The smart thing would have been to shoot him right there and dump his body over the side. That would have been the smart thing, except that none of us had the first idea how to work the boat and he knew it. He took the flags down—or at any rate I took them down for him. He was damned lucky I didn’t jam them down his throat, but he treated it all as a great joke. “You can’t blame me for trying.” That’s what he said.
Max said, “Would you like me to hit him again?”
“Oh don’t be so stupid. You want to get to Albania, and I’m the only ticket you’ve got.”
Of course he was right, and of course I couldn’t let Max hit him again. So I hit him. Back-handed. Right across the chops. Varga must have been pretty sick of getting beaten up and he looked as if he was about to burst into tears, so I waited until he’d got a grip of himself again and then I said, “Understand this. You belong to me. We all know how much you value your own skin and you bought it for the price of this boat. I would’ve been within my rights to stick you with your own sword back at the academy, you little coward, so don’t start getting any courageous ideas now. And here’s the truth of it: we are going to Albania or we’ll die trying. We’d rather stay alive, but we will die trying, and if you want to live you’d better get us there.”
“It’s the other end of the Adriatic.”
“Varga, can you get us there?”
“I am a Fregatenkapitän of the Kaiserliche und Königliche Kriegsmarine. Of course I can get you there.”
“How long?”
“It’s two hundred sea miles to Split, another hundred to Dubrovnik, and a bit less than that to Durres.”
Sarah said, “Is he telling the truth, Daddy?”
“Yes, more or less.”
“How long?”
“If we pile on the sail, if the wind holds from the starboard, we might make better than ten knots. But that’ll be hard sailing for a week or so.”
Professor von Mesmer gave a polite cough. “Forgive me, but ten knots for twenty-four hours is two hundred and seventy-six miles. We can do it in two days.”
“Impossible. We can’t sail at night.”
“Yes, we can,” I said. “It seems to me that ships come from Australia, from America, from all over the world, and they don’t stop in the middle of the night, bobbing about in the middle of the ocean until it’s time to wake up again.”
“They have a crew.”
“We are your crew.”
“I have to sleep.”
“Of course you do, and while you are sleeping, one of us will steer. If there’s any bother, we’ll come and get you. None of us wants to drown any more than you do, Varga.”
“There are islands.”
“I know. I saw them on the map. Get us through the islands and then you can sleep. We sail—” I pointed out the direction—“that way.”
“South-east by south,” said the Professor.
“See how easy it is? A blind man could do it.”
You would think, wouldn’t you, that I would have more to say about sailing night and day, canvas cracking, ropes creaking, with a lunatic in command and a blind man at the tiller. You would think, since I have filled pages with the business of getting on a train and pages more with the business of getting on a boat, I might have had something to say about the actual voyage. The truth is, I don’t.
I remember the oranges piled on Varga’s sideboard at the Naval Academy and the sound of the camel’s feet on the cobbles in the streets of Budapest, but that sea voyage seems to have passed without leaving too much of a mark on my memory. I know we got on the boat and I know we got off the boat and, it stands to reason, something must have happened in between, but to tell the truth, there’s not much to say.
If you or I were up in the sky tonight, in one of those planes, up in the blazing, burning clouds, following the fires and dodging the flak, circling, waiting, watching for the fighters to come at any moment, I know we’d remember every second of it, from the time we took off to the time we landed again. But I bet they don’t, those boys up there. For them it’s just hours and hours of hard work and routine with a few moments of blind terror now and again. If they did it twenty times, or thirty, hour after hour, flying through the night with death sitting on their shoulders there and back again, how many of them do you think would come home with even one good story to tell their grandchildren? Damned few, and if they did, it would probably be the tale of the time the dog ate the general’s trousers, not some nonsense about flying home with their tail on fire and the wings full of bullet holes.
And isn’t it amazing how much of our lives passes that way? All the million, million moments from the moment we first crawl, screaming into the world until we crawl, screaming out of it again and all the moments in between those two screams of fear and regret, how many of them do we actually remember? In each of them the sun is just as warm, just as yellow, the sky is just as blue, the clouds are just as white, roses just as red, birds sing, snowballs fly, women laugh, every plate of soup is just as hot and tasty as the next, cowsheds smell the same, grass feels the same under bare feet, and everything in the world that is there to be enjoyed is enjoyable time after time so we forget to notice and, before we even realize, all that vast store of moments is gone, worn out and eaten up with no record kept. Or that’s how it was with me. One minute I was a boy, running away from school, the next I’m an old man waiting to die in a little tin shack. Be warned. I’m wasting my breath. You will not be warned. I was warned, and I took no heed. I doubt if it is even possible for mere men to live, savoring every minute. It’s not in our nature. Life itself is as much as we can cope with, never mind storing it all up as we go like an endless newsreel. Nobody’s head is big enough to hold all that nonsense.
