Chapter 30: Anthesis

Anthesis is the period of flowering. In wheat, it is a brief and inconspicuous event — the anthers emerge from the floret, the pollen is released, the stigma receives it, the fertilization occurs — the entire reproductive act completed within a few hours, without color, without fragrance, without the elaborate display that insect-pollinated flowers produce to attract their pollinators. Wheat is wind-pollinated. Wheat is self-pollinated. The pollen falls from the anther to the stigma within the same floret, the distance measured in millimeters, the transfer accomplished by gravity and the slight vibration of the head in the wind, the reproductive strategy of a plant that does not need to attract, does not need to advertise, does not need to be beautiful, that has solved the problem of reproduction through proximity rather than display, the male and the female structures enclosed in the same small space, the meeting guaranteed by architecture rather than by chance.

The wheat on Astrid's windowsill flowered on June 12th, a Thursday, during the midnight sun. She noticed it in the evening, at ten o'clock, the sun low in the northwest, the light coming through the window at a sharp angle that illuminated the seed heads from the side and made the emerged anthers visible — three small yellow structures dangling from the top of the lead head, each one a sac of pollen, each sac containing the male gametes that would fertilize the ovules in the florets below, the reproduction occurring at this moment, in this light, on this windowsill, in this apartment in Longyearbyen, the most northerly anthesis of Triticum aestivum in the recorded history of wheat cultivation, the variety extending its range by proxy, by human intervention, by the decision of a woman to plant a seed and tend a plant and allow the plant to do what plants did, which was to flower and to set seed and to continue.

She stood at the windowsill and watched the anthers and felt the particular satisfaction of witnessing a threshold, a passage, a moment that divided the before from the after. Before anthesis, the plant was vegetative, was growing, was producing the biomass that supported the reproduction but that was not itself the reproduction. After anthesis, the plant was reproductive, was committed to seed production, was channeling its energy from the stems and the leaves into the developing kernels, the grain fill that would convert the sugars produced by photosynthesis into the starch and protein of the endosperm, the stored food that would sustain the next generation's embryo, the provision that was the mother plant's last gift to its offspring, the investment that exhausted the parent and enabled the child.

The plants were tall now. Fifty centimeters, the nine seedlings having grown rapidly in the continuous Arctic light, the stems thick, the leaves dark green, the architecture of the plants compact and efficient, the variety's adaptation to the dry, wind-swept landscape of northern Syria expressed in the short stature and the sturdy stems that resisted lodging, the falling over that taller varieties suffered in strong winds. The seed heads were compact too, each one carrying fifteen to twenty florets, each floret potentially producing a single kernel, the total yield per plant modest by the standards of modern high-yield varieties but consistent with the heritage varieties that traditional farmers had selected for resilience rather than maximum production, for the ability to produce a reliable, if not abundant, harvest under conditions that were variable and often harsh.

Nine plants. Nine seed heads. One hundred and thirty-five to one hundred and eighty potential kernels. The multiplication of twelve planted seeds into one hundred and thirty-five to one hundred and eighty harvested seeds, a ratio of approximately one to twelve, modest compared to the one-to-three-hundred ratio that a well-tillered wheat plant could achieve under optimal conditions but significant for what it represented: the continuation of the variety, the proof that the cycle could turn, that the seeds Astrid had stored in her desk drawer and vernalized in the growth chamber and planted on the windowsill could produce new seeds, could regenerate, could multiply, could do what agriculture had done for ten thousand years.

Erik came home at seven. The marine biology field season was beginning, the research vessel back in the water after the winter maintenance, the sampling program resuming, the acoustic tags deployed in the fjord tracking the movements of the polar cod population that Erik had been studying for eight years, the fish that were his vault, the organisms whose persistence he monitored and documented and worried about with the same attention that Astrid gave to the seeds, the same daily practice of observation and recording and care.

He set his bag down and came to the windowsill and looked at the plants and saw the anthers. He had learned to see the plants the way Astrid saw them, not as houseplants, not as decoration, not as the greenery that other apartments in Longyearbyen maintained on their windowsills — the spider plants and the pothos and the peace lilies that survived on the light that the windows provided — but as what they were, which was the descendants of a ten-thousand-year-old wheat variety growing in an apartment on an Arctic island, the descendants of seeds that had survived a war and a vault and a regeneration and a second planting, the descendants that were now flowering, now reproducing, now completing the cycle that connected the field near Ain al-Arab to the windowsill in Longyearbyen across nine thousand kilometers and thirty-three years and the accumulated interventions of Fatima and Astrid and the vault and the mountain and the cold and the warm.

