by Diane Lowman
The beer and harder alcohol blurred the lines that delineated rank, and the more the men drank, the louder and looser they got. They also became bolder with me. Reticent during the tea-totaling day, they’d come and sit close to me, in casual clothes, sweaty from the heat and humidity, and reeking of whatever they were drinking. They were little boys approaching a neighborhood dog that had initially scared them, so they’d kept their distance. Once they realized that I was domesticated and tame, they came ever nearer.
The conversation was always the same: “Fraulein Meyer! Why would a young American girl want to work on a container ship with a bunch of German men? So what do you think of our ship?” Sometimes they’d ask about my life at home, but more often than not, they would fire questions and spit Schnapps-flavored saliva at me, and not really wait for answers; just sway a bit and offer me another beer and a cigarette, no matter how many times I said I didn’t smoke. The more animated they grew, the smaller I became, folding my arms, crossing my legs, and trying to disappear into myself. I’d redirect the conversation by asking about them, careful not to be too intrusive.
But with each sip of Holsten courage, they would become more aggressive or more critical of American politics, sports, or people, and wait for me to either acquiesce easily or defend vigorously. I did neither, and tired of the game quickly.
“Jimmy Carter? A peanut farmer president, so silly!” They’d say. I just smiled as broadly as Carter himself, and said nothing. Frankly, at that time, I had more interest in academia and the arts than politics, so I had no retort, and even less in the way of interest in engaging with them. They had no interest in Socratic dialogue. They just taunted me to amuse themselves.
I stuck strictly to a three-beer maximum. No matter how many they offered me (Herr Most continued to insist that I not buy my own), I was determined neither to take advantage of their generosity nor to water down my defenses.
I would just excuse myself when things got raucous and one of my reliable defenders was not there to rescue me, often to objections that might include someone grabbing my arm or putting theirs around my waist. Especially if some of the shadier characters I didn’t know well, like the hulking machinist, were present. I could usually count on curly-haired Karl or Herr Rose to come to my rescue with a joke or some other gentle intervention to deflect attention if they saw me in trouble. In their absence I’d twist away and slip back up to my cabin, locking the door behind me.
Often at this point my phone would ring: “You come back to the party!” the unidentified caller would say. “We miss you!” I could hear noise and unfriendly laughter in the background; a bunch of middle-school boys making prank calls.
“No, I’m pretty tired.”
“We can wake you up!” Then I’d just hang up.
The beige phone started ringing more and more often in the middle of the night, waking me up in confusion every time. I couldn’t imagine who would call me. During the day, Herr Most might have a job for me, the radio officer might deliver some administrative information, or Alois or Chris might invite me to a gathering. But late at night, it was usually drunken sailors dialing, and my muscles would constrict as tightly as that beige, coiled cord. I wanted to leave it off the hook, but the constant tone that created was worse. And I still saw it as a way to reach out if I needed help . . . but to whom?
The informal parties, usually in Tim’s cabin, had the feel of a private back room in a club. These gatherings were by invitation only, and the officers never attended, except for Alois. He, like I, inhabited that unusual ether between the poles, and could slip easily between them, morphing now into one of the boys when it suited him, and then into a proper officer when protocol called for that. I wondered if the officers had parties of their own. I imagined them playing poker and smoking cigars, sipping whiskey, on a background of DayGlo oil paint in somebody’s black velvet suite.
Soundtracks that I recognized from home scored these low-key nights: The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who. For as much German pride as they boasted, I’d never heard German tunes at these parties. We would just talk, in a group or one-on-one, about ship happenings, politics, and culture. And we played chess. Claudia, her skin so light as to be almost translucent, often came to these speakeasies, but never to the deck parties unless accompanied by Bruno, and then she’d sit quietly in his shadow, a cigarette in one hand, and a Holsten in the other. I never saw Ana anywhere but at meals or stretched out by the side of the pool in her tiny string thong bikini, her straight black hair adding a modicum of modesty as it draped down over her shoulders and nearly down to her waist.
