by Sten Nadolny
Only the battle remained. That he couldn’t imagine. Determined, he fell asleep.
The fleet had already passed through the Sound. They would soon be in Copenhagen. ‘We’ll show ’em,’ said a tall man with a high forehead. John understood the sound of these words very well, since they had been repeated several times. The same man told him, ‘Go, cheer the men on.’ Something was up with the mainsail; there was a delay. Then the crucial words: ‘What would Nelson think?’ He marked both sentences for the night. He also included difficult words, like those Danish landmarks Skagerrak and Kattegat, or words like cable gat and colour vat. In response to a carefully phrased question asked after they had received their rum ration, he also found out that the Danes had been busy for weeks strengthening their coast fortifications and equipping their ships for defence. ‘Or do you think they’ll wait till we can join their council session?’ John didn’t understand this at once. But he had fallen into the habit of automatically acknowledging any answers couched in the form of questions ending on a rising intonation with ‘Of course not,’ which instantly satisfied the person who always countered with a question.
They arrived in the afternoon. That night, or early in the morning, they would attack the Danish gun emplacements and ships. Perhaps Nelson might still come aboard their ship that day. And what would he think? So the day ended hectically, with shouting, gasps and bruised joints, but without fear or rage. John felt he could keep up, for he always knew what was coming. An answer was yes or no, an order went up or down, a person was sir or not sir, his head banged into running or standing rigging. All that was altogether satisfying. A new difficult word had to be memorised: Trekroner. It was the most powerful coastal battery defending Copenhagen. When it started to fire, the battle had begun.
Nelson didn’t come after all. The lower gundeck was clear, the fires in the stoves had been extinguished, the sand was spread, and all men were at the stations where their duties required them to be. One of them, alongside the gun barrel, kept baring his teeth. Another, who pushed the shot into the breech, opened and closed his hand perhaps a hundred times and observed his fingernails carefully each time. Amidships somebody started up in terror, shouting, ‘A sign!’ so that all heads turned towards him. He pointed aft, but there was nothing. Nobody said a word.
And while the veteran sailors were feverish or frozen, John experienced one of those moments that belonged to him, for he could ignore the fast events and noises and turn to changes which, in their slowness, were barely perceptible to others. While they were crawling towards morning and the guns of the Trekroner, he enjoyed the movement of the moon and the transformations of the clouds in the night sky almost dead with calm. Unceasingly he gazed through the gunport; his breath deepened; he saw himself as a piece of ocean. Remembrances began to drift by, images that wandered more slowly than he himself. He saw a congregation of ships’ masts, standing close together, and behind them the city of London. Always when ships were assembled so closely and quietly, a city belonged to them. Riggings by the hundreds loomed over the port buildings like a criss-crossed far-reaching cloud. The houses were pushing up to London Bridge as though they were determined to get into the water and be part of it, and were hesitating only at the last moment. Now and then a house really fell off the bridge, always when no one was looking. The houses in London had completely different faces from those in the little village at home. Arrogant, surly, often boastful, sometimes as if they were dead. He had also seen a fire in the docks, and a lady who asked to have all her clothes brought from a shop to be examined through the window of her carriage, because she didn’t want to walk through the muck with her shoes. The shopkeeper had customers waiting, but he remained at the carriage door, imperturbable, and answered all questions most courteously. He was so quiet that John regarded him as an ally, although he sensed distinctly: this man is fast. He had a kind of merchant’s patience, which was pleasant but not related to his own.
A girl sat in the carriage. White-armed, slender, slightly embarrassed, red-headed English girls were among the eight or ten reasons why it was worth keeping one’s eyes open. Thomas had pulled him away in the manner of all older brothers who had to take care of younger ones and were filled with hatred in their impatience. They had bought the three-cornered hat, the blue coat, the buckled shoes, the sea chest, the dagger. A volunteer first class had to outfit himself. As they climbed up the memorial in Fish Street, he counted three hundred and fifty steps. A cold spring; the smell of acrid smoke everywhere. Far in the distance castles could be seen clinging to green parks. He observed an epileptic who banged something with his forehead, then stared into the distance. There were highwaymen around, he heard, but a gallows stood in Tyburn. As a midshipman, said his elder brother, he had to behave like a gentleman. In the market they observed a quarrel. It was about a fish which had perhaps been artificially puffed up, or perhaps not.
