Robert Butler - The Star of Istanbul

And there was no vortex. That thing it struck: it occurred to me how shallow the sea was here, within ten miles of shore, not even four hundred feet deep. The ship struck her bow to the ocean floor before she was fully under, and so when she vanished, all that was left was for the air within to blow. And it did, a last upswelling dome of white, and then the sea lifted beneath us and we were glad to be holding this chair and we rose and we fell and all around was a low, ongoing wordless cry.

We could not listen. We could not watch. We hung on to the chair, just to keep us from drifting separately, and we looked each other in the eyes. The ones who made it off the ship in one piece and yet would die on this day — and there would be many — were those without life jackets or those without any emotional reserves, the ones for whom this was such an enormous thing that they went “Ah to hell with it” and gave up the ghost. But the ghosts still cried out all around us till the bodies they came from sank or floated away.

And Selene and I just looked at each other and murmured to each other. Little things.

“Are you cold?” I would say.

“Oh, not anymore. I’m numb now,” she would say.

“The sea is very calm,” I would say.

“The sun is warm on my face,” she would say.

And when a particularly terrible human sound would wash over us and I could see in her eyes that she heard, I would say, “Don’t listen.”

And she would say, “I can’t hear anything but my heart.” And perhaps she would add, “Or is that yours?”

We would say these things, or things very much like them, over and over again. We didn’t mind the repetition.

And then at last I said, “Sing to me.”

And she did. Softly. “You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it.”

And so we floated. And later some crewmen got to a collapsible lifeboat that had drifted off right-side up, and they were able to raise and lash the steel-framed canvas sides, and the men began to pick the living from the vast sargasso of bodies, and they found us.

And before sunset Selene and I were on the deck of a fishing smack, huddled in blankets and drinking tea, quiet now together — we found that all we could be together for now was quiet — and by dark we were in Queenstown.

The city’s white row houses, lit by gas light and torches, were stitched into the side of the abrupt-rising hills by cobbled streets. The fishing boat put in at the Cunard wharf and the forty or so of us hobbled onto land. We all ached terribly after the exertion of having saved our lives in the sea and then having huddled for some hours cramped on that tiny boat deck.

We found ourselves on a cut-stone wharf that was crowded with the swaddled dead. Selene, still wearing the boat captain’s bright yellow slicker and sou’wester and smelling of mackerel, clung to me as we picked our way through, noticing the small bundles, which were the children, noticing the ones with faces framed in the open folds, noticing one bundle in particular: two faces bound in one blanket, jaundiced by the lamplight, mother and child, pressed together as if for a photographic portrait but having waited so long for the flash, they’d fallen into a deep sleep. Selene gasped and clung harder to me, and we angled our faces to each other, focused once again only on the two of us, until we entered the large open hall of the customshouse.

The place was dim, unprepared for night landings, and it was crowded with living bodies — hundreds of us now — and some of us were bumping about near the door in the first confusion of arrival. The familiar tones and cadences of the voices of low-level officialdom were directing us, as if we’d just left a steamship and were going off to retrieve our luggage and queue up for the customs boys to search for the booze and the tobacco and the silver plate and the books and the sheet music. And, to be honest, the faintly patronizing, coolly efficient voices were reassuring now, turning the horror into the routine, as much as that was possible with the background of moaning and coughing and whispering and with the quaking and the trembling and with the travelers being damp and bareheaded and with many of them clad only in their wetly clinging underwear and some showing flesh, too much flesh. We looked at these exposed bodies only out of the corners of our eyes, even as dry, dark-uniformed bodies emerged in the dim light to throw blankets over the nakedness.

And Selene and I leaned into each other.

The official voices propelled us into roped-off lines, the wounded who needed immediate help being sent to triage at the far end of the hall, the rest of us guided to the long, alphabetically sectioned wall where our luggage would have been placed but which now led to tables where they gave us coffee and then passed us on to queue and wait for a Cunard official sitting behind a large ledger book. We all waited to approach the book one at a time, Selene waiting before me, clutching hard at my arm, keeping me close. I thought this was because she still needed to rely on me.

Then the man at the table was looking our way.

“Next,” he said.

Selene let go of my arm and turned her face to me and I was surprised at what was there: a hard mouth, pressed thin, but eyes gone wide and gentle, and her head tilted a little. She was about to reenter the world as Selene Bourgani. She’d twice already tried to end our connection to each other. Now it was as if all that we’d done together these past hours — searching the sinking ship for escape and then entering the sea and clinging to life there amidst the dead and dying and then rising together into safety and landing once more on the shore — as if all that was just one more night of lovemaking and this thing between us could not last.

She’d been clutching my arm, keeping me close, because she knew it was time for me to go.

Realizing all this, I also realized I’d missed an opportunity. I’d tried not to intrude upon the silence we kept with each other since we’d been lifted from the sea. Perhaps if I’d pressed her to speak of Brauer, to speak of what it was she was intending to do, she would have told me what it was my job to learn.

But it had never occurred to me. The silence had been inside me as well.

And now she said, “Thank you.”

And I knew she would break away from me.

All I could do was nod.

She turned and moved to the desk.

I could not hear, but the man in the Cunard uniform sitting behind the ledger spoke, and then Selene spoke, and the man jumped up and gave a little bow.

A film fan, no doubt.

She said more to him, and he bowed again. He would grant her a special favor. He motioned to the ledger.

She drew her forefinger down the right-hand, half-filled page. Then she did the same to the left-hand page. Then she turned to the previous two-page spread.

I knew the name she sought.

Halfway down on the right, her hand stopped. She lifted it away and she straightened up.

She nodded to the official, and he sat back down.

She signed her name.

They spoke a few words more.

I was right about her. When she was finished, she did not look back to me but moved off at once, searching the crowd.

I approached the desk, the ledger, the Selene Bourgani fan in the Cunard uniform.

And after I’d signed my name and nationality — my pen-stroke going suddenly heavy, assertive, from a complex surge of feeling at writing United States of America —after then taking an abrupt, retained, chest-lifted breath at being an American upon this day, I turned and she was gone.

Before I could take a step away, the Cunard man, craning his neck to confirm his upside-down reading, said, “Mr. Cobb is it?”