Das Boot
Page 51
Some of the men on the bunks already look as if they’d died in their sleep: still, peaceful, their nozzles in their mouths. As for the ones who are lying on their backs, all you’d have to do is fold their hands.
I have to keep talking to myself. To everything there is a season—even this ordeal. I shall put thee through the wringer, saith the Lord, and I shall rip open thy ass to the topmost vertebra so that howling and gnashing of teeth shall profit thee nothing.
There it is again: fear that rises from somewhere between my shoulder blades up into my throat, distends my rib cage, gradually fills my whole body. Even my cock. Hanged men often have an erection. Or does that come from something else?
The Commander of the Bismarck still had his Führer in mind when the time came to die. He even put it in words and had it dispatched as a radiogram: “…to the last shell… loyal to the death or some such elevating text. There was a man after our First Watch Officer’s heart.
We’re not very well equipped for this sort of nonsense down here. We can certainly compose noble texts, but we can’t transmit them. The Führer will have to dispense with the UA’s last words. There isn’t even enough air to sing the national anthem.
Good old Marfels, he’s had it already. It was a mistake to ship on the Bismarck. Really makes you laugh. Marfels, the badge collector, still short of a battle medal, so he had to step up and volunteer. Now his young widow can enjoy the hardware he left behind.
What must it have been like after they got that torpedo in the rudder mechanism and could only plow around in circles? The salvage ships Castor and Pollux were ordered out from Brest, but all that was left of the Bismarck by then had been reduced to scrap metal and mincemeat.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria… of all the crap!
I seek refuge from my nightmares in Simone. I repeat her name silently… once, twice, again and again. But this time the invocation fails.
All at once Charlotte appears instead of Simone. Her gourd-shaped tits. The way she could swing them back and forth when she was on her hands and knees.
Now other pictures force their way upward. Inge in Berlin. The assistant at Staff Headquarters. The room assigned by the station commandant. A Berlin room, or rather a hall, really. Don’t put on the light: the blackout curtains are missing. I touch her. Thighs spread, she lets me fall into her. “For god’s sake, don’t stop! Go on! Don’t stop. Like that!”
Brigitte, with her taste for turbans. “J’aime Rambran… parce qu’il a son style!” It took me a while to realize that she meant Rembrandt.
And the girl from Magdeburg, with the unwashed neck and freckles on her nose! The half-filled ashtray with the used condom. The goddam sluttishness of these schoolgirl whores! Appetite gone. Instant complaints. “What’s wrong now? D’you expect me to wait till hell freezes over? Loosen up, will you!” And then, “Slow down—whaddaya trying to do—bang my fucking head off?”
The carousel keeps spinning, and I see the volunteer with the huge sagging breasts go sailing by. When asked why she did it free, gratis, and for nothing, her response was “showing the flag.” You could crank her up, but none of the usual treatment ever got her going. What she wanted was gymnastics—brace yourself on hands and toes and give her a lightning demonstration of sexual push-ups.
I have a clear shot of a pane of frosted glass, the lowest of three in a white painted door. A phantom face: the exiled husband on all fours, ostrich-like in the conviction of his own invisibility. “Look at him—will you look at him! Mr. Peeping Tom himself!”
And now the spinner of fairy tales: knees drawn up, squatting on top of me chattering away as if she had no idea what was going on underneath. Didn’t want me to move. Just played five years old and told fairy stories. Where on earth did I find that one?
The two naked whores in the shabby Paris hotel room. I don’t want to look at them. Go away! I try to concentrate on Simone, but I can’t summon her up. Instead I see one of the two whores washing herself between the legs, sitting on the bidet right under a bare lightbulb. Slack, pallid skin. The other one’s no better. She’s kept her stockings on and her grimy girdle. Gossiping away, she reaches into a battered shopping bag and pulls out half a pathetically small rabbit that’s already been skinned. Wet newspaper sticks to it in dark-gray patches. The neck is half severed. There are dark-red trickles of blood around the ax mark. The whore who’s still on the bidet with her face to the wall, working away with both hands splashing underneath her, keeps screeching every time she bends her head back toward the bluish white body of the rabbit, which the other one is holding out to her. She’s so excited over this prize that she starts to sputter with laughter. The one with the rabbit in her hand has red pubic hair. Sticking next to it on her thigh there’s a piece of the damp newspaper the rabbit had been wrapped in, as big as your hand. Her belly quivers as she laughs; the slack breasts wobble in unison.
