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Thorsten can barely understand Josef when they first meet. Thorsten is from Berlin; Josef hails from somewhere so down south it's almost Austria, somewhere with mountains and pretty girls in dirndls, or so Thorsten imagines. Josef asks him questions and Thorsten tries to be quick with the answers, but somehow it’s never right, what he says, he’s always missing something. When Thorsten is especially tired, Josef’s words roll together in his brain and become nothing more than a jumble of sounds. Eventually Thorsten catches on. He’s got to, if he wants to survive on this boat.
*
His mother cried when he signed up. He didn't understand why. Of course he expected some tears, but the display she gave, heaving and sobbing and red-faced, it was… unpatriotic. Didn't she realize that he was off to fight for their country, to defend it against the enemy?
"Be careful," she said, damp-eyed and empty, once the hysterics were over. "I can’t believe they’re even letting you go—you hear such stories—"
"I'll be fine, Mama."
The sky was the colour of a fresh bruise the day he left, electricity in the air. He hefted his bags and didn’t look back.
*
The prostitute is pretty: nice breasts, smooth pale skin, dark hair curling above her bare shoulders. She looks at him impassively, taking off her clothes with languid practiced motions, and when she’s done she swings her leg over the bed where Thorsten is sitting and slides a cool hand up his thigh. He isn’t hard, can't get hard, prickles of anxiety overwhelming him, and she can't get the condom on him, so she takes his cock in her hand instead. The next few minutes pass slowly and torturously. Eventually he pulls away from her. She gets some francs; he stumbles down the stairs stiff-legged, wrong-footed, heart pounding.
*
Josef is unpredictable. He can be moody and quiet, then explode at any innocuous remark; Thorsten has been screamed at, hit, pressed up against the clammy wall of the U-612 by his throat, was once knocked sideways into the frame of his bunk and went woozy for a few minutes. It just makes him want to be better. Faster. Prove to them all that he deserves to be here, that he’s one of them.
Josef's fist hurtles at his face and he takes it like a man.
*
The sound of Matthias's screams rings in Thorsten's ears long after the echoes fade from the ship. There are rusty sprays of blood on his shirt, flaking off the buttons.
He almost throws up after Smut is done hacking off the arm but only brings up bile in his mouth, the muscles in his throat constricting painfully. His arms, his whole body aches. It’s hard to reconcile the buzz of battle they were under so recently with what he's just seen. Pressing down the lever to fire a torpedo is easy compared to holding a screaming man down as the bone-saw grinds through his arm.
He stands up shakily from the bunk and realizes that Max has been watching it all.
*
Max is too gentle; he's trying too hard and he's not trying hard enough; he spits out blood and cries. Thorsten watches him with a sour mix of pity and disgust in his belly. If there's anything he needs to avoid, it's being like Max. Max who taught him to play chess, Max who promised they'd look after him, Max who attracted Josef's rage even more than Thorsten himself.
The torpedo machinists are kept in the boat as Max and Hoffmann are set adrift. Thorsten tries to imagine what it would be like to watch them slowly disappear and can’t, can’t even imagine what the open ocean looks like. Josef stirs him up when they’re gone— no more bad luck! —but now that both Max and Matthias have left, the torpedo room is much quieter. Thorsten remembers how it was with all of them together: the camaraderie, the jokes and stories, the sound of their breathing in the still hours, the electric feeling of everybody working together during those hectic moments in battle. Sometimes, while compulsively double-checking the safety on the torpedoes, Thorsten senses the emptiness around him. He grits his teeth against it and keeps working.
*
They're going to die. They're going to die. They're going to die. They're going to die.
He doesn't want to die.
