Grim Fiddle is prepared to be disregarded as a conspirator, alone here in his conceit, the last whisperer of Lazarus’s shattered republic of ice. More, Grim Fiddle is prepared to be dismissed as a storyteller, an odd-tongue clatterer, like the priests who copied and recopied the saving history of the Hebrews, changing a gang of forty outlaws into an army of hosts doing the Lord’s work. I have not exaggerated the ice camps. My error is more troublesome than hyperbole; in order not to degrade the truth, I am underestimating the horror of the camps, reluctant to speculate about the politics and catastrophes that delivered up the wretched to the South Shetlands. It seems fair to say that the camps were not a cause, only a product of untold crimes committed by people on every continent. It is my presumption that my experiences in Sweden, on the Atlantic, on the Falklands and South Georgia, illustrate the whole that I cannot know whereof. This is my testament, and I leave it to others to re-create theirs that carried them, like me and mine, into the Antarctic Circle.
At this point, what I have to say of the South must intersect with facts and testimonies that should be, must be, available in the modern world about the camps, their generation, their administration, their conclusion. When I mention Elephant Island and Anvers Island, it cannot be the first time they are portrayed in writing, nor can my passing reference to the pit of Clarence West and the hell of Anvers be novel. And yet, I cannot assume, and I certainly cannot be sure, how much detail has been arranged to someone else’s needs. I believe it is imperative, then, that I characterize the camps in my own way, for my own purposes. I choose not to begin with how many hundreds of thousands drowned, starved, disappeared, because I know such a report is not credible on the page, and because it is off my point: I want to explain how the camps were for us inside them, and why it was possible for me and mine to do as we did. Therefore, I choose to begin with an explanation of how I have come to understand the camps. I have been helped by my Norse learning, and must pause to render quickly Norse cosmology in order to explicate my mind’s picture of the ice camps. If this is mythologizing, then at least it is confessed, and it is mine. It comforts me.
The ancient Norse spoke of all that existed divided into three realms: Asgard, Midgard, and Niflheim. One should think of them arranged like cartwheels, atop each other, spinning beneath and overshadowed by the timeless ash tree, Yggdrasil. This is the guardian tree, the tree of life, with roots reaching into the three realms. Yggdrasil is indestructible, is said will survive the final cataclysm, Ragnarok. This notion did not make sense to me until one day, when I was twelve years old, I was daydreaming beneath a great old ash tree at Vexbeggar as a thundercloud hurtled from the Baltic. I watched the limbs bend in the gusts, listened to the dance of the leaves and the first big drops popping against the canopy, realized there were many birds and insects above me sheltering like me from the blow. I understood the majesty of Yggdrasil; of course it would survive me, and of course its roots held all that existed together.
Asgard was the home of the gods. It contained subdivisions, such as Valhalla, the hall of the slain heroes; Vanaheim, home of the fertility goddesses like Frigg the Queen; and Alfheim, home of the light elves who were magical goldsmiths. Asgard’s first citizens were the warrior gods, like Odin the Terrible-One, or Thor the Dim-Witted and Righteous. The Norse celebrated more than worshiped Asgard, for it was regarded as a place of epic folly: starvation and death were unknown, though pain and melancholy possible. I have always thought Asgard simpleminded and too often trivial, but that is Grim Fiddle’s mean way.
More significant for me is Midgard, the middle earth, home of mortal mankind. Here also lived the giants at Jotunheim, and the dark elves and dwarfs in caves and burrows. One traveled from Asgard to Midgard over Bifrost, the trembling road. Midgard was surrounded by a vast, forbidding ocean containing the monster Jormungand, who was so long he could encircle the realm to bite his own tail. Midgard was the paramount battleground, where man struggled against nature. The Norse were as sentimental as they were superstitious, and studied the tales of Midgard to find a balance between their mysticism and their fatalism. In Midgard, one discovered answers: What is brave? What is defeat? What is truth? Disease and death were commonplace, fearlessness was regarded better than a faint heart for any man who put his nose out of doors, and not even the gods could change fate there, or guarantee happiness, kindness, decency.
