The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 4

Israel were as much political prisoners in Stockholm as they would have been had they gone to jail in America for draft resistance. They had very little money left from their impetuous flight the year before. They were desperate men. Some of their kind, corrupted by the insanity that was the Vietnam war, had already descended into drugs, crime, or worse. Peregrine and Israel had avoided such an end by luck and by the quick thinking of Guy Labyrinthe. Guy and Earle Littlejohn were “money properties,” in ice hockey slang. The sly owner of the Slothbaden Berserkers, Eystein, wanted Guy’s balletic talent and Earle’s pugilistic talent more than he cared to obey the work laws of the Social Democratic Party that ruled at the King’s behest. Peregrine and Israel thus had jobs that paid one American dollar an hour, three nights a week, eight hours a night; it was penury, but it was better than the long fall into drugs and self-loathing. Still, some quick comfort was necessary to endure the irony of having been matriculated by Yale University as preparation for mopping vomit beneath temporary bleachers. Peregrine and Israel came straight from the rink to bathe their realization in good Norse brew.

Past midnight, the mickey mouse club was packed with sorrowful American boys, most too self-pitying to care about more than the flock of Swedish girls who offered sex and sympathy with certain conditions. Israel was quick to claim a booth near the Christmas tree, on the opposite side of the room from the panderers and gangsters. Israel signaled Earle, who was nursing a bandaged left arm from the evening’s combat, to insert his bulk and to wave his wound in order to open up the table enough for Peregrine and Guy close behind. Israel then volunteered to struggle through the crowd to the bar for beer, mostly because he hoped to catch the attention of his heartthrob, the poetess Molly Rogers. This raised the issue of finance. Peregrine groaned, emptying his parka of a few wormy krona and a carefully wrapped love letter. Earle said he had fifty k. somewhere, reaching with his bad arm. Guy stopped him, then carefully poked to produce Earle’s billfold, which had only thirty k., Earle having forgotten he had paid the penalty on their late rent that afternoon. Peregrine sank deeper into his seat to reread his letter.

Israel returned without Molly Rogers. Guy took note of Israel’s longing. Israel changed the subject, seizing upon the evening’s game and Earle’s wound, the result of a well-thrown but untimely cross-check. Israel then produced a four-day-old copy of The New York Times that he had bartered American cigarettes for at the rink, and the four turned to debate more somber games. They never talked ice hockey in those days, when there were the totems of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to curse. Besides, the Slothbaden Berserkers did not play ice hockey; they played “goon.” It was the American influence. The American and Canadian National Hockey League was a joke but also a fad in Sweden. Guy and Earle, having attended an NHL training camp before they were drafted, shipped to Vietnam as riflemen, tempted to commit crimes and to desert, were celebrities because of their supposed talents at “gooning.” Guy hit and scored. Earle just hit and hit. Violent as the Berserkers seemed, however, especially with bearish Earle on defense feeding Guy flying on the right wing, they still played a boy’s game. Off the ice, the bruises were badges of showmanship, not reminders of brutality. That night in late 1973, the beer hall was filled with young men who carried permanently the scars of true brutality. Israel once told me that the only time as a young man he had not cared about what happened to the New York Rangers was the year before, when President Nixon, and his prime minister, Henry Kissinger, had ordered bombers over Hanoi for Christmas.

The news from New York was promising. Kissinger, a strong man and a liar, had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo two weeks before (on my birthday). His co-winner, Le Due Tho, a Vietnamese strong man and liar, had shunned the affair altogether. Israel announced to Earle that getting the Nobel Peace Prize was a jinx equivalent to being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Earle, who encouraged others to think of him as slow-witted, which was not true, said he liked Israel’s idea. Guy grumbled about Israel condescending to Earle, and then opined that Israel was failing to take a dangerous man seriously just because he was Jewish. The Jews, Guy pressed, were less absurd and more effective than Israel allowed. Guy was of French-Canadian descent from the very poorest section of upper Vermont. He had a compact, quick, rugged body and a similar disposition. He also had a bitter sense of history and was a thorough radical libertarian, bred in the same mountains that gave America the romantic anarchists who followed Guy’s personal saint, Ethan Allen. Guy was an advocate of the violent overthrow of all governments. His opinion was to hang them before they hanged you. Israel shrugged at Guy. This was their oldest, most comfortable argument. Israel knew that he took Jews seriously, especially German Jews like his own father and like Henry Kissinger. Israel shifted the flow of the dialogue, with one staccato reading of a headline and lead paragraph, to the ongoing tragedy of Richard M. Nixon, president of the United States of America for the last fifty-nine months.

“Never nail him, not as long as he’s got the tapes and we’ve got the Senate,” said Peregrine. Father referred to the amazing story that Nixon had tape-recorded himself in his own secret chambers as he conspired to subvert the constitution of the Republic he was sworn on a Bible to defend to the death. The story is much longer, of course, most of the rest propaganda for subsequent petty tyrants. I admit my impatience. It was a long