The Library of Ice Read online

  for Anna

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  The broken mirror

  Upernavik Museum, Greenland

  I

  Scientists

  Calling time

  Bodleian Library, Oxford

  Halley VI Research Station, Antarctica

  II

  Explorers

  Paper trail

  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

  Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

  National Library, Greenland

  III

  Hunters

  The sound of a knife

  Ilulissat Kunstmuseum, Greenland

  The British Museum, London

  IV

  Skaters

  Traces

  Reagan National Airport, Washington DC, USA

  Kinross Curling Club, Scotland

  V

  Philosophers

  Under the glacier

  Gunnar Gunnarsson Institute, Iceland

  Vatnajökull, Iceland

  VI

  Gamblers

  Break-up

  Jan Michalski Foundation, Switzerland

  South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Italy

  Epilogue

  The icehouse

  Walden Pond, Massachusetts, USA

  The oceans

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Additional Copyright Acknowledgements

  On the way a miracle: water become bone.

  Riddle 69, from the Exeter Book,

  translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland

  Introduction

  THE BROKEN MIRROR

  Upernavik Museum, Greenland

  And if the sun had not erased the tracks upon the ice, they would tell us of polar bears and the man who had the luck to catch bears.

  Obituary of Simon Simonsen of Upernavik, called ‘Simon Bear Hunter’

  From Baffin Bay all that can be seen of the island is the museum built on the promontory, its timber frame painted blood red. It’s said to be the most northern museum in the world. On some days the building is almost completely buried under snow or obscured by mist. In winter, the whole island is surrounded by a moat of ice.

  No ships can navigate such conditions, so my first sight of Upernavik is from the air. The propeller plane stops to refuel often as it flies up the west coast of Greenland. At Uummannaq Airport I descend the folding steps to stretch my legs. The pilot has parked in the middle of the runway and I meander over to the terminal to buy some mints. The sky is a dense indigo, broken only by stars. As we travel on, the weather worsens. By the time we reach 72 degrees north, and begin to make our descent to Upernavik, the storm has intensified and the plane struggles to alight on the short airstrip. But we can’t fly back, or onwards to a safer landing.

  I can just make out the spot-lit airport sign through the blizzard – each capital letter cut from wood and painted pink. Upernavik means ‘springtime place’. The island was named by a nomadic people who once came here by boat when the winter ice broke up, to trade and to fish. Later inhabitants have learnt to adapt, to live here year-round and make use of the ice.

  I’ve been travelling for three days to reach this island – the times, and sometimes the days, of the flights were uncertain, and I felt as powerless as a toy in the bedroom of a child who has abandoned its games and gone to tea. The final stage of the journey takes only a few minutes. As the taxi slaloms from the airport to my new house by the harbour, I pass the lit windows of homes scattered down the hillside. There’s an Arctic myth that tells how before the sun came into being, ice could burn. People used ice to fuel their lamps, because no one could go hunting in the dark. Tonight the sea ice is luminescent, and mysterious objects glow by the shoreline in the twilight, their shapes distorted and concealed under snow. It will be weeks until the spring thaw, and sunshine, reveal what they are.

  When I received the email inviting me to work in the artist’s ‘refuge’ at the museum, I was offered a choice: summer or winter. ‘Contrary to the summertime,’ wrote the museum director, ‘the darkness of the winter to many southerners seems like a terrible and nasty time lying in wait. But whenever one gets accustomed to the darkness it proves to be a peaceful time that leaves the time for thought that one usually lacks.’

  I certainly lacked time for thought. I worked during the day for a book and manuscript dealer in London, and pursued my own projects in the evenings. I liked my job. Authors would bring drafts of their poems and plays to the shop on Seven Dials and I sorted the disordered papers, removing rusting staples and paper clips, and listing the contents. After months of sensitive negotiations, the papers would be sold, either heading in a black cab to the British Library ten minutes away, or being shipped overseas to other august institutions. Drafts were more valuable than fine copies, because they showed the workings of the mind. The words a writer had crossed out, in retrospect, became more valuable than their best lines. I learnt the true value of uncertainty.

  Sometimes as I sat among reams of paper and the legal pads with their scribbles, the perforated and punched continuous stationery spilling off my desk onto the floor, I felt as if forests of trees were passing through my hands. I wondered why, in a world that seemed pretty close to ruin, I was spending my days conserving all this paper rather than endangered species. The more archives I catalogued, the more concerned I became about their future readers. Humans had libraries to preserve their fragile records, but the gloomy news headlines put our own survival as a species – and that of the wider world – in doubt. As for my own writing, I was only just beginning to consider what I wanted to say.

  One day a photographer brought me a box of transparencies depicting cobwebby window panes, cracked mirrors and shadowy corners. As I held each slide up to the light to see the image in miniature, Claire told me she had taken the photographs at a ruined property in the Irish countryside. Her family’s property, which her parents had abandoned after her brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. ‘Could you write about this?’ she’d asked.

