“What? What?” cried Clarke inquiringly. “A conspiracy? On the Banbury? You know something. What do you know, Mr. Zantman? A conspiracy?”
I looked him in the eye.
“You know as well as I do,” I replied. “There’s a problem of cleanliness and modesty—my cleanliness and modesty.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I know,” I replied. “It’s because I am clean and modest. If I weren’t modest, there wouldn’t be so much immodesty. I know you all,” I added, “you’re all thinking about the same thing. You have a yen for goodness knows what, and I’m in the way—I’m a hindrance, isn’t that the case?—my modesty is a hindrance. That’s why everything around here either fawns or threatens, peeps or mocks; that’s the reason for the constant importunings and the fact that there’s only one unchanging thought—oh, one unchanging thought!”
“What?” said the captain, his mug agape. “Indecent, you say? Immodest? My, you’re a.... Come on, let’s have a drink; I have a first-rate drop of brandy,” he shouted in his excitement. I was most disgusted by the captain’s behavior, for he had turned red, and his beady little mariner’s eyes shone like lighted cigars; I realized that in my fervor I had said too much and, embarrassed, I quickly walked away.
3
The wind was blowing hard; thin, tattered little clouds were racing overhead—the masts and the parts of the rigging made of steel were moaning, gulls were struggling against the air current, which carried them windward, and on board there could be heard plaintive, doleful exhortations and songs.... I had said, had I not, that I knew how things would end—and for that reason I was not surprised to see something like the beginning of the end. I had even said, it seemed, that if women were to become involved things would get even worse. And if you please: the sailors scrubbing the boom-pulleys were crooning:
“I’ll be true, so love me do!”
And from the stern they were answered by a wild and passionate cry from those who had remained by the buckets and brushes:
“Kiss me!—Kiss me!”
I shouldn’t have mentioned women. That subject should never have been raised. Walls have ears.
The bow of the ship was plunging in large, fleecy combers; it rose and fell, but did not retreat an inch, despite the fact that the sea wind was blowing directly from the front to the back. The songs of the crew did not cease. True, Smith had warned them that if they didn’t stop he would make sure they were forced to eat their words and they would swallow them—but the old stagers, the old hands, knew how to handle this. Instead of singing obvious love songs, they put their entire souls into their ordinary nautical callings, and the result was the same. It was embarrassing. Passing the rope they called into the wind: “Loop it, loop it!” Bending over their bucket and brush: “Wash, scrub—clean, rinse!”—unrestrainedly, with heartfelt yearning. Smith could not forbid them this, since maritime law permits sailors to utter nautical cries. A male whale was circling the ship furiously, spouting fountains of water higher than the mainmast; the sharks were cowering in fear, and a sea dog brought its offspring out onto a wave, and the whole family stared at the vessel.
What a spectacle we were making of ourselves—how much abasement and ridiculousness—though at least none of our acquaintances was present. In fact, it was all the fault of Smith’s recklessness; it was all because the previous day, out of boredom, Smith had ordered a hunk of salted meat to be put on the anchor, and with this bait a huge female whale had been caught. The crew had gathered to pull out the gigantic fish and watch its dying dance on the deck. Smith ran up too—and instantly burst out with the filthiest words: “Jump to it, get rid of this carcass, this carrion, this mound of blubber that looks like nothing on earth—I can’t look at this bloated torso!” But it was too late. The sailors were watching rather tenderly, and Thompson said as he stretched:
“I’ll be true ...”
The whale, as everyone knows, is a mammal; for this reason a female mammal had excited them—had it been some cold-blooded fish, it would have had no effect whatsoever. Thompson, who was also a mammal, reacted particularly strongly. Smith burst out with more derision and imprecations. “Good God, it stinks! Disgusting! That rancid stench is unbearable. It must be old—I know what I’m talking about—it must be at least seventeen years old.” How incautious! seventeen years! For a female whale this was indeed old age, but—seventeen years! He shouldn’t have mentioned seventeen years. The deckhands wordlessly pushed the monster into the water, and half an hour later there had already begun nostalgic, passionate moanings, an inconsolability strangely unsettling to the nerves.
