Hard experience convinced them of this, the same experience that had lined their faces and tortured their bodies with frostbite. When the thirty-six ships of the convoy abandoned sailing in formation and tried limping on their own to Murmansk, to Molotovsk, or to Archangel on the White Sea, the Germans wouldn't require the overwhelming firepower of the Tirpitz's fifteen-inch guns to sink them: the U-boats could manage it with ease. Now that the British destroyers and the corvettes that had escorted them had been called off to go chasing after the Tirpitz, the convoy's thirty-six ships were left defenseless. No, they were doomed. Their own protectors had tricked them into an ambush.
They realized their insignificance with bitterness. They were expendable.
But what about their cargo? In Hvalfjörður they'd been told that in total they were carrying 297 aircraft, 594 tanks, 4,246 military vehicles, and 150,000 tons of ammunition and explosives to Russia. Were the British navy's officers prepared to sacrifice all that, simply to boast that they'd sent the Tirpitz to the bottom of the ocean?
They didn't get it. The only thing they understood about this whole business was that they couldn't trust anyone but themselves if they wanted to stay alive. If they didn't survive, they'd die without a soldier's sense of duty fulfilled or the comfort of knowing that their sacrifice made sense. If they were sunk, they'd disappear not just without honor, but without any acknowledgment that they'd so much as existed.
The defiance that flooded them wasn't directed solely at the enemy, but at friend and foe alike. As if they'd lost all notion of the difference.
The order came as a relief to Knud Erik. It meant that he could stop worrying about the drowning men. From now on, it was all about him and his crew. He could finally allow himself to surrender to the cynicism that comes when a crisis of conscience has exhausted itself. His sole priority was survival. They'd be alone in the middle of the ocean, and that was where he wanted to be. Alone, with no little red lights.
He changed course and headed north for Hope Island, sailing as close as he dared to the rim of the ice. Dense freezing fog covered the entire area. He ordered the crew to paint the whole ship white. They lay still for a couple of days, with the boilers switched off so the funnel smoke wouldn't give them away. The pack ice grated against the sides of the ship, and her steel plates protested in an ominous bass growl that from time to time shrilled to a treble scream. The message from the hull was clear: with a little more pressure from the pack ice, the Nimbus's luck might just run out.
Knud Erik thought back to the time the Kristina had been trapped in ice. The heavy timber of the sailing ship had been pliable; it didn't need to prove its strength the way steel did, but instead let the ice push the vessel about until the weight that threatened to crush her ended up supporting her.
He ignored the Nimbus's screaming hull. Better ice than U-boats. He dreamt about letting the Nimbus freeze and stay frozen until the whole world began to thaw and the weapons fell silent. He'd fought the sea his whole life. Now he embraced the dangerous ice as a friend.
He switched on the radio and invited the crew to gather around it as they'd done when they listened to the RAF frequencies. They heard nothing but distress signals: one SOS after another, and each cry for help a funeral service. There were only minutes between a ship's being attacked and its sinking. No one came to its rescue. Their crews went down alone in the icy cold sea. The Carlton, the Daniel Morgan, the Honomu, the Washington, the Paulus Potter. They counted twenty ships. There was nowhere to hide, not even here in the freezing fog at the end of the world.
They got going again and the Nimbus followed the ice edge north of the seventy-fifth parallel until she reached Novaja Zemlja, then headed south toward the White Sea. The ship encountered four lifeboats containing survivors from the Washington and the Paulus Potter. Both ships had been sunk by a formation of Junker 88s. The planes had flown over them as they climbed into their lifeboats, and the airmen had waved to them cheerfully while a cameraman filmed them for the German weekly newsreels. They hadn't waved back.
Captain Richter from the Washington came on board to consult a chart. After a while bent over it, he asked if they could spare a compass. His crew were still crouching in the lifeboats.
"Why d'you want a compass?" Knud Erik asked. "We'll take you."
Richter shook his head. "We'd prefer to sail on alone."
"In an open boat? The nearest coast is four hundred nautical miles away."
