The Whispering Muse

III

THAT MORNING the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen had cruised into Fedafjord, one of those endless Norwegian fjords, and now lay moored in a small bay at the foot of a lofty mountain. The settlement was a disgrace; shabby workers’ huts had been thrown up higgledy-piggledy on the rock, with the sawmill and a large warehouse below. The only building worthy of the name of human habitation in this godforsaken hole was a yellow two-storey house that stood at the end of the jetty. Meanwhile the gold — colossal tree trunks in their hundreds — floated in the bay.

After lunch I took a turn about the deck. I had a headache from the vicissitudes of the night before and was feeling lethargic following a midday meal of horse sausage with mashed potatoes and white sauce, but I found relief in watching the production of the paper pulp that was to be our cargo on this trip. Two steel cables ran from the mill and warehouse up to the summit of the mountain that towered a thousand feet above the seedy little settlement. I was informed that from there the cables ran overhead straight to the doors of a timber-working factory located ten miles away up the long tapering valley. I watched the workmen dragging the tree trunks up the beach, loading them on sleds and sliding them into the mill. There the monster logs were chopped into chips and the chips were put into wagons, which then rolled along the cable that carried them up the valley to the factory. After the wood chips had been shredded, pulped, blended with this and that chemical and pressed into sheets, they returned as iron-bound blocks of raw paper, running back down the cable that ended up in the warehouse by the wharf. There the raw paper was stacked and finally loaded on board the ships that came from every direction to transport it around the globe.

I anticipated spending many happy hours watching the fresh wood chips ascending the mountain and vanishing over the top, while the snow-white paper pulp materialised over the edge and swooped majestically down the slopes.

The freight rate was fifty kroner per ton, according to Captain Alfredson, and our intention was to take on 2,500 tons of raw paper and transport it to the Black Sea coast of Turkey. I found a good spot to sit and wrapped myself in blankets. It pleased me to be able to witness with my own eyes the fortunes of my friends the Jung-Olsen family swelling with every pallet that the crane swung on board that happy ship the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. In fact, the day before I embarked, a report on their prosperity had made headline news in the Stock Exchange Times:

The board of the Kronos shipping company has reported a profit from its operations last year, 1948, of 4,794,388.00 kroner. To this should be added the interest of 1,162,168.00 kroner which, after the addition of last year’s arrears of 738,806.00 kroner, makes a total income of 6,693,357.00 kroner. After the overheads of 1,258,022.00 kroner, including dockyard fees in Denmark and elsewhere for maintenance and repairs to the fleet, are paid off, there will be a surplus of 5,450,000.00 kroner, which the annual general meeting of the company has agreed to allocate as follows: profit to shareholders 20 per cent, payment to the new buildings fund 3,000,000.00 and, to be carried over to next year’s account, 985,355.00 kroner, while a sum has already been set aside in a special fund to cover payment of taxes and foreign currency fluctuations. The company currently has at its disposal 16 steam or diesel vessels and 4 ships under construction. Profit to shareholders in 1947 was 12.5 per cent.

At coffee time the purser’s lady friend brought me some refreshments on deck, a selection of rations in a wicker basket with a dishcloth folded over the contents. I had a better impression of her now than I had the previous night, having grown more accustomed to those goggling eyes and finding it evident from her general deportment that she had been well brought up, no matter where she crossed paths with the purser at the end of the war. She asked me warily whether it was right that I had been in Germany during the hostilities. I admitted as much and told her the truth; that I had worked for the German national broadcasting service, reading the news in Icelandic. She told me in turn that she had been a governess, a gouvernante, on a country estate in Poland when war broke out and had remained there to the bitter end.

We conducted our conversation in German, for it had been a misunderstanding on my part that she knew any Danish (or that the purser spoke any German, for that matter), and she told me how badly the Germans had behaved after their arrival in Poland.

‘First they broke all the windows in the house by throwing stones, then after that, they started on the family furnishings, the furniture and dinner service, not stopping until everything had been smashed to smithereens.

‘The filth and squalor were so appalling that it was too much to bear, even for a person trained in home economics like myself. Many of the soldiers had been wounded and the dressings on their wounds hadn’t been touched for weeks. Their clothes were in a disgusting state, but instead of washing them, they just threw them on the fire when use and dirt had worn them away. Then the soldier who was immediately subordinate in rank would have the clothes torn off his back, if they fitted his superior and were not complete Scheiße — please excuse the phrase — and so on down the line until some poor Pole was shot for his rags.

‘And their eating habits were no better. The Germans fed themselves with their bare hands, and if large chunks of meat were on offer they would throw themselves on them, ripping and tearing until the whole place was awash with brawling and a large part of the meal went to waste. Afterwards it took them hours to lick the remnants of food from their hands since they had rings on every finger (all looted from the living and the dead) and it required some skill to suck the scraps of meat, grease and blood from under the rings, where it would rot if it wasn’t eaten — those same hands that they laid on the womenfolk.’

