Dead Water (21 page)

The boys ruffle the pages of the strange red book that will one day be left here in the dark: a mystery why.

There are what look like games of snakes and ladders here. Rulerstraight arrows point up. Strange, sinusoidal lines sine down. There’s writing, but it’s hard to figure out. Passages have been scrawled crosswise over each other, offering more texture than sense. Stranger imagery, too: shamanic eyes and scales and fangs...

To Uncle Lothar

Wishing you a Merry Christmas Vibeke

Now this almost never happens: that the boys are confronted with something stranger than they are. Cautiously they disentwine, letting go their sinusoidal form. The shed expands and blurs, its seams peel open, jetting blue light. In the dusty village, miles distant, that is Ras al Hadd’s only habitation, cracked old men, flash-photographed against the mud walls of their houses, imagine that the old fuel dump has exploded –

But there is no sound and the light is gone almost as soon as it is noticed. A trick of the light, men say to each other, going on with their limited lives.

The fuel store, meanwhile, shrinks and comes back into focus. Its seams heal. Its mortar hardens. The blue light shrinks to a spark, a point, a full stop, locus
x
upon the graph. Pages turn and fan and blur...

The blow is so powerful, so fast, he does not see it coming. It all but decapitates him
.

Gasping, lump-throated, Abhik and Kaneer reel away from Lothar Eling’s Arctic agony, his death by polar bear, sweet fucking hell,
this
again!

Up until now the boys have not given much thought to the way other people’s stories intersect with their own. Why would they? Stories weave their way around the earth, knotting themselves around each other as they go. Winds blow. Hearts desire. You may as profitably marvel at the way a point on one particular rice noodle edges up against a point on another rice noodle in a bowl of noodle soup. At a certain scale, coincidence is a given. A commonplace.

But to be brought back twice to Eling’s lonely death: that’s a hell of a lot of noodles. Or a very small bowl. For the first time in its existence, the twofold djinn feels restricted. Hemmed in. A plaything of coincidence rather than its master. What is it about this notebook?
What is it trying to say?

The djinn coalesces and tries again. This time, it’ll pick a different entrance point, a different owner. Entering a cold, dark, well-appointed house in Svolvaer, it hears

sides of cod chock-chocking as they dry on wooden racks, while inside, Eric Moyse rocks himself into uneasy dreams: the taste of krill, the flash of flensing knives.

Dear heaven:
Moyse?
A name that’s emblazoned on the world’s every other shipping can!

Eric Moyse, future founder of the shipping line, slumps in an old rocking chair before the stove. He wishes he did not have to go through it all again, but if the notebook belongs to anyone now it belongs to Eling’s old professor, Jakob Dunfjeld.

Is that so? Well. The Djinn’s not above taking sage advice. Once again it withdraws, regroups, needles in...

Monday, 8 April: four in the afternoon

Nearly four decades after he first demonstrated his mathematics to his peers at the University of Bonn, Professor Jakob Dunfjeld is in Copenhagen describing his academic odyssey to an audience of journalists and students. In his breast pocket, pressed hard against his chest, palpitating, a second heart: Eling’s red notebook. It has become his constant companion.

In his youth, Jakob shared journal space with the greats: Hertz, Planck, Villard, Lorentz. Even now, with the old physics brushed away, he’ll hold forth, quite unabashed, about ‘the luminiferous aether’. In his lectures he lets the formalities drop and talks about Nothing. His little academical joke. ‘Because “luminiferous aether”, gentlemen, ladies, is Nothing clad in academical motley. All this talk of aether was only ever a sort of handwaving, an act of prestidigitation, drawing attention away from the fact, gentlemen, ladies, that what we are actually talking about, make no mistake, is the structure of the Void...’

Nothing exists. Nothing – with a capital N. Between atom and atom. Between surface and surface. Nothing has to exist, or energy is trapped in matter, matter falls in upon itself, and the universe is reduced to a homogeneous dot. Nothing is the universal yeast, the cosmological baking soda, the air in God’s balloons. ‘There can be nothing, my friends, without Nothing!’

This is
greeted with polite laughter
and even
a smattering of applause
. This Nothing, he goes on to say (the boys are riveted, to have their deep anatomy descried), this Nothing, being nothing, never gets in the way of Anything. Things move through Nothing and Nothing wraps itself around every Thing. ‘In other words, Nothing is a fluid.’

