That really is the truth – you forget you are underwater. You have jobs to do. You stay busy, and you stick to a schedule. You are aware of time only because your activities remind you what time it is. You realize that the further you get from the outward and obvious signs that days and nights exist, that is, natural lightness and natural darkness, the more painstakingly you must celebrate the rituals of night and day. If you are eating pancakes in the mess deck, it’s morning. If you’re eating leftovers, it’s midnight. You run drills. You relax when you’re told to relax. You exercise. You have to exercise, or you will experience a strange exhaustion – an exhaustion of mind, in which you can neither think coherently nor sleep. You’re on a six-hour duty watch every day, and for those six hours you are intensely focused on a small space in front of you. The working conditions you face in a sub are completely unique, and almost everybody who is not a submariner would find these conditions deeply unpleasant. But if you can hack it for a little while, it all normalizes. It’s a routine, and you look forward to the breaks you get from time to time, surfacing and looking up. If you are Officer of the Deck and you are in charge at night sometime, and you get to open the bridge access hatches, you might witness something pretty extraordinary – the clear night sky, full of stars, after weeks of being submerged. I was Officer of the Deck once on an Arctic transit. I drove the boat through the North Pole and cycled around it twice. We were there in wintertime, when there were only about four hours of daylight each day. We popped up in that daylight and got on the ice and had a snowball fight. For a reason I can’t explain, it didn’t feel very cold. A lot of the guys were out in T-shirts, shorts and bare feet. They just ran and ran and ran. We had come through quite a few feet of solid ice, which the sub does easily, and we were on top of thousands of feet of empty, cold water. One of the things you hear a lot from young officers is the surprise they feel standing in front of the attack centre, at being so young and being responsible for the launch of ballistic missiles, Tomahawks, and torpedoes. The message you get from senior officers from day one is to never forget that the submarine insignia, the dolphins you wear on the breast of your uniform, is a warfare qualification. You learn basic functions and damage control, but what it is really all about is learning how to employ the sub as a weapon. This is why no thirty-year-old officer ever stands in front of the command launch console and comments on how weird it is that he, just this ordinary nerd who somehow ended up in the Navy, is going to launch a cruise missile.
Saskia opens her mouth but says nothing, then closes it. Say it, I say. She says it’s not a happy story – it’s about her parents. I tell her it would be nice to hear. I don’t believe you, she says. Well, I say, now it will be awkward if you don’t. We continue, and after a considerable pause she says, When we moved away from this city, when I was a girl, we lived in Spain. My father was a civil engineer. We lived in a village full of men who looked like mushrooms. My mother was from here, but my father was from Spain. Leaving here made him happy, but it made her sad. How long did you live there? I ask. Ten years. About ten years. We left when my mother died. I was fifteen. Then we spent three years in Athens, and my father died, then I went to university in Brussels. Then I came here and got a job. Do you still have family here? I ask. Cousins, uncles, she says. It’s tough to lose your parents so young, I say, which is, I think, the same thing I said when she first told me. She says yes but not sadly, just agreeing. My mother’s death caused my father’s death, she says. Her death took a long time. She became tired of toxic medicine – every time the doctors gave her something, they would joke that it would kill a horse, different doctors, always a horse – and she decided to die. My father saw every hour of his life as a series of decisions that led to her death, and became depressed for about a year – our first year in Athens. Then one morning he woke up and shaved his beard and put on a suit. I told him he looked happy. Happy? he said. No, but I’m not sad. Your mother decided to die instead of going on living with us in Spain. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Then for the next two years he drank and womanized and stole money from his own business, and got very fat. In the end he died because of high cholesterol. Did he give up working? I ask. No, he kept working. He designed sewers. One day I was at home and he had grown very fat and his eyes were turning yellow, and he said, The function of a civil engineer is in all cases to ease the flow of human misery. We remove barriers to human connectedness and progress. Because of us, man could create cities. He was gentle and optimistic all his life, she says. But he had no courage. She stops and looks behind her, because she has heard the dinging bell of a streetcar at a stop at the bottom of the street. My feet are getting cold, she says. How are yours? My feet are fine, I say, but I don’t mind getting the streetcar. We wait. We watch the streetcar climb toward us. It has one bright light, a Cyclops eye, that points down at the street and makes the wet rails sparkle. Do you want to get some dinner tonight? she asks. Sure, I say, I owe you for today. Not at all. If it weren’t for you, she says, I’d probably be sitting in that café with Janos, complaining about the capitalists.