The End of the Ocean

Chapter 5 SIGNE

I take a shower in the cubicle between the saloon and the forepeak cabin, listen to the pump running, taking care not to splash too much on the bulkhead, directing all the water into the tub underneath me, because there is no drain in the room. My body feels quick and agile as I wash myself, primed, as if I were twenty years old again. Afterwards I fill up the tank with water from the faucet on the dock, as it must be completely full. I have to be able to stay away from land until they stop searching. To be on the safe side, I also fill up two 20-liter jugs and stow them in the afterpeak—enough water to be out at sea for weeks while they are searching, if they search, if they realize that I am responsible and they will perhaps do so, people in the village have seen me, know Blue, know my story. They can put two and two together.

During the final hour before the sun goes down and people leave the quay, I just wait, sitting on deck having a cup of coffee, forcing myself to eat calmly, a few slices of bread with peppered mackerel. The food tastes better than anything I’ve eaten in a long time; I chew slowly, looking at my father’s old house. He lived down here by the harbor once upon a time, but now the house is empty. When he died, I sold it for a song to someone who wanted to use it as a vacation cottage. Apparently they aren’t there much. The windows are dark empty squares.

The house is just as silent as the harbor, because now everyone has left and I am alone.

I jump ashore, walk towards the cargo ship, a heavy vessel of iron with patches of rust along the seam welds. I hop lightly from the quay down onto deck, landing almost without a sound.

The door to the wheel house is locked, but otherwise all the doors are open; they haven’t even thought about locking up, can’t imagine that something could happen here, deep in the bowels of the fjord. Bowels, something shameful, a dark inside, where nobody really cares, where everything that has meant something to us has slowly been developed, exploited, where the rivers, waterfalls and grazing lands have disappeared. Nobody cares. Neither do they care about Blåfonna being destroyed. They don’t want to hear, don’t want to see, they are like him, all of them, his entire generation, my generation, they just want better wines, larger vacation cottages, faster internet connections.

I go down into the cargo hold. It’s cold, a freezer is humming, I find a switch, blink at the bright light, at the frost vapor from my own mouth, at the containers—they haven’t been properly secured, have been left out on the floor. I walk over to the closest, stroke the hard plastic. They must be expensive, cast in one piece, shiny, royal blue, hard plastic. These will not decompose for 450 years, maybe 500 years, maybe even longer, longer than a plastic bottle, longer than a disposable diaper, a pair of sunglasses, a Barbie doll, a fleece-lined jacket. Much, much longer than any human being.

I open the top one, have to tug at the lid, it has already frozen shut and inside it is the ice, vacuum packed in an extra layer of plastic, protected by a thick lining of white insulation material; for a moment I run my hand across it, feeling the cold beneath my fingers, then I put the lid back in place.

The first one is surprisingly light. I carry it up the ladder, fling it towards the iron deck, feeling the reverberation under my feet when it lands. I don’t worry about trying to be quiet, take the lid off all the way, and yank the blocks of ice out of the plastic, my fingers tingling. I pull out a pair of gloves I remembered to bring along and then I hurl it over the railing, down into the fjord.

The second one also goes overboard easily, the third, the fourth, but then it becomes too difficult, I can’t manage any more. There are far too many containers.

I look at the crane on the quay—maybe I can use it, but there is no key in it, so I go down into the cargo hold again, stand facing the containers, looking at them. I can’t manage all of them. I step closer. My gaze slides across the broadside and I notice a joint in the woodwork aport—no, an opening, there is a hatch. Further up on the bulkhead I spot a button. I press it and the hatch responds immediately, sliding open with a loud creak.

Now I can lift the ice directly out—the fifth, the sixth, the seventh—soon I lose count. I fling the containers onto the floor, they’re not going into the water, although they will perhaps end up there anyway, to join the mountains and islands of plastic in the ocean and slowly decompose into microplastic, disappear into the digestive system of a fish, be served up on a plate to be eaten by a human being, who eats his or her own garbage, the way we all eat our own garbage every single day.

