Das Boot

  “Two hundred feet—one fifty—boat rising rapidly!” reports the Chief. When the manometer hand reaches a hundred the Commander orders a hydrophone check in every direction. No one makes a sound. I hardly dare breathe. Nothing.

  The Commander climbs the ladder. When the boat is at periscope depth I can tell from the sound of the gears that he’s doing a complete sweep.

  We wait intently: nothing!

  “Surface!” Compressed air rushes hissing into the diving cell. The Commander retracts the periscope. It takes a while for it to settle into place with a click. Only then does he remove his face from the rubber eyepieces.

  “Tower clear,” the Chief reports upward and then, “Equalize pressure!”

  The First Watch Officer turns the hatch spindle, and the hatch springs back with a snap like a champagne cork. Pressure equalization can’t have been complete. Fresh air pours into the boat. Cold and damp. I gulp it in eagerly. It’s a gift—and I savor it to the full, pumping it into my lungs, tasting it on my tongue. The boat pitches and tosses.

  “Prepare to blow tanks! Clear for ventilation! Diesel room stand ready to dive!”

  The Chief nods his approval. The Commander’s on his guard, doesn’t want to run any risks.

  The circle of the hatch still frames the dark sky. A few scattered stars. Sparkling and twinkling, tiny lanterns wavering in the wind.

  “Stand by port diesel!”

  “Port diesel ready!”

  The boat drifts, rocking. The hatch wanders back and forth beneath the shining stars.

  “Port diesel slow ahead!”

  A trembling shudder runs through the boat. The diesel fires.

  The Commander orders the bridge watch and the navigator to the bridge.

  “Radiogram to be sent!” I hear someone say.

  The navigator is already on his way down. I peer over his shoulder and can’t repress a grin: the text he’s writing out is almost exactly what I had predicted.

  He can’t understand why I’m smiling, and looks offended.

  “Lapidary,” I say. But he doesn’t understand that either. He makes his way to the radio shack and I see him shaking his head.

  “Permission to come on the bridge?”

  “Jawohl!” and I climb up.

  The cloud curtain is parting to reveal the moon; where its beams strike the water, the sea glitters and glistens. The cloud curtain closes, and now the only brightness comes from a few scattered stars and from the water. Behind the boat the foam phosphoresces—luminous green magic. Waves hiss over the bow like water poured onto hot iron plates, but beneath the sharp hissing is a continuing dull roar. Occasionally a larger wave rises and strikes the boat’s side with the heavy, hollow boom of a gong. Bomm—bomm—tsch—jwumm!

  Rather than being buoyed up by water, the boat seems to be gliding along between the depths and the heights on a thin, scarred skin—abyss above, abyss below: a thousand stories of darkness in either direction. Wandering thoughts—confused, hardly focused: We are saved. Voyagers to Orcus who have found our way home.

  “All the same, it’s a good thing this pond is three dimensional!” the Commander says close beside me.

  I’m at the table. Breakfast. Fragments of conversation from the Quarters. Going by the voice, it must be Johann. He seems to be in the middle of a story:

  “…turned out the only thing there was a stove. God oh god, was that a runaround! Nothing to be had. Not even with U-boat insignia on my jacket. The kitchen cabinet was no problem, thank god. My brother-in-law’s a prison inspector. He’s having it made in the prison… Of course there’s no baby carriages to be had either! Right away I said to Gertrude, ‘Do you really have to have a carriage like that these days? Black women carry their babies around in shawls!’ We still need a standing lamp to make our little sitting room complete. But the old man can go ahead and pay for that… Gertrude’s already as big as a house. Six months! I’d like to know whether we’ll be moved in when the time comes… Nah—no rugs—who needs rugs? Besides, how’d you get one except by heisting it? My other brother-in-law can take care of that, he’s a painter. Likes to call himself an interior decorator. As I always say, ‘If only the house is still standing!’ They’ve had eight raids in one week!”

  “Well, one more patrol and then off to the training course,” someone says in a comforting tone. The bosun.

