My Father, His Son

by Reidar Jonsson

  “I’ll see what to believe when I get to see them,” was how the third mate expressed his opinion.

  A rather reasonable request, considering the reputation of the two.

  I slid happily and eagerly down the ladder to convey the message. First when my feet touched the deck did it occur to me that the third mate would probably tumble backwards if both Vappu and Stockholm were to let their breath escape in the direction of his face. I have an absolutely extraordinary ability to do everything wrong by eagerly trying to please everyone.

  Well, I didn’t have to worry about it. Stockholm was already standing on the deck in the dark night, staring out over the river toward the faintly glimmering lights ashore. He was shivering, as if from a chill, when I dared to touch him. I could have sworn that I heard someone sobbing in the noise of the wind.

  Then he became unmanageable all of a sudden and yelled that he could walk on his hands along the railing around the whole damned ship, if he so desired. He jumped up on the railing and rocked back and forth.

  I have experienced that kind of thing innumerable times. Without asking for it, you are handed a bunch of cards that you can’t read. It’s a poker game with a deck of cards invented for the moment. The one invited to play inevitably does it wrong. But to save the life of someone who wants to jump overboard can never be wrong, a beginner in the game will say. Ha! He doesn’t know the first thing about the rules. I must discuss that another time. Now I had to deal with the grave matter of Stockholm. The problem was that he was unbelievably big and strong. I didn’t dare to get too close in case he’d get the brilliant idea to pull me along. I took a few steps away from the railing and suggested that he climb down. It was his watch; he should take his turn; I had neither the time nor the inclination to accompany him all around the ship while he walked on his hands.

  “Which I’m sure you’d be able to do,” I said.

  A glint of surprise forced itself to the surface.

  “You believe that?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “But not that I’d be able to swim ashore?”

  We were hanging from a cliff above a gaping abyss with our fingertips touching lightly — just half an inch more and I would have saved him. That’s how it was, in spite of me standing two yards away from him. A few words more and his madness would have lifted its wings and flown away. I drew a blind card in the mystifying game and thought I was on the right track when I appealed to his common sense.

  “You wouldn’t get very far away from the starboard side. I mean, however far out you’d jump, you’d end up in the propeller suction. There’d be nothing but gristle left of you.”

  “So that’s what you think!”

  It was over. I had only one card left. I turned away and took another step away from him.

  “Jump then. If you’re so goddamned stupid.”

  Such total lack of interest combined with cool disdain ought to erase his need of revenge. There was nobody looking now. Further astern, Vappu’s party was in full swing. Who cared about the disappearance of a guy from Stockholm, I thought, but wished he would quit the grim game.

  I pulled out my trump card, took a few more steps in the direction away from where he stood, icily determined not to turn back but to show that he had to play on his own, without an audience.

  As I reached the rope ladder leading up to the boat deck, I whirled around anyhow. Stockholm had jumped. Perhaps I had heard a faint scream and a splash through the roaring of the wind. Perhaps I only imagined it.

  With a few leaps, I was on the boat deck, yanked loose a life buoy, and threw it into the rushing water. Then all strength leaked out of me. It was not even twenty yards to the bridge. In a few seconds I would hear my own voice holler, “Man overboard!”

  But my legs turned to lead. I had to drag myself up the next rope ladder. The scene with Stockholm kept running over and over in my head, at the same time as large parts of my brain tried to erase and obliterate the whole event. It had not happened. He had not jumped. Why didn’t I do anything? Why didn’t I rush over and pull him down?

  The twenty steps seemed like a mile-long walk to a court of judgment where the verdict had already been handed out. I saw Eight in front of me, his finger pointing, even though he didn’t have any. To what punishment are people who don’t care condemned?

  Or had I done the best I could?

  Could I have done it differently? Could I have used other words?

