The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny
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appropriate formula for apologies had to be well rehearsed. Soon the others learned that it was better to get out of his way. The officers took the lesson with displeasure. ‘Please see it this way,’ he had said three days before to the fifth lieutenant, who actually listened to him as a result of a hefty rum ration. ‘Every ship’s hull has its own maximum speed, which it can never exceed, no matter what the rig or the wind velocity. And so it is also with me.’
‘Sir. I must be addressed as “sir,”’ answered the lieutenant, not unkindly.
Explanations were usually followed by orders. On the second day, he had made clear to another lieutenant that for his eye all quick movements left a streak in the landscape. ‘Climb up to the foretop, Mr Franklin. And I want to see a streak in the landscape.’
Meanwhile, things got better. John stretched out contentedly in his bunk. Seamanship could be learned. What his eyes or ears couldn’t manage, his head did during the night. Intellectual drill balanced slowness.
Only the battle remained. That he couldn’t imagine. Determined, he fell asleep.
The fleet had already passed through the Sound. They would soon be in Copenhagen. ‘We’ll show ’em,’ said a tall man with a high forehead. John understood the sound of these words very well, since they had been repeated several times. The same man told him, ‘Go, cheer the men on.’ Something was up with the mainsail; there was a delay. Then the crucial words: ‘What would Nelson think?’ He marked both sentences for the night. He also included difficult words, like those Danish landmarks Skagerrak and Kattegat, or words like cable gat and colour vat. In response to a carefully phrased question asked after they had received their rum ration, he also found out that the Danes had been busy for weeks strengthening their coast fortifications and equipping their ships for defence. ‘Or do you think they’ll wait till we can join their council session?’ John didn’t understand this at once. But he had fallen into the habit of automatically acknowledging any answers couched in the form of questions ending on a rising intonation with ‘Of course not,’ which instantly satisfied the person who always countered with a question.
They arrived in the afternoon. That night, or early in the morning, they would attack the Danish gun emplacements and ships. Perhaps Nelson might still come aboard their ship that day. And what would he think? So the day ended hectically, with shouting, gasps and bruised joints, but without fear or rage. John felt he could keep up, for he always knew what was coming. An answer was yes or no, an order went up or down, a person was sir or not sir, his head banged into running or standing rigging. All that was altogether satisfying. A new difficult word had to be memorised: Trekroner. It was the most powerful coastal battery defending Copenhagen. When it started to fire, the battle had begun.
Nelson didn’t come after all. The lower gundeck was clear, the fires in the stoves had been extinguished, the sand was spread, and all men were at the stations where their duties required them to be. One of them, alongside the gun barrel, kept baring his teeth. Another, who pushed the shot into the breech, opened and closed his hand perhaps a hundred times and observed his fingernails carefully each time. Amidships somebody started up in terror, shouting, ‘A sign!’ so that all heads turned towards him. He pointed aft, but there was nothing. Nobody said a word.
And while the veteran sailors were feverish or frozen, John experienced one of those moments that belonged to him, for he could ignore the fast events and noises and turn to changes which, in their slowness, were barely perceptible to others. While they were crawling towards morning and the guns of the Trekroner, he enjoyed the movement of the moon and the transformations of the clouds in the night sky almost dead with calm. Unceasingly he gazed through the gunport; his breath deepened; he saw himself as a piece of ocean. Remembrances began to drift by, images that wandered more slowly than he himself. He saw a congregation of ships’ masts, standing close together, and behind them the city of London. Always when ships were assembled so closely and quietly, a city belonged to them. Riggings by the hundreds loomed over the port buildings like a criss-crossed far-reaching cloud. The houses were pushing up to London Bridge as though they were determined to get into the water and be part of it, and were hesitating only at the last moment. Now and then a house really fell off the bridge, always when no one was looking. The houses in London had completely different faces from those in the little village at home. Arrogant, surly, often boastful, sometimes as if they were dead. He had also seen a fire in the docks, and a lady who asked to have all her clothes brought from a shop to be examined through the window of her carriage, because she didn’t want to walk through the muck with her shoes. The shopkeeper had customers waiting, but he remained at the carriage door, imperturbable, and answered all questions most courteously. He was so quiet that John regarded him as an ally, although he sensed distinctly: this man is fast. He had a kind of merchant’s patience, which was pleasant but not related to his own.
A girl sat in the carriage. White-armed, slender, slightly embarrassed, red-headed English girls were among the eight or ten reasons why it was worth keeping one’s eyes open. Thomas had pulled him away in the manner of all older brothers who had to take care of younger ones and were filled with hatred in their impatience. They had bought the three-cornered hat, the blue coat, the buckled shoes, the sea chest, the dagger. A volunteer first class had to outfit himself. As they climbed up the memorial in Fish Street, he counted three hundred and fifty steps. A cold spring; the smell of acrid smoke everywhere. Far in the distance castles could be seen clinging to green parks. He observed an epileptic who banged something with his forehead, then stared into the distance. There were highwaymen around, he heard, but a gallows stood in Tyburn. As a midshipman, said his elder brother, he had to behave like a gentleman. In the market they observed a quarrel. It was about a fish which had perhaps been artificially puffed up, or perhaps not.
Everywhere one could see the masts of ships, at least from the topgallant yards upward. The city’s thousand chimney pots were one level lower. It was difficult to conceive that ships could be moved across the sea with the help of the wind, following well-devised plans, even if one knew Moore’s Practical Navigator by heart. Sailing was something royal, and the ships looked it. He knew what was needed to make an entire wall of sailcloth stand in the wind at full speed. First one had to build hulls – all the curved, splinted wood, screwed tight, carefully polished, caulked, tarred, painted carefully, even overlaid with copper. Aship’s great dignity derived from those many materials and arrangements that were necessary for its construction.
Boom!
That was the Trekroner and the battle.
Act like a gentleman. At the side of the gun, be as little in the way as possible. Running from the gundeck to the quarterdeck and back. Understand orders at once if possible or, if impossible, forcefully request a repetition. ‘Listen, men!’ shouted the officer with the high forehead. ‘Don’t die for your country.’ Pause. ‘See to it that the Danes die for theirs.’ Shrill laughter. Yes, they stirred up the men. After that, the battle seemed to become heavy. The Trekroner and the other guns scored one hit after another. For a man who always reacted a little too late, all support was lost with each one of these jolts. Their own broadsides were the worst. Every time they went off, the ship seemed to take a leap. The regular routine went on as they had learned it, only now the purpose was to cause chaos for the enemy, and that came back at them with the kind of suddenness John disliked. From one minute to the next the black gun suddenly bore a repulsively glittering deep scratch, almost a furrow, as if made by an immensely powerful tool which had slipped. The ugly shimmering of this metal wound made a deep impression. A moment later nobody was upright. Who could still get up? Their mechanical tasks were well learned; now partners’ work had stopped, for half of them were no longer around. Then all that blood. To see it washing all about was worrisome. In the end, somebody had to be losing it, for it poured out of people, everywhere.
‘Don’t just stand there! To the guns!’ That was the man who had shouted, ‘A sign!’ Suddenly the gunport had become much wider than before. The missing wood covered several bodies amidships. Whose bodies were they?
On deck, he learned that three of twelve ships had run aground, but not the Polyphemus. White smoke billowed out of the side of another ship close by. That image remained fixed in John’s eye. On the Polyphemus,