Scavenger: переводы

→“Shoot me, sailor? Oh dear, you shouldn’t have said that you know: offering threats to an officer is a death-penalty offence in wartime. ‘Tod durch erschiessen . . .’ Is that how you want your parents to remember you?” The poor lad was almost in tears by now. I held out my hand. “There, there. You’re a young lad and no doubt they threatened you into joining them. Give me that pistol and we’ll say no more about it.” He handed me the pistol almost thankfully and I rushed up the ladder on to the deck abaft the conning tower.

→“Sailor,” I said in Croat, “do you hear that?” “Obediently report that yes, Herr Schiffsleutnant.” “What will you do now?” His voice trembled as he replied. “Obediently report . . . Obediently report that I’ll . . . shoot you dead if you move—by your leave, Herr Schiffsleutnant.”

→Vačkář sprang to his feet and rushed out on deck, leaving a very young Croat sailor with a pistol to guard me. Before long shouting and confused sounds of struggle came to me from amidships as the boat began to lose way. Something was happening in the engine room. I set to work upon my guard, who was clearly very perplexed by it all.

→And just because we had been indoctrinated to accept these things does not necessarily mean that they were themselves worthless: in fact, looking back on it now, I think that even if the Habsburg multinational empire was a pretty disastrous affair in practice, not all of its ideals were ignoble ones. But any inner struggle that I might perhaps have undergone was rapidly forestalled by a shout from the other side of the door.

→All of us officers—even first-generation officers like myself from the old peasant peoples—had been subjected to years of very subtle and effective mind-shaping as we went through the schools and military colleges of the Old Monarchy. Loyalty to our Emperor; loyalty to our ruling house; loyalty to our multinational Fatherland and to our ship and service; loyalty to the officer’s code of honour and to our oath; loyalty to the Catholic Church and to our country’s allies: all these were extremely powerful ties.

→And one of them the celebrated Ritter von Prohaska of the U-Boat Service. Well meine Herren, remember any of our Czech do we? Or did they wash that out of you at cadet school as well? Filth—you’d forget your own names if the Austrians told you to do it. Your sort make me sick.”

→He laughed. “Don’t come that tone of voice here Herr Leutnant or you’ll both end up back in the sea. We’re all in charge here.” A sailor stuck a pistol into my stomach as he reached down the neck of my flying tunic to pull out my identity tag. He collected Nechledil’s by the same means and handed them to Eichler, who examined the names stamped on the back. “I don’t believe it—both Czechs as well.

→“For God Almighty’s sake why did we have to pick them up? I told the helmsman to keep his course when I saw them. They’ll be out after us by now and we’ve still got three hours left until it gets dark.” “Shut up Eichler. Who’s giving the orders here, me or you?” “I thought there weren’t going to be any orders any more. You and your finer feelings, Vačkář. We ought to have left the bastards to drown. They’re only officers.”

→My feelings about all this were curiously mixed, I must say. On the one hand, after the excitements and terrors of my time as a front flier with the k.u.k. Fliegertruppe I might have been expected to have relished the boring safety of this sort of flying; and all the more so when I had a wife six months pregnant back in Vienna.

→As an ex-submarine captain myself I liked to think that he would never have had the chance if I had been there, but secretly I was far from sure of that. Observer and pilot used to work one-hour shifts in those flying-boats; but in the winter cold it was dreadfully easy to drift into trains of thought and miss a periscope wake, especially when the sea was flecked with white-caps from the wind or if there had been a lot of dolphins about.

→It was difficult to say which of these two was the more tedious. Escorting convoys meant flying over them in circles for four or five hours at a stretch all the way down from the port of Fiume through the Quarnerolo Gulf to the limit of our sector at the northern tip of Lunga Island—sometimes further, if the aeroplane from Zara had not turned up to relieve us. But, tiresome or not, it was certainly a necessary task.

