The Balloonist (2 page)

A
t four o'clock
Alvarez comes to tell me everything is ready. I immediately arise and go to the door of the shed. The air is clear and tepid, the sun hangs motionless in the east. The wind is still blowing gently from the south. It is not as much wind as I had hoped, but perhaps it is enough. Turning my back to it, I pause for a reflective moment to look northward in the direction of our hopes. Before me a beach of brown gravel stretches away a few hundred metres to the sea, a flat and endless grey surface wrinkled only slightly by the wind. At the edge of the water, bound to earth with a complicated system of ropes, is the Prinzess on which all our schemes and efforts have concentrated for so many months. Beyond her, only a mile or so across the strait, the shape of Amsterdam Island is clearly outlined in this crystalline morning light, and along to the right is the larger mass of Vasa Peninsula. The temperature, I note, is five degrees centigrade.

Alvarez is standing at my elbow, and without turning to look at him I know he is watching me with an expression I have come to recognize not only in him but in the other members of the supporting party, from the doctor to the last cook and carpenter in these final days as our preparations have drawn to a climax. They look at us as though we were dead, or more precisely, in the way one might look at men who are to perish in some bizarre and complicated way previously unknown to human experience, men who are to be executed perhaps by some new and intricate apparatus whose effects are unknown and might involve some unexpected and unimaginable ecstasy before the final annihilation. It is not
exactly a sympathy. The experience that lies before us is so unprecedented that they, the men who observe us, have no sense of participation in our fate, knowing it is one reserved exclusively for us and not, like death from an ordinary illness, something that they themselves may be eventually destined to experience. And so their glance is one of curiosity rather than sympathy or envy, and is quite distant and detached in its regard; it is a speculation as to what we might be experiencing in our thoughts and sensations in this thing that is already beginning to happen to us and will soon separate us inexorably from all the other men of the earth. It is the look one might give to men who were about to voyage to the moon, or be mated to goddesses or wraiths. Perhaps we are, although I am not quite sure which I mean, or what I mean by that. I would do better to avoid fanciful metaphors and concentrate on the task at hand.

Alvarez, the crew chief, is an Argentine and knows neither English nor Swedish. Since I know no Spanish we communicate in the French which is the working language of the base camp. In any case Alvarez is not loquacious; he works with his hands and his brain and speaks only when necessary for the job at hand. After a while, still watching me out of his tanned face without expression, he merely inquires, “Ça va?”

He means the wind. I tell him it is adequate, perhaps. “And there are disturbances to the southeast. In a little while there may be more wind than we can use or need.”

“Then we should start preparing the Prinzess?”

“Of course. Immediately. Remove what is necessary. Leave only the three ground ropes if you like.”

“D'accord, Commandant.”

With barely a nod to me, his face still expressionless, he disappears in the direction of the workshed. After only a moment I can hear his sharp voice through the walls of the shed. “Allons les gars—a l'éveillée! Tout est rassemblé—où sont les couteaux? On part!”

Most of the preparations have been completed for several days and what remains to be done is a matter of twenty minutes or so: removal of the lashing ropes, checking of instruments, loading of the final equipment. Out of habit, although I know almost precisely what it will say, I glance at my watch: a little less than ten minutes after four. Then, after a last appraisal of the wind, I go back into the sleeping shed to wake the others. Waldemer is already up, busying himself seriously and a little sleepily with the personal possessions he plans to take with him. When I touch Theodor's shoulder he says nothing, only looks at me with eyes that from the moment they open fix me steadily without so much as a glance at the other objects in the shed. Then he comprehends and pulls himself out of his sleeping sack without a word. The sleeping sacks are of reindeer leather with the fur inside, warm, but I can predict that the hairs they shed will be an annoyance. Theodor efficiently rolls up his sack; he seems as wide awake as if he had never been asleep, although he is still not very talkative. So much the better! We have not come to this place to talk. We should emulate Alvarez.