While I spoke mostly to Alois, Tim, and Chris, who spoke the best English—the others looked on in quizzical curiosity and occasionally asked a question, or for a translation to German—it was Roland who interested me the most, exactly because he seemed completely disinterested in me. He would hang back in the corner like a vampire bat, rarely saying a word, observing the group through half-closed eyes. He only engaged to play, and usually win, a game of chess now and then.
“Does Roland hate me, or what?” I asked Tim one night. He looked up and over at him in the corner. He shrugged.
“No, no. He had some trouble on another ship with a girl. He thinks women are trouble.”
Okay, fair enough. I think these men could be trouble, too.
“Go talk to Claudia,” he said. “She is upset about something. Maybe she needs a female shoulder to cry on.” It could have sounded caring, but it didn’t.
I sat down next to her and ventured, “Hi.”
“Hello,” she said, tears making rivulets across her fair skin.
“Hey, are you okay?” I asked, and she shook her head. She mumbled something about a fight with Bruno. Something to do with herring, I thought she said, but I had a tough time understanding her between her limited English, thick accent, and soft sobs.
“Let’s go out on deck where we can talk,” I said. And avoid prying eyes, I wanted to add.
She nodded, and I put my arm around her waist. We’d been drinking Black Russians, and she’d outpaced me by at least two to one. I looked up at Tim, whose hung head shook gently as he made eye contact with me, and then looked away at Roland. Fuck them. Girl Power.
Claudia and I had been working together to mop the halls lately, and Herr Most told us to clean all the walls while we were at it. She reported to him as well. Wax on, wax off. . . . I felt like Daniel-san. The crew could not help but snigger and comment when they passed the Cinderella twins with our mops and rags. It seemed to give them some great pleasure to see us both dripping with sudsy water and sweat as we swabbed the blue linoleum floors and beige plastic walls. We grew grumpy in the internal heat. She would quickly retort with German words I did not understand but was pretty sure were the ones I’d use if I had the nerve. We’d grown a bit closer, if only to close ranks and strengthen our defenses.
“What’s going on, Claudia?”
“He is horrible to me. He gives me no freedom. He is hard to me. He gets so mad even if I just talk to another man. Who else I can talk to? There is no one else. Just because I talk to them it does not mean I sleep with them. I only sleep with Tim once, anyway. Do not get married. It is no freedom. Keep your freedom.” She full on ugly cried.
I had my arm around her as we sat on the metal deck floor, knees pulled in tight to our chests and heads bent to avoid the rain that was now pelting us. The black ocean below, indiscernible from the sky in the absence of moonlight, was an inkwell so deep that Shakespeare could have written all 38 plays and 154 sonnets with it, still making nary a dent. Wait, what? She slept with Tim? Shit. Like it was no big deal. Wow.
I said, “It’s okay. It’s okay. You have me. You can talk to me.” I so desperately wanted her to need me as a friend, to see me as an ally, so I could see her as one. But even as I said those words, I knew that in the morning she would pretend that nothing had happened, and we would resume our relationship as companion scullery maids and nothing more. I hope
d she did not remember telling me about Tim. I tried to forget.
Certain things helped to mark the passage of time and distance since, on most days, there was literally nothing to see in any direction except the ocean and the sky. As constant as they were, they changed constantly. Their blues spanned the spectrum from Arctic to indigo. Sometimes the crests were so calm that they looked literally like little waves of nautical greeting lapping at us, barely strong enough to peak. Other times, the forceful, churlish chop churned this way and that, slapping at us, angry that we’d invaded the aquatic space with our crimson metal bow.