At this point, among the more knowledgeable of his audience, there’s a frisson of recognition. Because while Jakob was scrawling Nothing’s drag and swirl on the blackboards of the Norwegian Physical Society – pictures reproduced in the pages of no less a publication than the
Zeitschrift
of the Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften – the edifice of that sort of physics was already crumbling beneath the predictive weight of special relativity.

Jakob came off better than most when the old guard was swept aside: ‘It was as I was explaining the hydrodynamics of magnetic attraction and repulsion in mathematical terms to ever emptier lecture halls, that I discovered vortices occurring at the boundary layer between the magnetic body and the surrounding fluid. Now, at first I found these vortices a great nuisance! Neither Hertz nor Kelvin ran into them. But then, neither man had ever admitted the possibility that the density of the fluid is dynamic, responding to several variables at once. Let that be the case, and circulation will arise in even a perfectly homogeneous fluid!’ Not his words. Eling’s. Eling saw it first. Eling realized how it all tied together. After years of study, and too late. The red notebook drags inside his jacket. Absently he lays his hand on his heart as though taking an oath. Perhaps he is. ‘This is the point, gentlemen, ladies, this is the crux:
turbulence, even in an ideal fluid, is inevitable
.’

After his lecture, Jakob dines alone and catches the Malmö ferry to connect with the night train to Oslo. The sleeper cabin’s curlicued brass light fittings and its paisley pillowcases only serve to remind the old and ailing professor how far he is from resting on solid earth. There is nothing to see out of the window. Were it not for the rhythm of wheel on rail, he might be dropping through the Void.

He closes his eyes and almost immediately – this is how it seems – the guard is hammering on his door. He opens his eyes. Light bleeds in behind the blind. It is morning. He sits up, pulls up the blind and leans his head against the window, using the vibration and the cold glass against his forehead to wake him up. He blinks blearily at Oslo’s suburbs.

About two minutes outside the station, the train shudders to a halt. In the skies above the city centre, the Norwegian air force is putting on a show. About bloody time, is Jakob’s bleak judgement. Given the hostile forces ranged against them across the Skagerrak.

He has pretty much given up hope of meeting the connecting train and is pulling out his pen and a letter to his daughter Vibeke –

It still rankles that the editors of the
Zeitschrift
won’t let me redub it the ‘Dunfjeld–Eling theorem’. My study of his notes doesn’t justify the change, apparently. ‘Dunfjeld theorem’ indeed. Indifference dressed as flattery.

– when the wheels beneath him give a lurch and the train putters forward into the station. Jakob steps down from his carriage and looks around for a porter. Which way is the baggage car?

Ahead of him, part of the station’s ceiling explodes into fragments, showering the platform with glass. The crowd pulses and heaves as a single body. Jakob staggers. A woman screams. In the aftermath Jakob hears an aeroplane’s engine, receding at speed, and it comes to him as a single thought, prepackaged and entire: not the Norwegian air force; the German one.

At the station’s entrance commuters gather, looking out at the stalled and deserted intersections of Biskop Gunnerus gate, more as though assessing a rain shower than the air cover to an occupation. Jakob eases past them and heads west. Walking through the besieged city carries with it a perverse air of freedom amounting almost to vertigo. His shadow is a long figure laid out before him by the early morning sun, like an arrow for him to follow. Gunfire from the planes circling above his head is sporadic and, being directed at nothing in particular, it reminds him most of all of those scenes in the western serials he so much enjoys, when the villains ride into town firing their six-shooters into the air.

He walks calmly along empty roads. He is excited – but it is a species of excitement experienced in a dream, something disconnected from the will. (Already, he is dying.) He reaches the road that leads to Holmenkollen. The traffic here is heavier. Jakob holds out his hand, begging a lift. It will be his first act under the new dispensation. The thought of hitching a lift excites him even more than the fact of the invasion. He dreams up a stirring line for his diary tonight: We are all Adams in these first hours. We are all heroes, drunk on the possibility of action.

(In fourteen hours he will be dead.)

Home at last, he picks up the phone. The lines to Bergen and Narvik are down. He asks for the Oslo number of an acquaintance, another professor, of chemistry: ‘Steitzl.’

‘There are about a thousand German paratroopers parading through the centre of Oslo, I can see them from my window.’

‘Paratroopers?’

