The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  “We are doing Christ’s work,” he said, going below abruptly. I pursued, found him greeting Charity and Peregrine. He seemed guileless, simpleminded. Peregrine smiled at him, looked at me and said, “Be careful.” Father Hospital and I went up again, came upon Lazarus explaining to Cleopatra what he thought of The Free Gift of God. She called over Father Hospital and Father Novo Pedro, then tried to interrogate them: how long had they been here, where had they come from, what they hoped to accomplish. They replied with fragments of mystical evasiveness until Father Hospital took Cleopatra’s hand, asked her how long it had been since she had made confession. Cleopatra answered flatly, “Five years,” and then she lowered her head and added, “and one month.” It had not occurred to me that she had been raised Roman Catholic. I did realize then that she had made her last confession before her father’s murder.

  Before we got down into Black Crane, Lazarus took me aside. I was pleased he seemed to trust me; he had not wanted to tell Cleopatra everything, yet needed someone to tell. “It’s a stink over there,” he said. “These people, refugees maybe, are down below. We kept clear of the hatches. There is something wrong.” I recognized a deep agitation in Lazarus, fear mixed with disgust, and I touched him in sympathy. He pushed me away. I noticed that Grandfather was also agitated. He made the two missionaries sit before him in Black Crane, told them through Gizur not to talk to his crew. As we shoved off, I mentioned to Lazarus my puzzlement at what could have moved Israel to send for Grandfather.

  The answer was that The Free Gift of God was an open grave. It reeked of human waste and putrefaction. We staggered aboard using a cargo net flung over from a plank at the waist. Other missionaries greeted us, more pleasantries and polite invitations, particularly to a chapel on the foredeck. Grandfather rebuffed them with a blast. We found Israel and Guy on the quarterdeck; they looked stunned, ashen, terrified. Israel said that he and Guy had just returned from the captain’s quarters, where they had interviewed the missionaries’ leader, Father Saint Stephen.

  “They’re all insane,” said Israel.

  “They pray over them,” said Guy. “You should see it below, hundreds of people! And foodstuffs! In crates, anything you want, medicine, tools, grain. It sits there, rotting, for the rats! They pray over them. Some of those things down there have torn at the crates. Nothing is being done! You ask them why they don’t feed them, and nothing!”

  “They say they’re doing Christ’s work,” I said.

  At this, Grandfather turned to Otter Ransom, said, “Secure Black Crane. Clear the deck of those priests. None of them near your men. You and Tall Troll get below and mark the goods still worthwhile. Check that hoist.” There was a pause, Otter Ransom looking to see if Israel agreed. Guy said, in a pale protest to Grandfather’s presumption, that Father Saint Stephen had offered us whatever we wanted. Grandfather ignored Israel and Guy, pointed to the mast behind us, told Orlando the Black, “Find an ax and get that down. I’ll want the top forty feet.”

  You can t do that!” said Israel to Grandfather directly, in Swedish.

  “How long have they been here?” said Grandfather.

  “They didn’t say,” said Israel, in English to me.

  “This ship will never leave this anchorage,” said Grandfather.

  ‘Reason with him,” Israel told me. I struggled with a translation of Israel’s concerns.

  “Where is this priest who has frightened you children?” said Grandfather. Israel balked, straining to understand Grandfather’s withering Swedish. Grandfather continued, “You think him as mad as me, is that so, Jew? Now you need me. Not because you deserted your country and lived where you were not wanted, not because you forced me to save a fiend who deserved the blade. None of that! You need me because you see the darkness that you have cowered in for decades, and you begin to see what it has come to. To this! I do not intend to hold you up. And I would not help you or your Sodomites if not that you have filled my Grim with a child’s need of you, and you use him against me. Look hard, Jew. This ship is no Babylon. At most, it is a hole for Balaam. You are a small, weak, cowardly, unrepentant, faithless man. Show me this priest you fear. I shall show you what he is, and that he is as sane as me, and more sane than you!”

