If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

  “Otto, I was scared.”

  “No need. I had it all under control.”

  “But are you all right?”

  “Not a scratch.”

  “Oh you stupid man!” And then she hit me, punched me in the chest and called me, “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” again and rubbed her snotty nose on my clean shirt front for a bit and had a little snivel while I held her, which was nice but it didn’t last long. Girls are funny. She went from being worried about me to being angry, then all weepy and, from there, it was but a short step back to blind fury again, only this time it was Varga she was after.

  She called him a lot of words which I was surprised she knew, and I think she was working up to hitting him when Tifty arrived, hauling the Professor in tow. “Darling, you mustn’t be silly. Don’t soil your hands with him. Dignity, darling, always dignity. Remember that you are a lady. But I, on the other hand, am a fallen woman,” and she whirled round and slammed her hand into the front of Varga’s trousers, muttering fiercely at him in that awful Hungarish and squeezing so hard it made my eyes water.

  The poor blighter was helpless, skewered like a moth in a glass case, up on his tiptoes and dancing about weakly as if he wanted to escape from Tifty’s grip by climbing up an invisible ladder.

  And, just like I couldn’t understand a word of what the daddy in the beer hall said although I picked up the meaning, it was pretty clear that Tifty was making a point with Varga along the lines of, “Do we understand each other?”

  He barely had a breath left in his body, but somehow, he managed to squeak out “Igen, igen, igen,” which is how I learned Hungarish for “yes.” Funnily enough, that girl in the cellar had said exactly the same thing in a slightly different way.

  I said, “Put him down now, Tifty. Be nice. After all, Varga’s taking us boating.”

  “That’s kind,” she said, and she let him go and he fell over on the grass again.

  “Oh, pick him up. We have to catch the tide.”

  Varga managed to say, “It’s not a boat, it’s a yacht,” in a more than usually annoying way, and Tifty made a face and said another rude word which I did not recognize as I had not heard a pretty girl saying it any time recently, but I was having none of it. I told her to shut up in no uncertain terms and offered Varga his sword back.

  “I reckon it’s safe enough, if you’re as good with a blade as you are with a pistol, and anyway, Max has his eye on you.”

  Max made a bulge in his pocket and said, “Pop,” just to make the point.

  Varga feigned outraged concern. “It’s very silly to carry firearms down your trousers, Maxxie. That’s how accidents happen, and that would be such a terrible waste.”

  “Are you offering to kiss it better?”

  “Any time, Maxxie, any time.”

  Max looked to be pulling back for another one of his haymakers so I had to step in again. “Varga, just get us on the damned boat.”

  “It’s a yacht.”

  “Just get us on it.”

  So we gathered up the camel, who was picking his way round Varga’s garden like a burgermeister at a civic buffet, and we made our way back to the docks.

  If Varga had been a better officer, if he’d been better loved by his men, or perhaps just not a raving nutter, he could still have had us in irons in a minute and up against the wall the minute after that, but he was the man he was. Varga could not bring himself to cry out, “Help, I’m being kidnapped,” because he knew very well that every sailor in the academy would gather round in a body and help to shove him on the boat, so he simply smiled and nodded and returned the necessary salutes and he told the harbormaster, “My friends and I are going on a bit of a cruise. Back tomorrow.”

  That was all there was to it. Varga led us quickly down the quayside to where his yacht was waiting, a magnificent thing, sleek as a greyhound, elegant as a duchess and fast. I know nothing about boats, but you could see she was fast. Even tied up at the dock she looked like she was racing along, every line of her stretched and straining, every plank and beam polished like a nut, every inch of rigging taut.

  Varga couldn’t hide his pride. “Isn’t she something? Took her off a Turkish smuggler. It was quite a chase, I can tell you. She goes like shit off a shovel.”

  I gave him a little poke in the chest. “Please remember that there are ladies present,” which made Sarah very happy, and he was all set to say something smart but he saw from my face that I meant it. “Time’s a-wasting. Get the camel on board and let’s get going.”

