The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  We go back for the Faltboot and set out cautiously, fanning out a little more than usual to distribute our weight. It soon becomes apparent that the ice is stronger in some places than in others. Several times we have to stop and detour a spot that is too thin and beginning to sag dangerously underfoot.

  “Y’know, Major, someone should go ahead and scout out the best route. Then we wouldn’t have to keep towing this blessed battleship around in circles.”

  A good idea, Waldemer. But who? It should be me, by all rights. But Luisa drops her towline and comes slowly toward me, stopping a few paces from me so that she blocks my path across the lead. Because of the shawl I can see only her eyes, but I know the mouth is set firmly with the little creases at the corners.

  “I’m the lightest.”

  This is folly. I know the ice best and I am responsible for the safety of all. Besides she … but it has been a long time since conventions, chivalry, the ordinary hierarchies of life in the World of Cities seem to have had any significance. I am uncertain; I hesitate.

  “He’s right, Major. What d’you weigh, Theodor old man? Not a hundred and twenty, I’ll bet. Go ahead and be careful. We’ll follow.”

  We proceed in this fashion, Luisa two hundred metres ahead and Waldemer and I following with the Faltboot, which slips easily over this skating rink of a surface. We walk always in a film of water a centimeter or so deep, which follows us as the depression made by our weight proceeds across the ice.

  We are perhaps three fourths across when I notice a peculiar—as I first imagine it—optical illusion. The ice ahead, between us and Luisa, seems to bulge up a hand’s breadth or so, then in another place, a series of bulges traveling rapidly across the ice from left to right. A second later it occurs to me that seals, expecting as little as we that a lead would freeze over this time of the year, are trapped under the ice and are trying to break out breathing holes for themselves. But almost at the same instant this theory is blasted. Not far from Luisa—surely not more than thirty or forty metres from her—the ice is shattered with a dull bump or thud and an enormous black fin shoots up, followed by a glistening back the size of a hansom cab. Luisa has turned and is staring at this thing, staring across it to us. But everything happens very quickly. In another five seconds a dozen killer whales, perhaps, have broken out of the ice in a thrashing of white water. The huge hideous heads shoot vertically into the air through the holes they have smashed. One breaks out so close to us that we can see the tawny head markings, the small glistening eyes, the terrible array of teeth. They are black above, the lower parts white or yellowish-white. There is a distinctive white slash above and behind the little pig eye. They are ten metres long and weigh tons.

  Believing from our shadows on the ice that we are seals, they continue to heave up and split it into fragments, thrashing the water into foam in an effort to upset us and take us into those rows of conical white teeth, in a single gulp. What puzzles them—the reason they are unable to make an end of the business immediately—is that we can move faster on the ice than seals. Luisa has turned and is slipping off rapidly to the left, away from the centre of the danger. But the whales are everywhere. An enormous black shadow, like an underwater cloud, passes almost directly under our feet, at great speed.

  Waldemer and I sense the same thing almost instantly: that, against all instinct, we must not abandon the Faltboot to flee away to the left in an attempt to rejoin Luisa. The whales are sure to break the ice under the Faltboot, taking it for a large seal, and without the supplies on it we couldn’t last half a day. Without a word we seize the towlines and begin running as fast as we can over the slippery and undulating ice with the Faltboot impeding us. We are attempting to make a large circle to the left and cut back toward Luisa so that we can perhaps be of some help to her. Meanwhile, we wave, indicating to her that she should make directly to the south toward the thicker pack ice only a few hundred metres away.

  The ice disintegrates directly ahead of us and the black spike of a fin, two metres long, surges in the opening. A piece of ice the size of a table tips on edge, poises, and upsets. The head appears and the whale blows with a terrific roar. His breath has an odour of something rotten, of fish and death. Waldemer jerks the Faltboot to the right and I follow. The pig eyes inspect us for a moment, then the whale slowly sinks to try again somewhere else.

  The near escape distracts us and for a moment—I have to admit—Waldemer and I lose our heads. We jerk the Faltboot along as best we can, skirting the many broken holes in the ice. In our concern to watch for these holes, and in foolishly looking down to glance at the black shapes shooting by underneath, we forget to keep our eyes on Luisa. When we look away to the south again there is no sign of her. A single whale rises slowly, not far from where we last saw her, opens his jaw to reveal the jagged white gleam, and settles with a sigh and a jet of steam.

