Das Boot

  Frenssen favors me with a bored look, then rolls his eyes. “Bumpy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, you might say so.”

  Finally the propellers race free again. The compartment returns to horizontal. Our clothes resume the vertical against the walls. And then I shut my curtain. Why bother? the boat’s on its way into the next wave already.

  Monday. I haven’t been on the bridge for some while. It’s time for me to clamber up again and air myself out. But what’s the point? Face lashed by the waves, blows from a cat-o’-nine-tails, body soaked to the skin, limbs frozen stiff, aching bones, smarting eyes.

  These are, after all, valid objections. Why not stay put? It’s still the best place, here in the Officers’ Mess—dry.

  A book has fallen from the table. I must have noticed it fall, but it’s only after it lands on the floor that I see it for the first time. There must be a delay between actual vision and perception. Our nerves are overstretched like used elastic. I feel a definite urge to pick the thing up: it can’t just lie there! But I ignore this inner voice. I shut my ears, let the last ounce of initiative seep away. After all, the book’s not doing anyone any harm down there.

  The Chief comes in from his engines, sees the book, bends down and picks it up. So that’s that!

  He braces himself in his bunk with his knees drawn up and gets a newspaper out from under his bolster, all without saying a word. He just sits there sullenly, smelling of oil.

  After a quarter of an hour the ensign appears and asks for new cartridges for the recognition signal. The Chief’s reactions are slipping too: he doesn’t hear the ensign, who has to repeat his request in a louder voice. Finally the Chief looks up angrily. Observing him sideways I can see his mind slowly trying to tick over. He’s struggling to make a decision. The recognition cartridges are, of course, a serious matter. And they’re in the locker behind his back. Heaven knows whether we’ll ever use them, but their daily change is part of the sacrosanct routine.

  Finally he gets up and opens the locker with an expression of the most extreme repugnance. You’d think someone was holding shit under his nose. His newspaper slips down off the bunk and lands in a puddle no doubt left over from the last meal. He suppresses a curse and crouches back in his corner. This time he draws his knees up even higher. He seems to be trying to take cover.

  Crouching burial, I think; the Chief is re-enacting a crouching burial. I want to communicate my idea, but I’m too lazy even to speak.

  Barely five minutes pass and the ensign is back again. Perfectly clear: the old cartridges have to be locked away. There can be no careless handling of recognition cartridges : they can’t be left lying around. I expect the Chief to explode like a bomb. But he doesn’t utter a word. He even gets up with a certain alacrity, shoots a disgusted look at me, clamps his newspaper under his arm, and disappears aft. Two hours later I find him in the E-motor room. He’s sitting in the general reek of fumes, on an up-ended chest of prunes, with his back against the stern torpedo tube, still perusing his newspaper.

  After the evening meal my inner voice reminds me that I haven’t been on the bridge all day. I silence it by arguing that it’s almost dark up there by now.

  I do need a change, however, so I go off to the bow compartment, where I’m hit by a solid stench of bilge, remnants of food, sweatdrenched clothes, and rotting lemons. Two weak lightbulbs give the place the dim glow of a whorehouse.

  I can make out Schwalle holding a big aluminum pot between his knees. There’s a dipper sticking out of it. Around him is a confusion of bread and sausage and pickles and open sardine cans, and overhead two low-sagging hammocks weighted down by the bodies of the sleeping off-watch men. The upper berths to left and right are also occupied.

  The motion of the boat is worst here in the bow. Every few minutes the compartment begins to roll and sway violently and each time Schwalle has to seize the pot so it won’t spill over.

  Dunlop the torpedo man comes out of the depths of the compartment on all fours with two lamps, one red and one green, in his hand; he wants to substitute them for the white ones. It takes him a while to accomplish this, but he’s in ecstasies over the result. Bengal festival lights! His very own handiwork!

  “Sexy,” says a complimentary voice from one of the hammocks.

  I hear the Gigolo talking to Little Benjamin. “Perfectly clean, isn’t it? How long would you guess I’ve been wearing this shirt?”

  “Certainly since we left port.”

