by Diane Lowman
That evening, and for many of the next few, my cabin phone started to ring again in the middle of the night. Sometimes the caller identified himself: “Fraulein Meyer, it is Herr Stuhlemmer here.” He slurred his last name more than I had when I’d first tried to pronounce it. “I hope I did not wake you.” He tittered a little bit, and I thought, What the fuck, it’s 0238, of course you woke me!
“I had to tell you,” he continued, “I love you. You are so beautiful. I wish I had never married my wife, ugh, so boring, so fat.” I thought of poor Frau Stuhlemmer who was flying half way across the globe to Panama City to spend some time with her Odysseus.
“Herr Stuhlemmer. You’ve been drinking Schnapps.” I hung up.
Sometimes the caller remained anonymous, but the pitch was predictable: “Fraulein Meyer, we have a party now, why don’t you come down to the Kino lounge.” Half awake, I couldn’t distinguish voices and didn’t care enough to try. I didn’t even answer before replacing the receiver on the cradle. It upset me enough, though, that I always had a tough time falling back asleep, and the morning wakeup call to clean the bridge found me groggy and irritable.
I mentioned the unwelcome intrusions to Herr Most one morning after he handed me a warm slice of sweet raisin bread. He looked down at his, slathered in the butter that seeped into whatever spaces there were between the raisins and warm, soft dough. (Where did this man put all his calories? He had no discernable fat reserves. His engine revved high.) He said nothing.
Later that afternoon, while I was carefully cutting out images of tikis from the New Zealand museum pamphlets for my collage, there was a soft knock at my door.
I cracked it open to see Herr Kapitän Beucking himself standing there, head tilted down toward a small black case he held in front of him in both hands. Only his eyes looked up at me from under his well-endowed eyebrows.
“Guten Tag, Fraulein Meyer. I am sorry for the disturbance.”
I immediately sensed that it was somehow I who ought to be apologizing, but I wasn’t sure exactly why.
“I understand that some of the men . . . uh . . . call you in the night. I imagine when they drink. I am sorry for this. May I?”
“Oh, of course, come in.” I still wasn’t sure where we were going with this.
“It is better that you do not have the phone. You do not really need it. I am right next door. I do not want you disturbed any longer when you sleep.” I stepped back and surreptitiously scanned the cabin. Fortunately it was clean except for the craft detritus on the table.
Within moments he had removed the phone from the wall and disconnected the wires. He held the whole apparatus in his hand, bowed his head slightly, and said, “I hope this helps. I trust the men will disturb you no more.”
“Thank you, danke,” I said as I shut the door behind him. He’d been in the cabin for less than five minutes.
I sat back down at my table to work on the collage, but couldn’t focus on cutting or gluing. Herr Most must have told the captain as soon as I left the galley, clutching my warm raisin bread.
The captain wouldn’t have let any of the men come remove the telephone because he couldn’t know the perpetrators’ identities. I was especially relieved not to have mentioned the radio officer by name. But I imagined the captain sternly rebuking the men: “It has come to my attention. . . .” Would he convene a meeting? Send a memo on the thin onion paper that they used for morning news? Or relegate the reprimand to each group’s supervisor?
I shuddered to think of the retribution I might incur for having opened my mouth, and realized that while this meant that my nights would be more restful, I also no longer had any way of calling out once I was in. It was a mixed blessing with even less connection to the world outside than before. Herr Kapitän had mentioned his proximity as an assurance of safety. He’d told them not to bother me before I boarded, but beer made some of them forget. He’d remind them, though, I felt sure.
Fuck ’em, I thought. Let them be pissed at me because I stood up for myself. Shame on them. Let them not talk to me. I’m on my way home. And I’d become quite adept at waking up on my own with the little red leather-wrapped Bulova travel alarm. Who needed wakeup calls? And whom did I need to call anyway? Once ensconced in my personal container, with the door locked, I was perfectly safe. I lived next door to the captain, as he himself pointed out. No one was going to fuck with me up here.
At schmoke time I started to tell Herr Most what the captain had done. He cut me off with a wave of his wiry hand. “Ya, ya, I know. Now they cannot bother you.”