Niflheim was the home of the dead. It was a place of bitterness, unending night, untellable cold. The Norse made only a slight distinction between the honorable dead and the wicked dead. The Norse said, “Dead is dead.” Niflheim was ruled by a pathetically hideous female, half black and half white, named Hel, daughter of treacherous Loki the Shape-Changer; she lived in a mansion, Eljundir, near the rock Drop to Destruction.
I repeat: I have paused to explain Norse cosmology because my knowledge of such has helped me to solve what I believe was the largest mystery of the camps: What was their place and meaning in the world? I am a poor thinker. I cannot sustain a philosophical discourse. I need pictures of the world to help me remember it. My intention here is to present a model that I can hold in my mind’s eye as to how all that existed in the Age of Exile came to act upon me and mine at Golgotha and afterward. I did not see it this way at the time. I was blinded by fear and vengeance. I see now it was how all that existed weighed upon me. This is Grim Fiddle’s cosmology of those days. And if I borrow too heavily, and distort too broadly, so be it. It feels natural for me to have come to think of Antarctica in terms of my Norse ways: The North interprets the South.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, all that existed still divided into three realms. The proportions had altered radically since first my Norse ancestors daydreamed beneath the grand ash tree of life, Yggdrasil. Asgard, still the home of the gods, had grown to encompass all the shimmering towers of Babel ruled by latter-day magic, called logical positivism. The gods had faces and voices: American, European, Asian, African, the masters and mistresses of a bountiful harvest. Their politics did not signify, capitalist to socialist to nihilism; their religion did not signify, humanism to mysticism to atheism. There was no single Odin, instead a thousand thousand of terrible ones, fickle, compassionless, one eye for more of the same. There was no single Frigg, instead millions of well-fed, well-loved, and enriched queens. Charity Bentham and Cleopatra had been such Friggs, as Cesare Furore had been such an Odin, and all three had descended from Asgard to tamper with and then destroy my family. This modern Asgard was not simpleminded, was, rather, boundlessly avaricious, profoundly charitable. Few died violently. Starvation and disease were obsolete. The gods followed the sun. It was the realm of the New Benthamites, measuring their pleasure and pain units to determine which hall of gods should be most pleased, where the feast should be held next. The halls were heaped with largesse, which the gods dispensed with sly intent. The hedonic calculus was cunning. Asgard practiced a benevolence that the New Benthamites called the Charity Factor. The scales were weighed meanly. In order to safeguard their feasts, the gods dispatched armies of charity to minister to those shunned from the hearth-table by birth, by chance, and by murder. It was at such a charitable moment that Asgard dispatched the Ice Cross, over the trembling roadway of the Atlantic. When Angel of Death crossed Bifrost, there was no returning.
Midgard, still the realm of mortal mankind, had shrunk to the fens and ditches and backwaters of desperation. There, clinging to rocks like South Georgia, mankind suffered and died, caught between the charitable whims of the gods and the violence of nature. And when man was backed up against the uncrossable barrier of the sea, he struck out ineptly against the sea monster Jormungand, now made of steel and spitting fire. The continent upon which the fen was located did not signify, a hovel is a hovel, whether Asian or African or American. The skin-colors and regrets did not signify, lost is lost. There were still monsters and giants. There were still dark elves and dwarfs cowering in the damp caves of places like the South Shetlands.
In thi
s way the ice camps were the very edge of Midgard, the last chance of the last remnant. We were dark elves in the camps—our skins turned black from burning seal and whale oil; and it was generally so that only the smallest, most dwarflike, survived the conditions. Cast out of Asgard, or in flight from giants doing the bidding of the gods, or simply deprived of sense by accident, most of the wretches of Midgard were eaten by metallic Jormungand. The few who escaped were swept across, or sent across, the Southern Ocean to crash against the ice.
