The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 111
“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