"We'd prefer to get there in one piece," Richter said, eyeing him calmly.
Wondering if the captain was suffering from shell shock, Knud Erik addressed him in the kind of tone he might use to persuade a wayward child.
"We can't offer you berths, but of course we'll find you a warm place to sleep. We've enough provisions, and in this weather we can manage nine knots. We'll be there in a couple of days."
"You do realize what's happened to the rest of the convoy?" Richter said, in the same calm tone. Knud Erik nodded. "A lifeboat's the safest place to be. The Germans won't waste their bullets on men in a boat. They're only interested in ships. They'll get you too. I'm grateful for the offer, but we'd prefer to go it alone."
He climbed down the ladder with the compass. In the boat, his men were slapping themselves to keep warm. If the wind rose, they'd get splashed and become encased in an armor of ice. But still they preferred their lifeboats.
The men pulled at the oars while Knud Erik ordered the ship full speed ahead. He stood on the bridge and watched the boats as they disappeared.
The next day a solitary Junkers appeared on the horizon and headed straight for them. You could hear its machine guns rasping from a great distance. The gunners on the bridge answered back. The wheelhouse took several direct hits, but no one on the bridge was wounded. Then the Junkers dropped its bomb. The plane was so close, it almost collided with the mast. The bomb exploded in the water near to starboard, not near enough to tear up the side of the ship, but enough for the detonation to lift the Nimbus half out of the water and land her again with a force that snapped a steam pipe in the engine room, which made the engine cut out. They were no longer maneuverable.
The Junkers turned around and came back with a howl. The machine cannons on the Nimbus were firing at maximum capacity. The wheelhouse was pierced again, and they threw themselves to the floor. Only the gunner on the bridge wing was left standing. They waited for the explosion that would signal the ship's deathblow. She was loaded with British Valentine tanks, trucks, and TNT. If they received a direct hit, there'd be no time to climb into the lifeboats. They all knew that.
"Do it then, goddammit!" Knud Erik cursed.
Outside the gunner kept firing as if his hands had frozen fast to the trigger. Then, through the rasping of the cannon, they heard the noise of the Junkers's engine die away. Had the pilot decided to spare them after all? They remained on the floor, unable to believe that the danger had passed. Surely any minute now, the plane's engine would roar over them again, and they'd be finished.
Total silence. The machine cannon on the bridge wing was quiet too.
"It's over," the gunner said.
They were still shaking as they scrambled to their feet. The Junkers was now a tiny dot on the horizon. The pilot must have been on his way home after an expedition when he spotted them. He must have had only one bomb left, and chanced it.
Once again, the Nimbus had proved herself to be a lucky ship.
Dear Knud Erik,
Grind a man into the dirt and observe him beneath your heel. Is he fighting to get up? Does he cry out against the injustice he has suffered? No, he stays there, proud of all the punishment he can take. His manhood lies in his foolish endurance.
What does such a man do when he is held underwater? Does he fight to get up?
No, his pride lies in his ability to hold his breath.
You let the waves wash over you, you saw the bulwark smashed in, you saw the masts go overboard, you saw the ship take her final plunge. You held your bre
ath for ten years, twenty years, one hundred years. In the 1890s you had 340 ships, in 1925 you had 120, a decade later half that. Where did they go? The Uranus, the Swallow, the Smart, the Star, the Crown, the Laura, the Forward, the Saturn, the Ami, the Denmark, the Eliezer, the Ane Marie, the Felix, the Gertrud, the Industry, and the Harriet: vanished without a trace, crushed by the ice, rammed by trawlers and steamers, lost, smashed to pieces, stranded by Sandø, Bonavista, Waterville Bay, Sun's Rock.
Did you know that one in four ships that sailed the Newfoundland route never returned? What would it take to make you stop? Fewer cargoes? But freight rates kept falling: they halved in a decade. You simply lowered your wages, ate even worse food, gritted your teeth. You practiced holding your breath underwater.
