I MET ERLING JONSRUD ABOUT THIRTY YEARS AGO, NOT long after I first came to Norway. I had got into the habit of going to the Film Club showings at Filmenshus in Dronningens gate in downtown Oslo as many as three or four times a week, not so much out of interest in the films themselves as because I suspected I was starting to drink too regularly in the early evening hours between finishing my day’s studying at the University Library in Solli plass, and my future wife’s return from one of the two or three yoga classes she attended each week to the rooms we shared in Kringsjå student village, so that we could eat our evening meal together. Going to the cinema was a harmless and sometimes interesting way of passing that waiting time alone.
I enjoyed the ritual purity of those Cinemateket showings, the intimacy of the two small theatres, the atmosphere of dedication which meant that the showings always began precisely at the appointed hour, with occasionally a brief introduction from the director, or from an actor, now old and grey, who had made a brief appearance in the film at the start of his career; the way there were no advertisements, no trailers for forthcoming attractions, no buckets of popcorn and no coffee, nothing extraneous to the experience we were about to have, only the quick dimming of the lights and the hushed swish of the plush red drapes as they opened. Most of those who attended regularly were men, usually on their own. I guessed they were film buffs, unlike me, and for a long time, until I got to know him well enough to ask him to be best man at my wedding, I assumed that Erling also had a particular interest in film as an art form.
The Flight of the Eagle was showing that night, a Swedish film from 1982 directed by Jan Troell and based on a best-selling novel by Per Olof Sundman from the 1960s, about Salomon August Andrée’s attempt to fly a hydrogen balloon to the North Pole in 1897. On a July morning that year, Andrée and two young companions had lifted off from Danskøya, an island off the north-west of Spitzbergen, and drifted away towards the horizon, never to be seen nor heard from again. The part of Andrée, usually known as Engineer Andrée, was played by Max von Sydow. Göran Stangertz played the expedition’s physicist and photographer Nils Strindberg, aged twenty-three, and the Norwegian actor Sverre Anker Ousdal was Knut Fraenkel, twenty-seven, their strong man and mathematician, who was preparing for a career in the army when the chance to join Andrée’s exhibition came up. Andrée was forty-three.
As the film ended and the house lights went up members of audience rose to their feet in a staggered silence, men bending to pick up their coats and scarves and gloves and woollen hats from one of the vacant seats on either side of them – the club was not very well supported and the theatres were rarely more than a quarter full – and shuffling out towards the aisles in a pensive silence. All save on my row, which until moments before the film started I had had to myself until a latecomer pushed through the swing doors and sat down in the first available seat, which happened to be at the end of my row. And he remained seated now, watching the white words rise up the screen, until finally he and I were the only two people left in the auditorium. I glanced at my watch. Six forty. She would still be at her yoga so I was in no hurry to get back to Kringsjå, and I stayed in my seat, waiting until the figure at the end of the row decided to leave. Minutes passed, however, and he showed no signs of moving, and finally I felt constrained to loom over him. I remember that he gave a slight start of surprise as he became aware of my presence and looked up at me, and that his eyes were glistening with unreleased tears as he made a remark, quite as though we had been watching the film together – which, of course, in a way we had – the gist of which was that it was a strange thing to immerse oneself in failure on such a grand scale, without that failure necessarily even being heroic. He said these last words, speaking in that italicized way I came to know as habitual, as he got to his feet, apologetically fumbling for a thin and faded yellow scarf, which he knotted around his throat, and in a quite natural way we fell into conversation as we exited into Dronningens gate. Turning right onto Tollbugata he came to a halt outside Original Pilsen and announced that he was going in for a drink, would I care to join him? Like a man on a strict timetable I glanced at my watch, hesitated as though conducting an inner debate about whether or not I had time, and then, acting a sort of irritated resignation that might have puzzled him had he noticed it, said yes, I had time, but it would have to be a quick one.
We ordered our drinks at the bar, a beer for me, a beer and an aquavit in a tulip-shaped glass for him, and sat down at a table by the wall next to a pool table. I had never been in the Original Pilsen but knew of its reputation as a bar frequented by prostitutes and drug addicts, very often the same thing in those days. This was some years before the appearance in central Oslo of large numbers of Nigerian prostitutes, most of them travellers from Italy, who briefly turned the Egertorget area around the Storting government building into a red-light district, and whose energetic hustling was a main cause of legislation introduced shortly afterwards that made it a criminal offence for a man to pay for sex. The exuberant self-advertisement of these big and healthy-looking Nigerian women was in stark contrast to the pallor of the scrawny little drug-addicted Norwegian girls one used to see on street corners in the old business district of the city around Akershus fortress back in those days, huddled against the cold in their tattered anoraks, tottering forward on high-heeled boots and bending to lean in through the windows of the cars that crawled to a halt by the kerb.
We started talking about the film. Erling seemed to know a lot more about the expedition than the story told in the film, something I remarked on later in the evening and which he explained by saying that he had also recently seen a documentary film made by the same director, Jan Troell, about the expedition and its fate.* ‘The Swedish government organized a search for them but called it off after a couple of months,’ he went on. ‘They assumed something must have gone wrong with the balloon, but they had no way of knowing where the men might have landed. And then for the next thirty-three years, nothing. Until one day in 1930, a little Norwegian walrus-hunting ship, the Bratvaag, put a party of men ashore on a remote island in the Arctic called Hvitøya.† Two young deckhands from Tromsø were sent off to look for fresh water. They walked along the flat, rocky beach heading for a stream. One of them found an aluminium lid among the stones. And on the far side of a stream something that looked as if it might be man-made showing through the melting ice. They crossed to take a closer look, scraped away some of the coating of snow and ice and realized that it was a small boat. Two boys not even born at the time the expedition went missing. Perhaps they’d never even heard of Andrée’s expedition. Or thought the boat might have something to do with Roald Amundsen, who had vanished without trace two years previously while taking part in the search for another missing balloonist, the Italian Umberto Nobile.
‘Anyway, they made their way back to the camp and told the Bratvaag’s skipper what they’d found. They led the skipper and the other members of the landing party back to the spot. After a quick search of the terrain they came across what looked like two piles of blackened rubbish. On closer inspection these turned out to be human remains. One was leaning against a rock. There were boots on its feet. The head was missing, the bones in disarray. The body was still partially clothed, and opening the jacket they saw a large monogram, ‘A’, from which the skipper deduced that, after thirty-three years, he was looking at what was left of Engineer Andrée’s expedition. A little later, they found a third body, carefully covered with stones and wedged into a wall of ice. It turned out to be Strindberg. He must have been the first one to die. They had tried to bury him. That’s what people do. They bury their dead. Killed by a bear according to the film. That was a very well-done scene where he gets mauled to death by the bear, wasn’t it? I wonder how they did that?’