I feel as nauseated as I did then.
If we don’t move as much as a little finger, the consumption of oxygen must fall to almost zero. Lying stretched out, motionless, not even blinking our eyelids, we should be able to make our supply hold out much longer than the averages indicate.
Of course the motion of the lungs in itself uses up oxygen. So—breathe very shallowly, inhale only as much as the body needs for its basic functions.
But the oxygen we save here by staying still is being used up by the men who are exhausting themselves on the damaged engines aft. They’re exploiting our reserves. Sucking the oxygen right out of our mouths.
Now and again a dull clang comes from astern. Each time it makes me jump: Sounds are magnified five times in water. They’re certainly doing all they can to avoid noise. But how can they work silently with those heavy tools?
The First Watch Officer comes back from an inspection tour, From time to time he has to make sure that all the sleepers still have their snorkels in their mouths. His blond hair, wet with sweat, is stuck to his forehead.
About all I can see of his face is the cheekbones—his eyes lie in shadow.
I haven’t seen the Chief for a long time. I wouldn’t want to be in his place. It’s too much responsibility for one man. Let’s hope he’s up to it.
The Old Man appears on silent feet. He’s still six feet away from the table when there’s another clang from astern. He grimaces as though in sudden pain.
He’s not wearing a potash cartridge. “Well, how goes it?” he asks, as though he didn’t know that with the nozzle in my mouth I can’t reply. I lift my shoulders slightly by way of an answer, then let them fall. The Old Man glances quickly into the forward compartment then disappears again.
I’m ready to drop with exhaustion, but sleep is impossible. Images float up like entries from a card index. The hairnet lady: hoity-toity Tante Bella, the Christian Scientist, the healer who’d taken a dip in all the sacred waters known to man. She did a roaring trade. The hairnets came in enormous bundles from Hong Kong. By the hundred gross. Tante Bella had elegant envelopes with transparent windows and uplifting texts printed on them, and there she sat with three little office drudges, all of them untangling the hairnets and putting each individual one into its pale violet-colored envelope—which made the hairnet instantly become fifty times more expensive than it had been a moment before. Tante Bella had a good dozen salesmen. Later I learned that she carried on exactly the same business with contraceptives—but all that happened late at night. I picture her sitting there in dead earnest, in front of a pile of pale, rosecolored condoms like a mountain of sheep’s intestines, sorting out the mess with nimble fingers and slipping them into their little envelopes. Faber was Tante Bella’s narne—Bella Faber. Her son, Kurtchen, looked like a thirty-year-old hamster. He was the head of the sales force. Hairdressers were his principal clients. Meanwhile, Uncle Erich, Tante Bella’s husband, installed automatic vending machines in the washrooms of rundown bars. “Three for one reichsmark.” Uncle Erich had to have a drink with every barkeeper on his rounds to refill th
e machines. Then back onto his bicycle, one shabby saddlebag for the money and the other for the contraceptives; dismount, down another shot, out with the take, in with the condoms, down yet another shot. He couldn’t keep it up for long, good old Uncle Erich with the silver bicycle clips on his trousers. He never removed them, not even indoors. One day he fell off his wheels between one vending machine and the next and was done for. The police carted him off. They must have been flabbergasted at the loads of coins and condoms they found in his bags.
All at once I notice that the Second Watch Officer’s apparatus has fallen out of his mouth. How long has he been breathing without the snorkel? Was I dead to the world a while? I shake his shoulder but elicit no more than a rumble. I have to punch him hard before he gives a start and stares at me with horror, as though I were some grisly apparition. It takes a few seconds for him to pull himself together, grope for his snorkel, and begin to suck on it. Then he’s asleep again.
