Olga, page 5
Sometimes he came for a few days, sometimes for a week or two. He stayed in Tilsit in a hotel, rented a horse, and visited Olga every day. When she was marking exercise books, sewing or cooking, or preserving fruit or vegetables, he would sit beside her and watch her. He would tell her about his travels, the journeys he had been on and those he still wanted to make. She listened and asked questions; she had read about his chosen routes and destinations and was well informed. Sometimes he would rent a carriage and they would go for a picnic beside the Neman; sometimes they would take the first train from Tilsit to the town of Memel and the last train back, spending the day on the beach at the Curonian Spit.
She would have liked to have had him in her life more. She would have liked it if he had sung in the choir with her on Wednesdays, trod the bellows of the organ in the gallery on Sundays, helped organize the Ännchen von Tharau festival in September, and shared her pleasure in watching Eik grow up. But when he accompanied her, he was either too reticent or too forceful with others, didn’t find the right tone, and didn’t feel comfortable.
She saw that the role she played in Herbert’s life was like that of a lover in the life of a married man. The married man lives in his own world and goes about his business, and occasionally he sets aside a piece of his life to spend with his lover, who doesn’t share his world and his business. But Herbert was not a married man; there were no wife and children for him to go back to. Olga knew that he loved her and was as close to her as he was able to be with another human being. He was also as happy with her as he was able to be with another human being. He denied her nothing he was able to give. What she felt she lacked he wasn’t capable of giving.
In May 1910, Herbert gave a lecture to the Tilsit Patriotic Society for Geography and History about Germany’s mission in the Arctic. He happened to have gotten into conversation with the president of the society at a restaurant, had told him about his travels and a trip he was planning to the Arctic, and had immediately been invited to speak—the president didn’t find it easy to get lecturers to come to Tilsit. The garrison school hall was full, and Herbert spoke slowly and tentatively, until the interest he read in his listeners’ faces allowed him to present his ideas with increasing enthusiasm.
He recounted Petermann’s 1865 attempt to reach the ice-free polar sea, which many dreamed of at the time, and Koldewey’s exploration of the east coast of Greenland in 1869–70 with the two ships Germania and Hansa, during which the men of the Germania obtained important scientific data and those of the Hansa spent the winter in a heroic odyssey, drifting on sea ice after losing their ship and making it to a human settlement by boat in the spring. German discipline, German audacity, and German heroism had proven themselves splendidly in the Arctic, and were also capable of planting the German flag at the North Pole, which the Americans Cook and Peary falsely boasted that they had conquered. However, German interest had turned away from the Arctic toward the Antarctic—Herbert didn’t understand it, nor did he sympathize with the failure of von Drygalski’s Antarctic expedition in 1901–2.
“Germany’s future lies in the Arctic—in that land slumbering virginally beneath snow and ice, in the treasures hidden in its earth, in the fishing and hunting grounds, in the Northeast Passage connecting Germany quickly and easily with its colonies in the Pacific. The Arctic is not beyond German reach, if we trust in God and ourselves and make the attempt.”
Herbert, who had been standing behind the lectern, stepped forward to applause and began to sing the Deutschlandlied. The audience rose to its feet and joined in: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!”
19
It’s not your sort of thing,” Herbert had said to Olga before the event. But she had come nevertheless, in her best dress, blue velvet with a deep neckline over a thin white blouse with a stand-up collar, and she enjoyed the men’s appreciative glances. She waited until the end of the reception, where Herbert was surrounded by admirers, and glasses were raised to Germany and the Kaiser and the navy and the Arctic as well as to him. She was standing by the window, he walked up to her with a radiant face and a light in his eyes, and she told him what he wanted to hear. Wasn’t he deserving of praise for this radiance, this light?
They walked to the stables, and despite the lateness of the hour Herbert was able to get a horse and carriage and drive Olga home. He talked and talked. He wanted to hear that she thought that the phrases he was particularly proud of in his lecture were particularly good, that his Antarctic skepticism was justified and his Arctic dreams visionary, and what he needed to do now was turn his words into action. Until she grew monosyllabic in her assent, and he fell silent.
The moon bathed the fields in white light, and Olga thought of snow and the North and South Poles. But it was May, the air was mild, and a nightingale was singing. Olga put her hand on Herbert’s arm; he stopped, and they listened, spellbound.
“They say that the nightingale’s song brings the dying a gentle death,” she whispered.
“It sings to lovers.”
“To us.” She nestled against him, and he put his arm around her. “Why do you want to go there?”
“We Germans—”
“No, not we Germans. Why do you want to go there?”
He said nothing, and she waited. All at once the rush of the wind, the snorting of the horse, and the song of the nightingale sounded sad to her, as if they were telling her that her life was waiting, and waiting had no destination, no end. The thought shook her. Herbert sensed it, and answered.
“I could do it. The pole, the passage. I haven’t been there yet, but I’m convinced I could do it.” He nodded. “I will do it.”
