Das Boot

  “How many cakes have you baked?”

  “Eight, three slices per man!”

  “And when?”

  “Last night, Herr Kaleun.”

  Permission to grin can be read in the Old Man’s face.

  The debauch is followed by contented calm. The Old Man folds his arms across his chest, hunches his head down against his shoulders, and smiles amiably at us all.

  The Chief settles himself properly in his corner of the sofa: an intricate procedure. He takes as long as a dog to find the best position. He has just managed it when word comes from above. “Chief to the bridge!”

  Cursing, he struggles to his feet. He’s got only himself to blame. The minute anything of interest occurs topside he wants to be informed. Only the day before he was angry because he hadn’t been called when three whales surfaced quite close to the boat.

  I climb up after him and get my head above the edge of the hatch just in time to hear him ask angrily, “What the devil is it then?” And the Second Watch Officer replies obsequiously, “Thirteen white gulls flew around the ship!” Even from behind them, I can tell that the bridge guards are grinning. “They’ve just disappeared over the horizon,” he adds.

  The Chief yells, “Just you wait!” Then he goes below to the control room, obviously to plan revenge.

  This time the Old Man saves him the trouble. While the Second Watch Officer is still on duty he sounds the practice alarm. The boat cuts under the surface before the Second Watch Officer has sealed the hatch and he gets a tremendous dousing. As he climbs down into the control room the Chief favors him with a happy smile. The Second Watch Officer suddenly runs his hand in panic through his hair.

  “Anything wrong?” the Commander asks solicitously.

  The Second Watch Officer takes a deep breath. His mouth sags open and he looks crushed. “My cap—on the bridge,” he stutters. “I took it off and hung it over the torpedo sight.”

  The Commander adopts the ingratiating tones of a headwaiter.

  “Would the gentleman like us to surface immediately, reverse our course, and undertake a search?”

  The Second Watch Officer lets himself drop into a chair.

  A fly darts aimlessly back and forth under the lamp above the chart table. It’s a puzzle. After all, flies are not albatrosses: They can’t just sail straight across the Atlantic. When we left Saint Nazaire it wasn’t the right time of year for flies—already too late in the season, too cold, even for France. It’s possible the fly was brought aboard as an egg, pre-embryonic maybe, along with a thousand other ones that had less luck in hatching. Perhaps our fly got into the torpedo tubes as a maggot. Perhaps it grew up in the bilges, constantly pursued by the inveterate fanatical cleanliness of Number One. A true miracle, this fly’s life, as everything here is soldered shut. No pieces of cheese lying about. No idea how it has survived.

  One knows altogether too little about one’s neighbor. Here we sit, in the same boat—in the most literal sense of the word—and yet I have no inkling of this fly’s view of the world. I know nothing whatever about the emotional life of the common housefly. As to the fruit fly, however, I can at least give it its Latin name: Drosophila melanogaster. Short-winged and long-winged Drosophila were popular during my time in school. We had a fair number of each in test tubes with mashed bananas. The biology lecturer combined carefully counted specimens in a third tube, but the results of the cross-breeding never checked out because we secretly put a few additional short-winged flies in among the long-winged ones. There stood the lecturer trying to juggle the numbers till we all shouted, “Cheat!”

  A fly’s eye under the microscope—a true marvel. Flies have to be caught from in front because they can’t take off backward. Clear as daylight. But this one isn’t going to be caught. It’s under my personal protection. Perhaps it will even have babies, which in turn will have more babies—one generation of shipborn flies after another, and I their patron. And I’m not even that fond of the creatures.

  We had barely fished my classmate Swoboda out of Binsen Lake when those fat bluebottles began to settle in the corners of his eyes. Rigor mortis had made him stiffen in a strange bent position with his knees drawn up. The scent of acacias was almost overpowering in the Mecklenburg summer heat. The rigor mortis finally wore off by evening, so we could straighten him out. It was then that I discovered clots of yellow fly eggs as big as peas in the corners of both his eyes.

