As the two dozen lifeboats separated like specks on an expanding balloon, one pulled toward Sam’s boat to let them know that several ships had responded to the Athenia’s call for help. Soon, in just a few hours, they’d be saved. Those hours passed. Not long after midnight, a faraway gleam, which might have been a periscope caught by the light of the moon, caused two women to shriek. A U-boat, one said, the German submarine that had torpedoed them rising now to shell the lifeboats. But the last beam of the searchlight, just before the emergency dynamo used up its fuel and the Athenia went completely dark, revealed enough to convince Sam and some of the others that this was a rescue ship.
Steadily, Sam and his companions rowed toward the Norwegian tanker Knute Nelson, which, in the light of occasional flares, popped sporadically out of the darkness. A little string of emptied lifeboats tossed in the swell beside the tanker, the boat closest to the stern still packed with people. Some grabbed at rope ladders while the bosun’s chair went up and down, hoisting those not agile enough to climb until, in the grip of a heavy woman who pushed off too vigorously, it overturned and left her suspended upside down. The crew struggled to retrieve her, but before they were done another boat nudged in behind the one still being emptied.
The man rowing next to Sam muttered, “They should stand out, that’s dangerous,” and when Sam drew his anxious gaze away from the faces he was searching, he could see how little space separated the last boat in line from the tanker’s huge propellers. He turned back to his oars. The sea was rough, the boat’s seams were leaking, many of his fellow passengers were wounded or seasick or both, and Sam was working so hard to keep their boat steady that he failed to see exactly what happened a few minutes later. By the time he heard the screams, the broken lifeboat, impaled on one of the propeller blades, was already rising into the air.
“Row!” said the seaman in charge of Sam’s boat. “Row, row, row, row!”
Sam, the tallest but not the strongest of those at the oars (he was out of shape), lost his grip and banged into the man beside him, who shouted at him; then all of them were shouting at each other while women wailed and children cried. Unbearable to think about what must have happened to those drawn into the propeller. The boat sped into the darkness, headed, once the assistant purser spotted it, toward an enormous, brightly lit motor yacht that had appeared from another direction. Before they were close enough to hail her, Sam saw two lifeboats tangle at her stern, one crowding the other under the angled counter—the swell had increased, making everything more difficult—which, after rising unusually high, crashed down on the gunwale of the inner boat and tipped it over. Suddenly, struggling figures, too small to identify, also dotted the water.
That was enough for the seaman in charge; Sam’s boat pulled away until it was clear of everyone. “Let’s wait,” the seaman said, “until sunrise, when we can see more clearly what we’re doing.” The swell grew heavier; dawn finally broke and three British destroyers arrived. The little boy whose mother was wearing Sam’s life belt pointed at them, smiled for the first time since the ship had been hit, and said, “Ring around the rosy!” Sam couldn’t see what the little boy meant, and then he could: two of the ships were racing after each other, herding within an enormous circle the remaining lifeboats, the tanker, the white yacht, and the third destroyer, which was plucking boatloads of survivors from the water. Twice, he thought it was turning their way, but each time it moved toward another, even more crowded boat.
The sky was red and then pink and then blue; Sam’s hands were numb; he hadn’t been able to feel his feet for hours. Once or twice he either fell asleep or passed out. Once, he lifted his head just in time to see an old woman in a lifeboat not far away leap toward a lowered rope ladder and miss, slipping into the narrow space between the boat and the destroyer’s hull; the boat rose on a swell and the space disappeared. He was barely conscious when, in the middle of the morning, a U.S. merchant ship arrived, cleaned out one boat before taking in a crowd transferred from the motor yacht, and then waved over the boat Sam was in.
The injured and frail went up in a bosun’s chair, but Sam, jolted awake by the prospect of safety, scrambled up a rope ladder with the other men. A person reached out for him, grabbed his arm, and heaved him over the side—not a stranger, not a sailor, but someone Sam knew: Duncan Finch. Part of him wanted to jump back in the water. Duncan, here? But there was the ship’s name, City of Flint, mocking him from the smokestack.
