“I don’t see why we should move the cargo,” he says.
It is not a challenge. It does not oppose my orders. It simply lists a sufficient fact. The tone of his voice does not allow one to guess, but it seems that he is about to shout his protest, to refuse to obey. The Second Mate and the Cook prepare for another demonstration of Vlahutza’s bad humor. But I know him. He is simply telling the crew, telling himself, that he will not be as bad a captain as I. That he will never move cargo in the middle of a journey, or if he does, he will order it in such a way that no one can mumble under his breath (as he does) concerning the merits of his superior.
“Start tomorrow, during Arghezi’s watch,” I say, acting as though it just occurred to me, as one more way to bother him. “Ye may all of you withdraw.”
Upon the table, the food. Once I am alone, I chew it without noticing its flavor, too focused am I upon the movement of my face when biting, upon the muscles of my neck ….
Mikhail, in moments of calm, with sweat drying on our bodies, liked to speak to me in a low voice, as though sharing the only story he had learned in his life were something more intimate than intercourse.
Caresses on my flesh, the delicate taste of his skin, and his voice: “A pilgrim who was going to India met a woman with white clothes and black lips. ‘Who or what are you?’ he asked. ‘I am the Plague and I go to India, where I shall kill a thousand men.’ On the return trip, the pilgrim met the woman again. ‘Why did you lie to me? I went to India and a thousand men had not died: There were ten thousand victims and the pyres have not stopped burning.’ ‘I told you the truth,’ said the Plague. ‘I killed only a thousand; the others died of fear.’”
“They must not see us,” he whispered furiously in my ear. “No one can know. Fear can cause ten thousand to die and it can make ten thousand kill, as well.”
“Fear of what?”
He touched my cock lightly with his mouth, his saliva and my spilled semen mingling, an imprecise border that ended only in caressing skin, lips gently pressing.
He looked up at me, far away, on the other side of the flesh.
“Fear of us.”
I turn to the dead work, to the sound of the sea below decks, the whisper of the depths that the Demeter’s hull barely tastes. The wood ignores the copper plates that cover it. Alone, it knows the secret currents, the incessant slicing of liquid.
The sea is calm, heave and sway nigh-on imperceptible. I sling my lamp to the deckhead and watch its movement, as though a secret breeze plays with it, causing a thousand liquid shadows to dance throughout the space.
It is nearly possible to believe that the hold has been flooded by a sea of shadows.
And there are fish in its waters.
Living beings that travel the depths of my ship; crackling fish of dry fins, whispery anemones; fabrics and objects, wood and ropes tensing and sliding with the heave and sway. A haunted house with myriad ghosts. Revenants we have known so many years that we now require them. There is no silence on the route, nor any way of closing one’s senses to the movement.
Were it possible to hear the silence of nothing, it would not be necessary for the crew to move the cargo tomorrow, unwittingly startling the rats with the task, discovering by accident their nests and hiding places. Then Arghezi should not need to be present, looking for them, scouring the shadows in search of bodies.
I stop here, breath shallow so that the air I inhale makes little noise, as though it were possible to distinguish between the diverse sounds of the Demeter.
Sometimes, it was possible to hear, in the house of my parents, the ceaseless groan of the wind, the crunching weight of the snow bearing down on the roof, the sandy spray of snowfall against the windows.
The Demeter is the same, a home alive in the midst of the elements. Here as well, in the momentary calm where silence does not exist, I should be able to distinguish the continuous gnawing of rats, a scrabbling hint of what hides between the walls.
I remember that constant, meticulous animal creak. A rhythm in that endless sound.
When I was but another sailor, I listened a thousand times, in the dark, to some fellow crewman masturbating. Furtive sounds, like the scampering of rats. Insistent, precise. A rhythm also in them.
A rhythm different from mine.
Nervous, fast. As though they wished to hurry to climax. Ejaculate into their palms and finally find sleep.
At such moments, I also touched my sex, masturbating as silently as possible, imagining the semen would seep into my clothes or the rough cloth on which we slept, liquids drying in the gathered heat.
I thought then, like now, about rats.
Did they also expect some of that thick liquid to fall? Did they, like me, hope to taste its harsh tang?
Would they sip it carefully?
If those drops fell, would the rats bury their teeth in the wood of the floor? Would they extend thin tongues to drink up every drop?
It became a matter of keeping my semen from the rats. I tried not to let any drops escape my palm, bringing my face close to the warm scent. I drank it slowly. A dense taste, with the feverish temperature of my sex, bloated with blood.
I think of Muresh, the warm food I serve him.
Would any of my men who happened to descend at this moment understand why his captain slowly masturbates in the hold? Would he understand the care with which I drip my semen onto the wood?
Does the invitation stir rats that may no longer exist?
“Captain.”
The voice of Arghezi, somehow in the midst of my dream, although in this one, only the Demeter and I remain, sharing the vague pleasure of ramming the waves.
I open my eyes and see the Cook’s face above me, while he shakes me lightly. A movement would suffice and I could sip his breath, touch his lips with my tongue.
“Captain.”
