by Pam Lewis
She felt so drowsy and liquid from sex; it must have shown, for Dietz stared openly. The girl she’d been the night before at dinner was replaced with this new girl who couldn’t stop thinking of Sander. Her appetite was gone, would be gone, completely gone, and for a long time. She ate, knowing it was necessary, but without hunger: a slice of toast with jam and some hot tea. She was glad when Tessa and Astrid arrived—Astrid in a pale yellow dress that was too big for her, and Mevrouw in orange, like a large exotic bird. Minke leaned across Father Bahlow and took Tessa’s soft hand. “I’m afraid I was rude last night,” she said. “Inexcusable.”
“Oh!” Mevrouw beamed with pleasure. “Your apology is accepted.”
“That business of asking the waiter his name. You’re so right. And my mother would have told me exactly what you did.”
Tessa’s little mouth tightened with victory. “Good,” she said. “You miss your family, then?”
“Not yet,” Minke said, the God’s truth. “Too much has happened for me to think.”
Meneer Dietz laughed suggestively.
“There’s a tug-of-war on deck this morning,” Astrid said to Minke. “Let’s go.”
“Of course!” Minke said, and then wasn’t sure she was allowed, if the tug-of-war was child’s play and, now that she was no longer a child, if she was supposed to spend her time with Tessa.
“Have some fun.” Sander squeezed her leg under the table. “I’ll be tied up again this morning.”
“Ten o’clock,” Astrid said.
DOZENS OF PEOPLE milled about in heavy coats under a sky that was a uniform gray right down to the horizon. A thick rope perhaps thirty feet long lay on the deck. Here and there, men picked it up to test its weight. Minke went to the rail for a look at the sea, which was a darker gray than the sky, flecked with whitecaps. She breathed in deeply, happy to be so alive in this moment, her body still aching sweetly from the night before. Mama never said it would be like that. Mama never said that every inch of her could feel such pleasure at one time or that she would want so much of him, more and more.
She saw Astrid making her way through the others. She gave Minke a light kiss on one cheek. “At last, someone my age.”
“I know,” Minke said. “We’re so outnumbered.”
“And no real men at the table except for yours. I wish I were married. What’s it like?”
“I’ve only been married three days.”
“And what’s it like?” Astrid winked.
“I never want it to stop,” Minke whispered.
Astrid shrieked in delight. “I hear my parents, you know.”
“Hear what?”
“You know!”
“Oh,” Minke said, and then “Oh!” at the thought of those two large people doing what she and Sander did.
Astrid nudged her and continued, “I know. They’re like rabbits.”
“No!” Minke screamed laughter, drawing some glances from the people around them. They were being herded this way and that to a spot against the rail.
“That boy is waving at you,” Astrid said.
Minke looked about to see what boy. Oh! She recognized his white suspenders. He stood with a group of five or six burly-looking men.
“He wants you,” Astrid said.
“Wants me?”
“On his side, silly,” Astrid said. “He’s a team captain. Go, go.”
Minke stepped forward and took her place in the line. The boy, who looked in daylight to be about her age, with fine blond hair much like her own, gave her a warm handshake. “Hello again. My name is Pieps,” he said. “I’m happy to see you safe and sound.”
“Minke,” she said.
“You choose the next one,” he said. She chose Astrid, who skipped forward.
“Do you know him?” Astrid whispered after she joined the line beside Minke.
“I met him in steerage.”
“You’re not allowed down there. You could be raped.”
“Choose somebody. They’re waiting,” Minke said.
Astrid pointed to a man nearby and said, “You.”
“Well, I wasn’t,” Minke said.
“Wasn’t what?” Astrid said.
“Raped,” Minke whispered.
“My mother would kill me if I knew a boy like him.”
“How would she know?”
