Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  “Ha, ha,” yelled the Captain. “Not much to explore on a little ship like this. And it is not safe below. Stay up. Up stay. Do not flit-flut around my ship. Do not trit-trot everywhere. That is a rule. Even for the daughter of Manfred Bird. And I am the Captain.” He laughed as if he had just told another joke, then nodded his pudgy head at his glass and his plate. Mr. Crouch brought them more beer and began serving the herring.

  “Is there some secret you don’t want me to find, Captain?”

  The Captain kept up his laughing.

  “So, Lark,” said Donna Bird, leaning across and tapping the table in front of Lark’s plate, as if they were the closest of friends, “ready to learn about the world? Our Tom will be so pleased?”

  “You are friends?” the Captain exclaimed. “Is this a yoke?”

  “Jay, joke,” said Donna Bird gently.

  Lark felt she was watching a play still in rehearsal, the characters still trying to understand their parts, and she felt a terrible terror. The Big J, Tom had said. But by then it was impossible to get off the ship.

  “Our lady passengers will now give English lessons, ha,” cried the Captain.

  Donna laughed, a little giggle. “Asid raja Nalo nama,” she said and looked around, pleased with herself, waiting to be asked what it meant.

  “What means that?” Mr. Blut, the youngest of the three men, asked slowly and carefully.

  “‘There was a king, his name was Nala.’ Sanskrit. I have been reading some of the tales of power of yore.” Donna Bird waved her fan in front of her. “History teaches us lessons about our world, does it not?”

  “I agree very much,” said the Captain, “but we need magic to change history. Man-made magic. To unmake the bad that is already made.”

  “Zauber,” said Donna, and then, “Zauberei.”

  The Captain guffawed. “Good, good. You know German. Die Zauberflöte. One of our best operas.” He turned to Lark sitting there stonily and said, “Magic. Magic Flute. W. A. Mozart.”

  “Sanskrit and German?” Lark said to Donna, sarcastic.

  “It’s funny what one picks up?” said Donna. She seemed pleased to see Lark angry. “One is absorbing, picking things up all the time—information, facts, names—and these things, meaningless in themselves, surface much, much later, in a different form, I assure you?”

  “And she will teach us English on this voyage?” said Mr. Blut.

  Fine for Donna Bird, Lark decided. Let her teach them English. She would get on with her reading, having planned to get through at least a dozen books in the coming weeks, in preparation for meeting Tom in New York. She had brought To the Finland Station, The Technological Society, and The Religion of Java.

  Mr. Crouch withdrew to his position by the door. Donna Bird started going through all the words she knew for herring. “Maatjes,” she said. “Rollmops.” This kept her and the three men busy throughout the meal, recollecting where and when they had tasted excellent herring prepared in a certain way.

  “In New York, I shall buy you herring, you and the veneered Manfred Bird,” said the Captain. “When we end.”

  But suddenly, to Lark, the end with Tom waiting there seemed in doubt.

  “Revered,” said Donna. She looked around the table at the men, one by one, as if she were picking little flowers, and concluded the meal with a final murmur. “‘Allwissend bin ich nicht, doch viel ist mir bewusst’?”

  There was a hum of surprise from the men. “She do know German,” said Mr. Blut. “She do not know all, but she know much.”

  Donna nodded once, to approve his effort, before correcting him. “Does,” she said. “She does not know everything, but she knows a lot. Goethe. Faust. Another tale of power that is most instructive.”

  “Goethe is our genius,” said the Captain.

  “What Goethe and the other greats knew,” said Donna Bird, “is that fear and trembling, das Schaudern, is the best part of man, and not, as Aristotle proposed, fear and pity.”

  “You are a clever lady,” and the Captain lifted his hand and seemed about to pat Donna’s cheek. But the hand waved instead at the steward. “Herr Crouch will take away these plates,” he announced. “And lunch is finished. We all go to work.” He leapt from his chair and the two officers half stood up to acknowledge the departure of their lady passengers. For Donna Bird, the Captain clicked his heels together and bowed. “Good lady,” he said. “I mean ladies.” Then the three men sat back down at the table, suddenly relaxed and happily speaking German again.