A whispering, intimate voice. He wants no one to hear. I want him closer. I can feel the heat of Arghezi’s skin.
Fever.
I remember then and awaken immediately, scrabbling away from that feverish face, from the disease that has reached my bed.
Arghezi has to grab me, keep me from falling to the floor.
“Wake up, sir.”
When he touches me, I know he is real. The temperature of our skins is identical. Both safe from the plague, or already dying.
“What is it?”
Before he answers, the possibilities are already all-but certain. Who has fallen? What shall I do then?
“You must accompany me,” he says.
I dress in silence, while the Cook turns his eyes toward the dark corridor. Shoulders raised, head slightly tilted forward, hands touching his forearms, he hides his chest in an innervated hug.
He seems a man in the midst of an ice storm, with no more protection than his own flesh. The only certainty is that skin, the unbroken flow of blood.
But it is not the cold that makes his lips tremble.
He has seen something; something has happened that makes him retreat into a corner, ready to groan like a rat.
Something he wants to show me.
We cross the deck without saying a word, without calling out to any of the men who work the last watch of the day. I look at the canvas, dry skin hanging on a wooden skeleton. Arghezi points to the hold. Where else? I do not want to go, not to the place where the Cook refuses to return. Whatever scared him is there ….
But I am the Captain and someone must do it.
The hold is full of fog, coiled tight against the floor, flowing fast and easy, tides of mist in a white sea.
It is clear outside, sky and ocean free of haze. I do not imagine a fire, the hold filling with smoke. No. This fog is screaming.
I descend without knowing why. Mayhap I wish to verify that what I see is real, that I am not in another dream from which I shall be awakened by a man
who swears my ship has been condemned by the plague.
Arghezi stays above, holding the lamp that casts my shadow on whatever it is that shudders in the darkness.
A sharp, continuous scream, without volume. Secret. Like Arghezi’s whisper. Like Mikhail muttering, “Very well.” A multiple shout, composed of a hundred different sounds.
I understand it, when I go down into the fog, when something small stirs beneath my foot and sinks its little teeth into my shoe.
A white rat.
Thousands of them on the floor, blurred by their rapid movements. Screaming with an unknown voice, as if their color and hunchbacked bodies distorted their sounds as well. I can hear them, but not the skittering of their nails against the wood, nor the rapid drumming of their steps. They seem not to touch the floor.
A gray rat runs past me, fleeing toward Arghezi, chased by the white ones. He is about to escape but they leap upon him, sharp teeth digging into his entire body.
A territorial fight.
For this reason had they disappeared for ten days: the new ones learning the terrain, the old ones hiding before the superior number of the others, fights in the shadows, deaths and murders behind the studs, under the floors, between the beams.
It is not difficult to guess how the white rats have arrived; they surround the boxes of earth as if determined to protect them. Mayhap their nests lie within.
I lean all my weight onto my foot, crushing the biting rat. It begins to vomit blood, too much for that thin, wiry body.
I want to crush them all, tear each one apart. I know not why. Mayhap that voice, the meaningless screeching they collectively emit, their tiny, blood-colored eyes ….
It becomes a matter of closing the hold. There is insufficient food for such a number. Let them die in the eternal darkness of the dead work; let them eat one another.
That might kill the deep fear they evoke in me, the certainty that I felt, for a moment, that the darkness had not confused me, that before becoming rats, they had been fog that oozed from the boxes of earth, seeping through the tight weft of wood that I know is not wide enough to let anything out ….
“Sometimes, they scream like pigs.”
I look up, startled. Olgaren continues to look at the tightly closed hatch of the hold. He does not await an answer, but plays unconsciously with a loop of rope tied to his wrist, three large knots that he rubs with his fingers. It seems a rosary, but is not. Or in any event, the prayers required for it are different. Three knots: If one undoes the first, it releases a moderate wind; the second, a gale; and the third unleashes the gusting voice of a hurricane.
The same Finnish man offered it to me at the port of Hierapetra, after many days of calm. Olgaren bought it because he also believes in the efficacy of sewing small nets to one’s clothing to ward off demons. And he assures us that gunpowder mixed with liquor makes him a veritable stallion. Up to twice in one night, he usually proclaims with pride that makes the claim impossible to refute. A child still surprised at the miracle of his body.
Now he is a child who has not quite awakened from a bad dream.
“And they stink, Captain. They squeal and blow dead breath from their mouths, as if they’d eaten carrion or were themselves dead inside ….”
Joachim and Petrofsky have moved away, weary, it seems, of Olgaren and his stories.
“And they come out only at night. Have ye not marked it? They are white and come out only at night, because white is a sickly color in the dark.”
Olgaren wears an open shirt that reveals part of his shoulders. Upon them a bruise fades, losing definition. A blow from Vlahutza at the beginning of the trip. I ask not why: It is easy to guess. When Olgaren feels compelled to say something, he cannot stop; he cannot prevent what has fermented in his mind from coming out.
