The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Read online

  THE BIRTH OF THE

  PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

  OF ANTARCTICA

  John Calvin Batchelor

  THE BIRTH OF THE

  PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC

  OF ANTARCTICA

  The Dial Press ■ New York

  Copyright © 1983 by John Calvin Batchelor

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Bachelor, John Calvin.

  The birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica.

  I. Title.

  PS3552.A8268B57 1983 813’.54 82-22182

  ISBN 0-385-27811-X

  To my Mother and Father

  A mind that seeks to understand and grasp this

  is therefore best. Both bad and good,

  and much of both, must be borne in a lifetime

  spent on this earth in these anxious days.

  BEOWULF

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  THE KINGDOM

  OF FIRE

  My Mother

  I AM Grim Fiddle. My mother, Lamba, first spied me in her magic hand-mirror late in the evening of the spring equinox of 1973. She was dancing by herself at the time, at the rear of a shabby beer hall called THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB, located in the foreign quarter of Stockholm, the capital of the Kingdom of Sweden. She was midway between the music box and the bank of telephone booths. She was not under the influence of any drug, though my maternal grandfather was a Lutheran preacher. There is no further explanation of Lamba’s vision forthcoming. Mother was a Norse sibyl.

  My conception followed immediately. There is minor confusion as to the precise sequence. My father, Peregrine Ide, an American draft dodger, was seated in a cramped manner in the last of the telephone booths. He was talking with America. One of my godfathers, Israel Elfers, also a draft dodger, was standing nearby, playing a pinball game called Pirate King. Israel later claimed that my father was weepy and very drunk. Peregrine does not seem to have been aware of Lamba until she crashed atop him. Her demands were unambiguous, as was Lamba, a seventeen-year-old beauty, fine-haired and long-legged, with an unhappy depth to her features. Also, I was told, Lamba exuded a powerful scent. Her manner was brutal and possessed. Lamba forced herself on Peregrine. Their embrace was artless. They obviously did connect. And Lamba left just enough, and the right sort of, blood on Peregrine for him later to speculate that she had been virginal, thereby redoubling his fleeting sorrow for this sin of the flesh.

  Israel said he did not at once grasp the scene. When he did, he pulled another of my godfathers, Earle Littlejohn, the Ivy League hockey legend, over to the booth, providing my first biological moment with the privacy offered by Earle’s enormous backside. Lamba is said to have wailed. In order to conceal the affair further, Israel enlisted my final godfather, Guy Labyrinthe, another Ivy hockey legend, to join him in a vigorous rendition of “America the Beautiful.” They were eventually accompanied by a folk singer acquaintance, Timothy, on mouth harp.

  Finally, the assembled increasingly uneasy with the battle inside the booth, Lamba ended the escapade by crying out the Norse name “Skallagrim Strider!”

  Peregrine’s first sensible comment to Israel afterward was simply the American modifier “Grim.”

  I was born in Stockholm as well, in early December of the same year, in Lamba’s sparse bedroom on the first story of the small quayside cottage belonging to my grandfather, the Reverend Mord Fiddle. Mother was attended by Grandfather’s chess partner, Dr. Anders Horshead, and by a midwife, Astra, who was plump and cunning, and who was also one of Lamba’s secret sister sibyls. Thus, at a diminutive seven pounds odd (which might not be much more than the weight of the hand that writes this), healthy, red-faced, and ugly, with a sea-green umbilical cord attached to where it should have been (I mention this to dismiss notions that I am any other than of woman born), I enjoyed the mystical comfort provided by logical positivism, Lutheranism, and paganism. My birthchamber was so crowded by conflicting schools of thought, I marvel at my ability to assert myself. It was a sudden lesson in the contradictions that then darkened the fair, chill Kingdom of Sweden. My maternal people are a handsome, clean tribe, but I have often thought this might be heavenly compensation for the melancholy that taints their lives.

