Georg Letham (32 page)

And yet he is still a man, that is to say, he is vain. He has rooted out his shaving things (a forbidden possession) from among his belongings and tries to beautify himself for our arrival in C. Are there women there? he asks. Are there ever! I promise him. Not women, dames, he means. More, you poor dog, than you'll ever have any use for. But he is happy nonetheless and hopes. There is no mirror in either the sick bay or the ship's pharmacy. But the clever boy finds a solution. Every microscope has a mirror that can be turned to reflect light into the light collector or condenser–and this the ingenious youth has turned to his own purposes. The microscope's wooden box was locked, the brigadier
general had the key. But a thief as good as that, even one on his last legs, can find a way. A bit of wire and any lock opens for him. And there he sits on the laboratory stool, keeping his balance with effort amid the rocking of the ship, shaken by coughing and trembling with weakness, looking infatuatedly into the microscope mirror with his great beautiful eyes and doing himself up. Who would have the heart to stop him? Even the brigadier general kindheartedly looks the other way. All the tidbits the poor emaciated fool has begged fill the pockets of his convict's overalls. He likes to keep them around, he who cannot keep them down. But at least he
has
them.

He also makes music. On a well-used comb already missing some teeth–it belonged to the mugger, who lost all his hair from typhus–he plays stridulating, sweetly buzzing versions of popular songs, “Under the Bridges” and “La Carmencita,” stamping on the deck to beat out the rhythm (his wooden clogs are loose on his emaciated feet). He smiles, he is happy, he sleeps peacefully despite the heat, despite the coughing that plagues him. He coughs and gags constantly, yet sleeps as though he were in the bosom of Abraham.

No other creature on the ship is so happy. The officers have given up the shooting at dolphins with which they amused themselves a few times. The ship's cooks struggle to concoct delicacies for them out of canned goods; nothing appeals to them, they just sit sullenly together in the mess, give the crew a hard time, avoid the convicts like the plague, drink whiskey, and play poker, their money passing from one to another in turn, all except the brigadier general, who never plays, never drinks, and is never bored.

The oxen up on deck have no interest in food, either. March, poor fellow, strives in vain to get them to accept some hay and water. They
only pant, grunt reluctantly, lift their broad heads, strain at the tight chains binding them to the masts and other uprights. I want to be there when they are slaughtered so that I can use their blood to make a nutritive medium for culturing bacilli (blood flowing straight from the bodies of animals is almost sterile). We still have some days to go, and I have to work, have to keep busy.

March must have heard about my request to the purser. He has volunteered for slaughtering duty even though he has a horror of blood. To other criminals it would have been a pleasure: blood is blood.

And the unfortunate March, this man who is completely blinded by his infatuation and whom one is justified in barring from human society for that reason alone, tortures himself by butchering a beast that had once been a fattened ox but is now only a prisoner. Just to be able to see me and look into my eyes. But I do not look into his. I sterilize a tin basin with denatured alcohol, hold it into the stream of blood, and then take it away, leaving as I came, without a word. He is distraught. What was he hoping for? What am I supposed to be to him? He to me?

Hard-hearted, me? Only one who is equal to the world at last.

In the sick bay I follow my patient's example and check the mirror on the microscope before putting it away. The mirror is flat and beautifully polished on one side, concave and beautifully polished on the other. Precision is precision. I look at myself. And why not? I've been wanting to. I never found the moment for it before.

I look at myself. I see myself as I always was. I have not changed. My father certainly had a mirror on his voyage to the far north. Not on his way back. That I can look into this mirror, without love, without hate, face immobile, without a smile, without a grimace of pain, without hope, without feeling, do I have
him
to thank for this too?