*
Thorsten has never seen his father. It was always just Thorsten and his mother in their tiny flat, as far back as he can remember. His earliest memory is sleeping next to the stove with her in the winter, curled up in her arms and feeling her shiver against him as the bitter wind whistled in through the cracks around the window, and the sound of her gentle humming. But the other children had fathers, and when he heard them boast, mein Papa weißt alles, mein Papa ist der stärkste Mann der Welt, mein Papa ist Kriegsheld, he would slip back and burn with a furious kind of shame that he couldn’t do the same.
He begged his mother to tell him stories about his Papa. “He’s dead,” is all she would say back. “He’s dead and we have each other, so what does it matter?”
One day a family moved into the flat two doors down, a woman and a boy and two girls, twins. They were older than Thorsten, but not by much; the boy liked to play football, which Thorsten did too, and they played together in the summer, kicking around a homemade ball made out of rags and newspapers until the sky got dusky and their mothers got home from the factory. “Where’s your father?” Thorsten asked one day, digging the toe of his shoe shyly into the ground.
“Died last year,” the boy said, matter-of-fact. He flicked his dark curly hair out of his eyes and frowned. “Injuries from the war. Got his lungs.”
The war: Thorsten knew about that. He’d heard the adults talk about it, and the dark times afterward, and the cruelty of Britain. It got him thinking. That evening, his mother stirring the cabbage soup on the stove, he asked, “Did Papa die in the war?”
His mother spun very suddenly to look at him. Then she sighed and tucked stray hairs behind her ear, smoothed the front of her dress, took a few measured breaths. “Yes,” she said eventually. “Yes, it was the war.” Her eyes were far away. After a moment, she turned back around and started slowly stirring again.
Thorsten only found out the proper truth later. His father hadn’t died in the war. His father came back from the trenches in December of 1918, turned to the bottle, fucked his wife whenever he felt like it, got her pregnant, was fired from his job, and finally, on an unremarkable day, spring 1925, three weeks after the birth of his son, he took his old service pistol out from the back of the wardrobe, loaded it drunk and clumsy, and shot himself.
*
Josef changes. When Thorsten tries to talk to him he doesn't respond; he just sits in his bunk, hand closed around the cross, staring at nothing.
"Josef," Thorsten whispers. "Do you think we're going to die?"
Josef closes his eyes.
"Josef," Thorsten says, louder. "Josef."
Nothing.
A hot panic seizes his heart. He wants Josef to hit him. He wants Josef to curse him, to beat him, to smash him against the wall, to leave him gasping and motionless on the floor with the metallic tang of blood in his mouth—but Josef is just sitting there, quiet, and the emptiness around them is choking.
Thorsten pushes himself out of his bunk and grabs Josef's wrist. Josef tenses. His hand is white around the cross. Thorsten pries his fingers open with both hands, heart beating fast. Josef lets him. The cross has left deep red imprints marking Josef's palm. Thorsten drops it, and it swings between them, Josef bent the way he is. Thorsten is breathing hard.
Josef finally looks up and says, low, "Don't you fucking touch it."
Thorsten grabs the cross in both hands and jerks Josef forward, almost pulling him onto the floor. He has no idea what he's doing. Then, so fast he barely notices as it happens, Josef's hand flies up and Thorsten is on the ground, ears ringing.
There's a deadly quiet. Josef is staring at him like the prostitute in La Rochelle stared at him: blank, as if he's just doing his duty, no emotions involved.
Thorsten wheezes. "God won't save us," he says eventually, dragging himself back until he hits the wall to sit up. He doesn't believe it, but he knows that it'll make Josef angry, and that's all he wants.
*
Sex is violence and violence is sex. That's how the other men talk about it. Fucking is stabbing is spearing is impaling is fucking. Fucking means bruises and the blood of a virgin. Fucking is an invasion. Fucking is war.
Thorsten's prostitute was so pale he could see the veins under her skin. She scared him with her cool eyes and her smallness; he didn't know what he was doing, and it would have been easy to hurt her. He thought about squeezing her throat until her lips turned blue. He scared himself with his own perversion.
He knows better now. Violence is the glorious path to release.
