The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness Page 8

  One thing that made Hanna different was the fact that she was born on the Lofoten, a chain of islands north of Bodø and south of Tromsø. I’d heard people talk about the Lofoten, not just in Norway, but back in England before I left. Like the Isles of Scilly, it wasn’t the kind of place you would expect someone to actually come from.

  “Now I live in London.”

  She held up her camera; a heavy, expensive-looking one. In her other hand she was carrying a folded tripod.

  “I am a photographer. That is why I came to Knivskjellodden. I am on a commission to photograph the midnight sun.”

  Other things that made Hanna different were the fact that she had twelve brothers and sisters and had done so much meditation she’d actually had a real satori. (I knew the word from Jack, who wanted one quite badly.) It meant she was enlightened. An actual enlightened being. Which may or may not have been why hanging around her was a bit like being on acid, only without the fear and without the acid.

  But I’m going way too fast.

  Being the only people for miles around, we hiked back over the tundra together. This time I could see it, a gorgeous landscape of clear blue lakes and bog cotton, flowers flailing in the wind like tiny white feathers hanging on for dear life to thin spindly sticks.

  Hanna walked quickly, the heavy camera stuffed into her backpack and the tripod balanced on her shoulder, held casually in place by one slender hand. Neither of us said much at first. After we’d been walking for about two hours we stopped at one of the cairns to drink water and rest for a few minutes. Hanna asked why I had been crying. It was the same question Henrik had asked, only I didn’t give him a truthful answer. I suppose I knew he wouldn’t understand, or perhaps I didn’t trust him. Another thing that made Hanna different was the fact that I did trust her. Even then, when I had known her for two hours. Or maybe it was just a relief to talk, after all those days and weeks of silence.

  Either way, once I started I couldn’t seem to stop.

  I told her about Andrew and the senseless way he died, and how thinking about it gave me vertigo, and how I had thought that busking to the midnight sun for him would make it different somehow, but it hadn’t. If anything, it had made it worse. And I told her about Jack and how I used to carry his ropes to the bottom of the cliffs he used to climb, but was too scared to climb with him. And how I used to follow him down to the beach and sit for hours watching him surf, and it never occurred to me that I should try it, until I heard about the sweet, petite surfer, only there probably wouldn’t be any point anyway, because I was too scared of everything, including waves. I told her about the long weeks busking north to Tromsø and how much I hated it at first. I told her about getting drunk and sleeping with Henrik and how he was the reason I was hiking across the tundra with her. And by the time I had finished we were back in the car park and I was leaning against the van, more tired than I had ever been in my life, my legs collapsing under me. And then I told her that now I had seen the midnight sun and it was all over, I had absolutely no idea what on earth I was going to do with the rest of my life. And Hanna just eased her backpack off her shoulders and smiled and said, “Perhaps you are going to wake up.”

  16

  It was the first of many strange things Hanna was going to say during the short time we spent together. I can remember all of them perfectly and I turn them over in my head often, even now. And the funny thing is that they all seem to mean more over time. As if they were seeds that Hanna planted in my head that just keep on growing. I suppose that’s what she intended.

  Hanna hitched a ride to Nordkapp on the back of a motorbike that belonged to a Danish headmaster she met in Alta. She hitched a ride to Finland with me. I didn’t mind. The only difference was going south and then west from Alta instead of west and then south. She wanted to go to a place called Pallas-Yllästunturi, which was, she told me, the third largest national park in Finnish Lapland. According to Hanna, Finnish Lapland was bigger than Scotland and Wales put together. She called it Europe’s last great wilderness.

  The drive was easy. The road was empty and Hanna knew the way. Not that there was much choice. As usual, it was north or south, occasionally east or west.

  “You need a compass,” she said. “In Scandinavia you do not need a map, just a compass.”

  Hanna took control of the tape player. She was very particular, ejecting the smooth jazz classics and fast-forwarding through three more tapes before she found a tune she liked. It was an old-sounding song sung in cracked Spanish, with a lush violin solo at the start and an infectious Latin rhythm. Hanna told me it was an old Cuban song called “Bruca Maniguá.” She knew all the words and sang along. I tried to sing along too, but my Spanish was awful and I had no idea what I was singing. Hanna tried to explain the lyrics to me. It was all about going into the mountains and finding the answers there, she said. We were singing to the mountains, begging the mountains to show us how to be free.

  Mountains, help me find the paths of freedom.

  It was about surrender.

  Hanna told me that the version we were listening to was sung by Ibrahim Ferrer, from the Buena Vista Social Club, but that the song was much older than that. It was written by a blind man called Arsenio Rodriguez in the 1930s. It was not the kind of thing I would have expected Jack to have.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “You should learn it on your cello.”

  When I had to stop and sleep, Hanna slept, too—in her sleeping bag, under the van. I said she could share my bed but she refused, and there was no arguing.

  “I would rather be outside.”

  I had the feeling that she would always rather be outside.

