“Gentlemanly indeed, but it was of little avail, your Admiral ignored their presence and insisted on going down in these waters, together with two thousand hands including two of his own sons.”
“A cold grave. And what are you trying to tell me with this story?”
“For a geologist you are remarkably impatient. Before the battle, the squadron at a bay in southern Chile, that cost time, the element of surprise was lost, but it had to be: the admiral insisted on pinning Iron Crosses on three hundred of his sailors.”
“Are you telling me that three hundred Iron Crosses are lying just off the Falklands?”
“You’re catching on.”
“That’s insane.”
“On the contrary, it makes perfect sense, the farsighted admiral anticipated his demise and wanted to make sure his men did not go down undecorated.”
The pianist rested one arm on the back of the crimson chair and looked at me with great satisfaction. He has a remarkable talent for staging his own well-contented state, he smacked his lips and ran a finger along the rim of his gin-and-tonic glass, now nearly empty.
“Crosses on the sea bottom, mines on the beach, I have to admit I might have underestimated your island a bit.”
“Next time we should go for a walk together.”
“I’ll mull it over. But only if you take my request this evening.”
“Just don’t be too hard on me, I don’t know any Germanic funeral marches.”
“I’d never dream of asking for something like that. I’m thinking of something more current, something you could play with your left hand while unbuttoning a summer dress with your right.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“In honor of Admiral Graf von Spee, in honor of the light-footed penguins on the beach I would like to hear the only song I feel would do the occasion justice.”
“Aha, now you’re giving in.”
“What I’d very much like to hear is Rule Britannia! Britannia rule the waves.”
At least one time on every trip the talk turns to the hundred Inuit names for ice and snow. I always confirm that it’s true, the Inuit have a name for ice floe, pancake ice, hummocked ice, brash ice and grease ice, tabular iceberg, ice cliff, ice needles, ice foot and ice tongue, for the ice fields formed out of firn, for ice caps, permanent ice, ice age and for growlers and bergy bits. But I’m not one hundred percent sure they have a word for glacier fleas.
Like an elephant in a china shop, nothing’s as bad as it looks, things have gotten out of balance, you can write that one off, below 40° S there is no law, snap yours up now while supplies last, you’ve just begun to scratch the surface, November Zulu. This is Foxtrot Two Niner, over. This is November Zulu, proceed, Foxtrot Two Niner, over. I’m flying back from Gerlache Strait, over. What’s going on? over. Dan Quentin, over. Dan who? over. You can squeeze out a little more, no one’s going to question it, the guru chose the peace and solitude of the mountains, Charlie we haven’t paid her ass the tribute it deserves, I don’t have eyes in the back of my head, ha ha ha, you didn’t see that, in the spring, summer and fall months he lived in the dense forest, his only roof was heaven. Quentin’s raking it in, he’s the new Christo, over. Roger, never heard of this Dan Quentin, what does he have to do with Christ? over. Christo, The Umbrellas, Valley Curtain, Running Fence, over. Doesn’t mean a thing to me, over. Making nature visible by covering it up, over. That’s an old whore’s trick, over. Art with people, over. Torch them all, every SUV, give the firebugs a field day, under no circumstances should you mention that in your job interview, first there’s a big bang then the car bursts into flame, in winter he retreated to a cave that protected him from ice and snow, below 50° S there is no government, whatever had been sown and reaped by human hands he refused to eat. For example, over? “FAQ” in Silicon Valley, “QED” in the Burj Khalifa, over. The naked cyclists in Hyde Park? over. That was somebody else, over. What’s he looking for in the Antarctic? over. A big SOS on ice, over. He collected fruit from wild trees, plants from the forest and roots from the earth, below 60° S there is no god, we got off with a black eye, he fed his body just what he needed to survive. The passengers on board the Hansen linked together to form a red SOS, over. By choice? over. Yes, about a hundred pax per letter. It was a show, I’m telling you, out. Roger, out. I will fulfill all of your desires BREAKING NEWS MS HANSEN HIJACKED IN THE ANTARCTIC BREAKING NEWS MS HANSEN HIJACKED IN THE ANTARCTIC I’ll be sittin’ when the evening comes
5. 53°11′8″S, 45°22′4″W