She omitted to mention how the Russians had behaved when they entered Poland some years later and the fact that she didn’t touch on that side of the matter roused my suspicions that she was not entirely impartial. But I didn’t comment on it at the time because she pointed a plump finger at the basket and said:

‘Please, don’t let it get cold…’

Once she was out of sight I whipped the dishcloth off the basket to discover a thermos flask of milky tea, which was indeed going cold, and a diagonally cut ham sandwich on a glass plate.

So as yet there was no let-up in the carnivorous eating habits on board the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen.

Entrée

Thinly sliced roast beef

with pickled gherkins and cold potato salad

Main Course

Pork shanks in red wine

with red cabbage, Brussels sprouts and wild mushroom sauce

Dessert

Raspberry and rhubarb compote

with whipped cream

After the dinner guests had sung the cook’s praises for this tasty but indigestible meal it was time for the evening’s entertainment. This was a continuation of yesterday’s story, which was apparently not yet finished. The second mate took out the piece of wood, performed the same spectacle as the night before, and in the dead silence that settled on the saloon resumed his tale:

‘The message the young maiden brought Jason, our captain, was from Queen Hypsipyle, the doe-eyed beauty who ruled over Lemnos. According to this letter, the men of the island had moved away to Thrace, judging the women of that land both fairer and more submissive than their own wives. They had sailed from the island under cover of night, taking with them all their sons and killing any male slaves. The only male creature they left behind alive was Hypsipyle’s aged father, King Thoas. And he had not been alone with the daughters of Lemnos for long before he too fled on the only vessel he could push from land unaided; a chest containing the undergarments of Hypsipyle’s handmaidens. Yes, things had come to such a pass that when we landed on Lemnos it was inhabited solely by women.

‘It is a widespread belief that sailors have a girlfriend in every port but that’s an exaggeration. Far from having a girlfriend in every port we usually only have them in one or two — well, maybe three or four. Naturally, there are disadvantages to this arrangement, though the will is ever present; it depends on the countries and the native customs as to how willing their womenfolk are to accommodate strangers. For although it is pretty much the rule that sailors go ashore to find themselves a woman, this aim can miscarry in some ports. And worst of all are the times when part of the crew must set sail again without having experienced an hour of bliss in the arms of some compliant beauty, since this can lead to bad feeling between those who got lucky and those who did not. Such discord among the crew is something that no captain would wish for.

‘A manly smile played over the lips of Jason son of Aeson. Looking boldly to shore he raised the papyrus scroll to the skies and shouted in triumph:

‘“My friends, we find ourselves on an island of women!”

‘The news left us speechless.

‘Before being overwhelmed by the contrary winds that brought us to Lemnos, our ship, the Argo, had cleft the seas like a gull that skims the surface, the crests of the waves wetting the tips of its wings while the bird itself glides between sky and sea like wing-footed Hermes, the messenger of the gods. And all the while that miraculous musician Orpheus strummed the rhythm on his lyre, chanting a lay that caused the monsters of the deep to flinch away from the eager prow of our many-nailed craft in the very act of attacking. For the Argo appeared to these monsters like some divine being, a unique life force, the song and the singer, a new verb that combined the verbs “to come” and “to go”, at once both mother and womb — for the embryo always believes that the mother is nothing more than her womb. And we oarsmen were truly the Argo’s children. We braced against the blocks and rowed in contest with the hostile wind that filled the mainsail, twenty-four to a side, two to a bench, applying ourselves to the oars, dragging them back and swinging them forwards — back and forth, as if grappling with an energetic bedmate. The ship flew over the water, rocking her crew, and the way she rose and fell on her way across the choppy highways of the barren sea strongly recalled the rolling hips of Aphrodite as she took to the waves in her scallop shell.

‘Such was the lover-like tempo that had taken up residence in the virile bodies of the Argonauts during their voyage; such was the rhythm that governed our movements when we found dry land under our feet at last.

‘And the women of Lemnos had been alone a long time…’

Here the second mate paused in his narrative and reached for the water jug. His audience sighed gustily and sipped their drinks, pleased with the story so far. Meanwhile, I seized this opportunity to put a question to the evening’s guest of honour, Raguel Bastesen, the director of the paper mills (he claimed Icelandic descent through a grandmother from Hnífsdalur), saying by way of a preamble:

‘Today I have been looking down the fjord, or perhaps up it, I simply can’t work out which is which. I can’t for the life of me understand where the entrance is to this bowl we’re sitting in. When I asked Captain Alfredson this morning which direction we had entered the fjord from — by your leave, Captain — he answered by pointing due north, to where the rock wall is at its highest. But I couldn’t see any gap by which we could have entered, nor can the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen — excellent ship as she is — sail straight through the Norwegian fjeld.’

My dinner companions gave a murmur of laughter at this last sally. I tilted my head, looking waggishly at Captain Alfredson to ensure that everyone knew the joke was on me, not him. And added:

‘You see, I assumed we had come from the south where the mountains are lowest.’

Then I came to my question:

‘So I appeal to you, Herr Director, as a local; what species of fish are most common in this fjord?’