  We stop—another stupidity. Then Waldemer, without speaking, raises his mitten and points ahead and a little to the right. A black patch appears in the water between two floes, then something elongated extrudes from it: an arm. Luisa manages to pull half her body up onto the floe. For an excruciating time she remains thus: clutching the floe, arms outspread, her lower body still in the water. The thought of the teeth in the water under her goes knife—like through me. Everything stops in me: breathing, every nerve fibre, even my heart seems to clutch and stop. Four seconds. Five, six, seven. Why doesn’t she pull herself up? She is exhausted, there is nothing to grip on the ice. There is the boom of another whale striking the ice to my left; I don’t even turn to look at it.

  Finally Waldemer and I come to our senses and make away rapidly in her direction. In only a minute or two we are there. By this time she is out of the water and onto the floe. The floe is not very large. There is open water all around it. A shadow goes by underneath like an express train. I drop the towline, find another floe perhaps half as large as Luisa’s, and leap onto it, my momentum sending it tottering across the water like a crude raft. It sinks under my weight; my ankles are in the water. But it bumps against Luisa’s floe and I scramble out onto it.

  Waldemer, that fantastic fellow, has detached one of the towlines, coiled it, and thrown it in our direction. The first time I miss it. Then I have hold of the towline and Luisa and I are pulling it. We are back to Waldemer and the Faltboot. No time to attach the third towline again. Luisa flees on ahead, gesturing to right or left as she sees bad ice, and we stagger after with our load.

  We are on the pack ice. Some difficulty in pulling the Faltboot up over the brink a half metre or more high. Then Luisa—doesn’t collapse, simply lies down on the ice and breathes deeply, pants, while watching me out of her silent eyes.

  It is important that she begin exercising immediately to thaw herself. After a while she stands up, still without saying anything. By this time Waldemer has reattached the towline. She takes it without a word. The three of us pull the Faltboot a little distance, perhaps a mile, to a place where we can take shelter behind a pressure ridge. We tumble everything out of the Faltboot with our frozen hands. The tent is up in a minute; the two bamboos push it upright, some blocks of ice hold it at the corners and around the edges. As soon as this is done Luisa collapses onto the sleeping sack without a word.

  “Get out.”

  For some reason, perhaps sheer perplexity, Waldemer understands and leaves the tent. In a minute I have Luisa’s clothes off and am rubbing her to turn the blackish white of her body to, at least, a pale pink. She is still silent, only watches me out of her motionless dark eyes. Then I dress her in the spare set of skin trousers and jacket with a hood. She is able to help with this. She crawls into the sleeping sack and closes her eyes instantly as though she were asleep. I bend over her. She is all right, her forehead warm but not hot, her breathing even.

  I start the primus to warm the tent. Then I go outside to see what Waldemer is doing. Through the binoculars, the clever fellow, he has found a seal on the ice near a small lead a few hundre
d metres away, and is making for it with all the complicated skill and cunning of a born hunter. Down on all fours, the rifle concealed on the side invisible to the seal, he is working his way toward it in a simulated waddle, his arms working like flippers, legs wobbling tail-fashion on the ice. The seal is convinced. Imagining that there is a fellow of his own kind on that side, he feels safe, knowing that if a bear approaches the other seal will see it first and give the alarm by splashing into the water. So he concentrates on the other direction, turning his back to Waldemer. Who squirms on patiently, dragging the Mannlicher, to a range of seventy-five meters, where he rests his weapon on a chunk of ice and, after a long wait, squeezes the centre of it with his mitten finger. For some reason I am not aware of the sound of the detonation. The panorama itself is tiny at this distance. The seal kicks once, curls into a tight arc, and straightens again. He has no time to fall into the water or do anything else. Instantaneously he has been converted into seal meat resting motionless on the ice waiting for Waldemer, who gets up and walks toward it with an air of proud manly satisfaction.