You sailed where no one else dared or wanted to. You were the last.
You didn't have chronometers on board. You'd stopped being able to afford them. You could no longer work out the longitude, and when a steamer passed you, you would signal, "Where am I?"
Indeed, where were you?
In despair,
Your mother
WALLY WAS THE first to notice it. The others were on the bridge, supervising the unloading, when he turned to them and remarked enthusiastically, "Can't you see what a great place this is?"
They shrugged in their duffel coats and looked out over Molotovsk. Half-sunken, battered ships languished in the port, while along the pier stood vast piles of rubble, which were the remains of warehouses. Farther off in the low, rocky landscape loomed sooty barracks-like buildings roofed with tarpaulins. It was the height of summer, and although the sun was in the sky twenty-fours hours a day, it did little to warm the air. In the perpetual light they felt as if their eyelids had been cut off and they lived in a world where sleep had been abolished. The rocky gray landscape, the sunlight, and the knowledge that they were one hell of a way from civilized society filled them with a creeping, woolly-headed lethargy.
"Fetch the straitjacket," Anton snarled. "The boy's gone mad. He thinks he's in New York."
"This is better than New York. The chief engineer may have gone blind as a mole down in the machine room, but surely the rest of you can see what I mean."
And then they did. The workers unloading and placing tackles around the ammunition crates in their hull weren't men: they were women. Women with machine guns, patrolling the wharf where emaciated, thinly clad German prisoners of war stacked the crates onto the waiting transport trucks. And behind the wheel of each, a woman, preparing to drive the freight to the front line.
"Take a look at her behind," Helge said, pointing.
Not that you could see much: they wore felt boots and baggy boiler suits that concealed their curves. All they could do was guess at the bodies hidden under the shapeless clothing, speculating whether they were slim or thickset. Some of the women were young, though most seemed to be over thirty. It was hard to work out their ages. They had broad faces and gray, unhealthy complexions. Their hair was hidden under caps, though a few wore headscarves.
Not that any of that mattered. It had been three months since the men's last shore leave, and the sight of women in the hold or on deck was enough to stimulate the most important component of sexual desire: imagination. They started talking animatedly about their favorite parts of women's anatomy, while mentally stripping the dockers and guards in the insane hope that beneath the coarse, filthy uniforms every single one of them was a pin-up girl: a butterfly trapped in a grubby gray cocoon.
Knud Erik was wearing his captain's uniform. Normally he never put it on, but it was universally acknowledged that the Communists respected uniforms and nothing else, so when you negotiated with the Soviet authorities, it was smart diplomacy to look as official as possible if you wanted to get anything done. He noticed that one soldier kept staring at him, and he imagined it was his uniform that attracted her. He met her gaze and held it. As far as he could tell, she was slim and about the same age he was; she had ash-blond hair fixed in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. He didn't know why he looked back at her. It was a reflex he couldn't control, though he realized that it could be taken as a provocation. She didn't turn away but stared straight back, as if testing him. He couldn't interpret it any other way, though he had no idea what the point of it was.
His concentration was broken by a loud bang. A crate of ammunition had slipped out of its tackle and crashed onto the wharf, where it had sprung open. One of the German prisoners immediately began rummaging inside it, probably hoping to find something edible. Two female dockers grabbed hold of him and pulled him away. He struggled briefly, then gave up and let himself be dragged along the wharf. The unloading had stopped.
The soldier who'd been staring at Knud Erik the moment before shouted a brief command, and the dockers released the prisoner. The soldier stepped up to him, released the safety catch of the machine gun strapped across her shoulder, and fired from a short distance. She glanced briefly at the skinny figure lying prostrate before her, as if to make sure he was dead, then looked up at Knud Erik. This time he was in no doubt what she was up to. It was a challenge.
***
That evening, as he sat alone in his cabin, slowly numbing his brain with the bottle of whiskey that he never touched during the day, he had no doubt who the woman was. She was an angel of death, come to claim him. This crazy—even revolting—notion, which he didn't have the strength to resist, filled him with desire, and for the first time since the nights of bombardment in London he got an erection.
