Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  But still they came, swarming up towards the ship, harassed by the soldiers below. Emil and Solomon reached a lower deck and were herded aft, feeling the sudden loss of air as they went down, past rolled wire, below decks, into a low-ceilinged space crowded with hammocks and tables. Soldiers were shouting at them. ‘Find a bed. Sit on it. Shut up!’

  As the men descended into the bowels of the ship, hundreds pushing in behind them, it quickly became apparent that there would not be enough hammocks for even half the men. ‘Here,’ Solomon said to Emil. ‘Between us, we’ll take a hammock and a table, and we’ll swap, every night. He who sleeps on the table can have my coat as a mattress. That way we need never sleep on the floor.’

  The hold filled quickly around them, and when it was full, more crowded in, until they were huddled on the floor and in the hammocks, muttering to each other in the dark in disbelief. Emil sat on the table to reserve it while Solomon lay curled on his side in the hammock, his head balanced on the taut edge so that he could talk to Emil. ‘You were on the Arandora?’ Emil asked. A thrum of complaint rose around them, intermittently silenced by the yap of a guard.

  Solomon nodded. ‘I was near the lifeboats. The captain told me to get on one. Some of them broke as the ship went down. Ours was all right, but there was hardly anyone on it. We got some people out of the sea. Not many.’

  ‘Listen,’ Emil said, ‘you must take the hammock for the voyage. I’ll manage on the table.’

  ‘No, your cough is worse than ever. I’m fine. Not a scratch on me.’

  ‘But you must rest. It was only a few days ago. I cannot believe they have you on another ship so soon.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m their lucky charm. Me and the others who did not drown.’

  ‘Then I’m glad you’re with me. Perhaps this time the ship will make it to Canada.’

  ‘Emil, we can go to Timbuktu for all I care. So long as we get there in one piece.’

  They lay in the crowded hold all day without food, restless and sweating. There was a latrine at the rear, soon blocked and overflowing. The guards would not let them move about the ship to use another. The portholes were covered over with boards but there were gaps and they sensed nightfall, just as the engines rumbled into life and they began to move off. As soon as they left the shelter of the port they felt immediately that they were heading into rough waters. The men grew rowdy, talking loudly, excitedly, groaning, some of the boys crying, some old salts singing. Eventually, when it became clear that no food was coming, and that they must make it through the night however they chose, the men withdrew from each other in their hammocks, curled on tables, some on the floor, trying to stay away from the sloshing latrine as the ship pitched and tumbled away from England.

  Emil’s table was close to the latrine and it slid around in the slick of foul water from the overflowing buckets. The air was black and fetid. Solomon’s shape lay above him in the hammock, so close he almost touched him when he turned on his side. He dared not speak, in case Solomon had fallen asleep. He did not have the heart to wake a man who against all odds had found some rest.

  Emil stared into the thick black air above the men’s heads, these prisoners pitched into their darkest moments by the lurching of the ship. The hold was peopled with all of their nightmares: violent men, shattering glass, speechless farewells on railway platforms. He slipped eventually into a sleep more like illness than rest, a place of inescapable lucidity and repetition, of loss that filled his body like a sweet, poisonous gas.

  In the first moments as he sank under he immediately began a strange circular journey around the streets of his childhood. He rode the bicycle that his father built for him from scraps around the ten blocks that spread out from the apartment, the perimeter prescribed by his mother, past the school, the bakery with its wonderful morning aromas, the train station where the commuters swarmed onto the platform for trains to Düsseldorf in the morning and swarmed out again in the evening, the church, the police station. Along the river, the new warehouses and factories. As his table moved around the rolling deck it came into his dream that he could not remember which was closest to his home: the school or the shops. He became furious with himself. It was his job to remember exactly where everything was. Someone would come whom he would be charged with telling about the town, about what happened where, in precise detail, and there could be no question of simply forgetting.