Erling raised his head and peered at me with his pale blue eyes. I was getting used to his face. There was a troubled melancholy about it that reminded me of David Janssen, the actor who played the lead in a 1960s’ television series, The Fugitive, about a doctor on the run, wrongly suspected of murdering his wife, whose strongest card in trying to get people (women, usually) to help him was a lost and haunted look, which, as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, I spent a lot of time trying to make my own. Erling, like Janssen, wore his hair short, neat, parted on the left. His cheeks were almost painfully clean-shaven and glowed with the false health of alcohol, for – despite his obvious intelligence and the coherence of his speech – I knew already, from the dense wall of alcohol that surrounded him even at this early stage of the evening, that Erling was a man devoted to drinking. He emptied his shot of Gammel Oppland aquavit, chased it with a long mouthful of beer, caught the eye of the Pakistani waiter, and gestured briefly with split fingers at the two empty glasses in front of him.
‘It’s only when people close to you die that death becomes real. Your parents die, but they’re supposed to die. It’s different with a brother or a sister or a close friend. When a friend dies it’s like death jumps down and stands beside you. Once Nisse was dead, killed by a bear or however it happened, only then did Andrée and Fraenkel realize that of course they were going to die too. It was just a question of in what order. They realized, if they hadn’t realized before, that the whole thing, the whole expedition, had been a sort of salon dream from start to finish. Did you see how they planned to cook? On a primus stove suspended seven metres below the gondola? They were going to use mirrors to help them. Mirrors. And a pole. You would think, the very first time Andrée brought up this idea of cooking with mirrors, that Strindberg or Fraenkel, one of them, would have said to him: “Look, this is insane, let’s drop the whole thing now, before it’s too late.”
‘Andrée worked at the Patent and Registration Office in Stockholm. I’ve often thought about the significance of that. If you look at the expedition details, the idea of going in a balloon itself, those thick ropes dangling from the gondola that were supposed to drag along the ice below and help them control their speed through the air; that “steering sail” mounted at the front that would enable them to sail at a thirty-degree angle to the direction of the prevailing wind; this dangling cooking arrangement; the idea of using homing pigeons to carry messages and progress reports to the people back home, the whole stupid idea, it was all an absurd dream in the mind of a man whose every day was spent in the company of madmen who visited his offices trying to take out patents on things like perpetual motion machines. A man came in once with a sack containing hundreds of little bits of wood and cogs and emptied it on the floor of Andrée’s office. “Has it ever worked?” Andrée asked him. “Yes,” said the man, “it worked once. One night it just started up rotating, all by itself. But it made such a tremendous racket my landlady came running up the stairs and starting banging on the door and threatening me with eviction if I didn’t turn it off.” Which he did. He switched it off and the thing exploded, pieces of it flying all over the room, he told Andrée. And it’s never worked since.’
He fell silent momentarily as the waiter put his two drinks on the table and then headed off to another corner of the bar without taking any money. I still couldn’t get used to the way Norwegians didn’t pay for their drinks until the evening was over. It seemed very trusting to me. Erling rearranged the drinks so that the aquavit glass was closer to his right hand than the glass of beer. He took a sip of the aquavit, moved his hand in the direction of the beer glass but then changed his mind and let it rest on the table.
‘This was the kind of person Andrée was spending his time with. Maniacs. Madmen.’
Since Erling seemed to know so much about the story, I asked him something that had been on my mind throughout the film: the expedition’s photographer Nils Strindberg, was he related to the playwright? My impression was that Strindberg wasn’t a common surname in Sweden.
‘Nisse was the son of Strindberg’s cousin,’ he said. ‘When the Swedish papers first started writing about the expedition, August Strindberg’s wife thought he was the one who was going up in the balloon with Andrée. They were separated, so she didn’t know any better. Strindberg says in his diary that she wrote him a hysterical letter telling him she still loved him and begging him not to go, not to commit suicide, which more or less shows you what she thought of the whole enterprise. That was in 1896, when the Eagle’s first attempt to take off had to be abandoned after they’d waited weeks for a favourable wind that never came. In July the next year, Strindberg was walking along with a friend of his, a man named Axel Herrlin. Two pigeons flew over their heads, he says in his diary, and Herrlin pointed up at them and said “Look, there are Andrée’s pigeons.”
‘The next day, writes Strindberg, he was woken by a scream which seemed to come from somewhere above him. It sounded “like the mocking of a dying man,” he wrote, and he says he thought straightaway of Andrée’s balloon. This was only six days after the balloon took off, three days after it came down 118 miles (190 km) north-east of Danskøya. Nobody could’ve known about it. So maybe Strindberg really was psychic.’
He broke off, dipped into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket, draped over the back of the chair, pulled out a cigarette-rolling machine and a small rectangular packet of dark tobacco, fed a leaf of paper into the side of the machine, and then began separating the tobacco out into strands and arranging it evenly in the tiny cloth hammock suspended between the rollers.
‘The pigeons were Alfred Nobel’s idea,’ he went on. ‘Nobel was a friend of Andrée’s boss at the patent office. That’s how they met. Nobel took a great interest in the expedition, especially after he put 65,000 kroner into the 1897 attempt, which amounted to half the cost. He’d already put money into the Ljungström brothers’ plan to build an ornithopter, a flying-machine that was supposed to work by imitating the wing-strokes of birds. He also advised Andrée to coat the balloon with a special type of French varnish that would stop it leaking so much. It was leaking a lot of air through the seams. But Andrée wouldn’t listen. It must have been one of the last projects Nobel supported. He died in the winter of 1896. Andrée went to his funeral. I bet he was standing there thinking how glad he was it wasn’t him that was dead. Nobel was only sixty-three years old, he was probably thinking, well, I hope I get to be older than that. I’m glad he gave me the money before he died. That’s the way people think. There’s nothing wrong with it.’
Erling lifted the cigarette from its cradle, licked along its adhesive edge, conjured a ragged flame from his Zippo lighter and lit it, inhaled, looked upwards and blew out a cone of smoke. The ceiling was stained a speckled brown, the colour of the upstairs on double-decker buses in England before smoking was banned.
‘Are you sure you won’t have another?’ he asked, as the waiter passed our table again. I thought about it. I looked at my watch. Seven o’clock. Probably still too early to go back. Okay. I ordered another beer and a glass of peanuts.
‘You know why they were trying to be the first men to reach the North Pole?’ Erling resumed. ‘Why it was so important to them? This is interesting for you, if you’re trying to understand Scandinavian culture: it was because they were Swedes. Norway, little Norway, was way ahead of Sweden in the field of Arctic exploration. A tiny country but in terms of polar exploration we were a superpower. We had Fridtjof Nansen, famous all over the world. The Swedes had nobody. Well, Adolf Nordenskjold, but he wasn’t in the same class. When the British and the Americans wrote in the newspapers about polar exploration it was us they wrote about. The little brother was outshining the – do you say that, outshining? – the big brother. And don’t forget, this was just eight years before independence. The tensions between Sweden and Norway were very, very high. No one had ever reached the North Pole. You saw in the film how the crew were treated in Sweden. All that feting and celebrating. Dining with the king. The women looking at them, wanting to be with them. Treated like heroes before they’d even set foot in the gondola. You know how many times Andrée had been up in a balloon before this? Nine, maybe ten times. He was an amateur. And this great hero was going to do this wonderful and futuristic thing that no one had ever done before. A few hours in a balloon. Above Paris,’ he added witheringly, as if flying a balloon above Paris made it even worse.
