by F. R. Tallis
Lorenz had observed the Northern Lights many times before, but he was still entranced by the profligate genius of the natural world, the casual and indifferent but perfect flourishes that caused his chest to tighten with a hopeless, generalized yearning. He was tantalized by the possibility of meaning, but meaning inconveniently located beyond the reach of human intellect. Such beauty was so fiery and vivid and pure that it cauterized thought. He was nothing, consciousness bathed in green-white brilliance, a pattern of sensations, humbled and cleansed by intensive exposure to the sublime. The cold was no longer hostile, but fresh, vital, and redemptive. He wanted to leave the earth and fly up into the sky, not to be commemorated like some ancient hero in a constellation, but to achieve the exact opposite, to be absorbed and dissipated by the dancing lights, to be strewn across the heavens until the distance between his thoughts made personal identity impossible. He dreamed of nullity, obliteration, escape. A sigh brought him back to earth. Müller was standing next to him. The navigator held his sextant against his chest and his face was tilted back. A tear beneath his right eye had collected enough light to shine like a jewel. Müller wiped it away and said, ‘Are you coming back down now, Kaleun?’
‘No,’ said Lorenz. ‘A little longer . . .’
‘You’ll freeze, sir.’
Lorenz reconsidered. ‘Yes, you’re right, Müller. I’ve been up on the bridge for far too long. Thank you.’
On the way to his nook, Ziegler leaned out to attract Lorenz’s attention. ‘Kaleun? The lights . . . they’re playing havoc with the radio. I can’t pick up any broadcasts.’
‘All right,’ said Lorenz. ‘There’s nothing we can do about that.’
He crossed the gangway, pulled the curtain aside, and lay on his mattress. After closing his eyes he could still see the aurora borealis, glaucous cathedrals crumbling into dust before being blown away by a wind that had crossed the void between planets.
IT WAS CLOSE TO MIDDAY and the short-lived sunless glow that interrupted the polar night was revelatory. The ice floes were becoming larger and heavier, and it became increasingly difficult to navigate a way through. When the bow met with resistance the pitch of the engines rose to a higher, laboring note that persisted until the obstruction was broken into smaller fragments or pushed aside. Thereafter, the boat lurched forward, and the pitch of the note dropped to its prior default. The grim twilight seemed to collapse three dimensions into two, producing an effect that resembled a poorly executed oil painting—bleak vistas of a dead, colorless world.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Graf. ‘It’s getting colder.’ Lorenz responded with a bearlike grunt. He was reluctant to open his mouth, because whenever he did so his lower molars ached. ‘What are we going to do?’ Graf persisted. Lorenz bowed his head, and a full minute passed before he spoke. ‘Yes, you’re right. We can’t go on. It’s absurd.’ He descended into the conning tower, dropped into the control room, and marched straight to the radio shack where he found Brandt jotting down messages. ‘Are you receiving signals again?’ Lorenz asked.
‘Intermittently,’ said Brandt. ‘There’s nothing for us, though.’
‘Is all the equipment working? Right now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well,’ said Lorenz. ‘Send this message to headquarters.’ He grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled a terse request: PACK ICE IMPASSABLE. HIGH RISK OF CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE. PERMISSION TO ABORT. Headquarters responded promptly. PERMISSION DENIED. RPT DENIED. DO NOT ABORT. RPT DO NOT ABORT SPECIAL MISSION. IMPERATIVE YOU CONTINUE. When he encountered Graf in the officers’ mess the engineer said, ‘Well?’ Lorenz could only shake his head.
Within an hour the Northern Lights had rendered the radio useless again. Brandt offered Lorenz the headphones and said, ‘Solar interference, Herr Kaleun.’ Lorenz listened to what sounded like a high wind modulated by periodic changes of frequency. Below this ‘rush’ were sonic inflections that resembled a man chanting in an adjacent room. Short bursts of frenetic chirruping evoked mobbing birds. The overall effect was disturbing. Lorenz handed the headphones back to Brandt. ‘It won’t last forever.’
