Entombed
S
he is reading again:
Who could possibly calculate the minimum time required for us to get out?
Might we not be asphyxiated before the
Nautilus
could surface? Was it destined to perish in this
tomb of ice along with all those on board? The situation seemed terrible. But everyone faced it
squarely and decided to do their duty to the end . . .
Werner listens. The crew chops through the icebergs that have trapped their submarine; it
cruises north along the coast of South America, past the mouth of the Amazon, only to be chased by
giant squid in the Atlantic. The propeller cuts out; Captain Nemo emerges from his cabin for the
first time in weeks, looking grim.
Werner hauls himself off the floor, carrying the radio in one hand and dragging the battery in the
other. He traverses the cellar until he finds Volkheimer in the gold armchair. He sets down the
battery and runs his hand up the big man’s arm to his shoulder. Locates his huge head. Clamps the
headphones over Volkheimer’s ears.
“Can you hear her?” says Werner. “It’s a strange and beautiful story, I wish you could understand
French. A giant squid has lodged its giant beak into
the propeller of the submarine, and now the
captain has said they must surface and fight the beasts hand to hand.”
Volkheimer draws a slow breath. He does not move.
“She’s using the transmitter we were supposed to find. I found it. Weeks ago. They said it was a
network of terrorists, but it was just an old man and a girl.”
Volkheimer says nothing.
“You knew all along, didn’t you? That I knew?”
Volkheimer must not be able to hear Werner through the headphones.
“She keeps saying, ‘Help me.’
She begs her father, her great-uncle. She says, ‘He is here. He
will kill me.’ ”
A moan shudders through the rubble above them, and in the darkness
Werner feels as if he is
trapped inside the
Nautilus,
twenty meters down, while the tentacles of a dozen angry kraken lash
its hull. He knows the transmitter must be high in the house. Close to the shelling. He says, “I saved
her only to hear her die.”
Volkheimer shows no signs of having understood. Gone or resolved to go: is there much
difference? Werner takes back the headphones and sits in the dust beside the battery.
The first mate,
she reads,
struggled furiously with other monsters which were climbing up the
sides of the
Nautilus.
The crew were flailing away with their axes. Ned, Conseil and I also dug
our weapons into their soft bodies. A violent odor of musk filled the air.
Fort National
E
tienne begged his jailers, the guardian of the fort, dozens of his fellow prisoners. “My niece, my
great-niece, she’s blind, she’s alone . . .” He told them he was sixty-three,
not sixty, as they
claimed, that his papers had been unfairly confiscated,
that he was not a terrorist; he wobbled
before the
Feldwebel
in charge and stumbled through the few German phrases he could stitch
together—“
Sie müssen mich helfen!
” “
Meine Nichte ist herein dort!
”—but the
Feldwebel
shrugged like everybody else and looked back at the city burning across the water as if to say:
what can anyone do in the face of that?
Then the stray American shell struck the fort, and the wounded howled down in the munitions
cellar, and the dead were buried under rocks just above the tide line, and Etienne stopped talking.
The tide slips away, then climbs back up. Whatever energy Etienne has left goes into quieting
the noise in his head. Sometimes he almost convinces himself that he can see through the
smoldering skeletons of the seafront mansions at the northwestern corner of the city to the rooftop
of his house. He almost convinces himself it stands. But then it disappears again behind a mantle of
smoke.
No pillow, no blanket. The latrine is apocalyptic. Food comes irregularly, carried out from the
citadel by the guardian’s wife across the quarter mile of rocks at low tide while shells explode in
the city behind her. There’s never enough. Etienne diverts himself with fantasies of escape. Slip
over a wall, swim several hundred meters, drag himself through the shorebreak. Scamper across
the mined beach with no cover to one of the locked gates. Absurd.
Out here the prisoners see the shells smash into the city before they hear them. During the last
war, Etienne knew artillerymen who could peer through field glasses and discern their shells’
damage by the colors thrown skyward. Gray was stone. Brown was soil. Pink was flesh.
He shuts his eyes. He remembers lamplit hours in Monsieur Hébrard’s bookshop listening to the
first radio he ever heard. He remembers climbing into the choir of the cathedral to listen to Henri’s
voice as it rose toward the ceiling. He remembers the cramped restaurants with leaded windows
and linenfold paneling where his
parents took them to dinner; and the corsairs’ villas with
scalloped friezes and Doric columns and gold coins mortared inside the walls; the storefronts of
gunsmiths and shipmasters and money changers and hostelers; the graffiti Henri used to scratch into
the stones of ramparts,
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