The Jules Verne Steam Balloon

by Guy Davenport

  And the Everlasting spoke a word to the fish, and it coughed Dove out upon the beach, where he danced with joy before he fell on his knees and prayed for hours and hours.

  And a voice said again, Jonah go to Nineveh that great city and preach as I told thee before to go and preach that I am and that I am that I am.

  Nineveh as all know is so wide a city that it takes three days to walk from the front gate to the back gate. When Dove was a day’s walk into the city, confused by its booths and markets and temples that stank, he stood on a corner, in the dust, and shouted as loud as he could:

  —Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!

  People gathered about, and listened. They believed all he said, and repented, and wore sackcloth, and put ashes on their heads, from the king to the lowest beggar. The king sent an order throughout the city that the very oxen, asses, and sheep were to be dressed in sackcloth, and heaped with ashes, for the sake of repentance. Every word that Dove said, the king repeated as a royal decree. Every hand must stay itself in its violence, every heart must empty itself of lust. All the people of Assyria turned to the Everlasting, throwing their idols beyond the wall. Even then, the king was not certain that the Everlasting was not still angry unto death with him and his people.

  But the Everlasting himself came as a voice to the king and said that he was pleased with him and his people, and would not afflict them with pestilence and earthquake after the forty days.

  But Dove was filled with chagrin and outrage. He asked the Everlasting if he were sent as a prophet to destroy this wicked city, only to have his words cast back in his teeth, and his prophecy a mockery?

  —Is it good to be angry? the Everlasting asked.

  So Dove left the city, and pitched his tent outside the walls, for he believed in his heart that the Everlasting would strike the people with plague and a storm, and he wanted to see it, but not too close. He was happy when a gourd, his favorite of creation, grew before his eyes beside his tent. It grew faster than any plant outside Eden, by sinuous thrusts, putting out leaves like geese stretching their wings. In a matter of an hour the vine had made a green shade for Dove, and he sat in its cool with the sense that the Everlasting loved him, and had accepted his sorrowful repentance. Surely, on the morrow, Nineveh would perish, and Dove would be a prophet of great stature.

  The morning came. Dove woke, and saw straightaway that his gourd vine was wilting. The cool wind of the morning turned hot. The vine drooped and died, its leaves turning brown before his eyes. Nineveh stood in all its splendor, going about its business as on any other day. Then Dove knew that the Everlasting was angry with him, and would do him a mischief again, and that Nineveh would not care one way or the other. I have, Dove cried, disobeyed the Everlasting and come within the width of a hair of death. And I have obeyed the Everlasting and come to humiliation. There is neither justice nor truth in the world, or in heaven.

  As he sat in the broiling sun, he heard a voice in his ear.

  —Is it good to be angry because the gourd withered away when you thought it was a sign of your triumph over Nineveh?

  —It is good, said Dove in his anger. Would that I were dead.

  —It is pity you feel for the gourd, the Everlasting said, because you loved it, and saw me in it. But there is not in you anything that can make a gourd to grow, to flower, to be fat with fruit. Nineveh is my gourd. I made her, that beautiful city. It is rich in cows, sheep, and oxen. And one hundred and twenty thousand people live there who cannot tell their right hand from their left.

