War and Remembrance Page 6

  Yet it seems the column is not going to Katowice. The ranks ahead are making a left turn. That will take the draft south to Oswiecim, Berel knows; but what is there for such a large labor force to do in Oswiecim? The place of his boyhood yeshiva is a town of small manufactures, isolated in the marshy land where the Sola meets the Vistula. Mainly, it is a railroad junction. No heavy labor there. At the turn in the road, he sees a new Gothic-lettered arrow, nailed above the faded Oswiecim signpost. The Germans are using the old name, which Berel remembers from his youth when Oswiecim was Austrian. Not only is it harsher, as German names tend to be; AUSCHWITZ hardly even sounds like Oswiecim.

  4

  RABINOVITZ returned in a rusty van loaded with supplies, followed by two tank trucks carrying fresh water and diesel fuel. This touched off a frenzy of work through the twilight and into the night. Shouting, laughing, singing Jews passed the stores hand to hand up the gangway, across the deck, and down the hatches: sacks of flour and potatoes, net bags of wormy cabbages and other stunted, gnarled vegetables, bundles of dried fish, and boxes of tinned food. The ragged Turkish crewmen brought aboard the fuel and water hoses to throb and thump and groan; they fastened down hatches, tinkered at the anchor windlass, coiled ropes, blasphemed, hammered, and bustled about. The old vessel itself, as though infected with the excitement of imminent departure, creaked, rolled, and strained at its mooring lines. Frigid gusts were driving swells in past the mole, but despite the wind, happily babbling passengers thronged the unsteady deck watching the preparations. When they went below to eat, the wind was working up to a near-gale under a glittering half-moon.

  In a purple crepe dress, her face touched with rouge and lipstick, Natalie stood hesitating on the wobbly deck outside Rabinovitz’s cabin door. Close-wrapped around her shoulders was Aaron’s gray shawl. She sighed, and knocked.

  “Well, hello there, Mrs. Henry.”

  On the grimy bulkheads in place of the pinups were pallid yellow rectangles. Otherwise the rank disorder was as before: unmade bunk, piled papers, swirling tobacco smoke, workman’s smells from clothes dangling on hooks. He said as he closed the door, “Isn’t that Sarah Elowsky’s dress?”

  “I bought it from her.” Natalie steadied herself against the doorway. “That everlasting brown wool dress of mine I’ve come to loathe, truly loathe.”

  “Sarah would wear that when we talked to the authorities at Nice. She has a way with Frenchmen.”

  “I hardly know her. I know so little about all you people!”

  “How’s your baby?”

  “Cranky. He keeps pawing at his right ear, and he’s feverish.”

  “You’ve had him to the infirmary?”

  “Yes. They gave me pills for him.”

  “Well? And are you coming with us?”

  “I’m trying to make up my mind.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard.” He offered her his desk chair, and squatted on the iron deck. “Decide what’s best for yourself, and do it.”

  “Why did you ever bring us aboard, anyway? You only created trouble for yourself.”

  “Impulse, Mrs. Henry.” He drew hard on a cigarette. “When we sailed from Nice we had no plan to stop here. The generator burned out. I had to get an armature and some more money in Rome. I contacted Herb Rose. He told me your uncle was there. I’m an admirer of his. So —”

  “Are your passengers all from Nice?”

  “No. None of them. They’re Zionist pioneers, refugees now, mostly Polish and Hungarian. They’d have left from Constanta on the Black Sea — that’s the usual route — but their Rumanian fixer ran off with their money. They got shunted around by the Jewish agencies for months, and ended up in Italian-occupied France. It’s not a bad place for Jews, but they wanted to go on to Palestine, no matter what. That’s what I do, get Jews to Palestine. So, that’s the story.”

  “Are you going straight to Palestine, or via Turkey? I’ve heard both rumors.”

  “I’m not sure. I’ll receive radio signals at sea about that.”

  “If it’s via Turkey, you’ll have to take your people through the Syrian mountains illegally, won’t you? Hostile Arab country?”

  “I’ve done that before. If we can go straight home, of course we will.”

  “Are your engines going to break down at sea?”

