The Balloonist (38 page)

“Blue.”

There was a faint yodel from below. “Go, go. Go on down to the Gasthaus. The Major and I will come along later.”

“Hurry up, will you? It'll be dark before I get out of here. My hip has done some strange things and is deciding to get stiff.”

“So I take it, it's settled?”

“Throw me down the rope.”

“It's …”

“Settled.”

With a single vigorous stab she set her alpenstock into the ice and jimmied it until it was firm. Then she uncoiled the rope, tied the end of it to the alpenstock, and dropped the other end to me. It stopped only a short distance from my stretching hands. Shifting my position a little, I was able to pry myself up with my own alpenstock until the rope was within reach. Then, my back against the wall of ice, my knees pressing the ice on the other side, I went up the three metres or so to the surface. When I had only another metre to go, perhaps, I felt the rope shift and looked up to see that she was waggling the alpenstock in the ice, perhaps to set it firmer. But it was having the opposite effect; the point began to loosen and the rope slipped a little, losing perhaps a centimeter. Would she take her hands off the blessed thing and leave it alone! The crevasse was wider here and my knees couldn't reach the other side; I was suspended by my two hands on the rope. Between my legs I could see the dim blue bottom a long way below me.

“So, to be sure the matter is settled, I will ask you for your word as a gentleman. Whatever value that will have.”

“A gentleman's word holds only with other gentlemen.”

“Your ideas are really medieval, Gustav.”

And to tell
the truth she, at least, was a perfect gentleman in Trondheim and also at Spitsbergen. The cropped hair disappeared under the military cap, she ate and did the same as everybody else, she never complained of anything. In the camp at Dane Island she helped erect the balloon house and said nothing when a heavy section of the matchboard wall slipped and bloodied her hand (I was watching out of the corner of my eye).

“I don't know whether that German fellow will do, you know, Major. He doesn't look very robust to me.”

“I've already told you he's not German.”

“You cabled me that a German fellow would be going. Lustspiel or something.”

“I also cabled you that it was off and Luisa's brother would be going.”

“Well, well, you see. I thought the German fellow was Luisa's brother. He looks German enough, and he has a German hat. What is he then?”

“Three-fifths Goan. Half American. And all man.”

“I suppose that's another one of your paradoxes. Doesn't make a pin's difference to me. Doesn't look as though he has the complexion for the arctic, though. Ever see an Eskimo with a skin like that?”

I had to admit I hadn't. “Theodor is very intelligent. He likes Heinrich Heine. He can read poems to us when we have nothing else to do.”

“Sometimes I really can't follow you, Major. I can't tell whether you like this Theodor fellow or not. First you defend him warmly, and then you go off into your paradoxes or sarcasms or whatever they are.”

“I wish I could.”

“Could what?”

“Tell whether I liked him or not.”

“Why did you bring him along then?”

“Sometimes one isn't entirely free in these matters.”

“Ah, you mean the German brewers?”

“Something like that.”

This satisfied him for a minute. But presently his keen journalist's mind detected the flaw in the argument. “But of course, as you say, he's not German. So it must have been something else, ah. That, ah. Persuaded you …” He smiled tentatively, then more broadly. “Where there is a brother, there's a sister. I see now. Ahah! Cherchez la femme, eh, Major?”

He wouldn't have
to look far now, she is right at his feet, her head cradled on his ankles, the rest of her sheltered up inside the bow of the Faltboot. It isn't a hybrid thing half boat and half sled any more, we took off the oaken runners and threw them away this morning when the pack finally ended, or more precisely, when the proportion of water and ice changed until there was more water than ice. As for the arrangement of persons in the boat, this is more or less dictated by circumstances. There is only room for two in the tiny cockpit, which has a canvas shield to fit around our waists if a spray comes up. One of us must inch up inside and lie flat in the bow, and this is Theodor, he being the lightest. The compartment behind the cockpit, smaller than the one in the bow, is devoted to our few remaining possessions—the sleeping sacks, the tent silk, the provisions, and my navigation instruments and books. I must sit behind Waldemer so I can reach these things and occasionally verify our latitude with a sight. Longitude is pretty much out of the question now because the chronometers can't be counted on. As a matter of fact, the sun has been hidden in a cloud cover all day, but the sight isn't really necessary anyhow, because we can see land on the horizon now, probably White Island. This time it is no mirage. Since around noon there have been two sets of clouds in sight, a layer of cirrostratus high overhead and a low bank obscuring the horizon from south-southwest to southeast. Then, about an hour ago, the bank of mist rose and the island stood out clearly in dazzling white, a cloud clinging to its top and drifting away slowly to the east, the whole thing eaten and shimmering in the atmospheric phenomenon that makes everything on the horizon look as though it were drawn with a pen on melting sugar candy. It grows larger only very slowly, and seems to get more solid not at all. How far now? Perhaps ten miles. It seems unlikely that on the morning of this same day we were still struggling over the broken floes and slush with the Faltboot sled in tow. Now, according to Kullberg 5566's uncertain hands, it is 1800 hours Greenwich.

