The Lost Sailors

by Jean-Claude Izzo

  “I know. It was just to give the men something to do. I don’t want them to go crazy doing nothing. They’re starting to quarrel among themselves. Especially the two Burmese with the rest of the crew. I don’t know if you know this, but the Aldebaran had been on the scrap heap for two years when I took her over. So, however hard you scrape away at it, you’re not going to get rid of the rust.”

  “Well, I’m like them, Abdul. I feel like hitting out. It might as well be at a heap of old iron. And I’ll tell you something. I feel better. So do the men. We got our heads and arms covered in rust, but at least we felt like sailors again.”

  That was the night they’d started talking to each other.

  Since then, nothing had been the same. Abdul had become aware of hidden depths in his not very talkative first mate. In a way, he’d always known they were there, but he’d only just started to realize it. Diamantis could have been his friend long before this. He could have confided in him, asked his advice. And maybe things would have been different. Maybe he’d still have been the proud Captain Aziz, and not the pathetic commander of this shitty old tub. “The real questions,” he told himself, “are the ones you only ask yourself later. When you’ve already screwed up your life. When there’s no turning back.”

  He pulled his chair in front of the porthole so he could continue to watch Diamantis, who was walking nonchalantly along the sea wall, like someone who has no particular destination in mind. He seemed to be limping, as if his left leg was an inch or two shorter than the right. It was only an impression. It was just his way of walking. Almost an assertion that he didn’t belong on dry land. Abdul himself had always been concerned with the way he walked, the way he held himself. It meant a lot to him. It was a habit he’d gotten from his father. “Stand up straight,” he’d always said. “A man with a bent back is a man who’ll put up with anything.” And he’d add, “Look me in the eyes. If you’ve done something stupid, that’s no reason to lower your head.” When he’d got back from Sydney, that was the way he’d confronted his father. Standing straight, looking him in the eyes. The two men had sized each other up. Then his father had simply said, “Welcome home, son.” One week later, he’d enrolled him as a trainee officer in the merchant navy.

  Abdul had been pleased to see Diamantis climbing the gangway ladder, in Genoa. All they’d told him was “We’ve found you a first mate.” He hadn’t expected Diamantis. Or anyone. The Aldebaran’s time was up. He knew that. It was just an old bulk carrier. Fit only for losers who’d become sailors the way other people became factory workers. Without enthusiasm. You had to earn a bit of money to live on, to feed your family. And these days it was easier to find an old tub about to leave than a decent job. It was true in Europe. It was true everywhere.

  Abdul watched Diamantis for a few more moments. He saw him stop, light a cigarette, then crumple the pack into a ball and throw it in the air and kick it before it hit the ground. It was a good kick, which propelled the ball of paper far out to sea. Abdul smiled. “Quite a character!” he thought. What was he doing, stuck here on the Aldebaran? He still couldn’t understand that.

  “We all have our stories,” he told himself. He had his, and it was more than enough to be getting on with. He stood up and went and sat down at his work table. On the wall he had pinned a photo of Cephea and the children, and another in which he and his father were holding hands. Above the photos was a postcard of his home town, Deir al-Qamar, east of Beirut, which Walid had sent him before he left for La Spezia. We’ve received compensation for grandfather’s house, Walid had written. You see, modern Lebanon is being rebuilt. At last there’s peace between our communities. Your place is still here with us. As I’ve already said, there’s enough work for our two families.

  Abdul’s eyes moved rapidly from one image to the other, then came to rest on the forms he was supposed to give the crew. Once he’d countersigned them, each man would get one thousand five hundred francs as a lump-sum payment. The sailors agreed to forfeit all other rights, even if the ship was sold. It was a scam, of course. A way of reducing the costs for the new owner. But at least each man wouldn’t have lost everything. Abdul didn’t believe anymore that the Aldebaran would be bought by anyone. He didn’t believe much of anything anymore. Or, rather, just one thing. He was convinced his life was over. That was what he’d just written to Cephea. I think at night the world abandons us . . . The first sentence of his letter.

