by F. R. Tallis
The long walk from the hotel to the military harbor had been bracing but he still felt slightly drunk. He lay down on the mattress, closed his eyes, and surrendered to the illusion of movement. Tiredness paralyzed his limbs and dragged on his thoughts. Was he sinking? A fleeting recognition of mental dissolution preceded his descent into sleep.
Once again he was standing on the deck of U-330, looking out over slow-moving water that had the consistency of an oil slick. Red light seeped over the horizon and the benighted ocean was dotted with small, flaring conflagrations. The raft appeared in the middle distance as a silhouette, revealed only momentarily by the fires in its locality. With each burst of illumination it materialized a little closer. Lorenz realized that he was dreaming but this did not lessen the pervasive sense of menace. His very soul seemed at risk. A rising panic made the dream unsustainable, and he found himself awake, his heart knocking against his ribs and his mouth sucking in air. It was as though he had surfaced after very nearly drowning. Although his body remained still, his eyes darted around his nook, piecing together reality: loudspeaker, leather panel, cabinet. His heartbeat slowed and he felt the tension flowing out of his limbs. Resting his hand on his sternum he released the air that he had been retaining in his lungs.
At the periphery of vision Lorenz registered something crossing the gap between the curtain and the edge of the recess. Its transition had caused a fractional dimming of the light. There had been no accompanying sound. Lorenz propped himself up and called out, ‘Hello?’ There was no response, so he called again. ‘Hello, who is it?’ The silence seemed to intensify.
Warily, he swung his legs off the mattress and pulled the curtain aside. He looked across the boat into the darkened radio room. The sense of danger he had experienced in the dream returned and the atmosphere became overcharged with a kind of electrostatic imminence. His sure knowledge that something was about to happen did not prevent him from flinching when a loud clanging noise sent a reverberation through the hull. Lorenz judged that its source was located in the forward torpedo room.
‘Schmidt?’ Lorenz called. ‘Krausse?’
Pressing down on his mattress, Lorenz stood up and began walking toward the bow. He stepped through the bulkhead hatchway and made his way down the gangway between the bunks. The lamp in the crew’s quarters emitted a weak yellow light but it was enough to illuminate the torpedo room. As soon as the tube doors came into view he was aware that something was not quite right. Advancing slowly, he saw that one of the upper tube doors was open and he was certain that it had been closed before. He reached out and checked the hinges, moving the door backward and forward. Perhaps someone had come on board and opened it while he had been asleep? The silence was dense and suffocating. Once again, he sensed imminence, a feeling of things being strained to an absolute limit. He heard a crack and the tinkling of broken glass.
Lorenz walked back toward the control room, and when he got as far as the officers’ mess he saw that the framed photograph of Vice Admiral Dönitz was askew. The glass had been smashed and the shatter pattern consisted of radial cracks emanating from a central point. A few shards had fallen onto the linoleum and reflected the light with unusual brilliance. Lorenz lifted the frame off its hook and pressed his hand against the wooden panelling. It was warm, but not exceptionally so. He placed the photograph on the table and proceeded to the control room where he waited in a state of alert, uneasy preparedness.
The sound that followed made his limbs go rigid, and a tingling sensation passed over his scalp. He could hear someone coming toward him from the empty compartment he had only just left: a slow, measured step. It crossed his mind that the phenomenon might be caused by a returning member of the repair team walking along the upper casing, but no sooner had this thought formed than he recognized it as yet another desperate attempt to cling to a remnant of a normality. There was a buzzing sound, the lamp flickered, and he was enveloped by darkness.
The footsteps were getting louder.
Lorenz remembered the vivid dream he had had of being attacked by Sutherland, hands closing around his throat, terrible weakness, and being unable to call for help—their noses almost touching. Was it prophetic? Had he been vouchsafed a preview of his own demise? He felt blindly for the chart table and then the locker above it. After opening the door he reached inside where, next to the sextant, his searching fingers discovered a flashlight.