  We were headed for a village that was called Enontekiö on the map, although Hanna called it Hetta, right in the middle of the national park. There was a hike she wanted to do. The trail started at another village called Pallas. Pallas was sixty kilometers away and even smaller than Hetta. It crossed the mountains and finished up the other side of a huge lake called Ounasjarvi. I could see the lake glinting through the trees from the car park of something called the Fell Lapland Nature Center, where Hanna had told me to drop her off. I could see the bald, purple peaks of the fells too, rising up out of the forest like goose bumps. The forest was primeval, said Hanna, who was on her knees in the car park repacking her rucksack with the food she had just bought in Hetta’s only shop. She stood up.

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “On the hike?”

  “Why not? It is only three days. We can sleep in wooden Lapp huts. It is very civilized.”

  It didn’t sound it. It sounded crazy, even dangerous. If she’d been a man there’s no way I’d have gone. But she wasn’t a man, she was Hanna.

  “You said you didn’t know what to do with the rest of your life. Why not start with this?”

  It was impossible to say no.

  I wanted the van to be there waiting for me when we finally made it back to Hetta, so we left it parked at the Nature Center and hitched a lift to Pallas with some local fishermen. It took about an hour. It took another hour to reach the first peak, which was called Taivaskero. I was sweating. Hanna, on the other hand, looked like she’d just got out of bed after sleeping for twelve hours with a cucumber face pack resting gently on her eyes. By the time we reached the first hut, called Rithmaku, I couldn’t wait to sit down. The hut was a hexagonal Lapp hut with a stove in the center, a basket of logs next to it, and a hole in the roof for the smoke. Around the sides were slatted benches for sitting and sleeping on. A hundred yards away was a hand pump that drew drinking water out of the ground. Hanna found an axe, chopped one of the logs up to make kindling, and started a fire in the stove. I collected water, filled a saucepan, and set it on top of the stove to boil.

  Afterward I sat on the doorstep and looked out at the vast spaces in every direction. Inside the hut Hanna sat cross-legged and perfectly still on the wooden floor. She didn’t move when I came in, so I went back out and s
at on the doorstep again. In its vast emptiness the landscape reminded me of Finnmark. Only I had seen Finnmark through a windscreen, from the safety of a road. Now there was no windscreen. I was in it. Swallowed up by it. There was nowhere to go.

  Hanna eventually came and joined me on the doorstep.

  “Do you do that often?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it hard?”

  “No.”

  “It looks hard. You didn’t move at all.”

  “You just sit.”

  “Why?”

  “It helps.”

  “What with?”

  “Everything.”

  “How long do you have to do it for?”

  “That was just twenty minutes. But for three years I sat for five hours a day. That is when I had the satori.”

  “Five hours? Didn’t you get bored?”

  “It was very interesting.”

  “In what way?”

  “I saw things as they really are.”

  “So how are things really?”

  “I can show you if you like.”

  “How?”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Nothing happened at first, apart from my head went wild with thinking, and the thoughts seemed like fish, darting about in a tank and banging their heads on the glass. But I kept my eyes closed, and as I waited for something to happen I became aware of my own breathing; my chest going up and down, my heart pumping steadily. And as I became aware of my breathing it slowed down, and the fish stopped darting around so maniacally and I noticed the tiredness in my legs and how good my shoulders felt now that I wasn’t carrying the rucksack any more. In fact I felt very good altogether, now that there was space to think about it. Better, perhaps, than I had ever felt. Which was odd, but probably down to physical exhaustion and all the endorphins. I could hear the crying of the Kapustarinta, a type of golden plover with the most haunting call of any bird I have ever heard. It sounded more beautiful than music. In fact it was music; and so was the sound of water trickling through the mountains and the sound of the silence behind it and the sound of the wind. All part of some cosmic piece of music that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. Or at least something was making the hairs on my arms stand on end. I felt flooded with warmth and peace, and something else I had never known. Confidence, perhaps. Trust. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was all going to be okay. In fact, it already was okay. And I was okay. And I didn’t just know it with my head. I knew it physically. In my bones, under my skin, in my chest and head. It was like heat, a warmth spreading right through me from my toes to the top of my head. In fact it was so strong, this feeling of warmth, that I panicked. I opened my eyes. Everything even looked different, as if I was wearing Henrik’s sunglasses, which I wasn’t.

  “Did you feel it?”

  “What did you do?” I asked, and my voice came out all strange.

  “I wrapped you up in light,” said Hanna, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

  17

  “Some people cannot take it,” Hanna said later, as we sat on the floor of the hut, sharing the pasta, eating it straight out of the saucepan with forks. “It is too much energy.”

  “What happens?”

  “One lady wet herself. On my sofa.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. She was very embarrassed.”

  “I’m sure she was.”

  “She didn’t come back.”

  “Do you do it often? Wrap people up in light?”

  “No.”

  “Why me?”

  “I suppose you were in the right place at the right time.”

  I put down my fork and sat back on my heels. “What happened to your hair?”

  “You will laugh.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I thought that bodhisattvas had to be ugly.”

