The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  Günther is seated at the white piano in the lounge, playing with his arms held stiffly before him, like Brahms. He starts with Schumann’s Kinderszenen, his usual warm-up. The passengers are used to his playing now and ignore it. Some of them are looking out the windows where there is nothing to be seen but a gray sea, others are leafing through magazines or have their heads bent together in conversation. Philistines! The plague take them. Setting his fingers into the keys again, he begins improvising the theme of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony, with the idea of startling these indolent loafers into life with the fortissimo chord like a cannon shot at the end of the development. He maliciously anticipates the effect. Bang! But he never gets that far. After the first few bars, old Joshua Main joins in joyously with his rich baritone.

  Papa Haydn’s dead and gone,

  But his memory lingers on.

  When his mood was one of bliss,

  He wrote happy tunes like this.

  Günther breaks it off and turns instead to some little-known songs by a tormented soul who was once a friend of his, the Chansons Archaïques of Max Dervish. Let him try to sing to that.

  *

  Joan Esterel is standing before the open panel of the inspection cabinet in the passenger quarters. She grips the cable with one hand, getting grease on her fingers, and is filing away with the other. Scritch, scritch. She has been at it for half an hour now. She stops to inspect her progress; she is only about a third of the way through the cable that is the life-nerve of the airship. There is a clank and a groan, and the cable starts into motion and slithers upward. This has happened before. Evidently the Captain is making some change in the course. She waits patiently, glancing around at the deserted passageway.

  The worst crisis is over. It happened only a few minutes before. There was a stirring inside the door of Moira’s cabin only a few feet away. Joan Esterel’s heart leaped into her mouth. The door opened and Moira appeared, winding a scarf around her neck. But the door opened in such a way as to block the view of Joan Esterel standing in the tiny stub of a corridor. The regal figure swept by her field of vision and disappeared. Moira did not turn her head. All the better! She won’t come back again, Joan Esterel knows. With another groan, the cable slides down again. She finds her place on it and resumes her work. Scritch scritch.

  This moment is the apogee of her life. This is what everything that has happened before has prepared her for. All the indignities, the discomforts, the sufferings, the humiliations, her funny nose and bat ears, her squeaky voice, all the systematic injustices that Heaven or whatever it calls itself has inflicted on her. Time and space converge at this point: the infinite Cosmos, our turning nebula with its billions of sparkles, the solar system which she has seen pictured in schoolbooks, the earth circling under the sun with New Mexico on it and Germany and London, this spot over the northern ocean, and finally the dirigible which is its own universe in microcosm: its silvery skin, its girders and braces, its thrumming engines, its cabins like the warrens of crawling and mewling animals, the corridor she has stolen down to this open panel, and the thin sinew of metal rising and falling in the gloom. Everything, all existence, tapers down to the point where the file and the cable converge, with a shimmer of particles falling in a dust. She, Joan Esterel, is at the center of the universe, and of her own fate.

  Scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch. Her arm is numb but she keeps on. She is gold, she is a golden person, she is set apart and privileged over the others, and the sex between her thin legs, so often scorned and mistreated, is the source of the power that moves the sun and the moon. She is the anti-Moira, clad in the gold of the earth, contemplating the world through ancient circles of gold, her ears hanging with the penises of strange gods. The vision of her soul is not some faery garden in the ice but these two snakes of metal, file and cable, embracing with a hiss. They couple and their issue is Death. Scritch scritch. The cable is almost severed now and hangs by a single strand. The next time the Captain changes course, it will probably snap like a thread. If not, then the second time, or the third time. She closes the door of the cabinet, looks around, and lifts her skirt to stick the file into the waist-band of her knickers.

