I looked at Lazarus as Dietjagger concluded, and he shook his head no. Nowr near shore again, Lazarus resumed his authority for me. I challenged Dietjagger’s glibness.
“I have done what I can,” he said, disgusted. His men returned to report we were disease-free. There was no mention of plague. I asked about Candlemas Packet. Dietjagger would not answer. I understood then that Malody’s people were lost to us, would be committed to another camp receiving the infected. Dietjagger began to recite dogma again, saying this camp, Livingston Southeast I, was our assignment. He made a slip, used the jargon for the camp, Livingston Southeast I. He called it “Golgotha.”
Dietjagger had kept his most threatening requirement to last. We were ordered to surrender our firearms; we were told that we could keep our knives, harpoons, blades. He anticipated resistance, told me we had no choice, that his captain would not hesitate to enforce Dietjagger’s duty.
“You are holed along the waterline. Your rigging is rubbish,” said Dietjagger. “You have many dead and dozens wounded. The Strait is death here to Anvers Island, friend. This is the end of your struggle. Surrender. Accept the future.”
I saw what I must do. I paused to tell my council. They argued the obvious. Oddly, it was Longfaeroe who was most dark-minded, came as close as he ever did to turning from my lead. He did not want us to disembark there, said, “Golgotha is no place for Grim Fiddle’s people. The place of skulls.”
After we had obliged Dietjaggger’s orders, concealing as many weapons as possible, Dietjagger’s men, an international lot, mostly Spanish-speaking, organized our ferrying ashore. Dietjagger personally wanted to withdraw. I sensed he was afraid of more questions. He was not accustomed to being challenged, was used to corralling people too hungry and wasted to care what was next for them. His task was more servile than it first seemed. My defiance made him think about what he was doing, and that made him despondent, bitter, weak, also made him philosophical. I went up to him at the rail, not to thank him, more to get the measure of his mind. He must have thought I was going to revile him, because he turned defensively, said, “You will find life here is not different from what you have left. Nor from what I left. You are from the North? A Scandinavian, yes? I, too, from Prussia, East Germany, yes? My people are socialists. I am a nothing. We are the same. You will find death is different here. But we are not dead, and what does that matter? These islands are claimed by many nations. There is food, and some hope. It is much worse elsewhere, in the Pacific. Much worse. And I have heard that in the Caribbean the camps have revolted, and they are letting the epidemics do the police work.”
“There has been no war,” I said, repeating the English captain’s curse of Gaunttown, “just a bloody shuffle.”
“My friend,” he said quietly, “if we are lucky, we will both be dead before it finishes. Good-bye.”
Dietjagger climbed down into his boat, kept looking up at me as he was rowed back to the white cutter. He called to me in an angry voice. He recited what I took to be a German aphorism; I repeated it later to Lazarus, who translated it correctly. “That’s Nietzsche, son of a Lutheran preacher. It means, ‘Madness is rare in individuals, habitual to groups, parties, nations and ages.’ ” I did not like that aphorism then, think even less of it now. The Norse would have said it was the work of a bard-clatterer and an odd-tongue. It rolls out with self-conceit, says nothing neatly, craftily. It is sophistry. It speaks of the same misanthropic pridefulness as New Benthamism, pretending to describe mankind’s nature while actually it dismisses mankind with ornamental cynicism and calculated half-truth.
I have done a poor job narrating those four days from our arrival off Elephant Island to our surrender at Aurora Bay. It comes to me now not like a nightmare, rather like scenes too cluttered with pain and ignorance to recall with resonance. We were deprived of security, food, Candlemas Packet, Toro Zulema, Wild Drumrul, many more; and most of all, of information. All those ships of wretches, where had they come from, what did they hope for, what was their end? It is too easy to say, and yet it is all I have to say, that they came from the Americas or Africa, that they hoped for sanctuary, that they were imprisoned in those camps, where they died, or escaped, or waited. And waited for what? Their high dreams? Abigail’s notion fetches me. I believe that every man and woman, no matter what their station or luck, is granted a right to high dreams. If one exercises such a right, it costs. One pays with heart. That is not a bottomless account. It can be replenished after depletion—the sun, some good food, a human kindness—but it can also be exhausted, and after that sort of despair, death has no meaning I can think of. And I insist these high dreams speak every language, come to the very old, the very criminal, the very young. High dreams are what linked King James with Candlemas Packet’s survivors, with the wretched we watched founder in the Scotia Sea, with those dark-faced creatures that killed Toro Zulema, with Dietjagger and his brutal men, with the very smallest of the wretches at Golgotha. And, yes, with the Brothers themselves, who in their sorrowful, pious, otherworldly, and ineffectual ways not only had high dreams but also did their best, all they knew, to convey their peculiar high dreams to us wretches.