Around midday the captain appeared on the bridge, looked around at the foaming seas, nodded, and said:
“The ship is holding up in the wind with the stubbornness of a mule. Very good. Mr. Smith! Issue the sailors a tablespoon of cod-liver oil each.”
The sailors tried to worm their way out of the cod-liver oil as best they could—they had no wish to spoil their own dreams—but Smith gave each one of them a full spoonful. After the cod-liver oil things calmed down a little. But these were old stagers who had roamed every corner of the globe; one had only to look at them—they stuffed themselves with wholemeal bread and salt to cover the taste of the cod-liver oil and they began again, da capo, even more boisterously. The heart of the matter was that since their departure they had not seen a woman. “We”—this was how they presented the case—“we haven’t seen a woman since our departure, and so this yearning arose in all of us at once, with elemental power.” Of course they suffered from yearning—but this didn’t prevent them from stirring it up inside themselves any way they could; one provoked another to yearning, the latter returned the favor with a double dose and thus it continued. The sufferings of the male whale, which did not cease from circling insanely and spouting like a geyser, acted on them merely as an encouragement and a stimulus.
“He can yearn,” they thought to themselves, “and we can’t?”
What sons of bitches! What slyboots, what schemers; it hurt even to watch, and I tried to spend as much time as possible in my cabin. True, I already knew that they were a band of schemers, but I hadn’t realized it was to such a degree. Since Smith did not let them out of his sight, and the gimlet poked out of his side pocket, they could neither sing nor call things by name—if one of them had tried, Smith would have immediately summoned him to the hold for a word.—But one had to see how they were able to induce yearning in anything that came to hand. They picked up a brush caressingly and looked steadfastly into one another’s eyes. Or, as they were pulling the rope, they bent deliberately like hazel branches—as if they were ever-so-young boys. I was in no state to watch all this. I would have liked to give milk to the entire crew, but I knew it would not be drunk. Thompson’s bowl lay untouched, though I had put under it not one but two shillings. I ran to the back of the ship and wrote with my finger on the port-side wall:
“Now then! Mother of God! These men are unbelievable scoundrels. But what will become of me?”
The captain said sternly:
“Mr. Smith—make sure all gaps are tightly stopped up for the night. Give each of them an extra spoonful of cod-liver oil and forbid them to whisper.”
The captain and Smith seemed seriously concerned; I even know that the captain gave Smith a sharp dressing-down for his recklessness. Yet despite the prohibitions, despite the roar of the sea and the creaking of the brig, the usual nighttime buzzing and dreaming sounded through the cabin floor with redoubled strength, and much more clearly than on previous nights. I couldn’t restrain myself. Incapable of resisting my inadvisable and ill-starred curiosity about what they were saying and how among themselves, and also convinced that 80 percent of it must be about me—I dug out an opening between the floorboards and pressed my ear to it. Sounds immediately burst out, along with the stale smell of tobacco and cod-liver oil, but to begin with I couldn’t make anything out. They were tossing and turning, groaning, moaning, curs
ing Smith and the cod-liver oil, which tormented them and got in their wa—some were singing in subdued voices, while others were spinning confused, anguished yarns. It was only after a while that I heard:
“The girls of Singapore.”
And then:
“The girls of Madras ...”
“The girls of Mindoro ...”
“Of San Paolo de Loamin ...”
More moans, and painful writhings in the greasy embrace of the cod-liver oil. Then one voice rose above the others.
“So long as they don’t have the mange.”
“They can’t have the mange! Everyone knows!”
Then once more—the same thing over and again:
“A sweet little hand ...”
“A sweet little foot ...”
(How the imagination was at play!)
The hubbub intensified; then after a moment a single voice rang out once again:
“I was loved. I didn’t give a single shilling. I was loved for free. She didn’t take one peseta.”
There was an uproar:
“Come off it! You probably gave earrings instead, or a necklace!”