  In the galley the assistant cook and the two messmen, under the direction of the chef Wolslaw Nagy, who has served as Maître de Cuisine in a three-star hotel in Budapest, are cleaning up after lunch and starting on the task of washing the dishes. This will take them to the middle of the afternoon, when it will be time to start work on dinner. Most of this work falls to the two Portuguese messmen. The assistant cook, Naphtha, is a Greek and not on good terms with his fellow workers. The only common language they have is English and his English is not very good. He was formerly a chef in a tourist restaurant in the Piraeus, and he is proud of belonging to the race of Sophocles and Alexander the Great. He raves strangely under his breath and denounces his fellow workers as swine and dung. As for the two Portuguese, they are small timid men who are terrified of both cooks.

  The galley is no wider than a railway car and only a third as long, full of bulky aluminum equipment. It has no windows and the air is pumped into it by ventilators. In it the four men work elbow to elbow. The stove and the oven are electric, of the latest models. There is no open flame anywhere on the League of Nations except in the smoking room. The galley is directly below the dining salon, and the trays of cooked food, each dish under a silver bell, are sent up to it on a dumb waiter. After the meal the uneaten food and the dirty dishes are sent back down. At the moment the two messmen are carrying the dirty dishes from the dumb waiter to the sink, and Naphtha is scraping the food off them into a garbage bin. Wolslaw Nagy is supervising them with his arms crossed on his chest. Nagy is a chunky man with short arms and short hairy fingers. He is wearing white pants and shirt, a white apron, and a chef’s toque. His clothes are spotless. The clothes of Naphtha, whose toque is lower, are spotted with food stains. The two messmen are standing by the dumb waiter, which has gone up to the salon for more dirty dishes.

  All at once there is a crash that makes the galley shake. It is a complex sound, a combined thud and clang followed by a prolonged tinkle. When Nagy comes to his wits he sees that the dumb waiter has fallen and its contents have shattered and spilled out onto the galley floor. One of the messmen yelps. A silver bell rolls for a few feet and hits the stove with a clang like a chime. After that there is silence.

  The floor in front of the dumb waiter is ankle deep in broken crockery and glass, mingled with Mornay sauce from the turbot. Here and there a thread of Temperance Nectar trickles over the floor. Nagy pushes the messmen away from the dumb waiter. Sticking his head up the shaft, he pulls out several yards of cable until he comes to the frayed end.

  He stares at his three fellow workers.

  “Somebody for this is responsible party. This is called sabotage. No mind. You two,” he tells the messmen, “take up some platters and bring down the pottery.”

  The rest of the dishes from lunch are carried down from the salon, by the messmen. This involves climbing a narrow aluminum ladder and then going down a passage so narrow they have to flatten themselves against the bulkhead when anyone wants to pass. The passengers, those who are still lingering in the salon, stare at the two grease-stained wretches curiously. The stewards, all of them immaculate, look at the messmen as though they believe them to be responsible for this fiasco. They carry the trays of dirty dishes down the narrow passageway, averting their eyes with shame when they meet anyone.

  *

  At three o’clock the League of Nations is over the polar pack ice. It is not a solid surface; it is reticulated like a fish-net with fissures, cracks, and open leads. The Captain, who has not slept since the airship left Croydon, is standing at the windscreen looking out at the ice through his binoculars. He still has on his fleece-lined military coat and he has added a pair of leather aviator’s gloves that make his hands like paddles. It is cold in the control car, even though it is supposed to be heated. The Captain�
��s breath fogs the windscreen and from time to time he gets out a rag and wipes it. The sun, a cold red wafer, is pasted in the sky to the west.

  Standing behind him is Moira, wearing her scarf and a British naval cape that Cereste Legrand found for her in the boxes of stored clothing. At her elbow is Aunt Madge Foxthorn in a long black coat like a priest’s cassock. These civilians are not really supposed to be in the control car, but after all, the Captain tells himself, it’s her dirigible. The rudderman is an Italian whose name he doesn’t remember, and the elevator wheel operator is a young Englishman named Finch, formerly in the Royal Navy. Some of these Englishmen are good-looking young fellows. The Captain remembers the Roman Emperor who caught his first glimpse of an English boy-captive and said, “Non Anglus sed angelus,” not English but an angel. There is also a quartermaster in the control car now that the handling of the dirigible is getting trickier. He is lurking in the rear, leaning against the bulkhead with his ankles crossed reading a French novel.