  How do you write about that kind of loss? I researched the science behind capturing an image on film: early optics, experiments in darkrooms, how the camera works. I thought about how a photograph can evoke something that’s no longer there and studied the rules behind the invisible forces that have such a strong influence on our lives. I read about Einstein, who believed that formulae waited to appear to the right person, like finger-writing on a mirror, revealed when steam hits the surface.

  The deadline for Claire’s exhibition was tight. I worked through the night for a week. ‘Plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead,’ she said.

  I discovered that light was reassuringly predictable: it travelled in a straight line, sometimes over millions of miles, and arrived faithfully on our planet even when the stars it had come from had burnt out. The lives which it illuminated, by contrast, were all too brief. Ice would be a better metaphor for the human condition – part of an endless cycle of change.

  ‘You look exhausted,’ Claire said, when we met to talk through what I had written.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ That week the shop had also taken delivery of sixty years’ worth of diaries from a historian in west London.

  ‘Why don’t you get away? If you did a residency, you’d have the time to make your own work, instead of always dealing with someone else’s.’

  Claire was right. I would go as far away as possible from this expensive city with its cycle of bank loans and bookselling and brief bursts of free time. I would find out how other artists were recording this temporal world, and immerse myself in archives that nature itself had devised.

  I turned my attention from optics to ice. From light to da
rkness. When I received the offer from Upernavik, I found the idea of the terrible and nasty 24-hour polar night and the midwinter cold appealing. I emailed the museum back: I will come in January.

  On my last day at work, Bernard rang the bell, and I buzzed him upstairs to the office. He was my favourite of the many writers who passed through the shop, always to sell, never to buy. I was pleased to have a chance to say goodbye. He struggled up the stairwell with a check plastic holdall bulging with correspondence, prescriptions and play scripts, and sank down into a chair. His body was ruined by years of writing and amphetamines. Other authors would deposit their manuscripts and scurry off, but Bernard always stopped to ask how I was – if only to give himself time to recover his breath.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, when he asked. ‘I’m leaving.’

  ‘Good!’ he said cheerily. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘I’m going to the Arctic,’ I said, trying not to sound too pleased with myself.

  ‘That’s marvellous. Well done. You need to get away from all this’ – he flapped a hand at the vellum-bound editions of poetry, the gilt spines of the classics – ‘to find your own voice. Can I have my bag back, please?’

  Over the weekend I packed up my cups and candlesticks. Boxed some books, gave away the rest. Handed the key of my Highbury bedsit back to the landlord. Tried to leave a forwarding address with the Post Office: Upernavik Museum, Box 93, 3962 Greenland. But ‘Greenland’ was not on the Post Office’s drop-down menu of nations. I began to wonder if the place I was going really existed, or if I’d imagined it into being.

  The morning after my arrival, I walk through the cold museum building, peering into vitrines at the scanty evidence left by earlier visitors. I admire the ornate lettering engraved on a barometer and the entries in a logbook from one of the whaling ships that looted this coast in the eighteenth century. The first European explorers named Upernavik the ‘Women’s Island’. No one knows why for sure, but people speculate that when the explorers’ tall-masted ships passed the island, the men were away on a long hunting trip. Folklore tells of women in such situations, left alone in the settlements, but in these tales the boats that appear on the horizon are not those of whalers. It was believed that when the men left to go hunting, the spirits of the seals they had killed would sail ashore on boats of ice to exact revenge on their wives.

  There are no traces of these boats of ice in the museum, but in another room I find evidence of the hunters’ craft. A rusting harpoon blade. A mirror lashed onto the end of a pole for watching the movement of sea creatures under the ice. A pair of snow goggles: just a band of whalebone to cover the eyes, with a narrow incision to see through. Hunters wore these on long journeys in the hope that they would be enough to prevent the sun’s glare from damaging the retina and causing snow blindness. I stare at them, wondering what it’s like to peer through that narrow gap towards a white horizon on the look-out for prey – and predators.

  Many of the glass cases are empty. I almost walk past the tiniest object in the museum, the pride of its collection. It’s a copy of the Kingittorsuaq Runestone, a piece of soft slate into which a short text was scratched by three Norsemen around eight hundred years ago and left in a cairn on a neighbouring island. Only the men’s names survive: Erlingur the son of Sigvað, and the sons of Baarne Þorðar and Enriði Ás; the second half of their message is lost, written in mysterious characters that can’t be deciphered, even by rune-reading experts. I wonder what these Viking travellers made of this archipelago. What had they hoped to find here, so much further north than the fjords their countrymen had claimed? Did they ever make it back home? Their truncated story is emblematic of the history of Norse settlers in Greenland, none of whom would survive the fifteenth century, in part because of the cooling climate. During the Little Ice Age this green land was stricken by ice, and the sea trading routes back to Scandinavia and mainland Europe became impassable.