Israel always joked that the gods keep several sets of books. I understand the sharpness of his wit more completely here, because this must explain why it is impossible for me, without resources, to provide details of how many wretches arrived in the camps each week, how many died each day, how much was required to feed them, or starve them. I suppose, though, that it is probably impossible for anyone, even back in Asgard, to reconstruct a wholly accurate scheme of the camps. I have mentioned some of the Ice Cross’s patrons. I caution that the variety of the camps could be misleading. They tended to be either those administered directly by the Ice Cross or those administered by religious societies, such as Golgotha. Because the Ice Cross was international, there were European camps, five huge camps run by South Americans, at least one run by South Africans, perhaps a half dozen overlorded by North Americans. Also, there were small camps administered by international treaty organizations, and several with ties to socialist blocs. Then there were the Roman Catholic Church’s camps, from the extremes of Father Saint Stephen to the Brothers of Perpetual Witness at Golgotha. It is instructive to suppose what one political philosophy might have linked such diverse sacrifice. I have already suggested my solution: the Charity Factor of the New Benthamites, generalized benevolence on a world scale to assure stability among the pleasured while doing little to comfort the dilemma of the pained. This explanation must fall short, of course, because it presumes that the ice camps were conceived with vision and maintained with precision.
The truth was the ice was an impartial executioner; there was no one in charge; the Ice Cross and religionists suffered with the wretched. The bulk of the work for the camps was done by convicts like the Little Brothers who had been transported to the South Shetlands. This permitted the Ice Cross no real assistance. Even the elite of the South Shetlands, Ice Cross officers like Dietjagger and Ariadne, were not exempt, were sad itinerants who had plunged themselves across Bifrost for money but no gain. The Ice Cross did a ruinous job, committed atrocities that should never be forgotten; however, it is also true that it never stopped struggling to the limit of its mandate for charity, until Grim Fiddle stopped it.
Consider the difficulty of establishing order on the ice: an international brigade of adventurers, renegades, and the not rare saintly man, provided with warships and the absolute power of life and death, let loose upon a sea of ice and refugees. Who can be surprised that the Ice Cross came to be mind-crippled? What the Ice Cross was asked to do was absurd. Nothing good could be done. The only release for the Ice Cross was betrayal, either of humanity or of themselves. This alone should explain why the best of the capitanes de los Hielistos were Ice Cross turncoats.
Consider the task assumed by the mandate of charity: uncountable multitudes worldwide scrambling for a place under the sun, some several hundred thousand of them crushed into the ice camps, who must be disarmed, sheltered, fed, nursed, and only then, if they survived the winter, the quakes, the hopelessness, relocated to lands already awash with refugees. The resettlement program did exist. It collapsed from abuse and contradiction, drowned by the flood of flesh. And even if it had worked as designed, where to put them? What utopia then? That is the answer in the question; no place. The promise of resettlement became a whip with which the Ice Cross controlled the camps. I have explained how I was at first persuaded by the hope of resetdement. For the less lucky the thought of a new land, a new Eden, justified any disgrace. Worse, the resettlement program was soon made into another kind of trap: many nations, especially republics in Africa and South America, used the false promise of resettlement to persuade unwanted populations to submit to roundups, deportation, and final imprisonment on the ice.
Nevertheless, I do not mean to portray the South Shetlands as if they were a chain of death camps. That would be wrong. Yes, the camps were a result of Brave New Benthamism or old and familiar totalitarianism, in all, the apologetics of the politics of falsehood. And yet, yes also, the camps did become the focus of a colossal relief effort, one that required genius and compassion to bridge Bifrost in order to get goods into the Antarctic. Modern Asgard—those grand republics—was neither deaf nor heartless. For every Odin, there were Thors and Balders, wellmeaning guardians of men, people capable of decency. They must have sacrificed a great deal in order to get that food to us. They must have sent up a roar that shook the pillars of Odin’s halls. No banquet could have been without a woe-singer reminding the gods of our depravity. There must have been heroes and heroines in every nation who deserved credit, not the persecution they likely suffered. And I can suppose their frustration, gathering funds, hiring transports and transporters, fending off competing chauvinists, reaching across Bifrost to save the ice camps, only to watch the situation at the edge of Midgard worsen, descend.
