The Day Is Dark

the much-anticipated storm had arrived. She hoped it would stay like this, since hardly anyone in the group wished to be here any longer than necessary. Thora shuddered at the thought of being in close confinement with these people for days and days. She actually had nothing against her fellow travellers – except perhaps Bella – but being isolated with strangers was a recipe for trouble. Especially if the doctor’s ban on drinking the coffee wasn’t lifted. Matthew had, understandably, not had the brainwave of bringing any bottled water to Greenland. When the doctor asked him about water supplies he replied shamefacedly that he had assumed they could melt snow if they ran out. He then added that he had brought a considerable supply of milk, fruit juice and other soft drinks. Shortly afterwards Thora had made her own contribution to the reduction of those supplies, and this morning she was dying for a coffee rather than a Coke. Hope flickered in her heart when she encountered the aroma of coffee as she approached the kitchen, but her joy was tempered somewhat when she saw Bella sitting in the cafeteria. Thora engaged in a brief internal struggle about whether to turn around and eat a handful of snow on the way out of the office building or break the doctor’s ban and have a cup of coffee in Bella’s company. Her craving for caffeine had the upper hand.

‘It’s impossible to sleep here,’ muttered Bella after Thora bade her good morning on her way to the coffeemaker. ‘My bed is completely knackered and it’s fucking freezing.’

‘I was wondering how you could be out of bed so early when you have so much trouble making it to work for nine,’ said Thora, reaching for a cup. ‘You may want to consider getting a similar bed at home, and installing air conditioning.’

‘Or enlarging a photo of you and hanging it on my wall,’ replied Bella, her mouth full of cornflakes. ‘It’s all the same.’

Thora refrained from responding to this, mainly because she couldn’t come up with anything clever to say. ‘Do you know what you’re supposed to do later?’ she asked instead.

‘Type some stuff up. Something like that, anyway,’ drawled the secretary. She was thumbing through a worn-out old book lying on the table before her and looked up as Thora sat down with a steaming cup. ‘I just hope it’s warmer in the office – I can’t type much wearing gloves.’

‘It’s much better there,’ replied Thora. ‘It’s only so cold here because it takes time to heat up the building. The heating never went off in the offices.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘What are you reading?’

‘Some crap about Greenland,’ said Bella, flipping a page. ‘I found this on the table along with all the papers here and although it’s not exactly exciting reading, it’s a bit better than an out-of-date newspaper or magazine.’ Looking at the book, Thora had her doubts. Judging by the hue of the colour photos on its pages the book was a few decades old, and it was incredible how quickly guidebooks passed their sell-by date. ‘Do you know, for example, what the name of that miserable little town over there means?’ asked Bella, finally looking up from the book.

‘Kaanneq?’ said Thora in an inquisitive tone. ‘I would hazard a guess at the ends of the earth or something along those lines. It would at least be fitting.’

‘No, it means hunger,’ said Bella, as she reached for the packet of cornflakes. ‘The story goes that the first settlers there all starved to death. Maybe that’s what happened here?’

‘I doubt that the employees of Berg Technology starved to death, if indeed they are dead,’ replied Thora. ‘There’s enough food in the kitchen, even though we’ll have to make do with our own supplies.’ The doctor had not only banned them from drinking the coffee, but also from eating anything except what they had brought with them to the camp. Thora had made sure to mark all of the food and drink that came out of the boxes so that no one would become confused and consume anything that had been there before their arrival. It wasn’t just helpfulness that inspired her to label everything, but also her desire to be close to the soft drinks, as well as to see what Matthew had purchased. She had to hand it to him, it seemed the most sensible of inventories.

