Das Boot

  Compressed air has an extremely high market value: Given our present circumstances, we’re in no position to start manufacturing more. Using the compressor is out of the question.

  And how about the oxygen? How long can we go on breathing the stench that permeates the boat?

  The sound man gives one report after another. I too can hear the Asdic rattle again.

  But it’s still not really clear whether we have two pursuers now in place of one.

  The Old Man pushes a hand under his cap. He probably doesn’t have much grasp of the situation either. Hydrophone reports give practically no information about the enemy’s intentions.

  Or could they in turn be fooling us with their own noises? Technically it would be possible. Our having to rely completely on the operator’s perceptions is preposterous.

  The destroyer seems to be making a wide circle. No further word about the second series of noises, but this could mean that a second ship has just been lying there silent for some time.

  The pause continues. The First Watch Officer glances round uncertainly. Crumpled face. Sharp nose, white about the nostrils.

  The control-room mate is trying to pee into a big can. He fumbles about laboriously trying to get his cock out through his leather trousers.

  Then—without warning—a crash. The half-filled can drops from Tin-ear Willie Isenberg’s hand and spills onto the floor plates. The place instantly stinks of urine. I’m surprised the Old Man doesn’t start cursing.

  I breathe very shallowly so as not to encounter the steel band around my chest, not to inhale too much of the stench. The air is terrible: the hot smell of diesels running at full speed… the stink of fifty men… our sweat—the sweat of fear. God knows what else has gone into this miasma of odors. Now the air smells of shit too. Someone must have lost control. Sweat and piss and shit and bilge—unendurable.

  I can’t help thinking of the poor bastards in the stern. They can’t see the Commander, draw comfort from his presence. They are really caged in. No one to signal when the infernal din is going to break out again. I’d rather die than be stuck back there between the reeking, hot engine blocks.

  So it does matter, after all, where one’s battle station is. Even here there are the privileged and the underprivileged.

  Hacker and his crew working in the bow compartment at the tubes—no one tells them our course either. They hear neither the orders to the helmsman nor the signals to the engine room. They don’t know what the sound man reports. They have no notion which way we’re moving—or whether we’re moving at all. It’s only when an explosion suddenly hurls the boat upward or slams it deeper down that they feel it in their stomachs; and if we go very deep indeed they can hear the telltale “creaking of the beams.”

  Three detonations. This time the gigantic sledgehammer came from below. I catch a glimpse of the depth manometer in the beam of a flashlight. It jumps backwar’d. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach. We are being hurled upward in a high-speed elevator.

  If the boat is five hundred feet or so down, the pressure waves from depth charges are supposed to be at their worst if they go off another hundred feet below that. How deep are we now? Six hundred feet.

  There is no flexible steel underneath us. Nothing really to protect the engines! They are the most vulnerable to explosions from below.

  Six more bombs. Again so close under our keel that I can feel the twisting force in my knee joints. I’m standing on one end of a seesaw while someone drops blocks of stone on the other end. The needle jerks backward again. Up and down—just what the Tommies want.

  This attack has cost them at least a dozen bombs. There must be a mass of fish up there, floating on their sides, their air bladders torn apart. The Tommies could collect them by the netful. Something fresh for the galley.

  I try to take long, regular breaths, For a good five minutes I breathe deeply, then four bombs explode. All astern. The sound man reports a decrease in strength.

  I concentrate on imagining how one could reproduce all of this, this entire scene, in papier mâché for the stage. Everything very exact. Scale one to one. It would be easy: just remove the port wall—that’s where the audience would sit. No elevated stage. Everything face to face. Direct view of the hydroplane station. Shift the sky periscope up front to give the whole thing perspective. I fix in my mind the positions and attitudes of the actors: the Old Man leaning against the periscope shaft—solid, heavy-set, in his ragged sweater, his furlined vest, his salt-flecked boots with their thick cork soles, the stubborn tangle of hair escaping from under his old battered cap with its tarnished trim. Color of his beard: sauerkraut, slightly rotten sauerkraut.

