The Ship

by Stefan Mani

  For three days they’d had no food other than hardtack, wet by the sea. The sick children had had nothing to eat. The drinking water was just a soup of rust and dirt.

  During the night, a three-month-old girl breathed her last. It was the dark-haired child with the hare lip.

  The storm died down and they were able to see blue-green waves around the boat. There was less spray, so they opened the hatches and everything else that could be opened. The men were bailing with buckets, the women with pots and pans, and they used blankets and overcoats to wipe the rest. After two hours the boat was virtually dry, and they started caulking the cracks with hemp and tar. The boat leaked steadily but the hand pump managed to keep up.

  Hope – which had never died in the hearts of the refugees – quickened hour by hour.

  Most of the crew lay, exhausted, and soaked up sunlight on the deck. The sick children had been dressed in dry clothes and were on the mend. One young man got out his accordion and started playing a mournful folk song.

  The others joined in and sang …

  Guðmundur stops talking, sniffs, gently clears his throat and empties his glass.

  Silence.

  ‘And then what?’ asks Sæli in a low voice. ‘Did the boat sink?’

  ‘No, not while I was at the wheel. After sailing for five days we crawled into harbour in Jacksonville. The boat sank there just a few days later. After a few months in quarantine, the refugees were let loose. Fifty-four Estonians spread themselves over the US from one end to the other, and some went north to Canada, and I returned to Iceland, the wiser for the experience.’

  ‘I didn’t know about that,’ says Sæli, looking at the captain with admiration. ‘I’ve never heard this story, but everyone must have been talking about it.’

  ‘No,’ says the captain, shaking his head. ‘I’ve never told anyone before – not a living soul.’

  ‘Why not?’ asks Sæli.

  ‘Why not?’ echoes the captain and takes a deep breath. ‘Because I shouldn’t have gone on that trip. If I had refused, the ship would never have sailed. Then all those people would still be alive today.’

  ‘But you’re a hero, man!’ says Satan, smiling at the captain. ‘It must be seen as a great achievement getting all those refugees safe and sound across the ocean on a tub like that, even though one or two died on the way.’

  ‘Well, maybe you could say that.’ The captain sighs as he fills his glass with a shaking hand. ‘But I’ll be damned, and so help me God, if I don’t think it the lesser of two evils to drown in a storm every day for all eternity than to sail with the corpse of a child and a mourning mother for one single moment. That poor woman.’

  Silence.

  ‘But what of that – the boat was named the Lootus. That’s Estonian for “hope”,’ says the captain, then lifts his glass and breathes in through flaring nostrils. ‘Now let’s drink a toast, my friends. Now we drink to hope! Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers!’

  They all knock back their drinks, grimace and lick their lips. The bottle is empty and the glasses are sticky inside and out.

  Jim Morrison continues to sing about the music being over, about turning out the lights.

  ‘I can’t stand that song,’ says Sæli with tears in his eyes. ‘I just can’t stand it!’

  He stands up from the table and pushes some knobs on the tape deck, but the tape keeps turning and the song plays.

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ he mutters. He rips the electric cord from the socket but it makes no difference. The tape continues to turn and the song still plays.

  ‘What the fuck is …’ Sæli shakes the tape deck. ‘Sæli, lad, are you all right?’ asks Guðmundur, but Sæli doesn’t answer him. Instead, he stalks out of the mess with the tape deck in his hand and his eyes full of tears.

  ‘Sæli?’ The captain stands, his eyes following the seaman.

  ‘Let him be!’ says Satan, signalling the captain to sit back down.

  ‘That was Rúnar’s tape,’ says Stoker, sniffing up into his coal-black nose. ‘I think the poor guy misses the bosun.’

  ‘Yeah, perhaps,’ mumbles Guðmundur and sits back down. ‘I’m just worried that he’ll do something stupid.’

  ‘Something more stupid than attacking a radio?’ Stoker says with a smirk.