STANDING BRACED ON the weather deck of a pitching cruise ship, taking in the gale, the storm, face lashed by wind and spray, having the breath knocked out of the lungs, at the mercy of the elements and frozen through after only a few minutes no matter how many layers of high-end high-tech material — passengers can enjoy a brief taste of the deprivations of a bygone era, just one door removed from the warm cabin from where they can witness nature unleash its force through a glass pane as though they were watching a prizewinning documentary. Almost everyone chooses the comfortable front-row view. Alone at the bow I lean over the railing, the spray spits in my face, I claw myself into the wood, the wind slaps my cheeks, it has every right to punish me for my comfort, for the deadly sin of a civilization bent on denying the basic principle of life, because whatever lives must strive to climb the energy gradient. Petrels dance among the gusts, the ecstasy of their soaring and diving is my own yearning taken wing, I rock in the air as if I, too, had been granted such ability, the engines burble away in the maw of the howling storm, how ridiculous am I to be impressed by the obvious. We cannot read the flight of birds, says El Albatros, merely misunderstand it. In the half-visibility I sense the outline of a mighty object, an iceberg is floating our way, it’s larger than our ship, flat on top as though brushed smooth, as if an entire province had detached from the shelf ice and was damned to orbit the South Pole or drift north and expire, bequeathing to the hemisphere the purest air, and to the ocean the cleanest water, laden with healing powers that enable the phytoplankton to grow, as well as the zooplankton that sustain the small shrimp-like krill that nurture birds and whales (Beate claims that within her lifetime the krill population has declined by four fifths, there’s no arguing about it). The ice has been punched with oval holes, mighty vulvas pushing deep inside the berg. Melting mating calls. Behind a curtain of mist the sun flares unexpectedly, a measure of mortality. The glow withstands a few more waves before it disappears again and the storm rages on in the twilight.
Could this be calm? A commodity precious enough to be marketed with enormous success, guarded in protected areas, sheltered in reserves. But these ecological niches are shrinking as the pulse of our age thuds on ahead in four-quarter time.
One day some years back, just after the church bells rang vespers, I said I had no desire to go out and eat in some pub where they drench the roast venison in an earsplitting sauce.
“Does that mean you’re not going to the doctor because they play Radio Bavaria in the waiting room?” Helene asked full of spite. “And what about the dentist and all his spherical sounds straight from the Buddha?”
She snatched the car keys from the ceramic dish and rushed off to her sister, who was well inclined toward me because she didn’t have the patience for Helene’s continuous loop of complaint. I sat down on the chair in the hallway, closed my eyes and stayed there a long time. How did it happen that words like “quiet” and “standstill” have turned into something pejorative? Even on hiking trails I hear the numbing bass notes of music junkies who can no longer bear the sound of nature. If they at least just listened to their own voices, but no, they have to smear a layer of stale noise over every single thing. Admittedly I also put on a pair of headphones now and then in the S-Bahn on the way to the university, Thomas Tallis did a lot to help mask the ugliness of the utility buildings along the way, but it would have been unthinkable to listen to his music in the woods or on the mountain or when I was with people I knew. The Hansen doesn’t have a public address system (unlike other ships in other latitudes, where according to Paulina jingles screech and fanfares boom). Recently they held a rock concert on King George Island, soon the glacial faces will come tumbling down like the walls of Jericho. In our cabin the only perceptible sound is Paulina’s tender singing (in contrast to many of her compatriots she isn’t glued to her iPhone); she mixes evergreen hits from the ’70s with Filipino folk tunes. In fact it was her singing that cast me in a spell on the last evening of my first trip, I had hardly noticed her before that, her unobtrusive politeness blended in with the ready friendliness of all the other Filipinos. But at the farewell concert — the passengers had given the crew a chance to amuse themselves — she metamorphosed into a confident chanteuse, a bundle of energy inside a cone of light, she crossed her legs and let her right shoe slide down her foot so only the silver buckle was looped over her toe, the shoe dangled and swayed and all desires were fixed on her as she sang the old hits to a plucked accompaniment with an intensity that let me draw a curtain shutting the two of us off from the rest of the world. Later my feverish fantasy made me self-conscious as we stood next to each other at the after-party in the cafeteria, I was certain she could sense me looking at her with different eyes, my desire mixed with a strong dose of insecurity, my tongue my best enemy, and nevertheless a few hours later she lay next to me, just like now, with her head on my shoulder and one hand on my chest, and as so often on our days on the open sea, when one or the other of us is granted a free hour, she has asked me to read something out loud to her. I am happy to comply, for me it is a gesture of intimacy, I read a passage from the reports of the so-called Explorers because of her charming compassion for the hardships and suffering they faced, though in my anger I see them less as pioneers and more as avaricious parvenus seeking to take possession of the Antarctic as if she were a virgin who after the first night was theirs by right for all other nights, and so they despised all competitors as thieving rivals, while they themselves sought to conceal their own lust so as not to endanger their spotless reputation as impeccable gentlemen.