by Nigel Barley
They spent five bleak days in Kirkwall. Lauterbach looked out at the grey joyless town built of cold granite and felt even more depressed. To be hanged in this place would be terrible indeed. They were questioned every day by a thin-faced British officer in a duffle-coat as gales howled around the ship. If they were kept much longer, there was real danger that the auxiliary, complete with lavender man, would return to this, its home port, for resupply and then Lauterbach would swing at the yardarm. He had to dig deep into his childhood memories of Sweden to give a plausible account of himself and his family and it ended up sounding like another version of imagined Milwaukee. Fortunately the interpreter was incompetent and his own halting command of the language passed muster. The nastiest British trick was swooping down on them in the early morning and shouting them awake in German to test their response. On Lauterbach this was wasted. He responded to no human language at that hour. Then they started on about the bacon again. Lauterbach snarled back. What in God’s name did he know of bacon? He was a stoker. One, he realised suddenly, with awkward, lilly-white hands so he put them behind his back but again the British did not notice. After five days they were given leave to go and take their bacon with them. That night, they were hauled over by a German submarine that raked them with its searchlights and questioned them through a loud-hailer. Satisfied of their neutrality it vanished back into the depths. Finally, they arrived in toytown Copenhagen that crackled with a layer of silver ice and the whole crew sobbed with sated homesickness. And just as suddenly, in the chill air, Lauterbach froze solid.
He had been driven round the world and, in an instant, could move no more, like a donkey that will suddenly endure any amount of beating and just digs in its heels, lays back its ears and refuses to budge. Unafraid of the cudgel, it will die first. He checked into the best hotel in town and went to bed, summoning occasional meals to his room. The thick curtains were pulled over views of the frozen harbour and untrammelled heat puffed and hissed into the room through clanking radiators. Lauterbach lay under the flounced eiderdown and stared at the intricate moulded ceiling for hours, days. Or he would break out in a cold sweat like a corpse on a marble slab and lie naked, listening to the boiling and rumbling of his guts as they merged with the sounds of the heating. The fragile gangplank that connected him to the rest of the world had collapsed and sunk. He was all at sea and the ice was forminh again over his head. In the carpeted room was not Asian time, or American time but Lauterbach time, dictated by the rhythms and needs of his own body. It was the time of the sickness experience, when the whole world shrinks down to your own flesh and each breath requires a conscious act of volition and each minute is felt in every quivering nerve, not assumed and lived through. To forget to breathe is to die. He moved between bath and bed and no further. Sometimes he cried but did not know why and when he gazed in the mirror he saw a succession of tear-stained strangers staring back with eyes devoid of self-knowledge. Was he an apple or a pear? He did not know. His identity was a pen that he had left on a table, a dropped cufflink, a sock abandoned under a bed or perhaps by a stream and he had simply lost himself and did not know where to look. He could not remember what name he had signed in the register downstairs for the months of imposture had brought no flash of self-knowledge about the core of his being, as it often does. On the fifth day, he reached into his cummerbund pocket and counted his money, again. There were the familiar Chinese bedsheets, the crisp dollars, the arrogant pounds, the clenched and curlicued Reichshmarks spread out on the bed. He smoothed them and smelled them as they soothed him with their innocence and he fell asleep with his nose buried in their slim solidity and woke to find them soaked in his drool and his mouth dry from snoring. That afternoon he washed, shaved and went to the German consulate. He had rebirthed himself but had been born an orphan.
“Officially, you don’t exist,” they told him. “You have no passport, no right to be here. Our records mention no Lauterbach. Nothing from New York. Go away or we will have you arrested.”
He walked through the limpid sunlight, as light as a ghost, the air sucked out of him, leaving no shadow. On the street was a woman handing out biblical tracts to all and sundry. He passed her three times and she offered him nothing. He was invisible. He headed for the offices of the Hamburg America Line, his old employer.