  “Wrong!” There’s triumph in his voice. “Two weeks before that!”

  Along with Schwalle, Ario, and the torpedo man Dunlop, Gigolo Bachmann, Dufte, Fackler, and Little Benjamin (he of the Menjou mustache) are all sitting on the floor.

  The Commander has had the watches shortened. This means that people are now being thrown together who never used to see one another during their off-duty hours.

  The boat gives an unexpectedly violent jolt. The aluminum kettle slips out from between Schwalle’s legs and splashes soup all over the bread. The boat heels and begins to corkscrew madly. Next to the door a waste bucket tips over, spilling its contents of moldy breadcrusts and squeezed lemon rinds all over the floor. The bilge water gurgles. The bow falls with a crash and the whole room shivers. The bilge water shoots forward roaring.

  “Dammit to hell!” Schwalle shouts.

  “A pain in the ass—damn, shit, fuck!” Little Benjamin rolls cursing across the floor, pulls himself up to a sitting position, and hooks one arm around a bar of the bunk to keep himself upright, cross-legged like a Buddha.

  “Don’t take up so much room,” Ario snaps at him.

  “Just give me a minute and I’ll breathe myself flat!”

  Ario avoids being knocked about too by pushing his left arm around the taut lifeline that runs along a lower bunk, then he collects the heavy loaves of bread that are covered with green mold and uses a big knife to cut off massive pieces. The unspoiled parts are now no larger than plums. His biceps bulge from the effort.

  The boat heels again. But Ario’s hooked arm hangs on.

  “Like a monkey on a stick!” Schwalle teases him.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  “Take it easy now—I’ve got first-class references from people who’ve been punched in the face by me. All of them were completely satisfied.”

  New clattering and scraping. Forward between the bases of the torpedo tubes a bucket is banging back and forth. No one gets up to make it fast again. A towel hanging from one of the starboard bunks slowly unfuris and remains for some time extended diagonally into the room as if heavily starched.

  Ario gives it his full attention. “Fifty degrees at a guess.”

  The towel slowly sinks back into a reasonable position, then is plastered against the railing: the boat has heeled to starboard.

  “Shit, fucking shit,” groans the torpedo man, who has wedged a pail between the rails and is trying to wash up. His cloth fills the whole room with a sour stench. The dirty water that was a quiet puddle a few minutes before is creeping over the floor plates to where the men are sitting. Ario is starting to get to his feet when the water stops as though hypnotized and slowly recedes.

  Ario wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, clumsily stands up, leans crosswise on a bunk, still careful to keep firm hold of the bunk support, and peels off his jacket. Black hair sticks out like stuffing from a torn mattress through the holes in his shirt. His whole body is dripping with sweat. Snorting, he sits down and tells everyone that to hell with the weather, he’s going to fill his belly so tight we’ll be able to squash fleas on it with our thumbnails. We see at once that he really means it. Using a not completely moldy remnant of bread as a base, he carefully heaps it with butter, sausage, cheese, and sardines.

  “The perfect tower of Babel!” is the tribute from the Gigolo. Ario knows his reputation is at stake and placidly smears a thick layer of mustard on top. Sounds of noisy enjoyment. The hard dry bread gives his jaw muscles a
thorough workout.

  “It’s still better than some junk out of a can,” he growls.

  He finally washes the thick mush down with reddish-yellow tea. Grease shines at the corners of every mouth: cannibals seated around their pot. Everyone’s legs are interlaced like those in a full railway car. Now and again a belch from Ario indicates his satisfaction. A bottle of apple juice goes the rounds.

  The door bangs open.

  “Jesus! Look at this room!” the bridge johnny complains indignantly, shaking water from his face and hands.

  He’s answered with a roar of laughter.

  “Say that again!” Fackler jeers.

  “The room! Look at this room!” The Gigolo imitates the bridge johnny and goes on to ask him, “Perhaps something’s not quite satisfactory?” The Gigolo can’t contain himself. “Man oh man, what an expression! ‘This room’—almost as good as ‘Get the bullets up out of the cellar.’”

  “What’s all this about getting bullets out of the cellar?”

