The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content) (68 page)

Mecklenburg had shot at birds and squirrels as a boy but had never fired a pistol before, and his arm rang with pain, as if the cold had frozen his arm and the recoil shattered it. Quickly, before pain and fear and doubt of his actions could stop him, he squeezed off the rest of the clip. Only after he had emptied it did he realize that he had been firing with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, the American was standing directly in front of him. He pushed back the circle of fur, and his hair and eyebrows, moistened by the condensation of his breath inside the hood, began almost at once to rime over with frost. He was surprisingly young in spite of his beard, with an aquiline elegant face.

“I am very glad to be here,” the American said in flawless German. He smiled. The smile caught for an instant as if on a sharp wire. There was a neat black hole in the shoulder of the parka. “The flight was difficult.”

He pulled his right arm up inside the parka once more and felt around for a moment. When the hand reappeared, it was holding an automatic pistol. The American raised the gun up across his chest, as if to fire into the sky, and then his arm jerked. The Geologist took a step backward, then steeled himself, and threw himself onto the American, grabbing for the gun. As he did so, he realized that he had misinterpreted the situation, somehow, that the American had been in the act of tossing the pistol aside, that his unthreatening and even wistful air was not some elaborate ruse but merely the relief, dazed and unsteady, of someone who had survived an ordeal and was simply, as he had suggested, glad to be alive. Mecklenburg felt a sudden sharp regret for his behavior, for he was a peaceful and scholarly man who had always deplored violence, and one furthermore who liked and admired Americans, having known, in the course of his scientific career, a fair number of them. A gregarious man, he had nearly died of solitude in the last month, and now a boy had fallen out of the sky, an intelligent, able young man, one with whom he could discuss, in German no less, Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman, and now Mecklenburg had shot at him—emptied his clip—in this place where the only hope for survival, as he had so long argued, was friendly cooperation among the nations.

A chime tuned to C-sharp sounded in his ear, and with an odd sense of relief he felt his tormented bowels empty into his trousers. The American caught him in his arms, looking startled and friendless and sad. The Geologist opened his mouth and felt the bubble of his saliva freeze against his lips. What a hypocrite I have been! he thought.

It took Joe nearly half an hour to drag the German across ten of the twenty meters that separated them from the hatch of Jotunheim. It was a terrible expense of strength and will, but he knew that he would find medical supplies inside the station, and he was determined to save the life of the man who, just five days before, he had set out across eight hundred miles of useless ice to kill. He needed benzoin, cotton wool, a hemostat, needle and thread. He needed morphia and blankets and the
ruddy flame of a stout German stove. The shock and fragrance of life, steaming red life, given off by the trail of the German’s blood in the snow was a reproach to Joe, the reproach of something beautiful and inestimable, like innocence, which he had been lured by the Ice into betraying. In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death. Nothing that had ever happened to him, not the shooting of Oyster, or the piteous muttering expiration of John Wesley Shannenhouse, or the death of his father, or internment of his mother and grandfather, not even the drowning of his beloved brother, had ever broken his heart quite as terribly as the realization, when he was halfway to the rimed zinc hatch of the German station, that he was hauling a corpse behind him.

I
NFORMAL
G
ERMAN TERRITORIAL CLAIMS
to the regions bordering the Weddell Sea had first been advanced in the wake of the Filchner expedition of 1911–13. Flying the eagle of the Hohenzollerns, the
Deutschland
, under the command of scientist and Arctic explorer Wilhelm Filchner, had sailed farther south into this grievous sea than any previous ship, battering its way through the semipermanent pack until it reached an immense, impassable palisade of barrier ice. The
Deutschland
then turned west and sailed for more than a hundred miles, finding no break or point of ingress in the sheer cliffs of the shelf that today bears Filchner’s name; explorers invariably give their names to the places that haunt or kill them.

At last, with the end of the season only a few weeks away, they came upon a place, a fissure in the Barrier, where the level of the shelf dropped abruptly to no more than a few feet above sea level. A half-dozen ice anchors were quickly driven into the shore of this inlet, which the explorers named Kaiser Wilhelm II Bay, and crates unloaded for the construction of a winter base. They chose a site some three miles inland for the erection of the hut, to which they gave the rather too-grand name of Augustaburg, and prepared to hunker down in the southernmost German colony until spring. A series of severe tremors in the ice, some lasting nearly a minute, and the subsequent calving, witnessed by the awed and deafened crew of the
Deutschland
, of a colossal iceberg a few miles east of the ship, put an abrupt end to their plans. After an uneasy week spent wondering and arguing whether they were about to be set adrift, they abandoned camp, returned to ship, and sailed north for home. They were almost immediately beset, and spent
the winter being chewed by the molars of the Weddell Sea before warmer weather thawed them out and sent them limping home.