  He doesn’t know that I’m watching. I go back toward the tent, which with its red and white stripes makes an incongruous effect on the frozen landscape, flamboyant and a little tawdry, a camp of bedouins in a desert of sugar candy. As I come in she wakes up, or opens her eyes, and rises a little on one elbow.

  “Sleep. You’re exhausted. Six hours of sleep and we must start again.”

  “What were those things, Gustav?”

  “Just ordinary killer whales, Orcinus orca. Not common in these parts but found occasionally.”

  “They were trying to eat me.”

  “They thought we were seals. No malice in them. They were only earning their living, in the way that comes naturally.”

  “In that case Mr. Darwin was right, Gustav.”

  “I’ve never doubted that he was.”

  “I mean that we may be obsolete.”

  “That’s what I mean.” “It’s the whole arrangement I don’t like. B must eat A, so C can eat B. Who made the whole thing up?”

  “Whoever it was, He doesn’t bother much about our opinion. Close your eyes.”

  “If you close your eyes everything is red, and I don’t like that. The insides of things are red. I don’t want to know about the insides of things. The outsides of things are white, pure, clean. I like white things, Gustav. Cold things.”

  She goes on for some time, chattering in this toneless abstract way, almost as though she is talking not to me but to herself. I can’t get her to stop.

  “It’s Dante again. The bottom of hell isn’t fire and brimstone as people imagine. It’s frozen, a frozen lake. I’d like that. I’d rather be down there frozen with Ugolino than up with Paolo and Francesca, whirling around in a hot wind. Lovers locked together so you can’t escape. No chance to bathe. Imagine the smell of armpits.” She laughs, in an odd cracked voice, a sound I have never heard from her before. I begin to think that she is perhaps not well. “Who are those two that go together so lightly on the wind? Conjure them in the name of their love, and they will stop.”

  The tent opens to a chill of cold air. Entry of Waldemer dragging his pinniped, concealing his smile of pride as best he can under his mustache. She shifts to Swedish, forming her phrases with effort so that they come out carefully if not always correctly.

  “Minns du, Gustav. Do you remember that time I tried to kill you?”

  “Do I? But which time do you mean? The time in the crevasse, or the time with the revolver?”

  “The time in the crevasse was only a joke. That other time I meant it. But now, vet du, I’m happy I didn’t. It’s better as it turned out. I like it here where you’ve brought me, in the white world.”

  She seems rested now, almost content, although disinclined to move in the sleeping sack, her dark steady eyes fixed on me. Lying half propped on the bag of provisions I have given her for a pillow, her body is a shallow curve arching upward from head to foot, the pose of Goya’s Duchess of Alba.

  “In Paris, ser du, there was my world in Quai d’Orléans, and there was your world with your wires and sparks. I was a prisoner in my world, and you wouldn’t come out of yours. And so we were enemies—do I mean fienden?”

  “Fiender.”

  “We were fiends to each other. And here it is our world. There is nothing else. No one. Nothing but whiteness and ourselves.”

  There is Waldemer, but he is busy cutting up his seal, so perhaps she estimates that he doesn’t count.

  “Why should I have come out of my world, when it was my world that you wanted to come into? According to your own so fervent declaration.”

  “Don’t be fiendish. What I wanted—what we wanted—was to make a world that we could both inhabit. That would be both yours and mine. And we couldn’t do that there.”

  “And it didn’t seem to me you were so much a prisoner in your own. Since you could go pretty much where you felt like it. To Stockholm. To Stresa. To Montmartre. To odd places where only men are admitted.”

  “Thank you, a list of my sins. Would you like to have a list of your own? But we are quarreling again.”

  “There you two squareheads go again. Chattering on. Must have a secret you don’t want a fellow to hear about. Theodor, you caught all that Scandihoovian, I’ll bet, by sleeping in the same bag as the Major.”

  “Must you murder that poor thing in here? It looks like a baby with whiskers.”

  The seal, a fine young male specimen of Phoca barbata, is turning into meat under our eyes. Unlike the menagerie bear, he is fat and seems to have only a moderate number of bones for his size.

  “I murdered him out on the floe. Seventy-five metres. A single shot through the head. Not bad, if I say so myself. Now I’m making stew out of him. Which you can have for supper. If you ask me nicely in Queen’s English.”

