The Ice Museum (25 page)

Hamsun later claimed he had been blind to the realities of the German occupation, that he had not fully understood what was happening in his country and in Europe. At best he was ignorant and self-deluding. But his fulsome support for the notion of Nordic supremacy was hard to explain away. He had hammered his colours to the Nazi mast, however much he later quibbled about whether he had joined Quisling's party or not. As the Third Reich unravelled, he wrote an elegy to Hitler.

In May 1945, when the war ended, Knut Hamsun was placed under house arrest by the police chief of Arendal, a town south of Oslo. Shortly after that, he was put in a hospital in a town called Grimstad. Hamsun never fully apologized; in a later account of his arrest,
On Overgrown Paths
, he claimed, ‘I knew I was innocent, deaf and innocent; I would have done very well in an examination by the public prosecutor just by telling most of the truth.' There was a painful moment in Hamsun's trial for treason, when he defended himself on the grounds that he had been led to believe that Norway would have a high, prominent position in the great Germanic community which was now coming into being. ‘We all believed it—to a greater or lesser degree,' Hamsun had said, ‘everyone believed in it. I believed in it, that's why I wrote as I did.' He tried to implicate his nation, saying they had been as blind as him, but by then the war was over, and Hamsun was being tried by his countrypeople. Hamsun was judged to have ‘permanently impaired mental facilities.' The Norwegian authorities evaded the issue, for their foolish Nobel laureate. Hamsun, before the war, was the laureate of northern Europe, of all these quiet, semi-deserted countries, with their long summers and their chill light-bereft winters. He lingered over the high clear skies of winter, the trees stripped of their leaves, the hills green and peaceful on every side, smoke from the cottage chimneys rising into the air. Hamsun botched it, to use the idiom of another writer who tarnished his reputation during the war, Ezra Pound. Hamsun took the savage route out of modernism, the savage route out of the romantic attachment to the Sagas. His was the route which led to violent retrogression, unbridled nostalgia for the tribal allegiances of the past. He ended at a wild extreme: misanthropy because men interfered with his view of the endless hills, a belief in Nordic supremacy because the people who lived in the endless hills were the Norwegians.

There was a commotion on the deck; the boat was stopping at Tromsø, the largest town in the north of Norway, a wind-lashed port, standing precariously on a barren island. We were nearly 70° N, and the landscape was beautiful and severe—vast grey slabs of rock slamming into the ocean, decorated with swirls of mist and dustings of snow. The fjord was overcast, and the mountains rose above. On the shore, a brass band was playing “I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside.” The music drifted across the water towards the boat.

In Tromsø the strains of the past hung in the cold air. Tromsø was a Mecca for polar history. It was a contemporary centre for wilderness tours. Its concrete housing reminded the casual onlooker that the town had been burnt during the war, and there was a rusting relic of the war, the
Tirpitz
, a German battleship sunk in the fjord, which gave up drowned artefacts to divers from time to time. We were in Arctic Norway, where the towns were subdued by the severity of the winters, and Tromsø was a practical place. The brass band was incongruous, like a luxury the town could hardly afford, piping us off the ship. I was beyond Nansen's Thule, further north than he had thought Pytheas sailed, in his imaginative reconstruction. But Tromsø had elements of a last land; for the Norwegian polar explorers of Nansen's era, Tromsø was the departure lounge, the last substantial settlement, before the North Pole. When Amundsen flew across the North Pole, in 1926, he flew from Tromsø. When he flew out in June 1928 to meet an icy death, he left from Tromsø. He set off in a seaplane to hunt for an airship called
Italia
, which had been lost with Umberto Nobile on board. It was Nobile who had captained Amundsen's airship flight across the North Pole. Amundsen never returned from his rescue mission. Wreckage from his plane was later found, drifting on the ice floes. There were those who said he threw his life away, reckless to the last; others said that he was terminally ill and preferred to die in the ice.

