The Midnight Swimmer

by Edward Wilson

  Someone hidden in the shadows of the lower deck laughed. ‘Maybe old Kurt got drunk and fell in the river.’

  Then someone else said, ‘Shhh.’ And there was a tense silence.

  Arlekin grasped his duffel bag firmly and looked at the swirling water. Finally, the skipper of the pilot cutter stuck his head out of the wheelhouse to confront his visitors. The skipper’s upper lip was badly distorted – as if he had a cleft palate that had been poorly repaired. The damage thickened his speech. ‘The Lech is on the other side of the river – in the Neustädter Hafen. You should know that – that’s where all the ships from the East have to go.’ The skipper paused and looked hard at the fake border policeman. ‘We ferry pilots around the harbour, not just anyone.’ The skipper looked at Arlekin. ‘Is that the package you want me to deliver? He looks like a gypsy.’

  ‘He’s a Pole.’ The controller picked up Arlekin’s left arm and rolled back the coat sleeve. The hand and arm were bandaged. ‘He burnt his arm on a steam valve – and had to go to the St Jürgenstrasse Hospital. When they let him go, he got too drunk to find his way back to his ship.’ Arlekin stared expressionlessly into space. He tried hard to act out his cover story as a drunken sailor with learning difficulties. It was good to learn humility, to feel what it was to be powerless.

  ‘I think,’ continued the controller, ‘he’s a bit stupid – or maybe touched. In any case, he doesn’t speak any German – the only thing he could say to the police when they picked him up was Polski marynarz, Polish sailor.’

  The skipper turned to whisper something to the pilot, a self-assured looking man – an aristocrat of the sea who wore his peaked Käpitanmütze at a rakish angle and smoked a pipe. The pilot looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s getting late – we don’t want to miss the last of the ebb.’ Arlekin stared at the back of the skipper’s neck and realised the deformed lip had nothing to do with cleft palate: there was a huge ugly wound where the machine-gun bullet that smashed his face had made its exit. They were all scarred by that heritage: it must never happen again.

  Two tugboats were making their way across the river, the tide forcing them sideways. The skipper looked up at the controller. ‘Your Pole really should go through customs. I’ve never done this before – and I don’t want to do it now.’

  The controller reached into the breast pocket of his coat and began to flourish what seemed to be identity documents. ‘I’ll clear it with customs, don’t worry.’

  The skipper shook his head and waved away the document wallet. ‘You really ought to have gone around to the Neustädter Hafen – and embarked him properly through the Zollbeamte. They have to count all these birds off and then on again.’

  ‘There’s no sense in talking about what we should have done, we’re here now and there isn’t time to put it right.’

  Everyone knew there were no bridges near the docks. A trip to Neustädter Hafen would have meant a lengthy drive back to the centre of Bremen and then down the opposite bank of the Weser. And by then the Polish ship would have long departed.

  The controller lowered his voice and got confidential with the skipper. ‘Look, I don’t want to get stuck with this fellow – something’s not right with him. If he misses that ship, it means we’ll have to keep him in a police cell – and maybe get psychiatric help too. And the Polish consul is already away for Christmas, so it could be a long wait for repatriation. The simple thing is just to put him on that ship – and that’s the end of it.’

  ‘Make up your mind, Willy.’ The pilot was speaking. ‘We really must get going or we’ll miss the lock at Brunsbüttel.’ He gestured with his pipe to the Lech. ‘That old girl can only do ten knots.’

  The skipper waved a hand in front of his face as if brushing away responsibility, then gestured to Arlekin. ‘Come aboard – it’s back East with you where you belong.’

  By the time it was light, they were abeam of the Roter Sand lighthouse. Arlekin had just finished a breakfast of rye bread and Twaróg, a sort of curd cheese. There was also a flask of black tea. Arlekin still felt a sense of pique. He knew that the Bremen controller had treated him with less dignity than was necessary. It was as if it was a matter of personal score-settling. It worried him and he wondered how much the controller knew.

