Das Boot

  The horizon grows sharper. In the east the light has spread out along it; soon it will have encircled the skyline completely. Red fire now glows in the slit between the horizon and the blue-black clouds. The wind freshens, and suddenly in the east the gleaming upper portion of the sun appears. Soon snakes of fiery red are darting and twisting across the water. I have only a brief glimpse of the sun and the color of the sky, for the lighting is made to order for enemy flyers. Bright enough to reveal the boat and its foaming wake, but still too dark for us to spot airplanes quickly against the background of the sky.

  Goddam gulls! They’re harder than anything else on the nerves. It would be nice to know how many alarms have been sounded on their account.

  I’m profoundly grateful that I don’t have the sunlit sector.

  The First Watch Officer goes on issuing commands. “Tubes one to three—ready—one and three tubes fire—distance twelve hundred—width of spread two hundred fifty—angle?”

  “Angle ninety,” comes from below.

  The ocean is now fully awake. The short waves flash with the first light. Our bow begins to glitter. In rapid succession the sky now becomes red-yellow, yellow, then blue-green. The exhaust gas from the diesels extends its bluish veil to a few clouds of pink tulle. Our wake throws up myriad sparks of sunlight. The next man turns his face toward me, flooded with the red light of dawn.

  Far off amid the waves I suddenly discover a few dark points… and then they’re gone. What were they? The port lookout has seen them too.

  “Porpoises!”

  They approach like badly trimmed torpedoes, shooting first through the water, then through the air. One of the school has noticed the boat and they come flying toward us as though on signal. Soon we have them abeam on both sides. There must be dozens of them. Their bellies shimmer bright green; their dorsal fins cut the water like the prows of ships. Effortlessly they keep pace. This isn’t swimming, but a constant flowing succession of leaps and bounds. The water seems to offer them no resistance. I have to remind myself not to watch them, but to pay attention to my sector.

  Short gusts of wind ruffle the waves. Gradually the sky clouds over. Light trickles down and seems to be reaching us through a gigantic horizontal pane of milk glass. Soon our faces are dripping with flying spray. The motions of the boat increase.

  The porpoises abruptly abandon us.

  As I go off-watch my eyes seem to be swollen out of their sockets, at the end of tentacles. I press them with the palms of my hands and have the feeling that they actually are allowing themselves to be pushed back into place.

  I’m so stiff that I can scarcely move as I peel off my wet oilskins and clamber exhausted into my bunk.

  Still half an hour until change of watch. For the thousandth time I concentrate on the pattern of veins in the woodwork beside the bunk: nature’s indecipherable hieroglyphics. The lines around a knot look like the airstream around the lifting surface of a plane.

  Sudden jarring of the alarm bell.

  I’m out of my bunk and reeling on the floor before I’m really conscious. The navigator has the third watch. What in the world can have happened?

  As I try to get into my boots I’m caught in a crowd. The whole room is suddenly full of frantic commotion. Blue smoke billowing out of the kitchen. Looming through it the face of one of the stokers. With forced indifference he asks what’s up.

  “Whatever’s not tied down, you dumb pig!”

  The boat is still on an even keel. What does it mean? An alarm—and we’re still horizontal?

  “Belay alarm! Belay alarm!” rings out from the loudspeakers, and finally the report comes from the control room: “False alarm!”

  “What?”

  “Helmsman hit the alarm bell by mistake!”

  “What a shit!”

  “Which goddam asshole was it?”

  “Markus!”

  Speechlessness for a while, then general rage.

  “I could kick that swine overboard.”

  “Fucking shit!”

  “What a beat-up asshole!”

  “That’s what my girl says too…”

  “Shut your trap!”

  “They ought to use your ass for a fender.”

  “Between cruisers if possible!”

  I smell a real fight.

  The navigator is beside himself. He doesn’t say a word, but his eyes are blazing.

  Lucky for the helmsman that he’s sitting in the tower. Even the Chief looks ready to tear him limb from limb if he ever gets his hands on him.

