The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 69

clan and an independent Jewess, Longfaeroe made his way by contrary trial and error to university, where he took a degree in divinity. He would have needed high learning to sort out the feuding between his mother and grandmother. After, he answered a call not unlike his father’s, to be a soldier, this time for Christ. As a missionary of the Wee Kirk, he endured refugee camps in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia until he was invalided back to Scotland with malaria and what he said was “coldness of soul.” He had married in the Middle East, a beauty, an Armenian Christian, and tried to settle her and his two infant daughters in a Highlands community with sour patience for outsiders. There was trouble; one daughter was drowned in an accident that Longfaeroe blamed on himself, as is the way with hard-set Calvinists—what goes wrong is their fault, what goes right is God’s handiwork. Longfaeroe saw to it that he was called away, far away, to South Georgia, with the help of one of his father’s comrades-in-arms, Sergeant Major Balthazar Frazer, Elephant Frazer’s oldest brother. That was the early 1980s. Longfaeroe brought with him his wife and surviving daughter and a sense of mission that was farfetched: to bring the Scots-Irish and Norse of the Falkland Dependencies, rude fisherman, misanthropic shepherds and sealers, to Christ. First he had to gather them to church. The war in the Falklands elevated him from the butt of derision to one of the strengths of the resistance. I have mentioned his notion of himself as a strong tower. He lost his wife in a drowning in the early days of the war, another accident. I was told it did not touch him as had the loss of his daughter. He was a passionate man; there were many widows on South Georgia. And what they, and everyone, came to respond to was a man who was a book. Longfaeroe’s mind was the Psalter. He was a fickle, aloof minister, a garbled and not very fetching preacher. His gift was that beautifully rugged singing voice. When he lifted his head above his bent body to sing a psalm, he was inspirational and sublime. The rush of the sea was his choir, he was the soloist. And Longfaeroe did not make the psalms sound as Grandfather did—full of dread, dark warnings, last screams. Longfaeroe made them seem thanksgivings, full of hope and promise. It was the promise of the psalms that seemed to have led him to a visionary conclusion. His psalms were said to have first been sung by King David. Longfaeroe came to believe that his flock on South Georgia, spread over half a million square miles of violent ocean in their vocation of killing whales and seals, would come to Christ and their redemption if they were brought together by a single inspired leader, as David had brought together Israel and Judah.

Longfaeroe had encouraged another as “wee David” since his arrival on South Georgia and the explosion of the hate in the Dependencies that had brought the war. Longfaeroe had chosen Samson Frazer, eldest son of Elephant and Dolly Frazer, heir to the large Frazer holdings in sheep and sealing. Samson was said to have been the quickest eye and surest hand on South Georgia—the stuff of faultless heroes. He had been a hero in a large battle on West Falkland early in the war, and was made legend for his rescue of Luff Gaunt’s crew after the senior commander of the Volunteers failed to break the Pattie blockade on Port Stanley and died for his cause. Samson must have been a good man, strong, fierce, bold. Samson had also been the husband of Longfaeroe’s daughter, Abigail, and the father of Longfaeroe’s dearest possessions after his Psalter, two grandsons.

I have told the story of Samson’s death, presumed death. He was gone from Longfaeroe, and South Georgia, almost as I arrived. Longfaeroe said that he was reawakened by his grief for Samson, that he was more convinced of his vision than ever before. He said Samson had served to prepare the way for me, that Samson had found me, leading those four longboats across Falkland Sound. This sort of justification for accident and tragic turn can become heartless. It did hurt Abigail when she heard it. Longfaeroe persisted, told everyone who I was, told them he had known me when he first saw me. This was disingenous: he had questioned me at length before he settled on me as his new candidate. That was not an easy task; I was badly wounded when I was landed on South Georgia, babbled madly as I mended, and spent my first two years there either speechless or mumbling garbled nonsense to sheep and misty shadows. I was a long while recovering from my first episode of darkness, and looked dire—shrunken, hairless, unwashed, and barely fit for Iceberg’s company. Longfaeroe’s notion of me was reinforced by my appearance and woozy conduct, however; my repulsiveness attracted him, as harmony to harp.

Longfaeroe was not Grandfather, far short; not that cruel, or full of himself, or limitless, furious, inspired. Longfaeroe was weaker and, I suppose, stronger for it. It might help to think that Longfaeroe played the minor prophet to Grandfather’s Jeremiah. He was a man who demonstrated peculiar and extravagant resolve nonetheless. He could bend a will, even a wandering one like mine. The craftiest trick he used on me—when I could barely talk in full sentences on my own—was to teach me long passages of the books of Samuel (which contain the David story), substituting rote for reason in my mind. I can still do much of it without consulting the Fiddle Bible, like the words of the Lord of Hosts reminding David of his call: “I took you from the pastures and from following the sheep to be the prince of Israel,” said God to King David. “I have been with you wherever you have gone, and