  Arlekin poured the last of the tea and went over to a porthole to look at the bleak seascape of dawn mist. Roter Sand lighthouse was a stately structure from the Bismarck era with two mock Gothic turrets, the larger one housing a light that flashed three times every four seconds. They were in the Deutsche Bucht, known in the British Shipping Forecast as German Bight. It was a treacherous sea area scored with sandbanks by the outflows of the rivers Ems, Weser and Elbe. Arlekin regarded the sandy brown water and imagined Saxon longships taking the tide on their way to harry the east coast of England as the Romans withdrew – and then carrying settlers across the North Sea to replace the Romans.

  He sipped the tea and looked westwards trying to make out the island of Wangerooge, but the mist was too thick. Wangerooge was one of the islands that Erskine Childers had written about in The Riddle of the Sands. Arlekin peered hard through the porthole, but there was only swirling mist. Erskine Childers was more of a riddle than the shifting sands he had written about. Childers had been a man of complex loyalties – and even more complex disloyal-ties. His life had ended in front of a firing squad – the day after he had made his sixteen-year-old son vow to shake hands with each of the executioners. Arlekin wondered what it would be like to face a firing squad. The French were the only Western power that still used them. And the OAS generals and officers who attempted the putsch against de Gaulle were going to face them soon.

  The pilot disembarked from the Lech when they reached the Baltic end of the Kiel Canal. As they lay alongside dock, Arlekin stretched out on a narrow steel bunk and pulled a blanket over his head. If anyone looked through the porthole they would see only an empty dark cabin, or at best a sick crewman curled up in bed. As Arlekin lay with his forehead against the steel bulkhead, he heard shouting in German, and then loud footsteps on the deck. These were real border police. Were they going to search the ship? There was more shouting and another voice speaking German, but in an accent that didn’t sound German. Arlekin wondered if it was the ship’s skipper. Whoever it was, he was laughing. Maybe that was a good sign – or good acting. Then silence. After what seemed like an hour, Arlekin looked at his watch – only ten minutes had passed. Then the worst thing happened. Hatches were being opened and closed: loud echoing, clanging noises. They seemed to be progressing from one end of the ship to the other. Each time a hatch clanged shut heavy running footsteps echoed around the ship. There also seemed to be a lot of people going up and down ladders. The most frightening noise was the unbearable racket of someone beating a hammer on what seemed to be an empty cistern. It was as if the hammer wielder was trying to flush a stowaway out of his hiding place.

  Arlekin lay facing the cold steel of the bulkhead next to the bunk. He started planning what he would have to do. If he pretended to be mentally ill they might leave him alone. He tried to recollect the faces and gestures of the patients he had seen in a mental hospital. He especially remembered the lobotomised woman who took an hour to put on a sock – all the while rocking back and forth. And then, when she finally got the sock on, she pulled it off again and started screaming. If the searchers came into the cabin, that’s what he would do. He would pretend to be her. But he knew he couldn’t do it. It would be disrespectful to use her like that. Arlekin had loved the woman. He still loved her. He lay motionless as his tears dampened the thin mattress beneath his face.

  It all ended as mysteriously as it had begun. The border police must have left the ship. Arlekin could hear the engines starting up and the slapping sounds of hawsers against the hull as they cast off. He waited ten minutes before getting up and looking out the porthole. There was no land: the view was seaward across the broad waters of the Baltic. Arlekin had just begun to breathe easy when he heard
a knocking at the cabin door. He remembered that he wasn’t to talk to anyone so he ignored the knocking. He waited for the person to go, but could hear shuffling and breathing on the other side of the door. The knocking began again in earnest. He assumed it must be someone coming to take away the breakfast dishes so he opened the door.

  The visitor looked like an ordinary Polish seaman. He was dressed in khaki overalls with a soiled red bandana around his neck and a greasy rag hanging from one pocket. He smiled broadly and put a finger to his lips. Arlekin wasn’t sure what was happening. He wanted to tell his visitor to go away; he was sure the crew had been warned not to fraternise and not to ask questions. He shook his head and gestured for the other to leave. But the man in overalls just kept smiling and gestured for him to follow. Arlekin knew the reason for his enforced silence – lest a single word or accent give away his nationality or identity. He didn’t know how to deal with the visitor. He considered pushing him away and slamming the door, but the visitor’s face was too kind and innocent for such a rude response. The seaman gestured again with a friendly summoning hand. Against his better judgement, Arlekin followed.