  Israel was stiff with rage. Guy tried to soothe him. Grandfather bellowed at Orlando the Black about how to cut the mast for use on Angel of Death. This was a naked display of his lack of limits, his cruelty. He dizzied us. We stumbled about him: Guy begging me to shut him up; Lazarus and Orlando the Black conferring secretly in opposition to everyone. Father Novo Pedro appeared and saved us further misery, saying that his brother, Father Saint Stephen, begged a meeting with “the Lutheran.” When I told him, Grandfather clapped his hands, told me to follow, was gone with Father Novo Pedro. I looked to Guy, who said I could go, he would take charge on deck. I said that even I could not handle Grandfather when he was like this. Lazarus surprised me by saying he would accompany me, touching his belt oddly, threateningly. Israel pushed Guy away, looked at me and Lazarus, disdainful of our concern for him, saying, “I’m not afraid of that bully! I’ve got more backbone than any fanatic.”

  Israel led me and Lazarus into the gangway. He stopped abruptly, turned to me, defensive, tense. I sensed he was competing for me, and I felt sad for it. He told me that he had made a bad mistake, out of rashness, when he invited Grandfather over here, that only the shock of what they had found could explain his stupidity. He said Grandfather was a savage man, capable of any crime. He felt responsible for protecting these pathetic people from him. Israel was in a killing mood himself. I had watched him deteriorate since Stockholm. I am ashamed now that I had become more trusting of Grandfather’s patriarchal brutality than Israel’s enlightened humanity. To be fair to Israel, Molly’s pregnancy was a disabling fact. Israel seemed to suffer more than she with each new peril. Several times I came upon him belowdecks sitting with Peregrine and Charity; he was pale, weepy, withdrawn, seemingly inconsolable. I had tried to conceal that I was increasingly suspicious of his opinions. I was not the only one to waver before Israel’s weaknesses. Guy and Lazarus openly challenged him at our councils, even Earle—whose broken health undermined Guy’s confidence in the same way Molly’s listlessness did Israel’s—spoke against Israel’s pronouncements.

  Israel told me before Port Praia that he thought what was happening to us—what I have described as falling from the inside to the outside—made no sense, was neither a judgment of us nor inevitable. He said he did not hate Grandfather, nor did he blame him for our condition; he said that he was certain the opposition he had encountered all his life was not organized, nor of a piece, nor did it have a face. He also denied my talk of luck. He said, “I keep going, we keep on, because we believe we’re decent and right and honest. There is no protection for us if we lose that conviction. That will be the end.”

  I wonder now about that man, Israel Elfers, who loved me from that first moment I lay in Earle’s arms in the mickey mouse club, who helped to raise me happily, who taught me what he believed in above all else—decency—who played the gentle uncle for me so effortlessly that it was not until my five years of exile in Vexbeggar that I appreciated what a gift it is to have such parenting: ever patient, ever earnest, never ponderous or heavyhanded. Israel talked to me continually as I grew up. He drenched me with wit, wisdom, and plain fun. When I think of him now, I think of a man in motion, hands waving, eyes darting, a flood of talk—an endless monologue. Israel talked most easily when musing about himself. And before any other kind of portraiture, he described himself as a Jew. A man’s idea of himself has weight. Israel’s idea was that he was first, always, lastly, a Jew. He also said he was both profoundly comforted and profoundly worried by his birthright. He toyed with the word chosen, as in the Jews being God’s chosen people. For a quirk that I never penetrated, Israel laughed every time he said that God had chosen the Jews. I can guess that it suggested an irony to him that he preferred to illustrate with those romantic, m
elodramatic, sometime operatic stories he told about the struggles of the Jews since, as he said, God exiled them from Eden, abandoned Adam and Eve to homelessness and temptations. Indeed, so many of the best stories I remember from childhood were Israel’s parables about fantastic Jewish reversals, epic Jewish displacements, beastly Jewish persecutions, that I suspect that much of my ability to confront the sorrow in my story derives not from my Norse learning, rather from my borrowings and innovations of what Israel told me of Jewish history.