There was one incident that stands out in my memory that should help illustrate both my meaning of high dreams and the anxiety I and mine suffered leaving King James and entering Golgotha. Lazarus and Violante’s daughter, Cleo, then four years old, had a doll, a stuffed sheep dog, made for her by Charmane Gaunt. Cleo named the doll Goldie, for her own reasons. Because Cleo slept with Goldie, it regularly flattened and lumped, so for stuffing I would give her hair that I combed out of Iceberg. Cleo learned to sew, made Goldie outfits, including a greatcoat like the sealskin ones we wore. As we proceeded across the Scotia Sea, she clothed Goldie in ever bulkier outfits. She also insisted Goldie share her rations, which Violante obliged in theory. Cleo once asked me to tell Goldie what our new home would be like. I told of a sheep ranch on a green plain, with a huge kitchen where Cleo could bake bread to feed all the hungry people, with a large sheep herd for Goldie to tend. Perhaps one can understand how it was harder to lie to Cleo than it was to commit King James to those seas, much more so in retrospect, because she believed me totally, believed that if Goldie was happy with her future, so was she.
The night after the attack, while we ferried ashore, I saw Cleo on deck. She had wrapped a discarded bandage around Goldie’s flanks, carried the doll in a sling the way we transported our wounded. Cleo was crying, was talking to Goldie like a good nurse. She went ashore before me, and afterward I heard of her confrontation with the Brothers. They were small, strange men, fasted two of three days, maintained vows of silence. Lazarus thought them dumb fanatics, said that if they had talked, it would have been to deny life itself. I disagreed, not the least because when Cleo moved through the reception hut with her mother, she asked that Goldie be given an identification tag like hers, to wear around the neck. One of the Brothers—and we did not know then how to distinguish between them and their auxiliaries, the Litde Brothers, a troublesome lot of convicts—obliged Cleo. This caused difficulty in the barracks. We were grouped in arbitrary units called families. There were no beds, just blankets, and the families were centered around stoves for heating and cooking. Each stove was allotted so many families, which meant so many adults, male and female, and so many children. Because Goldie had an identification tag, a number, he had a child’s place and a child’s ration. It was not until my people were transferred, from the barracks that were temporary quarters for the newly arrived, back into the main camp’s longhouses, that the error was discovered and corrected. The Brothers were not rigidly scrupulous keepers, but space was a crucial problem. Goldie lost his tag. Cleo was undone by this, lost her courage, fell into mourning, said she would die along with Goldie. This was not entirely her invention, since Cleo had observed that when an internee died, his or her tag was removed. That was how the Brothers kept what count they could for rations. Violante panicked at Cleo’s mood, because the ea
rliest indication of death in Golgotha was when a person stopped trying: the pulse rate plunged, the eyes glassed over, the movements became sluggish. Cleo did seem inconsolable, took Goldie to the altars in the longhouses (built crudely, yet in general much the same as those in the cathedral in Stockholm) to bless him before he died. Cleo told Violante she never felt warm as she slept, because Goldie was too cold to sleep with. And no matter how much Violante fed her (our diet was fish paste, rice, beans, sea weed pulp, supplemented with bird, whale, and seal meat), Cleo kept losing weight, musculature, alertness.