“Danke,” I said, but he waved the thanks away, too, and handed me a warm éclair.
Herr Rose pointed out Pitcairn Island one morning while I was cleaning the bridge. Very beautiful, and all I could think about was the equally beautiful Marlon Brando and his breadfruit in Mutiny on the Bounty. And then about mutiny. I’d like to mutiny, but against and with whom? They’d make me walk the real plank into the infinite azure.
“We will pass Easter Island today, too,” he said, snapping me out of my rebellious reverie. “You know, where the enormous moai statues are.”
“I know the statues, but didn’t know what they were called. Will we be able to see them?”
“Nein, nein, we will not sail so close. You can see only the island, like we can see Pitcairn.”
It was July 29. I really wanted to ask him how long it meant, then, before we got back to the canal, but I kept my impatience in check. Just enjoy the journey, I reminded myself. And anyway, even if he told me, it was bound to change ten times before we got there. These waves often dashed false hopes.
When I checked in with Herr Most in the galley, he handed me some confectionary creation covered in baby pink frosting. Clearly he counted himself part of the ship-wide conspiracy to maintain my heft. I don’t remember how it began—maybe I’d mentioned Slaughterhouse Five to him— he always asked about what I was reading—but we started talking about World War II.
Herr Most, like Billy Pilgrim, and like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself, had experienced and survived the firebombing in Dresden during the war. Herr Most hailed from that ill-fated city. He was twelve when it happened, which would make him forty-six, the same age as my father. I could hardly believe this because he seemed so wizened, so withered, and so much older in many ways, despite his stamina and strength. He spoke quietly of the raging fires, of the leveled rubble, of the loss of so many friends. No wonder, I thought, he too had become a pilgrim of sorts. No wonder he chose to spend his life surrounded by cool and extinguishing water. No wonder he was such a curmudgeon sometimes.
I had only heard about “the war” from my parents and grandparents, none of whom had experienced it firsthand. They recounted the relatively mild hardships: shortages of butter and sugar, managing ration stamps. I’d heard joyous tales of V-E and V-J Day celebrations, from the victor’s viewpoint.
I’d interviewed an American veteran who had participated in the Battle of the Bulge for a ninth-grade world history paper.
“I want to write about World War II,” I’d told my teacher, Mr. Warren.
“You need to narrow your topic, Diane, you’re not writing a book,” he cautioned. So I settled on that pivotal, arduous Ardennes Forest engagement. We needed a “primary source,” so I asked the father of a boy I babysat if I could interview him. Looking back, I realized he resembled Herr Most with an extra foot of height and a head of brown, not silver, hair.
“I have nothing to say about it,” he told me, more melancholy than dismissive. “It was cold and dark and scary as hell.” You can put that in your paper.” I did. That was good enough for me; the quote counted as the primary source I needed. I would never forget his words. I got an A+ on the project, and a hint—a whisper—of what this war thing might have been like for real, beyond the pages of my ninth-grade term paper, beyond the pages of Jerzy Kosinski, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and all the authors who tried to make noncombatants understand their own private hell.
Here, again, very close in this narrow stainless steel galley, I got a whiff of what it smelled like to live in a city that blazed, then sizzled, then smoldered. What it felt like to stumble along Strasses he’d easily skipped down before, negotiating an obstacle course of strewn and tangled stones and rafters, and, in some cases, charred limbs. What it sounded like to listen to the shrieks of people melting, no matter how tightly his mother covered his ears and pressed his head to her breast; to hear the victims’ wailing and then whimpering bathe him in a cascade as relentless and chilling as the raging of a mountain stream in spring.
No wonder he, like my neighbor back in Westfield, did not want to talk about it too much. I told him I hadn’t meant to pry.
“Nein, nein, it is okay. Sometimes we have to talk about it. It was a long time ago.” He looked somewhere past me now, not down at his hands like usual.
“Did you ever read the book?” I asked.
“Nein, nein. I don’t need to read it. I lived it.”
Fair enough, I thought, fair enough.