  Grandfather did not witness my dive into contretemps. He was downstairs in his study praying loudly and drinking quietly. He had not slept well the last three months of Lamba’s time, haunted by images he associated with his wife Zoe’s desertion, and now Lamba’s infamy. He looked the robust but suddenly drowned fisherman—his blue eyes like smooth stones, his heavy beard like frayed rope. As he heard my first cry, he reached to find the resolve to bellow back, as if singing the lower range of this Fiddle duet; and what he returned me was not idle, was a portentous message that he had found in his come-what-may Lutheran style, by flinging open the gigantic Fiddle Bible and, with his eyes shut, tapping his finger on the page once for luck and twice for righteousness. He thundered in that Judgment Day voice of his:

  “My Son, fear Lord God and grow rich in spirit, but have nothing to do with men of rank! They will bring catastrophe without warning! Who knows what ruin such men may cause?”

  This is from the Book of Proverbs. It was staggeringly well chosen; and I have long suspected that Grandfather found it with one eye open, as that splendid Norse scoundrel, one-eyed Odin, would have done. I have never improved upon its wisdom, nor will I soon. What ruin indeed, Grandfather?

  For it so happened that Mord Fiddle, a man of very high rank in the tyrannical wing of the Swedish Lutheran Church, was mortified by my birth. That his dim-witted eldest should have conceived a bastard was shame enough. He saw Lamba’s disgrace as his own flagellation. But the matter was worse for him than that. Lamba had conceived so far out of wedlock that she claimed she had no clue who the father was, what the father was, what color or religion the father was. Grandfather was numb before fate. Not only was I to be his living curse, but also I could be any wretched shape and color of curse. And being a true son of Norse pessimism—his own father, Gunther, a dismal trawler captain who had anticipated all the days of his life the North Sea storm that drowned him—Grandfather expected the worst. He feared that I would be a Jew. And if not that horror, he feared that I would be dark-skinned. And if not that horror, he feared that I would be American. These might seem random demons, yet one must consider that for many years Grandfather had been hard-pressed to make sense of western civilization. He was a fiery preacher of the coming Kingdom of Heaven ruled by Him whom Grandfather called “Lord God.” Prior to his relatively plush appointment to the preaching post of one of Stockholm’s most conservative churches, Grandfather had labored twenty-one years sailing, sledding, and skiing the most remote precincts of the Swedish realm on the Gulf of Bothnia, preaching the Word to convicts, misanthropes, and madmen. His colleagues called him “Mord the Hard-Fisherman.” He had christened his own ship Angel of Death. After all this time in the wilderness, he had become convinced that the coming Kingdom looked a certain way, meaning white-skinned, clean, and well-stocked with lumber and fish. During his few years in Stockholm, he had had reason to reconsider his vision; he had not. One might attempt to excuse Grandfather’s irrational attachment to his earliest perceptions of heaven by arguing that he was stuck back in the Gulf of Bothnia, and in the gulf of time, before the heartbreak caused by his beloved Zoe’s desertion. Grandfather would be the first to refuse such a defense. He was persuaded, out of the pride that was his worst sin, that if the Jews, or the dark-skinned races, or the Americans, or a combination of same, ever gained control of the West, or of at least the North, then Stockholm would suffer and would d
eserve (perhaps even would welcome, like suicidal hermits) the same conflagration that consumed so many of the Bible’s infidel cities.

  I confess in detail Grandfather’s shameful delusion, because it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, the bigot harvesting what he sowed. I note also that the fruit was the most bitter for Grandfather because it did not proceed from hatred, which requires some passing knowledge of one’s adversary, instead was engendered by his absolute ignorance, his bottomless fear of the unknown. Grandfather did not hate Jews, Negroes, Arabs, Orientals, Indians, Americans. To my knowledge, he had never talked with one. Accordingly, they terrified him. And I submit that, for reasons having to do with his innate fear of hedonism, luxury, eroticism, fleshly profligacy, Grandfather did not fear the Jews or the dark-skinned races with anything equivalent to the hardness of his heart when confronted with the spectre of the Americans who were then pouring into Stockholm, on the run from the American tyrant, President Richard M. Nixon. Grandfather feared the Americans so much that he was willing to suspend his common sense about blasphemy—he had, as a seminarian, preached resistance at all costs in the face of German and Russian blasphemers—and to proclaim from his pulpit that Nixon was fit punishment for the American sinners. He said that he grieved that so many of the rascals escaped their horned chief executive.