  The Ringdove Sign

  1

  The Arctic Circle, Mariana said, and here’s that light again. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We’re deep in conifers and aspen, and when their shadows begin to stretch out long, as now, all the hard accurateness of the light out here in the woods becomes this brilliant softness that lasts for hours, greens going blue, the sky violet, with neat lines of gold on the edges of things. Splendid is the word, Hugo said. And the midges dance out in hordes. Their jigs in spirals, their jigs in rounds. The gnats and leafhoppers here, Hugo said, are so many silly innocents compared to the ferocious samurai mosquitoes up north. On the Arctic Circle. You’d think the silence at the top of Sweden would be absolute. Not a bit of it. For one thing, the silence itself is an oppression, a density in the ear, so that the whine of mosquitoes and the hum of big black flies make a drone you wouldn’t otherwise hear. We’d got to Boden by train, and marched out to the Circle in stages, great fun at that age. A devil, Mariana said. No I wasn’t, I was sweet and shy. Ask Papa. We were joining a troop of Swedish Scouts, boys and girls together. A fine August day. For the North Pole. Which is considerably beyond, Smarty. On the Circle all the trees are dwarfs, as they grow so slow in that climate, getting root water only a few months of the year. Swamps of peat, fields of moss all warped and wavy. The evergreens are giving way to birches. When the Swedes saw our guidon down the path, the loneliest scraggiest worn path in the world, they turned out their brass band, and chose to greet us with I Fratelli d’Italia, Garibaldi’s battle hymn, as handsome a piece as there is, always excepting Wilhelm of Nassau. I remember that the band all looked alike, peas in a pod, longish blond hair and cornflower-blue eyes, and almost uniform. The cornet was barefoot, and here and there one saw a shirttail out and an unbuttoned button, an unzipped fly, a haywire shoelace. But they played with spirit and dash, and to be met in that northern emptiness, that world of scrub and wild desolation, made us feel wonderful. We formed into a double file, and marched in to the music, left foot in time to the drum. Our scoutmaster, a freckly math teacher in steelrimmed specs and a race of coppery hair across his forehead, to be in style with his charges, saluted the Swedish master, or mistress, for she was a woman, and shook hands. The Swedes have the damnedest sense of humor. They told, over and over, with richer merriment every repeat, how the band got into its uniforms faster than it had ever before dressed, and how the trombone could not for the longest be found, and how they had a squabble as to whether they should play King Kristian or Du Gamla, du Fria, and compromised with Goffredo Mameli, as symbolic of idealism, youth, and liveliness. Mariana said, I’ve seen Franklin laugh at the bubbles in Perrier water.

  2

  When a mouse looks at the world, Einstein said, the world does not change. Yes it does, Niels Bohr replied. A little.

  LONG SHADOWS BEFORE THE FIRST STAR

  The Summer Box, Papa calls it, Hugo said. I can remember talk as to whether it’s a cabin or a hut. We came here for a month at least every summer, Papa and Mama (you would have liked her, and she would have liked you) and I, and on the odd weekend, when I could bring along a friend. The inconvenience of it is its charm for Papa, having to survive on what you bring. He divides people into those who like coming here and those who don’t. Put me in the first lot, Mariana said. And Franklin and Pascal when they get here, day after tomorrow, isn’t it? If they get on the right train, if they get on the right bus, if Pascal’s folks delivered him at Papa’s. Those two, Mariana said.

  BLUE RIVER WITH WILLOWS

  My buddy Asgar and I were certain our scoutmaster was largely unacquainted with the female of the species other than his mother and aunts. He’d certainly never before seen a woman scoutmaster, especially one who laughed at the bubbles in Perrier water. It took a while to sort out the sex of the Swedish Scouts. They were all dressed exactly alike, had the same length of hair, and names weren’t all that much help. A girl I thought for sure was a boy turned out not to be. We were supposed to communicate in Esperanto. We fell back on English. We pitched our tents in a line facing theirs and went off to a blue river lined by willows. There’s no underbrush up there, no ferns like here, or berry bushes. Only moss, rock, stunted grass. The Swedish mistress said we must undress quickly and get into the water, or the mosquitoes would quite literally eat us alive. Was she ever right.

  TRACTATUS 1.21

  Any one fact can be the case, or not the case, and everything else
remains the same.

  AUGUST

  Hayfoot strawfoot, Hugo said, crunching larch cones, Pascal copying Franklin, off the forest trail to our campsite on the river. That’s lovely, Mariana said, Pascal copying Franklin. I wouldn’t have guessed that anybody would copy Franklin in anything. It’s Franklin who’s the champion copycat. After you appropriated me, which has, willy-nilly, involved appropriating Franklin too, he has taken you as the authority for all of life’s surfaces and corners. He brushes his teeth, bathes, combs his hair. And now here’s a well-off tyke at Grundtvig who seems to be the apple of his housemaster’s eye and who talks like a book and as you’ve told me has the highest IQ in the school looking up to Franklin. Oh it’s more than lovely, Hugo said. It began, you know, with that fight when Franklin took Pascal’s side, wholly inexplicably, and then Holger asked me if I would take Pascal on an outing, to give him some sense of the practical and some measure of self-confidence. So when we had our tent pitched, the flaps reefed, and ringed rocks and set up a spit, we were in thick summer pastoral peace: frogs talking to each other across the river, a raven cawing, dragonflies glinting green. Pascal was whistling Mozart as we made camp, and so was Franklin, a musical ear I hadn’t suspected. So the copycatting goes both ways. We’d crossed paths earlier on in the afternoon with some Wandervögel from Stuttgart, rather raunchily ahead of the times. One of them, sienna brown and as towheaded as an English sheepdog, eyes china blue, was wearing jeans shorts that would have fitted Franklin better, and their zipper was on the fritz so that the pod of his briefs, rusty yellow, stuck out through his fly. His girl, freckled pink and gold her whole face over, seemed to be wearing his shirt and nothing else. There were two boys in scarcely anything except packs and red caps who were holding hands. Another girl was sweetly barebreasted. They hailed us jovially. Pascal had questions, to which Franklin made up answers of an outrageous sort.

