The Unhappiness of Being a Single Man Page 11

  At that moment, the former total quiet outside was interrupted by a far-off pattering, as if of children’s feet; it came nearer, grew louder, and then it became the measured tread of men. They were obviously going single file along the narrow passageway and you could hear a light jingling like that of weapons. Karl, who’d been close to stretching himself out on the bed and falling into a sleep released from all worries about suitcases and Slovaks, started upright and jabbed the stoker to make him pay attention, because the head of the column seemed to have just reached the door. “That’s the ship’s band,” said the stoker, “They’ve been playing on deck and now they’re going to pack up their things. That means it’s all over and we can go. Come on!” He took Karl by the hand, then, at the last second, pulled a framed picture of the Madonna off the wall and stuffed it into his breast pocket, grabbed his suitcase and hurried Karl out of the cabin.

  “Now I’m going to go up to the office and give those gentlemen a piece of my mind. There aren’t any passengers around any more, no need to keep quiet for their sake.” The stoker repeated this several times in various formulations, and, in passing, tried to use the side of his foot to crush a rat that was crossing the passageway, but succeeded only in kicking it faster into the hole that it reached just in time. He moved slowly in general, and although he had long legs, they were too heavy.

  They went through a part of the kitchens where several girls in dirty aprons—they splattered them on purpose—were washing dishes in big tubs. The stoker called over one of the girls, Lina, put his arm around her waist and led her along for a few steps while she pressed herself coquettishly against him. “It’s cashing-out time, do you want to come?” he asked.

  “Why should I bother, you can just bring me the money here,” she answered, then slipped out from under his arm and ran away. “Where did you dig up that beautiful boy?” she called after them, but didn’t stop for an answer. The other girls, who’d paused their work to listen, all laughed.

  Karl and the stoker continued on and reached a door topped with a small portico held up by little golden caryatids. By the standard of ship’s furnishings, it looked downright lavish. Karl realized that he’d never been to this section, which had probably been reserved for first- and second-class passengers during the crossing, whereas now the dividing doors had been taken out for the ship’s deep clean. They’d already come across men carrying brooms over their shoulders, who’d said hello to the stoker. Karl was astonished by how busy it was; down in steerage he hadn’t seen much of what was going on. There were even electrical cables running along the corridors and a tinny bell kept ringing.

  The stoker knocked respectfully on the door and, when someone shouted “Enter,” he gestured at Karl not to be afraid and to come in. Karl did go inside, but stayed close to the door. Out of the room’s three windows he could see the waves of the open sea, and as he watched their cheerful movement, his heart thudded as if he hadn’t just been looking at the sea nonstop for five long days. Huge ships crossed one another’s paths, so heavy that they shifted only slightly with the force of the waves. If you narrowed your eyes, it looked as if these ships were swaying under their own weight. On their masts they flew long, narrow flags, blown taut by their speed but still wriggling from side to side. Gun salutes rang out, presumably from warships, and the long barrels of one passing quite close by, shining brightly as the sun struck its steel cladding, were rocked back and forth by the ship’s steady, smooth but not quite perfectly horizontal motion. The smaller boats and launches could only be seen in the distance, at least when standing by the door, but there were swarms of them running in through the gaps between the big ships. Behind all this stood New York, watching Karl through its skyscrapers’ hundred thousand windows. Yes, in this room you knew where you were.

  At a round table sat three men, one a ship’s officer in his blue jacket, the two others officials from the port authority in black American uniforms. Stacked high on the table in front of them were all sorts of documents, which the officer skimmed over with a pen in his hand, then passed to the two others, who read or copied out certain sections and put them in their briefcases, pausing only when one of them, who kept making a clicking noise with his teeth, dictated something for his colleague’s report.

  Sitting at a desk by the window, with his back to the door, sat a diminutive man working through a row of heavy ledgers lined up at his eye level on a strong shelf. Next to him was an open, empty-looking cash box.

  The second window was unobstructed and gave the best view. Near the third, however, stood two more gentlemen having a murmured conversation. One, wearing a naval uniform and toying with the hilt of his sword, was leaning against the window frame. The man he was talking to was facing the window, and now and then his movements revealed part of a row of decorations on the first man’s chest. He was in civilian clothes and carried a thin bamboo cane, which, because his hands were on his hips, stuck out like a sword of his own.

