The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 112

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 earliest 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,