The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 158

I wanted the freedom of the quay; he agreed. I told Gardiner that I wanted his promise that this manuscript would reach Diomedes no matter what happens to me or my pending reawakening; he promised. I made him swear; he swore, on the Fiddle Bible.

The door to my prison is open. The path to my future is clear. I intend to become a fugitive. I am sixty-four years old. I have a savvy wolf, and know the Antarctic as well as any man who ever lived. The fortress on Anvers Island beckons me. There I was criminally king. There again I shall be—not regent of but brother to ghosts and possibilities. The volcanoes are silent. I shall make thunder in my hall. It will be my paradise. I realize now that I have also spoken prematurely of the death of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. I am the last citizen, and it lives on with me, the tyrant become the keeper of the flame.

And if this seems an imperiled fantasy, I note that the stores on Anvers were never destroyed, the fens and caves stand inviolate. How long will I have? Perhaps ten years in the flesh; Grandfather lived till seventy-four. And perhaps eternity as a ghost; Skallagrim Strider does live on in this place, Elephant Island, so why not Grim Fiddle at Anvers Island? I answer best any worry for my future by reworking Norse wisdom: Dare is better than caution for any man who goes out on the ice, for the length of my life and the day of my death were foretold long ago, and by an intimate of mine, whom I fancy spied her son sanguine and serendipitous on the ice when she looked into that magic hand-mirror late in the evening of the spring equinox of 1973. I boast I am predetermined, then, back to the wall of blizzards and behemoths. I shall have my wolves, the descendants of Iceberg and Goldberg, for the glacier at Anvers Island is a wolf-keep. I shall have my runic carvings, magical histories. I have considered taking this work with me, to continue the interrupted chronicle. It is better not. I have dim premonition, as if a whisper in my ear, that I shall be preoccupied with long vigilance. The ice camps might be empty of the wretched now. The world remains full of shame.

There is a last detail. I want to believe that my Sam survived, that someday he shall read his father’s confession, this odyssey of proverbial ruin. I have no power to thieve time, like Mother. I guess at his looks and whereabouts. It suits me. Orlando the Black was no defeatist. He was a Furore, the one of them I concerned myself with least; it follows that I entrusted my Sam, my abiding concern, to him. I have my high dream that Sam thrives; more, that he has sons and daughters, and that they thrive. I have asked Diomedes, by a letter that introduces this manuscript to him, to seek Radar Fiddle, if he lives, and to enlist his aid in locating my Sam. I would urge Diomedes also to seek Sam’s grandmother, but he is a properly superstitious Greek and would never risk ensnaring a pale albatross.

When they do find you, Sam, you shall know you are my son. I suppose that you bear the scars of our parting. I think of those burns as your birthmark. Forgive me for them, forgive me for permitting your legacy to be exile and abandonment. You are not alone. There should be two others about your age whom I ask you to find and to embrace: Cesare, son of Grootgibeon and Cleopatra; and Solomon, son of Israel and Molly. Start your search in America. The landmark is Cleopatra. And when you find them, show them what I have written of your births, and of the birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica.

Do more; tell them that if there is not a single moral to my story—what sort of life has one theme—there is this: The path to truth is to be fair-minded; never set yourself above another and you cannot fall. The hoard to discover on this path, as a good man, is that you should never bend to a master. Beware of charity. Charity is the grin of slavery. Any man in a position to give charity—not to share, not to distribute equitably—but to give from his largesse charitably, attained that lordly position by first becoming a master of the earth, and of men, a slave-master. Be a bold man, and stick the masters. Look into the face of kings and tell them they are doomed to fall. Carry the assurance that there is only one country from which exile is insufferable. Its name is Heart’s Truth. Remember that you are Grim Fiddle’s only son, and Peregrine Ide’s only grandson, and Mord Fiddle’s only great-grandson, and so your heritage is exodus as much as it is truthseeking.

This is the truth. I was not a savior. I was not a David. I was not a hero. I was a man who did wrong by stealing trust and taking rank, knowingly and criminally, and who repented, continues to repent, for my prideful misconduct. I was vain, eager, angry, and vengeful. I have learned to be grateful and patient. I still have hope to be wise, and to make right by doing right. In all, I was not a legend, I was a man. I was Grim Fiddle. No, I owe more to Israel’s sense of humor than that. I am Grim Fiddle, and in a hurry, and very, very lucky for it.

About the Author

John Calvin Batchelor was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1948, and now lives in New York City. He was graduated from Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the author of a previous novel, The Further Adventures