Stranger on a Train (3 page)

About two hundred miles south of Bermuda, in the Sargasso Sea, in sweltering June (it was in the mid-30s Celsius by seven in the morning), I was woken at 5 a.m. by a terrible noise. The screaming of metal breaking up had something hellish about it, as if Neptune and all his sea imps were tearing the ship apart. There were sounds of shouting, men calling to each other, and trainers thumping along the corridor past my cabin. I wondered alarmed but sleepily if they were not shouting ‘Abandon ship' in Croatian, but I'd had a heatwave headache the night before and taken a sleeping pill. I decided I'd rather go down with the ship than abandon it at such an hour. It turned out that the air-conditioning fan had catastrophically loosened, got out of line and one shaft had smashed irreparably. They did not, the chief engineer explained at breakfast, have a replacement fan on board. It was too hot for the loss of the air-conditioning system to be merely inconvenient. The day before I had been down to the engine room. It was like descending into my own headache, deep in the centre of the ship. The heat and airlessness were stunning, and the ubiquitous drumbeat deepened into a deafening roar down by the line of giant pistons pumping power to the massive screw that drove the propeller. It was not, however, entirely oppressive. The engine room was a fantastically clean, pale green cathedral as well as a fiery furnace; a vast space that soared up from the bowels of the ship to the open hatches, four decks above, through which the sky could be seen. In the middle of the day the engine room was reaching a temperature of 48 degrees Celsius. They would just have to make a new shaft for the fan.

‘Can you?' I asked.

‘We'll have to,' he said.

The chief engineer and half a dozen crew members worked all day around a brazier on the lower deck, straightening the remains of the broken shaft and forging a new piece of metal to fit it. By the early evening they were setting it in place. The screaming began again almost as soon as they turned the air-conditioning plant on. They returned to the deck and the makeshift forge. I slept fitfully in the suffocating heat. The next morning I woke to a cool air-conditioned cabin. At breakfast I learned that they had worked all night, and the chief engineer, glowing with pride, waved sleepily as he went off to bed for the first time since five the previous morning. The crew radiated heroic achievement, wafting their hands triumphantly around the cool air in the corridors as I passed them. I applauded appreciatively. They bowed. It was, of course, a welcome challenge in the general tedium of caring for an ageing ship at sea. The energy of having solved a problem that had looked impossible gave the whole company an air of gaiety for several days. For a while they seemed quite contented with their seafaring lot. Even the lugubrious Captain Bruno (‘They are a good crew. They work hard. No, I do not tell them. I write to them when the trip is finished.') expressed his appreciation at the job they had done by declaring a fishing fest the following evening after we had entered the Gulf of Mexico.

I woke from a late afternoon nap into an uncanny silence, and it was a moment before I realised the ship was still. The incessant throb of the engines had stopped (‘Ah, the music of the engine room,' crooned Captain Bruno). It was like a death. Heart failure. When I looked down from the small deck by my cabin, I saw below me most of the men, twenty-five or so crew and officers, side by side along the rails at the back of the main deck, dangling lines into the sea, shouting and joking to each other. Marco, the bullet-headed second engineer, wearing a great yellow sun across his mammoth stomach and baggy shorts that ended in the middle of his calves, a brute in boy's clothing, waved at me.

‘Come and fish.'

The deck itself, usually immaculate, always cleaned and washed down daily, was bloody carnage. Everywhere there were buckets and tubs full of small silvery fish, the ones on top writhing and flapping in the drowning air. The deck was alive with a plague of gasping fish that had used their last energies flopping themselves out of their containers to achieve no more than a solitary death, or been unhooked and flung down by the fishermen so that not a minute of fishing was wasted. The young cabin boy slithered around picking up the slippery arching creatures and throwing them into the buckets, before running off to find new containers for the great haul. Hundreds and hundreds of fish lay around, dead and dying, waiting for their turn to be gutted by the smiling, patient cook and his assistant. The cook sat on an upturned bucket and wielded his knife like a sushi chef, with just a thrust or two removing what had to be removed, throwing the bloody intricate waste down on the deck where his assistant eventually scooped the mounting pile of entrails into a bucket. Every now and then one of the men called out to him, and he stopped preparing the fish for long enough to cut more strips of the squid he had defrosted for bait. His task was impossible, there was no keeping up, but he smiled and worked on. The men were catching three or four fish on each line every few seconds, and the fish in these parts appeared to be suicidal.