‘That scene as they were boarding the train at Stockholm station. The people crowding the platform, wanting to touch them, shake their hands, get autographs. The flags. You can bet they wanted to put the Norwegians in their place. But I’ll tell you the worst thing about it: Andrée was so dishonest. A person should always know when to give up, don’t you think? Don’t you think that that is the most basic requirement any human being should be able to make of himself? Don’t you think that there is nothing more contemptible than a man who is so afraid to disappoint people, who is so afraid of disappointing himself that he would rather die? And let others die too?’
He stopped talking, stopped smoking, and peered at me with such a peculiar intensity that for a moment I thought he actually wanted me to answer. I was about to say that probably there were things more contemptible than a lack of self-insight, but before I could do so he was off again.
‘Strindberg was just a boy. Twenty-three years old. Andrée was nearly twice his age. And I don’t think he really wanted to go, not the second time, because in that intervening year two things happened that changed his life.’
He opened his left palm and stared intently down into it, as though he had a note written there, and then tapped it with the index finger of his other hand.
‘One, there was originally a different third member of the party besides Andrée and Strindberg, the one Fraenkel replaced. Nils Ekholm was a meteorologist. He was a mature man. Nearly the same age as Andrée. He knew the balloon was leaking air at the seams through the eight million stitch holes, and that it just wouldn’t be tight enough to make the trip unless they did something about it. They tried all sorts of things. Layers and coatings on the inside and outside. Patches. But afterwards, when they did tests with some kind of litmus paper, to see if hydrogen was still escaping, the air still came whispering out, the paper turned black. After that, you know what Andrée did? He went to the balloon hangar on his own, secretly, seven times, and ordered more air to be pumped into it. Seven times. Not a word to the other two about it. Andrée was a man who wouldn’t listen. He thought faking the evidence didn’t matter because he was right anyway. Ekholm saw through him. When he discovered what was going on he dropped out, and that’s when Fraenkel came in. I always liked Ekholm. He trusted himself, and his reward was another twenty-six years of life.
‘And two,’ he went on, looking back into his palm and now tapping with two fingers: ‘Andrée’s mother died in 1897, just a month before they left Stockholm. Andrée had no wife, no children, his father was dead. They give him a secret lover in the film but I don’t think so. Andrée’s mother adored him. She was his biggest fan. He could do no wrong in her eyes. When he was trying to describe what it felt like to lose her he said he’d lost the only reason he had to go on living. Two weeks later he boards the train from Stockholm and it’s up, up and away in his beautiful balloon and off into the cold white sky, taking those two boys along with him, waving goodbye to a world in which he felt he’d lost the only reason he had to go on living.’
Erling was telling his story with such empathic intensity that I found I was getting caught up in it, and when he suggested we move on to another bar I readily agreed. We headed along Dronningens gate, turned left and walked up past the shops along Karl Johans gate, past the cathedral. As we walked, I told Erling the story of Donald Crowhurst, with which Andrée’s tale seemed to share similarities.
Crowhurst was a participant in a round-the-world single-handed yacht race back in the 1960s, when there was great interest in these competitions following on from the triumph of Sir Francis Chichester who made the first solo circumnavigation of the world in Gipsy Moth. Crowhurst appeared to be on the final stretch of the journey and looking likely to win, heading for the eventual glory and prize money that would save his little Cornish boatyard from bankruptcy, when he suddenly disappeared from the airwaves. Some days later, his catamaran, the Teignmouth Electron, was found drifting with no-one on board. Crowhurst’s body was never found.
I told Erling about the log-books found on board the Teignmouth Electron. The fictional one meant for public consumption, which described his triumphant circumnavigation of the globe; and the true one, which revealed his disintegrating mental state as he realized his boat had never been adequate to the task, and which showed that within days of setting out he had made secret trips ashore to have it repaired, so desperate to win the race and be a hero that he hatched his plan to hide in radio shadow in a remote bay off the Leeward Islands and then to triumphantly reappear on the airwaves weeks later as one of the race leaders. Tormented by loneliness and by the possibility of his deception succeeding, in the end Crowhurst forced his mind to believe it had discovered a secret of Einsteinian proportions, a revelation so vast that it could only be communicated in BLOCK CAPITALS, how to carry out a circumnavigation of the globe using only the imagination.
My point was that from The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, one of the few books I have ever sat up reading all night, when I was twenty, I took a chilling warning about starting something you cannot complete. Something you know to be beyond your abilities. The importance of never being afraid to say you were wrong about yourself. Never being afraid of disappointing people. I thought Andrée, too, probably realized he could never succeed, no matter how much he wanted to, no matter how many well-wishers they had. He was just not cut out for great things. He and Crowhurst both were not as exceptional as they wished they were. And they could not accept it. They couldn’t disappoint themselves or their supporters.
We passed through the four-way pedestrian junction of Egertorget, the high point of Karl Johan, from where you can see both the palace at its western end and the railway station at the eastern end, where a vertical signboard alongside the main entrance, long since replaced, advertised ‘GOD MAD’, an old spelling of god mat (‘good food’) that always made me smile. Snow was starting to fall. Leaning over the railing of the first-floor balcony, a waiter from the Mona Lisa was having a smoke. He looked cold in his white shirt and waistcoat. I said to Erling that in my view he was being too harsh towards Andrée. I was moved by a sentimental and empathic sense of the general tragedy of the whole affair, thinking not of the isolated and individual failures of judgement and foresight that led the three men to their early deaths but rather of the nobility of daring to dream such a grand dream. Whether they succeeded or not, I said, to me they were heroes. ‘After all,’ I objected, ‘they were risking their lives. They knew the risk of failure was great.’
‘Aha, but did they?’ Erling interjected. ‘I don’t think they did. Andrée was quite literally up in the air from the very moment he thought of the plan. In his dreams he was floating to the North Pole in the relative comfort of his balloon. Instead of all that hard physical slogging across the ice he was going to complete the journey in a few days and do it the smart, modern, clever way. It was all going to be a breeze.’
He smiled at me as he said this, proud of his word-play, as though it demonstrated his mastery of the language. In much the same way, I had once thought it must be astonishing to be named Torbjørn, meaning ‘Thor Bear’, or Øyvind, meaning ‘Island Wind’ – both of them quite common male names – but could never persuade any Norwegian so named to share in my astonishment. Puns and the literal meanings that delight the linguistic tourist simply do not register with native speakers.
‘Listen,’ he said, holding up his palm to me, as though I had been talking all evening and not listening. ‘Within minutes of lift-off, two things happened. One, three of the four of those ‘patent office guide ropes’ came unscrewed from their sockets and fell off the gondola while the ground crew still had their hats off waving goodbye. The balloon dropped like a stone towards the surface of the water and they had to toss out valuable ballast left right and centre. Clothes. Food. Although not the champagne! Oh no. And that silly buoy-thing he was going to drop onto the North Pole as they passed over it... .’
