Submergence (22 page)

There was a town on a lake between Congo and Rwanda where the wind blew stiffly, but produced no waves. There was a Soviet-built hospital on the hill of the town and a beacon behind it which brightened in the dusk, and there was a boy selling sticks of chewing gum who, as he ambled by, glanced at the sky and said: ‘Look! The moon is taking the light away from the sun.’

They drove up out of the wadi. It was Martian, but there was movement; impala springing away, rock pythons and poisonous frogs. They passed a grave where the body was laid above the ground with stones piled on it. The headstone commended a herder’s life to the Almighty. There were a few wild people who paid them no attention, but took shelter from the sun and the wind in round huts made of paper, plastic and cloth.

They arrived at a place no satellite image can do justice to. There
was a plain of volcanic clinker, like on the slopes of the terrorist’s island, then the lorry drove down below sea level onto a Greenlandic whiteness. Even close up it had the look of pack ice, with those same veins of green. All the shades of white were visible and there were roseate floes far out to sea. It crunched under their feet when they jumped down onto it. But it was illusory. It was not the life-giving ice of the north that melts and freezes, under which the beluga whale swims. It was a salt flat. The mists were chlorine vapours. There were no birds in the sky. It was littered with the bones of animals which had strayed there and died and been covered in salt. He picked up what he took to be the skull of a gazelle. It looked frozen, the sockets hoary, but the salt broke apart at the slightest touch, leaving only the bone.

Saif ordered the group to smash up slabs of salt and load them onto the lorry that they might trade later in their journey for charcoal and whey. He helped wrap them in sisal. He brushed salt from his hair and face. It formed on all of them. They began to look frosted to each other: it was impossible to live under the rim of the world.

The ground was flat as a billiard table. It had been underwater in the last pluvial period. When he looked more carefully he saw the scattered teeth of prehistoric fish and crocodiles.

The arrival of a soul in heaven is like a sailing ship discovering the harbour whereunto it saileth. But the truth of Danny’s voyage was that she sailed to no harbour. They had left Iceland behind, Akureyri, with its fjord and green hills and glaciers, and steamed north into the Greenland Sea, Grønlandshavet. She was bound for the largest uncharted hydrothermal vent field in the world, far below the plunging icebergs and the blue-black top, in a part of the Hadal deep whose unlit clock ticked at an incalculably slower speed.

It was the most important summer cruise she had been on. It held the chance, she believed, to reckon the extent of life in the fissures of the rock underlaying the Hadal deep. She had been one of those who discovered the vent field the previous summer. She had been asked to name it and had called it the Enki field.

She was aboard the French oceanographic research vessel
Pourquoi Pas?
which carried also the French Navy submersible,
Nautile
. The preparations had gone well. Her lab equipment was in place. Thumbs was along for the ride. The scientists were French, British, German, Swiss, Italian and Norwegian. She was inclined to stereotype nationalities. There were enough Brits to guarantee showings of
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
in the evenings. The French, she thought, would take care of wine at meals and hand around cigarettes on deck. The Italians would surprise. She was happy anyway not to be on an American boat. The Americans were more self-congratulatory, with less bon viveurs, with people in the fluorescent-lit galley reading airport novels, sipping iced water through the evenings. There was a pressure on American boats to purchase ugly expedition T-shirts, even sweatshirts, as if a badge was needed to prove that you had touched the ocean and partaken in your own profession. She refused to buy the items. Even when she was given them she never wore them, except for a cap. She offended those American women who habitually covered themselves in such loose-hanging cotton garbs, who seldom wore high heels in their lives, and who felt she was a snob and an ice maiden.

She was a snob. She detested what was vulgar; vulgarity was something else. Thumbs had it best when he said she was two cats in one: a Persian and an alley cat. For inasmuch as she dressed carefully and stylishly on the boat, and expended her mind in the lab, she had drunk, punched and screwed her way through science cruises over the years with a dirtiness beyond the suspicions of her detractors.

