Georg Letham (26 page)

Carbon monoxide is reliable. It should have been used long ago. There are still some sacks of good coal. Now, in warmer weather, they are dispensable. They will char belowdecks on ironware basins, on copper pans from the galley. Carbon monoxide is absolutely lethal to all rodents. The gas will collect from the outset down in the rattery, in the deepest area of the ship, because it is heavier than air. It will not escape upward, like the disastrous arsenic.

So first, ashore with the provisions. The ship's watch, chosen from scholars and crew in equal numbers, enter the hold, some remove chests and barrels while others fire into the horde of rats. And if a bullet hits two or three or four rats at once–some hours later, when the job is done and the provisions have been removed as completely as possible in one of the two lifeboats and the missionary shines the lantern about belowdecks, there seem to be just as many animals as before. The coal basins are kindled in the deepest corner of the hold, and now: away from the ship in the second lifeboat.

Three groups are on the ice some three hundred meters from the ship: first the expedition's officers, crew, and scholars, second the Eskimos with their dogs, third Ruru, who was the last to drag herself off the ship, limping on three legs, leaving a moist trail behind her, and who has now settled down on the edge of the ice on an old, frayed blanket,
rolling onto her back to protect her paws and licking her wounded muzzle with her tongue.

The ship stands there brightly, the sails, riddled with holes, are tightly reefed, all the icicles have melted off the rigging. A gentle breeze is blowing.

A tiny puff of smoke rises from the deck. Soon a dark fog from below is smoldering around the mast, dispersing into the air.

Ruru howls. She groans out her pain, mouth wide. The crew have brought a great deal of rum and arrack. They make punch in kettles under the Eskimo tents. The scholars have recognized the seriousness of the situation, they walk back and forth at the edge of the ice, there is a somber silence among them.

The geographer, the missionary, and my father meet at Ruru's bed of pain. They pity the animal. They do not pity the thousands upon thousands of rats slowly stewing and suffocating in the ship's hold. Nor would they pity the rats if they were all incinerated. And the ship along with them? Is it burning? Is it burning? Is the fire going out? The cloud becomes heavier and heavier, darker, sparks flash through it. Quarter hour after quarter hour goes by in the steady pale light of the arctic day, until with a cannonlike crack an incandescent flame shoots out of the dense, slate-colored cloud of smoke.

For the first time since human history began, and since the world as we know it came into being, and since snow and ice armor-plated the topsoil and the rock beneath it here below the eighty-seventh parallel, this wasteland of ice and water is seeing fire.

The scholars do not want to see it. The last kettle of arrack punch is heated by the crew using the last of the wood from the chests. This time the gentlemen drink too. Beneath their high, dirty fur caps, pulled
down over the bridges of their noses, an abstracted expression appears on their dark or pale, emaciated faces, which might be a look of stunned horror or equally a dull-witted merriment induced by the hot alcohol. Many are toothless. Drops of the strong spirits hang from the unkempt beards. It is only despair behind it all. Mute despair as, one silently signaled by another, they turn their gazes once more to the ship shaken by flames: they see the rats so densely packed together that they are fighting for room in the water and one almost ejects its neighbor, a smooth-furred, shiny, darkly variegated back, onto
its
neighbor, and so on–the sharp heads stretched far out in front, the black rat eyes wide open–they see the rat community appear, without prelude, in one movement, as though the ten thousand animals were a single body, in the gap created by the spring thaw between the western side of the ship and the eastern edge of the ice. Hordes and hordes of rats follow, hurling themselves out of every hatchway, first onto the deck and from there into the ice blue and golden water, on which the reflections of the flames undulate.

The animals have a single goal, a single will, they swim with calm, measured strength. They push the little ice cakes forcibly ahead of them. They are heading for land. For the men.

My father stands at the edge of the ice. He touches his chest. He is feeling for a case that holds an excellent cigar, the last of a large supply. The rats have demolished the rest. My father has promised himself that he will smoke this Havana cigar at the “critical moment.” That moment has arrived.

