“You’re not going to make us traipse through all that mud now are you, Mr. Zeno, now that we’ve run into you.”
“That was the blubber cookery, Mrs. Morgenthau. First they carved the whales up here right where we are standing, then they extracted oil from the blubber in giant cookers.”
“That sounds like hard work.”
“Lucrative work. With high returns. In a good year they cooked away up to forty thousand whales.”
I politely take my leave, otherwise I’d have to explain how first the fur seals were skinned, until there weren’t any fur seals left, after that the elephant seals were killed for their blubber and the try-pots were heated with penguins when the fuel ran out, and when there weren’t any elephant seals left the penguins were rendered into oil. Everything was put to use — humans are always so eager to show Nature more efficient ways to manage her resources. I tramp across a gently sloping soccer field: the crooked goalposts a comforting sight. Slaughter by morning and soccer in the afternoon. Did the goalie’s hands stink? Were the striker’s shins streaked with blood? I leave because I know what they would say, the same thing everyone is always telling me: How come you have to be so negative? Why do you always insist on ruining the mood? Can’t you leave off just for once? The same thing over and over, burbling around me from dawn to dusk: don’t take it all so seriously, relax, stop picking on everything, turn a blind eye, things won’t work out so bad, nothing’s as awful as it seems — everyone has installed the same software: deflect, downplay, be ready to duck when the storm hits. I wonder what words would have sprung to their happy lips if they’d been hauled off to the clinic at Pentecost, just as summer was settling in, with a persistent pain in the chest. A whole week of examinations. Probes boring into my body, as though the pain had to be hauled up from the deep. And then I spent days waiting for the life-saving operation and after that three months recuperating. When the doctors declared I was (almost) fully recovered, I dropped my bag at home and dashed off to the glacier, leaving Helene staring dumbly behind me.
The mere sight of the strangers in my compartment got on my nerves. The woman sitting opposite — my equal in age and disappointment — was holding a box of chocolates. She cautiously untied the ribbon, removed the marbled paper cover and carefully laid it on the seat to her left, then positioned her fingers over the selected confection like the grippers of a crane and lifted it from the box with clinical precision. The candy quickly disappeared between her pale-purple lips, with hardly any sign of chewing as she closed the box and retied the ribbon, only to tug at it a few minutes later and repeat the entire pedantic operation. No matter how many pieces she removed, the outside looked completely untouched, as though the candies were intended as a present. At the rate she was going she’d have nothing but an empty box with a fancy bow by the time she got to Kufstein or Klagenfurt. Meanwhile the man sitting by the window was using newspapers — first Bild and then Krone—to shield himself against the swelling landscape. He gave the appearance of wealth, a middle-class man ready for first-class travel on that hot summer day, faint marks on his suitcase showed it had once been covered with tacky tourist decals, perhaps he’d acquired some aesthetic guidance since sticking them on. The man studied the first tabloid from top to bottom and then proceeded to the next with similar dedication. Such keen regard for sensational headlines and pathetic ads irritated me. I had to step out into the corridor. When we reached Salzburg three girls with blank faces entered our compartment, without paying any attention to us old-timers. The woman permitted herself another candy, the man remained buried in the Krone, the three girls regaled one another with gossip from school, and when the train stopped in the middle of a field I was overcome with the fear of being trapped in this compartment, my view blocked by the Krone, with nothing to eat but a last piece of candy, my ears ringing with the vapid talk of the young generation, and never being able to make it back to my glacier. The train started up again, I calmed down somewhat, little did I know things would only get worse. So I wouldn’t have to wait for the bus in my weakened condition, the host of the Zum Kogl guest house picked me up at the station. A shaggy dog was panting in the back of his jeep. I have to tell you right away, you’re not going to like it, something’s happened, you’re not going to like it. The road was all switchbacks and hairpin turns, with bare landscapes on both sides: without ice and snow the Alps are grossly ugly. I’m glad to see you’re back in shape, we prayed for you, our whole family — the man has seven daughters, or is it eight, in any case all daughters, and praying isn’t alien to him. For a moment I was distracted by a racing cyclist hurtling downhill, the car swerved left, the wheels grated on the gravel, I looked up through the windshield and saw … nothing. No glacier. No living glacier. Only fragments, individual pieces, as though its body had been mangled by a bomb. The escarpment was still iced over, but all that was left further down were lumps of darkened ice, strewn over the cliff like rubble waiting to be removed from a building site. All life had melted away. I told you it would be hard, that’s not a pretty sight. The host’s voice evaporates in my memory. Apparently I climbed out of his car without saying a word — so he informed me that evening over beer and Tafelspitz—and staggered from one shard of ice to the other, as though drunk or blind, reminding my host of the farmers saying good-bye to their livestock during the Mad Cow scare, so he told me that evening. I wasn’t capable of such a gesture, I was too stunned, all thoughts and feelings paralyzed. I knelt next to one of the remnants, the ice under the sooty-black layer of dust was clean, I ran my fingers across the cold surface, then across my cheek, the way I always did, performing my ritual greeting. In the past I could plunge my arms into the fresh snow and bring up full scoops that made my hands so cold they would revitalize my face. I licked my index finger, it tasted like nothing. Only then did the first trivial thought occur to me: never again would I be able to fill plastic bottles with glacier water to sip so enjoyably at home. My host was standing next to his vehicle, I brusquely signaled for him to leave me alone. Then I lay down on the scree, all balled up, a picture of misery, I would have welcomed any emotion that didn’t hit me like a positive lab test result. Not knowing what else to do, I stayed like that until a hiker put his hand on my shoulder to check on my condition. I snapped at him.
“You’re hiking here?”
“It’s amazing up here, isn’t it, and such a beautiful late summer day.”
“Don’t you see what’s happened?”
“Oh well, not much snow this year.”
“This glacier is dead, and you go sauntering blithely past. Get lost, disappear, you disgust me.”
The man didn’t deign to look at me again and went on with his hike. It would have been pointless to calculate the volume of melt for this September, to take the balance of the summer. There was nothing left to measure, not on this mountain. At some point I got back on my feet and climbed uphill, heading no place in particular. On the steeper terrain a stump of ice had survived in the shadow of a desk-sized rock, it served as a temporary support, I set down my notebook, the wind leafed through the pages. What hadn’t we measured and weighed? And what of all the findings we had compiled, the models we had constructed, the warnings we had issued in careful scientific format? The pages of futility are filled with noble ambitions, they need to be torn out, every last one, our methods have failed us utterly.
We had issued warnings, but in vain, things only worsened with every passing year. Only when it is too late do people hear Cassandra’s voice: today even more sanguine souls have joined the chorus of doomsayers. Nevertheless I hadn’t foreseen this degree of destruction, not when the snout disappeared (I had just turned fifty), not when the tongue broke off and the calved ice melted away as quickly as it did (I had just turned sixty), and now this blow from the blind spot of our calculated optimism. If even the experts are surprised by the terrible speed of the demise, whose intervention can still save anything, whose point of view matters, since everyone else harkens to the rotten call of comfort and convenience? My work had consisted in documenting our delinquency — the father confessor masquerading as a scientist.