“Of course we know you,” they said, gathering round, smiling, handshaking, offering a glass, pouring substance and sensation back into him. “Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tsingtao. Good old Lauterbach.” The clerks were called in, the manager came down from his high office. His boots refilled with comforting solidity, his swimming senses returned. There followed aquavit, beer, more aquavit, a pickled salmon meal in the steam of potatoes in a restaurant down by the port.
“Here’s a note to the Naval Attache. He’ll sort you out.”
He had danced and boasted and proposed toasts and awoken dry-mouthed beside a mousy-haired, dog-faced woman whom he did not remember and who spoke no language known to Man but demanded fish for breakfast entirely in gesture. He was alive.
On Sunday morning he took the little pot-bellied ferry to Warnemuende and, as the boat puttered towards land, he was surprised to see people on the beach. It was not the holiday season and the sea, for locals, was exclusively a place of work. But nobody worked on a Sunday. Here there was no gangplank and he took off his shoes and socks and clambered down onto the honest wet sand, enjoying the worms of sludge sliding up between his toes, a childhood memory. Germany. He had never been very good with the pomposity of abstractions. He was rooted again, earthed. A loud cheer rang out and he looked up to see a little brass band fighting down the beach and striking up a ragged rhythm.
“In Lauterbach I lost my sock / I won’t be going back there. / But if I went to Lauterbach, / I’d once more have a pair there.”
“Three cheers,” they shouted. “Three cheers for Lauterbach, the hero.”
They rushed up, good-natured, pig-faced people with fair hair and heaved him, grinning and grunting, onto their strong, fat, pink, shoulders and ran him around the beach. At least this time, they weren’t making him wear a turban and someone, somewhere, finally owed him a thousand dollars.
It was a bitter November day in Bremen and a stiff wind whipped around the empty flats of the shipyard before rushing out over the sea to smack the waves into life. Even though it was a festive occasion, there was a chill, funereal feel in the air, for it was a season for past memories not future hopes.
All the worthies from the city of Emden were there in the stands, clothed in deepest black, astrakhan-collared and well upholstered, fortified by hip flasks and heavy breakfasts as at a graveside. Their women were with them with dead foxes wrapped round their necks and hands thrust into fur gloves. Below, stood the workers in their rough serge and best caps, grimly determined to make the most of a rare day off work. The launch of a ship was always losing a daughter more than gaining a son, though the order book was full enough at present to make up the heavy loss of shipping in the endless war. She was a light cruiser whose principal distinguishing feature was a great, clumsy Iron Cross welded to either side of the bow and her name was picked out in white against the dark grey – Emden II. There was a long, bombastic speech with enough hot air to fill a Zeppelin. At the back stood two naval officers, one pared and thin, the other bulky, a comic pairing from the motion pictures.
“So Lauterbach. You have had a good war” stated von Muecke, eyes facing ahead, not without an edge of bitterness. “Out of all of us you seem to have come off best. So you are now a great hero? Who would have thought it?”
“Well, that is what the Kaiser says, so I suppose it must be so. It came out of the blue. They wrote about me in the newspapers and the Kaiser reads the newspapers. You might say I am a hero by imperial decree.” Lauterbach twitched his sleeve with its extra bands of gold. He was not just a hero now but also a Lieutenant-Commander of the Reserve. Von Muecke had stuck at Commander. The difference in rank should be noticed. They eyed eac
h other’s rows of medals and ribbons cautiously, like boys appraising each other’s conker collection. Lauterbach had more crosses than a Catholic altar.
“You have lost weight,” observed von Muecke. “You have been on recent active service?” The slimmer waist was from the absence of the cummerbund, replaced by a more conventional nest-egg in non-inflationary gold, stowed under the floorboards at home.
“I have just got back from the Baltic with my First Commercial Protection Half-Flotilla,” declared Lauterbach. “When I was in Hamburg, I asked to be posted back East so, out of spite or miscomprehension, they sent me to the Baltic – east after a fashion.” Not the east of Rosa. A pang passed through his stomach. God this Western world was grey. But Rosa would never do here, a Eurasian wife, a ‘Chink’, to be sneered at as inferior by tight-mouthed locals. He sighed. The loss of the East was not, for him, merely a matter of imperial pride. He felt it in his flesh. Yet, he had compromised and already put down a deposit on a serviceable Hamburg fiancee. He even had a marmalade cat.