Everywhere one could see the masts of ships, at least from the topgallant yards upward. The city’s thousand chimney pots were one level lower. It was difficult to conceive that ships could be moved across the sea with the help of the wind, following well-devised plans, even if one knew Moore’s Practical Navigator by heart. Sailing was something royal, and the ships looked it. He knew what was needed to make an entire wall of sailcloth stand in the wind at full speed. First one had to build hulls – all the curved, splinted wood, screwed tight, carefully polished, caulked, tarred, painted carefully, even overlaid with copper. Aship’s great dignity derived from those many materials and arrangements that were necessary for its construction.
Boom!
That was the Trekroner and the battle.
Act like a gentleman. At the side of the gun, be as little in the way as possible. Running from the gundeck to the quarterdeck and back. Understand orders at once if possible or, if impossible, forcefully request a repetition. ‘Listen, men!’ shouted the officer with the high forehead. ‘Don’t die for your country.’ Pause. ‘See to it that the Danes die for theirs.’ Shrill laughter. Yes, they stirred up the men. After that, the battle seemed to become heavy. The Trekroner and the other guns scored one hit after another. For a man who always reacted a little too late, all support was lost with each one of these jolts. Their own broadsides were the worst. Every time they went off, the ship seemed to take a leap. The regular routine went on as they had learned it, only now the purpose was to cause chaos for the enemy, and that came back at them with the kind of suddenness John disliked. From one minute to the next the black gun suddenly bore a repulsively glittering deep scratch, almost a furrow, as if made by an immensely powerful tool which had slipped. The ugly shimmering of this metal wound made a deep impression. A moment later nobody was upright. Who could still get up? Their mechanical tasks were well learned; now partners’ work had stopped, for half of them were no longer around. Then all that blood. To see it washing all about was worrisome. In the end, somebody had to be losing it, for it poured out of people, everywhere.
‘Don’t just stand there! To the guns!’ That was the man who had shouted, ‘A sign!’ Suddenly the gunport had become much wider than before. The missing wood covered several bodies amidships. Whose bodies were they?
On deck, he learned that three of twelve ships had run aground, but not the Polyphemus. White smoke billowed out of the side of another ship close by. That image remained fixed in John’s eye. On the Polyphemus, pieces of splintered wood skidded across the deck as fast as lightning, slicing in circles like mowers’ blades. Sadly, John watched ordinarily sedate officers who never had to get out of the way jump aside with most undignified leaps. Of course, they acted correctly, but it remained somehow degrading. He delivered his messages.
Now the companionway looked very different. Obstacles protruded from the wall, detached themselves from above, and swung down at the height of his forehead. Since he could neither get out of the way nor stand still, he received scratches, cuts and bruises, which certainly made him look like a hero. And at all times he tried
to act like a gentleman. One could easily lose an eye; Nelson had only one. What did Nelson think now? He stood on the quarterdeck of the Elephant. Nelson would always know everything.
He could hear pumps working. Perhaps they were on fire? Or was the ship taking in water? People were reeling on deck as though they were drunk. The captain sat on top of a cannon, shouting, ‘Let’s all of us die together!’ Earlier they had made very different noises. Next to the captain the head of a listener was suddenly missing, and with it the listener himself. John became unhappy. All sudden changes confused him, whether of seating-order, deportment or systems of coordinates. It was hard to stand these constant disappearances of more and more people. Besides, he felt it was a deep humiliation for a head when, in consequence of actions by totally different people, it lost its body just like that. It was a defeat and not really an honour. And a body without a head, what a sad, indeed what a ridiculous sight!
