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Their situation demands their tacit agreement to uphold certain comforting fictions. Their lives are not in any immediate danger. The long night is not beyond endurance. The commandant’s authority is not in question. The great fist which holds them is not capable of crushing them at any moment with a sudden contraction of its icy fingers.
Cook is delivering his professional recommendations in his usual animated blend of broken language and gesture. He has devised a new exercise regime — he has a theory about diet — he has plans to improve the health of the men by baking them. No, surely that is a mistranslation? The commandant, in buoyant spirits, is having none of it. The recent miraculous news, he insists, is all the men need to rouse them from the torpor of recent days.
“What do you think, my friend?” he asks Emile Danco. His voice is tender, as though addressing a young lady recovering from a fainting fit at a ball, and not a man who was a corpse three days ago.
Danco smiles.
“For God’s sake!” Lecointe can hold his tongue no longer. “Are we not going to discuss the fact that this man was dead, and now he is not?”
“Strike that last part from the official record of the meeting,” says de Gerlache. “God only knows what our country’s newspapers would say, were they ever to learn of it!”
“You ask too much of me!” says Lecointe, outraged.
Danco does not react to their raised voices. His face has a greenish tinge and there are shadows under his eyes. But you could say the same of any of them. His hands lie limp in his lap. The corners of his mouth turn upwards.
They have tried to question him, of course.
“What happened to you, my friend?”
“I feel better.”
“You must understand that this is unexpected. We all thought you dead. We grieved for you.”
“Thank you.”
“Can you remember what happened to you during those three days? Anything at all?”
Danco returns Lecointe’s gaze with perfect tranquility. “I feel better, thank you.”
“Christ, man! Can you not say anything else?”
“He has suffered a great shock,” says de Gerlache, quickly. “We can expect him to be a little quiet for a while.”
“Quiet? He is not even the same man!”
“You exaggerate. It is not as though he is roaming around drinking the blood of animals.”
Amundsen grunts.
“It would almost be better if he were drinking blood,” says Lecointe. “As it is, he has not had a bite to eat or a drop to drink, since he was returned to us.”
He controls himself, with an effort. “Here,” he says gently, handing Danco his old notebook. “I kept up your work, while you were ill.”
“Thank you,” says Danco.
“To surprise you, when you were better.”
“Better,” says Danco. He looks down at the observations in Lecointe’s handwriting, as though he has never seen anything like them before and has no idea what they mean.
“See?” says de Gerlache. “Lieutenant Danco has never been more himself in his life.”
Danco is not himself.
But the commandant is not a man who deals well with complications, unless it is the whims of the wind and the currents. All de Gerlache knows is that he has been given another chance. He has been absolved of his guilt — or rather, the thing for which he wanted absolution never even happened. He did not kill his dear friend with his ambition, for Danco is not dead. And the commandant is too weak a man not to welcome that second chance.
He, Lecointe, is different. It is akin to the act of striking words from the official minutes. The fact that you can expunge something does not mean that it was never there at all. And then there is something about being with a man in the last moments of his life. Squeezing his fingers in yours, feeling his fevered breath on your cheek as you bend close enough to hear his last words. Like a secret known only to the two of you. Now that Danco’s last words were not his last words, his last breaths not his last breaths, Lecointe does not know what to do with the emotion that attached to them.
Danco is not himself.
But no, this is another fiction, chosen because it is more comfortable than the truth.
The truth is that he is too much himself. His easy nature has turned to listlessness, his sweet temper to passivity. Emile Danco never lacked character. Lecointe knew him better than that. He had the quiet strength of a man who has chosen his friends and bestowed on them his unswerving loyalty, regardless of whether that loyalty is merited.
“Why can everyone not see that there’s something wrong with him?” says Lecointe, pacing. “You believe me, Raco, do you not?”
The two of them are alone. The others are amusing themselves after their own fashion. Cook and Amundsen are off somewhere together, inventing a self-assembling tent or a way to turn penguins into explosives.
Raco says, “I believe you, my friend. But you must understand their position. You also said that there was something wrong with the cat.”
He has been doodling on a sheet of paper during the conversation. Suddenly, he turns the page so that Lecointe can see. At first, Lecointe notices only the usual good-natured bawdiness of the cartoons. Artocho and his gigantic arse, which is in the act of blowing the ship free of the ice with one gigantic explosion of flatulence. And then he sees what Raco is showing him. There is Danco, sitting to one side like a child’s abandoned doll. His handsome face — the face of a story-book hero — is expressionless. His eyes are little black scrawls.
Lecointe does not realise that he is crying, until he feels Raco’s hand on his arm.
He says, “Come with me, Emile, my friend. There’s something I want to show you.”
He did not sleep last night. The ice groaned and howled around them, and he wished for a sudden spasm of that great fist, which would take this decision away from him.
Together, they walk out in the fleeting noon twilight. Perhaps they walk a little too far. In this place, things do not stay the same while your back is turned. Great ridges of ice rise up within hours like sleeping giants rousing themselves from sleep. In this place, you could shoot a man dead because, in that moment, he wore the appearance of a seal.
Danco walks beside him, like an obedient child. When Lecointe comes to a halt, so does he.
“Do you know what this is?” says Lecointe.
Danco does not reply.
“This is a hole in the ice, where an old crevasse has opened. Not the same one where—“ He is unable to continue.
“Thank you,” says Danco. He leans over the hole.
Lecointe says, “I love you.”
There is something about being with a man in the last moments of his life. Like a secret known only to the two of you.
Afterwards, the ice closes over as though the hole and the struggle were never there at all. Were Lecointe another kind of man, he might be able to pretend that this is true.