  Before leaving his cabin, Abdul noted in his log: Nothing to report. He wrote the same thing every day. Except that today it wasn’t true. Today, each sailor was going to sign the Aldebaran’s death warrant. His death warrant, too.

  Diamantis had become a regular at a bistro on Place de Lenche, at the bottom end of the Panier, the old quarter of Marseilles. Near the Vieux-Port. A former longshoreman named Toinou Bertani had bought it from its previous owner nearly three years earlier. At lunchtime, he served some twenty regulars. Simple but excellent Provençal cuisine. Diamantis liked to go there in the morning. He’d sit down on the terrace, under the plane trees, have two or three cups of coffee and read the newspaper.

  One day, Toinou had sat down at his table and said, “Can I offer you a pastis?”

  Up until that point, they’d only exchanged small talk. “Hi, how are you doing?” “Fine, and you?” “What’s up?” Just enough to make him feel more than an anonymous customer. The previous day, there’d been an article about the Aldebaran in the newspaper. With a picture of the crew. And Toinou had said to his wife, “Shit, that’s the guy who comes by for a coffee every morning.”

  “Poor man!” Rossana had concluded, after reading the article. “From what it says here, it can’t be much fun for them. On top of that, I don’t suppose they ever get a square meal.”

  Diamantis hadn’t refused the pastis—or Toinou’s invitation, after the third pastis, to share the dish of the day with them. “Seeing as how there’s enough for twenty . . .” That day, it was fresh pasta with a vegetable stew in olive oil. A treat. Toinou and Rossana had one dream: to open a “real” restaurant.

  “We don’t want it to be too expensive,” Rossana had said. “Not like the restaurants down by the harbor. You know, if a worker looks at the tables on the terrace and sees they’ve put the little plates on top of the big plates, then he tells himself this is not for him.”

  It hadn’t taken Diamantis long to realize that they weren’t going to open their restaurant any time soon. Here they were happy to give credit. On principle.

  “When you’ve been a worker all your life, like me, the one thing you learn is that we’ve got to stick together. Let’s say you come in here, Diamantis, and you’re in the shit . . . You think I’d ask you to pay?”

  “You’re going to be penniless at this rate.”

  “I’m nearly sixty. If I go bankrupt, I’ll retire. Simple as that. And if I don’t have enough, my son and daughter will help out!”

  Bruno and Mariette. Diamantis had already met them several times. Bruno, who was the spitting image of his father, had become a longshoreman, despite Toinou’s attempts to dissuade him. Mariette ran a small real-estate office on Rue Saint-Ferréol. A real Marseillaise. Cheerful and self-confident, with hazel eyes that weren’t easily fooled. Toinou, Rossana, Bruno and Mariette had become Diamantis’s family. He felt more at home with them than he did with Venetsanou, a cousin of his who lived in Marseilles.

  He’d visited Venetsanou once.

  Soon after he’d learned that the Aldebaran wouldn’t be putting to sea again in a hurry. He hadn’t seen him for ten years. He’d married a Greek girl born in Marseilles, they’d had three kids, and along with his brother-in-law he’d taken over his uncle’s small construction business and made it a big success. Since then, they’d been living in a little villa on Vallon Montebello, on the heights above the city, behind Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde.

  “It’s nice here.”

  “Yes, it’s
a good neighborhood. And there’s a school around the corner that’s one of the best in the city. You can’t imagine how Marseilles has changed. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s full of foreigners.”

  Diamantis thought he’d misheard. “Foreigners?”

  “Downtown is crawling with them. It’s true the mayor’s starting to clean things up, but in the meantime . . . For us, it’s quite simple, we just don’t go to the Canebière anymore. We don’t go any further than Place Castellane. We have everything we need here. There’s a market, shops, movie theatres . . .”

  “What do you mean by foreigners?” Diamantis asked, a little confused.

  Venetsanou smiled conspiratorially. “Arabs!”

  They had only gotten as far as the aperitif. The meal wasn’t shaping up to be particularly pleasant.