Astrid giggled. They were assigned places. Men took positions at the front and rear of the line and put the women in between. Pieps had the spot behind Minke. At a signal, everyone pulled at once. She completely forgot the dress she had on and gave it her all, straining back against Pieps when they inched their way to victory, then driving her heels into the deck to avoid being pulled forward. The other side let go at once, and Minke’s team fell back in a heap on top of one another at the very moment the ship plunged over the downside of a swell. They rolled across the deck, helplessly laughing.
“My friend Astrid. Astrid, Pieps.” Minke introduced the two as they tried to regain their footing.
Astrid had a coughing fit. She bent over, then sat up. “It’s nothing, just the air. It’s so damp on the sea.”
“I should go,” Pieps said. “They only let us up here for the manpower, then it’s back to the dungeon.”
Astrid coughed again.
“Can I do anything to help?” Minke asked.
“Talk to me. Keep my mind off it.”
They walked arm in arm to the ship’s railing.
“Will you go back to Amsterdam after Comodoro?” Minke asked.
“Daddy says there’s a war coming.”
“The Netherlands would be neutral in a war.” It was what she’d heard Papa say a million times, and it meant they weren’t to worry about any war.
“Daddy plans to get very rich, and you can’t get rich in the Netherlands even if it’s neutral,” Astrid said, stopping her coughing long enough to imitate her father to a T. “Anyway, he plans to have a lot of land and build a house as big as a castle, with servants and a swimming pool.” She laughed. “Mama can hardly wait. What about your husband?”
“I think he’s to have a store.”
“I’ll come and buy lots of things from your store. We’ll swim in the ocean. We’ll have picnics.”
Cassian appeared beside them. She thought he might have been observing them the whole time, and it occurred to her that Sander might have asked him to, a thought that oddly pleased her. “Look there!” he said. “Dolphins.” Out to sea, dozens of dolphins leaped and wriggled in the air like piglets. “They love a rough sea,” he said. The sea had definitely become rougher, the waves steeper and farther apart. “You might do well to return to your cabin soon, the both of you.”
“We will,” Minke said. He left them, and they watched as the sea built a great wall twenty or thirty feet high, twice as wide, and marbled with froth. From that slope, the dolphins flew from the water and arced into the air before disappearing into the foamy trough.
Astrid yelped, then coughed several times, very hard.
“Cassian’s a doctor, you know,” Minke said. “He can help.”
“I only need dry weather.”
Another swell raised and lowered the Frisia’s bow, slamming Minke and Astrid against the rail. They recovered their balance just as a wave came over the side and knocked them to their knees. Weak with the terror of the sea and drenched to the skin, they crawled to an inner wall where they could pull themselves to standing. Anything that hadn’t been fixed sloshed around at their feet—the rope, a jacket, debris. Someone on deck vomited, making the familiar, terrible sound, and immediately, the air smelled sour as another and then another vomited. Then Astrid leaned over the rail and was sick.
They staggered and rocked with the ship’s motion to Astrid’s small cabin, which was only a few doors down from Minke and Sander’s. Tessa was looking for her daughter in the corridor and took over from Minke in a fury of recriminations about how wet they were, how foolish to be on deck in such weather.
WHERE THE FIRST
two days had been calm, the next six were a blur of hell on the Frisia. The waves seemed like high mountains making the ship heave. At night, waves thudded and flowed up and down the deck. Men shouted. Most passengers were afflicted with vomiting, and the stench was everywhere. The only place to be during the endless days of bad weather was in the cabin and in bed.
Miraculously, Minke and Sander weren’t sick at all. They were both spared. As the ship rocked from side to side, groaning from the stress of one storm after another, and the sound of debris knocked against the outer wall of the cabin, they made love over and over. She had him all to herself for days.
Between lovemaking, lying naked in bed while the ship rolled, she stroked his skin and told him stories from her life. She’d never had anyone’s rapt attention the way she had Sander’s. The tiniest detail fascinated him—her skill at needlework, the suit of clothes she’d sewn for her father. She told him how she used to love pole-vaulting over the canals. “I was the champion in our town. I’m very quick,” she said. “Fenna was so furious to lose to me, of all people. She accused me of cheating, as if you even could cheat. You either make it over the canal or you fall in.”
