Das Boot

  He’s pushed his cap up and runs the back of his hand over his forehead. His sauerkraut hair springs out from under the visor like stuffing out of a torn mattress. His forehead is a washboard and his sweat a stream of bleach, He bares his teeth and snaps them sharply three times. In the silence it sounds like the faint clicking of castanets.

  My left leg is asleep. Pins and needles. I lift it cautiously. The moment I’m balancing on my right leg, a series of frightful explosions rocks the boat. This time I find no handhold and fall full length to the floor on my back.

  Painfully I manage to turn over. I force my arms up, raise my shoulders, and manage to get on all fours, but keep my head down ready for the next blow,

  I hear screams that seem to be coming from a long way off.

  Water breach? Didn’t I just hear “water breach”? Is that why we’re sinking aft? First forward, now aft.

  “Aft up ten—both E-motors full ahead!”

  That was the Old Man. Loud and clear. So I haven’t gone deaf after all. Full speed ahead. In this situation! Isn’t that much too loud? My god, the boat’s still shuddering and groaning continuously. Sounds as if it’s battling its way through an immensely deep groundswell.

  I want to lie down and hide my head in my arms.

  No light. The crazy fear of drowning in the dark, unable to see the green-white torrent of water as it comes bursting into the boat.

  A beam darts over the walls and finds its goal: the depth manometer. A sharp singing note from astern like a circular saw eating into wood. Two or three men shake themselves out of their daze. Orders are hissed. Another beam strikes the Old Man’s face, which looks like a gray cardboard cutout, The stern heaviness is getting worse: I can feel it in my whole body. How long will the Old Man keep the motors running full speed? The roar of the depth charge has long since died away. Now anyone can hear us—anyone in the belly of the ship up there. Or can they? Certainly they can if their ship’s engines are stopped.

  “Where are the reports?” I hear the Old Man growl.

  I can feel with my elbow that the man standing slightly to the left in front of me is shivering. I can’t see who he is.

  Once again the old temptation to let myself slump down onto the floor. Mustn’t give in.

  Someone stumbles. “Silence!” the Old Man hisses.

  It’s now that I notice the E-motors are no longer running at full speed. The emergency lighting goes on. So that isn’t the Chief’s back over there—the Second Engineer has taken over the hydroplanes. The Chief is nowhere to be seen. He’s probably astern for the moment; all hell seems to have been let loose back there. The evil sawmill-shriek is unrelenting.

  But we’re moving. Not on an even keel, to be sure, but at least we aren’t sinking any deeper. So the pressure hull must have held. And the motors are working.

  An odd scraping sound makes me lift my head. It sounds like a cable being dragged along outside. Sweep wires? But that’s impossible! They can’t be working with sweep wires at depths like these. Perhaps it’s something new, some special kind of probing impulse.

  The scraping stops. In its place we have the chirping ping-ping once again. They’ve got us!

  How late is it? I can’t make out the hands of my watch. Probably two o’clock.

  “Bearing one hundred forty degrees. Getting louder!”

  Again the vicious sound of the Asdic beam hitting the boat. Now it’s like pebbles being shaken in a tin can—not even loud. But loud enough to send visions of horror darting through my mind. Cascades of blood dripping over the diving tanks. Red-tinged waves. Men clutching white rags in uplifted hands. I’m well aware of what goes on when a boat is forced to the surface. The Tommies want to see red, as much juice as possible. They let fly with every gun they’ve got. They mangle the tower while we poor bastards are scrambling up into it; they smash the bridge to bits, make mincemeat of anything that moves, concentrating on the diving tanks so as to make the gray whale blow the last of its air. And then ram her down! Use their sharp bow to slash into the boat with a howling screech. No one can blame them: There at last is the enemy for whom they’ve been staring themselves blind—for days, weeks, months on end—the treacherous tormentor who’s denied them a moment’s peace, even when he was hundreds of miles away. They’ve never been able to be sure for so much as a second that they weren’t being spied upon from the trough of a wave by that Polyphemus eye. And here she is finally, the tarantula that drew blood. The blood lust won’t subside until fifteen or twenty men have been murdered.

