The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 24
I won’t record what Israel wrote me of Mord the Hard-Fisherman cursing Father. It was hideous. It was Mord Fiddle who first said that if the King washed his hands at all, it would be to cleanse them of innocent blood, not of Peregrine’s, whom Grandfather called “that assassin.” It was Mord Fiddle who first waved the white handtowel—to dry the King’s hands, he said—that became the favorite of the Loyalist mobs, they waving those towels over their heads, chanting for executions, deportations, crimes against the helpless, and especially for Peregrine’s head. And it was Mord Fiddle who toppled the King’s government—more of that shortly. According to what Israel wrote me of that day on the quays, the issue was at the point where the Loyalists believed they could force an election. Mord Fiddle alluded in his speech to the raising of a vigilante force—“Evangelical Brigade”—to storm the King’s prison and relieve the King of his burden of Peregrine Ide.
That Mord the Hard-Fisherman was my grandfather, that it was he who against nature and conscience had driven his daughter and grandson from the nursery, never occurred to us. The surname Fiddle was not rare in Sweden, or in the North. Indeed, Peregrine and Israel had always thought that my name on that piece of paper was a sad joke.
It seems blind of us now, but really, we had so many problems, why should such a farfetched coincidence of surnames have seemed significant? What is more, I was not then fully informed of the details of my conception and birth, and Israel was almost as ignorant as I was. There was only one person in the Kingdom who had facts enough to act, and she was as far from a philosophical disposition to politics as my dogs, high-minded wolves, were to the leash. However, Mother was not one to pass by an opportunity for melodrama. I have often thought that her reentry into my life was less luck than premeditated showmanship.
Lamba Time-Thief
VEXBEGGAR had been a modest fishing village centered on its Lutheran church until speculators had transformed it into a seaside gambling resort for the idle rich. It was shaped like a fishhook about a natural inlet, the bulk of the saloons and casinos shoved up against the lower part of the J, the housing complexes spreading back from there. Our dilapidated camp—two bunkhouses and a mess hall—stood at the extreme upper part of the J, at the tip of shantytown that itself was back from the harbor. The poorest and most unwelcome of the resort’s domestics lived there, heaped like driftwood on the tides of fate.
Because the bank would not buy it back from us, we had our own pier, jutting about forty yards into the Baltic. The Asians and Africans loved to fish from it, so it never appeared as sorrowful as the rest of the camp. After Molly returned to Israel, I closed up the inland houses and moved into the storage shack at the end of the pier, where we had tied up our ersatz six-meter Viking boat and our old ketch. My room, on the first story (an attic really, walls shaped by the pine roof), overlooked drifting hulks, abandoned warehouses, our two sad vessels, and the few craft tied up that far from the yacht club. It was damp up there, but with insulation and innovation it was tolerable in winter and heavenly in summer. I cooked my meals on a stove Guy had installed on the ground level, and used most of the shack as a kennel for Goldberg and Iceberg and the guests who followed them home frequently. Most of their friends were canine and male, and of consequence both had litters their third years; however, by that fourth year the human and feminine came regularly to my door.
I was shy, necessarily secretive. At first, the daughters of the year-round domestics pried into my affairs. I learned to say “boy” and “girl” and so forth in Turkish, Korean, Urdu, and Brazilian Portuguese. In the summer, there were also the intriguing nymphs from the resorts whom I chanced upon along the harbor walks. I had more than my share of fun, made a fool of myself in many tongues, learned some unbelievable things about females, spent spring nights wishing I was not alone and autumn nights wishing I was, and generally blundered my way through first love, second love, just fun, and what Molly called “serious crushes.” The summertime girls knew things I could not accept and never understood. I disguised my ingenuousness by telling outrageous Norse tales and by making up even more absurd stories about my father, Perceval, and his comrade, Moses, who had both been killed in action in Vietnam.
In brief, I moved from fumbling novice to casual heart-breaker. The wintertime girls had names: Lilli, an American halfbreed from Cam Ranh Bay who corrected my errors about the Vietnam war; Ananda from Bangladesh, who introduced me to Eastern eroticism; and Ethel-Bethel, the most sincerely devout Christian I ever met, who was from what