“Come with me, Erich,” said Schultze. The Aryan giant nodded. His patience, also, was now exhausted. Schultze half turned on the conning-tower ladder to his trusted friend Karl von Bulow. “Karl,” he said. “You will see to it that no one comes below until I give permission. Understood?”
The men watched tensely as their new captain and his engineer officer made their way up onto the conning tower, and down, out of sight. There was a short silence, lasting perhaps two minutes of remembrance, a silence in which a large, white seabird hovered over their craft as if it, too, awaited something. Then the sound of a single gunshot. As dusk approached, they gave Duchene a proper sea burial, his shroud wrapped in the swastika flag, as was proper. No one was disposed to question the fact that their former commander had shot himself. That night Bremen sent a coded radio message to Kiel to announce the death, in an accident, of U-181’s captain and the assumption of command by his deputy. In the log, the death was entered as an accident that occurred as Duchene cleaned his pistol without first checking that it was unloaded. Such things happened when a man did not get enough sleep.
Around the navigation table Schultze, the navigation officer von Bulow, and Engineer Officer Nitschke held a council of war with a single-topic agenda: survival.
“Our position is about twenty kilometers east of one hundred fifteen degrees longitude”—the navigator’s spatulate forefinger prodded an area of ocean between Borneo and Java—“close to latitude five degrees south. There are two areas of land nearby: Keramian Island, fifteen kilometers north, and Massa Lembo, an island group about the same distance to the south. I can’t say much about conditions inshore. The charts are fifty years old and reefs can shift. If our engines are working normally, we should avoid trouble.”
“We are still on an easterly bearing?” Nitschke asked.
“Yes.”
“Not so good. The current is against us. I’ve checked the sea log three times today. Our real speed, at a nominal ten knots, is half that. We are wasting fuel to no purpose.”
Schultze stared down at the chart as if willing it to give him an answer. An island group suggested more reefs than they would find helpful. “We turn north, for Keramian,” he said.
They limped the last few miles, then lay-to off the island and waited for dawn. The island, mountainous and covered by dense rain forest, was no more than a mile away. The air stank of rotten eggs. Through binoculars, Schultze and his officers could see a few fires twinkling inland. Keramian, it seemed, was already open for business and preparing breakfast. The odor, he concluded, came not from the cooking pots but the volcano that smoldered at the center of the island.
“Do we have any gifts to offer?” asked von Bulow. “The signal flags, some of our badges, perhaps? Their boats might come out to meet us.”
“I suggest we man the guns,” Bremen said.
Schultze opted for both guns and gifts.
The diesel engines finally died as the sun rose on their seventieth day out of Kiel. The silence was menacing.
An onshore tide ushered U-181 gently onto a sloping bank of shingle about two hundred meters from the shoreline, where the submarine rolled, beam-on to the sea, until the water receded, leaving the boat beached. She was lying at an angle that permitted the antiaircraft guns—one thirty-seven millimeter and a second twenty millimeter—to fire upward, or out to sea. The main gun, a 105 millimeter quick-firing artillery piece on the foredeck, was also limited to an arc of fire that, mainly, covered the entrance to the bay into which the sea had washed them. Nevertheless, as a precaution, Schultze had the men manhandle heavy boxes of ammunition onto the deck. The small-arms armory was also opened: assault rifles and pistols degreased and loaded.
As the sun touched the forest canopy, the first naked men materialized, wraithlike, out of the darkness under the trees. They were tall. Their hair was of shoulder length. They carried fine spears, blowpipes, and hunting bows. The Ibans—Sea Dyak people—with their tradition of headhunting, lived up to their mythology. Unlike Native Americans and Australian aborigines, they were not yet degraded parodies of the noble savage, brought down by alcohol, measles, and veneral disease. They stood very still, and watched for two hours. More and more gathered on the beach until it was crowded with staring, wondering, eyes. This crowd, so feral, reminded Heinrich Bohm, the hunter, of a deer herd. If they should suddenly take fright . . .