  I wonder if our ship’s fly is getting ideas…

  The First Watch Officer is instructing the petty officers again. Through the clatter of dishes, which the steward considers an indispensable part of his work, comes the fragment of a sentence. “…to break the stranglehold…”

  The Old Man gives a pained glance at the ceiling and raises his voice to reach the bow compartment. “Are you settling accounts with Albion again, First Watch Officer?”

  The navigator has spotted and reported an object at thirty degrees. The Commander climbs to the bridge the way he is, in sweater and drill trousers. I at least get down my rubber jacket from its hook. Luckily I’m wearing leather trousers and cork-soled shoes.

  The flotsam is easily visible to the naked eye. The Commander scrutinizes it for a good two minutes through his binoculars, then orders the helmsman to steer straight for it. It rapidly grows until it becomes a boat with its bow at an angle of two hundred degrees to us.

  The Old Man sends the two lookouts below and mutters an explanation: “No reason for them to have to look at it too.”

  It quickly becomes clear, however, that this move was unnecessary: the lifeboat is empty.

  The Old Man has both engines stopped. “…a bit closer, navigator, and read the name.”

  “Stel—la Mar—is,” he says slowly.

  The Old Man has the bridge lookouts come on deck again. “Make a note for the log,” he tells the navigator, and gives course and engine orders.

  After a couple of minutes we are back on our old course. I climb down behind the Old Man. The lifeboat wallowing in the gray-green sea must have stirred a memory in him. “A boatload of people once rowed directly at us. Odd story…”

  Well, out with it.

  But he says nothing more for the time being. One of these days he’s going to drive me mad with all his foibles and five-minute delays. I have to summon up all my self-control not to nag at him.

  But I soon realize that the Old Man isn’t putting on the usual act. His face is troubled. He doesn’t really know how to tackle his story. Very well, we’ll wait. I push my hands deep into my trouser pockets, straighten my back, and shift my weight from one buttock to the other to find the most comfortable position. We’re certainly not pressed for time.

  While I listen to the patter of the spray and the crash of the waves, the Old Man finally begins to talk. “I once sank a steamer—that is, it was really her own speed that sank her—on my third patrol. The torpedo tore away the bow and the steamer went down forward immediately; it was still making so much headway that she dived like a U-boat. You’d hardly believe it. Gone in a flash. Practically no survivors.”

  After a while, he adds: “Funny, it was actually a bad hit—but that’s the way it goes!”

  I find myself thinking that it’s not the story he’d really wanted to tell, interesting and typical though it is: a factual account of his professional experiences—curiosities and oddities—memorable departures from the norm. But the real story? A lifeboat must have come into it somewhere. I’ll have to give him a lead. “So they never got to the lifeboats at all… ?”

  “They didn’t!”

  I deprive him of the satisfaction of being prodded again and wait. He snorts twice, quickly, then wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “People shouldn’t get so cynical, you know…”

  Now it’s up to me to indicate my interest by a turn of the head. Nothing more. But he stares stolidly in front of him. That’s all right too. Don’t rush. I wait for the pause to be completely played out before I ask, as casually as I
can, “What d’you mean? Why shouldn’t they?”

  The Commander chews a while longer on his pipe stem before he starts to talk rather haltingly again. “I was just thinking about it—had an experience once—men in a lifeboat, English, overwhelmed me with thanks, and I’d just sunk their ship!”

  I can no longer pretend indifference. “So?”

  The Old Man takes a few more gurgling drags on his cold pipe, then finally launches out. “The steamer was called Western Star. Beautiful big ship. Ten thousand tons. Unescorted. Pure luck. By sheer chance we were in the necessary forward position. I fired a spread of four, but only one hit and it did astoundingly little damage. The scow simply settled a little deeper in the water and slowed down. Then we scored another with our stern tube. But she was still far from sunk. I could see the people getting into the boats; then I surfaced.

  “They’d launched two lifeboats. Steered directly toward us. Came right within earshot and one of the men just couldn’t stop thanking us for being such splendid people. Took me quite a while to realize they thought we weren’t taking any further action so that they’d have a chance to pull away from the steamer. Thanked us for our fair play. Truth was we simply hadn’t a torpedo in the tubes. They of course had no idea we’d already let fly with three other fish. Our crew was slaving like crazy, but reloading takes quite a bit of time. They thought we were postponing the coup de grace—”

  Half a glance sidewise and I see the Old Man’s grinning. “That’s how you achieve nobility before you know what you’re doing!”

