“A simplification, it will do,” said Lazarus, no smiles. Lazarus had stopped changing expressions; the face of an angry young man was gone, replaced with a mask of inhibition, placidity, and a stare that seemed faraway. The burn scars covered the right side of his body but only a third of his face, dark purple skin like fingers up from his neck and onto his cheek. He was self-conscious of the twisted part of his face, knew that smiling or frowming made his scars look worse. He had a habit of tapping his scar, doing so as he continued, “It’s the people who are strong, Grim, and the strongest people are w-hat you call beasties. By simple size of number, the beasties are strongest. They have more chances to get the future right. I know, I’m a beastie. Grim Fiddle is a beastie.”
“Not strong enough, I think,” I said. “What else explains what we found, that fleet of the damned?”
“A transient event. A function of anarchy. A product of a state wherein law and morality have broken down temporarily and yet the idea of national sovereignty has prevented the lawful nations from intervening. The idea of law can momentarily protect lawlessness. The fleet of the damned—really a superstitious name, misleading—that refugee exodus, then, it was also an example of the chaos that occurs between successive tyrannies in the cycle of despotism. It can be stopped with rigor and, yes, strong stomachs. We can stop it here, dismantle that camp, get Toro Zulema elected as a spokesman for his people, and all with a republic. A people’s republic.”
“What keeps majority rule—this people’s republic—from becoming a mob?” I asked. “Or becoming a tyranny, like America in Vietnam? And isn’t it true that a majority can cast out a minority? Wouldn’t that be the will of the people, too? Isn’t that what happened out there, and in Sweden, and in America with my father? What prevents frightened people from acting without decency? I read Charity Bentham’s books. She said charity is a function of self-interest. She never explained to my satisfaction how to stop a group of nations—and not tyrannies, all of them republics—from each acting in their supposed best interest like murderers.”
“One answer to your problem is to reformulate your question,” said Lazarus. “Exile is one result of slaves being stubborn, like Germanicus. Factions such as the one your father represented, Vietnam war protesters, were not republicans. In their way, dissenters like your father were absolutists, and crazed, and selfdestructive, typical romantic misanthropes, white men complaining that the world is not white enough. They said, peace or nothing. They got what they asked for.”
“I don’t think Peregrine and Israel asked for exile, nor did Guy and Earle ask for Saigon,” I said. “And I don’t think the beasties asked for Ascension Island. Sometimes, Lazarus, you and Plato sound more dangerous than the despots.”
“It is not possible or desirable to rule innocently,” said Lazarus, a hypothesis he often recited to me afterward, one that I have seen the truth of, and the ruin of. “Learn that. The people have a will. They must be shown how to use it. Forced, if it comes to that. Trust me. We can make them see we’re the future here, and right, and their last chance. What we need is time and will.”
“And luck?” I tried, ending our debate that night with what I meant as levity. I was trying then to love Lazarus, as he was trying to love the people of South Georgia. He was smarter than anyone on the island (he and Orlando the Black and Longfaeroe were our only university graduates), and his arrogance should be excused by his struggle to translate what he thought into what he thought we could understand. On South Georgia, his mind was somewhere between dogma and praxis. He was not yet ready to act as violently as he could talk. There was more to him than radical-republican-without-a-country, of course; for example, though he loved Violante and his little girl, Cleo, he did not conceal his sorrow about Cleopatra. He encouraged me to talk about Cleopatra, drew me out on my lingering fascination for her, as a way, I believe, of testing his own devotion to her memory. We shared an icon. We did not share a mind. He believed that revised Benthamism on South Georgia would protect South Georgia from what I now see as a ghastly distortion of Benthamism evidenced in the Atlantic Ocean. I remained reluctant to commit myself to him, as I also resisted Germanicus. Lazarus kept at me, for he was long-winded, detail-conscious, rhetorically adept, without humility or patience. He did have regrets.