Sliding the switch he was rewarded with a bright circle of light. He did not turn. The footsteps had stopped, and he found that he was unable to move. He remained perfectly still, facing the locker, but said with cold deliberation: ‘This is my boat—my command.’ Then, very slowly, he looked over his shoulder and aimed the flashlight-beam into the darkness. There was no one there. He moved his feet to ease the discomfort of his twisted waist and observed the circle of light warping as it passed over the uneven surfaces.
From the aft end of the boat there was another resonant clang. Lorenz immediately set off, marching briskly through the petty officers’ quarters and continuing into the diesel room. The stillness was particularly unnerving in this part of the boat because it was usually filled with the roar and clatter of the engines. He proceeded more cautiously but froze when the door behind him slammed shut. Suddenly, he felt in great danger, as if he had been lured into the diesel room for a specific purpose. He struggled to overcome an irrational conviction that he was entombed and that he would never feel the warmth of the sun’s rays again. Even more terrifying was the creeping conviction that he was not alone, that he was being closely studied. Richter claimed to have been pushed. A displacement of air chilled the back of Lorenz’s neck. Would he ‘slip’ and bang his head on a diesel engine too?
Turning sharply, Lorenz traced wild arcs through the air with his flashlight. For a glaring instant, halfway through its trajectory, the beam illuminated a face beneath a peaked cap. It had been close, alarmingly close, and Lorenz drew back, producing an atavistic cry of horror. When he aimed the flashlight at the location where he thought he had just seen the face, the passage of the beam was unobstructed. Anger made him address the shadows: ‘Get off my boat!’
Lorenz felt confused and divorced from reality. It was as though when he had awakened from his brief sleep he had not been fully delivered from the dream, and that he was still subject to its influences. The concession he had made by accepting the ghost’s existence had shaken the edifice of his intellect to its very foundations. He felt unhinged, no longer confident that he could trust his own perceptions. How could the boat be haunted? Such was his resistance to accepting what he had hitherto considered impossible that the idea of his own mental infirmity was now almost attractive. If ghosts were real then there might also be a heaven, a hell, judgement, and eternal damnation.
He staggered forward and opened the door that had slammed shut. At once he could hear voices and the thrumming of the ladder. Through the aft hatch of the control room he detected activity. Someone said, ‘The lights aren’t working.’ A gruffer companion swore and complained, ‘What? Have the batteries gone flat already?’
A man in oily overalls stepped into the petty officers’ quarters. ‘Kapitänleutnent Lorenz?’ He was followed by two younger men also dressed like mechanics.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Lorenz.
‘What happened to the lights?’ The senior mechanic’s face was crisscrossed by deep creases filled with dirt.
‘They just went out,’ Lorenz replied.
The mechanic shrugged. ‘Did you want to talk to us about something?’
‘No,’ Lorenz shook his head. ‘I just wanted to see how things are progressing.’
‘Not very well, I’m sorry to say.’ The mechanic grimaced. ‘We had to deal with an emergency on U-685. Anyway . . . your engine mountings are in a terrible state. And you’ll need a new propeller. One of the blades is badly out of true. But don’t you worry,’ he smiled revealing large, asinine teeth, ‘we’ll get your boat ready for action as soon as we possibly ca
n. I can promise you that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Lorenz, knowing all too well that such pledges were invariably honored.
ON THE EXPRESS TRAIN TO Paris, his head resting against the window, Lorenz watched the French countryside flashing past through the transparent wraith of his own reflection. The landscape was dotted with isolated farmhouses, and the boundaries between the fields were softened by a pale pink mist. Lorenz listened to the rhythm of the wheels on the track and was reminded of hammering diesels. Repetition lulled him into a state of drowsy abstractedness, and the sound seemed to change until it began to resemble exploding depth charges. He lifted his head away from the glass, picked up a newspaper, and turned the pages until he came to an article that accused President Roosevelt of indefensible duplicity. The propagandists were clearly readying the German people for a declaration of war. More U-boats would be needed; a lot more than the shipyards of Kiel and Hamburg were currently able to produce. He stopped reading and laid the newspaper aside.
