B007P4V3G4 EBOK (35 page)

Harry Mulisch

The base was in the rock. From the horizon the ocean came and
lay there deep inside the rock where the submarines, gleaming,
rose and fell with the tides. From the workshops, further into the
rock, the noise of machines, shouting and loud music resounded.

Brightly lit by electric light, a group of sailors in overalls stood
on a floating platform and watched the periscope, just above the
water's surface, making its way from the tropical sun into the dusk.
She rose a moment later, the dripping tower (Y253), the gun on
the bow, and then suddenly, with a lot of splashing and gushing,
the entire hull, the longest they had ever seen. A second submarine
was fixed to the foredeck, a pup, a sweet little thing with triangular
little wings, no more than four metres long.

The quarters for officers and men, the warehousing, the offices
and radio rooms lay deeper down. The electronic brain that
provided the base with all its meteorological and strategic data lay
in the furthest bowel of the rock that protruded, bare, from the
empty ocean.

Inside, Bernard Brose looked fixedly at the grey hair, brushed
diagonally across the skull, of the admiral behind the desk. He was
leafing through some typewritten papers, stapled together. He
looked up.

'This is an order,' he said. We can't take any risks. It must
succeed. Do realise what's at stake: the Beast's on board. With his
entire State Department.'

Brose stood to attention and slowly swung forwards so that he
had to crush his toes down to the floor in order to stay where he
was. For a moment, he marvelled at how, all his life, a human
being managed to balance on two legs like a tightrope walker.

The admiral raised an eyebrow so that his monocle dropped
into his hand, resting on the table top. He altered his tone.

'You'll bring the war to an end, Brose. On our side alone, the
war has already cost forty million dead to date. Far away beyond the horizon, three quarters of our cities lie in ruins. Your town has
been wiped from the face of the earth for ever. Both your parents
perished in the bombing. Your brother died in action at the
Northern front; his corpse is floating around the pole in an iceberg
somewhere. Of your two sisters, one was murdered, the other died
of typhoid. Your wife was in a train that was shot at, one which
ran from one pile of rubble to the next.' The admiral - he had
looked among the papers from time to time - began to twiddle the
monocle between his fingers and once again he changed his tone
of voice. 'You will exchange your life for forty million more lives
at least, just on our side alone. You will live on in memory as one
of the greatest heroes in the history of mankind - no, not a hero,'
he said, gesturing with wide-spread fingers, 'something else ...
more dangerous ... I'm still searching for it.' With his eyes, the
admiral scanned the space next to Brose; then he got up and came
out from behind the desk. 'I envy you, Brose,' he said and he laid
his hand on Brose's shoulder for a moment in passing as he walked
to the door.

Brose, his little finger unchanged along the seam of his trousers,
turned on his heels to continue facing the admiral. The admiral's
hand rested on the doorknob.

'I could not take any risks,' he said. 'Had I asked for volunteers,
would you have come forward?'

'Yes, Admiral.'

'But I didn't.'

'No, Sir.'

'It's an order.'

'Yes, Sir.'

The admiral opened the door and offered his hand.

'We'll meet again before long, Brose. You've been appointed a
Sub-Lieutenant.'

Brose took the hand and clicked his heels. It was cool and dry
and pleasant. All of a sudden he hesitated.

'Is it an order, Admiral?'

'It's an order.'

Brose felt the hand continue to grasp his.

'When must it take place, Sir?'

'The day after tomorrow. Tomorrow you can operate the craft and
try it out. It's dead easy. She's just arrived. She's just being unloaded
right now.' The admiral did not let go of Brose's hand, looked at his
watch and said: 'At precisely this moment the Beast is boarding ship.'