The sun played with the water. Sometimes it sprinkled it with silver fairy dust that landed but then danced on the waves. Sometimes it laid down a shine so blinding that it looked like ice thick enough to skate on. Sometimes it hid behind clouds turning everything a murky, monotone gunmetal. The sky could be fickle, too. It would show a painter’s palette of velvety blues, or an ominous swirl of charcoal, threatening rain. But unlike on land, where the weather moves over you, she just moved us through the weather, so that the calm cerulean always came back on cue. We needed other landmarks in a place without land. It could feel like Las Vegas on board, even with the brilliant sun and moon risings and settings. I could easily forget what day it was without Kino Night or Kanteen to remind me.
Since we were travelling west, we turned the clock back an hour every other day to keep pace with the time zones we crossed. At home, we college students struggled to keep up with the simple semiannual hour shifts. This accelerated time travel belied what felt like the glacial pace of the physical travel. Time seemed to lose its relevance—to feel more like an artificial human construct when we toyed with it thus.
But although the clock shifted as constantly as the decks below our feet, the menu anchored us to our place in the week. They printed it up and left it out for us to consult, but they need not have bothered. After a couple of weeks I memorized it, and it never varied unless there was a special event meal. I knew what day of the week it was by what Ingo cooked and Claudia placed down in front of me each day. Schnitzel (also, coincidentally our miniature schnauzer’s name; I missed her so much every time they served it), meatballs in brown gravy, and bratwurst—each, almost always accompanied by spaetzle—had their assigned day. “If it’s Tuesday, it must be . . . Potato Pancake Day.” The cooks adhered to this menu so rigidly that when we crossed the international dateline on the way to Australia we just skipped from Monday to Wednesday meals, and on the way back, we had two cuisines a la Monday.
Once a week, Ingo proudly presented me with his version of steak tartare: raw ground beef, an uncooked egg in the divot Ingo had pressed into it with his meaty thumbs. He would put it down in front of me with a broad smile: “Raw meat! It’s good for you, Fraulein! It makes you strong like Ingo!” Oh, the E. coli I dodged. I did not relish this bloody meal, but ate it every time, afraid to offend.
Freshly baked bread and sweet butter always sat alongside bottomless carafes of green tea. The lunchtime table always featured a platter of gelatinous cold cuts in various shades of pink, studded with things I did not recognize. We might have fruit or vegetables on occasion, and of course we could count on the schmoke-time sweets, but even these, I realized, followed the strict pattern of assigned days.
On June thirteenth, just short of two weeks after departure, Herr Rose pointed out one of the Galapagos Islands while I was cleaning the bridge.
“And we will see Tahiti maybe in six or seven days,” he said.
“It’s beautiful!” I gazed out over the deck, over the gently bobbing containers, as I bobbled along in my own, toward a more vivid horizon under the brightest sun I’d ever seen. Even though we were only two days out of the canal, I knew we had a lot of ocean to cross, and it was somehow reassuring to see land again, however far away.
“Ya, and we will pass the equator today,” he said. Such nonchalance for something so momentous. We would be at the exact spot where the hemispheres met. It mesmerized me, and I longed to know the exact moment of the crossing, but everyone else was completely blasé about it. Been there, done that. Even though I was an equator virgin, no one took much notice of my transition to womanhood. No fanfare. No celebration. I was grateful that Herr Rose had even thought to mention it. Herr Most also mentioned it to me matter-of-factly later, and watched, bemused, as I peppered him with questions about exactly when and how I’d know. Such a silly American girl, he must have thought. I watched for the water in the sinks and toilets to reverse and drain counterclockwise, as it does the moment you enter the Southern Hemisphere.
The next morning, though, Alois stood waiting outside my door at 0600. He startled me as I stepped out, groggy, to head up to the bridge, and I sensed this pleased him. But he also beamed with a different, preternatural self-satisfaction that I struggled to comprehend.
He had something in his hands, something the size of a small poster. His grin widened as he turned it over to reveal a most intricately and elaborately illustrated and lettered design. The god Neptune sat astride the waves, trident in hand, presiding over the proclamation below him. I could not read the inscription because it was all in German, but could make out my name, Diane Lori Meyer, in big, black calligraphy letters, and what must have been June in German, 14, 1979.