  “That’s the order some imbecile of a watch officer gave during the last artillery practice. Hadn’t you heard? ‘Get the bullets up out of the cellar,’ he said, instead of, ‘Pass the shells up from the hold’!”

  A grin spreads across the bridge johnny’s face. He’s so plump that he looks more like the boat’s cook than a seaman. His face is in constant motion. A small black beard is its only fixed feature. He must be good-natured, for he doesn’t mind the kidding; he searches quietly for a place in the circle and wriggles his way forcibly into an opening.

  “Don’t take up so much room!” Fackler snaps at him.

  But the bridge johnny only smiles at him in a friendly way and doesn’t budge an inch. Fackler becomes incensed. “You’re a real pile of blubber!”

  At this the Gigolo takes the bridge johnny’s part and addresses him in pastoral tones. “Now now, don’t let the nasty boys upset you.”

  There’s peace for a while. The rattling of the bucket forward between the torpedo tubes and the noise of eating echo all the louder.

  Dunlop the torpedo man steps into the red light of the lamp and busies himself at his locker. A mass of bottles comes to light. Whatever he’s searching for must be at the very back.

  “What d’you want?” Fackler finally asks from his bunk.

  “My face cream.”

  As though this were their long-awaited cue, the whole crowd lets go at once. “Look at that gorgeous little bathing beauty!”—“He’ll soon be rubbing ointments into his lovely alabaster body!”—“Please, please, you’re making me horny!”

  The torpedo man turns on them in a rage. “You bastards, you don’t even know there’s such a thing as hygiene.”

  “Come on, don’t get so excited!”—“You’re a real advertisement for shipboard hygiene! No doubt you’ve had a good shit today!” “Just look at him! Screaming about hygiene while his cock stinks like Gorgonzola!”—“It would have to be you that talks about hygiene. That’s what I like: filthy as a wild ass and you spread that mess on top. Some hygiene!”

  Hacker, the senior man in the bow compartment roars, “Jesus Fucking Christ, is there going to be peace here or not?”

  “Not,” says Ario, but so low that the torpedo mechanic can’t hear him in his bunk.

  Tuesday. The sea’s running even higher. The boat pancakes so suddenly that a violent shudder runs through every rivet—and lasts for half a minute. The foreship’s been rammed so deep into a wave that it seems unable to free itself, The boat rolls from right to left; I can feel it struggling to break out sideways. Finally the bow lifts, the screws pick up speed, and we feel like a boxer breaking out of a clinch.

  I try to keep my breakfast down and even to do some writing. But the compartment drops so fast that my stomach heaves. We hold on with all our strength because experience teaches that each downward swoop ends with a sudden jolt. But this time it goes off smoothly. The screws are driving powerfully again.

  The midday meal consists of sausage and bread. Hot food has been struck from the menu. There’s only cold chow out of cans because the cook can’t keep his pots on the stove. It’s a marvel that he even succeeds in supplying us with hot tea and coffee.

  When the meal is over, the Commander wrestles his way to the bridge, after putting on a thick sweater under his oilskins. Instead of a sou’wester he’s wearing a waterproof rubber hood that sits tight on his head, leaving only his eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered.

  In less than five minutes he’s back, dripping wet and sputtering barely articulate curses. Sullenly he works his way out of the gleaming wet rubber clothing and drags the sweater over his head; he shows me a big dark patch that has formed on his shirt during the short time he was up there. He plumps himself down on the chart chest, and a control-room mate pulls the boots from his legs. Water pours out of them and gurgles into the bilge.

  While he’s wringing out his sodden socks like a mop, there’s a gush of water splatters down from above and hisses back and forth a few times on the floor before it too finds its exit in the bilge.

  “Start the pumps!” he orders, hops barefoot over the wet floor plates, climbs through the circular door, and hangs up his wet clothes to dry over the gleaming red heater in the sound room.

  He communicates his observations to the navigator, who’s pushing his way past him. “Wind veering to port. So far, all according to program.”

  So our storm is behaving correctly, conforming entirely to expectations.

  “Are we to hold course?” the navigator asks.