  “You’re not taking that camel on my lovely yacht.”

  “Well, we’re not leaving him here,” said Max.

  “Have you forgotten that I am Keeper of His Imperial Majesty’s Camels? I have to deliver this magnificent animal to the King of Albania. That camel is the point and purpose of our journey.”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “Never more so.”

  “But my beautiful polished deck.”

  “Oh, his feet are as soft as thistledown,” said Max. “He’ll polish your deck up something lovely.”

  “It’s out of the question. I can’t allow it. I simply won’t permit it. I absolutely and utterly …”

  He was going to say “refuse,” but, about the time he got to “absolutely,” I gave a nod to my mate Max, who landed a little tap right in Varga’s guts. It wasn’t much of a punch. Like I said, just a little tap, nothing at all compared to what he could’ve done. Max was a man who bent steel bars for a living, after all, but Varga turned green and all the breath went out of him in a wheeze.

  Max put a friendly arm around him and held him up. “Sorry about that. It’ll pass off in a minute. Just breathe. Breathe.”

  It must’ve hurt like hell, particularly after what Tifty had done to him, but I was less than sympathetic. Once Varga managed to get his eyes uncrossed again, I told him, “You’re not giving the orders any more.”

  Tifty was gleeful, glinting with a sharp spite. “No,” she said. “We’re giving the orders now.”

  You couldn’t blame her. A couple of hours before Varga had been all set to have her shot in her shift so he could steal her dress, and all that champagne was beginning to wear off, and champagne always left her with an angry headache. Tifty suffered from no more than the usual dose of ordinary human viciousness, the natural urge to do unto others what they would have done unto you if only they got the chance, but I couldn’t let her off with that. I said, “Actually, Countess, I think you’ll find that I give the orders now.”

  Any sentence that contains the phrase “I think you’ll find” or the words “Don’t you know who I am?” is doomed before it’s even out of your mouth. It was a very grand thing to say and, looking back on it, it might have been a mistake. Tifty wasn’t stupid. I think she had already seen how things were with Sarah and me and, when I spoke shortly to her like that, well, I think she took it harder than I intended, especially when Sarah took my arm and cuddled in proudly, as if to make that “I” into a “We.”

  No, if I had been wise, I would have apologized right there and then, said sorry and explained that it didn’t come out right. But I was stupid, acting like the king I was not, and Tifty complained in the only way she could, crossing her legs and dipping a deep curtsy that would not have been out of place in the Hofburg. It almost convinced me that she was telling the truth and she really was a countess after all. By God, that girl had a magnificent cleavage. She stayed down there long enough to let me admire it and then rose again, smiling at Sarah, once she was sure that I had.

  “Get the camel on board,” I said. “There’s no time to lose.”

  There wasn’t much Varga could say to that. He rolled his eyes and said, “Make it stand in the prow.” And when Max didn’t move, he rolled his eyes again and said, “Oh for God’s sake! The pointy bit at the front.”

  That camel was surprisingly cooperative. He seemed to trust Max completely and he paid no heed to the gangplank and took his place at the front of
the boat, as calm as a carved figurehead, while we busied ourselves helping Varga get the boat ready for sea. None of us knew the first thing about boats or which rope to pull or which to let go, of course, and the Professor just stood there, turning his face up to the sky, catching the warmth of the sun on his skin and fiddling with his cane while we ran all about him. To tell the truth, he was probably the most useful of us all—unless you count the camel—since at least he did no harm but, somehow, eventually, Varga got the thing moving and we pulled out on the dropping tide. It’s a strange moment, that. It’s almost like falling in love. Or maybe like watching somebody dying. You can think of the time before it happened, and you can think of the time after it happened, but it’s hard to put your finger on just the very moment when it actually happens. It’s like that on a boat. One minute it’s a lump of wood, a dead thing, a stripped, shaved, nailed tree, fixed to the land, as lifeless as a staircase, and then something happens and you’re not very sure if you imagined it, but it seems as if there’s a gap that’s opened up just a little between the boat and the harbor wall. One end is just a little bit further out than it was before, so that must mean that the other end is closer, but, when you turn to look, it’s not, there’s a gap opening up there too, like a wound, and then, the next second, there’s no tiny bit of the boat left touching the land and you know that now, for sure, she’s afloat and moving, moving under your feet and through the water and through the air, moving away from everything that ever held her, and she’s alive, changed into something new and different and better. That’s what happens to people when they love. That’s what happens when a soul sets out on its journey. I know. I’ve seen them both.