  The pressure hull creaks, crunches, and grates again. The Old Man has been taking us deeper without my being aware of it. The Chief’s eyes are glued to the dial of the manometer, then he suddenly darts a glance at the Old Man, but the latter behaves as if he hasn’t noticed.

  “What bearing now?”

  “Two hundred eighty degrees—two hundred fifty-five degrees—two hundred forty degrees—getting louder!”

  “Hard a-port!” the Commander whispers after a brief pause for thought, and this time gives the change of course to the hydrophone operator as well: “To sound room: We’re turning to port!” And as a commentary for us, “The usual!”

  And that second noise?

  Perhaps they’ve long since changed places, I tell myself; perhaps the ship above us isn’t the same one that attacked us with her guns. After all, escort vessels each have different duties, The destroyer that fired on us was carrying out flank protection. She most probably turned over the task of finishing us off to a sweeper some time ago.

  We have no idea who’s attacking us.

  It’s fishing with dynamite: Rip open the air bladders of the fish so that they float up from the depths—our air bladders are our diving tanks. The fish have theirs in their bellies; with us the great air bladders are outside, not even pressure-resistant. For a fraction of a second I see a huge drifting gray fish that has been driven to the surface, white belly up, rolling heavily from side to side in the waves…

  This infernal dripping condensation! Pitter-patter—pitter-patter—every single damn drop sounds like a hammer blow.

  Finally the Old Man turns his head toward us: His body doesn’t move an inch. He simply twists his head as far as it will go on the turntable of his fur collar and grins. As if invisible surgical hooks were drawing the corners of his mouth diagonally upward—a trifle crookedly, so we can see a fraction of an inch of white tooth in the left-hand corner.

  What’s going to happen now? They can’t have given up and called it a day. A day! What time is it anyhow? About 04.00? Or Only 02.15? They’ve had us hooked since 22.53.

  But what was that second sound? Complete mystery.

  Does the operator still have no new bearings? Herrmann’s mouth looks sewn shut. He’s thrust his face out of the sound room but for once his eyes are open—his face looks empty, as if he’d died and someone had neglected to close his eyes.

  The Old Man’s contemptuous grin has become a trace more human, no longer quite so deadly. The relaxation in his face is like a laying-on of hands. Take up your bed and walk! Yes, walk—how about a pleasure stroll around the ship—on the promenade deck. That would make for an amusing interlude now. But no one ever considered our need for freedom of movement; we have no more room than tigers in a traveling cage.

  I suddenly see the tiger cage on wheels at Ravenna Beach, that filthy wagon with iron bars. The giant cats, limp and thirsty in the blazing midday heat, crowded together in three square feet of shade along the back wall. On the ground immediately in front of the cage, some fishermen had laid out dead tuna fish: gleaming steelblue projectiles, almost as slim as torpedoes. The fat horseflies were already at them. They go for the eyes first with tuna fish, just as they did with Swoboda. Accompanying this miserable sight was the tattoo of African drumming, a sharp, rhythmic staccato that was sent sweeping across the empty courtyard from a distant corner. The source of the African music was a dark-brown man in torn overalls who was thrusting thin slabs of ice ab
out three feet long into a metal box; inside which was a cylinder studded with spikes, rotating madly. It threw the ice into the air, snapped at it, threw it into the air again, bit once more. Hurled and crunched and ground up the slabs of ice to the thud and roll of drums. This barbaric uproar, the dead tuna fish, the five tigers—tongues hanging out—in their inferno: that’s all I can remember of Ravenna Beach.

  Softly, softly the Old Man orders a change of course. The helmsman presses a button: a dull click. So we’re doubling back, or at least turning a little,

  If only we had some idea of what this latest pause means. They probably want to cradle us into a feeling of security.

  But why no more Asdic beams? First two of them, then nothing at all!

  Have we managed to sneak away after all? Or can’t the Asdic reach us at these depths? Are the layers of the water finally protecting us?

  In the highly charged silence the Commander whispers, “Pencil and paper over here.”

  The navigator is slow to grasp that the request is being made to him.

