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Fiction by Mildred Pond
The Stowaway
The wide sweep of the scene, that jolt of
panic I felt, is still indelible in my mind after so
many years. Not just the receding lights of
Marseilles as the ship pulled free of the quay,
but my fellow passengers leaning over the rear
deck’s railing, calling their sad or overly gay
goodbyes, then the sudden, sharp whistle from
the captain’s bridge behind me, and --
permeating it all -- the haunting blare from the
single giant smokestack signaling departure.
But principally, engraved on that scene, is the image of what I unexpectedly saw on the upper deck behind the steward’s shoulder as he brought me the gimlet I’d ordered: a barefooted man in a white shirt and dark suit, desperately ripping off a corner of one of the lifeboat’s canvas tops and scrambling inside.
If I hadn’t looked up just then, would he have made it undetected all the way to Yokohama, our final destination? Or slipped off the battered old French ocean liner during one of many scheduled stops – Port Said, Djibouti, Saigon, Hong Kong, and others – on the way to my new post, Japan?
Since childhood, in that moment of departure, I’d always felt a churning sense of dread, as if an inner mooring was ripped loose, and I was falling into nothing. I’d experienced it so many times, when a train’s clanging slow motion departure began, or an automobile crammed with friends pulled away. Sometimes it was just a wave of the hand, someone calling "goodbye".
So my heart was already racing before I even saw the desperate man, but curiously – and I felt this too, strongly – I was aware that I’d joined with the emaciated stowaway’s desperate plan, whatever that might be.
I sipped my drink, remembering my doctor’s comment at my last post, the one I’d just left, Dakar. “You, liquor and hot weather don’t mix, Roger. Keep it down to two drinks and you’ll be fine.” The excitement, the strange fear of leaving solid land, my mysterious debilitating fever was the last thing on my mind.
But principally, engraved on that scene, is the image of what I unexpectedly saw on the upper deck behind the steward’s shoulder as he brought me the gimlet I’d ordered: a barefooted man in a white shirt and dark suit, desperately ripping off a corner of one of the lifeboat’s canvas tops and scrambling inside.
If I hadn’t looked up just then, would he have made it undetected all the way to Yokohama, our final destination? Or slipped off the battered old French ocean liner during one of many scheduled stops – Port Said, Djibouti, Saigon, Hong Kong, and others – on the way to my new post, Japan?
Since childhood, in that moment of departure, I’d always felt a churning sense of dread, as if an inner mooring was ripped loose, and I was falling into nothing. I’d experienced it so many times, when a train’s clanging slow motion departure began, or an automobile crammed with friends pulled away. Sometimes it was just a wave of the hand, someone calling "goodbye".
So my heart was already racing before I even saw the desperate man, but curiously – and I felt this too, strongly – I was aware that I’d joined with the emaciated stowaway’s desperate plan, whatever that might be.
I sipped my drink, remembering my doctor’s comment at my last post, the one I’d just left, Dakar. “You, liquor and hot weather don’t mix, Roger. Keep it down to two drinks and you’ll be fine.” The excitement, the strange fear of leaving solid land, my mysterious debilitating fever was the last thing on my mind.
The stowaway’s scramble along the upper
deck, his hoisting himself into the lifeboat,
desperate motions of a man at the end of his
rope, were a small part of a longer journey,
whose end he might never see. He knew it, and
I knew it. My hand shook as I opened my
notebook, in which I habitually jotted down
insights into new situations. I wrote: “Have just
looked into the face of death.”
I’d turned thirty-two recently, and was hardly prescient about much in those days. But I didn’t accept events at random or on their surface either. I hoped that no one else, passenger or crewmember, had seen the frantic man, and resolved to take him some food when it was safely dark.
I was curious about the stowaway’s plight and wanted, I believed, to be helpful, but there was also a seductive element of secrecy. Secrecy and deviousness are part of the required credentials of being in the British dip-lomatic corps, or any diplomatic corps: spying, without violence, join naturally. Yet I also felt personally exposed: I’d just left a failed love affair, was headed on a new assignment to a country I knew nothing about, and was suddenly loose at sea; like the stowaway, I felt a terrible loss.
This was in mid-August of 1952, not so long after the end of the war – World War II, I should explain, since there are always wars, aren’t there? Europe was still crawling with what were officially called ‘displaced persons,’ thousands of individuals and their astonishing variety of nationalities, dislocated by the latest signing of treaties, the redrawing of national boundaries, rejected, expelled, awaiting repatriation, sometimes gaining it, often not. Many still waited in camps hoping to be accepted in others’ homeland, since their own did not.
I stood up to stretch and immediately saw another strange sight. A woman, standing alone at the rear of the deck, removed one of her spike-heeled shoes, unscrewed the heel and – or so it seemed – screwed it back on more tightly. With its unscuffed sole, the shoe was obviously new; and noticeably cherished because of the way she caressed the shoe’s smooth, pale blue leather.
I’d turned thirty-two recently, and was hardly prescient about much in those days. But I didn’t accept events at random or on their surface either. I hoped that no one else, passenger or crewmember, had seen the frantic man, and resolved to take him some food when it was safely dark.
I was curious about the stowaway’s plight and wanted, I believed, to be helpful, but there was also a seductive element of secrecy. Secrecy and deviousness are part of the required credentials of being in the British dip-lomatic corps, or any diplomatic corps: spying, without violence, join naturally. Yet I also felt personally exposed: I’d just left a failed love affair, was headed on a new assignment to a country I knew nothing about, and was suddenly loose at sea; like the stowaway, I felt a terrible loss.
This was in mid-August of 1952, not so long after the end of the war – World War II, I should explain, since there are always wars, aren’t there? Europe was still crawling with what were officially called ‘displaced persons,’ thousands of individuals and their astonishing variety of nationalities, dislocated by the latest signing of treaties, the redrawing of national boundaries, rejected, expelled, awaiting repatriation, sometimes gaining it, often not. Many still waited in camps hoping to be accepted in others’ homeland, since their own did not.
I stood up to stretch and immediately saw another strange sight. A woman, standing alone at the rear of the deck, removed one of her spike-heeled shoes, unscrewed the heel and – or so it seemed – screwed it back on more tightly. With its unscuffed sole, the shoe was obviously new; and noticeably cherished because of the way she caressed the shoe’s smooth, pale blue leather.