It was still morning when the express train pulled into the station at Montparnasse. Lorenz hailed a cab and asked to be taken to Place Vendôme, where a smart hotel had been appropriated for the exclusive use of naval officers. In the foyer he ran into Kurt Gessner, an old friend who had recently been promoted to the rank of Korvettenkapitän, and they agreed to meet the following evening. After reporting his arrival at the reception desk, Lorenz was escorted to his suite by a porter whose humble office was aggrandized by a uniform decorated with epaulets and lengths of gold braid. The rooms were equally ostentatious and furnished in a style that suggested eighteenth-century aristocratic opulence. Leaving the porter to unpack his suitcase, Lorenz left the hotel and strolled along the north bank of the river. On the Île de la Cité he paused to admire the Gothic extravagance of the cathedral before crossing the bridge that linked the larger island to its smaller companion, the Île Saint-Louis. A few minutes later he entered his favorite restaurant, where the proprietor welcomed him with much ceremony and seated him at a table by the window.
The food was beautifully prepared and extraordinarily flavorsome: onion soup, braised rabbit with gratin potatoes, followed by a moist apple tart. Lorenz had imagined himself seated in this exact spot on countless occasions during the preceding months. Looking out over the cold, inhospitable waters of the North Atlantic, he had anticipated this moment which he was now, at last, able to savor along with the agreeable aftertaste of his meal. A woman pedaled past on a bicycle with a basket full of bread: a simple, everyday occurrence, but over a month spent at sea had imbued such simple sights with inestimable charm.
Lorenz beckoned the proprietor and asked if he could use the telephone that was situated in a rear office. When he heard Faustine’s voice he couldn’t think of anything to say except, ‘Hello, it’s me.’
There was a pause, filled with the clatter of typewriters, before Faustine responded. ‘Where are you staying?’ She was breathy with excitement.
‘Place Vendôme. Are you free this evening?’
‘Yes, of course.’
It was decided that they would have dinner together at a well-known restaurant near the opera house. Before ending the call Faustine whispered, ‘I’ve missed you.’ He pictured her covering the receiver with her hand to ensure that she was not overheard by her colleagues.
Lorenz spent the rest of the day wandering around the streets of Paris like a seasoned boulevardier. His route took him through the Latin Quarter, across Saint-Germain, beneath the Eiffel Tower, and up the Champs-Élysées. In the Jardin des Tuileries he saw German soldiers buying homemade biscuits from a girl. The men were laughing and joking with her, provoking feigned desperation with their abominable French. She was smiling and demonstrating a precocious grasp of the relationship between flirtation and commercial success. By the time Lorenz got back to his hotel it was already dark.
Two hours later he was sitting in a private dining room, fitfully reading the menu and consulting his wristwatch. After a significant wait, the door swung open, he heard Faustine thanking someone, and suddenly she materialized directly in front of him. She was wearing a long coat with a fur collar, and her beryl eyes seemed to glow from within like those of a cat. Lorenz stood up, walked around the table, and planted a kiss on her gloved hand. Her perfume reminded him of lily of the valley.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said in accented German. ‘Monsieur Gilbert insisted that I finish typing all of his letters before I could leave.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Lorenz, freeing her arms from her coat sleeves and taking her hat. ‘You’re here now.’
As the food and wine were served, Lorenz listened to Faustine’s fast-flowing talk with inordinate pleasure. She gossiped about her colleagues (one of whom was unmarried and pregnant), defamed Monsieur Gilbert, described the plots of numerous films she had seen, and complained bitterly about her feckless mother. She did not invite Lorenz to reciprocate because she understood that he was obliged to keep the details of his life secret. Even if the navy had made him uniquely exempt from the customary prohibitions, he would never have chosen to spoil their evening together by describing the horrors of submarine warfare. Occasionally, he would mention some of the more amusing incidents that had happened on patrol, like his discovery of the smuggled bra, but that was the limit of his openness. His contributions to their conversation were necessarily confined to bland generalities or harmless anecdotes.
