Trumann has emptied his magazine.
I peer over the edge of the table. The five ladies on the wall above the platform have lost their faces. Plaster is still trickling down. The Old Man is the first to get up and observe the damage, his head cocked to one side. “Fantastic performance—rodeo standard—and all done with wounded fists!”
Trumann has already kicked the pistol away and is grinning with delight from ear to ear. “About time, don’t you think? About time those loyal German cows got it, eh?”
He’s almost delirious with self-satisfaction.
Hands in the air, shrieking in a high falsetto as if afraid for her life, ready to surrender—enter the “madam.”
When the Old Man sees her, he slides down out of his chair again. “Take cover!” someone roars.
A miracle that this over-rigged old frigate, who functions as the hostess here, has taken till now to put in an appearance. She has dolled herself up Spanish-fashion, spitcurls plastered down in front of her ears and a gleaming tortoiseshell comb in her hair—a wobbling monument with rolls of fat bulging out all over. She’s wearing black silk slippers. There are rings with huge imitation stones on her sausage-like fingers. This monster enjoys the special favors of the Garrison Commander.
Ordinarily her voice sounds like bacon sizzling in the pan. But now she’s yowling away in a string of curses. “Kaput, kaput,” I manage to distinguish in the general yammer.
“Kaput—she’s right about that,” says the Old Man.
Thomsen lifts a bottle to his mouth and sucks at the Cognac as if from a nipple.
Merkel saves the situation. He clambers onto a chair and vigorously begins to conduct a choir:
“Oh thou blessed Christmastide…” We all join in enthusiastically.
The “madam” wrings her hands like a tragedienne. Her squeaks only occasionally cut through our performance. She looks ready to tear her spangled dress from her body, but then simply tears at her hair with her dark-red lacquered nails instead, screeches, and rushes off.
Merkel falls from his chair, and the chorus ebbs away.
“What a madhouse! Christ, what a racket!” says the Old Man.
In any case, I think, I must take the warm bodyband along. Angora wool. First-rate stuff.
The flotilla surgeon draws Monique onto his lap; he has hold of her rear end with his right hand and with his left is raising her right breast as if weighing a melon. The voluptuous Monique, straining in her scrap of a dress, shrieks, tears herself loose, and collides with the phonograph so that the needle shoots across the grooves with a dull, groaning fart. She’s giggling hysterically.
The surgeon pounds the table with his fists until the bottles jump, and turns red as a turkey cock with repressed laughter. Someone puts both arms around his neck from behind to embrace him, but when the hands disappear, the surgeon’s tie is cut short directly under the knot, and he doesn’t even notice. The lieutenant with the shears has already chopped off Saemisch’s tie, and then Thomsen’s, and Monique, watching all this, falls over backward on the stage having hysterics, and her wildly kicking legs reveal that she’s wearing only tiny black panties under her dress, just a kind of G-string. “Wooden eye” Belser already has a siphon in his hand and is directing a sharp stream up between her thighs, and she’s squealing like a dozen little pigs whose tails are being pinched. Merkel notices that the ends of his tie are missing, the Old Man murmurs, “Cleancut raid,” and Merkel seizes a half-filled Cognac bottle and hurls it into the tie-cutter’s stomach, doubling him up.
“Neat—perfect throw,” the Old Man says approvingly.
And now a piece of the lattice flies through the air. We all duck except for the Old Man, who sits there unmoved and grinning.
The piano gets another swallow of beer.
“Schnapps makes you im-po-tent!” Thomsen stammers.
“Back to the cathouse again?” the Old Man asks me.
“No. Just sleep. At least a couple of hours still.”
Thomsen laboriously pulls himself to his feet. “With you—I’m coming—fucking den of thieves—let’s go—just one more stop at the waterhole, one last good leak!”
The white moonlight beyond the swinging door hits me like a blow. I wasn’t prepared for light: a glitter of flowing silver. The beach a blue-white strip in a cold fire of pure radiance; streets, houses, everything bathed in icy, glowing neon light.
My god! There’s never been a moon like this. Round and white like a Camembert. Gleaming Camembert. You could read the paper by it with no trouble at all. The whole bay a single sheet of glittering silver foil. The enormous stretch from coast to horizon a myriad of metallic facets. Silver horizon against velvet-black sky.
