7. 60°11′5″S, 50°30′2″W
WHENEVER I WAKE up early I run sixty laps around the weather deck at a fast pace in the sleepy gray light. I’m wide awake, the waters of the Antarctic are running alongside me, flowing around me, clockwise, accompanying me on my laps just like Hölbl did decades ago when we circled the sacred temples of Ladakh early in the morning, before the workday began. It just seemed like the right thing to do, although some people accused us of trying to ingratiate ourselves with the locals — people eager to dismiss sincere interest in broadening horizons as some kind of smarmy xenophilia. Hölbl dubbed the venerable Lama “Maestro Boltzmann” and His Holiness took a mischievous pleasure in the nickname, sensing that the unfamiliar sounds contained a certain prestige, and he wasn’t wrong. The water creaks and groans, the waves are only a few meters high, our crossing is relatively calm, the Drake Passage is usually good for at least one storm before letting a ship into the eye of the hurricane, into the paradisiacal tranquility of Terra Nullius. I perform my rotations in sync with the Circumpolar Current that every moment spins one hundred fifty million tons of water, birds glide through the twilight, their sharp wings slice through the cold air as they loop through the sky in perfect figure-eights, white albatrosses soar in steep arcs, storm petrels dive like rash decisions and disappear behind glimmering crests, plunging into the feed troughs between the waves, and I circle on, with each of my steps the ship recedes into oblivion right under my feet. I would be perfectly content with this solitary round dance of self-forgetting and nothing more if duty wasn’t calling: I have another lecture coming up in just a little while and I have yet to update the announcements about our upcoming landings. Every day at 7:30 PM I can be found at the radio coordinating plans with the other expedition leaders. Some of the voices I recognize right away, and some have accents that leave no doubt as to their countries of origin (Beate claims this is entirely natural, even whale songs show regional differences, underwater dialects). At the moment there are eight ships in the vicinity of the Antarctic Peninsula, just among ourselves we divvy up the mooring places that were booked months earlier, we trade sites and help each other out to make up for cancellations due to weather. And we stay out of each other’s way, after all we don’t want the sight of another ship to ruin the illusion that we’re all on our own here in the Antarctic, far removed from any regulated traffic, alone at the end of the world.
No one in the institute had any illusion that I might consider changing my object of inquiry (the very phrase makes me think of an ingrown toenail), not at an age when my beard is straggling toward retirement. Nonetheless I couldn’t continue as I was, the Alps had become unbearable, what was there to be gained by accompanying one more glacier to its death? And to go on giving lectures undeterred seemed as grotesque as teaching veterinary medicine to paleontologists. No, there was no alternative but to bow out. Two colleagues invited me to join them in the High Caucasus Mountains. They didn’t want to see me leave the institute, and for that most sentimental of all reasons: they were used to my being there. You can cook for us in base camp, they joked. Actually I was considered an exceptionally gifted chef, a reputation that rested solely on the large pot of Jamaican fish tea soup I always brought to our summer parties. The first time I made it they were all dumbfounded, no one expected a dish like that (with that name, those ingredients, that taste) from me, a man who considers the tropics anathema in general, the Caribbean a steam pit in particular, and the idea of serving frutti di mare in the foothills of the Alps the epitome of decadence. And I would have no idea about the soup if a certain Jamaican who grew up in England hadn’t fallen in love with a young woman from Munich. He made ends meet teaching advanced conversational English at the Münchener Volkshochschule, where we discussed ska lyrics by Madness and read excerpts from George Mikes’ How to Be an Alien. At the end of the semester he invited the whole class over, gathered us in his kitchen, and then with the flourish of a circus director he opened the lid of a pot with a diameter as big as an oak’s and let out aromas that could spawn legends, fantasies of lazy afternoons rocking on boats with straw roofs or of diving into scallop beds. I took the course again the following year, even though my English was in good shape — not least thanks to an intensive exchange with colleagues from the University of East Anglia and the Jawaharlal Nehru University — just to get another taste of this soup and some idea how to make it. The recipe is incredibly elaborate, this Jamaican Fish Tea contains all the treasures of the sea, the ingredients are difficult to obtain (requiring the combined forces of the Viktualienmarkt, Dallmayr and Käfer), the preparation has to be planned well in advance and started at least one day before the feast. I spent weeks looking forward to this day, a day that knocked on my door with a tattooed hand. In the Caucasus, though, I’m not exactly in my culinary element, as I told my colleagues, and besides I can no longer bear the sight of living glaciers. That was a lie and they knew it, I still loved ice, but my perspective had changed, when I used to look at a glacier I saw history and change, abundance and endurance, the face I now encountered was grotesque, the remaining ice had become a mirror of our own neglect. From here on out no matter what I might see, I would never be able to recover my earlier acceptance of things. It seemed to me as though only now did I perceive their essence. Behind all the cornices and all the stucco I saw nothing but prisons. The people crowding the shops in the pedestrian zone struck me as display mannequins, pushed and pulled hither and yon by random jerks and jolts. You don’t need someone like me on your team, I said, and no one contradicted. That year saw the last pot of my Jamaican fish tea soup.