“Who couldn’t be loved?” growled the mate in a deep, ponderous voice. “But not everyone feels like it. To love, you have to wash your feet. Right now, when I have to wash my feet, I don’t have a woman, and when I have a woman then I don’t need to wash my feet, and so on around and around. On the other hand the passenger gave me five shillings.”
“That’s not it,” said someone else. “It’s obvious that anyone could be loved. But there’s no time. There’s no time, my friends, I tell you—because when you have time then you also have money, and when you have money you go to a brothel, where you take care of things without love. And when you don’t have money you have to climb on board and earn some. It’s a shabby trick.”
(How very true this was!)
And once again, even more heatedly:
“Sweet little teeth ...”
“Sweet little eyes ...”
(So much passion! So much fervor!)
“That’s not it, my friends,’ said Thompson gloomily, turning over—“that’s not it, my friends, it’s that damned travel bug. You see me here—there’s more than one woman has come running after me; in San Francisco, or in Aden one Sunday, I’m walking down the road, undergarments, my friends, are drying on the clotheslines, and the women are ogling me ...”
“Who wouldn’t ogle you,” said the ship’s boy ingratiatingly. (What? Such insolence! It’s true, I took a dislike to that ship’s boy the moment I set eyes on him—he inveigled twenty shillings out of me for “flirtation,” as I recorded in my notebook.)
“Accursed is our lot, I say,” mumbled the mate—“Accursed. Scrubbing and scrubbing! I’m fifty years old already—an accursed lot, I say.”
“My friends,” repeated Thompson gloomily, “I tell you—it’s all because of that travel bug. It’s that accursed itch, tempting, sending you in every direction—you know—it moves through your bones and won’t let you sleep, my friends! How many times have I been on a woman! And each time, I thought I’d get transported, like on a ship—I’ll take a trip, I thought, but not a bit of it—she stayed in one place. All this had me bursting, running around, I tell you! Goddammit! I hurried down to the docks to hop on the first ship I could find and go to sea—it was all the same which ship —so I could rock as one should, so I could gad about a little! That’s the main cause. Women, you see, give us the travel bug.”
“You’ve traveled far,” someone laughed. “In two weeks we’ve done maybe thirty knots.”
“We’ve not moved an inch,” someone cursed from the corner. “The sea wind has turned about.”
“And even if we did move, what of it?” snorted another. “In Valparaiso there’s the same wh ... as in Bombay, only under a different streetlight.”
“I don’t know,” said the mate uncertainly through his nose, “all day just cleaning, scrubbing, washing our feet. Why do they make us wash our feet when they won’t allow us even one woman? Is it on purpose? Is it always this way?”
He began cursing in a repulsive fashion, slowly and deliberately, choosing his words with care.
“A person goes to waste,” the ship’s boy said in his high-pitched voice. “Isn’t that so, Tommy? What are you thinking about, Tommy?”
“And the passenger’s feeding us with milk, like puppies!” Thompson burst out vulgarly. “If we were to change our course by half a point—and turn side on to the wind—then we’d be sailing, my friends! Then we’d be on our way. There in the south they say there are completely unknown waters, and they say there are sea cows as big as mountains, overgrown with trees, and in those trees —ho ho ...”
(Aha! What are they dreaming about! Some sorts of walks! They mustn’t be allowed!) “There are marvels there,” said the boy.
“And it’s warmer,” muttered the mate. “The sun gives more heat.”
“ ’Neath Argentina’s bright blue skies, a lovely girl delights the eyes. Let’s sing, my friends! For yearning, song is the best medicine; and everyone suffers from yearning!”—There came a soft, subdued song, like a moan. ’Neath Argentina’s bright blue skies.... I stopped up the crack, went to bed, and tried to get to sleep, but after a moment I jumped up and ran onto the deck, for my cabin had filled with the stench of cod-liver oil and it was stifling.