  ‘Yes,’ says the captain thoughtfully. ‘But it is perhaps best to leave him in peace. People act weird after a shock.’

  ‘That was quite the incident,’ says Satan and he laughs softly.‘I mean, it isn’t as if the song was “Killing me Softly”, or something, is it?’

  23:58

  Sæli tears open the door in back of the wheelhouse, leaps over the threshold and runs back to the stern, where he flings the tape deck as far out to sea as his strength allows.

  The tape deck flies in a long arc into the night, the music fades away little by little, and a soft splash is heard as it disappears into the silent deep.

  ‘SO SHUT UP, THEN!’ shouts Sæli over the railing. He holds the edge of the cold railing with both hands, clenches his jaw, widens his tear-filled eyes and tenses every muscle in his body as if he’s about to kick off and jump over the iron wall.

  All he can see is darkness as far as his mind can reach: thousands of kilometres of hopelessness, gloom and certain death, and somewhere beyond this all-encompassing void are Lára and Egill in a lit-up flat in the Old Town, like a distorted scene in a dewdrop light-years away.

  Like a little star in the night sky, receding at the rate of several thousand kilometres an hour.

  The mother and son are so far away that the thought of them at home is becoming ever more unreal. As if they’re no more than a memory. She’s happy and the boy is young, forever. A picture in his mind, nothing more. A picture that, with time, is becoming hazy, remote and confused.

  Home. What’s that?

  Ársæll Egilsson is stuck on a ship that is the beginning and end of all there is. The ship is; everything else is only imagination. The ship is home and home is the ship.

  Those who are not on board the ship may just as well be on another planet.

  He wants to jump into the sea without really knowing why. Is it death that draws him, or the mother and son who are disappearing into the distance?

  But he doesn’t jump. Not because reason gains the upper hand, but simply because he can’t.

  XXXI

  32°W 4°N

  According to the captain’s calculations, the ship is now located just north of the equator. So it has drifted one degree east and three degrees south from Sunday to Tuesday. That’s about twice as much drift to the south as the average international model allows for, but there are very powerful ocean currents around here that doubtless distort all the conditions for the model. There’s no point in comforting yourself with statistical wishful thinking and imprecise predictions when the facts speak for themselves.

  The ship is drifting fast to the south, whether Guðmundur Berndsen likes it or not.

  One and a half degrees of longitude a day. That’s up to ninety kilometres a day – even more. Seven hundred to 740 kilometres a week.

  ‘Am I going mad?’ mutters the captain, punching numbers into his calculator as he sits, sweaty and exasperated, at the table in his cabin.

  If no-one turns up to help them, the ship will drift all the way to Antarctica in only three months. Unlikely, yes, but statistically possible.

  ‘For the love of …’ The captain reaches for his sea chart. He puts his index finger on the point where the ship is situated at this moment and moves it slowly down along the thirty-second line of longitude west of the Greenwich line, which is marked zero.

  Over the next three weeks they’ll drift south along the coast of Brazil, where it juts out furthest to the east. After a week or so the ship should be situated about 110 kilometres east of the port of Recife. One hundred and ten kilometres! On the map, the distance looks so short that it should be no trouble for a fit man to swim it. But it is 100 kilometres, even more,
which is almost three trips across the English Channel.

  The dinghy! There’s a rubber dinghy on the ship, an eight-foot Zodiac not unlike the one the pirates arrived on, but shorter. It’s admittedly only meant for three, but Stoker’s nothing but skin and bones. The outboard motor is five horsepower and there’s more than enough petrol, and in good weather it is perfectly possible to sail a dinghy like that on the open sea, even if it is a bit overloaded.

  ‘It’s going to work out!’ the captain tells himself with a sigh of relief. ‘It’s all going to work out.’

  Guðmundur Berndsen turns off his calculator, closes the navigation log, rolls up the chart and drinks the last of his coffee, which has long since gone cold and bitter.