  For much of the year there is still ice here, though its extent is changing. The sea ice around Upernavik may cut the island off from shipping, but it forms a bridge to a network of other islands leading back to the interior. (I know this only from poring over maps – even from the cemetery, the highest point I can reach on foot, the mountains looming beyond Upernavik read like one solid mass to me, a basalt barrier. I cannot imagine the waterways that wind between them, or the even larger mountains they conceal, and the ice cap further east.) I wonder about the first nomads, leaving their winter settlements deep within the fjord system, their skin boats laden, arriving at the outer parts of the archipelago as the spring came. They would have quit their igloos hastily while the weather was favourable, taking the cooking pot but leaving a clutter of bones and debris, possibly a few tools – or a shoe, a toy, forgotten in the hurry to round up children and dogs. Years passed, and bitter polar winds blew earth and snow over the midden. Archaeologists now describe the whole region as ‘an open-air museum’. In other words, people suspect there are interesting artefacts lying undiscovered everywhere under the ice. No matter that they cannot be seen. They exist, and the museum’s empty vitrines await their arrival patiently.

  I can smell the filter coffee percolating. I climb a narrow wooden staircase to the office where Grethe, the museum assistant and sole member of staff on the island, is talking to Peter, a hunter who has dropped by to discuss weather conditions. A two-way radio stutters on the windowsill, issuing reports from Grethe’s father and brothers who are far out on the ice. It will be difficult to work, I discover, during these mornings at the museum – distracted by a long round of kaffe and conversation. Or are the conversations part of my work? Nothing is certain. I arrived full of questions. How long has the museum been here? What had happened to the director who encouraged me to come in winter? When would we hold the children’s workshop? In response to each enquiry people smiled at me indulgently, then changed the subject. As the weeks passed, I learnt to stop asking.

  Each afternoon, Grethe locks up the museum and I stumble the few metres downhill to my cabin. When this building was the island’s bakery many people would have used the track. Now, no one but me comes here. As long as there hasn’t been a fresh snowfall I can place my boots into the deep footprints I made that morning. On other days, I must force a passage to my door through waist-high drifts of light snow. In the outer chamber, I brush snow from my waterproofs, unzip my goose-down gilet, and force off my damp boots.

  I’m not the first outsider to call this place home. The museum has a rolling programme for writers and artists to come and work. Some of my predecessors have left a trace of their tenure, like the German filmmaker who was here last year: I opened the fridge on my first day to find a jar of apple spread (almost full), and there’s a packet of herbal tea in the kitchen cupboard. There are books too, in a variety of languages. Someone has left a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales. I wonder whether a writer before me brought these, as I’d brought Treasure Island, knowing I might want something comforting that reminded me of childhood. Other objects in the house are clearly of local provenance. There’s a narrow skull on top of the TV, large enough that I can’t identify it as any animal I’ve seen before. I wonder whether it has any association with the polar bear skin, laid down over the wooden floorboards.

  I knew this might be an unusual job. What puzzles me most is a sub-clause in the contract: if you’re an artist, you’re required to leave the work you make behind. If you’re a writer, you’re encouraged not to. The museum sets a greater store on images than words. I could paint the sea ice, or film the aurora, and this would be preserved in the museum collections; if I write something, no one wants to read it. Should I be relieved or offended that I’m required to take any words I write about Upernavik away with me?

  The proviso offers me a rare opportunity to relax – I could do the little required of me, hunker down in this cosy house and dine with the neighbours. But the problem intrigues me. It is so different to the symbolic power that books have in my own cultur
e. There must be some words I can write for the islanders.

  I think of everything I do leave behind, every day. My carbon trail from all those flights to get here, for a start. The empty packets of little marzipan biscuits from the store, and the beer bottles that are building up in my kitchen. And worse, there are no sewage pipes on this rocky island, so every few days I have to extract the heavy-duty plastic bag from the toilet bucket, tie it carefully, carry it sloshing outside to wait in the snow for the waste disposal boy. It’s impossible to live and leave nothing behind, and my work ought to reflect that conundrum.

  The one thing I want to leave behind as a trace of my tenure – words – isn’t wanted. Before I can challenge that rule, however, I will have to write something. I crumple up the sheet of paper I have been doodling icebergs on and start a new one.

  No door in Upernavik has a lock. On a small island it would not do to imply that your neighbour is a thief. And since no one wants to be thought to be doing something secretive, people are free to come and go to each other’s houses at any time. But not me, Grethe warns. ‘You have to wait until the first time you’re invited, only then it’s okay.’ After a pause she adds, ‘You should come to us for dinner tonight. We have some seal.’

  Sitting at my desk overlooking the harbour, a cup of black coffee beside me, in the twilight I spot flashlights bobbing away from the island across the shore-fast ice. Shadowy figures step carefully, pausing often. Nevertheless, their progress away from the island is steady; each time I look up, the lamps have grown more distant. Over dinner that evening, I ask Grethe’s husband what the men were doing. He explains they were on their way to drill through the ice and fish for halibut, testing the ice with their chisels before putting any weight upon it. They have to be adept at interpreting patterns and sounds in the ice, which tell them where to step to avoid falling into the freezing water. Each man’s understanding of the ice is essential to his survival. Grethe interrupts him. ‘My cousin drowned last month,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘He just disappeared under the ice.’ Now I understand why she keeps an ear to her radio.