A squall to the west. Paddle faster, Waldemer and Crispin! This frail craft is not made for storms, and it's overloaded. A forty-knot wind will raise waves that will swamp it in a minute. We must outrace this squall. No chance to shift and let Theodor take his turn, since it was hard enough getting him wormed up there inside the bow this morning when the boat was safely alongside an ice floe. I thought that Waldemer might perhaps grumble at Theodor for shirking and not doing his part in this respect, but in fact Waldemer has been acting very protective toward Theodor these last few days, not to say tender. This morning when Theodor went behind a pressure ridge to answer a call of nature (Waldemer doesn't even resent his wish for privacy in this matter now), he commented gruffly, “Have to take it easy on the fellow, you know. Some of us are not as robust as others.”

“He's robust
enough.”

“Well, but …”

Waldemer can't express his feelings precisely. And how could he, the poor fellow? He is not in possession of the basic facts that would make him understand why he feels the way he does. Theodor gives out some sort of emanations or waves, that's all, that pass right through the clothing and make a fellow feel like taking care of him and being sure he's comfortable. Waldemer doesn't know he has instincts and he doesn't believe in spiritualism or thought waves, but in spite of himself he is a fairly subtle animal. He knows, but he doesn't know that he knows. At the edge of the ice, where we finally gave up and turned the sled into a boat, he told Theodor, “You crawl up inside the bow, old man. Have a nap up there, rest your bones. The Major and I will paddle for a few hours and then you can take your turn.” When Theodor was installed in the bow, his head resting on Waldemer's ankles, Waldemer beamed jovially and seemed unwilling to meet my eye. It may be necessary to tell Waldemer the truth, in the end, in order to explain his own sensations to him and allay any fear that he is not—manly. As he would put it.

A little after seven. We have been paddling away frantically for an hour and are exhausted, but we have won. The squall will pass to the north of us. But it has left a pesky chop on the sea that doesn't make our task any easier. The island is nearer now—an oblong white mass rounded like a shield, ringed by sheer ice cliffs except in two or three places where there seem to be small shelves or beaches along the water. For another two hours we work toward it, resting only briefly because it is apparent now that there is an infernal current trying to set us off to the east, where there is no land for two hundred miles. The sea in the direction we are approaching is shallow; several large white icebergs are aground in the neighborhood of the island. As we pass one of these we can hear the groan as the swell lifts it and it grates and crumbles on the bottom. Finally, about nine o'clock, the island is abeam and we rest on our paddles.

The current has
set us to the east and the island is between us and the sun. As we approach it we are enclosed in profound shadow, an immense tent of darkness extending out over the sea and gathering us into its embrace. In the swell we rise and fall very slowly. There are teeth of surf along the shore of the island, hissing and growling sleepily. There are no landing places here, but a little farther along on the east shore of the island we find an ice shelf in a tiny semicircular cove with, behind it, some fissures of bare rock showing that might serve as a ladder to climb into the interior of the island. There are swarms of guillemots and ivory gulls, whirling up with sharp cries into the air over our heads where the sun is still shining. Here we land.

We get out and draw the Faltboot up on the shelf, extract Theodor, and stand about looking at our situation. The shelf is not very much larger than a dinner table and doesn't seem excessively solid. When the confused sea left behind by the squall strikes it, it groans and complains. However, it is perhaps a metre thick. It will do for a temporary platform, but as soon as possible we will have to climb onto the plateau in the interior of the island, where there will be game and where we will have a view of the sea around in those intervals when the murky weather clears. First we set up the tent and prepare a meal: hardtack, what is left of the seal meat, cocoa, and a tin of gooseberry preserves which we pass half-frozen around from one to the other and eat with our single spoon. During this supper I feel content but somehow odd. I am conscious, so to speak, of being the object of interest of spectators, and I even glance around to see who is in the tent. The premonition or vague hallucination I have felt for several days, that there is one more of us than can be counted, has expanded now until it seems like thirteen. Where is Judas? He is at the head of the table. I help myself to more gooseberries.

“Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, eh, Major?”

“I—” between swallows. “Used to gather. Gooseberries in the Stockholm skerries. When I was a boy.”

“You never told me you had been a boy.” Luisa too is in good spirits in spite of her ducking yesterday and her twelve hours of lying in the narrow Faltboot.

“I only was
for a brief time. Then they found a doctor—who cured me. He was called Doktor Liv.”

“Which means?”

“Life.” I clean out the can with the spoon. To me the taste of this confection (gooseberries, not life) is deeply provocative in a way that I am not at first able to understand. It isn't the skerries, or the gooseberries themselves. It is their container, tasting slightly of copper, still shiny from the industrial machine that made it. In these few days I had almost forgotten the World of Cities. This faint tinny tang, the sharpness of bright metal calls me back to it in a way that is somehow ominous and yet at the same time richly promising: a temptation. What have I to do with that world? What would I do there, and what have I done there? Is it possible that horse cars are still clanging down the streets of Philadelphia, that cocottes and their clients are still lighting cigarettes in Montmartre? If so, it is in another existence, a quite different solar system with another sun and planets. I throw the tin away, then retrieve it and put it away with the provisions. It may serve for something or other, perhaps as a second saucepan to stew gull meat in. Our other pan was made in a factory too. The fact is that we cannot live without the World of Cities, or can live only like animals. The tyranny of the cooking pot! Without it there is no Shakespeare or Beethoven, no love of Petrarch for Laura. It is clear that for mankind it has been a long and difficult business to get where we are, and that the heritage of gooseberry tins and symphonies is not lightly thrown away. Save all these scraps of trash, then, lest we turn into polar bears.