  Waldemer, although still jovial, is annoyed at our talking Swedish. What does he suspect? That we are what he would I I call “nancies”? He knows me better than that. Or only that we are making fun at his expense? Probably the latter.

  Now he is cutting the reddish and white-streaked jelly into cubes and putting them into the saucepan, setting it on the primus, adding salt, bacon, and some broken pieces of hardtack. An aroma something like New England chowder begins to diffuse into the tent. By Thor and Freya, I still have desires! I am hungry! I wouldn’t have believed it. Waldemer is a good fellow after all, invaluable. What would I we do without him? Even if he is a murderer. But at the risk of offending him I still have something to say to Luisa.

  “Hör du mig, I am innocent in this thing. You had seven or eight worlds and I only one. But you bewitched me out of it, time and time again. With only a gesture of your fingers. A breath in my air. Into all those worlds of yours where I was like a dog in breeches. In Stresa, and behind all those doorways.”

  “Ah? An agile dog still. A clever one.”

  “Chow down, you two squareheads. Savvy plain English? If not I’ll eat it myself.”

  “And the Salle Meyer, wasn’t that a world of yours?”

  “Ah, you are referring to my musical career.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was such a success.”

  “You are such a charming person, why should you want to be famous as well?”

  “Ah, tack så mycket. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.”

  But there is no hostility in this any more, it is a kind of a game, a casting of phrases back and forth, like those duels of old-fashioned poets jousting with lines that in any case both of them know by heart. The eyes under the reindeer-skin hood are calm, faintly ironic, if not amused any longer, at least resigned to the jest that the Great Nobody enjoys even if we don’t quite as much. Looking at these eyes, I am seized with a slight vertigo of uncertainty, of the strange. Who is I she? There is something elusive and perhaps slightly supernatural about this thing she has created out of herself by sheer force of will, becoming Luisa, Theodor, nexu
s of erotic magnetism, femme-savante, staid Anglaise in tweeds or angry gypsy, radiating energies of love and hate that are perhaps genuine or perhaps quite synthetic and controlled, coming from a centre of volition hidden deep in some place in her that I can never know and never penetrate. For, if I keep certain places in me hidden from her, why shouldn’t she do the same? To say, as I’ve often said to myself, that her emotions are “all on the surface” is meaningless. The surface of another human being is all we can know. I can only note, in my own sensations, that from her surface now I no longer detect either the pull of willed charm or those emanations of maenadic hatred that once seemed powerful enough to destroy both of us.

  “Major’s gone to sleep over his meal. Tired like all of us.”

  Because she has already paid me for the Salle Meyer, long ago. And I her. And how in any case should I be responsible for events that originated in her own labyrinthine and rococo but steely will, even if these events, if I am to believe the testimony of Theodor, were directed toward certain aspects of my own personality that I was somehow being asked to apologize for—my talent or alleged genius in realms where “she must leave the position of predominance to me” and “couldn’t hope to compete.” Ah well. Certainly I was out of it in music, but was she in? Not being God or her solfeggio master, I hardly had control over that. In short, what blame or part of blame was to be attached to me for that evening of grandiose fiasco I found it hard to fathom. Although tacitly and obliquely—and at the same time pointedly—invited, I wasn’t even a member of the family party, which included the aunt, the mother, the Polish cousin, and for all I knew the Peninsula and a whole collection of Peruvian diplomats. I hadn’t even, in fact, promised to come, and for all that Luisa knew in any formal and official way, it was not likely that I would be there. When the question of tickets arose I played the imbecile; not a natural role for me, but I did the best I could. “It is next Wednesday evening, you know.” “It? … ah. It.” “If you would like a ticket, Ma Tante has them.” “Ah, has she?” But sins of omission are easy; I never applied to the aunt for that piece of cardboard which would have given me the privilege of sitting gratis between her, perhaps, and the lady neurologist, or the Polish cousin, in a box from which I could not escape and in which, at the very least, I would have been obliged to make noises of a conventional nature that might have been inconsistent with my view of the proceedings and certainly with my character. As it happened, this imbecility, or sin, was very wise on my part.