For his part, Brandt voices a few conditions of his own. The boys must have new swimming trunks and towels purchased from the ship’s own shop, and after every lesson each boy must have his progress written up by the supervising brothers. Father Coffey must arrange with the purser to have the pool reserved for swimming lessons two hours before breakfast.
Early next morning, decked out in identical navy-blue swimming trunks and matching towels, the boys assemble by the pool. They are carrying themselves with a new confidence. All are eager to impress Brandt, whom they call ‘Jerry’.
Their progress is encouraging. By the end of the first week more than half the boys can either swim or dog-paddle at least the length of the pool. Brandt has even taught backstroke to the more capable. Even the uncoordinated Alan Gilbert who is nervous about the depth of the water, manages to swim a few feet, his head twisting from side to side, and, without his spectacles, his eyes squinting like an owl in daylight.
“I’ll never be a good swimmer, Jerry,” he says after he pulls himself out of the water and a brother passes him his towel.
“It will come,” says Brandt. “You just need practice; at least if you fall overboard, you’ll be able to stay afloat.”
“Did you shoot any of our soldiers in the war, Jerry?” asks Bert. There is no accusation in his voice, he might just as well be asking Brandt what he’s having for breakfast. The older boys gather around.
“Jerry can only give us his name, rank and service number,” declares a dripping youth rubbing his head with a towel. “That’s in the Rules of War, what it says about interrogating the enemy.”
“Yes, it’s in the Geneva Convention,” adds another helpful voice. The speaker is pulling on an oversized flat cap, which is comically unsuitable for the Mediterranean.
Brandt smiles, the first genuine smile he has given anyone in years. “The war is over, boys,” he says, and then, after a pause, he adds quietly, “I am not your prisoner, gentlemen… and I am not your enemy either.”
“Where did you serve, Jerry?” asks Bert. “On the Eastern Front?”
Brandt’s heart starts hammering, but, of course, he has the answer. Krüger not only issued him with a new identity, he also documented his false war record. He points seaward towards the baking shores of north Africa just visible to starboard.
“Do you see that coast? I was over there,” he says, “in the Afrika Korps.” He feels as if he has just stabbed his own chest with a shard of ice. For a second, he clamps his eyes shut.
“You served under Rommel?”
“That’s right,” he says through his teeth. Dear God, if only it were true.
“Yes, we thought so,” says Bert and approving looks spread around the group.
Brandt snaps to alertness. “Keep this to yourselves,” he says. “Real men don’t gossip.”
But there is no place more prone to gossip than a passenger ship; one boy probably said something to one of the brothers who mentioned it to a married couple during dinner. Within days, the embellished version of the best raconteur on board has become the orthodox belief. It eventually reaches Brandt himself when he overhears two women talking during a concert interval.
“But, of course, that gorgeous-looking man could never be a true supporter of Hitler. He was drafted into the Wehrmacht, but he never rose beyond the rank of corporal because he refused to join the Nazi party. But he did do his bit for Rommel; he was fighting for his country after all and you cannot blame him for that.
“Then do you know what happened? Towards the end of the war the poor soul lost his wife and children in one of our air raids. No wonder he’s leaving Europe, he needs to heal his broken life. And isn’t it simply wonderful that he’s been teaching those poor orphans how to swim? The brothers must be so grateful to him.”
Brandt doesn’t think much of the brothers. He wonders what they actually do for the boys. Probably they see themselves as disciplinarians. Alan tells him the brothers flog the boys with something called the tawse. They are ‘tawsed’ if they are late for Mass or fail to leave the meat on the side of their plates on Fridays, and the thrashing is more intense if they are caught speaking to girls. Every night, the brothers turn down the cabin lights and, in the darkness, they terrify their young charges with lurid details of the tortures meted out to transgressors, especially boys, in hell.