  My grandfather was a godly man. I loved him despite himself. He was also cruel, narrow-minded, vindictive, and too often hysterically vain. He preached the God of Love, the Sermon on the Mount, and the parables of Jesus with the same intensity with which he opined unjust, merciless politics. He could be a thunderous bully; he could be a dauntless ally. His strength was his resolve, his weakness was his lack of a sense of proportion, which could become a lack of a sense of decency. He stormed through a life of shame and triumph. Grandfather was as relentless as he was ruthless, was as vigilant as he was an ever-dangerous trespasser. He was shrewd, sudden, articulate, and long-remembering. Grandfather was fury itself. He got what he gave, and much more. It is not for me to judge him finally. Over the length of my life I have had to dispute nearly everything my grandfather said about Mother, Father, and peace of mind; and yet I know I am lucky for having been obliged to run such a long-winded course. All along the way I have found treasures.

  Dr. Anders Horshead was first down to pronounce me an average boy. This meant that I was not hook-nosed, chocolate, or radically not-Norse. Radar, my maternal uncle, then twelve but already given to the angelic keenness that would carry him on to the stage as the sort of Northman playwrights celebrate as tragic heroes, came down next to say he was going to chapel to give thanks for Lamba’s health. Radar was not then permitted to forget the lie that his sickly birth and youth had caused his mother’s death (a deception by Grandfather that fooled no one but the fools that cared for such gossip). Grandfather and Anders Horshead then emptied a fresh bottle of vodka in order to toast—and this was very Norse of them—what had so far been avoided.

  By daylight, and the first of a heavy snow, Grandfather exhausted his peculiar joy and returned to stoical fretting. “What should be done with the little bastard?” said Grandfather. (I do not know he actually said this; it pleases me that he might have. More likely, he called me “it.”)

  “Don’t talk so,” said Anders Horshead. “Let nature be.”

  “I would sooner it burn in Hell than let her keep it.”

  “You’ve a fine grandson. I envy you,” said Anders Horshead. “She’s not right! Something must be done! Shall be done!” Lamba was not half-witted. She was a precocious, motherless child who mocked her father’s will and enjoyed letting him know the pleasure she took in so doing. She did not intend to quit her commitment to rebellion merely because the act of giving birth had momentarily overwhelmed her powers of defiance. She did require a fortnight to recover, the nursing of me preoccupying her until Grandfather, in his cruel way, reminded Lamba of her plight. Once the couple was chosen, and my adoption process so far along that all that remained was a rubber stamp or two, Grandfather pushed into Lamba’s room and told her what was about to be done. Lamba lay passively. She wept, did not sniffle or wipe her eyes. She reached beneath her pillows in order to bring forth her magic hand-mirror like a weapon. Grandfather bolted, appalled at the reminder that his only daughter might be a witch. He left Radar in charge while he waded through a new snow to his office in the rectory of the Pillar of Salt Lutheran Church. He telephoned his spiritual advisor, Thorbrand of the Supreme Lutheran Council, to tell him that the deed was done, the future was set. He was right. He was wrong. By the time Grandfather returned home, past dark, I was gone, not to be seen again for many ominous years. Lamba never crossed Grandfather’s path again. Radar wept inconsolably. Grandfather called on the police, on Anders Horshead, and then returned to his study to call on his Lord God and, in prayerful repose, on his deeply missed Zoe.

  Lamba had bundled me in the usual swaddling clothes and walked to the foreign quarter on the other side of the city. It was Christmas week (though not Christmas Eve). Stockholm was decked in its finery, natural and commercial, its fourteen islands dusted with a fresh snow atop a heavy crust of ice, its streets filled with as many sleds as automobiles, its evergreens buffeted by the arctic winds that whined through the small stone closes of the oldest sections of a city part quaint, part deliberately futuristic. Back then, Stockholm was always aggressively organized. In winter, it also seemed serendipitous and not entirely credible. With only a few hours of sunlight, the twilight that predominated was that much more dramatic for the on-again, off-again flurries. And the deep night was philosophical. Lamba plowed a furrow through a city of ice and stainless steel, singing nonsense songs to herself and to me. Lamba was resolved, but not unafraid. She was not that far from childhood’s nightmares, and in those dreams (and also at the zoo) she had seen the telltale yellow eyes of the Norse wolf, poised to strike from out of the darkness.

