The Winds of War

by Herman Wouk

“That’s how I feel. Now that you’ve actually seen her, sir, don’t you agree with me that what has to be done in Lisbon may take at least five days?”

  “Three,” snapped Captain Caruso, the dreamy look vanishing. “Exactly seventy-two hours.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “And you’d better produce some damned convincing malfunction reports, Lady.” The captain tossed off his wine and smiled at Natalie. “Now, can I offer you the hospitality of the boat for a little while?”

  She followed the officers into the rusty sail and down a hatch. The ladder was cold and greasy, with narrow slippery rungs that caught at Natalie’s high heels. She had to lower herself through a second round hatch and down another ladder into a tiny room full of machinery, strongly conscious of her exposed legs and glad that they were pretty and that her skirt was narrow.

  “This is the control room,” Byron said, helping her down. “Up above was the conning tower.”

  Natalie looked around at solemn-faced sailors in dungarees, and at the valves, knobs, dials, handles, big wheels, twisted cables, and panels of lights filling all the green-painted bulkheads. Despite a humming exhaust blower, the close, warm air smelled sourly of machinery, cooking, old cigars, and unwashed men. “Briny, do you really know what all these things are?”

  “He’s learning,” said Lady Aster. “Between hibernations.”

  They stepped through an open watertight door to the tiny wardroom, where Natalie met two more young officers. On the table stood a heart-shaped white cake, iced in blue with a submarine, cupids, and Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry. She squeezed herself into the place of honor at the head of the table, opposite the captain. Byron and Lady Aster sat crouched against the bulkhead, to avoid a bunk folded back over their heads.

  Somebody produced a sword, Natalie cut up the cake, and the captain sent what was left to the crew’s quarters. The two glasses of champagne were going to Natalie’s head. She was half-dizzy anyway from the rush of events and the longing that blazed at her from the young men’s eyes. Over the coffee and cake she laughed and laughed at Lady Aster’s jokes, and decided that the old submarine, for all its cramped squalor, its reek of machinery and male bodies, was a mighty jolly vessel. Byron looked more desirable to her by the minute, and she kissed him often.

  Before they left the S-45, Byron took his bride to a tiny cabin and showed her the narrow black aperture near the deck, beneath two other bunks, where he slept. “I ask you,” he said, “would anybody spend extra time in that morgue slot through choice?”

  “The alternative might be more frightful,” said Lady Aster, over Natalie’s shoulder. “Like staying awake.”

  When Natalie and Byron came out on deck into cool fresh air, crewmen on the forecastle waved and cheered. Natalie waved back and some bold sailors whistled. The taxicab, called by the gangway watch for them, started off with a great clatter. The driver jammed on his brakes, jumped out, and soon Natalie and Byron heard him cursing in Portuguese as he threw aside shoes and tin cans. The crew laughed and yelled until the cab drove away.

  “I daresay poor Slote’s left the hotel by now.” Natalie snuggled against her husband. “We’ll collect my bags and go there, right? Wait till you see it. It was terrible of me to jump at it like that, but honestly, Briny, it’s the royal suite.”

  In Natalie’s room, in a boardinghouse on a side street, an old woman snored in an iron bed. “Well, Slote’s place must be better than this,” Byron whispered, glancing at the cracked ceiling and at the roaches on the peeling wallpaper, scurrying to hide from the electric light. Natalie swiftly gathered her things and left a note with her key on the table. At the door she turned to look at Mrs. Rosen, lying on her back, jaw hanging open, gray hair tumbled on the pillow. What kind of wedding night had Mrs. Rosen had, she thought, with the husband whose silver-framed face smiled brownly on her bedside table, her one memento of the wretched man dragged off a French train by Germans? Natalie shivered and closed the door.

  The desk clerk at the Palace Hotel evidently had been informed and tipped by Slote, for he yielded up the key to Byron with a greasy grin. The newlyweds had to give him their passports. Natalie felt a touch of fear, handing over the maroon American booklet that set her off from Lisbon’s forty thousand other Jews.

  “I just thought of something,” she said in the elevator. “How did you register?”

  “Mr. and Mrs., naturally. Big thrill.”

