Granta - The Magazine of New Writing 67, Autumn 1999 [antikvár]

Leonardo's Grave ü My son was three and my daughter five. It was the summer of 1997. James Cameron's film had not yet appeared, but a great human tragedy was unfolding on our living-room carpet. 'Here it comes!' said my son to his sister, and began to push a small toy ship across the floor from the direction of the television set. 'Here it comes, brm, brm, brm,' (the noise of marine steam engines, as a three-year-old thinks of them). My daughter moved a scrunched-up ball of white paper towards the course of the toy ship. They would meet, there would be an accident. My son swung his boat to the left, but the paper ball was too quick for him. 'Bang! Crash!' my son said, tilting his toy up and turning it over. 'Glug, glug, glug.' 'Let's get the passengers into the lifeboats,' his more humanitarian sister said. 'Look at all the people in the sea.' We needed to imagine them, just as we needed to imagine the carpet as the North Atlantic, the paper ball as the iceberg, the toy boat as the Titanic. 'Don't worry,' my son said. 'Here comes the Carpathia.' Another toy was being pushed across the carpet to the rescue. They played the game on many afternoons, but there were dissatisfactions. No detachable lifeboats; a funnelling discrepancy. The model ship had three funnels (it was based on the Queen Mary), whereas the Titanic had four. I explained to my son that the Titanic didn't need four to suck the smoke from its boiler furnaces—one funnel was a dummy—but that there was a fashion for over-funnelling in the Edwardian age—'a long time ago', I said—when numerous funnels implied grandness, size and speed; the more funnels the better the ship. Of course, this was just an impression, the equivalent of go-faster stripes and spoilers on family saloons at the other end of the century, but for about twenty years (like many other fashions, it died with the First World War) it held sway among the public and the premier passenger lines of the North Atlantic. Germany's Norddeutscher Lloyd line started the trend with the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse in 1897. Britain's Cunard Line followed after the turn of the century with the Mauretania and Lusitania. When the White Star company came to order their trio of Titanic-class ships