The Y253 from the fatherland was lying alongside the landing
stage, a great creature covered in crawling parasites. In the distance
lay the motionless ocean, turning a little pink. A piercing tone
began to whistle through the vaulted space, a signal that dusk was
falling outside and that the lights would be doused in ten minutes'
time except for a series of feeble lamps screened off on their
seaward side. Leaning motionless against the rock face, Brose
watched the bustle of unloading. The craft was already ashore and
being driven off to the workshop on a lorry. It resembled an
aircraft more than a submarine. Nobody knows she's intended for
me, Brose thought. All this fuss is because of me. This time, the
day after tomorrow, I'll be dead.

This was hardly a thought, however: it was a line in a foreign
tongue, learned off by heart. In the past, every New Years Eve,
awaiting midnight, his father would recite great chunks from the
Odyssey in Greek; he and his brother and sisters listened, breathless
and laughing by turns, to the incomprehensible white and yellow
sounds spiralling up from his mouth like smoke. It had been
exceptionally impressive, but it had also had something to do with
a boundless desolation and with great effort he had
learned the first two lines his father had written down for him
phonetically, off by heart.

Andra moi eneppe, M6esa, polutropon h6s mala p6lla
Plknchte epei Troies hier6n ptolietron epersen.

The day after tomorrow he would be dead - but he wasn't ready
to think this yet, not by a long chalk. He had never been able to
do his homework except at the very last moment. It would turn
into a thought the moment he broke into the Beast's ship with his
craft. In the instant of the explosion, language would surrender the
secrets of its grammar.

He could have eaten at the officers' table, but he went and sat in
his old place; he was a bit quiet, listened to the radio and later that
evening he lost a game of chess because he had never learned the
opening moves. The others smoked and played cards, or they
read. The morse from the radio rooms hovered in the walls, and
down below, in the workshops, hammering and the whine of
the torpedo lorry from the storage halls resounded. The entire
rock was just a den of energy and destruction.

A few men began to sing near the canteen. I'll never go to bed with a woman again, Brose thought - but it wasn't a thought. He
drew on his cigarette and thought of his wife, riddled with bullets
at a carriage window in a motionless train in the middle of the
countryside. It was all of it nonsense. She had never existed. What
existed was the sea, a dozen submarines and the Beast's convoys.

He got up and began to walk through the ice-cold striplighting
of the corridors. He wasn't a volunteer, but he would have been
had the admiral asked for one. Like him, volunteers had to keep it a
secret to the very last moment: who had been selected. Beneath
the black vaulting, he saw a vessel disappear under water in the
middle of the pond and slowly draw the trail of her periscope
towards the sea. He had a feeling she wouldn't return. In his bunk,
he thought: Why didn't he ask for volunteers? He must take no
risks, he'd said, but was he actually taking any? There had always
been at least ten, usually twenty volunteers for assignments without
hope. He had always been among them and had never been
selected. This had happened twelve times but, though the ones
selected had never returned, the number of volunteers hadn't
declined, not ever.

The sleeping quarters were still empty. He looked at the bunk
above and wondered what was bothering him. Suddenly he
thought: There's been a mistake. He should have asked for volunteers. He's not allowed to give an order for something which is
one hundred percent certain to result in death. And all of a sudden
he had the feeling of preferring to top himself rather than follow
the order. That was loopy. What did it matter whether he did it
voluntarily or was following orders? But it seemed to. He sat up,
leaned on his knees he had drawn up and tried to discover what
this was.

It was dead quiet. He was surrounded by stone on all sides and
not a single sound from the workshops penetrated here. For an
instant he saw himself sitting there, viewed from without, somewhere far away on the ocean: right inside a rock rising up from the
sea.

He couldn't discover what was bothering him and he went and
lay down again. One thing was certain: the Beast must be killed
and here was the opportunity to kill it, the Beast with his
concentration camps. Perhaps these were no worse than those in
his own country, but it would in any case mean the end to the
war. The Beast never travelled by didn't like an air
or missile attack on his ship was impossible because he knew how to defend himself more broadly and comprehensively than ever a
ship had done before. Nothing (the craft excepted) could approach
closely enough for his ship to even be on the horizon.