  The hydroplane operators in their rubber jackets—in the heavy unyielding folds of their foul-weather gear—are two stone blocks that might have been hewn out of dark basalt and polished.

  The Chief in half profile: olive-green shirt with rolled-up sleeves, crumpled dark olive-green linen trousers. Sneakers. Valentino hair slicked back. Thin as a whippet. Expressionless as a wax doll. Only his jaw muscles constantly working. Not a syllable, only the play of the jaw.

  The First Watch Officer has turned his back to the audience. One senses he doesn’t want to be observed because he isn’t in complete control of himself.

  Not much of the Second Watch Officer’s face to be seen. He’s too heavily muffled up, standing motionless, his eyes darting everywhere, as if searching for an escape hatch—as if they’re trying to get away, to be free of him, to abandon him, leave him eyeless, while standing rigid by the periscope.

  The navigator keeps his head down and pretends to be checking his stopwatch.

  Only some minor sound effects: a low humming and the occasional drip of water on the metal plates.

  All easy to reproduce. Minutes of silence, complete immobility. Only the constant hum and the dripping. Just keep everyone standing there frozen—until the audience becomes uneasy.

  Three detonations, no doubt astern.

  The navigator apparently has a new method of keeping score. Now he draws the fifth mark diagonally through the first four. That saves space and makes it easier to follow. He’s already on his sixth row. I can’t remember just how our conscientious scorekeeper tallied the last salvos.

  The Old Man goes on calculating uninterruptedly: our course, the enemy’s course, an escape course. With every report from the sound room, the basic factors in his calculations change.

  What’s he doing now? Will he have us steer straight ahead? No, this time he’s trying another turn: hard a-port.

  Let’s hope he’s made the right choice, that the Commander of the destroyer hasn’t decided on port too—or on starboard, should he be steering toward us. That’s the way it is: I don’t even know whether the destroyer is attacking from forward or astern.

  The figures that the operator is calling out are becoming jumbled in my head.

  “Dropping cans!” The operator has heard the splash of more bombs hitting the surface of the water.

  I hold tight.

  “Man the bilge pump,” the Old Man orders, enunciating with great care although the explosion hasn’t yet come.

  The noise! But it doesn’t seem to bother the Old Man.

  A whirlpool of detonations.

  “Saturation pattern!” he says.

  If it doesn’t work with single charges or with series of them, they simply lay down a carpet.

  Unshrinkable!

  With half my mind I ask myself where I dug up the English word “unshrinkable.” Finally I see it machine-stitched, in gold thread, on the label of my swimming trunks, under the words “pure wool.”

  A carpet! A spool begins unwinding in my head: hand-knotted, exquisite Afghan design—flying carpet—Harun al Rashid—Oriental bullshit!

  “Much too good for us!” sneers the Old Man. In the worst of the noise he orders the speed increased. “Now they’re reloading!” Contemptuously, he explains the absence of new detonations. “The more you use, the more yo
u lose.”

  A golden maxim, like something straight out of the messroom calendar. The quintessential lesson of a dozen depth-charge attacks: “The more you use, the more you lose.”

  The Commander orders us up. What does that mean? Are we going to surface? Is the next order to be: “Prepare escape gear!”?

  Atlantic Killer—a title for a film. Show a hairline crack in an egg. That’s all it would take on our eggshell—just one crack. The enemy can leave the sea to do the rest.

  The efforts we used to make to get rid of garden snails. The black shiny giants, the night snails, we would collect in buckets to be emptied into toilets and flushed away. Drowned in the cesspool—that did the job. Stepping on them is as disgusting as chopping them up. An explosion of green slime.

  As children we played the cremation game. Away with the hearth fender, little pails of rainworms dumped onto the red coals—and in a second the worms were transformed with a loud hiss into twists of black ash.

