“But it was you, you know, who jogged the apparatus.”
Ah hah. In the first place I hadn’t accused her of any ineptitude, although this thought may have been in the air. In the second place, she was supposed to be holding the bars firmly in her two hands, and even if I had begun rotating the shaft a little faster, this was no reason to break one off as though it were a stick of celery.
“I jogged nothing.”
“In short, it is I who am guilty of bringing your valuable scientific investigations to a standstill until ten o’clock tomorrow, just because I am a silly woman who doesn’t know that graphite is brittle.”
“I expressed no such conclusions.”
“But you don’t deny them. Isn’t that right? You don’t deny that in your mind I am a bungling, vain, loquacious, imperseverant, flighty, wrongheaded, illogical, vaporous, self-indulgent, sentimental, and impractical creature, just because of my sex.”
“Why should I have to deny it? I’ve never affirmed it.”
But she plunged on, not listening.
“While you of course belong to the magnificent race of pentapods, identical to the rest of us except for a certain appurtenance about which you are terribly vain, and which serves no useful purpose in the world as far as I can see.”
This was really unfair. And—how could I put it?—flighty, wrongheaded, and illogical. I might have cited evidence to her, but it would only enrage her the more. Although oddly enough she was not really showing any symptoms of rage. She was still cold and contained. The mouth was held like a small soft vise. She didn’t speak another word; there was no need for her to, the ones she had spoken were quite eloquent and made the matter clear only a liquidity about the eyes, a moisture that trembled and seemed about to fall over the lash but never did, showed that something was happening inside. She looked around for some means of cleaning her blackened fingers. There was a pitcher and basin on the commode across the room, even something that passed for a bar of soap, but to utilize these would have been too domestic a gesture, too intimate and too sharing of the tools of my personal housekeeping, for her mood of Corneillian abnegation. She rubbed her hands on the woolen skirt and thrust them into her gloves. Then, taking her umbrella, she went out. She did not “flounce,” or “storm,” she left with perfect dignity.
And I? what had I done? I had spoken only facts: “Graphite is brittle,” “Pertuis is closed until ten o’clock in the morning,” and so on. I had even let her call me a lynx without responding. I was not responsible, I felt, for what took place in her soul. Yet how clairvoyantly she had seen the problem of reciprocality! If she had insisted on my telling her frankly what I thought of her—there at that moment, in her English suit and cambric—I would have said that I found her admirable but not desirable, except perhaps at the very end when the balance between the two qualities was evened a little. Wasn’t that what she wanted? I was guiltless, I told myself as I faced my useless evening. It was shortly after this that a new epoch began, that of her musical career.
Still as she is fixed there in the photographic dream apparatus behind the retinae, it is often in that guise—bent over that odd harp of oak and copper wire, her glance intent not on me but on the invisibility of electrical currents coursing—through the thin filaments—that I see her. For the serious business of life (“And what might that be?”) one wants companions. So if I have predilections for one or the other of Luisa’s temperament—I tell myself—it is more useful to me in its brother form, a transformation in which the body no longer radiates distracting energies and the dark eyes, having been in their time exotic and sibylline, become knowing in another and more masculine way, watching, reflective, stoic. His glance turns from the apparatus mounted on the provision case to me.
“But you can’t tell whether the waves might be coming from the reciprocal.”
“True.”
“Still, if a deflection could be established through vectors—”
“For that it would be necessary for the platform to be moving. And, for the present time, we are fixed in one place.”
The eyes half hidden in the bedouin shawl go back to the slowly searching antenna basket. In the silence the graphite bars squeak faintly on the slip rings. The antenna rotates first in one direction and then in another, hesitates, and settles on a bearing on the left. I get out the notebook and write down, “1320 GMT. Disturbances along 95˚ east,” since in our present predicament, where all directions are south, we are obliged to use meridians of longitude for directions.
“Still, you’ve settled on a unilateral bearing.”
“I am guessing.” “And what are you guessing?”
“That the storm that brought us here has left an area of high pressure behind it. And that another cyclonic system is forming off to the left, in Siberia.”
