HMS BOUNTY

1 R H M S B O U N T Y R A C H E L K U S H N E R The following was written to accompany the catalogue for the building-wide exhibition ‘‘The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied,’’ which was on view at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, Italy from 13 May to 26 November 2017. Photographs of the exhibition are available at www.fondazioneprada.org/the-boat-is-leaking-the-captainlied /. They can/should be viewed in tandem with your reading. This is what happened: my friend and I took a night train north over the Alps to Munich. The train was so full of bodies that I had to stand on the metal scu√ plate, which flips up when the passenger-car door opens. If the train-car door opened, there would be no place for me to stand. Throughout the night, I worked with the other passengers at each train stop. We pulled on the car door handle, against those on the platform, to prevent them from boarding. We held the door against desperate and angry people no di√erent from us – except that they were outside the train, not in, and there was no room for them. We rode the night train standing shoulder to shoulder with strangers, drinking the Italian version of Night Train. The station 2 K U S H N E R Y at dawn was cold and chaotic. A giant man came toward my friend and me with a big, unwholesome smile. He negotiated with my friend, who spoke German, and then we were slumped against the backseat of the man’s Mercedes. He drove us into a park and in the park was a huge futuristic glass structure: the Olympic stadium. We followed the man into the structure and down a hall and into a locker room, to which the man had a set of keys. The locker room had cots in it, lined up. We gave the man some money and put our things into the lockers, and then he drove us to Oktoberfest, our destination, where people drank beer, ate roast chicken, fought, sang, and lined up to take very long pisses. When we were finished with all that we set out for ‘‘home,’’ a locker room of the 1972 Munich Olympics Stadium. It was not easy to get there. We finally found the Olympic park, where we stumbled and wandered. The park felt huge. It had no streetlights. We thought we would never find the stadium or our overpriced cots in the locker room. We found instead a set of apartments. My friend broke a window and climbed in, and then unlocked a door for me. We slept on the carpeted floor of an unfurnished apartment, and in the morning went back to our locker room, our untouched cots, and took showers, to get ready for another day of drinking beer and lining up to piss. Just now, searching for images of those apartments – the famous apartments where it all happened back in 1972, a history about which I knew not one single thing when I slept on the floor of the athletes’ apartments where people might have been tortured before they were murdered – I came upon an image of rows of cots and thought I was looking at an image of the locker room of cots that the German had rented to us. Those are the cots! I thought, amazed. I had Googled ‘‘Munich Olympics 1972.’’ This was on my phone, and it’s true I don’t see very well. Looking closer, I understood that the cots in the photograph, what I thought were cots, were actually co≈ns, each covered with a clean white sheet. The German man with the keys would have rented those out too; he wasn’t sentimental, so maybe I’m making too much of this. When I heard that the HMS Bounty had sunk, I thought my favorite lounge and restaurant was underwater. No, someone said, H M S B O U N T Y 3 R the HMS Bounty sank – the actual ship. But wasn’t it burned by the mutineers? The replica...