* * *
I waited several days for his ship’s company, including himself, to get some strength into them before taking the Russian captain on a tour of the settlement. I led him past the central “common” building—mess-headquarters hall—past the men’s dormitories, his murmuring his approbation of their construction qualities, through the guardsmanlike trees that ended at last at the waterfall, symbol of our priceless fresh water supply, where we stood awhile as I described to him the stream that, falling from it, led across the island to our Farm which I also described. I sensed in him the marvel at the setting itself that had struck me when I first saw it that day, seeming now so long ago, that Coxswain Meyer and Seaman Barker and I first set eyes upon it and only the great trees stood there. He listened with the most attentive care, scarcely ever interrupting even with a question, only an occasional “yes, yes” in his good English to certify that he was taking it all in, missing not the smallest detail; a superb listener, like every good ship’s captain I had ever known; briefing him meticulously, in Navy fashion, on the assets of the island: how the Farm was producing abundantly, food supplies increased by the island itself, the excellent fishing grounds just offshore. (Routinely explaining, something as a seaman he would instantly understand, why, despite the difficulty of access presented by the cliffs, we had chosen to build the settlement on this leeward side of the island, hurricanes sure in time to hit the other, windward shore, in addition the cliffs themselves a fortress against violent weather; in fact, since Pushkin had arrived a vicious storm bearing Force 11 winds, just below hurricane strength, had attacked the island, battering it for close on to two days, great waves traveling high and white up the unyielding cliffs, Noisy’s buildings, in which we had battened down to ride it out, holding up with hardly a whimper. I was almost glad of the storm, to show how well we had built.)
Naval officers both—more, Navy ship’s captains—all of this was done in the most straightforward fashion. Not the slightest barrier to communication, either in the providing or the receiving of the storehouse of facts, information, so readily assimilated it seemed. It was as if I were briefing a superior, or perhaps the officer sent to relieve me in a routine change-of-command, on the salient aspects of the new command in which he would soon be completely involved. In naval fashion, too, he confined himself, as I say, almost altogether to listening, myself nonetheless continually aware of his sharp, appraising eyes, which seemed to miss nothing. Now and then a question, always to the point, asking a bit more information on this matter or that—e.g., would the Farm and the fishing grounds feed more? “Easily so, Captain. About a hundred more men I would say, with no strain.” “Is that so, Captain?” “Happens,” I said, “to be about the size of the company of Pushkin, if I’m not mistaken?” “Why, so it does, Captain.” I could hardly believe that this was his oblique way of verifying that we intended to keep our side of the bargain, although it was true we had not once discussed it since his arrival; on my part, a waiting for physical recovery before proceeding to such matters; on his side, surely almost a question of manners not to ask—in any event I felt this exchange had reassured him. If he needed further confirmation, on passing the dormitories, myself indicating the one in which a good many of his ship’s company were now recuperating, volunteering, “We built an extra one, Captain. Let’s see. For about a hundred men, I believe.” His stopping then, turning and looking me directly in the face, all-serious. “You expected us, Captain?” “When we built the dormitory we hadn’t given up . . . After a while . . . honestly, I cannot say that I did any more, Captain. In fact I had lost hope. In any event I felt the space would one day be usable. Naturally we would expect our community to grow.” Neither making any further allusion to what that remark might easily have led to. We moved on.
Having come some distance we began to pass through the thickest part of the forest, deliberately left so, still some way more before we came upon the first of those dwellings so different from all others, so much smaller, no other structure visible from it, and he stopped a moment in admiration before it. “How well-built, Captain—how neat and well-kept.” That was all. Continuing through the trees, before long another clearing, an identical house, identically isolated, this time a briefer pause while he regarded it—thoughtfully, it seemed to me. Nothing else said. In this fashion proceeding, my guiding us along a hacked-out path that took us past four or five more of these dwellings, in each case none other in sight, each seeming embowered protectively in its green and flowering setting. Himself, of course, not remotely referring to the matter, my own mind blocking it out, refusing to confront at the moment, putting off, the question inherent in the cottages: Back in Gibraltar’s waters, I had in essence promised the Russian captain to take his people into the settlement, participating in everything—except the women. That subject had never explicitly come up.
I had a destination and I led us on until finally we had left the settlement behind, reentering the pure forest, moving along the stream above the waterfall. Soft and slanting came the mote-laden sunlight through the trees, combining with their branches to fashion flickering patterns of shadow and light on the water with its clean-flowing piano sound over its bed of small shiny rocks. From the thick growth on either side of the stream the songs of birds, his stopping to listen in the ardent green all around, with a wonder on his face perhaps possible only in one over a year at sea. Finally, taking up again, before long moving up the sharp climb, as we approached the crest alerted by that sound familiar above all others to sailors, making top, standing at last on the long prominence that sat high above the sea. It was the same cliffside where the Jesuit and I had first gone and which, for its isolation, had become a kind of sanctuary to me.