To my astonishment Raguel Bastesen seemed at a loss:

‘Er, that’s a good question…’ the director muttered, plucking at his right earlobe and rubbing it between finger and thumb while he considered his answer. I filled the gap:

‘You see, it occurred to me that we might be able to purchase some fresh fish for the pot.’

At this he seemed to wake up:

‘Oh, no, I doubt that, Mr Haraldsson, fish don’t find their way up here in any great number. It’s mainly in April that you get a shoal or two of cod straying into the fjord by mistake. Then you can catch the odd fish with a rod, some of them quite large, but we don’t see any other species.’

I had difficulty hiding my disappointment at Director Bastesen’s ‘neither nor’ reply. My dinner companions were not especially concerned, having shown nothing but satisfaction with the catering on board, so I thanked him politely and the captain gave the mate Caeneus a sign to resume his tale, which he did:

‘Our ship was the Argo of the many nails, the greatest vessel of her age. The timbers of her hull came from the forests of Mount Pelion, where Jason son of Aeson had been fostered until the age of twenty by Master Cheiron, Cheiron’s mother, his wife and his daughters — and this Cheiron was half man, half horse, or what the poets call a “centaur”. The trees of the forest containing the future strakes of the yet-to-be-built ship were felled under the guidance of this same Cheiron who chose only those trees that had achieved their full maturity during the time the future captain of our ship had shared the mountain with them. Indeed, while their branches had been stretching their leafy crowns to the skies and their roots sucked nourishment from the fertile soil of the Pelion heights, the young Jason’s muscles had been tempered by the practice of sports on the mountainsides by day, while by night his intellectual gifts were honed in debate and song in the deep cavern of his tutor.

‘Yet although Jason’s mind and hand had such a deep rapport with the vessel that he was to steer, it was evident that it would require more than mere mortal strength to achieve the superhuman task that had been laid upon us. So the day the ship was deemed ready to launch, bright-eyed Athena descended to earth among the shipwrights and fitted in her prow a beam from the whispering oak of her father Zeus. With this gift the Argo became the eighth wonder of the world, and the speaking bow timber was to be our guide throughout the perilous quest that lay ahead.

‘Now the bow timber had some motherly advice for Jason son of Aeson, captain of the Argo, telling him to order his crew back on board and continue on his way. Gently but firmly she reminded him that by our hazardous voyage into the blue grasp of Poseidon the earth-shaker, who could easily twiddle the greatest galley in the world like a sixpence between his blue fingers — by this voyage, we Argonauts were intending to be the first men ever to negotiate the Clashing Rocks. For thus we would enter the Black Sea to reach the land of Colchis and find the golden fleece that Jason’s people had lost and wished to recover. They had promised to make him king if he fulfilled this quest.

‘But as Jason son of Aeson stood foursquare on the gangway with the message from doe-eyed Hypsipyle in his upraised hand, he was deaf to the ship’s voice of reason. The Queen of Lemnos had concluded her letter with the words that he was welcome to a banquet at her palace together with those of his crew who were not standing watch that evening. So now Jason ordered us Argonauts to ready ourselves for a visit to the nation of women.

‘Jason buckled on his purple mantle of double fold, a gift he had received from the hand of Athena the day the keel was laid in our ship the Argo, and this mantle was a creation of such blazing splendour that it rivalled the dawn; red as fire in the middle, deepening to indigo at the richly illustrated hem. This hem was embroidered with gold and told the story of the siblings Phrixus and Helle, children of King Athamas and the cloud goddess Nephele. When their stepmother Ino convinced their father that he should sacrifice his children to prevent the harvest from failing in the land of Iolcus, they escaped on the back of a certain golden-fleeced talking ram.

‘Having flown a longish way, the children began to tire and it so chanced that midway the girl Helle fell to earth over the sea of Marmara which has been known ever since as the Hellespont. But at the ram’s urging the boy Phrixus clung on for dear life to his dazzling woolly coat and so at last they reached land at Colchis. There the boy married the princess, sacrificed the ram and dedicated the sacrifice to the war god Ares. He hung the blazing gold fleece in a grove of trees, casting a web of spells so that it would be guarded by a sleepless dragon and no man would ever be able to lay hands on it. Meanwhile, back in Iolcus, the children’s homeland, the people thought it a national disgrace to have lost the fabled ram into the clutches of the men of Colchis.

‘All these events could be seen woven into our captain Jason’s purple cloak. And where the story of Phrixus and Helle ended, his own story began.

‘Jason son of Aeson now set out to meet doe-eyed Hypsipyle, the powerful queen of the Lemnian women, together with the poet Orpheus, the beekeeper Butes and the brothers Zetes and Calais, the winged sons of Boreas. The mantle swirled about the captain’s body — how well he wore it! — while the dazzling storied web billowed about his feet as if he were floating like an immortal on a sun-flushed cloud. Towards evening the rest of us were to march through the town and meet them in the palace gardens.

‘So, with the help of the finery that we had brought along in our kitbags, we deckhands hurriedly set about making ourselves presentable for the womenfolk of Lemnos.’