  In actuality, the twenty steps took just a few seconds. And my voice sounded exactly as I had imagined it. It broke as if I were still in my early teens, though I was all of eighteen. And Eight swore exactly as much as I had expected. As a real captain, he made decisions before anybody else had time even to think about it. He threw himself on the engine telegraph and stopped the engines as he ordered me to drop the anchor quickly. There was no time to lose. We could not be adrift in the middle of the river’s current flow many minutes before we made contact with some sandbank.

  Gratefully I worked off some of the heavy questions. The steel cable clanged harshly in the black night at the same time as the tocsin resounded its signal over my head. “Every man on deck! Hurry!

  Hurry!’5

  Everybody seemed to be shouting.

  But really, what was there to do? If Stockholm had not been sliced to bits by the propeller, he must certainly be moving outward with the tide and the current, somebody reasoned, and made a gesture over the dirt yellow river water, which by now was bathing in light from every available light source.

  I was quite a distance ahead of the others in the development of events since I had more or less recommended Stockholm to jump. Irritated by their sluggishness, I yelped between clenched teeth that we must get a boat in the water. Crew hands wavered uncertainly over the lifeboat apron.

  Was it really any use? Especially since none of the men were sober.

  Of course I had forgotten that. What I took for slowness and general paralysis was the result of that damned jungle juice.

  A weak wind huffed a few warm breezes over us. From the skylight down to the engine room, the large main engine growled in a subdued voice. As many as possible of the earlier so boisterous party participants clung to the headlights, letting them sweep over the water. The rest did their best to avoid having to bring the lifeboat down into the dark and ominous water. I wanted to fall to my knees and plead for some action to be carried out in order to erase my guilt. But since I was the only one who knew of it, that seemed exaggerated. Why throw such burdens on others?

  Along with other seamen by the railing, I ultimately got used to the thought that everything was already too late.

  “When it comes to folks from Stockholm, one more or one less makes little difference,” someone muttered and spat into the water.

  I was inclined to agree when I happened to glance sternward. Vappu was working feverishly with the jolly boat that was hanging on the upper poop deck. Vappu! Yes! With him I could share my guilt. If Vappu had not forced his melancholy buddy’s arm, they might have continued to pump iron and slurp jungle juice for the rest of their days.

  I flew sternward toward Vappu. Several of the men followed me. The jolly boat was of course much more suitable for putting into the river than the ungainly lifeboats, which needed ten men with a sober sense of rhythm at the oars. The difference from the lifeboats was also that the smaller workboat had an inboard motor.

  Soon enough we were lowered. I threw off the mooring line and we drifted out with the current into the darkness while Vappu tried to get the motor going. He swore long tirades in Finnish, the water clucked against the sides of the boat, and our strongly illuminated ship seemed soon much too far away.

  “He couldn’t stand that you won the arm wrestling,” I said in order to transfer my burden onto Vappu.

  He looked up over the motor.

  “No, no. I didn’t break down his arm. I let him win. But maybe he noticed.”

  “Guess he had too much to drink. He may have tr
ied to keep up with you, Vappu. You pour a lot of that stuff inside you.”

  I kept jabbering. I couldn’t stop.

  Vappu straightened up from the stone dead motor. He looked out over the water and gestured for me to be quiet.

  “I don’t drink a lot. In Finland, we drink a lot.”

  Vappu stood there like a concrete block in the boat, immobile and yet as if ready to jump in after Stockholm. His weight slowly seemed to press the boat down, toward the bottom. Slowly, slowly it sank through the river’s indifferent surface. Suddenly I felt water far above the ankles.

  “Vappu! We’re sinking.”

  “Damnation! The stopcock!”

  We threw ourselves down and fumbled around in the dark. Somebody had probably unscrewed the stopcock so that the boat would not fill up with rainwater. Vappu grunted, fell to his knees and tore off his shirt, ripped off a few strips, and groped around until he managed to press the rags down into the hole. He stood up. For the moment we were safe, but we drifted with rather alarming speed away from the ship. The tide played with us as if we were a piece of cork. Again Vappu stood there, silent and inert. Shouldn’t we try to do something?

  “Shouldn’t we try to call him?” I asked.