It’s as if we spend our whole lives in a railway-station waiting room, sipping endless cups of coffee with the same people, handing round the newspaper, doing anything to make the time pass while, outside, people go by in droves, pretty girls and clever men, heroes and scientists and geniuses and simple, loving people by their thousands. We never meet them, we never speak to them, we never hear their stories. We stay in the waiting room, with the same people and the same newspaper, waiting for the bell to ring so that, perhaps a dozen times in a lifetime, we can rush out on to the platform and see a train arrive, actually experience something that makes a mark on our memory before we go back inside.
And what things we choose to remember. Brahms is dead. I know he’s dead, but I don’t remember when it happened. A mountain like that shifts away and I can’t say what I was doing when I heard the news, not the day of the week nor the month of the year, but ask me about the time my mother came home from the fair with the giant blutwurst and I can remember everything.
I heard tell once about this bloke, I’m almost sure he was French, who spilled out his whole life story, from the time he was a boy, filled book after book with it and it all came back to him because he ate a cake. That’s a lot of tripe, I can tell you. Writing even one story is damned hard work, and I’m sitting here, racking my brains, trying to think of a single thing that happened on that voyage. Of course, the French bloke wasn’t sitting down to write in the middle of an air raid, and I haven’t got any cakes, so we’re not exactly starting on an even footing, but let’s see what I can do …
I can see myself sitting at the tiller with Varga, and Sarah is coming up the little wooden stairs from the kitchen with coffee on a tray for us. Varga wouldn’t have taken it from Tifty. He didn’t like Tifty, and he knew she didn’t like him, but he was nice as pie around Sarah, and he took the coffee and thanked her like a gentleman. Of course Varga didn’t like me either, but he knew I wasn’t going to spit in his coffee and he knew that I was serious. I was going to get to Albania or die trying, and we had to get along.
I suppose, considering that he tried to murder me and considering how often he’d been slapped and punched and cruelly squeezed, we got along pretty well.
He got a bit upset when the camel discharged some ballast all over his nice deck and he started shouting and screaming about his lovely varnish, but Max shoveled the whole lot over the side and sloshed a bucket of sea water over the spot and that calmed him down again so, on the whole, we got on pretty well.
Varga stayed at the helm all through the afternoon and long into the evening, leaning on the tiller as he guided us down the passage between the islands, and in that time he taught me just about everything I needed to know about sailing a boat. There’s really only two difficult things about a boat: making it start and making it stop. I couldn’t get one started and I couldn’t get one stopped—well, not without ramming into something, which isn’t a good way of stopping, or just hauling in all the sails and dropping anchor, which will also work. The trick is to stop neatly at a quayside so you can get off without getting your feet wet, and I couldn’t do that. But keeping it going wasn’t too hard. The wind was steady and Varga showed me two little cranks to turn to let the sails out a bit if it started to blow too strong or pull them in a bit tighter if the wind dropped. I think that was it. It might have been the other way around. There’s another bit of useful knowledge that I’ve misplaced.
Anyway, the important thing was not to let the wind blow us too far over to one side, just keep things steady, not to try and race ahead too much and, I must say, that made sense, because if the boat tipped over, the camel might fall off. Apart from that, all we had to do was keep heading in the same direction. Varga showed me the point on the compass—not that I took his word for it, I checked with the Professor first—and then I got a turn at steering.
It was harder than it looked—the waves tried to knock us off course and the boat wanted to turn out of the wind like a weather-cock—but with a bit of effort I could get it done.
And then, after a bit, it wasn’t hard at all. Have you ever worked with a horse when it’s working, but not too hard, when it’s hauling a load or pulling a cart and that horse is almost laughing out loud because the work is easy? It’s like he’s saying, “I could do this all day and, if I wanted to, I could knock you down and kick you over the rooftops and still haul this load, but I won’t because I like you, and anyway this is fun.” That’s what it was like sailing that boat. Out at sea she was a living, breathing thing with a heart beating under her masts and muscles pulsing through the water. You could feel the strength in her, feel the waves passing under her and vibrating through the tiller, feel the wind thrumming through the ropes and buffeting the canvas. I swear, sitting there, I could see the air swelling the sails, filling them up and pouring out over the edges in torrents, like water from a bowl as the boat panted through the waves.