We stood looking at the endless waters, then as if by joint intention far and away down the coastline at the two ships we commanded, much diminished from here, nevertheless their differing configurations easily discernible and from this far and high, almost aerial distance seeming tied up alongside. He looked then, head turning this way and that, at the island itself, visible in its entirety from here, the settlement some distance away, its every evidence hidden by the trees and the thick growth, the island seeming an untouched thing, virgin, in the sunlight flashing off its impossible greenness a fragrant refuge set in a blue sea.
“What a beautiful place. Captain?” he said.
“Sir?”
He gave an apologetic laugh. “Captain, that is the longest journey I have made on land since . . .” His mind seemed to travel backward over great distances in time. “Do you suppose we could sit? Rest a bit?”
He had still not regained his full stamina, though he had forborne to say so. It occurred to me how thoughtless I had been.
“Forgive me, Captain.” My apology being: “It was the same for me at first. Land legs.”
We sat on the long ledge of smooth rock which formed almost an overhang, the very sharp drop hundreds of feet straight down to the rocks and the sea.
“You don’t have acrophobia?” I said.
“All submariners do.” I had no idea whether he was putting me on. “Don’t worry, Captain. I won’t fall off. These cliffs—what an extraordinary color.”
Somehow the great beauty itself had always seemed to me to make the place more lonely, that and the unobstructed vastness of the sea, the distant low sound of the water touching shore the only sound in an empty and hushed universe . . . again, looking far down and away, the very fact that only the two ships occupied such immense reaches further enhancing that loneliness. We sat awhile in unspoken but agreed silence, contemplating these vistas, each with his thoughts; resting after the climb.
I thought of him. He was a handsome man, in a sailor way. In his bearing, a touch of what a landsman might take as swagger but which I knew well as the mark of the sea captain’s essential self-confidence, of his knowing exactly who he is. His voice was marked by that other prevailing characteristic of ship’s captains: quiet-pitched, but with that certain t
one in it. Thick hair as black as licorice, seeming the more so for his unusually fair skin. Eyes as blue as deep waters, a strong chin, a bony-sculpted face; the eyes seeming curiously to combine traits of gaiety and of melancholy; and, above all, of that other sailor trait, a quiet watchfulness. A suggestion of an active inner life, of a strong personality, no surprise there; command of men sitting easily on his shoulders—strong shoulders, topping a very straight and lean six-foot frame, tight, hard, a grenadier of a man.
I judged his honor to be beyond question; his word to be absolute. None of this, of course, meant to define a man as in any way naïve or innocent. If ship’s captains were that, ships would not sail, seas would not part, men would not obey without question; i.e., a man capable of cunning as opposed to deceit; of any kind of stratagem in the world that would serve his ship and his men, short of treachery. Yet another mark of a ship’s captain suggested: a man unusually forbearing as to human weakness, correspondingly cold and hard, if need be ruthless, when crossed. Mirror images of each other, ship’s captains? Perhaps. Any of the same profession would tend reflexively to trust him; by the same conditions of that profession, in dealing with him to be equally alert to protect the interests of his own people, his own ship’s company. So it seemed to me we approached each other; open but vigilant; receptive as to ideas the other might present but carefully scrutinizing them. Trust: He appeared to have judged that to be indispensable from the first. I thought of how he could have used the fuel to bargain with me; to extract concessions of one kind or another (I hardly knew what they would be: the women, maybe). He had not. The transfer of the fuel to the Nathan James had already been made. Trust, openness. I must wherever possible reciprocate, save only for that one secret relationship toward him I felt I could never do the slightest thing about: that we had personally destroyed his home city of Orel. I broke the long silence.
“Captain,” I said, “there are no words in my language to express our debt. That of my ship’s company. For what you have brought us. The nuclear fuel. I can put it this way. We have come, all of us, to feel a gratitude to the island, for what it gives us—even simply for taking us in; for being habitable. Nevertheless, all of us—some more than others—have felt prisoners on it, with a ship almost empty of fuel. You have made free men of us.”
“I understand,” he said. “We need say nothing more of it. Besides, we are quits as to the matter of gifts. You have taken us in . . . we could not have lasted much longer . . . Let us put an end to this, Captain. There is an old saying of a Russian poet, ‘A thought spoken is a lie.’”
Despite that lovely Russian expression, other words would still need to be spoken, and with all forthrightness. And in their simplicity I felt would be fully understood. Now we spoke of our experiences. His asking me, I told him of our passage through the dark and the cold. Then he related the story of what had happened during the long months when we thought he and Pushkin were lost. When he had finished I hardly knew which of our ordeals had been the worse.
“Once we saw our motherland,” he said, “something like a madness took possession of us—I confess that to you, Captain.”