  “No. I’m a marine engineer. The ship is old, but it’s French. The French build good ships.”

  “What about the overcrowding? Those stacks of bunks down below — those long open latrine troughs! Suppose another three-day storm comes along? Won’t you have an outbreak of disease?”

  “Mrs. Henry, these people are trained for rough conditions.”

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you” — she twisted the shawl in her hands — “that you may not sail? That the clearance could just be a trick to lure my uncle quietly away? It’s quite a coincidence that you got your papers right after Werner Beck showed up.” Rabinovitz made a skeptical face. She went on quickly. “Now I’ve thought of something. If we do leave the Redeemer — I’m not saying we will — but if we do, Aaron could insist on going straight to the Turkish consulate. There we’d wait for a signal from you, relayed through the coast guard, that you’re past the three-mile limit. If no signal comes, we’d claim Turkish sanctuary, and — what are you smiling at?”

  “There’s no Turkish consulate here.”

  “You said there was.”

  “He’s an honorary consul, an Italian banker. A converted Jew, as it happens, and he’s been a help. The nearest consulate is in Bari, on the Adriatic.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “Anyway, a consulate doesn’t give territorial sanctuary, like an embassy.” His smile broadened. “But you’ve been thinking hard, haven’t you?”

  “Oh, I even had the signal.”

  “Really? What was it?”

  “Well —” with a certain embarrassment she brought it out — “ ’Next year in Jerusalem.’ Just the last line of the Passover seder.”

  “I know what it is.” His smile faded to a stern businesslike look. “Listen, Mrs. Henry, the Italians have no use for a lot of hungry stateless Jews. We’ll go. You ought to come, too.”

  “Oh, I should? And why?” The swaying of the smoky little room, with the bumping against the wharf, was making Natalie queazy.

  “Let’s say because your baby’s Jewish, and should go to the Jewish homeland.”

  “He’s only half-Jewish.”

  “Yes? Ask the Germans.”

  “Look, don’t you understand that I feel no emotion about Palestine? None! I’m an American, completely irreligious, married to a Christian naval officer.”

  “Tell me about your husband.”

  The question took her aback. She awkwardly replied, “I haven’t seen him for ages. He’s on a submarine somewhere in the Pacific.”

  He took out a worn wallet and showed her a snap of a big-bosomed dark girl with heavy hair. “That was my wife. She was killed in a bus that the Arabs blew up.”

  “That’s frightful.”

  “It happened eight years ago.”

  “And you want me to take my baby there?”

  “Jews live in danger everywhere.”

  “Not in America.”

  “You’re strangers there, too. In Palestine you’re home.”

  Natalie took from her purse a small colored photograph of Byron in uniform. “Here’s my husband.”

  Byron came alive in her memory as Rabinovitz knotted his brows over the picture. “He looks young. When did you get married?”

  For months she had been shutting her marriage from her thoughts — that hazy tangle of imbecile decisions, leading to delirious labor pains alone in a foreign hospital, surrounded by strange faces and half-understood medical babble in Italian. For all the delicious love flooding her at seeing the tiny wrinkled red baby, she had felt then that her life was wrecked. More or less, she still did. But as she sketched the story to the Palestinian, Byron Henry’s charm and dash, his ingenuity, h
is boyish appeal, all came back to her; also the terrific sweetness, however harebrained the thing had been, of the fleeting honeymoon in Lisbon. She thought — though she did not say this to Rabinovitz — that a crippled lifetime might be fair pay for such joy. Besides, she had Louis.

  Rabinovitz chain-lit a cigarette as he listened. “You never met any Jewish young men like him?”

  “No. The ones I went out with were all determined to be doctors, lawyers, writers, accountants, or college professors.”

  “Bourgeois types.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bring your son to Palestine. He’ll grow up a man of action like his father.”

  “What about the hazards?” Natalie feared she might be getting seasick, here beside the wharf. The motion was really nauseating. She got out of the chair and leaned against the bulkhead. “I hope this ship makes it across the Mediterranean, but then what? End up in a British prison camp? Or take an infant through Arab mountains, to be shot at or captured and butchered?”

  “Mrs. Henry, it’s risky to take him to Siena.”

