Das Boot

by Lothar-Günther Buchheim

  There’s something or other, as far as I can make out, that can only be put right by heavy hammering. The two of them agree that any work involving heavy hammering is out of the question.

  Again the voice from below. “Thank god—that’s halfway in working order—damned hair-splitting—more of a job for a watchmaker…”

  The Old Man orders, “Put everything you’ve got into it—it’ll be all right!” Then he turns to me as though he had a highly confidential communication to make, but what comes out is a stage whisper. “Good thing we’ve got a real specialist crew on board!”

  The wrecked motor room is as horrifying as the diesel room: it’s no longer our sterile, clean, electric workshop with all the machine parts hidden under steel hoods. The disguises have been torn away, the floor plates removed; the innards lie exposed, naked. Here too everything is a mass of oily waste, pieces of wood, tools. Wedges, cables, hand lamps, a wire net. And there’s still water down there. There’s something obscene about all this; something that looks like rape. The E-mate Rademacher is lying on his stomach, the veins in his neck bulging with the strain as he tries to tighten a base nut with an enormous wrench.

  “A lot of field damage!” I say.

  “Field damage: I like it,” says the Old Man. “The paymaster will be around right away to have a look at the trampled lettuce, then he’ll take care of our mere trifle out of his hip pocket—avoids bureaucracy!”

  Rademacher hears his voice and starts to get up, but the Old Man holds him down, then nods and pushes his cap to the back of his head. Rademacher grins.

  I discover a clock: twelve noon. So I must have slept, off and on. How could the clock have survived the explosion? My eyes fall on an empty bottle. Thirst! Where in the world can I get something to drink? How long is it since I’ve had anything? I’m not hungry: an empty belly, but no hunger. Just this hellish thirst.

  There’s still a bottle—half full. But I mustn’t make off with Rademacher’s juice.

  The Old Man stands stiff as a post, thinking, his eyes fixed on the breach-lock of the stern torpedo tube. Is he making a résumé?

  Finally he remembers me, jerks round, and murmurs, “Well, back we go again.” Another pilgrim’s progress past the halt, the blind, the needy, and the damned. A repeat performance to make sure the show’s made its proper impact.

  But this time the Old Man acts as if there were nothing special to notice; as though everything were in order. A couple of hall-nods here and there, and we’re back in the control room. He steps up to the chart table.

  Oranges! Of course, we have oranges from the Weser. Two crates of them were put aboard in the bow compartment—perfect, ripe oranges. December, the best time for them. My mouth is trying to water, but my throat is choked: a single mass of mucus that has blocked my salivary glands completely. But oranges will clear all that away.

  No one in the Quarters. The technicians are still aft. The navigator was last seen in the control room. But where has the bosun gone?

  I try to open the hatch to the bow compartment as quietly as possible. Feeble light, as usual: a single weak bulb. It takes me a good minute to make out the scene in the gloom: men on bunks, men in hammocks; everyone asleep. Men on the floor plates too, almost up to the hatch; huddled close together like tramps trying to keep one another warm.

  There’ve never been so many of them together in the bow compartment. Suddenly I realize that not only the men off watch but also the “lords” who would normally be on duty now are in here—so it’s double occupancy.

  The beam of my flashlight moves over the bodies. The place looks like a battlefield. Worse still, the aftermath of a gas attack: men lying in the half-darkness as if literally broken and twisted by pain, as if their masks had been no protection against some new gas introduced by the enemy.

  It’s reassuring to hear deep breathing and little smothered snores.

  Probably no one would notice if the Chief turned off the oxygen supply. They would go on just as calmly, dozing away with their pig snouts over their faces and their potash cartridges on their stomachs, Sleep, my little ones, sleep… Passed away, dozing for Volk and Führer…

  Isn’t that someone moving over there, all hunched over? Hacker, the torpedo mechanic. Stepping cautiously over the bodies as if he were looking for someone in particular. He has to stay awake to see to it that no one lets the pig snout out of his mouth.

  I begin to search for foot room. I have to force a way between the sleeping men, search out crevices, push my foot like a wedge between twisted bodies while taking care not to become entangled in the noose of a snorkel tube.

