E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-565-7
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Born in 1897, Christiane Ritter was an Austrian artist and author. She wrote A Woman in the Polar Night on her return to Austria from Spitsbergen in 1934. It has since become a classic of travel writing, never going out of print in German and being translated into seven other languages. 'A year in the Arctic should be compulsory to everyone,' she would say in her later years. 'Then you will come to realise what's important in life and what isn't.' Ritter died in Vienna in 2000 at the age of 103.
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Foreword
In these pages, first published in 1938, Christiane Ritter conjures the rasp of the ski runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights. Her prose is as pared as Arctic ice. As her adopted country languishes “in bluish grey shadow”, the author discovers, with childlike delight, the uncluttered nature of life in the Norwegian Arctic, where “everything is concerned with simple being”. Ritter’s husband Hermann had taken part in a scientific expedition in Spitsbergen and stayed on, fishing from his cutter in summer and in winter, when everything was frozen, hunting for furs. The Austrian Ritter, who was in her mid-thirties (she was born in 1897), did not follow at once, but when Hermann asked her to join him as “housewife” for a winter, she accepted. Before leaving home in 1933, she said that to her “the Arctic was just another word for freezing and forsaken solitude”. The reader does not know why Hermann had chosen to be absent from the family home for so long. The couple had a teenage daughter who is not mentioned in the book. They live in a small hut at Grey Hook on the north coast of Spitsbergen; an amiable Norwegian hunter called Karl Nicholaisen joins them there. Their nearest neighbour, an old Swede, is in another hut sixty miles away (so “it won’t be too lonely for you”, Hermann wrote to his wife apparently without irony). The trio have supplies, but the two men must hunt if they are to survive. Svalbard, Ritter explains, “is the old Norwegian name for Spitsbergen”, and it means “Cold Coast”. In fact, the archipelago, of which Ritter’s island was the largest, had been renamed Svalbard a few years before the author’s occupancy. Spitsbergen remains the official name of that one island, one of the world’s northernmost inhabited places. Though it was barely inhabited in the author’s day: early peoples never got that far after trekking east across the strait now called Bering and beyond. First impressions are bleak. The scene is comfortless. Far and wide not a tree or shrub; everything grey and bare and stony. The boundlessly broad foreland, a sea of stone, stones stretching up to the crumbling mountains and down to the crumbling shore, an arid picture of death and decay. “A beast of a stove” leaves the hut coated in soot at all times, a state of affairs Hermann, fastidious in lower latitudes, calmly accepts. “How Spitsbergen has changed him,” notes Ritter. She acknowledges “horror and dread”, though doesn’t tell her husband how she feels. When she arrives her eyes smart from unending daylight; then comes the long night, with its psychological challenges. She experiences rar, the Norwegian word for the strangeness that afflicts many who overwinter in the polar regions. All indigenous languages, such as Inuktitut, have a word for rar. Norwegian hunters apparently used to say ishavet kaller, or “the Arctic calls”, when one of their comrades hurled himself into the sea for no reason. But the author’s moments of despair are just that—momentary. Then she begins, maniacally, to sew, mend and polish. Ritter has her own room in the hut (it is six feet by four, with an inch of ice on the walls), and sometimes moonlight filters green through the small snowed-up window. For a month the trio have a light cycle, during which they collect birch bark born on the tide for kindling, then darkness takes over: that chapter is called “The Earth Sinks into Shadow”. Arctic foxes change colour, ptarmigans lose their spots, and everything freezes. I was in the polar regions once during the onset of winter. Night rolls in like a tide: it is one of the greatest seasonal events on the planet, akin to the rising of sap. (The author uses the adjective “titanic” three times to describe it.) In the smoky hut the trio play cards, though the wretched stove has rendered the hearts and diamonds as black as the spades and clubs. And of course they tell one another stories—often the same ones many times over. Anxieties over the availability of fresh meat run through the book like a Greek chorus, and Karl and Hermann set out again