“Fenna is a force to be reckoned with, it sounds.”
“We’re chalk and cheese. Fenna likes her coarse pleasures.”
This made him laugh and stroke her breast. “What coarse pleasures might those be?”
“Fenna swam naked with the boys. She didn’t think twice about it.”
“Mama was scandalized, yes?”
“She didn’t know, but Fenna wouldn’t have cared.”
“And you. Have you swum naked with the boys?”
She gave him a playful slap.
“What a lucky old bastard I am.”
“It’s funny, isn’t it? How fast it all happened.”
“Minke, I knew from the minute I saw you.”
ONE DAY WHEN the seas had calmed but the wind was strong and the other passengers were still ill in their cabins, Sander brought her to the deck and showed her what fun it was to walk into the wind on the starboard side, fighting for every foot of ground against the wall of wind coming at them, and, once they rounded the bow to the port side and the wind was at their backs, being practically swept down the deck on their behinds. Over and over they did this, laughing, tumbling, and catching each other. They saw no one else; the Frisia was theirs alone. Afterwards they went to the mess for something to eat, just the two of them in the wrecked dining room. The crew hadn’t the time to keep up, and broken dishes littered the floor. They ate alone at the table like a couple of war refugees.
During this time, Minke often brought tea to Astrid. The girl lay on her narrow bed on sweat-soaked sheets, and Minke was reminded of tending Elisabeth as she smoothed Astrid’s brow and fed her sips of tea laden with cream and sugar for her strength. But poor Astrid, even a single sip was too much and came immediately up. Cassian came to see her as well and gave her morphine to relieve the nausea, a miracle drug, apparently. It seemed to cure everything.
Minke didn’t know how long the storm lasted. Perhaps four days? Five? She lost track of time on the ship. But then it was over. They had crossed into the tropics under a sun that was hotter than it ever was at home, even at midsummer, and 100 degrees in the cabin, too hot for lovemaking, too hot for anything but taking the sweaty bedding to the deck and letting it air on makeshift lines. She was as tired as she had ever been, her body wrung out from the never-ending pleasure of Sander, her constant arousal, not enough food, and the harrowing agonies of other passengers. On deck, in the hot languid sun, she cut Sander’s hair to pass the time and sprinkled the amber cuttings over the sea. One afternoon a sailor caught a shark. The passengers crowded around to see as the sailor hit the thing with an iron bar, cut out its heart, and dragged the carcass off. The heart was the size of a fist, a porcelain blue laced with bright red where the arteries crisscrossed it. The heart beat for an hour before it died.
That same night they crossed the equator on a flat sea under a cloudless sky. Sander took her to the deck to see the moon directly overhead, something that could be seen only at the equator. They went back to the cabin for another luscious night together, their last love-making onboard, as it turned out.
They were three-quarters of the way to Comodoro, he explained, and soon the coast of Brazil would be visible to starboard. That morning he rose early, sat on the bed to put on his socks, smoothed his hair in the glass, straightened his tie, kissed her on the forehead, and said in a businesslike way, “I’ll see you at dinner, then. You should get some air, and a little sun will improve your color.”
Well. She felt bruised. Get some color, indeed. She looked at herself in the glass. What was the matter with her color? She certainly didn’t want her skin to darken in the sun. Worse than anything, she felt cast off, as though power had been taken from her.
Outside, the crew was washing down the decks, fixing all that had broken in the storms. The three nuns who were traveling with Father Bahlow were lying in deck chairs in their black habits, their doughy faces absorbing the sun. Farther along the row of chairs, Astrid was taking tea. Minke took the chaise beside her.
“I was turned inside out altogether,” Astrid said of the seasickness. She bit into a cookie, spat it out, and made a face.
“I know. I was there,” Minke said.