  31°W 2°N

  They’re standing, lightly dressed, on the starboard side of the boat deck: the captain and the engineer, staring at the Zodiac dinghy that’s drooping like a sail without a wind in the sling that holds it, because it’s been shot to pieces and ripped wide open after the artillery barrage.

  An easterly wind is blowing across the dark green ocean and the temperature is a good fifteen degrees Celsius and rising.

  ‘Can it be repaired?’ enquires the captain as he runs his hands over the deflated rubber.

  ‘Everything is possible,’ says Stoker and scratches his beard. ‘I have plenty of line and glue. The only thing I need is rubber to make patches.’

  ‘Isn’t there anything on board you could use?’

  ‘I could use rainwear. But it has fabric on the inside. The fabric doesn’t glue to rubber as well as rubber to rubber.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, probably not. I could try rasping the fabric out of the clothes.’

  ‘Go on, then, do that,’ says the captain, clapping Stoker on the back. ‘You have five days to complete the job.’

  ‘That should be enough,’ says Stoker with a nod. ‘When will the ship drift south across the equator?’

  ‘Late tomorrow,’ says the captain and he looks at sun, which will be reaching midday in three hours. ‘Or early the day after.’

  ‘And then the Brazil current will pull us into its endless flow to the south, is that it?’

  ‘Yeah. It’ll take the ship most of the way to Cape Horn.’

  Cape Horn. Where cold ocean currents run riot like monsters from the deep in the west.

  ‘But we’ll have left the ship long before it reaches that chaos,’ says the captain.

  ‘It’s just as well,’ replies Stoker, wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘No ship is safe east of Cape Horn, least of all a pile of dead-in-the-water scrap metal like this one.’

  30°W 3°S

  Satan puts on a parka that might have belonged to anyone before opening the walk-in freezer on A-deck, which is thirty degrees below zero. At first he can see nothing except the white steam that forms when the hot air from outside meets the frost in the freezer. The steam circles around as heat and cold fight it out, but after Satan closes the door the steam calms and gradually sinks to the floor where Big John, Methúsalem, Rúnar and Ásmundur lie side by side under a white sheet.

  This is the why the captain begged Satan to do the cooking. The deceased’s shipmates couldn’t stand the thought of walking in to the freezer, which has, in fact, become an energy-intensive tomb.

  Satan isn’t disturbed by such things, however. To him a corpse is just a corpse: dead meat that does neither harm nor good and is, thus, irrelevant. Why be afraid in the presence of dead meat? They were fond of these men when they were alive but avoid them like the plague once they stop living!

  Life is war and death is peace, not the other way around. Is that so difficult to understand? A living being fights for its existence until it dies. Then it sleeps forever and does no-one any harm.

  Those who pray for peace on earth are actually asking for the end of the world. And, of course, they’re exactly the people who are most afraid of death.

  Fools!

  The shelves in the freezer are split into compartments, each of which is closed with a door made up of a wooden frame covered with chicken wire. Satan steps over the bodies and takes a shoulder of pork from one compartment and four chickens from another. He’s thought it all out. First, he’s going to cook all the meat that needs to be cooked. If the generator fails there’ll be no cold in the freezer and no current for the electric cooker and then it wouldn’t be very clever to be left with pork and chicken. Beef can be eaten raw and lamb and fish can be salted, dried or pickled. When all the meat and fresh vegetables are finished there’ll be porridge and tinned food for all meals. With this plan there’ll be enough to eat for the coming weeks, even if they lose the electricity.

  The captain says that if they are not rescued within the next few days they’ll abandon ship and sail to Brazil in the dinghy, but Satan takes such pronouncements with a pinch of salt. At the very least, he is convinced that it always pays to keep something in reserve.

  For the next few days meals will consist of pork and chicken morning, noon and night. He’s the cook and he’s in charge. End of story.

