by Glenda Adams
“What? No green peppers?” Mr. Crouch whispered to Lark.
“I loathe green peppers,” Lark whispered back. “It’s possible they can kill you.”
Mr. Crouch smiled down at her. “Killer peppers.” He took her peppers away and brought bread and fruit.
“You can get killed laughing,” said Donna.
Finally Mr. Crouch was able to get rid of all the dinner plates and place before them dessert, a coconut thing.
“Killed, laughing?” asked Mr. Blut.
Donna took a deep breath. “For instance,” and she nodded at the coconut-covered cake before her, “man killed by lamington.”
Lark’s head was bowed. She was suppressing gales of laughter, which seemed to increase in strength inside her. She was frightened, imagining that she might never be able to stop laughing, that she might very well die.
“A lamington is an Australian cake, sponge cake, cut into little cubes, and each cube is rolled in chocolate icing and then coconut. Lam-ing-ton.”
The men repeated the word. Donna’s scarf, a tiresome silk she had gathered in some place during some other story, dangled over her plate. Lark waited for her to spill custard on it.
“Such lamington killed?” prompted Mr. Blut.
“It was meant to be a wonderful joke,” said Donna.
A scraping fork, a cleared throat, the Captain’s chewing, could blot out her voice. Everything had to stop when she spoke, Mr. Blut with his fork on its way to his mouth, Mr. Fischer with an unfinished mouthful resting inside his cheek, the Captain with his knife and fork in the air. A scene from Sleeping Beauty, with Mr. Crouch, the kitchen boy, immobile at the doorpost.
“The jokers at this party had covered a piece of sponge rubber with chocolate and coconut and given it to the guest of honor. He ate it, tried to, and it stuck in his throat. He was dead in a matter of minutes.” When Donna paused, Mr. Fischer was able to swallow his mouthful and belch into his table napkin. Mr. Blut, who had been mouthing the words along with Donna, said, “Stuck, dead minutes.” Mr. Crouch yawned from his doorpost, making his keys rattle.
“I thought you loved practical jokes,” said Lark. Her laughter had suddenly dissipated, leaving her angry at the spell she seemed to have been under. “I recall you dressed up as a schoolgirl and got yourself kidnapped?”
“I love jokes,” said Donna, unperturbed. “By affirming the spectacle, they educate and teach political realities.” Then for the table in general she terminated her tale. “The lamington plugged his throat?”
“Plug throat?” said Mr. Blut.
“I think you’re making it all up,” said Lark quickly, so that the men would not completely understand. “All these stories, all these people you say are friends of yours.” Lark decided that Donna Bird was a chronic liar, had fabricated her way through life, probably to the editorship of the newspaper and definitely to the good graces of Tom.
Donna rose, her face straight and cold. The Captain leapt to his feet to wrench her chair back. Lark got up from her bench and slid out. Mr. Blut half stood.
“Good night,” whispered Donna and crept to the door, brushing against Mr. Crouch.
“Guten Abend,” thrice.
At the door Donna paused and looked back at the men. Her face was smiling now. She had recovered from her fit of pique. “Say, anyone for a game of poker?”
The men looked at one another. The Captain nodded at them. “Oh, ja, ja, ja.”
“And you, Lark? Larkie?” She was imitating Tom.
“Five’s a crowd,” said Lark. “I hate crowds. And actually I also hate cards.”
Finally, Lark and Donna Bird had given up their pretense of friendship. The war between them was now in the open.
The three men followed Donna to her cabin.
Lark returned to her little cabin, a wood-paneled box, rather like a burrow, that was a sitting room, stateroom it was called, with an alcove at one end, which was the bedroom, and a closet off the alcove, which contained the bathroom. Donna’s cabin, on the opposite side of the ship, was identical. Lark sat on her couch for a while, dreading the coming weeks, then went out on deck.
There was not much space on the ship for promenading. The main deck was stacked with the aluminum rods, which left little room for the two passengers; only the deck at the level of the dining room and cabins, the little catwalks at the level of the bridge, and a little square deck at the very top of the ship, which formed the roof of the bridge. Lark climbed up the ladder to that topmost square deck. They had left the coast behind and were heading into the dark. Behind them a vague glow marked the residue of the sunset.
