Decompression (26 page)

“Almost certainly,” I said.

Theo let my arm go and nodded approvingly, as if giving me points for mortal danger. I let myself tip over backward. Before I
hit the water, I thought I heard Jola’s voice call out, “Happy birthday, Sven!”

My fortieth. When I was a kid in school, there used to be stickers that read
ATTENTION: TODAY IS THE BEGINNING OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
. For the first and only time, that inane dictum seemed appropriate. It just needed an additional line to indicate whether it was a promise or a threat.

As soon as I was in the water, the familiar calm came over me. The weight of the dive tanks had disappeared. Under me there was neither firm ground nor empty air but instead a liquid three-dimensionality that I could traverse in any direction I wanted. No swells, visibility excellent. I grabbed the anchor cable and began a brisk descent. Soon the current caught me, and I hung on perpendicularly, like a banner in the wind. Sixty meters down, the first brief stop to change over to bottom gas. Soon afterward, the wrecked ship came into sight, a gigantic shadow in the everlasting semidarkness of the ocean floor.

I’d figured this dive would be an extraordinary experience. All the same, my own reaction surprised me. With every meter, the closer I sank to the wreck, the more my hands started to shake. I felt as though all the hairs on my body were standing up. The ghost ship below me was as long as a football field and broken into two pieces. The bow had separated from the rest of the ship and lay a little distance away from it. The ship’s waist appeared to be well preserved, except for a loading crane that had snapped off and fallen diagonally across the bridge. The stern loading crane still stood upright, as did, in fact, the entire steamer. The
Fiedler
, as I’d baptized her, looked as though a mighty hand had placed her there to wait for a secret future assignment. If—as I guessed—
she’d sunk sometime during the Second World War, no human eye had looked on her for about seventy years. On the deck down there, people had once lived and worked, sung and quarreled, had harbored thoughts and feelings, and in the end had most probably gone to the bottom together with their ship. I was hovering above an inscrutable past that was principally, in the way of pasts, a graveyard. No one but the fish had taken care of those dead bodies. Maybe they were still to this day unaccounted for. Maybe there were grown grandchildren somewhere who believed Grandpa had absconded to America in the middle of the war and left Grandma alone with two little ones.

The most impressive feature of the
Fiedler
was, beyond a doubt, her enormous funnel, which towered at some distance from me. I decided to leave the anchor cable, swim over there, and negotiate the rest of my descent alongside the chimney. Because of the sunken ship’s imposing size and the strong current, I had to make sure I’d be able to find the cable again. The anchor would surely creep some distance over the seafloor; on the other hand, visibility was better than I’d expected that far down. I let go of the cable, battled against the current with strong fin strokes, and got my camera ready. The effort was worth it. I was looking down into a black maw big enough to swallow a cow. A dense school of sardines, as pliant as cloth, as agile as a single creature with a single will, wound around the funnel. When I got close, they formed dents and bubbles, but then they immediately went back to circling the chimney. One level down was a large battery of barracudas, too satiated to hunt. I pressed the shutter-release button. Those photographs would be the envy of the entire island.

I quickly completed the final stage of my descent. From this
point on, time would speed by. I couldn’t spend more than twenty minutes at that depth, and twenty minutes was the blink of an eye, particularly considering the size of the object I proposed to investigate. I took a plastic bag from my pocket, inflated it with gas, and released it. It fluttered upward like a frantic jellyfish doing battle with a family of different-size air bubbles. The marker made a beeline for the surface, where Jola would see it and interpret its meaning:
I’m down, everything okay
.

Then I started to swim. Against the current, but at a leisurely pace, because haste underwater only used up gas, strength, and nerves. I swam along the ship’s steel walls, which were as high as a house and covered with a closed layer of mussels, sponges, and soft coral, here and there decorated with sea urchins and starfish. It was a living, breathing, and ever-hungry vestment that hardly offered a glimpse of the metal underneath. The barracudas watched me and found me boring. While I had to keep working my legs hard, they hung almost motionless in the current.