“Then what? When you’ve reached the pole or made the passage? What will it achieve? You’ve said yourself that there’s nothing at the pole, and the passage is blocked most of the time. It’ll still be blocked most of the time, even if you make it through once.”
“What are you asking?” He gave her an anguished look. “You know I don’t have answers to your questions.”
“The great expanse? The expanse without end? Is that it?”
“Call it what you like.” He shrugged. “I have friends in the Guards who say there’ll be a war soon. Then I’ll go to war. But if there’s no war . . . I can’t explain it any better.”
You’ve explained nothing, she thought. Nothing.
20
He continued to work on his lecture into the winter. He knew that success in Tilsit did not guarantee success in Berlin, Munich, and other capitals and royal seats. There, the audience would be better informed, more critical. There, he would not be able to conceal the fact that Nordenskiöld had already navigated the Northeast Passage in 1878–79, or that the dispute over Cook’s claim to have reached the North Pole in 1908 and Peary’s that he did so in 1909 demonstrated how difficult it was to prove or refute such a claim. Navigating the Northeast Passage would require a great deal of luck and a great deal of time. This was known already; what else was there to know? Reaching the North Pole, and proving it, would be expensive, dangerous, and difficult. Flying machines were getting better and better—shouldn’t they be the ones to do it someday?
Herbert’s lecture would be on the Northeast Passage, the necessity of its German exploration, the necessity of its exploration by him. The Arctic Basin’s Siberian coast was poorly charted, worse than those of America and Greenland. Only by exploring and surveying it could a conclusive judgment be made concerning the maritime route between Europe and Asia. Only by closing the ring around the Arctic Basin in this way would it be possible to assess its treasures.
As well as working on the lecture, Herbert wrote letters. He offered the lecture to scientific societies: geographical and ethnological societies, societies for regional geography, for anthropology and ethnology, for prehistory and marine research. He wrote to von Drygalski requesting a public endorsement; to companies in Berlin and Hamburg requesting donations of equipment, clothing, and provisions; to the Brockhaus company suggesting it print postcards with Arctic motifs and use some of the proceeds to support his expedition. When invitations arrived from the various societies, he wrote to local rulers, politicians, industrialists, bankers, and other prominent personalities and personally invited them to attend his lecture.
Olga enjoyed Herbert’s spending a particularly large amount of time with her during the months when he was writing. He would read out to her what he wrote, both the lecture and the letters, and listened to her suggestions. She taught him to write not just a lecture but sections that he could combine as different lectures. She also taught him to speak without notes: first he wrote the sections down and learned them by heart; later all he needed were notes on the sections. She rehearsed with him, interrupted him, cut him off, asked questions, raised objections. She broke his habit of running his hand across his head when he was confused and of raising his voice when he was attacked. She turned him into an orator.
She made clear to him that if he wanted to win patrons and champions for his expedition, he would have to learn to deal with people of all kinds, and that he could start right here with her, in the village. He did get better at dealing with people. He lost his reticence. But his forcefulness, which sometimes made him come across as overbearing, remained.
Although Viktoria had now married and moved to the Rhineland and the sugar factory heiress had found another sugar manufacturer, Herbert’s parents continued to insist that Olga was the wrong woman for him. His money—the legacy from his aunt—was running out, and his parents hoped that impending financial hardship would make him compliant. For the time being, though, the only effect was that he stayed in a cheaper hotel in Tilsit and no longer hired a horse and carriage, but took the local train to Schmalleningken and walked, or ran, the six kilometers from the station to the village. Because there was no horse and carriage standing outside the house anymore, he could stay the night without attracting attention.
One evening in December, Herbert arrived after dark. Olga was no longer expecting him. Eik was staying with her; the other children on the farm were sick, his mother couldn’t keep up with all the wet compresses and rubbing alcohol and linden blossom tea, and she didn’t want Eik to get infected. Olga and Eik were playing Ludo, and Herbert sat down and joined in, grimacing slightly. The two of them went on playing while Olga cooked, then they all sat around the table and ate, then the two of them played again and Olga washed up. She listened to Herbert and Eik. Ludo was new to both of them; they got annoyed, complained, and laughed. After Olga had tucked Eik in—his bed didn’t fit in the living room, so it had been set up in the kitchen—she turned the lamp above the table way down so that the rest of the room and Eik’s bed lay in darkness.
Herbert was reading; the post had brought him Amundsen’s report on the navigation of the Northwest Passage. Olga had a pile of exercise books in front of her. She opened the first, but didn’t read it. Tears were running down her cheeks.
“What is it?” Herbert looked up, got to his feet, and knelt beside her. He stroked her hands, whispering. “What is it?”
“It’s just . . .” She too was whispering, but it was enough to open the floodgates of her sobs. “It’s . . .” She shook her head, sobbing.
“What?”
“Can you hear Eik breathing?”
