Andrea Barrett - Archangel

“But then,” Duncan said, “how did you lose track of him?”

The smoke, the darkness, the wounded people, the babble of different languages as passengers crowded boats already full, launched half-empty ones too early. Sam drew a breath. “We went where the crew told us to go, and they assigned us to separate boats. Then the boats scattered. Can you find out if he’s here?”

Duncan disappeared with a curse, leaving Sam to be herded down below with the newest arrivals. In a long room lined with barrels, they dripped into a growing puddle, which the crew and the freighter’s original passengers tried to avoid as they ferried in spare clothing pulled from their luggage. A plant physiologist from Texas, transferred from the motor yacht, slipped an old sweater over his head as he said that these merchant seamen were a lot more welcoming than the Swedish billionaire who’d originally rescued him. Sam tied his feet into a pair of slippers a size too large, thrilled to find them dry, while his new acquaintance described the smartly outfitted crew who’d handed out soup and hot coffee and blankets and then — the sun was well up, the Athenia had gone to her grave, and the destroyers were making their rounds — told the rescued passengers that the owner couldn’t interrupt his planned trip and needed to transfer everyone who’d been picked up. “To here,” the Texan said, stepping out of his oil-soaked pants and into a seaman’s canvas overalls. “Oh, that’s much better.”

Where was Axel, where was Axel? Maybe he’d been on that yacht, or maybe … he tried not to think about the huge propeller. Around Sam, coats, blankets, overshoes, shawls flew toward wet bodies, something dry for everyone. So many people, everywhere: bodies racked like billiard balls in every corner and companionway, babies calling like kittens or crows as women tried to comfort them. Among them, Axel might be hidden — or he might be in the water still, or safely headed toward Galway or Glasgow on one of the destroyers. Sam pushed through the mass, some faces familiar from the Athenia ’s decks and dining room but many not and none the one he most wanted to see, until, when he came out near the galley, he heard his name and looked behind him. Duncan, who’d always had this way of proving himself astonishingly useful just when he was at his most annoying, waved his hand above the crowd. Beside him, his front hair pushed forward into a kingfisher’s tuft by a gigantic square bandage, was Axel.

DUNCAN TURNED HIS berth over to Axel, who, after touching Sam’s face and saying, “You’re here. You’re all right,” disappeared into the deckhouse and fell, said Duncan later (now modestly moved to the floor of his cabin, where he’d already had two roommates), into an exhausted sleep. Sam, who stayed awake for a while after Axel left, slept that first night on a coil of rope, surrounded by women in men’s shoes and torn evening gowns, men wearing dress shirts over sarongs made from curtains, children in white ducks shaped for bulky sailors. A little girl whose parents had ended up in a different boat — Sam hoped they were now on some other ship — lay on a pile of canvas nearby. Earlier, he’d seen the two women looking after her piece together a romper from two long woolen socks, a pair of women’s panties, and a boy’s sweater. Now the women curled parenthetically around their warm charge.

Sam’s trousers were still intact, and between those, his donated slippers, and a wool jacket generously given to him by one of Duncan’s cabinmates, an old acquaintance named Harold, he was warm enough to sleep. The next morning, after a chaotic attempt at breakfast, he and Harold, along with everyone else who wasn’t injured, helped the ship’s crew spread mattresses in the hold, suspend spare tarpaulins from beams to make rows of hammocks, and hammer planks into bunks until everyone had a place to sleep. Harold had helped the captain organize seatings for meals — eight shifts of thirty people — and as he and Sam cut planks to length, they talked about supplies. Harold’s friend George, also sharing Duncan’s cabin, joined them an hour later and described the list he was making of those who’d been separated from family members and friends; first on it were the seven congress participants still unaccounted for. The captain would radio the list to the other rescue ships, which were returning to Scotland and Ireland — only theirs was heading across the sea, on its original course. But what about allocating medical care and pooling medications? What about basic sanitation? If we had rags, Harold said, we could tear them into squares. If we had a system , George fussed, gathering scraps of paper for the latrines.

If, if, if. Sam tried to think of these two middle-aged men as amiable strangers helping to make the best of a hard situation — as if they’d not just been together at a conference where the two of them had looked on blandly as Sam’s work was attacked. As if Duncan, elsewhere on the ship that morning, hadn’t been the one attacking.

He worked all day, as the ship steamed steadily west and the passengers pulled from the water continued to shift and sort themselves, the sickest and most badly wounded settling in the tiny hospital bay with those slightly better off nearby, the youngest and oldest tucked in more protected corners and the strongest where water dripped or splashed — layering themselves as neatly, Sam thought, as if they’d been spun in a gigantic centrifuge. He claimed one of the hammocks he’d hung himself, glad that at least Axel had a berth and a bit of privacy. Glad too to find, when evening came, that Harold and George had fit him and Axel into their dinner shift, which also included Duncan and the group of college girls.

The big square bandage bound to the top of his head made Axel look unusually defenseless. He smiled at Sam and tapped the spot next to him at the dinner table, but before Sam could get there, Harold, George, and Duncan swarmed in, leaving Sam at the corner. The college girls, already friendly with Duncan’s group, filled in the empty seats and introduced themselves to Sam and Axel. One, who had smooth red hair a few shades lighter than Sam’s, pointed to Axel’s gauze-covered crown. “Is that bad?”

“Not really,” Axel said. “A long jagged tear in my scalp, but the doctor said it should heal.”

Not nearly enough information. Sam imagined Axel underwater, trying to surface through the debris. An oar cracking down on his skull, a fragment from the explosion flying toward him. When did it happen, who was he with, who took care of him until he reached the ship? He leaned forward to speak, but another of the girls, annoyingly chatty — Lucinda was her name — said, “How do you all know each other, then?”

“We work in the same field,” Harold said. His doughy cheeks were perfectly smooth; of course he had a razor.

“Genetics,” George added. Also clean-shaven. Briefly, Sam mourned his lost luggage. “The study of heredity.”

“These two,” Axel said, gesturing first toward Sam and then toward Duncan, “used to be my students.”

“Really?” said the one named Pansy. “That wolf-in-a-bonnet disguise makes you look the same age as them.”

It was true, Sam thought as the others laughed; the bandage covered Axel’s bald spot, his sprouting beard concealed the creases around his mouth, and he was trim for a man who’d just turned fifty. Duncan, ten years Axel’s junior, boasted a big, low-slung belly that, along with his thinning hair, made him look like an old schoolmaster. Straightening up, sucking in, Duncan turned to Lucinda and said, “We were all at the genetics conference I told you about.”