Anatomy of a Night

By Anna Kim

Eleven families. Eleven suicides. What’s going on in Greenland?

Amarâq, Eastern Greenland, the end of the world. A lonely, cold, hard place, yet one that’s filled with boundless joy and bewitching natural magic, Amarâq plays host to an annual tragedy: a spate of suicides races through the town each spring, a plague that leaves no family untouched.

Anatomy of a Night details the events of one of these black nights, following the lives of eleven of Amarâq’s inhabitants – their loves and losses, their escapes from Amarâq and their inevitable returns, each victory and every defeat magnified by the unforgiving and unforgettably desolate landscape – and paints a portrait of a mysterious phenomenon that strikes a nearly-forgotten people, the Inuit of Greenland.

Anatomy of a Night is a hauntingly beautiful novel from a writer who has been proclaimed ‘one of the great voices of her generation’.

Anna Kim was born in 1977 in Daejeon, South Korea. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Austrian State Fellowship for Literature, the Elias Canetti Fellowship, the Robert Musil Fellowship, and the 2009 Austrian Prize for Literature. Her novel Frozen Time was published in English translation in 2010.

‘As I write this review and revisit the book I am struck by how well-written it is. It is tempting to compose this article as a set of quotations, to let Anna Kim speak for herself, for no one could doubt the beauty of the writing.’ A Common Reader

‘It is complex, and demands both patience and intelligence from its reader. But if you are willing to take the plunge, to dedicate some time to it, you will be rewarded tenfold. Beautiful and horrific in equal measures.’ A Novel Approach

‘Anna Kim’s great talent is her ability to pull the reader into a dangerous undertow … one of the great voices of her generation.’ Tiroler Tageszeitung

• Language: English
• Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781911420705

Book preview

Lighthouse

Prologue

The epidemic reached its climax in late summer, the threshold to autumn. Eleven suicides in five hours, from Friday night to early Saturday, all without warning, announcement, or pact. The dying spread like a plague, the victims appeared to have become infected by nothing more than a touch or a gaze—

afterwards it was called a disease.

22:00—23:00

1

Sivke Carlsen has just met a stranger; he tosses his shoes into the air, and they freeze for a moment, suspended in the darkness, as if they were following an invisible path, tracks in the snow. She can't see his face, he's draped in a uniform, seems tall, but also very thin, his clothes hardly touch his body, rather they protrude from it, like a board. He often finds himself on earth because in truth the sky is limitless, in flight the certainty of the plain is abolished and makes room for an ambiguity that short circuits the eyes and the brain; suddenly it's possible to toss sleds into the air, to hang them from the firmament, ride them across the sky, a trip that feels like a ride through the snow: it's a little quieter up here, the silence interrupted by the voices of individual birds, the rushing of the wind replacing the rushing of the sea, the runners gliding soundlessly, as if they're passing over fresh snow.

I'm Jens, the policeman says, slipping into his boots, I'm here for six months, she hears, pushing her competition aside. Asks him whether he'd like to dance, doesn't wait for an answer, just buries herself, head-first, in his arms; she lets him tell her that he's been in Amarâq for a month, that he had been stationed in the Sudan, and that he and his colleagues sailed along the west coast of Greenland, around the southern tip, and to the east, and she moves her lips a little closer to his, until she is only a finger's breadth away, she keeps talking like that, maybe she says she likes him, maybe he answers that she's very pretty, but in the end it doesn't matter what they say, the goal is to filter out the softly whispered grace notes until a single message remains: Take me with you.

Even in their sleep they danced, they twitched, while some people stepped, hopped, or stumbled over them or leaned on the gray bar—stocked exclusively with Tuborg and Coca-Cola, the bottles standing watch in rounded rank and file, bulky, little bombs of aluminum. Others drank at the round tables, arranged high and low in a semi-circle around the dance floor, drank to the end of the day, to the end of the week, until the end of their money. In this columned hall, affairs begin and end, in this columned room, known as Pakhuset, the warehouse. You can find it in the darkest corner of the harbor, by the harbor mouth, where the bulbs in the streetlights aren't replaced when they burn out.

But Pakhuset is more than a discotheque, a nightclub, a bar, it is an assault on the silence of Amarâq, an assault on isolation, it's a place for the present: everything that happens here happens now. Because it keeps loneliness out and life in, Pakhuset has become fixed in the townspeople's heads: for five hours, between ten at night and three in the morning, it's possible to escape both the past and the future.