  “What’s his name?” Vappu asked in turn. “I don’t know.

  I don’t remember.”

  Vappu was right. It felt wrong to call out “Stockholm” and let it reverberate in the darkness. Out of a little more than thirty crew members, I didn’t know the name of more than possibly five. We knocked against each other like old beer cans with long-since-rubbed-off labels. We lived and worked together in the ship’s microcosm, making dents and scratches in one another, and these served as name tags rather than the old association with regular names bestowed in a christening or similar rite. Had I jumped overboard, the rest of the crew would be faced with an identical problem. Who would stand there and holler “Strangler!” into the West African night?

  Sternward only Vappu kept his name. I don’t know why. Perhaps because he so determinedly pressed it into each hand when he introduced himself. Also, to our Swedish ears, Vappu sounded pretty much like a brand of beer.

  We kept drifting. We heard or saw no sign of Stockholm. Finally Vappu sat down. He let out a long sigh.

  “You Swedes are fucking funny. Never happy when you drink. Why not?”

  “Vappu,” I said. “We Swedes want to be very happy; we’re always happy. A normal Swede radiates joy, health, and prosperity. There’s no place for sorrow in our country, no room for tears. We cry too little and laugh too much. Our jaw muscles are worn stiff from all our smiles. That’s why we drink and get melancholy and gloomy. We need help to handle our sorrow. Look at me. I’m happy and jolly all the time. I’ve such an enormous and unrestrained sorrow inside me that I simply don’t dare to drink. Imagine if I drowned in all the tears that have never been let out.”

  In the dark I glimpsed Vappu’s thoughtful face.

  “No. Yeah. But couldn’t they listen to beautiful music instead? Sibelius. You know him? I listen to him every night. Then I cry. Cry big rivers. Just like the music. Try it.”

  “But Vappu,” I protested. “You don’t have a record player.”

  Vappu hit his bare chest with the enormous club that was his fist.

  “Oh yeah? Inside here.”

  He motioned for me to come over. I did. I bent over him and put my ear to his hairy chest, exactly above the heart. A whole symphony orchestra played inside the muscle-armored ribs. The sound was exquisite. Soft and expansive with a sadness strong as cold-rolled iron. Vappu ruffled my hair a little.

  “Well, can you hear it?’9

  “Vappu,” I said. “You’re overworked. You’ve a whole symphony orchestra in your chest. You hear hallucinations.”

  I was still lying with my ear glued to his chest. Sibelius must have been a big man with large, masculine tears. Rapids must have spurted from his eyes. The musicians in the symphony orchestra played as if enchanted in there; fir trees whispered, silvery lakes glittered, ripe wheat fields waved. It was a solemn, noble sorrow. In spite of the obvious danger of the boat overflowing, I had to press out some tears.

  While I lay against Vappu’s broad chest, sense memories of my father emerged. My own father was equally big and wide as a church door. He was a Swedish version of Vappu but with no symphony orchestra in his chest. I thought of the Islander who had fed me miniature chocolate bottles; I thought of an electrician who had saved me from a knife fight with a Spaniard. And I thought of Bengtsson, my very first bosun. He was like a father to me. Everybody had been like a father to me, but now I was eighteen years old and ought to become an adult and forget my father. What I had not received, I would never get.

  On the other hand, if I ever met my own father, I could kill him.

  Or at least punch him out, so long as he in reality was not quite as big as Vappu.

  Yes, indeed. Sibelius must have been a dangerous man, I concluded against Vappu’s chest as the symphony orchestra kept playing Sibelius’s mighty music. And the sorrow transformed itself into the West African night.

  All fell silent and there were movements against my ear as if the musicians put away their instruments and went home. But it was Vappu who had started rowing. I must have fallen asleep. He kept on rowing with long, rhythmic movements. The boat croaked and clucked along, and I realized that Vappu had given up. Searching for Stockholm in the dark was a futile undertaking. After a while I felt guilty and offered to take the other oar. We tried to match each other’s strength or lack of it but just kept rotating. When Vappu tried to put as little force behind the oar as I did, we got nowhere. So he took over the oars alone again. To make up for it, I bailed water as we approached the radiant ship, illuminated as if for a celebration.