*
They're not going to die. So many have died, but he hasn’t, and he’s not going to.
They break the surface and Josef grabs the back of his head, grinning tiredly. When the hatch opens, the men gasp in a breath as one. This is life.
*
Josef wouldn't look at him before. Now he does.
"Do you think Max is still alive?" Thorsten asks. They're on the surface now, and he's been thinking of that little dinghy somewhere out there with them, somewhere far away.
"Hope not," Josef says. "It's a slow death. Shitty way to go."
They're quiet for a few moments. The thumping of the engines seems louder than before; the sound fills up Thorsten's skull. He feels heavy. What have we done?
He puts his head on his knees and breaths unsteadily. He hears the creaking of a bunk, which has to be Josef’s. He senses Josef near him, and then a weight on his back. Josef’s hand. He tenses. Hit me.
Josef doesn’t hit him; Josef pulls him into a rough, painful one-armed embrace instead. “We’re still here,” he whispers, breath hot against Thorsten’s ear. “You hear me? We're still here.”
Hit me.
*
Thorsten imagines bad luck seeping out from him like an oily film, contaminating the ship, poisoning the air. He has nightmares: his mother drowning on the kitchen floor, Max's eyes burning into him, the French whore winding her legs around him and pulling him down into the howling abyss of the sea, this is all your fault, all your fault, your fault, your fault, your fault, suddenly Josef holding him down on a cold wet floor, hands all over him, Jungfrau an Bord bringt Unglück, his eyes, Max's eyes, always eyes on him, never alone, the white wake of the torpedo, and then he is alone, the final cold crushing lonely emptiness, and he screams and screams and screams and hears nothing.
He’s grabbed at himself to stop the bad luck, to keep it inside, but it slipped through his fingers and escaped. He can't stop it. He shouldn't be here. He's tried so hard and it's all his fault. He can see the bad luck spreading in the dark corners, hiding under the pipes.
*
Josef has known the whole time and he doesn't seem to care. Granted, they're in battle now, and there's no time for anything but the torpedoes. Thorsten joins the other men, falling into the rhythm of the pulling and heaving and pushing and releasing. A hit.
Later, Thorsten picks at his supper. It's the ham that's hung above the forward torpedo tubes since they left La Rochelle; there are streaks of rubbery fat in the meat, turning his stomach. The men slump on the floor in silence. The officers are discussing something in the control room, something serious. Thorsten has learned to feel the atmosphere of the ship that way. Sense the stirrings.
He gives up on the ham. Strange prickles are running through him, itching under his skin, nagging at his joints; they make him want to stand up and run. But there's nowhere to run. He bounces his knees until one of the other men tells him to quit it.
There’s a sharp wire next to him that pokes out from under the bunk. They use it to secure it to the wall when it flips up; every single one of them has scraped a shin on it by now. Thorsten runs his hand along the metal until he finds it, pushes the soft inside of his wrist against it and presses until he feels his skin break open, biting his lip to stop a whimper.
He pulls his wrist back and examines it discreetly. A thick bead of blood swells, then bursts and starts slowly trickling down his forearm. It hurts, but softly. Distantly. He licks it clean and tugs his sleeve down. He doesn't know how to feel.
*
Josef grabs his wrist. "What the hell is this?"
"Nothing," Thorsten says. They're still sitting on their bunks, still waiting, most of the men beside them sleeping. Thorsten was forgetful and let his sleeve ruck up; Josef saw the mark.
Josef pokes at it with a sharp finger, and the pain spikes. "Looks fresh."
"Come on, let me go. It's nothing." Thorsten yanks his hand back, but Josef's grip is strong; they're locked in a strange tug-of-war until Thorsten goes slack and manages to twist himself free. He leans back into his bunk, unsteady. They slip into a strained silence. Condensation drips from the pipes above them in a staggered rhythm.
"It's a sin," Josef says suddenly.
"What?"