Andrée’s balloon drops towards the sea shortly after take-off from Danskøya, Svalbard. Historical image collection by Bildagentur-online/Alamy Stock Photo.
Here I had to interrupt again, for as it happens I had that very morning been reading Hugo Hamilton’s Hågkomster, a political memoir from 1928 that was of interest to me for its references to Alfred Nobel; and there I came across a question that had occurred to me as we sat watching the film earlier that evening, namely: how would the balloonists, from their position aloft, know when they had reached the North Pole? It appears that at a gathering of the expedition’s main backers – besides Nobel, King Oscar II had put up a lot of the money – the Swedish king had asked exactly this question. Before Andrée could reply, Nobel had offered his explanation. The position of the Pole will be self-evident, he told them. Consider the speed at which the earth must be rotating at the precise polar point, he continued, and that it has been doing so for millions and millions of years. ‘Obviously large amounts of terrestrial matter must be continuously ejected from this point, so there will undoubtedly be a large hole there clearly visible to you from the gondola.’
Hamilton says that the king stared at Nobel in some surprise and then asked Andrée what he made of the idea. Andrée, looking slightly embarrassed, muttered that it was certainly one theory. Maybe so, said the king, and changed the subject.
Once, writes Hamilton, when he and Nobel were gathered at a dinner party, a guest recalled a previous meeting at which Nobel had mentioned a project that involved buying a row of houses on a Parisian boulevard for some obscure purpose, and asked Nobel whether anything had come of the mysterious project? Nothing came of it, Nobel replied. It’s a disgrace that something like that could happen in the most civilized country in the world. I have often wanted to do something for the people of Paris, he said. They have been very friendly and helpful to me on many occasions. And in thinking of some way in which I might repay their kindness the odd fact occurred to me that in Paris, the most civilized city in the world, people often commit suicide in the most repulsive and degrading surroundings. Now, it is the duty of any civilized society to ensure that any among its citizens who wish to depart this life should be able to do so in a dignified manner, and not condemned to cut their throats in some miserable alleyway, or have to throw themselves into the Seine, polluting the water for their fellow-citizens. Nobel said that this was a problem he had been thinking about for a long time.
In due course he had involved two acquaintances, an architect and a doctor, and put to them a plan that he was certain people would find very attractive and which, should it be successful, might prove inspirational to the rest of the world. Along one of the main boulevards in Paris he proposed to build a number of small and tastefully designed villas in which anyone wishing to kill themselves would be able to lodge while obtaining the assistance necessary to do so in a pleasant and pain-free fashion, certain in the knowledge that their dead body would be respectfully dealt with and their dying wishes properly observed, since legal as well as medical expertise would also be provided. When the guest asked why Nobel’s plan had come to nothing, Nobel responded in great exasperation that the Parisian police had forbidden it. He had protested furiously and arranged meetings with all sorts of influential people, to no avail. So in the end he abandoned the plan, consoling himself with the thought that the future would have a better understanding of what he had been offering.
We passed the Storting and Grand Hotel, then took a right along Rosencrantz gate and entered Original Nilsen, so-called to distinguish it from the larger Herr Nilsen on the corner of C.J. Hambros plass. Gone now, Original Nilsen was a small bar with black walls and ceiling, and at the far end a Sonor drum kit with bass drum, cymbal-stand and a snare drum with black glitter surround, which glinted faintly in the dimness. It was a Tuesday night, not a live-music night, and there were just a handful of drinkers in the bar. We sat at a small round table next to the tiny stage and as Erling took a first sip of his third or fourth aquavit – and I a sip at my first, a Gammel Oppland he had insisted on buying me since I was new to the country and the culture and ‘had to learn about such things’ – he returned to the subject of the doomed Andrée expedition. I couldn’t help noticing that on several occasions he had referred to it as ‘suicidal’. He seemed to use the term literally, not just as a way of underscoring the dangers involved.
‘You keep describing Andrée’s voyage as suicidal? But what about Nisse and Fraenkel? They didn’t want to commit suicide?’ To me one of the most successful and beautifully treated themes in Troell’s film was the way the thought of his fiancée waiting for him was what kept Nils Strindberg going.
Erling looked at me, sensing perhaps a vague disapproval behind my question. Taking a last drag on the frail rag of his roll-up, he squashed it in the ashtray with a twist of his thumb.
‘A lot of people who commit suicide don’t care who else dies with them. In fact, I believe they probably even think they’re doing them a favour. They believe they’ve seen deeper into the heart of human suffering than others, and that they know better than other people what they want. Of course Nisse didn’t want to commit suicide. He had someone. He loved someone and she loved him. Nisse was the nicest and sweetest boy, you can tell from his diary, from the heartbreaking sweetness of his letters to Anna Charlier. And the pictures he kept on taking, that lay undeveloped in his camera, the technicians were able to recover ninety-three of them. The spirit in that. The hope. You can feel it yourself. The idea that if you keep on photographing what’s around you then somehow you’re still in charge and it’s all still a sort of adventure. A very difficult and demanding holiday, but something you will be able to talk about afterwards. Here we are, standing with our rifles over the first polar bear we shot. Or Andrée and Fraenkel standing next to the basket. That black polyp flopped on the ice like a fucking dinosaur. I’ll bet they gave it a few kicks. Get up you fuck. You shit. Get up and fly.
Members of Andrée’s expedition ponder their fate after the Eagle comes down on the ice. Photo: Nils Strindberg/Wikimedia Commons.
‘Next year, or the year after, once it’s over and a trove of rich and unforgettable memories, Nisse, with Anna at his side, now his wife, will travel the world with a lecture and a slide show and show all these photographs. People will marvel at his photographs, at the fact that they really did fall out of the sky and lived to tell the tale. And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the fork Andrée made for Fraenkel. How we laughed!’
‘So you believe Andrée committed suicide?’ I asked. ‘And persuaded himself that Nisse and Fraenkel wanted to die too?’
Cutlery improvised by members of the Andrée expedition. Photo: Nils Strindberg/Wikimedia Commons.
‘You’re being too literal. Everybody wants freedom from the fear of dying. Even happy people. That is the suicide’s gift to those who die with him. He takes away their fear by giving them the thing they fear most.’
A big, hulking, badly dressed man passed, hands clasped behind his back and walking with hurried, tiny steps towards the door to the toilet, which was painted black like the walls. He stopped at our table, and he and Erling exchanged a few words before he continued his journey. I hadn’t understood anything of what they said and told Erling so. He laughed and explained that Rune was from the same town as him, Øystese in Hardanger. ‘We have to change the way we speak when we’re in Oslo, otherwise no one would understand us.’ I remarked that no one in England would do that. A Geordie or a Scouse would think it shameful to change his accent so that Londoners could understand him; but Erling said there was nothing shameful about it in Norway, it was just practical.