  He was a grown man, hiding in an apartment across the street from the trade union building. He did not know what he was hiding from, but then he saw them. It was early, and as the day’s work was due to begin and workers filled the streets on the way to their offices, two lorries drew alongside the union building and disgorged what seemed to be thousands of men, all in dark, crisp uniforms. They streamed into the building while around them the workers on the street kept their heads down, even as they came to a halt to allow the men to pass. They came without end, like a plague of insects, so numerous and close together that they were a black swarm rather than a group of individuals.

  Emil watched them from the window of the apartment, frozen as he saw through the windows of the trade union building the stairs and the offices filling with the black figures. Then, as the workers outside began once more to surge along the street towards their workplaces, there was his father, elderly, portly, running from the river against the tide of people on the street towards his offices. Emil remained immobile in the window as his father drew closer to the swarm, growing closer to being absorbed with every passing instant. The moment went on and on as Emil skated around the deck. The men still swarming from the lorries, his father running towards them, Emil frozen in the window. Inside his body there was a box of flickering light and dark, in which his father was running perpetually towards the building, and he was always watching, unmoving. For the rest of the night in that little box the scene did not end, only repeated, an inescapable loop.

  Eventually, as the weakest chink of light crept through the boarded-up portholes and the storm eased, he finally began to leave the darkness, coming up through the layers towards his life as it was now. Solomon’s voice came quietly from above. ‘How many nights would you say it takes to reach Canada?’

  Emil pulled his compass from his pocket, glad that it had not been stolen from him in the night. Hans had left it behind. It had been in his pocket the years since then. He would not put it past these Neanderthals to swipe it from him while he slept. ‘They’re not taking us to Canada,’ he said, studying it by the weak light from the edge of the porthole. Solomon leaned over the edge of the hammock and Emil held the compass up to show him. Its arrow pointed south, not west.

  By their third day at sea, rumours rippled and skirmished among the men in their hammocks and tables. Though the sky was overcast it was possible for all to see from the light at morning exercise that they were not going west. During their twenty-minute jog around the deck in which the weaker, slower men were insulted and hectored, an older man with shoulders like a wrestler’s, a Nazi, said to Emil: ‘They tell me you have a compass.’ Emil pretended not to hear. The Nazi pushed him. Emil punched him in the nose, blood appearing straightaway at his nostrils. The English guard beside them, Cook, a man who seemed to be of subnormal intelligence, perhaps even brain-damaged, and who took great pleasure in violence of any sort, let out a whoop. ‘That’s it, Jerry. Show him what you’re made of!’ The officer at the bow ordered the men to keep moving and jabbed a boy close to him with the butt of his rifle.

  That night, Emil lay in the hammock, trembling. He felt Solomon stand from the table and loom over him in the light from the dim lantern tied to the crossbeams above. ‘You’re shaking,’ he was saying. ‘Your shirt is wet. I’ll take you to the infirmary.’

  Emil stared past him, seeing not the men in the shadowy bowels of the ship but Papa, thin, young, running away from him on the ice, pulling a pale-headed boy on a sled. Solomon took hold of Emil’s arm and pulled him gently to his feet.

  Emil was aware intermittently tha
t someone was trying to bear him along the gangways and up and down stairs. He was confused by the darkness, the soldiers that reared up out of the shadows. I am a prisoner of the British, he thought. They will put my head on a stick. Each time he attempted to take his own weight both men fell on the floor, and it took minutes for Solomon to get him back on his feet, sliding him up against the metal wall to manage it. When they finally reached the infirmary the twenty or so beds were filled with men with dysentery, bayonet wounds and one suicide attempt, his wrists bandaged. Emil stared at the man’s soiled bandages as he lay there with his eyes closed and Solomon moved him on to where several men sat on wooden foldaway chairs at the end of the room. One of them noticed Solomon and Emil and stood. Solomon slipped Emil’s arm from round his neck and dropped him into the chair. ‘Where are the medical officers?’ Emil heard him say. He looked like he was shouting. And then he looked like Thomas. So, they were both prisoners. He couldn’t help but feel relieved.

