The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 140

guess is that Gardiner was a man of action who momentarily lost his self-confidence, or his nerve. At first, Gardiner was hostile, suspicious of me, but that has disappeared. My present person does not fit the legend I suppose he has of me. After his caution passed, there was curiosity, prying, about how I pass my time. He would come in here while I was up top exercising or taking the sunlight, and he would handle my rune-carved blocks and stones, would turn through my papers, and once went so far as to take parts of this manuscript from me. I worried he might destroy it, or confiscate the whole of it, or forbid me more paper. When he returned it and showed no inclination either to take more or to make comment, I worried about what he thought. My poverty includes a dearth of critics. My readers and not my characters are imaginary. Gardiner has never responded to my inquiries, though he must face me once a month to read the text of my sentence. I try to interrupt him by asking about my manuscript, “What do you make of Israel?” He stiffens and reads on. I once knew that piece of paper he reads so well that I could sing it. Oddly, I lost that trick, and the whole of it. It dances in my mind, yet when I try to write it down, I lose focus. Diomedes memorized it and came to dramatizing it in English, French, and, my favorite, in Greek Homeric couplets. Gardiner seems to have no need for burlesque. After four years, not including the months he is granted leave (when he travels to Cape Town), he has not changed a note, has made no casual remark afterward, has always ended, “Is all in order?” My answer is my cheeriest “All is in order!”

Perhaps now my shock this morning is more understandable, when Gardiner appeared with the cook bringing me my Christmas dinner. I am granted extra fruit on my birthday, and on Eastern and Western Christianity’s Christmas, a legacy of Diomedes’s devoutness that Gardiner has not altered, though he is cynic and not Christian. Helen does not like him, and growled when he sat down on the bench. I have worried he would take her from me also, and quieted her quickly. He had taken a seat, a first in my presence. He had an envelope in his hand, a letter. He seemed annoyed and anxious. He knew he should not have been here, a week early, out of the ordinary, a break in regulation. I was as flustered as he, flopped about to get him a chair. He told me to calm myself, to get back in bed, and to listen.

“Within the week,” he said, “I have received a communication, by letter, from my predecessor, Lieutenant Commander Nestoraxes of the United Greek Republic Navy, and, after studying my position, and weighing the implications of this confidence in terms of your sentence, have come to tell you of the parts of Commander Nestoraxes’s letter that concern you.”

Diomedes has retired to the Aegean island of Naxos. He decided at the last not to enter the Church, instead to settle on his pension in the village at the foot of the monastery. I can see it all, the azure Aegean, the bright beige beach, the dusty white town arranged in geometric acuity, the green and brown ridges rising to the stone and wood monastery pirouetting above that meditative seascape. For me, the image is voluptuous. Diomedes described it so well in the notes he put in the margins of the books he lent me—our secret dialogue—that I feel I can smell the olives and taste the goat’s cheese. I imagine Diomedes passes his days not too dissimilar to mine, excepting the profound differences of climate and food. He reads his philosophers, works he passed me from his library here, and he writes his memoirs—from a young recruit in battle against the Turk to a naval officer assigned to international treaty organizations charged with maintaining the law across the face of the earth. Diomedes called himself a professional truce-keeper, and only incidentally a warrior. I called him the old soldier. He was a student, and a poet, and a keeper, ever watchful with words and men. It was he who encouraged me to make a manuscript of my confession. I suppose his work is now as demanding as mine, for his adventures were no less sweeping and sad than mine; he was one of those who were ordered into the Pacific basin during those times we called, between us, the Age of Exile.

Diomedes believes that he, as a Greek, understands completely the ideas of banishment, redress, and revenge. He said that his ancestors invented exile. He said that God had granted the Greeks all those islands so that they might grasp, all at once, what it is to be surrounded by the unknown. Also, Diomedes said that the Greek thinkers could be as rash and antagonistic as they were because the island culture provided a way for despots to dispose of present dissent without disposing of dissent’s uncanny quality to transform itself, as with magic, into future dogma. Diomedes said that a Greek was a heaven-sent keeper for problems such as Grim Fiddle. He thought of Elephant Island as a challenge worthy of his blood. I think he is more comfortable on rock surrounded by ocean. It matches his mind, a keeper surrounded by forgetfulness.

Diomedes writes me, through Gardiner, that he misses me, and our secret talk, and feels ill-used without the ice and wind to combat. He asks after Satan’s Seat, which was silent all the while he was here, which he resented for depriving him of an experience approximating the great volcanoes that periodically tore apart and then reawakened the history of the Aegean. It was his favorite story of mine, the eruptions of Satan’s Seat. I think he was envious of my memory,