“You’re all right!” Duncan shouted as Sam dropped onto the deck. “Are you hurt?”
Sam flexed his elbow, which he’d cracked on a thwart but which still seemed to work, and then inspected his shin, where all the blood appeared to be coming from one long scrape. “Nothing serious,” he said.
Duncan pulled him toward a dry corner. “Is anyone else with you?”
Anyone, he meant, from the meeting; they’d been at an international genetics congress in Edinburgh, cut short by the situation. Sam shook his head. Families had been broken apart, siblings had ended up in different boats, friends had been randomly assorted: where was Axel? Eight other geneticists had been on the Athenia with Sam. One by one, in the thick, dark smoke, they’d climbed into lifeboats, dropped down to the water, and then disappeared.
Duncan said, with apparent enthusiasm, “But at least you’re here. You’re safe.”
Omitting, Sam thought, the fact that on their last day in Edinburgh, Duncan had asked Sam grudgingly, and only after Sam had already made his own arrangements, to join the small group he’d finagled aboard this American freighter loaded with wool and Scotch whisky.
“I did warn you,” Duncan added now. Still, after eighteen years of annoying Sam, unable to rein in his red-faced, bullying self. “I warned you not to take passage on a British ship.”
Anyone else would have understood how few choices existed. Sam’s booked passage had been canceled, the other ships were quickly commandeered, and on September 1, as he boarded the Athenia in Glasgow, it had still seemed likely that they’d get away safely. They’d had to pick up passengers in Belfast and then more in Liverpool, both ports packed with Americans and Canadians trying to get home, but by the afternoon of September 2 the ship was heading north up the Irish Sea, rounding the coast early on the morning of September 3. By the time the declaration of war was radioed, they’d almost cleared the most dangerous territory, their ship overbooked but still comfortable and, Sam had thought with a twinge of pleasure, less crowded than Duncan’s. Before Duncan left, not only his handful of stranded friends but also a group of college girls caught midway through a European tour had been stuffed into the City of Flint, making thirty instead of the normal five or six passengers. Now it bulged with another two hundred people, some freezing and still in shock, and among them—
“Is Axel here?” he asked.
Duncan turned, reached back to steady an elderly woman coming over the railing, and then pointed her toward a man who was giving out fresh water. “Of course not,” he said, inspecting Sam more closely. “Did you hit your head?”
For Duncan, Sam realized, Axel was still in Edinburgh, where he’d stayed to visit a friend despite Duncan’s frantic urging that he board the City of Flint. When the situation grew so dangerous that Axel’s friend cut the visit short and delivered him to the Glasgow docks, Duncan had already been at sea.
“He was with me,” Sam said. Two teenage boys tumbled onto the deck, their hair matted with oil; a girl in a tidy jacket rushed over to them. “The Athenia was the only ship that had a berth.” In another situation he would have enjoyed seeing the color drain from Duncan’s cheeks.
“He wasn’t.”
“He was,” Sam said. “We were eating dinner with that couple from Minnesota when we were hit.” One of what should have been many meals; what luck, he’d thought, to have Axel aboard! An unexpected benefit of letting Duncan sail without him. They might walk the decks, share quiet conversations, sit side by side in reclining chairs, and repair what had gone wrong in
Edinburgh. At the dock, the sight of Axel’s battered gray hat and unmistakable nose had suddenly made everything broken and ruined seem hopeful again.
“But then,” Duncan said, “how did you lose track of him?”
The smoke, the darkness, the wounded people, the babble of different languages as passengers crowded boats already full, launched half-empty ones too early. Sam drew a breath. “We went where the crew told us to go, and they assigned us to separate boats. Then the boats scattered. Can you find out if he’s here?”
