The Star of Istanbul (12 page)

I turned to find Selene.

She was standing beside me, a step behind.

She was staring at the unconscious man.

And she surprised me. On her face was a keen, narrow-eyed, steely focus.

Something had shifted in her. It let me move on to what was next. “Can you swim?” I said.

Her hands moved to her waist and she unfastened her skirt and it fell to her feet like a punched-out sailor. She stepped from it and stood there in black stockings, white drawers to the knees, and the bounteously phony bosom of her life jacket. “Yes, I can swim,” she said.

And I did not have to hold her hand.

I turned and Selene and I stepped past the unconscious junior officer, and before us was a waist-high wall, and bellied up to it just beyond was the fat body and great gaping black maw of a cowl ventilator, as tall as the bridge. No doorway through to the Hurricane Deck. But there was a passable space between the vent and the Bridge.

“Over,” I said to Selene, and I stepped aside. She went to the wall and put her hands on it and I grabbed her waist in my hands and lifted and she went over and I followed and she let me pass her as we went around the ventilator.

We crossed straight over to the starboard side and began to work our way up the incline of the deck, which made moving forward heavy-legged and hard, but we held tight to the railing, resisting the sideways incline of the ship, which would make falling down to the Boat Deck and then into the sea light-chested and easy.

I watched below as we moved, assessing the situation, seeking an opening for us. The deck seethed with passengers, and I was struck by two surpassingly sad things. One was this: hundreds of people were dithering and flustering and drifting and huddling about in faux calm, but there were dozens of different currents and directions, moving forward, moving aft, lurching to the rail's edge, clinging to the deck wall; worse than the sadness of the few wild retreats I'd seen of men on a battlefield, where at least their direction was clear, this was a vast shifting image of hopelessness, seen from above as if by a powerless or an indifferent god. And the second sad thing was all the bare heads, all the bare heads of men and women and children whose world was a world of hats and caps and scarves, of heads covered beneath the sky, and now all these people had been lifted desperately from the bareheaded safety of belowdecks or they had already stripped themselves of their coverings as they faced a plunge into the sea.

And the sea was very near to their deck now.

I watched a lifeboat amidships, pulled out by the list to the farthest extent of its snubbing chains, the boat almost full with huddling bodies, and a woman was poised at deck's edge—she still in fur-trimmed coat and hat and veil and without a life jacket—and men's hands in the boat reached out beseeching her to try to jump across the six or eight feet of empty space to them. She leaned forward and then back and then shuffled her feet and wobbled and tried to work herself up to the leap, while at the running blocks at each corner of the boat gap in the railing, crewmen pulled hard at the falls, the man forward visibly quaking from the strain of keeping the bow up high in order to level the boat with the sea instead of the deck.

The woman couldn't bring herself to jump and she broke away and retreated into the paralyzed crowd and a shout grew up and three others of those waiting behind—two of them men—surged forward to make the leap and a skinny young man in shirtsleeves and suspenders lunged in front of the others and planted his foot and left the deck just as the quaking forward crewman slipped at his feet and his legs buckled and the bow of the lifeboat dipped abruptly and the skinny young man tried to stop and he twisted and he fell disappearing into the gap and a great cry rose up in the lifeboat as it dipped farther and farther down at the front and the forty or so people inside tumbled out in a great flailing of arms and legs and the aft crewman fell now too and all the ropes were loosed and the lifeboat and all its passengers vanished from view.

I'd seen enough. I turned to Selene and she let go of the railing and she began to back away, her eyes wide.

I stepped to her, put my hands on her shoulders, stopped her. I did not have to shake her. She grew calm at once beneath my hands. Her eyes relaxed and they focused on me and then narrowed once more in the resolve I'd seen on the bridge.

“We have to go into the water now,” I said. “As quickly as we can, as easily as we can.”

She nodded.

I said, “Our jackets will help us. We swim as far away from the ship as possible. After that, there will be plenty of things afloat to cling to.”

She nodded again.

All this seemed feasible to me. If it was, if we ended up safely in the water, I still worried about the ship capsizing on us. But I didn't say so. I worried about the great sucking vortex at the ship's last vanishing. But I didn't say so.

