I gasped in the air and I opened my eyes, and swinging to my face as if to kiss me hello was a sweet woman’s face, her large eyes closed, the lids smooth and white, the face was very white and angled to kiss me, angled too far sideways, and I was no mind at all, I was only my body before her, and my body assumed she was Selene, and she was dead, I knew, this woman approaching me, and I clutched tight in the chest, but then I knew it was not Selene, and then bumping my face was a coldness beyond the coldness of the sea, a terrible coldness bumped a last kiss upon my cheek, a good-bye kiss sliding across my mouth and she moved away, she could not linger and she was gone and she was a stranger and she was dead, and I heard myself gasping, gasping for breath in the cold sea but gasping for the mistake my body had made and gasping to know if Selene had come up from the place where I had just been, and my arms knew to turn me, and a few yards away Selene Bourgani’s famous profile floated as if she were beheaded and I gasped again and then her shoulders appeared and her arms, and she was thrashing and turning, and her face swung around to me and we moved toward each other, this stroke, and this one, and we watched as each other’s living eyes grew nearer.
And we touched hands and we were in a dark shadow and we knew not to look above us, we knew not to consider the Lusitania about to fall upon us, and we turned side by side away from the ship.
And we swam.
14
So Selene Bourgani and I shared a deck chair when the Lusitania went down, having swum out far enough that the last whipping of the loosed Marconi wires just missed tangling us, though it dragged many others under, right before our eyes. We clung to the floating chair and we lifted our faces to the ship.
The stern rose from the water, and the massive starboard white propellers showed themselves, still spinning slowly, glinting brightly in the sun, and the Lusitania diminished before us for a long few moments like a knife blade disappearing into a chest, and then it stopped, as if it had struck bone, and it no longer evoked a blade, as its keel simply settled downward and it was gone.
And there was no vortex. That thing it struck: it occurred to me how shallow the sea was here, within ten miles of shore, not even four hundred feet deep. The ship struck her bow to the ocean floor before she was fully under, and so when she vanished, all that was left was for the air within to blow. And it did, a last upswelling dome of white, and then the sea lifted beneath us and we were glad to be holding this chair and we rose and we fell and all around was a low, ongoing wordless cry.
We could not listen. We could not watch. We hung on to the chair, just to keep us from drifting separately, and we looked each other in the eyes. The ones who made it off the ship in one piece and yet would die on this day—and there would be many—were those without life jackets or those without any emotional reserves, the ones for whom this was such an enormous thing that they went “Ah to hell with it” and gave up the ghost. But the ghosts still cried out all around us till the bodies they came from sank or floated away.
And Selene and I just looked at each other and murmured to each other. Little things.
“Are you cold?” I would say.
“Oh, not anymore. I’m numb now,” she would say.
“The sea is very calm,” I would say.
“The sun is warm on my face,” she would say.
And when a particularly terrible human sound would wash over us and I could see in her eyes that she heard, I would say, “Don’t listen.”
And she would say, “I can’t hear anything but my heart.” And perhaps she would add, “Or is that yours?”
We would say these things, or things very much like them, over and over again. We didn’t mind the repetition.
And then at last I said, “Sing to me.”
And she did. Softly. “You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.”
And so we floated. And later some crewmen got to a collapsible lifeboat that had drifted off right-side up, and they were able to raise and lash the steel-framed canvas sides, and the men began to pick the living from the vast sargasso of bodies, and they found us.
And before sunset Selene and I were on the deck of a fishing smack, huddled in blankets and drinking tea, quiet now together—we found that all we could be together for now was quiet—and by dark we were in Queenstown.
15
The city’s white row houses, lit by gas light and torches, were stitched into the side of the abrupt-rising hills by cobbled streets. The fishing boat put in at the Cunard wharf and the forty or so of us hobbled onto land. We all ached terribly after the exertion of having saved our lives in the sea and then having huddled for some hours cramped on that tiny boat deck.
We found ourselves on a cut-stone wharf that was crowded with the swaddled dead. Selene, still wearing the boat captain’s bright yellow slicker and sou’wester and smelling of mackerel, clung to me as we picked our way through, noticing the small bundles, which were the children, noticing the ones with faces framed in the open folds, noticing one bundle in particular: two faces bound in one blanket, jaundiced by the lamplight, mother and child, pressed together as if for a photographic portrait but having waited so long for the flash, they’d fallen into a deep sleep. Selene gasped and clung harder to me, and we angled our faces to each other, focused once again only on the two of us, until we entered the large open hall of the customshouse.