  In no time at all Varga had us heading out through the harbor of Fiume, past the great warships that lay at anchor there and towered over us like huge steel castles. It was hard to believe they could ever have uprooted themselves and sailed out into the ocean like trees walking out of the forest. They seemed so fixed and solid, but Varga’s yacht went running around between them the way those little farm dogs do when they are herding cattle, jinking in and out between their hoofs or dropping down, belly flat, to avoid the kicks. And then we were out in the bay and the warships were further and further apart and the town was dropping away behind us, getting smaller and smaller, and the shore was just a jumble of rocks.

  I looked back. Varga was at the wheel and he was actually smiling and I smiled too, because with every wave I was getting closer to my kingdom.

  Suddenly everybody was happy. Everybody was smiling, except for the Professor, who stood in the stern, holding on to the rail and looking about him with blind eyes.

  I went to him, leaning over on the tipping deck, swinging along, hand to hand from one rope to another.

  “Everything all right, Professor?”

  “He’s put out flags, hasn’t he? Near here? I hear them flapping.”

  “Yes. On a little pole at the back.”

  “Tell me.”

  “A lot of blue flags. One all blue and white, checked like a tablecloth, and one with a white stripe along the middle.”

  The Professor heaved a sigh. “N and J. The international signal for ‘I am under attack.’ Make him take it down.”

  The smart thing would have been to shoot him right there and dump his body over the side. That would have been the smart thing, except that none of us had the first idea how to work the boat and he knew it. He took the flags down—or at any rate I took them down for him. He was damned lucky I didn’t jam them down his throat, but he treated it all as a great joke. “You can’t blame me for trying.” That’s what he said.

  Max said, “Would you like me to hit him again?”

  “Oh don’t be so stupid. You want to get to Albania, and I’m the only ticket you’ve got.”

  Of course he was right, and of course I couldn’t let Max hit him again. So I hit him. Back-handed. Right across the chops. Varga must have been pretty sick of getting beaten up and he looked as if he was about to burst into tears, so I waited until he’d got a grip of himself again and then I said, “Understand this. You belong to me. We all know how much you value your own skin and you bought it for the price of this boat. I would’ve been within my rights to stick you with your own sword back at the academy, you little coward, so don’t start getting any courageous ideas now. And here’s the truth of it: we are going to Albania or we’ll die trying. We’d rather stay alive, but we will die trying, and if you want to live you’d better get us there.”

  “It’s the other end of the Adriatic.”

  “Varga, can you get us there?”

  “I am a Fregatenkapitän of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine. Of course I can get you there.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s two hundred sea miles to Split, another hundred to Dubrovnik, and a bit less than that to Durres.”

  Sarah said, “Is he telling the truth, Daddy?”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  “How long?”

  “If we pile on the sail, if the wind holds from the starboard, we might make better than ten knots. But that’ll be hard sailing for a week or so.”

  Professor von Mesmer gave a polite cough. “Forgive me, but ten knots for twenty-four hours is two hundred and seventy-six miles. We can do it in two days.”

  “Impossible. We can’t sail at night.”

  “Yes, we can,” I said. “It seems to me that ships come from Australia, from America, from all over the world, and they don’t stop in the middle of the night, bobbing about in the middle of the ocean until it’s time to wake up again.”

  “They have a crew.”

  “We are your crew.”

  “I have to sleep.”

  “Of course you do, and while you are sleeping, one of us will steer. If there’s any bother, we’ll come and get you. None of us wants to drown any more than you do, Varga.”

