My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  And I admire myself. Yes, I love myself!

  I am a crazy paid-by-the-hour laborer who merges with the monotonous work. Others hate such a conceited destroyer of the piecework idea. I could work myself to death just for the pleasure of the magnificent monotony. The first mate ought to be happy to encounter, finally, a lobotomized, seventeen-year-old, healthy, strong worker, since there are others who believe that work is a punishment to be done reluctantly. Guys like Svenson, for instance.

  Amazed but pleased, he observed my violent hammering and came to the conclusion that as far as he was concerned he could relax, let his legs dangle over the edge of the raft, and smoke, while he criticized my work as being totally inefficient in order to maintain his superiority as seaman.

  There wasn’t a shark in sight. But by the time for the coffee break, I had devised a plan to scare the pants off Svenson. He would have to eat his own self-satisfied guffaws that had echoed in my ears when I plopped into the water earlier.

  When we had climbed back up the rope ladder, I sneaked over to the kitchen’s garbage cans and put cold cuts, old meat scraps, bones, and fish gut in a few rags, which I tied together into a small sack. Then quickly down to the raft, underneath which I tied my drippy parcel with a piece of wire. I counted on being able to push the tidbits into the water behind Svenson’s back. Unseen by him. If the sharks were still in the harbor basin, my bait had to be irresistible.

  I jumped into the water.

  That’s how I am. If you are going to do anything, you should do it well and quickly. I was back on the raft before anybody noticed, climbed up on deck, and walked dripping wet into the mess hall, where I looked at a row of dumbfounded faces.

  Had I really swum across the harbor?

  Oh yes, indeed. I bet the wages yet due to me that nobody would dare to repeat the feat.

  An unnatural silence fell over the room. Soon after everybody began to cackle back and forth. Could there possibly be sharks in the harbor basin? And, depending on the answer to that question, what did that make me? Uniquely brave or an utter fool and madman?

  The German declared that there were no sharks whatsoever in the basin, but that I was a fool and a madman anyway. Had I not come close to missing the boat in Cape Town?

  Quick as a wink, Svenson decided to share that opinion. Just for the fun of it, he could swim clear across the harbor basin and back again. But why swim around in North Haven’s sludge when one could walk over to Beach Taperoo? Where one may meet girls from good families and fuck for free if everything worked out.

  Such a statement, inconceivable as it was, swept away all interest in sharks. Every man seemed to have his own story about meeting a girl from a good family in some corner of the world.

  Admiration mixed with envy and disbelief greeted the tale of a Spanish family girl and her generously bestowed favors. The majority seemed dead sure of the impossibility of such an event. It fell on its own preposterousness.

  I have read a few books during my life. Thanks to my beautiful and talented mother, I, at the age of seventeen, was rather well versed in what people call theological controversies. But all that hairsplitting amounts to zero compared to how sailors around a table in a mess hall are capable of turning and twisting the concept of girls from good families.

  Throw a parched sailor in the middle of the Sahara and he will see a family girl flutter in a mirage rather than an oasis.

  I felt entitled to claim that I was closest to girls of good families since I as the youngest had fresh memories of being considered a human being and not a fickle, faithless, seducing sailor in the perception of both girls and their families. But compared to the coarse descriptions flying in the air, my little accounts were weak numbers and nothing to write home about. So I listened and tried to learn something.

  The problem seemed to be that every mate wanted to meet a girl from a good family who at the same time was something completely different. It made no sense.

  I kept nodding and agreeing anyhow. Though mostly I was thinking of my sharks.

  The terror and the commotion of the morning had acted as a centrifugal force that had vacuumed out my power of judgment. I thought of the sharks as belonging to me and hoped they were not busy chewing their way right through the raft. Sharks can smell blood miles away, and some blood could have trickled out of my parcel. The plan would fail totally if they were already circling the raft. Seaman Svenson had to be taken by surprise, exactly as a family girl — surprise combined with a large dose of imagination, all based upon meticulous planning.

  He wasn’t going to dare to put even his little toe into the water at Beach Taperoo.

