I looked around us, and felt something inside me shift. I pictured the notes they pinned to the board in Southampton. I knew the ultimate Nazi goal of having one race and one grand narrative. Their effort to bind the continent together had failed by the mere presence of these people on board. Boats departed from every corner of Europe, and on each, there burrowed little tics of survival stories embedded in each of the passengers. These living refugees gave me hope. The continent itself was still populated with great storytellers, perhaps even some crawling through every contested border and shifting in currents beneath the very ground that was invaded. There was no mono-story, only the great, broken narrative of raw, throbbing life.
After we ate, the captain asked me to follow him to the wheelhouse. “Okay, Mr. Koopman. I’m going to show you how to steer this ship. Your job will be continental avoidance. In other words, don’t hit anything. If you can navigate a trawler, this won’t be much different. Only, it takes a lot longer to stop. You can start as the second set of eyes on the night watch.”
The first several days went like this. I slept in a crew bunk, woke, and helped wash the dishes in the galley and put them away. Then I ate, and sat watch with Peter, or Captain Fernandes, whoever had the watch at the time. I also had to wipe the engines, immaculately kept twin diesels, and do what Peter assigned on the outer decks of the ship, dabbing grout on the exterior so the ship looked rusted and old, which, I was realizing, it was not.
While under way, the passengers who weren’t sick ate salt bean soup out of tin mess kits from the ship’s galley. The conditions weren’t very good for those aboard, but it was a passage of escape. Every flat surface had a sleeping body on it. Many of them hung on to their bunks or the pipes along the base of the bulkheads as the ship pitched back and forth. They retched into vomit buckets that slid across the deck. The fetid air was so very human and pungent that I covered my nose with the cuff of my sleeve every time the buckets needed to be cleaned.
When Captain Fernandes came into the holds, he walked around the bunks looking at his passengers. He coughed something up from deep in his lungs. He bent over and hacked phlegm into a hankie he pulled from his coverall pocket and held the dark discharge in front of him, and then folded the hankie in half and slipped it away. He stopped. At the foot of the bed where a man was lying with his arm over his forehead, the captain leaned down and placed a hand on his chest, patting it, reassuring. A sweet gesture. He walked from person to person, smiling at them, touching them, performing a kind of ministry.
Everything important to me had been taken away or destroyed. These people had probably gone through the same series of losses and were left holding the wreckage of their own lives. Any of them could have been my family, and for a time, that is what they became. I realized that looking into these strangers’ faces. Each was my brother and father. The women were my mother, Hilda, Janna, and Mevi. The boys were Ludo and Pauwel.
The captain moved about them and I realized he wasn’t giving them last rites, but quite the opposite; he was willing them through. I watched him and thought maybe there were lesser gods who did walk among us. Lifting up others when they needed it most, offering an invisible push on the shoulder that can lead them back to the rest of their lives. Though, maybe that responsibility was for us all, to reach out when we could, to set the floor so people couldn’t free-fall forever.
I was touched by his interactions in the holds, and I knew if there was such a thing as redemption, it was quicksilver that must be recaptured each day.
When we came to a patch in the ocean that was glass-calm, the captain idled the engines of the ship. The crew opened a side hatch and let down a rope ladder. The smuggled passengers climbed onto the rub rail and jumped into the freezing sea. Cramped and lice-ridden, they leapt out into the ocean and splashed around like children, consecrated, briefly cleaned and renewed. I watched from the bridge’s wing station as the people whose old lives had been snagged away from them through the upheaval of war, shocking and surely violent, now floated on their backs in the sun.
A porpoise drifted up to the swimming crowd and the tip of its fin cut the water, which from the surface looked like a shark.
“Oh boy,” Captain Fernandes said. “Here we go.”
At once, the swimmers screamed and swam wildly back to the ladder. I was startled by their sudden pronounced and fervent desire to live, and felt I’d never heard a more joyous and powerful noise.
Once we were again under way, the bow of The Royal Crest cut through the waters southeast of Iceland. It was four in the morning, and I shared the bridge watch with Captain Fernandes. He had me organize the ship’s flag drawers. China. South Africa. Russia. Argentina. A flag for every nation on earth to hoist up the flagpole. He plotted the ship’s course and prepped the navigational charts. On watch with him, he let me ask questions about the ship and took the time to explain everything.
“Tell me about that uncle’s fishing trawler you were on,” he said, and I did, telling him about the good times I had spent with Uncle Martin on the water.
“How far out did he go?” the captain asked.
“All over the North Sea.”
“For how long would he go out?”
“A week or more at a time by himself. Only a few days if he took me or my brother along.” I didn’t mean to mention my brother.
“Was it your uncle who had you looking around for Captain . . . What was the name?”
“Courtier. Méndez. And a few others.”
“Huh.”
We were quiet for a while and the night was calm around us.
“Who are the people in the holds, really?” I asked. I expected him to tell me to mind my own business, but he didn’t.
“Financial backers from the major Canadian and American cities pay good money to have people smuggled out of Europe, and very few ships will attempt the trip because of all the carnage caused by U-boats.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“A long time.”
“Since the war started?”
“Depends on which war you are referring to.” His lidded eyes flared open so I could see them glisten.
“What will you do after you deliver these people?”
“I’ll go back. An Allied invasion fleet will be trying to get into Europe eventually, and if they do, nowhere will be safe. Every bit of the continent will be contested and this shoddy little ship will be needed more than ever. There will always be the business of refugees.”
The captain’s candor made me nervous. He was clearly working a secretive business, and yet he spoke openly. Still, I wanted to know more. “How have you managed to avoid getting caught?”
“There are ways. You figure them out and perfect them.”
“Do you have to lie about who you are to cross borders?”