Refiner's Fire (44 page)

“This is what I know of him, and this is all. His first name was Lev. He was from Leningrad. He was either an economist or an engineer, or both. He and Katrina Perlé said that after the war they would go to Jewish Palestine. He was tall, and Metzner said that his eyes were ‘piercing.' That's it.

“But, Metzner is alive. He is a scientist. When I met him, I had no idea that he was anything other than a peasant. (He was a strange man.) In this folder I have a paper on glaciology, written by Hans Metzner. I know that it's the same one because of the picture. Look at it.” Marshall saw an old man with white hair. The paper had been delivered in London, and Metzner was listed as Professor of Geology at the University of Lausanne.

Levy handed Marshall the dossier and headed for bed. Lydia could read German, and she and Marshall stayed up until the sun rose, going over the yellowed documents. In this way they spent their wedding night. Katrina Perlé and her husband had vanished from the memory of the world, and she had been cut down on a bright and beautiful day. Marshall and Lydia understood the rabbi's words about “the face of their mortality.” They passed the night uncomfortable and upset. It was tense and sad, like the night of an assassination. The rabbi's words came clear to them, especially when a placid morning arose from the sea by Charleston as they read over and over the words that Levy had taken from the man in the hospital: “And they knelt in the snow as she had done when she had first seen him...”

T
HEY RODE
in a boat-hulled helicopter with double-barreled jet engines and rotors that twitched like an insects wings in a hovering staccato wheel. Wind and engines were deafening as the military craft faced to sea and ran a hundred miles in search of the British Merchant Navy motor vessel
Royal George,
upon which Lydia and Marshall would sail to Rotterdam.

A hurricane in the east raged undecided and alone over an empty patch of sea. Just west of the Gulf Stream, the
Royal George
steamed up and down waiting to see if clear passage would open and in which direction. They were short of crew when they put out of Norfolk with half a cargo of coal, and a man had been swept overboard in the gale. On his telex, Levy had received a full report, and offered to send a replacement for the voyage, to work passage. Thus Marshall was conscripted into the crew.

Though she was the Admiral's sister, Lydia had never ridden in a helicopter. Nor had Marshall, though he felt at times as if the noise of the rotors—like sudden rain beating on a tin roof—were entirely familiar. The helicopter crew had just returned from Vietnam, and were elated to be alive, frightened of themselves, and remarkably casual with their machine. Partly from habit, and partly for Lydia, the pilot guided his craft through cloud and rain as if he were a skier. He slid down a steep ramp of broken clouds and made a wide circle above the sea. He banked to nearly vertical and looked downward through the side window. He charged ahead and then veered into the soft ceiling. He put music on the communications system, and swayed the helicopter so that they felt as if they were inside a dancing elephant. Lydia loved this, and it showed in her face.

The boys from Dallas and Tucumcari, in fatigues and lifejackets, stared at her without letup. In the gulf off Vietnam, and shuttling inland over dappled plains and muted gunfire, they had wished for such a woman. She put her hand on the gun carriage and looked over the sea, watching the waves drive northeast. She felt that she held the helicopter and its lethal weapons in her hand, that it emanated from her like spokes in the wheel of visual lines made by the airmen in her regard, that by will alone she could direct and co-ordinate its flight that in the slightest movement of her eye, she could turn it and make it sweep down. It
did
go where she willed, running smoothly over the sea, toying with the storm.

The Dallas gunner cried out, “I have a ship at two o'clock.” They waited for a break in the clouds, and, as soon as they had locked in to a distant form tossing in the spirited sea, made for the ship. Dropping to twenty-five feet above the waves, they sped through mist and spray toward the high steel sides. The crew of the
Royal George
lined the bridge and forecastle, watching the helicopter approach over the water as if it would smash against the ship. The pilot increased speed and, only a few hundred feet from target, rose rapidly over the masts. Then he went over on his side and circled the
Royal George
for no reason other than to show that here were men on the sea and in the air, in steel machines knotted in the mane of a hurricane; that the engines were firing and hot; that they could go where they wanted; that in conjunction with the sudden winds and high waves, they were free.

