EPILOGUE
No trace was ever found of Moira and the five other people who floated off in the after half of the League of Nations. There were dubious reports of sightings, from places as far away as northern Siberia, Iceland, and the coast of Virginia. The fisherman in Iceland even described the banner hanging from the broken tail, but he may have read about this in the newspaper. In Louisiana there were rumors of the mysterious notes of a trumpet heard faintly far overhead, but nature experts attributed this to migrating trumpeter swans from Canada.
Almost two years after the wreck of the League of Nations, a peasant in Lapland was scouring his pasture for stones when he saw a glittering object in the grass at his feet. It was a small gold lady’s wristwatch encrusted with diamonds. The local jeweler wound it up and tapped it on his worktable, and the hands began to move. In the end, it was donated to the local museum, to be displayed along with the caribou antlers and the collection of Lapp folk art.
Although the weak radio signals of the League of Nations survivors were heard in Trondheim, it was four weeks before they were rescued. They were far into the ice pack and it was impossible for ships to approach until later in the summer. A courageous aviator landed his plane on the ice near the wreckage, bringing medical supplies and a better radio, but crashed the plane on landing and had to sit out the wait with the rest of them.
Under the direction of Chief Engineer Lieutenant Günther, the survivors made tents out of the impermeable material of the gas bags. For fuel they had the gasoline in the dirigible’s tanks. The plane brought a rifle and ammunition, and Günther shot several seals with it and then a polar bear. The chefs set up a kitchen in a tent and stewed the meat in cauldrons carried out of the airship’s galley. The wine and beer lasted for quite a while. Finally a Soviet icebreaker broke through to them. Günther saw it first and shouted, and the rest of them turned to see the gray shape with its two tall funnels inching slowly toward them in the mist. The Russian sailors walked toward them wearing sheepskin parkas and broad smiles.
Without their leader, the members of the Guild dispersed. The Vestals and the Frieze stayed together for a while, living in lodgings in London. They had sexual relations freely. The Guild of Love became for them a dim dream, a barely remembered episode in their lives when they had gone temporarily mad, if delightfully so. Sometimes they asked themselves if they had really believed in Gioconda, and they concluded that they had believed in it in the way the hypnotized person believes he is drinking wine when he is really drinking water, or believes that the grinning hypnotist whom he kisses on the lips is really his beloved mistress. Yet who can gainsay those moments of bliss when his lips meet hers? Our lives are lived in the mind; all events are mental. Moira’s followers in the world, those who had not accompanied her on the ill-fated voyage, knew where she was. She was with Swedenborg. There is no death. God is Love. Time and space are but the figments of the disordered consciousness of man. Moira is encased in a silver cylinder with pointed ends, far aloft where the rays of the stars glister like hyacinths.
During the Second World War, Günther was a major general in the German Air Force, with a desk job in Berlin. He was decorated by the Führer for his efficiency. In 1943 there was a small show of his paintings in the Reichs Chancellery, along with the artwork of other government employees. Erwin became a Luftwaffe bomber pilot and participated in several raids over the London he visited briefly in 1926. He eventually ran into the tether cable of a barrage balloon and was decapitated by it at a thousand feet in the air. For the others, Joan Esterel joined the Catholic Church and became a Sister of the Amaranthine Order in a convent in New Mexico. Bella and Benicia Lake formed a vaudeville act, playing the piano and singing duets in theaters all over the world. Romer Goult became the manager of a sulfur mine on his family land in Venezuela. He studied mining engineering, supervised the operations, and kept the books for the company which in time became quite prosperous, especially when the Second World War enormously increased the demand for sulfur, which is used in explosives. His father looked on from the porch of his house. His mother grew fatter and more moist as the years passed. Eliza, his wife, did medical work among the families of the miners. They had one child, Anibal, named after an ancestor of Romer’s mother in Spain.
As for the Captain, the doctors tried to fix his broken leg, but it had set crooked during the weeks he lay on the ice. It hurt him and he limped for the rest of his life. He briefly tried life in Berlin, but found that the development of political events in the Thirties made him want to throw up. The one bright moment of this period of his life was when, browsing in a pawnshop near the Alexanderplatz, he caught sight of a plain aluminum ring in a case of jewelry. He turned it over to identify it, then bought it for a few marks, slipped it onto his finger, and stole out of the shop as though he were afraid that someone might stop him.
He took a room in a boarding house in Nice, but found that the French Riviera was too expensive for him. After that he lived briefly in Tangiers, Casablanca, and Dakar, where he had a misunderstanding with the authorities that cost him a good deal of his savings. He ended up in Rio de Janeiro in a small house on a hill, in a working class district. He made a few attempts to learn Portuguese but gave up; after that he lived the life of a hermit, speaking to no one.
And there we find him, lost in his memories, searching over them like a man trying to find his possessions in the wreck of his house. He doesn’t read and he has nothing in particular to do with himself. An old woman comes in to cook his meals on a charcoal brazier and sweep the house with a Cinderella broom. He is content to sit on a splayed wicker chair on his terrace and look out at the sea. Musing through his half-closed lids, he sees a cloud in the sky forming into a giant fish. Its tail fins dissolve, its pregnant belly falls off, and a hole appears in its midriff. It is only vapor and smoke. The hum of great engines that he hears comes from the stone of the knife sharpener next door. For some time he has had his eye on the knife sharpener’s son, a strapping lad of twenty, but he knows that the rest of his body is as broken as his leg. He sleeps a great deal. In his dreams he is Georg, a bad boy. We must believe him to be happy.
Ray Orphis
Donald Heiney (MacDonald Harris was a pseudonym) was born in South Pasadena, California in 1921. He published seventeen novels (including The Balloonist, which was nominated for a National Book Award in 1976); a nonfiction book on sailing; and a large number of scholarly books on comparative literature. He taught writing for many years at the University of California, Irvine. In 1982, he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Sciences for the sum of his work, and in 1985, he received a Special Achievement Award from the PEN Los Angeles Center. He died in 1993.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR AVAILABLE FROM THE OVERLOOK PRESS
THE BALLOONIST
by MacDonald Harris
with an Introduction by Philip Pullman
978-1-59020-980-6 • $14.95 • PAPERBACK
“Every so often, one discovers a novel that simply stays with you,
that haunts your imagination for days after it’s closed and put back
on the shelf. The Balloonist is that kind of book.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“What a joy it is to read this book, so full of the spirit of adventure! … A
delightful, quirky novel, The Balloonist is written in a dancing prose that
matches the excitement of the enterprise. Brilliant.” —Wall Street Journal
nter>
The Carp Castle Page 31