The Balloonist (30 page)

At seven o'clock we catch sight of something ahead. We stop, and I get the binoculars out of the Faltboot to look. Through the 12-power glasses everything seems to quiver. Sometimes the white spots look round, then they elongate into pillars, move sideways, and merge one into the other. There are four or five of them at least. I pass the glasses to Waldemer.

He twists the
focus knob, steam coming out from under the binoculars to freeze on his mustache, which is already white with rime.

“Good. A large male. A female. And at least two good-size cubs.”

The ectoplasmic effects are only tricks of the atmosphere. These are no dream bears but creatures of flesh and blood like ourselves. For the next hour we work our way cautiously toward them. The floes are getting more rotten, the open leads of water more frequent, and we progress only with difficulty. Once we are stopped by an open stretch of water. No way to get around it; it extends off into the far distance on both sides. It is ten metres to the solid ice on the other side. Hastily we unpack everything from the Faltboot and launch it into the open lead. Then, since it is only a two-man boat, Theodor crawls into it and worms his way up into the bow, completely out of sight. Waldemer and I then get in, pile the sleeping sacks, food, rifle, and other equipment on our laps, and paddle across the lead to the other side. There occupants and other contents are unpacked and the Faltboot pulled up on the ice. While Waldemer and I go ahead to reconnoitre, Theodor is left to repack the baggage in the Faltboot as before. Finding the bears still in the same place, we come back and set to with the pulling ropes again.

The white spots ahead remain more or less stationary, although they gradually assume solidity as they become larger and no longer leak out and crawl upward into the atmosphere, or sideways into each other. At five hundred metres we can make out the black of muzzles, and the red stain of something they are fussing with on the ice: a seal carcass. The large male raises his head, points it in our direction for a moment, and then goes back to what he is doing. The bears are not educated in the ways of men and may even doubt that we exist. We are blurry spots on the ice, as they are blurry spots to us.

But Waldemer is cautious. He unlimbers the Mannlicher from the baggage, we drop the pulling ropes and leave the Faltboot where it is, and go on slowly over the ice with Waldemer in the lead. At two hundred metres he begins bending down to take advantage of the cover of ice hummocks, and we imitate him. When we look up again, the female and the nearly mature cubs are lumbering off in a leisurely way, bending their heads now and then to look behind them. The male has turned to face
us. He is quite motionless, then rears up on his haunches to get a better look. He drops down onto all fours again, and has still not retreated when Waldemer gets in his first shot at a hundred metres. A red blotch appears on his throat and he falls down, but gets up at once. The second shot takes him in the hindquarters. This causes the rear end of him to fall down, but also incites him to fresh efforts, so that he gets up and begins running, the hindquarters dragging a little. Waldemer, taking more care now and making sure of his aim, squeezes one last time the lever of his ingenious machine which will convert this dangerous enemy into butcher meat. The bear tumbles in a heap, stretches out on the ice as though he were reaching for something with his forequarters, and expires. One hind leg rises once, extends a little, then sinks slowly.

“Huzzah!”

With an exultant gesture he pushes the rifle skyward, turns his face with its sugar-candy whiskers to us, and grins. Then, catching a note of something besides elation on our own faces, he calls out to us over the ice from fifty metres away, “Hard to do a neat job with this small-caliber stuff. Have to get in two or three rounds sometimes. Should have saved the Martini.”

We advance to inspect the victim. He is a big old he-bear, not really white but a pale stained yellow like dirty ice cream. The muzzle, the eyes, and the bottoms of the paws are black. The ravaged seal lies in a patch of splattered gore a little distance away, and the bear's own blood is spreading under him in a pool that becomes pink as it sinks into the porous ice. Luisa looks at it for a moment, with the detachment and slight reluctance of a schoolgirl observing a dissected salamander. Then she turns away and she and I, leaving Waldemer with his prize, trail our way back to where we have left the Faltboot.

“You were right, he is red inside.”

“We always forget that. About ourselves too.”

“So, the bear ate the seal, and we will eat the bear. And then?”