  “Suppose we might as well get a radio report ready,” murmurs the Old Man.

  The navigator is unprepared for this. He reaches awkwardly for a pad that’s lying on the chart table, and his fingers grope for a pencil with blind uncertainty.

  “Take it down,” the Commander orders. “Scored hit on eight thousand GRT and five thousand five hundred GRT—heard to sink—Probable hit on eight thousand GRT—’ Well, go on. Write it down!”

  The navigator bends over his table,

  The Second Watch Officer turns around, his mouth open with astonishment.

  When the navigator is finished and swivels around again, his face is as expressionless as ever; it betrays nothing at all. This doesn’t cost him much effort: nature has endowed him with wooden facial muscles. Nor is there anything to be read in his eyes, they lie so deep in the shadow of his brows. “After all, that’s all they want to know,” says the Old Man in a low voice. The navigator holds the slip of paper in the air, arm extended. I approach him on tiptoe and hand the paper on to the operator, who’s meant to preserve it carefully so that it will be ready in the event we should ever be able to transmit again.

  The Old Man’s just murmuring to himself, “…the last hit…” when the sea is shaken by four explosions.

  He shrugs his shoulders, makes a contemptuous gesture, and grumbles to himself, “Ah well!” And after a while, “Precisely!”

  You’d think he was being forced against his will to listen to the insistent self-justifications of a drunkard. But when the roar ebbs away, he says not a word; the silence again becomes tense.

  The operator reports his figures in a subdued tone, half whispered, like the formula for an invocation: he’s picked up a clear bearing again.

  No Asdic noises! I mock myself by thinking, “Our friends have turned their Asdic off to spare our nerves…”

  The moon—the fucking moon!

  If someone unexpectedly came through the hatch right now, he’d be astounded to see us standing around like idiots, not uttering a syllable. Speechless idiots would be the right description. A snatch of laughter wells up in me; I choke it back. Unexpectedly through the hatch! Some joke!

  “Time?”

  “02.30 hours,” the Commander is informed by the navigator.

  “It’s been some time,” the Commander acknowledges.

  I have no idea what’s normal. How long can we keep this up? What’s the state of our oxygen supply? Is the Chief already releasing precious gas from his cylinders so that we can breathe?

  The navigator is holding his stopwatch, following its jerking second hand as attentively as if our lives depended on his observations. Has he been keeping a dead-reckoning chart of our dive, all our attempted evasions? They must make a crazy pattern.

  The Old Man is uneasy. How can he trust this quiet? He can’t let his mind wander the way I can. For him there’s only the enemy and his tactics.

  “Well?” he drawls expectantly, the word long-drawn-out and derisive, as he glances theatrically upward. I wonder why he doesn’t add, “Ready, darling?”

  He grins at me, head to one side. I try to grin back but feel my smile stiffen. My cheek muscles harden of their own accord.

  “We really got them, didn’t we?” he says softly, and stretches himself comfortably against the periscope housing. You’d think he was savoring the attack in retrospect. “Amazing, the way the hatches burst. Sounded really fabulous. The first one must have sunk damn fast.”

  “Death rattle.” Just where did I get that from? Must have been out of some PR report. That kind of inflated rhetoric couldn’t come from anywhere else: death rattle.

  “Dying”—a funny word: everyone seems to avoid it. No one ever “dies” in obituaries. The Lord takes unto Himself. The dear departed enters into eternal peace, putting an end to his earthly pilgrimage—but there’s no dying. The straightforward verb “to die” is avoided like the plague.

  Silence in the boat. Only the soft shifting of the hydroplanes, and now and then a change of course.

  “Propeller sounds getting louder fast,” reports the operator. There’s the Asdic again! This time it sounds like someone writing on a slate with chalk, but pressing much too hard.

  “Sounds getting louder.”

  I notice the sausages hanging from the ceiling. All coated with white. Isn’t doing them any good, the stench and the damp. But salami will stand a good deal. Certainly still edible. Smoked meat too. Dead flesh—living flesh. My blood races. My ears respond. Loud beating of my heart: they’ve got us!

  “Time?”

  “02.40 hours!”