"Suicide. It's a sin. Cowards kill themselves."
There's a bitter fire in Josef's eyes. Thorsten has to look away. "That's not it."
Josef just shakes his head. Thorsten swallows heavily. This isn't how it's supposed to go. "It's my fault,” he says. "I can see it, it’s—"
“Still on about that?” Josef says, and snorts. “So you didn’t fuck her. What did I already tell you? It doesn't matter anymore."
"Bad luck." Thorsten's hands are numb. He has to make Josef understand, it was his idea, why doesn’t he understand? "Everything that's happened is my fault— Willy— Hoffmann— Tennstedt — Max— and, and Matthias—"
His voice breaks.
Josef reaches into the scant space between them and takes Thorsten's wrist again, the soft wounded inside facing up; his grip is light, but Thorsten doesn't pull away. "You did this to yourself."
It's not a question and there's no room to lie. Thorsten nods.
"You idiot," Josef says quietly. "You absolute fucking idiot. You don't know anything."
He presses his thumb against the gash, hard. Thorsten makes an involuntary sound high in his throat, a cry. "Josef," he whispers. Hit me hit me hit me.
"Shut up," Josef says. He pulls Thorsten toward him suddenly, and Thorsten hits the cold metal floor and rolls onto his side, pain shooting through him and paralyzing him. Josef hauls him to his knees.
“What—”
“I told you to shut up.” Josef jerks his head at the other men, lying still as the dead in their bunks and on the floor. Thorsten chokes on his own breath. Josef tugs him closer and says low in his ear, “Just until you get a proper fuck.”
*
There’s no room in one bunk for two people. Thorsten’s face is pressed against the pillow, one of Josef’s hands clamped over his mouth, Josef heavy and warm on top of him, the cross a cold burn on his shoulder—Josef’s other hand fumbling at Thorsten’s belt—Thorsten lifts his hips and bites down a helpless moan. Josef breaths raggedly against his ear. His hand starts to move roughly. Something is gathering inside Thorsten, he needs to move, he’s going crazy here, but Josef braces against him, holds him down, forces his struggling arms and legs still.
Thorsten tries to imagine this away. He tries but he can’t; no woman would do this to him, no woman is like Josef, his strength, his sweat, his smell, his harsh hands, his maleness —and Josef is hard now, he can feel it, he thrusts his hips back and Josef pants sharply into the curve of his neck. Maybe Josef is trying to imagine this away too. Maybe Josef is trying to make Thorsten into a soft young girl and can't because there's a cock in his hand.
Thorsten stops imagining. He's hyper-aware of every sound they make, their breathing, the slide of skin on skin, the intermittent creaking of the bunk; if any of the other men are listening, they'll know what's going on immediately. A muffled moan escapes him. Josef hisses something in his ear—a warning, he doesn't know—and drags his hand down from Thorsten's mouth to his throat, wraps his fingers around it and squeezes. The air stops in Thorsten's lungs. Josef's other hand is moving faster now, Thorsten bucks into him again, aching, prickling, and then it happens, the wave peaks, and he drowns in it.
Josef lets go of Thorsten, pushes him away, and rolls against the wall. Thorsten pants. He doesn’t move. Their bodies are still pressed together, their legs and sides. His eyes feel hot; he might be crying. The pillow is wet. So is the thin sheet on the mattress. Wet and warm. He wonders if this what fucking feels like. If this is what it feels like to be fucked.
Josef rolls back over and Thorsten twists onto his side, rebuttoning his fly with shaky hands. Josef is staring at the slats of the empty bunk above them. Thorsten should go back to his own bunk. He should, but he doesn’t want to; his brain is muddy, he wants skin, he wants to crawl into Josef like a child and sleep until they’re safe back home, La Rochelle or Berlin. He doesn’t know. He turns his head and presses his lips to Josef's bare shoulder.