  The radio assigns us a new area. We’re not to proceed to any definite destination; by way of a change we’re to chug along at a fixed course and speed again. At a predetermined hour the boat is then to reach the spot where the C-in-C’s Operations Division wants us to close a gap in the line. We will then proceed up and down as usual: half a day at minimum speed northward, half a day south.

  To my amazement the Old Man is optimistic again. “Something’ll happen yet… The dear Lord isn’t going to desert his frigging little Wolf Pack! Or don’t you believe in the dear Lord God?”

  “I do, of course I do,” says the Chief, busily nodding his head. “Of course I believe in the great Gas in the sky.”

  “You really are an evil bastard,” mutters the Old Man. Which doesn’t bother the Chief a bit. Simply to get a rise, he announces that he once had a vision of the Virgin Mary—”right on the net guard—soft rose-pink with a shimmer of violet—but completely transparent—gorgeous! The Lady pointed upward and blew out her cheeks!”

  “She probably wanted you to volunteer immediately for the Air Force. Balloon division.”

  “That wasn’t it,” the Chief replies dryly. “I’d forgotten to ventilate with the diesels after we’d surfaced!”

  The Old Man’s trying not to laugh, which would mean losing the game. “You should report that to the Pope. He’ll canonize you on the spot—only takes twenty-five years, as is usual with the Holy See!”

  We’re unanimous in our opinion that the Chief would make a handsome saint. “Pious and noble,” says the Old Man. “And even more ethereal than he is now—an ornament to the Church.”

  As I go through the Quarters, the navigator is busy arranging his locker. I sit down at the table and leaf through a seaman’s handbook. The navigator digs some photographs out of a worn wallet and hands them to me: badly underexposed pictures of some children. Three little boys, bundled up against the cold and sitting on a sled one behind the other in descending order of size. In another picture they’re in bathing suits. There’s an embarrassed smile on the navigator’s face. His eyes are fixed on my lips.

  “Sturdy little fellows!”

  “Yes, all boys.”

  But immediately he seems to feel that it’s not the place for tender emotions, here between these steel walls damp with condensation. He snatches the photographs back as if he’d been caught doing something improper.

  Twenty-eighth Day at Sea. The sun is the color of boiled chicken, and the sky grayish-yellow, like chicken broth. Little by little the horizon sinks into the mist; an hour later streamers of fog unfurl from the water around the boat.

  “Visibility zero!” the navigator reports from above. The Commander gives the order to dive.

  When the boat reaches 150 feet we make ourselves comfortable in the control room. Legs up, boots propped against the chart chest. The Commander is sucking and gurgling on his well-chewed pipestem. He seems lost in thought. From time to time he nods to himself, far away in his memories.

  Thirtieth Day at Sea. The horizon is still empty. An east wind has sprung up, bringing the cold. The guards on the bridge wrap themselves up like mummies. Inside the boat the electric radiators are on.

  A radio message arrives. The Commander signs for it and hands it to me.

  “To Wolf Pack: Advance patrol area from point G to D to be occupied on the twenty-eighth at 08.00. Distance ten miles. Course two thirty degrees. Speed eight knots—BdU.”

  The Commander unfolds the big transatlantic map and points with a pencil to the position of our ship. “This is where we are—and this is where we have to go.” His pencil moves far south. “Any way you look at it, this means a good three days’ sailing. The whole operation seems to have been broken off. Something completely new. No idea what’s behind it. This way we’ll be on a latitude with Lisbon.”

  “And out of the cold, thank god,” the Chief breaks in, shivering.

  Cookie bobs up. He’s furious. “Shit—what a fuck-up! Five big cans of sardines have leaked in the hold. Straight into the sugar!” He’s beside himself. “Goddam mess—now we can throw all the sugar away!”

  “I think we’d better keep it,” says Ario. “You never can tell—sometime you may want sugar on your fish.”