  7

  Tuesday, Mariana said, and whistled two long notes. I suppose the angels recorded it, they’d have to, blushing. If we came out here to love each other into fits and for you to pull together your crazy thesis, I hope the crazy thesis gets pulled together as well as the loving each other into fits. The angels won’t blush, Hugo said. They probably wrote it out as music, or in annotations of which we know nothing. Or maybe as bald facts. Only hours after making love deep into a summer night, Hugo woke Mariana with his finger, causing her to talk salaciously in her sleep. Birdsong. A skimpy breakfast, after making love, scarcely interrupting renewed affections. Made love all morning. Lunch forgotten. Made love all afternoon. A walk in the meadow, naked as Adam and Eve.

  8

  Well, Pascal said once we were all shipshape with site and tent, as a matter of fact I call Housemaster Sigurjonsson Holger when we’re by ourselves, never any other time. Hugo, Franklin said, is always Hugo. So, hr. Tvemunding, Pascal said, I’ll call you Hugo. Very spadger, his ribs, with something baby bird in the shoulders, something goblinish about the back of the head. There was a tadpole flexibility before this gawkiness. A sturdy symmetry to follow. From Maillol to Soutine to Kisling. Franklin’s a stage ahead with his prat pout and flat tummy, foxy eyes with the contour of an almond. Maillol, Hugo answered Mariana’s question. Chloe. You are my goat, Mariana said.

  HYACINTHUS INDICUS MINOR

  The root of this Iacinth is knobbed, like the root of arum or wakerobin, from whence spring many leaves, lying upon the ground and compassing one another at the bottom, being long and narrow and hollow-guttered at the end, which is small and pointed, no less woolly or full of threads than Hyacinthus Indicus Major. From the middle of these leaves the stalk rises long and slender, three or four foot long, so that without it be propped up, it will bend down and lie upon the ground.

  10

  Their two voices, Pascal’s burgher correctness and school slang, Franklin’s proletarian grittiness and complex grammar, began to swap locutions and tones. I adjudicated. I’ll bet you did, Mariana said. Franklin said that I talk all sorts of ways, and that Pascal should hear me talking with my father, whom Franklin identified as a pastor and his personal friend. And that he should hear me talking with you. To barf, he added, immediately bragging about my teaching you English. I’m much more interested, Mariana said, in the Swedish Scouts at the North Pole, as I have a feeling that there was mousing from tent to tent in the night. There was no night, Hugo said. The sun stays up all day, sinking to the horizon and rising up again. The mosquitoes had attacked in rolling singing hungry swarms despite our nimble scramble into the blue river with willows, and we all smelled of witch hazel and iodine. Of course we had to sing folk songs around the campfire, eating ashy sausages. So, Mariana said, you began a life of tents and campfires. Did I? Hugo asked. Does that mean something? Deep in a forest makes for good talk and good fellowship. Objecting I wasn’t, Mariana said.

  SILVER DRAGONFLIES

  Holger says, Pascal said, we’re all defeated by the inert violence of custom. This with a siffling sigh while Franklin was shedding every stitch. Shirt off, thrown down. A stare from me, a sorry from Franklin, and the shirt got hitched by its collar on the ridge pole. Pascal, imitating Franklin jot and tittle, doffed his togs. Blue Cub Scout short pants, identical as to red Swiss Army pocket knives pendant from belt loops, sheathed camping knives on left hip, canteen right hip, scut packs with nylon impermeables, compasses. Holger had seen to it that Pascal was to have precisely what Franklin was to wear right down to underpants (blushing), off, folded on mesial axis, and stashed in tent corner. It pleased Franklin to stomp around in shoes and socks only. This was when Pascal quoted Sigurjonsson quoting Sartre.