When he got back to the gundeck he was greeted by a sudden sharp brightness and an enormous racket: a ship had exploded nearby. He heard ‘Hurrah!’ and in between, again and again, the name of a ship. In the midst of the hurrahs, however, he heard a penetrating creaking, rasping noise, and then felt a jolt: a Danish ship had come up alongside them. And through the demolished gunport someone jumped aboard.
John caught the image of a light, foreign boot which suddenly pushed its way in and got a foothold. It was a quick, threatening move. Its image remained fixed in John’s mind and kept him from a full awareness of further events. His head thought automatically: we’ll show ’em! For this was the situation he had thought of when he first heard this slogan. Next he saw just that man’s open mouth and his, John’s, thumbs on his neck. By some chance the man had come to lie under him. Now he had a hold on him – he, John!
When John grabbed a person, there was no escape. Now he saw the pistol emerging at the lower periphery of his vision. The sight paralysed him immediately. He didn’t look at it but rather kept his eye on his strong thumbs as though they could prevail over the pistol, which – it could not be denied – was now pointed at his chest. In his mind, one single concern began to crowd out all others. It grew and grew. It surpassed all boundaries. It exploded. The man could pull the trigger at once and kill him, sending him to death or to perish slowly from gangrene. He was faced with it now: there was no escape. It was about to happen and could not be averted. Suddenly John clearly sensed where his heart was, like anyone who knows that death is inevitable. Why couldn’t he knock the pistol out of the man’s hand or throw himself to the side? Neither required ingenuity, yet he couldn’t do it. He had the man by the throat and thought only that somebody who is being strangled can’t fire a gun. But that a man would be particularly inclined to fire if he was in the process of being strangled but hadn’t been strangled yet – well, perhaps John wanted to think of that but couldn’t because his brain acted as if it were already dead. All that remained alive was the idea that the danger could be averted only by the unremitting, relentless strangulation of that throat. The other man still didn’t fire.
He was old for a soldier, certainly over forty. John had never knelt on top of anyone who could be his father. The throat was warm. The skin was soft. John had never touched a person for so long. Nowchaos had really set in: the battle inside his body. While he was squeezing the throat, the nerves in his fingers felt horror at its warmth and softness. He sensed how the throat – purred! It vibrated, tender and miserable, a deep, miserable purr. The hands were horrified, yet the head, which dreaded the humiliation of being killed, that traitor head which thought wrongly, acted as though it had understood nothing.
The pistol dropped to the floor. The legs stopped thrashing. A gunshot wound in the shoulder: bright red blood.
The pistol had not been loaded.
Had the Dane said something? Had he surrendered? John sat and stared at the dead man’s throat. He had been afraid of the humiliation of violent death. But squeezing an organism to death with slow deliberation, because fear had not subsided fast enough, meant losing more than one’s head. It was a humiliation, a powerlessness which was even more crushing than the other degradation. Now that he had survived, and his head had to admit all his thoughts again, the battle continued inside him: hands, muscles, and nerves rebelled.
‘I killed him,’ John said, trembling. The man with the high forehead looked at him with tired eyes. He remained unimpressed. ‘I couldn’t stop squeezing,’ said John. ‘I was too slow to stop myself.’
‘It’s done,’ the forehead answered hoarsely. ‘The battle is over.’ John trembled more and more. His trembling turned into shaking: his muscles contracted in different places in his body, forming painful islands, as though in this way they were armouring his inner self or were expelling an alien substance straight through the skin. ‘The battle is over!’ shouted the man who had seen the sign. ‘We showed ’em!’
They put out new buoys. The Danes had removed all markings from the waterway so the British ships would run aground. Gradually, the longboat advanced to the edge of an unfathomable depth, very close to the broken, shot-up Trekroner. John sat on the boat’s thwart, apathetically, and stared at the shore. Slowness is deadly, he thought. If it is so for others, so much the worse. He wanted to be a piece of coast, a rock on the shore whose actions would always correspond exactly to his true speed. An outcry made him look down: in the clear, shallow water countless slain men lay on the bottom, many of them with blue coats, many with open eyes staring up. Terror? No. Of course, they were lying there.