“What is that, ‘Commercial Protection’? Is it anything to do with the Seagoing Circus?” Von Muecke seemed to sneer but then whenever he smiled, he sneered. It was not his fault. His face was just made that way. Ask a shark to smile. But he looked older; more lined and the skin had an odd, variegated look, more like an old crocodile. Perhaps that was from the terrible sunburn they had all suffered. In fact, now he thought of it, von Muecke resembled one of those Iron Men, wooden carvings of warriors set up all over Germany, so that the patriotic could pay good money to knock nails into them and raise cash for the war by this odd fetishism. He also gave off a smell of stale laundry but then so did many people nowadays. Lauterbach sniffed unwillingly. He fished out a cheroot and lit it. In its turn, it tasted of old tea-leaves and floor-sweepings.
“What they call the Seagoing Circus is von Rosenberg’s operation, an amateur thing of mine-laying and -clearing. We’re different, the mystery ships. You know? You don’t know? The mystery ships are chamaeleons. We pretend to be merchant vessels to lure in enemy submarines but actually we are heavily armed and as they close in to attack on the surface, we sink them. We got three in the past year alone.”
“It does not sound entirely honourable.”
Lauterbach bristled. “Honourable or not, it’s bloody dangerous. My ship just got blown to bits by British destroyers and I sustained wounds that were accounted honourable enough by the Kaiser.” He shifted stiffly. His leg was playing up. He had broken it falling down the stairs to get to the boats but a wound was a wound as surely as one Reichsmark was worth another. “And you?”
“There was a lot of trouble over my report concerning the Ayesha. It was all politics. I am a naval officer in the service of his country and politics are not my concern. I would not lie. But they did not like the fact that I mentioned the treacherous collusion of our Turkish allies in the attacks on my men in the desert. You may have noticed my books?” He looked at Lauterbach with a small hope.
Indeed he had. Two best-sellers, all about von Muecke, snapped up by blind patriots and star-struck little boys. The vanity of authors. He was now a famous writer about the war and prouder of what he had written than what he had actually done. His life had become an object for him to possess. Lauterbach saw in a flash that he, himself, had never really cared about things. True, he liked money but that was for its sheer ethereal beauty, that it could magically transform into anything. When he was last in Berlin, von Muecke had been giving rousing, ticket-only, lectures on the Emden and Ayesha to packed houses and talked of conferring immortality on the dead heroes by his own deathless prose, proof enough that it was his own eternity he was concerned with. Lauterbach eyed his thick, non-regulation overcoat. He, too, had made a pretty penny, one way or another, out of the war and should not complain.
“No. I didn’t know you had written books.”
“Well I have. Some few people have heard of me.” Now he was piqued. “You know, Lauterbach. You should write your own life story. I am sure it would be not without a certain rude interest. Writing is an excellent discipline. I could put you in touch with a publisher, if you like.”
Lauterbach shivered. And clapped his gloves together. “Not my sort of thing at all, Number One. I’ve never been a man of words.” He put a manly gleam in his eye and thrust out the jaw like the prow of a battleship. “Deeds perhaps – words, no. Anyway, what can there be left to tell? You must have said it all.”
There was a crack, a smashing of glass and a cheer, drowned in a swelling rumble of iron on iron. The ship was sliding down the slipway, the chains and the great hydraulic pistons groaning and screaming. It was a foul noise, drowning out the band with its “Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles” and the cheering mob. Cold sweat dewed Lauterbach’s brow and he staggered back against the rear of the grandstand in sudden vertigo. The birth of a ship was the same sound as that of one dying, tearing itself apart, summoning up the ghostly legions who had perished on the first Emden. Ashes to ashes, rust to rust. He wiped his gloved hand over his face and looked at the glistening black leather as if he had never seen a hand before.
“And von Mueller? What of him. The last I heard, he had been transferred to England.”
“I had not heard that. I thought he was still in some prison in Malta.”
