The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  Then we have him inside the tent and there is something else difficult to do, turning him from his stomach over onto his back. Theodor holds the leg gently and I rotate him; he is heavy. During this he smiles with amusement at how heavily he is sweating. Found a way to keep warm in this climate, by Jove! Break your leg and you’re like toast. It isn’t really a warm sweat, however, but a cold one that leaves his face like milk. He needs the coats over him, all of them, and some cocoa.

  “Stupid of me. Now I’ve made a pickle. For everybody.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Tell you what. You fellows, tomorrow. Had better just go on. Leave me the Mannlicher. In the boat, the two of you. You’ll have a chance. Franz Josef Land …”

  “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  But he has read enough boys’ adventure stories to know how to behave. In order to play the game he even has to pretend it would really work, our abandoning him and setting out over that deserted sea to the east. “Sealers there. Now and then. In the summer. You can have them. Come back and get me.” He doesn’t complain and he even tells jokes while we improvise a splint for him out of the rifle and some strips of silk torn from the tent. The gunstock fits neatly under his arm and the barrel comes almost to his ankle. We make him comfortable and pour the cocoa into him.

  Inside the tent, in the deep shade of the cliff, there is an illusion almost of night. This is restful; the first time that watchful sun has turned away from us in ten days. It makes it colder though and we light the primus. I go outside and pile snow around the edges of the tent to keep out the wind. The rubberized silk which held the far finer atoms of hydrogen for a week will not let the slightest particle of air come through. I make sure the Faltboot is secure, wedged against the rock with the paddles inside it.

  Then I go back inside and seal the flap of the tent by piling snow around it. The light that comes through the silk is thin and greyish, a light made out of shadow. The red stripes have scarcely any colour now; they have darkened to the iron of coagulated blood. This banded half-obscurity of light and dark we will call night, for our purposes. It will do. The brandy is for Waldemer. We uncork it and he lies happily with it cradled under his arm. “Cognac Fine Champagne. Very best, by George. Go first class when you go with the Major.” Luisa and I unroll the other sleeping sack and get into it, with a certain alacrity, since we are coatless now.

  There is no sound but the faint hush of the wind outside against the silk, and a gurgle now and then as Waldemer lifts the bottle and tilts it. Even inside the sleeping sack it is terribly cold. I turn the primus up to make more heat, and the flame goes yellow and begins to rise off the burner, making a faint popping sound. I know from experience that under these conditions the burner is inefficient and that each molecule of carbon, unable to unite as it would like with two molecules of oxygen, has to be content with a monogamous marriage with one molecule of oxygen; a slight difference statistically, but one of profound importance for us.

  “Vet du, Gustav, I am not a little girl any more and I want to know. What will happen now?”

  “Do you care?”

  We lie quite chastely side by side, our flanks necessarily touching in the narrow sack and a common warmth suffusing the enclosed space, yet aware of each other only in the abstract play of minds and the subdued, distinct, and precise sound of voices.

  “Whatever happens, I want it to happen in a way that is—how do you say—renlig—enfaldig. Nettement tu sais, without too many unpleasant details.”

  “As in a book.”

  “Not like a book exactly, but the way I have already imagined it in my mind.”

  “Whatever happens will happen only in your mind anyhow.”

  “Hör du, Gustav. Those sealers. Do they exist?”

  “Which sealers?” “The ones who come to Franz Josef Land occasionally.”

  “They might exist.”

  You two. Always talking Squarehead. Discussing your love lives in Paris, probably. Might let a fellow in on it. The words are blurred now, the brandy is working. In an hour he might even go to sleep, from fatigue and through the sheer physiological efficiency of the hunter who can turn off his body when he has no use for it. He is—the idea occurs to me with the quick simplicity of a discovery—he is happy.

  “And if they do exist. What then?”

  “We can put our friend in the Faltboot and paddle to Franz Josef Land.”

  “Is it far?”

  “When it happens in your mind it isn’t far. Paddling, it’s quite a way.”

  “I’m still strong, do you know, Gustav. I’ve rested all day. You haven’t let me do my share. That’s not fair. On the Aletschhorn—”

  “Yes, I know.”

  And I have been thinking. It wasn’t really because she wouldn’t let me out of the crevasse that I agreed to let her go. Whether I knew it or not, it was to force her once for all out of her world, the world of couturiers and tea at the Café Royal, and into my world, the world of thought, where everything is clean and abstract. But now I know that here, the place I have brought her, is not her world and not my world, it is no world at all. It is nothing. And perhaps it is better that it should be this way. In her world or mine, one of us was always the enemy, the fool. And now the enemy is nothing. Not the whiteness and cold of a certain region of the world, even as remote as it may be, but the eventual Nothing that now gapes before us like an immense welcoming gate. But this is an enemy I have been careful to protect her from. Both of them. And they have believed me and entrusted themselves to me with a childlike simplicity—all because I have pretended to know, to be stronger than they are in my knowing, to be hard! It is important that this secret should be kept from them to the end—that there is Nothing, that no one among the angelic orders will hear us if we cry out. The other secrets—that no sealers ever come to Franz Josef Land, that it is impossible to cross two hundred miles of open sea against the wind and current—are unimportant and can be concealed with trivial lies. These are analogous to the lies I tell myself, for instance, that I am hard or that I do not care about what is going to happen.

  “Hör du, Gustav. I think it was on purpose that you brought me to this place. Because it is called White Island. And I like white things. Isn’t that so?”