  The corridor was narrow and dimly lit by low wattage bare bulbs. At the end was a hatch that opened to a steep stairwell that descended precipitously through the two lower decks. At the bottom of the stairs there was another bulkhead hatch which vibrated like a drum head to the loud thumping noise it contained. The seaman opened the hatch. He was smiling broadly as he turned to descend a ladder. Arlekin followed. The noise was much louder, but not deafening – pleasant, in fact. At the bottom of the ladder there was a workbench that faced a large panel full of gauges. The ranks of gauges were separated by a brass clock with roman numerals and a huge wheel of cast iron. The engine room was dry and warm like a Mediterranean beach in summer and smelt of hot oil. The man in overalls made a sweeping gesture as if to embrace the room and then pointed to himself with pride: he was the chief engineer.

  The engineer picked up a pair of wire-framed reading spectacles from the workbench and put them on. The glasses, precarious and uneven on the tip of his nose, suddenly transformed him from worker to intellectual. The lens magnified his eyes and made him seem even kindlier and more knowing. The engineer took his guest by the elbow and led him to the very heart of the ship; the great pounding dark goddess that drove all her tons through the waters at a stately ten knots. And she was beautiful.

  Arlekin stood for a moment in awe. The piston rods were radiant and sleek limbs in the half light. They looked like three dancers as they stroked in perfect syncopation to an endless minimalist music. Arlekin knew something about ships and he knew that he was in the presence of a triple expansion steam engine: a beautiful, but rare survivor into the marine diesel age of 1961. Her dance was graceful and slow as she turned the crankshaft at a mere sixty revolutions a minute – the pulse rate of a woman asleep and dreamless. He was almost hypnotised by the slow pendulum movement. He wanted to sleep too.

  Suddenly, the engineer was tugging again at his elbow. There was something else he had to show him. The urgency suggested that this was the important thing, the very reason for the engine room tour. Arlekin was taken to inspect a large brass plaque, a data plate that was bolted on to the aft end of the engine assembly. The engineer took a clean rag from his pocket and gave the data plate an unnecessary buff, for it already gleamed, then stood back like a curator revealing the museum’s prize exhibit. The embossed letters read:

  SWAN HUNTER

  NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND

  1934

  Arlekin was abashed, but kept a straight face and didn’t even shrug his shoulders as if to say ‘so what’. It was amusing, but it was also unfortunate. His job was to remain an anonymous piece of baggage on the way there and on the way back. Any speculation about who he was and why he was there could have serious consequences. Arlekin looked blankly at the engineer and jerked his head upwards to indicate he wanted to go back. He was worried. The behaviour of the engineer suggested bad security. Or it may have been part of the plan.

  Arlekin spent the rest of the voyage lying on his bunk – and trying not to worry. He knew that what he was doing was a terrible risk, but not taking that risk could be even more terrible. He had changed a lot since he was a young man. Winning was no longer all. Winning could mean that everyone loses. The problem was that not everyone understood what was at stake. And people still used out of date words like appeasement and patriotism – and treason. And what was honour? A pointless duel where you shoot each other’s children, until someone has the sense to shout, ‘Enough!’ But these were inner thoughts he had to keep to himself

  The thump of the steam engine suddenly changed pace and a shudder went through the ship. They seemed to be stopping. Arlekin got up and looked out the porthole. It was dusk, but he could still make out a flat coastline without any lights. The engine then clunked back into gear and the coastline came closer. He could soon discern a line of sandy beach and a clump of driftwood. As they approached the narrow entrance there was a flashing red light on the end of a breakwater – and then, as unexpected as grace, a windmill as white and ancient as a ghost. Both banks of the waterway were bound by dark woods. A few minutes later, the woods were replaced by the cranes of Świnoujście Harbour scoring the sky.

