by Matt Killeen
“Goodbye, Ursula, Élodie, whatever your name really is,” he grunted behind her.
Sarah turned at the rail.
“My name is Sarah Goldstein, Germany’s misfortune . . . and yours.”
Sarah saw the light and felt the wave of heat before she heard anything. The blast picked her up like a rag doll as the concussion and shock wave smacked into her.
She was unconscious before she hit the water.
* * *
She dreamed she saw a black ship turn on its end and slide into the dark sea, surrounded by little red lights that bobbed in the surf. The animal noises that accompanied it were distant and alien.
The red lights blinked and disappeared and sprang back to life, like the fireflies Sarah had once seen in the countryside.
She dreamed that the sea was filled with little boats and shouting men, but whenever she moved to look at them, they slipped away and vanished, leaves on a winter tree.
She dreamed she was warm, in a cocoon of cotton and silk, that she was being licked by a friendly dog with a salty tongue.
The ceiling of the room brightened, but it was a dull, uniform gray. Sarah was bored with gray, it was everywhere. She rolled over so she didn’t have to look at it—
Her face pulled out of the water, eyes stinging, spitting and coughing. Her teeth began to chatter, and she couldn’t stop them. She looked right and left, and all she could see was rolling waves and blank sky.
She tried to turn and swim, but the movement made the next wave break over her. She surfaced and coughed. The next wave hit. Cough. Spit. Wave. Cough. Spit. Wave—
She stopped struggling, closed her eyes, and tried to relax. After a few seconds her body, buoyed by the life jacket, began to float up and over the rollers.
How long had it been? The torpedo had hit in the dead of night. Now it was bright daylight, so . . . hours. Four hours? At least four hours.
She looked round, trying to see the horizon. There was some debris. Wood, rope, clothes. The smell of oil remained, along with the salted, rotting scent of ocean. No ships.
No ships.
Her tongue moved like sandpaper inside her mouth, her throat raw from swallowed seawater. Her lips smarted as the salt water burrowed into the cracks—
Stop thinking about these things. There is nothing you can do about it.
I need to vomit.
No you don’t.
She rose and fell. Rose—
She felt the tickle of saliva in the back of her mouth.
Up and down. Up—
She threw up, getting most of it over the neck of the life jacket, but not all. The sandwich was so digested that it was sour mush and bile, but she knew she couldn’t afford to lose any of it.
Stop thinking about the here and now.
How? I’m going to die—
Close your eyes for a moment. What can you hear?
The low roar of waves, pulsing, the inhaling and exhaling of something so big it couldn’t be seen or understood. Her chin on the oiled canvas of the life preserver, the scratching of her ears. But there was, far away, a familiar noise.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom.
She was not alone.
Sarah clung to this like it was a life raft.
I don’t deserve to be rescued.
Shush now.
* * *
She was cold. So cold that she felt . . . warm. Like a fire dancing over her skin. Her fingers could barely move and had formed claws, incapable of holding on to the woolen sleeves she’d pulled down over them. She began to move her arms to break their stiffness. She sensed this was important. She tried to move her legs, but they barely responded.
Sarah relived the moment when Hasse lunged toward her with the syringe, feeling the gun kick in her hand. Self-defense. Then she saw herself lean down and fire the gun into his head, watched the blood splatter onto her shoes. Making sure . . . but this was hotter, more angry. Less necessary. More needful.
Who, or what, had she become? A little monster. A little monster in a different service.
FORTY
November 10, 1940
SARAH FELT THAT if she was to live, she had to want to. But she also knew that wanting wasn’t going to be enough.
Sarah waited to die.
But she didn’t, and soon she grew bored.
She tried to figure out how many people she had killed.
Stern. If she hadn’t set fire to the lab and lied about it, he wouldn’t have gone into the fire to find Schäfer.
The guards of the Schäfer estate. They were dying of a mystery disease, the aftereffects of Schäfer’s superbomb that she had detonated. The car she sent to the house . . . They must have died immediately in the explosion. Ten?
Foch. She had held him while the Captain slit his throat from ear to ear. Definitely.
The Bateke boy who had fled after she discovered the reused syringes.
Lieutenant La Roux and his men, whom she had talked into leaving, straight into Hasse’s ambush.
Hasse. Bleeding onto her shoes.
How many of those had deserved it?
Self-defense. Necessity. This was how Bofinger and Hasse rationalized their decisions.
And what of the people whom Lisbeth would slaughter because of Sarah’s blindness and stupidity?
Well, thought Sarah, I am being punished now. Like any good Jew, in hell, in the here and now. Was that better or worse than Dante’s inferno? She was cold, colder than she had ever been, so maybe she was a traitor after all, in the lowest level of hell, frozen in the ice up to her neck.
She hadn’t killed Clementine. She was still out there somewhere. Clementine was a survivor. She wanted to live.
But she had forgotten a death. Her first murder.
Her mother.
