by B. TRAVEN
The skipper was gone. And so was the elegant Dutch with milk and honey.
39
A ship. Stanislav needed it badly. “Honorable trade,” he said, “is all right for a certain length of time, provided this length is not too long. You see, here a box, there a crate, then yonder a bag with crude coffee or sugar all this doesn’t hurt anybody. This goes for overhead expenses and inevitable losses of the big merchants. They don’t feel it, while it will help me well over water. The boxes and crates and bags may just as well have been broken or busted while being loaded. Anyway, this is not the point. The point simply is, one gets tired of the honorable trade.”
I said nothing and let him go on spreading out the inner part of his soul.
“Yep, believe me, Pippip, you get awfully tired and bored of this kind of business. There is something which is not true about the whole thing. And you feel it, see? You are just like lying all the time upon somebody’s pocket. Almost like living on a woman. So you feel dirty, see? For a certain time, well, you cannot help it. You do your very best to land a job, but you cannot get one, not even by selling your soul to the devil. You see, you want to do something. You wish to be useful. I do not mean that silly stuff about man’s duty. That’s bunk. There is in yourself that which is driving you on to do something worth while. Not all the time hanging on like a bum beggar. It is like this — hell, I can’t explain what I mean. It is that you want to create something, to help things going. You you I mean, some day when you know it is all over, you wish to have the true satisfaction of having done at least something while you were alive on this crazy earth. What I mean is, to stand by the wheel, say, in the dirtiest weather hell and devils can think of and then, in such weather, keep the course straight. That is something which nothing in the whole world can be compared with. No honorable trade, no matter how thick and honey it may be, is like that. Damn my soul. There you stand by the wheel, and the old bucket kicks around and around and wants to get off the course by all means and by all forces under the thickest sky you can imagine. But no matter how hard she may kick, you hold the wheel by the course just like that, see?”
Stanislav grabbed me by the belt and with a powerful twist tried to throw me off my feet and around, just as if he had his hands clenched to the wheel.
“Let go,” I cried, “I am no rudder.”
“Don’t get sore. I only wanted to show you what I mean. See, when you get her through and out of that sour weather without losing so much as half a point off the course, I can tell you, your heart jumps like a fish in a frying-pan. Then you could just bellow loud, out of joy and satisfaction. Just think how powerful you feel — you, such a little mite of a human thing, you can hold a fifteen-thousand-ton bucket in the heaviest gale straight on, as if it were a baby coming straight from mother, innocent like new-fallen snow. And then the old man comes along, or the first, and he glances at the rose, and he says: ‘Fine work, Koski. Man, you are some sailor, as I haven’t seen many the last twenty years. Damned fine accurate work, my boy. Hold her on this way and we’ll still back her through and we won’t lose even fifteen minutes off the schedule.’ Tell you, Pippip, then your heart knocks right in your throat, you can feel it. And you just could cry out aloud how happy you are and all the world around you. Believe me, the finest honorable trade, no matter how much you may get out of it, cannot beat such a feeling as holding old Caroline straight by the course.”
“I never stood by the wheel of a big can,” I broke in, “but I had the rudder of five-hundred-tonners all right. I suppose what you say is positively correct. Painting is just as pleasing often as standing by the wheel. If you can draw a green edge without breaking over into the brown layer, it sure makes you feel that you have done a great job. Because it takes a good time before you can accomplish this when the ship is in the open, and before you learn not to spit and splash the paint all over like a puppy does on mother’s fresh-washed floor.”
Stanislav did not speak for a while. He was meditating. After a few minutes he spat in good fashion over the railing. He bit off a cigar he had bought an hour ago from a dealer who had come alongside with his boat and had sold tobacco, matches, postal-cards of acting couples, fruits, chocolate, chewing-gum, buttons, thread and needles, writing-paper, stamps, and all such things as are offered to crews by these small traders in rowboats.