Progress was slow; however, that evening Müller completed his calculations and declared, ‘We’ve arrived.’ Glittering curtains billowed across the sky and the reflective plain of ice acted like a mirror. The boat seemed to be suspended between two green conflagrations. In the distance, a floating mountain appeared to be illuminated from within by a flickering, coppery fire.
In spite of repeated attempts to clear ice from the deck, the boat was beginning to feel unstable again. Lorenz ordered the crew to their diving stations and called out ‘Flood!’ Graf studied the ballast-tank lights and said, ‘Door number five isn’t opening.’ The diesels had already stopped. ‘Come on!’ Graf shouted. ‘Open up, you bitch!’ His anger seemed to have an effect. The light panel indicated that the water level in tank five was rising, and the boat began to sink. They circled for three hours at twenty-four meters and then settled into a pattern of three hours up, three hours down. This seemed to be the solution to their problem, but on the following day door number five didn’t open again. The ice floes had begun to fuse together and, as Lorenz had expected, the boat became trapped.
‘Shit!’ said Falk. ‘If a plane flies over they’ll just pick us off.’ Looking up at the blazing nebulae he added, ‘It’s the dead of night and look how light it is!’
‘We’re not defenseless,’ Lorenz replied, indicating the flak cannon. ‘We’ll just have to keep scraping the ice off.’
‘It’s minus twenty, Kaleun. And the 2 cm isn’t very reliable at the best of times.’
‘True, but what else do you suggest we do?’ Falk pressed his hands together in an attitude of prayer. ‘If I thought that would work,’ Lorenz continued, ‘then I would willingly request help from God, but I’m not convinced that we have his support.’
‘Don’t let Pullman hear you say that, Herr Kaleun.’
‘Why? Pullman doesn’t believe in God. He’s a Party man. Give him half a chance and he’ll be making sacrificial offerings to Odin.’ Lorenz watched a pavilion of light collapse. Without removing his gaze from the dissolving sheets of radiance, he added: ‘Get Sauer to organize a team, will you? To scrape the gun.’
Falk hesitated. ‘Why are we here, sir?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lorenz replied.
‘Really, Kaleun?’
‘Yes, Falk, really.’
‘Special operations . . .’ The first watch officer’s expression resembled the sagging countenance of a bloodhound.
THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO except wait. The men played card games and listened to endless repetitions of Glenn Miller. Some competed in an impromptu chess tournament. A singing competition was won by Pullman.
The photographer possessed a fine tenor voice and he performed a Schubert song of such lyrical sweetness that even the most cynical members of the crew yielded to its charm. Poetry and a disarmingly simple melody conjured a pastoral ideal of babbling brooks, linden trees, and naive, reckless love; a nostalgic vision of a German Eden purged of impurities and populated by beautiful maidens of peerless virtue. Lorenz was impressed by Pullman’s skill, his unerring instinct for opportunity and weaknesses. Even he, Siegfried Lorenz, the stalwart outsider—stubborn habitué of the political margins—had been momentarily moved, albeit briefly, by nationalist sentiment. It had crossed his mind that there might be something worth dying for after all.
Time passed slowly.
At five o’clock in the morning—a morning as dark as the deepest night—Lorenz poked his head through the hatch, and the first thing he saw was Juhl’s grinning visage. ‘We don’t have to worry about aircraft anymore.’ The second watch officer was wearing so many clothes he was almost spherical.
‘What?’ Lorenz wondered if Juhl had gone mad. His demeanor was uncharacteristically cheerful.
‘Not for a while, anyway.’ Juhl pointed upward. ‘We’re invisible.’
An opaque c
anopy had settled over the boat. It resembled the roof of a marquee.
‘Falk said he was going to pray for our salvation,’ Lorenz quipped.
After clambering out of the tower, Lorenz stood by Juhl’s side. More fog was rolling toward them, and there was enough shimmering light in the sky to imbue the advancing waves with a trace of exotic color. As soon as he was satisfied that the fog wasn’t a transient phenomenon, Lorenz said: ‘It hardly seems necessary to maintain a four-man watch under these conditions. Juhl, Voigt, Arnold, get back inside and warm up. I’ll stay out here with Wessel.’ The young seaman was unable to conceal his disappointment. ‘Don’t look so put-upon Wessel, it won’t be for long.’