I saw the quarterdeck, the main deck, and the bridge. The lifeboats were all properly in place; everything had obviously happened very fast. I noted the signal bridge, the Morse lamp, and the radio mast, which was overgrown to the tiniest branch with mussels and anthozoans. I inadvertently broke off a little stony coral from the bulwark and felt ashamed. I took meticulous care not to get tangled in any of the long-lost fishing nets that clung to the wreck here and there like giant spiderwebs. A hole in the ship’s side allowed me to peer into the engine room. I reached the detached bow, which lay separate from the rest like a wrenched-off body part. The break was a colossal, gaping wound. I guessed the ship was a British collier, maybe a merchant vessel built in the Roaring
Twenties and later put into service by the Allies. I’d have to come back here many times to look for the ship’s bell or the shipbuilder’s plaque, for identification plates in the engine room, for dishes or utensils embossed with the shipping company’s emblem, for the manufacturers’ marks on the engine telegraphs and the binnacle, before the secret of the
Fiedler
would be unlocked.

It was time to return to the anchor cable. I was slowly reaching the point of sensory overload anyway. There were too many impressions. I wasn’t processing them anymore, only registering them. Ground tackle, king posts, fan cowls, deckhouse. Thousands of dolphinfish, amusing themselves by pursuing me. Once again, the ship’s screw captured my attention. It was a four-blade bronze propeller with a diameter of about five meters. The rudder, which had been swiveled hard to the left, could have told an entire story. And I was curious to hear it. I wanted to sit on the seafloor and grow gills so that I could breathe freely. I wanted to cast off my equipment and move into the captain’s cabin. The barracudas would surely have had nothing against that; there was room enough for all. The wreck was as big as an apartment complex. I could have made myself at home in there. After all, I knew how life worked underwater. It occurred to me that during the previous several minutes, for the first time in days, I hadn’t thought about either Jola or Antje or Theo. That was the pass I’d come to. Jola and Theo had brought Germany to the island—and with it a war that wasn’t mine, that had nothing to do with me. Nonetheless, they’d turned me into a combatant. Up there on the land, there was no longer any refuge I could escape to. The whole island was a battlefield. I couldn’t stay out of it anymore. My living space had been destroyed, like the habitat of a creature on the way to extinction.
Down here was the only place I could still be. Everything felt right here. The planet
Fiedler
, discovered by myself. A realm nobody could follow me into. All I’d have to do was take off my equipment, breathe through gills, and …

I reached the anchor cable. Twenty-two minutes; deepest point, 109 meters. Not good, but acceptable. Apparently I’d forgotten the time for a few moments while contemplating the ship’s screw. I was breathing too fast—I had to get a grip on that. From this point on, the old rule from the Bible held good: don’t turn around, don’t look back. I couldn’t be interested in the wreck anymore. Now my entire focus must be on my measuring instruments, with whose help I had to bring the factors of depth, time, and gas mixture into perfect proportion.

I made my way up the anchor cable hand over hand, a little faster at the start because the cable sagged in the current, and then more slowly so as not to surpass the proper ascent speed. My first stop came at seventy-five meters, where I changed gases and then waited a further two minutes without taking my eyes off the dive computer. Constantly monitoring the parameters required my complete concentration. At three minutes per meter, up to a depth of forty-five meters; there a five-minute pause, including another gas change. Then continuing upward with increasingly longer decompression stops to twenty-one meters, where I had to wait twenty minutes and noticed for the first time the increase in the current. My arms and hands were already aching from clinging so tightly to the anchor cable. As soon as I noticed those aches, I started thinking I couldn’t hold on one second longer. Using one hand, I fished the mooring rope out of my pocket and attached myself to the cable. The next hour and a half was taken up with
the coordination of ascent and stops, and I had no opportunity for reflection. For the first time, I looked up. The
Aberdeen’s
oval hull lay obliquely above me. It was a reassuring sight. Some part of me must have secretly reckoned with the possibility that my support ship might disappear. It was hard to imagine that Jola was actually up there. My desire to see her and report on my meeting with the
Fiedler
was like a pang in my belly. At the same time, I already felt disappointment at never really being able to describe to her what I’d experienced, because there were no suitable words for it. The eternally dusky undersea world, the sleeping ghost ship, the pitiless dimensions of past, ocean, and death—that was all trapped inside my head. No one but me had seen those sights. I’d have to work hard with Jola to help her develop the abilities necessary for diving down there with me someday. Maybe she could do it in a year or two. Then we’d share the same memory forever. The
Fiedler
would marry us.

