Pursuit Read online

  ‘She says we’re eating it the wrong way,’ the grey-haired man says to me.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘We should eat it like this.’ He makes a sort of mini sandwich out of a piece of the pork and one of the steamed buns that came with it, which we had initially ignored.

  ‘OK.’

  I go to take one of the glazed pieces of pork from the central dish at the same moment that Yaya does, the same piece. ‘After you,’ she says, in her totally American voice.

  ‘No, go ahead,’ I say.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She watches me, smiling, as I put together a pork sandwich, or try to.

  ‘Have you seen the West Lake?’ the older man asks me, just when I have my mouth full.

  Wei overhears this. ‘You’re going to see it this afternoon, I think?’ he says to me, while I swallow.

  It was mentioned yesterday.

  ‘Yes, I’d like to,’ I say when I can speak again. I say it, however, in a tone that suggests it may not be possible. Because of the rain, I suppose I mean. And because I don’t actually feel like sightseeing.

  ‘You should see it,’ Wei says. ‘Yuning can take you.’

  Yuning. That’s the other young woman, the one I met yesterday, whose name I have forgotten twice already. I make an effort to fix it in my mind now. ‘OK. Well, maybe we should see what the weather does?’ This last remark I address directly to Yuning herself. It makes her laugh, for some reason.

  The older man says, ‘You know, there’s a Chinese saying. A rainy lake is better than a sunny lake, but a foggy lake is best of all.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say.

  But Yaya says, ‘I don’t know that. I’ve never heard that.’

  The older man doesn’t seem to hear her. He is putting together another of the pork sandwich things.

  ‘I’ve never heard that,’ Yaya says again. ‘Wei, have you heard that?’

  Wei, as if not wanting to take sides, just smiles inscrutably.

  And then Yaya says, to me, ‘Anyway you have to see it. Maybe I’ll come with you.’ And I can’t deny that this makes the idea more appealing.

  After the meal I wander off to find the toilet, which is out in the shopping mall somewhere, and when I get back to the restaurant Yaya seems to have left. Wei is just paying. ‘So,’ he says, putting his credit card back in his wallet, ‘you’ll go to the lake?’

  ‘What do you think?’ I ask Yuning, my tone sceptical.

  ‘I think yes,’ she says.

  ‘What about Yaya? Does she want to come?’

  Yuning looks doubtfully around, as if trying to find her. She obviously isn’t there.

  ‘She said she wanted to come,’ I point out.

  ‘I don’t know where she went,’ Wei says.

  We are standing on the threshold of the restaurant, where its wooden floor meets the white floor of the shopping mall proper in a line that cuts diagonally across the patterns of both materials.

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask.

  Wei consults his watch. ‘It’s nearly one thirty.’

  ‘And what time do we need to meet later?’ I ask. There is an event in the late afternoon. A lady is coming from Shanghai to interview me in front of an audience. What I most want to do in the hours until then is lie down in my hotel room. The idea of walking around in the rain all afternoon, and then probably having to go straight to the event, is exhausting and stressful.

  ‘About five?’ Wei says.

  ‘How long does it take to get to the lake?’ I ask. ‘Is it far?’

  ‘No,’ he says, without hesitation. ‘Not far.’

  Somehow I can’t find the strength or resolve just to say outright that I don’t want to go. Partly because some dutiful part of me feels I should go, since I’m here, and see this thing that everybody seems so enthused about.

  ‘And so what about Yaya,’ I say, conceding at this point, I suppose, that we will in fact go. ‘Didn’t she want to come?’

  ‘She’s seen it before,’ Yuning says, in a way that makes clear that she actually doesn’t want Yaya to come with us.

  ‘OK, but she said—’

  ‘I’ll let her know,’ Wei assures me. He is one of those enviable people with beautiful manners, and it is perhaps natural for him to attribute to me, as my principal motivation, a fear of being rude. This fear is what he means to address, I think, when he says, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll let her know that you’ve gone.’

