It was close to midday and the short-lived sunless glow that interrupted the polar night was revelatory. The ice floes were becoming larger and heavier, and it became increasingly difficult to navigate a way through. When the bow met with resistance the pitch of the engines rose to a higher, laboring note that persisted until the obstruction was broken into smaller fragments or pushed aside. Thereafter, the boat lurched forward, and the pitch of the note dropped to its prior default. The grim twilight seemed to collapse three dimensions into two, producing an effect that resembled a poorly executed oil painting — bleak vistas of a dead, colorless world.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ said Graf. ‘It’s getting colder.’ Lorenz responded with a bearlike grunt. He was reluctant to open his mouth, because whenever he did so his lower molars ached. ‘What are we going to do?’ Graf persisted. Lorenz bowed his head, and a full minute passed before he spoke. ‘Yes, you’re right. We can’t go on. It’s absurd.’ He descended into the conning tower, dropped into the control room, and marched straight to the radio shack where he found Brandt jotting down messages. ‘Are you receiving signals again?’ Lorenz asked.
‘Intermittently,’ said Brandt. ‘There’s nothing for us, though.’
‘Is all the equipment working? Right now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well,’ said Lorenz. ‘Send this message to headquarters.’ He grabbed a sheet of paper and scribbled a terse request: PACK ICE IMPASSABLE. HIGH RISK OF CATASTROPHIC DAMAGE. PERMISSION TO ABORT. Headquarters responded promptly. PERMISSION DENIED. RPT DENIED. DO NOT ABORT. RPT DO NOT ABORT SPECIAL MISSION. IMPERATIVE YOU CONTINUE. When he encountered Graf in the officers’ mess the engineer said, ‘Well?’ Lorenz could only shake his head.
Within an hour the Northern Lights had rendered the radio useless again. Brandt offered Lorenz the headphones and said, ‘Solar interference, Herr Kaleun.’ Lorenz listened to what sounded like a high wind modulated by periodic changes of frequency. Below this ‘rush’ were sonic inflections that resembled a man chanting in an adjacent room. Short bursts of frenetic chirruping evoked mobbing birds. The overall effect was disturbing. Lorenz handed the headphones back to Brandt. ‘It won’t last forever.’
Progress was slow; however, that evening Müller completed his calculations and declared, ‘We’ve arrived.’ Glittering curtains billowed across the sky and the reflective plain of ice acted like a mirror. The boat seemed to be suspended between two green conflagrations. In the distance, a floating mountain appeared to be illuminated from within by a flickering, coppery fire.
In spite of repeated attempts to clear ice from the deck, the boat was beginning to feel unstable again. Lorenz ordered the crew to their diving stations and called out ‘Flood!’ Graf studied the ballast-tank lights and said, ‘Door number five isn’t opening.’ The diesels had already stopped. ‘Come on!’ Graf shouted. ‘Open up, you bitch!’ His anger seemed to have an effect. The light panel indicated that the water level in tank five was rising, and the boat began to sink. They circled for three hours at twenty-four meters and then settled into a pattern of three hours up, three hours down. This seemed to be the solution to their problem, but on the following day door number five didn’t open again. The ice floes had begun to fuse together and, as Lorenz had expected, the boat became trapped.
‘Shit!’ said Falk. ‘If a plane flies over they’ll just pick us off.’ Looking up at the blazing nebulae he added, ‘It’s the dead of night and look how light it is!’
‘We’re not defenseless,’ Lorenz replied, indicating the flak cannon. ‘We’ll just have to keep scraping the ice off.’
‘It’s minus twenty, Kaleun. And the 2 cm isn’t very reliable at the best of times.’
‘True, but what else do you suggest we do?’ Falk pressed his hands together in an attitude of prayer. ‘If I thought that would work,’ Lorenz continued, ‘then I would willingly request help from God, but I’m not convinced that we have his support.’
‘Don’t let Pullman hear you say that, Herr Kaleun.’
‘Why? Pullman doesn’t believe in God. He’s a Party man. Give him half a chance and he’ll be making sacrificial offerings to Odin.’ Lorenz watched a pavilion of light collapse. Without removing his gaze from the dissolving sheets of radiance, he added: ‘Get Sauer to organize a team, will you? To scrape the gun.’
Falk hesitated. ‘Why are we here, sir?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lorenz replied.
‘Really, Kaleun?’
‘Yes, Falk, really.’
‘Special operations…’ The first watch officer’s expression resembled the sagging countenance of a bloodhound.
There was nothing to do except wait. The men played card games and listened to endless repetitions of Glenn Miller. Some competed in an impromptu chess tournament. A singing competition was won by Pullman.
The photographer possessed a fine tenor voice and he performed a Schubert song of such lyrical sweetness that even the most cynical members of the crew yielded to its charm. Poetry and a disarmingly simple melody conjured a pastoral ideal of babbling brooks, linden trees, and naive, reckless love; a nostalgic vision of a German Eden purged of impurities and populated by beautiful maidens of peerless virtue. Lorenz was impressed by Pullman’s skill, his unerring instinct for opportunity and weaknesses. Even he, Siegfried Lorenz, the stalwart outsider — stubborn habitué of the political margins — had been momentarily moved, albeit briefly, by nationalist sentiment. It had crossed his mind that there might be something worth dying for after all.
Time passed slowly.
At five o’clock in the morning — a morning as dark as the deepest night — Lorenz poked his head through the hatch, and the first thing he saw was Juhl’s grinning visage. ‘We don’t have to worry about aircraft anymore.’ The second watch officer was wearing so many clothes he was almost spherical.
‘What?’ Lorenz wondered if Juhl had gone mad. His demeanor was uncharacteristically cheerful.
‘Not for a while, anyway.’ Juhl pointed upward. ‘We’re invisible.’
An opaque canopy had settled over the boat. It resembled the roof of a marquee.
‘Falk said he was going to pray for our salvation,’ Lorenz quipped.
After clambering out of the tower, Lorenz stood by Juhl’s side. More fog was rolling toward them, and there was enough shimmering light in the sky to imbue the advancing waves with a trace of exotic color. As soon as he was satisfied that the fog wasn’t a transient phenomenon, Lorenz said: ‘It hardly seems necessary to maintain a four-man watch under these conditions. Juhl, Voigt, Arnold, get back inside and warm up. I’ll stay out here with Wessel.’ The young seaman was unable to conceal his disappointment. ‘Don’t look so put-upon Wessel, it won’t be for long.’
Wessel mumbled an apology.
When the other men had squeezed through the hatch Lorenz and Wessel stood back to back, staring north and south respectively. They made desultory conversation until the fierce cold made even superficial talk effortful. Lorenz was accustomed to desolation. The sea was a wilderness. But the interminable dark of the polar night and the green-white fog made him feel utterly isolated. There were forty-eight souls inside the boat, yet their proximity did nothing to mitigate his sense of unspeakable remove. Wessel and he were the last men alive. They had ventured too far and crossed some mysterious boundary from beyond which there could be no return. How could this forbidding, pitiless place be part of the same world in which waiters served wine in candlelit restaurants, small children laughed, and lovers held hands? He had been visited by such thoughts on countless occasions, but never more acutely.