  “Hold on, Dimitri, what are you? I don’t mean Nena and the kids, they were born here. But you, dammit!”

  “Look, I’m French, O.K.? I did my military service. But it’s not just that, it’s their culture. Their attitude. They’re different. You just have to look at them. They’ll always be Arabs. Foreigners.”

  On the Aldebaran, there were two Burmese, an Ivorian, a Comorian, a Turk, a Moroccan, and a Hungarian. Abdul Aziz was Lebanese, and he was Greek. Who was the foreigner, when you were at sea? For nearly thirty years, he had sailed with all the races in the world, on all the seas in the world, and the question of race had never come up. That was how he answered Dimitri.

  “Not everyone gets along, sure. Some people try to lord it over others. Some people are good at their jobs, others aren’t. But I’ve never noticed that much difference between the races.”

  “You’re getting things all mixed up, Diamantis. These people come to France and they want everything.”

  “Just like you. When you were sixteen, you realized you didn’t want to spend the rest of your life fishing for sponges. So you left Symi and came to Marseilles, and went to work for your uncle Caginolas. Now you’re your own boss . . .”

  “Yes, and I started a family, and put a roof over its head. And the money I make I spend here. Like a real Frenchman!”

  They had raised their voices. Diamantis had pushed away his plate. Cuttlefish and tomatoes in wine sauce, just like they made on the islands. Nena had made an effort. A real Greek meal. But she was probably more used to making steak and fries or sausages and mashed potatoes. Neither the sauce nor the cuttlefish had any taste.

  The argument became more unpleasant. There were old scores unsettled between them. Melina was also from Symi, and Dimitri had always been in love with her. He had gone back one summer to ask her to marry him. “I love Diamantis,” she had replied. “I’m waiting for him.” Dimitri had poked fun at her. She’d grow old like Penelope, waiting for him to return.

  “What can you expect from a sailor?” he’d asked her.

  “Nothing. You know, Dimitri, I had quite a few affairs when I was at university. I still have affairs. But he’s the man I love. If I’m going to marry and have a child, it’ll be with him.”

  The day she announced she wanted a divorce, Melina said to Diamantis, “I don’t have any regrets, you know. But it’s better this way. Because of all the happiness we’ve had together.” Diamantis knew what he was losing. Melina had given him her youth, and he had traded it in for the sea. That night, neither of them could find the words to express their pain. They made love, slowly. Just to give a meaning to their tears. Diamantis had spent the next few nights in the bars of Athens. Getting drunk and waiting for a ship to leave on.

  “Have you heard from Melina?” Dimitri asked, a malicious edge to his voice.

  “She’s getting married again,” Diamantis lied. “You see, you should have waited . . .”

  Nena got up and left the table in tears.

  “You bastard!” Dimitri cried. “You had no right to say that. It’s a subject Nena and I don’t talk about anymore. It’s ancient history.”

  Diamantis finished his drink in silence then stood up. He’d have happily punched Dimitri in the face. But that wouldn’t have erased the past or changed the present.

  “Don’t forget, Dimitri, there’s already enough hate in the world.”

  And he had left.

  Hate was everywhere in the newspapers. In Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Northern Ireland. There was always someone claiming to be superior to someone else. Diamantis wanted to go to sea. To get away from here. To find oblivion on a starry night in the middle of the ocean. To melt away between the sky and the sea. There wasn’t much chance it would happen soon. He had made inquiries at the Seamen’s Mission. There weren’t many ships in Marseilles taking on people. He’d have to go back to his point of departure, La Spezia. Or go somewhere else.

  “So,” Toinou asked. “What have you decided?”

  “I’m staying. I’ll wait with Abdul. I think we’re both idiots. He took command of the ship and he’s not going to give it up. He still wants to take it somewhere. I signed on with him, as first mate. Where he goes, I go. I don’t know where else I’d go anyway.”

  “Home. Wait there.”