  A yowling sound! What was that? And was it inside the boat? Or outside?

  A definite bearing! The destroyer with the white bone in her teeth! Coming at top speed!

  The Old Man puts his feet up and unbuttons his vest. He might be making himself comfortable to tell a joke or two.

  I wonder what becomes of sunken boats. Do they just stay there, crumpled up, a grotesque armada, perpetually suspended at a depth where the water corresponds precisely to the weight of the collapsed lump of steel? Or do they go on being compressed until they sink thousands upon thousands of feet and drop to the bottom? I must ask the Commander sometime. After all, he’s on intimate terms with pressure and displacement. He must know. Rate of descent, twentyfive miles per hour—I ought to know too.

  The Old Man grins his usual slightly crooked grin. But his eyes roam watchfully. He gives the helmsman a muttered order: “Hard a-port, steer two hundred seventy degrees!”

  “Destroyer attacking!” the operator reports.

  I keep my eyes fixed on the Old Man. Don’t look now.

  The white bone… they’re coming for us at top speed!

  We’re still as deep as we can go.

  A moment’s suspended animation. Then the operator makes a face. No doubt about what that means.

  The seconds stretch out: the bombs are on their way. Breathe deep, tense your muscles. A series of shattering blows almost throws me off my feet.

  “Do you mind!” the Old Man exclaims. Someone shouts, “Breach above the depth gauge!”

  “Not so loud,” snaps the Commander.

  It’s the same thing as last time. A weak spot. A jet of water, stiff as a rod, shoots straight across the control room, dividing the Old Man’s face in two; in one half, his mouth gaping in surprise, in the other, his raised eyebrows and the deep-curving creases in his forehead.

  A shrill whistling and clattering. Incomprehensible shouting back and forth. My blood seems to be turning to ice. I catch the fluttering glance of the Bible Scholar.

  “I’ll fix it!” The control-room mate. He’s at the point of the leak in a single bound.

  Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with rage: goddam swine! All we can do is wait for the bastards to drown us in our own boat like rats.

  The control-room mate is dripping. He’s turned off some valve or other. The stream falters and splash
es in a curve onto the floor plates.

  I notice that the boat has become stern heavy again. The Chief takes advantage of the next explosion to trim forward, The boat very slowly returns to an even keel.

  That jet of water shooting into the boat under unimaginable pressure has shaken me to the core; a foretaste of catastrophe. Only finger-thick, but horrifying enough. Worse than the worst storm wave.

  More blows.

  Unless I’m totally confused, some of the men have gathered under the tower hatch. As if there were any point!

  It hasn’t gotten to the point yet where we have to surface. The Old Man, sitting there so relaxed, doesn’t look at all as though he were at the end of his tether, But the grin has gone from his face.

  The operator whispers, “More propeller sounds at one hundred twenty degrees.”

  “Now we’re in for it!” the Old Man mutters. There’s no doubt about it.

  “What’s its present bearing—the second sound?”

  His voice has become urgent. Yet more computations to be made in his head.

  A report from astern: “Diesel air valves making water badly!” The Old Man exchanges a glance with the Chief, who disappears aft. The Old Man takes over the hydroplaries.

  “Forward up ten,” I hear him order in a murmur.

  I become aware of a strong pressure in my bladder. The sight of the stream of water must have prompted it. But I don’t know where I can relieve myself.

  The Chief reappears in the control room. Aft, there have been two or three breaks around the flanges. His head seems to have developed a nervous tic. A leak—and he can’t pump: the enemy up there have seen to that. The auxiliary pump must be kaput anyway. “Glass case of the auxiliary bilge pump cracked,” I hear amid the roaring chaos. The glass in the water gauge has broken, too. It’s madness.

  The Old Man orders both motors full ahead again. All our high-speed evasive maneuvers are doing is reducing the capacity of our batteries. The Old Man’s gambling with our supplies. If we have no more battery juice, if we run out of compressed air or oxygen, the boat has to surface. The game will be up—nothing more we can do… The Chief has blown compressed air into the diving cells again and again in order to give us the buoyancy he could no longer achieve with the bilge pump alone.