The Death Ship (34 page)

He could hardly believe he had in his possession such a fine passport. Everything in it was fine and perfect. Name, birthday, birthplace, occupation: Able-bodied seaman, honorably discharged from the Imperial Navy. Everything like a hymn. Now, let’s see, what is this? Wha-a-a-a-t? “Without country?” All right. It won’t matter. He will get a sailor’s book like a whiff. Well, well? What does this mean? “Good only for the interior.” Maybe the clerk thinks that ships sail on the sands of Brandenburg, or on the moors of Luneburg, or only on the river Elbe. Doesn’t matter. The passport is a peach.

Next day Stanislav went with his beautiful passport to the sea board to take out a sailor’s voyage book.

“You want a sailor’s book?”

“Yes, please.”

“We cannot give you a sailor’s book on this passport. You are without nationality. To have a citizenship, properly established, is the most important thing for a sailor’s identification book. Your passport is all right for Germany, but not for any foreign country. It gives you no right to a German sailor’s book.”

“How, then, can I get a ship? Won’t you, please, tell me this?”

“You have got a good passport. You will get any decent foreign ship with that passport. Only not a German ship. The passport says that you are living here in Hamburg, it tells who you are, where you come from, and all that. You are an old sailor with experience. Easy for you to get any ship. Any foreign ship. You make more money on a foreign ship than on a German, since our money is without any value.”

Stanislav found a ship. Two days later. A Dutch. An elegant merchant. Almost new. Was still reeking of fresh paint. Fine Dutch pay.

When the skipper saw the passport he smiled with lips lifted high and said: “Good paper. That’s what I like, men with fine papers. Let’s go straight to the consul, read the articles, sign on, and you get your advance. We sail with high water early in the morning.”

The Dutch consul registered his name in full: Stanislav Koslovski. A.B. Age, height, weight.

Then he asked: “Sailor’s book, please?”

Stanislav said: “Passport.”

“Just as good,” the consul said.

“Passport is brand-new. Ink still fresh. Only two days old. All shipshape. I know the officer personally who signed this passport,” the skipper said, and lighted a cigar.

The consul held the passport, satisfied to have in his hand such a wonderful piece of bureaucratic fine art. He turned the leaves and nodded approvingly. He was pleased.

Suddenly he stared. He stopped, and his satisfied smile froze on his lips. He turned the pages back and on again.

He took a breath and said shortly: “You cannot sign on.”

“What?” Stanislav cried.

And “What? “ cried the skipper. He was so surprised that he dropped the match-box.

“That man cannot sign on,” the consul repeated.

“Why not?” the skipper asked. “As I said, I know the officer who has signed the passport. The passport is correct.”

“No objection to the passport,” the consul said. “But I won’t sign on this man. He is without a country.”

“What do I care?” said the skipper. “I want this man. My first mate knows him to be a first-class man at the helm. I know the ships he has been on, and I know their masters. Therefore I know what he is worth. So that’s why I want to have him. I need men like him.”

The consul clasped his palms together and said: “Listen, captain, since you say you like that man so very much, are you willing to adopt him?”

“Nonsense,” the skipper said.

“Do you take all the responsibility for this man after he signs- off your ship again?”

“I don’t quite understand you, Mr. Consul.”

“I’ll explain it. This man, no matter how good a sailor he is, may not go ashore in any country he wishes; he cannot stay in any country he would like. He may go ashore, of course, as long as the ship is in port. But if he is found ashore after your ship has put out, the company of your ship is made responsible for him. Your company has to get him out of this country again. Where are you, or your company, going to take him?”

The skipper was quick with an answer: “He can always go back to Hamburg, where he comes from.”