I quickly
dress and collect the few instruments I have not embarked the night before: field glasses, the level sextant, the two pocket chronometers. (I speak of night only from habit since at the latitude of Spitsbergen the summer sun is always skulking around the horizon like a kind of friendly and stupid animal.) With Waldemer I walk down to the edge of the water and verify for myself that the instruments are carefully installed in the gondola. Waldemer stows his photographic apparatus, which except for the folding tripod fits neatly into a kind of leather portmanteau with a handle at the top. We have time for a final check of the chronometers Kullberg 5566 and Kullberg 5587. Still two minutes and thirteen seconds apart; the rates are constant. Then we go back to the sleeping shed where Theodor is lacing up his boots, his mouth set in a little crease of seriousness on one side. The doctor, alerted by Alvarez, has come ashore from the Nordkapp anchored in the bay and is waiting to examine us one last time. Except for Theodor and me he is the only one who knows—as inevitably he must know—the oddness that rests at the centre of this trio of us. A bear of a man with unkempt grey hair and whiskers, he applies a stethoscope to our chests in a rather perfunctory way. We have no fevers, palpitations, or visible fungi that would prevent us from carrying out our folly, as he regards it.

“Do you have dreams, Major?” he asks me unexpectedly.

“Dreams? What kind?”

“Of flying, for instance. Or climbing mountain peaks.
Odd
dreams, as they seem to you.”

I might have told him that even my waking existence seems rather odd to me, but we have no time for a pleasant conversation on epistemology. “Do you ask in the interests of science, or merely to verify my health?”

“Both, I
suppose.”

“I'm perfectly healthy. I'd be glad to engage you in Indian wrestling if you like, but some other time. Are you done with us?”

“I am speaking to you now not as a physician but as a man. It would be too much to say that I am fond of you. I am not. But I am concerned over what you are doing to yourself, and to others, as I would be for any human being.”

I simply meet his glance and look back at him, politely but without any expression. After a moment he takes me by the elbow and we move toward the door of the shed; outside he draws me a little apart from the others.

“Flesh has its limits, and different flesh has different limits. What you are concealing in this matter is more than an indiscretion, it is a crime. Besides I think you will find that this mischief you have made will defeat your own purposes.”

“Are you sure you know my purposes?”

“I would have thought they were fairly clear.”

I smile and might have remarked that he knows more than I do, then. But I only say, “If I am a criminal you ought to have told the authorities.”

“I have sworn to you to say nothing, and you know that I will not. But you are taking a life in your hands—three lives, although I hold you more greatly responsible for one of the three.”

“I am grateful for your advice. Goodbye, Doctor.”

To my surprise he doesn't reject my hand and responds almost warmly, it seems to me, to the pressure of my fingers. But there is no smile of sympathy on his face, only an immobility—not of disapproval, one has the impression, but of indifference—that contrasts oddly with the cordiality of his grasp. He turns and without a word goes back toward the ship, not waiting to witness the crucial moment of this enterprise for which we have prepared for so many weeks.

For the second time this morning I make my way down the shingled beach to the water. The great roundness at the water's edge, stretched upward as though by the force of some mysterious and insubstantial gravity, curves at the bottom into a kind of dimple or extrusion resembling the mouth of a
chemical flask. The net of light cord stretched over it is another geometry of reticulation imposed on this sphere. I am struck for the first time with the beauty of the form: the Prinzess strains upward, the ropes downward, and in their blind logic these forces have created an ellipsoid of exquisite feminine roundness. The alternate segments of red and white silk, tapering to points at the top and bottom, are each of them perfect shapes according to the laws of spherical geometry, yet when glanced at again they disappear as separate entities through a kind of optical trick and merge into this rounded whole to which nothing could be added and nothing taken away. The whole gives the impression of something ethereal in its substance and yet perfect in its concept, like the thought of a mathematician. As the breeze touches it, the shape trembles, dimples here and there, and then resumes its geometric curve. The red and white stripes, which are functional and intended to increase the visibility of the Prinzess at long distances, seem an intrusion, almost a frivolity in the barrenness of the surrounding landscape. Everything else is grey or brown, the sea is the colour of iron. The wind is holding constant at eight knots from the south.