‘You’re being too literal,’ he said again. ‘Some people just can’t stop doing the thing they know will kill them. Andrée didn’t poke a hole in the balloon. He wanted to die without noticing that he was dying. Collecting plants. Making scientific “observations”. Hoping he would just fall asleep in the middle of making a scientific “observation”.’
I couldn’t really see much difference between Andrée’s continuing to collect samples and make observations and Nisse’s carrying on taking pictures with his camera, but I said nothing. Erling seemed to have taken an almost personal dislike to Andrée.
‘Not like her,’ he added, with an upward flick of his eyes.
I followed the direction of his gaze. He was looking intently at the photograph of a woman, one of the gallery of black-and-white portraits that lined the upper part of the walls in a frieze. I recognized some of them – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jan Garbarek – but not this one.
‘Who is she?’
‘Radka Toneff. And that’s Jon Ebersen. Terje Gewelt. Arild Andersen. Jens Wendelbo. Pål Thowsen…. .’ He identified them all, finger dipping from picture to picture, as though they were well known and I should have heard of them. My gaze returned to the portrait of the dark-haired young woman. She seemed hardly more than a child.
‘What did she play?’
‘She was a singer. Pretty good singer. I heard her many times. Here, and at Club 7. Radka Toneff, she did it with her eyes open.’ He told me she’d killed herself over an unhappy love affair. Drove out to the Bygdøy peninsula on the outskirts of Oslo on a bitterly cold winter’s day and parked in a car park there. Took an overdose of pills, washed them down with whisky then left the car and walked away.
‘How old was she?’
‘Thirty, thirty-two, I don’t know. Anyway, she did it properly.’
I sensed he was talking half to himself, and hardly even cared whether or not I knew what he was talking about. But everything about the country and the culture was new and exotic to me. I was still thrilled beyond measure at this unexpected bonus that came with learning the language. A complete parallel cultural universe had opened up to me at the same time, with composers like Fartein Valen, Geir Tveitt, David Monrad Johansen, Øystein Sommerfeldt, poets like Rolf Jacobsen and the Swede Tomas Tranströmer, and a film industry with its own pantheon of stars, who appeared in almost every film made – Sverre Anker Ousdal, whom I had just seen playing Knut Fraenkel in Troell’s Andrée film, the beautiful Kjersti Holmen, Helga Jordal with his rumpled face and his thick Bergen accent; and footballers with nicknames like racehorses – Sverre ‘Brandy’ Brandhaug, Jan Ivar ‘Mini’ Jacobsen. Artists and writers and sportsmen largely unknown to the outside world. Yet, once you penetrated below the superficial level of local, good-natured deference to the global celebrity enjoyed by the stars of American and British culture, these names were dearer and closer to Norwegian hearts and minds than any of them. These were family.
‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ he said after a few moments. ‘She didn’t do it properly. It was a stupid and thoughtless thing to say. She took her own life. That’s all. That sweet little feather took her own life.’
He was a chain smoker. He’d stopped rolling his own now and started on a packet of Teddies. He tapped another cigarette out of the soft blue and white packet and lit it with his Zippo.
‘One mistake can be enough. The world turns dark. You think it’ll never brighten again. Or maybe it will, if you drink. So you take a drink. But instead, each day you wake up is blacker than the one before until finally one day you can’t face another one. You’ve had enough. You can’t go on.’
Jimmy Giuffre’s ‘The Green Country’ was playing softly in the background. A man with shoulder-length grey hair and huge, drenched eyes, almost comatose with drink, was being helped towards the door with exquisite tenderness by a taxi driver.
‘They had opium. Andrée kept giving it to Fraenkel every time there was something wrong with him, did you notice that in the film? You’ve got a sore foot? Here, have some opium. Diarrhoea? Have some opium. Nisse dies and they wedge his body into that wall of ice, they took his jacket and his trousers. Andrée takes the locket with Anna Charlier’s hair curled into one half of it and her picture in the other, and, probably very weak, just piled stones on top of the body. I can imagine the two others returning to the tent. Maybe making a cup of coffee on the primus. And then after that, what? Because really, there is no next. There’s nothing to do but wait for nothing. Fraenkel says he’s not feeling well and asks for some opium. Andrée says no, still trying to maintain his position as leader. Fraenkel ignores him and takes it anyway. And not long after him, Andrée too. They weren’t found inside the giant sleeping bag they all slept in for warmth. No one was inside it when they found it. They knew they wouldn’t feel the cold. They were ghosts already. They’d turned into their own ghosts long before they died.’
The Andrée expedition on the ice with tent and boat. Photo: Nils Strindberg/Grenna Museum, The Andrée Expedition Polar Centre.
From above the cloud of smoky chatter a woman’s voice floated down.
‘Listen,’ said Erling, touching the back of my hand. ‘This is Radka Toneff.’
I strained my ears to hear. The voice was diffuse and faint, like a ghost’s voice, the song a ballad with a strikingly melancholic refrain – the moon’s a harsh mistress, the moon can be so cold…‡
‘I asked the woman behind the bar to play this for you. I told him you were an English visitor who wanted to hear some of our Norwegian jazz singers.’ Resisting the urge to remind Erling that in fact I wasn’t a visitor but had come to Norway to stay I said again: ‘So – you do think it was suicide?’
‘Who knows what it was? Drink up,’ he said, suddenly brisk, standing and shrugging on the sheepskin jacket that I later learned was the only jacket he possessed, ‘I want to show you something.’
*
We paid and left the bar. Outside in Rosencrantz gate the snow was still falling, as it seemed to fall all the time during those first four or five winters in Oslo, with evening temperatures always well below freezing, the cold air chilling and tightening the skin, pinching the insides of the nostrils in a way that made me think of the trips to Iceland all those years ago.
We turned right along Karl Johans gate, passed the corner of Universitets gate and the coffee bar that I knew – from my memories of reading Hunger – had once been the site of Cammermeyer’s, in the 1880s the only bookseller and publisher in the city, and far too small an operation to publish giants such as Ibsen and Bjørnson, or Alexander Kielland and Jonas Lie: de fire store, the four Norwegian greats of the era, who took their plays and stories to Copenhagen to be published by Gyldendal.
We crossed Karl Johan and slanted over in front of the National Theatre, between the plinthed and greening statues of Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, and then up Drammensveien, with the royal park on the right and on our left-hand side the first-floor apartment on the corner of Arbiens gate where Ibsen had lived after returning from his twenty-seven years of exile in Italy and Germany, with the palace and the royal family as his neighbours across the road. I gathered that Erling was talking about another explorer, a Norwegian named Hjalmar Johansen, and that this man, of whom I had never heard, was well known as the only man to have travelled with both Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen on their polar expeditions; but I was so enchanted by the black night and the mysterious beauty of the royal gardens in the overspill of cold white light from the streets lamps we walked between that I realized I had missed some important narrative link connecting Andrée with Hjalmar Johansen and had to ask Erling to recapitulate for me.