  “We can paint the table white and make a little box around the gas meter.”

  “The men at the dock could make that for you. You could take a little box like that away without any trouble. After all, it’s not the biggest thing in the world.” That must be the navigator.

  “If I were you I’d have them make the baby carriage at the same time—after all, they’re equipped for that sort of thing,” the bosun teases him.

  “Thanks for the tip. If I need a bulletproof one, I’ll remember it.”

  He’s managed to have the last word, but he doesn’t stop there. “All that fuss about hoarding provisions. Why not give everyone a couple of cans? Gertrude could make good use of them.”

  Next morning around nine o’clock we come on an expanse of wreckage. One of our boats must have scored a hit on a convoy. Our bow wave parts planks smeared black with oil. A rubber dinghy bobs up. There’s a man in it. He looks as if he’s sitting in a rocking chair, his feet dangling over the bulge of the side, almost touching the water. His forearms are raised as if trying to read a newspaper. I’m surprised how short they are. Then we draw nearer and I realize that both his hands are gone. The blackened stumps are stretched toward us. His face is a burned-out mask with two gleaming rows of teeth. For a moment, the illusion of a black stocking pulled over his head.

  “Dead!” says the navigator. He could have saved his breath.

  The dinghy and its corpse slide rapidly past, rocking violently in our stern wave. The “reader” seems to enjoy being cradled in this comfortable position.

  No one ventures a word. Finally the navigator says, “But he was a civilian sailor. I just can’t work out where he got the dinghy. They usually have rafts on freighters. The dinghy—that’s very funny. Looked exactly like the Navy.”

  A technical observation at this juncture does us good. The Old Man is glad to pursue the subject. The two of them spend quite a while discussing whether or not steamers have been carrying naval personnel for some time. “Otherwise who would man the guns?”

  There’s no end to the flotsam. The sunken steamer has laid a broad swatch of wreckage in the water: black fuel oil, crates, splintered lifeboats, charred remains of rafts, life preservers, complete superstructures. In between, three or four drowned men hanging from their life jackets with their heads under water. And there are more: a whole field of floating corpses, most of them without life jackets, faces submerged, many mutilated.

  The navigator took too long to spot the dead men among the wreckage. There’s no time for us to alter our course.

  The Old Man’s voice goes cold and he orders higher speed. We shear through the scattered, torn remnants, bow throwing everything aside like a snowplow. The Old Man stares straight ahead. The navigator surveys his sector.

  I see the starboard lookout swallow as a corpse slips past, draped head down over a white-striped timber.

  Wonder how he got it.

  “There’s a life preserver!” says the Old Man, and his voice grates, suddenly rusty.

  In quick succession he gives two or three orders for engines and rudder, and our boat swings slowly toward the red and white life preserver, which is only momentarily visible among the waves.

  The Commander turns to the navigator and says, much too loudly, “I’ll take it on the port side. Move—Number One!”

  I keep my eyes fixed on the dancing life preserver. It quickly looms larger.

  The bosun reports breathlessly on the bridge, then climbs down the iron steps on the tower. He’s carrying a small grappling hook.

  Although we’ve known all along what the Old Man has in mind, he says,
“Just want to see what the scow was called.”

  The navigator’s up as high as he can go, hanging far out so as to be able to keep the entire boat in view for maneuvering. “Port engine slow ahead! Starboard engine full speed ahead! Rudder hard aport!”

  The helmsman in the tower acknowledges the orders. The life preserver disappears from time to time in the troughs of the waves. We have to keep a sharp lookout so as not to lose track of it.

  The navigator has the port engine stopped and the starboard run slow speed ahead. Once again I’m aware that all the boat’s otherwise famous maneuverability doesn’t amount to much in a high sea. Given its length, it’s so narrow that the propellers are far too close together.

  Now where’s the life preserver? What’s become of the damned thing? It ought to be almost dead on our port beam… thank god, there it is.

  “Port fifteen points, steer one hundred degrees—both engines slow ahead!”

