Hitler's Boat

by Pierre Turgeon

  “I’ll shoot myself in the head.” This sentence was constantly coming back to him, and every time, he could almost feel the cold cannon of his Colt 38 that he had left in Montreal, in the right drawer of his desk, where he could grab it as easily as one grabs a dictionary, lift his eyes over the bricks darkened by pollution of the walls of Saint-Joseph boulevard, towards the grey matter of any cloud. In a tired gesture, like with a fly, he chased away the idea of suicide. It seemed it haunted him more frequently since Virginia’s death.

  Not only had he not inherited the magnificent house on Saint-Sacrement street, too heavily mortgaged, that he wanted, nor the capital that would have allowed him to burn the thousands of pages of federal rules that he had to translate from English to French in order to survive every year, but the will of his priceless grandmother – may she burn in hell – was able to dispossess him of what little he had left: his past. The dead ceased the open wound and she transformed childhood memories in as many fake bills. Fake, this authoritarian father, that demanded that the corners of his bedspread fall at a right angle on the linoleum of his childhood bedroom, that insisted on talking in a terribly shaky and anglicized French under the false pretense that his mother – the equally false Acadian – wanted it this way.

  All at once it seemed his rebellion against the British institutions, personified by this Perceval Perkins, against the passport that asked, still today, in the name of “the Queen, for the interested authorities to please grant him the right of way,” was losing all its political sense.

  Should he rebuild his past like you regain capital? He did not have a choice. The price to pay for those who refuse to give a burial to their own was too heavy. The dead, who constitute the essence of thought, do not talk. His life was falling away though the void of his origins like when one pulls on a plug in a bathtub. He did not have too much of the Cutty Sark scotch he was drinking directly from the bottle to keep a little bit of liquid in his veins. The phone rang on the bedside table, next to the bed that was drifting off under the ceiling reddened by the rhythm of the neon signs.

  “This is Anthony O’Reilly. I was given the name of your hotel at the port management office. I’m at the bar.”

  The man was wearing a Basque beret over white, thick, curly hair that only made his physiognomy look even more stubborn where an elusive irony floated. He was drinking a beer. In front of the free sofa at his table, a glass of scotch was waiting for Christophe.

  “It’s Cutty Sark. The barman said it’s the only thing you drink. Cheers! OK… Listen, I came here with a good business proposition for you. I’m operating a dockyard in Paspébiac. Because of this stupid fog, my flight was delayed and I missed the auction for the Helgoland this morning. I’m offering you five thousand dollars more than you paid.”

  “No,” Christophe quickly replied. “The boat isn’t for sale. For personal reasons make it that it is priceless to me.”

  The Irishman gave him an inquiring look that remained unanswered. “You saw the state of the hull?”

  “I know. I’ll take care of it myself.”

  “Well then let me offer my dock for the repairs. I’ll take care of the towing as well. We’ll have to install a pump in the hold or it’ll sink.”

  “And what is this generous offer for?”

  “I’m the owner of a hotel in Paspébiac. It’s far from the tourist circuit. I thought of making an original attraction out of the Helgoland. Visiting Hitler’s old boat- that could interest people… So, when you don’t need it, maybe I could rent it from you monthly…”

  “Why not?”

  The two men agreed on a price. O’Reilly called his coaster to tow the Helgoland up to the dockyard in Paspébiac where it was brought to the dry dock. There, the hold finally dried out, Christophe searched in vain for a clue on the identity of Dansereau’s German friend. Also, using tar, he began to caulk the oak boards that had been cut from the Black Forest in 1936, carefully squared off by the Bremen cabinetmaker, coated in varnish, twined like the threads of an enormous wire that attached the past to the Helgoland. The boat slept and remembered.

  When replacing the oak marquetry, he discovered behind a rotten panel, under the sink drain, a metallic cylinder embossed with a Prussian eagle. At first he thought it was a pornographic film that the crew of the little sailboat would watch when the boat belonged to the Royal Canadian Navy.