  Donna Bird stopped at the door. “Oh, Captain, good Captain, I need your help. I wonder if you could do something to cover that light? I’m allergic? All light, artificial and natural.”

  Lark walked onto the deck outside the dining room to catch a last glimpse of the coast. Donna followed her. Mr. Crouch, who had taken off his white coat, was on the deck before them, leaning against the rail and smoking. Thrown over the rail near him was a blue coat, his cabin boy’s uniform. It soon became apparent to Lark that he had an hour off after each meal, between coats, which he generally spent smoking and leaning somewhere.

  That first afternoon Lark leant against the rail some distance from Mr. Crouch, looking toward the stern, the afternoon sun and the wind on her face.

  Donna Bird stayed pressed back against the bulwark, under the overhang from the bridge above. She had pulled her visor down onto her eyebrows against the western sun and held the fan in front of her chin and mouth. “You heard him talk about secrets. It’s very suspicious, I think.”

  “You’re the one who mentioned secrets,” said Lark.

  “But he’s the one saying don’t go snooping. And we don’t know what the cargo is, remember, apart from those rods, and stacked on the deck like that they could just be a front, a façade, to foil airplanes and surveillance. There’s the coffin, of course.”

  Lark turned to face Donna Bird for a moment, and not being able to stand the sight of her cringing there in her sliver of shade, she turned back to the sea. Donna Bird looked more like some kind of court jester than ever.

  Lark held onto the rail, squinting into the horizon. Mr. Crouch had not moved a muscle. He stared out at the water, flicking his cigarette butt, still alight, over the edge of the deck and lighting another.

  “Surely that’s against ship rules?” Donna Bird said in what was for her a shout, trying to overcome the wind. “Fire hazard?” She seemed more intent on provoking a reaction from the good-looking young steward than on the possibility of fire.

  Mr. Crouch, whose name Lark imagined was Krautsch or something like that, was lucky to be German, she thought, and to be spared Donna’s stories. Donna laughed her whispery chuckle, and then stepped forward and plucked at Mr. Crouch’s sleeve before ducking back into the shade.

  The steward moved a step or so away and mumbled something, shaking his head. There was something about him that did not seem quite right to Lark. He looked like a cowboy, a non-American’s imitation of a cowboy. Or he looked as if he were acting the role of a pirate in an operetta or a children’s movie, with the wind blowing his hair back, one foot up on the lower rail, squinting at the horizon. While he did not look like a real sailor, he certainly looked quite lovely standing there, so tense.

  Donna Bird was studying him, too, in this pose. Then she began to speak as if she were continuing an entirely different conversation. “There’s the word ‘callow,’ for instance, which, as you know, Lark, I came across in a story about a pompous young man on board a ship in the tropics who seems to know everything. In the heat he advises everyone to drink hot tea and to keep out of the breeze and turn off the electric fans in order to keep cool? He boasts that he is an experienced sailor, not a callow tourist. Of course, he is shown to be wrong. His stupidity nearly gets everyone killed. Callow.”

  The steward was gazing out to sea with such a look of distaste that Lark guessed that he had understood what Donna had said.

  “That’s what I mean about recurring,” Donna mused. “Each
time the context will be different. And apart from that there is no meaning. The meaning or truth lies on the surface, each time.”

  That first afternoon Lark went to the bridge and watched the Captain and the two officers doing their navigating. The Captain was charting the rest of the voyage, to Tacoma, then through the Panama Canal to New York. They were to sail due east from Australia, clearing the reefs and other coastal formations, then they were to head northeast. The Captain was checking the readings. He took a ruler, Lark saw him do this, and ruled a line straight up through the Pacific, past hundreds of little islands, across the equator, passing south of Hawaii, to Puget Sound. They had no scheduled stop until Tacoma.

  “Once we owned most of this,” the Captain said. He scratched his bald head a little, the soft skin moving about as he did so. And Lark shivered. “Now all is ruined. This independence all everywhere is to blame. Before, the Europeans, who know what art is, preserved the art, the culture, the innocence.”