  “I’m still Natalie Jastrow on that passport.”

  “So you are.” The elevator stopped. He took her arm. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “But maybe you should go back and explain.”

  “Let them ask a question first.”

  As the bellboy opened the door to the suite, Natalie felt herself whisked off her feet. “Oh, Byron, stop this nonsense. I’m monstrously heavy. You’ll slip a disk.” But she clung to his neck with one hand and clutched her skirt with the other, excited by his surprising lean strength.

  “Hey!” he said, carrying her inside, “I see what you meant. Royal suite is right.”

  When he put her down she darted ahead into the bedroom. Natalie had a slight nag of worry about the negligee she had left hanging in Slote’s bathroom, and the new sexy underwear in a bureau drawer. It might take some explaining! But all the stuff was gone—where, she had no idea. She was puzzling over this when Byron appeared in the french window of the bedroom, on the balcony. “This is great out here, all right. Cold as hell, though. Fabulous string of lights along the water. Did you notice the champagne? And the lilies?”

  “Lilies?”

  “In there.”

  In a corner of the living room, beside champagne in a silver cooler on a marble table, stood a bouquet of red and white calla lilies, and beside them Slote’s small white card, with no writing. The doorbell rang. A bellboy gave Natalie a box from the lingerie shop. She hurried into the bedroom and opened it. There lay the underclothes Slote had cleared out, a many-colored froth of silk and lace.

  “What’s that?” Byron said from the balcony.

  “Oh, some stuff I bought in a lobby shop,” Natalie said airily. “I guess Slote told them I’d be here.” She picked up a peach nightgown, and with mock witchery draped it against her bosom. “Not bad for an academic type, hey?”

  Then she saw a note in Slote’s handwriting, lying under the silks. Byron started to come in. She ran for the french door and shut it on him. “Give me a minute. Open the champagne.”

  The note read: Wear the gray, Jastrow. You always looked angelic in gray. Confidential communication, to be destroyed. Yours till death. Slote.

  The words brought a mist to Natalie’s eyes. She tore the note to bits and dropped them in a wastebasket. In the next room she heard a cork pop. She pulled from the box the gray silk nightdress laced and trimmed in black, and quite forgot Leslie Slote, as she speedily showered and perfumed herself. She emerged from the bedroom brushing her long black hair down on her shoulders. Byron seized her….

  … Wine, lilies, and roses; the dark sea rolling beyond the windows under a round moon; young lovers separated for half a year, joined on a knife-edge of geography between war and peace, suddenly married, far from home; isolated, making love on a broad hospitable bed, performing secret rites as old as time, but forever fresh and sweet between young lovers, the best moments human existence offers—such was their wedding night. The human predicament sometimes seems a gloomy tapestry with an indistinct, baffling design that swirls around and inward to brilliant naked lovers. The Bible starts with this centerpiece. Most of the old stories end with the lovers married, retiring to their sacred nakedness. But for Byron and Natalie, their story was just beginning.

  The lavish pulses and streams of love died into the warm deep sleep of exhausted lovers: Mr. and Mrs. Byron Henry, Americans, slumbering in wedlock in the Palace Hotel outside Lisbon, on a January night of 1941, one of the more than two thousand nights of the Second World War, when so much of mankind slept so badly.

 
; 38

  NATALIE opened her eyes, awakened by the warbling and chirping of birds. Byron sat beside her, smoking. A cool breeze was blowing from an open door to the balcony. In a pink-streaked sky, the wan moon and one star hung low over the choppy sea.

  “Hi. Listen to those birds! How long have you been awake, Byron?”

  “Not long, but I’m really wide awake. Wide awake and still trying to believe it.”

  She sat up. The bedclothes slipped from her breasts as she kissed him softly, sighing with satiated pleasure. “Gosh, that air’s icy, isn’t it?”

  “I can close the door.”

  “No, no, the sea smell is lovely.” She pulled the blanket to her neck, nestling beside him. After a silence she said, “Byron, how does a submarine work?”

  He glanced down at her. His arm was around her, caressing her shoulder. “Are you kidding?”

  “No. Is it hard to explain?”