The noise of the brass band faded as I walked along the harbour. There was a sign offering trips in an ‘authentic fishing boat.' The Russian trawlers rusted slowly along the quayside. On the decks, Russian voices gave commands through loudspeakers. The sail lofts had been converted into hotels and apartments. There were shops offering quantities of Arctic tat, though no one seemed to be buying: fur gloves and hats, keyrings with pictures of mountains on them, postcards with the Arctic Circle drawn across a map of Norway. There was a fine bridge slung between the island and the mainland, linking Tromsø to its Arctic cathedral, a building mocked up to look like a pile of ice. There was a polar centre where seals performed slithering circles of a water tank, and an Arctic café filled with posters for poetry readings.

I jostled determinedly with a few local drunks for possession of a bench by the harbour, under a statue of Amundsen in oilskins, facing the ocean. Amundsen had flown out from Tromsø, to go to the rescue of a former friend, a former colleague on his flight above the North Pole. There were rumours that Nobile had infuriated Amundsen on the flight. Nobile had told Amundsen that the airship could only hold a single national flag from each party, a small pennant, nothing heavier. Amundsen had obliged, packing a small flag, the sort of flag a child might hold on a special occasion. Above the Pole, Amundsen had thrown the small pennant from the airship, watching it flutter towards the ice. Nobile had produced a vast box, containing an enormous Italian flag, and hurled its vastness onto the ice, trumping Amundsen's efforts entirely. It was a comic story Amundsen told, possibly apocryphal. It was hardly enough to prevent him from flying out to save Nobile. He balanced all, brought all to mind, and disappeared in a small plane, into the mist. The people of Tromsø had commemorated him with a solitary statue, now stranded on a traffic island, staring indignantly at the coast, trying not to look into the windows of the Comfort Hotel directly behind him. The statue was weatherworn and faded, but it was a clear rendering of the man, his unmistakable profile, his staggering nose, a nose like a challenge. I sat on the bench beneath him, looking up at his silhouette. There were rows of NATO soldiers walking along the quayside, waiting for a lift further north. The pale sun warmed the wind, which gusted through the streets, through the main street, which was dotted with wooden houses and dull concrete high-rise hotels. I passed along the quayside and crossed a scenic stretch of the harbour, past low wooden sail lofts, and a collection of antiquated fishing boats, a mass of polished planks and intricate rigging.

There was another Amundsen in Tromsø, a bust rather than a statue, staring out across another patch of water from the car park of the Polar Museum. The Polar Museum was full of compelling Arctic junk, all the rusting teaspoons and polished ski-runners and blurred photographs of explorers standing by boats and aeroplanes, preparing to launch themselves northwards. Row upon row of blurred portraits of nineteenth-century fur trappers, standing sombrely in front of a grotesque array of seal pelts. Away from the skis and sledges and navigation equipment, I stopped at a glass cabinet, containing a pocket-sized, brown leather copy of
Frithjof's Saga
, a tale of chivalric courage and frostbitten love, adapted from an Icelandic Saga by Esaias Tegnér. The book was opened at the frontispiece, which had an inscription in it, written by Amundsen, dated 1926: ‘This book came with me on all my expeditions, Roald Amundsen.' Nansen, a Frithjof by name, could recite long passages by heart.

Nansen was there in the museum, among the skis and sledges and navigation equipment, in the newspaper clippings, celebrating his farthest north, celebrating the return of
Fram
to Norway, full of civic excitement. There were dour photographs of Nansen's later life in the museum, when he stared mournfully at the camera, and there was a large shabby waxwork, a puppet rendering of the man. This Nansen mannequin had a comically huge moustache, ruddy features, and an emaciated frame. The waxwork was falling apart; on one hand the fingers were sellotaped to the wrist. It was a bizarre tribute to the explorer, surveying the room with large blue eyes, staring at the torn newspaper cuttings and the maps of the north.

The sun slid slowly across the sky, its colours reflected in the clear waters of the fjord. Everything was very quiet in Tromsø, even as the bars began to fill. The cars moved slowly along the cobbled streets. On Storgata, the main street, the shops were beginning to close, shutters drawn against the long Arctic evening.

 
 
After a hundred more rocks, sullen in the cold afternoon, we had turned east and were heading towards the Russian coast. The ship was passing along the scrawny last rags of Norway, a country that shrinks from the swollen girth of its southern regions to the emaciation of the north. The mountains had lost their trees, and the towns were hard and functional. Hammerfest slipped past at 3 A.M., a place calling itself the world's most northerly town, its lights shimmering on the waves. Cold on the deck, huddled in a sleeping bag because I had fallen asleep while watching the sunset, I woke to the sound of the ship docking, and fell asleep again before we had left the harbour.