  “Garibaldi was wrecked in the Bass Strait.” It was Donna Bird who had crept up behind them and was watching the charting procedure. She put her finger on the patch of water between the Australian mainland and Tasmania.

  The Captain had taken out a length of rope and was tying the wheel into a fixed position. For the next three weeks they were to sail along that ruled line, the wheel tied into position, with no helmsman holding it steady, just an officer checking the bearings now and then, or a sailor standing nearby. It made Lark uneasy. Could navigating an ocean be so simple?

  At various spots on the chart coral reefs showed light brown in the light blue of the water. The reefs brought forth from Donna anecdotes about coral.

  “There is a poisonous coral, pinkish, that has a fatal sting?” she contributed. “If you step on it, there’s no hope?’’

  The Captain said that later on, out in the Pacific, he was going to stop the ship, if they made good time, so that Lark and Donna could walk on one of the reefs and observe the coral and reef life closely.

  Donna clapped her hands. “Standing in the middle of the ocean? Like walking on water?’’ She then frowned and placed two fingers delicately over her mouth. “Oh, but the sun.” She brightened. “I’ll cover up very, very well?’’

  “Are you allowed to do that?” asked Lark. It seemed highly out of order for a freighter to come to a halt in the middle of an ocean for such a frivolous undertaking, and she was scornful of the Captain’s allowing himself to be captivated by Donna Bird. “I’m not walking on any coral,” she said.

  The Captain gave a tolerant smile and put one arm around Donna’s shoulder, the other around Lark’s. “It is an opportunity to test equipment and for passengers to enjoy. Like on those Queens.”

  Lark shook herself free from the Captain.

  “Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mary,” Donna explained.

  “I know that,” said Lark, irritated.

  But Donna was already addressing the Captain again. “Please don’t bother about stopping the ship on my account? It’s too much trouble?”

  “Of course we bother,” said the Captain. “Is it not boring on this ship for beautiful ladies? You will walk on coral.”

  “We’ll need sneakers?” Donna stated.

  “I’m not walking on coral,” said Lark.

  “Mine are pink,” Donna went on. “In fact, I bought them especially for reef walking. On the Great Barrier Reef. Once I was there,” she put her hand to her lips and lowered her voice, “on holiday?” And she told the intricate story of paying a pound for a pair of sneakers and of choosing pink, rather than turquoise or yellow. Donna laughed, and as she continued her tedious story, Lark watched the Captain, bent over his charts, searching for a reef for the coral walk.

  “Ha, ha,” he said, and marked a spot.

  “That’s in the middle of nothing,” said Lark. “There’s no land. I’m not walking on any coral.”

  “I’ll show them to you,” said Donna, and she ran or rather sidled out to get her pink sneakers and bring them back, holding up their soles and pointing to the cuts and lacerations made by the coral. “As you can see, the damage wasn’t too great. I still wear them. But you can see what coral could do to your feet. Like glass?”

  Lark came in to dinner the first night to find the Captain on a chair tying some kind of paper shade over the ceiling light. He was trying to dim the bright overhead light to accommodate Donna Bird, who was sitting in her chair, clasping her hands and looking up at the Captain with a wide, encouraging smile. Mr. Blut, who was sinking into his place on the bench, having jumped up when Donna Bird came in, jumped up again when Lark appeared.

  “We all want to see your pretty faces as much as possible,” the Captain said, looking down at them, but clearly addressing Donna.

  Donna was wearing her formal gray and beige, a long skirt and a blouse, unbuttoned for evening, plus earrings and a brooch of little grapes pinned to the side of her visor. And there was the fan, which she waved back and forth, queen of the Avis Maris.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t, you’re so kind?” Donna whispered, to Mr. Blut for having jumped up and to the Captain for standing on his chair to struggle with the light for her. “I’m so sorry?” Donna whispered. “I’m so sorry to be so allergic? Please don’t bother on my account?” In order to hear her the Captain had to stop fiddling with the paper and Mr. Blut had to turn his head so that his ear was toward Donna Bird. “It comes upon you suddenly, this allergy. It came upon me after a visit to the tropics. It can go away, too, I hear.”

  Lark believed she was exaggerating, lying, and put it down to affectation, some kind of ploy for attention.

