The Star of Istanbul

by Robert Olen Butler

  And so she was letting go of my hand and she was recoiling backward toward the door and I knew from the rushing and crying around me and the angle of the deck beneath our feet and the lifeboats pinned against our hull that we should get away from the portside, and I reached out and grabbed her at the wrist before she could vanish and I dragged her forward and I cried “Look only at me” and I pulled her behind me for my first step forward and another—we would head for the starboard side, but not by the exit doors—and then I didn’t have to pull, and her wrist in my trailing hand twisted, but only so her own hand could grasp me in return, and she was with me, our hands holding at the wrists and I pushed hard through the narrow spaces between bodies, staggering at times as the angle to starboard tried to throw us down, but the angle forward helped us rush and we hugged the deck wall using it when we could, bracing our passage with our free hands or even at times with our feet, Selene slipping now sideways, and we got her up, clambering at each other with our hands, and we made our way forward, and in my functioning consciousness were only her hand and mine and the series of physical objectives I would set, one by one, to focus our rush. The Bridge Wing first, floating before us, and we stumble-rushed along and it neared and we swerved out from a staircase to the bridge and now we were passing beneath the wing and immediately ahead was the curving turn of the deck wall at the forward crossover passageway, and I knew we had to take that carefully, we dared not lose our footing in the turn, for there would be nothing on the other side to stop our tumble and I didn’t know the state of things down that slope, and so I pulled us up sharply, in the shadow of the Bridge Wing.

  I turned us and we pressed back there against the wall. Just to my right the corner began its curve forward. Selene intertwined her fingers in mine and squeezed tight. Briefly. And then her hand went slack.

  I turned my face to her. Selene Bourgani’s famous profile was before me, her head laid back as if she’d returned to her cabin bed. Her eyes were shut.

  “Don’t give up,” I said. I could barely hear myself.

  I realized there was a great din all around me of voices and chains and steam and footfalls and distress whistle and groaning hull metal and sobs and I blocked it all out once more and I leaned nearer to Selene and I cried out loudly, “Selene!”

  Her face turned to me and her eyes opened.

  “Stay with me,” I cried.

  She stared at me blankly for a long moment. I was afraid she was losing her will. I thought to shake her, even to slap her across the cheek. This mood would kill her. Would kill us both.

  But she stirred. She nodded to me: Yes.

  “I need to check,” I cried, motioning over my shoulder to the corner of the deck wall. “Then we move.”

  She nodded again.

  I let go of her hand and turned and laid my chest against the wall and I worked my way left, carefully, along the curve, feeling the pull grow stronger on me, feeling it in my chest, and I pressed harder into the wall, stretched my neck to the left, waiting to see what I needed to see, hoping the sight would come before I was grabbed off my feet and thrown forward.

  And then I could see, and I strained my legs to stop.

  I stopped.

  This is what I saw: the deck fell sharply toward the water, and beyond the foremast the water was foaming in a sharp, slashing angle across the forecastle, with starboard railing and capstans and hatches and windlass already vanished utterly beneath the sea and, with them, the far end of the passageway to the starboard side.

  I pulled away, pressed my back against the deck wall, edged around the curve, thrashing in my head to visualize a way out for us, with the portside promenade a death trap and the forward passage to the starboard promenade blocked and the inside starboard portals clogged with chaos.

  I was off the curve once more and I turned my face to Selene.

  She was gone.

  I pushed away from the wall, scrambled upright.

  I looked up the incline of the Boat Deck.

  Bodies jumbled there, black-uniformed crewmen pulling at people in the nearest lifeboat, dragging them out—and this was why I could not let myself see too much—and therefore think too much—I was immobilized now trying to understand the incongruity of the crew unloading the unlaunched lifeboat—but they were acting on orders based on the desperate reality that the rivet heads and flanges down the side of the hull would rip the boat open in its dragging descent, even as these men no doubt proclaimed the lie—since there was no official Cunard alternative—that the ship was unsinkable.