Stanislav lighted his cigar, spat out again, and said: “Perhaps you are going to laugh at what I am going to tell you. Anyway it is the truth. Now I am here on this can to shovel coal, to cart coal, to heave ashes, and to do the dirtiest and most miserable kind of work any rotten landlubber can do aboard a ship, while actually I am an A.B., and for sure a ten times better one than any of these three brazen drunkards here that think themselves such great guys. Maybe it is a shame, a real disgrace for me, a good sailor, to shovel coal here and all that goes with it. But maybe it is not. It has to be done to keep a can going, and somebody has to do it. I tell you, Pippip, even this has got its fun. You see, to throw into the tunnel, down to the stoke-hold, some six hundred shovels of coal and do it fine even in heavy weather, and then look at this mountain of fuel you have shoveled in, right in front of the furnaces, so that the fire’m stares at you in admiration, you feel so happy that you just could go and kiss that mountain of coal. Because it all looks so funny and so useful at the same time. That mountain also stares at you, and rather bewildered, for only a half hour ago it was still in the farthest corner of the upper bunker and now, without giving it any time to think things over, it is down here, ready to go into the furnaces and make steam for the bucket. Doesn’t that make you happy and feel as if you had done something important? Sure it does. And even here, believe me, the best honorable trade cannot be compared with what you feel having this mountain of coal down in the stoke-hold. You feel so healthy and so sane that I think the skipper can’t feel any better after having brought the ship home through a nasty sea.”
“Sometimes I feel that way also,” I said.
“And why is it that you have to do the honorable trade? Is it your fault? I should say not. You haven’t got anything better to do. You can’t lie in bed all day long or bum about and hang at the curb-stones day in, day out. You get plumb crazy in your head if you do.”
“Well, and you forgot to tell me. What happened when the Dutch was gone?” I asked him.
“I could not stand it any longer. I had to have a ship and go out again. Or I would have gone nuts. That excellent passport I had, which was no good for me, I sold to a stranded American for twelve dollars. Then, one night near the freight depot, a sack of coffee burst open again and in that way I got some sugar; I mean, of course, dough. Coffee was high then in Germany. Occasionally I went with Danish fishermen, helping them getting brandy into Denmark. Denmark had extremely high duty on foreign brandy. This business paid well. When I, finally, had shoveled on enough money, I took the train to Emmerich, which is the border station on the German-Holland international line. I got across fine at night. Yet when I bought a ticket to Rotterdam I was caught, and in the dark of night pushed across the border back into Germany again.”
Surprised at such a yarn, I asked: “You don’t mean to say the Dutch secretly smuggle people at night across the German border?”
I was anxious to hear Stanislav’s opinion of a case about which I thought I was an expert.
“They?” he said. “They? Don’t make me laugh. They do other things. Worse than such a trifle. Every night there is going on, at all European borders, a lively exchange of unwelcome travelers. Men and women and children. The Germans kick their Jews, and their undesirable foreigners, and Bolshevists and communists and pacifists, across the Dutch, the Belgian, the French, the Polish, the Swiss, the Danish border just like nothing. And, of course, the Czechs, the Poles, and all the others do exactly the same in exchange. They simply cannot do it openly. It would cost them milliards of money. Who is going to pay for that? It’s being done on such a great scale that it has become almost a legitimate proced
ure. Everybody knows it, yet nobody admits it.”
Shaking my head I said: “Stanislav, now don’t you try to pull my leg over the table. I can’t believe it.”
“They do it just the same, whether you believe it or not. That doesn’t matter a bit. I have met scores of men along the Dutch line who have had experiences you sure would get the kick of your life out of if I told you about them. What else can the officials do? It seems still the most human thing to do under the circumstances. They can’t murder them or throw them into the ocean. Those people haven’t committed any crime or anything bad. Only they haven’t got a passport. Some can’t pay for it. Most of them have had trouble with their voting for adoption. Lots have lost their country altogether. Their country has been split and divided up between five or six different nations. Every country tries to get rid of all such people who have no passport and no established nationality, for these people are for ever causing trouble to any nation that harbors them. Now, of course, if all the nations would cut out passports and all such things and do as it was before the war, this trade in human souls and this kicking out and pushing about of people — often very decent people all that would cease immediately and everything would stop that goes with it.”
