Summary
Beneath the Kiel fog, a war-maimed telegraphist named Krüger receives a cryptic cable that drags him from Baltic drizzle into the irradiated hush of a shuttered cinema; inside, celluloid ghosts of U-boat crews flicker while phosphorescent plankton drips from the vaulted ceiling like liquefied starlight. He is met by the reclusive impresario Mierendorff—part mesmerist, part mortician—who claims to have salvaged the last reel shot aboard a doomed submarine; every frame, he whispers, contains the faces of men who will soon be dead, a premonition that swims across the silver like a jellyfish. With him hover Steinbeck’s hydrographer, clutching bathymetric charts inked on human skin, and Schütte-Harmsen’s cabaret widow whose fox-fur collar still smells of cordite and Wilhelmshaven beer. Their plan: to project the forbidden reel at high tide, letting the sea itself perform as orchestra so that drowned sailors might rise, summoned by the Morse of the beam. Yet night after night the footage mutates—periscope shadows sprout limbs, torpedo wakes spell out lovers’ names, a captain’s gloved hand offers a single chrysanthemum to the lens—until Krüger recognizes his own younger face smiling from the conning tower, a moment he never lived. As the harbour siren drones, Mierendorff confesses the film was spliced with emulsion distilled from the bones of missing sailors; to screen it is to re-enlist their souls in a danse macabre helmed by the Kaiser’s undead silhouette. Krüger, desperate to rewrite fate, sprints across the breakwater, film canisters clanking like iron lungs, pursued by the widow’s laughter ricocheting off submarine nets. In a final apotheosis he splices the reel into the lighthouse beacon, turning the whole fjord into a threshing cinema: waves become gauze, moonlight becomes projector glare, and every crest births a sailor’s face before dragging it back to salt. Dawn finds only the telegraphist’s coat snagged on the tide gauge, sleeves inflated by wind as though still inhabited; inside the pocket, a damp telegram repeats the same greeting from the depths: “Gruss aus der Tiefe—greetings from below—your place is reserved.”