  Sucking on the finger he had cut on the side of the cap, he unrolled the bobbin in front of a lamp, his eyes blinking before the minuscule rectangles: microfilmed text too small to be deciphered with the naked eye! To do so, he would have to use one of the viewers at the National Library when he would return to Montreal. So then the German, despite his caution, had left evidence behind. Surely he thought that the Helgoland, torn by the reefs, would sink with bodies and goods.

  Soon, Christophe was able to put the boat back on the waves, and he invited O’Reilly onboard, who had helped him replace beams and weld rivets, and whose hotel he had been staying at.

  They sat on the seat in the cabin that still smelled of varnish. Behind the portholes, a meter above, the edge of the quay was rounding up in the fog underlining the cannery like a bold trait. Christophe felt homesick for Germany, homesick for his mother, present in his thoughts like a German suffix.

  After his fifth glass, he who would never confide in anyone began to talk about how he had committed an act of terrorism twenty years ago.

  “Here’s to the IRA!” cheered his partner, as he drank his glass in one fell swoop.

  In his college laboratory, Christophe had stolen three flasks, wrapped them up in a newspaper and placed them in his briefcase. The smell of rotten eggs. The perfectly circular hole carved by the nitric acid he had thrown in his bedroom wall. His burnt right palm, the yellowish and dried skin that peeled in layers from having grabbed a bottle with a light sulfur mist on it. The tar-like mix; inert like ink. Then the surprise of ebullition, the expectorant chemical groan in the July air, a red mushroom the size of the house. But he had forgotten to add a coil to disperse the vapors.

  He fixed his mistake. He built a tube of nitro; it looked like a genie in a bottle, which he placed on the rails of the commuter train. The vibrations set off the explosion well before the arrival of the locomotive. No deaths, a few light injuries, but mostly a whole lot of fear. His war had begun.

  From extreme right to extreme left: the classic family portrait, just as the psychiatrist had abundantly explained about his uncle.. He was able to survive because he was one hundred and eighty-five centimeters tall, and he was working as an assistant librarian. He made walls with books and weights.

  “I didn’t have a choice in there. I had to bring it all back to the question of strength.”

  “I know exactly what you’re talking about,” O’Reilly said. “I did some time in Belfast too. For the same reasons.”

  They listened to the sails flap, they breathed in the smell of rotten wood from the quay. There were shards of the moon on the waves and the world stopped in the middle of the bay. Christophe wiped off the excess saliva from his lips.

  “And now you live like a dead man,” the Irish said. “I find that very sad… Forgive me for talking to you like that. But I can see that this whole story is killing you. It’s a poison for you, isn’t it? Your parents must’ve really loved each other. They should have separated because of the war. But your father preferred to betray his country. And you in all this? They left you behind.”

  “They didn’t have a choice!”

  “You really think that? My parents would have dragged us to hell rather than be separated from us.”

  “In any case, my father wasn’t a traitor. In any other country, he would even have been a hero. In Quebec he had to be a double agent, and he became one.”

  “You know what you have to do? You have to avenge your parents.”

  “My parents abandoned me when I was two years old; I don’t owe them anything. I don’t owe anything to my country either. I did
twenty years in jail for it and when I got out, I saw that it didn’t even exist!”

  “You’re all fucked up, man,” the Irish said as he gave him a solid slap on the shoulder. The day after the defeat of the referendum on the independence project, Christophe indeed thought he had lived in and defended a land of legend. He did not have any truths to defend, only fiction before the universal void.

  He earned a living as a translator. He had abandoned all his friends. They no doubt had reason to sing in a total absence of political ideas. He wanted to be able to forget his soul, his pride, his ambition; to hurt himself in poverty, the inner desert. He wanted to take his car and run up his credit card. In California. So he did.

  It was in that moment that an official voice had chosen to dryly announce that his grandmother had passed away. A heart attack at the age of eighty-five: a name deleted from the social security computer, a room freeing up in an old folks’ home, the family to notify so they could retrieve the deceased’s personal effects and organize the funeral.