I have mentioned his regret for the murder of Father Saint Stephen. He talked to me only once about it, though he referred to it often, obliquely, metaphorically. It was a long talk, what I understand now was a confession to the only man he thought then was still alive who had witnessed what he had done. He said he did not know who his natural father was, only that he was from the West Indies, an islander, probably dead. He knew his mother had been in a Cuban monastery, as either a student or servant. Either she had died, or run away, or become a nun. Lazarus, as an infant, had been placed in an orphanage in Cuba and then transported by mysterious means to another orphanage in the American state of Florida. Through Roman Catholic Church auspices, he had been adopted at the age of four by the Furores, along with Orlando the Black and Babe, who had been resident in the same orphanage. Lazarus was schooled by Dominican priests in Chicago, a private school, exclusive, almost entirely white except for him and his new brothers. There, he said, he learned disgust for the Roman Catholic Church, what Lazarus called “holy chains.” He said that only once; it was atypical of his sense of humor. Did Lazarus have a sense of humor? Yes, he was readily amused by hypocrisy, his own and everyone else’s.
Lazarus concluded his confession by saying that, when he had attacked Father Saint Stephen, he had been out of his mind with revulsion for what he said was the pious gangsterism of the Church that had crushed his mother, and very likely shamed her to give up her bastard to strangers.
Then he seemed to reformulate, clarify, that mind of his, pounding, forging: “I killed him because I felt like it. It was stupid, an intellectual waste. What’s the point of silencing a madman? It hurt me more than him. He was out of his mind, and I let him pull me out of mine. It was sickening, to lose control like that. What you talk about, when you went crazy at Stanley, that sounds a lot like what I felt. I was angry! And I acted in a manner I absolutely revile and reject. It was like the beast in me, or . . . awful, Grim, awful to remember. Did I know what I was doing? Yes, I did. And what’s the difference between a murderer who knows why he kills and one who doesn’t? None. I had cause to kill and I did. It was still stupid. I think about my father. Did he know what killed him, or why, or why he abandoned my mother and me? I know why. That is important. What I have, by accident, is the means to act on my cognition. I have an excellent education, despite all the claptrap about the mysteries of the spirit, and I have a sense of history that is completely modern. What Longfaeroe would say was a vision of history. It isn’t magic, like your mother’s. It isn’t xenophobic, like your Grandfather’s. It is logical and informed, and just. And I have a place to apply my gifts, here, now. It is mine to do or to fail. I must succeed. I think of an American revolutionary, John Adams—a white master, yes, but a republican all the same, swept along by the truth of egalitarian justice—and how he felt when he was elected to the outlawed Continental Congress, which marked him for hanging by the tyrants. He wrote, ‘I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate. We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in Genius, in Education, in Gravel, in Fortune, in every Thing. I feel unutterable anxiety.’ That is how it always feels in a struggle against tyranny and for justice. That is why you feel inadequate, spun around. We must be fit for our times, Grim. When I killed that madman, I was not fit. When you killed at Stanley, you were not fit. Now, we are. I say so. We must build. Any campesino can kill. We must succeed. If not? There is no if not. Death in any form would be less terrible.”
I did not think to tell Lazarus at the time that he had explained his crime in almost the same words that Peregrine used to explain his murder of Cesare Furore, “because I wanted to” and “because I felt like it.” I wonder now if Lazarus knew. Th
ere seems to me a profound difference between killing a number of human beings and murdering one man intimately. I have done both, many times, and believe that while killing many—war—is often a consequence of events, a tactical decision, vicious, but often meant purposely, a murder of one man is an act of willful blasphemy. There are sophistic excuses for the mass killer; there is no balm for the murderer. A single murder, call it an assassination, corrodes the will that engenders it. It corrupts. The Norse had another way of saying this: “The dead man lives in the face of the slayer.” This means that the conflict that moved one to assassinate is not resolved by physical death. Assassination did transform Lazarus, taint him, weigh him down with Father Saint Stephen’s nature. The Norse would have said that Lazarus was haunted by Father Saint Stephen’s ghost. Lazarus seemed driven to create a people’s republic in order to prove to himself that a man who has freed himself of “holy chains” is right, and that one, like Father Saint Stephen, who celebrates human death as the most courageous human journey, is wrong. Lazarus had taken Grandfather’s verdict on Father Saint Stephen to heart—the priest was not only mad but also wrong. This fetches me, that my grandfather should have colored Lazarus, too. I am not saying that I saw Grandfather or Father Saint Stephen in Lazarus’s face, but then, I did.