  “There are islands.”

  “I know. I saw them on the map. Get us through the islands and then you can sleep. We sail—” I pointed out the direction—“that way.”

  “South-east by south,” said the Professor.

  “See how easy it is? A blind man could do it.”

  You would think, wouldn’t you, that I would have more to say about sailing night and day, canvas cracking, ropes creaking, with a lunatic in command and a blind man at the tiller. You would think, since I have filled pages with the business of getting on a train and pages more with the business of getting on a boat, I might have had something to say about the actual voyage. The truth is, I don’t.

  I remember the oranges piled on Varga’s sideboard at the Naval Academy and the sound of the camel’s feet on the cobbles in the streets of Budapest, but that sea voyage seems to have passed without leaving too much of a mark on my memory. I know we got on the boat and I know we got off the boat and, it stands to reason, something must have happened in between, but to tell the truth, there’s not much to say.

  If you or I were up in the sky tonight, in one of those planes, up in the blazing, burning clouds, following the fires and dodging the flak, circling, waiting, watching for the fighters to come at any moment, I know we’d remember every second of it, from the time we took off to the time we landed again. But I bet they don’t, those boys up there. For them it’s just hours and hours of hard work and routine with a few moments of blind terror now and again. If they did it twenty times, or thirty, hour after hour, flying through the night with death sitting on their shoulders there and back again, how many of them do you think would come home with even one good story to tell their grandchildren? Damned few, and if they did, it would probably be the tale of the time the dog ate the general’s trousers, not some nonsense about flying home with their tail on fire and the wings full of bullet holes.

  And isn’t it amazing how much of our lives passes that way? All the million, million moments from the moment we first crawl, screaming into the world until we crawl, screaming out of it again and all the moments in between t
hose two screams of fear and regret, how many of them do we actually remember? In each of them the sun is just as warm, just as yellow, the sky is just as blue, the clouds are just as white, roses just as red, birds sing, snowballs fly, women laugh, every plate of soup is just as hot and tasty as the next, cowsheds smell the same, grass feels the same under bare feet, and everything in the world that is there to be enjoyed is enjoyable time after time so we forget to notice and, before we even realize, all that vast store of moments is gone, worn out and eaten up with no record kept. Or that’s how it was with me. One minute I was a boy, running away from school, the next I’m an old man waiting to die in a little tin shack. Be warned. I’m wasting my breath. You will not be warned. I was warned, and I took no heed. I doubt if it is even possible for mere men to live, savoring every minute. It’s not in our nature. Life itself is as much as we can cope with, never mind storing it all up as we go like an endless newsreel. Nobody’s head is big enough to hold all that nonsense.

  It’s as if we spend our whole lives in a railway-station waiting room, sipping endless cups of coffee with the same people, handing round the newspaper, doing anything to make the time pass while, outside, people go by in droves, pretty girls and clever men, heroes and scientists and geniuses and simple, loving people by their thousands. We never meet them, we never speak to them, we never hear their stories. We stay in the waiting room, with the same people and the same newspaper, waiting for the bell to ring so that, perhaps a dozen times in a lifetime, we can rush out on to the platform and see a train arrive, actually experience something that makes a mark on our memory before we go back inside.

  And what things we choose to remember. Brahms is dead. I know he’s dead, but I don’t remember when it happened. A mountain like that shifts away and I can’t say what I was doing when I heard the news, not the day of the week nor the month of the year, but ask me about the time my mother came home from the fair with the giant blutwurst and I can remember everything.

  I heard tell once about this bloke, I’m almost sure he was French, who spilled out his whole life story, from the time he was a boy, filled book after book with it and it all came back to him because he ate a cake. That’s a lot of tripe, I can tell you. Writing even one story is damned hard work, and I’m sitting here, racking my brains, trying to think of a single thing that happened on that voyage. Of course, the French bloke wasn’t sitting down to write in the middle of an air raid, and I haven’t got any cakes, so we’re not exactly starting on an even footing, but let’s see what I can do …