  “Yes, we’ve got to! As long as we can—and so far we seem to have managed it.”

  As though to contradict him, a sharp heeling of the boat sends the accordion case shooting out of the sound room. The big box smashes against the opposite wall of the gangway.

  “Here’s hoping it was empty.” The box hurls itself against the opposite wall, breaks open, and disgorges the instrument. The Chief thrusts his head into the gangway, examines the wreckage, half curious, half concerned, and announces, “That’s not going to do it any good.”

  The control-room mate comes crawling rather than running and gathers up the fragments of the case together with the accordion.

  The Commander totters his way through to the Officers’ Mess and settles himself firmly in his corner at the narrow end of the table. He twists this way and that, shuts his eyes for seconds at a time as though having to remember how he used to arrange his body, and tries out various positions until he finds enough support not to be lifted out of his seat by the next roll of the boat.

  All three of us keep our heads bent over our books. After a while he looks up. “Just read this! It’s a perfect description!”

  I find the paragraph he’s pointing to.

  "The caprice of the winds, like the willfulness of men, is fraught with the disastrous consequences of self-indulgence. Long anger, the sense of uncontrolled power, spoils the frank and generous nature of the West Wind. It is as if his heart were corrupted by a malevolent and brooding rancor. He devastates his own kingdom in the wantonness of his force. Southwest is the quarter of the heavens where he presents his darkened brow. He breathes his rage in terrific squalls and overwhelms his realm with an inexhaustible welter of clouds. He strews the seeds of anxiety upon the decks of scudding ships, makes the foam-striped ocean look old, and sprinkles with grey hairs the heads of ship-masters in the homewardbound ships running for the Channel. The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death."

  I turn to the title page: Joseph Conrad. The Mirror of the Sea.

  Wednesday. “One good thing about this filthy weather,” says the Old Man. “At least we don’t have enemy flyers on our necks.”

  Hardly any sleep during the night. My bunk tries to toss me out in spite of the railing—or roll me up the plywood wall. Twice I climb out because I can’t stand it up there any lo
nger. Now I feel as if I hadn’t slept for a week.

  The storm shows not the slightest sign of letting up. The day passes in exhausted dozing. The whole crew is letting itself sink further and further into apathy.

  Thursday. The Commander himself reads the final words of the entry that he has written in the war log. “Wind south-southwest, 9 to 10. Sea 9. Hazy. Barometer 711.5. Heavy squalls.”

  “Hazy”—his usual understatement. Steam bath would be more like it. Overhead it looks as if water and air have united, leaving the world only three elements instead of four. The storm has grown still wilder—exactly as the Old Man prophesied.

  I get my oilskins down from the hook, wrap a hand towel around my neck as usual, and fetch my rubber boots from the sound room, where they’ve been standing near the heater to dry. I intend to stand watch with the navigator. Just as I have one boot halfway on, the floor goes out from under me. I roll in the middle of the gangway like a beetle on its back. As soon as I find my feet, another lurch knocks me over again. I finally manage to hoist myself up on the water distributors.

  The boots are wet inside. My extended foot will not go into the shank. It never works very well standing up, so I try it sitting down. That’s better. Should have done it the first time. The next roll pushes the Commander’s green curtain all the way open. He’s composing the war log again, chewing on his pencil. The sentence he’s written probably contains one word too many. The Old Man always acts as if he’s concocting an overseas telegram and each word costs a fortune.

  Now the oilskin breeches over the boots. They’re wet inside too. Oilskins—another one of those antiquated expressions; in fact they’re made of rubberized cloth. I suffer some minor dislocations getting the trousers as far as my knees. Okay, up off your rear end and on to your feet! The damn pants continue to fight me. I’m in a sweat before I finally drag them up over my leather clothes.

  And now the oilskin jacket. It’s tight under the arms because I have on two sweaters. They say it’s very cold topside. After all, it’s November and we’re pretty far north. I really ought to get my bearings again from the chart. We must be plowing around in the sixties. Probably not far from Iceland. Actually, we were originally supposed to be heading for the latitude of Lisbon.