I’ll never understand how he manages it. If only he were pretending—but no, he really is dead to the world again. All that’s lacking is a snore. I can’t take my eyes off his pale, relaxed baby face. Envy? Or am I just tormented by my disappointment at not being able to communicate with him even by glance or gesture?
I can’t stay here. My body is going to sleep of its own accord. Up and into the control room.
Repairs are still going on in the radio shack. Both mates are working by the light of a strong bulb they brought with them to screw into the socket, and they aren’t wearing snorkels. Apparently they can’t get the transmitter working. It’s a job for a watchmaker. Probably the necessary replacement parts are lacking. “Can’t be done with available materials,” I hear Herrmann say. Always the same thing: “Not with available materials as if they had any choice.
The emergency bulb sheds an ugly light that barely penetrates the thick air. It doesn’t even reach the walls, which are still in darkness. Three, four shadowy figures are working by the forward wall, bent over like miners at the end of a gallery. Wedged against the chart table with his forearms outstretched on it, the Old Man is staring fixedly at the chart. The machines have been stripped down, and the parts are still strewn at random around the darkened room. Even the flooding and bailing distributors are cluttered with pieces that don’t belong there. Probably parts of the main bilge pump. In the background the beam of a pocket flashlight flits over the armatures and valves. I can just make out the pale eye of the manometer in the gloom. The pointer remains at nine hundred. I stare at it as if I can hardly believe my own eyes. No boat has ever been this deep before.
It’s getting colder all the time. Certainly we’re not radiating much body warmth, and heat is out of the question. Wonder how cold it is outside?
Plaster altar: Gibraltar—plaster altar.
Now, thank god, the Chief arrives. He’s moving with his usual supple ease. Does that mean some kind of triumph? The Old Man turns to him and hmms and hahs.
As hard as I try, all I hear is that the breaches have been sealed.
No sign of satisfaction from the Old Man.
“In any case, we can’t surface before dark.”
To this I can only nod. What I’d really like to toss in is “How about after?”
I’m afraid they’re betting on their hopes rather than on realities.
The man who just came through the control room from the stern has doubtless heard what the Old Man said. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Old Man had formulated his sentence with “surface” in it just for him, so that he can now go forward to report, “The Old Man just said something about surfacing.”
I’m still not clear in my own mind how much of the Old Man’s confidence is play-acting and how much conviction. In any case, whenever he thinks he’s unobserved, he looks years older: a mess of wrinkles, all his face muscles slack, his reddened, swollen eyes half closed; at such moments his whole body speaks resignation. But now that his back’s supported, he holds himself straight, arms folded on his chest, head tilted slightly backward, so still he might be posing for a sculptor. I can’t even see whether he’s breathing.
Without knowing exactly what I’m doing, I seem to have sat down in the ring of the forward hatch.
Suddenly the Old Man’s face is bending over me. Has he said something? I must seem totally dazed as I pull myself to my feet, for he produces a calming, “There, there.” Then with a motion of his head he urges me to accompany him astern. “Have to show our faces back there as well.”
I dig out the rubber mouthpiece with my fingers, swallow my saliva, take a breath of air, and silently follow the Old Man. For the first time I notice someone sitting on the chart chest: Turbo. His head is flopping so loosely on his chest that his backbone might as well be broken. Someone is coming toward us: control-room mate Isenberg. Staggering like a drunk. In his left hand he has long metal rods and electric cables, and in his right a large pipe wrench that he’s in the act of handing down to someone crouching on the floor.
The Old Man halts at the level of the deserted hydroplane station and surveys the dismal scene. The control-room mate hasn’t yet noticed us. Suddenly, however, he looks round as he hears the splashing of my boots, and he straightens up, tries to stand, opens his mouth, and then shuts it again.
