The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  Past midnight, the mickey mouse club was packed with sorrowful American boys, most too self-pitying to care about more than the flock of Swedish girls who offered sex and sympathy with certain conditions. Israel was quick to claim a booth near the Christmas tree, on the opposite side of the room from the panderers and gangsters. Israel signaled Earle, who was nursing a bandaged left arm from the evening’s combat, to insert his bulk and to wave his wound in order to open up the table enough for Peregrine and Guy close behind. Israel then volunteered to struggle through the crowd to the bar for beer, mostly because he hoped to catch the attention of his heartthrob, the poetess Molly Rogers. This raised the issue of finance. Peregrine groaned, emptying his parka of a few wormy krona and a carefully wrapped love letter. Earle said he had fifty k. somewhere, reaching with his bad arm. Guy stopped him, then carefully poked to produce Earle’s billfold, which had only thirty k., Earle having forgotten he had paid the penalty on their late rent that afternoon. Peregrine sank deeper into his seat to reread his letter.

  Israel returned without Molly Rogers. Guy took note of Israel’s longing. Israel changed the subject, seizing upon the evening’s game and Earle’s wound, the result of a well-thrown but untimely cross-check. Israel then produced a four-day-old copy of The New York Times that he had bartered American cigarettes for at the rink, and the four turned to debate more somber games. They never talked ice hockey in those days, when there were the totems of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to curse. Besides, the Slothbaden Berserkers did not play ice hockey; they played “goon.” It was the American influence. The American and Canadian National Hockey League was a joke but also a fad in Sweden. Guy and Earle, having attended an NHL training camp before they were drafted, shipped to Vietnam as riflemen, tempted to commit crimes and to desert, were celebrities because of their supposed talents at “gooning.” Guy hit and scored. Earle just hit and hit. Violent as the Berserkers seemed, however, especially with bearish Earle on defense feeding Guy flying on the right wing, they still played a boy’s game. Off the ice, the bruises were badges of showmanship, not reminders of brutality. That night in late 1973, the beer hall was filled with young men who carried permanently the scars of true brutality. Israel once told me that the only time as a young man he had not cared about what happened to the New York Rangers was the year before, when President Nixon, and his prime minister, Henry Kissinger, had ordered bombers over Hanoi for Christmas.

  The news from New York was promising. Kissinger, a strong man and a liar, had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo two weeks before (on my birthday). His co-winner, Le Due Tho, a Vietnamese strong man and liar, had shunned the affair altogether. Israel announced to Earle that getting the Nobel Peace Prize was a jinx equivalent to being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Earle, who encouraged others to think of him as slow-witted, which was not true, said he liked Israel’s idea. Guy grumbled about Israel condescending to Earle, and then opined that Israel was failing to take a dangerous man seriously just because he was Jewish. The Jews, Guy pressed, were less absurd and more effective than Israel allowed. Guy was of French-Canadian descent from the very poorest section of upper Vermont. He had a compact, quick, rugged body and a similar disposition. He also had a bitter sense of history and was a thorough radical libertarian, bred in the same mountains that gave America the romantic anarchists who followed Guy’s personal saint, Ethan Allen. Guy was an advocate of the violent overthrow of all governments. His opinion was to hang them before they hanged you. Israel shrugged at Guy. This was their oldest, most comfortable argument. Israel knew that he took Jews seriously, especially German Jews like his own father and like Henry Kissinger. Israel shifted the flow of the dialogue, with one staccato reading of a headline and lead paragraph, to the ongoing tragedy of Richard M. Nixon, president of the United States of America for the last fifty-nine months.

  “Never nail him, not as long as he’s got the tapes and we’ve got the Senate,” said Peregrine. Father referred to the amazing story that Nixon had tape-recorded himself in his own secret chambers as he conspired to subvert the constitution of the Republic he was sworn on a Bible to defend to the death. The story is much longer, of course, most of the rest propaganda for subsequent petty tyrants. I admit my impatience. It was a long time ago, and though Nixon’s reign meant everything for my family’s fate, it seems to me now more folly than tragedy. No, that is unfair to my father: Nixon was ruin for him and his friends, was the immediate cause of their agony in exile.

  “I’m not sure anymore,” said Israel to Peregrine, sniffing the front page of the newspaper for what he called “the odor of corruption.” Israel added, “Nixon’s not straight no more.”

  “Like he took a shot in the head?” said Earle.