Duncan disappeared with a curse, leaving Sam to be herded down below with the newest arrivals. In a long room lined with barrels, they dripped into a growing puddle, which the crew and the freighter’s original passengers tried to avoid as they ferried in spare clothing pulled from their luggage. A plant physiologist from Texas, transferred from the motor yacht, slipped an old sweater over his head as he said that these merchant seamen were a lot more welcoming than the Swedish billionaire who’d originally rescued him. Sam tied his feet into a pair of slippers a size too large, thrilled to find them dry, while his new acquaintance described the smartly outfitted crew who’d handed out soup and hot coffee and blankets and then—the sun was well up, the Athenia had gone to her grave, and the destroyers were making their rounds—told the rescued passengers that the owner couldn’t interrupt his planned trip and needed to transfer everyone who’d been picked up. “To here,” the Texan said, stepping out of his oil-soaked pants and into a seaman’s canvas overalls. “Oh, that’s much better.”
Where was Axel, where was Axel? Maybe he’d been on that yacht, or maybe … he tried not to think about the huge propeller. Around Sam, coats, blankets, overshoes, shawls flew toward wet bodies, something dry for everyone. So many people, everywhere: bodies racked like billiard balls in every corner and companionway, babies calling like kittens or crows as women tried to comfort them. Among them, Axel might be hidden—or he might be in the water still, or safely headed toward Galway or Glasgow on one of the destroyers. Sam pushed through the mass, some faces familiar from the Athenia’s decks and dining room but many not and none the one he most wanted to see, until, when he came out near the galley, he heard his name and looked behind him. Duncan, who’d always had this way of proving himself astonishingly useful just when he was at his most annoying, waved his hand above the crowd. Beside him, his front hair pushed forward into a kingfisher’s tuft by a gigantic square bandage, was Axel.
DUNCAN TURNED HIS berth over to Axel, who, after touching Sam’s face and saying, “You’re here. You’re all right,” disappeared into the deckhouse and fell, said Duncan later (now modestly moved to the floor of his cabin, where he’d already had two roommates), into an exhausted sleep. Sam, who stayed awake for a while after Axel left, slept that first night on a coil of rope, surrounded by women in men’s shoes and torn evening gowns, men wearing dress shirts over sarongs made from curtains, children in white ducks shaped for bulky sailors. A little girl whose parents had ended up in a different boat—Sam hoped they were now on some other ship—lay on a pile of canvas nearby. Earlier, he’d seen the two women looking after her piece together a romper from two long woolen socks, a pair of women’s panties, and a boy’s sweater. Now the women curled parenthetically around their warm charge.
Sam’s trousers were still intact, and between those, his donated slippers, and a wool jacket generously given to him by one of Duncan’s cabinmates, an old acquaintance named Harold, he was warm enough to sleep. The next morning, after a chaotic attempt at breakfast, he and Harold, along with everyone else who wasn’t injured, helped the ship’s crew spread mattresses in the hold, suspend spare tarpaulins from beams to make rows of hammocks, and hammer planks into bunks until everyone had a place to sleep. Harold had helped the captain organize seatings for meals—eight shifts of thirty people—and as he and Sam cut planks to length, they talked about supplies. Harold’s friend George, also sharing Duncan’s cabin, joined them an hour later and described the list he was making of those who’d been separated from family members and friends; first on it were the seven congress participants still unaccounted for. The captain would radio the list to the other rescue ships, which were returning to Scotland and Ireland—only theirs was heading across the sea, on its original course. But what about allocating medical care and pooling medications? What about basic sanitation? If we had rags, Harold said, we could tear them into squares. If we had a system, George fussed, gathering scraps of paper for the latrines.
If, if, if. Sam tried to think of these two middle-aged men as amiable strangers helping to make the best of a hard situation—as if they’d not just been together at a conference where the two of them had looked on blandly as Sam’s work was attacked. As if Duncan, elsewhere on the ship that morning, hadn’t been the one attacking.
He worked all day, as the ship steamed steadily west and the passengers pulled from the water continued to shift and sort themselves, the sickest and most badly wounded settling in the tiny hospital bay with those slightly better off nearby, the youngest and oldest tucked in more protected corners and the strongest where water dripped or splashed—layering themselves as neatly, Sam thought, as if they’d been spun in a gigantic centrifuge. He claimed one of the hammocks he’d hung himself, glad that at least Axel had a berth and a bit of privacy. Glad too to find, when evening came, that Harold and George had fit him and Axel into their dinner shift, which also included Duncan and the group of college girls.
