The Lost Sailors (2 page)

“Afraid of finishing up here, yes. Not going to sea anymore, I mean. Not having a ship anymore.”

Abdul had fallen silent. They had walked between the winch and the anchor chain, past the hawseholes, to the very front of the bow. Abdul leaned on the ship's rail and looked at the stars. He pointed to the sky.

“You see that one?” he asked Diamantis. “That's Cepheus. My wife is Cephea. So that's my lucky star. Do you have a star?”

“I've followed all of them,” Diamantis joked. “None of them really smiled on me.”

“I became a sailor by chance. In my family, we've always been traders. One day, my elder brother—there were five of us, two boys and three girls—left Beirut to open a branch in Dakar. It did well. My father sent me to help him out. I'd just turned twenty-three and it was my first time at sea. The ship was a liner called the
Hope
. Before the war, it had sailed regularly to New Caledonia. The
Hope
, can you imagine?

“I spent almost the whole journey on deck. I was crazy about it. Love at first sight! When I got to Dakar, as you can imagine, I was bored to death. As soon as I could, I ran to the harbor, to look at the ships. There were so many! I ended up making friends with a guy my age named Mamoudi. His father worked for an American company, the European Pacific. He introduced me to him. Ten days later, I was sailing for Botany Bay, the port of Sydney. On the
Columbia Star
.”

They had continued their conversation late into the night, on the terrace of Roger and Nénette's, a tiny restaurant near the Vieux-Port. The pizzas were delicious there, but the real delight was the lasagnette in tomato and goat's cheese sauce, with an accompaniment of larks cooked in the same sauce. They had bicycled as far as the dry dock, then caught a bus heading downtown. The bicycles were a gift from the longshoremen's union. Five bicycles. There was only one left now. The others had been stolen from the bus stop!

“When I met Mamoudi,” Abdul continued, “his wife had just had a baby. A daughter. We all celebrated. She was his first child. Well, you're not going to believe this, Diamantis, that little girl was Cephea!”

Diamantis said nothing. He was listening. Thanks to the wine, a Bandol rosé—“From the Cagueloup estate,” the patron had said, showing them the bottle—he had overcome the unease he'd felt, entering Abdul's private world. He sensed that their relationship would never be the same again. Confiding in each other—and Diamantis was ready to do it, too—was an admission that they were well and truly lost sailors.

“One morning, eighteen years later, I put in at Dakar. I was sailing on the
Eridan
, my first command. I turn up at Mamoudi's place. We'd kept in touch. I always sent him a postcard from wherever I was . . . It was the least I owed him. And guess who opens the door?”

“The little girl.”

“Dammit, Diamantis, I was so amazed, I couldn't move! The kid I'd held in my arms had turned into a goddess. So beautiful. I've seen women, known women . . . Like you, I suppose. But this one . . .”

Diamantis caught himself thinking, for once, of Melina. He'd loved her, of course. But out of calculation. Or on the rebound. Which comes to the same thing. His father had just died, and he'd told himself, or had tried to convince himself, that he didn't need to search the world anymore. He could stop now. The man he'd missed so much as a child, the man he'd run after from port to port, hoping to spend a night, a day, a week with him, had come back to die in his arms. On Psara. Melina had come to the funeral with her parents. They were old friends of his parents. He'd known Melina since they were children. They had made love that night. The night after the funeral. “No, Diamantis,” he told himself, “you're crazy. Melina was beautiful. She was right for you. You really loved her.”

“What are you thinking about, Diamantis?” Abdul asked.

“Melina. She was beautiful, too.”

Abdul laughed. “Sure. The women we love are always beautiful. Otherwise we wouldn't sleep with them, would we? Let me tell you something. There are thousands of women more beautiful than Cephea, I know that. I've met them in every port in the world . . . But she . . . she had something in her eyes that was just for me. That's love. And that's what I realized when she opened the door that day. Maybe she remembered how I'd held her in my arms when she was born. My hands on her little ass . . .”

