The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 116

kept the children alert with stories from the Bible and the Apocrypha, especially Daniel, Ruth, and David. I cannot. It hurts to think of their fight, one less child each week, and how we almost lost Jane to her nightmares when one of the smallest children succumbed and she could not believe it. Longfaeroe sang and loved; we all did. How many times must I say that whatever we were or did or hoped for, nothing was enough.

And hatred: it came to that for me, and for many more. There is a point when love seems to fail, and one turns to the shame of hatred. We knew our need of God, could not abide that Heaven was all that was left us; we were sorrowful, found no consolation in grains of rice and frostbite; we tried to be gentle, had only frozen earth to die upon, and were obliged to steal from the weak to survive; we were hungry, could not fill our bellies with hope; we tried to show mercy to those more wretched, knew no mercy for ourselves; we struggled to keep our hearts pure, yet saw nothing but ghosts and corpses and the icicles on the walls; we tried to keep peace among the internees and in our own hearts, had to confront suicide and murder, hangings and strangulations commonplace; we were condemned and persecuted because we had stood for right on South Georgia, and what was the use of knowing the Kingdom of Heaven would be ours when the Kingdom of Ice tortured us because we would not quit?

We stood and fought with human love for eleven months. I am angry now for the remembering of it; I feel as I write that I am reexperiencing the same generation of fury that I suffered then. I should recount more of the courage of my South Georgians and the Brothers, and even the Little Brothers, at Golgotha. I shall not. What would it serve to say that they were brave, that they were good and humble and weak and bitter? Would it give them peace? Would it ease my frustration with my failure to find worth in what happened there? Lazarus meant to mock me when he said that I decried the Sermon on the Mount as inappropriate for this world. Perhaps I did, and do; perhaps he did know my heart, and his own. I confess my blindness to such wisdom then, have not paraphrased it idly. Yes, I know that there is no justification for making war on others; and yes, I know that vengeance is not mine to take or vouchsafe; and yes, I know that the yearning for freedom is common to all men and women, regardless of station, and no specific warrant, no detailed petition for redress, can usurp the majesty of those who preach love, forgiveness, and patience for divine justice. I do not balk, nevertheless, for what I and mine wanted were some food, some warmth, some release. We were slaves. We were less than slaves, rewarded for our perseverance by slow death. No one man, no one group of the nations of men, was murdering us. We died for no reason. Does that have meaning, to say that needful, sorrowful, gentle, hungry, merciful, pure-at-heart, persecuted, righteous, faithful and godly human beings can perish for no reason at all? I will not accept that, will not accept on this earth or in Heaven or in Hell that I was born, my loved ones were born, those wretches were born, to be murdered and buried so that we could find happiness in afterlife. I will also not accept that we should have been content to swallow charity. They, all the unnamable theys, took our decency and hope and forced on us the gruel of charity. In my time, I have learned that a man or woman upon whom such an exchange is forced will fall, and fall most savagely, to revenge.

Longfaeroe did sing, “O praise Jehovah!” If he had been with us at Golgotha, Wild Drumrul would have sung, “Allah is merciful and compassionate!” I believed it, for God created a world where men can know the renaissance of the return of the sun. And with the sun, my remnant at Golgotha was out again on the ice, hunting and planning. Germanicus and Half-Red Harrah threw themselves onto King James, finding her battered but not wrecked by the winter’s ice. The sealers showed us how to shed the winter’s weariness, and but for the shaking of the volcanoes I think Christmas Muir and his mates would have been joyous with the spring. The first supply ship arrived in convoy with Ice Cross cutters near my twenty-ninth birthday. There was green on the slopes; and Germanicus took a whale that was so disoriented by the quaking that it did not run on him. By then, my people had moved to the leadership of Golgotha, not without the jealousy of the Little Brothers, a rift that required Lazarus’s dialectical skills. Lazarus did manage to secure a document from Brother Silva that permitted me to speak for the camp alongside of the Little Brothers’ gang-leaders, Mosquite and Hardava. I was not elaborate to the Ice Cross commander, telling him through my translator so much: “Hosannah!”—save us. The Ice Cross officer was a shrewd, Frenchspeaking African, mixed blood, a black marketeer certainly, named Ariadne, whose replies were always prefaced by “Quel cauchemar!” (“What a nightmare!”). In bad Spanish, Ariadne said that we best save ourselves, and not only from hunger but also from the capitanes de los Hielistos. That was the first I heard of the infamous Jaguaquara, and more, learning enough to guess that the Ice Cross was in jeopardy. So far from a persecutor, the Ice Cross thought itself condemned to combat against the omnipresent outlaw wretches. Ariadne whined, said that the mountains above us were alive with Hielistos, that the white cutters were being overwhelmed in the early battles of