The Star of Istanbul

14

So Selene Bourgani and I shared a deck chair when the Lusitania went down, having swum out far enough that the last whipping of the loosed Marconi wires just missed tangling us, though it dragged many others under, right before our eyes. We clung to the floating chair and we lifted our faces to the ship.

The stern rose from the water, and the massive starboard white propellers showed themselves, still spinning slowly, glinting brightly in the sun, and the Lusitania diminished before us for a long few moments like a knife blade disappearing into a chest, and then it stopped, as if it had struck bone, and it no longer evoked a blade, as its keel simply settled downward and it was gone.

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.