  I might tell her that sometimes she likes white things and sometimes she doesn’t, and this is profound of her, and I know the reason why, but I won’t tell her, because her belief that she likes white things is necessary for her now, and for what is to come.

  “And are you happy here?”

  “I am happy. As long as you don’t touch me. And I must not touch you either. Then I am happy. I don’t know why that is.”

  “It is because the outsides of things are white. And inside they are red.”

  “You mean that part of me? I don’t know. I’ve never looked at it.”

  She is not fond of mirrors either. She alone, of all the women I have known, never looks in mirrors. This is something we share. She goes on: “I think it is because God is angry at us that we are condemned to be in pairs. Only he—she—It—is allowed to be one. Do you know, Gustav, the Garden of Eden story is told the wrong way. We weren’t two then but one, and we were happy. Then we did something terrible, told a lie or got into the jam cupboard. And He said: I condemn you to be split in two, and wander around forever looking for the other half, loving and hating at the same time. And ever since we’ve been trying to be one again. But that’s forbidden. It’s forbidden by God. It’s a sin and makes us suffer.”

  “So there’s no hope?”

  “The only hope is to go where everything is very cold and white. Then this red thing inside us is chilled and we are white all through. Only the minds can touch, and they touch very gently because they don’t want anything from each other. I’m tired of bodies. I have a headache. I don’t know how to say it in Swedish, c’est mes époques qui approchent. I’ve only had this body for twenty years but I’m tired of it already. I’m glad you brought me here, G
ustav.”

  This is a good place to get rid of it, if that’s what she has in mind. It isn’t really her époques, of course. The symptoms are well known to medicine: the feeling of pressure on the temples as from an elastic band or cap, weakness of limbs, gradual darkening of the vision. Lying quietly in the half darkness after she has finished talking, I imagine the atoms joining together into their silent deadly ether as thin as thought, invisible and merciful like the Grace of God itself. Two by two they steal upward from the yellow flame, clasping each other in their embrace inimical to man but not this embrace of theirs—forbidden by God, instead, it is the manifestation of His precise and infinitely complex will which never errs and which men call chemistry. Rising with a certain difficulty onto my elbow, I locate Kullberg 5566 and establish that it is ten minutes before midnight, and also note that the primus stove is working well, that is to say, it is not working well at all. (Another one of your paradoxes, Major.) To judge from the colour of the flame, it is converting kerosene to carbon monoxide at a highly efficient rate. Crispin’s Axiom: machines are really of use to us only when they work defectively and produce results not anticipated by their designers. A balloon intended to go to one place takes us to another, a Bell telephone earpiece receives messages from the Infinite, and so on. I have to confess that, in spite of my technical education, I am not really much of a believer in the hope that these trivial engines will bring us bliss.

  So I have not noted anything in my pocket diary about the Pole, and I have made sure that Waldemer has not kept any record of it in writing either, so that, if the nonexistent sealers or somebody else ever finds our camp, those down below in the World of Cities will not imagine that we have accomplished something significant, and Nansen or Lieutenant Peary or some other worthy person will have the honour of handing to the human race the navel of their planet on a silver platter. For me, for us, these things are unimportant. Because what does this or any of it matter, once we have opened our eyes from our sleep and contemplated at last the ultimate Nothing? Some of us are tired of our bodies at twenty, some at ninety, but we must all tire of them in the end. If man is superior to the universe, it is because he understands his predicament and is able, ultimately, to choose the means and the moment of his confrontation with it. For this, of course, strength is needed. I am happy that I have found this in myself. All modesty aside, and now that I am totally alone.

  This is not to say that I am at peace with myself. Far from it! There are too many things in my head for that, too many burdens. Others have trusted in me, and I have betrayed that trust. If I did it because it was best for them, this in no way diminishes what I must take on myself. There is that betrayal, and there is this final crime of mine—and a crime it is, murder pure and simple, and what is worst of all, against persons very dear to me, not the least of whom is myself. But I have to bear these things lightly and not regard them in a sentimental way. It is a shabby Götterdämmerung in the odour of kerosene, and I am only an eccentric Swede whose hair stands on end, perhaps not even a genius, only a minor clairvoyant. What egotism! The Mental Diary has degenerated totally into these first-person pronouns. This childishness is the best argument there is against the immortality of the soul.

  Something is changed. Everything is suffused with a swimming pink. My mathematical powers at least have not been impaired. I am aware of what is signified by this subtle changing of light. The sun, curving in its wolf-like lope around the horizon, has reached the point where it shines once more into our cove. I am glad that the others are asleep and not aware of this. The comfortable shadow is gone; the white stripes take the light gradually, the dark ones crawl at the edges and grow red. Midnight: altitude at the minimum, azimuth angle zero. Like a cathedral facing north our tent is aligned exactly with the meridian. This Great Window of Chartres commemorates a Passion, but it is not a holy one. The blood-glow is the sun of Stresa, it forces its way through the shutters of the closed eyelids and will allow no peace. The brocade falls, the curve of surface is a mathematical witchery of shadows. Luisa, det war synd! If this half and that half are brought together into One, it makes a fire that hurts. But she only smiles and glances downward at this most precise and unanswerable geometric theorem of her body. I float toward it and am lost in shadows, I am both the enclosedness and the enclosed, a warmth shudders somewhere at the centre of everything. This Finnish night is terribly cold. Thank God for the featherbed!