“But they don’t touch us. For some reason, they won’t cross our path, nor do they gnaw our things. They haven’t come to us. I haven’t felt any pattering feet upon my body. Shadows of rats, that’s what they are. And they keep to themselves and that should be enough for us, knowing that they’ll stay down there. But they shriek like pigs in the dark. The others don’t care, ‘Let them do what they want as long as they don’t bite us,’ but I should also have locked them in the hold, same as ye.”
Then he realizes his words, what it would have cost him if they had been heard by Vlahutza. That tone of approval, acknowledging that the Captain has done - for once - the right thing. His blessing for the measure taken, for canceling the redistribution of the cargo and ordering, instead, that closed hatch, and the reward of an extra cup of liquor for each white rat found dead on deck.
He looks at me, not knowing what my reaction might be.
“Thank you,” I answer, because I am not Vlahutza.
I watch him go, glancing over his shoulder at the sea as if afraid something might emerge from its depths.
The plague was not the something that frightens them. Nor was it the absent rats.
The true source of fear falls on me like a persistent rain.
The same gnawing worry shared by Mikhail and me and all who carry our queer appetites like stigmata.
eyes
I go out into the night and the wind, into the relative calm of the last watch of the day, with a man working the deck and another at the helm.
I was drowning in my cabin, in the riotous flood of my thoughts. I know that pleasure awaits me in my dreams, as once the rat awaited, but I cannot abandon myself to sleep.
I remember that I abandoned myself to Mikhail and he to me.
He is buried at a crossroads, condemned, according to the men who left him there, never to find peace.
And I, alive, safe, cannot sleep, though pleasure awaits me in the dark.
I think of Petrofsky, of the brand he bears upon his skin, of the moment when flesh ceases to be a border.
I can see the bodies in the warm atmosphere, wet with sweat, fingers eager to slip between the muscles, when the need to tear exceeds mere arousal, a certainty that the body beside us—whether penetrating or penetrated—is ours, and to confirm the truth that there is nothing quite like pain, fingernails digging grooves into backs, the feeling of skin opening, the exquisite shudder that thrums along nerves and infects us, as if the wound were fresh in our own flesh ….
I hear the sea around me, or mayhap blood pounding in my ears. It matters not. I know that I can accompany Petrofsky in the bow.
I make no noise. It is impossible to hear my bare feet on the wood. I also think of my parents’ home in Dzerzhinsk, of the nights when I would get up from my bed to wander the dark rooms, understanding that the house was no longer a communal place. In the shadows, once all the doors were closed, private spaces came into being, secrets hidden under sheets, sheltered by the hours of night.
Then, as now, slight spasms of delirium; fear and enjoyment fused and I knew not which caused me to risk opening doors in guilty silence, to peer through the cracks at sleeping forms of those who misused that precious time.
Acketz is asleep on deck, hugging himself, as though even in sleep he must protect himself from something.
Petrofsky is alone.
That excites me. Alone, having already permitted someone to mark his flesh.
Alone like me, at this moment.
Petrofsky stands by the mainstay of the foremast, looking up at the sky, pale and trembling, so absorbed he sees naught but his horror. I follow his gaze, seeking what must hang amongst the cold stars, turning him into a statue of salt.
There are but a pair of clouds that move slowly, barely visible in the glow of the night.
Petrofsky’s hair is shaken by the wind, open shirt exposing his white chest, pantaloons clinging to his wiry legs like wet clothes.
Petrofsky seems submerged in a sea of wind, sinking into unknown depths while watching the surface grow farther away, the fading bo
rder he has crossed to encounter these insubstantial waters that drown him.
His hands touch his bare chest, run down it. He attempts to convince himself that he is real, that he is awake. I can hear him gasping, looking for something—a scream, a word—that might allow him to understand or express something impossible.
Again, I let my eyes drift upward along the ropes and the tense sails, the insensate design of the rigging, toward the darkness above us.
Only clouds.
Then I understand and I also feel I am drowning in nothing.
The wind has come alive in the canvas. It strives to strip Petrofsky’s clothes from his body, giving an audible whine as it penetrates our ears, sensitive pressure.
Yet, the clouds above drift indolently in the opposite direction from the unbridled gale that envelops us.
Clouds moving in another universe, a different night than the one through which we sail. The speed of the Demeter leaves them behind, high and delicate, without the least evidence that the wind touches them or drives them as it does us.
I regard the sea, the waves that roughen our travel, the slight veil of foam the wind rips from their crests, its fury reshaping them into titanic surges. Impossible to see whether in the distance, on that black horizon, the sea also roils and roars, or whether yonder waters are so still they reflect the stars.
The wind surrounds Petrofsky, rocking to and fro through his hair, giving him a crazed air. He says something, seems to speak to someone in the midst of that invisible flow, the wind entering his mouth, muddying his voice.
I stand a mere dozen paces from him, but it is as though I were on the other side of the world. The lines grow tense like veins; the sails are muscles about to burst, each billowing in a different direction.
The snapping of the canvas makes a sketch of the formless wind; at its center is Petrofsky.
An invisible hand tousles his clothes, exposes a shoulder, luminous in the night.
He raises a hand, which hovers a few inches from his bare skin, as if something prevents him from touching his own flesh. It seems he rests his palm on nothing.
The Route of Ice and Salt Page 6