‘You see,' Marco said, seeing the look of horror on my face as I picked my way through the corpses. ‘They love to be caught. It is their destiny.'

Marco handed me his line – generously, because this was an informal competition between the men who trumpeted out their current score to each other. The out-and-out champs were Marco and the second mate, who fished unsmiling like a man possessed, pulling in his catch and casting again immediately in case any fish whose destiny it was to be caught by him was lost. Marco showed me how to throw the line out away from the side of the ship, and in a moment there was a tug and I yelped my ambivalence while Marco instructed me on the correct technique for pulling in the line. Three fish dangled and danced on the hooks. I was paralysed. I'd never fished before, and when Marco told me to manoeuvre the fish off the hooks I wailed my misery at being the cause of such misery. I was hopelessly squeamish about grasping the desperate, dying fish and having to wrench them off the hooks. Marco was disappointed. So was I. We both had higher hopes of me. Did I like fishing, Marco asked. Yes, I did, but I didn't care for actually catching fish. Nevertheless the men all congratulated me at having pulled three fish out on my first try. I accepted being patronised as what I deserved and gave up my fishing lesson to sit on an upturned bucket amid the dying fish and watch the men relaxing and goading each other, just enough, not too much.

Only Marco appeared contented with his sea life. At home he had a wife, a cat and a son who is in the Croatian water polo first team. He seemed proud of all of them, especially the cat. And of the crew. Not a brute after all, almost a sentimentalist was Marco. ‘You see how well the men get on? They have fun now, but when there is problem, everyone serious. Everyone pay attention. I like this life. Peaceful.' It seemed to be Marco's job, with his Sun King outfit and his grunting comments, to make people laugh. ‘I never eat chicken,' he bellowed at Franju the steward, dismissing the plate he was being offered at dinner (all the men disliked chicken; it was often all there was to eat during the war. It was the food of desperation). ‘They are too stupid. I don't eat stupid things. Don't eat egg, also. What more stupid than an egg? In a few hours it becomes a small chicken, then a few more hours, big chicken. That's all.' He shrugged dismissively. He ate fish though. Soon the barbecue was hot and the first fish were laid on it. Out of the sea and into the frying pan. About as delicious, these fish (‘What kind of fish are they?' ‘They are fish.'), as anything I'd ever eaten. However squeamish I was about catching and killing them, I had no trouble eating these nameless creatures. Marco explained the difference between America and Croatia as he continued to pull fish out of the water and I watched.

‘In Croatia the food is fresh, the wine is domestic, the women good. In US the women are unloved, the flowers have no scent and the food is tasteless.' His favourite film was
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
‘The Indian,' he said with a smile. ‘The Indian.'

As I said, a sentimentalist.

They had all been through the war with Serbia, but no one wanted to talk about it much. There was a small deep pool that was filled every morning with sea water. One day, I swam in it with one of the crew who had just come off duty. He was a quiet man, who I had noticed looking at me from time to time with a shy interest. We talked, treading water. He was in his forties. I asked him about the war. He winced.

‘I fought for three years, but what for? Now no money, no job, no food in Croatia. Tudjman,' he shook his head in disgust. ‘I had to fight. I got woman and three children. But I don't hate anyone. I went to school, and learned engineering, geography and history. Then I get a letter telling me I have to pick up a gun and kill people. I like people. Tito was good. Serbs and Croats lived together before the war. Will live together after the war. When Croatia was part of Yugoslavia we were not independent, but we had jobs. Can we talk about something else? Something we can smile about?' We were silent for a bit.

‘You are beautiful. Would you like to drink tea when I come off duty at midnight?'

I declined. He nodded that it wasn't a problem. He left the pool after a while and I lounged in the water with my back to him. Suddenly, he called out. I turned towards him. He was standing by the edge of the pool holding up one of his shoes, size 15, and one of mine, size 4. He smiled slightly. Nostalgically, perhaps. Sadly. Wistfully.

‘Look,' he said.