‘In any case, something happened to the residents,’ said Bella, turning the book towards Thora. She had turned it to the relevant page, with the heading Kaanneq appearing over several photographs and a short text. The photos were all black and white except for one that was clearly much newer, and in it the village looked similar to how it was today, a collection of colourful wooden houses. The other, older photos showed far fewer houses. They were taken from the same angle and the village looked pretty much the same; both the cold and barren landscape in the background, as well as the modest harbour in the narrow fjord, looked roughly unchanged. All the images had been taken in winter and showed the area covered in snow. The villagers had not always been so reluctant to be seen outside; in the old photographs people were out and about, dressed warmly in traditional protective garments made of sealskin. However, none of the photos dated back further than 1940, so the book did not show the original settlement that Bella had mentioned.

Thora skimmed over the text. It didn’t surprise her that it was thought that those who first settled in Eastern Greenland around two thousand years ago had all died out. One migration and settlement followed another, but it always ended the same way: no one managed to survive for long in this harsh region. It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that settlements started to thrive on the east coast, but in the nineteenth century the population started to decrease. One village after another fell to ruin after the villagers died from hunger or other hardships, or found themselves forced to move to the west coast, where conditions were better. First the northernmost villages disintegrated, then one settlement after another southwards along the coast. Eventually Angmagssalik had been the only settlement remaining on the entire east coast. Thora shuddered involuntarily at the thought of all the people that had lived and died there. Of all the troubles that they had had to endure, it hurt her most to think of the women who had raised children there, suffering bitter cold and extreme hunger on top of everything else.

The struggle for existence there had been enormously hard. When a Danish explorer came to Angmagssalik in 1830, only around four hundred people lived there. Sixty years later, another explorer calculated that the population had dropped to three hundred, and he speculated that if nothing changed, the area would eventually become uninhabited. Subsequently, the Danes decided to set up a colony in East Greenland, in spite of the difficult land and sea connections. Angmagssalik was chosen and a missionary and trading colony established there in 1894, leading to a sharp decline in infant mortality and malnutrition. Twenty years later the population had doubled, and from the First World War onwards the settlement’s population grew larger and larger, until it could no longer accommodate itself. The decision was then made to build a new town, Scoresbysund, nearly a thousand kilometres to the north, and to encourage a percentage of the residents to move there. Shortly before this organized resettlement occurred, ten families gave up on the dwindling supply of game for hunting in the Angmagssalik region and decided to pack up and move north. Why they decided to go north instead of south was never explained. This was the start of the story of the little village of Kaanneq.

Ten families set off in the summer of 1918 and little was heard of them until the autumn. They were doing fine, the hunting was good and they had constructed shelter. A Danish physician who visited the tiny settlement recorded in his report that the residents were fit, the children and adults were healthy, and two women were pregnant – one about to give birth, the other more than five months along. The doctor saw no reason for particular concern but nevertheless recommended that the group be checked on twice during the winter. The same physician and a native guide made the first trip by dogsled. They stayed for two days in the new settlement and the doctor reported that everything was still fine with the people there, although they had somewhat lower food supplies than he had reckoned on in the autumn. One of the babies, a boy, had been born and was doing quite well. The other woman was due shortly. How that child would fare would come to light in the second trip.

However, this never came to pass. Three months later, in mid-February, an assistant physician set out to visit the village, accompanied by the same guide. They were never heard from again. It wasn’t known whether they’d met their fate on the way to or from the new settlement, and hence whether they had made it there at all. Neither hide nor hair of the men or dogs was ever found. Admittedly, a search for them was never conducted, as there was no point; no one could survive there without shelter in midwinter.

A group of hunters from Angmagssalik said they had seen two men from Kaanneq fishing out on the ice in an area midway between the village and the new settlement, but the men from the north retreated from the group, who made no contact with them. It was their opinion that the men had fled from them and wished to avoid associating with their former neighbours. Apart from this incident, none of the residents of Kaanneq was ever seen alive again. In the spring three men went there to buy sealskins, but found all of the residents dead from hardship and hunger, or so it seemed. Some of the bodies were found in large tents, but upon closer inspection a number were found to be missing and were thought to have been buried before the famine crippled everyone and