“I’m going ashore. Cover me with the guns but do not open fire unless I am attacked first,” Schultze ordered.
The crew of U-181 watched as their leader waded ashore through the shallow water between their shingle bank and the beach. He was not armed. He carried a loaf of bread, a German sausage, and a braided naval officer’s hat. The Dyaks backed off a little, making a semicircle around him. He sat down, crossed his legs, broke a piece of bread, cut a piece of sausage and started to eat. A Dyak child, eyes fired with mischief, advanced and stood over him. Schultze, looking up, smiled, offered the child a morsel of sausage. The boy, giggling, snatched it from his hand and hurried back to the safety of his own people, a few yards away. One of the men, more tattooed than the rest, his rank identified by a necklace of shark teeth, took the sausage from the child, sniffed at it, passed it around the group that stayed as close as a presidential bodyguard, then ate it. His people watched, as if expecting him to metamorphose into a white man. He farted instead. It was a long, sonorous sound that went on and on like a Black Forest hunting horn. Suddenly, everyone was laughing: the child, the adult Dyaks, Schultze, and the crew of U-181. As the tattooed man approached Schultze, the German officer stood and presented the braided cap to him. The tattooed man, smiling through broken teeth, through the ritual pattern imprinted on his face, removed his necklace and placed it round Schultze’s neck.
As his men came ashore, bringing more food, Schultze told them: “Whatever you do, leave their women alone. Mess with them and their menfolk will have your heads as table decorations.” Only Bremen and a handful of others remained aboard U-181. Bremen, through binoculars, watched the party that followed with undisguised contempt.
“Savages,” he said aloud. “Soon, unless something is done, we also shall be as decadent in this accursed place. Heil Hitler!”
From the beach his shipmates looked back and smiled, but that was their only acknowledgment of Bremen’s presence, or the Fuhrer’s. After that, time passed pleasurably, deceptively. With the exception of Bremen—who held his own, one-man Nuremburg rally on the foredeck every morning, complete with Nazi marching songs—the crew of U-181 became accustomed to the langorous, lotus-eating life ashore, where there was as much air, sunshine, and fresh water as a man might want. They graduated from being guests in the chief’s atappalm longhouse; learned to hunt and fish with the tribe. They built their own longhouse and held a feast to celebrate its completion: a feast of baboon meat, newly slaughtered that day, and rice wine into which the chief had expectorated, as tradition required.
There was one tradition they did not keep. No Iban woman was allowed in the U-boat house. For most of the crew, this was a hardship. The women were naked, slender, and on heat most of the time. But, as Schultze repeatedly reminded them, to poach even one Iban woman would be asking for trouble.
Then, one stealthy night in early March, something happened to disrupt this idyll. Alien war canoes sailed into the bay. A rival tribe from the mainland, hunting women as a change of sport from baboon, porcupine, or python, massacred most of the Iban men as they slept. Then the raiders made the mistake of entering the U-boat house. The Germans were woken by the trip wire they set every night across the door. This rang a ship’s ceremonial bell brought out of the submarine along with other furniture. It was an unequal contest after that: modem rifles and pistols against machetes. The attackers, in their turn, were corpsed and then beheaded and castrated by the surviving local Ibans, most of them women.
Another week passed.
“Ho! Ho!”
It was early evening at the German longhouse. To the
north, a full moon was rising. Some of the crew repaired fishing nets. Others cleaned and oiled the rifles. They worked by the light of torches soaked in animal fat. True, the odor these produced could turn a sensitive stomach, but the stench was made tolerable by experience. And after life in the boat, it was no worse than diesel blended with excrement.
“Ho! Ho! . . . Ho-Ho!”
“Come!” said Schultze.