  “Yeah, puck in the chops,” said Israel. “I’m hopeful.”

  “I don’t see any hope,” said Peregrine. “It is what it is—”

  “—when it is,” finished Israel, scowling. He was annoyed with Peregrine. Father had soured on them. His heart was breaking, because his heart belonged to an American woman he was not permitted—a “full-stomach nightmare” according to Israel—namely, Miss Charity Bentham.

  Of a sudden, Timothy the folk singer squeezed through to the table, sat like a pixie on Earle’s huge knee.

  “You owe me ten k.,” said Israel, palm up.

  “Got some news I was thinking I could trade for my debt,” said Timothy. “You guys might not like it. Deal?”

  “English there,” said Israel. “You speak it, we speak it.”

  “Deal then,” said Timothy. “A little Ingrid came in about nine holding a real live baby-manger-type infant. Asked Felix about a tall Yank with a red beard, wears Irish caps, makes phone calls.”

  “Dear God,” said Israel.

  “What is this?” said Peregrine.

  “Maybe I saw her before,” said Timothy. “Maybe nine months back, climbing out of a phone booth with you.”

  “This is no lie?” said Peregrine.

  “Would I sit on the animal and jive you guys?” said Timothy.

  “What happened to her?” said Peregrine.

  “She went to the back. I saw her sit in a phone booth, the phone booth, you know? That was a while ago,” said Timothy.

  “Slow, slow, slow,” said Israel to Peregrine.

  “I’ll go,” said Peregrine heavily, resignedly.

  “We all go,” said Israel. The four made a wedge through the swirling revelry. They found me asleep beneath the seat upon which I had been conceived. I was soaking and hungry, but I slept unbothered by the racket of revolution around me. I slept as deeply as a human being can sleep that close to innocence. I slept in anticipation of the fabulous, which did arrive, in the guise of four weary Americans in exile from everything but their heart’s truth.

  I have often wondered, had I cried out before Father found me—because I was willful and not really innocent at all—whether someone might have become annoyed enough to call the authorities, who would then have surrendered me back to Grandfather and thence, stamp, stamp, to strangers. I might now be a clerk, or a fisherman, or a choir singer—anyone. It was an early dose of incomprehensible luck.

  I have also always wondered where Lamba had gone. One possibility is that she left me there, safe and asleep, in order to search the beer hall for Peregrine, no simple quest for a homeless beauty amid drunken ne’er-do-wells. Another possibility is that she was standing outside the telephone booth watching over me through the glass, watching for Father’s red beard and Irish cap above the crowd. Either way, she certainly kept close by. Perhaps, when she spotted Peregrine and his friends standing aghast outside the booth, she realized there was no need to intervene. And there is the vital consideration that Lamba might have known what was going to happen to me. I mean all of it, from telephone booth to telephone booth to finish, which even I am yet to know. Mother claimed she could see into the future, could, as the Norse said, thieve time. I have never doubted her. Nor have I ever doubted t
hat Mother saw Father open that telephone booth before she left me.

  My rescuers were stunned into an awkward candor. Peregrine groaned the more. Israel gestured to heaven and consoled Peregrine. Earle scooped me up and cradled me in his sling. Guy pawed me in order to determine my sex. He was rewarded with a small piece of paper tucked in my linen, upon which was printed the following information, in English: “I am Grim Fiddle.”

  My Father

  ONE is too easily tempted to reconstruct one’s conception, birth, and childhood. I have indulged the former two; I shall not the latter. My childhood was decent, not entirely logical, and as loving as one could wish. After lengthy lamentations, Peregrine did keep me, his bastard blond son. In so doing, he later admitted, he kept his sanity as well, and his three comrades. I provided those four pilgrims what they lacked much more than money or security. I gave them purpose. Peregrine, Israel, Guy, and Earle bound themselves together to become my family. And with the generous help of more maternal sorts, such as Molly Rogers, we survived the torrents of the Vietnam war and the torpor of what came after, which was no peace.