He patiently began to explain it once more, slowing with each step as he spoke; and I knew, since he had already done it several times during the course of what had turned into a pub crawl through the centre of Oslo, that he would shortly come to a complete halt and turn to face me while continuing to speak. I had tried once or twice to subvert the manoeuvre by simply turning my head in his direction and nodding slowly and deeply several times, clearly signalling that he had my complete attention even if, as on this occasion, it was not quite true, and that there was no need for us to stop walking.
‘Andrée’s and the other bodies were never given proper autopsies when their remains were brought back to Stockholm in 1930. And after the parade and the services, they were cremated. A glove, a mitten, they don’t know whose it was, was found on Hvitøya. It’s in the Andrée museum up in Grenna now. They found shards of fingernails inside, enough to do tests on. One theory was that they died from lead poisoning from all the tinned foot they ate. But the tests proved nothing, they hadn’t eaten the tinned food long enough, and the diaries show no evidence of the derangement that is one of the symptoms of lead poisoning. However, they did eat enormous quantities of…’
He stopped in mid-sentence to stare with transfixed wonder at the snow whirling around in the light from a street lamp on the far side of the road, mouth slightly open, as though he’d never seen such a thing before, the way the flakes seemed to swirl upwards towards the light as though seeking it out, moving so swiftly it was hard to see how they would ever reach the pavements and the parks and railings and lay themselves across the rooftops and the trees, the parked cars, the statues and frozen fountains, across the ships moored in the darkness down by Aker Brygge and onto the head of the tall, swallow-thin statue of Håkon VII, the first king of modern Norway, in 7 Juni plass.
‘What was I talking about?’ he asked, suddenly looking at me, and causing me to wonder how drunk he was.
‘About a connection between the Andrée expedition and this other explorer, the one who…’
‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’ he interrupted impatiently, ‘Hjalmar Johansen.’
The act of recall jolted Erling into motion again and he led us on up Drammensveien, crossing the road to pass the elegant façade of the Nobel Institute where, with a casual flick of his bony wrist, he brought to my attention the stone head of Alfred Nobel on a plinth in the gardens outside the front entrance. We crossed Inkognitogate, a street name which to this day fills me with a sense of mystery and enchantment, and headed on up Sommerogate into Solli plass and the heavy stone cube of the university library, which I had already visited several times in connection with my studies.
‘The most widely held theory about the cause of their deaths is that they suffered from trichinosis. It’s a form of food poisoning from eating too much polar bear meat. Although not the liver – it’s clear from Andrée’s diary that he was aware of the danger of poisoning from eating too much vitamin A. But the meat they ate must often have been almost raw. They had the primus, but Andrée mentions several times the problems they had in getting it to work properly. And by the time they reached Hvitøya early in October, which is when the diary entries more or less stop, and were faced with the prospect of spending the months of the Arctic winter there, with only woollen clothes, they had no furs, always menaced by the bears. And wondering how many more of them they would have the good fortune to kill and eat. So they kept these chunks of raw bear meat and seal meat. And ate every piece of it. The tongue. The brain. The blood, which Fraenkel made into pancakes. The bone marrow. But no fish. They never managed to catch any fish. Andrée did rig up a line out of hooks and safety pins, but they never caught a thing. That’s up in the museum too. Can you believe it? Going off on a trip like that, with the flags and the champagne and the caviar and the special buoy to drop onto the North Pole, but no fishing line?’
We passed a narrow banked strip of parkland that ran parallel with Sommerogate. A cloaked and huddled stone figure with a white cone of snow on its head stood holding what looked like an enormous key in his hand: a study by August Rodin for his Burghers of Calais group.
‘But I don’t believe that it was food poisoning,’ said Erling. ‘Just the year before the balloonists, Nansen was travelling in that same region, with Fram. His great idea was that he would let the ship be frozen into the ice and then let the polar drift carry her across to the top of the world to the North Pole. But, as time went by, he realized it was going to take much longer than expected. Five, maybe eight years. So in March of 1895, he decided to leave the ship and try to reach the Pole on foot, taking one other man with him. He chose Hjalmar. Hjalmar was the best dog-handler of the crew and the fittest of them as well. They reckoned they had to cover an average distance of about 11 miles (18 km) a day.
‘Things started off well enough, but soon they found out, just as Andrée would, that the fantastic distortions and endless walls on the surface of the ice slowed their progress to a fraction of that speed, and early in April Nansen decided to abandon the attempt and try to get back to Franz Josef’s Land. They spent the next eighteen months exclusively in each other’s company. Nansen was Norwegian upper class. Johansen was a janitor’s son from Bodø, away up in the north. Big class difference. They probably told you over there, your Norwegian teachers, that there’s no class system here in Norway. They probably boast about how we abolished the aristocracy back in 1821. Not true, my England man. There are classes here, upper class, middle class, working class, just like there are everywhere. Old money, new money and no money. There are no titles but there’s an aristocracy of names. Politicians, painters and writers, journalists on television and radio, you find the same names down through the generations.
‘For months on end, Nansen and Hjalmar slept together like man and woman. Shared the same double sleeping bag for warmth. They saved each other’s lives, countless times. They ate their way through a zooful of seals, birds, dogs. They ate nineteen polar bears. It was what you might call a brutal intimacy. And not until they’d been living like this for ten months, on New Years’ Eve of 1895, Nansen turns to Johansen, in that tiny shelter they built themselves out of the bones and skins and sinews of whales and seals, Nansen stands up, big man, tall man, couldn’t stand up straight inside it, and he says to Johansen: “Don’t you think it’s time we started saying ‘Du’ to each other?” It’s like he was saying “Listen, we’ve been living like this for quite a while now, maybe it’s time we started calling each other by our first names.” After all those months. Just the two of them.’
He came to a halt, and in a gesture with which I would become familiar over the years to come, clutched his forehead with the spread fingers of his big right hand as though trying to control the raging of his thoughts.
‘Throughout that whole time they had been observing the formalities, the what do you call it in English, the social niceties. Eating pancakes made from bear’s blood, still observing the social niceties. Your queen would have been proud of them. He would have been proud of them.’ Erling gestured across the road in the direction of a verdigrised statue of Sir Winston Churchill pugnaciously leaning on his stick outside Industriens- og Eksportens-Hus, a block of offices people just called Indexhuset.
