Ship of Fools (13 page)

“Well then, just hope madly that someone will fall in love with you,” said Jenny, feeling that she had got on a slow-moving merry-go-round. “Don't you see? It's really all so simple, Elsa!”

“But suppose,” said Elsa, “no one falls in love with me, what happens then?”

“Nothing, I expect,” admitted Jenny at last, completely cornered.

“That's just it,” said Elsa, a despairing satisfaction in her tone, and she said no more.

PART II

High Sea

Kein Haus, keine Heimat …

Song by Brahms

Ric and Rac, Lola's twins, got up early and dressed themselves quietly before Lola and Tito were awake. They were badly buttoned and frowsy-haired; their wary black eyes gave their sallow sharp faces a hardened, precociously experienced look; awake, they were up to mischief, and asleep, they dreamed of it. They did a song and dance act in the show, in bullfighter and Carmen costume, and tore each other's hair in the dressing room afterward through jealousy of the applause and sheer nervous excitement. Otherwise they were of one mind and spirit, and lived twined together in a state of intense undeclared war with the adult world—or rather, with the whole world, for they did not like other children, or animals, either.

They were christened Armando and Dolores, but they had renamed themselves for the heroes of their favorite comic cartoon in a Mexican newspaper: Ric and Rac, two lawless wire-haired terriers whose adventures they followed day by day passionately and with envy. The terriers—not real dogs of course, but to their idolaters real devils such as they wished to be—made fools of even the cleverest human beings in every situation, made life a raging curse for everyone near them, got their own way invariably by a wicked trick, and always escaped without a blow. They were in short ideal characters and the first the children had ever admired and longed to emulate. Ric and Rac they became to themselves and it gave them secret strength.

The decks were still damp and steaming lightly under the morning sun, and only a few sailors were moving about slowly. Ric and Rac went into one of the writing rooms and there silently, as if by previous plan, Ric took the cork from an ink bottle and turned the bottle on its side. For a moment they watched the ink pour out over the clean blotter and onto the carpet, then silently they went out on the other side of the ship, where Rac, seeing a small down pillow which Frau Rittersdorf had left in her deck chair, without a word took it up and tossed it overboard. Soberly they watched it bob upon the waves, wondering why it floated so long. A sailor appeared just back of them, and they fled with such obvious signs of guilt, he frowned and looked about him carefully to find what they had been up to; saw nothing, shook his head, went about his business, while the evidence slowly sank far in the wake.

Ric and Rac climbed the rail in the stern above the steerage deck and gazed down upon a fascinating sight. Hundreds of people, men and women, were wallowing on the floor, being sick, and sailors were washing them down with streaming hose. They lay in the film of water, just lifting their heads now and then, or trying to roll nearer the rail. One man sat up and held out a hand to the sailor nearest him, and the sailor turned the hose down to a light drizzle and washed the man's face and head, then turned the water on plentifully and washed his clothes, there on him, just as he was.

Another man lay on his face and groaned and gurgled as if he were drowning. Two sailors picked him up out of his own sickness and carried him to the lowest step of the stairway to the dark steerage quarters and there set him down. He fell over on his side at once. “Let's make him get up,” said Ric, the male twin, and taking off his loose heavy brown sandal, he threw it by the toe. It missed and struck a young woman sitting near with a baby in her arms. Her skirts were sopping wet and her bare feet were black with filthy water. She looked up at them and clenched her fist, shouting a wonderful string of dirty words—which they knew—at them, and added a few they had not heard, but they knew the meanings. They smiled for the first time at each other with an expression of discovery, then listened with all their ears, watching her dirt-streaked face work and crumple in hatred and helpless fury.

A sailor on deck below picked up the sandal and tossed it back so accurately he hit Ric in the chest, and almost at the same instant the twins were seized by an arm each from the back, and a stern voice of absolute authority said, “What are you doing here?” They were hauled downward so strongly they had not time to stiffen their spines, but they refused to meet the cold eye of the young officer, who shook them quite freely and said, “If you do such things again you will be locked up for the rest of the voyage. Now remember!” He gave them a little push, and they ran in silence, with impudent faces.