The place was dim, unprepared for night landings, and it was crowded with living bodies—hundreds of us now—and some of us were bumping about near the door in the first confusion of arrival. The familiar tones and cadences of the voices of low-level officialdom were directing us, as if we’d just left a steamship and were going off to retrieve our luggage and queue up for the customs boys to search for the booze and the tobacco and the silver plate and the books and the sheet music. And, to be honest, the faintly patronizing, coolly efficient voices were reassuring now, turning the horror into the routine, as much as that was possible with the background of moaning and coughing and whispering and with the quaking and the trembling and with the travelers being damp and bareheaded and with many of them clad only in their wetly clinging underwear and some showing flesh, too much flesh. We looked at these exposed bodies only out of the corners of our eyes, even as dry, dark-uniformed bodies emerged in the dim light to throw blankets over the nakedness.
And Selene and I leaned into each other.
The official voices propelled us into roped-off lines, the wounded who needed immediate help being sent to triage at the far end of the hall, the rest of us guided to the long, alphabetically sectioned wall where our luggage would have been placed but which now led to tables where they gave us coffee and then passed us on to queue and wait for a Cunard official sitting behind a large ledger book. We all waited to approach the book one at a time, Selene waiting before me, clutching hard at my arm, keeping me close. I thought this was because she still needed to rely on me.
Then the man at the table was looking our way.
“Next,” he said.
Selene let go of my arm and turned her face to me and I was surprised at what was there: a hard mouth, pressed thin, but eyes gone wide and gentle, and her head tilted a little. She was about to reenter the world as Selene Bourgani. She’d twice already tried to end our connection to each other. Now it was as if all that we’d done together these past hours—searching the sinking ship for escape and then entering the sea and clinging to life there amidst the dead and dying and then rising together into safety and landing once more on the shore—as if all that was just one more night of lovemaking and this thing between us could not last.
She’d been clutching my arm, keeping me close, because she knew it was time for me to go.
Realizing all this, I also realized I’d missed an opportunity. I’d tried not to intrude upon the silence we kept with each other since we’d been lifted from the sea. Perhaps if I’d pres
sed her to speak of Brauer, to speak of what it was she was intending to do, she would have told me what it was my job to learn.
But it had never occurred to me. The silence had been inside me as well.
And now she said, “Thank you.”
And I knew she would break away from me.
All I could do was nod.
She turned and moved to the desk.
I could not hear, but the man in the Cunard uniform sitting behind the ledger spoke, and then Selene spoke, and the man jumped up and gave a little bow.
A film fan, no doubt.
She said more to him, and he bowed again. He would grant her a special favor. He motioned to the ledger.
She drew her forefinger down the right-hand, half-filled page. Then she did the same to the left-hand page. Then she turned to the previous two-page spread.
I knew the name she sought.
Halfway down on the right, her hand stopped. She lifted it away and she straightened up.
She nodded to the official, and he sat back down.
She signed her name.
They spoke a few words more.
I was right about her. When she was finished, she did not look back to me but moved off at once, searching the crowd.
I approached the desk, the ledger, the Selene Bourgani fan in the Cunard uniform.
And after I’d signed my name and nationality—my pen-stroke going suddenly heavy, assertive, from a complex surge of feeling at writing United States of America—after then taking an abrupt, retained, chest-lifted breath at being an American upon this day, I turned and she was gone.
Before I could take a step away, the Cunard man, craning his neck to confirm his upside-down reading, said, “Mr. Cobb is it?”
I turned back. “Yes?”
“Would you be so kind as to wait behind my table? Someone has come to collect you.”
“Miss Bourgani was with me, as you saw.”
“Yes.”
“I was supposed to meet her . . . Did they assign her a place to sleep?”
“Most of the first-class passengers are going to the Queen’s Hotel.”
“I’ll be back in a few moments,” I said.
The Cunard man stiffened; he was responsible for me waiting. Before he could protest, I said, “I won’t be long,” and I moved off.
I watched for her yellow slicker to flash in the crowd, but my goal was the streetside doors. I did not see her among the bandages and slings and blankets—the half-naked bodies were disappearing into blankets—and now the doors were in sight and I saw the yellow there amidst a dark brace of Cunard ducks and I swung wide in my approach to them, ready to let her go.
I saw her from behind. She was speaking to a guy with a clipboard, and then she moved off through the doors.
I followed, brushing aside the Cunards’ importunings. She’d pushed through already, and I stopped and looked through the glass. She turned her face to the far left and then swept her gaze slowly toward the harbor street, where the merchants on the far side—milliner and ironmonger, draper and men’s clothier, sellers of fish and poultry and cakes—all were lit up inside, as the whole town had awakened to the rescue; and then her face kept moving right, across a square and to another long row of wider buildings—the Queen’s Hotel included—and above them, up the hill, an arch-supported roadway climbing to a Gothic-spired cathedral. I thought that Selene’s eyes would come to rest upon her hotel. But she did not pause, she scanned on, and then she abruptly stopped. Her face drew very slightly forward. She was checking her perception.
And from that direction a figure was moving now, coming out of the shadows, wrapped and hooded in a blanket. Selene straightened and waited, and the figure stopped before her, and she was speaking, and the blanket came down off the head. It was Walter Brauer.