  On the last day of April 1975, Peregrine’s twenty-seventh birthday. the last helicopter lifted off the top of the besieged American Embassy in South Vietnam, thus finishing more than twenty years of American war-making in Indochina. Thereafter political chicanery obliged Nixon’s successors to offer duplicitous amnesty to the thousands of American men who had chosen jail or exile rather than complicity in the illegal (Israel said “unconstitutional”) American war in Vietnam. I have no need for more specificity other than to report that Father and his friends had spit in the eye of the bald eagle once and were not shy to do so again when that bald eagle offered, in its talons, a remorseless deal. My family would not concede there was any justice in the deceitful posture of the Republic that had driven them into exile. They swore on Bibles, on newspaper headlines, and on a petition of redress that we posted to the White House, signed in our blood (mine, too, though I was just three), that we would not go home again until the government of the United States of America admitted its crimes, arrested and prosecuted the true traitors, saboteurs. and assassins, and repatriated us with the respect due us. This may seem vainglorious and naive. It was. My family was bound to, and trapped in, its highest ideals. We were right. America was wrong. My family was hardly the first that has had to endure exile long after the causes of alienation have been obliterated by historical revisionism. I refer to the bulk of the American public. I refer to the Jews.

  I also admit that my family’s decision to remain in Stockholm was not entirely ideological. Guv and Earle were wanted by the sheriff of an American army infantry division in connection with the suspicious deaths of an American MP and a Vietnamese policeman in Saigon in 1972. The details were ambiguous and tragic. And Peregrine and Israel were wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for questioning in connection with a theft of services from Pan American airlines and with the reckless endangerment of several flight attendants—a hunting knife was involved—on a flight out of Kennedy International Airport in 1972. These details were also ambiguous and tragic. My family needed sanctuary as long as it was available. Some might have said they were criminals. They thought of themselves as fugitives. They were my family, and I loved them dearly.

  We lived secretively in a slummy rented apartment (no one challenged them about me, but they worried continually—I was their shrine) in Stockholm’s foreign quarter, until Guy and Earle secured enough money against future gooning for Eystein to rent us a dilapidated double house near the ice rink. Later, through a poet friend of Molly Rogers’s named Orri Fljotson, Peregrine and Israel were introduced to a wealthy and mysterious art dealer, Thord Horshead. Thord had many secrets, the very least of which was that he was one of the two ringleaders of a Baltic smuggling enterprise, running liquor, small arms, and wonder drugs into heavily-tariffed Scandinavia and not infrequently through the Iron Curtain. There was never anything concealed about Thord’s attitude toward me, for he smothered me with generosity and patience. He overcame Peregrine’s objections and moved us all into the back wing of a sprawling manse he maintained at the edge of Stockholm as an art gallery and, covertly, a shipping and receiving office. For many years, Thord’s benevolence went unanalyzed but not unappreciated. We might not have survived without him. Thord was our protector. He was also our link to Swedish culture, as he introduced us to the most exotic elements of a society we defensively skirted.

  Thord was the one who advanced Peregrine and Israel the capital to enjoin their first and last attempt at American entrepreneurship, a summer camp for boys called Let’s Go Viking! I have forgotten whose idea it was, why exactly it failed. It is enough to say that Peregrine and Israel administered, for ten years, a summer camp for American children mostly of Norse extraction whose parents wished to indulge their offspring in the legends of the Vikings. Israel explained to me that American parents did not provide their children with real childhoods when a safe fake one was available for a price. In America, Israel said, it was called “preparation” and was most desirable when most extravagant. He must have had it right, for with just a few advertisements in American magazines, we collected a bag of applications. Using Thord’s legal status as a prestigious art dealer and his extralegal apparatus as a smuggler, Peregrine and Israel purchased a rundown wharf and abandoned buildings in Vexbeggar, a Swedish fishing village some leagues south of Stockholm. Vexbeggar was appropriate for an ersatz Viking camp, because it had already been converted by speculators from an antique cluster of shacks into a summertime resort for indolent captains of industry. My maternal people had lost their famous sense of austerity somewhere in the late twentieth century’s political compromises between the left, the right, and what Israel called the lazy and had become—for several fleeting decades of luxury—little more than swindlers and malingerers. Vexbeggar’s town fathers regarded Let’s Go Viking! as crass American profiteering. I feel there was envy, too, at least initially, because one of the reasons we failed was the yearly increases in tax assessments.

  Peregrine and Israel, through Thord, purchased costumes, a forge, a small trawler rigged as a yawl, an imitation of a six-meter Viking boat called a karfi that Thord had found at a Norse carnival, and all the other props necessary to fashion the camp of a make-believe Viking chieftain—we called him Gruff-the-Ruff—circa the eleventh century a.d. It was historical when it had to be, but was mostly a Viking camp in the same manner, I was told, that a famous American amusement park had re-created other historical tableaux called Frontierland and Jungleland, and my favorite, though I suspect Israel made this up, Ghettoland.