The plastic feels hard beneath my fingers when I remove the lid of yet another container, then I lift it, carry it towards the hatch, flip it over and dump the huge white blocks out into the water where they hit the surface with a gentle splash. The ice bobs on the surface—white, shiny cubes against the pitch-black water, amidst the uneven yellow reflections of light from the lampposts on the wharf. Sweat trickles down my back, but my hands are cold inside my gloves, so frozen that I have lost all feeling in them, and the sensation is painful, but satisfying. The ice blocks lie in the water like small icebergs, just the upper portion of them is visible, that’s how it is with floating glaciers, more below the water than above, but these won’t harm anyone, won’t destroy, I am the destroyer here, because the water is warm and the ice will quickly melt. When the skipper comes to start the engine in a few hours, the blocks will already be smaller and, moreover, the salt water will have ruined them. This ice can never be used as ice cubes, it can never, ever be served on a sheik’s table, in a crystal tumbler, in a drink, in Saudi Arabia or Qatar.

Ice that melts, ice that melts in salt water, I am a part of it now, a part of what is taking place at all times. I am compounding the changes. I laugh, startled by the sound of my own laughter, an unfamiliar croaking like a frog. They are dying, the frogs, being wiped out in silence, without the world caring, one third of the world’s species are in danger of extinction, but nobody thinks about it, the frog, as it moves through the world’s marsh landscapes, always in contact with water, slimy, modest, not disgusting enough to be hideous, not strange enough to be amusing, just odd, how it croaks, how it hops, how it flees from humans.

Finally I am almost finished. My back is aching, twenty kilos of ice in every container, so heavy, too heavy. I count rapidly, only twelve more, only 240 kilos. I am about to open yet another container but my hands are trembling, my fingers are stiff and then they stop. I’m tired, am just so tired, too old for this kind of lifting, my flesh and bones protest, far too old.

I sit down on the containers. Oh, Magnus, I am incapable of hurling the last of the blocks of ice overboard, our ice, it has been left in peace until now, until you came. But it hasn’t been silent, because ice is never silent, it has its own sound, it creaks. Ice creaking is one of the world’s oldest sounds and it frightens me, has always frightened me. It’s the sound of something going to pieces. And the sound of a stone that fails to penetrate the ice, but gives off an echo all the same, is a sound like no other, the brief reverberation of the water below, a reminder of everything imprisoned underneath, of how solidly in place everything is.

But it has been a long time since I threw a stone at an ice-covered surface. The ice no longer forms on the lakes. In the wintertime, pollen season is already underway in January. The ice is washed away by the rain and the world is being covered by flowing water. I used to go skating, I remember, on the fjord, I skated faster than everybody. Magnus stood onshore and watched me, we were ten or eleven, we still didn’t know one another but I remember that I liked that he watched me, that he knew I was the fastest. I had skates that I screwed onto my boots, with sharp blades. Nobody uses those any longer, they buy new skates every single autumn, new skates every year for the children. Black hockey skates or white for figure skating, they think that one has to have skates, but nobody uses them, because the lakes don’t freeze over any longer and everything I have done has been to no avail. I have really tried, I have been fighting for my entire life, but I have been mostly alone; there are so few of us, it was futile, everything we talked about, everything we said would happen has happened, the heat has already arrived, nobody listened.

Magnus, your grandchildren will not be able to skate across the lakes. Nonetheless, you have approved this—our glacier, the ice—you have disassociated yourself to such a large extent from everything that once was ours, or perhaps you have always been like this, you have just let it happen. I can hear you, how you are thinking now, how people like you think, we’re just following the development, what I have allowed to happen is happening everywhere, evil’s banality, you have become like Eichmann. But nobody holds you accountable. Your Jerusalem never arrives.

I have these twelve containers, twelve containers containing ice one thousand years old. I am not going to throw them overboard, because you have to see them, Magnus, you can’t just sit down there and let it happen; it’s not supposed to be as easy as that, you are going to see the ice, feel it, you will personally stand next to it while it melts, you will have the chance to walk on it, step on it, it will melt beneath your feet, the way it once melted under our feet.

Again I start lugging containers. One by one I take the twelve containers of ice with me out of the cargo ship, over onto Blue.