and again to find seal, bear, ptarmigan and duck. “It is grotesque how carefree they are”, the author writes early on, acutely aware of the perils of the situation, though she eventually gets into the rhythm of life, and begins to cherish the beauty and simplicity of the far north. This emotional transformation gives the book a shape beyond the practicalities of the story. She goes hunting with the men both before and after the light vanishes, sometimes on a Nansen sledge with the temperature hovering at a sprightly minus 38 degrees Celsius. Out in their small motorboat one time, “we are seized by an over-brimming sense of happiness in our worldwide freedom, in the complete absence of any restraint”. At the same time Ritter appreciates the men’s prowess: “The lives of these hunters,” she writes, “are a series of performances that are almost inhuman.” Astonishingly, she spends many days and nights alone in the sooty hut when the others are hunting, on one occasion during a nine-day storm. “If a bear comes near the hut,” the men say as they leave, “shoot him. It’s best to hit him in the breast, and even if he looks as though he is dead, shoot him again in the head.” And this to a young woman who had grown up with cooks and servants and drivers. She tackles seal-blood pancakes, sews the long seams of the fur sleeping bags and listens to the frozen corpses of skinned foxes knocking on the roof where they have been tied down. She learns icecraft, even when she has to crawl on all fours outdoors on account of the murderous wind. The emotional climax of the book arrives when she is alone in this storm, battling the stove, battling everything. I stayed in a hunter’s hut in Svalbard once. I didn’t have to shoot my own dinner though, and I had high-tech kit and a radio. I could have left at any time; when a ship dropped Ritter off, the captain said he would be back in a year to pick her up. Karl admitted later that he had thought Ritter wouldn’t cope, but after it was over he told another explorer that she was “one hell of a woman”. They make Christmas gifts, including a pair of salad servers carved out of a mahogany table leg washed ashore, and celebrate New Year’s Eve with raspberry juice and surgical spirit. Cheers! Just living takes a long time in the Arctic. Ritter skies down to a freshwater spring to rinse the laundry, a ski stick in one hand and a bucket of clothes in the other. “It is a slow job,” she notes nonchalantly, “to get along in the dark.” Small pleasures are attenuated in the polar regions. “To celebrate the return of the sunshine we have a whole spoonful of honey with our coffee and cold seal.” And as all polar hands note, a paucity of reading material renders old newspapers gripping. She quotes a “fascinating” advertising section, which includes, “Coffins, good, solid, cheap. Shrouds and wreaths also supplied. Hans Dahl, Storgt. 106.” She has a gift for the telling phrase: a slaughtered seal is slit up and “laid open like a book”. (Should she bake the flippers, she wonders?) Ritter leavens the prose with yeasty direct speech, and the book is fluently translated by Jane Degras. The author went on to enjoy a career as a painter, and she has a visual imagination and an eye for colour. As twilight falls she writes of scenes that remind us so strongly of the delicate, wonderful paintings of the Chinese painter-monks, in which the immense and mysterious effect is achieved entirely by gradations from light to dark grey, by forms indicated rather than outlines. The sky lightens to “a tender cobalt” at the horizon, a “pale yellow brightness” spreads from the east, and the frozen sea “shines like an immense opal”. And of course, there are the Northern Lights: their bright rays, shooting downward, look like gleaming rods of glass. They break out from a tremendous height and seem to be falling directly toward me, growing brighter and clearer, in radiant lilacs, greens, and pinks, swinging and whirling around their own axis in a wild dance. Heavenly music indeed. Rare flashes of sentiment add dashes of another kind of colour. When she tries to take a photograph, Ritter says, “It seems to me a deadly sin to steal a piece of this supernatural scene and carry it away with me.” (As it turned out the camera jammed and froze, so no sinning was involved.) In a moment of spiritual awakening she says, “I divine the ultimate salvation before which all human reasoning dissolves into nothing.” But the author is too much of a natural writer to put much of this in: the book is mostly about ice and soot. She comes to experience deep pleasure, and is immensely moved by the landscape, linking its shifts to human mutability. “Why has so little been written about the great transition...