No, Brandt concludes, these boys are better off spending a few hours with him learning to swim and afterwards playing silly buggers in the pool than mooching about with the brothers. And, come to think of it, he doesn’t mind them calling him Jerry at all; American youths would have labelled him ‘the Kraut’.
It is inevitable that the boys look up to him as a father figure, though he finds it ironic that the War Crimes Tribunal and the newsreels would portray him as the anti-father – a war criminal fit only for the rope.
A young English couple say hello to him as they start their daily perambulation of the deck. He returns the greeting with a smiling nod and they saunter past, linked arm in arm in a completeness denied to him. On the sun deck the women are wearing diaphanous tops over their two-piece swimming suits, but he hardly notices. Brandt feels he has aged before his time and wonders if the other passengers see him as an older man who prefers to be left alone to spend most of the voyage staring out to sea.
As he showers before dinner, he rubs the itch under his left armpit; he must be careful not to scratch it and leave a telltale scar. After the war, he began applying lye and hydrogen peroxide to remove his SS blood group tattoo. He treated it for four years and it was gone by the time he had his medical inspection for Australia, but he still suffers an irritation from the chlorine in the pool.
Having showered early, Brandt has some free time before dinner. In Bremerhaven, the purser decided to put him on second sitting because first is for families with babies and fractious toddlers, and he is happy to avoid them. The sight and sounds of small children bring back the memory of one big SS woman who used to swing Jewish children by their feet and beat their brains out against a wall, and then there was that hellish secretary in Lödz who would hurl Polish babies out of third-floor windows. He shuts his eyes. What is happening to him? He grinds his back teeth and shakes his head, but the images return and they are getting worse. The past is thundering around his ears.
Even today, his swimming was spoilt by the sight of all those sunbathing bodies by the pool because nothing brings back the Aktion more than seeing prostrate bodies. Winter was not so bad, as the corpses were already half frozen before the bulldozers covered them. Spring brought the paradoxes: he had seen the thawing River Memel choked with frosted corpses while at the same time, its banks sparkled with daffodils and jonquils. Summer was intolerable; under the direct heat of the July sun when the bluebottle flies buzzed around the putrid nostrils and open mouths brimming with maggots. In his mind, he sees the tumid blue-black bellies and breathes again the noisome air. He would never have believed it possible that human bodies could make such a stench.
His recollections always end with killing the woman in the saw pit. Deep in his subconscious, she remains with him in almost a wifely constancy. Because he remembers her fur stole, he thinks of her as the fox woman.
Each night at dinner he is confronted at table by the delightful Michaela Haas, a widowed pharmacist from Linz. Throughout the voyage she has offered him a generous unaffected friendship and he knows that she cannot understand his aloofness.
“Oh, Otto, don’t you realise that to be properly alive you can’t just be a lone wolf; you have to mix with other people?” she says one evening. “We have a choice: to grasp life with both hands or we can just let it atrophy.”
He looks at her soft cheeks and kindly brown eyes, and, for a time, even longs to reach out to her and share in that warmth, but a darkness possesses him, and he sees her face shredded to jam by a volley of bullets, which is why, just before the final cours
e, he makes his apologies and leaves the table.
5
A single crease on the water’s surface marks the wake of a police launch, and Brandt bites his lip, but then the sand mist comes down and hangs in the air like an ominous miasma. There is no horizon, no definitive boundary between the kingdoms of the sky and the sea, and the unmoving silhouettes of anchored ships are levitating in stillness.
An hour later, Brandt is relieved to hear again the low throb of Syrenia’s pistons and feel their vibration, as the ship departs the Great Bitter Lake and resumes its easterly progress down the Suez Canal. But it is only when Aden is far to stern that Brandt feels safer. He has heard that beyond Aden the authority of the British has waned since the war, especially with the loss of India.
The porthole is Brandt’s only respite from the proximity of the other men in the stuffy cabin. Each daybreak, it conforms the sky and the sea to its roundness, as an azure window of purity and light.