Now I was being pulled upward as powerfully as down. Below me was darkness, above me light. The boundary between all conceivable opposites ran straight through me. I hung between bright and dark, above and below, yesterday and tomorrow, life and death. My instruments told me what direction I should move in, and when: higher, immediately. I unhooked the mooring rope and worked my way up the next fifteen meters, making various stops of four to thirteen minutes.

The glass ceiling lay six meters below the surface. I had to remain at that depth for an hour, alternately breathing pure oxygen and bottom gas, while the
Aberdeen
’s hull was directly above my head, so close it seemed I could touch it by stretching out a hand. Below me was the vitreous blue water mass of the Atlantic,
in whose uppermost layer I found myself. There was nothing for eye or hand to fasten on except the anchor cable, which was quickly lost to sight in the deep. Now everything was pulling me upward and nothing down. I wanted out. Out where I could talk, breathe, get dry. So as not to lose my nerve, I strenuously avoided looking up.

Barely ten minutes had passed when I heard a loud splash. Something heavy must have fallen into the water. I raised my head and looked up toward the surface. A person was floating next to the boat.

Now they’re ruining everything
, I thought.
The careful plan, our agreement, my trust. The spirit of the expedition. Because they got bored. Or too hot. Because they decided to abandon their posts and go for a little swim while I’m finishing down here
. Disappointment took my breath away for a moment. Until that moment, everything had gone well—had gone perfectly, in fact. I couldn’t believe I’d been so wrong about Jola.
She begged me to go along on this expedition
. She’d wanted to be my partner, a person on whom I could rely 100 percent. Or had she? My reason was exhausted, and I could see I was arriving at strange conclusions. All I knew for sure was that the little swimming party up there represented an attack on everything I held dear.

Then I realized that there weren’t two bodies swimming in the water, only one. And that one wasn’t swimming, it was sinking.

I can see him in memory, gently drifting down toward me. In reality, he must have dropped like a stone. Nevertheless, I had endless
time to reflect, or so it seems to me today.
Jola
, I thought.
Something’s happened to her
. To be more precise, what I thought was:
Now it’s happened
. As though it had always been a given that something would, to her.

Against the light, the body showed like a dark spot that grew larger as it came nearer. Its contours billowed in the agitated water.
This person has to return to the surface at once
, I thought. I’d already let go of the anchor cable and would have simply swum up if the rope hadn’t held me back. My reason seized the opportunity to yell my instinct down:
You’re staying where you are!

If I surfaced now, the nitrogen inside me could expand fatally. Or make me very sick: vomiting, breathing difficulty, paralysis of arms and legs. I might pass out with blood running from my ears. Moreover, I didn’t know what had happened on the
Aberdeen
. Jola wasn’t making any swimming movements. Had she hit her head and fallen overboard? But then why wasn’t Theo making any attempt to rescue her? Was he asleep in a fog of alcohol fumes? I thought it was something else. I thought Jola and Theo must have had another quarrel. He’d knocked her down and thrown her into the water. Or she’d been injured in the struggle and fallen over the rail. In any case, it was clear, as the seconds went by, that Theo was purposely letting her drown. If I broke the surface with the unconscious Jola, I ran the risk of his attacking us both in the heat of the moment. Or he might simply start the boat and chug away. Even if he didn’t become aggressive, I still couldn’t assume he’d do whatever it would take to get me to the nearest decompression chamber. And not even considering the question of whether I’d survive long enough for that.
You solve your problems down here or not at all
.