As January ended, and the weather worsened, Violante was sure Cleo was dying. We sang to her, argued with her, pretended to feed Goldie, held Goldie up close to the stoves; nothing worked. Otter Ransom saved Cleo. He explained to her in the singsong English he had developed that Goldie was ill because he was out of place. Goldie, he said, should not be with us in the longhouses, rather with the dogs in the service huts, where Iceberg and Beow and the rest of the brood would take better care of Goldie than we could. Cleo thought upon this, wept the more; but then, with small ceremony, she presented Goldie to Lazarus to take to Grim Fiddle to take to Iceberg and Beow. She gave instructions about Goldie’s wounds, diet, personality. After that, Cleo slept without shudders, because, I argue, she had regained her high dreams for herself and Goldie.
Golgotha was not a place of skulls. It was deprived and badly built, bathed in fumes and continually trembling, but it was not a grave. The Norse would have called it a beggarly fen and made do with a camp of stones baked hot with huge bonfires. We lacked such luxuries, made do nonetheless, terrified of what winter would make of man-made caves. We learned as we burrowed. Because of the Brothers’ vows of silence, we gathered Golgotha’s history from the Little Brothers, the custodians of the camp. They were liars and thieves, all convicts transported to the South Shetlands for this duty. The most senior of them, Mosquite, had been there two years. What seemed reliable was that Golgotha was five years old, built on the remains of a weather station, and that the first wretches had arrived there in a derelict driven by storm and madness across the Scotia Sea. I now regard that tale as apocryphal, because it was one I heard repeatedly from other camps, probably only applying to the first of the camps.
The flood of wretches, however they arrived, overwhelmed the weather station. The Little Brothers could not explain how the Ice Cross had come to the South Shetlands, did not think the Ice Cross required explanation: they were slaves, we were slaves, what slave cares where his master comes from, or why? They could also not explain why the Brothers of Perpetual Witness at Golgotha, another of the rogue orders that flourished in the Age of Exile, had come to choose Livingston Island for their mission. I note that the Brothers did differ profoundly from Father Saint Stephen and The Free Gift of God; they were kind, muddled, long- suffering servants of Jesus, mostly Europeans, and at that mostly northern Europeans, Latvians and Poles. It is credible that the original wretches were landed at Golgotha by a ship, or ships, not unlike what The Free Gift of God had been before Father Saint Stephen and his men were overwhelmed by the perversity of their charity and collapsed to their worst nightmares. There was much that was not credible about what the Little Brothers said: that the Church was dispatching thousands of priests to convert the camps; that some of the Little Brothers had been soldiers captured in a war in the Caribbean (like Xique); that the camps were now being stuffed with wretches deliberately transported to the South Shetlands by governments gripped by civil wars. There were whole areas left blank then: how dependable the supply ships were; who had provided the earth-moving and construction equipment in the service huts; where we were to be resettled if and when someone arrived to hear our pleas.
For the year I was there, Golgotha never contained more than five thousand internees. We were housed in several dozen crudely linked longhouses carved into the bedrock. Someone had done that earthmoving, and with powerful, sophisticated equipment; we would never learn specifically who. The death rate at Golgotha was hard to measure; my guess is that it was less than ten a day. The perilously damp cold, caused by the excessive humidity offshore of Antarctica, did not kill outright. It weakened the strong, ravaged the indigent. There were at least fifty Brothers, aping anonymity; and twice that many Little Brothers of all sorts: brutes, lechers, campesinos. Together they were not our jailers, needed our cooperation as much as we needed their access to the Ice Cross’s haphazard authority.
Inside the camp, the society of mankind showed its commonplace vices, as Dietjagger meant when he said it was not different from what either of us had left behind. Food, heat, and space were the needs. Selfishness, despair, and accident were the threats. The Little Brothers were the chief transgressors, pathetic sneaks. They bought women, hoarded food, had firearms, which they brandished oafishly. There were beatings, hangings, persecutions, lawlessness. Barter was the currency. The Little Brothers, many internees, and my people, indulged usury. Rations were always inadequate, because one had to work or keep moving to fend off the damp, yet this caused one to need more food. The heating was makeshift. Those of us from colder climes, like my people, knew how to insulate, how to bear the rawness, and did what we could to teach those from equatorial climes how to survive. A few learned, most did not. We burned the coal we were given, also burned blubber we got by hunting, both of which filled the longhouses with thick smoke that blackened our skins. There are many tricks on the ice: bathing in urine, keeping one’s extremities dry; it is a hard game, and can be won, if not indefinitely.