Julie Hansen allowed herself to be pulled out on to the dance floor by Jens, even though her body had closed itself off from the music, unable to find even the edges of the song; he had to steer her, turn the corners, the straight lines and circles, to make her begin to feel the rhythm, she didn't notice that all he cared about was reducing the distance, moving closer with every step, until he was standing so close to her that his eyes blocked her view of anything else. She remained stationary, being jostled, pulled along to the beat, people stepping on her toes, shoes, but she didn't move, took the shallowest breaths she could—perhaps she thought she could only hold his gaze if she didn't move. At that moment her entire existence was reduced to that eye contact; she was nothing more than the sum of her eyes. She tried to hold that moment, to breathe it still, finally succeeded in slowing down time—

until he closed in on her mouth and held her with his lips.

They leave the harbor in his patrol car, along the narrow winding street, a sluice that is even twilit in the daytime, in the sunlight. They drive through a veiled town that belongs to the winter even in summer: even when the last traces of ice have disappeared, and one might be inclined to think there had never been any, the blind spots in front of the houses, tiny parcels of land set aside for sleds, sled dogs, and snowmobiles, stencils essentially, evoke the image of freshly-fallen snow, but in the summer these places are brown, green in patches, muddy when it rains.

They follow the road in the direction of heliport, uphill, always uphill, until after the third bend they stop, across from the little grocery, a general store that offers four types of biscuits, two types of noodles, stale packaged bread, expired jars of pasta sauce, instant Chinese noodle soup, flour, rusk, extended-shelf-life milk, and fobs for homeless keys, all arranged on three red, just barely red, shelves. At night this area is darker than the darkest square in Amarâq—it's illuminated by a single streetlight—and despite the overabundance of water, despite the rain that feeds the neighboring lakes and the river, the houses in this part of town have no running water, no sewers, they are smaller, more hut-like; they're inhabited by the poorest of the poor. Once a week the sewage tanker comes to pick up the sacks, filled with excrement, from the outhouses, and fresh water is drawn from one of the green miniature blockhouses, the tap just out of the children's reach, they have to stand on a rock to fill their buckets; fetching water is a job for the ten-year-old boys.

The area with one-storey houses, which are outfitted with running water and electricity, is near the harbor—

but poverty in Amarâq is relative, as long as one doesn't demand to be free, the community is happy. Everything is shared, and everyone owns only one thing: themselves. And that property, whose limits are marked precisely by the boundary of the skin, is called into question only during sleep, when the soul of sleep leaves the body and ushers in a state that resembles solitude: numbness.

We're here, says Jens, getting out; That's Johanna's house, says Sivke, stopping to straighten her dress.

He pulled her along through the emergency exit, on the other side of the Pakhuset, where people smoked in the narrow space along the road, under the weak light of the exit sign. At this spot, the night was covered with red glimmering dots that moved with their steps, with their breath. He moved Julie into the dark corner, slipped next to her and pressed her against the wall while he kissed her throat, the crook of her neck, her neck, and her face, gently pulled the strap from her shoulder, his other hand creeping under the fabric above her belly button and her ribs towards her bra, carefully turning down one, then the other cup and caressing her breasts, and Julie returned his kiss, his touches, put her hand in his pants, stroked his stomach, his thighs—

when they were interrupted, approached, pushed. Hey, someone slurred from the darkness, do you have a beer for me? Per wasn't going to be ignored; Jens caught his hands, grabbed Per by the collar, pulled him inside, and shoved him on to the dance floor.

Should we drive to your place?

Julie pressed Jens's hand, he nodded, and they climbed over the only fence in Amarâq—it was rickety, built to prevent people from dodging the bouncers—and then strolled to the parked car. It smelled of artificial fir inside, a scent that had seemed exotic the first time she had smelled it, exactly one week earlier. They took the street to the harbor, to the town's only gas station, drove along the fjord, past the hospital, the school, the big Pilersuisoq, the general store, and the police station. Julie rolled down the window and stuck her head into the wind, she didn't laugh but she smiled, widely, even her closed eyes smiled and her eyebrows, and Jens, who scrutinized her from the side, was reminded of his dog: if she could have, she would have hung her ears out of the window.

We're here, he said, leading the way; How do you like it in our old house? Julie asked, stopping to straighten her dress.