They almost collided with the dying man in the wheel chair being pushed along like a baby in a carriage by the tall angry-looking boy. “Get out of my way,” snarled the boy in Spanish, and they dodged around him, putting out their tongues.

The man in the chair sat among his pillows and coughed, as he did nearly all day and all night, his weak little beard agitated, his eyeballs mustard-yellow.

“Stop here,” he said to the boy, and they paused while he craned feebly to see the people on the lower deck, a sick pity in his face in the presence of so much misery. Some of the men were getting on their feet by then; they stood jammed together along the walls of the ship and at the rail while the sailors went on hosing down the filth of their sickness into the sea. They then piled back upon each other, on the wet canvas chairs in their wet clothes, and in the abominable heat a strange mingled smell of vegetable and animal rot rose from them.

Herr Graf said in a low voice as if talking to himself: “I can think only of how all that sinful flesh must suffer before it shall be allowed to die. We must all earn the blessing of death at a great price, Johann.” At the sound of his name Johann's mouth quivered with rage and disgust. He did not reply. The dying man spread one hand out in the direction of the steerage in a gesture of blessing. “God, heal them, give them health and virtue and joy.… If only I could touch them. Johann,” he said to the boy his nephew, in a weak but natural voice, “you must help me down there among them, to touch some of those sick; they must be eased, it is not right to let them suffer.”

Johann's sulky mouth curled with exasperation, his hands jerked on the chair: “You know you will not be allowed to go down there. Why do you always talk nonsense?”

In silence they moved on, the chair creaking faintly. “I forgive you, nephew Johann, I forgive you your hard heart and evil will. You cannot harm me by any means, but I might help you if you would let me.”

“You can help me by dying and letting me go free,” said Johann in a low shaking voice, giving the chair a sharp swerve. “You can die and let me go home!”

His uncle considered this awhile, and then said in a reasonable tone as if in ordinary conversation: “I promised I would leave you the money, Johann, if you would come with me and see me safely to Germany once more, for a last look. Is that not worth considering?”

“When?” asked Johann wearily. “When?” and the chair wheels rattled a little.

“It should not be long, Johann, in the very nature of things. Do you expect me to set the exact date for you? But I told you in the beginning that if you would come—”

“Don't go over that,” said Johann, “I know all about it.”

“And your mother my poor sister, she was glad of the chance for you. I renew my promise to leave you everything in my will, though you do not deserve it, you have not merited it; for charity and kind behavior were part of your agreement. But leaving all that aside, you may now finish your education in Germany; you may not have to go back to Mexico at all; I hope not.”

“I will go where I please,” he said bitterly. “And what did my mother care what happened to me? She wants only the money.”

“It is perhaps true, my dear nephew,” said Herr Graf, choking and beginning to cough. “Yet in fact the money will be yours and not hers.” He spat into a folded paper box which he produced from under his light rug. “I can see that you are my sister's own child. She was never like the rest of us. She had a cold nature, a hard heart, from the beginning.”

“It is time for me to go and ask for your breakfast,” said Johann. He broke out suddenly as if he were near tears. “Why can't I have my meals with the others in the dining room? It is making me sick to eat always with you in that nasty cabin. Why can't you sit up here on deck by yourself for an hour and let me breathe? You are a beast of selfishness, Uncle, I say it to your face. So.”

Herr Graf groaned and hid his face in both hands. “My God,” he said, “go, go and leave me. Yes, leave me alone. God will take care of me. He will not let me suffer by your cruelty. Stay as long as you like. But remember, I have made my will in your favor, and you shall have everything. Be sure of that. The rest is between you and your conscience.”

Johann gave a great explosive sigh and pushed the chair very fast. He was ravenously hungry, ah, he would sit in the pleasant bright dining salon among the lively young people and maybe get into a conversation with one of those pretty girls. He would get away from death for just an hour, the smells, the praying, the phlegmy rattle in the throat, the smothering air of old age, sick and whining and clutching …

“You will be all right, I will fix everything and you can read for a while,” he said, and he felt cold and determined. No, not for any money could he bear another day without relief, a little freedom, just a few turns on deck by himself before he lost control and smashed something. No, not for any money. He eased the chair downsteps with unusual gentleness, turned expertly through the cabin door, opened the porthole; and feeling the half-fainting gaze of his uncle heaping untold reproach upon him, he bounded out again. Half a dozen paces away he was whistling gaily a doleful little tune: “
Das gibt's nur einmal, das kommt nicht wieder
,” as if his heart would break for joy.

