The trader was still wearing his pointed shoes, his dark suit trousers, and his wrinkled white shirt, now more wrinkled and less white, but no jacket. The boat pitched slowly as she went, her big-bellied hull pounding in the chop. The sunlight glinted on the little brass wheel as the trader handled the spokes.
‘She pounds, eh?’ he said. ‘She’s not built for an engine, the old bitch. Built for sail. With an engine it’s like driving a big heavy pancake over a bumpy road. Wears you out.’
‘Why don’t you sail her?’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘Because she’s motorized now,’ said the trader. He seemed almost angry. ‘She’s not rigged for sail any more. This is not the old days. My old man used to keep me hopping. One of these things rigged for sail, you’ve got two masts, big long yards. Every time you go about you have to dip the yard, bring it around the other side of the mast, set everything up again on the weather side. Big sailing deal. “Move, boy! Hop!” I can still hear him. Big deal sailor, my old man. Fuck that. This is modern times, eh? He was a wonderful man.’ The trader spat to leeward from the wheelhouse window. ‘Sail like the devil, afraid of nothing. Great pilot. You never saw anything like it. Knew where he was anytime. Middle of the darkest night, no land, no nothing, knew where he was.’
‘How do you know where you are when you’re out of sight of land?’ said Boaz-Jachin. He saw nothing scientific-looking in the wheelhouse but the compass and the fuel and engine gauges. No instruments that looked like navigation.
The trader showed him a wooden board in which were drilled many little holes in the thirty-two-spoked wheel of a compass rose. Below that were short vertical lines of holes. Pegs, attached to the board by strings, were in some of the holes.
‘When I need to I use this,’ he said. ‘Every point of the compass is divided into half-hours. I mark with a peg how long I’ve been on any heading. Down below I mark the speed. I add on or take off for wind and current with me or against me, and that’s how I know where I am. That’s how my father did it, and I do it the same.’
‘I thought you had to have instruments, charts, maps, take sights and all that,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
‘That’s a lot of crap for playboys with yachts,’ said the trader. ‘I know the winds, the currents, the bottom, I know where I am. What do I need all that machinery for? My father was the best sailor, the best pilot out of our port. Fifteen, twenty other men masters of their own boats in our village, but if you came there a stranger and asked for “the Captain” they knew you meant him, nobody else. From him I learned the sea.’
‘You had a good father,’ said Boaz-Jachin.
The trader nodded, spat again through the wheelhouse window. ‘Nobody like him,’ he said, and sighed. ‘“Keep the boat and follow the sea,” he told me. Left it to me in his will. So here I am. This trip oranges, next one wine, cheese, olives, whatever. It’s not a bad life, eh? I mean it’s a proper thing for a man to do — not like running a restaurant or some shore thing like that. Dressed up like a gentleman all the time, greeting your clientele, making them feel big by remembering their names. White tablecloths, flowers, snapping your fingers for the wine waiter. A mural on the wall with the bay and the grottoes. All the same, for some people that too is a way of life. Takes all kinds, eh?’
‘Yes,’ said Boaz-Jachin, ‘I guess it does.’
‘That’s how it is,’ said the trader. ‘For me, as for my father, it’s the sea. Always the other thing looks good, you know — the thing you don’t have, the road you didn’t take.’ He put his arm out through the window, slapped the side of the wheelhouse. ’Swallow’s all right,’ he said. ‘She’s all right.’
The coast slid by — stretches of brown, stretches of green, old red rocks, lion-coloured cliffs, ruined forts, oil tanks, water tanks, pipelines. Blocks and planes and facets of houses, roofs, walls, angles scattering down hillsides, each casting a morning shadow. White walls, red tile roofs, black-cut windows and doorways. Clusters of boats painted blue, painted white. Boats in twos and threes, single boats passing. Sometimes a tanker, sometimes a big white cruise ship. The gull flew off the masthead as the Swallow left the coast astern and headed out to sea. The salt wind had a deep-water smell.
‘Where are we on the chart?’ said Boaz-Jachin towards the afternoon. There was no land in sight.
‘I don’t have a chart,’ said the trader. ‘A chart’s a picture. Why bother with a picture of the ocean when you’ve got the ocean to read? We’re half a day out from the port we left and we’re two days away from the port we’re bound for. Keep her on this heading while I make some lunch.’
Boaz-Jachin, alone in the wheelhouse for the first time, suddenly felt the weight of the sea that Swallow pounded through, the depth and the weight of it heaving against the boat’s old bottom. The engine chugged steadily, driving her on. She answered the wheel easily as he gave or took a spoke, his eye on the quivering compass card. Ahead of him the sunlight on the water danced, and dancing light reflected from the water rippled on the wheelhouse ceiling like flashes of mystic writing, like word-flashes in an unknown language. The blue dinghy followed astern like a child of the boat, its bows slapping the water in the wake of the Swallow, its own smaller wake spreading briefly behind it. Up forward the smoke from the galley stovepipe heat-shimmered against the sky and water, wavered the near and distant images of other boats and ships.
Sometimes Boaz-Jachin saw his face reflected in the wheelhouse windows, recalled the blank face of the king, the frowning face of the lion-king. The being-with-the-lion came back for a moment and was gone again. Again the emptiness, the urge ahead towards something gone out from him.
The chariot wheel, the wheel in his hand … He felt himself on the verge of understanding something, but could go no farther. He held fast to being where he was.
The trader came on deck with a napkin over his arm, carrying a tray on which was a covered dish, a bottle of wine, a basket of bread, a wine glass, silverware, a clean folded napkin. He set the tray down on the hatch cover, took the napkin from his arm, spread it out, arranged a place setting on it, put the covered dish, the wine bottle, the bread basket in their proper positions, stepped back, looked at everything critically, then came aft to the wheelhouse window.
‘The gentleman’s table is ready on the terrace now,’ he said. ‘I will take the wheel. I ate below before I brought your lunch up.’
There was an omelette under the dish cover, very light and delicate, flavoured with herbs. Boaz-Jachin sat on the hatch cover and ate and drank while the trader watched him from the wheelhouse, smiling his desperate smile and showing his large teeth.
Late in the afternoon the trader took a nap while Boaz-Jachin steered. When he took the helm again he said, ‘Tonight we’ll stand regular four-hour watches.’ In the evening he told Boaz-Jachin to heat a tinned stew and brew a pot of coffee, and he had his dinner in the wheelhouse. ‘I’ll stay here for a while yet,’ he said to Boaz-Jachin. ‘You might as well get some sleep.’
When the trader woke Boaz-Jachin it was two o’ clock in the morning. Boaz-Jachin looked out through the windows of the dark wheelhouse, saw nothing ahead but the phosphorescence of the bow wave in the blackness of the night. ‘Aren’t you afraid to leave me alone at the wheel for four hours?’ he said. ‘What’ll I do if something goes wrong?’
‘What could go wrong?’ said the trader. ‘All you have to do is stay awake and keep out of the way of big ships. Our running lights are lit. Here’s the switch for the masthead light if you think somebody doesn’t see you. Here’s the button for the horn. I’ve showed you how to steer and how to reverse the engine. If you have to relieve yourself you use these two eye-spliced lines on either side to tie down the wheel.’