  I wondered what to say about the stopcock. And about the motor. We could have gotten lost and been killed, too. It ought to be put in the log. Negligence. Goddamned sloppiness. The first mate did not keep things shipshape.

  “Now you’re fucking Swedish again,” Vappu commented. “Stockholm won’t come back, we’re afloat, and in just a little while we’ll get breakfast. What more do you want?”

  I wish that Vappu had been right about all of that. Oh yes, the gray dawn arrived and the darkness scurried off across the longitudes. Before we set foot on deck, the sun glittered forward its first welding-ray tongues. And from the cook’s domain, a rich odor of eggs and bacon floated toward us. Sunday breakfast was served as a small compensation for the night’s hell. One said thanks and lapped it up.

  Everything Vappu had said before we boarded the ship was correct except one thing. When he promised that Stockholm wouldn’t come back, he was wrong.

  On the bridge Eight paced back and forth when I was sent up to inform him of the nightly events. He was profoundly irritated. That we would have had to drop anchor anyway, he had forgotten. Stockholm would have to pay — three months off his salary. It was expensive as hell to have a full crew work overtime all night long. And a crew to boot that had the stomach to insist that it was the men’s right to be drunk during their time off.

  Eight would be holding forth about our worthlessness to this day, had not the second mate slipped in that the crew under no circumstances could count on overtime. The safety of the ship had been endangered. Through his negligence in not taking his watch at the correct time, Stockholm had put the whole ship in distress and peril since it was indeed highly dangerous to navigate in narrow waters with one crew member missing. According to the letter of the law. Period.

  The second mate was an extremely ambitious man, a reserve officer, and an incurable romantic. Two things made the world understandable and worthy of living in so far as he was concerned: maritime law and immaculate white detachable collars. In order for his collars to stay clean longer, he used to put them on the bridge in the dark of the night. The first chance we would get, we would rub our fingers, having made them sooty first, against the snow white collars. We had nearly man
aged to drive him to a nervous breakdown. Now, having a chance to show off his knowledge of maritime law, he radiated tightly packed self-esteem.

  Eight developed an aura of joy and relief as well. Those words about “the letter of the law” and “period” put him into a state of elation. He couldn’t have said it better himself. At that very moment, the mess waiter arrived with the breakfast tray —- eggs and bacon. A lot of coarse salt on it. And a misty glass of milk. And juice. The real kind, chock-full of vitamins. And black coffee. I could only congratulate Eight for what a sailor considers a reasonable breakfast. In comparison with that hearty repast, I became uninteresting. Perhaps his cross-examination of me would be a small dessert to stimulate his jovial goody-goody mood.

  Consequently I waited and stole glances at Eight when he grunted orders between chewing mouthfuls.

  No time to waste. Weigh anchor and full speed toward Sapele.

  The pilot and his steersmen were ready. Had it been up to them, we would have left at the crack of dawn. The lost hours meant, in fact, another night of waiting on the river. Sapele was far away and there was a chance that we would not make it there before dark.

  While the capstan grated away, two men in a small canoe were paddling in front of us across the wide river. Suddenly they stopped, swung around with splashing speed, and paddled frantically back in the direction from which they had come. It looked so weird that Eight brought up his binoculars to see what had frightened them. After an incredibly long while, he lowered the binoculars, put them down, took a piece of bacon, and chewed it thoroughly, not saying a word about what he had seen. To presume using Eight’s personal binoculars would be as blasphemous as spitting on his sunny-side-up eggs. But I reached over and grabbed the binoculars. I don’t know why. Perhaps what was coming closer, being carried toward us by the current, was so strong that it could reach us all the way up on the bridge. Oddly enough, Eight let me take the binoculars, merely throwing me a quick glance and smiling slightly as he kept on chewing.