The Survivor

by Thomas Keneally

  He knew he needed warning in this authoritative way. But he must never allow himself to accept her moral authority. “All right,” he had agreed. “Since you have Hammond charmed, it would be a shame if the conquest wasn’t extended to the entire press-hut.”

  On the ice three cameramen were evident. One, a sailor by the chevrons on his peaked hat, filmed equably; but working for networks had given the others an indigestive energy. They played with the calibrated rims of lenses, and grunted like lovers or sea lions. At something that was part their request and part command, Alec and Belle repeated their advance to the tangerine vehicle readied to race them away across the ice-shelf, towards tangerine helicopters. In this way the widow and Ramsey were mated by view-finder, and Ramsey became on film what he had once daydreamed of—the friend doing service for the widow.

  Indoors at McMurdo Station, in heavy warmth made from the piped exhaust of electric motors, they faced their press conference. Alec, still dazed, sat by expecting, despite himself, the same radical change he had looked for earlier in the day. He found it hard to attend to the sharp voices of the journalists; his ears seemed drawn to insulated sounds, the murmur of off-duty officers in the wardroom next door. He flatly answered the few questions aimed at him and, in his state of contrived numbness, could see that he would not easily be able to do himself harm: one of the few communicable images that could easily be fitted to him by pressmen was that of awed ex-comrade.

  He was taken by surprise when Belle, not distracted by suspicions of some coming explosion in the cortex of the brain, announced what would be done with her husband’s corpse. If Leeming could not be found, the pit would be reverently closed and prayed over. If Leeming could be found, he would be buried on the hill above the base, on Observation Hill, just beyond the crest, facing west.

  “This site,” she said, “was kindly suggested by the admiral.” She threw a hand in the putative direction of New Zealand. “Admittedly this little town looks rather industrialized, but they tell me it’s only a small feature in what can be seen from up there.”

  That he had been with her all day, and failed to ask her for such facts, made him anxious now for his sanity.

  At dinner the base commander told them that digging could not go on beyond the next few days; most of the summer personnel had already left for Christchurch or North America. He would permit Mrs Leeming, he said with a sly Irish smile, to visit the pit site in the morning only if she got a full night’s sleep, no big-eye, no waiting up for the midnight sun.

  At three the next morning Ramsey woke in the same buffered state of alarm as he had fallen asleep in. He went walking through the streets of the settlement. Bare earth which he bent to touch was frozen. The sun stood at a narrow angle over the scarps of Victoria Land. Whenever the town came close to earning Belle’s judgment, “industrialized”, its streets led you to a sight of Scott’s first hut, a stroll away, brown and like a failed grazier’s homestead. Turn, and he saw Observation Hill, where Leeming would be, to his honour, buried in rock or permafrost. The trouble of making a hole up there, on that freezing slope!

  There was already a cross on the hill, he could see, Scott’s cross humped there over two days by bereaved men in an age of murderous innocence and fatal sentimentality.

  Inside, he found himself fevered and neuralgic.

  Belle seemed grey, and possibly had not slept. Even so heavily wrapped, she showed aspects of her age that Ramsey had never noticed before. She seemed brisk enough, no health risk on the long helicopter haul she now faced. Hammond carried her duffel-bag of survival clothing, and there was this difference to her: she did not accept Hammond’s concern as tribute to her, as at eighty-five she would still no doubt accept kindnesses from polite businessmen at airports. Here she needed her bag carried; the way she walked testified to that. Never had she seemed older.

  Ramsey climbed into the thick warmth of the machine, and sat along the wall. His cheek that faced the cold hatch ached in its sinusitic manner; on his left the caged motor of the rear shaft made sickening heat. But as Hammond and the others boarded, cherishing private and commercial cameras, he was grateful that the motors were too raucous to allow talk.

  He remained placidly anguished. The blare of the machine gave even his eyes a certain torpor and privacy. As yesterday he had not been able to conceive a time beyond his arrival, so now his imagination persisted in the message that after the pit was reached, time in its accepted meaning would not continue to deliver itself, second by second.