The dazzling blades came so close that they nearly struck the ship. Like that of a muscular bird, a thickened quail, the body of the craft was streamlined with plenty of curved limb. The sound of engines shuddered down the decks like the rain, and coursed over the upturned faces of the sailors as the
Royal George
yawed, pitched, and rolled. Great waves lifted its bows, lurching along the sides like a flood in a gorge, and men in blue and yellow oilskins rushed to the main hatch cover as the helicopter hovered amidships.

The gunner threw aside nylon webbing at the door and swung out the winch, while the pilot followed precisely every sway of the ship, hand and eye usurping all his vital being. Marshall took the sling and pushed away. He was lowered into the rain, and a minute later he hit a slippery deck. Lydia followed, waving goodbye to Dallas and Tucumcari.

As Lydia slowly descended, the men of the
Royal George were
astounded—they had not expected a woman. She slipped out of the harness and swept her hands through her hair. So off balance had she rendered the sailors that they looked like prehistoric Britons. Open-mouthed, squat-faced, cliff-eyed, they rocked silently on yellow and blue sea legs like a chorus line of idiots. The officers saw Lydia and adjusted their tunics. Then a wave came unexpectedly from starboard and hit the ship with a ferocious hook. Grasping rails and lines as water poured from the deck into the sea, they rushed inside.

Marshall took Lydia's hand to help her through the companionway. As they looked back they saw the helicopter making a steady line to Hatteras and Virginia, where the sun would break through. In a confusion of oilskins and a dozen English dialects they looked at one another and realized that they hardly knew who they were. Suddenly they had come into the middle of the sea in hurricane season. The helicopter which had carried them was just a spot, cleaving its way to the coast. As the ship pitched into the storm they were shown down a long narrow corridor to their cabin.

They switched on a tiny light which did no more than accentuate the darkness, and they looked into their young faces dripping and windbeaten. Touching their cheeks together, they embraced in the glare, surrounded by shadow which agitated as if with gnats or smoke. They held one another and moved to stay standing while the ship rolled and the sea broke above them. Though dark, the cabin seemed to open like a flower into a picture of Western landscape, a fountain of colorful images. Marshall did not know if the Lydia he held were the graceful young woman with long perfect hands and silver rings, or the little girl in a gingham dress, in a starry Rocky Mountain meadow. He loved her.

T
HEY STARTED
a tour of the ship in the engine room. The
Royal George
was brand-new and more automated than a Japanese toy. The engines were run by computers, and adjustments in speed, maintenance, and corrective repair were accomplished electromechanically. Several times a year in major ports an army of technicians boarded with packs of instruments for an overhaul. The regulars had nothing to do but stare at several stories of green enameled iron in the main well; and the catwalks might just as well have been for cats. However, the union was present, insisting that a complement of motormen remain in number sufficient to wipe and fire a sweating gargantuan sea engine of the type that had once swallowed whole the labor and attention of fifty men. Each watch of fifteen congregated inside a white glass-enclosed room suspended in the well, where the walls were filled with registers of lights. They were, to a man, old Scotsmen and Northerners, raised in steam. But they sat silently at consoles and read the
Illustrated London News,
while they listened to a recorded tattoo of bagpipes and reeds. They were old, white-haired, of deliberate gait and hard methodical breathing. Sunken eyes gazed before them with the expression of an animal brought from its den to a closed operating theater. It was as if they had been kidnapped from nineteenth-century ships. “Isn't it strange,” said Lydia, when she and Marshall stepped off a ladder in a dim vibrating corridor, “that the future is always obvious when it first appears. That,” she said, meaning the banks of LED and the silent running of the control room they had just visited, no less the passive men whose grace and skill had been prematurely cupped in brain and eye away from hand and body, “is the way it will be. So much intellect and so little else.” They were alone in the dark corridor, on their way to the bridge and the kitchens. “Hold me,” she said.

He reached into her dress, and with his other hand he felt her back and shoulders while they kissed sadly and almost wildly. They might have gone on that way forever, so rough and alive did it make them feel, had it not been for the sudden appearance of a young rating, who, upon seeing the voluptuous entanglement, perked up to say, “My goodness, in the passageways yet. Well done.”