  31°W 5°S

  Guðmundur opens the door of his cabin, yawns and walks slowly into the dark. He doesn’t turn on the lights because moonlight is filtering through the curtains. He takes off everything except his socks and underpants, walks to his bunk and …

  It’s as if an ice-cold fist has grasped the captain’s heart. The pain is deep and excruciating, extending along his left arm. He gapes and stares and he can’t breathe …

  There’s a dead child in the bed.

  His mouth goes so dry that his throat and the insides of his cheeks sting, his veins fill with rust and acid and his stomach is on fire.

  A dead child, so very long dead. The body is embalmed, wrapped in swaddling so old and brittle that it crumbles off the baby’s brown body. Its eye sockets are empty and its nose gone, and its teeth project from shrunken lips.

  A tickling sensation passes through the captain’s genitals, the heat in his stomach reaches all the way to his head and urine begins to filter through his underpants and down his stiff legs.

  What child is this?

  He can hardly move but just manages to reach out a stiff arm that shakes like a leaf in the wind and takes on the colour of death in the cold light of the moon.

  Is this his daughter? Or the girl with the hare lip?

  His quivering index finger comes closer to the child’s face – this fragile shell that may crumble at the slightest touch.

  Should he …? What should he …?

  The boat lists to starboard, the curtains move and a shaft of moonlight enters.

  It’s not a child! It’s …The captain blinks and leans forward.

  The sextant! It’s been lying there on his raincoat since midday!

  Guðmundur wants to laugh but he can’t. He sits on the bed, hides his face in his hands and tries with little success to control his violent sobbing.

  30°W 7°S

  In the stern of the ship, Stoker is standing over the inflated Zodiac, which is so heavily patched that it looks like a homemade camouflaged punt. The engineer had moved the boat down to B-deck, where he worked day and night on stitching the torn rubber together. He glued large patches over the stitching with contact glue and then bonded the seams with a soldering iron. When this was done he inflated the boat, which still leaks in two places.

  Stoker uses a marker pen to draw circles around the holes before he deflates the boat. Then he cuts patches from the rainwear that was sacrificed for this job. Next he spreads a thin layer of contact glue around the holes on one side of the patch and gets on with other tasks while the glue is drying. He lifts up the outboard motor and attaches it to the vertical plywood board that he has screwed securely to horizontal wooden blocks using angle brackets.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asks Guðmundur, looking at his watch.

  17:21

  ‘Just fine,’ murmurs Stoker and pulls the cord, starting the outboard motor. ‘I
EXPECT TO FINISH IT THIS EVENING!’

  ‘That’s good!’ shouts the captain, frowning in the dark blue smoke. ‘WE LEAVE FIRST THING TOMORROW MORNING!’

  ‘YEAH, OKAY!’ Stoker cuts off the one-cylinder, four-stroke engine by pressing a red button. ‘Then all we still have to do is pour some petrol into smaller containers and cut out a canvas tarpaulin, in case it rains.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea,’ says the captain, nodding his head. ‘Is the engine okay?’

  ‘Yep’ says Stoker as he gets down on his knees, places the patches over the holes and applies pressure with the tips of his fingers. ‘We just need to top up the oil and tune it a little.’

  ‘I thought you’d finished patching the dinghy?’

  ‘As good as finished,’ mumbles Stoker, standing up to fetch the soldering iron and aluminium foil. ‘I’ll inflate it after I’ve bonded the patches with the rubber. If it’s still hard tomorrow morning, then we’re safe to go.’

  31°W 7°S

  Stoker ambles down to the engine room in his clogs to fetch the screwdriver that he’s going to use to tune the outboard motor. He’s wearing overalls but he’s taken off the upper part and tied the sleeves round his waist. Even though the sun has set, it’s still twenty degrees outside, a densely humid equatorial calm that smells of salt and sunbaked land in the distance.

  He crosses the steel floor, turns on the lights in the machine shop, finds the screwdriver he is looking for and sticks it in his pocket. But he doesn’t turn the light off straightaway, because there is something he wants to do before he goes back up to B-deck.