  Strangely enough, I did not think a lot about the German and his threats. Things were different between us. Perhaps he wanted to see me dead or perhaps he just wanted to give me a good scare. In spite of everything, I felt unwilling admiration for him. Almost in the same way as I did for the sharks.

  The boatswain saw his responsibility as foreman slip through his fingers in the face of the colossal subject of family girls, and he interrupted the lustily panting mirages with a summed-up conclusion.

  “In th’long wun ye pay ‘nyhoo.” Wise words, indeed, from a man with no teeth.

  He spoke like that. Sometimes it was impossible to make any sense out of the sounds, which did not make me less of a fool in the others’ eyes. The first time he allotted jobs, I didn’t understand one syllable.

  “Seep wi’ung” could only be translated as a command to us who were young to go and get some sleep.

  Consequently I had turned back to my bunk. Finally I had met a truly sympathetic human being. He seemed good-natured even when he woke me up with a spluttered torrent of unintelligible words. It wasn’t until he put his expensive false teeth in place that I understood his hatred for young punks who had their own teeth. That was the first and only time I saw him with his teeth in his mouth during work hours. The men whispered that he used them when he went ashore. Except that nobody had ever seen him go ashore.

  Enough about the bosun. “Weiter!” as the German used to say.

  I tried to hurry Svenson. We climbed down to the raft and continued our tedious work while he, in a splendid mood, related some of his ventures in the ports of the world. Girls from good families or not, one thing was sure: Port Adelaide was still the way the song described it. As long as you had money to spend, everything worked out just fine.

  As soon as I could, I pushed the kitchen scraps into the water. The parcel dangled about a yard below the raft. Water saturated the torn cloth and soon frail veils of blood were visible on my side of the raft. A well-formulated invitation to my friends, I thought — as if they could tell the difference between a deck boy and a seaman.

  To my utter disappointment, the surface of the water remained calm as a mirror. No triangular fins raced along, however many looks I threw all around the harbor basin. Instead Svenson began for the hundredth time to mock and ridicule my imaginary sharks. He threw his cigarette butt in the water and dove in after it, came up snorting, splashed wildly, and hollered kiddingly for help. An iron band closed around my chest. I urged him to climb back up quickly, my voice hoarse with tension. I fell to my knees and held out my hand, pleading with him.

  It would be my fault if he were to be suddenly pulled under by man-eating monsters.

  He must have detected something in my face. I was truly scared. He took my proffered hand and heaved himself up on the raft. He stared at me.

  “Boy, you’re shaking! Are you getting a sunstroke?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said and returned gratefully to the dull removal of rust while he pulled off his shorts to let them dry in the sun.

  His feet splashed in the water, and he rolled over on his back. To give his family jewels a bit of sun, was how he put it. Then he went into a long tirade about a birth-control method which, in short, meant that one overheated the balls and thereby killed all sperms.

  “In case one runs into a girl from a good family,” he
said and pointed proudly downward.

  He asked me to wake him up when “it” started to raise its head. That would mean it was Saturday night and time to go ashore.

  I kept on knocking and banging.

  And thought of women while the smacking sound vibrated in my ear. I imagined exactly how I would lose my virginity that clung like a leech to me. It was not right that I should be the one and only virgin, since all of me was actually drooling debauchery beneath the surface. Once a Spanish doctor in Las Palmas looked into my ear with a light. He emitted a whistling sound of surprise. I understood him perfectly: Lacking the real thing, my head had created its own pornographic movie theater. I was undernourished. It was time. High time. But I took the whole thing too seriously, as my brother used to point out. I had become stuck in the theology — the woman as a saint or not a saint —? and would probably have to sail the seven seas forever like a luckless monk. A part of me looked with horror and fright at everything people could and did do to each other, driven by carnal desires and raw lust. The other part of me romped around indecently with family girls and professional ladies of the night in one big voluptuous mess. To put it briefly, I wanted to be like Svenson. For him the whole thing was simply a matter of putting his trunk into the nearest available hole.