  Karl didn’t have much time to take all this in because a steward came up to them and, giving the stoker a look that plainly said he didn’t belong there, asked what he wanted. The stoker answered, as quietly as he’d been asked, that he would like to speak to the chief purser. The steward, for his part, rejected this request with a gesture, but nonetheless walked softly across to the man with the ledgers, making a wide detour around the table. The purser—you could see it clearly—literally stiffened at what the steward said to him, but eventually turned towards the stoker and sternly waved his hand to dismiss him, and then dismissed the steward, too, for good measure. At that, the steward came back to the stoker and, as if confiding something to him, said, “Leave this room at once!”

  Upon receiving this response, the stoker looked down at Karl as if Karl were the stoker’s heart and he were silently lamenting his sorrows to it. Without a second thought, Karl set off and marched straight across the room, even lightly brushing the officer’s chair as he passed; the steward went after him, leaning forward with his arms held out ready to grab him, as if he were chasing a bug, but Karl was first to the purser’s table and he held on to it in case the steward tried to pull him away.

  Of course the whole room suddenly got very lively. The officer at the table jumped to his feet, the men from the port authority were calm but alert, the two gentlemen at the window stepped closer together, while the steward retreated, believing that anywhere the higher-ups showed an interest was somewhere he was out of place. The stoker, still by the door, waited nervously for his help to be called upon. The chief purser finally swung his chair around to the right.

  Karl rummaged in his secret pocket, which he had no hesitation in revealing to these people, fished out his passport and laid it open on the table without any other introduction. The chief purser seemed to consider this passport irrelevant and flicked it aside with his fingers, at which Karl, as if this formality had been correctly taken care of, put it back in his pocket.

  “I have to say,” he then began, “that in my opinion this stoker has been unjustly treated. There’s a certain Schubal who keeps doing him down. He’s already served on very many ships, all of which he can name for you, to the complete satisfaction of their captains, he’s hard-working, takes his job seriously, and it really doesn’t make any sense that, on this one ship, where what’s required isn’t especially difficult, not like it is on a merchant clipper, for example, he wouldn’t be up to the mark. It can therefore only be slander that’s preventing him from getting ahead and robbing him of the recognition he deserves, and which he would certainly otherwise be getting. I’m only giving the general outline here, the specific complaints he’ll present to you himself.” Karl had directed this speech to everyone in the room, because they were already listening and because it seemed far more likely that there would be one fair-minded man among the group than that that man would happen to be the chief purser. Cunningly, Karl had omitted that he’d known the stoker for such a short time. And he would actually have spoken much better i
f he hadn’t been thrown off by the red face of the gentleman with the bamboo cane, which he could see properly from his new vantage point.

  “It’s all true, every word,” said the stoker before anyone had asked him, indeed before anyone had even looked at him. This over-hastiness would have been a big mistake had the gentleman with the decorations, who Karl now realized was the captain, not already made the decision to listen to the stoker. He reached out his hand and told the stoker, “Come over here!” with a voice so hard you could have hit it with a hammer. Now everything depended on the impression the stoker made; Karl didn’t have any doubts about the rightness of his cause.

  Luckily, in this moment it turned out that the stoker was a man of the world. With exemplary calm, he neatly fished a little bundle of papers and a notebook out of his suitcase and, as if it were the obvious thing to do, simply bypassed the chief purser and took his papers straight to the captain, for whom he spread his evidence out on the window sill. The chief purser had no choice but to go over there himself. “The man is a well-known troublemaker,” he said in explanation, “He spends more time at the cash desk than in the engine room. He’s driven Schubal, that quiet soul, to the brink of desperation. Now listen here!” he turned to the stoker, “don’t you think you’ve finally taken this pushiness of yours too far? How many times have you already been thrown out by the cashiers, just as you and your completely and utterly unwarranted demands entirely deserve! How many times have you come running from there to this office! How often have you already been told, quite rightly, that Schubal is your direct superior and that it’s him you have to sort these things out with! And now you’ve got so shameless that you come barging in when the captain’s present and bother him with this, and you’re not even embarrassed about bringing along this boy, who I’ve never seen on the ship before, to trot out these ridiculous allegations for you!”

