The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 33
When we were alone together, Grandfather put his right hand on the Fiddle Bible and went to one knee. Without explanation, he began a version of my birth and abandonment, the whole of which I have already recounted from several sources. I do not recall him using my mother’s name. What most distinguished Grandfather’s tale was that he was merciless in his criticism of his own part. He spoke as if in a dream, exhorting, whispering, thundering. I was enchanted, and frightened, and gripped. He had a magic tongue. And he used it to heap dark, lurid metaphors on the name of Mord Fiddle. Yet all through his confession, he kept that demagogic hubris of his at the fore. Grandfather was a man who could curse himself in a bold, heroic way, so that his humility seemed illusory, unearthly; it was certainly not entirely believable. In truth, he was proud of his fury and what it had wrought.
As Grandfather’s confession closed, it occurred to me that he was not really regretful about what he had done. This was all the discernment I could bring to Grandfather’s performance at twenty-one, a boy before a force of nature. I know now that he was without sorrow for anyone, especially himself. His self-abnegation was more ritual than revelation. Kneeling there, one hand on the Bible and the other alternately touching me or reaching upward for emphasis, Grandfather brandished the weapon he made of theological rhetoric. He was negotiating beneath the eyes of heaven, or, to be blunt, he was scheming for what was before his own eyes.
“This is the truth!” he said after half an hour, more, it was a timeless speech. “I have been wrong about you! I shall not make apology! I shall not! I repent, yes, I call on Lord God to forgive me. I shall atone. I know what I have done.” He halted then, studied me. I tried to think, tried not to avert my eyes. He broke the silence with a resolved tone, “You are a fine boy, Grim Fiddle. All that I have achieved is nothing compared to you. You are my grandson. Mine. I shall give all this up if I can have you back. I shall do that! I have earned this. I must have my grandson!” “You are my grandfather?” I managed to get out.
“Tell me, boy, tell me, Grim Fiddle, that you will stay with me.”
“Can you help my father?”
“He sinned!” said Grandfather, and it is hard to think how any other man on one knee could have spoken with such condemnation. “He sinned against Lord God.”
“Yes, I know. He’s suffered for it.” I controlled myself. I would not cry. “He doesn’t have anything, just me. I don’t have much. My father—”
“Do you know who I am?” he interrupted. “What I have done this day?”
“You are the man Israel calls the Minister of Fire.”
“Does he? That is what he would say, the Jew. Hear me close! This morning, your father was sentenced to death for what he did. I cannot reverse that decision. His execution is imminent.” “Please!” I remember then touching him, for one of the few times ever. “If you are my grandfather, help me. Help my father. There must be something you can do. Will you?”
“I am the only one who can save him,” said Grandfather. “Will you?”
He braced himself. The negotiation he had enjoined with Israel had been nothing before the profound deal he fought to close with me and for me. Now the paramount bargain was struck. My memory is that he said “Yes.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said to his assent.
“Don’t talk so! Remember this, Grim Fiddle. Make right by doing right. What men say of you does not matter. You shall be judged swiftly and finally by Lord God.”
Grandfather pulled me down to one knee beside him. He prayed for us, a long, deep, militant psalm that began, “Lord God is my light and my salvation, whom should I fear? Lord God is the refuge of my life, of whom then should I go in dread . . . ?” Then he got us both to our feet, handed me the Fiddle Bible (which is here at my hand as I write, and from which I have learned that Grandfather chose Psalm 27 that day, which ends with good counsel, “Wait for Lord God, be strong, take courage, and wait for Lord God”), and then he took me to the window. He pointed to a tarpaulin-covered two-masted schooner tied up behind Black Crane’s single mast—a big, lovely, fierce-looking ship, what the ancient Norse would have called a “wave-cutter.” He asked me if I could handle her. I told him I had never managed so large a ship in open sea. He told me that he meant from there to the King’s prison island, that night, near midnight. I gave a boastful nod. With that Grandfather pounded me on the back and told me he had waited all the days and nights of his life to have a son who could captain Angel of Death. I balked at the name. He did not notice, already throwing on his coat, throwing back the sliding doors to announce to the assembled his plan for the rescue of Peregrine Ide, who had been condemned that very morning to die that very night by an extraordinary tribunal of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Evangelical Republic of Sweden, a revolutionary vigilante court that had been given its mandate two days before by one of the leading strong men—in plain language, despots—of the revolution, the Reverend Mord Fiddle, my grandfather, Minister of Fire.
The details of the rest of All Saint’s Day do not concern me now. It was a rush to flight from a Norse reign