I said, “Let's go. We'll use the rail, but try not to look down. Just follow me.”

She nodded a last time and I turned and I led us back to the railing and we headed aft, passing from the shadow of funnel number one, and I was still trying to visualize if we needed to leave the Hurricane Deck. We'd have to be patient if we stayed. We'd have to wait for the very last moment for the sea to come to us. But with the bow filling, the ship could suddenly rear up from the stern to sink.

We left the rail to go around another cowl vent, which was no longer taking in fresh air but spewing thick black smoke from belowdecks, and beyond it we cut back to the railing and I leaned out and looked ahead for a way down to the Boat Deck. About fifty yards farther on, past funnel number two, was a staircase.

Suddenly the ship began to quake beneath our feet and a great metallic groan filled the air coming from all around us and I stopped and turned and I cried “Hold on to me!” and Selene put her arms around my waist and I gripped the railing hard with both hands and the
Lusitania
shook and it grabbed the breath out of me as it lurched toward the sea and I braced my hips against the railing and a many-voiced human cry came from below us and Selene held me tight and we stopped, we did not capsize but we stopped, and the cry below ceased abruptly and I looked and bodies were still careening and flying against the Boat Deck railing and over and gone but we'd stopped for now and the angle toward the sea was worse but it felt as if the angle forward had abated a little—just a little—we could still move, we still could move.

“Not much farther,” I cried. “Careful placing your feet.”

Selene knew to take her arms off me and we both clutched the railing and we moved aft as quickly as we could, pulling with our arms as much as driving forward with our legs, placing our feet carefully with each step so they would not slide from under us, and we approached funnel number two and its shadow fell upon us and I heard Selene gasp and she stopped and I looked behind me and she was staring upward and I followed her gaze and the top section of the listing funnel was directly over our heads.

“Just watch me,” I cried.

She lowered her face and I turned and we moved on.

And we were at the staircase and it was opposite the Marconi
shack—its wireless antennae rising from its roof to join the long, taut telegraph lines strung from foremast to mainmast—and the door was gaping open and inside an operator sat in a bolt-secured chair, hunched over his key, tapping furiously away. I wanted to step to him and grab him by the arm and pull him away. The ship was lost; whoever was going to hear us had heard us already. But this was one of those guys you find in times like this who'll die doing what he signed up to do. As I led Selene down the stairs I thought:
If I live, I'll put this man—and what he was—in the story I'll write.

And we were on the Boat Deck.

I looked to the left and staggered back, throwing my arm across Selene, startled as if I'd turned an alleyway corner into the chest of a hulking stranger. The sea had claimed the deck almost up to my feet.

Which was fine. We didn't need to seek the right place to enter. It was waiting for us.

The slash of sea before us foamed at its claiming edge.

I turned us aft.

Astern, those who had no life jackets and those who had them but could not muster the nerve to use them were clambering at the last two lifeboats, which were swinging wildly at the end of their snubbing chains.

“Here,” I said.

I took Selene by the hand and we moved toward the railing a few paces aft.

A little farther along, a man in a union suit was meticulously
folding his pants, with his overcoat and his coat and his shirt already carefully stacked at his feet.

Somewhere a woman was sobbing.

The bridge siren abruptly stopped.

I let go of Selene's hand and we were at the railing.

“Up,” I said and she climbed the railing and swung her legs over and she balanced a moment there and I came up beside her and I took her hand in mine once more and I looked at the sea and it was full of bodies alive and dead and it was full of planking from wrecked lifeboats and I looked down, and the drop was less than ten feet but a deck chair spun directly below us and I felt Selene's body as it started to move outward and I cried “Hold” and she tried, she gently braked her body, and the deck chair bumped the hull and it spun and Selene was starting to rebound backward, was starting to fall backward and
I slipped my arm around her and kicked hard with my heels against the bottom rail and we flew a little away from the hull and we had only water below us and we fell and the cold grabbed me by the feet and rushed up my legs as I took my arm from around Selene's waist and I sucked in a deep breath and the water rushed up my abdomen and my chest and I flinched my eyes closed and my face flashed sharp
cold, the cold raked through me and the sea was heavy upon me and now I was no mind at all, I was only my body I was only the memories of my muscles and I was the sinking and I was the slowing and I was the stopping. And I was the gathering of arm and flattening of hand and coiling of leg and then I was the stroking upward and I could feel my chest rising ahead of me rising as if on its own—the life jacket lifting me—and the pressure of the sea fell away from the top of my head and from my forehead and my eyes and my cheeks and all my face and now my shoulders and I was in the air.