A significant mystery for us at first was that the barracks had an internal heat source. We determined that the heat must come from the mountain, that the camp must have been sited there because of the eruptions. I think this sort of heat is called geothermal. We called it godsend. Also there was hot steam in the cracks outside, along the ravine, on the glacier; and in two of the longhouses there was a pool of boiling hot water that proved a curse, for many had bathed in it, shedding their body oils, becoming defenseless to pneumonia. From what I know of science, and from what I later learned, it is probable that the eruptions had opened up heat seams throughout the South Shetlands; one of those seams, on Elephant Island, proved to contain very hard coal, which was mined by slaves for slaves.
My people came to flourish in Golgotha, if that word flourish is sufferable. We were homogeneous, tough-minded, and our learning brought us to the fore of the community. Community! I do not intend irony; my words fail to portray the extremes there, make it seem as if Golgotha was like human culture everywhere. That is a lie. I strain to get it right. We South Georgians took over the work battalion, divided our labor between shoring up our space and hunting outside, on the slopes of Livingston and in longboats. This soon involved us in the camp’s security. The Little Brothers were morbid about the dark-faced creatures they called the Hielistos. There had been an attack every summer, they said; we guessed that meant there had been a massacre every summer, the Little Brothers quitting the defenses to hide within. We had the few firearms we had secreted from the Ice Cross; the Little Brothers were armed, would not give up their guns to us. It was obvious to us that what protected us was chance. I assumed that either the Ice Cross kept those dark-faced creatures away, or nothing would. Closer to the truth was that we were a small camp, unworthy of regular raids, and that the Hielistos were crudely organized, that they were us one step removed—condemned, inept, ice-cursed. Lazarus solved that puzzle, saying Hielistos meant, figuratively, ice brothers.
I have cause for presenting Golgotha as tolerable, fair-minded. It was our shelter in the darkness. It was never as bad as it could have been, as I know other camps were. There was more continuity than my people had enjoyed since leaving South Georgia. Our wounded either died or lived; we starved and scratched—not other than would have happened at sea. We were situated badly, but arguably better than might have been ours on a strange coastline against chauvinists like the Patties, or against disease. The Brothers tried to divide the su
pplies equitably, mercy to those more in need, such as children or disabled. The Little Brothers cheated, could be bribed. The quaking was incessant, with occasional cave-ins, yet that was not worse than those huge seas. After the first two months, my people had adapted ably, had mixed with the internees guilefully. The other wretches thought Golgotha more than a shelter; they held it dear, like a miracle. They were victims of untold wars, catastrophes, outrages, had sunk to complete destitution. Lazarus, tattered and sharp-eyed, regarded them shrewdly, at first seemed to proselytize among their leaders in Spanish and Portuguese. He was actually propagandizing, and not for what I supposed, a more subtle strategy. His health had returned to him—though not his equanimity, which none of us would ever find again—and with it a purpose as sure as the wind. I watched him come and go, a shadowy missionary in shadowy halls, and waited for an explanation, which came late summer.
“This is paradise for the beggars. They lay down and whimper like whipped beasts,” he said, waving his hands in the direction of the corridor that led from our barracks to the axis of the camp. By then, we had bargained for the best available—the greatest good for the least number—and dispensed from our largesse for our own gain and for no other reason, assuredly not for decency.
I was in a low mood. It might have had to do with some rationing problems, but then, I was ever in bad temper at Golgotha. I looked at Lazarus and said as rudely as possible, “I should think this a fit place for your Plato.”
“You mock me. You have changed. I have changed. For cause—time is a thing. It does bite, like the cold. Listen carefully. There is no need to panic here. We have a postrevolutionary society. We are caught in the stage between anarchy and tyranny. The Brothers are Mensheviks, not bad, whimpering fools, blind and dumb. They cooperate ignorantly with our antisocialist hooligans, Mosquite and his lot, and the imperialists, the Ice Cross. Would you understand me if I said that our call is to assume the idiom of the Bolsheviks? In France, it was the Directory that had to be crushed by Bonaparte.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 34