But, at this moment, at two o’clock in the morning, he is sitting up in bed, all in a sweat and trembling all over, staring with terror at the porthole. He had woken to someone screaming; it was himself.
“You’re in a bad way, boyo,” says the horsebreaker grabbing Brandt’s shoulder and offering him a silver hip flask. Brandt gulps a mouthful of poteen and then tries to swallow another.
“Steady on there, Otto,” says the breaker. Brandt wipes his mouth on his sleeve, screws the top on to the flask and hands it back. He shakes his head apologetically at the five other men all staring in his direction.
“You can turn off the light again, lads,” says the breaker. “Holy Jesus and a terrible fright you gave us,” he says to Brandt, “but for sure it was a nightmare; back to sleep now.” Brandt hears the springs of the lower bunk take the weight of the breaker’s heavy frame.
With the lights off and the cabin in darkness, the porthole becomes a single pitiless eye; he turns his face away, yet still it bores through the back of his head and into his brain. His body shudders and, for the first time, he dreads the abyss beneath the ship, its deepening opaqueness, the indomitable weight of salt water, and the tentacles and needle teeth of its deepest inhabitants – but most of all the darkness.
It was only a nightmare, but the worst he’d ever known. What must he make of it, even if he is bold enough to try?
For he had dreamt that, as he lay in his bunk gazing at the porthole, his reflected face was swept aside by the corpse of the fox woman rising from the depths in a blood-stained wedding dress, with her face half obscured in a torrent of red hair and her one green eye glaring. In horror and fascination, he’d watched her finger nails trying to claw onto the hull of the ship. His bride had been coming for him.
Strangely, his mind now turns to Trummler dying on the same day as the woman. Despite the freezing temperature at the pit, Trummler had left his greatcoat behind in his Opel.
“You should be wearing your coat, Herr Hauptsturmführer,” he had warned him. “It’s as frigid as the Arctic.”
Trummler’s reply had unnerved him. “Cold, Frick? Frigid, you say?” The man had started his muttering again as he gazed down at the filthy snow at his feet. “Frick, I will never know cold again, already I am too hot, fiercely hot; I stand at the mouth of hell.”
As the days pass Brandt’s nightmare fades, but now he avoids facing the once-desirable porthole and if there were a spare bunk available, he would take it.
*
Thankfully, the ship’s Christmas and New Year celebrations, with its Welcome to the 1950s Ball, are over. If passengers wonder why such a charming and desirable bachelor as Otto seemed only to have made a short appearance for politeness’ sake, they can go on wondering; his more immediate concern is the ceremony of crossing the line.
“Everyone’s trying to inveigle me into taking part,” says Michaela Haas. “I’m sure I’m too old for such nonsense.”
“No, my dear,” says one of the women at the dining table. “You’re just right for it.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” says another. “I only wish I was your age.”
Michaela looks across at Brandt. “Have you ever crossed the line before, Otto?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Then will you do it with me? Please?”
He comes up with what he thinks is the perfect excuse. “Thank you, Michaela, but I have promised to help the brothers with the boys. All of them are doing it.” It is a lie, he could do both and she knows it, and the following night when he arrives for dinner he finds that Michaela has asked to be moved to another table.
“We must have frightened her away,” says one of the women. “What a pity. She’s so lovely.”
Before the steward can put down the first course, Brandt rises from the table, mumbles an apology, abandons the diners and goes out on deck.
*
Michaela’s desertion has affected him more than he could have imagined, but he will not tolerate his own self-pity. If he is to survive in this post-war world, he must resign himself to solitude. Or jump overboard. The thought is not unconscionable; at times he feels he is already dead. He breathes, he eats and he even trains English boys how to swim, but he feels he no longer lives in the human world; he only haunts it. Whenever other people appear on deck at night, he even mutters the word “Humans,” as though they are a different and dangerous species who could be shut out of his life by merely closing his eyes. Yet the more he dwells on himself, the more the world shrinks around him, until all he has now is the derisory image of the Syrenia as the archetypal ship of fools.