‘
Yes
.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Like? A thousand German paratroopers marching through Karl Johans gate? This requires metaphor?’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘Do? I’m going to tell you and the telephone operator what we should do? An operator who’s by now been replaced by some well-scrubbed Berlin bierkeller tart? Good evening, Fräulein! And as for you, you old ass, get off the bloody blower before she takes your platitudes for some sort of code.’

At night, in his tiny cuboid bedroom, and as the time of his extinction approaches, Professor Jakob Dunfjeld dreams of a place with nothing in it. No matter. No heat. No energy. Nothing: not even light.

Waking, he clings to his dream. Picture it: unobserved and unobservable – perfect Void!

There is a heaviness in Jakob’s chest. A pressing, breathless mass. He imagines it not as it actually is – a cancer, fluid welling in a stinking lung – but as primordial matter expanding at the moment of the world’s beginning. It is a process that is almost purely mathematical: a rapid inflation of the nothingness that yawns between the components of matter. A stretching of distances.

It comforts Jakob, in the time of his dying, to think that things are clouds. Waking in the middle of the night, slathered in sweat, mouth and nostrils hot with the smell of it, he sits up, trying to control his breathing.

He sits on the edge of his bed, shivering, trying to get his breath. His dressing gown lies at his feet: a pool of deeper darkness in the unlit room. He cannot reach down to it. He will have to kneel.

So, he kneels.

Gently, the boys assist. They dull his pain. They sing to him, this good old man, this clever, disappointed man: how things are clouds.

Strange, that this should have become a prayer for him. To whom is he praying? The question is false. God is everywhere, interpenetrating matter and energy. So prayer is intransitive. I live. I pray. I die. Short sentences. Easy sentiments for the short of breath. All youthful lyric put away. Haiku his limit. He leans forward and coughs. Nothing comes. He waits for his breathing to begin again. He waits for his body to remember – and it does.

His arm jams in his dressing gown. He hasn’t the strength to yank his hand past the twist in the sleeve. He stands, his arm twisted up and back, bird with broken wing. The boys are good at knots: the sleeve unravels, letting him in. It enfolds him. He does up his dressing gown with shaking hands. He is fifty-four years old and he is going to die, very soon now. Nothing two little boys can do about that.

He lights a lamp and carries it, hobbling, down endless stairs, into the ice-cave of his living room. The living space in this house is so big, the other rooms so impractically small, that he has been obliged to take a part of the living room for his study. His work space realizes a fantasy of accomplished old age. A big oak desk. On it, stained and dog-eared, Eling’s ugly little notebook, still a source of fascination.

The oceans will not cease to turn, nor the winds to blow—

A wing-back chair. The bear skin before the fire is so big and so white it is hard to credit, but it is real enough: one of Eric Moyse’s youthful trophies. A gift. The effect of these things, cramped together for cosiness, and with no regard to the rest of the room, suggests a film set erected in the corner of a giant sound stage. Still, it is impressive.

The shelves are lined with books and journals.
Physikalische Zeitschrift
.
Die Naturwissenschaften
. Just look at him: the wouldbe geometer of the universe, become a human weathervane, a seer of herring! Still, it is a considerable accomplishment, worth more than a footnote in the history of science, to be the one to say why the winds blow and the oceans turn.

Shivering, Professor Jakob Dunfjeld unlaces his gown. He lets it drop on the floor. He nudges his nightshirt past his belly, his chest, gets it up under his arms and begins the painful process of getting the thing over his head. His chest feels sore and stretched: a container. Certain small, hard animals are groping blindly about in there.

He lies face-down across the bear skin, naked, and the fur’s warmth reaches up for him. This good old man. The boys, touched by his tale, weave a little spell for him. Their genial gift. Fur grows up around him, soft, as sweet as grass, as he descends.

Now who is this, rifling the pages of the holy notebook? Why, it’s his daughter, little Vibeke! Not so little now, of course. Aged and coarsened by her years of exploration. Toughened and at the same time made strangely merry by so many vagrant adventures. She’s come back south to Oslo on a sad and necessary mission, and in the teeth of the spreading Nazi bureaucracy, to sort out her dead father’s effects. This clever, kind old man: she sits and weeps a while. He was both mum and dad to her: a debt not meant to be repaid; meant to be borne. She’ll bear it, heavy as it is, with pride. This lovely, funny, sad old man: her dad.