The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 115
“None of your tricks, speak plain,” I said.
“I mean what I say. Remember what I say. Grim Fiddle is a good man who is becoming an angry one. You believe injustice, absolute justice—what you call righteousness, or godliness, or truthfulness. And you will enforce that belief, and your faith in yourself, enforce it absolutely. You might understand this: There is no more dangerous animal alive than a human being who is good, who knows what defeat is, and who determines to fight for dignity and then gets angry. Such a man is possessed, a moral monster, and limitless.” Lazarus sighed at his own argument, waved his hands toward the corridors again, added, “This might be a paradise for them. I shall give them a god to fear.”
“Lazarus,” I said, “I am tired of you.”
He did not smile, rubbed his scar, coughed deeply, stood up, and bowed. He bowed. As he did, I could see how badly his clothes hung. He was starving, and shaking from the damp, and beaten, and exhausted, yet he preferred philosophy to melancholy, unless those are the same on the ice.
The first of the great fall storms heaved ice floes up against Aurora Bay. The Ice Cross paid its last visit until spring in order to bring a freighter of goods and three small boats of wretches from Africa, dehydrated beings with cavernous mouths. The Brothers prayed over them, sang those rich hymns—not as dark as disengaged, they prostrate before their giant crucifixes. The Africans knew they were done, still begged charity. Decisions were permitted that were not Christian, were not just, however it is argued. There must be no excuse for our conduct, not even the winter that closed on Golgotha in screams. The winds off the continent can reach immeasurable, unimaginable strength, with the temperatures plunging well below zero, however calibrated, Centigrade or Fahrenheit. There are said to be worse places in the North, long settled by gritty Northmen. The peninsula of Antarctica and the offshore islands are not anathema to man; the temperature in the summer is above freezing, and the worst temperatures midwinter are far short of those in Finland, or the Yukon, or those of Russia north of the Arctic Circle, to give examples I have been given. I declare that the measurement of the severity of offshore Antarctica, the South Shetlands, does not signify; it is what such conditions do to the nature of a trapped and imprisoned human being. The howls get in the mind, the damp makes the heart feel like a lump of ice; and then there is the black of April.
What is the use of detailing that winter at Golgotha? We were daunted by natural and supernatural foes. Hard work and stern character kept the South Georgians sane, even as their rations were cut. My people had more than others; we knew what we were doing, stole shamelessly. We flopped about in the longhouses, told stories, sang with Longfaeroe, withered, began again, waiting, remembering. We also died. I thought I had empded of tears. Now that I write of Golgotha, am again at Golgotha, I find I can still weep. I resist sentimentality; it encloses me. It was so sad. No matter how many plans we made, about repairing King James in the spring, about training more of the wretches as hunters, another meaningless death dragged us down. I doubt that I can communicate what the blackness of the Antarctic winter does to the will. We South Georgians knew what only a glimpse of the sun winter-long does to resolve, and the sealers had experienced the ice continent itself. None of our experiences were enough. We were always tired, always hungry, always afraid. We did not want to die. We each in our own way, and as God-fearing folk, held to what we most desired. I have spoken of high dreams. There is another phenomenon that comes with the long night of the south. One remembers everything one has ever done, seen, heard, dreamed of, tasted, recalls it all with what seems exactitude. The memories come tumbling up while one works, idles, or dozes. One can be conversing with another, and just as one tries to make a point, a memory of a conversation from long before wells up and overwhelms, and one drifts. For me, my memories of Abigail were bliss and torment, the same of Peregrine, Israel—all my confusions, all my failures, tumbled right before me. On the ice, everyone hears ghosts, everyone meets the dead, and to see a man or woman talking to nothingness is not to see madness. That can be a purgative; it can also be extreme peril. We had to tie lines to those displaying excessive perceptual difficulties, in order to keep them from wandering away; had to keep knives and even stones from those who started talking about homicide or suicide. And those who refused to get up, became lethargic and glassy-eyed, we had to pull to alert, shake them, push and shout, make them care. There is one weapon against such despondency that works as long as one has it to give. One must love. One must hold the afflicted, sing to them, tell them they are needed and blessed. That is what mankind has to fight the ice, to fight abandonment and cruelty and defeat. My mother first said it, and I saw the truth of it. “As long as you are loved,” she said that night of Sly-Eyes’s party, “you are safe from their shame.”
It was awful to live, is awful to relate. I had intended to tell of Jane and Violante and Magda, how they