  Outside, Yuning summons a taxi with an app on her phone. It only takes a few minutes to appear. Quite soon after that, though, we’re stuck in traffic. This is frustrating for me because mainly I just want this expedition to be over as quickly as possible. When Wei said the lake wasn’t far, I assumed he meant five, ten minutes in a taxi. Now when I ask Yuning how long it will take to get there, she says, ‘Less than an hour, I think.’

  At least that’s what I think she said. I find it hard to understand her English sometimes.

  Anyway, my heart sinks.

  The rain is still coming down on the gathered, slow-moving traffic. I’ve never known rain so unvarying. For two days now it has been falling with the same relentless intensity.

  I feel sleepy, even though I’ve only been up for a few hours.

  ‘Did you try the craft beer at the thing last night?’ I ask Yuning, after a long interval. There was this thing last night.

  She seems to think about the question very earnestly for several seconds. Then she says, ‘No.’ She says it warily, as if it might be the wrong answer.

  ‘It was quite good,’ I say.

  The taxi driver sighs at our lack of progress.

  ‘Traffic seems heavy,’ I say, a minute later.

  ‘It’s always like this,’ Yuning says. She has a very pale oval face, a prominent underlip. A way of owlishly dipping her head when listening to someone, of looking out from under her hanging hair. There’s a wryness to her sometimes.

  I ask her some questions about her work – the job she does for the publishing company, in the IT department, or dealing with social media or something. The social media side, it seems to be, mostly. She says that isn’t what she wants to do.

  It turns out that she once lived in London, which surprises me. She was there for eight months, after finishing a degree (in what subject I don’t know) at Exeter University. In London, she tried to find a job. She didn’t, so she left. She says she would have liked to stay.

  The lake appears as lakes do – water glimpsed through roadside trees. Thickening crowds on the waterside walks.

  When we pull over, I find that I want to stay in the taxi. At least it’s dry, and fairly warm.

  Standing on the kerb, I put up the umbrella while Yuning pays the taxi driver.

  Then the taxi drives away.

  Now what?

  The rain is falling without let-up.

  I’m not sure what we’re doing here.

  At the place where we are a wide causeway strikes out across the lake and it seems like the obvious thing to do is to walk along it. That’s what everyone else is doing.

  Leafless trees line parts of the causeway. Their trunks and boughs are black, but the extremities of their branches are a dirty yellowish colour.

  Business is slow for the boatmen. A few gondola-like boats are out on the water and it would be romantic, I suppose, in other circumstances, to do a boat ride in these conditions but when Yuning asks if we should do one, I say, ‘Not today, I think.’

  There’s an ambiguity, already, about how close she has to keep to me to stay under the small umbrella. We keep softly knocking into each other as we walk along.

  I maintain a brisk pace on the wet tarmac.

  It’s all grey, the view.

  The islands and the hills on the distant shore.

  The only things that aren’t grey are the dead reddish-brown reeds in the shallows when the causeway arrives at an island.

  ‘What’s that?’ I say. There’s some temply thing among trees to the left. Yuning sa
ys she doesn’t know. We go to look, passing through a circular gate. On the other side there’s an inscribed stone, and I ask Yuning to translate the characters on it. In her long coat she leans forward, stiffly from the waist, like a hinge, to look at them.

  ‘This is the place,’ she says, taking care over her rendering of the Chinese, ‘where you should see the moon over the quiet lake in autumn.’

  The building whose gabled roof we saw above the trees is slightly offshore, linked to the main island by a circuit of little bridges.

  The views from these bridges are very beautiful. Even the distant islands, veiled by the rain today, turned into delicate silhouettes, seem carefully placed on the surface of the lake.

  The rightness of everything is captivating.