  Świnoujście was the outer harbour. The main harbour, Szczecin, was further inland on the other side of the Oder/Szczecin Lagoon. Both harbours had been German before 1945 – and known as Swinemünde and Stettin. When the borders changed, the former German residents had to shift thirty miles to the east, to the new Deutsche Demokratische Republik. And in turn, the newly christened harbours were repopulated with Poles who had been displaced from the parts of western Poland which had been annexed by the Soviet Union. Arlekin knew it was pointless to care too much about these things. There were far worse fates than packing bags and learning new languages. Peace was more important than just and fair solutions for all. But so was power.

  The plans were not completely clear. But the important thing for now was complete secrecy. One option had been for Arlekin to leave the ship at Szczecin. But apparently Mischa wasn’t happy about that one. The Szczecin option meant that the UB, the Polish Intelligence Service, would be responsible for taking him to the DDR border and turning him over to minders from Mischa’s own East German State Security Ministry. It occurred to Arlekin that Mischa had abandoned the Szczecin option because he didn’t trust UB security. When Arlekin’s clandestine visit had been negotiated, Mischa’s intermediary had bluntly asked if Polish intelligence had been penetrated by the Western allies. Arlekin gave the usual safe answer. He said he didn’t know.

  The Lech proceeded slowly past the Świnoujście cranes and docks as if waiting for instructions. For a while the navigation lights of a smaller craft motored abeam of the Lech as if lining up for a rendezvous, but then gave up the game and disappeared into the dark. The lights and cranes of Świnoujście then faded away and it was as if the ship had dropped into an underworld. Arlekin strained his eyes to make out something, to get a bearing, but there was only blackness. Finally, there was a green marker light that illuminated the end of a retaining wall. It looked like they had reached the end of a canal. A moment later there was a break in the clouds. A brief burst of moonlight revealed a broad lagoon of open water so vast that you couldn’t see land. The ship continued at a slower pace than ever before; cloud extinguished the moon and a gust of wind pelted the porthole with icy rain. They appeared to have stopped.

  The ship seemed suspended in a netherworld where time had stopped. The stasis was suddenly broken by a roar of engines coming from the west that grew louder and louder. Arlekin put his face against the porthole and strained to see what was happening. He finally managed to make out a line of white wake cutting across the black waters of the lagoon. A second later a searchlight from the bridge of the Lech began to sweep across the waters until it found a black high-speed boat heading in their direction. The boat, still tracked by the sear
chlight, yawed sharply as it hove alongside the hull of the Lech. A voice from the boat shouted something in German, and then another voice shouted even more loudly in Russian – and the searchlight was quickly extinguished. There was then a clunky sound as a boarding ladder was lowered over the side.

  Two minutes later Arlekin heard the sound of heavy boots approaching in the corridor outside his cabin. They stopped outside his door, and there was a pause as someone cleared his throat. Arlekin waited, but no knock came. For the first time, he was frightened: none of this was part of the plan. Just as he was about to call out, the door flew open. It was a tall man dressed in dripping black oilskins and sea boots. His face was masked by a dark scarf that only revealed his eyes. The man gestured and Arlekin followed.

  There were no crew about as the pair made their way to the upper decks. For a second Arlekin wondered if the Poles had been imprisoned in a hold or forced to walk the plank. The emptiness was eerie. He followed the tall man in oilskins along the deck to the boarding ladder. The ship was in complete blackout mode; even the navigation lights had been extinguished. The man gestured for him to go first. As Arlekin stepped over the ship’s side onto the ladder, he had a sense of déjà-vu. It was a repetition of going over the harbour wall the day before in Bremen. His fear dissipated. Boarding strange boats in the night rekindled the mysterious allure of childhood adventures.

  The craft at the bottom of the ladder was a steel-hulled military assault boat powered by two enormous outboards. There were two crew, also dressed in black oilskins with their faces hidden. They cast off without a word and the boat was soon planing at thirty knots an hour across the lagoon. It was bitterly cold, but Arlekin found himself enjoying the fast boat ride in the utter blackness. The only illumination was the compass dial. Forty minutes later, the helmsman cut the speed and pointed the boat to the south. For the first time since leaving the Lech, Arlekin was able to see coastline: the silhouettes of trees and the roofs of houses and barns. The helmsman cut the speed to walking pace. Someone was signalling with a light from the end of a jetty.