  Rabbits. You hold them firmly with your left hand and give them a blow on the back of the neck. Neat and clean: only a little twitching—as though electrocuted. Carp you hold with your left hand sideways on the board and give them a heavy blow on the snout with a stick. It makes a crunching sound. Quickly slit open their stomachs. Careful with the gall bladder, the gall mustn’t spill out. The swollen air bladders gleam like Christmas tree ornaments. Funny thing about carp: even when they’re cut in two there’s still life in them. It used to frighten us as children when the halves went on jerking for hours on end.

  I could never bring myself to kill doves, even though it’s easy to do. You simply tear their heads off. Clamp them between index and middle fingers—a small twisting motion and crack and away! Roosters and hens you hold high on the wings with your left hand, directly under the shoulder blades, as it were. And then quickly press them sideways on the block and guillotine them with the ax. Let them bleed, but be sure to keep a firm hold, or they’ll fly away without their heads. A bloody mess.

  New sounds: propeller noises—a high whistling, audible throughout the boat. I see the new control-room assistant trembling all over. He’s slumped down over the water distributor. Someone else—who is it?—sits down on the floor plates. Doubled up, a dark lump of flesh and fear. The others are huddled in a variety of postures, making themselves as small as possible. As though hiding would do any good now.

  Only the Old Man sits in his usual way, casual and relaxed.

  A new detonation! My left shoulder hits something so hard that I nearly cry out.

  Two more.

  “Start pumping!” the Old Man orders above the roar. We can’t lose the destroyer. Damnation, we can’t shake her off!

  The Chief stares glassily out of the corners of his eyes. He looks as if he can hardly wait for the next series of bombs. Perverse: he wants to bail, and to do that he needs the bombs.

  The boat can no longer be held without continuous bailing. Bilge pump on when there’s roaring outside, bilge pump off when it stops. Again and again—on and off—on and off.

  Waiting—waiting—waiting.

  Still nothing? Nothing at all? I open my eyes but keep them firmly fixed on the floor plates.

  A double blow. Pain in the back of my neck. What was that? Cries—the floor shudders—the floor plates jump—the whole boat vibrates—the steel howls like a dog. The lights have gone again. Who cried out?

  “Permission to blow tanks?” I hear the Chief’s voice as though through wool.

  “No!”

  The beam of the Chief’s pocket flashlight wavers over the Commander’s face. No mouth. No eyes.

  Tearing, shrieking, shrill screaming—then more shattering blows. The orgy of noise has hardly ebbed when the chirp of the Asdic is back again. In our deep-sea aviary, the chirp that rings of betrayal. Rasps the nerves more than anything else. They couldn’t have come up with a worse sound to torment us. Like our own Stuka’s siren scream. I hold my breath,

  Three o’clock plus how many minutes? I can’t quite make out the big hand.

  Reports. Fragments of words both from forward and aft. What is leaking badly? A drive-shaft gasket? Of course, I understand, both shafts go through the pressure hull.

  The emergency lights go on. In the half-darkness I see that the control room is full of men. What now? What is happening? Which men are these? They must have come in through the after hatch. I’ve been sitting in the forward one. They couldn’t have got through here. Damn this dim light. I can’t recognize any of them. Two men—the control-room mate and one of the assistants—half block my view. They’re standing as stiff as ever, but everything behind them is in motion. I hear the scuffling of boots, panting breath, sharp snorts, a few mumbled curses.

  The Old Man hasn’t noticed yet. He keeps his eyes on the depth manometer. Only the navigator turns his head.

  “Breach in the diesel room,” someone shouts from the stern.

  “Propaganda!” says the Old Man without even turning around, and then once more with deliberate clarity, “Prop-a-gan-da!”

  The Chief starts in the direction of the diesel room but stops short and looks at the manometer.

  “I demand a report!” snaps the Commander, turning away from the manometers and seeing the crowd in the semi-darkness around the after hatch.

  As though by reflex he draws his head in and bends forward slightly. “Chief, just give me your light,” he orders in a whisper.