  “I don’t know about that. My uncle talked by telephone to our chargé d’affaires in Rome, during his lunch with Beck. The chargé advised Aaron to go to Siena. He called this trip an unnecessary hazard for us.”

  “Your chargé d’affaires told him to trust a Hitler bureaucrat?”

  “He said that he knows Beck well. He’s not a Nazi. Our own Foreign Service respects him. Beck has offered to drive us back to Rome tomorrow, straight to the embassy. I don’t know what to believe, and frankly — Oh!” The deck of the small cabin sharply pitched and bumped. Natalie staggered, he jumped up to steady her, and she fell against him, crushing her breasts on his chest. He caught her upper arms in a hard grip, and held her gently away.

  “Steady.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  He let her go. She forced a smile, her arms and breasts tingling.

  “The wind keeps backing around. The weather reports aren’t good. Still, we sail at first light.”

  “That may solve my problem. Maybe Beck won’t come that early.”

  “He will. You’d better decide. It’s a tough one for you, at that. I can see it is.”

  Aaron Jastrow in a blue bathrobe, his thin gray hair blown about, knocked and opened the door. “Sorry to interrupt. The baby’s acting strange, Natalie.” Her face distorted with alarm. “Now don’t be frightened. Just come and see.”

  Rabinovitz seized her arm and they went out together. In their scurry down the moonlit windswept deck, Natalie’s hair blew wildly. Louis lay in his basket on the bunk, his eyes shut, thrashing clenched fists this way and that.

  “Louis!” She bent over him, putting both hands on the writhing little body. “Baby! Baby! Wake up — oh, he won’t open his eyes! What is it? He’s wriggling so!”

  Rabinovitz took the child up in a blanket. “It’s a convulsion from the fever. Don’t worry, infants come out of convulsions.” Louis’s head was jerking above the blanket, eyes still shut. “Let’s get him to the infirmary.”

  Natalie ran after him, down into the fetid gloom of the lower decks, into the miasma of latrines, of crowded unwashed bodies and clothes, of stale overbreathed air. Rabinovitz pushed past the queue jamming the passageway outside the infirmary. In the narrow white-painted cabin he thrust the baby on the doctor, a haggard graybeard in a soiled white coat. With a harassed air the doctor unwrapped Louis, looked at the jerking body, and agreed that it was a convulsion. He had no medicine to give. He reassured Natalie in a hoarse weak voice, speaking a Germanic Yiddish, “It’s that inflammed right ear, you know. It’s a febrile episode, I’m sure, nothing involving the brain. You can expect he’ll come out of it soon with no harm done.” He did not look as cheerful as his words.

  “What about a warm bath?” Rabinovitz said.

  “Yes, that could help. But there’s no hot water on this boat, only cold showers.”

  Picking up Louis, Rabinovitz said to Natalie, “Come.”

  They hurried down the passageway to the ship’s galley. Even when the galley was cleaned up and shut for the night, as now, it was malodorous and greasy. One piece of equipment, however, a tremendous vat, shone in the flickering electric light. Soup was the mainstay of the refugees’ diet. Rabinovitz had somewhere procured this restaurant boiler and installed it. Briskly he opened a faucet and a valve. Water poured into the vat, and from a nozzle at the bottom live steam bubbled up.

  “Feel that,” he said after a few seconds. “Too hot?”

  She dipped in a hand. “No.”

  Stripping the writhing infant, she pushed back her purple sleeves and immersed the little body in the tepid water to the chin. “Get some on his head, too.” She obeyed. The stiff arch of Louis’s back soon loosened. Rabinovitz let in more cool water. The spasms weakened, her son went limp in her hands, and she glanced at Rabinovitz with nervous hope.

  “When my baby brother went into a convulsion,” he said, “that’s what my mother always did.”

  The blue eyes opened, the baby’s gaze focussed on Natalie, and he gave her a tired little smile that wrung her heart. She said to Rabinovitz, “God bless you.”

  “Take him back up and keep him warm,” Rabinovitz said. “My brother used to sleep for hours afterward. Let me know if you have more trouble. There’s a clinic on shore we can go to, if we must.”

