Who is safe?
“Look,” cried the purser, “the horse has two rumps and six legs! Shall we give the prize to this happy monster?”
The crowd, which packed the midnight saloon, dancing and tangling themselves in clouds of confetti and streamers of bright paper, cheered in a polyglot of affirmation. I recognized the drunken purser with distaste, in my arms my little partner was wearing her bikini, the white officer’s cap at a rakish angle and, with sleeves rolled to her fragile wrists, the official white tunic with its gold buttons and lightning bolt at the collar. Her small dark face looked like a child’s. The dance floor was awash with gin. My partner was impersonating a wireless operator, while I (with distaste, with severity, with self-consciousness) was impersonating a heavy-set and class-conscious burgher from Amsterdam. I wanted to slip my wet hands inside the tunic.
“Allert,” she cried, dragging me to the edge of the crowd where the purser was hanging a lopsided floral wreath around the horse’s neck, “look, it’s Olaf!”
And there he stood, now holding the horse’s head in his arms and grinning. And there too stood the ship’s drummer and the ship’s saxophonist, two coarse and grinning women exposed now from the deformed horse’s unzippered double rump. For a moment longer they demonstrated how they had crouched and swayed and danced, one bony woman to each rump. At the purser’s insistence the wireless operator, now wearing the ring of flowers around his own naked neck, lavishly and drunkenly kissed them both. The crowd cheered, my partner clapped her hands, the vibraphone player smeared his silvery instrument with congealed blood.
“Kiss me, Allert,” she whispered, wiping my brow and fixing my tie. “I am enjoying this party so much. I want you to kiss me. Right here. Right now.”
Who is safe?
When the divers descend and open up this unfortunate ship, I thought, they will find all the drunken passengers packed in confetti and paper streamers tangled like dead rainbows. The ship will be rusting, but the travelers will still be packed together in silent joy. All of them will be preserved in kelp and seaweed and bright paper — a dense and soggy conglomerate which will be to the sunken ship as the marrow is to the broken bone.
Who is safe?
I now think without doubt that I, the old Dutchman dispossessed of the helm, am the living proof of all of Peter’s theories. Or almost all. Yes, I tell myself that I am the legacy of my friend, my wife’s lover, our psychiatrist. Yes, I am that dead man’s only legacy. But unwanted legacy, I suddenly correct myself, unwanted legacy. Of my friend Peter but also of the women I have known.
In the darkness I am their entire legacy, the filthy sack of their past and mine. And unwanted, every drop of it.
“Ursula’s complaints are meaningless,” Peter was saying, “quite meaningless. You must simply ignore them. Most wives complain about their husbands. As a matter of fact, my friend, if you were not as emotionally strange as you arc, Ursula would not like you at all. A curious paradox but true. And you will note,” he said, smiling up at me with the wind in his face, “you will note that I did not say ‘sick’ but merely ‘strange.’ I will not pin you down, to use a vulgarism, until you request me to do so, professionally.”
His long dark fingers continued to stuff the little white bowl of his pipe with shredded tobacco, the sun was a cold ray in a dark sky, his smile belonged not on his weathered and sardonic face but rather on the little round sculpted face of some clever cupid. He continued to stuff the white pipe. I removed the shells from my gun.
“But what is so wonderful and so hard to believe,” Peter said then through the clarity of the fierce wind, “is that she cares for us equally. To her all our differences are nothing. And what a capacity it is to be able to elevate two such different men to the same level of acceptability. She has the gift of love, my friend. The gift of love.”
Cupped in his two dark bony hands, the flame of the match was pale beside the intense red color of his hunting shirt. Then the pipe was lit and the two of us, side by side and thinking in our different ways about Ursula’s love, were heading home.
He bolted forward from the bench. In the dry and desperate heat, in which the three of us had been reposing as if in a dream, naked and white and at our ease, suddenly Peter bolted forward from the wooden bench and, in complete silence, flung his hands to his chest and looked around him with eyes filled with the joy of extreme pain. His chest was a network of small bones, every hairy filament in his pubic growth appeared electrified, his white legs and arms were long and oddly muscular, his nipples were dark, his loins were a nest of blue veins.
“Peter,” Ursula said in alarm, “what’s wrong? What is the matter?”
Her sentence was the only one spoken from that moment forward in the sauna. And yet throughout that terrible ensuing time, during which Peter pantomimed his death and Ursula and I our helplessness, through all that time, which on the clock was nothing, I heard Peter’s voice (jocular, lofty, confidential) inside my head. As we watched, moved, tried to assist him, and while he lurched and staggered about in the small circle of his dying, I thought I was listening to every word he had ever said, and I did not know which was worse, the brief and wordless struggle of our performance there in the sauna, or the confidence and unbroken flow of that silent voice. There he was, talking away at the moment of his own painful death (which was from his heart, I realized at once) and in complete ignorance of the advice, the pronouncements, the elocutions of middle age, the sparkling tones. He talked to me even after he lay dead on the floor. I could not bear to listen.
When he fell, tall white fishlike man I no longer recognized, I could hear his nose breaking on the slats. He lay on his stomach lurching and trying to crawl after the trail of bright blood that flowed from his nose. A moment before, and in shock and ignorance, I had seized his arm and attempted to steady him. But as he collapsed he tore loose from my grip. Now we could hear the very sound of the pain inside his chest.
Ursula was kneeling at his head with her face constricted, her breasts in a chaos of motion, her breathing heavy, and had somehow managed to lift his head and was now holding his bleeding head in her two hands. At his mid-section I too was kneeling, one knee raised, the other burning on the wooden slats, and I heard the faint popping sound of the tubes that were parting inside Peter’s chest.
His body looked like dry fat and cartilage. He looked like a creature that had been skinned. He was still flicking with movement. But then that awful movement ceased. He was dead.
And then he defecated. Yes, even while Ursula rocked his head and tried to soothe the contorted face, and even while I knelt helplessly at his side, listening to my friend’s silent voice, suddenly Ursula and I knew simultaneously what had happened and together stared in shock and grief at this last indignity.
He was dead. The smell was strong. We could not move. We did not know what to do. The fecal smell of Peter’s death was overpowering the smell of eucalyptus that was filling the small room. I thought that Ursula and I would soon die like Peter there in the heat. But I could not allow my friend’s body to remain unclean, that much I knew.