I narrow my eyes. The island beyond is a dark carp’s back in the dazzle. The funnel of a sunken transport, the fragment of a mast—all sharp as a knife edge. I prop myself against the low concrete wall; the feel of pumice on the palms of my hands. Disagreeable. The geraniums in the flowerboxes, each blossom separate and distinct. Mustard gas bombs are supposed to smell like geraniums.
The shadows! The roar of the surf along the beach! I have the groundswell in my head. The gleaming, spangled surface of the moonsea bears me up and down, up and down. A dog barks; the moon is barking…
Where is Thomsen, the new knight? Where the hell is Thomsen? Back into the Royal again. You could cut the air with a knife.
“What’s become of Thomsen?”
I kick open the door to the can, careful not to touch the brass knob.
There lies Thomsen, stretched out on his right side in a great puddle of urine, a heap of vomit beside his head, blocking the urine in the gutter. On top of the grating over the drain is a second great mess of it. The right side of Thomsen’s face is resting in this concoction. His Ritterkreuz dangles in it too. His mouth keeps forming bubbles because he’s forcing sounds out. Through the gurgling I can make out, “Fight on—victory or death. Fight on—victory or death. Fight on—victory or death.”
In a minute I’ll be vomiting too. Rising nausea against the roof of my mouth.
“Come on, on your feet!” I say between clenched teeth and seize him by the collar. I don’t want that mess on my hands.
“I wanted to—wanted to—tonight I wanted to—really fuck myself out,” Thomsen mutters. “Now I’m in no shape to fuck anything.”
The Old Man appears. We take Thomsen by the ankles and wrists; half dragging, half carrying him, we get him through the door. The right side of his uniform is completely drenched.
“Give me a hand with him!”
I have to let go. I rush back into the can. In one great torrent the entire contents of my stomach gush out onto the tile floor. Convulsive retching. Tears in my eyes. I prop myself against the tile wall. My left sleeve is pushed up and I can see the dial of my wristwatch: two o’clock. Shit. At six thirty the Old Man is coming to drive us to the harbor.
II DEPARTURE
There are two roads to the harbor. The Commander takes the somewhat longer one, which runs along the coast.
With burning eyes, I observe the things we go past, the antiaircraft batteries with their mottled camouflage in the gray morning light. The signs for HEADQUARTERS—capital letters and mysterious geometric figures. A wall of shrubbery. A couple of grazing cows. The shattered village of Reception Immaculée. Billboards. A half-collapsed kiln. Two cart horses being led by the halter. Late roses in untended gardens. The splotched gray of house walls.
I have to keep blinking because my eyes still smart from all the cigarette smoke. The first bomb craters; ruined houses that anflounce the harbor. Heaps of old iron. Grass withered by the sun. Rusted canisters. An automobile graveyard. Parched sunflowers bent over by the wind. Tattered gray laundry. The half-riddled base of a monument. Parties of Frenchmen in Basque berets. Columns of our trucks. The road descends into the shallow river valley. Thick fog still hangs over this low ground.
A weary horse in the heavy mist hauling a cart, its two wheels as tal
l as a man. A house with glazed roof tiles. A once-enclosed verandah, now a mass of splintered glass and twisted ironwork. Garages. A fellow in a blue apron, standing in a doorway, the wet butt of a cigarette stuck onto his fleshy lower lip.
The clanking of a freight train. A siding. The riddled railway station. Everything gray. Innumerable nuances of gray, from dirty plaster-white to yellowish rusty-black. Sharp whistling of the shunting engine. I feel sand between my teeth.
French dockworkers with black hand-sewn shoulder bags. Astonishing that they go on working here despite the air raids.
A half-sunken ship with patches of red lead showing. Probably an old herring boat that was to have been rebuilt as some kind of patrol vessel. A tug pulls out into the shipping lane with a high forecastle and the lines of its hull bulging underwater. Women with huge asses in torn overalls, holding their riveting machines like machine guns. The fire in a portable smithy glows red through the gray murk.
