“Are you sleepwalking again?” I yelled to Pauwel.
Then the guard moved up closer behind him. Everyone was jittery from the explosions. Saboteurs were feared. They trained their guns on Pauwel, likely wondering if it could have been him who blew up the buildings. Pauwel must have sensed the man closing in on him, as he swung around with a rod high in the air and brought it down on the guard’s head. The guard crumpled to his knees in front of Pauwel, who was about to bring his second drumstick down onto the man when the other guard fired his gun. The shot hit Pauwel’s abdomen below the left side of his rib cage, ripped out his back, and popped through one of the oil cans. The raised metal drumstick fell from his hand and clanked off a drum before hitting the ground. A melted rose opened on Pauwel’s back and seeped down over his buttocks as he crumbled to his side, next to the man he’d struck down.
“Stop. Don’t shoot him. He’s one of us.” I ran to his side with my arms up and shielded him. “He’s one of us.”
Both men were put on stretchers and carried away. They were taken to the compound’s medic, who had a long line of wounded to deal with from the explosions before he could stitch up the guard’s head and spend the rest of the morning suturing Pauwel’s wounds. The bullet missed all his vital organs but tore through his upper intestine.
While waiting for him to get out of surgery, I found out that his U-boat returned early because it had technical difficulties. It had submerged several hours outside of Kiel and gone west for two days when all the lights on board started to explode and pop out. “I mean all the fucking lights,” a sailor told me. “It was the craziest thing. We were in the dark damn near the whole time. We had to turn back, but that took twice as long because we had to be extra-careful going about the smallest things. It was spooky. I felt a little crazy too. And the other U-boat that set out with us, we haven’t heard word from them yet. There’s no telling what happened to them.”
Old visions of lights exploding all over Europe and shards of glass raining down on Nazi soldiers’ heads flashed into my mind, and then there was my father, tall and kind and patient, opening his giant mouth to let out some new story, some soul-enriching story that would tell me who I really was and was supposed to be. But I couldn’t hear the words. I tried to listen to that specter of my father floating through my head, but nothing came.
I was starting to grasp that I didn’t understand this war or where I should be within it all. All the clear lines had blurred.
After Pauwel’s surgery was over, they gave him a large dose of morphine. He was limp in the infirmary bed but his head kept thrashing back and forth.
“Pauwel, what happened?”
“The bubbles are in my blood. I have dark bubbles seeped into my blood,” he said. His head was tilted back and rocking, smoothing out the pillow. Beads of sweat rolled off his brow and his eyes were open too wide. All pupil. It made me nervous. Later that night I held his dirt-smudged hand as he struggled to breathe. His rib cage sank when he exhaled, then he gasped, and a sucking noise rose from inside his chest. When the medic wasn’t watching, I lifted his eyelid back with my thumb. The white of his eye was threaded with bloodshot veins that looked like raw red worms.
I stared at the spackled walls of the infirmary room by Pauwel’s side that night, trying to understand what happened to him all those hours in the dark, and how a human being could capture the mechanical heartbeat of war with only a set of drums.
18
The Beaver was a wider version of the Negro and they said it could move faster underwater. The dock crew strapped me into the cockpit and closed the glass dome over me. Major Oldif stood on the dock with several engineers, checking off items on their clipboards, and never looked at me. The first training exercise had been fast-tracked because of the Martin’s sabotage. I’d been keeping Pauwel company as he fought his way through morphine dreams and recuperated when I was yanked away to take the Beaver out for a submerged lap of the harbor, and then out to open water and back, to be sure it worked and they could push on with their production schedule.
“Hurry now. Hurry it up,” Major Oldif kept saying.
It took me several hours to get to the open water, because there had been a British bomber raid hours before. German fighter planes had been sent to cut them off, which forced the bombers to lighten their load by dropping their bombs into the sea north of Kiel, and left kilometer-long strips of dead fish drifting on the surface. Fish bellies awash with gold and oil-slicked purple-silver drifted past me as the Beaver slipped out on the ebb tide. The bow parted the fish so they fanned out in my small wake.
It looked like the sea had been poisoned along the northern shores into deeper water. All those dead fish. Almost everyone in Europe was starving and here were so many dead fish. I’d heard talk of what the Germans were doing to Jews, how the eastern front was erupting and the western front was waiting for a giant invasion. There was talk of Japs, Turks, Brits, and Yanks, but they were all out of sight. They were allegedly fighting or ramping up to fight all over the world, spreading out, shooting one another down. Still, it was all out of sight, too big for me to see how I, in my little tube out in the ocean, fit into any of it.
Uncle Martin had been right. I saw no larger picture, and though I did not know it at the time, that is what made me so dangerous. Now, I can imagine boys from camp, like rash-necked Timothy, Garth, Lutz, and all the rest becoming small parts of a machine that would grind us to bits.
When I returned from my run in the Beaver, I reported to the medic building. After performing a test, the doctor told me I had a very bad case of stomach ulcers. I then went and sat next to Pauwel and told him about the ulcers and dead fish, even though he was still unconscious, and I didn’t know if he could hear me.
I dipped bread into coffee until I was full. Eating anything had started to feel like a chore, an acidic boiling in my stomach. Perhaps it was the ulcers that gnawed me, or maybe it was the fear that Pauwel would die in front of me, or of being in a midget sub again.
The coffee in my stomach made me feel nauseated. I propped my hand up against the wall and vomited it all up into a puddle at my feet. The smell rose up in vapors.
After my running of the Beaver, the crew was ordered into one of the only remaining buildings where Major Oldif gave us a folder with our new orders inside.