  Moira, after a few moments, moves to a position where she can see out the windscreen too. She is almost at the Captain’s side. He is aware of her perfume and can catch a glimpse of her in his peripheral vision. The military cape gives her an odd look, something like the Queen of the Fairies in a children’s book.

  “Captain, I forget what we call each other. I believe we made an exception to the general rule.”

  “Yes, I call you Moira and you call me Captain.”

  “What was that terrible crash we heard just now?”

  “The dumb waiter fell in the galley. It was full of crockery and made quite a fanfare.”

  “And earlier I heard a strange kind of noise outside my cabin, as though mice were gnawing the aluminum.”

  “Maybe we have mice on the airship.”

  “One of our own number has a file which she carries around with her for some reason.” Without turning his head the Captain recognizes the fluty, slightly sinister voice of Aunt Madge Foxthorn. From the first she has struck him as the dangerous kind of spinster, a type found perhaps only in England. “Do you think a file could make that kind of a noise, Captain?”

  “Like a mouse? No.”

  These women are both a little crazy. If he is more favorably inclined toward Moira, it is because of her perfume, a purely chemical reaction in his olfactory system. Mice carrying files are nothing to him. He has heard far stranger tales. Monkeys trained to work in treadmills. Artificial bones for penises. Once, looking down from his control car, he saw naked figures dancing in a clearing in the forest. But why would one of Moira’s followers, no matter how crazy, want to file through the cable of the dumb waiter? He assumes that the person in question is a woman. Hysteria, as he knows from his classical education, is a Greek word meaning a disease of the womb.

  “Is it far now, Captain?”

  “Far? Oh, to the North Pole.”

  “To Gioconda.”

  “Not far. Another four hours perhaps. It depends on the weather. It doesn’t look too promising ahead.” He levels his binoculars at a wall of fog and mist on the horizon.

  “I can assure you that the weather in Gioconda will be splendid.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’ve been there.”

  He lowers his binoculars and turns to her with a smile. “Tell me, Madame. Excuse me, Moira. You seem like a sensible woman. Do you really believe all this business, eh?”

  “Business?”

  “Transmogrification. Astral Bodies. Old Hindu spooks. Warm holes at the North Pole.”

  In a corner of his mind, he realizes, he hopes not only that she believes but that it will all somehow be true. It was a mistake for him to go to that séance in London; his intellect has been addled, perhaps for good, by those green lights. Gioconda. Her scent. Plashing brooks. The secret innocence of the flesh. A strange inchoate desire swells in him like a diaphanous fish.

  She says simply, “My belief has created this dirigible.”

  In his opinion, it was the factory in Friedrichshafen. But there is something to what she says.

  “Now in Gioconda, Madame. I’m sorry, I just can’t stop calling you Madame. You seem like such a grand person to me.” She smiles. “In Gioconda, as you call the place, how will we find our way around? How will we give directions?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “In Gioconda, there will be no north, south, east, or west.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because at the North Pole there is only one direction, south. Whichever way you go. I’d expect that your Vision would have informed you about that.”

  “If there is no east or west, then we shall just go wherever we please.”

  He turns around and looks at her. In her military cape, with the scarf around her neck, her chin raised in the way she has, she resembles an Empress with total command over the bodies and souls of her subjects. Like a bolt of lightning he remembers his reverie: he and Moira in an old German palace with the stuffed bear and the busts of Emperors.

  “You and I are very different kinds of people,” he tells her. “It’s a miracle that we’re able to talk to each other at all.”

  “I really know nothing about you.”

  “There’s nothing to know.”

  “Have you always been a dirigible captain?”

