I put on my undersuit and wet suit. Fastened the hose to the urinary sheath. Checked fins, mask, gloves, hood, weight belt, dive light, backup dive lights, battery packs, knife, camera, surface marker buoys, reels, plastic bags, dive computer. Sat on the boat rail and breathed into my back. Now I could feel the aftereffects of the previous night’s drinking. A slight dizziness, a throbbing at the temples. Under normal circumstances, residual alcohol would have been a reason to call off the expedition. But this wasn’t a normal situation. It was — I don’t know what it was. A desperate attempt at self-assertion. I forced myself to concentrate. The last minutes before a dive were the most important of the entire expedition. I turned my gaze inward, went over all the points of my gas plan one more time, visualized every single movement. My intensity seemed to rub off on Jola and Theo. They maintained a resolute silence. The farther the Aberdeen got from land, the more the onboard tension increased. Even Theo looked as though he was slowly coming to full consciousness. When he wasn’t squinting at the Atlantic, he was eyeing me thoughtfully. I didn’t try to sustain his gaze. I was glad to have a day when he wasn’t my responsibility. I could keep my mind on more important matters than the question of what was up with him.
The diesel engine’s decibel level and stroke rate diminished, the steady noise of the bow wave became softer and then fell silent. I joined Jola on the narrow helm stand and looked at the GPS. She’d hit the coordinates exactly and had moreover maneuvered the boat into the best anchoring position. The depth sounder showed an elevation in the ocean bed. The wreck lay a little east of us, around 107 meters down. Its outline was clearly recognizable on the sonar screen. I placed my hand between Jola’s shoulder blades so that she’d know how proud I was of her. She pushed past me and prepared to cast the anchor. No one had spoken a word since we left the harbor. At that point, I no longer doubted that the expedition would go off without a hitch. All Theo had to do during the three hours of the dive was to watch the water surface and look out for my buoys. If he should prove unreliable, Jola would share the task with him. She’d keep one eye on the instruments and the other on the Atlantic. Bernie and Dave were good, but when it came to boats, Jola was obviously better than the two of them together.
I spent the next ten minutes fastening seventy kilos of equipment to my body with snap hooks. The six cylinders with the different gas mixtures seemed particularly heavy. I was sweating feverishly in my hermetically sealed dive suit. The biggest challenge consisted in standing up, fully outfitted, in the rocking boat, making my way to the stern, and putting on my fins. When I was finished, Jola gave me the “okay” sign, and I responded in kind. I’d just as soon have gone over the side amid general silence, but Theo had constructed a question out of his various preoccupations, and he just had to ask it. He took hold of my wrist to prevent me from dropping into the water before he could speak.
“Suppose we disappeared with the boat. Would you die?”
“Almost certainly,” I said.
Theo let my arm go and nodded approvingly, as if giving me points for mortal danger. I let myself tip over backward. Before I hit the water, I thought I heard Jola’s voice call out, “Happy birthday, Sven!”
My fortieth. When I was a kid in school, there used to be stickers that read ATTENTION: TODAY IS THE BEGINNING OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. For the first and only time, that inane dictum seemed appropriate. It just needed an additional line to indicate whether it was a promise or a threat.
As soon as I was in the water, the familiar calm came over me. The weight of the dive tanks had disappeared. Under me there was neither firm ground nor empty air but instead a liquid three-dimensionality that I could traverse in any direction I wanted. No swells, visibility excellent. I grabbed the anchor cable and began a brisk descent. Soon the current caught me, and I hung on perpendicularly, like a banner in the wind. Sixty meters down, the first brief stop to change over to bottom gas. Soon afterward, the wrecked ship came into sight, a gigantic shadow in the everlasting semidarkness of the ocean floor.
I’d figured this dive would be an extraordinary experience. All the same, my own reaction surprised me. With every meter, the closer I sank to the wreck, the more my hands started to shake. I felt as though all the hairs on my body were standing up. The ghost ship below me was as long as a football field and broken into two pieces. The bow had separated from the rest of the ship and lay a little distance away from it. The ship’s waist appeared to be well preserved, except for a loading crane that had snapped off and fallen diagonally across the bridge. The stern loading crane still stood upright, as did, in fact, the entire steamer. The Fiedler, as I’d baptized her, looked as though a mighty hand had placed her there to wait for a secret future assignment. If — as I guessed— she’d sunk sometime during the Second World War, no human eye had looked on her for about seventy years. On the deck down there, people had once lived and worked, sung and quarreled, had harbored thoughts and feelings, and in the end had most probably gone to the bottom together with their ship. I was hovering above an inscrutable past that was principally, in the way of pasts, a graveyard. No one but the fish had taken care of those dead bodies. Maybe they were still to this day unaccounted for. Maybe there were grown grandchildren somewhere who believed Grandpa had absconded to America in the middle of the war and left Grandma alone with two little ones.
The most impressive feature of the Fiedler was, beyond a doubt, her enormous funnel, which towered at some distance from me. I decided to leave the anchor cable, swim over there, and negotiate the rest of my descent alongside the chimney. Because of the sunken ship’s imposing size and the strong current, I had to make sure I’d be able to find the cable again. The anchor would surely creep some distance over the seafloor; on the other hand, visibility was better than I’d expected that far down. I let go of the cable, battled against the current with strong fin strokes, and got my camera ready. The effort was worth it. I was looking down into a black maw big enough to swallow a cow. A dense school of sardines, as pliant as cloth, as agile as a single creature with a single will, wound around the funnel. When I got close, they formed dents and bubbles, but then they immediately went back to circling the chimney. One level down was a large battery of barracudas, too satiated to hunt. I pressed the shutter-release button. Those photographs would be the envy of the entire island.
I quickly completed the final stage of my descent. From this point on, time would speed by. I couldn’t spend more than twenty minutes at that depth, and twenty minutes was the blink of an eye, particularly considering the size of the object I proposed to investigate. I took a plastic bag from my pocket, inflated it with gas, and released it. It fluttered upward like a frantic jellyfish doing battle with a family of different-size air bubbles. The marker made a beeline for the surface, where Jola would see it and interpret its meaning: I’m down, everything okay.
Then I started to swim. Against the current, but at a leisurely pace, because haste underwater only used up gas, strength, and nerves. I swam along the ship’s steel walls, which were as high as a house and covered with a closed layer of mussels, sponges, and soft coral, here and there decorated with sea urchins and starfish. It was a living, breathing, and ever-hungry vestment that hardly offered a glimpse of the metal underneath. The barracudas watched me and found me boring. While I had to keep working my legs hard, they hung almost motionless in the current.