Georg Letham (22 page)

The reserved, overly courteous man the world saw later, a man hugely vain beneath a mask of modesty, morbidly stingy though generous to all appearances, secretly buffeted by sensual passions, an atheist through and through yet a pietist and a churchgoer, an anarchist in his own eyes and a worshipper of authority in those of the world, unsparing toward others yet excessively indulgent of his own frailties, despising people from the bottom of his heart and dominating them with supreme ease, a Dr. Georg Letham the elder, who, beyond his career as a civil servant, his base passions, his instinct for power, and his psychological experiments, valued only his bank account and his second son–this Georg Letham was unrecognizable as the Georg Letham who set out
before the turn of the century, pure of will, highly gifted, seemingly under the most favorable stars, to conquer the geographic North Pole. He was away for almost two years–but what years! The result was a report to the Academy of Sciences just five pages long, unfortunately consisting more of impressions and general propositions than of rigorous scientific facts. It was a catastrophe. The voyage cost millions. The result was a few phrases.

And yet there can be no doubt that he was masterful in managing people, and in turning circumstances to his own purposes when, beaten, returning after an atrocious odyssey, he was able to rescue himself even from this, to hold his own, indeed to prosper. He obtained a high post in the Ministry of Agriculture on the strength of his meteorological experience. He wedded the sister of one of his companions on the voyage, marrying money, though not very happily; and I was his second son.

This career and this “meteorological experience” did his soul no good. He had been so disappointed that the primary tissue of his being had changed. Beyond recognition.

It was not the failure alone that brought him down, but the gulf, the unbridgeable gulf, between his task and its execution.

To know what one lives for, and to be equal to it, that was the main goal of his life, his faith, which was not inconsistent with the Catholicism of his childhood. And that later on he knew, but was not equal, was that his doing? Was he at fault? What a question! Only the facts were at fault, the facts in his report. And what were these facts, what colossal catastrophes were recorded in this great report? If only some such thing had happened! But it was all just tragicomedy, it was all the doing of little animals, of sweet beasts that are only too devoted, of neighborly creatures that look upon people as kind, prosperous fathers
and providers, of those children of God that even now are scurrying back and forth in the darkness between the ship's medicine locker and the ropes on the deck of the
Mimosa
, their long tails dragging behind them–have I not said enough, more than enough?–of rats.

From this voyage he knew them, and knew the world. It turned a naturalist into a connoisseur of human nature.

The North Pole lies beneath perpetual ice. It can be reached only on snowshoes, by dogsled expeditions, if at all. During the summer, the great expanse of ice is crisscrossed by fissures and crevasses that have emerged from the melting ice sheet under the weak rays of the sun. The breaks in the ice are frozen over during the winter, but then the rigors of the weather are too great. For four months, night is total. One must therefore make use of the short summer.

To reach the pole by water, daring explorers had occasionally entrusted their lives to an enormous ice floe! But they did not find this method a happy one. For as they moved northward on the ice floe (it was vast), the floe drifted southward, and all was in vain. But in those years, at the end of the nineteenth century, a world-renowned arctic explorer (it was not my father) came as close to that coveted piece of cold ground as was possible given the technical means of the time, that is, without the use of radiotelegraphic devices and without airplanes or airships. His method was the same as my father's; here, as in much else, there was only
one
practical way. For him it succeeded. Not for my father. Was the other more astute? Perhaps not. He merely had fewer rats on board.

Now what was the method? Many expeditions had undertaken the quixotic journey to the legendary pole without success. All had failed in different ways, at different places.