The Eskimos plunge into feverish activity, harness the dogs, strike
the tents. They look up at the reddish glare of the sky in which, as their superstition has it, the angry gods dwell. They have not a glance to spare the burning ship, the columns of rats approaching ever nearer.

The sailors, who have been drinking under the tents, stand under the open arctic sky, suddenly sober and freezing. Their raucous songs are suddenly stilled.

They surround my father, but at a certain distance. Between my father and his companions (the scholars and the ship's captain) and the sailors is a space of some thirty meters. In this space of thirty meters is the dog's bed.

Everything, the men's faces flushed with drink, the rolled-up leather walls and wooden pegs of the tents, the harnesses of the Eskimo dogs already standing in formation, the boats loaded onto the sledges, everything is burnished with the glow of the fire.

A crashing comes from the fiery ship. The murmuring of the sailors can be heard.

The two lifeboats are at the edge of the ice, in a kind of inlet. One is loaded with the last provisions and the weapons, the ammunition, and the blankets. The other, which brought the men not long ago, is now empty. Whoever has the first boat still has a chance of saving his life–if he can protect himself from the rats, if the provisions can be protected from their teeth.

The other boat is worthless.

The division of the camp has taken shape in an instant. The crew have huddled together. There is not room and food enough for everyone. There is space only for a small number under good leadership, only for the strongest “collective egoists.”

The first rats try to land. They attempt to cling to the edge of the ice with their clawed feet, to climb up. Unsuccessfully at first.

My father is going to light the cigar. Before he can strike the match, he becomes aware of someone approaching behind him. A small, warm, square object with something that rattles attached to it is carefully placed in his left hand, between whose index and middle fingers the cigar hangs loosely. Surprised, he brings his hand up to look. It is the long-lost Gospels. The man who stole the book felt pangs of conscience at the critical moment. He wanted to give up the booty. He brought it out from under his shirt. I never found out who it was, the geographer or the captain. Between the pages of the little book is a rosary.

My father has to pull himself together. Reflect. Resolve is everything. His thoughts elsewhere, he opens the book at the place marked by the rosary. It is the Sermon on the Mount. His eyes scan the beginning of the fifth chapter of Matthew: Jesus's Sermon on the Mount. The first rats scurry over his feet. Their landing has been successful.

My father reads, but does not go on reading. He does not give himself up. He does not pray. He spits out the cigar, kicks at the rats, reaches for his revolver, gathers his closest comrades around him with a brief order. The social question has been broached, class warfare has begun. Here the officers, the scholars, and the captain. The leaders. There the sailors. The masses. Before them the object of dispute, the boats. The burning ship unattainable and useless. At their feet the rats. Above them the arctic sky and otherwise nothing.

The Eskimos are in wild flight, prod their dogs with long, sharp-pointed sticks, beat their flanks raw, they stand on the low sledges, legs wide apart. With a scraping sound the sledges move off on their runners.
And with the cracks of their whips coming again and again, but more softly, dying away, the children of nature race from the scene of the final battle among the members of the ill-fated expedition. Across the ice they came, across the ice they have gone.

My father flings the little book to the ground. Rats will eat it, as they have eaten the last cigar. Leaves of tobacco, leaves of paper, to them it is all the same in the struggle for survival. They escaped the carbon monoxide, death by fire too. Nor did they drown.

There is not a moment for sentimentality.

Something strange happens. The dog has risen from her bed, has limped to my father with neck outstretched, ears laid back, tail between her legs, has, for the first time since her return from the underworld of the rats, snuggled against him. What has taken place in the animal's soul (an animal too has a soul, if quite different from that of a person) cannot remotely be guessed.

What took place in my father's soul (my father too had a soul, if quite different from that of most people) cannot be guessed.