  This is not just an accident. The whole landscape is artificial. The lake itself is largely artificial. It wouldn’t exist at all without damming and dredging, Yuning tells me as we stand there in the rain. The landscape of the lake, she says, is supposed to represent an idealised fusion between humans and nature. And standing there I find that it does indeed present a compelling image of an ideal. One that seems like a plausible basis for a civilisation. Plausible, but out of reach for us, I think, as a large tourist boat goes past, dragging its white wake. Because of how we see ourselves. We’re down on ourselves. Us humans, I mean. We want to look in the mirror and like what we see. Whether we’ll be able to do that, honestly, until we feel that we’re living in something other than antipathy with the world around us seems unlikely. The rain patters on the umbrella. We are walking back along the causeway. When we arrive at the end there’s a small crowd of people waiting for taxis and we attach ourselves to it. I hold the umbrella over Yuning while she uses her app. ‘About ten minutes,’ she says.

  ENDURANCE : ONE HUNDRED YEARS AND ONE DAY LATER

  Kamila Shamsie

  SOON after we boarded the Russian icebreaker, Polar Pioneer, in Ushuaia, we were directed to meet at The Mustard Point. Surely the colour not the condiment, I thought, walking down the ship’s corridors, which were unpromisingly lined with sick bags. Once outside I saw the rest of the passengers gathering next to hulking bullet-shaped objects that were clearly orange. No, not gathering – mustering.

  The giant bullets were submersible lifeboats. In we climbed. Pressed together on benches, we listened to the expedition leader explain all the ways in which this vessel would keep us alive and safe if the Polar Pioneer, which was to be our home for the next ten days, ran into trouble and we were forced to leave. It’s just as well I didn’t know then that Shackleton’s Endurance had set sail from South Georgia to Antarctica exactly one hundred years and one day ago, on 5 December 1914, and two days later first encountered the pack ice that would ultimately crush her. There were two lifeboats on the Polar Pioneer and about sixty of us divided between them. The word ‘sardines’ was the only one that would do – and that was before we were told that in the event of an actual evacuation the crew would join us, which would add another dozen or so people to each vessel. Then we were shown the bucket that would have to serve as ‘the facilities’ for the hours or days we were confined to the lifeboats. It was so awful to contemplate we passengers couldn’t even hazard eye contact, let alone a joke.

  Back out in the open, we watched South America recede; in time, the image of the bucket receded too. Ahead lay Antarctica – a word I had always vaguely associated with foolhardy men doing unnecessarily dangerous things that drove them to kill sled dogs, and sometimes eat them, in order to stay alive. I had never had a longing to go to the frozen wastelands of the earth – and yet when I was asked to do just that for a travel piece, something in my heart started singing. Who can understand the ways in which even the most urban among us can feel a pull towards the absolute unknown?

  But when they tell you ‘Antarctica’ they skip over the ‘Drake Passage’ – a body of water that is the meeting point of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Southern Seas, made more remarkable by the fact that there is no significant landmass anywhere along its latitudes. No landmass means nothing to provide resistance to currents as they travel and grow in strength around the globe. What results are the world’s choppiest seas. Or put in more visual terms: your view out of the porthole of the room in which you’re lying prone on your bed is sky, sea, sky, sea. I don’t mean a mix of sea and sky. I mean at one moment you are looking at nothing but sky and the next the porthole is covered with water. Repeat for thirty-six hours. The most surprising part of all this was how perfectly right it felt to be horizontal. Vertical was all wrong, but horizontal was fine, almost soothing. Stay horizontal, take seasickness pills, sleep, sleep some more.

  Later, I understood the narrative necessity of the Drake Crossing. It wouldn’t have been right to progress undramatically from Argentina to Antarctica on calm seas – the tempest-tossed voyage with its drug-induced drowsiness was an essential way of marking the passage from one world to another.

