Falling bodies, tiny shipwrecks.
Even when they fall no more, I keep hearing them.
A Turkish officer looks at the Demeter, then at the rats that swim toward his boat. He whispers some words I cannot hear and steers away, toward the coast.
We will go out to the Aegean Sea in a couple of hours, when it gets dark.
I look at the deckhead above me. Dark wood pitted by the salt of a thousand trips, witness of many routes and captains. From my cot, I cannot reach the ceiling. Far from my hands, the boards cleave close to one another without any ornamentation. They are utilitarian. As serious as those joined to make coffins for peasants, in mujik burials that deliver the dead to that earth from which they drew their lives. Rough boxes, without personality or detail, whose purpose is found in the hidden spaces of dissolution.
It is bootless to think of my room as a coffin.
And it goes without saying that the last vision of those buried alive, just before asphyxiation, are those same slats suspended above them.
I cannot stop smiling.
The point of staying awake is to avoid my nightmares, to avoid Mikhail waiting under the sheets. Why, then, do I lie here thinking about the secret runes of wood that only the dead can decipher?
I get on my feet, repeating that it is logical that coffins be coarse, rough. If you awaken in your grave, you will need to hold on to something.
What are these morbid thoughts compared to what I fear I shall find in my dreams?
Mayhap there is something worse than the nothing to which we deliver the dead, than the heavy mantle of earth with which we drape their rotting forms.
The worst part is that they may not be alone down there.
How about that intimation to help one forget one’s nightmares, eh?
I laugh, thinking about some black thing knocking on the rough wood as if it were a door.
Knock, knock.
I hug, feeling myself shiver.
“Who is it?”
If Vlahutza has left the bridge to ask me why I am laughing myself to death, I could answer, honestly: It matters not what that hidden thing might answer underground. The loneliness of the grave is so vast that one would open regardless of the cost of that company.
Better than sleeping every night with an oneiric rat beneath the sheets.
Its disgustingly human hands touching my sex, its sickly fur pressing against my body, its twitching bald tail curling around my legs, slipping inside me.
Its black lips, full of insects and rot, pressing against my lips ….
And the fundamental fact that I am as hungry for those lips as they are for mine.
Isn’t it better to knock on wood, even that of one’s own coffin?
I cannot stop laughing. Not until I realize that someone is watching me.
A rat in a corner of the room.
My laughter fades till the cabin is silent. I stare at the animal without daring to do anything else.
A ship rat, gray and hairy, all wiry muscle beneath that dirty pelt. It does not move. Yet something shudders inside its flesh, its throbbing gristle.
It watches me with small, reddish eyes. I am also still. The way it runs its eyes over me makes it clear that I am not of interest. Just another object in the cabin, a piece of furniture casually endowed with voice, but nothing more.
It turns its head toward the entrance. Something there has caught its attention.
Its hair bristles slowly. The rat seems to grow, or mayhap each bristle of hair rises to hide the rat inside. It bares its teeth like a dog, spits a threat at something I cannot see, something out of sight in the corridor. It backs up without ceasing to growl, ready to attack if anything pounces on it. There is no escape, only one corner. It stays there, too scared to understand that it has cornered itself. It does not seem to care. Still it shrinks away, a throbbing mass of fear. Its growling is no longer a threat, not the whistling sound they make when we shoo them from bags of seed. It moans like when their backs are broken and they are nothing but sheer pain twisting and squirming till death overcomes them.
But this rat is unharmed. There is nothing on it that suggests injury or illness.
It frightens me not. How to fear something that is itself so afraid?
But it looks with such fear at the open door that I feel obliged to discover what awaits in the corridor.
It is not the wisest course of action, yet I cannot resist. I must check. I tell myself that mayhap I should grab my pistol, call the Second Mate.
I look out the door, ready for everything.
But there is nothing.
Or nearly nothing.
Something runs in the dark, small claws scratching the floor. A tiny figure flees in the shadows, a white and imprecise blur.
Another rat. An albino rat.
I enter my cabin again and the rat that has sought refuge there stares at me. I want to shrug and inform it that it can relax.
I lie down and reassure myself that the ship rat will also stay awake, afraid of dreams.
The wood is warm, as if keeping the memory of the sun inside. I can feel it under my bare feet, the rough skin that I tread, the sensations on soles that boast almost no sensitivity and yet could sketch out, if I desired, the lines and contours of the boards. Tree sand on this beach built for us.
On the other hand, the cold on my skin is nearly liquid. I have no clothes to keep it at bay, so it runs its avid tongue over my flesh, swirling it lightly where there is more warmth: my cheeks, my armpits, my groin, my tumescent sex.
Mikhail is in the forecastle, waiting for me naked under the sheets, and I go to him.
Sails slap the night with a dry, tight snap. I can see red veins on the cloth, stretched, filling with blood, like my sex.