  I do not mock our Vikingland, because it provided me with a childhood entirely of fantasy and fun. When summer came, with its white nights and warm Baltic breeze, I became the most precocious student of Let’s Go Viking! More, I worked hard to help Peregrine and Israel hold the attention of the tedious, hollow boys we attracted. I soon grew more expert than my mentors and was by the end a snob in all matters Norse. With my mind free of modern education (I did not legally exist, so they did not dare enroll me in school), it was the happiest course for me to fill it with the arcane lore of what is called the Age of Migration. I lived what Peregrine could only show me, what Israel could only give me books about. I made myself into a spear-chucking, boat-making, sword-swinging, rune-carving, cain-raising warrior. The truth was, I had within me the genesis of a full-blooded shape-changer. Back then, however, it was all joy and spontaneity, nothing dark.

  During the long winters in Stockholm, my self-education was supplemented with the curiosities of my family, which, being kind, American, and frozen in boyishness by an accident of history, mitigated my infidel urges actually to go Viking. In my daydreams, I plundered Faeroe Islands merchantmen, razed Saxon farmsteads from John O’ Groats to Land’s End. But daylong, I was obliged to endure Earle’s opera records, Guy’s stories of dashing French triumphs, Israel’s Socratic philosophizing about things in gener
al, and Peregrine’s reading aloud of the great and, as he said, “correct” novels of the world. Sometimes it sounded like D’Artagnan playing Twenty Questions with Huck Finn (the most Norse of American heroes), but I did acquire a wider view of life than permitted by Icelandic sagas. In all, my family tried to culture me. I think now they probably pushed me further into my fantasies. They thought me too much fun to control with measured strokes. And once I had acquainted them with my grandest notion, they readily cooperated, helping to transform me into a chubbycheeked, ruddy-faced, curly-locked miniature of Beowulf Himself, slayer of Grendel and mother, hero of Viking heroes. If I seem less than a twenty-first-century man than should be the case, if I seem one whose thought is quaint, anachronistic, misinformed, out of step, I reply that I learned how to shape a short sword on an open forge before I learned how to work a telephone, that I charted the exploits of the Norse from Scandinavia to Iceland, Greenland, Markland, Helluland, and Vinland before I learned that Christopher Colombus was a Jew (according to Israel). And thinking back now, there was a most fortuitous result to my eccentric education: it was that during my Norse studies I tentatively solved the puzzle set by Mother—whom none of us then knew or knew whereof—when she exclaimed, at my conception, the Norse name “Skallagrim Strider!”

  The boys’ camp closed. Sadder, Earle, badly injured in a fist-fight with the Trondheim Trolls, had to miss three seasons. Eystein did not believe in sick leave. At home, Earle was vexed by his back and disconsolate with Guy away for weeks at a time; he calmed himself by teaching me everything he knew about ice hockey. My passion for the Viking Age was displaced by the thrill of learning how to handle a two-on-one breakout, when I was the one defenseman and the two were twinkle-toed Canucks, the only people besides the Norse who live for ice hockey. I was growing quickly, developing to Earle’s delight along the lines of a bulwark defenseman—trunk-legged, wide-hipped, long-armed, supple and very solid on ice. Earle trained me exhaustively. He said he thought he had discovered the answer to the right and left wings of the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL, a supreme compliment. It frustrated him hard, then, that I could not live on ice. We were pressed for funds, despite Thord’s munificence, and I had to work parttime jobs with Peregrine and Israel. Guy was our only reliable provider, and it was never quite sufficient, what with Earle’s physical therapy expenses. Guy was selfless; his money could not lift his despondency. Even given that he could not make the overseas road trips with the Berserkers, it was the rare month that he could spend a fortnight with us and Earle. It was true that Guy loved Earle above all things temporal, and that Earle loved Guy above all things temporal. I say this because it was not for many years that I learned their love was considered by polite society (not us, to be sure) to be unnatural. When I did discover—from other boys at pickup hockey games—that love between men, homosexual love, is considered sick, I was confronted by one of my first adult mysteries. Nature is creation, I argued with Peregrine and Israel, and creation is all there is, so how can what is be unnatural? Peregrine would shake his head and Israel would laugh.