  Toinou didn’t understand. Diamantis couldn’t just say, “I’ll go home and wait there.” That was what it meant to be a sailor. Waiting didn’t exist. Only leaving had any meaning. Leaving and coming back. Even those with families thought that way. Or at least most of them. Diamantis knew perfectly well that these days, a lot of people became sailors because they couldn’t find anything better on land. Nedim, the Aldebaran’s radio operator, was one of those people. He’d seen the sea for the first time when he was eighteen. When he’d been called up for his military service. It was in the army that he had learned about radios. As he couldn’t find any work on land, he’d gone to sea.

  One evening, he’d told them about his early days at sea. “You know, I was never seasick. The cook was always complaining because even when the weather was bad, I ate like a horse. So one day he says to me, ‘Nedim, what do you think? Is it the sea that’s moving or the mountains?’ It took me ten seconds to understand what he was talking about and less than a minute to go on deck and throw up! Now, whenever there’s the slightest squall, I’m as sick as a dog.”

  Gregory, the engineer, had laughed. “That always works with peasants!”

  “Which of you never gets seasick?” Diamantis had asked.

  “Me,” Ousbene had boasted.

  “Oh, yes? And how do you sleep when there’s a storm?”

  He’d laughed. “On my back.”

  “Me too,” Diamantis had replied. “If you sleep on your side, you’ll be as sick as a dog. That hasn’t happened to me in thirty years.”

  “I lie on my back, too,” Nedim said. “It makes no difference. I can feel the boat going up and down.”

  “It’s all because of that jerk who mentioned the mountains,” Ousbene said.

  “He was a Greek. They’re the worst kind of jerks.”

  They had all burst out laughing. Except Nedim, who hadn’t realized his blunder.

  “Oh, shit! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you. I was just talking in general.”

  That was the kind of company Diamantis liked. Men who talked without thinking too much about what they were saying.

  Toinou was looking at him, his protruding, slightly bloodshot eyes radiant with kindness. He didn’t understand what was happening in Diamantis’s head, but deep down it didn’t matter.

  “So, listen,” he said, in a very serious tone. “You can come here whenever you like. Think of this as your home. And you can bring your friend the captain. No need to stand on ceremony. Because you know something, Diamantis? I think the only reason you’re staying is because of him. Because of the respect you have for him, the friendship . . .”

  “No, Toinou,” Diamantis should have replied. “I’m staying because I’m alone.” But he didn’t say that. He simply sa
id, “Thank you, Toinou.”

  3.

  WE’RE NOT LIVING IN LUXURY,

  BUT WE’RE NOT POOR EITHER

  When Abdul got back on board the Aldebaran, late in the evening, Diamantis was in the mess. On the table, he’d spread a nautical map. An old Roman map. Beside him, a pad for making notes. He was in shorts, with his chest bare. The heavy, storm-laden air was coming in through the half-open door. He looked up when Abdul came in.

  “So, just the two of us left now?”

  Abdul didn’t reply. He took off his shirt, pulled up a chair and sat down at the table. “I didn’t know you were interested in maps.”

  “You don’t know anything about me, Abdul. And vice versa. How long have we known each other? Ten years? I know more about our crew than I do about you.”

  “You’re no more talkative than I am.”

  “I don’t like talking about myself.”

  “You never feel like confiding in someone?”

  “When things are going bad, when I have doubts, I just confront the situation.” Diamantis pointed to the map in front of him. “I’ve been learning that what used to be true is now a lie. That truth is always relative.”

  “Explain it to me.” Abdul took a box of cigarillos from his pocket and lit one. He didn’t offer one to Diamantis.

  “It’s simple, Abdul. What are the two of us doing here, on this shitty freighter? We could have gotten out of here. You probably have an explanation for it. So do I. And we’d both be sincere. We’d both be telling the truth as we see it at the moment. But, in fact, we both know we’re deceiving ourselves. It’s all lies. Because, when you get down to it, we hate anything that keeps us away from the sea. Being on this boat is still better than knowing we’re going to be unemployed. The truth is, we don’t want to go home.”