  It wasn’t fair that I should be the one with an overdeveloped sensitivity.

  I cursed fate while the sun rose toward its zenith and threw bolts of fire at us. The work demon grabbed hold of me again, the rust spots shimmered in front of my eyes, sweat ran in torrential rivers, the blows resounded, and my head was boiling over. The monotony had put me into a hypnotic state. Forward. On and on. It would have been impossible to stop. I had to conquer the vast surface of boiling metal.

  In this condition I got a sudden feeling that the sun had run off to hide inside a cloud. I was freezing. Chills traveled from the nape of my neck down toward the ice-cold hem of my sweat-soaked pants. I turned around to grab my shirt and tie it quickly around the waist in order to return without loss of time to my insane hammering. But the sun had not disappeared behind any cloud. And Svenson was sleeping peacefully. He was still lying on his back with his feet dangling in the water. No man of woman born would be able to have fun with what Svenson had between his legs now, courtesy the scorching sun.

  I could easily imagine the sore seaman’s new and cautious way of walking. My own heavily sunburned back was nothing in comparison with the look of his most dearly prized bodily parts. I exploded in irrepressible, roaring laughter.

  Svenson woke up, confused and under the influence of the sun. He neither stirred nor tried to get up. He kept lying without moving while I tried to explain the reasons behind my attacks of mirth. The poor idiot didn’t feel a thing yet, and I was unable to get comprehensible words out of my mouth.

  Laughter folded me in two, and I took the opportunity to scrutinize the sun blisters on the severely burned skin and gristle scraps between his legs. What a wondrous sight!

  In my head the laughter was hot bubbles appearing in boiling porridge. I fell to my knees, laughing. I could not stop, even when I saw my two sharks race toward the raft.

  This time they attacked the way sharks are supposed to. With fins like superbly honed saws, they cut their way with terrible speed through the water. Laughing hysterically by Svenson’s side, I managed somehow to get out a word or two about the sharks.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said lethargically

  He wasn’t going to be fooled.

  With no time to discuss the matter, I rolled him roughly onto his stomach and pulled at his arms to get his legs up on the raft. He roared in pain when his scorched sex organ chafed against the rough planks as both sharks hit the raft with a dull thump. Fighting for my balance, I was thrown down headlong and looked straight into Svenson’s empty, staring eyes. He was gone. The pain had made him lose every concept of anything. Great confusion shone out of his eyes and cold sweat squirted out of his pores while he moaned that the sharks had bit him between the legs. Somehow, mysteriously, they had jumped up through the double planks and chewed the pride of his manhood to bits. I nodded in agreement. The two shark fins made a turn a few yards from the raft and plunged straight toward us again.

  “It’s the blood attracting them,” I hissed and pointed.

  He sobbed plaintively when the raft shuddered violently. I jumped up, pushed the shirt under him, bounced down on his bare buttocks, and yelled that if he did not want to bleed to death, he had to have a pressure bandage.

  In any other condition, he would have seen things more clearly. But the heavy shock had an immense effect. It must have hurt terribly when I pulled him over the unplaned planks at the same time as the sharks thumped heavily into the raft. They kept whipping up the water around us and, in spite of my having reinforced the raft, it felt eerie.

  Accompanied by Svenson’s grunts and moans, I hollered for help.

  Someone let down the hook, I fastened the raft to it, and we were lifted out of the water and away from the two beasts. My food parcel had long ago been torn away. In other words, no trace remained of my carefully planned revenge. With my foot on his ass, I stood on the raft and affirmed spiritedly Svenson’s confused grunts. Yes, the sharks had bitten him in a very special place. And I had saved him without giving a thought to the danger to my own life.

  The crew came running. The sharks were interesting, of course, but it was equally fascinating to see the mutilated seaman. The bosun tried to turn him over, but Svenson refused, remained on his stomach, and yelled bloody murder, while he pressed my shirt against his lower abdomen with all the strength he had left.

  “D'n't b’a bib,” said the bosun.

  Which probably meant that Svenson should not carry on like a baby.