“Well, Isenberg?” says the Old Man. The control-room mate swallows but doesn’t make a sound.
The Old Man takes a sideways step toward him and lays his right hand on his shoulder—just for a second; but Tin-ear Willie blossoms under it. He even manages a gratified grin. The Old Man gives two or three short nods and then moves heavily on.
I know that the control-room mate will now be exchanging glances with his men behind our backs. The Old Man! He’s always managed…
The floor plates are still up in the petty officers’ quarters. So they’re still working on battery two, or giving it another go-around. A face streaked with sweat and oil pops up like an apparition from a stage trapdoor. The wide beard identifies him as Pilgrim, the E-mate. More dumbshow: for two or three seconds the Old Man and Pilgrim exchange glances, then Pilgrim grins all over his filthy face. The Old Man allows himself a questioning noise, then nods—and Pilgrim nods back eagerly: He too is comforted.
It’s hard to get through aft. The nimble Pilgrim tries to prop up a piece of the floor plate from underneath so there will be room for us to put our feet down.
“Don’t bother,” says the Old Man; like a mountain climber, his belly pressed against the bunk railings, he traverses the narrow footledge toward the stern. I accept Pilgrim’s help.
The door to the galley is standing open. The galley itself has been cleaned up. “Excellent,” murmurs the Old Man. “Just as I expected.”
The next door, to the diesel room, is standing open too. Usually when the diesels are running and sucking in air, you have to exert all your strength to overcome what is virtually a vacuum in the diesel room. But the pulsing heart of the boat is dead.
Weak light from hand lamps; our eyes quickly adjust. My god, look at it! The duckboards have been removed, the shining floor plates too. For the first time I realize how far down the diesels extend. Between their bases I can make out a jumble of heavy machine parts—oil pans, tools, bushings. This is no longer a machine shop but a cannibal cave. Everything drips with black lubricating oil—the spilled black blood of machines. Repulsive pools of it have formed on all flat surfaces. Bunches of waste lie about. Everywhere tattered rags, dirty packings, bent pieces of pipe, asbestos boards black with finger marks, greasy nuts and bolts. Whispering voices, the dull clang of a tool.
While Johann is whispering with the Old Man, he goes on working with a gigantic wrench. I had no idea we had such heavy tools on board. Johann’s movements are precisely measured: no nervous errors, no uncertain holds.
“Beam wedges in the leaks holding fast!”
The word “beam” sets me off again. Wood amid all this steel? Beam defenses—that’s naval vocabulary. Where else are there “beams”?
Where on earth does Johann get his calmness from? Does he simply forget that we have nine hundred feet of water over our heads, and that the oxygen will soon be running out? The Old Man peers here and there. He kneels in order to get closer to the people working below deck, contorted like fakirs. He says hardly a word, simply hums a little to himself and produces his usual drawling “Well-l-l?”
But out of their narrow pits the oil-smeared faces look at the Old Man as if he were a miracle worker. Their faith in his ability to get us out of here must be without limit.
At the after end of the starboard diesel, the lamplight reveals two or three men hunched over in cramped positions at the base of the diesels; they’re cutting large gaskets.
“Well, how do things look in general?” the Old Man asks in a hushed voice, but warmly, the way he would inquire after the health of their wives and children.
He’s standing propped on one elbow for support; in the angle between his arm and his body, I catch sight of the Chief. “…ribs broken by the dozen,” I hear him whisper. “…can’t really get at the problem anywhere!”
His face is thrown into exaggerated relief by one of the lamps. Extreme exhaustion has put greenish semi-circles under his eyes, which are burning feverishly. The lines in his face have deepened. He seems to have aged ten years overnight.
I can’t see his body, only his floodlit face. I give a start as the pale, bearded head of John the Baptist speaks again. “Made a mess of the cooling-water system too. Pretty fair job actually—soldered—starboard diesel—Herr Kaleun—seems to be—complete wipe-out—not with available materials—otherwise it’ll go to pot—not balanced—driveshaft bearings…”