If her mother hadn’t had a constant reminder of her lost love, would she have drowned herself in alcohol? Would she have sobered up and driven to Friedrichshafen if Sarah hadn’t demanded she do something? Would she have plowed through that roadblock if Sarah hadn’t been there to protect?
She could add her mother to that list.
“Ick heff mol een Hamborger Veermaster sehn . . .”
Sarah hummed to herself, an old shanty that she’d heard some builders singing once across the road from her house. The language was Low German and English, and this had fascinated the young Sarah, who’d leaned on the windowsill, chin in hands, listening and learning.
“To my hoo . . . day!” she whispered, rocking her head from side to side. “Her masts were as crooked as the skipper’s legs . . . to my hoo-day, hoo-day, ho, ho, ho, ho . . .”
Singing the next line in front of her mother had got Sarah a slap that had made her ears ring. She giggled and, hurting her throat, shouted it to the ocean.
“The galley was full of lice, SCHIET SAT ON THE SHELVES . . . the biscuits walked away, all by themselves . . . to my hoo-day, hoo-day, ho, ho, ho, ho . . .”
She giggled to herself.
She couldn’t think of the next line.
The schnapps was only there at Christmas Eve. That was it, the next bit.
Sarah stopped. She never wanted to think about that gottverdammte Christian holiday again . . . Schäfer, silk dresses, and champagne. Gifts that were traps, a nighttime visit that had left blood over the walls. She heaved, but she couldn’t even find the bile to spit out.
She bobbed up and down in silence, listening to the water, the restlessness that never ended.
She threw her head back and screamed. “I . . . once . . . saw . . . a . . . Hamburg Veermaster . . . to my HOO-DAY.”
The water listened.
* * *
Sarah dozed, not quite sleeping, so she failed to notice the growing gloom, until she realized she couldn’t see the horizon. The sky was still clouded, and in a room the size of a planet, Sarah star
ted to feel confined.
She had survived a whole day. The thirst went from desire to a draining sensation in her shoulders and cheeks. Now it sat in her head, a constant throbbing in her skull. However, the pain’s very insistence made it perversely easy to forget . . . to drift away.
* * *
Sarah jerked awake. She was actually a little disappointed to find herself still alive. The sky had been leached of all color. She closed her eyes again, but sleep wouldn’t come.
She floated in darkness. No stars, no moon. No green glow, no white foam. Just the hissing growl of the water, the sensation of rocking, the taste of salt, and a black cowl that didn’t end.
She watched the first circling light in confusion, its glowing trail hanging in the air and fading slowly. She was not asleep and felt the cold water lapping at her all around. Then the iridescent line grew buds, leaves, and finally flowers above a meadow that stretched off to the edge of the light blue sky.
A hare hopped into view. It stopped and cleaned its head with its forepaws, before being joined by two others. They fed on the grass.
There was someone walking toward her. Someone whose footsteps sprouted red flowers as the grass sprang back from her touch.
Sarah knew who it was before she could make them out. She had seen that walk, the stride of someone utterly at ease with themselves. This was the woman of Sarah’s early years, before the bitterness and sadness had got their claws into her.
The woman came into focus.
“Hello, Mutti,” Sarah managed, her voice little more than a croak.
“Oh, Sarahchen, my princess.” Her mother sighed, a wide, warm, and genuine smile crossing her face.
Sarah reached out to her but found her arms were underwater. The meadow flickered, so Sarah remained still.
“I’m in trouble, Mutti.”
“I shouldn’t have left you, I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s all right, we’ll do it together.”
“I’ve done bad things.”
“That’s my girl.”
Sarah’s mother was wearing the blood-flecked fur hat, which hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Clouds rolled in over the blue sky.
A slow trickle of blood ran down the side of her face, a face older, more lined, a little crueler, less patient.
“Waiting is an art form, my darling.” Her mother struck a theatrical pose. “You wait for your cue, but you don’t just stand there and do nothing. You have to become that character, be that person who is listening. You wait with the impatience of someone with things to do, places to go, words to say.”
The hares began to run, around and around her, building up speed, and the clouds grew dark.
Ba-boom. Ba-boom.
“These are the lines delivered by your leading man. What is he saying? Why is he saying them?”
“Who—” Sarah said, shaking her head.
“Himmels! Who else is onstage?” her mother snapped.
The clouds lit up with lightning, briefly turning her mother into a silhouette.
“A ship, well done.” Her mother continued, “The ship is talking to you. What is he telling you?”
Ba-boom. Ba-boom.
The noise was closer, louder, more urgent than it had been before.
“He’s . . . looking for something?” Sarah asked.
“Yes!”
The hares took flight and spun in ever-tightening circles around her mother, her face dripping with fresh red blood. The sky behind her lit up with fork lightning that remained and brightened until it hurt Sarah’s eyes.
The hares froze mid-jump, three two-eared animals with just three ears in all. Her mother dissolved as the night sky turned to white, and the bow of the destroyer carved through the meadow, turning the grass over and into the silver ocean.
