking about, the cook inspected his last delivery: melons, pineapple, and then some more melons. A blond chap wearing a bobble hat was unloading our suitcases from another pallet. I waked up a gangway to get on board. Ahead of me, women pushed their handbags through a scanner like those used at airports. One of them had her photograph taken. ‘For de boarding passes,’ the Asian looking man at the light barrier said. The first woman went through. A metallic voice said, ‘Welcome.’
My cabin was located on deck 7, at the end of a long corridor. To the left was a semi-circular bathroom, and behind the bed, along its length, was a large window shaped like the screen of a TV from the Sixties. My suitcase, which had somehow managed to overtake me on my way from the lower deck, lay on the bed. I considered unpacking, but the air outside my window began to flicker in pink and light grey colours. I grabbed my camera bag and raced upstairs.
An hour later I was still up on deck and stared up at the sky, dumbstruck like all the other passengers by the LSD sky. The world was a pastel-coloured acid dream. The brown rocks shimmered pink. I could see far, far out into the fjord where the contours of the ragged rocks and the mountain ranges were so sharp as if someone had cut them into the icy blue evening sky with a razorblade. Even the sea wasn’t water but a mass of viscous oil reflecting everything in the brightest neon colours: the light blue sky, the mountains shimmering in lilac colours, the clouds bathed in golden yellow sunlight. The chimney’s metal casing shone like copper, the black hull had a purple glow. The ship was gliding through the fjord, quietly, like a knife slicing through soft butter. We left Japanese patterns in the blue-black water. I looked back and imagined a tape stretching between me and the land, getting thinner and thinner until it would eventually tear.
Herr Mücke
We were greeted outside the restaurant by a man in a dark blue uniform and the cook. Each of them held a spray dispenser at the ready. I stopped, uncertain what to do.
‘It’s a disinfectant,’ a female voice behind me said. I turned.
‘Go on, then, you’re holding up traffic.’ The small red-haired woman waved her hand as if I were a bellboy. Her eyebrows were plucked crescents, her mouth a grumpy arc of lipstick, that hung in between chubby cheeks that had refused to age alongside the rest of the face.
I took a step forward, held my hands out to the cook to let him spray them and asked myself, not for the first time, how other German speakers recognised me as one of them. I did not look German. I had dark brown eyes and a prominent nose which some people called distinctive, whereas I thought it was aubergine-like. My complexion was olive rather than pink, and I had long dark hair. I looked Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. Did I walk like a German? Dress like a German? I looked down at myself. Grey jeans, brown hiking boots, white T-shirt, black V-neck sweater. I did not look like the other people here and certainly not like that red-head. Or did I? Had I, being in my mid forties, already lost the ability to see myself for what I was? The tragedy of age is that you are the last one to notice that it has happened to you. Many of my colleagues talked about ageing as an incurable illness but at the same time behaved as if they were immune to it. Men in their late forties suddenly leased a Maserati while mocking women their own age who dared maintain a good figure: ‘High school from behind, museum from the front.’ It was pointless trying to explain to them that for women, getting older was a different matter: women didn’t have crises. Women had thoughts.
The view passed by outside the restaurant windows. A purple and golden-pink sky streaked with wisps of white clouds and pastel coloured patches. Below, water sloshed around like liquid black lacquer, but the colours gradually lost their shine, as if someone was calming down the world with powder.
Passengers in functional clothing waited with empty plates at the counters and display cabinets. A constant low hum blended in with the mumble of voices and the clinking of cutlery on crockery. I sauntered around the buffet. There was too much of everything: fish, meat, hot, cold, sweet, savoury, starters, coffee, bread, cheese. I watched the other guests and wondered what had made each one of them pay fifteen thousand Euros in order to stand around here.
At some point, I had developed a theory as to why people travelled. One third travelled in order to make discoveries (sadly, they usually knew in advance what they would discover). The second third travelled in order to get a break from home (it didn’t matter where they went as long as the other place was more pleasant, warn and friendy). The rest went after. As in: the wife wanted to go somewhere, the husband followed suit. Or: the neighbours had been there, this season’s destination was such and such, and so on.
But these people here? They dressed similarly, many were the same age, around sixty. They wore practical clothes in bold petrol, flashy yellow, vivid violet. Not exactly camouflage colours, unless they planned to fly into the sunset every night. Perhaps just like surfers they had a kind of dress code – this is what we wear so you know who we are. We are the hikers. We seek the cold, the damp, the slopes, we have tight calves, you have handbags. We are active, you are interactive.