The lung patient has finally taken to his bed. He can no longer smoke and suffers painfully from doing without. “
You
smoke!” he says to me. I smoke a black cigarette that has almost entirely disintegrated from the heat and blow the smoke into his waiting nostrils. He turns away if the smoke is too strong (the paper is the main thing, the tobacco is incidental), but then he brings his wax-pale, skeletal face back, his eyes full of longing. He has no desire to eat. Or is now unable to eat. “
You
eat!” he says, and I eat, and he avidly watches my throat and yearningly inhales the smell of the food, his eyes burning. It irritates his throat, sore from laryngeal tuberculosis, just as much as the tobacco, but he is enthusiastic about the strong broth for which we can thank the world-weary ox slaughtered yesterday, and in his awkward, ludicrous voice, the dying man wheezes to me, “Go on!” He clutches at me with his emaciated hand, looks at me with his great, beautiful, dark blue eyes. He smells disaster coming but refuses to believe it. The bacilli demolishing his lungs, stomach, intestine, larynx, etc., secrete as a by-product a wonderful toxin, essence of euphoria, whose effect is that he
always hopes, always believes, is always happy, always laughs
! There'll be pie in the sky by and by. He dozes off. As he falls asleep, he asks me to open the porthole. But it has been open for a long time.

The night is blue, lit by the floating moon. Not the slightest breath of wind. The stokers shovel coal into the fireboxes. The ship's officers quarrel, then laugh, and singing is heard. In the convicts' catacombs, things are especially wild. But no music, just clamoring and scuffling, strident hooting, muffled crashing.

There is a gleam on the horizon like oxidized silver. The piled-up clouds are vast, complex edifices, like Indian temples with endless
gingerbread and turrets, everything sharply defined, flooded by the bewitching whitish blue of the moon.

Down in the water by the sides of the old ship, a spectral shimmer is passing by. Tiny sparks flash, little flames strewn in a plane phosphoresce and die down. All in the shadow thrown by the ship. They materialize from some realm of light, tremble on the surface of the water, which gleams under the moon like a single piece of cast bronze, then fade behind the ship, where the smooth, shiny, silvery blue-green backs of the splashing, dancing, leaping dolphins toss in the wake. They reappeared this evening and have been following the ship in a large school. But little sea creatures play in the soft shadows on either side of the gliding ship, phosphorescent plankton and undulating medusae, squids on the hunt and being hunted, tiny organisms brought to the glistening surface of the ocean by the hot, still night.

The lung patient has awakened. His body feels the end coming. But his mind, addled by the happiness toxin, has only a blind sense of well-being. He asks me for his suitcase, and from the bottom of it he brings out scraps of illustrated magazines. Photos of naked and half-clothed young women, in candy-cane colors, posing provocatively. He turns the pages with his pencil-thin, tobacco-stained fingers, and suddenly he begins to cut the figures out with his nail scissors, laying them out on the grubby blanket in front of him. A children's game? You little lamb, white as snow! So this is a harmless person, someone who arrived on this convicts' ship just because of a moment of recklessness? Pie in the sky? Pie in perdition too, I fear. Just look at the dark red lips twisted with lewd destructiveness in the pale, gaunt face, their corners still showing traces of the blood he lost this morning! Look at the depravity in his pathologically glowing blue eyes as he carefully, precisely, dismembers
the paper figurines with the scissors as though they were living, suffering flesh. Off comes the left foot, extended in a toe dance, then the right foot, then the delicate, supple left forearm. The typhus patient looks on, a smirk on his face. Take him away, off with him! But I leave the dying man undisturbed. Now he hesitates: should he first cut the paper head off straight across, or slice the slender lingerie-clad midriff top to bottom? Pure evil at play is an exciting thing to see up close. For him who understands it. Rejoice, poor soul! I do as he wishes and leave him alone. Fifteen minutes later he is again in a deep sleep, the blood gone from the corners of his mouth. The next morning he can barely breathe. “Am I going to die?” he croaks. He's dead already! There are no scraps of paper lying about. But when he is lifted from the sweat-soaked bed, there they are on the sheet. I give him the dismembered figures to take on his final pilgrimage. A man must have what he needs.

The brigadier general comes to view the deceased. He gazes at him with a sage expression. He touches the dead man's fallen-in chest with his black fountain pen like a Chinese medicine man with a chopstick and sends the deceased to his final repose. And a cross is entered in the rolls. Prisoner 4431 is no more.

We are near land. Possibly an island is not too far away.

