We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [309]
He struggled to free himself from her embrace. He couldn't do this. He'd been alone all along, even when he lay with his cheek against her naked breast. And he was doomed to be alone. He'd sought an angel of death and found a human being, and he couldn't cope with that.
He sat up in bed with a jerk, leapt out, and ran through the empty barracks, where his footsteps echoed as if all the soldiers who'd once filled the building and were now dead had come back.
KNUD ERIK WAS sent for just after lunch. Sent for: that was how he thought of the summonses to meetings with the local Soviet authorities. A soldier and an English-speaking official turned up, both in uniform and both female. The official was young, and confident in a way that suggested she regarded herself as a representative of something great. The Soviet state spoke through her, in an English superior to his and in phrases that took the form of commands.
She wore a faint trace of eye shadow and he couldn't work out where it had come from. He'd never seen her in the club, and he was certain she didn't mix with any of the sailors who called at Molotovsk. If there was any truth in the men's rumor that some of the women were spies, then she was an obvious candidate.
These meetings generally concerned cargo. Endless discussions were sparked by small details that didn't add up, and he always attended them in the same resigned mood. He knew that he'd be wasting yet another day on bureaucratic squabbling and be forced to listen to insulting comments about the Allies' inadequate war effort.
On one occasion, however, he'd been pleasantly surprised: they'd handed him an envelope filled with checks for the crew. It was a war supplement. The Russians were paying one hundred U.S. dollars to each man; Joseph Stalin had personally signed the checks.
"You'd have to be stupid to walk into a bank with this and get your hundred dollars," Wally said, when he was handed his check.
"Anyway, they might be fake," Helge said. "And then we'd get arrested."
"One of my friends, a guy called Stan, got one of these checks and went to a bank on the Upper East Side to get his hundred dollars from Uncle Joe. The cashier kept turning it over. 'Do you have a moment?' he said, and took him up to the fourth floor to see the manager. He started staring at it too. Like Helge, my pal thought that something was wrong. 'I'll give you two hundred dollars for it,' the bank manager says. 'What?' my friend says, gasping. He doesn't understand. 'Okay, okay,' the bank manager says. 'Three hundred dollars.'"
"I don't get it?" Helge frowned.
"It was the signature. Stalin's personal signature. It's worth way more than the check."
But this time the meeting wasn't about checks or cargo. The official told him he was going to the hospital.
"I'm not ill," he snorted. It had to be some kind of mistake.
"It's not about you," the official said sharply. "It's about a patient we want you to take back to England."
"The Nimbus isn't a hospital ship."
"The patient is as well as he'll ever be. He can take care of himself. We can't continue to look after him."
"So can he work on board?"
"That depends on what you want him to do. By the way, he's Danish. Like you." He'd never told her he was Danish. She was well informed.
"Let's go," he said brusquely.
He'd expected the hospital in Molotovsk to be located near the harbor, but it turned out to be some distance outside town, along one of those roads that seemed to lose itself in the wilderness. The hospital was a long, low building, and no signs suggested that there might be hospital activity behind its crude wooden walls. A heavy woman in dirty overalls had turned the floor into a pool of mud and water, which she stirred with a mop in a doomed bid to give the impression of cleaning. Their footsteps splashed loudly as they turned down a long,