The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 29

“We got home about dawn. We figured we’d seen forty tenements go in three hours. I was too upset to sleep, so I went down for the paper. There was talk at the shop of a Loyalist rally later that morning. They wouldn’t tell me details, but I got that some of the boys were planning to hijack the van transferring the suspected arsonists, all gooks, from the north of the city to the prison island. They kept talking ‘Norse justice.’ I did what could have been a stupid thing on the way out. I asked them what century it was, since I’d lost my watch in the swamp. They didn’t get it.” Israel continued in this exhausted tone. I was so drained that I had to read the last paragraph three times before I understood he was telling me a secret, in a colloquial code of sorts, in case the King’s Spies were reading Thord’s outgoing mail.

“And take special care with your rehabilitation of her. The surf is up that time of year. We don’t want any sickly passengers to catch their death. Get plenty of sleep yourself. Be good to strangers with long legs. Peace and Love, I.”

I puzzled out that this could only be referring to a rescue of Peregrine with our ketch from the King’s prison island. I raced from the post office, down the harbor walk and over the fences into shantytown. I was on the boat immediately, measuring, inspecting, estimating. She was in bad shape, without serviceable engines, with rotting bulkhead and mainmast, with tattered lines and sails. I might have given up if I had been anything but a dreamer. She was still afloat, I told myself, and with hard work, a fair wind, abundance of luck, she could make Stockholm harbor, and from there, perhaps cross the Baltic to Poland. There was a new rebellion there, and anything was possible for homeless outlaws in a land turned from extremism to anarchy.

Over the next few weeks Israel’s letters continued to encourage me, with cryptic asides and buoyant double-talk. I invested the money Israel sent me in ill-fitting sails, in used lines, in a new boom for the mainsail. I used my savings as well, abandoning my longtime fantasy to steal up to Stockholm, bribe my way in to Father, and, if he agreed, to save him from his pain by killing him.

I do not hesitate to confess this, because the question remains if it might not have spared Peregrine and so many more of my loved ones—all of them—of far worse than whatever I would have had to endure as a father-murderer. I was too young, too angry, too romantic, and in that state life seems easy because it seems clear-cut. Could I have put a knife in my father’s heart? Could Peregrine have found the strength to resist suicide so offered? There is no end to this speculation; I defer. Yes, I imagined Peregrine’s death; yes, I imagined my release from his crime.

The possibility of Peregrine’s rescue gave me great joy. It seemed a gift. I worked tirelessly. Yet there was never enough time for what had to be done. Fate was not patient. September in Vexbeggar ended with labor troubles at the casinos and hotels. Soon there were pickets, scabs, thuggery, and strike committees. The news from the rest of the coast was more of the same turmoil. The government overreacted and stationed troops near Vexbeggar. There was a crucifixion of a striker in one of the inland villages. The strikers, who were mostly foreign workers, formed a secret militia. There was strutting and cruelty on both sides. I watched it from afar, hearing stories from my neighbors in shantytown. We all sensed something bad coming. By All Saint’s Eve, which the Lutheran Norse ignored but which the mostly Roman Catholic alien population celebrated with processions, Vexbeggar was prepared for the worst.

I was just returning from a trial run on the ketch. I had a volunteer crew of Dede Gone, a now unemployed dishwasher and militant striker, and his three younger brothers: Wild Drumrul, Little Dede Gone, and Kazur Gone, called Goggle-Eye for his wandering left eye. They were gritty Turks from Cyprus via a Greek labor camp and an American intervention in a massacre on Rhodes. They had grown up in fishing villages ignorant of the industrial age. This meant they were superb inland-sea sailors. They taught me how to navigate a leaky, sluggish ketch with bad sails and a useless motor. How pathetic my ambition seems now. Yet, filled with boyish hope, I aimed for glory.

Dede Gone spied smoke as we wore around the shoals. We heard the alarms as we tied up below my shack. The one-legged fisherman, Gino, who survived in a tent at the end of the pier, called to us that there was rioting in town. Dede Gone started off immediately to join his strike committee. I called to him that he was no good to us as another martyred soldier of Islam. He stopped to wave. Wild Drumrul, then fifteen, understood his brother’s risk and asked him not to go. Dede Gone ordered him to stay with me. He called to me in English, “Love my brothers like your brothers.”

The fire started near the school. Soon enough, the flames spread along the edge of shantytown toward the well. The smoke thickened with the nightfall. The boys and I, with Goldberg, Iceberg, and the three of their male pups that I had kept, climbed atop my shack to watch. We could see the burned-out in flight. It pleased me to see one of the large hotels catch fire. Wild Drumrul prayed, “Fire, be cool to my brother, and keep him safe.”

We heard sirens, roars, and gunfire soon after, which signaled the assertion of martial law and order. The first refugee column started south. We discussed Dede Gone in sad voices—they had no