But was the couple next to the pancakes really interested in the Northwest Passage? Had they read The Discovery of Slowness or My Journey on the Gjöa? The man inspecting the cheese – had he experienced the Arctic light and wanted to see it again, here in this far-away region that non-scientists could only reach on a cruise ship like ours? The mother and daughter next to the goulash, were they looking forward to the climate lectures? Or to the goulash? Which of them would stand at the window, watch the thawing permafrost and think, something’s not quite right here?
In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy there is a restaurant at the end of time and matter, where every evening guests watch the end of the universe. Just before it all disappears into a black hole, they travel to a safe space at the speed of light, and the next evening they take their places again to watch the end. That wouldn’t happen here. There was no spaceship to take us to safety. And the world wasn’t disappearing with a bang, but centimetre by centimetre. Erosion gobbled up the coastlines, the ice caps were melting, temperatures were rising. I looked outside. There was the coast, there was the sea, there was the sky.
I found a free seat not right next to some couple or group. I squeezed in between two tables bolted to the floor, came precariously close to a wine glass, and made my apologies to an older gentleman sitting next to the window, who rose politely when I joined him. His name was Herr Mücke, he was about eighty and wore a red vest over a striped shirt. This is how I pictured Alfred Wegener, so meticulous.
‘Enjoy your meal,’ I said, and he returned his attention to his chicken leg, which he dissected carefully with fork and knife. I loved seeing someone using fork and knife to eat a chicken leg, just as I could not stand people with no table manners. Even in high-class restaurants you will find yourself seated between excavators, hunchbacks or and arthritics who used their cutlery as if they intended murder.
I ordered wine and ignored my growling stomach. Buffets put me under pressure. Being alone in a restaurant put me under pressure. There should be a sign for single women: ‘Please do not feed, stare or talk to.’ The small print should read: ‘Dear wives, this woman is not interested in your husband (really, she isn’t! Please keep him!). Dear mothers of small children, just because this woman slept, this doesn’t mean she’s immune to sound. Please mute your children and keep them on the leash.’ Although, no. There should be free-of-charge room service for women travelling on their own. Worldwide, across all price categories. Leave me alone with all that connecting and getting to know people and other emotional drivel. If you’re lonely, you remain lonely, wherever. Holiday acquaintances are acquaintances that belong into holidays. Anyone who has found their true love in a Greek animator at the Robinson Club on Samos in the Nineties knows what I’m talking about. Nobody needs to jet across the globe and blow half a year’s salary to understand that. You only end up even lonelier than before.
All of a sudden, a giant Pavlova drifted past the window. A white meringue doused in Blue Curacao.
‘An iceberg,’ I called out.
Herr Mücke turned towards me and raised his eyebrows like a researcher who has spotted a rare worm. ‘Your first?’
I nodded.
He raised his beer. ‘Let’s drink to that.’
On ships like this one, he said, there was a ritual for every kind of nonsense. Upon crossing the polar circle, you had a ladle of ice water emptied over your head. At the equator, you were lathered in fish oil and then showered off, truly disgusting, that. Only icebergs didn’t warrant anything, which was a pity, really. Perhaps there were simply too many of them by now. And that one there, well, that was only a baby iceberg. I should look out for the massive tabular icebergs that broke off from shelf ice. Those were real whoppers. Some of them were a thousand kilometres in length!
‘Oh,’ I said.
The ones around here originated in the north and drifted around Greenland, anti-clockwise. The one that got the Titanic had also come from the north. But shhh! It was not permitted to utter that word aloud.
‘Which word: iceberg?’ I asked.
‘No.’ He whispered, ‘Ti-taa-nic,’ and looked around like Lefty from Sesame Street trying to sell me an invisible ice cream.
I smiled.
‘On one of my first cruises we got caught in a hurricane,’ Herr Mücke said. ‘That was on the Bremen on the way to the Antarctic. That’s when somebody told me.’
‘You go on a lot of cruises?’
‘Oh yes. I’ve already been to the Antarctic seven times. Went up the Amazon three times, and once around Spitzbergen, with a Russian. The ship which I took for my first trip to the Antarctic sank ten years ago. The Explorer. It was listing by 45 degrees.’
‘It sank?’
‘It did, but without me! I wasn’t on that trip. And nobody drowned. Didn’t you read about it? A few years ago, just south of Cape Horn. It was quite spectacular. A ship like that, it doesn’t go down bottom first, it leans over, listing. See, like this.’