  The Captain resumed folding the paper shade around the light fixture.

  Donna Bird spoke beseechingly, submissively, commanding a response. “Please don’t bother on my account?”

  “Of course we bother, yes, yes, nicht?” said the Captain.

  “Ja, ja, naturally,” said Mr. Blut.

  The Captain jumped down from his chair, pleased with his handiwork.

  Lark now understood that people always bothered about things on Donna’s account.

  Then Mr. Fischer, the first mate and engineer, who had not forgotten that women on board tended to bring bad luck, appeared and told the Captain that the paper shade was a fire hazard. The Captain, happily entranced, was losing his nautical judgment. And Donna Bird had to continue wearing her sun visor.

  At dinner the Captain resumed his jokes, beginning with, “Where are the queens of England crowned?” pronouncing it crown-ed, two syllables, as if he were reciting a sonnet, and he looked at Donna, a big smile on his face, pleased with his offering. “In the head,” said the Captain, answering his own riddle. “The queens of England are crowned in the head.”

  Donna smiled sweetly.

  “Kopf, Kopf,” the Captain explained to the unsmiling Mr. Fischer, tapping his own head, the finger making an indentation that remained for a second or so after each tap. “Kopf, ha.”

  “On the head? On, on the head?” Donna suggested.

  “On on on the head,” sang Mr. Blut.

  “Now our ladies will give English lessons,” cried the Captain. Donna’s scarcely audible voice made everyone else shout.

  The fan paused in its scan across Donna Bird’s face. “Yes? Certainly, yes.”

  Lark looked at Donna, trying to make out whether she was being serious or droll. The young pirate, whatever he was, was putting before them his stuffed green peppers, a dish that Lark particularly hated, and which were so khaki and sodden that they could have waited until midnight to be eaten, if necessary, without changing in appearance or taste. The Captain would certainly make no effort to have the schedule of stuffed green peppers changed to accommodate Lark. She would not even consider mentioning it.

  “So,” said the Captain, turning to Donna, “here is a story, in English, about the opera. We Germans love the opera, but alas, hiding like this at sea, I no longer go to opera. Before the war, then it was the palmy days of cultu
re. Manfred Bird knows culture. It is the reason we are friends. So, the story goes, Brünnehilde sings to Wotan. She must sing, ‘Weiche, Wotan, weiche,’ which in English means—” and he searched for the word.

  “Surrender,” Donna said, nodding encouragement. “Surrender, Wotan, surrender.”

  “This clever lady knows so much,” said the Captain, shaking his head. “Surrender. And also it means ‘soft’ in German. So, before Brünnehilde takes her big breath to sing, ‘Weiche, Wotan, weiche,’ whispers Wotan to her, sotto voce, so that only Brünnehilde hears, ‘How do you like your boiled eggs in the morning?’ and she must sing loud, for all to hear, ‘Soft, Wotan, soft,’ without laughing. You understand?”

  The Captain looked like a soft-boiled egg himself, with his smooth round head, wider and pudgier at the cheekbones than at the forehead and chin, and a smile that was a perfect arc, painted on by a child. Often, looking at him, Lark saw the eggshells on which she had drawn Hitler and which she had smashed with her fist on the breakfast plate.

  Donna laughed a little. She had got the Captain’s joke. Then she started with her own story. “I love practical jokes.”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” The men were leaning forward and staring at her lips, following her.

  Lark was unwilling to watch those lips letting loose their stories. If she lowered her eyes to the table, all she saw were the green peppers on the plates, half-eaten, sagging. If she raised her eyes, she saw Mr. Crouch at the door, who winked at her, which made her want to giggle. She kept her eyes rotating from one undesirable object to the next, thinking of the worst things in the world—drowning, a nuclear war, chocolate-covered soft-boiled eggs—to stop herself from collapsing in hysterical laughter when she caught Mr. Crouch’s eye.

  “I love jokes. But, did you know, you can get killed with a joke, just laughing, against your will?”

  The Captain looked hurt and Donna placed her hand on his arm.

  “Practical, dangerous, killed, joke,” said Mr. Blut, making little haiku fragments, enjoying the words.