The ship is alive. I can feel it in this moment. Blood and wood, shaking against the onslaught, vibrating as the wind penetrates. Like me, she is headed somewhere. The wait makes her tremble in anticipation of pleasure.
I touch the lines that restrain her desire, the ones that link ship to sails. It feels as though someone, something, were touching the root of my cock, the insensitive base of the beginning. But as that prepuce covers my sex, what I see of the Demeter is nothing more than skin that must be pulled aside, moistened so it can separate more easily.
What wets me is not spindrift, not spray on the breeze. Upon my skin and the ship pools the slow humidity of before.
It readies itself.
Mikhail is also waiting.
What makes me shudder is not his warm lips, his thin fingers, or the naked sex that seeks me out.
What caresses me is the distance, the space between us, whether far or near.
His skin is not as important as the thought of that skin. The taste I yearn for now, without having yet tasted it, the shudder of semen that still remains within him.
It is the man who has not yet probed my lips with his tongue, but who I can guess in the meantime is the cold that sips my breath.
I can see neither sea nor stars. A mist rises from the waters, from inside the ship. This is right, just. Neither the schooner nor I are here in the present moment, but in that which is to come.
When Mikhail arrived at the house, when I first explored a space in search of him, I remember the dark snow on the other side of the windows. Night snow, white darkness.
Mist.
There is no one on the bridge, no man at the helm. The snow hides them. They have taken refuge next to the fire to survive the winter.
I cannot allow this.
I am the Captain. Although Mikhail is there, caressing himself, I am responsible for this ship.
Who could have told me that I should one day postpone pleasure, desire, for duty?
Not even I.
Or mayhap I could have. I have exchanged my duty for guilt, because I know what
happened to Mikhail, the reason he rests in a mujik grave, far from consecrated ground.
I take the helm. My hands close firmly on the wheel. The wood is warm but not from the sun. There is no sun in the mist, in the dark snowfall.
The wood is soft. I can sink my fingers into it slightly, softened as it is by a thousand hands that have touched it before. Our course is important.
As though simply wishing it suffices, I remove the mist from me, leaving a path between the stars and the instruments. I measure the angle of elevation, verify the figures against the nautical calendar. All this without leaving the helm, while I point the Demeter back in the right direction.
She shudders, suddenly heavy. The sails momentarily lose their stiffness. Men should trim them, catch the wind again. But I am alone with the helm that groans under my hands. No wooden voice, just effort creaking inside. The wheel groans and I understand.
Without releasing it, I penetrate its center, allowing my foreskin to retract, the wood to encompass my sex. There is no humidity and yet it is easy to enter the Demeter, which directs her bowsprit in the right direction, toward England.
The sphincter of the helm is the right size for my sex, but I can sense its strength. If it should close tightly enough, it could rip my cock away, but the ship wants me to stay inside, to feel her, vibrating with the wind, that continual whisper over the waves, liquid and dry in a thousand parts. I do not move. There is no need. The ship moves for me, ramming the waves, burying its rudder in the waters and its main mast in the night. The lines vibrate, transmitting the sensations to my glans, each piece a part of me, and I can feel everything, muscles of cloth, tree, cable, wind and water.
Slowly, I deliberately turn the helm. I spin the wheel around my sex.
The rudder, the reckoning, the route.
Penetrating it, clinging to the helm, while I speak to someone standing behind me, I don’t know whether naked or clothed, erect or watching.
It matters not.
Nothing does: not Mikhail, not the fact, gleaned from my breathing, that I am about to ejaculate inside my ship.
What will be the schooner’s reaction?
I can feel the man (someone, something) behind me, smiling, while I shudder.
I know he is satisfied with my pleasure, as though he has granted me the Demeter in exchange for the rat under the sheets.
Mayhap he has, and so can see me with eyes full of night, while I fear him not.
Why should I do so in the quiet lassitude of after?
In some fashion that I cannot ken, I have made a pact with him.
The man behind me listens. I mutter words that might be related to navigation, but little do they matter.
Not in the dream.
For a moment, I can set aside the images and perceive reality. My cabin and my hand firmly closed on my cock, caressing it.
I return to the vision, continue enjoying the Demeter.
But even there, in the midst of intense pleasure, comes the unbroken shriek of a rat.
Cornered, screaming before a dry and definitive click silences his voice.
Vlahutza studies the stars with the sextant and carefully reviews the nautical almanac to calculate our position. A task I carried out hours before and whose results he consults, making his own dead reckoning, to certify that his captain is not sending the Demeter into the abyss.
We have rounded the Cape of Matapan and the waters are calm. No surprises await in their currents or in the slow rhythm of the waves. The Messenian Gulf offers us the same tranquility that must exist in its depths.
The same illusory aspect as fragile ice ready to break under our feet.
And in order not to hear the lure of that spellbinding liquid, the promised peace awaiting us, motionless, the First Mate seeks order in the constellations, the position and distance that separate us from the end of our route: the port awaiting us in England.