21
On March 12, 1911, Herbert gave his first lecture in Altenburg and gained his first patron in Duke Ernst von Sachsen-Altenburg.
He wanted to set off on the journey through the Northeast Passage in the summer of 1912, and thought a year would be enough to finance and prepare for the expedition. But von Drygalski not only didn’t support him; he criticized him for his lack of geographical knowledge and Arctic experience. The Hamburg and Berlin companies were unenthusiastic about providing support, and the Brockhaus publishing house, which initially found the postcard project appealing, lost interest. Herbert had to keep touring with his lecture from city to city until the winter of 1912–13 before he had collected enough to fund the expedition. Only a preliminary expedition, though, during which the equipment and provisions would be tested and the team bonded and trained for life in the Arctic. Herbert hoped the success of the preliminary expedition would trigger a wave of enthusiasm for the main one.
Their destination was Nordaustlandet, an island in the Spitsbergen archipelago whose little-known interior Herbert wanted to cross before the start of winter. At first, he planned to set off in the early summer of 1913, but then he entered into negotiations to organize a lottery to finance the main expedition, and these became difficult and protracted. By the time he finally left to meet up with the other members of the expedition in Tromsø, it was late July.
On his last evening he said goodbye to Olga. Initially, she had viewed the expedition as one of his many travels, for which she had never seen him off on board the train or ship. But then he asked her to meet him in Berlin before they set off, and she came, not knowing whether to be happy that he needed to be close to her while leaving or worried that some secret fear was troubling him.
He met her at the train station, took her to the apartment he had rented for the months of preparation for the trip, and left her there alone; he had to go to a meeting and couldn’t say when he would be back. He was tense, rushed, and jittery. She didn’t want to let this infect her, but as she waited for him in the apartment, she grew increasingly uneasy. She paced up and down from the window in the kitchen, which looked out onto the courtyard, down the corridor and through the drawing room to the window in the study, which looked out onto a square with flowers and a fountain, and back again.
She didn’t intend to pry, but then she stopped at Herbert’s desk after all and went through his papers: bills, lists, prospectuses, cards, excerpts, letters, notes. Among these was a poem in Herbert’s handwriting:
First look, consider, then leap, without delay!
Better in the bloom of life to be snatched away
In the struggle to serve humanity—to dare—
Than a hobbled old age, an existence free of care.
Is this what he wanted to tell her? That he was setting off to be snatched away in the bloom of life? Was he not intending to cross Nordaustlandet at all—did he have bigger plans? Was he actually going to attempt the crossing of the Northeast Passage or the conquest of the North Pole? Would he not return before the start of winter?
She found potatoes, eggs, and ham in the kitchen and fried them up together for dinner. She found champagne, which she put under running water, and red wine. When Herbert came back, they ate. All he talked about was the ship that he still didn’t have and would have to find in Tromsø—what if there were none in Tromsø to be found?
In bed, she said, “I read your poem.”
He said nothing.
“You’re coming back before the start of winter?”
“I wrote that poem years ago. It has nothing more to do with the expedition than with anything else.”
“Before the start of winter?”
“Yes.”
22
In August, Olga read in the Tilsit newspaper that two members of the team had already left the expedition in Tromsø and returned to Germany. This could only mean that Herbert had decided to winter on Nordaustlandet or Spitsbergen. Olga felt so disappointed, so betrayed, that she wrote Herbert an angry letter, which she sent general delivery, or poste restante, to Tromsø, even though he would only get it on his return. She had to vent her anger. Two days later she wasn’t angry anymore and wrote another letter with “Read first!” on the envelope. This too he would only read on his return: that she was bolstering his spirits in preparation for the long, dark winter. Now, though, it was her own spirits she was bolstering. And she reproached herself. The idea that he could do anything, he just had to not give up—if only she had tried to talk him out of his Karelian delusion!
In January she found another report in the Tilsit newspaper. The ship Herbert had purchased in Tromsø was stuck in pack ice. It had managed to drop Herbert and three other members of the expedition on Nordaustlandet, but had not been able to pick them up again. Eventually, the captain and the remaining team members had left the icebound ship and set out to walk the three hundred kilometers to the nearest settlement. The captain had actually reached it, but he was the only one to do so, in a wretched state, with severe frostbite and so exhausted he couldn’t speak for days. The others had fallen behind en route.
From then on, the newspaper reported every week on the fate of the expedition. A Norwegian rescue team set off in January, the first German one in February, a second in March, the third in April, and the fourth in May. If there was nothing to report about the departure or return of a team, there was still plenty of room for speculation. There were huts in Spitsbergen and on Nordaustlandet, built during previous expeditions or by whalers and hunters—which ones might the expedition members have reached? Which route might the team members have taken who set out with the captain but then went a different way? Which route might Herbert and his comrades have taken? Or had they found a hut and built a camp at the start of winter and would reappear at winter’s end in the bay where the ship was supposed to pick them up after their crossing of Nordaustlandet?