Whereas the engine room was a leap into the future, the galleys were a throwback to the twelfth century. Long-haired kitchen boys were jammed into corners and below tables, peeling potatoes and shelling eggs. Tremendous pots, cauldrons on tripods, hanging perforated utensils, and wooden boards laden with chopped onions, garlic, and beef were scattered about a cold slippery room filled with jets of vapor from leaky steam valves at the base of the ovens. There were two cooks, Dave and Harvey. Dave was tall and skinny, and resembled a prehistoric bird. Harvey was dark and inexact, and looked like the head of the Guatemalan Secret Police.

As stewards often do at sea, they sailed together in sin, battling for the attentions of the innocent young cookboys, despised by the randy deck force, ignored by the motormen, and cultivated by the officers for whom they cooked and served special meals. In the latter half of the voyage, Lydia was put to work in the galleys. At first Harvey and Dave resented her so intemperately that she moved in between them and took command, improving the cuisine ad infinitum and raising morale among the boys forever under tables peeling or slicing, forever subject to lascivious pinches from above. They came alive in Lydia's presence, turning from sallow candle-fleshed morons to bright apple-cheeked prodigies. Lydia lay with Marshall in their narrow bed, silvery clouds racing past the porthole on warm southern air, and delighted as he recounted her praise. At her table, the rough and insolent deck force was completely tame. “Tell me more,” she said. “I feel like the daughter of the regiment.”

And then Marshall would repeat what had been said: “This puddings better than me mum's.” “Does your missus give receipts?” “Hell's bells governor, I've never tasted such great lima beans.” When she appeared in the mess one evening, they broke into spontaneous applause. And every night she would tell Marshall about her day in the “kitchen,” as she insisted upon calling it.

Dave and Harvey were upset and did not speak for a week, except once when Dave was rustling a big basket of fried potatoes and Harvey was slicing cabbages. One of the cabbages rolled off the block and into Dave's cauldron of sizzling fat. Dave looked at Harvey for the first time in days, and said, “You little devil!”

To finish their tour of the 600-foot bulk carrier, Marshall and Lydia struggled across the deck to the forecastle. Clinging to handles on the anchor winches, they resolved to climb the mast. Marshall loved many things about Lydia apart from the indefinable main elements of their affection. One of these was her willingness to explore. Side by side they had swum raging inlets, roamed the mountains, and pushed through disgusting mushfooted swamps. And she had always remained ready to go. The crow's nest was sixty feet above the deck—no laughing matter in a hurricane. The spikes by which they ascended were short enough, it seemed, to be stubble on a beard. In wind and rain they went upward into darkness. Because the
Royal George
was a modern ship, its crow's nest was well appointed. Enclosed, heated, and carpeted, it was more like an apartment than an observation post. They were comfortable there, bobbing up and down high above a tumultuous killer sea. Swabbed with iodine-colored light and stretching from side to side, the bridge seemed like a wide rectangular eye. The sea was curly and white. Now and then a high part of it struck the ship, a storm within a storm. “This is just like
Die Fledermaus
said Marshall, “in which a woman suddenly calls for music even though music has been playing for an hour. And when it begins, its as if there has been silence.” Every eighth or ninth wave covered the part of the ship they had crossed to reach the bows. They made note of this in regard to getting back, and realized that it had been only by chance that they hadn't been swept overboard on the way up.

L
ITTLE LOVE
was lost between the crew and the Bosun, flown into Norfolk because his predecessor had vanished mysteriously somewhere off the Bahamas. The Bosun had one eye, wore a bright green hat, and was the toughest-looking bugger anyone on the ship had ever seen. “He beats up the plumbing at Dartmoor,” they said. To show who was boss, he had eaten his glass, plate, and fork at the hurricane dinner. He hated the crew, and they hated him. He was a fearsome character, and they were a tough bunch. They hated him because he tried to make them work in the storm. He hated them because they were a unique set of work-shirking duds who hadn't done a day's labor in their lives. But they did have a case, because the ship was fully automated. A war smoldered in the spray of the hurricane.