The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 1

THE BIRTH OF THE

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

OF ANTARCTICA

John Calvin Batchelor

THE BIRTH OF THE

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

OF ANTARCTICA

The Dial Press ■ New York

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bachelor, John Calvin.

The birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica.

I. Title.

PS3552.A8268B57 1983 813’.54 82-22182

ISBN 0-385-27811-X

To my Mother and Father

A mind that seeks to understand and grasp this

is therefore best. Both bad and good,

and much of both, must be borne in a lifetime

spent on this earth in these anxious days.

BEOWULF

HAPTER

THE

IRST

THE KINGDOM

OF FIRE

My Mother

I AM Grim Fiddle. My mother, Lamba, first spied me in her magic hand-mirror late in the evening of the spring equinox of 1973. She was dancing by herself at the time, at the rear of a shabby beer hall called THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB, located in the foreign quarter of Stockholm, the capital of the Kingdom of Sweden. She was midway between the music box and the bank of telephone booths. She was not under the influence of any drug, though my maternal grandfather was a Lutheran preacher. There is no further explanation of Lamba’s vision forthcoming. Mother was a Norse sibyl.

My conception followed immediately. There is minor confusion as to the precise sequence. My father, Peregrine Ide, an American draft dodger, was seated in a cramped manner in the last of the telephone booths. He was talking with America. One of my godfathers, Israel Elfers, also a draft dodger, was standing nearby, playing a pinball game called Pirate King. Israel later claimed that my father was weepy and very drunk. Peregrine does not seem to have been aware of Lamba until she crashed atop him. Her demands were unambiguous, as was Lamba, a seventeen-year-old beauty, fine-haired and long-legged, with an unhappy depth to her features. Also, I was told, Lamba exuded a powerful scent. Her manner was brutal and possessed. Lamba forced herself on Peregrine. Their embrace was artless. They obviously did connect. And Lamba left just enough, and the right sort of, blood on Peregrine for him later to speculate that she had been virginal, thereby redoubling his fleeting sorrow for this sin of the flesh.

Israel said he did not at once grasp the scene. When he did, he pulled another of my godfathers, Earle Littlejohn, the Ivy League hockey legend, over to the booth, providing my first biological moment with the privacy offered by Earle’s enormous backside. Lamba is said to have wailed. In order to conceal the affair further, Israel enlisted my final godfather, Guy Labyrinthe, another Ivy hockey legend, to join him in a vigorous rendition of “America the Beautiful.” They were eventually accompanied by a folk singer acquaintance, Timothy, on mouth harp.

Finally, the assembled increasingly uneasy with the battle inside the booth, Lamba ended the escapade by crying out the Norse name “Skallagrim Strider!”

Peregrine’s first sensible comment to Israel afterward was simply the American modifier “Grim.”

I was born in Stockholm as well, in early December of the same year, in Lamba’s sparse bedroom on the first story of the small quayside cottage belonging to my grandfather, the Reverend Mord Fiddle. Mother was attended by Grandfather’s chess partner, Dr. Anders Horshead, and by a midwife, Astra, who was plump and cunning, and who was also one of Lamba’s secret sister sibyls. Thus, at a diminutive seven pounds odd (which might not be much more than the weight of the hand that writes this), healthy, red-faced, and ugly, with a sea-green umbilical cord attached to where it should have been (I mention this to dismiss notions that I am any other than of woman born), I enjoyed the mystical comfort provided by logical positivism, Lutheranism, and paganism. My birthchamber was so crowded by conflicting schools of thought, I marvel at my ability to assert myself. It was a sudden lesson in the contradictions that then darkened the fair, chill Kingdom of Sweden. My maternal people are a handsome, clean tribe, but I have often thought this might be heavenly compensation for the melancholy that taints their lives.

Grandfather did not witness my dive into contretemps. He was downstairs in his study praying loudly and drinking quietly. He had not slept well the last three months of Lamba’s time, haunted by images he associated with his wife Zoe’s desertion, and now Lamba’s infamy. He looked the robust but suddenly drowned fisherman—his blue eyes like smooth stones, his heavy beard like frayed rope. As he heard my first cry, he reached to find the resolve to bellow back, as if singing the lower range of this Fiddle duet; and what he returned me was not idle, was a portentous message that he had found in his come-what-may Lutheran style, by flinging open the gigantic Fiddle Bible and, with his eyes shut, tapping his finger on the page once for luck and twice for righteousness. He thundered in that Judgment Day voice of his:

“My Son, fear Lord God and grow rich in spirit, but have nothing to do with men of rank! They will bring catastrophe without warning! Who knows what ruin such men may cause?”

This is from the Book of Proverbs. It was staggeringly well chosen; and I have long suspected that Grandfather found it with one eye open, as that splendid Norse scoundrel, one-eyed Odin, would have done. I have never improved upon its wisdom, nor will I soon. What ruin indeed, Grandfather?

For it so happened that Mord Fiddle, a man of very high rank in the tyrannical wing of the Swedish Lutheran Church, was mortified by my birth. That his dim-witted eldest should have conceived a bastard was shame enough. He saw Lamba’s disgrace as his own flagellation. But the matter was worse for him than that. Lamba had conceived so far out of wedlock that she claimed she had no clue who the father was, what the father