I gasped in the air and I opened my eyes, and swinging to my face as if to kiss me hello was a sweet woman's face, her large eyes closed, the lids smooth and white, the face was very white and angled to kiss me, angled too far sideways, and I was no mind at all, I was only my body before her, and my body assumed she was Selene, and she was dead, I knew, this woman approaching me, and I clutched tight in the chest, but then I knew it was not Selene, and then bumping my face was a coldness beyond the coldness of the sea, a terrible coldness bumped a last kiss upon my cheek, a good-bye kiss sliding across my mouth and she moved away, she could not linger and she was gone and she was a stranger and she was dead, and I heard myself gasping, gasping for breath in the cold sea but gasping for the mistake my body had made and gasping to know if Selene had come up from the place where I had just been, and my arms knew to turn me, and a few yards away Selene Bourgani's famous profile floated as if she were beheaded and I gasped again and then her shoulders appeared and her arms, and she was thrashing and turning, and her face swung around to me and we moved toward each other, this stroke, and this one, and we watched as each other's living eyes grew nearer.

And we touched hands and we were in a dark shadow and we knew not to look above us, we knew not to consider the
Lusitania
about to fall upon us, and we turned side by side away from the ship.

And we swam.

14

So Selene Bourgani and I shared a deck chair when the
Lusitania
went down, having swum out far enough that the last whipping of the loosed Marconi wires just missed tangling us, though it dragged many others under, right before our eyes. We clung to the floating chair and we lifted our faces to the ship.

The stern rose from the water, and the massive starboard white propellers showed themselves, still spinning slowly, glinting brightly in the sun, and the
Lusitania
diminished before us for a long few moments like a knife blade disappearing into a chest, and then it stopped, as if it had struck bone, and it no longer evoked a blade, as its keel simply settled downward and it was gone.

And there was no vortex. That thing it struck: it occurred to me how shallow the sea was here, within ten miles of shore, not even four hundred feet deep. The ship struck her bow to the ocean floor before she was fully under, and so when she vanished, all that was left was for the air within to blow. And it did, a last upswelling dome of white, and then the sea lifted beneath us and we were glad to be holding this chair and we rose and we fell and all around was a low, ongoing wordless cry.

We could not listen. We could not watch. We hung on to the chair, just to keep us from drifting separately, and we looked each other in the eyes. The ones who made it off the ship in one piece and yet would die on this day—and there would be many—were those without life jackets or those without any emotional reserves, the ones for whom this was such an enormous thing that they went “Ah to hell with it” and gave up the ghost. But the ghosts still cried out all around us till the bodies they came from sank or floated away.

And Selene and I just looked at each other and murmured to each other. Little things.

“Are you cold?” I would say.

“Oh, not anymore. I'm numb now,” she would say.

“The sea is very calm,” I would say.

“The sun is warm on my face,” she would say.

And when a particularly terrible human sound would wash over us and I could see in her eyes that she heard, I would say, “Don't listen.”

And she would say, “I can't hear anything but my heart.” And perhaps she would add, “Or is that yours?”

We would say these things, or things very much like them, over and over again. We didn't mind the repetition.

And then at last I said, “Sing to me.”

And she did. Softly. “You made me love you. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to do it.”

And so we floated. And later some crewmen got to a collapsible lifeboat that had drifted off right-side up, and they were able to raise and lash the steel-framed canvas sides, and the men began to pick the living from the vast sargasso of bodies, and they found us.

And before sunset Selene and I were on the deck of a fishing smack, huddled in blankets and drinking tea, quiet now together—we found that all we could be together for now was quiet—and by dark we were in Queenstown.