When I woke again in the rich dawn, the ship was sliding towards another old rock, this one with significance daubed upon it by earlier travellers. The atmosphere on deck was expectant. We were approaching North Cape, formerly the last point of Europe. I arrived in a strange mood. North Cape was a tourist magnet, a formerly significant goal, once a place embedded among thousands of miles of hostile nature, now easy enough for the tourists to find, as they reclined in the buses, clicking cameras at the rocks and tundra. North Cape was a significant rock, named by Richard Chancellor, a sixteenth-century English captain, who sailed past the lump of rock on the way to the White Sea. Chancellor landed at Archangel and set out for Moscow, where he and his crew were received at the court of Ivan the Terrible. Chancellor returned triumphantly to England, preparing to make a fortune in fur trading, the fashionable commodity from the north, but he was lost at sea the next year, on another profit-making expedition. North Cape stayed in the minds of sailors and explorers; the horn pointing out to sea was a landmark visible from the ocean as the boats sailed along the storm coasts.

I drifted through the glass-fronted building, built like a hi-tech physics department, called the North Cape Centre, a tourist hypermarket at the formerly most mysterious place. The Norwegian attendants suggested I might like to buy some North Cape merchandise, and nudged me towards a supermarket full of North Cape tankards, North Cape cuddly toys, North Cape postcards, North Cape pennants. A first wave of tourists moved into the supermarket, towards the videos of circling seabirds, through the aisles of trinkets, but I moved slowly onwards, down a corridor. Pushed along in a grand flow of tourists, I walked through an exhibition in glass cases, with plastic figures posed into tableaux, representing past visitors. There was a plastic figurine of the Italian explorer Francesco Negri, who emerged onto the rocks in 1664 and wrote: ‘I am now at North Cape, on the exterior coast of Finnmark and at the roof of the world . . . My curiosity is now satisfied, and I wish to return to Denmark, and if God is willing, to my own country. ' There was a description of the arrival of Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, who came in 1795, in exile from France. He visited Oslo, Trondheim and Bodø, and continued to North Cape. North Cape was the sort of destination that might attract a man like Louis-Philippe, who later travelled on horseback around America. There was a portrait of the rocks, showing Louis-Philippe and his party on the shores below North Cape, preparing to clamber up the cliff. It was sentimental—the prince and his cohorts were standing above a swollen ocean, staring reverently at the great rock, while sailors struggled to lash the sail to the mast. In the background stood the great grey escarpment, blanched by a pale sky. All this idealism, this passionate excitement, splashed across the rocks; centuries of overwhelmed travellers, arriving at an escarpment which an otherwise forgotten sailor had called North Cape, and sinking to their knees: princes, explorers, sailors, traders. A great line of satisfied people; in the nineteenth century they came reciting lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: the ‘huge and haggard shape/ of that unknown North Cape/ Whose form is like a wedge.' They all came, they unloaded their quotations, like a picnic rug and plates, they relaxed into the created significance of the rocks, and then they packed everything up and went home.

I moved on, through the empty restaurant, where champagne buckets were laid out ready for the lunchtime rush. At the edge of the cliff the tourists massed like seagulls, peering down at the grey ocean, which lapped the base of the cliff. They took photographs of each other, standing in front of the view out to sea.

When I returned to the boat, I watched the sunlight flood across the rocks, as the boat eased past the isolated settlements of box houses, designed and constructed after the war, planted on the soil. Past the layers of sandstone and granite, the striped mountains of brown and grey. I stood on the deck, watching the light gleaming across the pastel mountains, turning them purple. The sun shone like fire on the rock pillars. Small villages emerged out of the rock desert, and receded again, as the boat moved onwards into further miles of slab rocks lurking above the sea. The lights flashed at the entrances to the harbours, the night was rich and bloodied, the sun disgorging its colours across the water.

The sky was blue in the early morning, though dark clouds lined the tops of the mountains. The sun cast a pale light across the empty land. The sun flickered across the purple mountains, the trees lined the roads, the roads wound southwards, receding into points at the horizon, a distant horizon, the sun drifting towards it.