  Karl had to keep himself from lunging forward. But the captain was already there, saying, “Let’s hear what the man has to say. It’s true that Schubal has recently been getting a bit too independent for my liking—which isn’t to say anything in your favour.” The latter was directed at the stoker, but it was natural that the captain couldn’t take up his case just like that, and everything seemed to be on the right track. The stoker began his explanation and even managed to give Schubal the title “Mr”. How happy Karl was, standing by the chief purser’s abandoned desk, where he kept pressing down a parcel scale with his fingers, out of sheer delight.—Mr Schubal is unfair! Mr Schubal gives preferential treatment to foreigners! Mr Schubal ejected the stoker from the engine room and sent him to scrub the toilet, which was certainly not his job!—At one point doubt was even cast on Mr Schubal’s work ethic, which was apparently discussed rather more than it really existed. At that, Karl stared at the captain with all his might, candidly, as though they were colleagues, so that he wouldn’t let himself be unfavourably influenced by the stoker’s slightly clumsy way of expressing himself. Nevertheless, for all the stoker talked, he didn’t actually bring up anything concrete, and although the captain still looked straight at him, his face set with determination to hear him out this time, the other men started to get impatient and the stoker’s voice lost its hold on the room’s attention, which was not a good sign. The first was the gentleman in civilian clothes who began to toy with his bamboo cane, tapping it, albeit quietly, on the parquet floor. The others began to glance around the room and the two officials from the port authority, who were obviously pressed for time, took up their files and started looking through them again, if still a bit absent-mindedly; the ship’s officer shifted his chair closer to them, and the chief purser, who thought he’d won the day, heaved a deep and ironic sigh. Only the steward seemed unaffected by the air of distraction that was setting in among the others, because he sympathized with the plight of a poor man put in front of the powerful, and he nodded seriously at Karl as if trying to assure him of something.

  Meanwhile, the life of the harbour went on outside the window: a flat cargo barge carrying a mountain of barrels, which must have been ingeniously stacked not to roll off, went by and plunged the room into shadow; small motor launches, which Karl could now have got a good look at if he’d had a moment, swooshed past in dead straight lines, twitching with the hands of the men standing upright at the helms; strange floating objects kept popping up out of the unsettled waters, but they were swamped again at once and sank out of Karl’s astonished sight; boats belonging to the ocean liners were rowed ashore by toiling sailors, each stuffed with passengers who quietly and expectantly sat where they’d been told to, even though a few couldn’t resist turning their heads from side to side to see the changing backdrop. It was motion without end, a restlessness transferred from the restless deep to these helpless people and their works!

  The whole situation urged speed, clarity, the most precise description, but what did the stoker do? He talked himself up into a sweat, his hands trembled so much he couldn’t hold the papers on the window sill; he thought of endless complaints to make about Schubal and in his opinion any one of them should have been enough to bury him for good, but what he managed to present to the captain was just a sad mishmash of all of them. The man with the bamboo cane had already started whistling quietly and looking at the ceiling, the men from the port authority had drawn the ship’s officer over to their table and showed no sign of releasing him again, the chief purser was visibly holding himself back from butting in only because the captain had stayed so calm, and the steward was waiting attentively for the order that the captain must soon give about what to do with the stoker.

  Karl couldn’t stand idly by any longer. He went slowly over to the group, and as he went he thought quickly about the cleverest way he could get a grip on what was happening. The time was ripe: only a little more of this and he and the stoker would both be thrown out of the office. The captain might be a good man and might also, as it seemed to Karl, have some particular reason for presenting himself as a fair commander, but at the end of the day he wasn’t an instrument you could play however you wanted—and that was exactly how the stoker was trying to handle him, albeit out of sincere and boundless indignation.

  Karl said to the stoker: “You’ve got to explain it more simply, more clearly; the captain can’t take it seriously, the way you’re explaining it. Do you think the captain knows the surname of every engineer and errand boy, or their Christian names, so that you can just refer to them like that and he’ll know who you’re talking about? You’ve got to arrange your complaints, say the most important thing first, then the other things in descending order, and it might turn out that most of them you don’t even have to mention. You’ve always explained it so clearly to me!” If you can steal suitcases in America, you can also tell a little white lie here and there, he thought apologetically.

  If only it had helped! Wasn’t it already too late? The stoker broke off as soon as he heard Karl’s familiar voice, but his eyes were glazed with the tears of wounded male pride, of dreadful memories, of an extreme predicament, and he couldn’t even properly make out Karl’s face any more. How could he now—Karl silently understood this as he stood in front of the silent man—how could he now suddenly change his whole manner of speech, especially when it must seem to him that he’d already put forward all there was to say, without anything to show for it, while at the same time, it also seemed that he hadn’t really said anything yet and couldn’t expect these gentlemen to keep on listening to the rest of the story. And in this moment, here comes Karl, his only supporter, trying to give him some good advice, but instead only showing him that all, truly all, is lost.