Years earlier one of these ships, the
Jeannette
, had come to a place north of the New Siberian Islands where it could advance no farther in the pack ice. Captain and crew leave the ship. Save themselves. The three-master remains. Masses of ice pile up titanically. More and more icebergs approach, irresistibly propelled; the entire horizon, the broad steel blue expanse of sea is filled with them. Gleaming greenish blue, hung with long beards of melted ice, sparkling in the northern lights, they gradually sail up to the ship's walls from all sides. The day comes when they join, soundlessly pressed together by tremendous forces. The little ship is squashed like a bug between two smooth fingernails. It cracks. It is done for. The dense ice mass stands like a mountain range grown up over millions of years. Polar bears, arctic foxes, arctic hares, seals, occasional birds, and many other animals draw near and pass by. The timbers of the ruined, abandoned ship, the yards and chains, the planks and chests, the ropes and sails, all are frozen into the ice. Snow covers them. Everything is silent. The moon, a glassy ball, then a half moon, then a delicate crescent, then back again–it never vanishes from the sky, except when snowstorms obscure it. Then the sky lightens: the stars come out and shine. The polar foxes pursue their scents. Solitary birds hang in the misty, somber air, their pearly wings outstretched.

The hulk is not released until spring, when the ice breaks up under the oblique rays of the sun and the warmer breezes. The sea is open now.

Does it follow that years later one would necessarily find all the wreckage of the ship in the same area? No. It is discovered far away from these New Siberian Islands. On the east coast of Greenland–that is,
beyond
the North Pole. A journey of thousands of miles. Blind, pilotless,
the wreckage of the ship found the one practical route. Men with all their scientific knowledge and experience had been unable to find it. A slow but steady current must thus flow from North Siberia over the North Pole to Greenland. What was the conclusion? A ship must be so solidly built, the sides, ribs, and keel reinforced in such a way as to be able to withstand even the tremendous pressure of the masses of ice bearing down upon them. If the pole is not reached on the first approach during the short summer, one must allow oneself to be frozen in at the spot where the
Jeannette
went down. At the next thaw, the current will carry the ship into the region of the pole, close enough that it can perhaps be reached with dogsleds obtained from the natives.

The world-renowned arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen succeeded in this. My father would have succeeded before Nansen, if not for the rats.

No ship of any size without rats. Even smaller ones have plenty of splendid specimens. New ships like my father's are not spared, they are no better off than old, run-down crates marinated in all sorts of harbor filth like my ship, the
Mimosa
. No reliable method of ridding the old tubs of rats is known, and the new ships are tenanted by these boldest of seafarers immediately, the moment they take on their first cargo. On long voyages their numbers increase in geometric progression, provided they have enough to eat. On sailing ships like my father's, which are provisioned for periods of years, they find colossal stores.

But an optimist expects only a slight loss from parasites; and my father, Dr. Georg Letham the elder, was one. An arrant optimist, though he
became the darkest, most poisonous pessimist after his return from the north. Out of nature, into the office.

Such an optimist figures on a certain loss, but he imagines some rightful equilibrium between human dominion and the destructiveness and voracity of pests.

He had expected difficulties, he was not a fool, and he had great responsibilities. He was not a coward or a weakling and believed himself equal to his task. A night four months long did not frighten him.

All on hand were males; as far as any sort of intellectual cultivation was concerned, it was a desolate, dry company, which did not become much livelier when it was joined in a Nordic port by a volunteer passenger, a Norwegian Protestant missionary, for whom no space had been provided and who declared himself willing to replace the purser, the latter having fallen ill (or having decided to return home to his “loving hearts”). This was the company. In addition the crew, my father's dog, the parrots belonging to the geographer, later to be my uncle.

Everything has been heard before, the same responses to the same cues, stale phrases, questions and answers mechanically reeled off. The same reminiscences are rehearsed at random, the same remarks made. The same hopes and fears fill the hearts of all members of the expedition. Terrible boredom. Cards played for hours for no stakes of any possible value. No contact with the outside world apart from scientific observations and hunting, which becomes more and more infrequent at higher latitudes. No blue sky for so very long, scanty artificial light day and night. No flowers. Close quarters in gloomy cabins, not properly ventilated because of the cold. Fresh water only in minimal quantities: the fuel for melting snow must be conserved. Even the petroleum
for the lamps has frozen solid and must be laboriously thawed. A warm bath in a wooden tub is a rare privilege, over which jealous fights soon break out; baths are taken in the most uncomfortable position, hunkered down, knees to beard-swathed chin. No fresh vegetables, no fruit (a ripe, yellow, aromatic butter pear, the “Prince of Wales,” is the voluptuous dream of many nights), no green other than the pale green of the blotting paper in the herbarium folios brought with utter needlessness into these inhospitable climes. For what plants are there to be dried and pressed? Whatever sparse vegetation still grows up here, algae, lichens, mosses, is already dry and hard as straw. The pages of the herbarium therefore find “other use,” much to the annoyance of the scholar, who finally brings the volumes into his bunk with him and sleeps on them.