  I had to stop trying to figure things out with my head. I was losing any sense of what to do. I had to trust my body simply to act now.

  And I found my body sparking with undirected energy to find Selene.

  She was not visible.

  And then she was.

  I saw her white shirtwaist and dark skirt against the sky, emerging at the portside railing from beyond the wide, upright column of the Bridge Wing. She was moving up the deck, slowly, looking out to sea, as if she were taking some fresh air after lunch.

  I knew a way.

  I scrambled up the deck toward Selene. She did not move as I came near, and I stepped to the railing beside her. She seemed not even to notice.

  We clung to the rail and watched the wide, bright, sun-flecked sea together for a few moments, as if the deck was deserted and I was ready to offer her a cigarette and later we might even work up to a kiss.

  Then I slipped my arm around her waist.

  And to my relief, she laid her head against the point of my shoulder.

  I angled my head toward hers.

  In spite of our appearance at the rail and my sharp focus on her, I was fully aware of the welter all around us. I bent to her, brought my mouth close to her ear so I could speak loudly enough to be heard but still sound tender, like an actor wooing an actress and projecting the performance to the back of the mezzanine. “Selene.”

  She lifted her head away from my shoulder.

  “I want to hold you close to me once again,” I said.

  She lifted her chin just a bit.

  “In this lifetime,” I said.

  She nodded.

  She turned her face and looked up into my eyes.

  We could delay no longer.

  I took her hand.

  “We have to go over,” I said, flipping my head a little toward the top of the ship.

  And we turned and we cut across the deck to the stairway and we were going up and the stairs were empty—groups in panic follow the obvious paths, stack up at exit doors, refuse to act against their conditioned response—and we were climbing fast and we emerged onto the rubber-matted flooring outside the wheelhouse. The windows were a few steps forward of us and I couldn’t see inside and I was glad for that, glad to miss an image of the quiet chaos in there. We turned aft.

  And a junior officer stepped from the bridge doorway, directly into our path. He lifted a meatpacker’s hand, giving us his palm.

  We stopped. Though I didn’t want to do it because I was afraid Selene would run again, I knew I had to let go of her hand.

  I gave it a squeeze and released it.

  “Forbidden,” he shouted. “Go back.”

  A pistol was wedged into his belt on his right hip. He was under orders to protect the bridge with deadly force.

  “We’re just going through,” I said.

  His palm was coming down and it was angling toward his hip.

  I took a quick step forward as his hand neared the pistol and my right fist was closed tight already and I stepped once more, planted my leading foot, my left foot, out ahead, and I stopped and he grasped the pistol and I set myself and the barrel was coming free and I drove my fist forward—an overhand right—shifting my sight to his face, seeing only his deep-clefted chin, and I
was pivoting my whole body from the hips and pushing off on my back foot and driving through and I caught him square in a boxer’s sweet aiming spot, right on the point of his chin, and there was a crack that I could hear above the siren roar and there was the clean, hard yielding and the release and the flying away. He landed hard and bounced and settled, and the rube’s jaw was glass: his head lolled to the side and his eyes rolled back and closed.

  I turned to find Selene.

  She was standing beside me, a step behind.

  She was staring at the unconscious man.

  And she surprised me. On her face was a keen, narrow-eyed, steely focus.

  Something had shifted in her. It let me move on to what was next. “Can you swim?” I said.

  Her hands moved to her waist and she unfastened her skirt and it fell to her feet like a punched-out sailor. She stepped from it and stood there in black stockings, white drawers to the knees, and the bounteously phony bosom of her life jacket. “Yes, I can swim,” she said.

  And I did not have to hold her hand.

  I turned and Selene and I stepped past the unconscious junior officer, and before us was a waist-high wall, and bellied up to it just beyond was the fat body and great gaping black maw of a cowl ventilator, as tall as the bridge. No doorway through to the Hurricane Deck. But there was a passable space between the vent and the Bridge.