Back in London before I left, a woman acquaintance had looked horrified when I told her about the trip I planned.

‘But aren't you frightened about being on your own spending weeks and weeks isolated with so many men?'

They were after all
men,
and three weeks without a woman but with one in sight would, she supposed, turn them into ravening beasts. But the same rules for surviving in an enclosed community were applied to women as to living with each other and caring for the ship. They took care (as I did) not to disturb the balance of the group. There were surreptitious looks from some of the men, not those long aggressive stares that can become anything, or downright invitations, but glances I would sometimes catch that I had not been supposed to see, thoughtful, interested, but not to be acted on. And there was a kind of comradely flirting between Marco and myself that we both kept well below critical level. The invitation to take tea was slightly shocking in the careful atmosphere, but my refusal was taken as lightly as it was made. It even had a touch of old-fashioned romance about it. On other occasions when we met in the mess, my friend would tell me about his life, his hopes of setting up a small engineering factory, the music he liked. He smiled at me a lot, and bought me a beer from time to time. He would often be in the pool when I was swimming. And he asked me about myself and my life. It was clear that I could have chosen to intensify the contact if I wished, but I think he trusted me not to, at least until the end of the journey. There was a pleasing formality about my relations with the crew, as if we were all capable of living in earlier times, when these things were better ordered. It seemed we all knew how to maintain boundaries and not to let dangerous sex get in the way of good relations. It was more important that they got on with one another. Sex could wait until they arrived in Tampa, when the day before was spent washing and ironing their shore clothes, shaving off stubble, and in the first officer's case, removing his wedding ring. The girls were waiting on the quay as the ship docked, waving and laughing, and the men lined the rails, as they had when they fished, discussing which girl they were going into town with.

‘When I am in Tampa, I am not married,' the first officer said with a broad bright white toothy grin when another passenger, Roz, asked what had happened to his wedding ring at lunch before we docked.

‘And in Split, when you are in Tampa, is your wife also not married?' I asked.

He smiled happily. ‘No. She is always married. She has two' – he extended his arms sideways as if they were being buoyed up – ‘lifeboats … the two children to keep her good.'

After lunch, Roz and I agreed that he probably meant millstones.

*   *   *

Between the silence and delicately boundaried encounters with the crew, I read Conrad and concurred with him on the seafaring life. Magic monotony. Enticing. Enslaving. And disenchanting?

Travelling with no purpose is a purposeful business. I had put myself in the way of a long sea journey. The destination was of no concern to me. In fact, when I arranged the trip, the
MV Christiane
was scheduled to travel first to Rio de Janeiro and then up to Georgia. Only two days before I was due to leave, the plans were altered, the ship was leaving several days later and skipping the South American leg. Freight timetables are notoriously changeable, the profit margins are critical, companies will revise their schedules from one day to the next, sometimes in mid-journey. If you travel by freighter you'd better not have any definite plans or firmly fixed destination. I was sorry the South American stop had been cancelled, but only because it meant a shorter journey. I was prepared for a trip of six weeks or more before I arrived at Savannah, Georgia, after which I had made no firm plans except to purchase an open plane ticket back to the UK. A long sea voyage was the only point of the trip. Why? An exercise in sensory deprivation, I suppose. To find out what happened when one day followed another, one mile followed another and each was exactly the same as the last. What was a person left with, when there was no landscape except the curve of the horizon, and no anticipation in arriving somewhere you wish to be? How was it when the day by day went on, when only the routine demanded by the human needs of eating and sleeping distinguished you from your surroundings, whose single rhythm was the rising and setting of the sun? To be accurate, it wasn't so much that I wondered about how it was, as that those were the conditions I wanted to be in. But still, in all that silence and lack of interference, wouldn't there be something to listen to? I'm always supposing that if I can get things quiet enough I'll hear something to my advantage. Like the fish on the hooks, I wriggle away from activity, companionship, wanting to launch myself into nothingness where I will find … what? The fish find themselves gasping on deck, out of their element, suffocating in the poisonous inimical air. Somehow, I've developed a notion that I am more than a fish. Doubtless that's what the fish think, too. Get out of the water, get away from the circumstantial, and
then
we'll see.