His narrative has remained in my memory as I have recounted it to this point. His words were precise and he never contradicted himself no matter how many times I heard the story. My mother, who knew about it from her brother, confirmed the facts for me too.

About the final battle between men and beasts, everyone kept silence, for as long as they lived. It must have been more terrible than any hunt in the heart of the wild in which men have faced dangerous animals and died glorious deaths. There must have been a truly indescribable contest as four-footed and two-footed creatures fought for survival, fought to have the last chance. My father won it.

He came to know man as he is. As I am.

Not only did he not shrink from the most extreme violence, he also certainly made exhaustive use of every psychological method of dealing with the men whose help he had to have in order for him to save
himself
. It speaks for my father's savage, boundless energy as well as for his virtuosity in playing the keyboard of the heart, working out every type of human behavior in advance with the utmost precision, like a surgeon with a scalpel or an experimental bacteriologist with a toxin test weighed out to a millionth of a milligram, it speaks for him that he . . . that as a collective egoist he . . .

Now there is a hissing over Brig. Gen. Carolus's wobbly little table. For a second his face, his salmon pink, rubber-gloved hands, and the thin hunched back of the prisoner he has just painstakingly examined are bathed in chalky light. Then a tongue of flame spurts from the old acetylene lamp's calcium carbide tank, which has cracked into jagged pieces. Fireworks, then everything is cloaked in darkness. The prisoners have spontaneously seized the critical moment. The charlatan general, rigid with fright, watches from behind his spectacles as they dash as one down the open ship's ladder, upsetting the basin of sublimate solution in the darkness, into the sleeping quarters, two facing halls or stables with strong bulkheads toward the middle, each with a veteran petroleum lamp swinging from its ceiling and peacefully smoldering.

I am no match for the others elbowing for the best spots, those in the corners. But my companion is. He pulls me along with irresistible energy, then pushes us both through the crowd while squeezing against me so tightly that I feel the warmth of his body, half with pleasure, half reluctantly. He twists and turns, presenting first his back, then the
sack he is carrying, thumps and blows rain down, but he captures a corner spot, and once he has it, no one can wrest it away. As he looks at me silently, but breathing deeply, I have a rare feeling of ease. Home. Calm. Here? Now? With him? But so it is. Or is it only fatigue? I am unable to think clearly, and yet the image of my father will not leave me. Do I still love him so much? I don't know. But I want to finish with his story.

It speaks for my father's boundless energy and for his knowledge of human nature, which henceforth would take as its foundation nothing but the basest human motives, greed and vanity, cruelty and stupidity, that he was among the three survivors who were picked up by a whaler off Skovby. He, the geographer, and the missionary, the missionary troubled in mind, perhaps in an alcoholic delirium. My father was not in a delirium. He was only too lucid. A different man. He hated and hates people, except me and himself. Then again, he may not have received the best treatment from people. Fortune had not exactly smiled on him.

When I asked him to tell me the happier part of his story too, his rescue, he said he was too tired. He did not say no, in fact rarely did.

The bard also passed in respectful silence over his dog Ruru's end. An oval scar on the back of his left hand where the veins from the fingers snake under the skin in a soft ridge might possibly have been the traces of a severe dog bite; but I never found out whether this bite dated from before or after the reconciliation at the critical moment. It may be that the rats ate human flesh and the humans canine flesh, he did not say yes, did not say no, but ran his heavy left hand through my blond hair, at that time very thick, soft or rough, straight or somewhat wavy, depending on the weather. It is no longer so thick now and its pale
blond has given way to a muted nut brown, but possibly my companion is tempted to run his fingers through it. I look at him in astonishment, but do not speak, do not say yes, do not say no.

I must have been a beautiful child. Not a happy one.

My father became an incorrigible misanthrope. Even my mother's brother (my father married six months after his return without fanfare from the far north)–even he was not his friend. He did nothing to stop him from leaving and never tried to find him. My mother grieved a good deal. He did not.
I
was supposed to be his friend.