Some weeks ago I wrote on this page about the death of Jacky. On a mountainous
island off the coast of Kerguelen, Joël, the senior doctor at the French
base, shot his friend in a hunting accident. He had slipped in the snow,
triggering his gun. Recounting the story, I tried to explain how difficult
it is at tense times to write objectively about the community of which one
is part. A journalist, I said, does best to blunder in from the outside and,
ignorant of raw nerves and touchy subjects, kick around the questions which
need asking. If there had been any awkward observations to make about that
shooting, I said, I would have been ill-placed to make them. But I doubted
that there were.
As my ship prepares to sail from the island tomorrow, I still do.
There's something to be said about the aftermath, though; something hard to
say while I was still among my friends at Port-aux-Français. Hard, not
because what follows is a criticism of any of those I leave behind (I admire
them all), but because these are very personal reflections on a tragedy as
little discussed there as it was deeply felt.
For that's another lesson I've learnt: close communities avoid talking about
things that touch deeply. Only those who have never thrown in their lot with
a small group in a harsh environment suppose that this would be a time for
candour. People do not, absolutely not, become more candid when they are
thrown together; they become less so; they act more gingerly. In four months
nobody has asked why I am not married and do not have a girlfriend, an
inquiry which might surface easily before the second bottle of wine among
friends around the kitchen table in London. Life at the edge does not invite
the heart-to-heart.
So none of what follows has been said, and I cannot know whether what follows
are my thoughts alone; but I doubt it. After Jacky's death the weeks, then
months, which followed for us without intrusion from the outside world, and
with the man who had killed him still among us and grieving, have been a
time for intense personal reflection.
My own reflections are two. They are more confidently ventured because they
were both unwelcome and have shaken beliefs with which I was comfortable. I
was not looking for this. My own ethics have no place for blood-guilt; and I
personally hate ceremony. But, shuddering, I have had to acknowledge the
spell cast upon a man by the fact that he has been the direct
instrument of another's death: a fact of such brutal potency as almost to
elbow aside the argument that he was not to blame. And I have been
astonished to discover even in myself a confounded hankering for some kind
of ritual to mark the closing of a chapter.
These are linked. The persistence of guilt in the face of all exoneration
makes unfinished business of a tragedy. Reason cannot finish it; only ritual
can. I think I am talking about redemption, a word I never understood before
this accident.
"Who killed Cock Robin?/ I, said the sparrow . . ."
Who? That is the question. Who was the instrument? Joël was. It could
have been anyone but it was not anyone: it was Joël. How much this alters
attitudes towards the individual, has astounded me.
"Instrumentality" is a top-heavy word for a nursery-rhyme
simplicity: the instinct which makes a child cry because it has smashed the
teacup even when the child was not at fault. The idea finds a simple and
cruel expression in the New Testament: "It needs must be that offences
come, but woe unto those men through whom they come!" - a most Judaeic
thought.
"Instrumentality" is the simple fact of having directly caused
something. In most English criminal law, and in any criminal law you could
call civilised, instrumentality alone would not convict a man. There must
also be a guilty mind. Obviously.
Or one says "obviously". Yet real human behaviour suggests we do not
believe this - or only the civilised part of us does. The primitive part
looks to the consequences pure and simple. Does a speeding driver into whose
path a child runs not feel more guilt than a speeding driver who encounters
an empty street? Yet the behaviour and intentions of both were identical.
When Joël accidentally killed someone on Kerguelen, every one of his 57
fellow-winterers shuddered and inwardly whispered that what befell Joël
could have befallen any of us. If we do not shoot, we drive, or fell trees,
or burn candles or think ourselves a dab hand at wiring plugs. So do not
misunderstand me: nobody pointed a finger. There was universal sympathy for
Joël. What people felt was nothing like blame.
How then shall I describe what people felt? It was a sort of recoil: an
isolating of the man who did it. I shall not use the word "untouchable"
because all tried to act in a friendly and normal way. Nobody wanted
the distancing which we felt; nobody wanted to hurt him. But it became hard
for a while to look him in the eye. I saw people involuntarily avoid Joël's
gaze. I had to force myself not to. I saw him in a crowded room looking
about him with almost panic in his eyes for someone to return his glance.