Josef stiffens. Thorsten should know what this means. But he's still lightheaded, he’s not thinking, and he kisses Josef's shoulder again, longer. He kisses the cross. Josef is still hard. Thorsten slides a hand slowly on Josef's chest. They breathe together in the silence for a few long moments.
Then Josef says quietly, “I'm not a faggot. And neither are you.”
“I know,” Thorsten says. It rings false in his ears, though it shouldn’t. He likes women, he knows that, always did. He’s not one of those deviants like Hinz. But he’s lying next to Josef and this is different, somehow. He rests his forehead against Josef’s neck and puts his mouth on his collarbone. He’s not a faggot.
Josef shoves Thorsten's hand off his chest and pushes his head away. “Get back to your bunk."
It's an order, and Thorsten follows orders. But he waits a second too long. Josef curls his mouth and grabs Thorsten by the neck of his shirt—blinding pain through his skull—Thorsten slams against the metal floor limp as a rag doll.
The other men are listless, don't seem to care what they're doing, though a few raise curious heads. Thorsten crawls sideways into his bunk, cradling his cheek. Josef swings his legs slowly onto the floor, rubbing his knuckles. He catches the cross as it slips down from his shoulder and looks down at it. Scoffs quietly. Raises his head and stares at Thorsten.
Thorsten hesitantly meets his eyes. Josef nods. "There," he says. He sounds almost dismissive, mocking. "No more bad luck."
*
It all happens quickly, what comes next. The Russian freighter is sighted and Strasser the radioman makes a nice speech: we must get home, this is the only way, there may be fighting, who has fought a man hand to hand? Wrangel shows himself with the same heavy steps that Tennstedt had before certain death. Would Thorsten kill for him? He probably would, if he had to. And he may have to. Nahkampf. He was never taught that.
They board. It’s the first time that Thorsten has held a gun outside of training. He clutches it carefully and stays behind Josef, who swings his own gun around the corners of the ship like he’s eager to put a bullet into someone. But there’s never anybody there. The emptiness of the ship is wrong, Thorsten feels that in some fundamental part of him; whoever abandoned the ship did it for a reason, knew something they didn’t. He swallows down the fear. When they reach the bottom of the stairs on the main deck, Josef guides him with a hand firm on his back. The touch soothes his jumpiness. Wrangel orders him to stay behind alone with Lutz and he simply nods. He is a brave German submariner.
He notices the sound after standing in tense silence for a few minutes. At first he thinks it’s a wounded animal, that faint high whimpering. Maybe the ship’s cat. But there’s an intermittent banging or clanging noise too, unusual. Lutz can’t hear it but it jangles Thorsten’s nerves; he starts down the hallway wiping his hands off on his pants before hefting his gun, not exactly sure what he’s doing, ignoring Lutz and his protests. He was ordered to stand guard, that’s true, but it might be too late by the time Wrangel comes back to investigate.
The sounds get louder, he finds the compartment, and it’s not an animal. It’s a girl. She’s filthy and gagged and hand-cuffed to the leg of the sink, and her eyes are wild and panicked. Thorsten stands frozen. Then he drops his gun, crouches down, and pulls her into his lap as gently as he can. He still has no idea what he's doing. "I won't do anything to you," he tells her, and hopes she understands German. He takes out the gag.
He's tempted, he can't lie. She's vulnerable and restrained and it would be easy to do what he wants with her. To fuck her. It’s been gnawing at him, what Josef did to him, what he let Josef do to him. The bad luck is gone if Josef says it is, but he’s been stained in another way, because he’s not—he doesn’t—if he fucks a girl it’ll be gone. If he fucks this girl it’ll be gone. His body will forget the feeling of another man’s hand. Who knows when he’ll get another chance.