“It is an important event when a sailor passes the equator for the first time,” he said. Wait, I’m a sailor? He said I’m a sailor! He continued, “It reads: From Neptune, the god of the diligent and the streams, who rules over the high seas at all times, with a powerful eye. . . .” Neptune was long-winded, but proudly and boldly recognized me as “a full-fledged equator-passer.” The word’s length and stature in German, Aquatoruberquerung, made it look weighty and impressive.
I tried hard, but could not stop the tears that welled up in my eyes. The gesture was as stunning as the certificate. Wanting to, but unable to hold back, I hugged him tightly.
“Oh, Alois, it is so beautiful! That’s amazing! Thank you so much! I cannot wait to frame it and hang it at home!”
He smiled. I know he’d hoped for a big reaction. He was the least reserved of the reserved Germans, and he seemed genuinely pleased. He’d certainly earned it.
“It is customary on a ship to commemorate each sailor’s first time. I had to convince Herr Kapitän (who had signed it with an elaborate flourish) to allow me to give it to you. He thought I only wanted to do it to make you want to sleep with me.” He laughed awkwardly.
My eyes, glued to the document, rose to meet his. His smile faded ever so slightly.
“That was really nice of both of you. Thank you. I’d better put it in my cabin (which, I was acutely aware at that moment, was formerly his cabin) to keep it safe, and get up to the bridge. I don’t want to keep them waiting. Herr Most would be furious if he got word that I was late.”
“Ya, ya.” He nodded nervously. “Well, Guten Morgen,” and he handed me the certificate and turned to go.
“Alois,” I said, “danke,” and went inside to stow it in the closet between some shirts.
That old sea dog, Herr Kapitän Beucking. He was not only very wise, but he was looking out for me. It didn’t matter whether it was because he actually cared, or just didn’t want trouble on his ship. He had my back.
The ship’s alarm bell sounded loudly early one evening, just as we were finishing up dinner. I’d never heard it before, so it scared me. Which was, I realized, exactly what it was meant to do. Stir you to swift motion.
“Come,” Ingo said, grabbing me with his beefy hand, wiping the other on his white apron. “Lifeboat drill. You are starboard, ya?”
I nodded. None of his usual kidding around here. He was serious. I followed him to the starboard side, where half the crew mustered; the others had the port boat. All I could think of, foolishly, was all hands on deck.
From afar, we’d have all looked the same, lined up, covered in bright-orange, puffer life vests. But as always, I stuck out sorely in the crowd. The gathering highl
ighted how different I looked, and I felt the isolation acutely. This privileged little suburban undergrad, playing, it must seem to them, at sailing, while they, clad mostly in coveralls and grease, worked hard at keeping this vessel afloat and in forward motion.
I kept quiet and listened carefully and did what I was told, Ingo whispering translations in my ear.
Once the all-clear sound—we’d mustered satisfactorily—and the drill concluded, those of us who had nowhere to report milled about. “Come, sit,” said Alois, motioning to the deck chairs. He had some nautical rope with him, and knotted it into intricate shapes. I’d never seen anything like it before; the complex patterns he created with a soothing motion reminded me of my grandmother’s knitting. It filled me with wistfulness for home. I would have loved to ask him to make me a keychain or something, but I didn’t want to open the door and let him think he could slip a toe in. I almost wished I were attracted to him. It would be exciting and romantic to have a beau on board, but it would also be stupid and complicated. Besides, the whole garden-gnome look didn’t do it for me. The truth was that Roland—dark and brooding—was more my type, and he was too aloof and, probably wisely, too uninterested.
A colossal cloud way in the distance flashed lightning periodically as if it were trying to plug into some unseen outlet out there all alone in the slate ocean. Chris and Karl joined us, and it felt like we were sitting on someone’s back porch. For just a moment, I forgot where I was; I felt like I was among friends.