The cranes on their high stilts are all still standing—despite the constant air attacks. The pressure waves from the detonations meet with no resistance in their iron filigree.
Our car can’t go any farther in the confusion of the railroad yard. Rails bent into arches. The last few hundred yards to the bunker we have to cover on foot. Four heavily bundled figures in single file in the mist: the Commander, the Chief, the Second Watch Officer, and I. The Commander walks bent over, his eyes fixed on the path. Over the stiff collar of his leather jacket his red scarf has worked its way up almost to his spotted white cap. He keeps his right hand deep in the pocket of his jacket; the left is hooked into the jacket by the thumb. Under his left elbow he carries a bulging sailcloth bag. His bandy-legged gait is made even heavier by his clumsy seaboats with their thick cork soles.
I follow two paces behind. Then comes the Chief. He walks in a kind of unsteady bob. Rails that don’t even check the Commander’s stride force the Chief to proceed in short, springing hops. He’s not wearing leather gear like us but gray-green overalls—like a mechanic wearing an officer’s cap. He carries his bag properly by the handle.
Last in line is the Second Watch Officer, the shortest of us all. From his mutterings to the Chief, I make out that he’s afraid the boat will not be able to put out on time because of the fog. There is not so much as a breath of air stirring in the dripping mist.
We go through a landscape of craters. In the depths of each shellhole the fog has settled like thick soup.
The Second Watch Officer has the same kind of sailcloth bag under his arm the Commander and I do. Everything we’re taking on this patrol must fit into it: a big bottle of cologne, woolen underwear, a bodyband, knitted gloves, and a couple of shirts. I’m wearing the heavy sweater. Oilskins, seaboots, and escape apparatus are waiting for me on the boat. “Black shirts are best,” the navigator had advised me and added knowledgeably, “black doesn’t show dirt.”
The First Watch Officer and the apprentice engineer are already on board with the crew, readying the boat for sea.
Over the harbor to the west the sky is still full of shadows, but eastward above the roadstead, behind the black silhouette of the freighter lying at anchor, the pale dawn light has already reached the zenith. The uncertain hall-light makes everything strange and new. The skeletal cranes that tower above the bare façade of the refrigeration depot and the low roofs of the storage sheds are like charred black stakes for giant fruit. On the tarpaper roofs, ships’ masts have been erected; along them coil white exhaust steam and oily black smoke. The plaster on the windowless side of the halfbombed house has been attacked by leprosy; it’s falling away in big pieces. In huge white letters across the dirty red background of the ruins swaggers the word BYRRH.
Overnight, hoar frost has spread like mildew over the rubble still left from the last air raid.
Our path leads between ruins. Instead of the stores and inns that once lined the streets there are now only splintered signs above empty windows. Of the Café du Commerce only the “Comme” remains. The Café de la Paix has disappeared into a bomb crater. The iron framework of a burned-out factory has folded inward into a gigantic thistle.
Trucks are coming toward us—a column of them, carrying sand for the construction of the bunker channel. The wind from their passage picks up empty cement bags and blows them against the legs of the Commander and the Second Watch Officer. White plaster dust takes our breath away for a moment and clings like meal to our boots. Two or three shattered cars with Wehrmacht numbers lie overturned, their wheels in the air. Then more charred timbers and blown-off roofs, lying like tents amid the twisted railroad tracks.
“They’ve certainly messed the place up again,” growls the Commander. The Chief takes this for an important communication and hurries up to him.
Then the Commander stops, clamps his sailcloth bag between his legs, and systematically digs out of the pocket of his leather jacket a shabby pipe and an old battered lighter. While we stand about, shivering and hunched over, the Old Man carefully lights the already full pipe. Now, like a steamer, he trails white clouds of smoke as he hurries along, frequently turning back toward us. His face is twisted in a mournful grimace. Of his eyes in the shadow of the Visor of his cap nothing at all is visible.
Without taking his pipe from his mouth he asks the Chief in a rasping voice, “Is the periscope in order? Has the blur been fixed?”
“Jawohl, Herr Kaleun. A couple of lenses came loose in their cement bedding, probably during an air attack.”
“And the trouble with the rudder?”