  “Over,” I said to Selene, and I stepped aside. She went to the wall and put her hands on it and I grabbed her waist in my hands and lifted and she went over and I followed and she let me pass her as we went around the ventilator.

  We crossed straight over to the starboard side and began to work our way up the incline of the deck, which made moving forward heavy-legged and hard, but we held tight to the railing, resisting the sideways incline of the ship, which would make falling down to the Boat Deck and then into the sea light-chested and easy.

  I watched below as we moved, assessing the situation, seeking an opening for us. The deck seethed with passengers, and I was struck by two surpassingly sad things. One was this: hundreds of people were dithering and flustering and drifting and huddling about in faux calm, but there were dozens of different currents and directions, moving forward, moving aft, lurching to the rail’s edge, clinging to the deck wall; worse than the sadness of the few wild retreats I’d seen of men on a battlefield, where at least their direction was clear, this was a vast shifting image of hopelessness, seen from above as if by a powerless or an indifferent god. And the second sad thing was all the bare heads, all the bare heads of men and women and children whose world was a world of hats and caps and scarves, of heads covered beneath the sky, and now all these people had been lifted desperately from the bareheaded safety of belowdecks or they had already stripped themselves of their coverings as they faced a plunge into the sea.

  And the sea was very near to their deck now.

  I watched a lifeboat amidships, pulled out by the list to the farthest extent of its snubbing chains, the boat almost full with huddling bodies, and a woman was poised at deck’s edge—she still in fur-trimmed coat and hat and veil and without a life jacket—and men’s hands in the boat reached out beseeching her to try to jump across the six or eight feet of empty space to them. She leaned forward and then back and then shuffled her feet and wobbled and tried to work herself up to the leap, while at the running blocks at each corner of the boat gap in the railing, crewmen pulled hard at the falls, the man forward visibly quaking from the strain of keeping the bow up high in order to level the boat with the sea instead of the deck.

  The woman couldn’t bring herself to jump and she broke away and retreated into the paralyzed crowd and a shout grew up and three others of those waiting behind—two of them men—surged forward to make the leap and a skinny young man in shirtsleeves and suspenders lunged in front of the others and planted his foot and left the deck just as the quaking forward crewman slipped at his feet and his legs buckled and the bow of the lifeboat dipped abruptly and the skinny young man tried to stop and he twisted and he fell disappearing into the gap and a great cry rose up in the lifeboat as it dipped farther and farther down at the front and the forty or so people inside tumbled out in a great flailing of arms and legs and the aft crewman fell now too and all the ropes were loosed and the lifeboat and all its passengers vanished from view.

  I’d seen enough. I turned to Selene and she let go of the railing and she began to back away, her eyes wide.

  I stepped to her, put my hands on her shoulders, stopped her. I did not have to shake her. She grew calm at once beneath my hands. Her eyes relaxed and they focused on me and then narrowed once more in the resolve I’d seen on the bridge.

  “We have to go into the water now,” I said. “As quickly as we can, as easily as we can.”

  She nodded.

  I said, “Our jackets will help us. We swim as far away from the ship as possible. After that, there will be plenty of things afloat to cling to.”

  She nodded again.

  All this seemed feasible to me. If it was, if we ended up safely in the water, I still worried about the ship capsizing on us. But I didn’t say so. I worried about the great sucking vortex at the ship’s last vanishing. But I didn’t say so.

  I said, “Let’s go. We’ll use the rail, but try not to look down. Just follow me.”

  She nodded a last time and I turned and I led us back to the railing and we headed aft, passing from the shadow of funnel number one, and I was still trying to visualize if we needed to leave the Hurricane Deck. We’d have to be patient if we stayed. We’d have to wait for the very last moment for the sea to come to us. But with the bow filling, the ship could suddenly rear up from the stern to sink.

  We left the rail to go around another cowl vent, which was no longer taking in fresh air but spewing thick black smoke from belowdecks, and beyond it we cut back to the railing and I leaned out and looked ahead for a way down to the Boat Deck. About fifty yards farther on, past funnel number two, was a staircase.