  Politics is taboo in the Officers’ Mess. Even if I touch on political matters when talking privately with him, the Old Man instantly puts an end to any serious conversation with a mocking twist of the lips. Questions about the meaning of the war and our chances are absolutely out. At the same time there’s no doubt that when the Old Man takes to brooding all day long, staring at nothing, it’s the political questions that bother him, not his personal problems.

  He’s good at camouflage. Only occasionally does he open a small crack in his visor, venture a cryptic remark, and for a few instants betray his real opinion.

  Especially when enraged—the radio news almost always puts him in a fury—he reveals his hatred of Nazi propaganda. “Bleeding the enemy of shipping capacity, they call it! Destruction of tonnage. Heinies! Tonnage! It’s good ships they’re talking about. Fucking propaganda—turns us into official executioners, wreckers, slaughterers…”

  The cargoes of the sunken ships, which are usually much more valuable to the enemy than the actual ships, hardly interest him at all. His heart is with the ships themselves. For him they’re living things with pulsing hearts of machinery. It is abominable to have to destroy them.

  I often wonder how he can possibly come to terms with this inescapable inner conflict. Apparently he has reduced all problems to a single common denominator: Attack so as not to be destroyed. “Submit to the inevitable” seems to be his motto. But he will have nothing to do with the rhetoric.

  Sometimes I feel compelled to coax him out of his reserve, to ask him whether perhaps he isn’t playing a game like all the others, though in a more complicated fashion than most; whether it doesn’t require an infinite capacity for self-delusion to be able to live with the conviction that all doubts are silenced by the concept of duty. But he neatly evades me every time. Most of what I learn comes from his dislikes and antipathies.

  Again and again it is the First Watch Officer or the new engineer who annoys the Old Man.

  Even the way the First Watch Officer sits down so precisely irritates him. And there’s his demonstrative cleanliness. And his table manners. He handles a knife and fork like dissecting instruments. Every canned sardine is subjected to a formal post-mortem. First he excises the ribs and backbone with the utmost care, then goes to work to remove the skin. Not the slightest scrap is allowed to escape him. By this time the Old Man is beginning to glower.

  In addition to the canned sardines there is a kind of dried sausage with an especially thin skin that simply cannot be peeled off. This is a favorite object for the First Watch Officer’s dissections. He captures the skin in tiny slivers; in the deep folds it can’t be loosened at all. Everyone else devours the sausages skin and all. Although he fiddles about, naturally he can’t get it off. He finally cuts so much of the sausage away from around the skin that there’s almost nothing left. The Old Man can contain himself no longer. “Perfect ornament for the garbage pail!” But even this is too subtle—the First Watch Officer doesn’t get it. He simply looks up expressionlessly and goes on scraping and cutting.

  The new engineer obviously doesn’t go down any better. What disturbs the Old Man most about him seems to be his vulgar way of grinning and his arrogance. “Second Engineer isn’t up to much, is he?” he recently inquired of the Chief. The Chief merely rolled his eyes and wobbled his head back and forth like a mechanical dummy in a store window—a gesture he’d picked up from the Old Man.

  “Come on, s
pit it out!”

  “Hard to tell! A Nordic type, as they say.”

  “But a very damn slow Nordic type. Just the man we need for Chief Engineer! Down to a ‘T’!” And after a while, “All I want to know is how we’re going to get rid of him.”

  At that moment the Second Engineer turns up. I study him carefully: chunky, blue-eyed, the perfect model for textbooks. All hair cream and indolence, he’s the exact opposite of the Chief.

  Because he doesn’t feel welcome in our mess, the Second Engineer tends to seek out the petty officers. The Commander disapproves of such crossing of lines and glowers at him out of the corner of his eye whenever he disappears into the petty officers’ mess. Not being very perceptive, the Second Engineer is quite unaware of this, but perches on the sofa when there’s room and babbles away to the petty officers about this and that. No wonder the atmosphere is less than congenial when the First Watch Officer and Second Engineer eat with us.