For there was one aspect of the South that no god, no hero, no machinery of shimmering Asgard could overcome. I could explain it glibly by rendering it with Israel’s cynical remark that the only difference between a man and a dog is that the dog will not bite the hand that feeds it. I shall not, because it pertains completely to my conduct on Anvers. I confess forthrightly.
The wretched in the South, we wretches, we were not all innocent victims of some fabulous conspiracy to disenfranchise lambs. It is this point that shows me that my fantastic model of twenty-first-century Asgard and Midgard has distorted the truth. For we wretches were the worst possible remnant. The genuine meek, the genuinely wronged, they had been left far behind, dead in their hovels, on the beaches, in the sea. We in the ice camps had come through our ordeals because we were tougher, wilder, cruder than our brethren. We were the lucky remnant. We were the most violent wretched: pirates, killers, thieves, madmen, lost to reason and utterly embittered. As we suffered atrocities, we were atrocious. We did have high dreams, but they had come to be twisted by hatred. Those of us who survived, we came to believe that only the most murderous could endure the ice camps. What was the face of our enemy? It was not only the mind-corrupt Odins, or the self-deceived Thors, or the miserable Ice Cross. The enemy was also the reflection in the ice. How to say this and convince in a blow? We did drink the blood. We did eat the dead.
I read over Grim Fiddle’s cosmology, and I perceive that I have overstated; in so doing, I have reached too far ahead, anticipating events that I have not explicated. This seems an inherent trouble with models and model-makers. I saw this with Charity Bentham’s works. My cosmology has separated the world of men too severely, has contrived rather than described the meaning of the camps.
The truth was that the South was ever covered by a pervasive gloom, like the wafting fogs of the Antarctic convergence. I correct my excess in the same way one confronted that climate, by plunging into it. I shall set aside my mythology of the Antarctic for the moment and try to penetrate the lost history of the South with specificity. It too may fail to gain the whole. It is all I can do. It is my hope that somewhere between the universal above and what I know of the specific outrages below, there is the same revelation I once experienced—and some understanding of what we did there.
My hope also is that this, the last testament of my family, will convey my lasting fury for their murder. I have already told how King James came to the ice. Our exodus was late. I shall now return to the saga Grandfather related to me that fortnight he lay dying at Golgotha. I shall translate as best I can Mord Fiddle’s cosmology. It would be contrary, however, if I were to narrate only Mord Fiddle’s story, and so I shall weave in what I know now of the genesis of the ice ca
mps and of the travail of my family. Grandfather’s story spanned the seven years he waited and searched for me. It began with his reply to my question, “Are they all dead?”
Grandfather said, “No.”
Elephant Island
Grandfather blamed Israel when I failed to return in Black Crane. He shouted down my family’s protests and chose for them, they would winter on Mead’s Kiss. They had sufficient supplies; this overlooks their fears. The major event that winter was that Molly Rogers gave birth, a son, named Solomon for Israel’s dead father. By late spring (November 1996), the increase in refugee traffic, the dissension among my family, the threat of the Pattie gunboats, all obliged Grandfather to declare himself. He carved his name in the rock, then put to sea, south on the sixtieth meridian.
Grandfather kept to his sailing course for over a month, back and forth between the Falklands and the Antarctic convergence looking for Black Crane. The cumulative stress of the blows finally shattered Angel of Death’s foremast. They were driven east toward the South Orkneys. Somewhere just off the edge of the retreating ice pack, they were rescued by a European warship—Russian, I think, perhaps an escort for a whaling fleet—a forerunner of the as-of-yet-unborn Ice Cross. They were taken to the first landfall, the well-built British naval station on the southwestern shore of Elephant Island, then serving as a staging point for the several northern European republics asserting their claim over West Antarctica. There was no network of camps then, probably not more than a few thousand wretches scattered from the South Orkneys across the Scotia Sea. The refugees were not then the major concern; instead, several republics of the North were in the early stages of a confrontation with republics of the South over territory—sea, land, and ice.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 37