‘It’s going to work out!’ the captain tells himself with a sigh of relief. ‘It’s all going to work out.’
Guðmundur Berndsen turns off his calculator, closes the navigation log, rolls up the chart and drinks the last of his coffee, which has long since gone cold and bitter.
31°W 2°N
They’re standing, lightly dressed, on the starboard side of the boat deck: the captain and the engineer, staring at the Zodiac dinghy that’s drooping like a sail without a wind in the sling that holds it, because it’s been shot to pieces and ripped wide open after the artillery barrage.
An easterly wind is blowing across the dark green ocean and the temperature is a good fifteen degrees Celsius and rising.
‘Can it be repaired?’ enquires the captain as he runs his hands over the deflated rubber.
‘Everything is possible,’ says Stoker and scratches his beard. ‘I have plenty of line and glue. The only thing I need is rubber to make patches.’
‘Isn’t there anything on board you could use?’
‘I could use rainwear. But it has fabric on the inside. The fabric doesn’t glue to rubber as well as rubber to rubber.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No, probably not. I could try rasping the fabric out of the clothes.’
‘Go on, then, do that,’ says the captain, clapping Stoker on the back. ‘You have five days to complete the job.’
‘That should be enough,’ says Stoker with a nod. ‘When will the ship drift south across the equator?’
‘Late tomorrow,’ says the captain and he looks at sun, which will be reaching midday in three hours. ‘Or early the day after.’
‘And then the Brazil current will pull us into its endless flow to the south, is that it?’
‘Yeah. It’ll take the ship most of the way to Cape Horn.’
Cape Horn. Where cold ocean currents run riot like monsters from the deep in the west.
‘But we’ll have left the ship long before it reaches that chaos,’ says the captain.
‘It’s just as well,’ replies Stoker, wiping sweat from his forehead. ‘No ship is safe east of Cape Horn, least of all a pile of dead-in-the-water scrap metal like this one.’
30°W 3°S
Satan puts on a parka that might have belonged to anyone before opening the walk-in freezer on A-deck, which is thirty degrees below zero. At first he can see nothing except the white steam that forms when the hot air from outside meets the frost in the freezer. The steam circles around as heat and cold fight it out, but after Satan closes the door the steam calms and gradually sinks to the floor where Big John, Methúsalem, Rúnar and Ásmundur lie side by side under a white sheet.
This is the why the captain begged Satan to do the cooking. The deceased’s shipmates couldn’t stand the thought of walking in to the freezer, which has, in fact, become an energy-intensive tomb.
Satan isn’t disturbed by such things, however. To him a corpse is just a corpse: dead meat that does neither harm nor good and is, thus, irrelevant. Why be afraid in the presence of dead meat? They were fond of these men when they were alive but avoid them like the plague once they stop living!
Life is war and death is peace, not the other way around. Is that so difficult to understand? A living being fights for its existence until it dies. Then it sleeps forever and does no-one any harm.
Those who pray for peace on earth are actually asking for the end of the world. And, of course, they’re exactly the people who are most afraid of death.
Fools!
The shelves in the freezer are split into compartments, each of which is closed with a door made up of a wooden frame covered with chicken wire. Satan steps over the bodies and takes a shoulder of pork from one compartment and four chickens from another. He’s thought it all out. First, he’s going to cook all the meat that needs to be cooked. If the generator fails there’ll be no cold in the freezer and no current for the electric cooker and then it wouldn’t be very clever to be left with pork and chicken. Beef can be eaten raw and lamb and fish can be salted, dried or pickled. When all the meat and fresh vegetables are finished there’ll be porridge and tinned food for all meals. With this plan there’ll be enough to eat for the coming weeks, even if they lose the electricity.
The captain says that if they are not rescued within the next few days they’ll abandon ship and sail to Brazil in the dinghy, but Satan takes such pronouncements with a pinch of salt. At the very least, he is convinced that it always pays to keep something in reserve.
For the next few days meals will consist of pork and chicken morning, noon and night. He’s the cook and he’s in charge. End of story.
31°W 5°S
Guðmundur opens the door of his cabin, yawns and walks slowly into the dark. He doesn’t turn on the lights because moonlight is filtering through the curtains. He takes off everything except his socks and underpants, walks to his bunk and…
It’s as if an ice-cold fist has grasped the captain’s heart. The pain is deep and excruciating, extending along his left arm. He gapes and stares and he can’t breathe…
There’s a dead child in the bed.
His mouth goes so dry that his throat and the insides of his cheeks sting, his veins fill with rust and acid and his stomach is on fire.
A dead child, so very long dead. The body is embalmed, wrapped in swaddling so old and brittle that it crumbles off the baby’s brown body. Its eye sockets are empty and its nose gone, and its teeth project from shrunken lips.
A tickling sensation passes through the captain’s genitals, the heat in his stomach reaches all the way to his head and urine begins to filter through his underpants and down his stiff legs.
What child is this?
He can hardly move but just manages to reach out a stiff arm that shakes like a leaf in the wind and takes on the colour of death in the cold light of the moon.
Is this his daughter? Or the girl with the hare lip?
His quivering index finger comes closer to the child’s face – this fragile shell that may crumble at the slightest touch.
Should he…? What should he…?
The boat lists to starboard, the curtains move and a shaft of moonlight enters.
It’s not a child! It’s…The captain blinks and leans forward.
The sextant! It’s been lying there on his raincoat since midday!
Guðmundur wants to laugh but he can’t. He sits on the bed, hides his face in his hands and tries with little success to control his violent sobbing.
30°W 7°S
In the stern of the ship, Stoker is standing over the inflated Zodiac, which is so heavily patched that it looks like a homemade camouflaged punt. The engineer had moved the boat down to B-deck, where he worked day and night on stitching the torn rubber together. He glued large patches over the stitching with contact glue and then bonded the seams with a soldering iron. When this was done he inflated the boat, which still leaks in two places.
Stoker uses a marker pen to draw circles around the holes before he deflates the boat. Then he cuts patches from the rainwear that was sacrificed for this job. Next he spreads a thin layer of contact glue around the holes on one side of the patch and gets on with other tasks while the glue is drying. He lifts up the outboard motor and attaches it to the vertical plywood board that he has screwed securely to horizontal wooden blocks using angle brackets.