Georg Letham (24 page)

They have to make an effort to restrain themselves, but they do it,
gradually becoming calmer, hoping to find the ship free of rats upon their return.

Fifty hours later my father is the first to enter the ship. The planks echo hollowly under his high, heavy leather boots. In one hand he has a pike like those the Eskimos use to goad their dogs, in the other a lantern, he thumps on the deck, nothing seems to answer him. So the beasts are dead, thank heavens. His joy, his satisfaction cannot be described, he takes a white handkerchief out of his pocket, waves to his comrades on the ice: all is well. He lifts a hatch with the pike, its barb in the iron ring, he climbs down the main entrance to the provisions store. No sooner has he descended a few steps, shining the lantern about, than a second light appears behind him. The geographer could not let my father go down alone and has disobeyed his orders. While the two are arguing over which is more important, discipline or comradeship, a big fat rat darts boldly past my father's feet and up on deck, runs nimbly, whirring like a top, around the main mast and back again, leaping over my father in one colossal bound. My father and my uncle shine their lanterns into the depths. Good God! They are everywhere, sitting and slithering and darting about, the indestructible rats. My father's feet encounter a carcass, half torn to pieces, only four or five times. The beasts are there as always on the provision lockers and barrels, nibbling at things with their white protruding teeth or cleaning themselves, staring insolently into the light from the lantern. And the birdlike cheeping of the young rats is heard not just from one spot, but from many, indeed from every corner of the storerooms. The older generation has not cashed in its chips and the younger one is well on the way! What can happen now? How are they going to fill their bellies? The shameless rats have even consumed the fuses that did not burn.
Live, eat, procreate. Shamelessly! No, modestly. Equal to life, on the increase, a worthy adversary. How can they be eradicated without also eradicating the people to whom they have adapted themselves?

So this was the result: only thirty-two animals had met their maker. They had to be buried in the ice at some distance from the ship so that the dogs would not poison themselves on them. But most importantly: thousands upon thousands of rats are alive and flourishing. The ship is stuck in the ice. The renowned, venerable shipyard delivered prime work. The heavy ship withstands, groaning and creaking but intact, the masses of pack ice continually bearing down upon it.

The ship does not withstand the rodents in its belly. They merrily go on living. They are not looking for any pole. They are not interested in meteorology, not in dialects, not in Eskimo folktales, not in Christianity. Not facts to be taken down, but food to be taken in is all that exists for them. If a weaker, good-tasting creature is alive and they can catch it, then they kill it. And if it is dead, then they do not dissect it but gobble it up. They do not live lives without mates, full of privation, in the service of nothing but the lofty purposes and noble ends of theoretical science, like my father and his companions, but simply behave naturally. Male and female, father, children, mother, and grandmother, unto the fourth and fifth and seventh generation, all one family, huge and still not big enough. With their flesh and blood, their filth, and their scent, they overrun the artful structure built by men. Their uniform is everywhere one looks, that grayish brown body with its bottlelike swell, along the spine more darkly variegated, in front the sharp head and in back the wormlike, lighter, hairless tail with its two hundred transverse rings. They are happy to be able to gorge themselves. They rigorously obey the
stubborn instinct to survive. They stake everything on their existence and know nothing else. Brown rats are known as
Wanderratten
, migratory rats, but they can also keep faith with a place as long as the place and the foraging there keep faith with
them
.

Here was where my father made his study of the animals that later lived as guests in his house.

But when a community grows beyond measure, can there be enough food for it in the long run? No. Fierce, passionate battles over food are already breaking out among the animals, infrequently at first, but nevertheless. And yet there are vast provisions on the ship, vast in the eyes of a single, comparatively small rat. But their greed is not small. Nothing is safe from them.

