In the Kirkenes Library, I find the northernmost Internet point in Europe; it’s nice and warm, and I ensconce myself inside to catch up on correspondence. Among my other contacts, I try to find a Russian geographer by the priceless name of Kolossov, who, it seems, can give me some information about my “borderline,” one of the most militarized places in the world. The keyboard of my workstation has no accents or apostrophes, Mediterranean embellishments that, I gather, are useless in a language in which everything is as clear cut as a hatchet blow. That far I can adapt, but the ø’s and å’s are too much, and on top of that, the instructions are not available in any foreign language other than Russian.
I look around for some help, and it comes in the form of an octogenarian, skinny as a herring, who has just arrived. He deposits his enormous backpack and springs into action on the keyboard as though that were all he’d been waiting for.
That monitor seems to be his only contact with the outside world. He explains that he lives far away out on the tundra, all by himself, and comes down into town once a week to do the shopping. His name is Mette. Meanwhile, the workstations are occupied by an incredible sampling of humanity. A little Lapp girl with dazzling black eyes pops in from the reading room, followed by a refrigerator-size Russian and then by a Chinese man—a member of the only people more close-lipped than the Norwegians—who hammers away at the keyboard, letting out a series of little grunts; it’s not clear whether of disappointment or satisfaction. But the best is a mother who parks her baby carriage and baby outside (the thermometer is fixed on forty degrees), comes in, and after placing her baby monitor on the tabletop, starts typing. She doesn’t bring the baby inside so as not to disturb the others. Can you believe it? This is Norway, the land of silence.
Down at the shoreline, the sun has come out, and Kirkenes is suddenly beautiful with its brightly colored houses and birch trees. In front of every house is a snowmobile, which is probably the only sure means of transport. Winter up here in this extreme region must be an extraordinary season. You can even walk or drive across the lakes, the rivers freeze over, and all you need is the stars to show you the way.
I hear the horn blast of the Hurtigruten cruise ship that is arriving at the end of the line after weeks of sailing along the serrated Norwegian coast. It sounds like all the pipes of a cathedral organ playing at the same time, and that thunderous boom, resounding through the mountains and echoing down the valleys, reveals the acoustic dimension of the fjord. The fjords are cathedral naves, fabulous sound boxes that send even the most minimal acoustic signal down every coastal ravine and gorge. I go to see the docking operation of the cruise ship. An army of timid trolls, bundled up and happy, comes streaming down a gangway, welcomed by a rubicund woman dressed in the national colors and waving the gold-crossed flag to announce that their voyage has ended. The ship’s second officer is a magnificent young woman with short-cropped hair, smiling and full of life. Among the regional fauna of depressed males, the Northern woman takes command.
All around us are the sea, the mountains, the wind, and the little wooden houses—white, red, blue, or mustard yellow, in the style of Ice Station Zebra, and the inhabitants don’t try to impose themselves by wealth or arrogance. On a street in the center of town, I knock on the door of the secretariat of the Euroarctic region of Barents, a border zone that includes parts of Norway, Russia, and Finland, and Mr. Rune Rafaelsen tells me about the demilitarization of what used to be one of the most heavily armed borders in the world. To me it appears to be just the opposite. On the ex-Soviet side, Putin is still flexing his muscles, and actually the area under surveillance is now several miles wider. Even a Russian who wants to enter it has to request authorization on his passport. For Westerners, the procedure for obtaining a visa is now longer and more costly than it was in Brezhnev’s time. Back then, all you needed was a photocopy of your passport. Today you have to send in your passport itself, weeks in advance.
Who knows why? Maybe back then everything was so programmed that the place itself, Russia, left no room for the do-it-yourself traveler. Now that moving around has become easier, the police are always on your back, and here at the border, it’s even worse. For a thirty-mile-wide swath, from the border to a place called Staraya Titovka, everything is prohibited: taking pictures, asking for information, getting out of your car.
Now it’s snowing hard. I’m all bundled up, walking against the wind on a frontier that if it were any more of a frontier, you’d die. Kirkenes doesn’t have one border; it has three: not only with Russia and Finland, but also with the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean, which in the winter comes all the way down to the entrance to the fjord. Old German bunkers cling to the cliff sides like motionless green lizards. Some of them have since been blown up and imploded, caving in on themselves after a quaking spasm. This is where Hitler launched his attack on Murmansk, the only northern Russian port that didn’t freeze over, allowing the Allies to supply military aid to Stalin. That’s why Kirkenes was bombed three hundred times and reduced to ruins like Dresden. And later, also like Dresden, it suffered the worst of the Cold War. Today the city is a shadow of its former self. In this cemetery-like silence, nobody would believe that, up until 1940, thanks to the nearby iron mines, this was a Klondike full of adventurers, restaurants with caviar, banking windows, beautiful women, and Eastern palaces with onion domes.
In the realm of silence, it happens that cemeteries speak, and the cemetery in Kirkenes is a special place. The gravestones ask, Who are you who have come here to visit us? Berglioth Hansine Kristensen, 1916–1938, mutters it; the query is repeated by Harry Jensen Fodt, 1918–1941, and along with him, Berte Marie Eliseussen, 1866–1939. I catch myself thinking out loud. I wonder if Amanda Thorbjornsen, 1892–1978, was as passionate as her name seems to whisper to me? What changed in the life of Gunnar Oistein Fjeld, 1918–1979, after 1945? Why does Ole Ulvang, 1878–1947, confide to me that he had a happy love story? And was Helga Eleonora Konstase Eriksen, 1887–1968, worthy of the matriarchal epitaph that remembers her? And who knows why, right in front of the grave of Andreas Lind Hanssen, 1876–1931, a hot-tempered seagull takes aim at me from his perch, spreads his wings, screams, and then attacks, grazing the top of my head? The dead are laid to rest just under the surface because the permafrost makes digging graves impossible, and the great beyond seems closer here than it does elsewhere. I walk around by myself in the dim light, and it feels as though, around every turn, behind every hump in the terrain, I might run into a ghost.
From the solitary lighthouse of Bokfjord, mythical finis terrae just a few miles from Russia, I’m looking north-northeast onto an ivory-colored window of open sea. A surface so flat I can make out a walrus fin three miles away. I wonder where she is at this time of year—the White Lady, the fata morgana, the ice pack. How is it formed, how close does it come to the shore in the winter months?
About nine hundred miles out from the lighthouse, beyond the far end of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, lies another archipelago known as Franz Josef Land. The men who discovered those remote islands came from my home, from the east coast of the “Sea of Venice” (the Adriatic). Their names were Marola, Zaninovich, Scarpa, Lusina, or Catarinch—frontier names, “bastard names” like mine—and they amazed the world by all coming back alive from the white inferno that had swallowed them up for nine hundred days. A crew of fourteen sailors from Dalmatia, Fiume (Rijeka), and Trieste, who—after abandoning ship—returned home by a horrible journey on foot across the glaciers over a span of two winters at sixty degrees below zero. It was 1874, and those sailors and officers pushed themselves north to the highest latitude ever reached—82° 51′ in the lonely archipelago that they baptized Franz Josef Land in honor of their emperor. Upon their return, in Norway, then Germany, and finally in Vienna, they were given a heroes’ welcome, but still today the name of their commander, Carlo Weyprecht, from Trieste, is unknown in Italy. In the Kirkenes Library, I found a number of books with references to his story.