Das Boot

  I’m on watch with the navigator. My biceps at least are being kept in training. I can feel every muscle in my upper arm all the way down into my shoulder blades from holding up the heavy binoculars. I’m lowering the glasses more often than I did in the first hour of the watch. The navigator can hold his for hours at a time: you’d think he’d been born with his arms fixed at right angles to his body.

  “We lead what you might call a double life,” he begins, out of nowhere.

  I don’t know what he’s getting at. The navigator is anything but articulate, so his words emerge hesitantly from between his leather gloves. “Half on board and half ashore, so to speak.” He wants to say something more but obviously can’t find the right words.

  We both busy ourselves with scanning our sectors.

  “The way it is,” the navigator finally resumes, “here we are, dependent on ourselves—no mail, no communications, nothing. But we still have a kind of link with home.”

  “Yes?”

  “For example, there are things that bother you. You keep wondering how things are going at home. And even more, how your folks are. They don’t even know where we really are, swanning around the way we do.”

  Another pause. Then, “When we put to sea”—he lets the sentence dangle for a while—”we’re already half gone. If something really happens to the boat, it’s months before they announce the loss.”

  Silence. Then he abruptly begins again. “If a man’s married, it makes him as good as useless.” This uttered as a maxim beyond dispute.

  Finally light dawns. He’s talking about himself. But I pretend we’re still talking generalities.

  “I don’t know, Kriechbaum, whether wedding rings matter all that much… How long is it the Chief has actually been married?”

  “Only a couple of years. Stuck-up kind of lady—blond hair, with a permanent.”

  Now he’s talking easily, without hesitation, relieved that it’s no longer about his own problems. “She delivered a sort of ultimatum. ‘Not going to let my life be all messed up,’ that sort of thing. Not that she looks as if she’ll lack for entertainment while we’re promenading around out here. Nice mess for the Chief. Now she’s pregnant, too.”

  Another silence, then when Kriechbaum starts up once more he’s as hesitant as he was at first. He’s obviously talking about himself again. “You find yourself carrying so much ballast around—better not to think about it too much!”

  We devote ourselves to the horizon again. I scour it with my glasses, inch by inch. Then I rest the binoculars and look out across the sea and sky to relax my eye muscles. Then I squint and raise the glasses again. Always the same routine: search horizon, lower binoculars, take a look all around, raise binoculars again.

  Ahead of the boat, two points to port, there’s a fog bank—a clump of dirty, gray-green wool—clinging to the horizon. The navigator concentrates on that area. Fog banks are always suspect.

  A good ten minutes pass before he takes up the thread again. “Perhaps it’s the only thing to do—away with the whole menkenke!”

  This goes around in my brain for a while: “Menkenke”—isn’t that Jewish for “bag of tricks” or something? Where can he have come across “menkenke”? “Fisimatenten”—that’s another one—for “fuss.” “Menkenke”…“fisimatenten”—you could go nuts speculating over things like that.

  I remember Ensign Ullmann. He has his troubles too. Ullmann is from Breslau. With his snub nose and those sparse freckles scattered all over his face, he looks like a fourteen-year-old. At the base I saw him once in his blue dress uniform. With his big peaked cap on his head, he looked like a clown done up in a costume that had been bought too large so he could grow into it.

  The ensign is popular. He seems to be a tough fellow. Actually, he’s not so much small as compact, and, viewed close up, he’s older than he looks at first: He didn’t get all those creases in his face just from laughter.

  One day when I was alone with him in the petty officers’ mess he started behaving oddly: fiddling aimlessly with the utensils on the table, pushing them here and there, laying a knife parallel to a fork and glancing up from time to time to catch my attention.

  I realized that he wanted to tell me something.

  “D’you know the flower store next to the café, A l’Ami Pierrot?”

  “Of course, and the two salesgirls. Pretty thing, Jeannette, and what’s the other one’s name?”

  “Françoise,” the ensign said. “As a matter of fact, I’m engaged to her—secretly, of course.”