“All fixed. There was a break in the cable connection with the E-machine. That’s why contact was intermittent. We put in a whole new cable.”
Beyond a line of billboards there is a long row of freight cars. Behind them, the way leads straight across the tracks, then along a mud-choked road deeply rutted by the transport trucks.
Slanting iron bars armed with a thicket of barbed wire flank the road. In front of the guardhouse, sentries stand with raised collars, their faces hidden, like phantoms.
Suddenly the air is filled with a metallic clatter. This rattling ceases abruptly and an increasingly shrill whistle from a siren, as visible as a cloud of steam, hangs in the cold damp wind that smells of tar, oil, and rotten fish.
More bursts of metallic sound. The air is heavy and pregnant with them: we are in the wharf area.
To our left yawns a gigantic excavation, long strings of tip-cars disappear into its murky depths. They puff and rattle about below.
“There are going to be new bunkers all over this area,” says the Old Man.
Now we’re headed for the pier. Dead water under wads of fog. Ships moored so close beside and behind one another that the eye can’t even distinguish their shapes. Battered, salt-encrusted fishing steamers, now serving as patrol boats, strange floating vehicles such as lighters, oil barges, harbor defense boats lying next to one another in packets of three—the bedbug flotilla—that wholly unaristocratic confusion of shabby, wornout work and supply boats that is now a part of every commercial harbor.
The Chief points into the fog. “Over there—a bit to the right on that six-story house—there’s a car up there!”
“Where do you mean?”
“Over the gable of the supply shed—the house with the wrecked roof!”
“How the hell did it get there?”
“Day before yesterday in the attack on the bunker. Bombs coming down as big as phone booths. I saw that buggy fly up and land on the roof—right on its wheels!”
“A circus act!”
“And the way the Frenchmen suddenly vanished. Couldn’t believe it.”
“What Frenchmen?”
“There’s always a whole dockful of fishermen. You’ll always find some right beside the entrance to Pen Number One. You just can’t get rid of them.”
“Of course they must have been keeping watch for the Tommies—which boats go out and which of them make it back—with exact times!”
“They’re n
ot spying any more. When the alarm sounded they just sat where they were, twenty or thirty of them—and then one of those huge bombs smashed into the pier.”
“It caught the bunker too.”
“Yes, a direct hit—but it didn’t penetrate. Twenty feet of reinforced concrete.”
Metal plates bend under our feet and spring back into their old positions. A locomotive whistles a piercing cry of woe.
Beyond the heavy, bouncing figure of the Commander there slowly emerges a concrete shape looming over everything. Its side walls are lost in the fog. We hurry toward a bare front without cornice, doors, or window openings. It looks like the side of a mighty foundation for a tower planned to climb far above the clouds. Only the twenty-foot-thick covering seems slightly out of proportion—a heavy load; it looks as though it had jammed the whole structure some distance back into the earth.
We have to make our way around blocks of concrete, railroad tracks, piles of boards, and pipes as thick as a man’s thigh. Finally we come to the narrow side of the structure, an entrance protected by heavily armored steel doors.
Furious riveting greets us from the dark interior. The rattling stops occasionally, only to resume and grow to a thunderous uproar.
There is half darkness in the bunker. Only through the entranceways from the harbor basin can a pale light penetrate into the concrete caves. Two by two, the U-boats lie moored in their pens. The bunker has twelve pens. Some of them are constructed as dry docks. The boxes are divided from one another by huge concrete walls. The entrance to the pens can be protected by lowering steel bulkheads.
Dust, fumes, the stink of oil. Acetylene torches hiss, welding torches sputter, crackle, and howl. Here and there fireworks shoot up from the blow torches.
We go in single file along the concrete ramp that leads straight through the bunker at right angles to the docks. We have to be scrupulously careful. Loose material is lying around everywhere. Snakelike cables are trying to snare our feet. Railway cars block the path. They’re bringing in new machine parts. Vans are drawn up close to the freight cars. On them, cradled in special supports, are the dully shimmering torpedoes, dismounted cannon and anti-aircraft guns, and everywhere pipes, hawsers, more cables, heaps of camouflage netting.
Das Boot Page 4