  Later he came and looked into her cabin, which was lit by two candles. His face and hands were black with grease. Aaron was asleep in the upper bunk. Natalie sat by the baby, in a bathrobe, her hair pinned up, one hand resting on the blanketed basket.

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s in a deep sleep, but even so, he keeps rubbing his ear.”

  Rabinovitz produced a small flat bottle, and filled a small glass. “Drink this,” he said to Natalie. “Slivovitz, if you know what that is.”

  “I’ve drunk slivovitz. Lots of it.” She drained the glass. “Thank you. What’s the matter with the electricity?”

  “The dumb generator again. I’m trying to fix it. You have enough candles?”

  “Yes. Can you sail if it isn’t working?”

  “It will be working, and we will sail. More slivovitz?”

  “No. That was fine.”

  “See you later.”

  When the lamps flickered on about 2 A.M., Natalie began to pack a cardboard suitcase she had bought from a passenger. That took only a few minutes, and she resumed her vigil. It was a long bad night, a sterile churning of regrets and afterthoughts stretching back to her girlhood, interspersed with nightmarish dozes. The baby slept restlessly, turning and turning. She kept feeling his forehead, and to her it seemed cool; yet when the porthole began to pale he broke out in a flooding sweat. She had to change him into dry swaddlings.

  Herb Rose met her on the breezy deck as she carried the suitcase to the gangway. The dawn was breaking, a clear pleasant day. The deck was full of jubilant passengers. On one hatch cover some were singing around a concertina player, their arms thrown over each other’s shoulders. The Turkish crewmen were bawling back and forth from the wharf to the deck, and there was much noisy slinging around of tackle.

  “Good God,” Rose said. “You’re not really doing it, Natalie? You’re not putting yourself in the hands of that German?”

  “My baby’s sick as hell.”

  “Listen, honey, babies’ fevers are scary, but it’s amazing how they can recover. Just a few days at sea and you’ll be safe, once for all. Safe, and free!”

  “You may be at sea for weeks. You may have to cross mountains.”

  “We’ll get there. Your baby will be fine. Look at the weather, it’s a good omen.”

  What he said about the weather was true. The harbor had calmed down, the breeze was almost balmy, and Vesuvius seemed inked on the apple-green horizon. Happiness diffused all over the crowded deck like a flower fragrance. But when Natalie had changed Louis he had been trembling, pawing at his ear again, and whimp
ering. Her memories of the convulsion, the infirmary, the ghastly night, the pestilential air below decks, were overpowering. She set the suitcase down at the gangway. “I don’t suppose anybody will steal this. Still, please keep an eye on it, for a minute.”

  “Natalie, you’re doing the wrong thing.”

  Soon she returned, bearing the bundled-up baby in his basket, with Jastrow pacing behind her in cloak and hat. Beck’s Mercedes, with its large diplomatic medallion on the radiator — crimson shield, white circle, heavy black swastika — drove up the wharf and stopped. Rabinovitz stood beside Rose at the gangway now, his hands, face, and coveralls black-smeared. He was wiping his hands on a rag.

  The jocund chorus of passenger noise on deck cut off with the arrival of the Mercedes. Unmoving, the passengers stared at the car and at the Americans. The raucous cursing of the crewmen, the slosh of water, the cries of sea birds, were the only sounds. Rabinovitz picked up the suitcase, and took the basket from Natalie. “Okay, let me help you.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  As she set foot on the gangplank, Herb Rose darted at her and clutched her arm. “Natalie! For God’s sake, let your uncle get off if he insists. He’s had his life. Not you and your kid.”

  Jostling the American aside, Rabinovitz grated at him, “Don’t be a goddamned fool.”

  Sporty in a tweed overcoat and corduroy cap, Dr. Werner Beck hopped out of the Mercedes, opened the front and back doors, and bowed and smiled. The scene was swimming around Natalie. Jastrow got in at the front door as Beck loaded the two suitcases in the trunk. Carefully, Avram Rabinovitz bestowed the basket in the back seat. “Well, good-bye, Dr. Jastrow,” he said. “Good-bye, Mrs. Henry.”