Mr. Crouch was there, leaning and smoking.
“Pain in the neck.”
“Pardon?” Lark was startled.
“That woman. Pain in the neck, isn’t she?”
“You’re not German at all.” Lark could now hear that Mr. Crouch—Paul, as she came to call him—was a native English speaker.
“Who said I was German?”
Lark had taken it for granted—a German ship, a blond, blue-eyed man called Herr “Krautsch,” speaking and spoken to in German—in spite of the lesson in stereotypes that Tom had tried to teach her in the cafeteria with his portraits.
“They like it that I don’t know too much German. Just ‘More beer’ or ‘Bring the peppers’ is all I need to understand. They’re an odd lot.”
Lark looked at Paul Crouch, really pleased, both because of the sentiment he had expressed about Donna and the officers and because his speaking English gave her someone on board to feel allied with.
“She’ll make dinner take twice as long, and she’ll make my days even longer.” Paul grumbled, mumbled, not a clear diction. “She’s a busybody, a know-all.”
Lark could now hear that he was Australian.
“But don’t say anything to her,” Paul said. “I don’t want her after me with her reminiscences and stories and interrogations. She wants to get at me. You saw her this afternoon.”
“She thinks we’re carrying bodies, or bombs.”
Lark did not think to ask him why he had left home, or when. It was logical enough for him to be cabin steward on a German freighter. Australians were circling the globe by the thousands for years at a time. It was one of the things they did. And here on this little ship were three of them, engaged in what was shaping up as some ritual of endurance.
The twenty or so sailors who slept and worked below were rarely evident. Occasionally they could be seen checking the ropes around the aluminum rods on the deck and swabbing the parts of the deck that were not covered by the rods. Occasionally Lark saw large mice of various shades of gray and brown, which she had to admit were probably rats, nipping in and out of the rods.
To escape from Donna Bird, Lark went up to what she came to consider her deck, on top of the bridge. And she went around the ship barefooted. She intended the soles of her feet to become rough and hard, her skin brown and tough, her hair blonder and coarser, as if all of that, too, would free her from Donna Bird’s artful pallor and restraint.
Donna spent the days inside, away from the sunlight, usually in her cabin or in the dining room, which became a library and lounge room between meals, where she sat, pale and soft, and wrote. Sometimes she prowled around the ship, “flit-flutted” as the Captain put it, in the early morning or late afternoon, when the sun was not too hot.
It was a brilliant day. The sea was calm. Lark lay on her deck. She looked up and saw Paul Crouch’s head, as if on a plate, just a foot or two from hers. Thick blond hair, blue eyes, brown skin, several fine scars under the right eye, and two or three large light brown freckles on his right cheekbone, the mark of Australians who had spent their youth in cars with the southern sun beating down obliquely through the driver’s window. She noticed later that on his right arm and shoulder were similar freckles. On the palm of one hand, held at chin level, he bore a tray with a teapot and two cups. He knew that Lark would invite him to keep her company.
H
e slid the tray onto the deck and hoisted his body up. “You don’t want to get sunstroke,” he said. “You should wear a hat.”
“A visor, perhaps?” And Paul Crouch smiled. Lark looked at the two cups. “Hot tea is the best way to keep cool in hot weather,” she said, “and stay out of the breeze, it’ll only make you hotter,” and they both laughed.
Paul Crouch sat down, cross-legged, beside her. They drank their tea, not talking, neither wanting to begin the story of a past life that travelers were always expected to tell. Then Paul pulled off his T-shirt and his sneakers, took a book from his trouser pocket, rolled up his trouser legs, and lay down on the deck beside Lark.
Lark dozed off and dreamt about Solomon Blank. He lived in a glass house, with an indoor pond whose surface was practically obliterated by water lilies. In the dream his wife was short, and hairy, resembling a wombat.
Lark came into the dining room before lunch and found Donna hunched on the bench, on the spot where Lark sat for meals, scribbling in her book in that bright green ink. Donna looked up and placed her two hands over the open pages. “Just jotting down thoughts.”
