The weary old ship creaked:
‘Caeneus?’
‘ARRK! ARRK! ARRK!’
The gull squawked and flapped its wings as the bow timber gave way with a groan of pain and fell to the ground, crushing the man beneath.
And that was the end of Jason son of Aeson.
But Corinth was not the end of the road for the herring gull Caeneus. He flew away, bearing in his claws a splinter of wood from the bow timber, which he has used for his storytelling ever since. Feeling things had become too hot for him in the Aegean, he persisted in his flight until he came all the way north to Finnmark. There a shaman took him under his wing and turned him back into the likeness of a man.
He had stayed a long time in the land of the Lapps, and since then had always worked on Scandinavian ships, generally as mate but occasionally as a telegraphist.
So Caeneus maundered on until the early hours. I must have fallen asleep in my chair and been carried by him to my quarters. I have no memory of undressing myself — it must have been him because my clothes were not in the cupboard but lay on the desk chair, though everything was neatly folded and the shirt and jacket had been hung over the back. This is still further proof that he had been well brought up, in spite of his interminable verbal diarrhoea.
I slept until three o’clock in the afternoon.
Today is Good Friday.
Need I say more?
In an attempt to make the day of crucifixion bearable for us, Captain Alfredson ordered a more lavish spread than usual, so we would have all the ingredients for a feast, as far as circumstances allowed. As the evening progressed the guests grew merry, and the captain was not behindhand in ensuring that everyone had a thoroughly good time. People told jokes which frequently raised a smile, and many of them were well received, though others were not quite as adept at finding the words for what they wished to say, and there were those who verged on the risqué. But, on the whole, one cannot deny that the evening was most congenial.
The purser’s lady friend, who seemed to have an absolute monopoly over the serving of alcoholic beverages, was now in the best of spirits and I could see no sign that she harboured a grudge against me. She served us liberally, filling her neighbours’ glasses and asking the diners please not to be shy about helping each other to wine. In fact, as it turned out, everyone had rather more than they wished for. What reason she had to play both host and hostess that evening and offer the drink so freely I cannot say, though I have a hunch that as ever the couple’s addiction to profit was to the fore, since I had gathered from Captain Alfredson that my hospitality bill, like those of the officers, would be paid by the shipping company, however high. So the couple would profit from any refreshments we consumed over and above what was considered a normal part of the meals, and alcohol weighed heavily in the balance. I tried to raise the matter with Alfredson but the woman saw and forestalled me by rising from her seat and inviting the guests to drink a toast to the captain, which we did with a good will.
Pleased as punch, Alfredson hurried to his quarters and returned with a stack of records and a gramophone. Seeing this, the first mate grabbed the corners of the tablecloth, one after another, and whipped it off the table complete with all the dishes and the remains of the rum trifle. He swung it over his shoulder like a sailor’s kitbag, swept into the galley and flung it in the corner with a resounding crash and clatter of breaking crockery. I saw the purser’s lady friend laugh out loud at this, for the purser could also charge the shipping line for loss of tableware. The captain slammed the gramophone down on the table and the second engineer was set to winding it up and choosing the music; drinking songs, as it turned out — tales of womanising and debauchery in thirteen languages.
The instant the needle touched the groove in the record the purser’s lady friend became the focus of the party. Everyone had to dance with her in turn: the captain, the first engineer, first mate, cook, steward and the three deckhands who were off duty — it was Caeneus’s watch — while I myself filled in for the second engineer and twirled the gramophone crank while he twirled the woman.
From where I sat, squeezed up against the phonograph, I couldn’t block my ears to song after song describing the sailor’s life. The most memorable for me was a comic number listing all the scrapes that drinkers can get into:
I went to Australia and there I was happy:
I bought dozens of girls for a month at a time.
I went down to Italy and there I was happy:
I poleaxed the barmen who didn’t serve me on time.
I went to Rhodesia and there I was happy:
I knocked down wry-faced old blackamores with my fists of steel.
I went to Colombia and there I was happy:
I took married women to my bed and enjoyed them for a while.
(Retold in my own words, V. H.)
The chorus went as follows:
I ended up in hell and here I am happy.
And I have this to say to anyone who’s curious about my lot:
I feel no compunction for what I have done.
I have no interest in the dishonoured –
No interest in the dead.
(Retold in my own words, V. H.)
Why should this particular song have been etched in my memory so that I can record its contents here? Well, because during the last verse the purser’s lady friend came dancing up to me with one of the Kronos line’s fine linen napkins in her hand. She had folded the napkin into a Napoleon hat. As the woman bent forward to place the hat on my head, my senses were filled with a powerful odour of mingled gin, cigarettes, eau de cologne, hair lacquer and sweat — before she straightened up and screeched:
‘Du bist doch mein süßer Papageientaucher…’
I laughed at this along with the rest while thinking to myself that Dr Pázmány would have been able to read a thing or two from the woman’s behaviour, especially when she called me ‘her puffin’.
Be that as it may, when the carousing was at its height and the music had begun to pierce one’s ears like the song of the sirens, I heard someone shouting above the din of the gramophone:
‘Hey, hey there! I… you! Listen, hey, listen! Hey, you!’
The purser was standing apart from the milling throng, snatching at his shipmates, one after the other, in an attempt to buttonhole them. He was one of those whom Bacchus renders eloquent, and had imbibed just the right dose of spirits to fine-tune his speech organ to the point where his inability to pronounce his ‘r’s had largely disappeared. This emboldened him to make pronouncements, and he began imparting loudly into my right ear everything that he had on his chest — I was his sole audience and confidant once his shipmates on the dance floor had shaken him off — and unfortunately it has to be said that it was pretty poor, thin stuff, though it contained the odd interesting titbit.
Including the news that he had purchased his lady friend for the price of a leg of pork:
THE PURSER’S TALE
There is a type of venomous snake known as Vipera ursini. It is about a foot and a half long, ash-grey with brown spots and prominent black markings that zigzag the length of its spine. This snake lives in the undergrowth on the forest floor, devouring small animals, both hot- and cold-blooded, though it will sometimes undertake long forays into areas inhabited by man. Here it suddenly appears, having slithered under tree roots, down streams, along tracks and across the borders of the wood, all the way to the dark green thicket of willow that stands on the eastern edge of the old garden on the Polish estate of TZ—, posing as a compromise between cultivated land and untouched nature.