On a ship at sea it’s hard to get out of the way, the passageways are straight and narrow, it’s best to stop and turn so you’re back is against the wall, pull in your stomach and don a broad smile that makes it easy for the other person to glide past. Everyone on board is quickly located: within a few days it’s clear who has set down roots where, which binoculared guest has staked out which spot in the hope it will content him throughout the trip, an armchair in the crow’s nest of the Panorama Lounge, for instance, where it’s easiest to escape the ones who can’t keep still, who change positions every fifteen minutes, heading now to the weather deck now to starboard now to port because they’re afraid of missing something, who soak up every scenic view and then rush back inside where it’s warm, on to the next lecture, the next film, to coffee or afternoon tea. And those who have paid a great deal of money for a top-of-the-line suite may under no circumstances be disappointed. Emma at the reception desk tells me that no one can teach the art of complaining as well as rich people. As Expedition Leader I am fair game for the restlessly inquisitive, passing from Deck 3 to Deck 6 is like running a gauntlet of questions. I prefer sitting in the bistro, where every second table has a jigsaw puzzle — postcard scenes, carved into 500 tiny pieces waiting to be put back together so as to match the picture on the box, and whoever succeeds can graduate to 1,000 or 1,500 pieces, clearly all puzzle-piecers must be happy people. I sit down at one of the tables for two, across from Mary, who keeps her recording device running even while she sketches away in her unlined notebook with a sharpened pencil, the Antarctic Ocean is on my left, and on my right is Paulina, who plays the part of the indifferent waitress with furtive joy, repeating my order with intense concentration, as though it were the first time she’d heard me ask for a double espresso with a good dose of foamed milk, but foam only please, so as not to drown the taste of the coffee in a lot of milk, she recommends the marble cake which I detest, whereupon Mary orders a slice just out of solidarity. We have just crossed the 60th parallel, I explain, only now are we truly in the Antarctic, from this point on ships aren’t allowed to dump waste water, which naturally limits the length of our stay in these latitudes, an additional advantage of this sensible regulation, after all this is the only ocean humans still haven’t polluted, and that’s the way it ought to remain. Just four percent, says Mary, while I take a swallow of water, the Antarctic Ocean makes up only four percent of the Earth’s surface water. Outside, a flock of cape petrels floats past on invisible pillows of air. Paulina serves the coffee and cake with an air of professional efficiency and practiced nonchalance. Mary thanks her by name, which she reads off the tag pinned over Paulina’s breast pocket. Paulina responds with an exaggerated smile before turning to me and asking, “Anything else, sir?” Whereupon I answer stiffly, “No that will be all, Paulina, thank you.” Mary asks what I think would happen if it weren’t for the Antarctic treaty. “There’d be a public discussion about the exploitation of the Antarctic and lots of bargaining behind the scenes. Lobbyists would stress the need for mining and oil exploration, and a campaign would be launched against the penguins with the slogan ‘Should we give up flying just because these birds don’t know how?’ The penguins would no longer be photographed standing up but lying down, so that they looked plump and a bit dodgy, as though they were begging to be slaughtered. We can give up the luxury of our sentimentality at any moment, and there’s no guarantee this won’t happen prematurely, despite the treaty, when the going gets tough, who’ll pay attention to voluntary obligations when even binding treaties don’t count for much.”