Lark shrugged. Who cared? She turned to the bookcase and then saw that the Captain was standing there quietly, apparently looking for a book, gazing at the titles, his finger moving along the spines.
“You really should try keeping a diary, Larkie,” said Donna. “Tom would definitely approve. Of course, in my diaries there’s nothing of importance. They have no meaning. I try to stay on the surface, that is true freedom, and to eschew the psychological.”
“And to affirm the spectacle, of course. But your diary makes you feel you are a drop in the ocean of life, isn’t that right?” said Lark.
“Exactly. I celebrate the ludic and the joke. Playing is itself subversive, and therefore liberating,” said Donna, ignoring Lark’s sarcasm. “And so, you see, the world itself is my text, the spectacle.” Although she still placed her hands over the pages containing her thoughts, she nevertheless flaunted her diary and her writing, as if daring someone to pry. Lark was surprised that she felt no impulse to take a look. She felt rather that the diary would contaminate her, stain her fingers green.
“But since your vision of me is as liar, I am writing something now especially for you, something to make you adjust your view of me. Later you will have it, when I’ve finished.”
The Captain walked over to the table and turned the pages of Donna’s diary. “Very good handwriting,” he said. “An artist. Very cultured. We value that in Germany.” He bowed slightly. “Good morning, ladies.” And he left the room.
“I think he is going to make us do it,” said Donna. “Walk on the coral.”
“I’m not going to,” said Lark. “I believe you’re egging him on.”
Donna looked down at Lark’s feet. “Of course you, Lark, will be less vulnerable than I, with those feet and that skin.”
“Walking on coral must surely be against the law of the sea,” said Lark.
Donna got up and tucked her arm into Lark’s. “If you don’t go, I won’t go. Just think what adventures you’ll be able to entertain Tom with in New York. You’ll be so worldly. So grown up. That’s what you want, right?”
Paul Crouch took to coming up the ladder to Lark’s deck after breakfast every morning, bringing tea for two.
“She won’t follow us up here into this sun,” he said.
Paul had read the entire library on the ship long ago, novels like Exodus and popular works on subjects like out-of-body travel, and wanted to start on Lark’s books. When she finished one she passed it on to him. Sometimes they read together. She got to know the line of his cheek, the pale freckles, his hair and his hands as they sat reading, and she learned his gestures, his postures, his characteristic noncommittal smile.
Sometimes they talked a bit. Sometimes they lay on the deck silent. Sometimes they stood up and leant against the rail and watched the water and the sky.
“I like this clear sky,” said Lark. “Nothing can fall from it. There can be no surprises.”
Paul smiled. “Like a piano on the head?”
“Don’t laugh. A plane fell into the Empire State Building in New York, you know. Imagine, sitting at your desk and being hit by an airplane.”
“You’d have to wear a hard hat indoors. You’d be like Donna Bird.”
Lark did not laugh with him. “Then I would be a crank. It’s a fine distinction, between being sensible and being a crank.”
Now and then they saw birds circling in the distance, and they would know that an island must be off there somewhere. Now and then they saw what looked like a bird but turned out to be an airplane, generally not a high-flying commercial jet but a speedy, low-flying type, military, French or American, patrolling the Pacific Ocean. “Maybe one day it’ll be Superman,” said Paul, “ready to catch the piano as it falls.” The distant birds and the planes were the only signs of life they encountered, if a plane could be called a sign of life. They never saw another ship, and they never saw land.
After a while Lark said, “I always wanted to live on an island, under a sky like this.”
And they lay back down on the deck and read their books.
“‘Galeotto fu il libro,’” croaked a soft voice.
Donna Bird’s head had appeared at the top of the ladder. She had a view of their heads close together as they read.
“The Inferno,” she said. “Dante. Without that book, which told the story of Galahad and Lancelot and Guinevere, Francesca and Paolo would not have become lovers. At least, that is what Francesca would have us believe. You’d think there would have been something for them to think about beyond each other and sex.”