  Slowly the boat homes in on the life preserver. The navigator brings the helm around and sets a direct course. Seems to be working right.

  The bosun holds the grappling iron in one hand and the line coiled like a lasso in the other. Advancing cautiously, hanging onto the net guard for support, he moves over the slippery gratings toward the bow. The life preserver is already level with us. Damn: the letters seem to be on the other side. Or have they been washed off?

  Slowly it comes within ten feet of the boat. Could hardly be better. The bosun takes aim and throws his iron. To one side! I groan aloud, as if I’d been the one to be hit. Before he’s reeled the iron in again, the life preserver has already drifted far astern.

  “Both engines stop!”

  Damnation, what now? The boat still has a lot of headway. We can’t just put on the brakes!

  The bosun has run to the stern and now he makes a cast from the afterdeck, but this time he jerks on the line too soon. The iron splashes into the water two feet this side of the life preserver, and he looks up despairingly.

  “Another approach, if you please,” the Commander says frostily. The boat describes a great circle, while I concentrate on keeping the life preserver in range of my glasses.

  This time the navigator goes so close that the bosun could have caught the thing with his hand if he’d stretched himself out on the upper deck. But he still relies on the grappling iron and this time makes a hit.

  “Gulf Stream!” he shouts to the bridge.

  In the Officers’ Mess the Old Man says, “I hope our activities don’t make difficulties for anyone.”

  The Chief looks up questioningly. So does the First Watch Officer. But the Old Man takes his time. Finally he reveals haltingly what’s going through his head. “Assuming our colleagues didn’t find out the name of the ship they sank and then greatly overestimated it in their success report—and assuming they’ve reported a fifteen thousand tonner—now we report that we’ve found the wreckage of the steamer Gulf Stream—and it turns out that she’s in the register at only ten thousand tons—”

  The Commander pauses to see whether we’re all with him and says, “Could be embarrassing, really embarrassing, don’t you think?”

  I examine the linoleum tabletop and silently wonder what we’re gabbing about. Whether a commander can make a fool of himself or not? First a grisly paper chase and now these guessing games.

  The Commander has leaned back. I look up to see him stroking his beard with the back of his right hand. At the same time there’s a nervous twitch in his face. Of course—it’s an act: he’s playing hard-nosed to inoculate us with his own firmness. He feels it all very keenly. He overacts, entertains his audience with observations and conjectures—just to keep us free from haunting scenes of nightmare and horror.

  But the dead seaman won’t leave me alone. He blots out my visions of the devastation around him. He was the first dead foreign seaman I had seen. From a distance he looked as though he’d made himself comfortable and would go on happily paddling away, his head tilted slightly backward, the better to see the sky. The burned-off hands—other people must have lifted him into the dinghy. He couldn’t have managed it without hands. A total mystery.

  No survivors to be seen. They must have been picked up by a sweeper. In a convoy people who lose their ship still have a chance. But the others? Those on lone vessels?

  The Commander is at the chart table again, calculating. Before long he orders both engines full speed ahead.

  He gets to his feet, straightens up and squares his shoulders, shakes himself thoroughly, clears his throat for a good minute, and tests his voice before uttering a single word. “If we’re not square on the course of the convoy I’ll eat my hat. Probably missed a whole batch of radio reports while we were submerged, dammit. Let’s hope the contact boat calls in again—or anyone else who has the scent now.”

  And then suddenly, “A depth charge is the most inaccurate weapon there is!,,

  The Chief stares at him. The Old Man nods with a trace of self-satisfaction. Everyone in the control room has heard. He’s just got around to drawing the moral of the corvette attack: You don’t score hits with depth charges. After all, we’re the proof—the living proof—of that.

  Bertold is repeatedly requested to report his position. We wait just as intently as the people in Kernével for his answer.

  “Hm,” says the Old Man and gnaws at a few hairs in his beard. Then again, “Hm.”

  VI STORM

  Friday. Forty-second Day at Sea. The nor’wester is blowing harder. The navigator has an explanation. “Apparently we’re south of a family of cyclones that’s being drawn toward Europe by way of Greenland.”