“You have circles on your mind today.”

“I make no objection, you understand. I just want to understand clearly how everything will happen.” “What happens now is that we will bring the baggage back to Waldemer, and we will make camp.”

By the time
we have dragged the Faltboot up to him Waldemer has opened up the bear with his hunting knife to get at the rib meat. There is not much of this, to tell the truth; the old fellow seems to consist mostly of spars. While Waldemer finishes his butcher work Theodor and I put up the tent. The bright red stripes are conspicuous on the white landscape. Our camp is a study in red, white, and black: the striped tent, the bear, the blood on the snow, the black seal carcass. Inside the tent I start up the primus and make cocoa. The primus isn't working well; the flame burns yellow and pops up and down on the burner. I adjust it to try to get the proper blue, with only partial success. Then Waldemer comes in dangling some slabs of dark red flesh. Attempts to cook these are unavailing; we don't have a large enough pan and can only hold them over the primus flame with forks. In any case they are better raw, getting cool now in the chill air and the consistency of hard ice cream. When chewed for a long time the flesh melts slowly in the mouth, turning into a nourishing essence with a taste more of strawberries than of blood, and leaving behind a certain quantity of fibers that get stuck in the teeth. It was truly an ancient he-bear, quite possibly the oldest bear in the arctic. Waldemer opines that it was probably an escaped menagerie bear. The meal is “bully,” as he himself says, and we have more hardtack with raspberry syrup for dessert.

With the primus going the tent warms gradually. This makes us all drowsy after our day's promenade over the frozen junkyard, and the same is scheduled for tomorrow. All the gear from the Faltboot has been brought into the tent, and we sort out and unroll the sleeping sacks. For some reason there are only two of these. We tumble over the other things piled in the back of the tent, but the third one is not there. Waldemer even goes out to look for it in the Faltboot, letting in a quantity of cold air as he comes and goes, even though Theodor assures him that everything has been brought in.

Waldemer is bemused. “You're sure it was there when we broke camp this morning?”

“I packed it myself.”

“And I recall unpacking all three of them when we came to the lead.”

“It fell out perhaps when we were crossing the lead.”

“Not likely.”

The onus
of the misdeed falls on Theodor. All three sacks were there when we came to the lead, nothing was left on the ice behind, and Waldemer now remembers piling the three of them out on the ice on the other side. It was Theodor who was supposed to re-stow everything while Waldemer and I were off scouting the route up ahead.

The sleeping sacks are identical and it is impossible to tell whose is missing. Theodor offers to go without. But there is no floor in the tent and without the sacks there is nothing to lie on but ice. Some prolonged and jocular negotiations take place as to which two of us are to share a sleeping sack. The arguments:

1. Offered by Waldemer. The Major and he have known each other the longest, they are old hunting chums and used to bedding down just any way.

2. My own, totally facetious. I am captain of this expedition and as such entitled to have a private cabin. This is not taken seriously and Theodor offers a fanfare with a trumpet made out of his hands.

3. He proposes instead his own scheme, which is based on scientific fact and is virtually indisputable. Waldemer is by far the largest of us. A sleeping sack would hardly accommodate Waldemer and anyone else. The rationale ought to be that the tandem sleeping sack should be strained to the minimum through charging it with the minimum bulk. This is constituted by Theodor himself and the Major. This thesis carries the day, and we arrange ourselves for the night accordingly.

Waldemer is deep into his sleeping sack with only the top of his head still showing, the hunting cap pulled down over it. From inside we hear, “The Major's whiskers look prickly to me, Theodor. You can come over here if you change your mind.” Then there is a sigh, and nothing more from his direction. In only a few minutes he is snoring.

