The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 121

and I suffered their burden, first the confusion of them and finally the revelation in them. In pursuit of Grim Fiddle, Grandfather had walked through the darkness, and he survived just long enough to tell the tale.

And yet, if I were to report straight out what Grandfather told me at Golgotha—and I remember it as acutely as the cold—it would undermine my purpose. I do not want this account to become so heaped with mystery that the truth is lost. I must first speak clearly of the ice camps. And so I defer briefly from Grandfather’s tale. Grim Fiddle has his own mind.

I cannot conceive how, at this late date, any decent man or woman cannot know something of the ice camps. I also worry that such selective ignorance might still be possible, even fashionable, as I was told was the case of crimes against humanity in both my father’s and grandfather’s times. Israel once told me that the larger the crime, the more likely it is to be argued to have been an inevitability, the more readily it is to be recalled and recorded not as outrage but as fate. I remember how Israel said it, speaking of his people, the Jews, “Kill ten, it’s murder. Make ten thousand vanish in the night, it’s a phenomenon. Obliterate a million, it’s the Devil’s work. Remind them of what’s been done, you’re called a conspirator, or worse, a storyteller.”

Grim Fiddle is prepared to be disregarded as a conspirator, alone here in his conceit, the last whisperer of Lazarus’s shattered republic of ice. More, Grim Fiddle is prepared to be dismissed as a storyteller, an odd-tongue clatterer, like the priests who copied and recopied the saving history of the Hebrews, changing a gang of forty outlaws into an army of hosts doing the Lord’s work. I have not exaggerated the ice camps. My error is more troublesome than hyperbole; in order not to degrade the truth, I am underestimating the horror of the camps, reluctant to speculate about the politics and catastrophes that delivered up the wretched to the South Shetlands. It seems fair to say that the camps were not a cause, only a product of untold crimes committed by people on every continent. It is my presumption that my experiences in Sweden, on the Atlantic, on the Falklands and South Georgia, illustrate the whole that I cannot know whereof. This is my testament, and I leave it to others to re-create theirs that carried them, like me and mine, into the Antarctic Circle.

At this point, what I have to say of the South must intersect with facts and testimonies that should be, must be, available in the modern world about the camps, their generation, their administration, their conclusion. When I mention Elephant Island and Anvers Island, it cannot be the first time they are portrayed in writing, nor can my passing reference to the pit of Clarence West and the hell of Anvers be novel. And yet, I cannot assume, and I certainly cannot be sure, how much detail has been arranged to someone else’s needs. I believe it is imperative, then, that I characterize the camps in my own way, for my own purposes. I choose not to begin with how many hundreds of thousands drowned, starved, disappeared, because I know such a report is not credible on the page, and because it is off my point: I want to explain how the camps were for us inside them, and why it was possible for me and mine to do as we did. Therefore, I choose to begin with an explanation of how I have come to understand the camps. I have been helped by my Norse learning, and must pause to render quickly Norse cosmology in order to explicate my mind’s picture of the ice camps. If this is mythologizing, then at least it is confessed, and it is mine. It comforts me.

The ancient Norse spoke of all that existed divided into three realms: Asgard, Midgard, and Niflheim. One should think of them arranged like cartwheels, atop each other, spinning beneath and overshadowed by the timeless ash tree, Yggdrasil. This is the guardian tree, the tree of life, with roots reaching into the three realms. Yggdrasil is indestructible, is said will survive the final cataclysm, Ragnarok. This notion did not make sense to me until one day, when I was twelve years old, I was daydreaming beneath a great old ash tree at Vexbeggar as a thundercloud hurtled from the Baltic. I watched the limbs bend in the gusts, listened to the dance of the leaves and the first big drops popping against the canopy, realized there were many birds and insects above me sheltering like me from the blow. I understood the majesty of Yggdrasil; of course it would survive me, and of course its roots held all that existed together.

Asgard was the home of the gods. It contained subdivisions, such as Valhalla, the hall of the slain heroes; Vanaheim, home of the fertility goddesses like Frigg the Queen; and Alfheim, home of the light elves who were magical goldsmiths. Asgard’s first citizens were the warrior gods, like Odin the Terrible-One, or Thor the Dim-Witted and Righteous. The Norse celebrated more than worshiped Asgard, for it was regarded as a place of epic folly: starvation and death were unknown, though pain and melancholy possible. I have always thought Asgard simpleminded and too often trivial, but that is Grim Fiddle’s mean way.

More significant for me is Midgard, the middle earth, home of mortal mankind. Here also lived the giants at Jotunheim, and the dark elves and dwarfs in caves and burrows. One traveled from Asgard to Midgard over Bifrost, the trembling road. Midgard was surrounded by a vast, forbidding ocean containing the monster Jormungand, who was so long he could encircle the realm to bite his own tail. Midgard was the paramount battleground, where man struggled against nature. The Norse were as sentimental as they were