Amarâq is at the end of the world, it's a place-swallower, a place that swallows you up along with the place where you are; that purports to be less a place than an entrance—but once you cross the threshold, you can't leave: this entrance isn't an exit.

On the one hand, when you arrive in Amarâq your memory starts to dry up, you gradually forget how you got here and that, once, you had just arrived, you begin to forget what it was like when you arrived, and you feel like you can't remember anywhere other than Amarâq—the city limits wrap themselves around your neck, like a heavy scarf that makes turning your head, looking back, impossible. A forgetting supervenes, making the end of the world definitively what it is: the end.

On the other hand, the end of the world is the end of everything that is of the world. Amarâq isn't just a place with its own, unmistakable coordinates, Amarâq also has a purpose: to end. That means this place is an interruption of the world, it also means the world doesn't continue beyond here—after Amarâq, there isn't anything. Nothing waits at the end of the world for its turn; maybe it's not nothing that waits, but something, a something that is so inchoate and chaotic that it looks like nothing, whereas, in truth, it is everything. That would make Amarâq a place where everything is possible, because nothing is, but because everything is open, and these infinite possibilities are hidden in the chaos, no one is aware of their existence.

Because the world comes to an end in this place, it contains nothing but the world's remains: isolated, cravenly colorful houses, the offshoots of isolated, cravenly colorful houses, even the vegetation comes to an end, exists only in miniature: tiny, tiny offshoots of plants. Amarâq is a world that is running out, which is why whatever is left of it, the elementary, the unadorned, the undisguised, consists of basic geometrical shapes: cones and cuboids. The silence emanating from this penury is interrupted only by the calving of icebergs, the waves, the splashing of the rain, the trickle of melting snow; this place is nothing but the backdrop for water's varieties of play.

But perhaps Amarâq's landscape has to be restrained, so it can show that the earth isn't the opposite of the sky, but its counterpart: at the end of the world the distinction between sky and earth disappears, the sky is a vast ocean just as the ocean is a vast sky, and the mountains green-seamed clouds, perhaps it's possible to climb that mirror image, and not only the mirror image but the actual firmament, where you wait for the last drop of rain, the first ray of sun, and the rainbow, for the lowermost sky, and then climb slowly from rainbow to rainbow, from hue to hue, in the winter, when everything is frozen, every step confirming that the earth continues into the heavens, and that the end is really nothing but an illusion.

Naturally it depends on the type of gaze, how and what is seen, and what is overlooked: the educated gaze will stick with the familiar, but the distorted gaze will also perceive those things which it ought not to have seen. Perhaps the peculiarity of Amarâq lies in the fact that it takes a particular kind of gaze to see it, to look through the nothing and discover the something that, albeit in miniature and in small quantities, exists nonetheless. Precisely because Amarâq consists only of offshoots, only the right kind of gaze can discover their stories, the wrong kind will remain blind. It is as if nature, as if the town, spoke a different language, expressing itself in images which require a special kind of eyes to see. But it is a fragile language, a pane off whose edges one may easily fall, which can happen suddenly, without warning, and in that instant the nothingness would reappear, for nothingness is disguised—

as loneliness: it has suppressed the contents of Amarâq, pushed them away and spread them out, it is unavoidable, unexchangeable. Loneliness creeps into every conversation, demanding space. But loneliness isn't interested in what is said, only in the amount of time speech takes, it censors duration—

and silence descends upon Amarâq, a dense fog, and your breath is its ally.

Mikkel Poulsen grabs his parka and house keys, but he hesitates and hangs them up again. He slips out of his shoes and peers into the kitchen. Inger has begun to wash the coffeepot; she lets the dish soap drip into the pot, slowly and rhythmically scrubs the vessel, rinses it with circles and dashes, submerges it until bubbles rise to the surface, only then does she take it from the plastic tub and dry it. Removes the paper filter from the coffee machine, empties it, taps on the seam, the filter's spine, the remains fall into the garbage can, and places it to dry over the pepper shaker. Nestles the silverware into the wooden box, layers fork upon fork, knife upon knife, spoon upon spoon, adjusts the glasses on the shelf.

The kitchen is small: a stove; a refrigerator; a table, painted white; and two chairs. Thin wooden shelves are mounted on the walls; ladles, a cooking spoon, and spatulas dangle above the stove; under the table there are three jugs for drinking water and three for other purposes. Inger is hardly visible against the furnishings—Mikkel would say she's well camouflaged—both she and her clothing are faded, as if someone had tried to erase her and a stubborn residue remained, one which moved around in its own house like a guest, always stumbling over the furniture, completely out of place; she would probably fade away completely one day.