"They're flowering," he said.

"Since this afternoon. The anthers emerged around four."

He looked at the plants. He looked at Astrid. The looking was the looking of a man who had been watching his wife change for two years, who had watched the coat thin and the water enter and the germination begin and the growth proceed, who had been present for the process without directing it, the way a person was present for a sunrise without directing it, the event occurring on its own schedule, in response to its own conditions, the observer's role limited to being there, to watching, to providing the conditions — the warmth, the patience, the steady attention — that the process required.

"I have news," he said.

He sat at the kitchen table. Astrid sat across from him. The table between them held the usual evidence of the evening — the mail, the keys, the fruit bowl — and Erik's face held the expression of a person organizing a thought, arranging the words in the order that the thought required, the deliberation of a man who did not speak carelessly and who was about to say something that he had been thinking about for weeks.

"The cod paper is published," he said. "In Nature Climate Change. The reviewers accepted it without revision."

"Erik. That's wonderful."

"It's the migration data. The northward shift. The paper documents a range contraction of thirty-eight kilometers per decade in the Svalbard polar cod population. The warming is pushing them out of their thermal habitat. The Atlantic cod are moving in. The populations are shifting."

He paused. The pause was not dramatic. The pause was Erik, the pause was the space he left between the data and the interpretation, between the measurement and the meaning, the space that the scientist maintained out of the habit of caution, the habit that said: the data says this, and what the data means is a separate question, a question that requires a different kind of attention, a different kind of language, a language that is not the language of Nature Climate Change but the language of two people at a kitchen table talking about their life.

"The University of Tromsoe has offered me a position," he said. "A full professorship. Arctic marine ecology. Starting in January."

Astrid heard the sentence. She heard the words and the words were clear and the meaning was clear and the implications were not yet clear, the implications requiring a moment, a beat, the processing time that the mind needed to translate a fact into a consequence, to move from "Erik has been offered a position in Tromsoe" to "Erik is considering leaving Longyearbyen" to "if Erik leaves Longyearbyen, what happens to us."

Tromsoe was on the mainland. Tromsoe was seventy degrees north, eight degrees south of Svalbard, a city of seventy-seven thousand people with restaurants and cinemas and a university hospital and trees and a bus system and all the infrastructure of a mainland Norwegian city, the infrastructure that Longyearbyen did not have and that eight years of Arctic living had taught Astrid to live without but that existed, that was there, that was possible.

Tromsoe was also a three-hour flight from Longyearbyen. Tromsoe was the nearest city on the mainland. Tromsoe was the place that Svalbard residents went for medical appointments and shopping trips and the occasional weekend that involved restaurants and fresh vegetables and the particular relief of being in a place where trees grew and the sun set every night and rose every morning.

"What are you thinking?" Astrid said.

"I'm thinking I want to take it."

The sentence was simple. The sentence was the culmination of a process that had been running in Erik for months, perhaps for years, the same kind of process that had been running in Astrid, the slow accumulation of inputs that eventually produced an output, the drip-drip-drip of daily experience that filled the reservoir until the reservoir overflowed and the overflow was a decision, a change, a departure from the current state.

"Tromsoe," Astrid said.

"There's a marine research station. The acoustic monitoring network extends along the entire coast. The cod populations I study overwinter in the fjords near Tromsoe. The work would be better there. More students. More resources. More collaboration."

He said this with the practical tone of a scientist presenting the rationale for a methodological choice, the tone that was familiar and that was also, Astrid heard, a cover, a layer over the other tone, the tone of a man who was not only talking about the scientific advantages of Tromsoe but about the personal advantages, the advantages of trees and restaurants and a university hospital and a population of seventy-seven thousand and the possibility of a life that was not defined by the extreme conditions that Longyearbyen imposed, the conditions that Astrid had chosen eight years ago because she wanted to live in a place that did not pretend and that she was now, perhaps, ready to leave.

"The vault is here," she said.