We smiled and we laughed, sitting there together drinking coffee, me and Sarah and Varga, or sometimes all of us in a row, Max and Tifty and the Professor too, because Max had to learn how to steer as well. Max was better at the hard work of steering but, with Tifty there to remind him about looking at the compass and letting the sails out and in, he did all right. You could rely on my mate Max.
So there we were, all of us sitting in a row and bouncing along, just like we did on that bench at the picture show except without the tickles this time. Strange to think that only a day had passed and yet everything had changed.
Only the day before we were all together in the dusk of Budapest and now, a day later, we were on a boat in the Adriatic watching the stars come out, still together, but changed. In Budapest I had a girl on each arm. On the boat I sat with Sarah, but Tifty sat with Max. Something had changed. I had changed. I had spoken harshly to Tifty, not once but twice, and I’d put my foot down with the Professor.
We were still friends. We still loved each other, but something had changed. Everything was the same, but everything was different, as if we had gone to bed at night and woken up to find all the furniture moved round—the same old comfortable furniture, but in a different place entirely.
It grew dark. From up in the prow the camel gave a contented belch and sank to its knees, ready for sleep, jawing away like an old man with a plug of tobacco and looking up to count the stars.
Varga rubbed his hands together and turned his collar up against the wind. “Now,” he said, “I wouldn’t want you to use this as an excuse to throw me over the side and seize the ship and, bearing in mind possible emergencies and the finer points of pilotage, reading of charts, lamps and signals and so forth, that would probably be a very bad idea anyway, but I’d say you’ve turned into a very able crew.”
“So you reckon we could sail her,” said the Professor.
“Well, I wouldn’t want to throw you out in mid-Atlantic in the teeth of a nor’easter with the waves as high as steeples but, for a cruise like this, you’ll do.”
“But we could keep her running on this course, saving emergencies,” I said.
He looked a little nervous. “But that doesn’t mean you can make me walk the plank. Emergencies. You have to bear in mind emergencies.”
“Exactly, and for that reason I want you close at hand and fresh and alert. I suggest you turn in, Herr Fregatten-kapitän. Get some sleep. I am relieving you of command.”
He stood up and saluted and hurried down the stairs into the boat, pleased that he was going to bed and not going overboard. “Keep her on her current heading,” he said. “There is nothing between us and Dubrovnik. Watch out for the lights of other vessels. The slightest difficulty—the slightest difficulty—call me at once.”
As soon as he was gone, I gathered the others around. “Do you remember that puzzle from when we were kids, the one about the farmer with a fox and a goose and a bag of grain and he has to get them all over the river but he can only take one at a time? Well, that’s us now, and Varga is the fox. He’s bent over backward since we left port, but I don’t trust him. I want him watched at all times, whether he’s down below or up on deck. Professor, why don’t you bunk up with him? For all we know he’s down there right now pulling the plug out. Your eyes are as good as his below decks at night. Make sure he puts all the lamps out, and watch him like a hawk.”
The old man seemed happy to be useful. He found the stairs easily with his cane and wished us all a good night.
The nights are not long at that time of year. I fixed it with Tifty and Max that they would get some rest while I stayed at the tiller with Sarah.
“I’ll wake Varga in a few hours and he can share a spell with me and then, a few hours after that, you can take over and watch him. If he gives any cause for concern, just shoot the little bastard.”
But Max said, “Otto, mate, I don’t think I’m much of a killer,” which was good because I wouldn’t have liked him nearly as well if he had been. Still, it made me think about this king business. The day before I was running away from an angry daddy as fast as my legs would carry me, and now I was blithely issuing orders to have a man killed. Max was my conscience. Every king should have a conscience, and Max was mine.
“Don’t worry,” said Tifty, “I’ll do it. It would be a treat.” She had a rare gift for bearing a grudge, that girl, and she gave me a wink and took Max by the hand to lead him downstairs into the dark ship.
“Go to sleep, you pair. I mean it. Get some rest.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Soon, Your Majesty,” and she laughed that laugh, that gorgeous, filthy caramel laugh that came echoing up from below deck.