“I have said this before,” I interrupted him.
“I know you did. But don’t you put into your head the idea you invented it. Thousands of people have said this before you. Whom do passports do any good? No one but the bureaucrats. As long as there are not at least five hundred million sane and decent persons found on earth who admit the same you say and I say, there will be no change. That’s all I can say.”
Stanislav had been warned by the Dutch border officials that if he should ever try again to come into their country he would get the workhouse, or the chain-gang, or at least the prison camp. He did not mind. He wanted to have a ship, as a banker wants depositors. He was afraid of nothing. So the same night he crossed over into Holland again. He had learned how to avoid border patrols. So he worked more cleverly and with more intelligence. He reached Amsterdam. Four days afterwards he got an Italian, a real rotter. A death ship with all the trimmings. She was all set to make sailor angels or sailor devils as the case might be. He went on his first trip out on the reefs with her. He and a couple of fellow-sailors survived and landed on some shore. In rags he bummed and begged along the shore until he came to a port where after a few weeks he got another ship. Again it was a death can. When he found it out he skipped her in a North African port. He had reached the end of his possibilities for surviving when the Yorikke put in. He knew what she was and what she was after. But he had not eaten for days. And having tried his honorable trade several times again, the planks of the pier had become too hot for him, and he had to look for a hole to get out. The only hole was the Yorikke, just hauling in anchor. He hopped on and was welcomed. Safely on deck, he made faces over the rail at the police.
Now where is he? A man fine at heart and body, for ever willing to work true and honestly. Where am I? Where are all the deads to be some day? On a desolate reef. Or on a shore with another death ship the only future ahead of them. Nobody can sail death ships for ever and get away with it. Some day, no matter how far off it may be, everybody has to pay for his voyage. And the payment is always made on and with a death ship.
One day I said to Stanislav: “I have been told that in the bunk on top of mine somebody was killed. Did you know him, Lavski?”
“Of course I knew him. We were almost like brothers. Was a German. Home in Mülhausen, in Alsace. I don’t know his right name. Said name was Paul. He was called Frenchy aboard.
Coal-drag. Once, in a night, when we were sitting in a coal-bunker, he told me all about himself. He was crying like a schoolboy.
“He learned the trade of a coppersmith in Strasbourg or in Metz. Don’t remember which of those two towns. When he had finished his apprenticeship he went traveling, as most young German artisans do, so as to get an all-round experience of their trade. He went to France, worked there for a few months, then he went to Italy, where he also worked for a time at his trade.
“When that bloody trouble started, he found himself in Switzerland. He had no money and no job. Was caught as a vagrant and deported to Germany. There he was put in the army. Fighting on the Italian front, he was taken prisoner by the Italians. He escaped from the prison camp, stole civilian clothes, and bummed about in Italy. It was southern Italy, where he had worked before the war. So he knew that part well enough. Somehow he was caught. Nobody knew that he was an escaped prisoner of war; they accepted his story that he had bummed in Italy all the time. He was taken to a camp for civilian aliens.
“From there he escaped before the armistice and fled to Switzerland. The Swiss again deported him to Germany. Here he found well-paid work in a brewery. It was the time when they had some kind of communistic trouble there, which after a short success was quelled by the socialists. He was thrown into prison, and later deported as a Frenchman. The French, however, did not accept him, probably because he was thought a communist. All people today are afraid of communists, as in the time of the Roman emperors everybody was afraid of the Christians, Officially, of course, the French refused him recognition on account of the fact that he had been away too long from Alsace, which was now French territory again, and that he had not declared his adoption to either country. What does a worker care about such nonsense? He has to worry and to think about other troubles when out of a job and when running around like a hungry rabbit to find something to eat.
