The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 79

Germanicus was shamed, would not reach to cover himself, apologized to his father and to the Hospidar publicly, offered to resign his commission. The Hospidar saw his victory, was generous in conquest, said Germanicus’s contrition was not sufficient but that Germanicus’s arms were necessary, as were all the loyal arms of all the loyal people of South Georgia. Simon Brackenbury was there that day, and added that he could promise that none of his people would ever question Elephant Frazer and the Volunteers while the Falklands remained unavenged. The Hospidar and Brackenbury thus combined to satisfy no one, to advance their own cause. The factions were left bitter, and were well armed. They might have been moved right then to assassination if not for the shock of a real crime against the island.

In December—early summer—someone set fire to the school. I recall the incident clearly because I was at dinner with Abigail in my hut, had gone out for water, when I spied the glow over the ridge. Abigail had left Sam with the Frazer women to come up to celebrate my twenty-seventh birthday. She explained the sparks of the feud as we watched the fire grow quickly in the wind. It was pathetic; South Georgia had so little, and then it had no school.

I realize this has become much detail. I suppose I record it as a way of making myself remember that I did spend almost six years there—though I can recall only that last year with acuity—and also as a way of feeling close again to people whom I did love, who did love me. They were not the most generous people, quick to anger, unforgiving, hateful of outsiders, especially if their skin color or religion or ways were not theirs. I am sure Lazarus’s words would have been considered wise if he had not looked like the Patties, and I do wonder if Lazarus would have been more patient if he had not concluded too easily that his enemies were bigots instead of frightened husbands and wives. Overall, however, the South Georgians were more fair-minded than not—they had taken me and mine and a thousand beasties in—and struggled to remain sanguine and good-natured, considering how cruel nature was to them. More, I have emphasized here their fears and weaknesses and feuding, have not done justice to their decency. I am writing of an island a thousand leagues of water from despair, just ten degrees north of the permanent ice shelf, where there is nothing but wracking work and savage sea. It is natural then that they moved toward savagery to settle their disputes. I also admit that I might have jumbled the details leading up to the school fire; and I have left out or forgotten much of consequence, such as the turns of the Lindfirs, the Harrahs, the Roses, the Moogs, the Johansens, and the beastie family who ruled the camp, the Zulemas. The enslavement, the stoning, the suicides, the stillbirths, a theft from the Volunteers’ fort at the lighthouse on the inlet point that I have not noted, and the Hospidar’s defamation of Germanicus are a sad chronology. But there were even drearier details that I only heard rumor of, and there was one more sadness (which I shall soon record) that reached back before the defeat to the root of the vulnerability of the South Georgians. They were poor people, whale-poachers, high-risk sealers, ill-equipped to continue in a world of electronic warships. I record in this work my disgust for what I call the Age of Exile, the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century; however, I register that the South Georgians were the result of an earlier age’s willingness to degrade and drive out and abandon men and women. One cannot believe that the Scots and Irish and Norse people who made up the families on South Georgia had elected to risk the Adantic Ocean and to scratch a life on hornstone crags. They had survived there without anyone’s help, without even the sinister charity that I identify as the source of the so-called fleet of the damned. They asked no favors, gave no favors, fought and endured and fought. South Georgia was their home, and I think they knew it was not a refuge, nor sanctuary, nor peace. It was a chance, and they took it for that.

The women of South Georgia were far more crucial to the struggle I recount than I have acknowledged: Abigail and Jane Gaunt, Violante Furore and Santa Bianca Furore, Dolly Frazer and Frances Gaunt, and many more. They organized, fed, gave birth, made peace, stood as solid as the cliffs. It was the women who held up better than the men in those days. They seemed to know that the war, the British abandonment, the plague, were fleeting threats, yet the loss of the school was a profound emergency. They responded in unison, outraged at their men for posturing while the children were deprived. There were so many suspects for the arson, it was an easy conclusion that everyone was guilty. Dolly Frazer pulled Elephant Frazer’s beard, told him to act, and soon, or he could govern everything without a bed to sleep in. The Gaunt women and Rose women, and the Hospidar’s sister, Victoria, followed suit. The Volunteers were left to complain in their cups. It was not funny. The weapon was spite, and the women used it. A new opinion was advanced that the sort of government that could fight a war and block out beasties was not necessarily the sort of government that could tend its homes. In a subdued yet serious way, revolution was in the wind. The shock of the fire brought Germanicus to my hut soon after, Christmas week, and with him Jane Gaunt and Otter Ransom. Abigail and Wild Drumrul were already with me. It was a damp night, a big storm coming from the west, and we gathered around my hearth fire eating mutton,