“We’ll go riding together, you and I,” Astrid said. “In Argentina. Papa will buy wonderful horses, I’m sure.”
“We’ll gallop across the pampas,” Minke said.
“You’ll come and stay with me, and we’ll ride every day for weeks. We can go exploring!”
“I can’t stay with you, Astrid.” Minke sat up the better to see if her friend was joking. “I’m a married woman, remember?”
“You’ll have to stay. It’s a day’s journey from Comodoro.”
“What is?” Minke said.
Astrid frowned. “Our house, of course.”
“Not in Comodoro?”
Astrid made a face. “Mama refuses to live in Comodoro. She insists on being out in the country, where it’s quiet and where there are rivers, a better class of people, and no filthy oil wells. We’ll be upland. Millions of birds. Do you like birds?”
“Birds are birds,” Minke said. “What have birds to do with anything?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Then you’ll have to come to see me,” Minke said. “There must be horses in Comodoro.”
“They’d never let me do that. That’s why we’re so far away. You should hear Mama talk about it. Comodoro is a frontier, like in America—full of gambling and guns and whores.”
“But that’s a lie!”
Astrid shrugged. “Oh God, another storm.” She pointed toward a bank of clouds filling the horizon. “My stomach heaves just looking at it.”
But the storm never materialized, and the Frisia passed smoothly out of the tropics and back into cooler seas. A few days before their scheduled arrival in Comodoro, word went around that there would be a feast in the mess that night. No more pressed meat or dried beef; instead, a lamb would be slaughtered.
Minke threw her three dresses on the bed and looked at each of them with a critical eye. Which was best? Sander watched, but she didn’t ask his opinion. She still smarted from his abrupt behavior of the morning. She would wear the lavender. Mauve, actually. It was not the fanciest of the three, though a dress to be taken seriously. Otherwise, with her blond hair and pale skin, she was a girl in pink. The red had taken her down between decks that time, so it held a different mood for her. No, the lavender was stately and lower-cut than the others. She knew the effect it had. She smoothed the fabric and examined it closely. There were small slubs in the fabric, as if the dress had been worn before, and it occurred to her that the dresses had once belonged to someone else, perhaps Elisabeth.
Before the looking glass, she combed out her hair until she could run her fingers down its length and not hit a single snag. She stood tall, brushing i
t back from her forehead, watching herself, feeling Sander’s eyes on her. Then, leaning to one side so her hair hung almost to her hip on the left, she began to braid it tightly into a long silken rope. She laid the braid over the crown of her head, secured it at her right ear, looped it back left, and finished on the right side. Three times. She was transformed. Regal. And the weight of the braid over her spine gave her the perfect posture of a woman with a book on her head.
SHE WAS DISAPPOINTED to find only Captain Roemer and Father Bahlow at the table. She had so looked forward to her effect on them all, particularly Astrid. She’d show her what it meant to be a married woman!
She and Sander took their usual seats. She turned immediately to Captain Roemer, the protocol second nature to her now. “What a lovely idea to have this farewell dinner,” she said.
He was the stiffest man she’d ever seen, and when he turned his face to her, his whole upper body came along, like a cardboard doll. “Astrid’s unwell,” he said. “Dr. Tredegar has gone to see to her.”
“But she was improving.”
“She’s taken a turn, I’m afraid.”
The soup was served. The fish. Everything delicious, although Minke kept worrying. It had to be serious for Cassian and the Dietzes to miss this special dinner. Father Bahlow told a story about an experience on some other ship, in some other part of the world, and when he burped, Minke wished for Astrid’s little grin from across the table. Before the meat course, the captain excused himself, saying he thought he might go check on the Dietzes.
He was gone through the main course, the dessert, the cheese course, and coffee. Father Bahlow seemed oblivious to the situation and kept talking, making good use of the silence away from all those noisy Dietzes. As the brandy was being served, Captain Roemer returned. “It’s my great sadness to announce that young Astrid has expired.”