“The funny thing was, while the French, without saying so, did not accept him, because of his communistic ideas, truth is he did not know even the elements of communism. He had no idea at all what it was all about. What he talked was pure insane nonsense. Nothing behind. That’s the trouble with nine hundred ninety-nine out of every thousand people that they think they know something and really they don’t know anything. If the capitalists would know the truth about communism I feel sure they would adopt this system overnight to meet their fear of depressions. Of course, it is by far better they do not accept it; they sure would spoil the whole thing just as much as the original Christian ideas were spoiled the very moment an emperor made them his state religion.
“The Germans, now, ordered him to leave Germany within forty-eight hours or he would be put at hard labor for six months with exactly the same deportation order meeting him at the prison gate after he had served this term. And so on until his death.
“What else could he do facing such a dilemma? He had to make France. Half a dozen times he had been at the French consulate without any success. When he came there for the eighth time, the consul did not receive him, but forbade him to set foot in his office ever after. He had lost his job long ago. At the French border he was held and sent back into Germany, where again he got six months’ hard labor. The Germans warned him once more to beat it. He went to Luxemburg. From there he made France. He could not speak much French. It was not long before the French caught him. He swore he was a French citizen. Official investigation was made, with the result that it was established clearly that he had tried to acquire fraudulently a citizenship to which he had no legal right. Such doing is today considered a greater crime than a bank hold-up or taking a jane behind a bush without her full consent. He was to get five years or so for this crime. To punish such a crime with five years is only the beginning. The next stage will be, without question, the electric chair. God the Almighty can no longer bestow on human beings citizenship; any bureaucrat may set it aside if he wants to.
“The French left him a hole through which he could escape a couple of years of prison. So he went to the recruiting office of the Foreign Legion and came out a legionnaire. If he could stand it for nine years, the French would grant him a little pension and about one tenth of French citizenship.
“He could not stand it and to keep alive he had to run away. He told me it is not quite so easy as one may see it often in the pictures. Where can he go? If lucky, to
Spanish territory. But the distance is too far. Then there are certain Moroccans who are greedy enough to get the money that is paid for capturing a deserter. He said that he would have rather killed himself than return to the legion a captured deserter. It is not so pleasant, what awaits them when they come back.
“Then there is another type of Moroccan, who does not return a deserter, regardless of how high the reward may be. He catches the deserter, strips him entirely, and then lets him lie on the sand in the boiling sun. If he happens to meet such a fate it would be still better to be brought back to the regiment. There are still others who take a legionnaire and torture him slowly to death with a refinement that takes a week or so before it is fully accomplished. With them nobody on earth is more hated than a legionnaire. Again, there are tribes who take the captured man and sell him for a good price to the farthest interior, far south of the Sahara Desert, to be used as a slave for the treadmills. Also very pleasant. There are so many reasons why the Foreign Legion has so astoundingly few deserters. The real legion, the comradeship and the honor of its soldiers, are not quite as pictured in the movies made for salesladies and for the profit of the film companies.
“This fellow, though, he had all the luck. He met Moroccans that first wanted to tie him to the tail of a horse and skin him. Yet he could make them understand that he was German. Now, the Germans are Christian dogs as well as the French. Not much difference. Nevertheless, the Germans had fought the cursed French, which was something to their credit. Exactly as the Germans are liked in Cuba, Nicaragua, Spain and all over Spanish America for having killed some fifty-five thousand gringos. To all the Mohammedans, including the Moroccans, the Germans have got one more point to their credit. They have fought side by side with the Turks, also Mohammedans. All prisoners of war of Mohammedan faith captured by the Germans were treated as they treated no other prisoners, because these prisoners were considered rather friends than enemies. This is known all over the Moslem world.