She laughs. No, she wasn’t a beauty when she was young either, although she’s quite slim and shapely. If she hadn’t made that remark about me not being Italian, then I …
‘Is it twelve yet?’ she asks. ‘I haven’t got a watch.’
I push up my left cuff and show her the time: five minutes to go.
‘Thank God for that,’ she says. ‘Oh well, maybe a bit of staring at the midnight sun will do him good. He hasn’t had much sunshine in the night, I have to say. Know what I mean? But he’s only got himself to blame, you know, too eager for his own good … Boy, oh boy!’
She swings round towards a cluster of tourists.
‘Jack, Jack, it’s midnight now!’
I consider telling her that although my watch indicates twelve, that doesn’t mean it’s twelve o’ clock solar time. But then I realise that I don’t know the exact geographical longitude of Tromsø, so I won’t be able to tell her at what time the sun will in fact reach its lowest point. Telling her she’s got it wrong and not knowing the right answer myself — perish the thought.
So I mutter:
‘There’s a gondola leaving in a moment, and there won’t be another one for half an hour. I can’t wait that long. The sun is the sun, also before midnight.’
And I take my leave from her at three minutes to twelve.
I go down in the cable car and head back to the bridge.
Making my way across I keep my eyes on the American ship I watched earlier as it passed beneath the bridge. It is now docking. City of Chicago, Chicago, it says on the stern.
For the next twenty minutes — the time it takes me to cross to the mainland — my eyes don’t leave the ship. Passengers with luggage swarm over the decks.
The nagging doubt at the back of my mind swells into a conviction so strong that I can’t help acting on it. I continue down the ramp quaking at the knees. Drawing level with the ship, I have a full view of the decks. A gangway has been lowered to the pier. People are disembarking.
The man I waved to earlier could very well have been Arne! There could have been a change of plan, some hitch, happens all the time. It’s due to a succession of hitches that I haven’t got my aerial photographs, so why couldn’t something have gone wrong with my appointment with Arne?
We were supposed to meet up in Alta, but who knows what has happened: he could have sent a message which I never received, suggesting another meeting place. Such as here in Tromsø. I must get to that ship as quickly as possible.
The bridge forces me to make a frustrating detour. Being so high in the middle, it extends a long way over land before reaching ground level. I have no choice but to follow it to the very end, and all this time passengers are leaving the ship.
Arne could easily have disembarked by now. Where will he go looking for me? There aren’t many hotels in Tromsø … The least I can do is find out if he’s on the passenger list.
Having reached the end of the bridge at last, I double back towards the pier. I come across a straggle of passengers, the last to leave the ship.
No Arne. My next thought is that maybe they aren’t passengers at all, just people taking a stroll.
I run up the gangway, looking left and right for a crew member to direct me to the purser’s office. No-one tries to stop me. I enter the first unlocked door I come across and find myself in a narrow passage leading to the foredeck.
The man I took for Arne is standing there with his hands in his pockets and his foot propped on a winch, talking to a sailor. The sailor’s jersey has horizontal stripes that ripple when he slips his hand beneath it to scratch his chest.
The man does not look in the least like Arne. Nor would he if he stopped screwing up his eyes against the sun. The midnight sun, for all I know.
I leave the ship without having spoken to anyone.
It is still too early for bed, so I keep walking. After a bit I’m back on the square with the statue of Amundsen.
True, he had the advantage of those inside-out animals skins, but he didn’t have Sherpas: loyal, tea-serving, sahib-venerating Sherpas for whom loads of thirty kilos are the norm and loads of sixty no exception. How heavy was that crate again? — the one the young Sherpa carried two hundred metres uphill? A hundred kilos? A hundred and fifty?
The stuff they print in the newspapers!
Sitting on the base of Amundsen’s statue there are now three boys with their arms around three girls. The grass surround is dotted with crocuses, a sign of early spring at home. The air is filled with the cold screech of gulls.
I notice to my surprise that there is another monument on this square, which I evidently missed earlier on. It is not very big, hence easily overlooked, and headless. Just a rough chunk of red granite, with a bronze plaque fixed to the top.
I spell out the inscription. I am so intrigued that I write it down in my pocket diary:
Eidis Hansen labukt Balsfjord 1777–1870 bar denne steinen frå fjaera her og omlag hit. Steinen veg 371 kg.
Although I don’t speak a word of Norwegian, the meaning is quite clear. I needn’t have bothered to copy it out — I would have remembered anyway. Eidis Hansen. Carried 371 kilos. And he (possibly she?!) lived to the age of 93.
12
The weight of my assorted belongings adds up to just under thirty kilos.
This is confirmed when my suitcase and rucksack are weighed at the airport, which is just a small wooden building with a very long, narrow jetty protruding into the water. That is all.
There are six other passengers wandering about, idly helping themselves to leaflets from the counter and then putting them back. Two of them are men in waders carrying bundles of fishing rods. There is also a woman with three little girls, all of them wearing ski-pants. We wander in and out of the building.
The sky is bright, though sunless.
But then, just as the green seaplane touches down, the sun bursts forth, as if the aircraft had ripped open the lid of clouds. Walking to the end of the jetty, I suddenly think my trip is going to be a great success.
There are ten seats on the plane, five down each side, each with its own little porthole.
The net on the back of the seat in front of me contains the regulation sick bags as well as a route map mounted on cardboard showing the coast and the mountains in meticulous detail. A couple of post office sacks are tossed aboard, after which the hatch is slammed shut.
*
This is flying the way our great-grandparents must have dreamt of it. The wings of the aircraft extend from above the portholes, so my view is unobstructed.
The seaplane cruises at an altitude of roughly 300 metres. The coast and the mountains look like scale models. It is easy to recognise the map in the landscape: coastline, bays, islets, glaciers, rivers, barren heights. A pity we are not flying over the terrain I will be exploring for my thesis.
My thesis! I have been poring over the names on the cardboard map for some time, but now my concentration vanishes. My failure to obtain the aerial photographs washes over me like a wave of toothache. My imagination shifts into overdrive. Those photos nobody would give me — I wouldn’t even need them if I could get hold of a helicopter … But how? … Maybe a sports plane, then … No, a helicopter might be better after all … An army helicopter? Or one belonging to the Topographical Service?