Their visitor was Nakei, son of the former, now dead headman. Nakei was an intelligent boy, quick enough to have picked up a fair amount of German, most of it from his friend, the boy, Otto Zurn. The two communicated through a mixture of Iban, German, and sign language. The sign language was often particularly coarse.
“Otto, wake up. It’s your buddy,” Schultze called. A sleepy Otto held out his hand at the door. He and Nakei sat on the fallen tree that acted as a doorstep. There was much giggling. Then they heard Otto say: “I will go and ask him.”
“Sir?”
“What is it, Otto?”
“Sir, Nakei brings an important message for you, an urgent message.”
“Oh?” Since the massacre, Schultze was increasingly called upon to arbitrate in some local dispute or other. He was not pleased to be disturbed at this hour, after sunset. They—whoever they were—must have known this was out of order. He would make that clear in the morning.
“Sir, Nakei says his mother has a bad feeling er . . . between her legs, since the chief was murdered. She says she wants you to . . . er . . .” The boy tried not to laugh. “She wants you to make a baby with her. Tonight. Now. She says this is the Big Moon Time.”
Nakei’s mother, the most recent of the chief’s collection of wives, was probably still in her late twenties. She moved within her skin with a lissomness that fascinated men and women alike. It was as though her skin were a transparent dress, revealing the life force that pulsed within her. Because of the way her muscles shifted and turned as she moved, the other Iban nicknamed her Python Woman. Schultze, momentarily, was tempted. He fingered the ring on his wedding finger. Then the pain of his discovery of Use’s long betrayal of their marriage, a discovery fatefully made on the eve of this voyage, and her suicide, returned.
“Tell Python Woman she makes me a very happy man but it is not possible,” he replied.
Behind Schultze, the navigation officer von Bulow, moustache twitching with the keen intelligence of a cat’s whiskers, placed a hand on Schultze’s shoulders.
“Willi . . .” He breathed the name softly into his friend’s ear. “Willi, we need to talk.”
Long before—more than a lifetime, it now seemed—Schultze and von Bulow were inseparable friends within the same cadet crew—Crew 37—at Murwik, the naval officers’ school. They had come through many dangers and joys together, from the songs and ritual of passing out parade to the nightmare of Ahab’s death. Now, under the palms of an obscure island somewhere off Borneo, watched by unseen eyes, they stood head-to-head once more.
“Willi, if you don’t do as the lady wishes, someone else will have to. My guess is that this lady knows her business. It is not sex business. It is political business. When the chief was murdered, she was the junior wife. Now you are the emerging chief. Do you realize what her invitation really means? Whoever fucks Python Woman effectively becomes the chief and she becomes First Wife. Now then, at sea, you’re our skipper. No dispute about that. But if someone else fucks the girl, I promise you, it will lead to a split command ashore. This we do not need. The Ahab problem was bad enough, but this . . .”
Though he did not say so out loud, von Bulow was considering the nightmare of something worse than a split command . . . a civil war between two factions which would doom them all. “Humor the woman. Go along with it. Then you remain in control and we survive.”
The nuptials to celebrate the union of Python Woman and Leutnant Willi Schultze, Kriegsmarine officer and holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Third Reich, were arranged for the next full moon. The Keramian Iban people, unlike their lethal mainland cousins, celebrated weddings at night, always at the full moon. Usually, the matter was consummated there and then, on a circle of grass in front of the chief’s longhouse, watched by the entire community, to the accompaniment of drums and clapping hands: flamenco without guitar.
Schultze, a faithful and disciplined servant of duty, agreed to all these local customs, but, to the surprise of his crewmen and tribesmen, who now recognized his chieftaincy, the bridegroom added one further, strange ingredient of his own to the wedding ritual. He demanded that his bride, wielding a machete, should remove the third finger of his left hand, the ring finger. He would then consummate the affair with blood as well as, he hoped—in a characteristically dry joke—with iron.