  “He’s had a nervous breakdown,” I said, as humbly as I could. One should never exaggerate.

  The second mate was pale under his tan but realized his duty as our ship’s doctor. He ordered a couple of men to turn Svenson over on his back so he could assess the damage. Strong arms rolled over the recoiling and kicking seaman. After a tug-of-war using my shirt, he let go, totally exhausted. We formed a tight circle around him, put our heads together, and made the observation that the second mate was correct.

  “Oh well. Nothing’s bleeding.”

  On the whole, that was the only positive thing that could be said about Svenson’s purply, swollen genitals. Some born-again wit insisted that he had seen similar damage on other sailors who had tried sexual intercourse with sharks.

  Never in my wildest stretch of imagination had I dreamed of so much rehabilitating satisfaction all at once. The sharks were now a reality. And Svenson was shaking in every cell of his body. For the moment, his interest was concentrated on gingerly protecting what he thought he had lost forever.

  One day he may begin to ponder what had actually occurred, but that day was as far away as the crew’s interest in taking over his work duties. While I, naturally, jumped gallantly onto the raft the minute the first mate kicked up a row to indicate that the workday was not over, bravely offering to go on fighting rust spots. Whereupon he pointed at me and, to his own surprise, found himself holding me up as an example, worthy of imitating — an example of the old, responsible, honorable, self-sacrificing sailor corps.

  As such a fine example, I was lowered down to the sharks.

  The odds were not really against me. The raft was stable enough, as only I could know. Also, as one would expect, the first mate’s pale visage was hanging over the rail most of the time. He was vain but not stupid. A lost and eaten deck boy would be a serious demerit.

  When the sharks returned after a while and rubbed against the outside of the raft, as if expecting some special treat, he was the one who with his pipe tapped out the distress signal SOS.

  I waved good-bye to my finned friends and climbed up the rope ladder. I left the raft where it was. The first mate patted my shoulder as he would a prodigal lost and found son. Beneath that loose skin palpita
ted a father’s heart that, after a moment’s hesitation, still refused to let me go ashore this Saturday night but was willing to make an exception so far as Sunday was concerned. I cheered up and tried to look as if I fully intended to go to church.

  Saturday or Sunday, what does it matter? I thought. The main thing was that I, as the completion of my crucifixion of Svenson, was given a chance to put a crown of thorns upon his head by a matter-of-fact description of my pleasures ashore. Besides, it was high time for me to become a man. While I made a beeline for the nearest Eden to partake of tempting fruits, Svenson could always quote the Song of Solomon: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.”

  I combined this pleasant state of affairs with the splendor of being a shark expert. As modestly as I was able, I reminded my shipmates of my earlier swim. That outdid even the captain’s stentorian contribution to the conversation. With his twenty years in the trade, he had still not seen even the fin of a shark in any harbor basin.

  He cursed the sons of Allah who heaved dead sheep overboard. He cursed strike leaders, agents, the sun, the heat, and the mess boy, who did not bring a fresh beer quickly enough after he had gulped down the first. A real captain, famous in every Australian harbor, ruled over us and our ship. He had even been given an Australian pet name: Woolakiiaan sagamaaroo. It means “the man who carries his table on the stomach.” Beer belly is a milder version.

  Our dear commander could be useful, said one mate. As a buoy if we were to go fishing for sharks. The crew continued tirelessly to discuss the immediate future of the sharks rather than take an interest in work. Some thought it would be impossible to fish for sharks from a given, permanent point. A shark would tear himself or the cordage apart when it was stretched. One sailor’s suggestion sounded more feasible —- to make a buoy with a hook and chain below, something similar to what was used in whale hunting.

  Sunday.

  “Sunday,” everybody said in unison.

  Because now we had managed to stretch out the Saturday afternoon to the finishing line and the fetters burst apart. To borrow the words of the first mate, a free weekend ashore was about as common as kangaroos turning into camels. Electric shocks of expectation went through the crew. The bosun even considered putting in his false teeth. An aroma of soap and shaving lotion fought in the insane heat against the musty stench of sheep from the Muslim ship.