“Can. Can. The truth is he cannot.” The consul began to talk like a judge sitting at his bench and pouring out stale moralities. “He has got a German passport good only for Germany. Germany has no obligation to let him in again once he has left it. Now, of course, he might obtain a special certificate, independent of this passport, which would permit him to enter Germany and to live there whenever he wants to. Such a certificate, though, can only be issued by the German secretary of state. I do not believe that this German authority will give him such a paper, because it would equal a paper of citizenship, and that is exactly what was denied him, or else he would have obtained a passport without any restriction. Fact is, and so far a well-established fact, that he was born in Poznan, and that neither Germany nor Poland, for some reason or other, has acknowledged his citizenship. He may go to the League of Nations. But the League of Nations has no country to give him. So, whatever paper the League of Nations may issue on his behalf, the fact that he has no country to call his own would still be unsettled. Only if you are willing to make out an affidavit here that you take the responsibility for him after he leaves your ship –”

“I cannot do such a thing. I am only an employee of my company,” the skipper said.

“Then, of course, no other road for me. I do not sign him on.” Saying this, the consul, with a heavy double stroke, crossed out the name of Stanislav, already written in the registers, so indicating that for him the case was at end.

“Listen.” The skipper leaned over on the desk. “Couldn’t you make an exception here? I would like to have him. I cannot find a better man at the helm than he is. I can go to sleep and leave the whole ship to him and nothing would go wrong. He got the right sailing instinct with the first bottle of milk he drank. I know this. We have talked together for a couple of hours.”

“Sorry, captain. Very sorry indeed that I cannot be at your service.” The consul rose from his chair. “My powers are extremely limited. I must obey my regulations. I am not the government. I am only her faithful servant.”

When he had finished he drew his mouth wide into his cheeks, as if he wanted to give a smile studied before a mirror. At the same time he lifted up his shoulders so that they almost reached his ears. His arms hung down flabbily, and they swung slightly at the elbows. He looked like a plucked bird with both wings broken. He made a sad picture, but it was a true picture of an excellent bureaucrat, who knows that by his word men may live or die.

“Damn it all, and to hell with it,” bellowed the skipper. With a powerful gesture he threw his cigar upon the floor, and crushed it with half a dozen steps, dancing like a savage Negro. He sent the consul a look as if this shrimp had been a deck-hand and been caught kicking a full pail of black paint over a washed deck. He stormed with two long steps to the door, jerked it open, went out, and banged the door so that the whole building seemed to shake.

Stanislav, having already left, waited outside in the corridor.

The skipper came up to him and said: “What can I do now with you, Lavski? Nothing. Devil knows how much I would like to have you with me. I cannot get you now, not even under the emergency. That guy knows your name, and if he finds out, then I will find myself not in good shipshape. These god-damned scribblers, how I hate them! More than squalls on the Zuider. Well, here, take five gulden. Have a good time tonight. Now I have to run around to find another A.B. Good ones are rarer than sunshine on the North Sea. Good luck.”

The skipper was gone. And so was the elegant Dutch with milk and honey.

39

A ship. Stanislav needed it badly. “Honorable trade,” he said, “is all right for a certain length of time, provided this length is not too long. You see, here a box, there a crate, then yonder a bag with crude coffee or sugar all this doesn’t hurt anybody. This goes for overhead expenses and inevitable losses of the big merchants. They don’t feel it, while it will help me well over water. The boxes and crates and bags may just as well have been broken or busted while being loaded. Anyway, this is not the point. The point simply is, one gets tired of the honorable trade.”

I said nothing and let him go on spreading out the inner part of his soul.

“Yep, believe me, Pippip, you get awfully tired and bored of this kind of business. There is something which is not true about the whole thing. And you feel it, see? You are just like lying all the time upon somebody’s pocket. Almost like living on a woman. So you feel dirty, see? For a certain time, well, you cannot help it. You do your very best to land a job, but you cannot get one, not even by selling your soul to the devil. You see, you want to do something. You wish to be useful. I do not mean that silly stuff about man’s duty. That’s bunk. There is in yourself that which is driving you on to do something worth while. Not all the time hanging on like a bum beggar. It is like this — hell, I can’t explain what I mean. It is that you want to create something, to help things going. You you I mean, some day when you know it is all over, you wish to have the true satisfaction of having done at least something while you were alive on this crazy earth. What I mean is, to stand by the wheel, say, in the dirtiest weather hell and devils can think of and then, in such weather, keep the course straight. That is something which nothing in the whole world can be compared with. No honorable trade, no matter how thick and honey it may be, is like that. Damn my soul. There you stand by the wheel, and the old bucket kicks around and around and wants to get off the course by all means and by all forces under the thickest sky you can imagine. But no matter how hard she may kick, you hold the wheel by the course just like that, see?”