  “Tst!” I sputtered in sheer astonishment: our little ensign with his porcupine haircut and his outsized dress uniform engaged to a French girl!

  “She’s nice,” I said.

  The ensign was sitting on his bunk, hands palms up on his thighs, looking helpless—his confession seemed to have worn him out.

  Gradually it all came out. The girl is pregnant. The ensign is not so naïve as to be unaware of what it would mean for her to have a child. We are the enemy. Collaborators usually get short shrift. The ensign knows how active the Maquis are. The girl obviously knows it even better.

  “Besides, she doesn’t want the child!” he said, but so hesitantly that I asked, “Well?”

  “Not if we get back!”

  “Hmm,” I said. Embarrassed, I could think of nothing better than, “Ullmann, that’s no reason to be so depressed. Everything will straighten out. You’re imagining things!”

  “Yes,” was all he said.

  Up with the glasses again. They ought to make them lighter. The navigator beside me says bitingly, “The gentlemen at Headquarters ought to see all this just once—nothing but ocean and not a trace of the enemy. I can just imagine how they picture it: we put to sea, run around for a few days, and hey presto—here come the freighters, sailing along, crowds of them and all loaded to the gunwales. A daring attack—fire everything we’ve got. A few depth charges in return just to teach us not to get too uppity. The victory pennants on the periscope for a lot of fat tankers, and tie up at the pier grinning from ear to ear. Brass bands and decorations, of course. But there really ought to be a film of all this: closeups of pure shit. Horizon bald as a baby’s bottom, a couple of clouds—and that’s it. Then they could film the inside of the boat: moldy bread, filthy necks, rotten lemons, torn shirts, sweaty blankets, and, as a grand finale, all of us looking utterly pissed-off.”

  Sixteenth Day at Sea. The Chief seems to be in a good mood today. Probably because he succeeded in making an especially complicated repair on one of the engines. He’s even persuaded to whistle for us.

  “Ought to be in vaudeville!” says the Old Man.

  I only have to close my eyes for a second to see every detail of the scene in the Bar Royal, with Merkel’s Chief trying to teach me to whistle on two fingers. The art of whistling—in this flotilla, at least—is apparently a specialty of the engineers.

  How long ago it seems. The musicians with their empty, staring eyes, and crazy Trumann. Thomsen, lying in his own piss, bellowing slogans through a cloud of bubbles.

  “Haven’t heard from Trumann in a long time,” the Old Man says suddenly, as though he’d read my thoughts. “He must have put out long ago!”

  Nothing from Kortmann either, nor from Merkel.

  We have only heard Kallmann and Saemisch by accident, when they were ordered to report their positions. Plus the reports that our radioman also picked up of Flechsig’s and Bechtel’s boats.

  “This is going to be a shitty month,” growls the Old Man. “The others don’t seem to be having any luck either.”

  Another hour and ten minutes until dinnertime—seventy minutes, four thousand two hundred seconds!

  The radioman Hinrich comes in and delivers a message addressed specifically to us. The Chief takes the slip of paper, gets the deciphering machine out of the locker, puts it down among the plates, carefully tests the setting, and begins to strike the keys.

  The navigator turns up as if by accid
ent, and watches out of the corner of his eye. The Chief pretends to be completely absorbed. Not a muscle moves in his face. Finally he winks at the navigator and gives the deciphered radiogram to the Commander.

  It’s only an order to report our position.

  The Commander and the navigator disappear into the control room. Won’t be long before the radioman spits out a brief signal with our coordinates.

  IV FRIGGING AROUND: 2

  The boat continues to wander around with its cargo of fourteen torpedoes and one hundred twenty shells for the 8.8 millimeter cannon. Only the amount of 3.7 ammunition has been slightly reduced by practice firing. And a good deal of our 114 tons of oil has gone. We are also the lighter by a fair amount of our provisions.

  So far we have contributed nothing to the war effort of Greater Germany. We haven’t inflicted the slightest damage on the enemy. We have added no luster to our name. We haven’t loosened Albion’s death grip, or added a single new leaf to the laurels of the German U-boat Command; blah blah blah…

  We have merely stood watch, gobbled food, digested it, inhaled bad smells, and produced a few ourselves.