That night, the engine’s rumble, and all its attending rattling, banging, and vibrating, abruptly stopped. The noise and motion of the colossal vessel, which was, at the beginning of the trip, distracting, had become more of a soothing meditation mantra. So when everything suddenly ceased, I sat up and took notice. Literally. The only thing more pronounced than the silence and my heartbeat was the ship’s undulating in the monstrous mid-South Pacific waves. The swell had reduced the big red behemoth to a small buoy, now unimpeded by forward motion. It was nauseating.
The pitch black told me there was no moon that night, or that clouds covered it. The sound of distant footfalls and muffled but urgent-sounding snippets of conversation slipped under my doorway. I fumbled for the clock. 0200. What the hell?
According to the original schedule, not worth the red paper it was printed on, we should have been nearing New York by now. We, or more precisely, I, could not endure any more delays. At this rate, I had no faith that I would make it back in time for the beginning of my junior year.
I should have flown home from Auckland, I thought, as the strong oscillations reeled me up to the head of the bed and then tossed me back down to the foot like a fish caught on a line. Maybe I’d fly home from Panama, if we ever got there. But I really didn’t want this summer sojourn to cost any more than it already had, and I still had this romantic notion that, like Odysseus, I should complete the journey. I barely slept, tossed by waves and tormented by thoughts.
“Guten Morgen,” said Ingo mischievously. He couldn’t wait to pounce. “Not much sleep, eh? The sea is very rough. She tosses us like a salad.” His culinary humor amused him. “We are stuck, ya? The boiler is shut down.” He grinned from ear to ear, and rubbed the white cotton covering his belly as he awaited my reaction. Claudia brought me a carafe of tea along with bread, butter, and an array of pink fatty coagulated cold cuts. “Morgen,” I directed my greeting to her. The meat turned my stomach.
Shit. Shit shit shit! I could absolutely not let Ingo see my distress, but I was having a hard time suppressing it. “Oh, broken boiler? Interesting.”
“Ya, ya. It could be days.”
Shit.
On a normal day, we could always see the sea and sky simultaneously out of the portholes in the downstairs mess as we listed languidly from side to side during steady forward motion. Now, standing still, the downward starboard tilt was so steep that we seemed submerged. All I could see was an agitated sea out the porthole, as if I were inside a washing machine, on spin cycle, looking out. The upswing tilted us so high that it showed only dark flannel gray sky. The ship had become a carnival pendulum ride that was swinging us a full seventy degrees side to side in the middle of the ocean. With each slow, deep roll, the competing hues changed places: water, sky, water, sky. This was the steepest pitch we’d encountered, so I tried hard to fix my gaze and get something in my stomach so the motion didn’t make me ill. I wouldn’t let the men see me succumb to the lurching. To the ocean that bounced this steel whale up and down like two teenagers on a seesaw.
“Ya, ya. The engineers work on it now. They say maybe they will put you inside the boiler to have a look around. You are so small! You will fit!” Wider grin, still.
Surely he jests, I thought. He won. He got me.
“Ingo, stop it! No one wants to put me in the boiler, and anyway. . . .” but I stopped to follow his eyes to the door of the mess to see Chief Engineer Schnoor standing there in his dress whites. Which meant he was on duty. Officers rarely came down to the crew slums themselves. Usually they sent a messenger. He was an imposing figure in the doorway, his outstretched hand resting on the top of its frame. Ingo stopped grinning and stood taller. Claudia slipped into the galley.
“Fraulein Meyer. Guten Morgen. Will you come with me for a moment, bitte?” I looked back at Ingo who now looked down. He would not meet my gaze. Claudia had disappeared. “Schnell, bitte.”
“Ya, ya, right away.” I left the hot tea and cold meat where it was. I had no appetite any more anyway.
We walked out together, he briskly, marching really. I tentatively, sort of chasing him. “Wie geht es, Fraulein Meyer?” He asked, but before I could answer, he added, “You notice we have stopped. We have some issue with the boiler. You had a tour of the ship mechanics, ya, so you saw it, I understand? I was nodding, but wondering where this was going. “And you said you might be willing to go inside during the cleaning?” Now I stopped nodding my head and started shaking it vaguely instead.