  Yet there is more to say of him, and there was more mystery to him, than whatever he finally meant to communicate with the idea of Jewishness. He was smart, cagey, kindhearted, political, secretive, motherly, childlike, all things to all he loved, and he loved everyone whom he could tease and who appreciated, even acknowledged, his jokes. There were always those jokes—ridiculous word-games, absurd puns, excited displays of farce involving costumes, props, masquerade masks. That was Israel most of the time I knew him, the jester, the man who could always make me laugh. Beyond that, it did not come to me until after he was gone from me, forever, that his pranks and cracks and gamesmanship were his way of struggling with the despair that threatened him as an exile and that had dragged Peregrine down to his crime. Israel once told me that he thought tragedy was too easy to be deep wisdom, all one had to do was pull up a chair and moan about betrayal, hatred, slaughter, and get the audience to weep at the meaninglessness of murdered innocence. It was comedy, Israel declared, that was the sublime endeavor; for one to get that same audience to laugh in the face of defeat or at their own fears, that was a worthy challenge. Israel told me, “Make laughter, Grim, and you make reason.”

  Israel stopped laughing at Port Praia. What undid him were his tears for Molly’s helplessness and his inability to love her and himself back to strength. He had passed his life laughing and making laughter. His weakness was that he had not learned how to cry and at the same time remain balanced and resolute. I understand why; I rush to excuse. His life had been endless adversity. He had been obliged to reach for laughter again and again, straining to smile, wearing out his humor. He had emptied of smiles. His cup filled with tears. He would not drink it. He thought it poison. He was right. Still, I have learned that one must risk the drink, try endurance. Israel must have intuited this, yet he could not make himself accept sorrow as a meaningful theme. Lost in darkness, he denied the darkness. This might explain his frustration and rage with Grandfather, who could seem the sponsor of the very darkness Grandfather warned against. This might explain more completely Israel’s rage at Grandfather—he must have thought it appalling that Grandfather could seem to be winning me to his way of seeing. Israel must have thought he had to show me, had to show himself, that he was right to believe in laughter and that Grandfather was wrong to sing woe.

  That was why I followed Israel so close behind in the gangway. He was murderously determined to disprove, to undo, Grandfather. We missed a turn, another, were some few minutes finding our way. We finally had to follow the sound of Grandfather’s voice.

  There was laughter. I opened the cabin door to duck into an austere, shadowy tableau, half a dozen men in sooty robes seated about a bare table, among them Grandfather, his back to me, his hands spread before him as if he were gesturing in conversation. The light was from a cluster of candles. The smell was incense, barely covering the stench from below. Grandfather continued to speak right at a man who was not as old, nor as hairless, nor as thin, nor as agonized as I had thought he would be. Father Saint Stephen seemed, in his soft piety, to be a fair and suggestively anonymous version of the sort of priest the Roman Catholic Church, in my readings, favored as voice and authority. However, he was not an ordinary religionist. Indeed, I can make the good guess now that he was an Englishman—his manner, his accent, his contrived passion. He was certainly not an opposite to Grandfather. They shared egotistical discipleship, bore their burdens with pridefulness and impiety. It was Father Saint Stephen whom we had heard laugh, joined by his brethren; they thought Grandfather’s Lutheranism an amusement.

  “What of their empires?” said Grandfather in German, who did not seem to take offense at their laughter—because, I now suppose, he thought them also due condescension.

  “That is the reward, isn’t it, Reverend Fiddle?” said Father Saint Stephen, speaking a careful German, looking up to welcome us with a smile. He gestured that we be given benchroom at the table.

  Israel marched forward, said, in English, though his German was adequate for the exchange, “We’ll take what we need, and go”

  “Tell the Jew what you have told me,” said Grandfather.

  “Where are you bound?” said Father Saint Stephen in excellent and aristocratic British-English. He spoke with the care, tact, dispassion, of an accomplished intellectual. I can also guess now that he had never been poor in his life—he was perfect as the mendicant, which I take as meaning he was playing a part he had chosen, that had not fallen to him. Father Saint Stephen held himself like a painting: original, cold, sincere, calculated.

  Israel answered flatly, “Mexico.”

  Father Saint Stephen continued, “We have heard stories about the Caribbean. The poor souls spoke of their revolution. The Americans are said to have taken a complete vengeance. You are American? I do not reproach. They made slaves to build their towers of Babel. Now that the cities rise over the plains—purple, is it, or golden—they have less need of slaves. I do not condemn. It is the same east and west. Is this news to you? These are the last days.”

  Israel reacted oddly to this; he seemed to be talking to himself when he said, “I don’t know what you are.”

  Father Saint Stephen said to Israel, “My son, we are servants of God.”