  The machine rose at a tilt, and jerked along the ice-free coast; then out across the sound to a west glaring with white mountains. Once during the journey Belle leant to him and shouted, “Alec, be good, won’t you?” For some reason transcending eardrums, Alec heard and nodded. Those of the others who were not distracted by scenery tilted an ear in false hope of a press statement.

  The western side held ice in the seams of its complicated coast, last winter’s ice that had not found a clear strait up the sound. And massive ice, an ice-tongue, with dim blue water to the north. Then he felt the helicopter pitch and enter the course of a glacier, a neat glacier to his eyes, a geography-teacher’s dream, seamed and waved at its edges, its lines of flow enforced by streaks of moraine, its north side charred with the black emergence of mountains. To the helicopter’s front bulked theatrical ice-falls and summits.

  Alec twisted in his seat. They would not make him believe that that spectacular white trench was the scene of his and Lloyd’s hard survival. So when they swept low once over a scatter of portable huts, and a crewman threw a smoke bomb out of the hatch to read the wind force, Ramsey found himself gazing for the result with a genuine tripper’s interest. His standard anxieties, no worse in this sunny, stage-managed iceway than they had often been at home, snaked about his belly as the machine plumped down between bamboo flags. Motors fell back to a lower pitch of chugging. Conversation was possible if you screamed it forth.

  What was largely fear, and the desire to verify kindred fears in others, made him speak to the widow.

  “Are you afraid, Belle?”

  She merely smiled, like someone with a professional care on hand, and patted his gloved hand. And though this was the supreme arrival, time went on secreting itself; there came no explosion in the cortex.

  Instead, he jumped down onto firm snow, and helped the widow out. Belle had her fur hood zipped to the nose, but stood making eyes of avid gratitude at the men who ran in wincing beneath the churning props to help her to the site.

  Ramsey stumbled after.

  A man with lieutenant’s bar on the peak of his snow-cap deployed away from Belle’s elbow and faced the straggle of visitors.

  “Mrs Leeming and gentlemen,” he yelled, “welcome.”

  In a most authentic manner, the cold licked at Ramsey’s cheeks like something interior to them, some hot-cold facial cancer; and the added Antarctic violence of the helicopter swept them as the machine lifted sideways and went.

  “You must first come and have coffee in the mess,” the lieutenant concluded. He led them to a wood-framed hut of canvas, already drifted up to chest-height by the late blizzard. Inside, a portable generator hummed, making light and a startling moist warmth. The alternations of hot and cold that his hosts had provided for him woke again Alec’s face pains, his fever.

  Meanwhile the party were shedding their outer clothes and draping them on chairs. Before them stood a servery, and behind the servery, a bare-headed, open-necked boy pouring coffee.

  “If you would care, gentlemen, to help yourself.”

  The lieutenant sat Belle down and fetched her coffee. And, as if Ramsey was in need of further dazing, announced, “You’ll notice that I’ve taken the liberty of ordering a certain medicinal additive in the coffee. I trust none of you object.”

  The men rumbled with approval. Belle gave a dazzling smile. With a trace of jealousy, Ramsey knew that Belle admired this brand of courtesy sitting so well on the tanned and rugged features. A man of
thirty-five, a paterfamilias far from his familia. Some decades back, Belle would have eaten him without salt.

  Saved by the generation gap, the man talked to them while they drank. He hoped that the visit to the summer station would not be too painful for Mrs Leeming, nor for Mr Ramsey, to whom this glacier was unhappily known. He thought that it might help if he told them in greater detail the background to the … the event. A team of ice physicists from Colorado were interested in a range of ice properties that could not as readily be studied by drilling an ice-core as by working on the sides of an open pit. He implied that the ice properties under examination were of a venerable if not too practical scientific nature. The radioactivity of snow contaminated with thermonuclear fallout; the regularity of strata in a glacier; dating snow by the study of its hydrogen and oxygen isotopes; stress and movement. For the sake of examining stress, the pit would be marked and covered when the ice men had finished their summer studies, and revisited the next year.