I suggest that Lazarus, a man who dismissed orthodox religion as irrational, and even denounced art as antirational, was a deeply religious man in his devotion to the revolutionary theory that he took from the republican spirit of the Greeks, the Romans, the Italians, the French, the Germans, the Russians, even the white masters of early America. He spoke much of a man named Tom Paine, whom I have too little knowledge of to connect to what Lazarus did. Lazarus worshiped republicanism like a tireless pilgrim. He had dreams; he called them ideas. Was he a fanatic? Yes, but that seems an unfair word for a man like Lazarus, who acted so coolly, resolutely, clearheadedly. Israel taught me that there is no school absent of a little sleight-of-hand, mystical chicanery. So for Lazarus and his republican schools. I suggest that in Lazarus’s confession to me, the moment he proved his vision with the statement “I say so,” he was introducing a matter of faith-beyond-reason into the debate. Grandfather and Father Saint Stephen, clearly zealous men, believed in the coming Kingdom of Heaven. Lazarus believed in the coming revolution. What made Lazarus qualitatively distinct from Grandfather and Father Saint Stephen was that his utopianism, his millenarianism (at the birth of a new millennium), was informed by his specific, earthly, demonstrable belief in the idea of the Republic of South Georgia.
Lazarus was a dreamer and a builder. I pause to marvel that in saying this I describe an orphan, bastard, beastie, revolutionary, who was almost a theoretical combination of his foster-mother the dreamer and his foster-father the builder. Father Saint Stephen had wanted to enrich the future through mass suicide. Lazarus wanted to enrich the future through mass enfranchisement. I have shown that they both used history—what Lazarus sometimes called “the agenda of history”—to justify their conduct. Father Saint Stephen had failed because he was wrong. Lazarus might not have failed on South Georgia. What he needed was time and will and men fit for the times. We were that, in the very end, I and Lazarus, men fit for our times. God help me, the truth of it, Grim Fiddle was fit for his times. There was never enough time on South Georgia.
Our fate was fixed by the time Germanicus and Lazarus and I had our separate conversations on the future of South Georgia. The events that undid us seem now sadly trivial, a protracted blood feud, and yet the situation revealed the shadow that could not be enlightened. Lazarus and I, for all our learning and magic, were beasties to the South Georgians, and anyone who stood with us, loved us, became a beastie too.
It began with the stoning of Jane Gaunt, when she tried to visit the two wounded children in the hospital. The stone-throwers were wild children and hags, mostly old sealers’ widows. The Gaunts sought justice. Kevin Gaunt, Jane’s older brother, a hot-tempered man, sought blood justice. Elephant Frazer could not give it, for the ringleaders of the assailants were pathetically old, beyond punishment, their motives clouded by hysteria. After her recovery, Jane Gaunt spoke at church, forgiving her trespassers. Most were proud of her for it, and all assumed the wounds were healed. This is not to forget the trouble it caused Germanicus, and how the incident led indirectly to my election as president of the Assembly. It lingered in the hearts of the guilty also.
The following year, midwinter, the ice freezing our hearts, one of the meekest among us, Lena Rose, a younger half-sister of the Hospidar’s favorite, Christian Rose, was attacked on the high heath as she was walking up to feed her pet birds, albatross chicks. The attack was deranged, a knifing and possible ravishment, and the girl lost her senses. She might have been tortured. She was unable to name the criminal.
It was sadder still, because Lena had been born simple-minded and deformed. She was also a great favorite of the old wives of Gaunttown, some of whom were the hags who had attacked Jane Gaunt. More, Lena was often seen in the company of the other simpleton in Gaunttown, Robby Oldmizzen. The old wives had never liked this; the hags among them called Robby unclean and “demon-plagued.” Robby Oldmizzen was the very same young boy whom Germanicus had rescued at 2 de Diciembre. Through his great-grandmother (that old woman I carried to the longboats, who had died in Port Stanley), he was related to the Frazers. Robby had been tortured by the Patties and had lost his senses when he was forced to watch the Patties break his uncle on one of those wheels of theirs. This was significant, since it was believed by the old wives, and others who should have known better, that Robby was not simpleminded, that he was actually a mad dog, and dangerous. He had screaming fits, similar to the ones I experienced my first year on South Georgia; unfortunately, Robby had his in Gaunttown, not protected as I was by Longfaeroe and the Frazers, and Robby’s worsened as he got older. It was also believed that Robby was the one who, in my third year on the island, had lashed a ewe to a wheel and tortured it with a harpoon.