  Three days pass at cruising speed, south-southwest, without the guards on the bridge seeing a trace of the enemy; only empty casks and drifting wooden cases.

  The dull shuttling to and fro of a scouting patrol begins again. The eternal sameness has made all sense of time long since disappear. I don’t know how long this frigging around has lasted already. Weeks? Months? Or has the boat been driving around in the Atlantic for half a year? Even the distinction between day and night seems to be getting blurred.

  Our supply of stories has long since run out. We try to cheer one another up with stale jokes.

  A new catchword of approval has spread through the boat like the plague: “Bomfortunal.” No one knows who invented this nonsense, but all at once everything is “bomfortunal.” There’s also a new unit of measurement everywhere, the word “jet.” At first it cropped up only at breakfast time: “Just one more jet of coffee if you please.” Then it bobbed up as a unit of time. “Sure I’ll do it, but just wait a jet.” And now the Chief asks me if I would please move a jet to one side.

  I stay in the control room, sitting on the chart chest and trying to read. After an hour, the Commander clambers heavily down from the tower.

  “Very pretty!” he says, lines of anxiety creasing his forehead. He paces the room three or four times, nervous as a cat, then lowers himself onto the chart chest beside me; instead of saying anything, he drags at his pipe, long since extinguished. I put aside my book because I feel he wants to talk. Wordlessly, we stare straight ahead.

  I wait for him to speak first. He draws a tattered letter written in green ink out of his pocket and strikes the paper a couple of times with the back of his hand. “Here, I just came across this a little while ago. What a crazy notion they must have of the way we live!” Green ink, as I know, is the mark of the Commander’s fiancée, the flyer’s widow.

  He thrusts out his lower lip and shakes his head. “End of subject,” he says brusquely and gestures as if to wipe his own remarks off a blackboard.

  So, I think: no go.

  Although we’re sailing with open hatch, thanks to the improvement in the weather, the petty officers’ quarters stink to high heaven. Of moldy bread, rotting lemons, rotting saus
age, of oily exhaust from the diesels, of wet foul-weather gear and leather boots, of sweat and semen.

  The door is yanked open and a cloud of diesel stench comes in along with the engine-room watch just relieved. Curses and imprecations. Locker doors slammed shut. The diesel mechanic mate Frenssen suddenly bursts out singing like a drunk. “Love and love alone drives our ship and steers it home…”

  Of course. Frenssen—as usual.

  “We could use a nice beer right now!”

  “Just cool enough, with a head as white as a lily—and then another—and another—let them hiss down your throat. Christ!”

  “Shut up! You’re driving me insane!”

  Today the sky is as slimy as sour milk. No motion. The water seems to have become more viscid. The waves simply stoop over, round-shouldered and weary; no more crests. Only occasional white veins showing in their black-green. The Atlantic has turned one single color: this blackish-green—not a sight anywhere to cheer us up.

  Big ships at least offer the eye some color here and there. Funnel insignia, white-painted ventilator hoods, red markings. But with us everything is gray. Not a dab of color in the whole ship—only gray, and even the same shade throughout. We ourselves blend into our background superbly well: our skin is gradually turning the same pale, sickly gray. No more bright pink cheeks like the ones children paint on the faces they draw. Even the bosun, who was positively apple-cheeked when we sailed, now looks as if he’s just got up from a sickbed. Still, he certainly hasn’t lost his voice. Right now I can hear him bellowing at someone: “Look with your goddam eyes, not your goddam asshole!”

  All of us need a psychiatrist. He could thrash out the First Watch Officer’s elaborate affectations—some job! Also that trick of wrinkling his nose, and his sensitive, oh-so-considerate smile.

  The Second Watch Officer’s laugh lines are another matter: they would have to be retained; the baby face is still really in pretty good shape. But the Chief would need intensive treatment, nervous and overstrained as he is—the tic at the outer corner of his left eye, the way his mouth twists, his habit of sucking in his cheeks, the meaningless pursing of his lips, and above all his jumpiness—that sudden shudder at the slightest noise. At least a small piece of the Second Engineer’s thick hide needs to be transplanted onto the Chief. And it might help the Second Engineer as well. He needs a thinner skin.