Radu Tudoran — All Sails Up!

Anton Lupan remained puzzled by the canal. He figured that the man he was looking for had more important things to do than a harbor captain and thus wherever he might have gone, he was bound to come back by nightfall and light the lighthouse. He needed only to wait for him patiently; after all, he was by that Levantine gate where time didn’t cost a thing.

A half-buried shipwreck lay in the sand before him on the shore, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed her until now. She looked like a longboat stuck in the wind-swept sand from long ago. Behold, then, that this harsh shore, with all its tranquility, had demanded from the seamen yet another sacrifice. North of the canal, in the shadow of the lighthouse he could make out a bent and broken mast, rising form among the sand dunes with the doomed writhing of a human arm that grasps for help right before the crash; perhaps the disaster had taken place not so long ago, otherwise the mast, together with the rest of the woodwork that could still be used as firewood, would have reached their inevitable end in these lands without forests. On the southern side, another sand dune was rising, revealing here and there the rotten crumbled shell and the black ribs of a ship wrecked long ago. 

Anton Lupan walked south by the shore, pondering that each of these shipwrecks had her own mystery… The sand was burying, year by year, their woodwork that had not yet been scavenged by people, that would inevitably rot beneath the sand, and that no one would ever learn what destinies had been crushed here. Each of these wrecks had been a ship once – with their stem arching proudly, with tall masts and slender like pine trees, sailing thrillingly with their sails swelled by the wind – had furrowed seas and oceans, carrying the message of human life on earth. Throughout their history they all looked alike, yet each had her own past, which not even this common end could erase. But what were their names, and their captains’ names, who had made up the crew that had led them throughout the world, who were the helmsmen that had guided them through storms, what passions, virtues, joys, and suffering had broken the hearts of these missing men? What anger, madness, love, and feelings had been cut short in the long-ago shipwreck, what mysteries lay beneath the sand? …

A few hundred meters to the south he could make out another ship thrown ashore by the waves, this one also old, seeing as she was already half-buried in the sand, except that, because she had been made of harder wood, she had withstood the weather and its cruel ally, the ruthless rot. Anything that had once been useful had been taken long ago. The deck’s planks had been yanked apart, and the rest of the woodwork would have suffered a similar fate had the long touch of the sea not petrified it, leaving it unfit for the fire. Two heavy chains from the bow were lost to the sand, where most likely the anchors also lay buried, which no one bothered to take because they were now useless. The useless capstan was likewise left in place, like all other iron parts, eaten up by the rust worms.

There was so much stubbornness in this shipwreck’s fight with time, that Anton Lupan approached and gazed upon her with wonder. As far as he could tell, by whatever was left above the sand, she seemed like a ship that had come from the Baltic or from the Northern Sea. With her long keel, her stern almost as sharp as the prow, her fine yet robust lines reminded him of… Suddenly, the researcher turned pale, his heart stopped beating, his legs would no longer take him any further…

This ship thrown ashore by the waves, at the mouth of Sulina, reminded him… In the next moment his heart started beating again maddeningly, his blood burned through his veins, his legs started moving by themselves around the shipwreck…

Each shipwreck has its own mystery… bearing it until the sand takes her, until the rot takes her; no one can guess it, no one can unravel it. 

Anton Lupan stopped by the prow; on the gray wood of the shell some letters worn by weather could still be made out – and the man who had once known them could make out the name of the ship.

This ship too had a mystery, like all the shipwrecks of the world, but it was known to him; it remained a mystery only to all the others. It was breaking his already-torn heart, filling it with unease and confusion…

Explanation:

Romanian author Radu Tudoran’s novel Toate Pânzele Sus! (All Sails Up!) (1954) recounts the maritime voyage of Anton Lupan, as he searches for his lost friend and their schooner, Speranța. Tudoran portrays a journey through the Black Sea and beyond to distant shores. In this excerpt, Lupan encounters the wreck of his former vessel at a location reminiscent of the edge of the world. The littoral location functions as a site of meditation upon loss, survival, and the inherent dangers of exploration, or a pursuit of impossible horizons. Tudoran articulates the sea space as a paradox of risk and revelation.