Voyage

[This is a short piece of fiction, written about a year ago. New English translation.]

The rocks are hard and cold, but they are red and glimmering further up. The sun is going down behind the mountain, and the sunbeams are coloring the water around the boat like drops of blood orange juice in a glass of water.
It is cold now, the surface is crisped by a wind from the north. But I am afraid that it will become even colder soon.
“Do you want to turn back”, Y says, “it is not to late?”
I shake my head. I don’t think it matters what we do, our best chance is to keep on going in our boat. We have very little food left, I doubt we will survive a voyage back.
“No", I say, "not if you don’t want to.”
Y puts down the oars in the water and we glide forward. Closer to the mountain, closer to the border.
We will soon be beyond what anyone has ever returned from.
We hear a thunder, as if from a waterfall. Yes, something like that is supposed to be there, I have heard. But then what? Nobody believes that the world ends there, that there is only nothingness behind the falls. But, it must be some kind of ending, nevertheless.
Or a beginning.
I see a fire of determination in Y’s eyes. I know what he is thinking: this is his life’s adventure, and he will not lose this opportunity, not even if it means death.
And I have chosen to follow him, rather than to survive alone.
We go around a big rock, and when we are behind it, the sun cannot reach us anymore. It is very cold now, and the thunder is almost deafening.
No, the sound is not a waterfall, but something similar. Because I was expecting falling water, my first thought is that there is something wrong with the view.
A huge mountain is rising in front of us, and it is so high that it makes me feel sick and I think that I will fall backwards when I look up. I think I can see snow high up there. The mountain is spreading out just as far in both directions. The black water is clucking around the rocking and swinging boat.
There is a crack in the mountain right in front of us, and that’s where the sound of water comes from. But the water is not gushing forth towards us, it is on it’s way into the mountain. It is foaming and sprinkling, as if the water is in a hurry.
“That way”, Y says, pulling the oars in for a moment.
I realize that we will sucked in by the ice cold water. It seems unlikely that one will ever be able to get out that way, in the opposite direction of the wild water. And we don’t know if there is something on the other side.
“Are you sure that you want to do this?”, I say, with my voice shrill with fear.
“I have to”, he says, “I just have to know what’s there.”
And the water pulls at the boat. We are inside the mountain now. The mountain walls are so close upon us that a slightly larger boat would get stuck and be crushed. Y barely had time to pull back the oars before the speed was too much for any of us to be able to hold on to any thoughts. After only a few moments, there is so dark, we can no longer see anything.
For all that I know the cave in the mountain has maybe extended itself, we would have been able to swing both backward and to the sides. Time and space become blurred. Everything is just a single perception of that life is about to expire.
Then it becomes brighter, and I realize with dizziness that the tunnel in the mountain actually has an end. We are still going very fast in the cramped space, but I think that it still takes a few minutes before we fly out of the mountain.
The boat is falling with the water that is now actually falling, and it is a miracle that the boat does not capsize.
Now, everything is quiet around us. Silence, cold. Dusk, almost night.
We look at each other in deafening silence.
And Y says:
”Is this all?”
The water is spreading shiny like a mirror but black around us. Behind us are the dark mountains. Mountains pile up around us as far as we can see, they are immobile icebergs.
Ice in the water, dark iceberg and only silence, barely a gust of wind. The place is waste, and it is so huge that I feel completely dead inside.
”It is said that there is something wonderful beyond the mountains", Y says voicelessly. “Freedom, beauty, happiness. They say you never want to return.”
”One can not return”, I point out. “We knew that after all - how could all the talk about happiness be anything but fairy tales?”
”So this is all”, he says.
”It is almost night”, I say. “Tomorrow when the sun rises and we see glittering in the ice, then the sky is blue - maybe it will be really beautiful here, in daylight.”
Y hears that I speak without conviction. We feel that the future is as blank as the ice in the water.
From his backpack Y picks up hats, gloves and two pieces of bread, hard and tough. We chew resolutely, remembering the flavours and fragrances from a lost life.
Then, he finds two candles. We keep them in our hands and we try to get as much heat as we possibly can from the small flames.