The warship, illuminated by the star shell it had fired, turned to port a hundred meters away. The wave it created in that small course correction was vast, revealing the weight and power of the monster roaring by. Sarah floated, unable to move for a few seconds, and then she began to wave her hands in the air. She tried to scream, but her throat couldn’t make any noise.
It slid effortlessly by, apparently blind to the little girl floating in the artificial daylight.
The pennant number D71 told Sarah that this ship was HMS Virulent. Lisbeth was just one hundred meters away.
FORTY-ONE
THEY EITHER DIDN’T see her, or assumed she was wreckage from Godalming, because Virulent didn’t stop or slow or aim a searchlight in her direction. Instead Sarah watched several barrel-like cylinders roll off the stern of the ship into the water.
Are those to help me?
The sea exploded behind the ship, a double ba-boom creating two huge circular mounds of white spray, and at their hearts erupted two enormous fountains of dirty water. Sarah watched the sea between them bubble toward her like a wave on the shore.
It was like someone had dropped Sarah from a roof. The impact hit her submerged body, everywhere and equally, causing her heart to thump inside her chest. She sagged back into the life jacket, winded.
Killing fish?
Killing U-boats.
Virulent plowed on, searchlights dancing around the disturbed water. They would come back around and then they would find her. Better still, someone was already telling their captain about the girl in the water.
She could see the sailors aboard. The two men in the stern were working on the line of barrels there. How could they not have seen her?
“Hei!” she managed, but it came out like a cough.
The destroyer didn’t turn. It just steamed on, its searchlights swinging out and away.
The star shell was almost spent, and the warship was leaving.
Sarah became panicky. Angry. She waved more frantically and found a tiny, hoarse, and gravelly part of her voice.
“Come back here, you Scheißkerle!” she rasped at the retreating stern.
Sarah had been waiting for death, but to have been so close to rescue, to safety, even to continuing her mission, and having it all torn away again was cruelty. It had made her want to live, and now she had to die all over again.
Virulent held its course.
“Verpisst euch!” she ranted huskily, tears running down her face. She kept swearing as if they might turn in disgust and see her. “Leckt mich im Arsch . . .”
She touched her cheek and put it to her lips. Like everything else, it was salty.
“I can’t spare the water . . .” she moaned more quietly, but she wept anyway.
* * *
The ship didn’t leave entirely. It moved back and forth on the horizon, occasionally lit by its flares, bombing the ocean as it went. Sarah watched it like a dog might watch bacon being fried, and she just couldn’t look away. Both nah und fern. She wanted to laugh, but all she managed was to bare her teeth and hiss.
The dawn brought nothing but light.
Sarah was tired now, past the exhaustion that stopped you sleeping into the realm of quiet softness that swallowed everything.
She wanted to close her eyes so she didn’t have to see the blurry smudge prowling the edge of the earth anymore.
Hei, wake up.
Leave me alone.
No, I didn’t come back so you could just fade away like an old photograph.
Let me sleep.
No, because this time you won’t wake up.
Good.
Dumme Schlampe. How dare you throw away your life?
I’m dying, Mutti.
No, Sarahchen, you’re living.
You call this living?
Sarah thought about this. Her mother was right in one way. Floating alone in an ocean was as much living as being a doll. A darling. A diversion. An eavesdropper. A thief.
<
br /> Certainly this was her at her least destructive. No one had died or wound up in an institution because Sarah Goldstein was adrift in the South Atlantic.
Better that she wasn’t around to hurt anyone, to make more catastrophic errors of judgement. Had she saved people? She struggled to name anyone.
Unless this was hell. Did she have more atoning to do?
Mutti? Are you God?
Her mother’s laughter was long and uncontrolled.
It made Sarah smile for its unexpectedness. It had been a long time.
About twenty meters away, a piece of debris bobbed in the surf. It looked like a wooden pole sticking up into the air. At least Sarah assumed it was wood, as it was floating.
It wasn’t bobbing. It was still as the water rose and fell around it.
It vanished into the ocean.
Maybe it was a snake, Sarah wondered. A water snake. There were water snakes, definitely.
Do they eat people? she thought casually.
The snake rose again, nearer this time. It was black with a bulbous head. And it was turning. Sarah watched it with grim fascination. It didn’t have scales, it was smooth, and when its face appeared, there were no eyes, just a mouth.
It wasn’t a mouth. It was a glass window.
The waves pushed Sarah around, and she lost sight of it. She thrashed her arms and legs to regain her orientation, but she was weak now, and it took a minute to make any headway. By the time she was facing the right way—the snake, the mouth, the window, whatever it was—was gone.
She would have chuckled to herself, but the best she could do was grunt. She was imagining things in daylight now.
The water grew rougher, swirling and bubbling, buffeting her more than usual. One wave hit her square in the face. If she wasn’t able to float over the rollers, and she was too frail to swim through them, there was a real chance of her drowning, life jacket or no life jacket.
That’s one way of settling things, she thought grimly.