It was in the base camp abandoned by this expedition that Joseph Kavalier, Radioman Second Class, was found by the navy icebreaker
William Dyer
. He had been in intermittent contact with the ship via a portable radio set, giving more or less accurate readings of his position. Commander Frank J. Kemp, skipper of the
Dyer
, noted in his log that the young man had been through considerable hardship in the last three weeks, surviving two long solo flights conducted with only limited skill as a pilot and a dying man for a navigator, a crash, a bullet wound to the shoulder, and a ten-mile hike, on a fractured ankle, to this ghost town of Augustaburg.

He had been living in this hut, noted Commander Kemp, on thirty-year-old tins of meat and biscuits, his only company the radio and a dead penguin, perfectly preserved. He was suffering from the effects of scurvy, frostbite, anemia, and a poorly healed flesh wound, which only the Antarctic uncongeniality to microbes had prevented from becoming infected, perhaps fatally; he had also, according to the ship’s doctor who examined him, gone through two and a half thirty-year-old boxes of morphine. He said that he had set out alone across the ice from the German station, crawling the last part of the way, with no intention of getting anywhere at all, because he could not bear to be near the body of the man he had shot and killed, and had chanced upon Augustaburg just as the last of his strength was failing him. He was taken to the base at Guantánamo Bay, where he remained under psychiatric examination and investigation by a court-martial until shortly before V-E Day.

His claim to have killed the lone enemy occupant of a German Antarctic base some seventy-five miles to the east of the hut where he was found was investigated and confirmed, and in spite of certain questions raised by his behavior and his handling of the matter, Ensign Kavalier was awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Service Cross.

In August 1977 a huge chunk of the Filchner Shelf, forty miles wide and twenty-five miles deep, calved off from the main body and drifted north as a giant iceberg into the Weddell Sea, carrying with it both the hut and the hidden remnants, some ten miles distant, of the German
polar dream. This event put an abrupt end to tourism at Augustaburg. Filchner’s Hut had become a required stop for the intrepid tourists who were just then beginning to brave the floe-choked waters of the Weddell Sea. The people would tramp in from out of the wind with their guide and respectfully examine the piles of empty tins with their quaint Edwardian-era labels, the abandoned charts and skis and rifles, the racks of unused beakers and test tubes, the frozen penguin, shot for examination but never dissected, standing eternal vigil under a portrait of the Kaiser. They might reflect on the endurance of this monument to a failure, or on the dignity and poignance that time can bring to human detritus, or they might merely wonder if the peas and gooseberries in the neat rows of cans on the shelves were still edible, and how they might taste. A few would linger a moment longer, puzzling over an enigmatic drawing that lay on the workbench, done in colored pencil, frozen solid and somewhat the worse from long-ago folding and refolding. Clearly the work of a child, it appeared to show a man in a dinner jacket falling from the belly of an airplane. Although the man’s parachute was far beyond his reach, the man was smiling, and pouring a cup of tea from an elaborate plummeting tea service, as if oblivious of his predicament, or as if he thought he had all the time in the world before he would hit the ground.

W
HEN
S
AMMY WENT IN
to wake Tommy for school, he found the boy already up and modeling his eye patch in the bedroom mirror. The bedroom furniture, a set from Levitz—bed, dresser, the mirror, and a hutch with drawers—had a nautical theme: the back wall of the hutch was lined with a navigation chart for the Outer Banks, the brass drawer pulls shaped like pilot’s wheels, the mirror trimmed in stout hawser rope. The eye patch did not look all that out of place. Tommy was trying different kinds of piratical scowls on himself.

“You’re up?” Sammy said.

Tommy nearly jumped out of his skin; he had always been an easy child to startle. He yanked the patch up over his dark, tousled head and turned, blushing deeply. He was in possession of both his eyes; they were bright blue, with a slight puffiness of the lower lids. There was, in fact, nothing at all wrong with his vision. His brain was something of a puzzle to Sammy, but there wasn’t any problem with his eyes.

“I don’t know what happened,” Tommy said. “I just somehow woke up.”

He stuffed the eye patch into the pocket of his pajama top. The pajamas were patterned with red pinstripes and tiny blue escutcheons. Sammy was wearing a pair that had red escutcheons with blue pinstripes. That was Rosa’s idea of fostering a sense of connection between father and son. As any two people who have ever dressed in matching pajamas will attest, it was surprisingly effective.

“That’s unusual,” Sammy said.

“I know.”

“Usually I have to set off a charge of dynamite to get you up.”

“That’s true.”

“You’re like your mother that way.” Rosa was still in bed, buried under an avalanche of pillows. She suffered from insomnia and rarely managed to fall asleep before three or four, but once she had gone under, it was nearly impossible to rouse her. It was Sammy’s job to get Tommy out of the house on school mornings. “In fact, the only time you ever get yourself up early,” Sammy continued, allowing a note of prosecutorial insinuation to enter his voice, “is for something like your birthday. Or when we’re leaving for a trip.”