Brose felt his eyelids drooping. If I could flee, I would do so, he
thought, even if the Beast does remain the Beast and even if there
is no weight in an order to do something one would have done
voluntarily in any case. An order like that isn't an order, and the
one who gave it is none other than my own will having turned
admiral ... With a sense of satisfaction, he fell asleep.

And yet, that night, Brose saw himself fleeing down endless,
cool, striplighted corridors, walking on the sea in an admiral's
uniform, and he saw his mother's house, half of it torn down but half
still standing, his mother in the severed rooms, and a friend from
his schooldays who had come to fetch him to go by car to the
heath, but nothing had come of it.

In the chart room he bent over a huge table and followed both the
index fingers of the commodore, the one indicating the Beast's
route, the other his own. At a spot, hundreds of kilometres out
into the ocean, there was a red cross, marking where they would
meet and the war would end. The admiral was standing next to
him and had his eyes fixed abstractedly on quite a different spot
on the map.

When Brose looked up at the general officers on the opposite
side of the table, he suddenly knew all the nonsense he'd been
thinking last night. He wasn't the point, the Beast was. Whether he
set sail voluntarily to destroy him or was obeying an order, and
what subtle differences flowed forth from this perhaps, that was in
no proportion whatsoever to the issue at stake: the end of the war
which had already lasted nobody-knew-how-many years.

Among the gold and the stars, he walked over to the wall
where a sketch was hanging of the ship the Beast would be
travelling on. She wasn't a cruiser or a battle ship, but something
that could only be termed a steamer: an unarmed tub which no
freight company would keep in service any more. This was one of
the whims the Beast had to set against his inhumanity. It meant
nothing. All depended on penetrating the tremendous cordon
around him. In the afternoon he practised with the craft. She was
back on the Y253; with a helmet down to his collar, in a leather
suit full of belts and chronometers, he crawled inside, was fitted
with an oxygen mask and everything was bolted down around him. He had just enough room to sit upright; his head protruded
above the hull in a little dome of moulded quartz, and near his
eyes there was a little periscope he could raise and retract. The
men helping him looked at him questioningly now and then but
didn't ask -a thing.

With all the officers on the landing stage, the Y253 let herself
sink and he sank with her - soon he saw the surface of the water
rise above him and disappear. Not for a second did he think of
what it was all about, that tomorrow he would see the sky
disappear above his head like that for the last time. He felt only
the tension of the experiment.

After a minute the water suddenly fumed pale green. They were
out into open sea. Continuously, he checked the instruments in
front of his eyes and spoke into the microphone that was in front
of his mouth. Ten minutes later he was given his position and he
fired the engine; he felt severe juddering, and with a broad smile
round his mouth he noticed he was starting to move. He dived to
a depth of a hundred and fifty feet where the light turns so
incomprehensibly blue, like that of a dying flame, and then,
navigating by his illuminated instruments, he hurtled through the
sea along a precisely charted trajectory for a quarter of an hour.
His heart was pounding and he laughed loudly into his oxygen
mask. A little later he began to sing. Something that would have
to be a fat fish slapped against the dome and was gone. Brose
laughed and bounced up and down, singing. On all sides he felt
the boundless mass of water slipping by as though it were stone,
but he was outsmarting it! Never before had he felt so free.

He switched off the engine, made the craft rise and raised his
periscope. He was exactly at the calculated spot in front of the
cave, and slowly he sailed inside. The Y253 was lying alongside
the landing stage again. He came to the surface by her side.
Laughing, he stepped ashore a moment later and shook the
gravely extended hands of the general officers. Wide-eyed, the
admiral looked out to sea.

The departure was at six o'clock that evening. For the third time,
the craft was atop the Y253 and the crew were already on board.
Brose sat on his bunk in the sleeping quarters and put the
photographs of his wife and family in his pocket. Moments later he
brought them out again and tore them up. His eyebrows raised, he
looked at the shreds of paper between his feet. He looked at them and thought nothing. There was a gleaming sky, blown quite clear
of everything, in his head. When he looked up, somebody was
standing in front of him and said that he was to take him to the
admiral.