  “No. For several years there’s been no work in that profession.”

  “What did you do in the meantime?”

  “I studied and reflected on the meaning of life.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “That it has no meaning.”

  This produces a sibylline smile from Moira.

  “Have you never been married, Captain?”

  “Oh yes. Once. But we didn’t get on. And you?” he demands bluntly.

  “Twice. But we didn’t get on. That was many years ago. Since the death of my second husband, I’ve devoted myself to the Astral World.”

  A half an hour later the gray band on the horizon looms up and bulks larger. It is not a solid wall; it consists of fragments and wisps that float about turning slowly in the air. It suddenly gives a sense of the tallness of the sky, the feeling that the dirigible is not something floating magically in the ether but a heavy object that would have far to fall if it lost its buoyancy. The dirigible noses into it and is surrounded with chilly wool that slithers around the control car.

  “This garbage will make us sink.”

  “The fog? It seems so wispy.”

  “Rime collects on the hull. Tons of it. And without the sun the gas will cool.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “Drop some ballast.”

  “Then it’s all right.”

  “Later if the sun comes out, the ship will rise and we’ll have to valve off some gas.”

  “My Vision will carry us through, Captain.”

  “We’d better turn back to Spitsbergen and wait for better weather. We can get more fuel there.”

  “Never! Onward! To the North!”

  “I warned you about this weather. How can we find your dimple at the top of the world in this damned fog?”

  “You have only to follow your compass, Captain. At Gioconda—”

  “I know. The sky will be clear and the air as balmy as Italy.”

  As he predicted, the dirigible loses altitude slowly. The Captain drops some ballast and orders ten degrees up elevator. He waits, watching the needle of the altimeter. Finally the fog around them thins and the dirigible emerges on a slant into the thin arctic sunlight.

  As if she had done this herself, Moira says, “The physical world is Maya. Illusion.”

  “No doubt. But at the moment we have to deal with these various illusions.”

  The Captain is beginning to wish he hadn’t released that ballast so quickly, just because of a wisp of fog. Now the ship is rising rapidly, warmed by the sunlight.

  “Thirty-seven hundred, Captain. Thirty-nine. Four thousand.”

  “Ten degrees down
elevator.”

  “She won’t answer, Captain.”

  “Give her twenty then.”

  She is very slow to respond. The quartermaster at the telephone gives the order to valve off gas. The altimeter peaks at forty-seven hundred, then the dirigible tips her nose downward and begins sinking toward the ice.

  The Captain is no longer looking out the windscreen. He has his eyes fixed on the inclinometer and the altimeter, with a glance now and then at the compass.

  “You have so many instruments, I wonder that you can keep track of them all.”

  “Madam, there is one way you can be of inestimable, of priceless assistance to me. That is by shutting up and getting out of my way.”

  Aunt Madge Foxthorn stiffens. The two women move a few feet to the rear. Moira’s expression doesn’t change even a trifle.

  The dirigible is sinking faster now, a little too fast. Twenty degrees down elevator is too much.

  “Elevator neutral.”

  “Elevator neutral, sir.” And a moment later, “Sir, the wheel won’t move.”

  The Captain pushes the Englishman aside and takes the wheel in his own hands. It is jammed fast at twenty degrees down. He applies all his force to it, but it won’t budge.

  “Altitude twenty-two hundred, sir.”

  “Stop all engines. Quartermaster, phone the riggers to overhaul the elevator cable. And fast! Schnell, schnell!”

  “What is it, Captain? Surely you’re pleased now that we’re out in the sunlight again.”

  Moira’s very placidity exasperates him. Her Maya and her suvamana! Her all loves all! “The elevator cable is jammed,” he tells her with malice as if it were her fault. “We’re going down on the ice.”

  “Where is the cable?”

  “It runs the length of the ship.”

  “How could it jam?”

  “Slipped off a pulley perhaps. There are hundreds of pulleys.”