Qvigstad says something, which I don’t catch.
‘What did you say?’
He raises his voice to a shout:
‘Anna Bella Grey! A beauty with two heads and three tits!’
I want to say who’s she when she’s at home, but decide it is too silly. He doesn’t need encouragement anyway.
‘I saw a picture of her naked,’ Qvigstad roars. ‘Unbelievable. Completely normal from the waist down. See the potential? A tit for each hand and another for your mouth. And that’s not the end of it. What she can do with her two heads, or rather her two mouths … it’s mind-boggling.’
Silence. Then he adds, dropping his voice:
‘I can only get it off with black women, you know.’
‘Oh?’
‘Ever since I went to America. Once a negress always a negress. A tiger that has tasted human flesh …’
‘Is it the same, then?’
‘I reckon. My inborn puritanical nature. Psychiatrists maintain it’s because my mother couldn’t possibly have been a negress. You kid yourself that it’s about the beauty of black skin — finer and softer, no blemishes, pimples, blackheads, nervous rashes, no hair in the wrong places. Perfect skin for people who don’t wear clothes. But subconsciously you see the image of your mother in every white woman, and being with your mother makes you impotent, precisely because you started out wanting her and her alone.’
He blows out smoke.
‘Maybe they make too much of it in psychiatry. Personally I think it’s because I was born in Norway, where there aren’t any negresses. So when I was a kid and other kids told me their smutty stories about snogging, I never thought of negresses.’
He flicks his cigarette away, grinds it into the ground with his heel until every trace of it has vanished and walks on without further comment.
I lean forward, and in so doing lift the rucksack off the ledge of rock. I set off, lurching and staggering at first. Even smacking my lips fails to get the saliva running now. Trickles of salt-saturated sweat run down either side of my nose, stinging my cracked lips. Aeneas walked all the way from Troy to Rome carrying his father on his back.
The shadows cast by the Vaddasgaissa reach to the bottom of the slope. It is half past three, and as I step out from the shade the sun feels slightly warmer than when we first arrived in the mountains. I squat down by a stream and slurp three cups of water. Where are we?
Mikkelsen is out of sight. Over the next, slightly lower hill. Arne vanishes next. Qvigstad, too, is well ahead of me. But I will catch up. It is not as if I’m dawdling. Now it’s Qvigstad going over the hill, but he doesn’t vanish completely. He’s going up again, getting taller! Two or three more steps and I can see him full length once more. I catch sight of Arne again, too, far away, on yet another slope. Mikkelsen? Same goes for him. He was just hidden from view by an outcrop. The only one still missing is the strong man. Where is he?
23
The strong man is down on his knees blowing a fire. He has improvised a little stove with some stones to prop up a frying pan. The flames crackle. For the rest silence all round. Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are huddled on the other side of the fire. The smoke billows slowly towards me, so to them I am probably looming up from a dense fog. When I am close enough to make out their voices, I hear they are speaking Norwegian.
I unload my rucksack and lie down on my stomach next to Arne.
‘Is this where we’ll be staying?’
‘No, but it’s very near here.’
I drag out my map. Arne points to our current position before I have even started looking. Lake Lievnasjaurre is four centimetres away. Four kilometres.
We eat bread with fried eggs and drink a lot of coffee.
The conversation is mostly in Norwegian, for the strong man’s benefit. There is nothing for me to do but rest. The strong man puts out the fire, cleans the frying pan, packs away all the items he has used, fetches drinking water. If only we could keep him with us! Not enough food? What about Sherpas — don’t they have to eat? Or do they survive on moss and stones? I’ll have to ask Brandel how they manage in the Himalayas. No, needn’t bother, the solution couldn’t be simpler. The ratio is a hundred Sherpas to four sahibs, and twenty-five Sherpas can easily carry all the food they need, plus provisions for one sahib. Just one strong man, however strong, is not enough for the four of us.
I run down the slope towards the next river. That I have got this far with a rucksack heavier than I have ever carried before proves I have nothing to fear. It’s just that I’m out of practice. I’m obviously strong enough. Yes I’m weary, but this weariness is like a headache, a temporary hardship that has nothing to do with lack of energy.
The river I am now approaching is not wide, but the current is fast. Plenty of stepping stones. The secret is not to wait about. No furtive casting around for a stone even closer to the bank, just forging ahead with a step, stride, and jump without thinking what you’re doing any more than when you dash down a flight of stairs.
First step … second … don’t look at the water, keep your eyes on the next stone and your foot will land there automatically …
Oh!
Damn! Damn! Damn!
My right foot is up on the stone, my left in mid-stream! My trousers are about to split at the crotch. Cold water seeps up to my groin. Arne looks round, then turns back to help me. Qvigstad, Mikkelsen and the strong man press on; thank God they’re too far away to notice what’s happened.
‘It’s nothing! It’s nothing!’ I yell, shifting my entire weight onto my right leg, but in doing so my foot slides off the stone and I pitch forward onto my knees.
Nothing matters any more. Splashing more than necessary, I wade the rest of the way.
‘My rucksack is still dry. It’s nothing, really.’
‘No, you can’t go on in this state. You must change into dry socks or you’ll get sores on your feet.’
Arne lowers his rucksack to the ground and takes out a pair of grey socks rolled up in a ball. I sit down meekly and untie my shoes, breaking a nail on the wet laces. There is blood trickling down my shins. I pull up my trouser legs, dab my knees with a handkerchief. Grazed, that’s all, but the pain bites to the marrow.
Arne passes me a towel. I have to accept his help. If I don’t I’ll only cause more delay. I am no match for him, I have no practice, I don’t belong in this country the way he does.
‘Sorry,’ I mutter, ‘I’m so clumsy, I’ve always been very clumsy. I’m doing the best I can, but it doesn’t always work. I’m sorry.’
24
Flat-topped mountains with steep, rugged flanks. Like shards of broken pottery magnified to gigantic proportions. This is what an ant sees when making its way between the jagged edges of a broken tile. This is how I see the mountains, but I only lift my head briefly now and then, just to check which way the others are going. The rucksack puts such a strain on my neck that if it weren’t for my shoulder blades my back would be wrapped around my spine, in which case the straps would slide right down my arms … nothing to hold them up … Crazy imaginings. Dark stains spread along the straps, my sweat having seeped through layers of clothing. That much is true. As if the moisture is being squeezed from my body by the leather straps.
Am I tired? I don’t care. Would I prefer to stop right here and call it a day? Not at all. But it does come to me that there is an immense disproportion between the physical and the intellectual exertions demanded of me. I’m like the man who invented the electric motor a hundred and fifty years ago, in the days when insulated copper wire didn’t exist, when it wasn’t on sale all over the place as it is now, in any shop selling light bulbs. He couldn’t afford raw silk, so he was reduced to tearing up his wife’s wedding dress to have something to insulate the copper wire with. For months he did nothing but the most mind-numbing labour imaginable: winding shreds of silk around lengths of fine copper wire. Compared to the time he spent doing that, the actual invention was achieved in a flash.