From dawn on the day of the ceremony the local Iban and the German Iban came together to hunt anything that moved in the forest, so as to prepare for a great feast. The German Iban acted as beaters on the perimeter of the chosen killing zone, driving the game onto the spears and blowpipes of their native brethren. At noon they returned to the village. The men carried orangutan on their shoulders and dragged other carcasses after them, hunted in their turn by swarms of ravenous black flies. They shared the weight of wild pig on poles that pierced the animals from gullet to tail. Then, waist deep, they trawled the shallows around the bay for small octopus and barracuda, using dragnets. Others climbed the coconut palms, drilled holes in the fruit, and filled the juice within them with wild honey to begin a process of fermentation which would have everyone drunk a few hours later.
As he fished, Schultze noticed that the tides had gradually shifted U-181 so that her bow, and the main gun, pointed directly toward the mouth of the bay, as if their boat sought escape from this paradise, to some sterner reality across the horizon. The vessel now rested evenly, her hull half buried and gripped by the shingle as if in dry dock. Schultze mentally ran through a checklist of sensitive items to be removed, starting with the code machine. He knew he did not need to be concerned, for all were now safely unloaded and, in some cases, concealed in the longhouse. There, unknown to him, red ants were feasting on secret documents.
On the deck, Bremen was doing what he always did at this time. He was cleaning the gun, loading and unloading a forty-kilogram shell, locking and unlocking the breech, swinging the gun on its cradle in a trajectory that covered the whole of the bay. His gramophone played “Lilli Marlene.” The crew sometimes marveled at the man’s determination, or obstinacy. The shells, as everyone knew, were stored in a hold below the floor of Bremen’s radio room. Each was kept in a reinforced cardboard container.
To lift even one shell from this store, through the constricted space of circular hatches first to the control room, then up a ladder to the conning tower and down again to the foredeck, was not a task for one man, even a strong one such as Erich Nitschke. Bremen was built like a ferret. Yet since their landfall he had assembled ten shells on deck.
“Expecting a war, are we, Hanskurt?” one of the fishers shouted.
“You will see,” Bremen replied. “I have not forgotten my duty to the Fatherland, even if you have.”
Schultze, advised by his bride, was learning to spear fish in the clear water. He was happily absorbed in this task, stalking a fat parrot fish, when Nakei, the boy who was now his adopted son, tugged at his right arm.
“Not now, Nakei.”
Too late. The fish darted back under its rock.
“Big Pappa-Shush,” the child insisted. He found Schultze too complicated a sound to articulate. Shush was easier and, to Iban ears, sounded better, like wind in trees rather than metal on stone. “Big boat comes!”
Schultze estimated that the visitor displaced around ten thousand tons, with a single funnel. She was painted white and moved like a queen at a ball, a clear Red Cross painted on her flanks. The ensign on her counter was the Stars and Stripes. A plume of white steam rose confidently from the stack and the sound of children’s voices—excited, full of new life—floated toward them as s
he dropped anchor.
“Hospital ship,” Schultze said quietly, as if to himself. He supposed she was bringing casualties from some corner of the Pacific War, en route to sanctuary in Australia, by a back route that would evade Japanese submarines. Bremen also saw the ship. He stood as if hypnotized. Only his fingers moved, and these twitched nervously, like talons. Then, shaking his head as if unable to believe his luck, he opened the breech of the 105 and rammed a shell into the block.
“Bremen, no!” Schultze shouted.
Bremen did not hear him. He was possessed by a passion that had waited a lifetime for this moment of consummation. He was swinging the gun now, to bear upon the midships section of his target. Having satisfied himself that the gun was properly aligned, he stood back and raised his right arm. “Heil Hitler!” On the gramophone, the worn vinyl recording of “Lilli Marlene” was slowing down so that the voice of Marlene Dietrich became a slurred, unnatural base-baritone. Then Bremen knelt carefully to one side of the weapon, the way the gunners did when they practiced, and grasped the firing lanyard in his right hand.
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