16
That she was seeking Brauer did not surprise me. Whatever hesitation about him she’d had in response to the torpedoing of the Lusitania was overcome by her rescue. And whatever had been the allure of her rescuer, that was overcome by the renewal of her mission for the Germans, no matter what those transient reservations might have been. What did surprise me was that Brauer had figured out how to save his own skin. Perhaps luck had played a part. But I knew I’d better not underestimate his resourcefulness or his toughness, bookman-fancying King’s College lecturer though he be.
Selene, in response to something Brauer said, lifted her chin a little to gesture over his right shoulder. He looked in that direction—at the Queen’s Hotel—and I knew enough for tonight, given that someone was seeking me out. I needed to attend to that.
So I backed away from the door, turned, and made my way through the hall to the ledger table. As I approached and passed beside him, the Cunard man taking names gave me a relieved glance.
I stood behind him, as he’d asked, and almost at once a serious weariness shuddered through me. I bucked myself up and even did a long-habitual bucking-up gesture: I shot my cuffs. Except over the past few hours my cuffs had apparently decided to permanently shoot themselves. I considered my body down to my squishing brogues, surprised that I’d left them on. I’d gone into the water in a gentleman’s blue serge suit and I now stood in a schoolboy’s blue serge suit, my adolescent wrists and ankles protruding like cowlicks from cuffs and pant legs.
“Mister Cobb?” a man’s voice said.
“Master Cobb,” I said, lifting one outgrown sleeve as I looked at the speaker. He had a round face and most everything about it was the color of wheat spike before a harvest, skin and hair and eyebrows that wheat-field yellow, and in the midst were unblinking pale eyes, their color hard to identify in the shadows of the customshall but they were pale, unflinching; he was a fleshy, wheaty man wearing a three-piece suit of his own money-crop color but a shade or two darker, baked for a while.
He flashed a willful little smile and he nodded at my right wrist. “We’ll take care of that.”
He offered a doughy hand doing one of those I’ll-hesitate-a-second-and-muscle-up-my-squeeze-to-equal-yours kind of shakes; I had the feeling I could squeeze harder than he could, though I also had an inkling this guy could surprise me. He said, in a flat plains accent common to a large number of Post-Express readers, “I’m James Metcalf. United States embassy in London.”
He paused now and lowered his voice a bit, turning it into a covert elbow nudge in the ribs. “We have a mutual friend in Washington.”
“The other James,” I said. James Polk Trask.
Metcalf doled out one more of those little smiles. “He’s the one.”
Then the smile vanished at once and his manner changed abruptly to the studied gravity of an embassy Guy. “I’m glad to see you’ve made it.”
“I am too,” I said.
And Metcalf took charge, which was fine with me. So I found myself in the well of a two-wheel jaunting car pulled by a sixteen-hand mule, a bundle of new clothes beside me and two bespoke suits being done up overnight. We were bone-rattling our cobblestoned way up the hill behind the wharves, bound for the Admiralty House that sat above the city, where an Admiral Lewis Bayly ran the British Fleet in the North Atlantic and where I’d get some decent food and a bed but I shouldn’t expect a drink.
“Sorry, old man,” Metcalf said. “The admiral’s a teetotaler and so is everyone else, as long as they’re under his roof.”
I grunted. I hadn’t the time or focus or opportunity to think about a drink so far, but this struck me instantly as bad news.
But Metcalf removed a flask from his inside coat pocket and handed it across to me. There was a pretty good whiskey inside and I took a couple of bolts of it as he watched in silence. That was enough of the whiskey for tonight. In spite of the past eight or ten hours, I wasn’t interested in getting drunk and I handed the flask back to him.
“Tha
nks,” I said.
He offered me a cigarette. A Capstan Navy Cut in a flat tin.
I took one and he did too and he lit them for us and I blew the smoke out to sea, which lay below me now, sucked up into this harbor, all sparkly calm from the harbor lights and acting like it never could hurt a soul.
“They call this Spy Hill,” Metcalf said.
“Imagine that,” I said.
“From back when it meant just a place to watch the ships.”
“I bet it’s become that again.”
“Back when you didn’t count and classify the warships and telegraph Berlin.”
Metcalf was clearly the guy I was supposed to report to. I looked toward the driver sitting above us.
“Later,” Metcalf said.
“I figured,” I said.
And then we were at Admiralty House, which was a massive, boxy, neoclassic Adam-style building built into a sharp upslope, with three stories at the back and a fourth, half-underground basement story that showed its windowed facade only at the front. Inside, the place was as sparse and grim as the admiral himself, whose junior officer years were crusted on his face and who gave me a curt smile with his handshake, the kind of smile that would, in other circumstances, seem dismissive but between men sharing a war passed for comradely.
The Star of Istanbul Page 11