Abdul was a bit drunk, and Diamantis was lost in thought. His memories were coming to the surface, like something coming to the surface of a pond that has been stagnant for too long. It didn't feel all that good. He'd have liked to drive these memories out of his head. He knew that behind Melina, another face loomed. The face of a girl, eighteen years old. He had loved her madly and had left her—abandoned her—without even saying goodbye.

It had happened twenty years ago. In Marseilles. He had never tried to find her again any of the times he had put in here, had never tried to find out what had become of her. Not even in all the time they'd been stuck here. He missed her terribly at that moment. Amina. Her face was in his head, and it was too late now to blot it out. He knew what he was going to spend his time doing from now on. He was going to find her. As if by doing that he could finally straighten his life out.

“How about another one?” Abdul asked, pointing to the empty bottle.

Diamantis didn't need to be asked twice. Wine is for remembering, not forgetting.

A
bdul was watching Diamantis through the porthole of his cabin. “Where on earth's he going so early?” he wondered. Diamantis hadn't taken the one remaining bicycle, and that intrigued Abdul.

It was the first time, since they'd been stuck here in Marseilles, that Abdul had wondered about Diamantis's life on land. He would often leave in the morning, by bicycle, and come back two or three hours later. Sometimes, he was away the whole day, and when he did that, he would go on foot. Like today. But he always did it with Abdul's full agreement. And never shirked the tasks that needed to be done on the ship. Diamantis, he had to admit, was no slouch when it came to work. On the contrary. One afternoon, he had even joined the crew to tackle the rust that was spreading through the ship. At the end of the day, Abdul had commented to him, somewhat curtly, that a first mate was out of place doing that kind of thing. Diamantis had replied that rust was out of place on a freighter. Abdul had smiled.

“I know. It was just to give the men something to do. I don't want them to go crazy doing nothing. They're starting to quarrel among themselves. Especially the two Burmese with the rest of the crew. I don't know if you know this, but the
Aldebaran
had been on the scrap heap for two years when I took her over. So, however hard you scrape away at it, you're not going to get rid of the rust.”

“Well, I'm like them, Abdul. I feel like hitting out. It might as well be at a heap of old iron. And I'll tell you something. I feel better. So do the men. We got our heads and arms covered in rust, but at least we felt like sailors again.”

That was the night they'd started talking to each other.

Since then, nothing had been the same. Abdul had become aware of hidden depths in his not very talkative first mate. In a way, he'd always known they were there, but he'd only just started to realize it. Diamantis could have been his friend long before this. He could have confided in him, asked his advice. And maybe things would have been different. Maybe he'd still have been the proud Captain Aziz, and not the pathetic commander of this shitty old tub. “The real questions,” he told himself, “are the ones you only ask yourself later. When you've already screwed up your life. When there's no turning back.”

He pulled his chair in front of the porthole so he could continue to watch Diamantis, who was walking nonchalantly along the sea wall, like someone who has no particular destination in mind. He seemed to be limping, as if his left leg was an inch or two shorter than the right. It was only an impression. It was just his way of walking. Almost an assertion that he didn't belong on dry land. Abdul himself had always been concerned with the way he walked, the way he held himself. It meant a lot to him. It was a habit he'd gotten from his father. “Stand up straight,” he'd always said. “A man with a bent back is a man who'll put up with anything.” And he'd add, “Look me in the eyes. If you've done something stupid, that's no reason to lower your head.” When he'd got back from Sydney, that was the way he'd confronted his father. Standing straight, looking him in the eyes. The two men had sized each other up. Then his father had simply said, “Welcome home, son.” One week later, he'd enrolled him as a trainee officer in the merchant navy.

Abdul had been pleased to see Diamantis climbing the gangway ladder, in Genoa. All they'd told him was “We've found you a first mate.” He hadn't expected Diamantis. Or anyone. The
Aldebaran
's time was up. He knew that. It was just an old bulk carrier. Fit only for losers who'd become sailors the way other people became factory workers. Without enthusiasm. You had to earn a bit of money to live on, to feed your family. And these days it was easier to find an old tub about to leave than a decent job. It was true in Europe. It was true everywhere.