“So there will be wind?”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. In any case not much.”
“But see here, Major. Suppose there isn’t any?”
“Then—we will stay here.”
Theodor and Waldemer exchange a glance. Waldemer is—earnest. That is the only word for his expression. A little crease has formed in his forehead, exactly between his eyes. It is the first intimation he has had that his optimism about the expedition, about life itself, about everything, might not be justified, that I might not bring him through after all as he has always bluffly and cheerfully expected—that he himself might be mortal. It lasts for only a moment. Theodor is expressionless.
“What must we do?”
“Persuade the wind to blow.”
“You mean we must pray?”
“Bah! We must will it, force it out of those Siberian hills. Give it no rest, wake it up from its sluggish sleep.” And, afraid I may have alarmed him a little with these necromantic ravings, I add practically, “In the meantime, we can think how to lighten the Prinzess.”
In this cold the hydrogen has contracted, the rigging sags passively and the gondola rests on the ice. Even if the wind should come now (and I am by no means sure it will) it would be impossible to ascend. In the dead calm the fog has lifted a little and is now a bed sheet of milk hanging a few hundred metres over our heads. If we could ascend through it the sun would warm the bag and restore its buoyancy. But to get up there we must throw away something heavy. We can begin with the hoarfrost and rime on the gondola.
Waldemer is ready to start on the rigging with a mallet. But first it is necessary for him to answer a call of nature. He climbs down out of the gondola, removes mittens, unbuttons hunting jacket, and strives at the openings of his trousers and the practical undergarment underneath. A surprisingly robust cylinder something like a Philadelphia breakfast sausage appears and emits a vigorous stream of gold.
“Have to do this fast. A fellow could freeze off hiswhatchamacallit. Ever get frostbitten there? It’s not very jolly, I can tell you.”
Theodor watches him steadily, calmly, without comment. He himself has never been seen performing this action. His modesty, or his pride. Perhaps he prefers to take care of it when Waldemer and I are asleep, which means being uncomfortable for long periods of time. No matter! each of us has the right to be odd in his own way, and Waldemer and I have our own oddities. Waldemer has his clothing adjusted now and climbs back into the gondola. Resolutely grasping the mallet, he mounts to the bearing ring and begins banging on the skein of frozen ropes. Shards of ice, like whitish broken tubes of glass, fall on our heads. Theodor and I gather them up in our mittens and throw them over the side, then he finds a pan in the provision basket that will do a better job. I take the hatchet and work on the ice on the gondola itself, chipping carefully in order not to damage the beautifully handworked Spanish cane.
In an hour the three of us have removed, perhaps, thirty or forty kilos of ice. Theodor, the lightest of us, climbs on up higher into the rigging to dislodge the thin crust of rime clinging to the balloon itself under the net. Waldemer and I get out to collect the miniature camp we have set up a few metres f
rom the gondola: the stove, the cooking pan, a can of kerosene, a few spoons and implements. We abandon the tarpaulin as too heavy but save the bamboo poles.
“That fellow. He’s really bully, you know.”
I say nothing and he goes on.
“I had my doubts at first. Seemed to me a thousand people we might have brought along who would do better. I told you so quite frankly, as you’ll remember. But—”
Expressionless, I stop him with a negative motion of my head and a gesture upward to the round gas bag. In the frozen air the slightest sound carries far. Ten metres or more over our heads Theodor, his boots jammed into the net and clinging with one hand, is tapping steadily and patiently at the crust of rime. Flakes of white and brittle debris fall with each blow. And it is this, finally, that seems to wake up the wind. With each blow of the mallet a molecule of air seems to stir, over there, in the direction of the great sleeping Russian beast. We don’t feel it in our faces, since these are virtually frozen, so much as sense it in the stirring of the great soft sphere hanging in the air over our heads. The ropes creak very faintly. The wind! Not a wind really but a breath, a reluctant and preliminary zephyr that we hope is a portent of more to come. The direction isn’t ideal for our purposes but perhaps it will do; we only want more of it.