  One might assume she could have taken a bus. She did not, and not only because she was an operatic girl. The recent border wars in the Middle Eastern kingdoms had precipitated an embargo that even then condemned the North to a dim panic. Public transportation was erratic. Shops closed early. My first Christmas was not well lit or well heated. Considering the other problems I endured, such as maternity, paternity, survival, the fact that there were more candles than light bulbs on Christmas trees might be superfluous. It was instead prescient of fratricidal chaos to come.

  Lamba shoved into the crowd at the entrance to the very same shabby beer hall, the mickey mouse club, where I had been conceived. Some were taken aback by a snow-flecked golden girl gripping a bundle that could hardly have been bread. A few of the women suggested the worst aloud: “It’s dead.” Lamba did not appear that desperate. The eerie depth to her features intimidated the curious at the last moment before interference. She was a beauty but, in cold lights, could seem overdone and spooky. Her mission reinforced her intrinsically bizarre manner. After all, Mother was magic.

  THE MICKEY MOUSE CLUB was a series of concentric ovals, the inmost being the bar, the next being the booths, the outermost being the cafeteria line and auxiliary items, such as the music box, the pinball machines, and the telephone booths. Lamba moved to the bar to inquire in Swedish of the dwarfish bartender, Felix, as to the whereabouts of a tall, hairy, red-bearded American dressed in blue jeans, plaid shirt, vest, and Irish cap, who made telephone calls at the back. Felix told her half of America was tall and the other half lived on the phone. Did she have a name for him? Lamba backed away from the stares. She weaved her way back to the Christmas tree set up by the music box. Some women jumped in her path for fear she might deposit me amid the presents. Lamba continued on to the very’ phone booth of the act. She placed several calls to her sister sibyls, the last of which, to Astra, secured a room for us for the night. Lamba was a practical pagan. She was prepared to return to the beer hall as often as it took. Under the circumstances, she was finding me the best home available. Mother never, never planned to aba
ndon me.

  Peregrine came in late, since it was the first week on his first job after more than a year in Stockholm. He and Israel had fallen into part-time employment selling snacks during, and cleaning up after, a game at the rink of a semipro ice hockey team, the Slothbaden Berserkers. It was filthy work, and it paid slave wages, yet Peregrine and Israel were glad to get it. Like most of the Americans in Stockholm—draft dodgers, deserters, thieves, bad characters—Peregrine and Israel did not have work permits. The King’s government might let them stay, because Sweden prided itself on its so-called neutral status, but the King’s government would not readily let them work. There was bureaucratic wind about clearance, waiting lists, adjusting the labor pool. In the end, there were half a million foreign workers in Sweden; very few of them were American exiles. It does not matter profoundly, I know, except to make the point that Peregrine and Israel were as much political prisoners in Stockholm as they would have been had they gone to jail in America for draft resistance. They had very little money left from their impetuous flight the year before. They were desperate men. Some of their kind, corrupted by the insanity that was the Vietnam war, had already descended into drugs, crime, or worse. Peregrine and Israel had avoided such an end by luck and by the quick thinking of Guy Labyrinthe. Guy and Earle Littlejohn were “money properties,” in ice hockey slang. The sly owner of the Slothbaden Berserkers, Eystein, wanted Guy’s balletic talent and Earle’s pugilistic talent more than he cared to obey the work laws of the Social Democratic Party that ruled at the King’s behest. Peregrine and Israel thus had jobs that paid one American dollar an hour, three nights a week, eight hours a night; it was penury, but it was better than the long fall into drugs and self-loathing. Still, some quick comfort was necessary to endure the irony of having been matriculated by Yale University as preparation for mopping vomit beneath temporary bleachers. Peregrine and Israel came straight from the rink to bathe their realization in good Norse brew.