What had happened was not just a meticulous but a weird and repetitive exploration of the enormous Russian coastline from Murmansk to Vladivostok, back and forth over the same course, the Northern Sea Route. This not once but a number of times. Including, lest they miss an available inch, up and around Norway and into the Baltic Sea, there approaching Latvian and Lithuanian towns. The reason for this excess was not unlike that which I sometimes had imagined might have overtaken us had we decided to return to our own country. Now that they were in native waters, off the cities and towns which were the homes of many of them, ship’s company “begged, entreated—I had neither heart nor will to resist them”—that they do this endless inspection of wherever any part of Russia could be viewed, to determine if there was life there; when they found none, still not giving up, but insisting on going back again and again to see if any had appeared since their previous visit. “I myself got caught up in this mad business,” he said. “It was as if nothing could convince us.” A horror had followed. “We continued to investigate coastal towns. Never sighting one live human being. Sighting sometimes untouched towns. Makarova, I remember for one, Babrovskaye—there were others. All the houses, buildings still standing. Just nobody in sight. One of these was a place called Tobseda, the hometown of a starshima—petty officer—of mine named Suslova. We had surfaced some miles offshore. I had let Suslova look through some binoculars, see his town. There was not a scratch on it. I remember his lowering the glasses, still looking at the town, saying something like, ‘They must all be asleep, Captain. There—see that house?—the red brick one halfway up the hill—that’s my house. My wife, my child must be asleep in there.’ It was around noontime. I knew it at that second. Readings where we were being dangerously high, I was about to give the order to submerge anyhow and tell him to get below. Before I could he had his shoes off and was gone overboard, started swimming to his town. I waited until I saw him step on the shore. He turned and waved back, then started into the town. I gave the order to dive.”
He paused a beat. “What Suslova had done seemed to give the men ideas . . .” Pushkin had lost over a period of time eighteen men as she got near their towns. After that he had stopped surfacing anytime the ship was in swimming distance of the shore. His voice took on a tone that sent a chill up the spine. “What was odd was—I could even understand it. If your own town was right in front of you, and everything was still standing, the houses, the shops and all, it was almost irresistible not to go have a look. Something pulled you in there. I was glad Orel was inland. I might have done it myself. I knew then I had to get us out of there.”
A tremor seemed to go through him—and through me. During one of their criss-crossings of the Northern Sea Route they had put into the secret nuclear fuel depot at Karsavina, found there the fuel he had anticipated finding (along with enough uncontaminated food in deep storage vaults to permit him to do exactly what he was doing, the repeated reconnoitering). Meantime he had received our message that we had found a habitable island. Now he used this to persuade his crew to give up this insane enterprise; explaining that we had discovered a place that would accept men, were awaiting them as promised. “Even so, it was all I could do to tear them away from Russia.” No way to tell us the correspondingly immense news that he had the fuel and was coming. Earlier he had taken me aboard Pushkin and showed me precisely why that was. Navigating the sometimes narrow waters, his VLF antenna, which trailed a couple hundred feet in the submarine’s wake, had been severed—a sunken ship, he had speculated, one of numerous derelicts now occupying both surface and undersurface of these choked sea-lanes; thereby immobilizing the channels on which alone we could communicate. Whatever had done it, it was as simple and awful as that.
“Russia.” The name fell on the island air as he concluded his account. “A terrible place. You are fortunate, Captain, in never having had to take your men to their own country. Just seeing it . . . it came close to costing me my crew, my ship.”
Then silence. Then something that seemed like a shudder, a trembling, but was not. An unspoken signal of desiring urgently to leave the past in that sense of any intelligent man’s doing so, and especially if it be such a one as his and his ship’s, in that the past is beyond man’s changing, beyond his redemption; of wishing only to look ahead; the future being the only thing possibly subject to man’s control, what might ours be? He looked out at the horizon.
“Do you believe there are people out there?”
It had become an immutable fact of our existence, sometimes extracting terrible tolls. Whenever I myself had come here and gazed out into that boundlessness of waters, the thought had never failed to occur; or if there were another with me, to occur to both of us. It had kept me from paying as many visits as I would have liked to this place which, save for that, had become a comfort to me. There was no getting away from it
; the thought was imperishable, appearing to have established not just a permanent dwelling place in one’s subconscious but to pop up, like one of those chronic itches brought on by certain stimuli, every time one sat, as now, simply gazing out to sea, as though that horizon plucked it forth and set it buzzing in one’s head, attacking one, sometimes producing something one felt not all that distant from madness. The circumference so huge, as if all the universe lay directly before our eyes, nothing preventing our viewing it in every detail, what had happened, what was happening even now, except that terrible horizon of nothingness which took on the aspect of an immense and opaque, an impossibly cruel window blind. It seemed to taunt one in its sadism. If only it would rise, even for a moment, and give us a glimpse! I was in no way surprised that he had asked the identical question, looking out into the infinity of naked ocean, looking at the horizon and as it were over it—the question which would never go away, eternal as the sea itself—what was now beyond? Even the answer always the same, as in some unvarying responsive reading in a churchly ritual, out of the Book of Common Prayer.
“There have to be,” I said.
Until now, the thought could only have been speculation hypothetical in the entire, impossible of verification; a helpless game of the mind one played, whether one wished to play it or not. Even now, trapped in this fixed liturgy, mind dulled by it, protectively so, it did not immediately occur to me that it could be more than a thought, burst free from that theorem-exploring category where it had so long resided. With an active jolt, realizing even as he said it that matters might well now be different, conjecture subject to actual authentication . . . even so, comprehending only in part . . . it was still, so fixed were the old ways, difficult to grasp as reality as opposed to phantasm.
The Last Ship: A Novel Page 69