Lena had been born with an overlarge head, crooked limbs, and a severe limp. Robby’s limp was from paralysis brought on by torture. They limped about together. They shared weak minds. There had been vulgar talk of a romance between them. That was ridiculous. Lena seemed as innocent a creature as I have ever known, a lamb. Robby seemed too absorbed by his nightmares to have been able to concentrate erotically. Nevertheless, the suspicion was there, and I cannot deny that Robby loved Lena in his way, and she him. They were a delight to many of us, to me, and I often regretted that I did not find more time for them when, as a shepherd, I had visited the market square where they played. Robby and Lena were also usually among the few who attended the assemblies Lazarus and I called to draft the constitution. And Robby was one of Iceberg’s favorite playmates; with his one good hand, he once carved her profile in stone, and I named one of her grandchildren for him.
Longfaeroe called a prayer service to sing for Lena’s recovery. Fergus Moog, the old crank who had accused Lazarus of being responsible for the original knife fight, stood up to say that no sane man would have “hacked up” poor Lena. His inference was clear, and he was not alone in his leap to vigilante justice. Some of the young Rose boys had already dragged Robby to Lena’s bedside in hospital. She was said to have been shaken awake, to have looked at Robby and screamed. Robby screamed back and tried to run. Christian Rose was summoned and took Robby to the Rose camp, as he said, “in the name of the Volunteers.” Elephant Frazer heard about this through Jane Gaunt, and sent a message to the Hospidar, commander of the Volunteers, to intervene. The Hospidar would not reply. Elephant Frazer took several Volunteers the next morning to the Rose camp and arrested Robby “in the name of the governor-general.” Motherwell accompanied Elephant Frazer, had to wrestle one of the Roses to the ground. There were hard words before Christian Rose relented. By the next day, the whole of Gaunttown knew several versions of the confrontation. The Roses, to save face, demanded blood vengeance.
Elephant Frazer orde
red me to call an Assembly. Nature then tried to help us calm tempers by serving up a raging storm that delayed the affair several days. It was not until a week after the attack that the Assembly met. By then, factions and counterfactions had formed. The meeting was chaos, all the anxieties of defeat, plague, the ice pack, and the rationing washing together to spill on this one concrete tragedy—Lena’s desecration. Elephant Frazer refused to come inside the hall until I gained order. In the meantime, that night, he had Motherwell remove Robby from the governor-general’s office above the helper pub, where he had been kept for fear the hospital was too vulnerable to mischief, to the Frazer camp. It is my memory that no man of sense at that Assembly thought Robby guilty. It did not seem to pertain. Reason was in eclipse. The meeting became a mob, and a motion was moved to force Elephant Frazer to present Robby to answer accusations. Lazarus decried this as a “rape of civil rights,” a terrible choice of words. Lazarus and I were hooted from the podium; a fight broke out between the Rose boys and the Gaunts, who were divided between Christian Rose and Elephant Frazer. Worse, one of the hags, the very one, Jane told me, who had stood over her and kicked her in the stomach, burst into the hall to announce, falsely, that Lena was dead, that the Frazers had hidden her body, and that Lena’s ghost had appeared to her to demand “an eye for an eye.” Jane and Abigail then took the podium and denounced the Assembly as a “Pattie disgrace.”
“Shame!” said Jane, in a rage. “Lena be alive. I left her tonight. Shame! Poor Robby fought for us, a brave Volunteer. Ye have no proof again’ him. Ye care more for yerr low ways than for poor Lena. Robby lays up there, terrible grieved, thinkin’ his Lena dyin’. It ain’t so! Shame! Get ye home and pray forgiveness, as I’ll be doin’, prayin’ for poor Lena and for the man, whoever he be, what did this black deed.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 27