  “Not at all, but why talk about that?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  “Well, it’s a hell of a topic to take up with a beautiful naked girl, but okay. I’ll tell you how a submarine works. To begin with, it’s built so that it just about floats when ballasted. So when you flood the diving tanks with a few tons of seawater you go right down, and when you blow the water out with compressed air, you pop up again. You begin with marginal buoyancy, and by changing the water ballast you become a rock or a cork as desired. That’s the general idea. The details are numerous and dull.”

  “Well, is it safe? How much have I got to worry about?”

  “Less than if I were a New York traffic cop.”

  “You get hazardous duty pay.”

  “That’s because civilians, like congressmen and you, yourself, have the illusion that it’s scary and risky to dive a boat under the water. No submariner will ever argue Congress out of that.”

  “But when you go deep, isn’t there quite a risk of being crushed?”

  “No. A sub’s just a long watertight steel tube, braced to hold off sea pressure. That’s the inner hull, the pressure hull. It’s the real ship. The outside that you see is just a skin for tanks, open at the bottom. The water sloshes in and out. The inner hull has a test pressure depth. You never submerge near that. Nobody to this day knows how deep the old S-45 can go. We ride on a thick cushion of safety.”

  “Submarines have been lost.”

  “So have ocean liners and sailing yachts. When men are trapped in a hull on the ocean bottom, tapping out Morse code, it makes a good story, but it’s only happened a couple of times. Even then there are ways of escaping, and we’re all trained in them.”

  “But when you flood the boat to go down, can’t the flooding get out of hand? Don’t smile, darling. It’s all a mystery to somebody like me.”

  “I smile because you ask good questions. But as I told you, the main tanks are outside the real hull. They’re just stuck on. When they flood, you’re awash, waterlogged. For diving there’s a small sealed tank inside, the negative tank. It can hold about twelve tons of sea water. Flood negative and down you go fast. When you’re at the depth you want, you blow negative, and there you are, hanging. You spread your bow planes, and you’re sort of like a fat airplane, flying slowly through thick air. Submariners are picked men, and great guys, darling, and all seventy-five of them dearly want nothing to go wrong! There are no slobs on a submarine. That’s the truth about submarines, and this is one peculiar conversation to be having in bed with a new wife.”

  Natalie yawned. “You’re making me feel better. That rusty little boat scared me.”

  “The new fleet submarines are luxury liners compared to the S-45,” Byron said. “I’ll go to one of those next.”

  She yawned again, as a patch of pink light appeared on the wall. “Bless my soul, is that the sun? Where did the night go? Draw the curtains.”

  Byron walked naked to the windows and closed the heavy draperies. As he returned to her in the gloom, she thought with piercing pleasure how handsome he was—a sculptured male figure—alive, warm, and brown.

  He settled beside her. She leaned over him and gave him a kiss. When the young husband strongly pulled her close she pretended for a moment to fight him off, but she couldn’t choke down her welling joyous laughter. As the sun rose outside the screening curtains on another day of war, Byron and Natalie Henry went back to lovemaking.

  They breakfasted at noon in the sunny sitting room, where the air was heavy with the scent of roses. Their breakfast was oysters, steak, and red wine; Natalie ordered it, saying it was precisely what she wanted, and Byron called it a perfect menu. They ate in dressing gowns, not talking much, looking deep in each other’s eyes, sometimes laughing at a foolish word or at nothing at all. They were radiant with shared, gratified desire.

  Then she said, “Byron, exactly how much time do we have?”

  “Well, seventy-two hours from the time we came alongside would be half past two, Thursday.”

  Some of the pure gladness in her eyes dimmed. “Hm. That soon? Short honeymoon.”

  “This isn’t our honeymoon. I’m entitled to twenty days’ leave. I reported straight to the S-45 from sub school. I’ll take those twenty days once you’re back home. When will that be?”

  She leaned her head on her hand. “Oh, dear. Must I start thinking?”

  “Look, Natalie. Why not send Aaron a wire that we’re married, and go straight home?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I don’t want you going back to Italy.”

  Natalie raised her eyebrows at his flat tone. “But I have to.”