After they had finished eating they walked back to Lorenz’s hotel where they drank champagne and made love. Their mutual culmination was poignant, and they both cried out, gripping each other tightly. A line of hazy street light showed where the curtains almost touched. He was dimly aware of Faustine smoking cigarettes; the sound of matches being struck, one after another, becoming increasingly distant.
When he awakened she had gone, but not without having written an affectionate note that he discovered on the bedside table. Her fragrances still clung to the pillow. He breathed in the smell of her perfume and the musk of her body and acknowledged that he was, in all probability, falling in love.
As he luxuriated in the moment, his thoughts were interrupted by unwelcome, intrusive recollections: the hardness of his mattress on U-330, the stink of the crew, burned faces, and a sea of bodies. Returning to that hellish world was always a formidable challenge, but now the hardship and horrors of war were compounded by less tangible threats. Foreboding made his stomach churn. Lorenz turned his face into the soft whiteness of the pillow and groaned.
THE SCHEHERAZADE CLUB WAS A high-class bar mostly frequented by submarine officers. Even Vice Admiral Dönitz was known to drink there when he was in Paris. A small band of musicians were playing arrangements of popular German songs, and ice buckets were beginning to appear in significant numbers. Lorenz was waiting for Faustine at a corner table when he noticed a young girl approaching. As she advanced he remembered her from a previous visit. ‘Siegfried?’ Her voice was hesitant. She touched her neck self-consciously and the skin flushed. ‘It is you—isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, standing up; somewhat embarrassed because he couldn’t remember her name. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t quite . . .’
‘Audrey,’ she said, making a forgiving gesture to indicate that she was not offended. ‘I was wondering . . . have you heard anything from Richard?’ Lorenz suddenly remembered who she was: Richard Heppe’s girlfriend. ‘It’s been such a long time,’ she added.
‘Oh, I’m sure he’ll be back here soon enough,’ Lorenz said encouragingly. In fact, Heppe’s boat hadn’t responded to signals from headquarters in over a month. There was always a slim hope that his name would show up on the roster of survivors that the British released occasionally, but this was very unlikely.
‘Have you seen him?’ Audrey rested a hand on the tablecloth.
‘No.’ Lorenz sighed. ‘But that doesn’t mean anything.’ Audrey’s brittle smile vanished and her eyes became moist. ‘Look,’ he continued, affecting cheery optimism, ‘the
re’s no need to worry. Not yet, anyway. Why don’t you sit down? Let me buy you a drink?’
The girl shook her head and said, ‘You’re very kind, but . . .’ Without finishing her sentence she took a few steps backward, turned, and marched off in the direction of the bathrooms. A handkerchief appeared in her right hand as her pace quickened.
The band began to play the introduction to ‘Lili Marleen,’ and the audience responded with appreciative applause. Lorenz was joined by two watch officers up from the U-boat base in Lorient. They were in high spirits and accompanied by a pair of sisters who tittered melodiously at every conceivable opportunity. Faustine arrived shortly after, and the last vacant seats at Lorenz’s table were taken by Karl Altmann, a fellow commander, and Altmann’s fiancée, Catherine Varon, a French actress who had appeared in a Hollywood musical. Varon’s stories about life in America and the excesses of famous film stars were quite amusing at first, but her tendency to dominate the conversation eventually became rather tiresome.
Lorenz’s attention had started to wander and he found himself staring at a group on the other side of the room. One of the faces was familiar. Doubt was gradually replaced by increasing levels of certainty. The face Lorenz was studying belonged to Hans Freidrich, the SS officer who had supervised the transfer of prisoners from the cargo ship to U-330. ‘I’m sorry.’ Varon displayed mild irritation as Lorenz stood: she was in the middle of another anecdote. ‘I’ve just spotted someone I really must talk to.’ As he crossed the floor his pulse added syncopations to the steady beat of the music. Friedrich was sitting with an older man and two well-dressed female companions, one of whom had a white fur stole wrapped around her shoulders. When Lorenz arrived at their table the company fell silent. ‘Obersturmbannführer Friedrich?’ The SS man looked up. ‘Kapitänleutnant Siegfried Lorenz.’