Her lips are moving but she doesn’t really seem to be able to talk. There are sores at the corners of her mouth and swollen cuts all over her face; her wrist where she’s cuffed is rubbed raw. “I won’t hurt you,” Thorsten says again. She blinks up at him and then starts to struggle weakly, horrible strangled rasping noises eking out of her throat. Thorsten panics, covers her hand with his mouth, and she shakes her head, tears springing up in her eyes. Her lips are chapped and he can feel the roughness against his palm. Her blouse is ripped down the middle to her sternum. Her skirt is rucked up one side and he can tell she isn’t wearing underpants.
And then he suddenly realizes why she's being restrained in this room.
He lets go of her. He’s getting hard and he wants to fuck her, he needs to fuck her, and she’s looking at him like she thinks he’s about to kill her and she’s still making those pitiful sounds and she's just a slut and he's almost on top of her and making all kinds of excuses and then he hears the gunshots.
They're distant. His first thought is that Josef has gotten impatient and fired off a round somehow. But then there are more shots, louder, closer, echoing through the metal passages, and he rolls away from the girl and lunges for his gun. His heart thunders for a different reason now— Nahkampf.
The door bangs open and the next gunshots are so loud that Thorsten stumbles back and sees stars. He barely catches sight of the man in the doorway before another gunshot blasts the room. The man falls and doesn't move. Lutz steps into the room. Thorsten doesn't understand the look Lutz is giving him; then Lutz looks behind Thorsten and his face twists up, and Thorsten turns.
He jumps back just in time before the blood reaches his boots.
*
Thorsten never thought Josef could die. But he does.
Thorsten has his fist tight on the cross and doesn't let go of it. It's sticky with blood. Some of it comes off on Thorsten's palm, clotted and streaky. Josef's blood. Thorsten has seen more blood in the last month than in the rest of his seventeen years combined.
He’s the one who heaves Josef’s corpse into the water. He looks down into the deep and wonders if Josef would prefer to be buried in some pretty cemetery, mountains and fields nearby, flowers in the spring. Thorsten can’t imagine it. But he watches Josef sink down until the blackness covers him up and knows that this isn’t right either. Fire would be better for him, Thorsten thinks. Fire licking his guts and skin and bones, his soul released in an explosion of ash.
There are tears on Thorsten’s face. His body does this to him sometimes, trying to force some feelings out, anything. The wind whips the tears cold on his skin, but the world is muffled from him, and the only thing he feels is empty. Time moves like stiff treacle.
Eventually a hand drops on his shoulder and shakes him, and there is a voice. "Go down and warm yourself up." Lutz. Thorsten looks at him and opens his mouth because he wants to say something. Or he thinks he does. There are no words in him. “Come with me,” Lutz says, softly, like he's talking to a small child.
Lutz leads him back into the U-612, back into the stale diesel-defiled air and unrelenting damp. Thorsten feels crushed under the compassionate weight of that hand. The boat is busy; Wrangel turns to him with cold eyes in the control room, and gives him orders. Ready torpedo tubes one and two. Überwasserschuß.
It takes Thorsten a long time to maneuver the torpedoes. The other men step in, but they're out of practice and Thorsten doesn't know how to lead them. They're in no rush, though. That ship isn't going anywhere.
*
Thorsten starts sleeping in Josef’s bunk. The others around him are empty. Everything is empty, this ship of fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five men. Forty-four. Lutz lies grey-faced and mute, nobody owns up to it, but Thorsten sees the stony look on Ralf’s face, the destroyed look on Pips’, and knows. Everybody knows. Silence fills the boat.
The silence, the emptiness. These things that sound weightless and harmless, that crush in like the sea. When Lutz dies, the raw nothing that is Thorsten’s grief hardens against them. It dulls. It sets. It resists. He clasps Josef’s cross like a lifeline, so tight that were the cross new, with sharp edges, it would break the skin; but it’s been worn smooth, and he rubs his thumb along it, thinking of Josef doing the same a million times before.
He wants to go home. He wants to sink a thousand Allied ships. He wants to survive. And he no longer believes in luck.