We were walking now through the small park directly opposite the entrance to what was then the university library and now houses the National Library. Distantly I heard the City Hall bells chime eleven, and with the snow and the strangeness of the night and my intense and voluble companion my thoughts turned again as they so often did during those early days, particularly at night and in the winters, to Hunger and Hamsun’s homeless, vivid and hungry narrator in his ceaseless wandering through the streets of old Kristiania. I knew my future wife must be wondering where I was, and that soon I would have to manufacture a break from this walking and from Erling and get back home to her. At the end of the park that is nearest to Drammensveien and the library a dark rectangular slab commemorates those executed during the Nazi Occupation for their involvement with the illegal free press. A few paces on from it was a large shallow pool with a low, surrounding wall. The water was frozen. Two magpies pecked at something on the ice. Erling brushed snow from the wall, sat down and crossed his legs and pulled a small flat bottle from his inside jacket pocket. Its lower half was encased in what looked like zinc, a thin, hand-stitched black leather coating protecting its upper half. Norwegians call such flasks a lommelerke, a pocket lark that sings to you. He unscrewed the metal cap and took a long swig and offered it to me. I accepted. It was Gammel Dansk. With its hard, sweet, herbal tang and almost syrupy consistency it was not unlike a proprietary brand of cough medicine and the perfect antidote to the chill that was becoming extreme, the temperature now down to about minus eight or nine.
‘This is where he shot himself,’ he offered suddenly, stroking the air above the ice with the palm of his hand.
‘Where who shot himself?’
‘Hjalmar Johansen. Here in Solli Park. 6 January 1913. He put his service pistol in his jacket pocket and walked up here from his miserable little bedsit in Egertorget, sat down on one of these benches and put a bullet through his head. Can you work that out? You go through all that. Struggle so hard to save your life, as though your life meant something to you, as though it was important to you, as though you liked it…’
He reached down and rapped on the surface twice with his bare knuckles. I had noticed earlier he wasn’t wearing gloves. I was about to cough and look at my watch and enact a pang of distress at the lateness of the hour and say I needed to head off home immediately, but before I could do so, he spoke again.
Hjalmar Johansen, the only man who travelled with both Nansen and Amundsen. Wikimedia Commons.
‘See, Hjalmar was a drinker. Only when there was some present danger of losing it, that’s the only time life mattered to him. A bear. A wilderness. Fight and you stay alive. Don’t fight and you die. Out there, death is never more than ten seconds away. It breathes on your neck, into your face. Like when he was attacked by a bear. Hjalmar was on his back on the ice, punching up at the bear’s snout as it stood over him. You know what he shouted to Nansen? ‘You better hurry up or it’ll be too late!’ He repeated it under his breath in Norwegian, as though it hadn’t seemed real in English: Nå får De nok skynde Dem, skal det ikke bli for sent. Like characters out of a saga. But they were real people.
‘Drinking took too long,’ I said, to show I understood. ‘So he shot himself.’
Erling put his head back and drained what was left of the Gammel Dansk without offering it. ‘The terrors of ice and darkness,’ he said with a bitter laugh. ‘Ice blizzards, polar bears. They’re nothing compared to whisky.’
He half-turned and with a flick of the wrist span the empty bottle across the ice. It skipped and skidded with a high, whining sound before sliding to rest against the wall on the far side. The movement caused him to lose his balance and he had to reach down to steady himself on the ice with his hand. Then he stood up and walked unsteadily around the perimeter of the pond to retrieve it. I took advantage of the distraction to call a goodnight to him and set off beneath the dripping chestnut trees of Bygdøy allé on the long trudge back to Kringsjå.
On the way I thought a lot about the evening and the conversation with Erling. I understood that he was a connoisseur of failure, that he was one of those people who feel a curious and powerful attraction towards failure. Somewhere along the line I had picked up that he was in the fifth or sixth year of a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the University of Oslo, and that the delay in finishing it was partly because he was also a painter. He had become fascinated – or perhaps obsessed is a better word – by the story. He had told me he was working on a series of paintings that he called his ‘Frieze of Death’, an echo of Edvard Munch’s Frieze of Life, and that his inspiration for the series was the photographs Nisse Strindberg had carried on taking, almost to the very end, as he documented the little group’s terrible and terrifying six-week trudge towards death and those piles of human rubble found by the crew of the Bratvaag. He seemed to feel a closer bond with these failed and unheroic explorers than with the success and rugged glamour of either Fridtjof Nansen or Roald Amundsen. Did he, I wondered, feel that the fate of August Andrée and Hjalmar Johansen epitomized something important about Scandinavians as a tribe that was obscured by the glories surrounding these two heroes? Was he trying to articulate a tension that existed between the profound individualism of the polar explorer and the sometimes oppressive communality of Scandinavian societies?
*
It was well past midnight when I got home. My future wife was already in bed and asleep. I wasn’t drunk, the night had been too cold for that. But I knew I would regret the drinking in the morning and as I crept into bed beside her I made a determination not to carry on this way, now that I had been given, at the late age of thirty-four, this unexpected gift of a rebirth. I understood that my drinking was an expression of protracted adolescence, an unwillingness to concede the passage of time rather than the true sickness unto death of a real drinker like Erling. I made up my mind to avail myself of her fabulous commonsense, so that I could live close to it and learn from it every day, and the following morning, as soon as I woke up, I proposed to her. She said yes. That same afternoon I bought a grey suit from a Dressman store and two weeks later, at 11 o’clock on a Wednesday morning in the City Hall, we married each other. Erling was my best man. Apart from Mona, my wife’s closest friend since the age of five, he was the only guest at the meal we ate afterwards at Grand Hotel on Karl Johan. A piano trio was playing. I remember it was the first time I ever heard a live performance of Thelonius Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’. That tune is almost impossible to whistle.
*
In the early days of our friendship, Erling drank more or less constantly without ever actually appearing to be drunk. He was a continual smoker too, occasionally trying to break the chain with the use of an old briar pipe, which, as I told him on several occasions, suited his dignified bearing well. But very shortly the pipe would be put away and the cigarette-rolling machine would reappear, or the soft blue and white cellophane pack of Teddys, lying between us on the tables of the bars and cafés we visited over the years.
He got married not long after I did and at about the same time he abandoned his biochemistry studies to devote himself to painting, drinking, talking and listening to music. To my astonishment, since he never spoke of it unless asked, I also learnt that he believed in the literal truth of the Bible. In his youth, he said, he had gone to bible school with the intention of becoming a missionary. His ability to read Hebrew involved him in so many semantic arguments with his teachers, he said, that in the end he was asked to leave the class. But he rarely spoke in a personal way at all and the little I knew of his upbringing came from sentences dropped here and there, late at night in the studio he had built for himself at the first-floor apartment in the neighbourhood of Storo, which he and Karoline moved into after they married, listening to the St Matthew Passion or anything by Glenn Gould, whom he adored, and surrounded by half-finished canvasses from his ‘Frieze of Death’. His family came from Skien on the south coast of Norway, an area with a strong tradition of piety. Henrik Ibsen was from the same town and Ibsen’s brother Ole and sister Hedvig joined a Christian revivalist movement started there by Gustav Adolf Lammers, which broke with the state Church in the 1850s and established its own free Church. Lammers denounced literature as the Devil’s work and forbade the use of curtains on the grounds that everything a person did should tolerate the light of day. His women followers thought he was the returned Christ. The movement spread all along the south coast of the country and laid the basis for sørlandspietism, a tradition of austere piety that survives in the region to this day.
