The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny
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ordinarily sedate officers who never had to get out of the way jump aside with most undignified leaps. Of course, they acted correctly, but it remained somehow degrading. He delivered his messages.
Now the companionway looked very different. Obstacles protruded from the wall, detached themselves from above, and swung down at the height of his forehead. Since he could neither get out of the way nor stand still, he received scratches, cuts and bruises, which certainly made him look like a hero. And at all times he tried to act like a gentleman. One could easily lose an eye; Nelson had only one. What did Nelson think now? He stood on the quarterdeck of the Elephant. Nelson would always know everything.
He could hear pumps working. Perhaps they were on fire? Or was the ship taking in water? People were reeling on deck as though they were drunk. The captain sat on top of a cannon, shouting, ‘Let’s all of us die together!’ Earlier they had made very different noises. Next to the captain the head of a listener was suddenly missing, and with it the listener himself. John became unhappy. All sudden changes confused him, whether of seating-order, deportment or systems of coordinates. It was hard to stand these constant disappearances of more and more people. Besides, he felt it was a deep humiliation for a head when, in consequence of actions by totally different people, it lost its body just like that. It was a defeat and not really an honour. And a body without a head, what a sad, indeed what a ridiculous sight!
When he got back to the gundeck he was greeted by a sudden sharp brightness and an enormous racket: a ship had exploded nearby. He heard ‘Hurrah!’ and in between, again and again, the name of a ship. In the midst of the hurrahs, however, he heard a penetrating creaking, rasping noise, and then felt a jolt: a Danish ship had come up alongside them. And through the demolished gunport someone jumped aboard.
John caught the image of a light, foreign boot which suddenly pushed its way in and got a foothold. It was a quick, threatening move. Its image remained fixed in John’s mind and kept him from a full awareness of further events. His head thought automatically: we’ll show ’em! For this was the situation he had thought of when he first heard this slogan. Next he saw just that man’s open mouth and his, John’s, thumbs on his neck. By some chance the man had come to lie under him. Now he had a hold on him – he, John!
When John grabbed a person, there was no escape. Now he saw the pistol emerging at the lower periphery of his vision. The sight paralysed him immediately. He didn’t look at it but rather kept his eye on his strong thumbs as though they could prevail over the pistol, which – it could not be denied – was now pointed at his chest. In his mind, one single concern began to crowd out all others. It grew and grew. It surpassed all boundaries. It exploded. The man could pull the trigger at once and kill him, sending him to death or to perish slowly from gangrene. He was faced with it now: there was no escape. It was about to happen and could not be averted. Suddenly John clearly sensed where his heart was, like anyone who knows that death is inevitable. Why couldn’t he knock the pistol out of the man’s hand or throw himself to the side? Neither required ingenuity, yet he couldn’t do it. He had the man by the throat and thought only that somebody who is being strangled can’t fire a gun. But that a man would be particularly inclined to fire if he was in the process of being strangled but hadn’t been strangled yet – well, perhaps John wanted to think of that but couldn’t because his brain acted as if it were already dead. All that remained alive was the idea that the danger could be averted only by the unremitting, relentless strangulation of that throat. The other man still didn’t fire.
He was old for a soldier, certainly over forty. John had never knelt on top of anyone who could be his father. The throat was warm. The skin was soft. John had never touched a person for so long. Nowchaos had really set in: the battle inside his body. While he was squeezing the throat, the nerves in his fingers felt horror at its warmth and softness. He sensed how the throat – purred! It vibrated, tender and miserable, a deep, miserable purr. The hands were horrified, yet the head, which dreaded the humiliation of being killed, that traitor head which thought wrongly, acted as though it had understood nothing.
The pistol dropped to the floor. The legs stopped thrashing. A gunshot wound in the shoulder: bright red blood.
The pistol had not been loaded.
Had the Dane said something? Had he surrendered? John sat and stared at the dead man’s throat. He had been afraid of the humiliation of violent death. But squeezing an organism to death with slow deliberation, because fear had not subsided fast enough, meant losing more than one’s head. It was a humiliation, a powerlessness which was even more crushing than the other degradation. Now that he had survived, and his head had to admit all his thoughts again, the battle continued inside him: hands, muscles, and nerves rebelled.
‘I killed him,’ John said, trembling. The man with the high forehead looked at him with tired eyes. He remained unimpressed. ‘I couldn’t stop squeezing,’ said John. ‘I was too slow to stop myself.’
‘It’s done,’ the forehead answered hoarsely. ‘The battle is over.’ John trembled more and more. His trembling turned into shaking: his muscles contracted in different places in his body, forming painful islands, as though in this way they were armouring his inner self or were expelling an alien substance straight through the skin. ‘The battle is over!’ shouted the man who had seen the sign. ‘We showed ’em!’
They put out new buoys. The Danes had removed all markings from the waterway so the British ships would run aground. Gradually, the longboat advanced to the edge of an unfathomable depth, very close to the broken, shot-up Trekroner. John sat on the boat’s thwart, apathetically, and stared at the shore. Slowness is deadly, he thought. If it is so for others, so much the worse. He wanted to be a piece of coast, a rock on the shore whose actions would always correspond exactly to his true speed. An outcry made him look down: in the clear, shallow water countless slain men lay on the bottom, many of them with blue coats, many with open eyes staring up. Terror? No. Of course, they were lying there.
He himself was part of them: a stopped clock, that’s what he was. He belonged to them down there much more than to the crew of the boat. Too bad about all that work. He thought he heard a command but didn’t understand it. No one could follow a command after all that thunder of cannon. He wanted to ask for a repetition of the order but thought he had understood it after all. He drew himself up, rose, closed his eyes, and keeled over, very slowly, like a ladder that had been set up too straight. When he was in the water, the question came to him unasked: what will Nelson think? The traitor head was too slow even here; it didn’t want to let go of the question. So the others fished him out again before he could find out how one drowned.
At night he stared straight up to the ceiling and searched for Sagals. He no longer found him. A god of his childhood only, Sagals had now succumbed, too. A hundred times he rattled off all the sails from the foresail to the topgallant royal, back and forth. He recited all the rigs from the fore royal stay to the main topgallant royal and all the running rigging from the jib stay to the fore stay. He conjured all the yards from the mizzen topgallant to the foretop. He cleared the ship for battle with all topmasts, all decks, quarters, ranks – only his own mind had become inextricably entangled. His self-confidence was gone.
‘I expect,’ said Dr Orme when they saw each other again, ‘that you’re sad about his death.’ He said it very slowly. John needed to take his time, then his chin began to tremble. When John Franklin wept it took a moment or two. He cried until the urge to weep tickled in his nose and in his fingertips.
‘But you love the sea,’ Dr Orme resumed. ‘That shouldn’t have anything to do with the war.’
John stopped weeping, because he was thinking. While doing so, he studied his right shoe. His eye followed incessantly the shining square of the large buckle: up to the right, down along the side, then farther down to the left, returning to its starting point more than ten times. Then he fastened his glance on Dr Orme’s flat shoes, which had neither tongue nor buckle, but left the instep open with a bow in front. At last he said, ‘It’s about the war that I was so wrong.’
‘We’ll have peace soon,’ said Dr Orme. ‘Then there will be no more battles.’