Stanislav grabbed me by the belt and with a powerful twist tried to throw me off my feet and around, just as if he had his hands clenched to the wheel.

“Let go,” I cried, “I am no rudder.”

“Don’t get sore. I only wanted to show you what I mean. See, when you get her through and out of that sour weather without losing so much as half a point off the course, I can tell you, your heart jumps like a fish in a frying-pan. Then you could just bellow loud, out of joy and satisfaction. Just think how powerful you feel — you, such a little mite of a human thing, you can hold a fifteen-thousand-ton bucket in the heaviest gale straight on, as if it were a baby coming straight from mother, innocent like new-fallen snow. And then the old man comes along, or the first, and he glances at the rose, and he says: ‘Fine work, Koski. Man, you are some sailor, as I haven’t seen many the last twenty years. Damned fine accurate work, my boy. Hold her on this way and we’ll still back her through and we won’t lose even fifteen minutes off the schedule.’ Tell you, Pippip, then your heart knocks right in your throat, you can feel it. And you just could cry out aloud how happy you are and all the world around you. Believe me, the finest honorable trade, no matter how much you may get out of it, cannot beat such a feeling as holding old Caroline straight by the course.”

“I never stood by the wheel of a big can,” I broke in, “but I had the rudder of five-hundred-tonners all right. I suppose what you say is positively correct. Painting is just as pleasing often as standing by the wheel. If you can draw a green edge without breaking over into the brown layer, it sure makes you feel that you have done a great job. Because it takes a good time before you can accomplish this when the ship is in the open, and before you learn not to spit and splash the paint all over like a puppy does on mother’s fresh-washed floor.”

Stanislav did not speak for a while. He was meditating. After a few minutes he spat in good fashion over the railing. He bit off a cigar he had bought an hour ago from a dealer who had come alongside with his boat and had sold tobacco, matches, postal-cards of acting couples, fruits, chocolate, chewing-gum, buttons, thread and needles, writing-paper, stamps, and all such things as are offered to crews by these small traders in rowboats.

Stanislav lighted his cigar, spat out again, and said: “Perhaps you are going to laugh at what I am going to tell you. Anyway it is the truth. Now I am here on this can to shovel coal, to cart coal, to heave ashes, and to do the dirtiest and most miserable kind of work any rotten landlubber can do aboard a ship, while actually I am an A.B., and for sure a ten times better one than any of these three brazen drunkards here that think themselves such great guys. Maybe it is a shame, a real disgrace for me, a good sailor, to shovel coal here and all that goes with it. But maybe it is not. It has to be done to keep a can going, and somebody has to do it. I tell you, Pippip, even this has got its fun. You see, to throw into the tunnel, down to the stoke-hold, some six hundred shovels of coal and do it fine even in heavy weather, and then look at this mountain of fuel you have shoveled in, right in front of the furnaces, so that the fire’m stares at you in admiration, you feel so happy that you just could go and kiss that mountain of coal. Because it all looks so funny and so useful at the same time. That mountain also stares at you, and rather bewildered, for only a half hour ago it was still in the farthest corner of the upper bunker and now, without giving it any time to think things over, it is down here, ready to go into the furnaces and make steam for the bucket. Doesn’t that make you happy and feel as if you had done something important? Sure it does. And even here, believe me, the best honorable trade cannot be compared with what you feel having this mountain of coal down in the stoke-hold. You feel so healthy and so sane that I think the skipper can’t feel any better after having brought the ship home through a nasty sea.”

“Sometimes I feel that way also,” I said.

“And why is it that you have to do the honorable trade? Is it your fault? I should say not. You haven’t got anything better to do. You can’t lie in bed all day long or bum about and hang at the curb-stones day in, day out. You get plumb crazy in your head if you do.”