The town, which lay a couple of kilometers from the port, was nothing but a handful of wooden houses arranged around a square. The streets radiated from it like wheel spokes that led nowhere: a few hundred meters away, the wilderness began.
The town had an International Club, and that's where they headed that night. The first sight that greeted them was a badly stuffed, scrawny-looking bear standing on its hind legs, with its mouth open, baring a row of yellow teeth. The two fangs were broken, as if snapped off by someone afraid that the creature might spring to life and attack the customers.
Behind a table in a corner sat a bald man wearing a white shirt and red suspenders and guarding a money box, a crutch at his side. An accordionist sat on a chair on a makeshift stage made of roughly sawn timber. He too was unable to walk without the help of a crutch. Both men were around fifty, and each had a row of medals on his chest. They were the only other men the crew of the Nimbus ever saw in the club.
They'd got a general picture of the losses the convoy had suffered. Only twelve out of thirty-six ships had reached their destinations. Most had been bound for Murmansk or Archangel, and only the Nimbus had managed to reach Molotovsk, which meant that in this town of women, they had no rivals. They saw other men in the streets, but like the cashier and accordionist in the International Club, they were crippled or white-haired.
The few children begged the foreign sailors for cigarettes and chocolate. Their faces, which seemed wise beyond their years, would light up with an inviting smile as they approached.
"Fuck you, Jack," they said. It was British sailors who'd taught them this greeting.
"Fuck you, Jack," Wally answered, and passed out cigarettes.
The beer in the club tasted of onions, so they drank Russian vodka, which tasted like meths and most likely was. Every time they sat down on the red velvet sofas, the only furniture apart from the bare tables, they raised clouds of dust. The floor was filthy too. Anton's explanation was that once a woman had wielded a machine gun, a mop did nothing for her.
The crew from the Nimbus sat at one end of the club, and the Molotovsk women at the other. In the evening the women changed out of their work clothes and into dresses that looked like altered smocks. They put up their hair too, but their broad, heart-shaped faces were as colorless as before; they didn't own any makeup. Rumor had it that they were all spies who seduced foreign sailors in order to wangle secrets out of them, and this added to their fascination. Not that the crew of the Nimbus h
ad any secrets.
"They're welcome to have a go," Wally said. "They can spy on me all they like." He crossed the dance floor and pulled a lipstick out of his pocket. The women looked at him with bright eyes and started giggling. He handed the lipstick to a hefty blonde in a faded blue dress, who immediately started painting the lips of the woman closest to her. The lipstick was passed around, and a bevy of red lips turned to him, united in a huge smile. He pursed his own lips at them, and another wave of giggling rolled through the room.
He walked up to the stage where the accordionist had yet to start the evening entertainment, and handed him some cigarettes: the musician stuck them behind his ear and began playing. A moan sounded from his instrument as he squeezed the air out of it in a heavy, stomping rhythm.
Wally went back to the women and bowed to one of them. She leapt up with surprising agility and led him to the center of the dance floor, where she placed her hand on his shoulder. He responded by putting his arm around her generous waist. She was older than he was and didn't hesitate to guide him through the unfamiliar steps. When the dance was over, she curtsied and returned to her seat.
"That didn't get you very far, did it?"
It was Anton. Wally turned to him.
"That was merely the preliminary discussion. I start by showing them a small selection of my wares. Then I give them time to think about it."
"You can't have much faith in yourself if you have to buy them."
Helge gave him a scornful look, and howls of protest erupted from the others.
"Quit that sanctimonious shit," Absalon said. "We all do it from time to time. You wouldn't stand a chance with that potato face of yours unless you left a few bank notes on the dresser." The others laughed.
"They're just like us," Wally said. There was an unaccustomed tenderness in his voice. "They're in need. So are we. Yes, we probably could get some Commie pussy for free. But where's the harm in spoiling them a bit? I mean, they don't look as if their life's all that much fun as it is."
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