The seamen were undoubtedly giving themselves over with all their souls to those never-ending fairy tales, to nautical fantasies about unknown waters, marvels, tropical wonders, and the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor. They had undoubtedly begun to tell those tales, heard a thousand times over, of mountains, groves, and cliffs, in the style of the biblical Solomon—breasts like a herd of lambs, hair like a roaring waterfall, eyes like a pair of young fawns. Imagination, like a vicious dog let off the leash, was baring its teeth, growling low and lurking in recesses. The deck was completely deserted. The sea was swirling in an impressive manner; the wind blew with twofold strength and in the murky waters the furious trunk of the whale loomed up, relentless in its circling motion. Hmm ... to my right I had Africa, to my left America; in between, in the depths swam some little fish of the gudgeon family. Those tiny fish are so terrified of solitude that they never set out to sea except in schools of ten thousand or more, and if you catch one of them and dangle it over the water, the others poke their snouts pathetically out of the waves and perish—just like sheep!
“It’s just as well,” I whispered, “that there are no women, because if even one were to be found on the ship ... ugh ... who could protect me? But luckily we’re far away and there is no woman, nor could there be—whatever else were to happen there couldn’t be, for there is none and the men cannot. Thank you, Lord!”
At that moment I heard, behind me and somewhat to the left, the distinct sound of a juicy kiss. I looked around, thinking it was a sail flapping—no one was there—but a moment later the same sound reached me with even greater clarity. A kiss? A kiss on the ship? How on earth could that be, since there were no women? I cleared my throat and walked slowly windward, that is, toward the bows. Here I once again heard the same most unseemly sound, distinctly, as if it were just by my left ear. I decided to return to my cabin right away. Since there were no women, there could also be no kisses—and therefore I ought not to have heard something that did not exist. If, on the other hand, there really was a conspiracy, retreat was the appropriate course of action.—“I don’t want to get mixed up in anything. Let them be by themselves and ...”
Nevertheless, right by the cabin door I stopped, hearing behind the foremast, no more than three paces away, the tender, high-pitched voice of the ship’s boy.
“Tommy, Tommy—give me a scarf and I’ll go to the circus with you.”
“Thompson,” I called, “Thompson! What are you up to? Dear God, Thompson, think what you’re doing!”
“What?” barked Thompson, not letting go of the ship’s boy, who was clinging to him.
“Thompson, he’s not a woman! Here’s a pound sterling, Thompson, a pound sterling! I beg you!”
“But I resemble a woman,” squeaked the ship’s boy. “I have a high-pitched voice like a woman”—and all of a sudden Thompson insolently poked his thumb directly at my eyes—and they stopped paying any attention to me. I pretended I’d forgotten my handkerchief and I quickly left. But by the forward hatch, in the dark of night I suddenly caught sight of two other sailors walking along arm in arm. So I turned around—and again I saw two other sailors, near the galley, whispering to one another.—“It’s not nice,” I murmured, “that from now on I won’t be able to look without embarrassment at two sailors, or even at one sailor. I’ll have to turn my head away. In any case it would be a good idea to wake the captain. They’re whispering and conniving together.”
But Clarke was not asleep. I was surprised to spot the will-o’-the-wisp of his little pipe on the bridge. He had evidently decided to watch over the brig in the night. He stood staring intently at the tip of his bent finger. A good captain, I thought beseechingly, a noble captain, somewhat eccentric on the surface, but conscientious and experienced, a stalwart captain. He won’t let it happen! He won’t allow it! I went up and mentioned briefly in passing—that kisses had appeared on the ship, and that the crew was swarming about the deck and tossing and turning on the hard bedding of the fo’c’sle. In addition, the sailors were walking together—and saying things to one another—leaning toward each other and embracing.
“What? The crew is mutinying?” cried the captain, awaking from his revery. “Mr. Smith, have them bring my storm helmet! A mutiny needs to be punished by all the maritime and nautical statutes. The culprits will be sewn into sacks, then I’ll read them the prescribed passage from the New Testament, after which they’ll be thrown into the sea with stones around their necks. The only difficult part is catching them in the sacks. You have to put bait at the bottom of the sack.”