  12

  Perhaps what cannot be said is the ground on which what can be said comes by its meaning.

  BOEHME THE COBBLER

  In some sense, love is greater than God.

  14

  Me, I’m simply lucky, Franklin said. Pascal munching a cinnamon bun at breakfast, up to his neck in my nylon parka, Franklin similarly engulfed in my khaki shirt but with his dinky maleness honestly bare, had said how keen it was to sleep in a tent and run naked and eat on a riverbank. Their wearing my parka and shirt referred to Franklin’s saying that when he stayed overnight with us at NFS Grundtvig he wore my undershirt for a gown. Though it is always more probable that the reporter of a miracle has been deceived than that the miracle occurred, this does not obviate the miraculous, and there remains the space where the misunderstood has the force of miracle. There you go, Pascal said, using that word. What’s wrong with it? Franklin asked. It’s vulgar, is what, isn’t it, hr. Tvemunding? Hugo, I mean. It’s vulgar all right, I said, but it’s Franklin’s word. We are our words. We can, however, make the words we use, like poets and philosophers, and people who want to be understood. Most people are parrots, hoping to please by imitation. Squawk! said Franklin, and fell over backwards laughing at his own wit. Pascal waited two seconds before joining the laugh. Language, I persisted, always the explainer, is mostly a matter between friends, and friends can use words they wouldn’t before some people, like parents and in public, on a bus, say. My language in class is impeccable, but gets saltier in the gym, looser at home. Holger, Pascal said, always talks the same. We’re friends. Franklin gave one of his looks. Satiric doubt.

  THE MORE ANGELS, THE MORE ROOM

  The second afternoon of an outing is when the roundness of it asserts itself. No need to tell me, Mariana said, shuffling into a dance and snapping her fingers. There’s community, rhythm. The outside world has receded out of sight. Out of mind, Mariana said. There are no Kindergartens, no crayons stuck up noses, no peed knickers, no flash cards with Mina Jenssen croodling dog when I show the porcupine and hat for the letter A. The outside world has been replaced by an alternate one of exploring, swimming, botanizing, telling jokes, remembering analogues of each other’s tales. I didn’t think I’d like you at first, Franklin said to Pascal, but now I like you. Pascal thought of no reply, poor fellow. Well, Mariana said, a declaration of love from F
ranklin is not to be taken lightly. He didn’t like you at first, was jealous, resentful. When the angels were manufacturing Franklin they broke off big blue pieces of heaven and worked them into his soul. Pascal too, Hugo said, but I don’t think heaven has a great interest in mind, which is what the angelic craftsmen paid much attention to in Pascal. I asked myself what cautionary advice he’d had from Holger, who couldn’t very well disapprove of Franklin. Probably some comprehensive warning against nastiness, certainly supererogatory in a school like NFS Grundtvig, but then Holger would have only a vague idea of townsfolk like you and Franklin. Who pinned Pascal’s arms from behind and nuzzled his nape. Pascal froze, wriggled loose, and regarded Franklin with a look that slid to the tail of his eye. Whereupon Franklin, determined to hug somebody, came and hugged me. I was sitting, writing. I hugged back, and got to my knees and rolled him squealing over my head, and grappled him into a rolling hug that toppled us, and we fell knotted together arms and legs, hooting. Pascal, miserable, contracted his shoulders, one foot on top of the other. I swung Franklin loose, carried him by the armpits and stood him nose to nose in front of Pascal. You two, I said, work on your friendship. I’ve got notes to make, water to fetch, wood to gather, thoughts to think.

  SWEET YELLOW MOTH MULLEIN

  The yellow moth mullein whose flower is sweet has many hard grayish green leaves lying on the ground, somewhat long and broad and pointed at the end: the stalks are two or three foot high, with some leaves on them, and branching out from the middle upwards into many long branches, stored with many small pale yellow flowers of a pretty, sweet scent, stronger than in other sorts, which seldom give seed but abide in the root, living many years.