  No tears on this statistical incident. But the death of his grandmother Virginia had cut the last link he had to this grey, sour city. A squirrel was running on a wire over the neighboring school, its days marking a beat with the bell: subway, tunnels, hot wind, a hideous tower with a blue sign with a white fleur-de-lis. Her personal belongings: a trunk in the basement garage. Her letter: your parents are not your parents. Her will: she made him his universal legatee and asked to be incinerated and buried with her two sons. To fulfill her wishes, he would have to search for a father who had disappeared in Germany forty-five years ago.

  Wilted, wrinkled, shriveled up in a purple dress with a lace collar. Her death allowed him to love the one who had raised him once again. He made the arrangements with the funeral hall. The metallic urn he was given looked like a bombshell. It had to be changed. He transferred the ashes into an anonymous plastic thermos and stuck her photo on the red plastic cap. He could not decide where to bury her, so he kept her in a cabinet.

  He had to sell the Victorian house on Saint-Sacrement Street. He lived there a few weeks: the time to find a buyer. He found the only photo of his real parents. Taken on the porch of the Anglican church of Quebec, on Perceval and Marie’s wedding day, Marie, the Acadian from Halifax. The newlyweds triumphed in the foreground, eyes mere slits from the sun’s violent light. He, strapped in his uniform and his national motto “God is my right,” and she, dreaming and frail, her waist girded by the dress with a train.

  Behind, a few steps higher, in the shadow of the bell tower: the couple that had created him. Relentlessly, he searched their faces to read the signs of their future fate. His father, a twenty-something redhead, whose portrait he had seen in history books: withdrawn lower jaw, thick lips and a slender neck that betrayed a weakness and sentimentality he was trying to hide with a stubborn pout and his arms crossed over a black velvet suit with thick white stripes. The lesser son, Christophe thought before the adoration Virginia expressed as she looked at Perceval.

  The image of his mother, whom he was seeing for the first time, caused him genuine shock. He did not understand what neither Virginia’s letter nor the reading of the few snippets about his father had explained: why had von Chénier, leaving his son and country, thrown himself towards the dangerous perils of a hysterical Germany? A simple glance at Lizbeth was enough for him. In this amateur shot, she emanated as much beauty as the mysterious silent movie stars. Great eyes partially hidden by the fringe of her hair. His mother. She held on to her lover’s arm with such fondness, but the look she was giving Virginia was not tender.

  The Irish whistled between his teeth as he gave him the photo back. “What a babe. But your Virginia, at eighty, she wasn’t imagining things a little?”

  “You want to see what I found here?” Christophe asked. He got up and felt around the cache under the sink, pulling out the cylinder with the Prussian eagle that he placed between them on the cabin table.

  “What is it?” O’Reilly asked.

  “Nazi microfilms,” he answered, feeling slightly nauseous. Then he climbed up the ladder that led to the cockpit, staggered across the deck and then without thinking, threw himself in the sea. He emptied his lungs and sank, oh, the wonderful hushed fall through the freezing water that dragged him to the limit of his burning lungs, that suddenly blew up like the bolt of an air rifle, and reluctantly brought him back to the surface, eyes and mouth full of salt. Leaning over him, the Irish was smiling.

  “You see that you don’t have a choice. You have to settle this. Or kill yourself. See you!”

  He put the bottle of Smirnoff at his feet and climbed the ladder up to the quay. Christophe changed and lay on the deck. The trawlers’ superstructures shone over the dark mass of hulls. To the left, a sandy beach stretched between the bay and the Barachois; on the horizon, the low coast of New Brunswick. He pulled up the collar of his loden and traced the railing that surrounded the ship with his thumb where the plate glass had made a swastika appear, engraved in the oak.

  He fell unconscious and woke up on his bunk around eleven in the morning, terribly hungry and thirsty. The Irish had to bring him back in the cabin in the early morning. Christophe turned on the radio: the navy fleet had just sailed off to board and inspect refugee boats off the coast of Newfoundland. Canada is a clean country and intends on remaining as such.