  The man nodded towards one of the beds where there was a man in uniform, as dishevelled and forlorn in sleep as the men around him. His friend, it was Solomon now, said something to Emil’s neighbour who put out a hand to keep Emil upright in his chair while Solomon approached the sleeping medical officer. Emil saw one man stand over another, could not establish who they were. It was a ship, with soldiers. But one of those men was a friend, trying to help him. Without his help he would die. Something had gone wrong inside his body. His blood was poison. He recognised the feeling, but he did not know from where.

  The man Solomon was shaking jolted, sat upright immediately, and Emil lurched forward, thinking to save his friend from a blow. He was falling forward. The man with his hand on his arm pulled him back onto the chair.

  His friend was talking to the man he had woken and was pointing to Emil. They approached him together. The man placed his hand on his forehead. The hand was very cool and dry. How was this man so cool in this furnace?

  ‘Could it be malaria?’ Solomon asked the man in English. ‘I think he was in Palestine, and Turkey.’

  The man nodded thoughtfully and said something from deep underwater and they began to manoeuvre themselves under his arms, to take him somewhere. The man in the chair next to them began to grumble. He was upset about something. ‘Hours,’ he said. ‘Hours and hours.’

  No one had a chance to answer him because just then a thump hit the ship low down behind them and several of the men fell off their beds and started screaming. Emil was wrenched from the grasp of Solomon and the doctor and fell to the floor. It smelled of ammonia but it was cold. A nice cold, hard surface under his cheek. A second strike shook the floor and he saw the blur of feet rushing towards the door. Solomon and the doctor steadied themselves and pulled Emil to his feet. There was an English voice in the corridor. ‘Stay below! Stay below!’

  When they had grappled Emil back onto a bed, the doctor went out to the stairway. ‘What’s going on? Are we under attack?’ he called up to the guard. ‘Shouldn’t we get ready to evacuate?’

  ‘Orders are to stay below! Just do as you’re told.’

  Then there was a soldier in the room, hurtling from the stairwell into the infirmary. A big man like a stupid bull, pushing patients from their beds onto the floor. The soldier crashed through the beds towards Emil, face red, and then he was pulling him onto the floor and kicking him in the head, once, twice, screaming at him. Do I know this man? was all Emil could manage to think. There was a feeling amid the assault that some old trouble was surfacing, something he’d believed himself done with.

  His head flashed with bright light, as though something had detonated inside it. He heard someone scream as the explosions in his head came one upon the other. ‘Filthy German swine have torpedoed us. We will all die, you filthy kraut.’ He felt liquid in his ear. Saw nothing. Then there were men on every side, German voices, gathering around his attacker, bearing him away.

  He felt his friend help him onto the bed. He recognised his voice and when he opened his eyes he saw him, knew him. It was Solomon Lek, the man with the books, the man who didn’t drown. If this man stayed with him, he would be all right. He was lucky. Solomon pulled a chair alongside the bed and rested on Emil’s legs, arms and head, pinning them down, so that he would not fall off. Solomon fell asleep instantly. At some point the medical officer returned and gave him quinine, he knew the smell as it came towards his face. Ah yes.

  Emil closed his eyes and felt the doctor touch his ear, pat the dried blood with something that stung. When he had gone Emil slipped inside himself into a place where the man kicked him until he could not see. For the rest of the night Emil understood that the screaming man was a Nazi, that the British army was run by them now, and that none of them would ever see land, nor even daylight, again.

  Emil mended, slowly, and was transferred back into the cavernous hold with the other men, still shaky, with the cleared-out lightness of recovery. He suffered their jokes about his holiday in the infirmary without comment, not sharp enough to offer a response. He slept one night a little better than the other, rocked in the hammock, enclosed within his cocoon. Several days into the voyage, they were called on deck at dawn. It took two hours for two and a half thousand men to shuffle out, blinking under a pink sky, onto the deck. Everyone could clearly see from the position of the great red orb breaking free of the ocean that they were heading south. Emil looked at the men around him, their faces lined and hairy in the pink light, and wondered where in God’s name they would all end up.

  ‘Men,’ came the voice of the captain through a loudhailer from way up ahead, ‘now that we have left Europe behind us, I can inform you of our destination. It is Australia, where you will remain for the duration of this war, and will pose no more threat to the security of the British Isles. Dismissed.’