At the water's edge a considerable crowd has collected: workmen, cooks, sailors from the Nordkapp, old Captain Nyblom, whom I have known from the time of the Greenland expedition. Alvarez is on top of the gondola checking the guide ropes and verifying the screw mechanism that detaches them in case of entanglement in the ice or for some other reason. My two companions stand by the gondola with their hands on the instrument ring, waiting for the word to mount. Theodor is elegant as usual in a fur-lined German officer's greatcoat, a peaked cap, and boots which came from Foirot in rue Saint-Honoré. I glance at his face for a sign of emotion, but he seems completely self-assured, with the faint touch of arrogance or contempt that is part of his nature. He has trimmed his hair short and neatly cleaned his fingernails, I see, in preparation for the flight. Waldemer is wearing a thick padded shooting jacket and a hunting cap with flaps, and you sense rather than perceive that there is long woolen underwear beneath, the American kind with a door at the rear, a most practical arrangement. As for me, I am clad in the outfit made for me by the Greenland Eskimos in 1882; a coat of reindeer skin with a hood, breeches of the same material, and sealskin boots.

Alvarez comes
down from his inspection of the guide ropes; he has checked the manoeuvring valve carefully and verified the ballast. We haven't bothered with breakfast; there is no time to lose if we are to take advantage of the favourable wind. The lines that hold the Prinzess to earth have been removed except for three stout ropes of Manila fixed to stakes. Three workmen are standing by these with knives we have been careful to sharpen the night before. There is a certain amount of conventional handshaking, which makes everyone concerned feel rather silly. Alvarez is the enemy of all sentiment and does not participate in this ceremony. Not looking directly at me, his eyes fixed on the lower part of the gondola, he merely says crisply, “Bonne chance, Commandant.” Captain Nyblom, for some reason, shakes his head slowly, without altering his wrinkled Norwegian smile.

Somewhat impeded by our heavy clothing, we climb up into the gondola. Because of the bulky shooting jacket Waldemer has some difficulty crossing the instrument ring, and is immobilized for some time with one leg on one side of it and one on the other. No one shows even the faint trace of a smile at this (and again I think of condemned men who are being adjusted into some execution machine which malfunctions slightly so that there is a delay in the proceedings; it is with exactly that combination of detached silence and curiosity that the spectators watch us), and by unbuttoning his coat at the bottom I manage to help him across and in. “Thanks, Major.” He is puffing a little at this incident. But he is smiling; if he can climb so smartly over the instrument ring then surely he, and all of us, can do the rest! Theodor shows no sign that he has observed this little playlet. He has swung over the ring as though it were an exercise he has performed a thousand times, and now he stands quietly waiting for the next order, with his gloves resting on the wicker of the gondola. I notice that his earlobes are already grey, and I wonder if he will be able to endure the much greater cold we are soon to encounter.

Now that we are aboard, the mechanic Eliassen and his helper attach a spring scale to the bottom of the gondola and pull it down a little to measure our buoyancy: eleven and a half kilos. Alvarez is waiting for a lull in the wind. The ropes creak, at my feet the pigeons supplied by a Stockholm
newspaper coo softly in their wicker case. There is a faint and not unpleasant smell of kerosene to the south in the centre of the island, some round grey knobs of hills are watching us like a circle of spectators. Slightly to the east of north lies the larger mass of Spitsbergen, mountains we can't hope to climb over and must skirt with the help of this wind which we hope won't turn fickle. In the other direction, a quarter of a mile away, the Nordkapp with her tall narrow funnel and her squared foreyard rests docilely at anchor in the bay. It is too far away to see if the doctor is watching, but I'm sure he isn't; he is no doubt in his cabin writing up the notes of the examination. The time, a minute or two after five. I can no longer see Alvarez because he is directly under the gondola, but I can hear his voice speaking French with its brisk consonants, asking for the last time if everything is ready, warning all hands to stand clear of the guide ropes. At the last moment Eliassen comes running across the gravel with something in his hand and I catch the word
dagboken
: I have forgotten the pocket diary bought only two weeks before on Drottninggatan in Stockholm in which I am to record my notes of the voyage. The diary is handed up amid jokes about absentmindedness. From under the gondola the telegraph-like voice continues to give orders.