Abdul watched Diamantis for a few more moments. He saw him stop, light a cigarette, then crumple the pack into a ball and throw it in the air and kick it before it hit the ground. It was a good kick, which propelled the ball of paper far out to sea. Abdul smiled. “Quite a character!” he thought. What was he doing, stuck here on the
Aldebaran
? He still couldn't understand that.

“We all have our stories,” he told himself. He had his, and it was more than enough to be getting on with. He stood up and went and sat down at his work table. On the wall he had pinned a photo of Cephea and the children, and another in which he and his father were holding hands. Above the photos was a postcard of his home town, Deir al-Qamar, east of Beirut, which Walid had sent him before he left for La Spezia.
We've received compensation for grandfather's house
, Walid had written.
You see, modern Lebanon is being rebuilt. At last there's peace between our communities. Your place is still here with us. As I've already said, there's enough work for our two families
.

Abdul's eyes moved rapidly from one image to the other, then came to rest on the forms he was supposed to give the crew. Once he'd countersigned them, each man would get one thousand five hundred francs as a lump-sum payment. The sailors agreed to forfeit all other rights, even if the ship was sold. It was a scam, of course. A way of reducing the costs for the new owner. But at least each man wouldn't have lost everything. Abdul didn't believe anymore that the
Aldebaran
would be bought by anyone. He didn't believe much of anything anymore. Or, rather, just one thing. He was convinced his life was over. That was what he'd just written to Cephea.
I think at night the world abandons us . . .
The first sentence of his letter.

Before leaving his cabin, Abdul noted in his log:
Nothing to report
. He wrote the same thing every day. Except that today it wasn't true. Today, each sailor was going to sign the
Aldebaran
's death warrant. His death warrant, too.

 

Diamantis had become a regular at a bistro on Place de Lenche, at the bottom end of the Panier, the old quarter of Marseilles. Near the Vieux-Port. A former longshoreman named Toinou Bertani had bought it from its previous owner nearly three years earlier. At lunchtime, he served some twenty regulars. Simple but excellent Provençal cuisine. Diamantis liked to go there in the morning. He'd sit down on the terrace, under the plane trees, have two or three cups of coffee and read the newspaper.

One day, Toinou had sat down at his table and said, “Can I offer you a
pastis
?”

Up until that point, they'd only exchanged small talk. “Hi, how are you doing?” “Fine, and you?” “What's up?” Just enough to make him feel more than an anonymous customer. The previous day, there'd been an article about the
Aldebaran
in the newspaper. With a picture of the crew. And Toinou had said to his wife, “Shit, that's the guy who comes by for a coffee every morning.”

“Poor man!” Rossana had concluded, after reading the article. “From what it says here, it can't be much fun for them. On top of that, I don't suppose they ever get a square meal.”

Diamantis hadn't refused the
pastis
—or Toinou's invitation, after the third
pastis
, to share the dish of the day with them. “Seeing as how there's enough for twenty . . .” That day, it was fresh pasta with a vegetable stew in olive oil. A treat. Toinou and Rossana had one dream: to open a “real” restaurant.

“We don't want it to be too expensive,” Rossana had said. “Not like the restaurants down by the harbor. You know, if a worker looks at the tables on the terrace and sees they've put the little plates on top of the big plates, then he tells himself this is not for him.”

It hadn't taken Diamantis long to realize that they weren't going to open their restaurant any time soon. Here they were happy to give credit. On principle.

“When you've been a worker all your life, like me, the one thing you learn is that we've got to stick together. Let's say you come in here, Diamantis, and you're in the shit . . . You think I'd ask you to pay?”

“You're going to be penniless at this rate.”

“I'm nearly sixty. If I go bankrupt, I'll retire. Simple as that. And if I don't have enough, my son and daughter will help out!”

Bruno and Mariette. Diamantis had already met them several times. Bruno, who was the spitting image of his father, had become a longshoreman, despite Toinou's attempts to dissuade him. Mariette ran a small real-estate office on Rue Saint-Ferréol. A real Marseillaise. Cheerful and self-confident, with hazel eyes that weren't easily fooled. Toinou, Rossana, Bruno and Mariette had become Diamantis's family. He felt more at home with them than he did with Venetsanou, a cousin of his who lived in Marseilles.