Wessel mumbled an apology.
When the other men had squeezed through the hatch Lorenz and Wessel stood back to back, staring north and south respectively. They made desultory conversation until the fierce cold made even superficial talk effortful. Lorenz was accustomed to desolation. The sea was a wilderness. But the interminable dark of the polar night and the green-white fog made him feel utterly isolated. There were forty-eight souls inside the boat, yet their proximity did nothing to mitigate his sense of unspeakable remove. Wessel and he were the last men alive. They had ventured too far and crossed some mysterious boundary from beyond which there could be no return. How could this forbidding, pitiless place be part of the same world in which waiters served wine in candlelit restaurants, small children laughed, and lovers held hands? He had been visited by such thoughts on countless occasions, but never more acutely.
The ice was producing odd sounds, creaks, and cracks; however, these relatively inconsequential noises were subsequently augmented by moans, groans, and even a howl. Lorenz could sense Wessel’s unease. The sounds continued, becoming increasingly reminiscent of human vocalizations. It was such a compelling illusion, Lorenz imagined that he could hear his own name being called. He did not expect Wessel to react, but the young man gasped, ‘Kaleun?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you hear it?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘It sounded just like a person, shouting.’
‘There’s no one out there, Wessel. How could there be?’
‘An animal perhaps?’
‘We’re too far away from the coast of Greenland. Nothing could make it out here.’ Lorenz traced a horizontal arc over the bulwark with his extended arm. ‘This is pack ice.’
‘A polar bear?’
‘No.’
‘I thought . . .’ The young seaman’s sentence trailed off.
‘What, Wessel?’
The young man muttered a few words and added, ‘Nothing, Kaleun.’
Lorenz peered into the swirling fog and the flickering of the Northern Lights broke the continuous movement into a sequence of halted images, each one slightly different from its predecessor.
‘Kaleun?’ Wessel’s voice was almost a whisper. ‘Over there.’ Lorenz turned abruptly and raised his binoculars. The mouth of a tunnel had opened in the wall of a fog bank and its vault was penetrated by shafts of silver light. Pools of luminescence mottled the ice. Lorenz couldn’t see anything remarkable, and certainly nothing that merited apprehension. ‘There! Kaleun!’ Wessel’s voice was urgent, ascending to panic.
‘What?’ Lorenz demanded, glancing at his companion.
‘There!’ Wessel jabbed his finger at the tunnel. ‘Something dark.’
‘Where?’
‘There!’ The young man was emphatic. ‘Coming toward us.’
Lorenz lowered his binoculars. ‘I can’t see—’
Wessel cut in, ‘On the ice!’ Suddenly the young man was less sure. ‘It’s . . . I . . .’ The vault of the tunnel collapsed creating slowly rotating vortices. Eventually, the uniformity of the fog bank was restored, and it acquired the appearance of a low chalk bluff. The two men gazed at the inscrutable whiteness, willing it to give up whatever secrets it was harboring. ‘I did see something,’ Wessel added, more to himself than to his commander.
‘Was it big? Small?’
‘It’s difficult to judge. There’s nothing out there to make a comparison with. You lose perspective, sir.’
‘Could it have been a periscope?’
‘No, it was traveling on top of the ice.’
‘The floes are still separated by water that way. We’re at the very edge of the ice shelf.’
‘It wasn’t a periscope, Kaleun. It didn’t move like a periscope; it moved like . . .’ Wessel hesitated. He looked confused and alarmed. ‘It moved like something alive.’
‘A seal, perhaps?’
‘Yes,’ Wessel allowed with edgy impatience. ‘Perhaps, Herr Kaleun.’
The air was filled with semitransparent wisps and filaments. They collected together and twisted into loose braids or spiraled into snail-shell patterns. The atmosphere around the conning tower seemed to be in a state of restless agitation. High above, the distant, muted ordnance of the Northern Lights was unnerving; as if the contagious madness of war had now reached the citadels of heaven. At the very limits of audition he could hear muffled bangs, sputters, and claps. Lorenz imagined the bloodied down of angel’s wings descending and settling around the deck gun. The fog bank thinned and became diaphanous. Through the transparent escarpment the ice plate receded into an obscure distance dotted with sapphire and diamond glimmerings. Wessel breathed in sharply. ‘There! Coming toward us.’ He was gesticulating frantically, and his protuberant eyes were wide open. Lorenz looked through his binoculars but was unable to detect the cause of Wessel’s excitement.
