The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 72

told me she wanted to love me clear of Germanicus and Longfaeroe; she said she did not want to keep me; she said she did not want to lose me. I see the paradox, so did she, and she kept at it. She said a man might not have time for killing himself if his woman kept his face to hers, kept him well fed and busy fixing the house, tending the flock, waiting for her to lift skirts. She believed in her father’s Jehovah, not overridingly. There was something private in her that seemed to want to make even God an observer, not judge, not helpmate, to what she could do, her ways. She had her sons, her memories, and what she called “my high dreams.” Yes, I can speculate now how much she came to use me as she claimed Longfaeroe and the Frazers used me, how much what came to be her need for me was part of her fight with the dead husband she faulted herself for not being able to hold, with her love, from self-destruction. This does not mean I am suspect of what she did to me, for me. I liked it much. She was my friend. I did love her. I did want to marry her. She would not let me talk of marriage, though, and so our love was constrained from deepening. Nevertheless, it was a strong love, as mutual and kind and worthy as my love for Cleopatra never was. What blocked it from completeness was her anger at fate and at her father. She would not say it that way, proposed it sadly, that a woman should have only one husband, and that she had had hers. Sadder, given more time, she might have relented.

It is Abigail’s mention of Moses that touches me now (as I think of her touching me, and her bites—she tore flesh). This is the first time I have turned Moses over in my mind. It is entirely my rumination, long afterward, harmless, not meant for selfaggrandizement, more to complete my search here, in this pause in my narrative, for the meaning of what I have done.

There are no historical parallels between what Moses did and what I did. I declare I see none. I am attracted to Moses as a character. Reading the Fiddle Bible, I find several kinds of Moses: the first is reluctant, the others are miraculous, suffering, prophetic. It is the reluctant Moses I appreciate. He was of humble origins. His mother tossed him to his fate in that reed basket. His rise as a young aristocrat in the pharaoh’s court was luck. Then he murdered for pride, also for frustration, because he had a bad temper, felt lost to his destiny. A fugitive, he fled into the wilderness, became a shepherd by chance and took a wife who loved him and taught him her father’s religion, of the God who dwelled on a mountain. It was on that mountain one day that God, called Jehovah, appeared as a burning bush, a fire that scared Moses. Jehovah told Moses what was required of him. Moses resisted, “Why? Who am I? I do not speak well, have no tricks, am no general.”

It was a complaint that Moses repeated severally throughout his ordeal at the new pharaoh’s court—there is always a new pharaoh, how well I know—in the desert, on Mount Sinai, at the rocky waters of Meribah where Moses did worse, spoke rashly to Jehovah. I think Moses’ reluctance was the reason Jehovah did not permit Moses to enter the promised land. Moses remained his own man; Jehovah did not like it. Moses was rash, did talk back to Jehovah, accused Jehovah when things went bad, such as, “Was it me who did this, brought these people out of Egypt where they were miserable and into the desert where they are more miserable and also rebellious?” Moses no more wanted the job of commander of multitudes than I did. At least, this is true before I let the darkness take hold and I grabbed power at Anvers Island. Moses’ attitude was in great contrast to how David schemed for kingship and how Jesus accepted his mantle without marked resistance. Would Moses have serenaded Saul for favors? Would Moses have baited the priests and faced down Satan without complaint? He would not. God commanded and Moses backed away; God saved and Moses felt sorry for himself.

I am not saying that Grim Fiddle was like Moses. God never talked to me; I never turned staffs into snakes, a river into blood, or vouchsafed the vengeance of the Angel of Death. I parted no seas, climbed no mountains. It is true that Lamba Time-Thief clobbered me with a staff, that Grandfather’s League turned Stockholm harbor into a bloody river, that I took revenge at my loss of Grandfather’s Angel of Death, that the ice did part before me because of the volcanos, that I did try to climb a volcano to confer with a delusion; but that is all off-the-point, contrived coincidence, and I mention it here to show that it is folly to pursue such fancy. Yet I realize now that I felt like Moses did in the desert when I struggled with my fate at Anvers Island. I did not think this then; I ponder it now. I did not want what was thrust upon me, what I took when I wore vengeance. In this way I will admit I was like Moses. My errors as warlord king derived from my pride and from my dereliction of duty when success was right before me. I shall show the truth of this later. For now, I am reaching for an apology for myself. That I am condemned as a criminal and monster is justice. I hate it; I do not turn it aside. I ask, however, could not one argue, with some slight changes, that Moses’ reluctance and resistance and rashness and anger brought