  Israel repeated, “I don’t know what you are.”

  Grandfather interrupted to say that the Jew was a fool; there was no use telling him anything. Grandfather added that he would appreciate it if Father Saint Stephen could explain the mission of The Free Gift of God to his grandson. He introduced me. Father Saint Stephen began in German. I shook my head no, and he continued in English.

  “Your grandfather has set me a difficult task. I introduce myself as did the gospel-writer John, ‘I am a voice, crying out in the wilderness, “Make the Lord’s path straight.” ’ ”

  Father Saint Stephen continued in the measured, sonorous tone of a preacher in his pulpit, “When Our Lord returned from Jordan, he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days, where he was tempted by Satan three times. Jesus carried no food. He grew weak and angry and afraid in his hunger. Satan challenged Jesus to demonstrate his power by turning a stone to bread. Jesus was not a little tempted, because he loved his life. Jesus took courage, and told Satan that he would never be so hungry as to follow a suggestion made by Satan.

  “Satan saw that Jesus was a stubborn, soldierly antagonist. Satan conjured up a kingdom on the wasteland, of utter splendor and power on earth, and challenged Jesus that if he just paid the smallest allegiance to Satan, perhaps crush an insect like this creature here”—Father Saint Stephen plucked up a cockroach—“that Satan would make Jesus king of that shimmering realm. Jesus studied the towers and gems and beautiful bodies, and was not a little tempted, because he was a poor man’s son and there had been few pleasures in his life, because he was ambitious for more than he had as a carpenter and pilgrim. Jesus took courage, and told Satan that he had only to worship God, and God alone, and a kingdom the like of which the earth would never see would be his to enjoy.

  “Satan saw that Jesus was sly as well as learned, devoted, and trusting in the future as few men are in times of catastrophe. Satan took Jesus by the hand and led him to a precipice that we can suppose hung over the pit of Hell. Satan challenged Jesus to leap into the pit, for, said Satan, if Jesus was the son of God then surely his Father would send angels to catch him as he fell, and surely the angels would obey for fear that a hair on Jesus’ body”—Father Saint Stephen singed the back of his wrist on a candle
—“should be damaged.

  “Jesus looked down into the pit. He was tempted a great deal this time, more than when he was hungry, because he was young and healthy and had confidence in his physical fortitude, and much more than when Satan offered the kingship of pleasure palaces, because Jesus was faithful and knew that the kingdom he had set out to establish made Satan’s construction seem sandstone caves. The third time Jesus was tempted to his limit, because he himself wanted to know if God, his Father, loved him as completely as he had been told, because he wanted to know if the angels were quick, because he wanted to know that he could not fall were he deliberately to throw himself into the pit of Hell. Jesus stepped to the edge and raised his arms, prepared to dive. And then he took courage, and then he laughed. Without looking back at Satan, Jesus said that he did not need to test God, his Father, further than this, and that he felt ashamed that he had tested God this far. Jesus said, ‘I have been forty days with you, Satan, without food or weapons or security, and yet I still want to live. You are evil incarnate, yet I am still capable of laughter and play.’ Jesus flapped his arms as a child imitates a bird. Satan withdrew from Jesus, to bide his time.”

  Father Saint Stephen stood, went to the cabin door, opened it, pointed toward the gangway that I presumed led below decks. He waited while I summed up quickly for Grandfather what he had said. Grandfather nodded approvingly.

  Israel suddenly grabbed my arm and asked me to get out of there with him right away. I did not answer. I confess I was too hungry for knowledge of God and man, to leave then, as I should have. I was tempted by Father Saint Stephen’s story, and wanted more, wanted also to test my faith in God and Grandfather and Israel and my own sense of decency. I did not think then, and certainly do not now, that Father Saint Stephen was a devil. Nor was he an evil man. He was weak, in his own way. He had read the Gospels for his own purposes, the way good and bad men have done since Paul, and though Father Saint Stephen’s interpretations (or misinterpretations, his black, black exegesis that I shall present as best I recall) had led him and his brethren to vertiginously bad judgments, Father Saint Stephen’s opinions were still grounded in a compelling parable, Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. In that sweltering, rolling cabin aboard The Free Gift of God, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Father Saint Stephen’s sermon offered me raw revelation of what we had chanced upon in the world.