  He did not have the courage to heat up a can of food in the kitchen that lightly lulled. He listened to the water splashing, the flat sound of the hull when it softly hits the tires attached as buffers to the quay that he climbed on the worm-eaten ladder. He packed his bags, wrapping the cylinder containing the microfilms in his clothes, then, in the sun, he left behind him the smooth, slender silhouette of the Helgoland. He went up the deserted road. A salty scent rose up from a marsh surrounded by wild grass, in the middle of which stood a broadcasting antenna, held in place by steel cables and attached to the ground by a log pontoon.

  Quickening his pace, he crossed the bridge over the Barachois and climbed the slope towards the steep forest between the bay and the national road that followed from the top of the cliffs; the coast’s rugged edges. At the end of a path of water-filled ruts where the dead trembled over the glow of the sun, he found the Irish’s hotel with its three floors of openwork design turrets and its caryatid moldings.

  “The boss isn’t around?” he asked the waitress after having ordered a kyr.

  “Here I am!” the Irish answered. A pair of binoculars dangled from his neck. He had seen a whale with its three babies: blue with fins marbled in black, and he thought he could still hear the echo of songs produced by the biggest mouth on the planet, that whistling the other titans were picking up on thousands of kilometers away. It reminded him of the sound of a sonar on the hull of a submarine.

  “I would’ve liked to be a whale,” he said. “Diving at the bottom of the seas, only to surface one ocean later.”

  Christophe handed him a set of keys. “I’m leaving the boat in your care. I have accounts to settle.”

  “With the living or the dead?”

  “I don’t know. If I’m not back in six months, the Helgoland is yours. Can you drive me to the station in three hours?”

  In the car, the Irishman, visibly eager to be on more secrets, did not stop watching him from the corner of his eye, but Christophe remained silent. He was being smothered beneath three centuries of treason, defeats and surrenders; his history was written in invisible ink, or in smoke signals. What does an aborted nation dream of? Their agony is discreet, civil, Americanized, but they continue to die through video clips, comic books and free trade. He would have liked to sit with von Chénier and talk to him. But he was dead, murdered, with no one to avenge him. And his absence tormented Christophe as much as his imaginary ridiculed and renounced country. He could not build anything on emptiness; he fell into it, that is all. All that remained was for him to live in that fall, slow and beautiful; to slow it down.

  Perhaps, Chris
tophe thought that the Irish could understand him since he did not belong to the triumphant people, with high and clear verbs, that act out their plays on the stakes of history, that move forward with their hands on their hips, with their tutelary god, immense and flamboyant in the night above them; people he admired, as his own were floating in marshy indecision, leaving him an orphan of time, like an unborn fetus; not giving him any leverage to lift the crushing, enigmatic world.

  “The best,” the Irish said as though he were reading his thoughts, “would be to never be born. Believing you exist is the first mistake. Where are you going like that?”

  “Montreal. I have a translation job to do.”

  “On the microfilms?”

  O’Reilly braked and parked on the shoulder of the road. He got out and walked to the trunk, which he opened, and then he waited for Christophe to join him.

  “Look in your suitcase,” he said.

  Before he even unscrewed the cylinder to notice that the microfilms inside were blank, Christophe had figured out the trick the other must have played on him, probably while he lay drunk dead on the deck.

  “Where are they?”

  “In Halifax. I lied to you. I wasn’t trying to buy the boat, not for me, but for a client: a German who didn’t have the time to come to Canada. He called me at the dock. I took his offer. He transferred the necessary funds into my account. With a generous commission. He told me he was collecting the items that had belonged to Hitler.”

  With his back to him, O’Reilly had sat on a rock in front of a bushy, steep slope that went all the way down to the Chaleurs Bay. He was throwing gravel on the corrugated tin of an open sewer.

  “He called me last week. I didn’t like his tone when he said: ‘So you have failed in purchasing the Helgoland?’ He explained that it wasn’t the boat that interested him so much as a metallic cylinder hidden under the sink. And if something were to happen to you, it wouldn’t bother him. I would even get an additional reward, a bonus like in those times in Ireland. The bastard knew of my terrorist past… I told him: ‘Hell no! That guy is my friend.’ But I didn’t want any trouble with that German. So I mailed him the microfilms.”