He himself was part of them: a stopped clock, that’s what he was. He belonged to them down there much more than to the crew of the boat. Too bad about all that work. He thought he heard a command but didn’t understand it. No one could follow a command after all that thunder of cannon. He wanted to ask for a repetition of the order but thought he had understood it after all. He drew himself up, rose, closed his eyes, and keeled over, very slowly, like a ladder that had been set up too straight. When he was in the water, the question came to him unasked: what will Nelson think? The traitor head was too slow even here; it didn’t want to let go of the question. So the others fished him out again before he could find out how one drowned.
At night he stared straight up to the ceiling and searched for Sagals. He no longer found him. A god of his childhood only, Sagals had now succumbed, too. A hundred times he rattled off all the sails from the foresail to the topgallant royal, back and forth. He recited all the rigs from the fore royal stay to the main topgallant royal and all the running rigging from the jib stay to the fore stay. He conjured all the yards from the mizzen topgallant to the foretop. He cleared the ship for battle with all topmasts, all decks, quarters, ranks – only his own mind had become inextricably entangled. His self-confidence was gone.
‘I expect,’ said Dr Orme when they saw each other again, ‘that you’re sad about his death.’ He said it very slowly. John needed to take his time, then his chin began to tremble. When John Franklin wept it took a moment or two. He cried until the urge to weep tickled in his nose and in his fingertips.
‘But you love the sea,’ Dr Orme resumed. ‘That shouldn’t have anything to do with the war.’
John stopped weeping, because he was thinking. While doing so, he studied his right shoe. His eye followed incessantly the shining square of the large buckle: up to the right, down along the side, then farther down to the left, returning to its starting point more than ten times. Then he fastened his glance on Dr Orme’s flat shoes, which had neither tongue nor buckle, but left the instep open with a bow in front. At last he said, ‘It’s about the war that I was so wrong.’
‘We’ll have peace soon,’ said Dr Orme. ‘Then there will be no more battles.’
PART II
John Franklin Masters His Craft
6
To the Cape of Good Hope
Sherard Philip Lound, ten-year-old volunteer on the Investigator, wrote home: ‘Sheerness, 2 June 1801. Dear Parents.’
He licked his lips and wrote without any ink spots – probably Master Wright-Codd, the teacher, would read the letter to them.
‘For the ship, it will be the longest voyage she ever made. I’m happy to be part of it, and above all as a Volunteer First Class. The captain refuses all thanks, saying that John Franklin had spoken for me. I’d like to be a captain, too, some day. I was in London with John. He’s become even slower since Copenhagen and broods a great deal. At night he dreams of the dead. John is a good man. For example, he bought me a sea chest just like his own. It’s cone-shaped, very deep, and has many compartments. On the bottom it’s ringed with a rubbing-strip. The handles are loops made of hemp. The lid is covered with sailcloth. I’m writing on it.’ He propped the sheet of paper higher, licked his lips, and dipped his pen into the ink. The page was only half filled.
‘I got a shaving kit, too, because John said that somewhere in Terra Australis it’ll be time. Also, he showed me around the city. People don’t say hello there because they don’t know me at all. John’s aunt Ann (Chapell) is also on board; she’s the captain’s wife. He’s going to take her along to the other side of the earth. She sometimes asks me if I need anything. I’m eager to know how it all comes out and I’m happy. I’ll stop writing now because there’s lots to do on board.’
The ship’s captain was none other than Matthew, who had come home at last after he had been given up for lost. John Franklin had just turned fifteen.
‘He isn’t all that well,’ even Matthew said, and since he was now John’s uncle he expressly took his side against the others – Lieutenant Fowler, for example.