  Conversations remain entirely neutral. Thorny subjects are avoided, but occasionally the Old Man gets out of control. One day at breakfast he said, “The gentlemen in Berlin seem to be working full steam ahead to invent new epithets for Herr Churchill. What’s he called in today’s official notices?” The Old Man glowers. No answer from the circle, so he answers his own question. “Sot, drunkard, paralytic… I must say that for a drunken paralytic, he’s giving us one helluva time.”

  The First Watch Officer sits bolt upright and looks mulish. The world is suddenly incomprehensible to him. The Chief, in his usual position with his hands clasped around his knees, stares at a spot between the plates as though it contained some remarkable revelation.

  Silence.

  The Old Man won’t let himself be put off.

  “What we need is some music—perhaps our Hitler Youth leader would be kind enough to put a record on.”

  Though no one looks at the First Watch Officer, he feels the remark is meant for him and leaps to his feet, bright-red in the face. The Old Man thunders after him, “’Tipperary,’ if you please.”

  As the First Watch Officer returns and the opening bars start blaring through the boat, the Old Man needles him. “The record won’t undermine the foundations of your philosophy, First Watch Officer, will it?” Then he solemnly raises his forefinger and announces to the table: “His Master’s voice—not ours!”

  In the bow compartment, close to the door, I sit on the floor plates, with my knees drawn up. It’s the only possible way to sit in there, torpedoes underneath, and my back against the wall of the Quarters.

  Conversation flows freely. Nothing like the constrained atmosphere in the Officers’ Mess. The leaders in the bow compartment are always the same—Ario and Turbo along with Dunlop and Hacker. Some of the less articulate men withdraw from the arguments—leaving the others to talk and show off to one another—and creep into their bunks and hammocks like nocturnal animals into their burrows.

  “Once a whore pissed all over my back,” a voice comes from a hammock high up. “Man, that was a sensation!”

  “You slob!”

  “Sensations! I’ll give you sensations!” Ario asserts. “On our steamer we had a character who always said, ‘Get a cork with a nail in it and a violin string attached, push the cork up your ass and then have someone fiddle a tune on the string’!”

  “You can’t get much more complicated than that, can you?”

  “They say it gives you an amazing buzzing in the ass,” Ario insists.

  Now I hear fragments from way ahead in the bow. “Emma still doesn’t know who knocked her up.”

  “How so?”

  “How so? Christ, are you that dumb? Just try holding your bare ass against a circular saw and then say which tooth cut you first!”

  Uproar.

  For the first time I see the chief mechanic Johann on the bridge. Here in the bright light he looks twice as bleached and emaciated as he did down there in the electric light of the engine room. Although he’s only just got here, he’s already shivering as if he belongs in bed.

  “Not used to fresh air, Johann?” I ask. Instead of answering, he stares grimly over the bulwark with something like disgust. The sight of the sea obviously makes him uneasy. I’ve never seen him so sour before. He usually seems cheerful, but that’s because he’s looking at pipes and manometers. The silvery gleaming floor plates of the E-room are the true foundation of life for him, the fine smell of oil a balm for his lungs. But up here—nature in the raw—the hell with it! A disgusted sweeping glance makes clear that no doubt the sight of the sea may be all very well for primitive creatures like sailors, but not for specialists who are on intimate terms with highly complicated machinery. His face set, Johann disappears below in silence.

  “Now he’s pouring out his woes to his machines—all about the wicked, wicked sea,” the Second Watch Officer says. “Funny heinies, these machinists. Fresh air seems to damage their delicate lungs, daylight screws up their retinas, and seawater is pure hydrochloric acid.”

  “It’s not like that with the Chief,” I remark.

  The Second Watch Officer is never at a loss for a quick answer. “He’s simply perverse!”

  For me, visits to the bridge are pure salvation.

  Luckily two men are allowed topside in addition to the guards. I take advantage of this as often as possible. The moment I stick my head through the tower hatch, I feel liberated. I climb out of the mechanical cage, out of confining walls, out of the stench and dampness into the light and the pure air.