  Suddenly the ship began to quake beneath our feet and a great metallic groan filled the air coming from all around us and I stopped and turned and I cried “Hold on to me!” and Selene put her arms around my waist and I gripped the railing hard with both hands and the Lusitania shook and it grabbed the breath out of me as it lurched toward the sea and I braced my hips against the railing and a many-voiced human cry came from below us and Selene held me tight and we stopped, we did not capsize but we stopped, and the cry below ceased abruptly and I looked and bodies were still careening and flying against the Boat Deck railing and over and gone but we’d stopped for now and the angle toward the sea was worse but it felt as if the angle forward had abated a little—just a little—we could still move, we still could move.

  “Not much farther,” I cried. “Careful placing your feet.”

  Selene knew to take her arms off me and we both clutched the railing and we moved aft as quickly as we could, pulling with our arms as much as driving forward with our legs, placing our feet carefully with each step so they would not slide from under us, and we approached funnel number two and its shadow fell upon us and I heard Selene gasp and she stopped and I looked behind me and she was staring upward and I followed her gaze and the top section of the listing funnel was directly over our heads.

  “Just watch me,” I cried.

  She lowered her face and I turned and we moved on.

  And we were at the staircase and it was opposite the Marconi shack—its wireless antennae rising from its roof to join the long, taut telegraph lines strung from foremast to mainmast—and the door was gaping open and inside an operator sat in a bolt-secured chair, hunched over his key, tapping furiously away. I wanted to step to him and grab him by the arm and pull him away. The ship was lost; whoever was going to hear us had heard us already. But this was one of those guys you find in times like this who’ll die doing what
he signed up to do. As I led Selene down the stairs I thought: If I live, I’ll put this man—and what he was—in the story I’ll write.

  And we were on the Boat Deck.

  I looked to the left and staggered back, throwing my arm across Selene, startled as if I’d turned an alleyway corner into the chest of a hulking stranger. The sea had claimed the deck almost up to my feet.

  Which was fine. We didn’t need to seek the right place to enter. It was waiting for us.

  The slash of sea before us foamed at its claiming edge.

  I turned us aft.

  Astern, those who had no life jackets and those who had them but could not muster the nerve to use them were clambering at the last two lifeboats, which were swinging wildly at the end of their snubbing chains.

  “Here,” I said.

  I took Selene by the hand and we moved toward the railing a few paces aft.

  A little farther along, a man in a union suit was meticulously folding his pants, with his overcoat and his coat and his shirt already carefully stacked at his feet.

  Somewhere a woman was sobbing.

  The bridge siren abruptly stopped.

  I let go of Selene’s hand and we were at the railing.

  “Up,” I said and she climbed the railing and swung her legs over and she balanced a moment there and I came up beside her and I took her hand in mine once more and I looked at the sea and it was full of bodies alive and dead and it was full of planking from wrecked lifeboats and I looked down, and the drop was less than ten feet but a deck chair spun directly below us and I felt Selene’s body as it started to move outward and I cried “Hold” and she tried, she gently braked her body, and the deck chair bumped the hull and it spun and Selene was starting to rebound backward, was starting to fall backward and I slipped my arm around her and kicked hard with my heels against the bottom rail and we flew a little away from the hull and we had only water below us and we fell and the cold grabbed me by the feet and rushed up my legs as I took my arm from around Selene’s waist and I sucked in a deep breath and the water rushed up my abdomen and my chest and I flinched my eyes closed and my face flashed sharp cold, the cold raked through me and the sea was heavy upon me and now I was no mind at all, I was only my body I was only the memories of my muscles and I was the sinking and I was the slowing and I was the stopping. And I was the gathering of arm and flattening of hand and coiling of leg and then I was the stroking upward and I could feel my chest rising ahead of me rising as if on its own—the life jacket lifting me—and the pressure of the sea fell away from the top of my head and from my forehead and my eyes and my cheeks and all my face and now my shoulders and I was in the air.