  So the pit was dug to a depth of nearly sixty feet, one side terraced and provided with aluminium ladders.

  “There are patterns in ice,” the lieutenant said, “even in moving ice. A peculiar conformation was spotted, just above head height. The wall was probed with a pick, and a series of objects were uncovered.”

  Knowledge of having behaved with respect pushed down the officer’s lids. In the man was apparent a certain feeling of kindred towards Leeming: wreath-laying fervour at its best. If Ramsey had not gropingly cuckolded Leeming and passively murdered him, it would have been possible for him to be touched.

  “We knew about Leeming and his Australians,” admitted the lieutenant. “It was pretty clear what this debris might mean. The pit was closed immediately. Another one, a little upstream, was dug for the use of the scientists.”

  He ended by saying that before they all visited the grave of a brave man he would like to express his pleasure at being of aid to his widow.

  There recurred in Ramsey an amazement that had become familiar during the past eight days: that the concrete world—an odd pattern of ice deep down—kept verifying what, he believed in his guts, had taken place on a higher or lower or beyond plane of being.

  He had let his coffee go tepid, and drank it with distaste. Others were already pulling on outer coats and sun-glasses, and zipping furry hoods to the nose.

  “Isn’t he kind?” Belle asked him loudly. She would spend her last days praising American graciousness which, by cultivating all the apt emotions, had very likely conjured up in her a wistful and not unpleasant feeling for her own widowhood.

  Beyond the double door the light flared in their faces. Ramsey fumbled for his sun-glasses and blundered into hock-deep furrows made by the wind. It seemed that at contact with these crusty seams, sickening memories surged in the soles of his feet. All he could hear were boots hissing through the rind of the glacier. Glare robbed him of his sense of up and down, of ridge and hollow. But for a litter of crates, but for the black line of mountains on the left, there would have been no perspectives.

  The pit was marked by a windlass and four red flags on bamboo. A small petrol-motored winch chuffed unattended. Beyond the windlass, a sailor with a hand-model radio waited for communiques from below.

  “The edges are presumed to be firm,” said the lieutenant. “But don’t go too close.”

  At once the cameramen danced forward for footage of the burial pit. Hammond and his brothers stretched their necks for a view, on one side, of the blue-white terraces and, on the other, of the straight, blue-grained depth that was the wall. Ramsey and Belle edged least of all, taking quick, wary squints that sensed but did not verify a hint of fluorescence at the bottom, where the digging soundlessly went on.

  The officer called across the mouth. “Anything?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  He came to Belle’s side and within earshot of Ramsey. “We can’t afford to be too hopeful. I hope you don’t mind those people.…” He gestured obliquely at the pressmen. “I suppose it’s their version of reverence. But things are being done better down below.”

  Belle nodded. Weak in the knees, cringing within, Ramsey still heeded how the slow, weighty nod signified grief in the fibre, grief taken in and made so intimately part of her essence that tears were beside the point.

  Awed by her, the lieutenant led the press team back to the edges of the site and left both mourners huddled in remembrance. Forced thus to take his passive part in the tableau, Ramsey listened to the murmur of shutter mechanisms somewhere behind him. In the name of networks, the pious moment was recorded.

  “Belle,” said Ramsey, forestalled by the whirring voice of public opinion at his back from speaking as ironically as he should, “do you think, perhaps, after all this, you ought to take a rest indoors?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was even. “Isn’t it startling the way one’s glasses ice up on the insides?”

  What, of course, he feared from Leeming’s removal, was a change in the essence of his life, a change as absolute as death. His fear felt strangely deep, as if room was left on upper levels for a show of politeness to the press and a thin crust of sanity. Modified hope and disappointment had simultaneously risen in him, now that he had seen the icecap that sat on Leeming, the barrenness of the pit, the poor tools to hand.

  So he answered the questions of the pressmen, all the while playing with what was a grotesquely diverse lunch to be served on a glacier—rice and meatballs, slaw and chilli, corn and peas. When they asked him what he had thought when he saw the pit he managed them without panic.