Theodor climbs down the net, swinging the last few feet with his legs free, and drops into the gondola. He seems tired but elated; his teeth are set perhaps against the cold or perhaps against a youthful impulse to smile. Rather hastily we make preparations to ascend before the wind dies. The Ice Men, who have taken our places again in the gondola while we break camp, are thrown overboard; they live here so they won’t mind, and they wouldn’t last long in the World of Cities. Theodor, curiously energized in spite of his fatigue, drops down with an ax to free the ice anchor. But he is unskillful with the tool and it ricochets off the hardened ice. Waldemer moves to help him.
“Never mind. Leave the anchor there.”
“You don’t think we’ll be using it again?”
“It’s not that. It’s the weight.”
And in fact, even with the anchor and ax abandoned, the three Ice Men thrown overboard, a bag of ballast sacrificed, the Prinzess is reluctant to leave this place. She rises a half a metre or so, drifts slowly in the direction of Franz Josef Land, and soon begins to bump on the ice again. Climbing out and hanging to the side of the gondola, I stretch my leg down and shove upward with my boot. It is surprising that this immense machine, stretching over our heads as high as a church steeple, can be moved in this way with a small shove of the foot. Very slowly, with a kind of clocklike grace, the Prinzess rises and then slows as though something heavy in the air were pushing her down. Soon she is settling again and only a hand’s breadth from the ice.
“Another bag of ballast?”
“Not yet. What else is superfluous?”
I am in favor of deleting the pigeons, which with their wicker basket must weigh eight or ten kilograms, and my two companions agree. The two rifles we keep for the present. The last of the Prinzessin Brauerei bock goes overboard in its hamper, also the photographic apparatus. I expect Waldemer to object to this last but evidently the candid discussion of our predicament this morning has gone home to him; the little furrow is still there in his brow. He says nothing. Finally the shovel, the floorboards of the gondola, a kerosene tin, and a novel of Barbey d’Aurevilly which Theodor has brought along to read. This does the trick. The Prinzess, still reluctantly, continues her upward slant toward the low-hanging whitish clouds. I estimate: lateral drift four knots, ascent ten metres a minute. The last we see of our long-sought-for and finally attained mathematical point is a small diagonal line in the ice: the handle of the abandoned axe.
Waldemer has cheered up again now. “Drat it, I wanted to bring a flag. The axe will have to do. A surprise for the next fellows who get here.”
Theodor has tied the scarf under his chin again and is holding it against his ears with both hands.
“That will be Peary and his village of Eskimos, probably. Imagine their dismay. What’s this? An axe made in Connecticut. They’ve beaten us, fellows.”
“You forget that, according to De Long, the pack is drifting at fifty metres an hour or twelve hundred metres a day. So that in a year the ax will be four hundred and thirty-eight kilometers from here.”
“Ah well, Major. You and your paradoxes.”
This rude good fun warms us a little if nothing else. But I observe a nuance in Theodor’s joke about Peary that Waldemer hasn’t noticed: his acceptance not only that the pigeon we sent from the Pole is dead but that in no other way will those in the World of Cities ever learn what we have done. I think this myself but have said nothing. Only Waldemer, evidently, still believes in the happy outcome we have so blithely predicted to ourselves and to others, even though it is possible that in a deep part of him a doubt may have crept in now. Theodor is perhaps aware that I have noticed what he said, perhaps not. I remain silent and let the two of them chatter.
Before the ax handle disappears from sight we mount the theodolite and take a bearing on it to establish our course. We are moving a good deal more to the east than I would have hoped—to the east, I can say now that we are no longer at the Pole and are back in the world of directions. This wind will never take us to Spitsbergen. Never mind, there are plenty of other islands strewn along the eightieth parallel between Greenland and Siberia. And the wind is holding, we are still rising and in the cloud bank now, it is thin and we are soon through it—the sun! It is somewhat behind us and to the right, pale pink like a melon, swimming faintly at the edges in its arctic way, and it gives out a slight, barely perceptible warmth that we can feel through our clothing but not on our frozen faces. The Prinzess feels it too; after half an hour the gas has expanded enough that we have climbed to eight hundred metres. Even a little too high. I hope we won’t have to use the maneouvring valve. The hydrogen is constantly seeping in tiny quantities through the seams and stitches, even through the fine rubberized web of the silk itself, and what we have left is precious.