  As the men shuffled and mumbled to each other, a word, repeated over and over in an incredulous whisper, hovered above the crowd: Australia! Emil watched the sun at the horizon finally lift free of the water with a viscous drop and absorbed the information. They had all included Australia on their list of possible destinations but now that it was a certainty it was an incredible thing to take in. But so then would be Shanghai, or India. He tried not to think of the number of mines laid across the vast spread of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

  He had heard the voices of Australians in the trenches at night, had taken plenty with his rifle. The Australians had been brown, dirty, scared, mad and vicious, just like them. They looked the same inside when their intestines were spilling out into the mud. Their faces looked the same when they lay in a shell crater, wounded, as good as dead. And there had been a group of them at the hostel once. Louder than the English. Taller. More energetic. They had given the impression they ate a lot of beef and lamb, and spent their spare time swimming and playing cricket. No doubt there was more to it.

  It seemed beyond belief that they would reach the other side of the world intact. Even if he did, Hannah could not reach him. For the duration of the war, the captain had said. Hitler and Churchill might fight forever. They seemed to have an appetite for it. He drank in the acres of ocean knowing that at any moment they would be ordered below. He could not see what was coming and he could not think of what was past. He was still light with illness. Too much thought would knock him off his feet.

  Solomon squeezed through to him as they reached the stairs. ‘What do you think?’ He was smiling. He looked young. ‘I have a cousin in Melbourne. I should not say it out loud—’ he dropped his voice low among the babbling of the other men ‘—but I do feel lucky! To survive two torpedo attacks, and now this!’

  Emil saw in Solomon’s face his own response as a younger man when he discovered the destination of his next voyage with Siemens. He rarely knew a thing about the place printed on the paper, it was the names that were exciting. Reykjavik. Caracas. ‘Do you think letters can be sent from Australia, in wartime?’

  Solomon turned to him. They were being sucked into the door with the
crowd. They would not see each other’s faces clearly again for a long time. ‘Oh yes, I had one from my cousin. She said I should come.’

  Emil felt a hand on his arm, a soft pressure, as they went back into the darkness, and the stench of themselves.

  At Freetown they smelled the sharp barbecue cooking and the sweetly rotten tropical plants. The place was lit up like a tree at Christmas after their months of blackout in England and at sea but they glimpsed the lights only through the gaps in the porthole or on the gangway, through wire. They took extra trips across to the putrid latrines to breathe in Africa and see the black silhouettes of the immense palm trees stirring in the breeze before the collective odour of their own insides overwhelmed them. Emil had been here before, was free then to roam the alleyways and marketplaces and bars, scramble up the red slopes behind the town for a view of the pale ocean, and did not know whether he was luckier than the younger men, who were desperate to see it, or worse off, knowing the strangeness and wonder they were missing, right there on the shore, close enough to smell, to feel. As they departed the coast of Sierra Leone, the men who ruled this floating kingdom, for a reason known only to them, opened the cases they had not thrown overboard and distributed clothes and towels at random. Perhaps the stink of the internees had become too much for them. Or perhaps they had already taken everything they wanted.

  At first the men would not use them, not wanting to sully each other’s possessions, but the soldiers refused to make any attempt to assign items to their true owners, and so the men at last took the supplies and changed their clothes for the first time in three weeks. And then they were all briefly cleaner, their shirts and underclothes whiter and still smelling of the laundries of their landladies, wives and mothers, but they became an odd collection of souls whose clothes did not fit them, worrying constantly that they would chance upon their owner at exercise or dinner and cause irredeemable offence. They were ordered to throw their discarded, lice-infested clothing overboard, and so behind their ship, strewn back towards the lush, mountainous coast of Africa, they left a wide wake of trousers, shirts and hats that drifted momentarily on the foamy green surface before sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic to create an exotic garden for the creatures that lived there. Emil watched as his group returned from their dumping expedition on deck, wondering which of the litter stranded behind them was his, how much of Hannah’s translation fees it had cost.