  Because Antarctica really was another world. One pared down, pared back. There was sea and sky and icebergs and rocks. There were penguins and seals and petrels and skuas and occasionally whales. There were my fellow travellers and the ship’s crew and the expedition staff. There was the Polar Pioneer and the inflatable Zodiacs. There was the morning expedition and the afternoon expedition. There was breakfast, lunch and dinner. There was sleep. There was landing on the continent and there was cruising between the icebergs. There was endless blue and endless white. There were layers and layers of clothes to put on and take off. There was my copy of Moby Dick. There was watching. There was talking, too, but most of it was about the day’s watching – did you see the calving of the iceberg, the fluke of the whale, the line-up of gentoo and chinstrap and Adélie penguins, the blood-smeared slab of ice?

  It was astonishing how quickly the world disappeared, how much I revelled in its disappearance. I too became pared down in what I was willing to absorb and with what I was willing to interact. Antarctica, Moby Dick and the people on the ship – that was as much as I could bear of the world. As early as day two, I wrote this in my journal: ‘A note in the folder on the door tells me a complimentary email account has been set up for me. I can’t imagine using it.’ I never discovered how or where this email account was supposed to work on a ship – indeed, on a continent – where my smart-phone only functioned as a camera.

  A couple of days later one of the passengers asked another a question and received the reply, ‘I don’t know, and I love that we can’t google it.’ Yes, exactly, I found myself thinking. There was a strange pleasure in returning to a state where so many things could be unknown. Tiny bits of trivia, the name of an actress, a quote from a book, the weather in some other part of the world, the causes of seasickness. The brain asked a question, cast about for an answer, realised, no, I don’t know that and neither does anyone else standing around me – and there the matter rested. It was, I discovered, almost always fine not to have the answers to the questions that came and went from my mind; and on those occasions when it wasn’t fine there was something so gloriously human in the wondering and wondering – what is the answer? How do I find it? How little I know.

  When endless information isn’t always at your fingertips, all new knowledge that comes to you from other people feels like a gift:

  That crackling sound is air bubbles travelling to the surface of a piece of ice that has broken off a glacier; it is the sound of ancient air, perhaps 10,000 years old, escaping.

  Penguins are heavy, like a small dog; seven or eight kilogrammes, most of it blubber.

  That glossy smooth texture of ice you see there – that’s the mark of an iceberg melting in the sun.

  In the pared-down world, even our actions were limited. All humans were visitors to Antarctica; the continent belonged to the animals and birds, and to nature itself. And as visitors there were strict rules about what we could do – we could not, for instance, approach a penguin, and if one approached us we were to move away and ensu
re we maintained a certain distance; we could not take anything – not a feather, not a pebble – from Antarctica. And we could leave nothing behind save for footprints that would soon disappear under snow.

  The more the world became pared down, the more I saw the depth of its variety. So many shades of blue in the icebergs; so many textures of snow. So many icebergs to make you want to cry out with their sculptural beauty. Each whale sighting felt different, each glimpse of penguins transformed from land-waddling creatures to sea-torpedoes turned the world joyous.

  The day I saw another ship far off in the distance I was furious. How dare anyone else exist in this world? The day I saw moss clinging to rocks I was distraught – we were returning northward to everything unnecessary, including the colour green. But my distress at these unwanted sights was nothing to the expressions I caught on the faces of the old Antarctic hands as they looked upon a strip of sand or a surface of rock they hadn’t seen before in all their years of coming here. That sand, that rock, signalled melted ice, climate change.

  ‘It’s over for the Arctic, but Antarctica might still have a chance,’ I heard one of the expedition guides say as I sat on the bridge one day reading Moby Dick, and glancing up from its pages to the snow petrels and ice-covered peaks all about. And for a moment right then I recognised what my low-grade but persistent sorrow at the thought of the journey’s end was all about: I did not want to return to the world made by humans. Shackleton and his crew might have answered the question ‘how much of Antarctica’s hardship can men endure’, but the weightier question remained: how much of humanity’s arrogance will Antarctica – and everywhere – have to endure before we truly commit to course-correction? And where will we be relative to the point of no return when that occurs?