  “Funny customs these Cyclops and their families have,” I say.

  “What do you mean—Cyclops?”

  “The Cyclops is a one-eyed wind.”

  The navigator favors me with an openly suspicious glance. It’s probably high time for me to stick my head out into the fresh air again.

  The sea is now a dark blue-green. I try to define its shade. Arborvitae? No, rather bluer than arborvitae. Onyx? Yes, onyx is closer.

  In the distance the sea appears almost black under a mass of low-hanging cloud. Scattered about the horizon a few single clouds, dark gray-blue and bloated. Halfway to the zenith and directly ahead of us hangs another that looks more solid. On either side, arranged in orderly rows, dirty wisps of gray—like large weaver’s shuttles. And—directly above—wind-torn cirrus hardly distinguishable from their background; really not clouds at all but just carelessly slapped-on whitewash.

  The only violent movement in the sky is in the east, where new clouds well up over the rim of the sea, growing visibly plumper until they finally free themselves from the horizon like balloons with sufficient gas to float up. I watch them take over the sky. From the dark, massed army close to the horizon in the west the first scouts set out, little groups of clouds that gradually feel their way forward to the zenith. Only when they have established an outpost does the whole black horde move up. It rises, slowly pushed sideways by the wind, but already there are new clouds underneath, thrusting their ragged edges above the horizon—forced upward out of some apparently inexhaustible reservoir. Rank upon rank of them.

  Seaman Bockstiegel, nineteen, comes to Herrmann, who doubles as the medical orderly, with an itching inflammation of the armpits.

  “Crabs! Down with your pants!” says Herrmann.

  Then suddenly he explodes. “Are you completely nuts? There’s a whole lousy army running around here. They’ll finish off a mouthful like you in no time!”

  The orderly reports to the First Watch Officer, who orders an inspection at 19.00 for those off-duty, and for the current watch an hour and a half later.

  The Commander, who was asleep, finds out about it an hour later in the Officers’ Mess. He’s like a bull stopped in his tracks by the cape as he glowers up at the First Watch Officer. Then he strikes his forehead with the flat of his left hand, fighting to control his anger.

  Word gets around i
n the bow compartment. “Knocks you sideways, doesn’t it?”—“Nasty business.”—“This on top of everything else.”—“What a nerve!”

  Now we seem to have ship’s crablice as well as a ship’s fly. We’ll soon be a kind of Noah’s ark for the lower orders of animal.

  Five men on the off-duty watch are found to have crabs. Soon the sweetish smell of petroleum spreads through the boat. Extermination is in progress.

  The wind comes roaring at us like compressed air through a narrow nozzle. Sometimes it ceases for a moment while the bellows are replenished, then suddenly it lets loose again with increased fury.

  With each moment that passes the water surges to fiercer heights in the grip of the gusts. Streaks of foam flicker out in every direction like cracks appearing in dark glass. The waves look more and more sinister—a seething, swirling cauldron. Again and again the spray sweeps hissing over our bows and spurts up through the gratings. The wind sweeps through the showers, to send whiplash after whiplash of water smacking against the faces of the forward lookouts.

  Humidity in the control room gets worse. Bit by bit, everything is coated with a film of damp. The ladder is wet and cold to the touch.

  Without oilskins and sou’wester I can no longer remain on the bridge. Once below, the first thing I look at is the barograph. Its needle has described a descending staircase. It looks like the crosssection of a cascade. The bad-weather line is falling so steadily that it’ll soon reach the bottom of the paper.

  The barograph is a fascinating instrument. The weather seems to take up ,a pen and write its autobiography on a drum that slowly revolves on its vertical axis. This line, however, is broken at regular intervals by sharply rising peaks.

  Since I can make no sense out of these spikes I ask the navigator what they mean.

  “They’re the record of our daily practice dives—the barograph reacts not only to variations in the pressure outside but also—naturally enough—to variations inside the boat. The spikes mean excess pressure.”