Paul groaned, mumbling something like, “Bloody woman,” The more he disliked Donna Bird, the more attractive he seemed to Lark.
Lark looked at Donna’s face, the closest she had ever been to it—usually she found herself averting her eyes from Donna’s intensity—not that much was visible, swathed as she always was in her scarf and visor and flapping her fan. Her eyes were as blue as Paul’s, and Lark could see the pale freckles on her right cheekbone. But Donna looked like a gray, out-of-focus photograph beside Paul’s Technicolor moving picture.
“Won’t you burn up out here?” Lark asked. She could not imagine what had brought Donna out into the sun.
“The Captain says it’s getting close to the time for our coral walk,” she said.
“I’m not going coral walking,” said Lark.
Paul had become the stage pirate. He stood up and was leaning again, his back to them, still with his trousers rolled up and his T-shirt off, his back and his calves smooth and brown. Paul never looked at Donna, never spoke to her, in fact hardly spoke at all, even to Lark. It seemed powerful to Lark, that he stayed so silent, and so safe. After Donna’s little anecdote about the callow traveler that first day, she appeared to ignore Paul Crouch, although Lark was aware of her keeping track of him, of both of them, tracking their movements. And Donna had risked her skin to climb up to Lark’s deck in broad daylight, more, Lark now guessed, to check on her and Paul than to announce the coral walk, which Lark still believed was just the Captain’s teasing.
“It’ll be such an adventure,” said the head at the top of the ladder. “But you don’t think he’s trying to get rid of us, do you? You don’t think it’s connected with his secret cargo?”
“What secret cargo?”
Donna smiled. “You know. You’ve heard him. You saw that box.”
“You’re absurd.”
“Of course,” Donna went on, “he does know my father, so we’ll probably be safe. On the other hand, an accident at sea is always possible, if he thinks we’re onto something. But then you think I lie, so you shouldn’t believe what I say, and you might as well walk on coral, too.”
“I’m not going coral walking,” said Lark.
“Tom would be so proud of you?” said Donna, goading. “You could dine out on the tale for months in New York.”
>
With a grunt Paul left his rail, picked up his T-shirt and pulled it on, then lowered himself down the ladder, practically vaulting over Donna Bird, taking care to look at neither of the women. Lark watched his head disappear, angry at Donna’s interference.
Donna was absent from dinner. She sent word that she had had too much sun and needed to rest her skin in her cabin. The meal was very quiet. The men exchanged subdued brief sentences in German, which all seemed to concern the condition of the engine, fuel, the weather, and sometimes life in the good old days. There were no jokes, no poker game. The Captain, having told Paul Crouch to take Donna Bird’s dinner in to her, hurried through his own meal and paid a courtesy call on Donna Bird in her cabin, as if he wanted to be sure she had not flown off.
It was later, after dinner, on Lark’s deck, that Paul told Lark that Donna had been sitting in her cabin with just one little light on over her desk and had just reached her hand around the door to take the tray, so that even the light from the gangway would not reach her.
“She was wearing gray socks,” said Paul “but they were over her hands.”
“Did she have whiskers stuck on, too? Did she squeak?”
But the next day Donna’s head appeared again at the top of the ladder, a pale jack-o’-lantern. Paul and Lark were lying rather close together. Paul had taken off his shirt as usual and lay on his back, his hands under his head. Lark was reading. She could hear the airplanes in the distance. It took her several seconds to understand that the whirring sound she heard was coming from Donna’s movie camera.
“I’ve lost my pen,” Donna said. “Have you seen it?” She had dropped her camera so that it was out of sight, below the level of the deck. Only the strap around her neck showed.
Paul took up his book and rolled away from Lark.
“Borrow mine,” said Lark.
Donna screwed up her nose. “I could never write a word using a Biro.” She burrowed in the bag she had slung over her shoulder and held out a sheaf of papers. “Here, Lark. For you.”
Lark took the papers. In columns in bright green ink, filling up each side of each sheet in tiny script, were the names of everyone Donna Bird had ever met. Lark looked at the head just a few inches from hers. “Is this why you missed dinner? You must have been doing this for days.”