“Well, um, yeah, no, I—”
“We need to determine what is happening inside, and perhaps if you are still interested. . . .”
We followed the same path down as Karl and I had taken, but this time I felt more like Gretel being led to the oven than an intrepid adventurer. And as the lone Jew on a German container ship, the import of this image was not lost on me. I had no idea if anyone on board knew my religious background, nor had I ever discussed it. I was hardly devout, or even practicing, but I do come from a lineage of Orthodox practitioners, including some rabbis and cantors. Our family on both sides lost distant relatives to the Holocaust. I knew intellectually that this was a completely inane rabbit hole to think myself down, but I began to feel dizzy glancing over the precipice. Why didn’t they ask Ana? She was even smaller than I. She’d fit really well.
“Of course if you are uncomfortable. . . .” He continued to talk although I’d missed the last moment or two of what he’d said. Nauseous was closer than uncomfortable to what I was feeling.
“You can just have a look in,” he said, as if encouraging me to peek in at a basket of sleeping newborn kittens. He pointed at a stepladder that would get me to the window-sized opening, about six feet up. “Be careful, even at rest it retains quite a lot of heat.”
No shit. I could feel the warmth radiating off it. With one foot on the first rung, I hoisted myself up and looked into a cavernous abyss. The heat alone could crisp my face like the sun at the equator. Did the mottled, whitish walls glow a little orange, or did I imagine that because it felt like hell?
I imagined Herr Schnoor, like the witch in the woods, pushing me in, closing the heavy wrought iron door, and latching it behind me. So this is how they planned to get rid of me. What would they tell my parents? That I fell in during a valiant attempt to assist them? I could not breathe the red hot air into my lungs, and I felt as if I were drowning, but not in cool blue water.
I wanted to help. I wanted to be helpful. To be the hero. To have them like me because I helped them solve the boiler problem and got us moving again. But then, I thought, forget it. Pleasing them was no longer my priority. I was my priority. I was scared, and even if it meant further delay, I decidedly did not want to descend into that infernal container. Whoever went in to clean it could go in again to figure out what was wrong with it. I may not have had a clue what I was signing up for when I came on board, but it was decidedly not this.
“Herr Engineer Sch
noor, I am so sorry, but I feel really uncomfortable right now. I’m having a hard time taking a deep breath. I think maybe it’d be better if someone who knows the boiler better—”
“Ya, ya, Fraulein it is not a problem at all. Really I just thought if you were curious. We will have one of the machinists take a look. Thank you for coming down. Guten Morgen.”
I turned and went back to air conditioned oxygen as quickly as I could without looking as if I were fleeing a crime scene. It occurred to me that I might have misjudged his intentions. Maybe he’d heard I’d been down there poking around with Karl and thought I’d find an inside tour of the boiler interesting. That they’d be doing me a favor—adding some spice to my otherwise pretty mundane days. Or maybe they just thought it would be easier to maneuver a smaller person around in there than some of the heftier engineers. I didn’t know, and I didn’t really care. I didn’t want to go into the boiler. For any reason. And I didn’t care what they thought.
Lost and found. Lost in space. Lost at sea. At a loss. I once was lost but now I’m found.
When I was six, my mother lost me. Not on purpose. She was struggling to juggle shopping bags and a three-year-old Suzanne in her arms and held tenuously onto my hand. We jostled along in a crowded rush-hour bus en route home from a shopping trip in Jamaica, Queens. She strained and swayed to keep her balance and a hold of everything, a slice of meat sandwiched between sweaty bodies. At six, I could hardly see her, or anything except belt lines and bellies smushing up against me. Her hand was my lifeline.
Someone pulled the overhead cord to signal that they wanted to get off—I heard the dull ding-ding, and the bus jolted to a stop. My grip on her loosened, leaving me afloat in a sea of strangers. What I knew a few scary moments later was that it was not a stop, but our stop, and she, the packages, and my sister had disembarked. I was lost.