They no longer content themselves with the storerooms belowdecks. Having become a more courageous, virile race under the new living conditions, they advance up to the cabins of the scholars and the captain, they creep into the common ship's mess, first during sleeping hours, then even when men are present, for there it is always warm, it is heated. They find their way into the lockers, shredding even the thickest fur, mother, child, and grandchild move into warm winter quarters between the lining and the pelt of beaver hats with long earflaps. They have to be beaten with sticks, cut with knives, or they do not budge. They occupy provision lockers of all kinds as though they were houses and villages. Anything they can chew, gnaw, gulp down will do fine. Flour, grease, dried fruit, dried fish, sugar, tea, rice, tobacco, spices, but also wood, wool, leather, sailcloth–everything except iron, and rum and other alcohol. They have gotten into more than one cask of rum, but they did not drink, rather they drowned or were poisoned,
much to the overjoyed satisfaction of the missionary. Alas–“joy”? Joy has long been unknown in the community of men, the atmosphere is never peaceful, and yet the men remain in each other's company for hours, for days on end.

My father goes about in silent fury. He is emaciated, his cheeks are gaunt, his eyes hollow like those of the others. He has very courteously asked not to be addressed unbidden, but his companions will not accept this order as legitimate, instead pestering him with every conceivable question, requests, reproaches, complaints. It emerges that they (all of them in an entirely abnormal state of mind) hold him responsible for the “impossible conditions” aboard the ship. He should have taken more precautions–but what would those have been? Others confide in him their darkest family secrets, still others their scientific plans and ideas, some, more fortunate, return to the realms of childhood, they play childish games, run races on deck, but stumbling backward, not forward–or on all fours, as though they wanted to compete with the nimble beasts–and these are grown men doing this, men with beards, with wife and child at home! My father does not dare order them categorically to stop, since he expects only opposition. What can he threaten with, how is he to punish anyone, how can he enforce anything? Others have taken up baby talk, converse like three-year-old girls, weave colored ribbons into each other's beards, kiss each other, progress to false, unnatural caresses, but also to grim, jealous battles.

And above all the rats. It's no good pretending that their numbers will diminish of their own accord or that they will necessarily destroy each other in their wild battles and vanish from the face of the earth. They are there. Everywhere. All the time.

But the time will come when the ship is afloat again. The great effort that will be needed to reach the pole is something that can only be imagined. And to know that then one will be trapped here on the accursed ship, which is home only to rodents, not to men! To be facing the prospect of hunger–for stores a hundred times greater would not survive the constant depredations of the armies of rats.

In this state of mind–this torment, this gnawing impatience, this awareness that someone else has gotten to the pole ahead of you and all is in vain–now anything goes. The last barriers fall between the crew and the scholars and officers. From this point the scuffles, the thrashings, the cuffs and the kisses, the fits of anger, the practical jokes, the fruitless and therefore forbidden mad rat hunts do not cease, and order, inward or outward, is now just an empty word, at which one can only laugh.

Among these men condemned to idleness and waiting and tortured by their boredom in both mind and body, compulsive weeping, compulsive laughter, compulsive praying begin to be heard. Nothing comes naturally. No one is now who he was when he set sail some months before, expecting quite different dangers and difficulties.

In all their battles for their daily bread, the rats remain cheerful and full of the joys of life. They have what they need, and if they do not have it, they get it. But how does man get what he needs?

Bibles in every conceivable language had been brought along in three large trunks, they too have fallen victim to the rats, down to the steel staples holding the pages together. But the hard-drinking missionary still had his private Bible, his confirmation gift, a personal memento–until it suddenly vanished. Who has it? Has one of his comrades simply
hidden it as a childish practical joke, or has someone stolen it? Yet whoever took it would be able to read the word of God only at “Mass,” that is the only place with enough light and warmth, and there he cannot bring the stolen item. A note requesting its return is attached to the main mast, but it too disappears after a few hours, either torn down or eaten by the rats. Still no trace of the Bible.

My father is silent. His face beneath his heavy beard can become no paler. What does he care about the Gospel
now
? It is easier for the others. The missionary solaces himself with alcohol, he throws the empty wine bottles at the rats in the magazine, but they misunderstand and play with them trustingly.

A new Eskimo band has come. They too have heard about the other arctic explorer, indeed seem to know something more, but will not come out with it. They are insatiable in their demands, behave greedily and calculatingly, watch their words, are deliberately unforthcoming. The oldest speaks for the others, who follow his lead.