  The oranges must be stowed all the way forward beside the floor breaches. I grope around until I touch first a crate and then a fruit, which I roll and heft in my hand. I gulp. I can’t bear to wait any longer: standing there just as I am, both feet jammed between torsos, arms and legs, I dig the snorkel out of my mouth and plunge my teeth into the thick rind. It’s not till my second bite that I get to the flesh of the fruit. Sucking loudly, I swallow the juice. A lot of it runs out of the corners of my mouth and drips onto the sleeping men. Bliss! I should have thought of it long ago.

  Someone moves beside my left foot; a hand seizes my calf; I jump as though I’d been grabbed by an octopus. In this dim light I can’t see who it is. A face rises: a grisly lemur with a trunk. Coming out of the half-darkness, the man scares me to death. I still can’t recognize him: Schwalle or Dufte? I stammer, “Damned good oranges!” But there’s no answer.

  Hacker, who’s still poking about, comes past, pulls out his mouthpiece, and growls, “Rotten acoustics.” In the beam of my flashlight, long threads of spittle hang down from his chin. Dazzled, he closes his eyes.

  “Excuse me!”

  “I’m looking for the cook,” he whispers.

  I point to a dark corner near the hatch.

  Hacker wobbles his way over two men, bends down, and says in a low voice, “Come on, up, up, Katter! Move. The men astern want something to drink.”

  Nothing has changed in the Officers’ Mess. The Second Watch Officer is still asleep in his corner. I pull out one of the tattered volumes from the shelf and compel myself to read. My eyes feel their way along the lines. They move at their accustomed pace from left to right, registering every syllable, every individual letter, but meanwhile my thoughts drift away; peculiar connections take place in my brain. Disparate texts intrude themselves between my eyes and the printed page: sunken boats—what becomes of them? Does the shipwrecked U-boat armada come sailing home to harbor some day, washed in on the tide along with the mussels and the seaweed? Or do people lie here for the next ten thousand years preserved in some kind of salt-water alcohol? And if a way is eventually found to search the bottom of the sea and raise the ships? How will we look then if our boat is cut open with a blow torch?

  Actually we would offer the recovery team a marvelously peaceful picture. In other sunken boats it would certainly look worse, with the crew probably locked together in chaos, or floating, bloated, between the diesel blocks. We are an exception. We’d be in a dry place.

  No oxygen, so no rust, and above and beyond that, only the highest quality U-boat materials. The salvage would certainly pay for itself: We have any amount of valuable merchandise on board. And our provisions are certainly edible. Only the bananas, the pineapples, and the oranges would be too far gone.

  And as for ourselves? In general, how much do corpses decay without oxygen? What becomes of fifty-one bladders full of urine, of the fricassee and potato salad in our intestines once the oxygen is all gone? Won’t the fermentation process stop too? Do U-boat corpses become stiff and dry like dried codfish or like the bishops that one sees high above Palermo in Piana degli Albanesi? There they lie, under the altar pictures, in their glass caskets, adorned with brocaded silk, colored glass stones, and pearls: hideous but enduring. The difference is that the bishops had been disemboweled. But if it rained uninterruptedly for a couple of days, they stank just the s
ame, as only codfish can stink, through their glass panes.

  Our ship’s fly comes into mind. I see the boat being raised years from now, covered with shaggy dark-green seaweed and thick clumps of mussels. The tower hatch is broken open and out swarm a million fat, greasy flies. Closeup of millions of Battleship Potem kin maggots, swarming over the hatch rim. And millions upon millions of crablice covering the corpses of the crew like mange.

  “Twilight!” I hear from the control room. What does that mean, morning twilight or evening twilight? I’m totally confused.

  The whispering voices come closer. The Old Man appears, and behind him, the Chief.

  The Chief is reporting to the Old Man. He seems to have a newfound supply of strength, like a boxer getting his second wind after being almost counted out in the previous round. God knows how he does it. He hasn’t had one moment away from the Second Engineer and his people. Now he and the Old Man are drawing up a kind of provisional account. I hear that the compressors have been rammed tight with wooden wedges. The thumb-thick bolts that fastened them to their base plates had been sheared off by the pressure wave of the explosion. Much depends on the compressors: they supply the air for blowing out the buoyancy tanks. Both periscopes are definitely in the ashcan. For the time being there’s nothing to be done there. Too complicated…

  I can see that the Chief is beginning to radiate hope as he makes his report.