  “I was numb,” he murmured. “Please.…”

  “Yeah,” they agreed, understanding all and nothing. They would drain him in season. For the moment, they tried more chilli.

  There were glaciologists, too, at table, men from the neighbour pit to Leeming’s. Like the sailors who came in for coffee, they were going home soon, their data complete, their kudos increased, carrying stuffed penguins for their kids—made-in-New-Jersey penguins that were sold in the PX at McMurdo. The season had been looted of its best days; no presumption gripped the mess that anything more would be yielded up. The atmosphere of coming departure soothed Ramsey.

  The lieutenant came round, telling his guests that their helicopter had just left McMurdo Sound.

  All lumbered to the pit again. The mourning party of Belle, Ramsey, and the officer went ahead; the witnesses followed. Deserts were suggested by the harsh afternoon light, the winch made small, dry noises, drew up a hodful of ice, and dumped it on the north side of the pit. Helped by such tired sounds, Ramsey sensed the presence of all the elements that go to make a non-event. He might not have been able to itemize them, yet they subsisted in the perduring light, in the afternoon that would not end but grow to dusk at midnight, in the unzealous mechanisms detailed for the dead’s recovery, in the shuffle of sixteen inexpectant feet. There would be no apt resurrection today, at Ramsey’s feet and Belle’s. No flair for the appropriate resided in the corpse: perhaps Ramsey had visited the glacier simply to verify the powerlessness of those remains. If he felt let down by the fact he felt also reprieved, readmitted to the warm nastiness of the concrete world. What especially appealed to him was that he would use the return page of his Melbourne-Christchurch air-ticket, that it had validity to bring him back from the zone of metamorphosis.

  There was a large youth pouncing towards them at the trot who stood at last before the lieutenant. Urgent mutterings shuttled between the two of them. Ramsey heard the boy say, “… so hard they’re digging round it with their hands.”

  The officer spoke to Belle, who gave quick, acquiescent nods as if she was one of the lieutenant’s men. “I’m going down,” the lieutenant then said aloud. “There seems to be something.… This man will take you all on to the pit.”

  Immediately Hammond was at Ramsey’s elbow.

  “Alec, what was it he said? Are there indications …?”

  Ramsey’s legs seemed gone. He felt himself to be fettered
in the viscous manner of dreams.

  “He’s gone down to see. Oh, ghouls rejoice!”

  “They will indeed,” said Hammond, presuming easily that Ramsey was making a judgment on a national basis. Ramsey turned his back.

  Before him the pit gave out thin metallic noises of haste rising to the surface with something like a fluid speed. Like a clockwork ascension. He felt some iron bubble of panic fly up from his belly and stick at the narrow gate of his throat. Yet even as the clamour reached climax he mocked his lack of reason. Was it, he asked himself, the crude possibility of an ice-harrowed Leeming rising in his sight, flat and brown as a Byzantine Christ?

  It proved to be the lieutenant on the ladder. Before fully emerged he began broadcasting orders; the evening watch to be roused, recovery gear to be fetched. And a chair for Mrs Leeming. At glacier level he peered concernedly at Belle and asked her if she was wise to remain. Momentarily, Belle’s face crumpled, an old page licked by flame. One tear was given off by her left eye.

  “Well?” she said.

  “It seems this is it.”

  “Seems?” She sounded brisk.

  The officer sighed. “It’s him. No doubt at all.”

  “How does he seem? Crushed?”

  “He’s completely done up in a sleeping-bag. He doesn’t look big.…”

  “He was only five foot nine,” Belle explained.

  “That’s right,” said the lieutenant. “In answer to your question, Mrs Leeming, everything seems normal.”

  There was silence. Once more the pit seemed to Ramsey to be supremely unproductive. His disbelief became a medicinal balance to the authentic panic in his blood, a counterweight called forth perhaps by his desire not to be judged mad. So no one judged him mad as he strolled across the glacier.

  “Belle,” he said into Belle’s ear, “you have to stop this comedy.”