“At least we are free, Lauterbach.”
They looked at each other again. They would never be friends – there could be no melty love – but they were forever shackled together by too much shared history, like family, not to feel something. Indeed, there was a proposal before the Kaiser that all crew members of the Emden and their loved ones should be allowed to hyphenate the word ‘-Emden’ to their surnames and so become truly family. That ship would follow him around all his life, forming him, dominating him. Soon he would be Julius Lauterbach-Emden, hyphenated genteelly enough, but von Muecke would be hyphenated and still hang on to his aristocratic ‘von’ so that the distance between them would be maintained. Free was it? No. He would never be free.
“We should send von Mueller a postcard,” suggested von Muecke. “A card in prison to cheer him up.”
Lauterbach paused. “No. I don’t think one of my postcards would be quite the thing. But let’s go somewhere and have a drink to him,” he offered grudgingly. It occurred to him how few real friends he had and how often he ducked behind a shared drink like a barricade.
Von Muecke nodded. “Yes. A good idea. And it will permit me to raise another matter of the greatest national importance that I want to discuss with you in strict confidence.” They picked their way carefully down from the grandstand, decorations tinkling like two Christmas trees in the wind, von Muecke swollen by the importance of his undisclosed mission.
“You were always a man of great resourcefulness, Lauterbach. I concede it. It was something I always admired in you and a quality of great service to the Reich, in its way. You are now in a position to perform another great deed for your country. With the British blockade, there are strategic shortages everywhere, things that simply cannot be had on the regular market and with your irregular contacts you may be able to lay hands on them when the rest of us cannot.”
What was this? Soap! Soap had completely disappeared from the shops six months ago. Everyone stank. Was it possible he was after Elysium-brand toilet soap?
Von Muecke was embarrassed, looking down like a blushing schoolboy at his iron crosses. “You are even close to the Emperor. You could speak to him on this matter. Personally.” There was reluctant awe in his voice and rage at the injustice of the fact. “At this stage of the war a pen may be as lethal as a ten-inch gun.”
Lauterbach paused and stared into the impossibly vivid blue eyes that still glowed with undiminished zeal. He felt suddenly immensely tired. “What exactly is it you want of me, Number One?”
Von Muecke, seized him passionately by the arm. “For a patriotic writer, such as myself, at this time of the year, one thing is quite indispensable. Gas mantles, Lau
terbach. For God’s sake, for Germany’s sake, find me some gas mantles.”
Lauterbach opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by a tweaking at his coat. He thought of scuttling shipbound rats and shuddered but, looking down, saw the grubby hand of a child tugging at his fine worsted. It belonged to a waif, blue with cold, with symmetrical snot trails as if two snails lived up its nostrils.
“Mister,” it sniffed, holding out an envelope, already creased and seamed with grime. “A gent arsed me to give this to ya.”
“Gent? What gent?” Lauterbach took it cautiously from the chapped and slightly sticky fingers. Was this some trap? He looked around. Everyone was watching the ship. No one heeded their odd little group. The child scanned the crowd and shrugged. “Dunno. E’s gorn. Said you’d give me summink.”
Lauterbach dispensed small change and the delighted child scuttled away. He tore the flap open with clumsy, gloved fingers, aware of von Muecke’s curious gaze. Inside was a smooth, beige sheet of paper with writing in a scrawled, ugly hand. He held it away, at arm’s length to focus and peered down his nose. Age was catching up with him. Perhaps, as he grew old, he would become metaphorically as well as literally farsighted. It was an IOU, signed “John Smith”, made out for one thousand American dollars. The notepaper bore the address of a London gentlemen’s club, not – he thought – one of the best but the sort frequented by ambitious tradesmen who, like himself, were not quite gentlemen. Without thinking, he put it to his nose and laughed as he smelled fresh lavender and laughed again to see von Muecke’s shocked face at his receiving a perfumed billet doux, in public, from what must be a female admirer. Wait, there was something else in there. He tipped the envelope and something rolled into his palm, a little jewel, shiny and patinated from much handling – a bullet.
