فصل 95

joana

The dark air was full of screams. Snow and sleet blew horizontally, battering our faces. A lifeboat near ours was sandwiched full of crying women and children. Florian saw them and stood up.

“They need someone to row their boat.”

My free hand grabbed at his back. “Stay,” I begged him. “Please, Florian. Stay with me.”

“I’ll go.” The husband of the woman in the fur coat stood up. The woman yelled and berated her husband as he bravely jumped from our boat into the other.

Floating in the sea of black, we were forced to witness the massive and grotesque deaths of thousands of people. I clutched the baby tight and closed my eyes. But the scenes continued to play in my mind: The severely angled deck. A woman throwing her baby down to a sailor. He reached. He missed. The child hit the steel raft and then rolled off into the sea. Thousands of desperate people jumping, kicking, gulping. Seawater filling mouths and nostrils, collapsing lungs. High waves, angry sea, snow, and wind.

The injured soldier who had begged for a kiss now floated dead near our lifeboat, his head strangled in the netting of a raft. So many people needed my help. And now I could do nothing. The frigid temperature of the water would induce immediate and lethal stress on their hearts. They would die of hypothermia. Instead of helping, I was forced to watch the panorama of catastrophe unroll before my eyes.

Guilt is a hunter.

I was its hostage.