"The vault will be here whether you're here or not."

This was true. The vault did not require Astrid's physical presence. The vault required a coordinator, a person who performed the functions that Astrid performed, but the person did not need to be Astrid. Kari could do it. Kari was doing it, was performing many of the functions already, was the natural successor, the colleague who knew the vault and the database and the procedures and the partners and who had the competence and the temperament and the commitment to maintain the conditions that the seeds required. Astrid's departure would not be the vault's abandonment. Astrid's departure would be a succession, a transition, the transfer of custodianship from one keeper to the next, the process that all institutions required, the process that ensured the work continued beyond any single person's tenure.

But the vault was also here. The vault was in Longyearbyen. The vault was in the mountain she could see from the office window. The vault was three kilometers from her apartment and she could drive to it in ten minutes and walk through the tunnel and stand in the chamber and feel the cold on her face and see the shelves and the boxes and the packets and know, with the knowledge of her body and her years, that the seeds were there, were maintained, were at minus eighteen degrees, were waiting. The vault was here and the knowing that the vault was here was part of who she was, was part of the identity that eight years of daily custodianship had produced, the identity that was not only professional but personal, not only about the job but about the relationship between Astrid and the mountain and the seeds and the cold, the relationship that she had built and maintained the way Lars maintained the compressors, daily, methodically, with care.

And the vault would also be in Tromsoe. Not the physical vault — the physical vault was in the mountain and the mountain was in Svalbard and the mountain would not move — but the vault's work would be in Tromsoe, because the vault's work extended beyond the mountain, extended to the institutions in Alnarp and Oslo and Tromsoe that managed the vault's operations and the network of gene banks that the vault served and the partnerships that the vault depended on and the living collection program that Astrid was proposing, the program that would connect the vault to the field, the mountain to the soil, the stored to the growing. The work could be done from Tromsoe. The work could be done from anywhere. The work was not bound to the mountain the way the seeds were bound to the mountain. The work was bound to the person who did it, and the person could move.

"I need to think about it," Astrid said.

"I know," Erik said.

They sat at the table. The midnight sun came through the kitchen window and lit the table and the fruit bowl and the mail and their hands, the light falling on the surface where eight years of meals had been shared and where the conversations that had changed their marriage had occurred, the table that was the domestic equivalent of the vault's workbench, the surface on which the important things were placed and processed and examined and filed, the surface that held whatever was brought to it.

She reached across the table. She took his hand. The hand was warm. The holding was the holding of two people who had learned, through the long process of thawing and imbibition and germination and growth, to hold each other without sealing, to be close without being closed, to maintain the warmth without controlling the temperature, the holding that was not the vault's holding — cold, sealed, preservative — but the other holding, the holding of an open hand, the holding that allowed the thing held to move, to grow, to change, the holding that was love in its mature form, the form that understood that love was not preservation but cultivation, not the maintenance of a fixed state but the tending of a living one.

"The wheat is flowering," she said.

"I see that."

"The seeds will be ready in August."

"What will you do with them?"

The question was the question that the seeds always posed: vault or soil, store or plant, preserve or grow. And the answer was the answer she had been learning for two years, the answer that was not one or the other but both, the answer that required the balance, the holding of the two states simultaneously, the cold and the warm, the mountain and the field.

"Some for the vault," she said. "Some for planting. Some for Fatima. Some for the gene bank in Addis Ababa, for Dr. Bekele, for the collection that connects the wheat to the teff to the barley to the ten thousand years of grain that the Fertile Crescent gave the world."

"And some for us," Erik said.

"And some for us."

The sentence sat between them on the table in the midnight sun, and the sentence was about seeds and the sentence was about more than seeds, the way all their sentences about seeds were about more than seeds, the seeds the language through which they spoke about the things that the direct language could not carry, the weight that the direct words could not bear, the meaning that required the metaphor, the indirection, the seed and the soil and the vault and the field standing in for the life and the marriage and the future and the thing they had not yet named and might never name but that was there, was present, was growing, was flowering in the midnight sun on the windowsill of an apartment in Longyearbyen where two people sat at a table and held hands and looked at each other and saw, in each other's faces, the evidence of the years and the evidence of the change and the evidence that the change was not finished, that the change was continuing, that the flowering was the middle of the story, not the end.