Erling had spent the first eight or nine years of his life in Argentina, where his step-father worked as a missionary. On the rare occasions he spoke of this man, it was with a passing and frightened bitterness that was out of character with his usually tolerant and benign indifference to people. Otherwise the experience of those early years in South America left him with a great fondness for the Latin temperament, which he said he greatly preferred to the Protestant chill of Norway. He spoke Spanish fluently, idolized the Formula One racing-driver Juan Fangio, hated pop music but made an exception for the Gipsy Kings, and always quietly but insistently referred to the Falkland Islands by their Argentinian name, Las Malvinas.
With the passage of time, Erling told me, he gradually lost the knack of going to sleep. Instead he would sit up all night in the studio drinking, painting and listening to favourite recordings like Olli Mustonen’s doubling of Bach and Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues. If he couldn’t paint, which happened with increasing frequency, he found other ways of passing the time. Once, at about three-thirty in the morning, he decided to cut his hair. Somewhere between the blunt scissors and the hand-held mirror and the perceptual disturbances of the whisky he realized he had made such a mess of it that he saw no option but to scrape the lot off with a safety razor. Exhausted by the strains of the adventure he then crawled into bed beside his sleeping wife, and was sleeping soundly when he was awoken some three hours later by her screams of distress at the sight of what lay beside her. He told me the story as we sat over a beer in an upstairs corner of Justisen on Møllergata that evening. He seemed genuinely bewildered and even aggrieved by Karoline’s reaction but had agreed to her demand that he wear a woollen hat until some hair had grown back.
It was at around this time that he got into the habit of making more or less incoherent phone calls late at night. I rarely, and latterly never, had the patience to listen to these rambles of his, which were almost always complaints about Karoline’s unreasonable responses to his drinking. He was living entirely in his own world by this time and once complained bitterly of her fury when he had failed to return home for all of one night and most of the next day, having failed even to telephone home to warn her. His own explanation was the usual one: he had been talking. To him this justified everything, and he had no understanding at all of his wife’s fears that something might have happened to him. Much as I liked Erling I could not bring myself to take his side against hers in these exchanges, and in the end bought a Caller ID device and, with an always guilty heart, let the phone go on ringing if the display showed his number.
I saw Erling for the last time in 2004, about a year before his death and fifteen years into our friendship. In the course of one of those late-night communications we had arranged to take a walk together in the Oslo marka, the dense belt of forest that surrounds the city on three sides. My wife and I had moved into an apartment in the eastern suburb of Lambertsæter by that time and I asked him to call on me there at ten in the morning, supposing that no one, not even Erling, would turn up drunk at such an hour. He arrived an hour and quarter late carrying an old-fashioned and battered little grey rucksack which contained only a quarter bottle of Dawson’s whisky. He had been up all night. It was early spring but snow still lay thick in the forest above the lake at Sognsvann. It wasn’t walking weather and we had to keep to the impacted snow in the centre of the ski tracks, cursed by skiers as they raced by. I remember that walk now with mixed emotions. My anger at him for his failure even to try to cure himself. The way he kept stopping to take a pull on his bottle of Dawson’s. His disappointment and surprise at my refusal to join him. The pity and sadness afterwards, when we parted company in the metro station at Kringsjå, where he had taken a cleaner’s job at the student village. It had been a long time now since I had heard any talk of the ‘Frieze of Death’ and I knew better than to ask about it.
A young mother was waiting on the platform with her son, a boy of about six or seven. Women always took to Erling, even shrouded in his cape of alcohol. They seemed to sense his decency and gentleness and his absolute unfitness to live in the same world as the rest of us. He engaged her attention with a few remarks about the new buildings that were going up all around Kringsjå to accommodate the ever-increasing number of foreign students arriving in Oslo to study. But when he bent to address the child there was something about him – the jerky uncertainty of his movement, the redness of his face, the washed-out blueness of his eyes, the poisonous blast of whisky from his open mouth – that terrified the boy. He stared into Erling’s face for a moment then turned and ran to his mother and buried his face in her thigh.
During the walk I told him I had made a vow never to drink whisky with him again. It felt like the last good turn I could ever do for him. As things turned out I never drank anything at all with him again. Never even saw him again. Periodically, over the next few months, I heard news of him from our mutual friend Bjarne, a dentist who was part of my wife’s crowd from her secondary-school days and with whom I had become friendly, and who, in due course, had become friends with Erling too. From Bjarne I learnt one evening that Erling had left Karoline and divorced her, and shortly afterwards married a childhood sweetheart, a woman of whom I had never heard him speak but who was, according to Bjarne, a highly successful biochemist who shared with Erling, in all its compelling and private intensity, a faith in the literal truth of the Bible. Bjarne said that the two of them sang psalms together at the breakfast table. No longer able to tolerate spirits Erling was drinking only watered wine. The risk of incontinence had become so great that he rarely left the house. One day a toothache necessitated a trip to Bjarne’s to have a tooth taken out. At home that evening the cavity began to bleed and the bleeding never stopped.
In his oration at the densely Christian funeral the priest did not mention by so much as a word the part Brother Alcohol had played in Erling’s demise; and yet for one of the very few times in my life I felt that a priest’s words from the pulpit were a true and meaningful address to the body lying in the flower-decked white coffin below him. Erling’s faith never wavered. He believed implicitly that he was bound for a better world than this. After the service we followed his coffin in bright cold sunshine as it juddered along a twisting path atop a metal, battery-driven trolley to the grave, and stood around watching as the box was lowered into the ground, and listened to the rattle of earth and stones on the lid. I don’t remember feeling any grief, only how little dignity there is left in life. It’s curious as I write this to reflect that Erling is still down there in that hole, still wearing his suit, perhaps even still remotely recognizable in some way. It makes me think of the words of that Swedish trader whom Ibn Fadlan met on the banks of the Volga more than a thousand years ago. We burn our dead, the Rus told him. In a few moments they’re gone and in the next world already.
*
Close to the end of Troell’s film there is a scene in which the three explorers take turns at looking into a small mirror Nils Strindberg has unexpectedly found among his camera accessories. At first it seems fun to them, like a toy. Then, as the memory of who they once were returns to them, they fall silent. They act almost as though they wish Strindberg had never found it. The camera cuts to the scene of Nils Strindberg struggling beneath the polar bear and then abandoning his struggle. Knut Fraenkel takes off his boots and his gloves, helps himself to an overdose of opium and lies down to die. Max von Sydow, as August Andrée, stands alone on the rock-strewn beach and remembers the episode with the mirror. He listens to his inner voice as it reminds him again of how little of ourselves we are able to see. Just the front. Not the back, and not ever the face. Like birds, von Sydow’s hands begin to flutter at his sides. They glide and flit about his body. He turns his head, watching them, his own hands, flitting about his body as though he has no control over them, as though they belonged to someone else. Follows their fluttering with the bewildered fascination of a child.
Nils Strindberg’s remains. Grenna Museum, The Andrée Expedition Polar Centre.
* You can see the film at https://youtu.be/dJM62aIN.
† White Island.
‡ Hear it at https://youtu.be/XtgIxU8TCyY.