  And we haven’t even got off any misses. They would at least have made space in the bow compartment. But all the torpedoes are still here, expertly tended, greased to perfection and regularly tested.

  The sky grows darker, and the tattered sheets of water that hang from the net guards after every plunge of the boat are as gray as laundry washed in wartime soap. All around us there is nothing but gray on gray; no line of division between the gray of the sea and the gray of the sky. Higher up, where the sun ought to be, the gray is only a shade lighter. The sky looks like watered-down gruel.

  Even the foam on the occasional breaking wave is no longer white. It is soiled, second hand.

  The howl of the wind sounds like the yowling of a kicked dog, spiritless and depressing.

  We are heading against the sea. The boat stamps along like a rocking horse: up and down, up and down. The strain of peering ahead becomes a torment. I have to keep cheering myself up lest I fall prey to the sick hopelessness that engulfs us all and sink into apathy.

  The gray light seems filtered through gauze and weighs on the eyelids. The watery mist makes it dimmer still. There is nothing solid in this soup to catch one’s attention.

  If only something would happen! If only the diesels would run at full speed for a while, if the boat would throw up a bow wave again instead of jouncing around at this soul-destroying jogtrot. Head stuffed with cotton, heavy limbs, aching eyes.

  Shitty sea, shitty wind, frigging around!

  As the oldest man in the bow compartment, the E-stoker Hagen commands universal respect. And he obviously knows it. In the dim light all I can see of his face is eyes and nose. The high, curled ends of his mustache reach almost to his eyelids. Forehead hidden under a thick thatch of hair. His black beard is thick and long, since he didn’t sacrifice it even during our time in port. From a favorite phrase of his, he’s known on board as “the Plain, Straightforward Fellow.” He already has seven patrols behind him, six of them on another boat.

  “Tsch!” says Hagen, and at once everyone is silent.

  I stretch my legs, brace my back against the frame of a lower bunk, and wonder what’s to come.

  Hagen savors this expectancy to the full, wipes the palms of his hands thoroughly on the hair of his chest, and drains the teapot into his cup. Relaxed, he then savors his tea, swallowing it in great gulps.

  “Well, out with it, O Gracious One! Speak, Lord for Thy servant heareth!”

  “I was once so angry at the Tommies!—”

  “…in my plain, straightforward way!” This last from a bunk; Hagen answers it with a glance of truly theatrical contempt.

  “It was hellish weather—just like—today, and they got us by the nuts off the Orkneys, a great batch of escort vessels standing over us. No decent depth under our keel. No chance of escaping underwater. Surprise packages of depth charges all day long—”

  He takes a mouthful of tea, but doesn’t swallow it immediately. Instead he swishes it noisily around a few times between his teeth.

  “Nice bombing job. Then the Tommies went quiet. Simply waited up there for us to surface. The second night, our Commander went mad, used every trick he knew, including the thin silhouette, and suddenly we’re up and away. The Tommies must have been sleeping on the job. I can’t understand it even now. The very next day we sank a destroyer. Nearly ran into it in the fog. Had to fire at almost point-blank range.”

  Hagen falls into a trance, and someone plays midwife again. “Come on, out with the rest!”

  “We got the destroyer at angle zero!” Hagen demonstrates with two matches. “Here’s the enemy destroyer, and here’s our boat.” He arranges the matches with their heads facing each other. “I was the first to spot her—in my plain, straightforward way!”

  “Now we’re getting it—didn’t I tell you?” The voice from the bunk again.

  Hagen cuts the story short. Pushing the matches around, he demonstrates the attack. “Sank in a matter of seconds.”

  He reaches for the match representing the destroyer and breaks it in two. Then gets up and tramples it under his boot.

  The helmsman Little Benjamin pretends to be fascinated. He gazes straight into Hagen’s face, simultaneously trying to make off with a piece of bread that Hagen’s just buttered for himself. But Hagen is on the alert and slaps his fingers smartly. “Not so fast with my bread and butter.”