The big square bandage bound to the top of his head made Axel look unusually defenseless. He smiled at Sam and tapped the spot next to him at the dinner table, but before Sam could get there, Harold, George, and Duncan swarmed in, leaving Sam at the corner. The college girls, already friendly with Duncan’s group, filled in the empty seats and introduced themselves to Sam and Axel. One, who had smooth red hair a few shades lighter than Sam’s, pointed to Axel’s gauze-covered crown. “Is that bad?”
“Not really,” Axel said. “A long jagged tear in my scalp, but the doctor said it should heal.”
Not nearly enough information. Sam imagined Axel underwater, trying to surface through the debris. An oar cracking down on his skull, a fragment from the explosion flying toward him. When did it happen, who was he with, who took care of him until he reached the ship? He leaned forward to speak, but another of the girls, annoyingly chatty—Lucinda was her name—said, “How do you all know each other, then?”
“We work in the same field,” Harold said. His doughy cheeks were perfectly smooth; of course he had a razor.
“Genetics,” George added. Also clean-shaven. Briefly, Sam mourned his lost luggage. “The study of heredity.”
“These two,” Axel said, gesturing first toward Sam and then toward Duncan, “used to be my students.”
“Really?” said the one named Pansy. “That wolf-in-a-bonnet disguise makes you look the same age as them.”
It was true, Sam thought as the others laughed; the bandage covered Axel’s bald spot, his sprouting beard concealed the creases around his mouth, and he was trim for a man who’d just turned fifty. Duncan, ten years Axel’s junior, boasted a big, low-slung belly that, along with his thinning hair, made him look like an old schoolmaster. Straightening up, sucking in, Duncan turned to Lucinda and said, “We were all at the genetics conference I told you about.”
“Where everyone was arguing!” Lucinda said brightly. “See, I do listen. Which side”—she turned to Sam—“were you on?”
“Lucinda,” said a girl named Maud.
“Actually,” Harold said, rubbing his cheek with his thumb, “it was Duncan and Sam, here, who were having a disagreement. But that’s all behind us now.”
Sam tried but failed to catch Axel’s expression, while Duncan changed the subject. But as they were clearing out for the next shift of diners, one of the quieter girls approached Sam and said, “Were you really all quarreling about some experiment while the soldiers were gathering? I would have thought …”
“… that sc
ientists aren’t petty? That we’re not as childish as everyone else?”
“Something like that,” she said, with a surprising smile. “Although I don’t know why I should expect that. I’m Laurel,” she reminded Sam.
Straight brown hair, solid hips, pleasant, but, in Sam’s opinion, unremarkable-looking except for her eyes. Up on deck, amid a crowd of people he didn’t know and safely away from the ones he did, he watched the water move past the hull and listened to Laurel talk about what they’d heard on the radio. The Germans were smashing through Poland and had occupied Kraków. An RAF attack on German naval bases had gone awry. Each wave took them farther from what was going on in Europe. On the Athenia, along with the Americans and Canadians bolting for home, had been refugees from Poland and Romania and Germany who’d managed to get to Liverpool and then fought for berths, only to end up floating in the water before being rescued, if they were among the lucky, by a ship that would bring them back to Britain to begin the process of trying to flee again.
The sky was streaked with mare’s tails to the south, dotted with little round clouds to the north; the last edge of the sun had vanished but some color remained. The open deck was so crowded by now that each of them touched at least one other person. Duncan pushed through like a fox through a field of wheat, nodded when he saw Sam, and kept moving. Duncan wasn’t stupid, Sam thought; he knew some things, including what it meant to be part of a field of science still in its infancy. But he didn’t know the new and enormous thing that Sam and Axel now shared. Sam in one boat and Axel in another, but the same sky, the same rain, the same flares and fears and darkness and dawn. Laurel said something about the windows of a church in London and Sam pretended to pay attention. Why was it, he thought, that even here he couldn’t escape Duncan?
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