At this moment, that distant border makes little sense, much like the hawsers that we will use to moor the schooner quayside.
The only certain thing is those stars that have not changed in generations, the imperturbable rhythm of the stopwatch, the magnetic compass that does not rest, the figures on our tide charts, the shipwrecks written down in logbooks full of salt that we rescue so that they point out the sites hidden, the other abysses located in the abyss of the sea.
The First Mate does well to anchor us in this world with the numbers written down in the logbook, the longitude and latitude that the Demeter occupies.
We are not in the middle of nowhere. We are en route. We know where we are going.
The men who walk along the deck, throwing some debris overboard, securing lines, repairing canvas, believe they have crossed the invisible routes so often that they know them beforehand. But they and I should be helpless without the markings on the maps, without the declensions noted in the almanac, without the navigation charts carefully transcribed by men who—mayhap—do not know the sea.
There must always be at least two men on each ship who can calculate the course, who know the weak secrets of navigation. Vlahutza and I know that each of us is here in case the other dies. We are continuations of truncated destinies, descendants of he who dies in the hypothetical catastrophe. Ghosts of each other.
Petrofsky also looks like a ghost up there, scrutinizing something high up in the rigging. We all regard him as though what he does is especially dangerous, but no blow of the wind, no movement of the Demeter justifies that apprehension in someone who daily trims the sails and secures the lines.
Something has changed since the darkness fell, as if we heard the world freezing rapidly around us, surrounded by the terrible rassol of the Bothnian Sea, salt ice forming needles in the white mantle that yearns to imprison ships.
The crew is dissatisfied with something, scared, but they refuse to talk, mayhap because their fears are formless and vague.
There are no signs of coming rain and, nevertheless, we regard the sky. Waiting for the water to drop upon us and dissolve our restlessness.
And here we are, salty dogs, veterans of a thousand trips, yearning for a storm to calm us.
“There are no rats, sir,” says Arghezi, while leaving the food on the table.
I regard him, not knowing what expression my face might bear.
“Not enough,” he clarifies.
“Enough for what?” Muresh interrupts, but I already know.
“Didst check the storerooms well?” I ask, without letting fear weigh on my words.
“Yes, Captain. They have not infested the provisions.”
“Everything is normal?”
“Everything, sir.”
That is to say, there were the common traces of their activity: droppings mixed with food, but no nest there, no white pups twisting in the flour.
It is the ninth day of navigation. With no more cargo than the boxes of earth, the rats should have left their hiding places in search of something to eat.
Normally, they would have reached our cabins looking for crumbs, clearing a path between our food and their hunger.
It is true that in the thousand corners that exist in every ship, in the depths of the dead work of the Demeter, there must be enough garbage and debris to keep our rat crew alive for days, but they always prefer fresh food, whether to bother us or to make us feel their disdainful supremacy. When they run up to the deck and climb with obese precision along the ropes and masts, they seem to tell us that they are the true owners of our ship. We sail to maintain them. We cross great distances and seven seas to provide them exotic food, delicacies from around the world. They do not hide.
Not without reason.
Nine days is not much time. No reason to scare the crew by asking about rats. Mayhap they have just been hiding, chewing through some unknown delicacy.
Or perhaps not.
“
Muresh, go fetch me the First Mate.”
Muresh looks at the Cook. The appropriate thing is that someone of lower rank must comply with these types of orders. His expression tells me that he does not consider it fair that I should send him. I suspect he spends too much time with Vlahutza. However, he still goes.
“Has anyone reported sick?” I ask the Cook.
“No, sir.”
“Dost know what to look for?”
“Aye, sir. Sore throat, lumps of dense flesh in the armpits and groin. Nodules on the neck. Fever.”
The symptoms of plague.
I remember my father telling me about the eclipse of rats, waning rats while the disease incubates inside the streets. Black rats that nobody sees again. After their disappearance, the deaths begin. Then the fires in the streets, the heavy wagons carrying the dead and rags that look the same in the dark.
We know of the plagues in India, of a thousand dead in a pyre that never ceases its burning, while elephant gods are begged for the return of rats and normalcy.
“Captain?”
Vlahutza and Muresh enter the cabin, crowding it further. Nigh-on half of the crew present.
The Cook and I shall not mention diseases and rodents. I know I shall not write anything in the logbook. Not until someone finds the small bodies and touches one of the dying animals to certify that in its fatty flesh there are livid nodules, hard as wood. Then I shall lower the sails and let fly the white flag that will prohibit us from entering any port, make us await some solution at sea.
I order Vlahutza to put fewer men on duty. Let the crew rest today as much as possible. Tomorrow, they must redistribute the cargo, find new positions for the boxes of earth.
The First Mate listens to me, saying nothing. Extra meaningless work, shouts and orders to a crew that already has enough dealing with the daily routine.
The Route of Ice and Salt Page 5