A ring, now much too big, is taken off one of the dead youth's fingers. Imitation gold, with a fake stone. The junior officer checks his mouth for genuine gold crowns, but, what a pity, the boy still has all thirty-two of his teeth, gleaming white, flawless. So without further ado. The body is decaying from within, and one more hour on board in this hellish heat would be too many. Where can it go? Not to heaven. The other way, where we all must go. Down.

Scattered butterflies, the size of grape leaves and with the same
ragged shape, crimson and sapphire blue, or dull mauve, float through the rigging on the forecastle of the
Mimosa
. They encounter obstacles and come to rest, their long, dove gray antennae vibrating, behind coils of rope, winches, chests, nothing giving more than the scantiest shade in the blazing equatorial sun.

Behind the ship is a frenzy of activity: the school of dolphins. Several hundred magnificent ones and more every hour.

Gleaming like niello, they are so densely packed that they almost lift each other out of the dark blue water; they spiral into the air, spinning like dragonflies over a brook. Broad heads, white snouts, small eyes, slapping dorsal fins, laminate tail fins lashing and reflecting the highlights in the water like mirrors. Above them gulls and pelicans: shrill cries, rippling wings, banking, powerful climbing, lightning plunges as they slash into the water, flinging up silver-bellied, finger-sized, slim little fish. Above it all the unapproachable grandeur of the sky.

This is the hour when the convicts are led on deck, in squads, double file: a boarding school with a prefect. Bayonets in front, on the side, in back. Quick time! Move! Move! A tender rifle butt in the back, a kick in the meager behind, forward, march! Flex those muscles! A little exercise never hurt anybody! I will not describe the gray faces.

No church bell tolls to announce the burial. The convicts do not care. Their faces are agonized, sullen. Many drag themselves along like sick birds, like lame animals. But what primal strength still lives within them! Strength to suffer!

With my help, the junior officer has wrapped the not yet cool body of the consumptive criminal in one of the typhus patient's sheets. Throw in a piece of iron bar, and then the whole thing into the sea! One, two, three, hup! But the piece of iron comes loose and flops into the water.
The featherlight corpse beside the ship is carried to the wake and then back to the dolphins.

They play with it: the fun-loving lad floats between heaven and earth as the animals in mad high spirits toss his mortal remains back and forth, until at last the whitish naked corpse disappears in the dark mass of silvery dolphins.

I was awakened by shouting. I heard shots being fired. I say awakened, and yet I was unable to wake up properly. It was hard to breathe, there seemed to be a lump of lead the size of a man's head on my breastbone. I was dreaming about being awake, tearing off the few clothes I had on, yet they kept being there, clinging tightly to my sweat-bathed body. There was an unnatural, pathological longing in me, the half-sleep refused to lift, and I had to realize that the shooting and shouting had stopped (waking thoughts alongside the sleeping ones) before I could summon the energy to wake up. And this after close to three weeks of almost total sleeplessness.

When I finally became fully conscious a few hours later, I thought it was still night. My cabin seemed strangely gloomy; the ship was abnormally quiet. The horizon was completely draped with brownish black clouds resembling coarsely woven old sacks. The air was dark, the sun breaking through only at rare instants with an unpleasant gleam. Here and there on the horizon toward the west and the south, little rain showers sprayed down from the clouds, creating a fraying fringe lit by rainbow colors.

The sea is not turbulent. But abruptly whitecaps appear, the ship shudders as though it has run onto a sandbar–the throb of the engines
stops, then sluggishly starts up again. A dense lilac curtain forms in front of the ship to the north and northeast.

The surface of the sea is wan, flat, dirty, gray. Without warning a cloudburst hammers down out of the low sky onto the planks of the ship. All decks are flooded. The junior officer and the black guards wade through tepid ankle-deep water, carrying an apparently lifeless heavy man on a stretcher.

The convalescent typhus patient, happy not to have to be below in the common area, makes himself useful, sets up a bed in the sick bay, blows the dust off the night table. The heavy man is Suleiman, the Sultan. He is breathing heavily, wheezing, his head moving beneath a bloody rag; he prods with clenched, bloody fists at his face–a shapeless, bloody mass, a seething, twitching expanse of raw flesh. The men carry him carefully into the sick bay. He twists his head back and forth, unable to see.