We have a discussion about navigation. Our present course will take us to somewhere near Franz Josef Land, but we can’t expect the wind to hold in this direction. The cyclonic system sucking it in toward the continent will gradually bend it leftward, pulling us into that awkward gap along the eightieth parallel where there are no islands. And I don’t expect we can go all the way to Siberia with the Prinzess day by day getting flabbier as her gas seeps out.
There is the chart: first there is Spitsbergen, then leftward along the parallel Franz Josef Land, then a long space with nothing in it, then the islands of the Siberian Archipelago.
“Spitsbergen is only a little to the right. If we set the sails to steer across the wind …”
“We’d have to drop low enough for the guide ropes to drag. And to do that—”
“We’d have to vent gas.” Theodor is warming a little now from this pallid sun and no longer holds his mittens over his ears. He still seems exhilarated from his feat of knocking off the hoarfrost. He is cheerful and his dark eyes are watchful and interested in everything. He is like a quick and confident bird, fragile in some places and strong in others, not unhappy to be looking out at the world from the cage of the gondola and its supporting ropes. Waldemer is busy overhauling his heavy Martini rifle, he has the bolt out now and is anointing it with whale oil, which does not thicken at low temperatures, and Theodor seizes the opportunity to move closer to me and to do an odd thing: watching or pretending to watch something outside the gondola, the sun or the nonexistent horizon, he brushes my thickly jacketed elbow with his own and I feel my hand grasped in a soft but firm enclosing touch. This lasts for only a few seconds and is quite formal; interdigitation is impossible because of the mittens. When I glance at him he is watching me with a placid smile that has something in it—how shall I say? encouraging, reassuring.
I permit myself to smile slightly too. Without speaking I form my lips
silently to tell him: “Va-t-en. C’est fou.”
But Waldemer notices nothing. And indeed why should he notice anything when I noticed nothing myself for so many months? This face with the military cap and greatcoat, like a white dahlia in the muzzle of a gun, is an odd enough contrast itself that nobody would think anything odd of its behavior. In other clothing there is something firm and resolute about the face, virile in spite of the smooth paleness of the chin, but the uniform throws into relief its very delicacy of modeling, the grace of antique marble, a Cyprian hermaphrodite. Even on his second visit to rue de Rennes—he only dropped in for a chat, nothing like the stiff call of honour the previous fall—I was struck not so much with his youth as I had been the other time but with his mastery of the youth, his control of what for others of his age would have been perfectly spontaneous and unconscious gestures. That second time he simply knocked and came in himself without bothering to be announced. Perhaps because he preferred to visit informally and sans façons, perhaps because the concièrge had given me up for a hopeless lunatic by this time and no longer had anything to do with me.
I had just finished working, as a matter of fact, and was feeling about as sociable as I ever do. “Why don’t you take off your cap?”
“We’re not supposed to. It’s a rule of the school.”
“And why aren’t you in the school now?”
“It’s a holiday. I’m home for a few days.”
“And where exactly is this famous school anyhow?”
“Oh. Là-bas. Somewhere beyond the Rhine.”
I could get little more out of him about his mysterious Prussian education. He asked me about my work—in his thin, rather high but controlled voice—and I showed him the directional antenna basket, which was finished by this time and had enabled me to plot the course of several winter storms moving across the Île-de-France. Whatever else they taught him at the Militärische Hochschule, he had a modest but sound grasp of electrical theory. I gathered from a reference he made that he had studied Vogelweide, an excellent textbook at least for an introduction to the subject. “And what about the problem of the reciprocality of the antenna system? Have you solved that yet?”
The Balloonist Page 18