  Have our chances improved? I stop paying attention to detail. All I want to know is whether the Chief is certain he can force the water outboard and free the boat from the bottom. What do I care about the periscope? I have only one wish: to get to the surface. God knows what comes next. But first we have to get there. Just get there.

  Not a word about bailing and outboard pumping. So what’s the point of all our other successful repairs if we can’t free ourselves from the bottom? Suddenly there are noises again, coming slowly closer. Unmistakable. Ship’s propellers. Louder and louder.

  “Propeller sounds in all directions!”

  What does that mean—a whole convoy? The Old Man rolls his eyes like a tenant enraged by a brawl in the apartment overhead.

  I look around helplessly. I am superfluous. I can only press myself farther into my corner. Every bone in my body feels tortured, tormented. That must be from swinging the buckets: a kind of violent charley horse.

  The Old Man booms away in his usual voice. At first this terrifies me, then I understand that with the uproar overhead it’s safe to talk aloud. No one can hear us. And the familiar hoarse growl is a comfort.

  “Must be a tramc jam!” he says. The usual pretended indifference. But he can’t fool me: I’ve seen him secretly massaging his back with both hands and heard him groan as he does so. He must have landed very awkwardly when he fell, but since then he has only snatched the odd fifteen minutes now and again to lie down.

  The Chief isn’t taking the din as well as the Old Man. When the rumble deepens overhead, the words stick in his throat, and his eyes dart this way and that. No one says a word. Dumbshow.

  I wish the whole thing would reach its finale, so that the players could finally cross the footlights with their everyday faces again.

  The propeller noise stops. The Old Man looks me straight in the face and nods in satisfaction, as though he had been the one to cut the noise off—just to please me.

  The Chief takes a hasty gulp from the bottle of apple juice and disappears again.

  I resolve to conquer my inhibitions and ask the Old Man straight out how things stand, but at that moment he gets to his feet, grimacing with pain, and plods heavily toward the stern.

  After a while I can think of nothing better to do than follow him. Perhaps I can lure him into conversation in the control room. But he’s disappeared. Must have gone farther astern. I have a nasty feeling that something is all fouled up aft. I should have listened more carefully.

  The fog in my brain is getting thicker. The best thing would be for me to rest on my bunk. A man has to sleep sometimes. No point in just sitting around.

  I must have felt my way into the petty officers’ compartment in a trance. Now the trouble starts: I’ve had no practice wriggling into my bunk with a potash cartridge over my stomach; however, by dint of a kind of pole vault with a couple of very painful twists in it, I finally manage. Now to start unbuttoning my shirt, loosen my belt, unbutton the shirt further, all the way down, let my stomach swell as I breathe in, then flatten again—stretch out, exhale, lie there in a kind of sheath with my potash cartridge for a hot-water bottle; a mummy on a funeral bier.

  Consciousness dissolves. Is it sleep, or another kind of oblivion? When I come to again, it’s 17.00. Ship’s time. I can tell from Isenberg’s wristwatch.

  I remain in my bunk. The borderline between waking and sleeping dissolves again. A dull booming echoes somewhere in my mind. Instead of getting up I try to take refuge in sleep, but the noise persists. Eyes closed, but awake, I listen. No doubt about it: depth charges. Trying to terrify us? Or are the Tommies harrying some other boat? But it must be broad daylight up there. No one would attempt a breakthrough in daylight. So? Are they on maneuvers? Keeping their men up to the mark?

  I strain to hear, try to locate the rolling thunder. It’s cascading all around us. Probably small units at work practicing encirclement. Now it’s quiet again. I lean out of my bunk and stare into the control room.

  The sound man reports propeller noises, several at once, from different directions. How can that be—the sound gear was supposed to be a wreck. Then I remember at one point that the Old Man had an earphone pressed to his head as I was squeezing past. So the sound gear is functioning again: We’ve got to the point where we can pick up acoustical information about the enemy. Is that some kind of an advantage?

