The Balloonist (24 page)

“If you would like to wait, you could hear some. With good luck I'll be finished in a half an hour. There's a storm building up in the direction of Rambouillet.”

“I would adore hearing some. But I would prefer not merely to wait for a half an hour. Surely there's something I can do to help.”

She was so brisk and intelligent, so businesslike in her cambric shirtwaist, that in the end I let her do it. I showed her the problem of shaping the ends of the graphite bars to the curvature of the slip rings, a task for which at least three and perhaps four hands were useful. “The bars must fit snugly onto the slip rings, otherwise electricity from the waves will be lost. The bars are flat and the slip rings curved. I will wind fine emery paper around the slip rings—thus and hold it with my fingertips. Then, as I rotate the vertical shaft of the antenna basket, you must press the graphite bars firmly onto the rings. The tension of the springs is not enough. The emery paper will grind away the ends of the bars in the exact shape of the rings. You see?”

“Very well.” She grasped the bars with her thin fingers and pressed them inward. With her hands stretched out, the sleeve of the cambric shirtwaist fell down over one wrist, and she removed the other to push the sleeve up. A black smudge appeared on the cambric.

“Why is this messy black substance necessary?”

“Graphite is self-lubricating, and is an excellent conductor of electricity.”

She examined her fingers briefly and went back to the task. I turned the shaft with one hand and held the emery paper with the other, she pushed on the bars. The graphite was hard and it was slow work.

“Have you
noticed, we both have long fingers. I can't stand people who have short fingers. There's a woman who comes to Quai d'Orléans, her name is Lucienne de Portoriche but I call her Madame Gecko. She's an impossible person, really. Darting at you with little chops of her head, almost as though she had a tongue a yard long and were catching insects.”

I didn't know Madame Gecko, so I made no comment.

“Have you ever noticed that each person you meet, if you look more closely, resembles an animal?”

“Which animal?”

“That's it, you see. Each person resembles a different animal. One is a camel, another a hedgehog, someone else a flitterbat. Chauve-souris is a funny word. In Italian it's pipistrello; I like that better.”

This chattering, or demonstration in comparative linguistics, was not really necessary to our task. However, she was so smooth and helpful in other ways that I decided to take it in good grace. To remain silent in the face of such an elegant effort at conversation would seem curmudgeonly.

“And I?”

“A lynx.” She almost smiled here, caught herself, and resumed a grave intensity of expression, with her mouth even drawn a little together in her concentration on the task. I examined myself in a mental mirror. The rather high brow and slightly outstanding ears, the bristly hair at the temples that would not lie flat, the somewhat prickly mustachio with the corresponding tuft under the lip. If I had been younger and less experienced I might have reddened. I decided not to tell her what animal she reminded me of, because I suspected she wouldn't appreciate it, although why she thought I would appreciate being equated with a slinky marauder of the forest I didn't know. Getting a little impatient at the task by this time (my left hand was at an awkward angle and getting tired), I rotated the shaft more rapidly. Just at that moment she moved her hand to get a better grip on the graphite bar, and the fragile substance broke under her fingers.

“But it's
brittle.
”

“Of course.”

“You didn't tell me.”

“I didn't think
it was necessary for me to give you a lecture on the physical properties of various elements and compounds before you helped me in a simple task.”

Her lips tightened. But she didn't say, “Are you going to commence that again?” Instead, still calm, she said, “What must we do now?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Pertuis is closed for the day. I can go there tomorrow, at ten o'clock in the morning, and buy another bar of graphite, if he has one in stock.”

“But it was you, you know, who jogged the apparatus.”

Ah hah. In the first place I hadn't accused her of any ineptitude, although this thought may have been in the air. In the second place, she was supposed to be holding the bars firmly in her two hands, and even if I had begun rotating the shaft a little faster, this was no reason to break one off as though it were a stick of celery.

“I jogged nothing.”

“In short, it is I who am guilty of bringing your valuable scientific investigations to a standstill until ten o'clock tomorrow, just because I am a silly woman who doesn't know that graphite is brittle.”

“I expressed no such conclusions.”

“But you don't deny them. Isn't that right? You don't deny that in your mind I am a bungling, vain, loquacious, imperseverant, flighty, wrongheaded, illogical, vaporous, self-indulgent, sentimental, and impractical creature, just because of my sex.”

“Why should I have to deny it? I've never affirmed it.”

But she plunged on, not listening.

“While you of course belong to the magnificent race of pentapods, identical to the rest of us except for a certain appurtenance about which you are terribly vain, and which serves no useful purpose in the world as far as I can see.”

This was really unfair. And—how could I put it?—flighty, wrongheaded, and illogical. I might have cited evidence to her, but it would only enrage her the more. Although oddly enough she was not really showing any symptoms of rage. She was still cold and contained. The mouth was held like a small soft vise. She didn't speak another word; there was no need for her to, the ones she had spoken were quite eloquent and made the matter clear only a liquidity about the eyes, a moisture that trembled and seemed about to fall over the lash but never did, showed that something was happening inside. She looked around for some means of cleaning her blackened fingers. There was a pitcher and basin on the commode across the room, even something that passed for a bar of soap, but to utilize these would have been too domestic a gesture, too intimate and too sharing of the tools of my personal housekeeping, for her mood of Corneillian abnegation. She rubbed her hands on the woolen skirt and thrust them into her gloves. Then, taking her umbrella, she went out. She did not “flounce,” or “storm,” she left with perfect dignity.