  “No, you don’t. Aaron’s too cute,” Byron said. “Here, let’s finish this wine. As long as you or I or somebody will do the correspondence and dig in the library and keep after the kitchen, the gardeners, and the plumbers, he won’t leave that house. It’s that simple. He loves it, and he doesn’t scare easily. He’s a tough little bird, Uncle Aaron, under the helplessness and the head colds. What d’you suppose he’d do if you sent him that wire?”

  Natalie hesitated, “Try to get me to change my mind. If that failed, make a real effort to leave.”

  “Then it’s the best favor you can do him.”

  “No. He’d make a mess of it. He’s not good with officials, and the stupider they are the worse he gets. He could really trap himself. Leslie Slote and I together can get him on his way in short order, and this time we’ll do it.”

  “Slote? Slote’s en route to Moscow.”

  “He’s offered to stop off in Rome and Siena first. He’s very devoted to Aaron.”

  “I know who he’s devoted to.”

  Natalie said softly with a poignant look, “Jealous of Leslie Slote, Briny?”

  “All right. Sixty days.”

  “What, dear?”

  “Go back there for two months. No more. That should be plenty. If Aaron’s not out by April first or before, it’ll be his own doing, and you come home. Book your own transportation, right now.”

  Natalie’s wide mouth curved wryly. “I see. Are you giving me orders, Byron?”

  “Yes.”

  She rested her chin on her palm, contemplating him with surprised eyes. “You know, that feels pretty good, being ordered around. I can’t say why. Possibly the delicious novelty will wear off. Anyway, lord and master, I’ll do as you say. Sixty days.”

  “All right,” Byron said. “Let’s get dressed and see Lisbon.”

  “I’ve seen Lisbon,” said Natalie, “but I’m all in favor of coming up for air.”

  Dropping the key at the desk, Byron asked for their passports. With a heavy-lidded look, the swarthy short clerk disappeared through a door.

  “Look at those fellows,” Byron said. Half a dozen Germans, in belted black raincoats despite the sunshine, were talking together near the lobby entrance, looking hard at everybody who came in and went out. “They might as well be wearing boots and swastikas. What is it about them? Those raincoats? The big brims on the hats? The bronze sunburns? H
ow do they find time for sunbathing?”

  “I recognize them with the back of my neck. It crawls,” Natalie said.

  The desk clerk emerged from the door, busily shuffling papers. “Sorry, passports not ready yet.”

  “I need mine!” Natalie’s tone was strident.

  The clerk barely lifted his eyes at her. “Maybe this afternoon, madame,” he said, turning his back.

  After the languors of the bedroom, the cold sunny outdoors felt bracing. Byron hired a taxi to drive them into and around Lisbon. The city was no Rome or Paris for sights, but the rows of pastel-colored houses—green, pink, blue—perched along the hills above a broad river made a pretty picture. Byron enjoyed himself, and he thought his bride was having fun too; she clung to his arm and smiled, saying little. The peculiar mixture of Moorish and Gothic styles in the churches, and in the great fortress commanding the city’s highest hill, brought back to Byron his dead-and-gone fine arts drudgery. They left the cab to descend arm in arm the steep, narrow, extremely small streets of the Alfama, where ragged children swarmed in and out of cracking crazy houses hundreds of years old, and open shops the size of telephone booths sold fish, bread, and meat scraps. It was a long wandering walk.

  “Where did the cab promise to meet us?” Natalie spoke up in a strained tone, as they traversed an alley where the stinks made them gasp.

  “Everything all right?” he said.

  She wearily smiled. “At the risk of sounding like every stupid woman tourist in the world, my feet hurt.”

  “Why, let’s go back. I’ve had plenty of this.”

  “Do you mind?”

  She said not a word as they drove along the river road back to the hotel. When he took her hand it was clammy. Entering the hotel, she pulled at his elbow. “Don’t forget—passports.”

  It proved unnecessary. With the key, the desk clerk, showing large yellow false teeth in an empty grin, handed him two maroon booklets. Natalie snatched hers and riffled through it as they walked to the elevator.

  “Okay?” he said.

  “Seems to be. But I’ll bet anything the Gestapo’s photographed it, and yours too.”