Deathly quiet outside the ship, or, just a few meters away, the grating crackle of the ice plates, the grinding and creaking of the floes, the hollow roar of the frigid, knife-sharp wind, the explosion-like bangs of icebergs splitting, and the wrenching, sucking groans of the ship's walls writhing under the pressure of the ice.

The men (I am speaking of the time of waiting, of being locked in at the prescribed latitude)–the men groan too, but their groaning is not a human groaning, it is like the groaning of a board clamped in a vise. They forget surprisingly quickly how to listen, they forget how to speak sensibly. Lethargy, enervation, apathy. Tired, tired. They growl and snarl inarticulately, touchy from the moment they wake up, mute, grim, ironic, sullen to the depths of their uncooperative bowels. Only the Norwegian and my father are still in good spirits, the former with the aid of alcohol. One of the other men is always close to the edge, a
gun has to be taken from him by force. Three days later he takes it back from someone else, and thus the revolver makes the circuit of most of the men. No one takes this seriously, it is just “playacting,” an idea they are toying with, and it is even suspected that they are using this “playacting” to obtain the better rations that have been designated only for the ill and debilitated. Eventually my father is able to mend matters. At bottom they all still believe in a successful outcome. They just had not thought it would be so difficult. The cold is paralyzing. Dreadful, heart-gripping frost. The ship is finally frozen in at the eightieth parallel during the night. It no longer tosses, does not rock, it stands like a house, it is like solid ground. Good.

These were the predictable difficulties. They could have been overcome. But the rats! They were starting to breed with some rapidity. At the beginning no one had given them a second thought. One of the scholars had even experimented with taming two young ones, rearing them in a small, woven straw basket. He would laugh with childlike pleasure when they bit at his fingers or scratched his hand with their long front teeth. But rats were not playthings, they were unpleasant surprises.

There they were when one least expected it, sticking out their pointy, sparsely furred snouts and blinking their intelligent, sharp, malicious eyes, their drab heads adorned with long mustaches, their ears naked, hairless like those of bats. They made their presence known. They communicated with each other.
They
had not forgotten how to communicate. They raced hither and thither, purposefully. They were not apathetic. They did not miss blue and green, they did not sweat and did not freeze. They lived boldly and were bold. But at this time they
appeared no more than very annoying, not dangerous, to the leader of the expedition.

These were the first months in the pack ice, the beginning of what might be a lengthy sojourn.

Even here there were men. Eskimos appeared, young and old, drawn from far away by the light in the cabins, courageous fur hunters who approached the ship in their kayaks or with dog teams, depending on climatic conditions. The missionary was as though electrified. The Eskimos were lively too. They already knew or learned very quickly what tobacco and schnapps were, and they also knew the way to these delights: conversion. They kissed the Bible, drank the schnapps, and chewed or ate the tobacco. And laughed uproariously.

These were people clothed in luxurious furs, stinking of rancid whale oil, with magnificent teeth in dingy faces; uncultivated, indifferent to danger and death, possessed by superstitions. Christianity was preached to them, and they related wonderful folktales and myths. The same men gave clear, scientifically precise reports of the weather conditions, the currents, the routes taken by the icebergs, the periodicity of the polar light phenomena. They could recount their hunting adventures, they knew a great deal about the habits of the arctic animals that they and their ancestors had encountered on their expeditions. Only about hunting shipboard rats did they know nothing, they were not even acquainted with the use of mousetraps, and to lure rats with bacon seemed to them wanton waste.