And I? what had
I done? I had spoken only facts: “Graphite is brittle,” “Pertuis is closed until ten o'clock in the morning,” and so on. I had even let her call me a lynx without responding. I was not responsible, I felt, for what took place in her soul. Yet how clairvoyantly she had seen the problem of reciprocality! If she had insisted on my telling her frankly what I thought of her—there at that moment, in her English suit and cambric—I would have said that I found her admirable but not desirable, except perhaps at the very end when the balance between the two qualities was evened a little. Wasn't that what she wanted? I was guiltless, I told myself as I faced my useless evening. It was shortly after this that a new epoch began, that of her musical career.

Still as she is fixed there in the photographic dream apparatus behind the retinae, it is often in that guise—bent over that odd harp of oak and copper wire, her glance intent not on me but on the invisibility of electrical currents coursing—through the thin filaments—that I see her. For the serious business of life (“And what might that be?”) one wants companions. So if I have predilections for one or the other of Luisa's temperament—I tell myself—it is more useful to me in its brother form, a transformation in which the body no longer radiates distracting energies and the dark eyes, having been in their time exotic and sibylline, become knowing in another and more masculine way, watching, reflective, stoic. His glance turns from the apparatus mounted on the provision case to me.

“But you can't tell whether the waves might be coming from the reciprocal.”

“True.”

“Still, if a
deflection could be established through vectors—”

“For that it would be necessary for the platform to be moving. And, for the present time, we are fixed in one place.”

The eyes half hidden in the bedouin shawl go back to the slowly searching antenna basket. In the silence the graphite bars squeak faintly on the slip rings. The antenna rotates first in one direction and then in another, hesitates, and settles on a bearing on the left. I get out the notebook and write down, “1320 GMT. Disturbances along 95˚ east,” since in our present predicament, where all directions are south, we are obliged to use meridians of longitude for directions.

“Still, you've settled on a unilateral bearing.”

“I am guessing.” “And what are you guessing?”

“That the storm that brought us here has left an area of high pressure behind it. And that another cyclonic system is forming off to the left, in Siberia.”

“So there will be wind?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case not much.”

“But see here, Major. Suppose there isn't any?”

“Then—we will stay here.”

Theodor and Waldemer exchange a glance. Waldemer is—earnest. That is the only word for his expression. A little crease has formed in his forehead, exactly between his eyes. It is the first intimation he has had that his optimism about the expedition, about life itself, about everything, might not be justified, that I might not bring him through after all as he has always bluffly and cheerfully expected—that he himself might be mortal. It lasts for only a moment. Theodor is expressionless.

“What must we do?”

“Persuade the wind to blow.”

“You mean we must pray?”

“Bah! We must
will
it, force it out of those Siberian hills. Give it no rest, wake it up from its sluggish sleep.” And, afraid I may have alarmed him a little with these necromantic ravings, I add practically, “In the meantime, we can think how to lighten the Prinzess.”

In this cold the hydrogen has contracted, the rigging sags passively and the gondola rests on the ice. Even if the wind should come now (and I am by no means sure it will) it would be impossible to ascend. In the dead calm the fog has lifted a little and is now a bed sheet of milk hanging a few hundred metres over our heads. If we could ascend through it the sun would warm the bag and restore its buoyancy. But to get up there we must throw away something heavy. We can begin with the hoarfrost and rime on the gondola.

Waldemer is ready
to start on the rigging with a mallet. But first it is necessary for him to answer a call of nature. He climbs down out of the gondola, removes mittens, unbuttons hunting jacket, and strives at the openings of his trousers and the practical undergarment underneath. A surprisingly robust cylinder something like a Philadelphia breakfast sausage appears and emits a vigorous stream of gold.

“Have to do this fast. A fellow could freeze off hiswhatchamacallit. Ever get frostbitten there? It's not very jolly, I can tell you.”

Theodor watches him steadily, calmly, without comment. He himself has never been seen performing this action. His modesty, or his pride. Perhaps he prefers to take care of it when Waldemer and I are asleep, which means being uncomfortable for long periods of time. No matter! each of us has the right to be odd in his own way, and Waldemer and I have our own oddities. Waldemer has his clothing adjusted now and climbs back into the gondola. Resolutely grasping the mallet, he mounts to the bearing ring and begins banging on the skein of frozen ropes. Shards of ice, like whitish broken tubes of glass, fall on our heads. Theodor and I gather them up in our mittens and throw them over the side, then he finds a pan in the provision basket that will do a better job. I take the hatchet and work on the ice on the gondola itself, chipping carefully in order not to damage the beautifully handworked Spanish cane.

In an hour the three of us have removed, perhaps, thirty or forty kilos of ice. Theodor, the lightest of us, climbs on up higher into the rigging to dislodge the thin crust of rime clinging to the balloon itself under the net. Waldemer and I get out to collect the miniature camp we have set up a few metres from the gondola: the stove, the cooking pan, a can of kerosene, a few spoons and implements. We abandon the tarpaulin as too heavy but save the bamboo poles.

“That fellow. He's really bully, you know.”

I say nothing and he goes on.

“I had my doubts at first. Seemed to me a thousand people we might have brought along who would do better. I told you so quite frankly, as you'll remember. But—”

Expressionless, I
stop him with a negative motion of my head and a gesture upward to the round gas bag. In the frozen air the slightest sound carries far. Ten metres or more over our heads Theodor, his boots jammed into the net and clinging with one hand, is tapping steadily and patiently at the crust of rime. Flakes of white and brittle debris fall with each blow. And it is this, finally, that seems to wake up the wind. With each blow of the mallet a molecule of air seems to stir, over there, in the direction of the great sleeping Russian beast. We don't feel it in our faces, since these are virtually frozen, so much as sense it in the stirring of the great soft sphere hanging in the air over our heads. The ropes creak very faintly. The wind! Not a wind really but a breath, a reluctant and preliminary zephyr that we hope is a portent of more to come. The direction isn't ideal for our purposes but perhaps it will do; we only want more of it.