  There’s a stir among the men who have come into the control room from astern. They shrink back like tigers in front of their trainer. One of them even succeeds in raising his leg behind him and groping his way back through the hatch. It looks like a circus act. The flashlight in the Commander’s hand catches only the receding back of a man hastening through the hatch toward the stern, rescue kit under his arm.

  The face of the control-room mate is close to mine. His mouth a dark hole. His eyes wide—I can see the full circle of his pupils. He seems to be screaming but there is no sound.

  Have my powers of perception gone mad? I don’t see the controlroom mate as frightened, but as an actor imitating the fear of a control-room mate.

  The Commander orders both motors half speed ahead.

  “Half speed ahead both!” comes the voice of the helmsman from the tower.

  The control-room mate seems to be coming out of his coma. He begins to glance around furtively but won’t look anyone straight in the face. His right foot feels its way cautiously over the floor plates. His tongue moistens his gray lower lip.

  In a soft voice the Old Man sneers, “Wasting their tin cans…”

  The navigator has come to a dead stop, his hand holding its piece of chalk. He looks frozen in mid-movement, but it’s only hesitation. He doesn’t know how many marks to jot down for the last attack. His bookkeeping could get scrambled. One error—and the whole thing would be down the drain.

  He blinks as if to shrug off a dream, then makes five bold strokes. Four straight up and down, and one through the middle.

  The next explosions come singly—sharp, ripping bursts but with little after-roar. The Chief has to shut down the pumps quickly. The navigator starts on the next group of chalk marks. As he is drawing the last one, the chalk falls from his hand.

  Another great blast. Once more, a rattling over badly laid rails. Rumbling across switches, then bumping through broken stone. Metal screams and shrills.

  If a rivet should give way now, it could—as I well know—plow straight through my skull like a bullet. The pressure! A stream of water breaking into the boat could saw a man in half.

  The sour smell of fear! Now they’ve got us in the wringer, by the short hairs. We’ve had it. It’s our turn now.

  “Sixty degrees—getting stronger—more sounds at two hundred degrees!” Two, then four explosions in my head. They’re going to rip open our hatches, the filthy swine!

  Groans and hysterical sobbing.

  The boat is jouncing like an airplane in a pocket of turbulen
ce.

  They’re carpeting us.

  The impact has knocked two men down. I see a mouth shrieking, flailing feet, two faces masked in terror.

  Two more explosions. The sea is a single raging mass.

  Subsiding roar and then suddenly silence. Only essential sounds: the sonorous insect hum of the motors, men breathing, the steady drip of water.

  “Forward up ten,” whispers the Chief.

  The whine of the hydroplane motors pierces me to the bone. Must everything make so much noise?

  Isn’t the Old Man going to change course? Aren’t we going to turn again? Or will he try to break out of the circling pattern by steering straight ahead?

  Why doesn’t the sound man say something?

  If he has nothing to report, it can only mean that there are no engines running on the surface. But the bastards can’t have gone so quickly that he didn’t catch them at it. So they’re lying there doggo. We’ve seen that happen a couple of times before. Still, the noise of the destroyer’s engines has never been absent this long…

  The Old Man maintains depth and course.

  Five minutes pass, then the operator’s eyes suddenly open wide, and he turns his hand wheel furiously. His forehead is deeply furrowed. They’re about to attack again. I no longer listen to his reports but try to concentrate on nothing but keeping my seat. A sharp double crack.

  “Boat making water!” A cry comes from astern in the roar following the explosion.

  “Express yourself properly,” the Commander orders the invisible man in a hiss.

  Making water! This miserable naval jargon! Sounds like manufacturing something: “creating” it, and yet making water is about the worst thing that can happen in our situation.

  The next one seems to hit me below the belt. Don’t scream! I clench my teeth until my jaws ache. Someone else cries out for me, in a falsetto that goes right through me. The beam of a flashlight sweeps around in search of the man who screamed. I hear a new noise; the chattering of teeth like the quick rattle of castanets, then sniffling, snorting. There are men sobbing too.