Has the pole already been discovered? Have the
others
reached the mark? The gentlemen look at each other, but again learn nothing definitive. The expedition is no longer rich enough to buy an accurate report from the Eskimos.

A new mental illness has appeared among the scholars. They have finally devised the cruelest punishment possible under the circumstances. They are punishing each other with silence. Particularly artful practitioners move their lips as though to speak, but make no sound. They will not speak. Others have not produced a properly constructed sentence for months now, they are mentally at the level of one-year-olds and just as tearful. They cannot speak.

Purely physical health too deteriorates day by day during this period.
The cold is tremendous, the wind rages through the freezing darkness, no one wants to leave the ship. But an effort must be made to hunt fresh meat, there are ducks and eiders, polar bears, seals, arctic hares, arctic foxes in the area, their tracks can be seen in the snow on the ice sheet. The eye has adjusted to the murky twilight, the hunt could be successful. But who can be ordered to shoot if no one will leave the ship, even those in the most robust health? Only one possibility remains: to hunt the rats and consume their fresh, fatty flesh in order to guard against scurvy. But as gladly as the men fall to the forbidden chase, bang away like mad in the dark with pistols and carbines, they do all they can to shirk the official one. Why? Only the forbidden excites them. Kill–yes. Eat–no. They shun the repulsive animals like the plague, a plague of rats, they do not want to sully themselves with them, never mind ingest their loathsome flesh. But when hemorrhage after hemorrhage from the gums is weakening the men terribly, when gentle pressure leaves broad stigmata on their pale skin, when tooth after tooth silently falls out, when a foul stench emanates from the sick, miserable men who nevertheless mingle with the healthy, indeed have less intention than ever of leaving them–what then? Any other ideas? And on top of it all the silence of the arctic sky, the silence of the men among themselves.

The purser conducts a new inventory in the storerooms, white as a sheet he climbs up from the depths, kicking at fierce rats even on the ship's ladder. Something has to happen, the best, the most important provisions are dwindling; if it goes on this way, they can last just a few weeks, and the ship's cook will have nothing to make into meals. Starvation will take anyone who has been spared by cold, scurvy, and general hardship. But if it were possible to eat the beasts, that could
save at least half a year's worth of provisions essential for keeping the expedition afloat. And after that half year, what good things might not come to pass? Might not heaven allow the ship to reach the pole (six weeks), and might the ship not then be carried back to the coastlines of populated lands by a current flowing southward from the pole?! It might! It might! Anything could happen. There is always hope–hope of hope–if only the rats were gone. My father thinks it over. He is in charge, it is his decision. He must make it.

My father has so far remained healthy, his teeth are all there, strong and white; his skin pale, if you like, but not brownish, earth-colored, like the skin of those suffering from scurvy, nor mottled with livid hematomas. How is he going to inspire his comrades with the heroism necessary to eat rat meat, or, better yet, drink warm rat blood? That is one danger. The other is the inexorable proliferation of the disgusting animals. Neither is anything new, just the same old thing, but more intolerable with every day that passes. They must stop it, they must at least try to stop it.

My father has one last friend. He talks to this friend. He can no longer talk to his comrades. They would regard it as weakness, would view him with contempt for no longer being able to bear the silence.

This friend is the dog Ruru. She is an intelligent animal, full of optimism and unbroken in body and spirit. This beautiful, gray-eyed, tall, slender dog, covered with long golden fur in gentle waves, is not only magnificent to look at, but she still has her old fire, her pluck. When the men are boring each other to tears in the mess and a bold rat comes along, she wastes not a moment in thought. The men are already too apathetic to go after the creature. They are not true men. On the white
patch on the map representing the unexplored area around the pole, the geographer draws made-up islands, mountains, glaciers, volcanoes, names a bay in his own honor and thus makes fun of himself. Or is he already so mentally enfeebled that he believes it? Other gentlemen carve toys out of nutshells for imaginary children or put dominoes end to end, playing games against themselves with the dominoes divided into two piles.