It had been so much easier to be alone in the Tyrol. He had lived and worked in a blurred state of suspended insecurity. Despite the affable exchanges between himself and the paying guests, his regular duties had been solitary. Vegetable gardens needed to be tended, meat and fish to be smoked, windows to be cleaned and the bus to be driven.
And then, at night, his engineering course – diagrams, theorems and mind-sapping formulae; afterwards, he was often too tired to sleep, so he lay on top of his narrow bed and waited for the dawn.
But, now, at such close quarters with other human beings, he is finding them not only a threat but also repulsive: the way they all scuffle like seals for a place to lie on the sun deck, their raw bodies, their smell, their personal habits and their couplings, but, above all, their little pretences, their snobberies and their pathetic attempts at self-importance.
Gradually, he is coming to understand why they repel him; it’s because he has been politically conditioned to deride and hate, first the Untermenschen; then, by an almost imperceptible progression, the human species in general; and, finally, himself.
He certainly doesn’t hate the boys though, and it has to be said that something inside him is different since he started teaching them to swim. In his mind, he denies the very thought and he will fight it to the death, but the reversal is continuing, like the painful thawing of frozen fingers and toes. It is here on the whispering ocean that he is confronted by truths well known, it seems, to every human being except himself and he asks “Am I really that bad?” The answer whispers back: yes, much worse than you can possibly imagine, infinitely worse. Remember your nightmare and then say truthfully that you didn’t realise how bad you are until now.
He reminds himself that some of those on Truman’s List who were executed in Warsaw or Krakow were not buried there because, it was said, these men were so vile that their remains would have polluted the holy soil of Poland, so their corpses were weighted down in steel ammunition cases and dumped into the Baltic Sea.
*
Michaela Haas is doing the crossing-the-line ceremony with some Danish photographer. Waiting his turn with the boys, Brandt watches the couple being daubed all over with soap suds and forced to walk a slippery plank until they both slip and tumble in together with a single mighty splash. And now they are up again, bobbing about in eac
h other’s arms and neither of them can stop laughing.
*
Tonight, Brandt haunts an empty deck and projects his imaginings onto a starlit ocean. Beyond the invisible horizon towards the fringe of the eternal, the silent ghosts are thawing from his frozen past – from Treblinka, Lödz, Sobibor and Buchenwald – all in their stripes, thousands upon thousands of them, their arms outstretched towards him until they become ephemeral and are lost in the wind.
An hour later and Brandt is still on deck. He stares up at the unfamiliar constellations hanging bright in the dustless sky and, apart from the low throbbing from the bowels of the ship, the human world is silent. Beneath him in the saloon, the dance band must be taking a break.
On a whim, he finds the ladder and descends to the saloon deck. Leaning over the rails he lights a cigarette and tries to take stock of his position. The voyage has three weeks still to run, time enough to make a rudimentary plan for when he disembarks. He knows that in Australia he must avoid close contact with other migrants, as some might recognise him. Having to live in a camp on the Snowy Mountains Project will pose a constant risk, but it seems there is no alternative.
The purity of the sea wind fills his lungs and far below him the green swell draws astern the long wake of the Syrenia. In the saloon, the dance band starts up again with ‘Sunrise Serenade’. Through the glass door, he glimpses the Danish photographer swanning around the floor by himself in a white tuxedo. At one table, half a dozen women are clapping and cheering him on, and he spins across to them and scoops up Michaela Haas as the music changes to ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ in waltz time. It is one o’clock in the morning.
*
Ten days later, they are in cooler southern latitudes and the final swimming lesson is over. Brandt is the last to leave the pool. He heaves himself out, grabs his towel and strolls over to Father Coffey. “All your boys can now swim, Father,” he says. “None of them has much of a style, but most can do at least twenty lengths, even young Alan.” He wraps the towel around his dripping body.
Orphaned Leaves Page 5