They rattled up into the green hills.

‘We’re going to where the water is,’ said one of the boys.

His Somali was improving; he understood.

In the clouds there was a hut tended by a shepherd in a ski jacket. Geese flew overhead and one of the fighters covered his ears to their honking. There was grazing. Water trickled from the rock into a pool green with algae.

It was easier out of the heat. Even the mad boy, the snake, became more reasonable and did not strike so often. Down there in the badlands were those who did not know any more where to dig for water, and so tied up a cow to the point of death, then cut its rope and let it go smell the water out.

The shepherd made extra money by harvesting frankincense. It was not clear whether his connection with Yusuf was related to that trade, or whether they shared a shepherding past, but the nicks in the boswellia trees, and how carefully the shepherd attended them, stood in contrast to the boiling down of a whale for perfume.

The hut had two rooms with a cement floor. The doors and windows were gone and there was a thickness of dust and dead flies throughout, but he could picture a Calabrian shepherd once hiding out here to escape the law. It must have been an Italian who planted the cypress tree at the back of the property. It was tall and cast a tapering shadow up the hillside. James would not have believed a cypress could have so prospered there, but it was well planted, in a shady spot.

It was different from the coast. The wind ripped through in the mornings, and there was a stillness at the end of the day: the land seemed to sigh with the fleeing light.

It was a new, soft, blown-apart hill. The spring water attracted all kinds of thirsty animals. There were dik-diks, of course. They made only the slightest disturbance, their tiny hoofs staying a second in the
dust. Three elephants walked through. They had climbed the hill for a drink. They moved cautiously, snapping the branches. They were small, with short tusks. It was improbable, yet that was how nature was. Hippos appeared at waterholes from nowhere. Tilapia fish eggs attached themselves to the legs of water birds and spread from one pool to another. Life clung to life.

James had met an old Serbian poet in New York City. The man was always living hand to mouth, on the edge, and bitter that his Yugoslav neighbourhood had turned Haitian.

There was a basketball court beside his tenement where the youths came to play.

‘Cocksucking blacks. They shout. They’re rude, you know. I’d whip them with my fists … But look at me, I’m so old I want to go to church, know what I mean?’

What sounded like vot. W was a
v
, t was sometimes
tz
.

It was a small room. The man gave him a glass of clear alcohol and told him about observing the faces of Ustashe soldiers during the Second World War, even though James had come to him on a matter related to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The poet said that as a young man he was standing off to one side under an oak tree on an October day.

‘It couldn’t have been November, no, it was October, you know, it was one of those days that ain’t summer and ain’t winter, with mushrooms, with berries. When the Ustashe was shot there was a kind of a cloud from their face, you know, or it was from the back of the head, yeh, like a breath, yeh. I remember the ground was wet, my boots were wet. It wasn’t warm. It was in the mountains, around Plitvice.’

The poet had left Yugoslavia in 1960; his poems in exile had made him a figurehead for some Serbian paramilitaries.

‘It came I couldn’t stand Tito. He sold us out. Anyway, I was brought forward, I was asked to shoot one of these Ustashe in the head. I couldn’t do it. I mean, I could think about doing it any number of times, yes, but a real gun, a real man, uh-uh.’

There was the screeching of the last elevated train, the Jamaica line, the poet said, then a single bird on the street outside, then nothing; the basketball court was empty. There was an open notebook on the table and a sharpened pencil.

‘It’s funny,’ the poet said, ‘how things go around in your mind. Whirligigs they call them, in them toy shops uptown. Here I am in New York City, but I ain’t in New York. I was born in a kingdom, the KINGDOM of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Yes, I seen a war, I come to America, how to explain, I float, the baseball seasons come, they finish, the snow comes, goes, never money, but time is standing still for me, like I was every day stamping a time clock.’

He threw his hands in the air. His body language was all New York.

‘You come ask me about the future. These men in hiding. This Bosnia. What do I know, I’m the wrong guy, I just can’t move.’