The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 6
I also admit that my family’s decision to remain in Stockholm was not entirely ideological. Guv and Earle were wanted by the sheriff of an American army infantry division in connection with the suspicious deaths of an American MP and a Vietnamese policeman in Saigon in 1972. The details were ambiguous and tragic. And Peregrine and Israel were wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for questioning in connection with a theft of services from Pan American airlines and with the reckless endangerment of several flight attendants—a hunting knife was involved—on a flight out of Kennedy International Airport in 1972. These details were also ambiguous and tragic. My family needed sanctuary as long as it was available. Some might have said they were criminals. They thought of themselves as fugitives. They were my family, and I loved them dearly.
We lived secretively in a slummy rented apartment (no one challenged them about me, but they worried continually—I was their shrine) in Stockholm’s foreign quarter, until Guy and Earle secured enough money against future gooning for Eystein to rent us a dilapidated double house near the ice rink. Later, through a poet friend of Molly Rogers’s named Orri Fljotson, Peregrine and Israel were introduced to a wealthy and mysterious art dealer, Thord Horshead. Thord had many secrets, the very least of which was that he was one of the two ringleaders of a Baltic smuggling enterprise, running liquor, small arms, and wonder drugs into heavily-tariffed Scandinavia and not infrequently through the Iron Curtain. There was never anything concealed about Thord’s attitude toward me, for he smothered me with generosity and patience. He overcame Peregrine’s objections and moved us all into the back wing of a sprawling manse he maintained at the edge of Stockholm as an art gallery and, covertly, a shipping and receiving office. For many years, Thord’s benevolence went unanalyzed but not unappreciated. We might not have survived without him. Thord was our protector. He was also our link to Swedish culture, as he introduced us to the most exotic elements of a society we defensively skirted.
Thord was the one who advanced Peregrine and Israel the capital to enjoin their first and last attempt at American entrepreneurship, a summer camp for boys called Let’s Go Viking! I have forgotten whose idea it was, why exactly it failed. It is enough to say that Peregrine and Israel administered, for ten years, a summer camp for American children mostly of Norse extraction whose parents wished to indulge their offspring in the legends of the Vikings. Israel explained to me that American parents did not provide their children with real childhoods when a safe fake one was available for a price. In America, Israel said, it was called “preparation” and was most desirable when most extravagant. He must have had it right, for with just a few advertisements in American magazines, we collected a bag of applications. Using Thord’s legal status as a prestigious art dealer and his extralegal apparatus as a smuggler, Peregrine and Israel purchased a rundown wharf and abandoned buildings in Vexbeggar, a Swedish fishing village some leagues south of Stockholm. Vexbeggar was appropriate for an ersatz Viking camp, because it had already been converted by speculators from an antique cluster of shacks into a summertime resort for indolent captains of industry. My maternal people had lost their famous sense of austerity somewhere in the late twentieth century’s political compromises between the left, the right, and what Israel called the lazy and had become—for several fleeting decades of luxury—little more than swindlers and malingerers. Vexbeggar’s town fathers regarded Let’s Go Viking! as crass American profiteering. I feel there was envy, too, at least initially, because one of the reasons we failed was the yearly increases in tax assessments.
Peregrine and Israel, through Thord, purchased costumes, a forge, a small trawler rigged as a yawl, an imitation of a six-meter Viking boat called a karfi that Thord had found at a Norse carnival, and all the other props necessary to fashion the camp of a make-believe Viking chieftain—we called him Gruff-the-Ruff—circa the eleventh century a.d. It was historical when it had to be, but was mostly a Viking camp in the same manner, I was told, that a famous American amusement park had re-created other historical tableaux called Frontierland and Jungleland, and my favorite, though I suspect Israel made this up, Ghettoland.
I do not mock our Vikingland, because it provided me with a childhood entirely of fantasy and fun. When summer came, with its white nights and warm Baltic breeze, I became the most precocious student of Let’s Go Viking! More, I worked hard to help Peregrine and Israel hold the attention of the tedious, hollow boys we attracted. I soon grew more expert than my mentors and was by the end a snob in all matters Norse. With my mind free of modern education (I did not legally exist, so they did not dare enroll me in school), it was the happiest course for me to fill it with the arcane lore of what is called the Age of Migration. I lived what Peregrine could only show me, what Israel could only give me books about. I made myself into a spear-chucking, boat-making, sword-swinging, rune-carving, cain-raising warrior. The truth was, I had within me the genesis of a full-blooded shape-changer. Back then, however, it was all joy and spontaneity, nothing dark.
During the long winters in Stockholm, my self-education was supplemented with the curiosities of my family,