He held his hand out flat in front of his face, then turned it sideways. I followed the movement and tilted my head.
‘On the lower side they just let the boats down to the water. But on the upper side, up here, nothing moved. There wasn’t enough of a tilt. You know what they did there?’
I shook my head.
‘Once everyone was in, they were told to crawl to the stern. Then the rigging was loosened on that side. The boat slipped down a little so it hung off the hull at an angle. See, like this. Then the passengers had to crawl to the other end, the rigging was loosened there, and the boat dropped on that side. They kept doing this, back and forth, back and forth, and so the lifeboat eventually made it down to the water. A Polish guy told me, Tomek. He was actually there. The pensioners, he said, were suddenly all very agile.’
I had to grin. Herr Mücke was just like me: bash your own peer-group.
Mr Mücke was from Berlin, like me, and before he retired, he had worked first as a watchmaker, then as a teacher at a vocational school. After his wife died, he started travelling, just upped and left, and now he rarely spent any time at home. Not to get the wrong idea, he said, that required a lot of money, but with the right kind of prep you could do it.
‘I’ve been to the Annapurna four times already, just not to the top, we only ever made it to base camp. Last time I got to know a young woman who said, “Mr Mücke, if ever you want to go to Mongolia, give me a call. I’ll arrange that for you.” And I’m telling you, that takes a lot of preparation! Starting with getting a car – you try to get a car in Mongolia, there are no rental companies, no petrol stations, no AA, either your car works or you break down and then you’re stuck, until next spring if you’re unlucky. Anyway, you need to prepare everything from a car to the coins you need to buy a prayer book for the ghosts. No matter where you go, you always have to hang up a prayer book in order to placate the ancestors, because the dead own the land. At least the Mongolians believe that, and that’s why you always have to hang up bits of cloth that you have to pay for. I offered to pay my guide’s cloth bits but she said that wouldn’t work, everybody must pay for themselves. Here, it’s simple, we’re at sea. We don’t have to hang up any bits of cloth here.’
I looked out the window and let my eyes wander across the heaving, dark grey mass of water.
White sage, they had said. I should burn white sage, that would make my dreams stop. So I bought a few cones in the eso-shop on Heinrichplatz and at some point stood in my parents’ living room, wafting smoke into all corners. I hadn’t set foot in the building for years, but I had dreamt about my parents and grandparents several times in the previous weeks. The house had been sold years ago; now it stood empty, and the new owner wanted to tear it down. I wandered through the rooms, which seemed curiously small to me. In the cellar, everything was covered in white fluff, as if it had snowed. Mould grew on the stairs, the window sill, the crumbling shelves, super-fine white strands that trembled when hit by a breeze. Every now and then I felt a cool draft scurry through the rooms and corridors, as if it was trying to chase away the memories, but they resisted, they wanted to stay, only there was nothing they could attach themselves to. No furniture, no people, not even a trash bag left behind. In the bedroom, I got the feeling that someone was standing behind me. I turned. Nothing. I moved on, into other rooms, wafted smoke. Cars went past outside, human voices approached, moved on. A dead bird lay on the stone floor in the laundry room. I think it was a sparrow.
The sea outside had decided to turn a dull anthracite. The contours of the coast were thrown into relief. I had taken my sketch book on board with me, the watercolours too, even though I know I would not use them. Recently all I’d been drawing was lines, contours. It wasn’t even intentional. First I’d stopped using red, then lost all interest in yellow, green, blue. At some point I left out the shadows too. In photographs, this went unnoticed, and for coloured illustrations I used the computer.
‘You always think that it gets pitch black out at sea, but that’s not true,’ Mr Mücke said, noticing my gaze. ‘In a storm, the darkness becomes really spooky. That’s what it was like on the Bremen. The wind was almost fifty knots. Or was it fifty kilometres per hour? Anyway, we’d covered half the distance between South America and the Antarctic. I felt so ill they took me to the sick bay, then the nurses had to rush off, and I was all on my own, lying there. Up and down the ship went, and the noise! I thought we were done for.’
He folded his napkin, placed it next to his plate and wiped a few crumbs off the table with his hand. ‘Now, now, don’t look so worried. The sea is still calm. The wind is blowing our way. Perhaps we will even get across the pond faster if it keeps blowing this way.’
He got up and gave me an encouraging nod.
awarded with the Hans-Fallada literature awards, 2022.
Foreign rights