Not Just a Pretty Fish

Not Just a Pretty fish

Squashed together with six other strangers, I melted in the scorching desert breeze, scuba diving kit all donned up, ready to jump from the weather-beaten wooden platform.

‘Yallah, yallah! Go! Go!’ Captain Ahmed yelled at us divers, his long, discoloured galabeya flapping in the wind.

Bent by the heavy tanks on our backs, we shuffled like penguins and, in quick succession, took the half-meter’s leap of faith that separated the boat’s platform from the shimmering surface of the sea.

About to step into the tropical sea, I spared a quick thought for Franz, my über-mustachioed scuba diving instructor who had first tortured me for months in a glacial swimming pool with a series of Jurassic drills — blind-mask exercises and underwater weight-lifting among them — and then drove me fifty kilometres South of Nuernberg to chuck me into a murky green and equally glacial quarry. Staring at my long and frozen face after our last joyless dive, he’d said to me, ‘You want pretty fish? Go on a holiday to Sharm el Sheikh,’ his head and moustache hanging low, his words drenched in cold breath and disapproval.

And there I was now, hopping into the Red Sea, the wind skittering across the surface, the cooling water on my face slapping me back to reality.

I anxiously looked for Alex, our dive guide who, during the pre-dive briefing on the boat, while confidently wearing only a pair of skimpy red Speedos, a leathery tan, and two make-you-weak-at-the-knees turquoise eyes, had explained, ‘we will dive the reefs of Shark and Jolanda, two pinnacles, just off of the coast, rising from 800 meters.’

The mention of that depth had made my head spin. Alex had then ended the briefing by saying, ‘at this time of the year all kinds of fish travel hundreds of kilometres to be in this place. Basically, this is the Glastonbury of the fish world.’

This had cheered me up because I really wanted to see the pretty fish, although I wasn’t sure that ‘pretty fish’ would be the only thing I’d find in a place called Shark Reef.

My feet, squeezed into a pair of yellow fins, propelled me toward the reef wall where the rest of the group floated like champagne corks, and my eyes, pressured under a way-too-small rubber mask, managed to locate Alex — now dressed as a diver — just before he disappeared beneath the surface, giving all of us the thumbs-down, which, in scuba diving language, means, ‘time to descend.’

Teeth biting hard into the regulator’s mouthpiece, index finger on the deflating button of my buoyancy control jacket, I sank, gurgling. The noises of the world above were gradually being swallowed as the surface closed over my head, until the sound of my bubbles were all I could hear.

Submerged in crystal-clear water, I followed Alex across the blue; my mind cheered me on, and my body followed suit, albeit less enthusiastically. Beneath me, the rays of sunshine lost their brightness and faded into the abyss, falling away into the pitch-black depth of eight hundred metres.

‘Breathe in, breathe out. Look forward, not down,’ I whispered to myself while forcing my eyes away from the mesmerising, terrifying attraction of the deep.

In the background, the glorious wall of Shark Reef unfolded bit by bit before me; it looked like a rainbow had sprayed it, covered, as it was, in corals and darting orange goldfish playing the fastest hide and seek game I’d ever seen.

Reef on the right side and infinity on the left, I glided, headfirst, into what seemed like an impenetrable wall of glittering silver fish hanging motionless in the blue; they reluctantly parted, and still ignoring me, let me in. I was probably ruining their mojos, being their mating season and all, but at that moment I foolishly believed we could become friends. Suspended, not just in what felt like mid-air, but also in time, I looked up and squinted as the light, like twinkling beams through a half-shuttered window, filtered through thousands of swirling, toothy barracudas. Thankfully, no sharks. I wasn't ready for them, not yet.

The current carried me gently between the two pinnacles and onto a sandy saddle carpeted with hard and soft corals. As Alex had predicted, she was there: Giuseppina, the attention-seeking, googly-eyed moray eel, snaking out of her hole, opening and closing her mouth incessantly, as if about to say something but changing her mind at the last second. She was busy entertaining a small crowd of bubble-blowing spectators gathered around her rocky outcrop of a home.

The current intensified, and I ducked to avoid being beheaded by a large group of black surgeonfish slicing above me. In the distance, a turtle tore generous chunks from a yellow soft coral with her beak, not caring a second about our group, which tumbled past in every direction, pulled in and twisted by the surge.

Alex promptly moved all of us to the sheltered side of the pinnacle and gave us the thumbs-up, which, in scuba diving language means, ‘time to resurface.’

The pink corals just beneath the surface shimmered in the midday sun and, like never before, I felt at home, completely. That was when I finally realised how wrong I had been to look for a place to put down roots: my life’s nutrients could only be extracted from the salty water of the sea, not from the fertile soil of the earth.

On the surface, the distant rumble of boats dropping off divers drifted across the water. Air, sea, and sky stretched as far as the eye could see. Captain Ahmed, at the helm of his battered boat, cut through the waves, waving as he closed in.

Squinting in the hot and salty wind, I watched my old life in Germany collide with the sparkling surface of the Red Sea and dissolve, oh so quickly, into effervescent stars. And in that moment I knew: it was time to drift away from a life that no longer belonged to me, it was time to get loose from my moorings.