David Scott, who slept on the narrow bunk against the wall, was wakened by Denny climbing out of the upper berth. David, after a quick glimpse, pretended to sleep. There seemed nothing much wrong with Denny except he was a bore. His mind seemed to run monotonously on women, or rather, sex; money, or rather his determination not to be gypped by anybody; and his health.

He got up early every morning and took a dose of effervescent laxative salts, making the same nauseated face after the draught. Then he ate a cake of yeast, nibbling it little by little as he shaved. He would dash cold water in his face and examine the whites of his eyes apprehensively. He had small, mattery pimples on his neck and one cheek, like a boy of fourteen. He had, by a long roundabout arrangement through German friends of his father, got a chance to work with a great chemical manufacturer's firm in Berlin, and now and then he made a vague reference to his future as a chemical engineer. But as David displayed not only an utter ignorance of the subject but a total indifference as well—and Denny thought David meant signboards or houses when he called himself a painter—their topics of conversation had narrowed almost to nothing unless Denny's three preoccupations could be called topics.

Herr Glocken said little, but after a few days' rest he seemed in fair health, and began to show himself at moments to be rather a good-humored twinkling little man in the friendly male atmosphere of the cabin, with the two young fellows who never seemed to notice that his back was not like theirs. Sometimes they talked German together, gossiping about the affairs of the ship, and the young men never made Herr Glocken feel that their general experience of life was particularly different from his own. Herr Glocken was at ease. He slept well, and kept the curtains drawn in the morning until he could emerge fully dressed, saving them the sight of his unseemly frame except under the best disguise he could manage.

At that moment there was no sign of movement behind his curtain. David did not stir, but was outraged to observe that Denny proceeded to strip and give himself a sponge bath from the communal washbasin. But I have to wash my face in that, he thought, and viewed with horror and repulsion the naked brown flesh of the other, like badly tanned leather, all overgrown with sparse curly hair which came off on the soapy cloth and stuck to the sides of the bowl in a light scum. If he does that again, I'll stuff him through the porthole, resolved David, seething. Still he said nothing and realized that probably he never would. He would wait until the fellow was gone and scrub the bowl with disinfectant. Hot and nervous, he sat up and felt for his straw sandals with his wriggling toes.

“Hello,” said Denny in a cautious voice, “I'll be the hell out in a minute. It's a tight fit in here.”

David, feeling that for him it would be a tight fit anywhere that he had to put on his shoes before a stranger, or speak to anyone except perhaps Jenny before he had had his coffee, said, “I'll try to get in the shower, don't hurry yourself.”

Herr Glocken's head appeared between the long curtains, his thin confused hair all on end. His long face with its pseudo-Hapsburg jaw was a network of fine wrinkles. “Good morning,” he croaked, though not gloomily. “Would you be so kind as to hand me that little flask?” and he pointed towards it, standing beside his water glass. “And some water, if you will please.”

David gave him both, and noticed that the flask was marked “Every three hours or when required,” and it occurred to him that perhaps Herr Glocken was never altogether without pain. Herr Glocken, reaching out, parted the curtains more than he intended, and David noted with intense surprise that he wore a bright red silk pajama coat. Profusion of color in anything was offensive to David; it offended more than his eye—he distrusted it on moral grounds, and nowhere more so than in dress. His own neckties were black knitted strings he bought by the half dozen from sidewalk peddlers, his socks were black cotton, his suits were mottled gray, dark gray, light gray, Oxford gray and blue-gray, besides the chaste white linen and canvas he wore in summer. His favorite palette was a mixture of grays, browns, ochers, and dark blues with a good deal of white; and his favorite though not original theory was that persons who “expressed themselves” by wearing color were merely attempting to supply its inner lack in their own natures, adding a façade that fooled nobody.