There are two reasons to worm one's way far down into the sack. For warmth, first of all. Even with the primus burning all night the temperature can hardly be more than freezing, whereas inside the sacks we can hope for something at least approaching blood warmth. And for protection against the light. The sun, which seemed pale outside, comes through the red and white silk as though magnified in some way in the process; the white is white as ice glare, the red is the blinding effulgence of bear blood, of fire, of the sun beating twisted on the ripples of the lake in Stresa. Down, down to escape this scarlet glare of things we have done that
we ought not to have done, of things we left undone that we knew to be our duty. Did the bear ask to show us that he was red inside? He wanted only to be left alone with his wife and children. Did we debate with him like rational creatures whether his life was more important than our own? Did the Pole ask to be discovered, trampled on, soiled with our tin cans and our urine? Down, down into the darkness and warmth of the reindeer skin, another murder we have committed without willing to or ever doubting our own righteousness, like most murderers. We are nowhere, Luisa and I, everything is darkness, we are bound as though by thongs in the reindeer skin, clothing is no longer necessary in this joining and merging of two metabolisms in common warmth. In the thick bristle of my hair just over my ear I hear a murmur in Swedish: ‘Vi har … förut.” Yes, this has happened before, and it was you who made it happen each time, fragile and ethereal, vulnerable one who must be protected in the streets of Paris, who cannot hold a bar of graphite without breaking it, it was you who lost the third sleeping sack, who pushed it into the water when nobody was looking, no doubt with that little crease of secret determination at the corner of your mouth. And yet this would not have happened, the vague notion forms somewhere in my consciousness, if it had not been for the bear. If the landscape had remained white. And then rather incongruously another lucid, scientific, and even journalistic thought occurs to me: what is happening is a very common phenomenon and yet this is a historic moment in its way, the farthest north that this event has ever taken place. Should we wake up Waldemer so that he can take a note? No, poor fellow, he needs his sleep. Four limbs are entwined somewhere down at the bottom of the sack, four others higher up near the centres of our noting intelligences. These belong to neither of us, we share the eight of them, we are a two-headed octopus hugging itself in order to stay warm and in order to know and penetrate itself, to know and receive itself, in order that its vast loneliness in regard to the sea around it may be at least temporarily alleviated. The octopus, touching at last a place of secret and hidden knowledge somewhere in its centre, vibrates with the mindless and grateful ecstasy of a saint showered with grace. And after that it is quiet, sufficient unto itself, the tentacles stirring only lazily now and then one against the other. It is safe for it here in the darkness, there is sustenance and warmth, if it ventured above the surface into that red and white light it would die, or rather separate into those two odd creatures imagined by some old Greek, incomplete, wandering apart from each other in a lonely and confused living death until at last they manage to unite once more.

“Tu es
content, n'est-ce pas?”

“You are mad,” I whisper back in Swedish. “Don't speak.” In any case I am very sleepy.

But the voice continues. “Moi, tu sais, je n'ai pas peur de mourir. To die would not be very different from this.” There is silence for a while, then the little sound, the touch of warm air, resumes now and then and brushes the chilled and half-numb outer convolution of the ear, passes down the narrow cave to the tympanum and into the shadows of the deeper consciousness. “On est dans la chambre jaune, tu sais. Le soleil se couche, tout le monde se couche, on est content.” And a little later, “Tu sais, le Bois. On était content … le lac.” What lake? The one we paddled across with half-frozen fingers because the clients are requested to abandon boats only at the places provided? But I am already far under the surface and oblivious, stirred only now and then by the warm feather touch by my ear.

“Nous n'irons plus au bois
,

Les lauriers sont coupés.

La belle que voilà
,

La ferons nous danser?”

My back warmed by the fire, I sit with half-closed eyes warming the cognac glass in my hands, hardly noticing what I am seeing, conscious only of sounds. The Polish cousin Gela, visiting, is at the piano. Something to one side the fashionable photographer and the aunt are talking of Dreyfus, of Wagner, of the winter, which is unusually severe and prevents one from so much as going to the Bois for a breath of air in one's carriage. “The Lac Inférieur is frozen, did you know that? We had thought of going to Menton, or to Spain, but Luisa insists on staying for her recital.”

“Which is to take place?”

“In February.”

And indeed Luisa
is intent on this difficult task, attacking even a simple folk song with the élan and seriousness of a professional, her back against the piano, the delicate tendons at the base of her throat distended with concentration.