‘Calm down, Wessel,’ Lorenz barked.
The young man stopped waving his arms around but he was breathing heavily, and each forceful exhalation clouded the space between them. ‘There! Kaleun! Surely you can see it.’
‘There’s nothing there, Wessel!’
The young man stepped past the flak cannon and leaned over the rear railings, his head craning forward. Tense cords of muscle had raised the taut skin of his neck. Lorenz looked through his binoculars again but all he could see was surging fog. When he turned to challenge Wessel, the boy looked desperate and bewildered. ‘There’s a man out there.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Wessel.’
‘I saw him, Kaleun!’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘He was wearing a long coat and striding toward us.’
Lorenz experienced a chill that superseded the polar cold and penetrated his very essence. He addressed Wessel sternly: ‘Pull yourself together, Wessel.’
The young man, chastened, stood at attention, pushing out his chest. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’
‘I think you should get back inside the boat, Wessel.’
‘But Kaleun . . .’
‘It’s all right, Wessel.’ The tone of Lorenz’s voice was conciliatory. He reached out and gripped the boy’s arm. ‘It’s all right, Wessel, really. You’ve been up here for too long. The cold—the dark—this . . . landscape. Sometimes it all proves too much for the brain.’
‘I could have sworn . . .’
Lorenz pulled the hatch open. ‘Yes, of course. Get some rest, eh? Ask Ziegler to give you a dose of something to help you sleep.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And ask Leutnant Juhl to come up.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Wessel began his descent. Their eyes met for a moment, and Lorenz was perplexed by Wessel’s expression. Did it show frustration or was it resentment? He couldn’t tell.
While Lorenz waited for Juhl he noticed that his heart was beating faster. The fog bank had become fully opaque again.
Juhl appeared: ‘What happened? What’s wrong with Wessel? He looks terrible.’
‘I don’t know, he had some sort of . . . panic. He started seeing things.’
‘Do you want me to come up again?’
‘No, send Voigt. I want you to organize a two-man rotation. Let’s not have anybody exposed to this cold for more than an hour.’
‘The cold doesn’t make you see things, si
r.’
‘Where did you study medicine, Juhl?’
‘I haven’t studied medicine.’
‘That’s what I thought. We can go back to a four-man rota when the fog lifts.’
WERNER HAD MANAGED TO PREPARE a surprisingly tasty stew from tinned meat and the last bag of potatoes. Condensation trickled down the wooden panels and the spicy fragrance that filled every compartment briefly masked the underlying stench of body odor and mold. Everyone in the officers’ mess agreed that a good cook was a godsend, and Pullman, visualizing a heart-warming magazine feature on the unsung heroes of the navy, hurried off to the galley in order to memorialize Werner on film.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Graf.
Lorenz glanced at Falk. ‘Are you still praying?’
‘Yes,’ Falk replied.
‘Keep it up. And while you’re at it, ask God to make the North-Atlantic Drift a little warmer. A degree or two should suffice.’
‘I don’t think God responds to specific requests, Herr Kaleun,’ said Falk.
‘Is that your plan?’ asked Graf, looking over at Lorenz.
‘We’re stuck in pack ice,’ Lorenz replied. ‘That’s all. If the North-Atlantic Drift brings us a little more heat then there will be a thaw and we’ll be free.’
‘And if the sea doesn’t get any warmer?’ Graf licked a cold dribble of stew from his spoon.
‘The fireworks can’t go on forever. When the radio starts working we can ask headquarters to send a boat to cut us out.’
‘A rescue mission may take a long time to get here,’ said Graf. ‘We’ve been lucky so far. But . . .’ He passed his hand over his plate like a low-flying aircraft.
‘Falk’s prayers have been exceptionally effective,’ Lorenz responded. ‘I have every confidence in him.’