Mikkel briefly wonders if it's possible to talk to the chronically absent, with someone who is unwaveringly lost, because he isn't in the place he belongs, and even as he is occupied by this question, his eyes wander from one end of the room to the other, lingering on objects, the television, the radio, the binoculars, the table, both of the chairs, and the couch, things he once loved and that now disgust him, and he remembers the conversation he overheard yesterday, when Inger was speaking to Sofie—her voice sounded so strange, he thought he was hearing it for the first time: unshared love can't survive, yet love was so often one-sided in Amarâq.

When Inger feels his gaze, she lifts her eyes and begins to speak to him without using any words. He doesn't intrude, doesn't attempt to stitch in words, sentences that would transform the ambiguity into something unequivocal. She answers by holding her eyes out to his, by not breaking contact.

He turns away.

At first Keyi is unsure where he is.

He is lying under a table, pieces of gum are stuck above him, the legs of the table are scratched, scarred, it smells of damp wood. Keyi slips into the middle of the room, sits down on the drain, a ray of light falls on his hand, and suddenly he notices the scent of laundry detergent and remembers he had fallen asleep in the washhouse, a bundle of balled-up clothes, pants, and sweaters served as his pillow, his coat as a blanket, the linoleum as a bed; Ulrika and Lone hadn't ousted him, unlike yesterday, when they said, Move over Keyi, move to the side a little, and filled the machine, the detergent slot, and coin slot, and had started a conversation with him, just to kill the time, which he had ignored until they poked him in the ribs.

Get out of here, what are you still doing here?

He goes into the kitchen, fills the kettle with water, and presses the start button. Takes a bag of black tea from the can, looks on the shelves for something to eat—food is often left behind. No bread, no cake, but he does find a bag of rusk, a package of old butter cookies, and a jar of orange marmalade. He spreads marmalade on the cookies and waits for the tea to cool—

while he is munching on the cookies, the silence from the Valley of the Flowers blows in through one of the tilted windows—a small group of mummified flies had gathered on the sill after they dropped dead at the end of the summer, just like that—the silence which is the opposite of loneliness and has the ability to turn off the world, if only for a few seconds. The silence chiefly lives in the nights in Amarâq, and when Keyi senses it, it seems as if he has finally come home.

2

At night Amarâq is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what's left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.

At night Amarâq becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky—suddenly everything is sky. On clear nights the stars sparkle like the illuminated windows of a distant place; on overcast days the darkness is joined by an impenetrable fog, as though someone had spread a white sheet over the town, the fog dilutes the darkness but in return it miniaturizes Amarâq: the parts beneath the sheet no longer exist—until the next wind. On nights without moonlight, this darkness spreads further, the earth is marked by silvery, iridescent icebergs that float through the dimensions like images from the past, hazy, unapproachable, you can lose yourself in a desire to grasp them, replicate their contours, their forms, however bizarre, however extraterrestrial they may be. One is reminded of a yearning one didn't know one possessed.

Sivke drinks from the glass that Jens had given her. She stands before the window, next to the three violets that persistently grow in their pots, so completely out of place, so extremely strange at the end of the world. They are just as bleary-eyed as the conversation Jens is pursuing—it dies at the end of every sentence, the sober white apartment, which allows only for the necessities, sterilizes the mood—at the same time Sivke doesn't want to let the words wilt, she likes Jens, she believes she likes Jens, but the deafness of the room drives her to cling to the view: it is warmer here, full of life, a girl paces back and forth under the streetlight.

Julie stood at one of the windows, it's as wide and as high as the wall, with a view of the fjord. She was tempted to believe she was standing in front of an aquarium, without fish or sea mammals, but brown-gray mountains, light blue water, smooth under sunshine, wavy when overcast, and pyramids of ice whose tips float isolated through the bay in summer: ice sharks. Aside from a living room suite, a table, and four light-wood chairs, there was also a kitchen unit with refrigerator, microwave, and coffee machine, as well as a brown sofa, which stuck out because of its piercing color and where it was placed: in the middle of the room, as if it were for sale—it felt like you were sitting on a display.

It was the morning after. Jens watched Julie out of the corner of his eye while making coffee. How tall she