Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

She nodded again.

All this seemed feasible to me. If it was, if we ended up safely in the water, I still worried about the ship capsizing on us. But I didn’t say so. I worried about the great sucking vortex at the ship’s last vanishing. But I didn’t say so.

I said, “Let’s go. We’ll use the rail, but try not to look down. Just follow me.”

She nodded a last time and I turned and I led us back to the railing and we headed aft, passing from the shadow of funnel number one, and I was still trying to visualize if we needed to leave the Hurricane Deck. We’d have to be patient if we stayed. We’d have to wait for the very last moment for the sea to come to us. But with the bow filling, the ship could suddenly rear up from the stern to sink.

We left the rail to go around another cowl vent, which was no longer taking in fresh air but spewing thick black smoke from belowdecks, and beyond it we cut back to the railing and I leaned out and looked ahead for a way down to the Boat Deck. About fifty yards farther on, past funnel number two, was a staircase.

Suddenly the ship began to quake beneath our feet and a great metallic groan filled the air coming from all around us and I stopped and turned and I cried “Hold on to me!” and Selene put her arms around my waist and I gripped the railing hard with both hands and the Lusitania shook and it grabbed the breath out of me as it lurched toward the sea and I braced my hips against the railing and a many-voiced human cry came from below us and Selene held me tight and we stopped, we did not capsize but we stopped, and the cry below ceased abruptly and I looked and bodies were still careening and flying against the Boat Deck railing and over and gone but we’d stopped for now and the angle toward the sea was worse but it felt as if the angle forward had abated a little — just a little — we could still move, we still could move.

“Not much farther,” I cried. “Careful placing your feet.”

Selene knew to take her arms off me and we both clutched the railing and we moved aft as quickly as we could, pulling with our arms as much as driving forward with our legs, placing our feet carefully with each step so they would not slide from under us, and we approached funnel number two and its shadow fell upon us and I heard Selene gasp and she stopped and I looked behind me and she was staring upward and I followed her gaze and the top section of the listing funnel was directly over our heads.

“Just watch me,” I cried.

She lowered her face and I turned and we moved on.

And we were at the staircase and it was opposite the Marconi shack — its wireless antennae rising from its roof to join the long, taut telegraph lines strung from foremast to mainmast — and the door was gaping open and inside an operator sat in a bolt-secured chair, hunched over his key, tapping furiously away. I wanted to step to him and grab him by the arm and pull him away. The ship was lost; whoever was going to hear us had heard us already. But this was one of those guys you find in times like this who’ll die doing what he signed up to do. As I led Selene down the stairs I thought: If I live, I’ll put this man — and what he was — in the story I’ll write.

And we were on the Boat Deck.

I looked to the left and staggered back, throwing my arm across Selene, startled as if I’d turned an alleyway corner into the chest of a hulking stranger. The sea had claimed the deck almost up to my feet.

Which was fine. We didn’t need to seek the right place to enter. It was waiting for us.

The slash of sea before us foamed at its claiming edge.

I turned us aft.

Astern, those who had no life jackets and those who had them but could not muster the nerve to use them were clambering at the last two lifeboats, which were swinging wildly at the end of their snubbing chains.

“Here,” I said.

I took Selene by the hand and we moved toward the railing a few paces aft.

A little farther along, a man in a union suit was meticulously folding his pants, with his overcoat and his coat and his shirt already carefully stacked at his feet.

Somewhere a woman was sobbing.

The bridge siren abruptly stopped.

I let go of Selene’s hand and we were at the railing.

“Up,” I said and she climbed the railing and swung her legs over and she balanced a moment there and I came up beside her and I took her hand in mine once more and I looked at the sea and it was full of bodies alive and dead and it was full of planking from wrecked lifeboats and I looked down, and the drop was less than ten feet but a deck chair spun directly below us and I felt Selene’s body as it started to move outward and I cried “Hold” and she tried, she gently braked her body, and the deck chair bumped the hull and it spun and Selene was starting to rebound backward, was starting to fall backward and I slipped my arm around her and kicked hard with my heels against the bottom rail and we flew a little away from the hull and we had only water below us and we fell and the cold grabbed me by the feet and rushed up my legs as I took my arm from around Selene’s waist and I sucked in a deep breath and the water rushed up my abdomen and my chest and I flinched my eyes closed and my face flashed sharp cold, the cold raked through me and the sea was heavy upon me and now I was no mind at all, I was only my body I was only the memories of my muscles and I was the sinking and I was the slowing and I was the stopping. And I was the gathering of arm and flattening of hand and coiling of leg and then I was the stroking upward and I could feel my chest rising ahead of me rising as if on its own — the life jacket lifting me — and the pressure of the sea fell away from the top of my head and from my forehead and my eyes and my cheeks and all my face and now my shoulders and I was in the air.

I gasped in the air and I opened my eyes, and swinging to my face as if to kiss me hello was a sweet woman’s face, her large eyes closed, the lids smooth and white, the face was very white and angled to kiss me, angled too far sideways, and I was no mind at all, I was only my body before her, and my body assumed she was Selene, and she was dead, I knew, this woman approaching me, and I clutched tight in the chest, but then I knew it was not Selene, and then bumping my face was a coldness beyond the coldness of the sea, a terrible coldness bumped a last kiss upon my cheek, a good-bye kiss sliding across my mouth and she moved away, she could not linger and she was gone and she was a stranger and she was dead, and I heard myself gasping, gasping for breath in the cold sea but gasping for the mistake my body had made and gasping to know if Selene had come up from the place where I had just been, and my arms knew to turn me, and a few yards away Selene Bourgani’s famous profile floated as if she were beheaded and I gasped again and then her shoulders appeared and her arms, and she was thrashing and turning, and her face swung around to me and we moved toward each other, this stroke, and this one, and we watched as each other’s living eyes grew nearer.

And we touched hands and we were in a dark shadow and we knew not to look above us, we knew not to consider the Lusitania about to fall upon us, and we turned side by side away from the ship.

And we swam.

So Selene Bourgani and I shared a deck chair when the Lusitania went down, having swum out far enough that the last whipping of the loosed Marconi wires just missed tangling us, though it dragged many others under, right before our eyes. We clung to the floating chair and we lifted our faces to the ship.

The stern rose from the water, and the massive starboard white propellers showed themselves, still spinning slowly, glinting brightly in the sun, and the Lusitania diminished before us for a long few moments like a knife blade disappearing into a chest, and then it stopped, as if it had struck bone, and it no longer evoked a blade, as its keel simply settled downward and it was gone.