The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 57

that man, your father, he doesn’t know what you are capable of. He’s been frightened of you for years. Not afraid, precisely, that would be too much. Better to say, under your power. The power of the barbarous. Do you see how the others treat you and your grandfather? When you turn on that face of yours, they get out of your way. I saw it at Vexbeggar. It stunned me. Israel says you saw me at the Nobel Prize ball. Is that where I remember your face from? You can look like a face in a nightmare. You mock civilization when you look like that. I can’t solve this. What are you for? What are you reaching for?”

This speech is probably a conflation of many remarks Cleopatra made to me during the voyage; nonetheless, if it is, it touches the themes she reiterated that night. I could not answer her. I felt humiliated. How cruel she was. A man speaks better of his dogs than that. It still hurts to recall her compassionless appraisal of me as if I were a specimen in a cage. It would please me if I could now declare that she was wrong. She was not right.

At the time, Cleopatra’s reference to Peregrine’s so-called fear of me made me most ashamed—of what kind of son I was and had been on board Angel of Death. It was that remorse, for faults I see now were not mine but the result of fate, mixed with my boyish adoration of Cleopatra’s intelligence, that turned me once again. I wanted to show Cleopatra that I could act with reason and utility. (New Benthamism was on my mind, although not as now, for I was not bold enough then to challenge Cleopatra on her mother’s prodigies and how ruinous they seemed for the outcasts we had encountered in the Atlantic, sacrificed hideously for someone’s idea of the greatest good for the greatest number.) I wanted to show Cleopatra that I could think abstractly, could imagine, could choose.

I was a fool, as I tangled myself up again racing between Grandfather and Israel. Having been finally disloyal to Israel after The Free Gift of God, I was willing to be disloyal to Grandfather too. I should have minded Grandfather. He told me what I myself believed. We were lucky on Mead’s Kiss. We should not have asked more. I confounded myself. There were good reasons, utilitarian reasons, to follow the council’s vote for a reconnaissance to the Falklands. Molly needed vegetables. I needed charts. There was a sound argument that we were being overcautious, that the Falklanders would welcome us not as refugees but as a ship in distress. I know now that all the reason in all the books cannot change fate, or provide a flicker of the wisdom one gains if one heeds a prophetic voice like Grandfather’s.

I understand now that those two weeks of Norse luck on Mead’s Kiss had lulled us, so that the inexplicable outrages of our Atlantic crossing no longer weighed on us. It was profoundly wrong of us not to concentrate on what we had learned out there, on what was right in front of us, that dirty rain and those ash deposits and those deep, resonant boomings from the south. It is my experience now, as it was not then, that tragedy—I mean drama of catastrophe on a global canvas, like the Greeks’ Troy, the Romans’ Rome, the Lutherans’ Saxony—is like a living thing, with genesis, personality, talents, especially with times when the despair seems to have done. This apparent respite is where the irresolute fail. One is beaten by turning from themes established and explicated. When under attack, one is always in peril, even during the lulls. I shall be specific. It was possible to reconsider our voyage from Stockholm harbor in such a way that our escape from the King’s Spies, the German “wolf,” the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese cutters, the massacre at Port Praia, the tempest, the burning sea, Father Saint Stephen, were not simply defeats, were also victories—that we were fortunate, blessed, very, very lucky to have made Mead’s Kiss. However, this did not mean that the tragedy was complete. We were still in jeopardy. We were still lost, outside, exiled. It was stupidity to let down our guard. Indeed, if Israel and Guy and Thord and the Furores had one common fault, it was not that they could not believe in goodness, it was that they could not believe in irredeemable and nonrational badness. Cleopatra was wrong. There are villains. Israel was wrong. There is darkness. For all his shameless excesses, Grandfather could look at those villains and into that darkness and endure, more, he could keep fighting for his own. The others looked at darkness and begged parole, pleaded for a peace that did not exist.

I pushed off in Black Crane at twilight. I took with me the Turks, Otter Ransom, Lazarus and Orlando the Black, and Iceberg, who had weathered the tropical crossing better than Goldberg and the two pups. Grandfather’s final warning to me was clear: he took me behind the sealer’s shack, stood me up against a huge boulder protruding from the hillside, and lectured me with an intensity that was a blend of his dread, wisdom, resolve, might, and love. He told me that if there was trouble and I could not get back to Mead’s Kiss, or if he was forced to retreat from Mead’s Kiss, I was to sail Black Crane due south on the sixtieth meridian, and he would find me no matter how long it took, “as Lord God is my witness and judge, I swear.” If only I could report equally meaningful exchanges between me and Peregrine, Israel, Guy, Earle, Thord, Orri, Gizur, Molly, even Charity. My farewell was subdued. I was too superstitious to say good-bye. How profoundly I regret that now.

East and West Falkland are like two crabs, back to back, divided by