“You’re all right!” Duncan shouted as Sam dropped onto the deck. “Are you hurt?”
Sam flexed his elbow, which he’d cracked on a thwart but which still seemed to work, and then inspected his shin, where all the blood appeared to be coming from one long scrape. “Nothing serious,” he said.
Duncan pulled him toward a dry corner. “Is anyone else with you?”
Anyone, he meant, from the meeting; they’d been at an international genetics congress in Edinburgh, cut short by the situation. Sam shook his head. Families had been broken apart, siblings had ended up in different boats, friends had been randomly assorted: where was Axel? Eight other geneticists had been on the Athenia with Sam. One by one, in the thick, dark smoke, they’d climbed into lifeboats, dropped down to the water, and then disappeared.
Duncan said, with apparent enthusiasm, “But at least you’re here. You’re safe.”
Omitting, Sam thought, the fact that on their last day in Edinburgh, Duncan had asked Sam grudgingly, and only after Sam had already made his own arrangements, to join the small group he’d finagled aboard this American freighter loaded with wool and Scotch whisky.
“I did warn you,” Duncan added now. Still, after eighteen years of annoying Sam, unable to rein in his red-faced, bullying self. “I warned you not to take passage on a British ship.”
Anyone else would have understood how few choices existed. Sam’s booked passage had been canceled, the other ships were quickly commandeered, and on September 1, as he boarded the Athenia in Glasgow, it had still seemed likely that they’d get away safely. They’d had to pick up passengers in Belfast and then more in Liverpool, both ports packed with Americans and Canadians trying to get home, but by the afternoon of September 2 the ship was heading north up the Irish Sea, rounding the coast early on the morning of September 3. By the time the declaration of war was radioed, they’d almost cleared the most dangerous territory, their ship overbooked but still comfortable and, Sam had thought with a twinge of pleasure, less crowded than Duncan’s. Before Duncan left, not only his handful of stranded friends but also a group of college girls caught midway through a European tour had been stuffed into the City of Flint, making thirty instead of the normal five or six passengers. Now it bulged with another two hundred people, some freezing and still in shock, and among them—
“Is Axel here?” he asked.
Duncan turned, reached back to steady an elderly woman coming over the railing, and then pointed her toward a man who was giving out fresh water. “Of course not,” he said, inspecting Sam more closely. “Did you hit your head?”
For Duncan, Sam realized, Axel was still in Edinburgh, where he’d stayed to visit a friend despite Duncan’s frantic urging that he board the City of Flint. When the situation grew so dangerous that Axel’s friend cut the visit short and delivered him to the Glasgow docks, Duncan had already been at sea.
“He was with me,” Sam said. Two teenage boys tumbled onto the deck, their hair matted with oil; a girl in a tidy jacket rushed over to them. “The Athenia was the only ship that had a berth.” In another situation he would have enjoyed seeing the color drain from Duncan’s cheeks.
“He wasn’t.”
“He was,” Sam said. “We were eating dinner with that couple from Minnesota when we were hit.” One of what should have been many meals; what luck, he’d thought, to have Axel aboard! An unexpected benefit of letting Duncan sail without him. They might walk the decks, share quiet conversations, sit side by side in reclining chairs, and repair what had gone wrong in Edinburgh. At the dock, the sight of Axel’s battered gray hat and unmistakable nose had suddenly made everything broken and ruined seem hopeful again.
“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.