Joël runs a CD-sharing system for us. On an evening soon after the shooting
when he would normally have been in place for this we found before supper
his message on the blackboard saying the exchange would go ahead because "Jacky
would have wished it". On each table were two bottles of wine. As we
began the meal, Joël stood and addressed us. Speaking slowly, pausing as if
close to breaking, he told us he had bought the wine to thank everyone for
our support and friendship. As he sat down, one of the cheerier Creole
people from La Réunion, Gerald, began applauding: a gesture of friendly
support to a desperately unhappy man.
There was a slight but thundering hestitation in the room. Gerald kept
clapping. Then others, but not all, did join in. I have thought hard about
that hesitation, which I shared. I believe it was rooted in a primitive
conception of the appropriate status for one who has recently killed, even
by mistake. We insist that penitence is unnecessary but are troubled if
anyone acts as though it were true.
Something else too seemed to me to have troubled the spirit of the base. As
the time became right, people wanted a way to end the mourning, and Joël's
isolation. Until a couple of days ago, when a priest travelling on this ship
went ashore for a few days, we had had no religious service for Jacky. I am
not suggesting something should have been improvised, but I do know that the
only outward show - the Tricolour at half-mast and the faxes of sympathy on
the noticeboard - was strangely comforting; and when both were taken down,
everyone noticed, and felt that too to be significant, comforting and right.
People were hankering for . . . what?
On June 14 a fishing boat from the Antarctic, the Australe, called on
her way to La Réunion and hove to in the gulf. Hubert, our carpenter, had
made a wooden box for Jacky's body and, just before dawn, this and the post
were taken on to our little barge, the Aventure, at the quay.
With no official notice or instruction, the entire base was there, stumbling
to the quay in the dark. The whole crew of our ocean-going boat, La
Curieuse, left their anchored vessel empty and came ashore to join us.
All stood silently, hatless in the cold, as the box was heaved awkwardly on
to the barge. A handful of Jacky's best friends including Joël, stood by the
box on the unprotected deck as the Aventure ploughed off over a
mercifully quiet sea towards the Australe.
Nobody moved. Everybody remained, quietly watching the barge's slow progress.
Everybody remained as, far away now, the Australe's crane swung out
over the barge and lifted the box. Everybody remained when the Australe
sounded a mournful whistle and the Aventure replied. Everybody
remained as the Australe moved off into the gulf. Then everybody
left.
That leave-taking was the closest there has been, since Joël broke the news,
to an occasion of grief or memory. It was immensely moving.
Two days later one of the satellite-observation officers held a birthday party
- wine at table, drinks upstairs for all. Everyone let their hair down.
Conga-dancing and dancing on tables continued into the small hours. Joël sat
quietly at the bar. To me the dancing had taken on an almost frenzied
character.
Not long after, another fishing boat called unexpectedly, with a wounded
sailor, his arm almost sawn through. Though Joël must have been under
immense strain he acted as anaesthetist throughout a 14-hour operation in
which his assistant, the junior doctor, John, probably saved the man's arm.
People were pleased not by that fact alone, but also by the occurrence of an event
by which Joël seemed to be making his passage back to us.
What am I suggesting? I'm unsure. Not that things should have been done
differently; I thought our chief's low-key handling of a difficult nine
weeks well-judged. By the French too, "least said, soonest mended"
seems to be thought wise advice. And you would call me crazy if I proposed
some kind of tribal ceremony in which a man who has killed makes a
propitiatory offering, and is ritually forgiven.
All I can say is that when, on a deep black night near the end of June, we all
stood near the ocean in the bitter cold around a great bonfire on the Feast
of St John, a long and total silence fell upon the little crowd staring into
the fire. Nobody mentioned Jacky; nobody mentioned the accident; but in many
imaginations the flames were consuming more than the wood.
