Free Stella by Siegfried Lenz

out for certain; I drew up a chair and sat down beside him, dismissing the thanks he was straining to express. I told him about our party, the Hirtshafen beach party, saying he could have joined in if he’d only been here a little earlier, people had come from all over the place, I said,even my teachers didn’t want to miss the Hirtshafen beach party. It didn’t interest him, he didn’t want to know any more about it, but I still had a feeling that he sometimes cast me an inquiring glance. However, the concierge settled the matter. When he came back with the inhaler he said, “There was a phone call for you, Dr. Cranz, a call from Hanover. The car is coming tomorrow.” Something about me seemed to have intrigued him earlier, but his mind wasn’t on me now.
    Back at home I reread Stella’s letter, I read it several times, and thinking of the bird warden’s hut I decided to write to her, I simply had to. Without any hesitation I wrote, “Dearest Stella,” and told her at once how dreary everything here in Hirtshafen was without her, “too many old people, boring boat trips, that smell of fish all the time, and the wind never changes, it’s always a cool easterly.” And then I told her about my idea. As I wrote I felt more and more enthusiastic, even happy about it. I outlined my plan for the two of us. “Imagine, Stella: we could move into the bird warden’s hut, just you and me, I’ll put up a notice on the landing stage saying: No Landing Here. I’ll repair the roof and put a lock on the door, collect firewood for the stove, I’ll buy some cans of food and dried goodsfrom our marine stores. We won’t go short of anything.” Finally there was the prospect of swimming together, and best of all, from the moment we woke up we’d be there for each other. I thought of a PS, and added: “Maybe we could learn how to live together.” At first I was going to sign it in English with “Yours sincerely,” but then I decided on “Yours truly, Christian.” I put the letter in an envelope and slipped it into the English grammar textbook, for later.
    While I was still thinking about the letter, my father called me downstairs, a brief call in a voice used for giving orders. He was standing at the open window with his binoculars in his hand, and he pointed out to the bay. “Take a look at that, Christian.” Our barge was drifting there, and not far from it our tug Endurance . The two vessels were connected by a line that was not taut but hung loose, dipping into the water. Looking through the binoculars, I could see that our barge was carrying a heavy load of rocks, I could also make out Frederik on the tug, standing at the stern and manipulating a boathook, pushing and shoving.
    “Come on,” said my father, and we went down to the landing stage where our inflatable was lying. I took us out and we tied up to the tug.
    My father was soon up to speed. Frederik hardly needed to tell him that the tug had run into a fish trap unmarked by flags and become entangled before he was handing me a diving mask and knife. “You go down and take a look.” The tug’s propeller, turning furiously, had worked its way into the trap, pulled it over itself, and was now crippled, strangulated and with part of the trap hanging loose from it. Without surfacing to tell them what the scene looked like underwater, I set to work with the knife right away. There was a mackerel caught in the net; it had shot in like a torpedo and choked to death. I cut it out and went on carving away at the hard, apparently waxed cord of the trap, coming up for air now and then. If our knife had had a serrated edge, I could have freed the propeller from the tangled trap more easily, but as things were I had to push and press the knife hard until I finally managed to cut the tangles away. My father and Frederik praised my work, consulted briefly, and agreed on what to do next.
    The engine of our tug was reliable. Slowly, very slowly, we got under way. The