  The oil leak! The current must have carried it so far away that nobody up there can work out where it came from. Probably—cross fingers—there was one great bubble, and that was that. Luckily, oil doesn’t float forever like cork. It emulsifies and gradually disappears. Viscosity—isn’t that what they call it? Another word to add to my collection of spells and incantations.

  “We must be lying in a good spot,” I hear the Old Man say in the control room. Well, that’s one way of looking at it: thank our lucky stars that we’re jammed in the rocks; because they’ve saved us from the Asdic.

  “Goddammit, if that noise doesn’t stop, it’ll drive me crazy!” Zeitler suddenly bursts out. Against orders: Zeitler’s supposed to keep his pig’s snout in his mouth and be quiet. Let’s hope the Old Man didn’t hear him.

  Zeitler’s left arm is hanging out of the bunk over there. If I squint hard, I can make out his wristwatch. 18.00 hours. No later? Losing my watch was a bad omen. Must simply have fallen off my wrist. Perhaps it’s ticking away somewhere in the bilge. After all, it’s antimagnetic, waterproof, shockproof, stainless, made in Switzerland.

  The nose clip is hurting so much that I have to loosen it for a moment.

  Christ, how it stinks! That’s the gas from the battery! No, not just the gas. It stinks of shit and urine, too—as if someone had had the trots in here. Did someone’s sphincter go while he was asleep? Or is there a piss bucket standing around somewhere?

  Piss: immediately I feel the desperate pressure in my own bladder. The urge subsides, only to be succeeded by ominous stomach cramps. I squeeze my thighs together. What if we all get the trots? The can is unusable at these depths—no good trying to expel the stuff with compressed air. The stench is becoming almost unbearable.

  Better to put the clip back on my nose and breathe through the rattling cartridge! Lucky that nature gave us a choice: nose or mouth. I can simply opt for breathing by the second method; mercifully there are no olfactory nerves in my jaws. The Lord of Heaven and Earth had more foresight in kneading his clay than the designers of our scow did.

  I can certainly hold out for a while longer. Stay flat, don’t move, relax your belly muscles, think of something else, Anything but piss and shi
t.

  In the whorehouse in Brest the smell was awful: sweat, perfume, sperm, piss, and Lysol—a stomach-churning mixture—the smell of lust gone rotten. Eau de Javel, they called the disinfectant, and no perfume, however sweet, could prevail against it. Nose clips would have been in order in that place too.

  Rue d’Aboukir! When a big ship put in, the whores simply stayed on their backs between tricks. No more squatting on the bidet, panties on, being seductive, then panties off again: wornout cylinders of flesh with five dozen different pistons working up and down in them day after day.

  I can see the steep alley: leprous, crumbling walls, charred timbers thrust into the air. A dead dog flattened on the broken pavement. Disgusting. A whole swarm of blowflies swirling up from the squeezed-out entrails. Fragments of tarboard. Bizarre wreckage of tile roofs like huge pieces of layered nougat. Every single garbage can overturned. Rats in broad daylight. Every other house damaged by bombs; even the ones partially intact are abandoned. Wooden window shutters piled up like barricades. There’s barely a footpath between the ruins and the garbage.

  Beside a wall, two sealords leaning against each other, face to face. “Come on, man, I’ll pay for your fuck. You need it.”

  They’re lined up at the bottom of the alley in front of the sanitation room. Two rows of stiff cocks. Everyone has to go through. From time to time the fat orderly shouts out of the door, “Next five… and get your rocks off fast! You’ve each got five minutes—and that’s it!”

  Idiotic grins. The bluejackets all have one hand in their trouser pockets holding their balls or their cocks. And they almost all have a cigarette in the other: nerves.

  A miserable shed. All gray and shabby. Only the sanitation room is painted white. The rest’s like greasy oil—light rancid yellow. Smell of semen and sweat. There’s no bar. Not even the most primitive decoration.

  The madam on her wooden throne has an obscene pug dog pressed against her bosom, right in the middle of the cleavage between her two massive tits. “Really looks like a fat ass,” somebody remarks. “Boy, would I like to fuck her there!”