→Fighter aircraft could not get this far, and we ourselves were too far from the Italian ports to be employed for bombingraids. So air operations from Naval Air Station Lussin Piccolo consisted entirely of the humdrum business of convoy escort, varied only occasionally by the odd anti-submarine patrol.

→There’s an air-raid every other day now, the missus says. They had a bomb come down the chimney of the house next door last week and bring our ceiling down. Frightened the life out of her it did. No danger of that out here anyway.” He was quite right about that: Lussin Island was way outside the range of the smaller Italian aircraft, and had nothing whatever to attract the big Caproni bombers that were now raiding Austrian towns as far behind the Front as Graz and Laibach.

→Tomassini sucked his remaining teeth and thought for a while about this. “Can’t say that it bothers me too much, Herr Leutnant, if you really want to know what I think. It gets me away from the old woman for a bit, and all things considered this isn’t too bad a place to sit out the war, specially now as they’re copping it back in Pola.

→They would while away their off-duty hours huddled around the stove at the Café Garibaldi in town, playing backgammon and wheezing complaints against the war and the “verfluchtete Kriegsmarine” as they snapped their arthritic knuckles. My servant was an ancient Pola-Italian naval pensioner called Tomassini who claimed (with what truth I cannot say) to have served as a powdermonkey aboard the wooden battleship Kaiser at Lissa in 1866. It was a pity, I once told him, that the Monarchy’s desperate shortage of manpower should have compelled it to call up men in their sixties.

→There was none of the drunkenness, none of the whoring, none of the fights and none of the requests to visit pox clinics that normally make life so tiresome for divisional officers; only a good deal of grumbling among a collection of aged men who had suddenly found themselves in naval uniform again when they were already grandfathers, and who had now been exiled to spend the war on a remote island in the Adriatic.

→Apart from a few young engine fitters and other such craftsmen from our parent unit, the naval air base at Pola, the station personnel were simply too old to present us with the disciplinary problems that usually arise from having a ship full of feckless and hot-blooded young men.

→“Yes, from Pordenone if you must know. My father was a wine merchant there.” I saw at once that I would regret this lie. His face brightened. “Ah, from Pordenone? I know it well. I have cousins there. But on which street, if I might ask?” “The Strada della Libertà.”

→“Er . . . the Aosta Dragoons.” This seemed a good choice: in 1916 a very high proportion of flying officers in all the air forces of Europe had come from the cavalry, tired of sitting behind the lines and waiting for the breakthrough that would never happen. “Aosta Dragoons? But you come from the Veneto don’t you?” I could hardly deny this: the Habsburg Navy had been entirely Italianspeaking until the 1850s and the version of the language taught in the Marine Academy had been the soft, lilting Venetian dialect which one used to hear in those days all the way down the Adriatic coast as far as Corfu. This man’s questions were becoming impertinent, but I sensed that it would be unwise to—how do you say?—pull rank and tell him to mind his own business.

→He laughed. “Lines? There’s no lines up here, any more than there are for you fellows up in the air. The Austrians are over the other side of the massif and we’re over here and so far it’s been skirmishes most of the time. Sometimes their artillery chucks a few shells over and we chuck a few back, but mostly it’s patrols taking a few shots at one another up among the cols. We lost two men back in March when the bastards brought a machine gun up on a sledge, but we ambushed them the next month and killed three of them, so it’s about quits at the moment. Funny thing really, but we know most of them, the Landeschützen I mean. In fact some of our local men and some of theirs are cousins and brothers-inlaw. Crazy really: fighting over mountains when the mountains could wipe out the lot of us if they chose.” He topped up my mug of coffee. “That happened last spring over on Monte Cristallo, you know? There were two companies shooting it out on the mountainside with their rifles. Then some stupid sod tossed a hand-grenade and that started an avalanche and neither our lot nor the Austrians have been heard of since. No, Tenente, if you’ve earned your living up here as a guide then believe me you treat the mountains with a bit of respect.” He paused and stoked the fire. “But that’s enough about us, Tenente, what about yourself? Have you been long in the Corpo Aereo?”