  I’d heard Jack mention bodhisattvas, but I never quite knew what he was talking about. I suspect he didn’t, either. I think his bodhisattvas came straight out of Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums.

  “What exactly is a bodhisattva?”

  “Someone who works for the complete enlightenment of all living beings,” she answered, matter-of-factly.

  “Are you a bodhisattva?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why did you decide to meditate five hours a day for three years?”

  “Why did you drive from England to Knivskjellodden?”

  “I told you. I had a broken heart.”

  “So did I.”

  “Over a man?”

  It was hard to imagine. The more I looked at her, the more beautiful Hanna seemed, with a kind of beauty that was more than the sum of its parts. Her features were pretty, and she was slender and elegantly built, but that wasn’t it. There was something about her that made you want to be as near to her as possible, because being near her felt so good. Hanna opened the stove and shoved another log in it. Hanna said the logs were delivered by park rangers, paid for by taxes.

  “Because men were not the answer,” she said, shutting the stove. “And neither were clothes or money or my nice apartment or my expensive jewelry or any of the things I was told would make me happy.”

  “What if a man is the answer?”

  “He isn’t,” said Hanna.

  The distance we covered the next day wasn’t vast, about twenty kilometers, but the terrain was mountainous, the paths were rough, and Hanna didn’t go in for resting much. Mostly we walked in silence. Occasionally Hanna told me things she knew about the landscape. The names of trees and of birds, like the Kapustarinta, which looks like a chicken up close, and to stick to the path in the valleys, because the muskeg (a kind of soupy bog that’s frozen in winter) can be 100 feet deep and drown you. There were bones to prove it, not human, thankfully, sticking up out of the mud. Ancient trees, their branches like ghostly sculptures, rose out of the gloom and stuck their fingers in my eyes.

  When we finally reached the second hut I collapsed on a bench. Hanna made kindling, lit the stove, went outside to gather water, came back in and set a pan on to boil.

  “How come you’ve got so much energy?”

  She was kneeling by the stove, cutting something with a knife.

  “I do not think,” she said. “You are always thinking. I can see you, head down, thinking about this and that, watching your feet, screwing up your eyes. As if there are better things in your head than out here.”

  She came and stuck the knife in my face. There was a shrivelled piece of leather on the end of it.

  “Eat!”

  I took a bite and gagged. “What the fuck was that?”

  “Reindeer.”

  “Gross.”

  “At least you noticed it. What are you thinking about anyway?”

  “Love and death and how crap they both are.”

  Hanna burst out laughing. “Love is not crap.”

  “It’s crap when it goes. When it’s lost.”

  “Love is energy. It can never be lost.”

  “How can you say that?”

  Maybe she’d never actually been in love.

  “There’s so much love you can find it wherever you go. There are always people waiting to love you. The world is full of beautiful men, for example. If someone goes from your life then there is always someone else to take their place. Only you won’t notice because you will be so busy looking backward at the ones who have gone.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I experience it all the time.”

  “But you’re beautiful. Much more beautiful than me.”

  “Not better or worse. Just different. I have a job, for example. I have to go back to London. You are free.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course.”

  At the end of the third day we arrived at Hannukuru. Hannukuru was the reason Hanna wanted to do the hike in the first place. Because Hannukuru had a sauna. And not just any old sauna. One of the oldest and most famous saunas in Finland, the cou
ntry that invented them.

  Finland gave us the word sauna and we’ve abused it ever since with our lukewarm leisure centers and swimming costumes and fake plastic coals. The first rule of a Finnish sauna is no swimming costumes. You have to be naked. The second is that it has to be so hot you think you’re actually being cooked alive. So hot that you can feel your pores opening one by one, as if the sweat is washing you from the inside out, driving out all the rotten stuff that’s got under your skin. The third is that the plunge pool has to be a frozen lake made from snowmelt and surrounded by fells you have just walked over for three days, without washing, or even changing your clothes, so that by the time you take them off they are sticking to you like a cold, damp flannel.

  After the sauna we lit a fire outside. We were nearing the end of the trail. It was our last night together in the wilderness.

  “What do you think about death?” I said when we had finished eating and were leaning back against the stump of a tree staring up at a lost star in the light blue sky.

  “I think in some ways it is an illusion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the same way that we are illusions.”

  I sighed. It’s the kind of thing Jack used to say when he’d upset me.

  It’s just an illusion, baby.

  “But saying that we’re illusions doesn’t change the fact that people die and when they’re gone we miss them and it’s scary because we don’t know where they’ve gone and we can’t ask them what it’s like and we don’t know if they’re unhappy or missing us.”

  “I think that those concepts are all illusions.”

  “I just don’t get it.”

  “Death is life. Life is death. It is only words that make one good and the other bad. Actually they are the same. You could not have one without the other.”

  “But death is terrifying.”

  “If death is terrifying then life must also be terrifying.”

  “Life is terrifying.”

  “Then death will also be terrifying.”

  “Bruca Maniguá” was going round and round in the silence, like a stuck record. Mountains, help me find the paths of freedom. My head was spinning.