And then we were alone, just me and Sarah, with no noise but the noise of the wind rolling in the sails, the camel’s gentle belches and the strange musical ripple of the water disappearing behind the boat, sparkling and bright, like an endless, unbroken apple peel, unfolding itself from the prow.
Sarah took my arm and leaned in close, with her cheek in my coat collar. I could smell her hair and it was wonderful, sweet as a night garden. “Tifty doesn’t mean it,” she said. “She’s not a killer.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Then the job’s done. If you can’t be sure, then Varga can’t be sure, and so long as he thinks she might do it, he’ll be good. It’s not what’s there that counts, it’s what people think is there. You know that. You work in a circus.”
I had to lean into the tiller for a moment to keep the needle in the compass lined up just so and, as I leaned, Sarah leaned with me, her weight against me, holding on to my arm, pressed against me down the length of my body, smiling up at me as the candle in the compass-house made pretty shadows on her face. “That’s quite a promotion,” she said. “How are the wages?”
“Pretty good.”
“Do you get your own caravan?”
“I hear there’s a house comes with the job.”
“And who will live with you in your new house, King Otto?”
“Oh, palace guards, advisers and ministers, my grand vizier of course, Max and Tifty and the camel and dancing girls, lots and lots of beautiful, fat dancing girls with their hair in ringlets.”
She punched me. “Anyone else?”
“No. Nobody in particular.”
She punched me again. “Nobody?” Punch. “Can’t you think of anybody a king should have with him?”
“Apart from fat dancing girls with their hair in ringlets?”
“Yes,” punch, “apart from fat dancing girls with their hair in ringlets. Cat goes with mouse, cheese goes with crackers and king goes with …?”
“Dancing girls?”
“Otto, do you want another punch?”
“Queen! Queen! I meant ‘queen.’”
“Of course you did, Otto. I will be your queen.”
“Thank you. I was afraid to ask.”
“I know. It’s the only reason I was forward enough to apply for the post.”
“Consider yourself hired.”
“Thank you, Otto.”
That girl. My God, but she was pretty. She lay there with her head on my chest, letting her hand trail the length of the tiller to play with my fingers and back again to brush my face in the dark. And somehow she had decided to marry me, and somehow I had agreed.
“What are the duties, Otto?”
“Of the queen? Oh very light. Almost negligible. Mostly they include keeping the king happy, seeing to his wants.”
“Blimey, I thought you got your wants seen to last night. I don’t call that ‘light duties.’”
“Oh, very light. And don’t say ‘blimey.’ Queens don’t say ‘blimey.’ Say ‘my word’ or something like that.”
“My word, Otto, I don’t call that light duties.”
“Very good.”
“Thank you, Otto. What else, Otto?”
“Well, obviously, there’s number one on the list: the supply of an heir.”
“I think that’s probably a natural consequence of ‘light duties.’”
“Probably, yes. And there will be the business of curtains to make up for the royal palace. Miles and miles of curtains and bedrooms to decorate, and there’s forks and knives to choose and plates.”
“Otto, they must have plates!”
“Maybe, but this is the good stuff for when the King of England comes to visit—and the President of America.”
“Will they come?”
“Sure to, love. And the Sultan. Maybe even the Czar. Everybody loves Albania now. They will all want to woo us to one side or another.”
“And will you be wooed, my king?”
“I will act always and only with the interests of the loyal and loving Albanoks at heart. I will be immune to the blandishments of the Great Powers, except in so far as they extend to harbor improvements, railways and model farms, caring only to secure for the people of Albania their rightful place on the stage of world affairs. And, since we start with ‘A,’ that’s pretty close to the front.”
“And while all this wooing is going on, and all the blandishments and stuff, what will I be doing—aside from providing heirs?”
“You’ll be in the garden, dear, talking to the queens who come calling. You must discuss pug dogs and the difficulties of successful rose growing and dull books and boring music and how difficult it is to bring up little kings and the charitable home you have established for the rescue of fallen women.”
“I have?”
“We’ll make Tifty the matron.”
Sarah laughed then. She held on to me and she laughed until she cried and then she kissed me and cried some more, still in a happy way but a different kind of happy.
I made a lot of crazy promises in between those kisses, stuff about palaces and plenty and peace and bread on tables and children in schools when, all the time, we were sailing to murder and greed and ice-cold lust.