  “My mistake,” Little Benjamin says apologetically, “as the hedgehog remarked when he got up off the toilet brush.”

  Control-room assistant Turbo also has something to contribute. He’s cut out a cigar and a plum from the advertisements in a magazine and pasted them together to make an obscene montage that he now proudly hands around.

  “Swine!” says Hagen.

  For three days and three nights the radioman has picked up nothing but position reports from other boats. No victory announcements. “Never known such a total washout!” says the Old Man. “Absolute bottom.”

  The sea seethes and boils. The wind keeps whipping up the surface into a gray-white plain. Not a single patch of the usual’ beer-bottle green, only dull white and gray. When our bow works its way free of the waves it seems to be festooned on both sides with dripping decorations of stucco.

  Brooding bleakly at breakfast time, the Old Man simply forgets to chew. It isn’t until the steward enters to clear the meal away that he suddenly comes to with a start, moves his lower jaw busily for a few minutes, then drifts off again with his thoughts. Finally he pushes his plate away indifferentry and pulls himself together. He gives us a friendly glance and opens his mouth to speak but seems unable to find a single word. He saves himself with a few official announcements: “09.00, practice dive; 10.00, instruction for petty officers! Maintain course until 12.00.” Same old thing.

  The First Watch Officer is not the least of the causes of the Old Man’s depression. The expression on the man’s face—at best faintly critical, often openly contemptuous—grates on the Old Man’s nerves. His pedantic mannerisms unsettle all of us, both on watch and off, in much the same way as a driver who sticks exactly to the rules produces chaos in traffic. Most of all, however, it is his thinly concealed political convictions that irritate the Old Man.

  “He really seems to hate the Tommies,” the Old Man says just after the First Watch Officer has gone on duty. “Thoroughly indoctrinated. At least he’s got it all worked out to his own satisfaction.”

  I’d give a lot for a half hour’s walk—or a cross-country run through the woods. My calf muscles have gone slack. My existence consists of nothing but lying down, standing up, and sitting still. Some hard physical exercise would be a big help. Felling trees, for instance. The very thought makes me smell the pines. I can almost picture orange-red chips of felled timber, the cabins we used to build ourselves, hear the rustling of reeds, see myself hunting water rats. Dear god…
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  The radio has picked up a message. We behave with elaborate indifference, yet each of us is longing for a radio order that will put an end to all this frigging around. After a contemptuous glance at the decoding machine, the Commander reads the slip, noiselessly moving his lips, and disappears without a word through the circular door.

  We look at one another.

  Plagued by curiosity, I move into the control room. The Commander is bent over the sea chart. For the moment I must wait in vain. In his left hand he holds the slip and with his right he’s manipulating the dividers.

  “It’s possible—not altogether out of the question,” I hear him murmur. The First Watch Officer can no longer endure the uncertainty and begs for the slip of paper. “Convoy in Square XY. Zigzag course around sixty degrees, speed eight knots—UM.” One glance at the chart and I feel sure we can reach Square XY.

  The navigator clears his throat, looking totally indifferent, and asks the Commander for the new course. You’d think the radiogram had brought us nothing more than the new retail price of potatoes.

  The Commander isn’t giving away anything either. “Wait and see,” he says.

  Everyone falls silent. The Chief bores into a tooth with his tongue. The navigator becomes absorbed in his fingernails while the Commander measures angles and lays off distances with the dividers—the problem of interception.

  The navigator peeps over the Old Man’s shoulder as he works. I get myself a few prunes from the box and move the pits back and forth in my mouth, trying to pick them clean. The control-room mate has nailed a milk can to the wooden wall for the pits. It’s already half full. Mine are by far the cleanest.

  UM—that’s Marten’s boat. Marten, who used to be the Old Man’s First Watch Officer and is now serving with the Sixth Flotilla in Brest.

  New radio messages tell us that three boats have been ordered to join in pursuit of the convoy, then four, then finally five.

  We’re not one of them.