  First I search the sky for weather signs, then give a quick sweeping glance around the horizon. Then I turn my head to and fro and finally tilt it all the way back. Through a few holes in the clouds I look out into space. Nothing to distort my view of the heavens—a huge kaleidoscope that offers a constant succession of images with every hour that goes by. I watch the panorama of the sky as it changes: now, for example, it’s deep-blue high overhead. All the holes in the rapidly moving cloud cover are filled with deeper blues. Only toward the horizon is the cover torn. Here the blue is thinner, washed out by the drifting water vapors. To the east a touch of red still hangs above the horizon; in it floats a single dark violet-blue cloud.

  Presently, something marvelous occurs behind the boat. Halfway up the vault of sky a moist patch of steel-blue light spreads until it blends with a flood of pale ochre, rising from behind the horizon. At first the fringes take on a soiled, greenish tone, but then they are slowly shot through from behind by a dull, luminous blue with the merest shimmer of green remaining: Verona blue.

  At noon the sky becomes filled with cool silvery-gray. The piles of cloud have disappeared and only a few silky cirrus clouds veil the sun, scattering its light in silvery glints and flashes. A quiet pastoral scene unfolds, drawn in nacreous, subtle tints—like the inside of an oyster shell.

  In the afternoon, to starboard, yellow and orange bands shimmer behind dark blue clouds. Their color is rich, heavy, almost oily. The clouds surge upward as though from a prairie fire: an African sky. I picture table mountains, giraffe acacias, gnus, and antelopes.

  Far off to port beside a pile of dirty woolen clouds a rainbow rises in the sky. A second, paler one arches over it. In the middle of this semi-circle floats a dark ball like an explosion of shrapnel.

  In late afternoon the stage sets above me change completely. The alterations are not achieved by drawing a few curtains or changing the shades of color; instead, a magnificent procession of clouds arrives, quickly filling the heavens.

  As though the pattern of forms were not striking enough, the sun breaks through a rift, shooting oblique spears of light into the tumult of clouds.

  After the evening meal I climb up to the bridge again. The day is dying, dissolving. The only color left is dabbed here and there on the clouds that float in the western sky, lined up like beads on an abacus. Soon only a small fleecy cloud retaining the last of the light is there to hold the eye. The glow of the setting sun lingers a while above the horizon, but then that
too grows cold. Now the day is finished. In the east, night has already come. The water is transformed under the violet shadows. Its murmuring grows louder. Like the breathing of a sleeping man, the waves sweep by beneath the boat.

  I am always awakened at midnight by the change of watch in the engine room. Both watches have to pass through the petty officers’ mess. For a while both doors to the diesel room stand open. The roaring fills the room and the engines suck in great drafts of air, making the curtain of my bunk billow up. One of the men coming off-duty forces his way past the unfolded table, pulling the curtain all the way back. It will be some time now before peace is restored.

  I keep my eyes shut and force myself not to hear the voices. But another light is turned on. The glare of the bulb in the ceiling strikes me straight in the face, and I’m fully awake. There’s a strong smell of diesel exhaust. The petty officers who have been relieved are pulling off their oil-smeared jackets and trousers, taking a few drags of apple juice from their bottles, and climbing into their bunks, chatting in subdued voices.

  “Big fancy to-do.” I hear Kleinschmidt. “Coffee at my future inlaws, with vases of flowers and gold-trimmed dishes. Very nice people. The old man’s sixty-five and she’s already seventy. Pound cakes and plum cakes. Before that, black currant liqueur, homemade—all first class. My fiancée was in the kitchen making the coffee. I was sitting there on the sofa—with my arms sort of spread out, and I happened to push my right hand down into the crack between the seat and the upholstery at the back—you know?”

  “Of course, then what?”

  “Guess what I fish out?”

  “How the hell would I know?” That must be the control-room mate Isenberg. “Don’t overdo the suspense.”

  “Well, a five-pack of condoms. Three still in it. Two missing. What d’you say to that?”