Lifeboat - a story in expanding versions.
50 words:
“This lifeboat is for women and children ONLY. You there – stay put. Come on, Lady, make up your mind, climb in or stay out, we don’t have all night.”
But they did have all night, they had all eternity, and the cold dark sea rose up and closed around them.
200 words:
The refugee ship Surf City rapidly settled into the winter north Atlantic, chuffing steam like a dying animal’s last breaths. A drifting mine – maybe British, possibly German – had blown off the bows, causing fatal damage. Extensive flooding shut down the power plant, the only light came from flickering light from distress rockets. The last rocket illuminated one of the night’s tragedies.
“This lifeboat is for women and children ONLY,” said a deckhand to a man and woman, the man ambulatory only with her assistance. “You there,” he said, pointing to the man, “stay put”. To the woman, with exasperation, “Come on, Lady, make up your mind, climb in or stay out, we don’t have all night.”
She hesitated. He did not leave her in Budapest, when a Gestapo raid rolled up their resistance network. Nor did he leave when a turncoat betrayed them in a Greek fishing village, and only the nimblest and fleet-footed escaped with their lives. He fought her to safety and buying her life with a shattered leg.
She would not leave him now.
The sailor was wrong. They did have all night, they had all eternity, and the cold dark sea rose up and closed around them.
1200 words:
McBragg spun a globe in the library of his less-than-fashionable club, stopped it with a finger.
"There, the Atlantic just off the northwest coast of France. Did I ever tell you about the U-357 Incident?"
Everyone not named "McBragg," except the member he buttonholed began quietly moving to the library doors and filtering out.
"The submarine whose skipper they hanged for, what was it, torpedoing a … "
"... sinking a refugee ship, many hundreds lost, only a handful came through it. You think you've heard the story, but the press and the war crimes investigators told the story the tribunal wanted to hear. Lt. Kretzmer was innocent of murdering all those people, but, Kretzmer was one of ze Germans and one Nazis more or less was no matter to me."
"I was on that rust bucket when she went down, and let me tell you a story no one's heard of, so it can end the right kind of way."
McBragg paused, packed a clay pipe, blew puffs and settled back in his overstuffed armchair and began talking...
… The Faucon Bleu Line steamship Surf City carrying textiles and overburdened with illegal refugees rapidly settled into the winter north Atlantic, chuffing steam from its single funnel like a dying animal taking its last breaths. A drifting mine – maybe British, possibly German – blew off the bows, killed the watch standers on the bridge, caused catastrophic and fatal damage below the waterline. Extensive flooding shut down the power plant within minutes, leaving the stricken vessel without motive or electric power.
Most of the passengers, blasted out of sleep, drowned below decks by the rapidly rising flood, the situation on deck was less chaotic only by small degree. There were enough lifeboats, there just weren't enough survivors to put in them, or enough crew to operate them the ones that weren't blown off their davits. One remained for the handful of passengers who made it to the upper deck, under the supervision of a surviving ship's officer who had not yet shaken off the effects of the blast's concussion.
A waning moon and flickering distress rockets cast an eerie half-light on the disaster. The rockets were a futile gesture to the empty ocean. Sea water contamination of the boiler feed lines slowed down the ship and cost her the protection of a convoy, now long gone over the horizon.
The last rocket illuminated the night’s final tragedy.
“This lifeboat is for women and children ONLY,” barked the second officer at a man and woman. The man, hastily dressed in workingman’s clothes but without hat or coat against the sub-zero conditions, leaned on a bollard for support against the ship’s list. His lower right leg was wrapped in bandages and he was ambulatory only with the woman’s assistance. The woman, dark hair and slight of build, wore a seaman’s pea jacket over a nightgown.
“You there,” the officer said, pointing to the man, “stay put,” he said unnecessarily, rising panic evident in his voice. To the woman he spoke with exasperation, under the custom of the sea no one would blame her for leaving the man, but she would not move. Although this conversation had been going on for only a half-minute, to him it must have seen like forever.
“Come on, Lady, please make up your mind now, climb in the boat or stay out, we don’t have all night.” The conversation lasted only as long as it did because a sailor, cursing to himself as only a sailor can, was desperately trying without success to clear the davit falls, which had fouled.
The woman still didn't move. But not in the way a rabbit freezes when run to ground by harriers. This is what I heard from the ship's medical officer (may he rest in peace), who attended his injury during the voyage.
The man with the wounded leg was a tailor who organized a resistance group in Romania. Amateurishly at first, but he had an instinctive talent for it, and most importantly for surviving. His network lasted longer than most, and because it achieved a certain level of success and was not communist, it attracted the attention of a British intelligence service, which provided arms and advice.
She was a peasant girl from up-country. How or why she came to be in Bucharest did not occur to him to ask. They became lovers to keep a fragile grasp on their humanity, but were not in love in any conventional sense, the term no longer had a real meaning by then and certainly not to them. In fact, neither knew the other's name, for security’s sake -- and no one was safe until they landed in England -- they knew only each other's nom de guerre.
Inevitably, someone slipped up. However it happened, betrayed, the wrong word to the wrong person, a radio operator staying on air for a minute too long, one night the Gestapo kicked in the front door. At the same time he dragged her through a back window and carried her across rooftops to safety. He got them as far as a Greek fishing village when a turncoat betrayed them and only the nimblest and fleet-footed partisans escaped with their lives. They crossed into France, in a suburb of Nice he fought her to safety with a Schmeisser wrenched out of the hands of a Vichy policeman. When he ran out of ammunition he used a knife, when the blade broke he fought with tooth and claw and paid for her life with a gunshot wound that shattered his leg.
From there he was finished as an asset; the security service would expend their limited resources to bring her out to safety but not both of them, scuze doamnă. Undaunted, the farm girl took charge. After Nice she inveigled, conned, defrauded and sold her body but never her soul to evade roadblocks, police dragnets and buy passage for both of them to Tunisia, Marseilles, across unoccupied France, then to Bordeaux and the dubious safety of the neutral-flagged Surf City. But for unimaginable reasons the gods intervened and booked their appointment with a loose mine less than a hundred miles from England.
She would not leave him. Not because of a romantic beau geste, but because she believed she could get them both off that sinking ship. She schemed until there was no time left for scheming.
Then It was finished, time had run out and every last soul still alive on that deck knew it. The whistle of steam played out, a boiler explosion gave the ship’s death rattle. There remained only the rising sea. The officer was lost overboard when the sodden hull lurched. The deck hand, resigned to his fate, gave up trying to free the lifeboat.
But the second officer had been wrong. They did have all night, in fact they had all of eternity. The man and woman found each other's eyes and for them time stopped, not figuratively, but actually. They lived a lifetime with the moments remaining -- they learned each other's true names, survived the war, married, saw their grand children grow up, and long afterwards on a fine Summer day one said a final goodbye to the other in a quiet English churchyard far, far away from a foundering wreck in the north Atlantic.
And only then the cold dark sea rose up and close around them all.
in progress .. McBragg (Jay Ward, anyone?) is a framing device for the as yet unwritten parts of the story.
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